Cardozo On The Parashah. Volume 2 - Shemot/exodus: Essays On The Weekly Torah Portion 5l305s

Praise for Cardozo on the Parashah

The biblical prophets raised eyebrows with antics that would have kept the tabloid headline-writers of the ancient world on their toes. Alas, Rabbi Cardozo received no divine imprimatur to perform stunts of this ilk. But the flamboyant philosopher-rabbi does his best to implement their literary equivalent. The prevailing value of this book is its potential to jolt the reader from a religious somnambulism that idealizes robotic routine over spiritual search for meaning, empty ritual over an attempted relationship with God.

— Shmuel Phillips, author of Judaism Reclaimed: Philosophy and Theology in the Torah

I find it impossible to resist the combination of humanity and spirituality wrapped up in a lucid and even humorous morality that is Cardozo. Warning: The book is addictive!

— Rabbi Daniel Landes, former Director of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies

Original. Provocative. Iconoclastic. All of these adjectives can be used to describe the prolific writings of Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo. The essays in this book were written specifically to be topics of (hopefully fierce!) debate around the Shabbat table. Without a doubt, this book will achieve that goal, and enable you to study the Torah in new and exciting ways.

— Rabbi Professor David Golinkin, President of The Schechter Institutes, Inc.

Jerusalem

Rabbi Lopes Cardozo is a fierce and courageous proponent of rational thinking. His honest and open exploration of Judaism, challenging fundamentalism and conformity, is a breath of sanity and fresh air.

— Jeremy Rosen Professor at FVG and Rabbi of the Persian Community of Manhattan

Praise for Jewish Law as Rebellion A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage

[Rabbi Cardozo] is a rebel fighting for a most worthy cause — a genuinely pious Jew deeply concerned for our Jewish future.

— Rabbi Professor Daniel Sperber, Professor of Talmud, Bar Ilan University

[This book] is full of insights that will challenge and inspire Jews and nonJewish alike. Immensely enriching.

— Rowan Williams, Former Archbishop of Canterbury

What a great pleasure it is to discover this book. What an interesting, creative and off beat mind its author has!

— Rabbi Professor Avraham Yitzchak (Arthur) Green, Rector, Hebrew College Rabbinical School, Boston

To think with [Rabbi Cardozo] about the challenges he raises is one of the great experiences of modern Jewish thought.

— Susannah Heschel, Professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth college

Taste and see that God is good and that Cardozo’s wisdom is the stuff of a better life.

— Rabbi Irving (Yitz) and Blu Greenberg, international known scholars

Cardozo on the Parashah Shemot | Exodus

With Questions to Ponder from the David Cardozo Academy Think Tank

Kasva Press

St. Paul / Alfei Menashe

Copyright © 2021 by Nathan Lopes Cardozo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover photo by Claudia Kamergorodski

Kasva Press Alfei Menashe, Israel St. Paul, Minnesota

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Cardozo on the Parashah: Shemot

ISBN:

Hardcover: 978-1-948403-37-5 Ebook: 978-1-948403-27-6

Civility is Made from the Broken Tablets of the Ten Commandments. We are all exiles, living within a strange painting. Those who know this, live greatly.

Godfried Bomans Celebrated Dutch Author 1913-1971

This book is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Nejat Yigal Zarabi z”l A wonderful loving father, an exemplary grandfather and a kind and caring human being. May his memory be a blessing to our entire family.

Dedicated by Frank and Desiree Zarabi and their children

Preface

It is a great pleasure to present my second book on the Torah: Cardozo on the Parashah, this time on the book of Shemot. As those who read the first book on Bereshit know, the Foreword was written by none other than God Himself, and although He gave Kasva Press permission to publish it, I did not escape unharmed. This was also true of my readers. Like God, several people were astonished by the book’s daring but nonetheless serious content. Many praised it, others condemned it. In fact, the book became a hit especially because of all those who attacked it. As often happens, those condemnations raised the interest of many. So I thank all those who criticized the book for helping it to disseminate. I am reminded of Arthur Guiterman’s famous quote:

The stones that critics hurl with harsh intent, a man may use to build his monument. (A Poet’s Proverbs, 1924)

I was therefore more than a little surprised when the Satan (aka, “the attorney for the prosecution”) appeared to me in a dream, and asked that he be allowed to write the foreword for the next book. He thanked me for often playing devil’s advocate in my last book, but said that he had initially been rather upset about the book, because it seemed I was taking his job away from him. I was asking the sort of questions that he was supposed to ask—questions that trip people up and test their faith. Only after studying the book more carefully and discussing it with his fellow attorneys, did he find that all my questions were in fact authentic from the perspective of traditional Judaism.

No greater praise could I receive! The Satan indeed hit the nail on its head. I have tried to discuss issues in this book which I know many people—including very religious people—are bothered by. These are issues that make even the devout begin to doubt the Jewish tradition’s wisdom. I have tried to respond to this and show why Judaism and the biblical stories and commandments carry enormous weight, that they give us new religious insight in our often-complicated lives. Nevertheless, I politely declined the Satan’s request to write a foreword to the book. A foreword by God is one thing, but one by His least popular flunky is another! I pray to the Lord of the Universe that this book may help readers to come closer to Him and love the Torah as much as I do, if not more. Nathan Lopes Cardozo, Jerusalem / Herzliya, September 2020 / Tishri 5781, In a Corona stricken world.

Acknowledgments

This is the second of several volumes discussing certain halachic-moral and philosophical topics within Parashat HaShavua, the weekly Shabbat readings of the Torah in the Synagogue. The commentary on the Book of Bereshit, Genesis, was published in 2019. Now it is the turn of the book of Shemot, Exodus. This book contains essays that have some relation to the issues discussed in Shemot. Some of these essays are deep, others controversial and perhaps shocking to some mainstream religious or non-religious people, while others are merely quirky. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is which! There is no consistency among these essays. All topics stand on their own (with one or two exceptions) and do not have to be read in any particular order. Some topics have been discussed from very different perspectives in different parashiot. Most of these essays were first published as “Thoughts to Ponder” which I write every week for the David Cardozo Academy website. Many of them have appeared in the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post, as well as other Jewish or non-Jewish journals, papers, and books. As always, I want to emphasize that I did not write these essays with the purpose of persuading people to agree with me, but with the aim that they would become topics of (hopefully fierce!) debate around the Shabbat table. But I also hope that they will be read at Sunday assemblies in churches and other houses of worship, and even in secular gatherings or at family get-togethers. For the benefit of nonHebrew speakers, Hebrew words are defined in a glossary at the end of the book. You will find conflicting ideas among the essays, reflecting the rabbinic tradition (Talmud: Eruvin 13b) that religious disagreements are all rooted in the word of God, Whose words cannot be captured in any final truth. I am not even sure I always agree with myself. If I did, I would be ashamed of myself, as it would mean that I am no longer spiritually alive. It would also reflect a belief that the word of God has been exhausted, a great insult to God Himself.

Having said all this, the reader should be aware that my observations are deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, which I have chosen as the spiritual guide in my life and that of my family. Still, many of the classical sources I quote are not well known. I thank Urim Publications in Jerusalem, and especially Tzvi Maor, for allowing me to use some of the essays which were published in several of my earlier books. The publication of this book was made possible by Family Frank and Desiree Zarabi of Los Angeles in memory of Mr. Nejat Yigal Zarabi. z.l. I thank them profusely for their help. I want to thank Kam and Lily Babaoff of Los Angeles for making the connection with family Zarabi. Chazak Baruch to all of them, not only for their financial , but also for their ongoing encouragement. I also wish to thank Rony and Toby Hersh of New York for all their . Thanks also to Nery and Ester Alaev from Austria, Edward and Orna Cohen from Yerushalayim, Joseph and Leelah Gitler, Jonathan and Tamar Koschitzky, Gerald and Naomi Braunstein from Ra’anana, David and Marcia Nimmer from Los Angeles, Menno and Louise Paktor, Doron and Sharon Sanders, Alex and Marguerite Schottland, Micha Eitje from Amsterdam, Wim and Gerry Van der Hoek from the Netherlands, Sid and Judith Tenenbaum-Cardozo from Jerusalem, Alan Webber and Family from Jerusalem; Charles and Ariella Zeloof from Herzlia Pituach, Robert and Elizabeth Kurtz from New York, David and Karine Morris from London, Amy Bernstein from New York, Family Feldmar from Los Angeles, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz from Phoenix, Arizona, Rabbi Jeremy Rosen from New York. I also thank Rabbi and Mrs. Zeev (Wim) van Dijk for their great friendship, as well as Benja and Grace Philipson, previously of Haarlem and now Jerusalem. As always, I want to express my gratitude to my late parents, Jacob and Bertha Lopes Cardozo, my brother Dr. Jacques Eduard Lopes Cardozo, may he live long, together with his family, and my late parents-in-law Grisha and Rosa Gnesin, who encouraged and ed me while studying the Jewish Tradition and growing in wisdom. The late Aron and Betsy Spijer and the Board of the Dutch “Spijer Foundation,” Dr. Leo Delfgaauw, Dr. Hans Wijnfeldt and Mr. Eldad Eitje have been

responsible for many of my achievements and have enabled me to teach, publish, and run the David Cardozo Academy. I thank the Think Tank of the David Cardozo Academy (run by Yael Shahar and Jonathan Rossner, and formerly by Yael Unterman and Yael Valier) which constantly challenges me to come up with new ideas, and whose wrote the questions after each parashah in this book. The Boards of the Israeli Ohr Aaron Foundation together with our foundation in England, especially Mr. David Yamin-Joseph, the American and Canadian Foundations are all the be thanked. Special thanks to my editor and good friend Chana Shapiro, Yehudah DovBer Zirkind, and to Yael Shahar who make sure my English is as flawless as it humanly can be. Again, very special thanks to (Rabbi) Yehudah DovBer Zirkind and to Yael Shahar for going through my essays, putting them together in order of the weekly Torah reading, and carefully checking all the sources. A major undertaking! Chazak baruch to my secretary Esther Peterman who takes care of our istration and all other matters related to our Academy. A special thanks to Yael Shahar who has been sending my weekly “Thoughts to Ponder” via Internet to thousands of people. She and her husband Don at Kasva Press have done an outstanding job at publishing this series! Yael is also responsible for many of the questions at the end of the parashiot. This is a lot of work and much appreciated. A special thanks to my children, children-in-law, grandchildren, and great grandchildren who give me much joy and who are a constant source of inspiration. Their commitment to Judaism is my life-line. Many thanks to Shoshannah Nasch, and Ilana Manzour of Beth Juliana, Parents Home, in Herzlia. Last but not least, my dear wife Frijda Rachel who endures my long hours at my office, writing and teaching, with great patience and s me in every way possible. Being married to her for 53 years is a great blessing. May it continue

for a long time! Not one of my many books would ever have appeared without her help. Above all, thanks to the Lord of the Universe who made all this possible. To Him all praise! Nathan Lopes Cardozo Jerusalem, Herzlia, Cheshvan 5781, November 2020 For more acknowledgments, see the end of book.

Encountering Shemot

The Theology of the Halachic Loophole

The book of Shemot is the first book of the Torah dominated primarily by commandments and laws. In its pages we are introduced to the mitzvot (commandments), the mishpatim (laws) and the hokim (ordinances). These together have become the basis for the great system of Halakhah, which regulates the lives of Jews and Jewish communities to this day. To a great many people, the authority of Halakhah derives from its divine origin; these are the very laws that God has ordained for the Jewish people. For others, Halakhah is authoritative precisely because it has benefited from centuries of human input from some very great thinkers. In this essay, I will try to describe where I stand in this ongoing debate.¹ Let me start by saying that I believe that the Torah is min haShamayim (“from heaven”) and that its every word is divine and holy. But I do not believe that the Torah is (always) historically true (sometimes it seems like Divine fiction) nor that it is uninfluenced by external sources. What’s more, I am reminded of the observation by the famous Chassidic leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov,² who suggested that the children of Israel heard only the Alef of Anochi of the Ten Commandments, which means that they did not hear anything, since one cannot pronounce the Alef! Nor do I believe that the Torah’s laws, literally interpreted, are all morally acceptable. They are not. Rather, I believe that the Torah is often morally, deeply, and deliberately flawed, and that furthermore, God Himself intentionally made it flawed. It is the latter issue that I will discuss in this essay.³

Far-fetched arguments and halachic loopholes

My belief that the Torah is morally flawed is closely related to an altogether different topic: The “halachic loophole,” which our Sages and later poskim (halachic decisors) frequently used to solve halachic problems. Many of these loopholes are legal fictions, used by the Rabbis to deliberately ignore straightforward biblical pesukim (verses) or halachic standards.⁴ They often made use of far-fetched arguments and twists that violated the very intent of these verses or halachic norms, and they seem to have done so with no compunctions and without much resistance. To the Rabbis, this method was seemingly a normal procedure whenever it was “convenient” to achieve their goals. To us, however, some of these loopholes are not only far-fetched, but misleading; they seem like a kind of trickery. The Sages declared that certain implementations of Torah laws “never were and never will be”. These included the Ben sorer umoreh (the stubborn and rebellious son, who was to be executed),⁵ and the Ir hanidachat (the subverted city, which was to be entirely destroyed because its inhabitants worshipped idolatry). In addition, they decided that lex talionis, the principle of “an eye for an eye,” meant financial compensation, while the text does not even hint at this.⁷ To solve the problems of mamzer (a child born from an adulterous relationship), the Sages invented mechanisms that the Torah never mentioned.⁸ There are numerous other such cases. In all of these instances, the Rabbis used arguments that are highly problematic, and seemingly dishonest and deceptive. How could they do this with a clear conscience?

The Torah as a divine compromise

We believe that a profound reason stands behind the Sages’ willingness to adjust the Torah in this manner. While the Sages believed that the Torah is absolutely divine, they did not see it as the final text. They realized that the Torah’s text was a stage in God’s plan at a particular moment in Jewish history.

Revelation is a response to the human longing for a relationship with God; it can succeed only to the extent that human beings can relate to it. The Divine Will, therefore, is limited by what human beings are able to pragmatically and spiritually understand and accomplish at a given time and in a given place.¹ The Torah is anthropocentric, while its aspirations are theocentric. In other words: While the Divine Will may want to accomplish the ultimate, it is constrained by the limitations of human ability. The Torah, then, is really a divine compromise, filtered through the mindset and mores of its intended audience.¹¹ It is necessarily flawed in the sense that it must sometimes allow or introduce laws that are far from ideal, but were the best possible option at the time they were revealed to the Jewish people. In some cases, they were never meant to be applied literally, as we will see.

Rambam: the outdated sacrificial cult

One famous example of this view is given by Maimonides (known by his Hebrew initials as the Rambam), in his Moreh Nevuchim. There he deals with the sacrificial cult in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple. He suggests that the Torah carefully limited the already existing practice of sacrifice, and kept it for the sole purpose of weaning the Jewish people away from the primitive rituals of their idolatrous neighbors. In other words, Rambam believed that the sacrificial cult in Judaism was established as a compromise to human weakness:

For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of suddenly abandoning those things to which he is accustomed…. Therefore He, may He be exalted, suffered the above-mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to His own name…commanding us to practice them with regard to Him.¹²

To give the sacrificial cult a more sophisticated, dignified, and monotheistic meaning, the Torah introduced many laws to refine this kind of worship. This would slowly move people towards allowing it to be abolished altogether, which was the divine objective. Still, the numerous and intricate sacrificial laws in the Torah, carefully detailed in the Oral Law, have tremendous symbolic and educational meaning far beyond the actual sacrificial deed. Many of them, paradoxically, make the worshiper sensitive to higher standards, leading to genuine monotheism. Thus, while one should really outgrow the actual sacrificial deed, the many spiritual messages behind these laws remain relevant even to this day.¹³

Slavery

The same reasoning is true also of slavery.¹⁴ The fact that the Torah tolerates slavery only means that it was not yet possible to completely abandon it. Ancient societies would not have been able to sustain themselves economically had slavery come to a sudden end. So the Torah introduced laws to make slavery — at least Hebrew slavery¹⁵ — more ethical, by creating much better conditions for slaves, helping them to overcome their slave mentality, and giving them the opportunity to free themselves and start a new life.¹ Only at a later stage could slavery be eliminated altogether.

What if the Torah were given today?

To take the point one step further, not only would the laws concerning sacrifices and slavery be totally abolished once the people outgrew the need for them, but they would actually not have appeared in the biblical text at all had it been revealed at a much later stage in Jewish history.¹⁷ This has enormous consequences for a proper understanding of what Torah, in

essence, is all about. Just as slavery and the cult of sacrifices are compromises to human weakness, and would not have appeared in the text at a later stage, the same may be said for other problematic laws.¹⁸ But whether, or how, such laws might have appeared at a later stage would depend on the moral and religious sophistication of human beings, not on God. The more human beings purge themselves of earlier ideas and practices that still reflect primitive and amoral perceptions, the more the ideal divine law can reveal itself. So the text of the Torah is human, in the sense that it is the human condition that determines what appears in the divine text and what does not.

Humanity’s innate moral intuition

Our obligation is to aim for higher moral and religious standards. Because we are created in the image of God, we carry within ourselves moral notions of the highest order, which are very close to God’s ultimate will. We may not be aware of these, since we remain subconscious, at least early on in Jewish history — such as at Mount Sinai — but at a later stage, and throughout all of history, these moral notions slowly develop and come to the forefront.¹ But developing these higher moral notions is possible only if we morally disconnect themselves from the biblical text when the text still represents lower moral standards. If we were to always rely on the text as representative of correct moral standards, we would be unable to progress to higher moral and religious goals, since we would consider the text to have the final word. The text would then become an obstacle, instead of a system to achieve even higher levels of growth. So rather than humanity following the text, the text should follow humanity

A present-day Torah vs. a historical Torah

Thus, were the Torah given today, it would not be the same text that God gave at Sinai. After all, over the centuries, we have developed a more sophisticated understanding of moral values. It is true that we have bitterly failed in living by those standards, but there is no doubt that humanity’s understanding of what morality should be is far more advanced than it was in the days when the Torah was given. The unconditional equality of all men, the dignity of all women, the equality of Jews and non-Jews are but a few examples. Yet the drive to reach for these higher levels is inspired by the Torah’s introducing such laws as Love your neighbor as yourself, as well as laws that call for sexual restraint, the wellbeing of the stranger, respect for human dignity, and many others. The Torah gave us a taste of how things really should be. By doing so, it has greatly contributed to the ongoing development of many other values, some of which are not even mentioned in the Torah.

The paradox of the Torah’s ethical charge

It must therefore be understood that sometimes the Torah’s laws reflect the highest standards, and sometimes they do not. Too much “theocentric” legislation at once would probably have been impossible to accept by a society that was still rooted in conditions so much at odds with those standards. The resulting Torah is thus a paradoxical mix of sublime divine ideals and primitive human necessities. By sustaining this paradox, the text created a vision and aspiration in stages. It gave us a feeling of how things should be, while not yet asking us to go all the way. It reveals an understanding, as Rambam teaches, that such changes need time for us to adjust, since one cannot make a “sudden transition from one opposite to another.”

The sages’ responsibility for “updating” the text

It is here that one of the most far-reaching ideas in Judaism appears. Instead of God constantly upgrading the text to higher standards according to human capabilities, and giving the Torah over and over again, God left it in the hands of the Sages. After laying the foundations, God asks the Sages to become partners in the creation of the Torah,² in the sense that humans would now be able to develop it to even higher levels. Just as in the first chapter of Genesis, God provides the main ingredients, and then asks humanity to fashion the world and improve it, the Torah is presented as the main ingredient that the Sages must engage with and improve. The text was meant as a point of departure, not as a destination,²¹ and the Sages are the ones tasked with adapting the text.

Changing the laws without changing the text

The Rabbis’ divine mandate to update Judaism and keep its moral development on target was not to be accomplished by changing the “underdeveloped,” compromised, and flawed divine wording itself but by their interpretation of the Torah text, and by advancing ideas and even laws that sometimes violated the literal meaning of the verses. It isn’t only that they were willing to do, but they felt obligated to do so, since this was the very intention of the text. The divine but flawed text asked humans to transcend it; sometimes even to ignore it. The text demanded its own fundamental renovation. Four examples of rabbinic updating Let us now return to the four examples of Rabbinic adaptation with which we opened this chapter:

A. Ben Sorer u-Moreh (the Rebellious Son)

The Torah commands that a stubborn and rebellious son be put to death. The

rabbis were of the opinion that this law could never have been enforced, since it completely violates the moral spirit of the Torah, even by its lower standard at Sinai. They therefore declared that such a law is only theoretical: “There never was a stubborn and rebellious son, and never will be.”²² Its message was purely educational. There are many important lessons to be learned from this so-called commandment, but that it should actually be implemented is not one of them.²³ To get rid of the law, the Rabbis read the text so literally, using every means of deduction and legal hairsplitting, that it became totally impossible to enforce the law. For example, the rabbis interpret the phrase “he doesn’t listen to our voice”²⁴ to mean that the father and mother must speak with identical voices, a state of affairs that is all but physically impossible. For good measure, they argue that the parents must also be the same height and have the same face.²⁵

B. Ir Hanidachat (the Subverted City)

The second, and perhaps most radical, example of how far the Rabbis were prepared to go is the case of ir hanidachat, (the subversive city) regarding which the Sages used a very far-fetched argument to abolish this biblical law for the sake of a higher morality. Here, too, they were convinced that “there never was a condemned city and never will be,” and the law was meant only to convey some important lessons. The Sages justified this ruling in a most ingenious way. They argued that it was impossible to destroy the entire city, since no doubt there must have been mezuzot on the doorposts of some of its inhabitants. (You can be a Jewish idol worshipper, but what Jew doesn’t have a mezuzah on their doorpost?) Since it is forbidden to destroy the name of God, which is found in the mezuzah, and everything in the city had to be utterly destroyed, the law of ir hanidachat could not be enforced and was meant to be purely theoretical! That the mezuzah could be removed before the city was destroyed was something the Sages did not want to contemplate. They must surely have been aware of this possibility. But since they believed that God could never have meant this law to be applied, they found an extremely far-fetched loophole and based their whole argument on a minor detail — an impediment which they

could easily have overcome, and which they knew made little sense. It was deliberate trickery rooted in an unequalled moral awareness.²

C. Lex Talionis (An Eye for an Eye)

Another case is lex talionis, the law of “an eye for an eye.”²⁷ This law was understood by the Rabbis to be purely symbolic, since it was impossible to enforce in a way that could be justified. (How could one person’s eye ever be equal to someone else’s?) They therefore felt obligated to interpret the true meaning of this law as financial compensation.²⁸ It was written as “an eye for an eye” to emphasize that ideally a person should give their eye to the one whom they blinded.² While this was not actually possible, the point was made!

D. The Mamzer (Bastard)

Another case that illustrates how far the Sages were prepared to go in finding loopholes is the mamzer (a child born from an adulterous relationship). Since the Rabbis (according to our theory) considered this law to be flawed, perhaps a relic of a primitive society, which the Jews at the time were not yet able to dispense with, they argued that they were obligated to at least limit the damage until the day when it could be abolished altogether. This, after all, was exactly what God and the Torah desired.³ Ideally, the Torah does not want such a law to apply, since it violates its spirit, according to which no one may be punished for another’s transgressions or become the victim of a malicious spouse.³¹ Why punish children for the sexual misconduct of their parents? Still, the Rabbis believed that for the meantime the law had meaning, and was a very strong warning against sexual offenses. As such, the “flaw” did not yet have to be completely abolished; it had only to be amended in such a way that it would nearly never apply. It was clear that at a still later stage, it would need to

be altogether abolished. There was no way, however, to reinterpret the text in order to accomplish this temporary goal, so another device had to be found. The Sages invented a mechanism that was so “out of the box,” one can only stand in awe of their courage. They decided that the legality of any marriage was not contingent on any action taken by the husband and wife, or even on the rabbi who oversaw the marriage, but only on the Sages’ agreement to this marriage. If they no longer approved, they simply declared the marriage null and void.³² While they seldom made use of this principle, it was there to be used, should they feel it would help a mamzer out of his or her unfortunate status.

Seeing through to the Torah’s true values

The Sages didn’t see any of these interventions as trickery, but as a way of achieving the higher objective of the Torah.³³ They believed that the Torah, while divine, was also flawed, and that it was their task to refine it and to bring it to the level that God had intended. This, I believe, is the secret behind the halachic loophole and the divinity of the Torah.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

The belief in Torah min hashamayim — the divine origins of the Torah — is, for some, a litmus test for distinguishing a believing Jew from a heretic, or an “Orthodox” Jew from a non-Orthodox Jew.

Do you agree that this is a valid litmus test? Why? (A related question is: are Jews even required to believe anything specific? or only to observe and practice halackah?)

How much time do you spend thinking about this issue, and what is your own standpoint?

If you do not have a clear standpoint on the topic, does that trouble you or not?

“Were the Torah given today, it would not be the same text that God gave at Sinai.” Do you agree? To conduct a thought experiment: what might be the content of such a Torah? (Be as specific as you can). Would it be identical — or at least similar — to what the Rabbis have done to date, or would it possess a very different tone, form and content?

“The text would then become an obstacle, instead of a system to achieve

even higher levels of growth.” Should a new Tanach be printed in which morally uninspiring verses and sections are highlighted in a different color, so as to caution the reader not to learn from them?

The essay argues that the Torah is a flawed document. The rationale given is that this was unavoidable, as it mirrored the limitations of its receivers. But what of the Giver — might it mirror God too? Though most religious doctrine seems to assume that God and the Torah must, by their very nature, be perfect, there are also theological strands or ideas that ascribe “imperfection” to God, implying that God created humans due to “needing something” from them, or that humans can “help” God in some way.

Does your own theological world rest upon an absolutely perfect Divine being, or would you embrace a notion of an imperfect Deity, whatever that might mean? And might embracing an imperfect God lead us to more easily accept the idea of a flawed Torah, or are the two notions irrelevant to each other in your view?

1 This essay originally appeared on the www.thetorah.com website and is accessible online at: https://thetorah.com/the-deliberately-flawed-divine-torah. A lengthier version of this essay was published in Nathan Lopes Cardozo, Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halakhic Courage (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2018), chap. 27.

2 Cited by Rabbi Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Ropschitz in Zera Kodesh (Jerusalem, 5714) vol. 1, Parashat Yitro, 71b; see also R. Mendel of Rimanov, Sefer Menachem Tziyon, Sefer Yalkut Menachem (Jerusalem: Siftei Tzadikim, 1998), 158-159.

3 The following was inspired by the writings of Rambam, Moreh Nevuchim; Maharal, Tiferet Yisrael; Eliezer Berkovits, Jewish Women in Time and Torah (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1990); Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of the Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004); Nahum L. Rabinovitch, “The Way of Torah,” Edah Journal 3, no. 1 (2003); Donniel Hartman, Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016); and many others. For the possible influence of Gentile wisdom on the Torah, see R. Tzadok ha-Kohen of Lublin, Pri Tzaddik on Shemot, Parashat Yitro.

4 For a general overview of the issue of rabbinic loopholes (ha’arama), see Talmudic Encyclopedia, s.v. “ha’arama,” 9:697 — 713, and Elana Stein, “Rabbinic Legal Loopholes: Formalism, Equity and Subjectivity” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2014), http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A175659/.

5 Devarim 21:18-21; Sanhedrin 71a.

6 Devarim 13:13-19; Sanhedrin 71a.

7 Shemot 21:24; Vayikra 24:20; Devarim 19:21; Ketubot 32b; Bava Kamma 83b.

8 See Ketubot 2b-3a; Gittin 32a.

9 See, however, Marc B. Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), chap. 7; see also Yehuda Brandes, Tova Ganzel, and

Chayuta Deutsch, Be’einei Elohim Ve’Adam: Biblical Criticism and the Person of Faith (Jerusalem: Bet Morasha, 2015) [Hebrew].

10 For a scholarly treatment of this topic, see Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God, Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), especially chaps. 5 and 6.

11 See Hartman, Putting God Second, chap. 5.

12 Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, tr. Shlomo Pines, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), part 3, chap. 32.

13 See the commentaries of Don Yitzchak Abarbanel and R. Samson Raphael Hirsch to Sefer Vayikra.

14 On this topic, see Gamliel Shmalo, “Orthodox Approaches to Biblical Slavery,” Torah U-Madda Journal 16 (2012): 1-20.

15 The case of a non-Jewish slave is different. In my opinion, this institution as well was meant to be temporary and to be eventually abolished — as, indeed, it was. See discussion in James Diamond’s TABS essay, “The Treatment of NonIsraelite Slaves: From Moses to Moses.” Accessible online at: http://thetorah.com/the-treatment-of-non-israelite-slaves -from-moses-to-moses/.

16 See Shemot 21: 1-11; Kiddushin 15a, 16b-17b; Bava Metzia 31b. The biblical texts emphasize the moral struggle behind the attempt to coerce owners to free

their Jewish slaves. See discussion in Marvin Sweeney’s TABS essay, “The Bible’s Evolving Effort to Humanize Debt Slavery.” Accessible online at: http://thetorah.com/the-bibles-evolving-effort-to-humanize-debt-slavery/.

17 Or, they would still appear but in a different schema, in which only the moral lessons could be learned.

18 This refers only to moral laws, not to Shabbat and other rituals, since the latter topics touch on the relationship between God and man. For a discussion of a change in all of the laws, including laws such as Shabbat, see Nathan Lopes Cardozo, The Torah as God’s Mind: A Kabbalistic Look into the Pentateuch (NY: Bep-Ron Publications, 1988) and Cardozo, Between Silence and Speech: Essays on Jewish Thought (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), chap. 7.

19 In truth, the very existence of the Jewish people is a compromise to human weakness. When looking into the stories of the Flood, the Tower of Bavel, and the birth of the Jewish people starting from Avraham’s family, we clearly see that the ever-widening scope of corruption caused God, as it were, to no longer expect all of humanity to live by the highest moral standards. Instead, He charged Avraham and his family with the task of becoming an example from which others would learn. This ultimately led to the creation of the Jewish nation as a Chosen People. Had humankind behaved morally, there would have been no need for such a nation, and the Jewish people would never have emerged. See Cardozo, Between Silence and Speech, chap. 3.

20 See Seder Eliyahu Zuta 2, Friedmann ed., 2.

21 See Maharal, Tiferet Yisrael, chap. 69.

22 Sanhedrin 71a.

23 See Maharasha (ad loc.) and Keli Yakar to Devarim 21:18. There, Rabbi Yonatan states that he sat on the grave of a rebellious son, indicating that the law had at some time been executed. This may reflect an earlier, more primitive understanding of the text in which people did not grasp its real meaning. It may have been as a result of laws that were practiced in other cultures, in which children were severely punished for not listening to their parents. It also seems to indicate that parents were actually willing to bring their children to court to have them killed, something the Talmud regards with extreme aversion. But in a society that in earlier days practiced child sacrifices, anything could happen. Note that it is inappropriate to sit on a grave, and that Rabbi Yonatan was a kohen — a priest! See Bava Metzia 90b. In some editions of the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan (not Rabbi Yonatan) is the sage who is mentioned. See Daf al Daf on Sanhedrin 71a.

24 Devarim 21:20.

25 Sanhedrin 71a.

26 Here, too, Rabbi Yonatan maintained that he sat on the ruins of such a city and that the mezuzot must have been removed beforehand. His arguments in both of these cases seem to be far-fetched, as the Sages must have known about such incidents. Either they were in denial about them or they decided to be in denial, so as not to undermine their viewpoint that these laws never did and never will apply!

27 See Shemot 21:24; Vayikra 24:20.

28 Bava Kamma 83b-84a. For a discussion, see Talmudic Encyclopedia, s.v. “chovel,” 12:693 — 695.

29 See Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Chovel u-Mazik 1:3; the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer in Bava Kamma 84a; Moreh Nevuchim 3:41; Seforno on Shemot 21:24; Maharal, Gur Aryeh on Vayikra 24:20.

30 Perhaps this has to be done in stages: First by stating, for example, that the law of the mamzer was only applicable to the child of such an adulterous marriage but not to his or her offspring, unlike today’s law that says all the offspring are forever mamzerim. See b. Yevamot 78b; Sifrei Devarim 23:3, 249; Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Issurei Biah 15:1; Shulchan Aruch, Even Ha-Ezer 4:1. Then, at a later stage, it would be abolished entirely. See the opinion of Rabbi Yossi that in the days of the Mashiach all mamzerim will be purified and permitted to marry freely, a clear indication that they saw this law to be only temporarily applicable (Tosefta Kiddushin 5:4; Kiddushin 72b).

31 Devarim 24:16; Melachim 2, 14:6; Divrei HaYamim 2, 25:4. See, however, Shemot 20:5, 34:6; Bamidbar 14:18; Devarim 5:9. The Sages attempted to resolve this contradiction in several ways. See b. Berachot, 7a; Sanhedrin 27b; and Midrash Aggadah (Buber) on Shemot 20:5.

32 See Talmudic Encyclopedia, s.v. “afke’inho rabbanan le-kiddushin minei,” 2:137-140. See the famous teshuvah of Rabbi Shalom Mordechai Schwadron, Teshuvot Maharsham (Warsaw, 1902), vol. 1, no. 9. See also the Collected Responsa of Rabbi Yitzchak HaLevi Herzog, Even Ha-Ezer (Jerusalem, 1967), vol. 2 no. 17-19. For a detailed treatment of this issue, see Nathan Lopes Cardozo, Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2018), chap. 27.

33 In the case of the biblical commandment to destroy the nation of Amalek and the seven nations of ancient Canaan, the sages also found ways to nullify this law by claiming that these nations no longer exist. (See Mishna Yadayim, 4:4; Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Melachim 5:4 and Minchat Chinuch by R. Yosef Babad, mitzva 604.) However, the biblical text indicates that these nations once did exist and were partially destroyed — including women and children — by the Israelites. We have to wonder whether these stories really happened or whether they are purely figurative. Alternatively, perhaps only the males were killed. Most interesting is the observation in Yoma 22b where Rabbi Mani states that King Shaul argued with God about why the Amalekite children had to be killed for the sins of their fathers. King Shaul argued with God as Avraham did when God wanted to destroy Sedom and Amora (Bereshit 18:20 — 33). For a discussion of this topic, see Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, “Amalek and the Seven Nations: A Case of Law vs. Morality,” in War and Peace in the Jewish Tradition, ed. Lawrence Schiffman and Joel B. Wolowelsky (NY: Yeshiva University Press, 2007), 201-238; Shalom Carmy, “The Origin of Nations and the Shadow of Violence: Theological Perspectives on Canaan and Amalek,” in War and Peace in the Jewish Tradition, 163-199.

Shemot

The Unorthodox Education of Moshe Rabbenu

‫ויפן כה וכה וירא כי אין איש ויך את המצרי ויטמנהו בחול‬

He (Moshe) turned this way and that way, and he saw there was no man, and he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. Shemot 2:12

True leadership is one of the most difficult qualities to achieve. It requires a rare combination of wisdom, courage, knowledge, and experience. Very few people possess all these qualities, and even fewer know the art of combining them in a balanced way. In the first chapter of Shemot, we learn an astonishing story of how Moshe Rabbenu became capable of undertaking the arguably most challenging leadership role in human history: liberating a few million slaves from an entrenched dictatorship and transforming them into a nation of God. Moshe had the additional mission of teaching mankind the highest level of ethics. One might think that the ability to inspire a few million people to love God would necessitate the best religious education, under the tutelage of the finest teachers. Such a person would have to be holy, and that would require a wellprotected environment into which outside heretical ideologies could not penetrate, and where secularism would play no role. Only under such conditions might a leader emerge who would be great enough to experience an encounter with God, receive His teachings and guide millions. Yet, the story of Moshe confronts us with an altogether different truth. When Moshe first leaves the palace of Pharaoh to visit his enslaved brothers, he is struck by the hard realities of life. Right in front of him, an Egyptian strikes a

Hebrew slave, possibly with the intention of killing him. With no hesitation, Moshe kills the Egyptian and buries him in the ground.³⁴ This is most astonishing. Why would Moshe take the side of the Israelite? Brought up in the world of Egyptian culture and instructed by elite Egyptian educators, possibly receiving private tutelage from Pharaoh himself to prepare him for the monarchy of Egypt in years to come, Moshe must have seen the Egyptian as a compatriot. This was a man of his own culture! Why take any action against him in defense of the Israelite?

And he saw there was no man

Nevertheless, it is clear that Moshe had warm feelings toward the Israelite, despite the fact that Hebrews were total foreigners to him. This is made very evident by the text, which tells us, “He came to see his brothers.”³⁵ Whether Moshe was actually told that he was of Hebrew stock is not clear, but it is highly doubtful. His identifying with “his brothers” must therefore be the result of an inner voice that told him of his shared destiny with the Israelites. This must have put Moshe in a very difficult position. Psychologists would no doubt raise the question of dual loyalties. How was he going to be the next Pharaoh while feeling strong sympathy for the Hebrews, who were considered arch enemies of the Egyptian regime? What would he do to resolve this? I once heard a deeper reading of one verse, which may give us some insight into this psychological quandary. After the Egyptian attacks the Israelite, we read:

He (Moshe) turned this way and that way, and he saw there was no man, and he smote the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.³

This may allude to Moshe’s psychological situation, albeit in a metaphorical way. Moshe suddenly realized that he was living in two worlds. While his youth was spent immersed in Egyptian culture, as far as knowledge, art and religion

were concerned his heart was elsewhere. Deep down he heard a voice demanding the opposite of everything Egypt stood for. It is for this reason that “he looked this way and that way.” Moshe realized that he was at a crossroads in his life and that “there was no man.” Until he could decide to which world he belonged, he lacked identity and would have neither character nor strength. Consequently, he decided then and there that he was to be a Hebrew and therefore “smote the Egyptian man” within himself and, figuratively, buried him in the sand. It is this decision that turned the world on its head, and sets the stage for events that would change the direction of history. Made in the blink of an eye, this is among the most radical decisions ever made in human history, eventually leading both Jews and gentiles to put God at the center of their lives and commit themselves to a higher ethical mission. But Moshe must have also realized that by ending his ambivalent situation, he would be destroying his entire future. Not only would he not become the new monarch of Egypt, but he would surely turn the whole of Egypt against him, becoming a wanderer and refugee, with no money or future.

The makings of a hero

Heroism is in no way better demonstrated than by one who can say no and then calmly — or not so calmly — accept the consequences of his resistance, knowing all too well that usually that heroic act will vanish into oblivion. Many a great person has disappeared from the map of history because those around him or her could not grasp his or her message. Yet, contrary to Moshe’s expectations, God reveals Himself to him at the burning bush, viewing him as the man suited to be the leader of the Jewish people. Had Moshe been educated by the best teachers in a warm Jewish environment, protected from the influences of the outside world, he would not have become the extraordinary man he was. He would have remained in Pharaoh’s palace, probably to become the next head of state in Egypt. He would have left no legacy that would turn the world on its head.

What is completely surprising is that Moshe became the prototype of the ideal leader not in spite of being raised in a world of idol worship, self-worship, and total lack of morality, but because of it! He became the greatest Jewish leader ever, precisely because of his secular, polytheistic, and morally empty education. It turned him into a fighter, determined to overthrow the false ideas he knew and recognized so well from the inside. It was the “rebel within” that made Moshe the leader of a nation whose function it is to fight and protest. “Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm,” said Latin writer Publilius Syrus. But it is the resistance and rebel within a person that creates the real leader. Leadership, borne of opposition, can only emerge in an environment at odds with the comfortable. The one who can swim against the current knows its strength and will therefore become stronger himself. We owe almost all our inner strength, not to those who have agreed with us, but to those who have opposed us. Had Moshe been educated in a strong religious environment, with the best Jewish educators to guide and protect him from the influences of the outside world, he could never have become Moshe Rabbenu. Only in a foreign environment that challenged all Jewish moral criteria could a man like Moshe emerge.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo argues that Moshe was probably not told that he came from Hebrew stock, and that “His identifying with ‘his brothers’ must therefore be the result of an inner voice that told him of his shared destiny with the Israelites.” Do you think the plain meaning of the text s this, given that Moshe’s own mother served as his nursemaid?

Moshe is presented as the first Jewish leader, and a rebel against Egyptian society and the education he received in the palace. He is also described in the Torah as the most humble of all men. How do you understand these seemingly contradictory character traits within one person?

Is great leadership always born of internal conflict? Are there other models of great leadership? Isn’t the ideal that a leader should match the needs of the people?

34 Shemot 2:12.

35 Ibid. 2:11.

36 Ibid. 2:12.

The Need for Heresy

‫ויאמר משה אסרה־נא ואראה את־המראה הגדל הזה מדוע לא־יבער הסנה‬

Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?” Shemot 3.3

Moshe’s destiny truly begins with his ability to question. He questions the right of the Egyptians to beat the Hebrews, he questions the right of the Midianite shepherds to the water at the well, and he questions the seeming anomaly of a bush burning in the desert. His ability to question and to upset the status quo is part of what he has to teach us. It is a lesson that we can apply both to our children’s education and to Jewish education in general. It is often entirely forgotten is that the Torah was the first rebellious text to appear in world history. Its purpose was to protest. It set in motion a rebel movement of cosmic proportions, the likes of which we have never known. The text includes all the radical heresies of the past, present and future. It calls idolworship an abomination, immorality an abhorrence, the worship of man a catastrophe. It protests against complacency, self-satisfaction, imitation, and negation of the spirit. It calls for radical thinking and drastic action without compromise, even when it means standing alone, being condemned and ridiculed. Judaism was born out of opposition, rebellion and protest. It overthrew and outlived mighty empires and gave the world a radically new understanding of itself. It has nothing to fear. It has prevailed over all those who criticized it, but it has also learned much about itself by listening to opposing voices. Through these voices, it has been able to sharpen its own claims and, if necessary, to change its mind when the inadequacy of these claims has become clear. Only by

continuing to do so, will it continue to play a central role in the future of humankind.

The benefits of opposition

While it is most important that we give our children and ourselves the best Jewish education possible, we will succeed in creating determined religious personalities only when we ensure that they are confronted with strong ideological opposition. Instead of developing a Jewish educational system that is self-contained and ideologically self-ing, we should build yeshivot and high schools in which students are constantly challenged in their beliefs and commitment, in order to give them the Jewish religious tools to explain and defend these beliefs. In fact, they should learn how to challenge the very teachings that oppose their tradition. To make this happen, teachers should bring to the attention of their students critiques against the Jewish Tradition and show them how these criticisms could be answered through the world of Jewish wisdom as found in the Talmud, Midrash, and the writings of Jewish philosophers. A reading of Spinoza’s Tractatus and Nietzsche’s critique of religion would do wonders in the Bet Midrash. John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration should be studied and debated along with Tractate Sanhedrin. The teachings of Sartre should be challenged by Chassidic texts such as those of the Kotzker Rebbe and the Mei Ha-Shiloach. This would sharpen the minds of students and show them the profundity of the Jewish Tradition. They would learn how to challenge these non-Jewish works, or even use them to deepen some of the most important Jewish teachings. This would generate a new appreciation of what Judaism is all about and would make it more relevant and vital than ever. Once in a while, a yeshiva should invite an apikores (heretic) to come and challenge the students’ beliefs. The debate that would follow could spark a whole new way of seeing what Judaism really has to offer. Instead of shunning such a proposal, it should be embraced and encouraged. Of course, this can only be done with mature and serious students who have a

good understanding of Jewish religious texts. These encounters would need to be carefully guided by talented, well-informed teachers who have struggled with religious doubt and questions in their own lives. After all, how can one be truly religious without having experienced an inner fight? It is this inner battle that create strong religious Jews who know what they stand for, enjoy challenges, and move Judaism forward.

A rebellion against mediocrity

This need for opposition seems to be entirely lost on our current religious establishment. We are instructing our students and children to obey, to fit in, to conform and not stand out. We teach them that their religious leaders are great people because they are “all-right-niks” who would never think of disturbing the established religious and social norms. We train them to view these leaders as the ideal to be emulated. But by doing so, we turn our backs on authentic Judaism and convey the very opposite of what Judaism is meant to project. By using clichés instead of the language of opposition, we deny our students the excitement of being Jewish: excitement resulting from the realization that there is a need to rebel and take pride in it, no matter the cost; excitement at the awareness that they are part of a great mission for which they are prepared to die, knowing that it will make the world a better place because they are real dissenters. When we teach our children to eat kosher, we should tell them that this is an act of disobedience against consumerism that encourages human beings to eat anything as long as it tastes good. When we go to synagogue, it is a protest against man’s arrogance in thinking that he can do it all by himself. When couples observe the laws of family purity, it is a rebellion against the obsession with sex. By celebrating Shabbat, we challenge our contemporary world that believes our happiness depends on how much we produce. As long as our religious educators continue to teach Jewish texts as models of approval, instead of manifestations of protest against the mediocrity of our world, we will lose more of our young people to that very mediocrity.

Judaism, in its essence, is an act of dissent, not of consent. Dissent leads to renewal. It creates loyalty. It is the force that compels the world to grow. We need new and bold religious leaders, but they will only emerge when those we have today stop fearing any and every challenge to Judaism. It is easy to be brave from a safe distance, but that does not create great leaders. Judaism was built with courage. To overcome fear and behold its wonder is the way to go. Let Judaism be challenged; it will only improve. As C.S. Lewis once said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”³⁷ To forget this is to betray Judaism.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Judaism, the author posits, is an act of dissent, not consent. What of the values and needs embedded within a thriving community, which require adherence to law and custom, along with protest? Isn’t there a balance that needs to be achieved? Who decides how to calibrate that balance?

Is the willingness to cleave to a highly structured and all-encoming system an act of heroism nowadays, given that we live in a milieu that respects and elevates individuality and unstructured spirituality? Could the conservatives, at whom most of the Western world rolls its eyes and sniggers, be the courageous ones?

Non-conformists must have something against which to rebel! They need the conformists as an anchor, a springboard, and a default. Could it be that all of us — conformists and non-conformists — are part of a system that produces bold ideas? Rebellion is always inspired by (and against) the status quo, and both extremes are necessary in the forging of the ultimate Golden Mean. Should the Orthodox serve as that anchor, and might this be its own form of heroism?

37 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (HarperCollins e-books), 156.

Knowing How to Lose

‫ויאמר משה אל האלהים מי אנכי כי אלך אל פרעה וכי אוציא את בני ישראל ממצרים‬

But Moshe said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should take the children of Israel out of Egypt?” Shemot 3:11

Throughout history, some of the greatest people often failed time after time before they really made it to the top. Others thought that they had failed but realized at a later stage in life that what they believed to be failure was in fact a grand success. Still others never succeeded — in the conventional sense of the word — but served as models of extraordinary accomplishments, sometimes without ever being aware of it. When we carefully study the life of Moshe Rabbenu, we are confronted with a series of failures. Until he was in his 80s, he spent most of his time on the run without getting anywhere. Following a short period of tranquility at Pharaoh’s palace, Moshe had to run for his life after having killed an Egyptian.³⁸ He spent many years in different places, often hiding from the soldiers of the Egyptian regime, never enjoying a quiet moment.

A life of constant defeat

He continuously failed to make any impression on his surroundings. There is little doubt that by the time he reached the age of 80, just before God called to him, he must have thought that his life was over and for the most part wasted. He

had accomplished nothing. He was still the same shepherd, trying to obtain some meager food, running around in circles. And even after God called to him at the burning bush, in his 80th year,³ and then sent him to liberate his people from the bondage of Pharaoh, his failures seem by far to exceed his successes. His first encounter with Pharaoh ended in total defeat. Instead of getting Pharaoh to agree to let the Jews have their freedom, Moshe’s presence and request caused Pharaoh to harden his heart, and his fellow Jews were then doomed to work even harder.⁴ After each plague brought upon the Egyptians, Moshe was convinced that he achieved his goal and now he would be able to take the Jews out. But he soon discovered that Pharaoh had once more changed his mind and again Moshe’s high hopes were crushed. In the desert, he encounters one rebellion after another. The Jews blame him for all sorts of wrongs and even demand to return to Egypt.⁴¹ After the debacle of the golden calf, God tells him that He will destroy the Israelites.⁴² No doubt Moshe must have felt that he had completely failed to educate his people to avert such a terrible transgression.

The great fiasco

Still later, after he sends twelve “spies” to survey the Land of Canaan, he is told that he will have to walk around in circles and spend another 39 years in the desert!⁴³ On another occasion, his opponent Korach attempts to undermine his authority, and Moshe is nearly murdered by his own people.⁴⁴ And then there is the great fiasco when Moshe ignores the exact instruction of God, and instead of speaking to the rock in order to produce water, he strikes it and consequently hears that he will never be allowed to enter the Land of Israel.⁴⁵ This devastating news must have been the final blow to all of his expectations. Now that he was not allowed to fulfill his greatest dream, of living in the Land of Israel, he must have felt that “it was all over” and that all his good intentions and deeds were of little value.

It probably never entered his mind that he would be seen as the greatest Jew of all time, that his name would be immortalized in Scripture and on the lips of millions and millions of people for thousands of years. Indeed, he may never have known what an eminent man he really was, and that there would never be a person who could even come close to his accomplishments. What was Moshe’s secret that enabled him to continue to fight for his goals, in spite of everything, and succeed where so many others would have failed?

Knowing how to lose

The answer is simple: he knew how to lose. He knew that his failures were in fact the building blocks for his future successes. While he may never have known what his accomplishments were, he continued to fight and ultimately prevailed. According to a Yiddish proverb, one who lies upon the ground cannot fall. Many people who are the most critical of those who have failed do not realize that they themselves have never left the ground. Those who never fail, also never accomplish, since defeat is the necessary step to success. The famous American philosopher Paul Tillich once remarked: “The awareness of the ambiguity of one’s highest achievements, as well as one’s deepest failures, is a definite symptom of maturity.”⁴ Above all else, one has to ask oneself what real success is all about. Let us bring an example from the world of fitness. A fitness center consists of a large hall filled with many pieces of equipment that could take us on long journeys. But they do not. There are bicycles that go nowhere, no matter how hard we peddle. There are rowboats but no water, skis without snow, and even climbing frames on which you can climb for hours without getting any higher. Still, you will find lots of people throughout most of the day working hard in the fitness center, fully aware that they are getting nowhere. It is all a failure.

This, however, does not sadden them. In fact, many return the next week and try again. The reason is obvious. Success with such equipment is not measured by how far you get but how much you gain in making your body healthier from within. Externally, it seems that there is no success whatsoever, but internally, the human being is growing steadily. The superficial viewer may draw the conclusion that the cyclist, the mountain climber and the rower are all failures. The wise man smiles and knows that they are great winners. And so it was with Moshe Rabbenu. Every failure was a building block to his success. He was bicycling, rowing, and climbing mountains, yet getting nowhere. But inwardly he knew he was getting stronger and stronger. He never gave up, and finally became the greatest man on earth.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Moshe is characterized as a failure from the perspective of results. Ignoring for a moment the author’s conclusion that Moshe’s success was inner, do you agree that outwardly for a leader, only results count?

How do you understand Moshe’s emotional relationship with the people? How does that factor into an assessment of his achievements?

It is said that failure is the greatest teacher, as it builds character. Failure, through the pain that accompanies it, provides a great incentive to avoid it going forward. However, the author is saying something more about the ability of failure to transform character. How do you understand that process?

38 Shemot 2:11-15.

39 See Shemot chap. 3.

40 See Shemot chap. 5.

41 Shemot 14:11-12

42 Ibid. 32:10

43 Bamidbar 14:26-35.

44 See Bamidbar chap. 16.

45 Bamidbar 20:7-13.

46 Quoted in Russ Volckmann, Phoenix Rising: Embracing and Transcending Failure (Bloomington, IN: Russ Volckmann, 2002), 168.

Vaera

Jewish Law: In Praise of Chaos

‫ויאמר אלהים אל־משה אהיה אשר אהיה ויאמר כה תאמר לבני ישראל אהיה שלחני‬ ‫אליכם‬

And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.” He continued, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh (I will be) sent me to you.’” Shemot 3:14

What is the meaning of this enigmatic age? What does it mean when God names Himself as “I will be what I will be”? It sounds as if God is saying to Moshe, “I will be completely arbitrary”! There is an old saying: Chance is God’s signature when He prefers to remain anonymous. But according to this age, this should really be: Chaos is God’s signature when he does not wish to be anonymous!

What Halakhah shares with science

Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, when discussing the logic of science, said: Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality. Our science is not knowledge: it can never claim to have attained truth, or even a substitute for it…. We do not know: we can only guess. And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in

regularities which we can uncover — discover…. The old scientific ideal of episteme — of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge — has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever.⁴⁷ In his preface to Realism and the Aim of Science, Popper writes:

“As a rule, I begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist.”⁴⁸ Almost paradoxically, he writes two pages later:

I dislike the attempt, made in fields outside the physical sciences, to ape the physical sciences by practicing their alleged “methods” — measurement and “induction from observation.” The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as there is mathematics in it, or as much as there is measurement or “precision” in it, rests upon a complete misunderstanding.⁴

What Popper says of science could also be said of Halakhah.⁵ Halakhah is the set of rules according to which God wants the Jew to live his life. At first glance, Jewish Law appears to be a set of strict rules that are part of a well-worked-out system. Upon careful analysis, however, it becomes evident that Halakhah consists of “arbitrary” laws, which on their own can make a lot of sense on a religious, ritual, or social level, but which are difficult to understand as an overall consistent weltanschauung. Many great thinkers have tried to impose logic or systematic structure on these laws, but they have been forced to it that their overall systematic philosophy of Halakhah doesn’t fit into the very structure of Halakhah. This prompts them to put forth sometimes farfetched and unconvincing arguments that make sense only within an entirely different classification, or by means of arbitrary reasoning that they would normally reject out of hand.

The subjectivity of Halakhah

Anyone who reads halakhic literature — particularly responsa — will quickly realize that while some basic principles of interpretation (mainly found in the Talmud) are at work, there is chaos regarding how to understand them in of ideology, weltanschauung, and even the practical application of Halakhah. Famous halakhic expert Professor Aaron Kirschenbaum, in his essay, “Subjectivity in Rabbinic Decision Making,” refers his readers to a remarkable book written by British scholar Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs: A Tree of Life, Diversity, Flexibility and Creativity in Jewish Law, “in which he catalogues innumerable changes in the Halakhah — drastic modifications as well as moderate adjustments. These changes are so varied — in subject matter, in geographic distribution, in historical period — that one is at loss to delineate the precise parameters of halakhic development….”⁵¹ One of the main reasons for this is that so much depends on the personality, emotional makeup, and worldview of the halakhic arbiter. His personal circumstances, as well as where and in what era he lives, make all the difference. No objectivity can ever be achieved, because humans — no matter how clever — cannot escape their own soul forces, the environmental influences that they subconsciously internalize. Moreover, the type of halakhic training the arbiter has received, the religious values in which he has been steeped, and even his secular education all play a major role.

A law meant for human beings

Many would argue that this is far from ideal. After all, how can a person gain an accurate understanding of the divine will when they are hampered by their subjective emotions, desires, philosophies and circumstances? But within the context of classical Judaism, all of this is considered a blessing! For people to be human and reach out to the Divine, they must maintain their humanness, and having emotions and desires is exactly what makes us human. Were we to

relinquish those feelings (clearly, an impossibility), we would cease to be human beings and the Halakhah would no longer have any meaning for us since it was intended for humans, not for angels. This is what is meant by the Talmud in Bechorot 17b: “The Merciful One said: Do it [construct the Sanctuary] and in whatever manner you are able to do it, it will be satisfactory.”⁵² Furthermore, if Halakhah were to operate by clearly determined boundaries and criteria, it would not survive. Studies have shown that systems whose development is organic and unconscious are much more successful than agendadriven organizations and ideologies.⁵³ Clearly-stated platforms and goals cannot develop and expand in ways that are conducive to real life. They are too confining to solve the many problems that we humans are asked to deal with. Overall strategies often create stagnation, while free association produces progress. Within religious thought and experience, there is the awareness that we must allow God to enter via what appears to be chaos and chance. Were everything to be worked out and predictable, we would close the door both to God and to real life. Chaos is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. What’s more “Chaos” seems to be — at least partly — the name that God offers to Moshe! I will be as I will be, and so My Law will be what it will be! This does not mean that anything goes, and that we can dispense with rules. That would cause a breakdown of society. But it does mean that we must allow for openings in the prevailing system, enabling the unpredictable to enter. The sine qua non for a vigorous life is the rejection of our conviction that all is predictable and bound by absolute laws. Certain things must be left to chance, in order to solve problems that we are unable to predict or resolve in conventional ways. They cannot, and should not, be forced into a carefully worked-out plan. We can’t always make accurate predictions, but we can suggest probabilities. It is for this reason that Halakhah has always developed on the basis of “case law”, rather than over-riding ideologies. Our decision on a case depends on circumstances, the kind of person we are dealing with, local customs, human feelings, and sometimes trivialities. God, as Abraham Joshua Heschel explains, is concerned with everydayness. It is the common deed — with all of its often trivial and contradictory dimensions — that claims His attention. People do not come before God as actors in a play that has been planned down to the minutest

detail. If they did, they would be robots and life would be a farce. The purpose of Halakhah is to disturb — to disturb a world that cannot it that it doesn’t have all the answers. The great tragedy is that the halakhic community itself has been overcome by exactly those obstacles against which the Halakhah has protested and for which it was created. Halakhic living has become the victim of Halakhah. The religious community has succumbed to the daily grind of halakhic living while being disconnected from the spirit of Halakhah, which often clashes with halakhic conformity for the sake of conformity. Many religious people convince themselves that they are pious because they are “frum.” They are conformists, not because they are truly religious but because they are often self-pleasers, or are pleasing the communities in which they live. The task of today’s halachists and philosophers is to reverse this phenomenon and allow Halakhah to once again be what it has always been: an anarchic, colorful and unequaled musical symphony that requires room to breathe. Or as Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs is said to have quipped: “Religion throughout the ages has been used to comfort the troubled. We should now use it to trouble the comfortable…”⁵⁴

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

How does it make you feel to imagine that something “chaotic” stands behind the system responsible for traditional Jewish life? Is that idea disturbing or invigorating? Or would you disagree altogether with this premise?

Some might argue that it is not chaos but Divine Providence that has propelled significant halakhic innovation throughout history (or at the very least, Divine Providence working via these chaotic forces). Would you agree with such a statement? And if so, do you, in fact, have this sense when reading groundbreaking psak? Furthermore, does the adoption of this notion make it easier or more difficult to create major halakhic precedents and changes?

Rabbi Cardozo calls for halachists and philosophers to allow Halakhah to once again be anarchic. What historical, sociological, religious and political trends over the last several decades in Israel might make this call a wise, or alternatively an unwise, direction in your opinion?

What do you think of the proliferation of halakhic rulings online? Is this a healthy thing for the “chaotic” development of Halakhah? Is it problematic that these rulings are being made for people whom the decisors will never meet?

47 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp. 278, 280.

48 Karl Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science (New York: Routledge, 2000) p. 5.

49 Ibid. p. 7.

50 These observations were inspired by: Yael Shahar, “Chaos Theory, Goedel’s Proof, and Halakhah: Thoughts on undirected Halakhic process,” https://www.yaelshahar.com/chaos-theory-and-undirected-halakhic-process/.

51 Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, Ed. by Moshe Z. Sokol (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992) p.87.

52 See Ohr Yisrael: The Classic Writings of Rav Yisrael Salanter and His Disciple Rav Yitzchak Blazer, ch. 30.

53 See: Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, “Doing Problem Driven Work” CID Working Paper No. 307 (Harvard Kennedy School December 2015). http://bsc.cid.harvard.edu/files/bsc/files/doing_problem_driven_work_wp_307.pdf

54 Quoted by Dr. Elliot Jager in “Celebrating skepticism”, December 2007, http://elliotjager.blogspot.com/2007/12/.

Believing the Unbelievable

‫’וארא אל אברהם אל יצחק ואל יעקב באל שדי ולא נודעתי להם בשמי ה‬.

I appeared to Avraham, to Yitzchak, and to Ya’akov with [the name] Almighty God, but [with] My name Y-H-W-H, I was not known to them. Shemot 6:3

I have tried to be an atheist, but skepticism always got in the way. Whenever I meet self-declared atheists, which happens on a regular basis, I am always dumbfounded by their capacity to believe the unbelievable — a true tour de force. It moves me deeply, and I stand in awe, feeling highly uncomfortable at not being able to sustain a similar level of belief. By now, I have read many books by famous atheists: books such as The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins; God Is Not Great (2007) by Christopher Hitchens; Stephen Hawking’s Black Holes and Baby Universes (1993); and Dick Swaab’s We Are Our Brains (Dutch edition, 2010). While these books are well written, and their authors often display great erudition in many important fields, I am fascinated by their capacity for a level of belief that seems so boundless as to make me deeply jealous of them.

The mysterious miracle of chance

The trouble is that while I am intrigued by these books, they also strangle me, and I feel the urge to run outside in desperate need of air.

They are telling me that our universe, with all that it includes, is the result of some accident that took place billions of years ago. That somehow, existence came into being by chance and left us with a mindboggling world that is totally mysterious and astonishing. It is a universe in which the most wondrous things exist and happen, but I am informed that there is really no purpose to it all and that it’s purely the result of some unfortunate coincidence. I am asked to believe that the development of our universe is nothing but the result of evolutionary accidents and other cosmological incidents. I have a hard time believing this. My limited mind just can’t grasp it. I keep on asking: If it’s all an accident, then why does the universe bother to exist? And I feel terribly immature, compared to these great minds, when I ask that question.

Refutation of the existence of God

Yes, I have studied the cosmological, teleological, ontological, and so many other arguments for the existence of God. And I agree that, philosophically and scientifically, they can be refuted, and that probably not even one of them is valid. But after all is said and done, I am still left with a strong inner notion of wonder: How can all this be accidental? And how is it possible that my atheistic friends don’t seem to have a problem with this? It worries me, because it seems that I’m missing something very important… But what? It keeps me awake at night and gives me no rest during the day. I want to be a rational human being, but I’m being told that as long as I don’t believe in this huge accident, my faculties are underdeveloped, and I cannot lay claim to reason. And yet: I keep asking myself where all these natural and cosmic laws come from, and when I’m told that they too are accidental, I again have a hard time grasping this. It just doesn’t sit well with me and I feel ashamed at my ignorance. It overwhelms me.

The problem of wonder

When I carry one my great-grandchildren — not more than a few hours old — in my arms, and I look at her face and small body, with tiny hands and feet, and I see that everything is perfect, when only nine months earlier there was nothing more than a miraculous sperm that met an egg. I feel ashamed that I can’t believe all of this is accidental. I just cannot make this leap of faith. It’s too much, and I feel embarrassed that I can’t my atheistic friends. But what am I to do? I cannot get rid of this sense of wonder that permeates my life. Yes, I it it’s terrible that I still live with this primitive and outdated notion of amazement, which I think was with me since the day I was born. I must tell you that I’ve tried very hard. I have read countless books on the philosophy of science, on cosmology and evolution, and God knows what else (pun intended!). But instead of helping me to see the truth, they have only increased my levels of wonder and amazement about this strange world in which I live. Accident? Really?

Max Planck and I

I am reminded of the great scientist Max Planck, who seems to have been as simplistic as I am when he wrote:

What, then, does the child think as he makes these discoveries? First of all, he wonders. This feeling of wonderment is the source and inexhaustible fountainhead of his desire for knowledge. It drives the child irresistibly on to solve the mystery, and if in his attempt he encounters a causal relationship, he will not tire of repeating the same experiment ten times, a hundred times, in order to taste the thrill of discovery over and over again…. The reason why the adult no longer wonders is not because he has solved the riddle of life, but because he has grown

accustomed to the laws governing his world picture. But the problem of why these particular laws and no others hold remains for him just as amazing and inexplicable as for the child. He who does not comprehend this situation misconstrues its profound significance, and he who has reached the stage where he no longer wonders about anything, merely demonstrates that he has lost the art of reflective reasoning.⁵⁵

You see, Max Planck and I are in the same boat. We just don’t get it: It’s all an accident. When will we be mature enough to stop standing in wonder and amazement when we see the sun rising; or that a small amount of soft tissue in our skull produces ideas and allows us to make strange sounds, which others seem to understand as words; or that — most incomprehensible of all — we are able to comprehend? When will we come to our senses and stop being awestruck at the fact that we can enjoy music because we’re able to bring all the different sounds together and make them into one, which deeply affects us, and elevates us to such a level of emotional upheaval that our hearts nearly burst from excitement? After all, my atheistic friends tell me that everything has already been explained. And when they offer me books and essays that clarify why all of this is obvious, and then I very carefully read them all, I am left with more questions than answers.⁵ Yes, I know that the notion of a God is full of problems and contradictions. I fully agree that our thoughts about this God are far too simplistic and underdeveloped and that most religions, including different forms of onedimensional Judaism, are guilty of creating this often-naive image. But does that mean that I have to start believing the unbelievable and convince myself that everything is a coincidence, and that all is explained — or can be explained — by the human brain, which itself is the greatest mystery? Should I actually start believing that my notion of wonder must be reduced to some physical brain activity, which no brain has ever sufficiently explained to me? So who is more of a believer, the atheist or me? Surely the atheist is. And I am jealous of atheists because they are able to believe the unbelievable. And I, in my simplicity, cannot reach that state of belief. I’m just too skeptical. And of

course I’m terribly embarrassed! After all, it is a huge personal fiasco! Anyway, I still can’t sleep.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

The teleological argument for the existence of God, also known as the “Argument from Design,” maintains that the physical world is too intricate to have come into existence out of happenstance or chance. Rather, the world as we know it had to have been designed by an “intelligent being” — God. Rabbi Cardozo turns this argument on its head to question the atheists’, claim that the world indeed came into existence randomly. Since neither approach can be proven, where do you stand? Do you see God’s hand, as it were, in creation? Intuitively, do you believe in a Creator of the world’s intricacies?

Rabbi Cardozo asks: How can this world that gives rise to so much wonder be an accident. How might you answer him?

Would you live your life differently if your belief about God were different? If so, how so?

55 Max Planck, Scientific Biography and Other Papers, trans. Frank Gaynor (NY: Philosophical Library, 1949), 91–93.

56 For some more reading to explain my questions, see E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Harper Colophon, 1977); A. van den Beukel, More Things in Heaven and Earth: God and the Scientists (London: SCM Press, 1991); and Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search

for Meaning (NY: Schocken Books, 2011).

Moshe’s Failure to Educate God

‫ויאמר פרעה מי ה' אשר אשמע בקלו לשלח את־ישראל לא ידעתי את ה’ וגם את־ישראל‬ ‫לא אשלח‬

“Who is the Eternal, that I should listen to His voice to let Israel go? I know not the Eternal and moreover I will not let Israel go.” Shemot 5:2

When reading the story of the Ten plaques, one gets the impression that there is something absurd about the story. Why should Pharaoh listen to Moshe and allow the Israelites to leave Egypt? And why all these plaques? After all, let us be honest, Pharaoh has never heard of this God. He was educated in a world of polytheism in which he himself was the ultimate god. Why should he listen to Moshe and Aaron, who tell him that there is a God greater than him, and that he’d better listen to Him? On what basis should Pharaoh take Moshe and Aaron seriously? To him they were charlatans. And so, he gives these two a real scolding when they come to him with not just a simple request, but with incredible chutzpah, with impertinence. They demand no less than the liberation a few million slaves whose departure from the country will ruin the economy and to destroy the infrastructure of Pharaoh’s dictatorship. Surely the only proper answer is exactly what Pharaoh tells them: “Who is the Eternal, that I should listen to His voice to let Israel go? I know not the Eternal and moreover I will not let Israel go.” What else do we expect Pharaoh to say? It is only natural that the words of Moshe and Aaron fall on deaf ears. In fact,

they have the opposite effect than the one they intended. Pharaoh tells them: This is all a trick to free your people from their bondage: “Why do you distract the people from their tasks”? He loses no time and immediately charges his taskmasters and foremen: You shall no longer provide the people with straw for making bricks… Let them go and gather straw for themselves. But impose upon them the same quota of bricks as they have been making heretofore, do not reduce it, for they are shirkers, that is why they cry: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.”⁵⁷

Round One to Pharaoh

And so, the first round with Pharaoh completely fails. Even God seems surprised that His command to let the Israelites go not only failed, but resulted in God having made Himself a bad name among the Israelites when the foremen of the Israelites accuse Moshe and Aaron of making things worse. “May the Eternal look upon you and punish you for making us loathsome to Pharaoh and his courtiers — putting a sword in their hands to slay us.”⁵⁸ But Moshe and Aaron hear much more in these words then what was actually spoken by those who attacked them. “Then Moshe returned to the Eternal and said: O Eternal, why did You bring harm upon these people? Why did You send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has dealt worse with this people; and still You have not delivered Your people!”⁵ In other words: Did you hear, God, what these people are really saying? They attack me, Moshe, for Your failure to deliver them and Your idea to send Aaron and me to speak with Pharaoh!

You never call; you never write

But it does not end there. Moshe seems to say much more: Dear God, things are much worse than what the Israelite foremen are saying. It seems that they do not

believe that You, God, even sent, my brother Aaron and I, to Pharaoh. And You know why? Because they do not believe that You exist. After all, for hundreds of years, they have not heard anything from You (not even a postcard!). And when I asked You how to introduce You to them after so many years of divine silence, how to make them believe in You, You answered: “Tell them: I am whoever I will be sent you” (3:14). But what kind of answer is that? That is not a name. That is a lot of hot air. And all of this a distraction. And You know why? Because You now realize that You failed these people. You let these people suffer without ever interfering and helping them, and now You feel embarrassed. You hide behind a smoke screen, saying that “I am whoever I will be” and that You will take them out of the misery. It sounds all very deep and mysterious, and You think You can get away with it. But these people are not philosophers who will dwell deeply into Your words. They are slaves. They have little time for metaphysical speculations. You know, God these people will tell me that this whole idea of getting us out of Egypt is mission impossible, a farce. And they will think that I made up the whole story to impress them. And what makes this even worse is that after the debacle with our first visit with Pharaoh, when he brushed us off and ridiculed us, he consequently made the lives of these Israelites even more difficult. It has only convinced them that much more that You do not exist. The little hope they still had, that I could convince Pharaoh to let them go, has now been crushed as well. And now You want me to tell them that You will really deliver them. But God, here is Your second mistake. You added a little caveat: I will take you out but not immediately. No, first I need to make sure that Pharaoh will refuse, not once or twice, but nearly ten times and then he will let you go! So what do You think the Israelites will say? No doubt, they will argue that this so-called God is again dragging His feet. Not only have they not heard from You for hundreds of years but now that I informed them that You will actually deliver them, I have also to tell them that You are postponing it again. Are You, God not able to understand that they once more will say that all this is a fantasy, wishful thinking? So, God, that is what You have achieved! Instead of giving them more reason to

believe in You, You actually made them into deniers and scoffers. And now You will need to use extreme measurements to make them believe in You against all logic. You really believe that ten plaques will do it and convince them, not to mention Pharaoh and the Egyptians? And that You will no longer accept the unbearable situation of the Israelites. So now You are forced to use overkill, for which there would not have been any reason if You had made sure that the Israelites had constantly heard from You for all these hundreds of years. You would have made their stay in Egypt much easier, and would have taken them out at a much earlier stage!

A crisis of confidence

But God, the story does not end here either: The reason why Pharaoh threw Aaron and me out at our first encounter with him was because Pharaoh was fully aware that the Israelites no longer believed in You. His taskmasters told him that the Israelites were constantly complaining that You did not come to rescue them and concluded that You do not exist. So Pharaoh was quite right when he refused to listen to us and said: “Who is the Eternal, that I should listen to Him and let Israel go? I know not the Eternal and moreover I will not let Israel go.” What Pharaoh was saying was: Even your own people do not believe in this God. So why should I? It is all a trick to free your people from their bondage and all this “God talk” of yours is nothing more than a way to scare me and to let you and your people go. But it is all a hoax. So when Pharaoh said to us: Why do you distract the people from their tasks? he hit the nail on the head. He was quite right in telling his taskmasters no longer to provide the people with straw for making bricks but impose upon them the same quota of bricks as they had been making heretofore! In other words: Pharaoh said to himself: Will I, Pharaoh, the god of Egypt, really believe in this farce? In the whole country, there are only two people who believe in this: Moshe and Aaron. They have convinced themselves that they had heard the voice of this God. But I and the Israelites know better! And if they, Moshe and Aaron, would not have made them aware of the concept of freedom, the Israelites would never have complained, and they would continue their work

as they did for hundreds of years and see it as their fate. So I, Pharaoh, have only one way to do deal with this problem: I will make them work harder so that they won’t have time to think about freedom, and everything will be back to normal again. You see God; you have maneuvered Yourself into a corner. Yes, I Moshe and my brother Aaron and You, God, know that You really spoke to us. But nobody believes a word of this. So You have made Yourself millions of enemies: the Israelites, the Egyptians and Pharaoh! And now You tell me that You want me to go and tell the Israelites that You do exist and that you will take them out of Egypt. You really believe that they will go for that? You are making another mistake again by putting another obstacle in the way. You want me to tell them that You will only deliver them from Egypt after You have brought all sorts of terrible plaques on Egypt. God, let me tell you something: I am not a man of words. I cannot sell this to them. They will keep asking me who You are and why they should believe me. And what am I going to tell them? That this time You really mean it, after hundreds of years of total silence. But only after a lot of plaques? They will not even believe You even when You actually bring about all these plaques on Pharaoh and the Egyptians, because their belief in You has “died the death of thousands of qualifications” and they will probably argue that all these plaques are nothing but natural phenomena. And they will still not believe in You.

Trouble down the road

Yes, Aaron and I know that at the end the Israelites will leave. But God, even after You will have done all this and You will take them to the land of Israel via the desert, this problem will hound You. They will be complaining, being stubborn, and even questioning Your existence like they did in Egypt because You yourself laid the foundations for this skepticism.

Even when You will be forced to split the Reed Sea, it will only hold for a short moment. In fact, when they will hear You speaking at Sinai, it will not convince them, and they will keep on complaining. Yes, first they will be deeply impressed when they hear You speak and see all thundering and lighting, but it won’t last. Their cynicism will again overtake them, and they will start believing in something else which is tangible, such as a Golden Calf. It is all much too late, God. Sure, we know You have Your reasons for all this. But I must be honest with You. From a human point of view, we do not understand why You do all this. Why not just one devastating miracle to put Pharaoh and his people in their place? Without any postponement. Would it not be much better than all these circumventions We all know that many good Egyptians will pay the price as a kind of collateral damage. You appear as if You want to make Yourself a lot of unnecessary problems. “Why make it easy when you can make it difficult?” seems to be Your motto. I greatly pity You, God. You are the most tragic Figure in all of human history. Sure, I will bow my head before Your majesty. But why did You not speak this over with me before You took this on? I would have given You different advice. Why did You not do with me as you did with your servant Avraham in the case of Sedom and Amora, when You said: “Shall I conceal from Avraham what I plan to do?” ¹ Avraham’s response: “Shall the Judge of al earth not do justice?” ² Your failure in not being open with me, as you were with Avraham is Your great misfortune.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Do you think that Rabbi Cardozo is right in saying that even the Israelites themselves did not believe in God? Do you think that it matters to God that we believe in him? Or perhaps, is such belief needed only in particular ages?

Rabbi Cardozo suggests that the Israelites were unlikely to take Moshe’s claim that he was sent by God seriously. “After all, for hundreds of years, they have not heard anything from You (not even a postcard!).” Might there be another explanation for God’s silence for all those years?

“So now You are forced to use overkill, for which there would not have been any reason if You had made sure that the Israelites had constantly heard from You for all these hundreds of years.” Do you agree that the plagues were “overkill”? Might they be aimed more at future generations than at Moshe’s generation?

Rabbi Cardozo has Moshe remind God of Avraham’s criticism of God’s possibly destroying the innocent along with the wicked in Sedom. But do you think that Avraham was actually instructing God in that instance? Was it not the other way around?

Rabbi David Mescheloff once argued that God was in fact teaching Avraham that the destruction of Sedom was not a “numbers game”, and that the number of righteous people in the city wasn’t the real issue. Might the slavery in Egypt and the subsequent traumatic events be in the nature of a similar lesson?

How might God answer Rabbi Cardozo’s tongue-in-cheek criticism in this essay? How might different personality types answer the questions that Rabbi Cardozo raises? (Think Bibliodrama!)

57 Shemot 5: 6-9.

58 Ibid 5:21.

59 Ibid, 5: 22-2.

60 Anthony Flew, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, pp. 98-99

61 Bereshit 18: 17.

62 Ibid 18:25.

Bo

The Miracle of Israel

‫החדש הזה לכם ראש חדשים ראשון הוא לכם לחדשי השנה‬

This chodesh (new moon, month) shall be for you the head of months; it shall be for you the first of the months of the year. Shemot 12:2

As this book was being compiled, a historic event took place: Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates. After more than seventy years of being considered a pariah state by its neighbors, Israel is finally becoming an accepted reality in the Middle East. It is interesting in this context to recall Rashi’s comment on the question of why the Torah does not begin with the first commandment given by God to Moshe: “This month shall be to you the head of the year”; why does the Torah instead begin with “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”. ³ This great Torah commentator quotes Rabbi Yitzchak as saying,

If the nations of the world will say to Israel, “You are thieves, for you conquered the lands of the seven nations (of Canaan),” they (the people of Israel) should say to them, “All of the earth belongs to God. He created it and gave it to whomever He saw fit… It was His will to give it to them, and it was His will to take it from them and give it to us.” ⁴

What is strange about this is that it is so easily refuted! If God decided to give the land first to the Canaanites and afterward to the people of Israel, He could again decide to give it to another people. If the Jews would then try to re-

conquer the land, would that not be thievery?

The need for miracles

Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, most commonly known as Hatam Sofer (1762-1839), gives Rabbi Yitzchak’s comment a most intriguing twist. ⁵ In his opinion, the nations of the world do not object to the Jewish people’s owning the land of Israel, but they insist that the Jews can never have a legitimate claim to the land if it is not given to them by way of manifest miracles. The people of Israel are a nation that typifies the concept of miracles. If they conquer the land by aggressive force, their occupation of that land has no validity. Only if it is clear that God intervened and gave the land to the Israelites through overt miracles can there be a lawful claim. This observation is not only daring, it is profound. Chatam Sofer explains that the Jewish response to the nations’ objections is reflected in Rabbi Yitzchak’s insistence that the Jews’ right to the land is rooted in the creation of the universe, and that the creation chapter teaches us how all existence is miraculous — ultimately inexplicable and forever mysterious. Consequently, all that happens within creation must be seen as supernatural. Even the laws of nature are nothing other than the frequency of miracles. We must conclude, then, that the conquest of the land by the Israelites was also miraculous, as was any re-occupation of the land in later days. This is not thievery; it is a supernatural expression of God’s will.

If everything is miraculous then nothing is!

This begs the question: If everything is a miracle, what is special about Israel’s miraculous settlement that justifies its claim to the land? When other nations occupy the land, is it not just as miraculous as when the Jews do?

It must be, then, that the Jewish claim to the land represents a different kind of miracle, one that does not pertain to the non-Jewish nations. Only in that case could the Jewish claim be justified. It must go beyond the argument that all of nature consists of a frequency of miracles. Herein lies the crux of the matter. Israel stands out as a nation that experiences miracles that have no universal application. They lack frequency and as such cannot be called ordinary. Indeed, the ten plagues, which led to the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, and the subsequent splitting of the Red Sea, are identical to the miracle of creation. Just as the creation occurred only once, so did many of the miracles experienced by the people of Israel. And even when they happened more than once, they happened only to the Jews and lacked universality. When one carefully studies Jewish history, from the early biblical days to our own times, one can only conclude that, in spite of the many pogroms, the Inquisition and the Holocaust, Jews were constantly accompanied by highly unusual events, large and small. The fact that Jews survived these atrocities, outlived all their enemies throughout the millennia, and made it back to the Land of Israel is unprecedented. and a vexing conundrum for historians and sociologists. It is indeed miraculous.

The subjectivity of miracles

This doesn’t mean that there is no natural explanation for any of this. The most important quality of a miracle is not that it is supernatural, or super-historical, but that it is a moment which, even if it can be argued away in of science and brought into the nexus of natural phenomena and history, nevertheless remains miraculous in the eyes of the person who experienced it. The true power of a miracle is in the individual’s incredible experience of an event in which the current system of cause and effect becomes transparent, permitting a glimpse of the sphere in which another unrestricted Power is at work. Such experiences shatter the security of all knowledge and undoes the normalcy of all that is ordinary. It is the abiding astonishment that is crucial. We stand in wonder; no cognition can weaken our amazement. Any natural explanation will only deepen

our wonder. Besides the fact that we Jews have survived all our enemies, what stands out in particular is the extent of our contribution to Western civilization — from Monotheism, the Bible and its ethics, to the fields of science, psychology, technology, medicine, and the arts — all grossly disproportionate to our numbers. American writer and sociologist Milton Himmelfarb (1918-2006) once wrote: “The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census. Yet we remain bigger than our numbers”. It was Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), the famous Russian author and philosopher who asked his readers to take proper notice of this fact:

And, indeed, according to the materialistic and positivist criterion, this people ought long ago to have perished. Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the process of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history; all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny. ⁷

A higher Power?

For over seventy years, the State of Israel has been surrounded by more than a hundred million people living in numerous Arab countries, occupying more land than the entire area of the United States. And nearly all of them — even those ostensibly at peace with the Jewish state — considered Israel a cancerous growth, or at least a major problem in their midst. Israel has fought war after war to defend itself against these nations. Logically, this country should never have survived. The fact that it did attests to a higher Power. It is this Power that now, once again, can clearly be noted. What is perhaps most

astonishing is that even while in the midst of a war with various states and nonstate actors, our day-to-day life continues as it does. Of course, we must never underestimate the tragedy of the loss of our soldiers on the battlefield and our citizens who have fallen victim to terrorism; nor do we trivialize the fear of those brave Jews in the southern cities, towns, and kibbutzim who face an almost daily barrage of rockets. Yet, we must it that the people of Israel continue to experience a great number of miracles.

Resilience and optimism

Throughout Israel’s history, these miracles have given birth to optimism. In the dark days of the suicide bombings, almost as soon as the smoke had cleared, things got back to normal. Even during the daily rocket attacks in the south, only a few kilometers from where rockets hit the ground, people gathered in synagogues for evening prayers and Talmud study; met friends for coffee; and sung zemirot at the Shabbat table. Arguing that life can continue under the circumstances only because of the Iron Dome is missing the point entirely. It confuses the hard facts with the abiding astonishment that something extraordinary is taking place. Although for the most part it is not verbalized, nearly every Israeli realizes it. An uninformed outsider visiting Israel for the first time would never know that a war is taking place. This indeed reflects the nature of the people of Israel. Though it should not encourage a fatalistic attitude, for there is no way of predicting the future. Neither would it be right to simply rely on the continuation of these miracles, as miracles are not to be taken for granted. One needs to merit them and recognize them as such. We must realize that miracles have been part of Israel’s history only as long as Jews, in and outside the land, have understood their uniqueness and have done everything possible to merit these extraordinary events.

It may be that after all these years, the nations of our region, too, are beginning to believe in miracles.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Do you agree that the continued existence of Israel proves the existence of miracles?

“The true power of a miracle is in the individual’s incredible experience of an event in which the current system of cause and effect becomes transparent…” Have you personally experienced such events? How might you explain them away as natural occurrences? How would you convey the sense of the miraculous to someone who wasn’t there?

Do you agree with Rabbi Cardozo’s contention that Israel’s survival depends on the realization that its existence is miraculous? Can miracles can still occur to us even if we don’t see them as miraculous?

63 Bereishit 1:1.

64 It is not clear who Rabbi Yitzchak was, although it is believed that he was Rashi’s father. This view is ed by Rabbi David HaLevi Segal (known as the Taz) in Divrei David. However, the statement quoted by Rashi and attributed to Rabbi Yitzchak is also found in Yalkut Shimoni, Parashat Bo, Remez 177, quoting Midrash Tanchuma in the name of an anonymous source.

65 Drashot on Simchat Torah.

66 Quoted by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “Love, Hate, and Jewish Identity,” First Things, vol. 77 (November 1997) pp. 26-31.

67 Nikolai Berdyaev: The Meaning of History (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1962) pp. 86-87.

The Challenge of Freedom

‫והיה הדם לכם לאת על הבתים אשר אתם שם וראיתי את־הדם ופסחתי עלכם ולא־יהיה‬ ‫בכם נגף למשחית בהכתי בארץ מצרים‬

The blood on the houses where you are staying shall be a sign for you: when I see the blood, I will over you, so that no plague will destroy you (negef laMashchit) when I strike the land of Egypt. Shemot 12:13

In the story of the Exodus from Egypt, we are confronted with a strange phenomenon: the mashchit (destroyer). After the Jews were told to mark their doorposts with the blood of the korban pessah (paschal lamb), they were informed that God would over their doors and not allow the destroyer (mashchit) to enter their homes. ⁸ Only later, at midnight, would Moshe call for them to leave their homes after they had had a family meal, and they would subsequently leave Egypt. Commentators struggle with the term “the destroyer.” Who or what was this? God? A plague? Some other power? One of the most remarkable explanations is that the destroyer was freedom itself. Often in history, national liberations have been followed by long periods of chaos and violence. Many bloody and ruthless insurrections have been instigated by slaves eager to settle scores with their cruel masters. At the time of the French revolution, many of those who were liberated subsequently initiated massacres, in which both the innocent and the guilty perished. The same is true of the upheavals after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Victims of harsh slavery tend to throw off the shackles of moral behavior and become criminals themselves, taking their revenge on innocent bystanders. The brutish drive for vengeance, for gratification of the worst impulses within us, can often seem

irresistible. And so, it is significant that the mashchit was not, in fact, connected with the Israelites themselves. There was no upheaval of revenge. No Egyptian babies were snatched from the embrace of their mothers and thrown into the Nile, as had been done to the Jewish male babies just a short time before. Not one Jew beat up the taskmaster who had tormented him mercilessly only a few days earlier. Nor was there an Egyptian house destroyed or vandalized. At that crucial hour, when the Jews had the motivation, opportunity and ability to take revenge for 210 years of exceedingly cruel treatment, they chose to be restrained and quiet. Instead of rioting in the streets of Goshen, they remained in their homes, as they had been instructed, ate a festive meal — which included the korban pesach — sang praises to God, and waited until they were told to leave. Would anyone have blamed them for beating up a few taskmasters who had thrown their infants into the Nile? Yet, not one Jew raised a hand against his enemy. Once it was certain that they would be free at any moment, and that there was no longer a need to defend themselves, revenge would be meaningless. This is one of the greatest lessons that Judaism has to teach: freedom should be experienced in a prudent manner, far removed from chaos, bloodshed, and revenge.

Freedom and the unlived life

But even individual freedom can be very dangerous if one does not think it through, control it, and apply it carefully. It is therefore quite understandable that Pessah, the Jewish festival of freedom, is associated with so many restrictions and obligations. All forms of chametz (leaven), are forbidden to be in one’s possession, and even a crumb becomes an issue. The precise rituals to be followed on the Seder night, when Jews celebrate their release from bondage, are painstaking and even grueling to the modern, carefree soul. What kind of freedom are Jews celebrating on the very evening of their forefathers’ departure from Egypt? A life of even more restrictions?

Today, freedom is defined as the ability to do whatever one wants. Entire generations have been thrown into a life of meaninglessness, ivity, and boredom in the name of this artificial freedom. It wreaks havoc on many fine souls who no longer have a sense of what they are living for. After all, a life with no mission and commitment is not worth living. Even in the religious community we find many youngsters who observe the commandments by rote, either out of social pressure or fear of punishment. They dream of freedom, of liberating themselves from their many obligations. Yet, they are unaware that these very obligations are the manifestations of genuine freedom, that a life with no boundaries is a life of confinement. In our chaotic world, the symbolic restrictions of Pessah teach a most important lesson.

Embracing obligation

When speaking of obligation, people say, “duty calls”. The metaphor is clear: a duty calls. It is far removed and needs to call us, or else we may not hear. For us to hear, we must come closer. But we may decide to keep our distance, living our lives free of duty. This is not the case in the Hebrew language, which expresses the concept of obligation very differently. In its worldview, duty has arms that embrace us and will not let us go. When describing one who has not yet done his duty, the Mishna uses the phrase: Lo yatza yedei chovato, “He has not yet left the hands of his obligation”. In Judaism, our duties are not “long distance calls”. Rather, they hold us in their grasp, and only when we have lived up to our duty can we claim to be free. It is the refusal to do one’s duty that casts us into confinement. Judaism is the art of making a problem out of every solution. It correctly believes that what is taken for granted is boring; it does not get our attention and therefore has no significance. Only when we see something as a challenge and give it thought do we come alive. A sense of duty reflects awareness that the trivial is critical. There is no growth except in the fulfillment of one’s duty.

Without it, we do not live fully; we merely exist without experiencing the seasons in our souls. Surely we must hear the music of our obligations and realize the privilege of being charged with a sense of duty. We must simultaneously be aware that by restraining ourselves, we prove that we are not hostage to our own desires, but the master who rises above our limitations. We need to know what we are free from, to daily experience this freedom and, above all, to know how to use it. Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote: “In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister und das Gesetz nur kan uns freiheit geben.⁷ ” (“Only through his limitations does the master really prove himself. And only the law can provide us with freedom.”) This expresses a fundamental Jewish concept: A man is never more free than when he is involved in a life of Torah. (See Pirkei Avot, 6:2) Today, when so much freedom has been given to us, many of us do not know what they are free from. We have confused the free with the “free and easy”, the license to do whatever we like, regardless of how it may impact others. “He only earns his freedom and existence,” Goethe also wrote, “who daily conquers them anew”.⁷¹ In these days, when we hear calls for violence on the background of increasing political polarization, the lesson of the mashchit is of utmost importance.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo suggests that the mashchit, the destroyer, is freedom.What else might the mashchit be? From what other force might the Israelites need protection?

Had you been there that night, do you think you would have left as calmly and politely as our ancestors apparently did? Have there been times in your life when revenge was the preferred option? Does not acting on the need for revenge feel good or bad?

Rabbi Cardozo asserts that many people today do not know what they are free from. Do you know? Do you feel free? Might there be advantages to not knowing the hardships of lacking freedom?

While Goethe’s character tells us “He only earns his freedom and existence, who daily conquers them anew,” Karl Marx tells the workers that if united, they have nothing to lose but their chains. How might these differing ideas about status, humanity, and freedom relate to Rabbi Cardozo’s assertion that freedom can be a very dangerous thing?

What do you think freedom is? Do you believe that the definition of freedom varies from one culture to another?

68 Shemot 12:23.

69 Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, Logic of the Heart, Logic of the Mind (Jerusalem: Genesis Jerusalem Press, 1991) pp. 137-142.

70 From the Sonnet: “Was wir bringen”.

71 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Act V, Scene 6.

Temporary vs Eternal Prophecies

‫ויאמר משה כה אמר ה’ כחצת הלילה אני יוצא בתוך מצרים‬

Moshe said, “Thus said the Eternal, ‘At the dividing point of the night, I will go out into the midst of Egypt’” Shemot 11:4

The Torah uses several expressions for prophecy. Two phrases that appear frequently in this regard are, Zeh Hadavar (This is the word) and Koh Amar Hashem (Thus says God.) We find an example of the former in Bamidbar, where the Torah teaches the laws related to making vows. “And Moshe spoke to the heads of the tribes of the children of Israel and said, ‘This is the word that God has commanded: if a man makes a vow…’”⁷² An example of the latter occurs in our Parashah, where Moshe informs the people that the promised redemption from the hardships of Egyptian slavery is imminent. “Thus says the Lord, ‘At about midnight I will go out into the midst of Egypt.’”⁷³ Rashi offers the following comment on the verse in Bamidbar:

Moshe prophesied with “Koh Amar Hashem” (Thus says God) and the prophets prophesied with “Koh Amar Hashem”. Moshe, however, added [another kind of prophecy] with the words, “Zeh Hadavar” (This is the word).

Rabbi Eliyahu Mizrachi (circa 1440-1525), in his classic commentary on Rashi,

explains that this subtle difference in the language hints at the unique nature of Moshe’s prophecy. The Talmud observes that with the exception of Moshe Rabbenu, the Jewish prophets experienced communication from God beaspaklaria she’ena me’ira — via an obscured lens, which means that they received prophecy only while in trances or in dreams.⁷⁴ Only Moshe received his prophecies at all times, even while fully conscious.⁷⁵ He achieved a spiritual level on which nothing stood between him and God. Thus, we say that Moshe’s prophesy came to him be-aspaklaria ha-me’ira — through a clear lens.

Through a glass darkly

If this interpretation is correct, then the expression, Koh amar Hashem — “Thus says God” — somehow implies a prophecy revealed through an “obscured lens.” Commentators point out that this kind of prophecy does not have to be transmitted as a literal word-for-word repetition of the divine communication.⁷ Koh Amar Hashem actually means “This is about what God said,” while Zeh Hadavar should be understood to mean, “This is the exact word”. In order to explain Rashi’s aforementioned comment (from which we learn that Moshe prophesied using both expressions) Rabbi Mizrachi argues that before Moshe received the special gift of prophecy which was uniquely his (i.e. the clear lens) he prophesied on the level of all other prophets (Koh Amar Hashem).⁷⁷ Only once he spoke with God “face to face”⁷⁸ in a direct manner of communication unmediated through an obscure lens, did he and his prophecy become elevated to a higher level, at which point he started to prophesize with Zeh Hadavar. The Maharal, however, points out that we find multiple instances in the Torah where Moshe prophesied with Koh Amar despite his exalted status. Thus, the aforementioned distinction cannot be justified. Consequently, the Maharal suggests another possible explanation for the two different prophetic expressions, which touches on the very nature of the Torah.⁷ There are, in fact, two kinds of prophecy — one, of a temporary nature, and the other, eternal. The words Moshe uttered to inform the Israelites that God would lead them out of Egypt were very much contextual. They were specific to a certain time and place, and as such, Koh Amar Hashem sufficed. But when God

reveals His will in the form of mitzvot, His message takes on an eternal stature, and therefore requires a more forceful phraseology: Zeh Hadavar — “This is the word [forever]”. The Maharal, with his usual profundity, explains that the first kind of prophecy portends a change. For example, in our case, in which Moshe tells the Israelites that God will effect a dramatic change by taking them out of Egypt. This was a finite affair belonging to the world of space and time, since change is only possible in a physical/temporal realm. The second variety of prophecy — the revelation of mitzvot — is, however, neither rooted in physicality nor in finitude. The mitzvot are the result of eternal spiritual realms touching the physical world without becoming part of it. As such, mitzvot have no existence or role in the physical world other than as an influence. Therefore, they manifest with Zeh Hadavar — “This is the unchanging, eternal word”.

An eternal entity

The Maharal’s explanation may also indirectly offer us some insights into one of the fundamental questions in Judaism. Why was God unwilling to give the Torah to the Avot, the Fathers — Avraham, Yitzchak and Ya’akov? If, indeed, the Torah contains such a profound message, why hold it back for so many generations? With the above observations in hand, the matter becomes crystal clear. One cannot put something infinite and eternal into a finite vessel; obviously the vessel, no matter how strong, would shatter. As long as the Jewish people were merely a collection of individual mortals — even if those individuals possessed the towering stature and sterling character traits of Avraham, Yitzchak and Ya’akov — they could not receive an infinite Torah. Only after the Jews left Egypt and became into a religiously distinct nation — an eternal entity — did they become a vessel capable of receiving God’s eternal Torah.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

The Maharal’s distinction between “eternal” prophecies (“Zeh HaDavar”) and circumstantial prophecies (“Koh Amar”) would seem to be a distinction between levels of reality. Matters of this world, are represented by “Koh Amar”, while the eternal matters relating to a more spiritual realm are addressed by “Zeh HaDavar”.

Might there be another distinction between “Koh Amar” and “Zeh HaDavar”? For example, might this be distinction be between prophecies meant to be absolute, and others that are meant to be reinterpreted by each generation as circumstances arise?

Might the different expressions relate not to prophecy for one-time vs. a prophecy for all times, but rather, commandments that are meant to stand the test of time in this world, as opposed to commands that are meant to remains flexible.

Rabbi Cardozo characterized the mitzvot as “eternal” and “infinite”: “The mitzvot are the result of eternal spiritual realms touching the physical world without becoming part of it.”

Do you agree with this characterization of mitzvot as purely spiritual matters? How might mitzvot be seen as matters purely of this world, which “touch the other world without becoming part of it”?

Would you agree that the mitzvot have “no existence or role in the physical world other than as an influence”? If we say that the mitzvot were given to us in order to build a perfect society, or in order to refine our character, is this consistent with Rabbi Cardozo’s characterization?

What other roles might the mitzvot have? In what way might mitzvot be “eternal” and “infinite” or “temporal” and “finite”?

The Talmud (Massechet Temurah 16a) recalls a disturbing reality after Moshe Rabbenu’s death:

R. Yehuda said in the name of Shmuel: Three thousand laws were forgotten during the period of mourning for Moshe. They said to Joshua: Ask! He replied: “It is not in Heaven.” (Deuteronomy 30:12). They said to Shmuel: Ask! He replied: “These are the commandments” (Leviticus 27:34) — no prophet has the right to introduce anything new from now on [i.e., after Sinai]…. R’ Abbahu said: Nevertheless, Otniel ben Knaz restored [these forgotten laws] via his dialectics ‫מתוך פילפולו‬. Thus it is written, “Otniel ben Knaz, the brother of Calev, conquered [Kiryat Sefer, and Calev gave Otniel his daughter Akhsah as a wife]” (Joshua 1:17).

If the mitzvot are eternal, what does it mean to say that “three thousand laws were forgotten”? And if they were forgotten, how did Otniel ben Knaz restore them? Does Rabbi Cardozo’s distinction, following the Maharal between onetime ordinances and mitzvot established for all time offer an answer? How

would you characterize the laws that were “forgotten” — as “Koh Amar” or as “Zeh haDavar”?

72 Bamidbar 30:2.

73 Shemot 11:4.

74 Yevamot 49b.

75 See Bamidbar 12:8; Mishne Torah, Hilchot Yesode ha-Torah 7:6; Rambam, Perush ha-mishnayot, Sanhedrin introduction to chap. 10, the seventh principle of faith.

76 See R. Moshe Shmuel Glasner, Dor Revi’i al masechet Chullin (Jerusalem, 2004), 4. For a discussion see Abraham Joshua Heschel, Theology of Ancient Judaism, vol. 2 (London and NY: Soncino Press, 1965), 146-150 [Hebrew].

77 Ad Loc.

78 See Shemot 33:11; Devarim 34:10.

79 Gur Aryeh on Rashi, Bamidbar 30:2.

Beshalach

Jewish Self Delusion and the Denial of the Future

‫?ויאמרו אל משה המבלי אין קברים במצרים לקחתנו למות במדבר‬

Are there no graves in Egypt that you have taken us to die in the desert? Shemot 14:11.

One of the most common psychological conditions human beings find themselves in is denial. All people repress unpleasant experiences and do not want to be confronted with reality when it is not to their liking. Sigmund Freud devoted his full attention to this phenomenon. In this week’s parshah, we read about a most bizarre complaint received by Moshe. After the Israelites experienced the ten plagues, left Egypt, and witnessed the downfall of Pharaoh, they accuse Moshe of having brought them into a disastrous situation. Once they realize that Pharaoh is chasing them, they say:

Are there no graves in Egypt that you have taken us to die in the desert? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Isn’t this the very thing we told you in Egypt, when we said, “Leave us alone and let us work for the Egyptians”? For it would have been better to be slaves in Egypt than to die in the desert.”⁸

This is a remarkable twisting of events! What skepticism, arrogance. and utter untruth to say, “We told you so in Egypt”! Even more surprising is the fact that after witnessing the unprecedented miracle of the splitting of the Reed Sea, the

Jews once again repeat these psychological fabrications:

The entire community of Israelites complained against Moshe and Aaron in the desert. The children of Israel said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of God in Egypt, where we sat by pots of meat and ate our fill of bread. But you brought us out to this desert, to kill the entire community by starvation!”⁸¹

This argument is astonishing. A fiction of unimaginable proportions! Was there really a choice between living a life of tranquility in Egypt and dying in the desert? Not only that, but God’s name is invoked so as to make the argument stronger and religiously sound. There are several ways to understand this phenomenon of radical self-deception. Obviously, the Israelites were well aware that their life in Egypt was definitely not one of tranquility while sitting by pots of meat! So what were they saying?

To deny the future

I would suggest that they did not intend to deny the past, but that they wanted to deny the future. Not that it did not happen, but that it would not happen again! It’s as if they were saying: “Now that Pharaoh has been without us for some time, he has surely realized that we are a great asset to his nation and to the future of his government. He is in need of the Jewish kop (head, or brain) to run his country and develop it. So let us return home in triumph! We will be received with dignity and honor. Don’t you realize, Moshe, that Pharaoh’s chasing us is really a clear indication of his desire to escort us peacefully back to Egypt and offer us comfortable homes and food? We are just scared of them because you won’t allow us to go home. You argue that pandemonium will erupt, and that they’ll kill us out of frustration. But Pharaoh has learned his lesson, and from now on we will live in tranquility and indeed eat

from Egypt’s pots of meat! Why can’t you see this, Moshe?” Even after the splitting of the Reed Sea, this argument still stands: “God only split the Reed Sea to show Pharaoh and the Egyptians what a prestigious people we are. We are protected by God and are therefore of invaluable importance to the Egyptians. We will be welcomed in Egypt with open arms and given the most prestigious positions in the country. A new world has opened up, and it is time we realize that. And if you, Moshe, ask us how we know that this is exactly what God has in mind, we respond that He would otherwise have given us plenty of food in the desert, and we would not have been chased by Pharaoh. God would have destroyed Pharaohs’ chariots the moment he left Egypt! Everything that is happening to us is a clear indication that we are ethically and even ‘halakhically’ obligated to return to Egypt!” The Israelites might have continued their line of reasoning as follows: “Pharaoh did all these terrible things to us because he sensed that we wanted to leave and therefore he started killing our boys. But if we had made it clear that we wanted to stay and had no such dreams of freedom, nothing unpleasant would have happened to us. We would have been part of the Egyptian society and everything would have been fine. But now, since we acted with “dual loyalty”, we are paying the price.”

Speechless

This may very well have been the reason why Moshe, at the burning bush, did not want to accept God’s command to become the redeemer, claiming that he had a speech impediment.⁸² He was hesitant to take this task upon himself, because he realized that when he would return to Egypt, Jews would say to him: “It all started with you! You ran away from Pharaoh’s palace after killing the Egyptian,⁸³ and then Pharaoh started hating us. Because of you, our people are being killed. So leave us alone and forget your aspirations to be our redeemer.” This would indeed have made Moshe speechless. Looking at Jewish history and current events, we realize that the above arguments sound all too familiar. Yes, Jews in Europe should be able to live as

free people. But they must not think that Europeans will wake up to the fact that Europe without its Jews will no longer be Europe, and that Jews will be accepted by all segments of society and anti-Semitism will come to an end. Solving the problem of antisemitism can only begin once we fully understand where it originates. And most Jews, as well as gentiles, have still not grasped its actual roots. In fact, they prefer to look the other way.⁸⁴

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Do you agree with Rabbi Cardozo’s analysis of the Israelites’ complaints? How else might you explain their seeming amnesia about the reality of their servitude in Egypt?

Rabbi Cardozo writes: “Solving the problem of antisemitism can only begin once we fully understand where it originates.” What do you see as the origin of anti-Semitism? Do you believe that antisemitism can ever be eradicated?

Philosopher Michael Wyschogrod writes that antisemitism is a reaction to the election of Israel: “Instead of accepting Israel’s election with humility,” the nations of the world all too often “rail against it, mocking the God of the Jews, gleefully pointing out the shortcomings of the people he chose,” for “Israel’s presence is a constant reminder to them that they were not chosen but that this people was.”⁸⁵

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, on the other hand, localizes antisemitism in human psychology, and notes its implications for societies that harbor it:

Anti-Semitism is a classic example of what anthropologist René Girard sees as the primal form of human violence: scapegoating. When bad things happen to a group, its can ask two different questions: “What did we do wrong?” or “Who did this to us?” The entire fate of the group will depend on which it chooses.

If it asks, “What did we do wrong?” it has begun the self-criticism essential to a free society. If it asks, “Who did this to us?” it has defined itself as a victim. It will then seek a scapegoat to blame for all its problems. Classically this has been the Jews.⁸

Which of these explanations do you feel is closer to the truth? How would the Jewish self-deception cited by Rabbi Cardozo play out according to each explanation?

80 Shemot 14:11-12.

81 Ibid. 16:2-3.

82 Shemot 4:10.

83 Ibid. 2:11-12.

84 See www.cardozoacademy.org Thoughts to Ponder 480 — “Have Some Pity on the Anti-Semite.” Accessible online at: https://www.cardozoacademy.org/thoughts-to-ponder/have-some-pity-on-theanti-semite/

85 Michael Wyschogrod, Avraham’s Promise, p. 182.

86 Jonathan Sacks, “Anti-Zionism Is The New Anti-Semitism, Says Britain’s Ex-Chief Rabbi” Newsweek Europe, 3 April, 2016.

The Virtues of Insanity

‫ויאמר ה’ אל משה מה תצעק אלי דבר אל בני ישראל ויסעו‬

The Eternal said to Moshe, why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the children of Israel and let them travel. Shemot 14:15

A famous Midrash tells of the courage of Nahshon ben Aminadav. Standing at the Reed Sea, pursued by Pharaoh and the Egyptian army, Nahshon ben Aminadav made his decision and jumped into the waters, nearly losing his life.⁸⁷ Only at the very last second did God intervene and split the sea, saving Nahshon and the rest of the Jews from Pharaoh’s assault. No other Jew, standing by, had the courage to take this unprecedented step. They waited until the waters were split before entering. Presumably, they thought that Nahshon was so terrified by the approaching Egyptian army that he chose to commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of Pharaoh and face cruel torture. Only afterwards did they realize that it was he who showed great courage, saving all of them, and that it was they who were the cowards. As G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life in order to keep it.”⁸⁸ Still, objectively, their decision made sense. Jumping into the sea would have ended in tragedy, and nothing would have been accomplished. Better to wait and see what happens, they thought, and not take action that had almost no chance of succeeding. But Nahshon won the day. Looking at history, one needs to realize that the greatest accomplishments of mankind were achieved by the Nahshons of every generation. Those who were prepared to jump into the sea, taking huge risks, were responsible for magnificent scientific discoveries, space travel, grand business deals, daring political decisions and waging war on evil. Very often, they were declared by

others to be insane and irresponsible. People with courage and strong character are often looked at as strange. There is a story that physicist Wolfgang Pauli once gave a talk that was attended by the great physicist Niels Bohr. After the lecture Pauli said to Bohr, “You probably think that these ideas are crazy.” “I do,” said Bohr. “But unfortunately, they are not crazy enough.”⁸

No authentic life choice is risk free

No doubt, such bold and heroic actions have often failed, bringing with them havoc and much pain, but without such attempts the world would not only stagnate, but in fact, disintegrate. There can be no future without hope and risk. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises, said Samuel Butler. A reasonable probability is the only certainty we have. Aristotle maintained that probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities. Surely risks must be calculated and carefully planned, but without an element of uncertainty nothing can be accomplished. There is no authentic life choice which is risk-free. Nahshon’s deed, however, was not based on rampant imprudence. After the great miracles that took place in Egypt, and God’s repeated statements that He would bring the Jews to Sinai and Israel, Nahshon may have felt that his decision to jump had a good chance of succeeding. Indeed, against everyone’s expectations, he was right. We can be sure that he had doubts about whether he would succeed, but he realized that this very uncertainty would impel him to greater strength. After all, the quest for certainty blocks the heroic and liberating deed. The reluctance to take risks has often killed opportunities to create a better world. By closing the door to all possible error, we shut out any possibility to discover the new and the better. Judaism, throughout its long history, has always taken risks. In fact, it is built on the foundations of uncertainty: Avraham’s standing up to the injustices of his world and proclaiming ethical monotheism in defiance of the beliefs of his day;

his unprecedented courage in challenging the Lord of the Universe concerning His treatment of the people in Sedom and Amora; Nahshon ben Aminadav’s heroic jump into the sea; Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai’s daring demand of Vespasian to hand over the city of Yavne to the sages; the Zionist movement in our own days; Operation Thunderbolt in Entebbe by the Israel Defense Forces in 1976 — all of them took risks that could very well have led to failure while endangering themselves and others. Some, like Bar Kochba, did indeed suffer that fate; his courageous revolt against the Romans ended in total defeat and national disaster.

Where are the Nahshons of our generation?

Today we no longer encounter religious leaders who act like Nahshon, prepared to jump into the sea, saving what needs to be saved and creating what needs to be created. Instead, we experience a constant desire to stay with the old and not rock the boat, to look over one’s shoulder fearing possible failure. Judaism’s predicament is one of great urgency; it would be no exaggeration to speak of an emergency situation. Too many people marry out, are no longer connected with their Jewish souls, or lack any interest in developing a bond with Judaism. This is true not only for many communities in the US and Europe, but also in Israel. Only a small percentage of Jews around the world are deeply connected with their Jewishness. Judaism is about new ideas. It is dependent on fresh concepts deeply rooted in its tradition. We must be aware that if we do not apply new remedies, we should expect new evils, because time is the greatest innovator. Sticking to the old is contrary to nature, and those who do so are buried long before they die. Too often, people object to novel ideas and try to kill them before these ideas have a chance to prove themselves and actually succeed. After all, we must that new ideas are fragile. They can be easily destroyed by a sneer or a yawn, abolished by a frown. It is for this reason that we must nurture and protect them, carefully considering them, however outrageous they may seem. When ideas are born, they struggle and have to fight for their place in this world.

They need to be cultivated until they flourish. If they are truly worthy, they will survive and become a great blessing. If not, they will disappear. True, new ideas may occasionally fail and even be counterproductive. Novelty can sometimes best be served by staying connected with the old. One does not discover new lands without keeping sight of the shore from which one has embarked. Still, we need to produce ideas and see where they will take us. Innovative thinking is the need of the hour. It is time for halakhic authorities and religious thinkers to take notice of the immense changes that have taken place in our day. Never has the world gone through so many adjustments in so short a time. Never have the Jewish people been confronted with so many challenges. It is not only the security of the State of Israel that is at stake, but even more so, its very spirit and spiritual future. Judaism must respond with the courage of Nahshon ben Aminadav. We are in desperate need of people like him to avert our drowning in the very sea from which he saved our forefathers.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Are those who stick to the old always buried long before they die? What if they do so as an active and conscious choice? Can dedication and commitment to old ideas be as ionate and authentic as dedication to new ones?

Do you think that any all-encoming system of law — one which claims divine provenance and demands onerous practice — can ever become widespread in times of access to information and exchange of ideas, as in the era of the Temples and the era of the Greeks? Can you point to a time in history that conforms to these conditions when all the people were inspired to follow the law? Could it be that Judaism is designed to maintain a steady loss of (and some influx) in every generation?

It is significant that the story of Nachshon comes from a Midrash, and not the text of the Torah itself. Are there things that should be done, perhaps by a small minority, but not out in the open?

There are people making radical changes — slowly — from within any particular system. Luther’s seminal work, published in 1517, was inspired by the philosophies of Hus, Wycliff and others, beginning a century before the Reformation. The leaders of the French Revolution were inspired by the ideas of the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the beginning about 150 years prior. Can radical change last if it is not built on preexisting ideas and values?

Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Headlines tout individuals and relate a simplified story of daring, but most often scientific discoveries are made by collective, grinding work. So too with diplomacy, wars against oppression, space travel and grand business deals. Judaism has performed incredibly well over centuries, thanks to the formalization of its ideals in the form of repetitious law. Might this stability be necessary for the production of the occasional Edisons, who capture the collective imagination and bring radical improvements to the population, based on their patiently derived, incremental advances on the work of many?

87 Mechilta, Beshalach 5; Exodus Rabbah 13; and others. See also T. B. Sotah 37a.

88 G.K. Chesterton, “The Methuselahite,” in All Things Considered: A Collection of Essays (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016), 76.

89 Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.

90 Aristotle, Poetics, chap. 24, 160a, 26-7.

The Spliting of the Sea and the State of Israel

‫ה ויהי לי לישועה זה אלי ואנוהו אלהי אבי וארממנהו‬-‫עזי וזמרת י‬

The Eternal’s strength and His vengeance were my salvation; this is my God, and I will make Him a habitation, the God of my father, and I will exalt Him. Shemot 15:2.

Jewish history consists of many epoch-making events. However, not all of these occurrences have entered the consciousness of the Jewish people. For this to happen, the event must be what Jewish philosopher Emile Fackenheim termed a “root experience” ¹ — a moment in which the hand of God becomes apparent through His active participation in Jewish history. Still, even this is not sufficient to transform an event into a root experience of enduring value. It is also necessary for the experience to take place in front of a multitude of observers, as in the case of the splitting of the Reed Sea, when “what a maidservant saw by the sea (the prophets) Yechezkel and Yeshayahu did not see.” ² It is not the opening of the heavens but rather the transformation of the earth that is decisive in affecting all future Jewish generations. However, above and beyond all, a third element is necessary. It must be possible for later generations to have access to this vision. Only then can one speak of an actual root experience. If a vision cannot be shared with later generations, it will become a mere story of the past and lose much of its religious value within current Judaism.

Miracles in the eye of the beholder

It is most important to realize that it is not the conventional understanding of a miracle that is of importance here. While nobody can deny that the splitting of the Reed Sea was a violation of the laws of nature, this is not the source of its religious power or message. The most important quality of a miracle is not that it is supernatural, or super-historical, but that it is a moment which, even if it can be argued away in of science and brought into the nexus of nature and normal history, remains miraculous in the eyes of the person who encountered it. The real power of a miracle is that it is an astonishing experience of an event in which the current system of cause and effect becomes, as it were, transparent, permitting a glimpse of the sphere in which another unrestricted Power is at work. As such, it destroys the security of all knowledge and undoes the normalcy of all that is ordinary. It is the abiding astonishment that is crucial. The religious person stands in wonder; no knowledge or cognition can weaken his amazement. Any natural explanation will only deepen his wonder. It is in this sense that a historical miracle becomes a root experience and allows later generations to have access to it through their own involvement in it. It is possible for these later generations to relive the experience, not because of what happened, but through the way they perceive it. The establishment of the State of Israel was no doubt an epoch-making event. It is the completely extraordinary nature of this event that stands out — the transformation of the Jewish people’s earthliness into a radically different situation. While miracles no doubt occurred to enable it to happen, the most important religious dimension is, again, the enduring astonishment at this event, especially after the Holocaust.

Existential dullness

Only when the establishment of the State of Israel is seen in the light of the miracle at the Reed Sea will this astonishment be maintained. And this is exactly where the greatest danger to Israel’s continued existence lies. Just as we are

informed that the miracle at the Reed Sea lost its religious impact on the Israelites, and became “normal” — so much so, that they complained that God had left them — so we see a similar trend in Israeli society and leadership today. Just as the complaints concerning food and water took on a new impetus after the great miracle at the Sea, so we see a mentality of psychological denial and existential dullness in the State of Israel, where many people — most of all of its leadership — no longer see the miracle of the State’s very existence. And just as the Israelites in the desert paid a heavy price, so will Israeli society if it does not force itself once again to look through the clouds, marvel at the wonder of it all, and rejuvenate itself through the abiding amazement at the miracle before them.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo writes that for a historical event to enter the consciousness of the Jewish people, it must become a “root experience”. What do you think causes an occurrence to become such a root experience?

In his iconic book, Zakhor, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes about this particularly Jewish form of ahistorical memory: “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to felt as a religious imperative to an entire people. … If there can be no return to Sinai, then what took place at Sinai must be borne along the conduits of memory to those who were not there that day.”

How is such a memory ed on from generation to generation? Is merely telling the story enough to cement the memory in the minds and hearts of the next generation?

“Many prophets arose in Israel, double the number of those who left Egypt,” says the Talmud, “but prophecy that was needed for future generations was written and that which was not needed was not written.” (Megillah 14a)

What do you think determines whether a prophecy or the memory of an event will live on in the Jewish people?

Several debates are recorded in the Talmud (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5, Shabbat 30a,

Megillah 7a) about which books to include and which to exclude from the Jewish canon. Do you see this as an attempt to determine the content of Jewish cultural memory? Do you believe that such attempts inevitably succeed? Who gets to decide which historical memories are preserved?

“All the holidays will cease except Purim, as it says: And its memory will not cease from their descendants.” (Midrash, Yalkut Shimoni, Mishlei 9). On this, Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein, known as The Torah Temimah, writes:

I heard from my father (Rabbi Yechiel Michel Halevi Epstein) that the intention is as follows: the miracle of Purim is different from the miracles celebrated by the rest of the holidays, such as the exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah, the clouds of glory of Sukkot. For those were open miracles, about which there could be no doubt. But the miracle of Purim, even though it was all the work of God’s hands, it was still in the realm of natural occurrences, such that one without belief in God could explain it away as coincidence. This is the meaning, even if open miracles, such as those celebrated by the other holidays, should come to an end, the covert miracles worked out in the way of nature will never cease, as we see in every generation in the workings of history and in the life of the nation of Israel in particular.

Do you think the establishment of the State of Israel, and its continued survival qualifies as a “covert miracle” of the kind described by the Torah Temimah? Does your answer to this question change how you relate to Israel, its people, and its challenges?

91 See Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 8-14.

92 Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, Bshalach, Masechet Shira, 3.

Yitro

The Challenge of Yitro: Would You Convert?

‫ויאמר יתרו ברוך ה’ אשר הציל אתכם מיד מצרים ומיד פרעה אשר הציל את העם‬ ‫מתחת יד מצרים‬

Yitro said, “Blessed is the Eternal, Who has rescued you from the hands of the Egyptians and from the hand of Pharaoh, who has rescued the people from beneath the hand of the Egyptians.” Shemot 18:10

As we are daily confronted with a steady increase in the number of Jews who have not only left the fold but are actively involved in anti-Jewish activity inside and outside Israel, it would perhaps be instructive to study an episode in the life of a biblical non-Jew who decided to the Jewish people at all costs. Yitro, Moshe’s father-in-law — and one of the earliest “converts” to Judaism — presents a challenge, not only to many anti-Jewish Jews but also to those who are actively living a Jewish religious life but lack the intensity and ion for Judaism and its message. For sensitive souls, Yitro’s story is not just a significant narrative but also a painful confrontation with one’s own Jewishness. After many years of separation, Moshe and Yitro meet again. Moshe had married Yitro’s daughter Tzipora many years earlier, but had then left his father-in-law’s home and gone back to Egypt to redeem his people. Subsequently, he took the Jews out of Egypt and miraculously led them through the Reed Sea. Once the exodus had been realized, Yitro, Tzipora and her children were able to meet him again. The text tells us that this meeting took place in the wilderness:

“Yitro, Moshe’s father-in-law, came with [Moshe’s] sons and wife to the desert,

where Moshe was staying…” ³

What, asks Rashi, is the importance of knowing that they met in the desert? He answers that this points to the tremendous sacrifice Yitro made when he decided to become a Jew:

“The verse speaks in praise of Yitro. He lived in a world of glory, yet his heart prompted him to go out to the desert wasteland to hear the words of the Torah.” ⁴

Losing everything

Indeed, our tradition teaches us that Yitro was a man of great wealth. He held the prestigious post of high priest in Midian, a kind of Midian “pope”. He was surrounded by servants and basked in glory and abundance. The verse now informs us that he gave up all of this to go to a “desert”, a place where he would no longer have any of these honors. He had decided to “convert”. In many ways, this was a catastrophic decision. All the glory and prestige would be gone. Instead of being the high priest and playing a crucial role in political affairs, he would now be an ordinary Jew, sliding into oblivion. He would become one among many, no longer a great man in his own right, just “the father-in-law of Moshe”. In fact, our tradition continues to provide us with remarkable information about this sweeping decision. Yitro had become an outcast among his own people. After having rejected all forms of religion and philosophy known in his day, he was excommunicated and abandoned by the societies in which he lived. He had turned into a “lonely man of faith”, as Rabbi Soloveitchik would say. Once Yitro heard about the exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Reed Sea, and the soon-to-come revelation of the Divine Teaching at Sinai, everything else seemed of secondary importance. Only this moved him: to be part of the Jewish people and participate in their Torah experience. The price was indeed

enormous.

To be a Jew by choice

Yitro confronts us for the first time with a new phenomenon: to be a Jew by choice. He presents all Jews with a major challenge: how to become a Jew by choice even when one was born into the fold; how to feel the fire needed to live the life of an authentic Jew, as Yitro did. Such an undertaking is possible only if one is able to re-enact and experience Yitro’s journey to Judaism. It must have been a long and difficult road, a heart-rending challenge, with many ups and downs before finally arriving at the top. Along the way, Yitro must have had countless fiery conflicts with his former friends and colleagues, and he surely felt terribly lonely. He may have been plagued by doubts and inner conflicts before he was able to become a Jew. Like a baby taking its first steps, he most likely tried to engage the world of Torah and its spirit, undergoing its hardships before experiencing its joy. How many times must he have nearly thrown in the towel in despair, only to continue his struggle until he overcame all obstacles and took the final, crucial and radical step: to be a Jew and nothing but a Jew; to experience the incredible joy and difficulties that accompanies it.

The challenge

For many of us who were born into the fold, Yitro’s desire to become a Jew is a major problem. It hits us in the face. It’s a challenge to all those among us who left the fold, opting for a comfortable secular lifestyle. We must ask ourselves why a non-Jew would be prepared to give up everything to become Jewish. What is there in Judaism that makes a non-Jew conclude that it’s worth losing all? These questions should plague each one of us. But for those of us who are religiously observant, Yitro’s engagement with

Judaism is also a challenge, posing questions such as: Am I in love with Judaism as much as Yitro was? Am I prepared to give up everything, including wealth, honor and social standing? Would I have been prepared to exchange my prestigious position in the world for a life in the desert, ridiculed by old friends and colleagues? Yitro forces each of us to ask ourselves whether we would have opted for Judaism had we not been born Jewish. And if yes, would this not mean that we would have had to start all over again, discovering Judaism on our own in order to really comprehend what it is all about? If Yitro traveled his road to Judaism step by step in order to fully grasp its beauty and truth, we may have to reengage ourselves with every mitzvah as if we have never done it before, as complete beginners. Only thus can we become “Jews by choice”, real Jews. Perhaps we should begin a process by which we take hold of every mitzvah that we have been observing for years and transform it into something radically new.

Tefillin — not yet

It is told that the great Jewish philosopher and ba’al teshuva Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), in his earlier days when he was still on his way to becoming observant, was once asked whether he put on tefillin. “Not yet”, was his answer. Although he may not have felt ready at the time to take on this great mitzvah, he made it clear that he looked forward to the day when wearing tefillin would become a truly religious experience. Surely this does not mean that we should wait until we are fully ready. After all, it was Rosenzweig himself who taught that it is in the deed that one hears the mitzvah. ⁵ Only when one actually does a mitzvah can one hear and feel its profundity. But it does mean that when a person just goes through the motions of putting on tefillin, they have not yet authentically performed the mitzvah. Only when one approaches it as a novice, as did Yitro, can one experience its full power. Not out of tradition or habit, but from a genuine desire to fulfill the word of God. This is the road that Yitro took, which led him to realize the enormous religious profundity of Judaism, of each and every mitzvah, for which he was prepared to

give up everything. And therefore he poses a challenge to each of us. The famous non-Jewish, British literary historian A.L. Rowse (1903-1997) gave added meaning to Yitro’s decision when he wrote at the end of his memoirs: “If there is any honour in all the world that I should like, it would be to be an honorary Jewish citizen.” For him, it remained an unfulfilled dream. For many Jews, it is a reality never dreamed of, and consequently unappreciated. Let us change this attitude and discover great joy in being Jewish.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Have there been times when you have, so to speak, gone into a metaphorical desert for the sake of your Judaism, or felt uncomfortable in society due to your observance? How did this make you feel? Proud? Embarrassed? Lonely? Resentful? Something else? How did you deal with those feelings?

The rabbis, asking why Yitro ed the Jewish people, cite the miracles the nation had experienced in the exodus from Egypt. In today’s world, in which God’s presence is less obviously experienced, how can we bring ourselves to feel the inner fire needed to live the life of an authentic Jew? Could such a fire emerge from a different source, and not only the sense of God’s presence — for example, love of Am Yisrael, belief in the value of Torah, or seeing the traditional Jewish way of life as a more mentally healthy one?

Are there instances in which, although you are fulfilling a mitzvah in practice, you nonetheless experience yourself as only going through the motions on the way to fully observing it? Of which mitzvot is this true? Can we bring ourselves to move from the first stage to the second — and if so, how?

93 Shemot 18:5.

94 Ibid. Rashi.

95 See Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (NY: Schocken Books, 1961), 245-246. See also Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (NY: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955), chap. 28.

96 A.L. Rowse, Historians I Have Known (London: Duckworth, 1995), 204.

What makes a Legal Case a “Major” one?

‫ואתה תחזה מכל העם אנשי חיל יראי אלהים אנשי אמת שנאי בצע ושמת עלהם שרי‬ ‫אלפים שרי מאות שרי חמשים ושרי עשרות‬

But you shall choose out of the entire nation men of substance, God fearers, men of truth, who hate monetary gain, and you shall appoint over them leaders of thousands, leaders of hundreds, leaders of fifties, and leaders of tens. Shemot 18:21

As is well known, Yitro, Moshe Rabbenu’s father-in-law, advised him to reform the juridical process used to mete out justice for the Jewish people during their travels in the desert on their way to the land of Israel:

It came to on the morrow that Moshe sat to judge the people and the people stood around Moshe from the morning until the evening. Moshe’s father-in-law saw all that he did for the people and he said: “What is this that you do to the people…?” And Moshe answered his father-in-law: “Because the people come to me to inquire of God. If they are solicitous about any matter, they come to me. I have to judge between one and the other. I have to make the laws of God and His teachings known.”

Moshe’s father-in-law said to him: “What you are doing is not good. You shall surely wear yourself out and the people that are with you, for this thing is too heavy for you alone, you are not able to carry it out. Listen to me…you shall appoint out of all the people able men…and place them over them [the

Israelites], leaders of thousands and leaders of hundreds, leaders of fifties and leaders of tens. And let them judge the people at all times and it shall be that every major matter will be brought to you but every minor matter they [the other judges] shall judge…” ⁷

Major versus minor

It is generally believed that Moshe fully implemented Yitro’s program of reforms and indeed appointed judges to hear the smaller cases, freeing Moshe to involve himself only in the major ones. However, a careful reading of the text reveals that this is not entirely true. It seems that Moshe was not prepared to take his father-in-law’s suggestions at face value — that in fact, he saw some flaws in Yitro’s approach. When we dig a little deeper into how Moshe actually implemented changes in the national judicial structure, we see a most significant difference between Moshe’s and Yitro’s attitudes in regard to the application and function of the law. When Yitro suggests changes in the juridical process, he makes a distinction between a major case (davar ha-gadol) and a minor case (davar ha-katan). However, when Moshe puts these recommendations into practice, he makes a distinction between a hard case (davar ha-kasheh) and a minor case (davar hakatan): “And they [the judges] judged the people at all times; the hard case (davar ha-kasheh) they brought to Moshe and the minor case (davar ha-katan) they judged themselves.” ⁸ Various commentators explain that there is a vast difference between what Yitro calls a major case and what Moshe calls a hard case. Yitro considered a major case to be one involving, for example, a large sum of money. Consequently, in Yitro’s proposal, Moshe would only judge high-stakes, “headline-producing” cases in which substantial amounts of money or property were at issue, while minor monetary disputes would be heard by the judges in the “lower” courts.

Juridical complexities

Moshe seems to object to this vision for the judicial system. In his eyes a “major case” is one that is harder to judge because of the more complicated and difficult legal principles involved, or because of the subtlety of the distinctions the judge would need to make in order to decide correctly. Obviously then, a so-called hard case could have an enormous amount of money or a paltry sum on the line. A problem related to a small amount of money can sometimes cause a judge more juridical hardship — forcing him to draw upon more of his wisdom and experience — than disputes over larger amounts of money. Jewish Law and Ethics view the quantity of money at stake as completely inconsequential to the rabbinical court’s dealings with monetary cases. Justice is (or at least tries to be) absolute, while money is relative. What the rich man sees as a mere trifle is a fortune in the eyes of the poor. No objective distinctions between major and minor can be made on the basis of quantities. Yitro, whose suggestions in part reflected the materialistic ideology of his idolatrous society, could not (yet) fully grasp the notion that “having” more in no way implies “being” more. Moshe Rabbenu, who never for a moment considered that he should give his time and wisdom only to the wealthiest of the Jewish People, allowed his father-in-law the honor of restructuring the Jewish nation’s juridical procedures, but at the same time, without even mentioning it, he radically altered the intent and content of Yitro’s program of reforms. In many ways Moshe’s response demonstrates the way Jewish wisdom is meant, more generally, to interact with the world at large. Its purpose is not always to replace other systems, which are many times socially beneficial and highly effective, but rather to refine and elevate these systems in the moral dimension, by imbuing them with Jewish values.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Yitro’s suggestion to Moshe about reforming the Israelite’s judicial system in the desert was meant to relieve Moshe of the burden of adjudicating every legal matter (“You shall surely wear yourself out” while also reducing the frustration of the people who had to wait until their case could be heard (“and the people that are with you”). Considering that Moshe appreciated the wisdom of his father-in-law in this regard, even though he ultimately changed the way cases should be divided up amongst the various levels of judges, why do you think Moshe himself did not come up with such a system? Why did he need someone from the outside to tell him that a one-man judicial system simply won’t work for an entire people?

Rabbi Cardozo brings an interpretation of Yitro’s “major” cases as representing highstakes, headline-producing cases, meaning only the cases of the rich and famous, and Moshe’s “hard” cases as representing legally complex cases, regardless of the amount of money or property at issue. Can you provide another interpretation that differentiates Yitro’s “major” cases from Moshe’s “hard” cases?

Modern judicial systems do seem to differentiate between small-stakes and highstakes cases. For example, there are small claims courts which deal with monetary issues up to a limit, beyond which the case must be heard by a higher court. Ostensibly there appears to be a logic behind this that smaller stakes cases, whether in monetary matters, damages or torts, are inherently less complicated than higher stakes cases. Rabbi Cardozo presents a different view and argues that the stakes should not be a consideration at all in deciding which court should review a case; rather it should be the level of complexity of the legal principles involved which a judge might have to use to come to a proper decision which

should arbitrate which court reviews the case. Yitro’s suggestion was meant to make the judicial system of the Jewish people more efficient and possibly also more effective.

Does Moshe’s interpretation of Yitro’s suggestion undermine this efficiency for the sake of absolute (at least as absolute as is humanly possible) justice? Do you believe that this is the best way for justice to be served?

97 Shemot 18:13-22.

98 Ibid. 18:26.

Racism and Gentile Wisdom

‫וירא חתן משה את כל אשר הוא עשה לעם ויאמר מה הדבר הזה אשר אתה עשה לעם‬ ‫מדוע אתה יושב לבדך וכל העם נצב עליך מן בקר עד ערב‬

When Moses’ father-in-law saw what he was doing to the people, he said, “What is this thing that you are doing to the people? Why do you sit by yourself, while all the people stand before you from morning till evening?” Shemot 18:14

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, one of the great Jewish leaders and thinkers of modern times, asks us to take notice of a strange incident that occurred in the days of Moshe. After Moshe left Egypt with a multitude of people, his father-inlaw, Yitro, criticized him for the way he was arbitrating disputes among the Israelites:

“Why are you sitting alone and letting all the people stand around you from morning until evening?” Moshe replied to his father-in-law: “Because the people come to me to seek God. Whenever they have a problem, they come to me, and I judge between each man and his neighbor, and I teach God’s decrees and laws.” And Moshe’s father-in-law said to him: “What you are doing is not good. You are going to wear yourself out, along with this nation that is with you.”

Yitro then suggested that Moshe reform the existing legal system so that only the major problems would be brought to his personal attention while minor disputes would be decided upon by a large number of wise people who would assist him. “It will make things easier for you, and they will share the burden. Moshe took

his father-in-law’s advice and did all that he said.”¹

Moshe’s Exhaustion

Rabbi Hirsch poses a very simple question: Could Moshe not have determined this on his own? Did he not realize that he was exhausting himself and that it would not be long before he could no longer cope with the situation? One does not have to be a genius to recognize the problem. Moreover, Yitro’s suggested solution is basically a simple one and does not require any extensive judicial knowledge. So why did Moshe, who possessed great wisdom, not think of this himself? Before studying Rabbi Hirsch’s answer, we would like to pose another question. We are informed that at the end of Moshe’s life “His eyes had not dimmed and his vigor was unabated.”¹ ¹ His physical stamina was beyond average, and indeed we do not see that Moshe ever got tired (except in the case of the Jews fighting Amalek, when his hands did become heavy).¹ ² It is therefore strange that Moshe suddenly felt weary while judging the people. We would not have been surprised to read that Moshe told his father-in-law not to worry, since he was untroubled by fatigue and he could easily handle all those who came to see him. Moshe, however, made no such claims. Instead, he seemed most eager to implement Yitro’s suggestion. We must therefore conclude that he did indeed feel extremely tired! Our question, then, is obvious. Why did he suddenly feel weary? Would the man who was without food and water for forty days at the top of Mount Sinai not have been able to sit from early morning until late at night to judge the people without exhausting himself? Why did God suddenly deny him his usual, though unprecedented, stamina? All this aside, we would suggest that God had good reason to ensure that Moshe actually maintained his strength. As the great leader and teacher of Torah, Moshe desperately needed to stay in with all of his people. The best way to

accomplish this would be by guaranteeing that he would see them on a regular basis. Once he would no longer encounter all of them, they would become spiritually distanced from him, and he would be unable to teach them in the manner to which he was accustomed. Indeed, this seems to have happened after he implemented Yitro’s advice! So what were God’s motives in causing Moshe to suddenly feel tired? We may now refer to Rabbi Hirsch’s observation:

Nothing is so instructive to us as this information regarding the first legal institution of the Jewish State, coming immediately before the chapter of the Law-giving. So little was Moshe in himself a legislative genius, he had so little talent for organizing that he had to learn the first elements of state organization from his father-in-law. The man who tired himself out to utter exhaustion and to whom of himself did not occur to arrange this or some other simple solution, equally beneficial to himself and his people; the man to whom it was necessary to have a Jethro [Yitro] to suggest this obvious device, that man could never have given the People constitution and Laws out of his own head, that man was only, and indeed just because of this the best and the most faithful instrument of God!¹ ³

In other words, Moshe, in spite of his immeasurable talents and abilities, lacked basic insight into how to ister proper judicial process. God denied him this insight to prove to later generations that he could never have been a lawgiver and that the laws of the Torah were not the result of his superior mind.

Non-Jewish greatness

I would like to suggest a second reason for God’s denying Moshe his usual stamina: in order to allow a non-Jew to come forward and give him advice! The Kabbalist Rabbi Chaim Ibn Attar, known as Ohr Ha-Chaim (1696-1743), indeed

alludes to this when he writes that the very reason why God caused Yitro to come and visit the camp of the Israelites was to teach the Jewish people that although the Torah is the all-encoming repository of wisdom, gentiles, while not obligated to observe all its laws, are fundamental to its success and application.¹ ⁴ There are areas in which Jews do not excel and where non-Jews are much more gifted. One such area seems to be judicial istration skills. Judaism has never been afraid to it that the gentile world incorporates much wisdom and insight. While Jews have to be a nation apart, this does not contradict the need to look beyond our own borders and benefit from the wisdom of outsiders: “The gentile world may not possess Torah, but it definitely does possess wisdom.” ¹ ⁵ It is this message that God sent to His people only a short time after He had delivered them from the hands of the Egyptians. Due to their experience in the land of their slavery, they had developed such animosity for anything gentile that they became utterly convinced that mankind at large was anti-Semitic. God immediately crushed that thought and sent them a righteous gentile by the name of Yitro, to impress upon them that the non-Jewish world includes remarkable people who not only possess much wisdom but actually love the people of Israel and contribute to Jewish life. Moshe’s sudden weariness and God’s decision to deny him his usual strength is therefore highly informative. The Jews may begin to believe that they’re selfsufficient and can do it all alone. This attitude, which is rooted in their conviction that all gentiles are anti-Semitic and therefore not to be relied upon, could lead not only to total isolation but also to an air of Jewish arrogance contrary to God’s will. By allowing Moshe to become exhausted, God ensured that he would indeed require the wisdom of someone else — this time the wisdom of a non-Jew. At the same time, it kept Moshe humble. By designating Yitro to be the fatherin-law of the most holy Jew of all times, God made it crystal clear that He would not tolerate any racism and that a righteous gentile could climb up to the highest ranks of saintliness. Only after that message was sent were the Jews ready to enter the land and begin their life as an independent nation.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

“…that man could never have given a constitution and Laws out of his own head, that man was only and indeed just because of this the best and the most faithful instrument of God.”

What does Samson Raphael Hirsch mean by this?

What kind of leader does he suggest God wants?

Do you agree with his interpretation? Why or why not?

Does this make Moshe a stronger or weaker leader in your eyes?

“Moshe, in spite of his immeasurable talents and abilities, lacked basic insight into how to ister proper judicial process.” The Jewish world is divided as to the appropriate lens through which to view biblical heroes. One approach, held for example by Rabbi Aaron Kotler of Lakewood, holds them to be “the most luminous, loftiest and purest personalities”¹ The other approach is to engage with their flaws and shadow side, arguing that in doing so we are following the Torah’s lead. A discussion of Moshe, the ultimate prophet, is likely to be particularly sensitive ground. Does Rabbi Hirsch’s statement about Moshe

trouble you? If not, what type of statements would?

Rabbi Cardozo argues that a central lesson here is that the outside world is to be embraced, and has much to teach us. But Judaism also contains significant warnings against embracing foreign cultures. Are there limits to what Jews should learn from the non-Jewish world? If so, what are they?

Though the mainstream view is that Yitro is a convert, one Rabbinic opinion seems to suggest that, after a time spent in the desert with Moshe, Yitro went back to his gods and never converted.¹ ⁷

Does this change how you view him, or the significance of his advice to Moshe?

Do you find the idea that he did not the Israelite people disappointing? Why?

Why might the tradition be invested specifically in the notion of Yitro becoming a Jew, or alternatively in his not becoming one?

Yitro is an essential aid and mentor to Moshe. Without him, Moshe’s ability to lead would have degenerated, conceivably greatly impacting Jewish history. Rabbi Cardozo suggests that one of the reasons Yitro was chosen for this role was because he was an outsider. But he was, in addition, Moshe’s father-in-law.

Is it significant that it was a relative who was the one to advise Moshe? What might this tell us about family?

In your life, who puts you in your place, telling you essential, difficult-to-hear home truths and offering practical advice — or, at least, who do you wish would do so? A family member? An outsider? A friend? A mentor? Or no one?

99 Shemot 18:14-18.

100 Ibid. 18:22, 24.

101 Devarim 34:7.

102 Shemot 17:12.

103 The Pentateuch, Exodus: trans. and explained by Samson Raphael Hirsch, rendered into English by Isaac Levy (Gateshead: Judaica Press, 1989), 247.

104 Ohr Ha-Chaim on Shemot 18:21, beginning with the words Ve-nir’eh ki ta’am ha-davar hu.

105 Echa Rabba, Buber ed., 2.

106 The Jewish Observer, March 1991, p. 50. Accessible online at: http://www.atid.org //istrativa/WebFiles/rkotler.pdf.

107 See Mechilta on Shemot 18:24; and the commentary of the Ohr ha-Chaim on Bamidbar 10:30.

Mishpatim

Law and Liberation

‫ואלה המשפטים אשר תשים לפניהם‬

These are the laws (mishpatim) which you shall set before them …

Few matters are as misunderstood as Judaism’s “obsession with the law.” As religious Jews, not a moment goes by that we are not reminded of our obligations as set down in the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law). While later authorities have sometimes disagreed with certain decisions laid out in this legal code, and have even ruled differently, Halakhah is still at the center of Jewish life and is relentless in its demands. Nearly every moment in the life of a Jew is codified, sometimes touching on seemingly absurd details, such as the way we are to tie our shoes, or how many grams of matza we must eat on the first night of Pesach. Judaism has never had a finalized or dogmatic belief system such as we find in the Church. Not even Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith were fully accepted by later thinkers. Throughout the centuries and to this very day, there has been an ongoing debate about what the Jew is obligated to believe. Halakhah, on the other hand, is far more normative and standardized. Moses Mendelssohn’s famous observation, “The spirit of Judaism demands conformity in action and freedom in respect of doctrine,”¹ ⁸ is most illuminating. Judaism is basically a religion without an authorized theology, in which the correct deed is more valued than the correct belief.

The absurdity of rejoicing in the law

Since the earliest days, this “obsession with law” has often been attacked, even ridiculed, by Christian thinkers, as well as by some of the most sophisticated philosophers in modern times. Benedictus Spinoza, Emanuel Kant, and many others have accused Judaism of extreme behaviorism, in which we lose our freedom and are imprisoned in a web of laws that make life miserable and devoid of any simcha (joy). How, after all, could such a system be conducive to the kind of life we all long to live? Where is its spirituality? Even more surprising is the fact that Jews throw a party every time another member of their community is literally coerced to comply with all these laws. The bat-mitzvah girl and the bar-mitzvah boy are both forced into this covenantof-the-law when they respectively turn twelve and thirteen years old. Up to that moment they are not obligated by any of these laws — except for educational purposes — and are therefore still able to enjoy their freedom. But all of this changes overnight when they reach the age of legal obligation. Instead of a party, one would expect a gathering of heavy-hearted people where these children mourn and are offered consolation, similar to when people have just lost a loved one. After all, losing one’s freedom is not much different from losing life itself. And yet, religious Jews throw a party, dance and sing, and are as happy as they can be when one of their comes of age. Nothing better can happen to them then when their children enter this covenant of duties. Jews have an inborn love for the law. Anyone who has ever studied in a yeshiva cannot forget the joy that permeates the study hall when a student manages to discover a new law, or even invent one when no law was known to exist. While many Orthodox Jews sometimes seem to be more in love with the law than with God, demonstrating that they do not see the forest for the trees, one cannot help but be flabbergasted by the fact that they would almost give up their lives for one little law that seems, in the eyes of others, to be of the utmost triviality. What is the mystery behind this devotion?

The secret of true freedom

Religious Jews carry a secret that few people have understood: that true freedom can be earned only through great discipline. Freedom is the will to take responsibility. It is a mental state, not just a physical condition. Its primary requirement is to live for something that is worth dying for. A life without a mission is not worth being born into. In the words of Avraham Joshua Heschel,

The dignity of man stands in proportion to his obligations as well as to his rights. The dignity of being a Jew is in the sense of commitment, and the meaning of Jewish history revolves around the faithfulness of Israel to the covenant.¹

There is no greater injustice than bringing children into the world without giving them a mission to live for. While most people today believe that one should not burden children with obligations, but rather allow them to make their own choices, Judaism teaches us that giving a child the feeling that he has a moral task to fulfill is giving him the option to experience immense joy.

A vote of confidence

Most employees will complain when asked by their manager to take on a difficult task and will try to free themselves of the assignment. What they don’t realize is that by doing so, they miss out on exactly what they are looking for — a compliment. A wise manager will know the art of assessing her employee’s abilities properly. By giving him a difficult task, she sends the strong message, “I believe in you.” Every challenge presented is, in fact, a vote of confidence: “I know you can do it.” It is for the above reasons that religious Jews revel in their many obligations. They do not see these as a burden, but rather as a tribute to their greatness and their unlimited potential. For them, these are not just 613 obligations; they are 613 compliments. The question is not why we have so many obligations; the

question is why so few compliments. Only 613?¹¹ It is this feeling that prompts them to look for many more, and they will sometimes use the most farfetched arguments to discover yet another law. They will debate back and forth just to discover one more compliment, as if searching for a diamond. And nothing motivates them more than enjoying this. When their children reach the age of twelve or thirteen, parents are elated at the prospect that they too will now enter into the covenant of compliments. For that they will certainly throw a party, whatever the cost. It is their ultimate moment of joy. And even if the non-religious (Israeli or Diaspora) Jew no longer understands this truth, but still insists that his daughter celebrate her bat-mitzvah, or that his son celebrate his bar-mitzvah, that insistence indicates that deep down he still knows what it really means to be a Jew. One of the greatest tragedies in the Jewish community today is that even many Orthodox Jews no longer realize the significance of what they celebrate or what they are committed to. A covenant of compliments! No greater freedom exists.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Many cultures have traditionally held some form of ceremony when a child “comes of age”. Why do you think this is? Do you agree with Rabbi Cardozo regarding the “absurdity” of “throwing a party” when a child reaches the age of legal obligation?

Rabbi Cardozo uses the analogy of a manager who assigns an employee a difficult task, and says that such an assignment is really a compliment. This analogy seems to assume that if the law is given by God, and we revere God, we will see each mitzva as a compliment. But what if we do not believe that the Torah is in fact divine? Will we still see our obligations this way? Why or why not?

Psychologist Carol Dweck defines a “fixed mindset” as one where people believe their basic traits, such as intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. ¹¹¹ In a “growth mindset,” on the other hand people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work — brains and talent are just the starting point. She argues that such an attitude creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for a meaningful life. Do you think that the Jewish “obsession with the law” fosters a growth mindset or a fixed one?

108 Moses Mendelssohn, Letter to Wolf Dessau, 11 July 1782.

109 A.J. Heschel, God in Search of Man, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955), p. 216.

110 This is the official number of commandments mentioned in the Torah. Obviously, not all these commandments apply to the average Jew.

111 Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2016).

The Sensitivity of the Torah and the Power of Language

‫כי תקנה עבד עברי שש שנים יעבד ובשבעת יצא לחפשי חנם‬

When you buy a Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve, and in the seventh year he shall go out into freedom for nothing. Shemot 21:2

When discussing the case of the Eved Ivri — the Hebrew Servant — the Torah states that the Hebrew slave is to be released after six year of service, without having to buy his freedom.”¹¹² This situation arises only when the court convicts a Jew of theft and he is subsequently unable to make restitution. As a result, the thief must work as a servant to pay off his debt.¹¹³ A little later in the text, we read about a similar situation regarding a Hebrew maidservant: “If a man sells his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the male servants do.”¹¹⁴ Both cases describe tragic circumstances; one in which a man has to sell himself into servitude because of a theft that he cannot repay, and the other where a father has to “sell” his young daughter out of sheer poverty, with the hope that she will survive and perhaps marry her new master or his son when she grows to maturity. If we pay close attention to the wording of the text, we notices that the Torah uses the second person (“When you buy a servant…”) in the Eved Ivri case, while the case of the Hebrew maidservant is written in the third person (“If a man sells his daughter…”). Why the difference in conjugation?

The purpose of servitude

Based on a comment by Meshivat Nefesh,¹¹⁵ we can perhaps suggest the following explanation. According to the Talmudic Sages, buying a thief as a servant is a positive commandment, and was also a somewhat joyful occasion. The whole institution of servitude in Judaism is built on the premise that the time spent living and working in a proper Jewish home will help to rehabilitate the thief. Instead of going to jail to be surrounded by like-minded criminals, as is the procedure in other legal systems, he is adopted by a Jewish family who will try, throughout the six years of his servitude, to rebuild his self-respect and reeducate him by giving him a model of how life should be. The example of how a proper family functions provides the Hebrew servant with a new image of what his future could be. And at the end, he will leave with the hope of enjoying a new and better way of life.

The dignity of the slave

The most critical aspect of the servant’s education comes from the Torah’s requirement that the of the family treat him with the utmost respect. For example, if the family has only one pillow, Jewish law obligates the family to let the servant use it, since he must not be made to feel discriminated against by the family in even the slightest way.¹¹ The fact that he may not want to leave at the end of the six years is another proof of how well his new family must care for him.¹¹⁷ Taking such a person under one’s roof is, therefore, a happy occasion, and so the Torah speaks directly to the reader using the second person (“When you buy a Hebrew servant”). However, the case of the Hebrew maidservant is anything but happy. When a man’s circumstances become so dire as to necessitate “selling” his daughter, however much he may be consoled by the monetary reward involved and/or the

fact that the arrangement may give his daughter the opportunity for a better future, the situation remains, undeniably, a human tragedy. In that case, the Torah does not want to implicate its readers or relate to them as the case’s sad protagonist in any way, and therefore does not use the second person, but rather creates a distance by speaking exclusively in the third person. Obviously, the details of the case are not the most striking feature of the Torah’s instructions. We may even wonder if such a thing ever happened, given that Jewish law would require the community to help the father so that he would never be forced to sell his daughter. The subtlety of this teaching regarding how we should ideally communicate with our fellows is part of the Torah’s greatness. When we speak to another about something good, we should use the second person — “When you loan someone a million dollars…” But when we have to discuss a possible tragedy, we should speak in the third person: “When a man buries his relative…” If we live by this advice, we demonstrate great sensitivity to the way words influence people’s psychological condition. In addition we act as a source of positive, growing energy to those around us.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Regarding Rabbi Cardozo’s pondering about the reality of the case of the Hebrew maidservant, do you agree with his thinking that this may be one of those theoretical cases that was never actualized (and was never meant to be actualized), akin to the rebellious son and the wayward city? Or do you think that the Torah was presenting a realistic, yet sad situation, in which a father would “sell” his daughter into servitude in the hope of her living a better life?

Do you think that the rehabilitation system for property crime (for example theft, vandalism, larceny, shoplifting, and the like) as proposed by the Torah (the Eved Ivri system) is more effective at criminal reform that the penal system (i.e., jail) used today in Western countries? Why? At face value, the Eved Ivri system is only used if the criminal cannot repay the restitutions decided by the judge. Given the apparent benefits of reform to the criminal as described by Rabbi Cardozo above, why do you think the Torah did not legislate the Eved Ivri system even if the criminal can repay the restitutions? If someone reached a mental and emotional state where they justified stealing why should the ability to repay the restitutions be the condition of whether the Eved Ivri system is used or not?

Rabbi Cardozo argues that the sensitivity of language — second person vs. third person — is what makes all the difference in how one is to relate to the Hebrew male slave versus the Hebrew maidservant. The verses relating to the Hebrew slave and the Hebrew maidservant however exhibit other differences which might suggest a change in how one is to relate to the two cases, for example, the Hebrew slave is “set free without charge” whereas the Hebrew maidservant “shall not go out like the man servants do”. What other lessons can be learned from this difference in language between the two cases?

112 Shemot 21:2.

113 Ibid., 22:2.

114 Ibid., 21:7.

115 On Shemot 21:2.

116 See Kiddushin 20a and Tosafot s.v. “Kol ha-kone eved ivri ke-kone eved leatzmo”; Mishne Torah, Hilchot Avadim, 1:6-9; Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 3:39.

117 Shemot 21:5.

We Are All Strangers

‫וגר לא תלחץ ואתם ידעתם את־נפש הגר כי־גרים הייתם בארץ מצרים‬

You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. Shemot 23:9

One wonders why we Jews, throughout the thousands of years of our history, have rarely ever had the blessing of security. We’ve had to deal with so many obstacles: being deprived of our homeland for nearly 2,000 years; experiencing difficulties living with each other; being few in number; and being the target of a constant onslaught of accusations and challenges to our very right to exist — all unparalleled in world history. Even today, after the re-establishment of our commonwealth — the State of Israel, with its military power and exceptional accomplishments — we remain a nation in a constant state of uncertainty, never sure what the next day will bring, confronted with one crisis after another. This emerges as a major paradox, considering the nation’s remarkable capacity to be constantly on the brink of extinction, and yet, not only to survive, but to rejuvenate itself in a most powerful way. Historians and anthropologists are hard put to comprehend how we not only live on, but we outlive our enemies, draw the world’s attention with our achievements, and contribute to mankind in a manner that is significantly far out of proportion to our numbers. The shifting sands on which all of Jewish history is based makes us wonder whether this paradox is not, in fact, essential to the very existence of the Jewish people.

The need for instability

There is one commandment that, unlike any other in the Torah, is almost endlessly repeated. This is the commandment that we must be concerned about the welfare of the stranger in our midst. According to one opinion in the Talmud, this commandment appears thirty-six times in the Torah.¹¹⁸ Since no other commandment even comes close to such numerous repetitions, we must conclude that we are looking at the core of the mystery of Jews, Judaism, and Halakhah. Of great importance is the fact that we are asked to look after the stranger because of our own experience in Egypt. Here we are confronted with a crucial aspect of a halachic moral imperative. The demand of what is seemingly the most important of all commandments, to care about the stranger, can only have sufficient authority when it is substantiated through the appeal to personal experience. It indeed does not take much effort to realize that all of Jewish history is founded on strangerhood. Avraham, the initiator of Judaism, was called upon to become a stranger by leaving his home and country to find his religious identity. Early Jewish history is the story of a nomadic people who even after they reached their destination, the Land of Israel, were compelled on numerous occasions to leave that land and live once again as foreigners. They were forced to live for hundreds of years “in a land that is not theirs,”¹¹ namely Egypt, and it was under those circumstances that their identity was formed. It was only sporadically that Jews actually lived at peace in their own homeland. Even the Jewish raison d’être, the Torah, was not given “at home” but in a desert, an existential experience of “foreigner-hood.” It is as if all of the Torah’s commandments, without exception, find their meaning, justification and fulfillment only once one knows and experiences what it means to be a stranger. More recent Jewish history, of the last nearly 2,000 years, once again found Jews living as foreigners in other people’s lands.

Hope for morality

What the foreigner lacks is security, a feeling of home and existential familiarity. Paradoxically, it is this deficiency that creates the climate in which we can be sensitized to the plight of those around us. It leads to the realization that there can be hope for morality only as long as we are somehow unsettled. Our quest for security will obstruct our search for meaning and purpose, while our lack of security will impel our moral powers to unfold. It is clearly this fact that underlies the ongoing repetition of the commandment to look after the stranger “because you were strangers in Egypt.” What this means is that for a nation to maintain sensitivity and concern for “the other,” it must continue to live in some form of strangerhood. It must never be fully secure, and must constantly be aware of its own existential uncertainty. As such, the Jew is to be a stranger. Only in that way can he become a moral beam of light to the nations of the world, a mission that above anything else is the reason for his Jewishness. The Torah is a protest against our feeling overly secure, for it is aware that the world will become a completely insecure place once people begin to feel too much at home, and consequently forget their fellow human beings.

To trouble the comfortable

The upheavals in recent Israeli Jewish history, which have denied the Jewish people stability and security, may well be a message to return to a much greater sensitivity towards the stranger and fellow man. Jews must realize that God fashioned them into a people of archetypal foreigners, in order to enable them to live by the imperatives of the Torah. We need to understand and internalize that nearly all problems in society result from seeing “the other,” including our fellow Jew, as a stranger. Most people cannot perceive what it means to be a stranger and how far it extends unless they themselves experience it on some level. “For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”¹² Most of us are alone, surrounded by many; and we suffer our most

difficult moments when by ourselves, standing in a crowd. To put an end to the solitude of another, one need to feel oneself a stranger. This awareness should become the bedrock of Jewish society. To be an eternal nation while lacking definite security is the great paradox that makes a truly moral Jewish society possible. Still, once we create an inner awareness of our archetypal character as foreigners, and create a society in which the stranger, including the other Jewish foreigner, is fully cared for, the external threats that surround us may diminish. The more the stranger is looked after, the less need there is for the Jewish people to experience strangerhood.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

The commandment not to oppress a stranger “for you were strangers in Egypt” was given to a nation of recently freed slaves wandering in the desert. Who were the strangers among them at that time? Why might they be tempted to mistreat them?

It is clear that the word “ger” translated here as “stranger” must originally have meant “migrant,” what we might today call “stateless person”, as indicated by the phrase “for you were gerim in Egypt”. Only much later did this word come to refer to a convert to Judaism. What do you think led to this shift in meaning?

Do you agree with Rabbi Cardozo’s premise that morality requires a degree of discomfort — of being strangers in some way? What occurrences in your own life or contradict this premise?

118 Bava Metzia 59b. See Tamudic Encyclopedia, s.v. ona’at ha-ger and s.v. ger 6:277–278.

119 Bereshit 15:13.

120 Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral. (CreateSpace

Independent Publishing Platform, 2016) 46

Terumah

In Spite of Religion, God Is Still Around ¹²¹

‫ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם‬

And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst. Shemot 25:8

Lately,a strange feeling has come over me. I am not yet able to fully articulate it, but something tells me that God is relocating to a different residence. He has hired a moving company and they are at this time loading all His furniture and possessions into a van and awaiting His instructions as to the destination. The truth is He’s been thinking for a long time about moving but has not yet done so because we, in our ignorance, are still busy visiting His old home, completely blind to the fact that the curtains have been taken down, most of His furniture has already been removed, and He is standing in the doorway, dressed in His jacket and ready to go. He nevertheless listens to us, smiling and feeling sorry for us that in our utter blindness we still believe we are sitting comfortably in His living room, chatting and having coffee with Him, while in fact He is sitting on the edge of His chair, gazing longingly at the door, dreaming of His new home.

His primary residence

Synagogues — whether Orthodox, Conservative or Reform — are no longer His primary residence. Surely some of the worshippers are pious people who try to

communicate with their Creator, but overall, the majority of these places have become religiously sterile and spiritually empty. So God is moving to unconventional minyanim and places such as Israeli cafes, debating clubs, community centers, und religious gatherings, and atypical batei midrash. The reason is obvious. In some of those places people are actually looking for Him. And that is what He loves; not those who have already found Him and take Him for granted. He is moving in with the young people who have a sense that He is there but cannot yet find Him. It gives Him a thrill. In some of these cafes He encounters young men sporting ponytails, without kippot, but with tzitziyot hanging out of their T-shirts, praying in their own words, attempting to find Him. In secular yeshivot, He meets women in tros and mini-skirts who are earnestly arguing about what it means to be Jewish and who kiss mezuzot when they enter a fashion show. Then there are those who, to His delight, are keen on putting on tefillin once in a while and do this with great excitement; or who enthusiastically light Shabbat candles Friday night and can get into a serious discussion about Buddhism and how to combine some of its wisdom with Kabbalah and incorporate it into Jewish practice. No, they don’t do it because it is tradition, or nostalgia, as their grandparents did, but because they sincerely want to connect, to grow and become better, deeper and more authentic Jews, but at their own pace and without being told by others what they ought to do. They won’t go for the conventional outreach programs, which try to indoctrinate them. No, they strive to come closer because of an enormous urge and inner explosion of their neshamot. No better place for God to be, even if these attempts may not always achieve the correct goals and are sometimes misdirected. At these unconventional sites, theological discourses take place over a glass of beer, and the participants talk deep into the night because they can’t get enough of this great stuff called Judaism. Many of these people want to study God and understand why He created the world and what the meaning of life is all about. What is the human condition? What is a religious experience? How do we confront death? What is the meaning of Halakhah? What are we Jews doing here in this strange universe? They realize that life becomes more and more perplexing, and these questions are therefore of radical importance. These are, after all, eternal issues. Who wants to live a life that es by unnoticed? It is in this mysterious stratosphere that God loves to dwell. He can’t get enough of it.

Going through the motions

Regrettably, His interest wavers when He enters conventional synagogues. He finds little excitement there. People, including myself, seem to go through the motions, activate their automatic pilot, do what they are told, say the words in the prayer book, and go home to make Kiddush. Few are asking questions on how to relate to God, why they are Jewish and what their lives really are all about. Many do not want to be confronted with these nasty issues. They only disturb their peace of mind. A nice, conventional dvar Torah is good enough. After all, “everything has already been discussed and resolved.” Regular synagogue visitors — again, like me — only speak to Him when they need Him, but almost nobody ever speaks about Him or hears Him when He calls for help in pursuing the purpose of His creation. So God is moving to more interesting places. He laughs when He thinks of the old slogan, “God is dead.” It was a childhood disease. He knows we have learned our lesson. Atheism is too easy, too simplistic, and has not solved anything. He knows that He has not yet been replaced with something better. Oh yes, there are still run-of-the-mill scientists who believe that they have it all worked out. Some neurologists sincerely believe that “we are our brains” and that our thinking is nothing more than sensory activity. They seem to believe that one can find the essence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by analyzing the ink with which the composer wrote this masterpiece. There are even Nobel Prize winners who believe that we will soon enter God’s mind and know it all, no longer needing Him. They are like the man who searches for his watch in the middle of the night. When asked why he is looking under the streetlamp, if he lost his watch a block away, he answers: “This is the only place where I can see anything.” These scientists have still not realized that there are more things in heaven and earth than their research will ever grasp. They have convinced themselves that they are merely objective spectators and have not yet understood that they themselves are actors in the mysterious drama of what is called life. And God simply winks. During the duration of this long-term disease beginning in the nineteenth century, antibodies have been developing to fight against the denial of His very being. Although atheism is still alive and kicking, many have

become immune to all these simplistic ideas. Over the years, more and more antitoxins have accumulated, and we are now stunned by the fact that He, after all, may indeed be in our midst. Suddenly, an outdated hypothesis has come to life again. God is a real possibility, and we had better become aware of that.

The discovery of God in spite of religion

But here’s the catch: While the religious establishment is now shouting from the rooftops “We told you so,” it has not yet grasped that this is completely untrue. The discovery of God did not happen because of conventional religion but in spite of it. The truth is that the great shift concerning God took place far away from the official religious establishment. It is in fact a miracle that some people continued believing in God while religion often did everything to make this impossible. For centuries the church blundered time after time. Since the days when Galileo proved the Church wrong, it was constantly forced to change its position. And even then, it did so reluctantly. The enormous loss of prestige that religion suffered because of it is beyond description. God was pushed into the corner. Not because He was not there, but because He was constantly misrepresented by people who spoke in His name. Since the Renaissance, many other great minds have moved the world forward; and while several may have missed the boat, a large number of them introduced radical new perspectives of the greatest importance. Yet, the Church’s only response was to fight them tooth and nail until, out of utter necessity, when all its arguments had run out, it had to succumb and apologize once again for its mistakes. Time and again, religion lagged behind in sharing the victory of new scientific and philosophical insights. Ironically, long before the Church officially sanctioned these new discoveries, they were already part and parcel of the new world. As always, the imprimatur came too late. And so religion paid a heavy price. Its territory became smaller and smaller. The constant need for capitulation made many people leave the world of religion and opt for the secular approach. And the story is not over yet. Scientists are now discussing the possibility of creating life forms in the laboratory that do not

depend on DNA to survive and evolve. In all likelihood, several religious leaders will fight this again, with force and ferocity, and will probably have to succumb once more when they can no longer deny the hard facts of science.

Unconditional beliefs?

But what was happening in the Jewish religious world? While it cannot be denied that Judaism, too, got caught up in all these debates, and quite a few staunch traditionalists were not much better than some of the Church Fathers, the overall situation within Judaism was much more receptive to scientific developments. While the Church declared in one authoritative voice — often the synod — that these new scientific discoveries were outright heresy, such pronouncements never took place in the synagogue. This is because Judaism is so different from other religions. Positions of unconditional belief were never its main concern. They were always debated, but never finalized as was the case with the Church. What kept Judaism busy was the question of how to live one’s life while living in the presence of God and one’s fellow man, as expressed in the all-encoming halakhic literature. Because of that, it did not see scientific discoveries as much of a challenge. There was also a strong feeling that scientific progress was a God-given blessing. The greatest Jewish religious thinker of the Middle Ages, Rambam, was even prepared to give up on the concept of creation ex nihilo if it would be proven untrue.¹²² Although he was attacked for some of these radical and enlightened ideas, the general attitude was: let science do its thing, and if we were wrong in the past because we relied on the science of those days, we will now rectify our position. Even when the Talmud made scientific statements, many — although certainly not all — understood them to be the result of scientific knowledge of the day, and not sacrosanct.¹²³ And even when these debates became more intensive, it was never argued that opposing views should be absolutely silenced. There was no final authority in matters of belief, no Jewish synod. At the same time, many sages warned against making science into an idol that is all-knowing and can solve all of life’s riddles. Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of

superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all…of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.¹²⁴ But today all this has changed. In many Orthodox circles, Judaism’s beliefs have become more holy than the pope. Suddenly, there is an attempt to outdo oldfashioned Catholicism; to insist that the world is actually only 5,800 years old; that the creation chapter must be taken literally; that seven days consist of twenty-four hours each and not one minute more; that there is no foundation to the theory of evolution; and that the Talmud’s scientific observations came straight from Sinai. That this happened in the past, when there was limited scientific knowledge, is understandable; but that such claims are still made today is downright embarrassing. It makes us blush. We can laugh about it only because the hopelessness of some of these ideas has already ed the point of being disputable. They have faded into flickering embers soon to be extinguished. Surely it could be argued that possibly science will change its mind. But if the core beliefs of Judaism are not undermined (and they are not!), and as long as there is no indication that science will change its mind in the near future, there is no need to reject these scientific positions. And let us never forget that it is not even completely clear what these core beliefs are! So why fight modern science? ¹²⁵

Judaism is becoming laughable

The incredible damage done by doing so is beyond description. It makes Judaism laughable and, in the eyes of many intelligent people, completely outmoded. It makes it impossible to inspire many searching souls who know what science teaches us. If not for this mistaken understanding of Judaism, many people would not have left the fold and could actually have enjoyed Judaism as a major force in their lives. And it is here that many of us, including myself, are at fault. We blame the Synagogue for this failure, as we blamed the Church hundreds of years ago.

Many of us have said, “Judaism has failed”; “It is outdated”; “I am getting out.” But such statements are as unfair as they are illogical. Judaism is not an institution external to us, which one can abandon as one quits a hockey club. We are the Synagogue, and we are Judaism. When Galileo revolutionized our view concerning the solar system, it was not only the Church that failed; we all failed. Those who from the perspective of Galileo claim that the Church was backward are reasoning post factum. We must realize that while Judaism consists of core beliefs and values that are eternal and divine, it is also the product of the culture during which time it developed. That, too, is part of God’s plan and has a higher purpose. And when history moves on and God reveals new knowledge, the purpose is to incorporate that into our thinking and religious experience. Ignoring this is silencing God’s voice. Religion will regain its old power only when it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.¹² That is why God is relocating. He doesn’t want to live in a place where His ongoing creation is unappreciated and even denied.

The Holocaust and halakhic obsession

We have replaced God with prayers, no longer realizing to Whom we are praying. We even use Halakhah as an escape from experiencing Him. We are so busy with creating halakhic problems, and so completely absorbed by trying to solve them, that we are unaware of our hiding behind this practice so as not to deal with His existence.¹²⁷ In many ways this is understandable. Since the days of the Holocaust, we have refused to confront the problem of God’s existence, due to the enormity of the evil which He allowed to happen. So we threw ourselves into Halakhah to escape the question. But while the problem of God’s involvement in the Holocaust will probably never be solved, we must realize that the purpose of Halakhah is to have an encounter with Him, not just with the Halakhah. Halakhah is the channel through which we can reach Him, not just

laws to live by. Notwithstanding the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, we must return to God. It’s high time we realize that His being is of a totally different nature than we have ever imagined. God can only be understood in a way that is similar to the relationship between a computer hard disk and what you see on the screen. What you see on the screen is totally different from what is inscribed in the hard disk. You can examine the inside of the disk using the most powerful microscope, but you will see nothing even slightly resembling pictures, colors or words. We are mistaken when we picture God based on the world screen. In no way does it reveal the actual contents of the hard disk, God Himself. All we know is that God’s ways –which we see only through the external sense of sight — is somehow related to the disk. The problem is that we believe we can have a good look at God by watching the screen. But we haven’t the slightest clue of what is actually going on in the disk. The Holocaust will probably always remain an enigma, but it can never deny the Divine disk.¹²⁸ It is in those who are still uncomfortable with God that new insights about Him are formed. And it will be in those uneasy environments that Judaism will be rediscovered and developed. The need for religious transcendence, and for the spiritual thread that keeps many young people on their toes, is enormous. Numerous secular people are ing a new category of spiritual theologians. Matters of weltanschauung are pivotal to many secular Jews now. The problem is that for them, and for the religious, the Torah is transmitted on a wavelength that is out of range of their spiritual transistor’s frequency. Yes, we turn on the radio, but we hear strange noises and unusual static. There is serious transmission failure. We are no longer sure where the pipelines are. In the world of physics, matters are becoming more and more hazy. Our brains are penetrating places where well-established notions, such as matter and substance, have evaporated. They have been transformed to puzzling phenomena. They have moved, and God has moved with them. Science is becoming intangible, and it’s happening at a speed that we can’t keep up with. It puts us in a difficult position and causes us anxiety. We are all living in exile, within a mystical landscape. Those who are aware of this are alive; those who are not have left this world unwittingly. The question is whether we move our synagogues to where God is now dwelling. Will we, the religious, live up to the expectations of the young people in cafes and discussions groups who have preceded us? Will we apologize to them and in their discussions, creating a real religious experience out of our

synagogue service? Or will we, as usual, stay put, fight the truth, and then be put to shame? When will we move Judaism to the front seat so that it once again becomes the leader instead of a follower? Will we move to God’s new habitat, or are we still drinking coffee in His old home where the curtains have been removed and He is long gone? One thing is clear: God has relocated.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Do you agree that “God has relocated” away from synagogues and traditional religious venues? Or would you say that God is more easily found in those places where we usually look for Him?

Have you ever felt that new scientific discoveries challenged your religious faith? Was your solution to deny the validity of faith or science, or did you find a third way to reconcile them? Do you feel that your solution is applicable to other such challenges?

If a self-proclaimed atheist challenges you to defend the validity of religious faith in our age, what would you say? Do you think your defense would convince your challenger (and does it matter)?

If you were asked to define the core beliefs of Judaism, which beliefs would you choose? Do you feel that your choices are vulnerable to future advances of science, or could they be redefined to take into new knowledge?

Do you feel that positing “core beliefs” bolsters religious faith, or is this detrimental to the future development of religion? If religion is not based on belief, on what is it based?

121 This essay was originally published (as a longer essay) under the title “God Is Relocating: A Critique on Contemporary Orthodoxy — Four Observations” in Conversations 19 (Spring 2014): 1-26.

122 See Moreh Nevuchim, part 2, chap. 25.

123 ittedly, this claim (that the primary Jewish view concerning scientific statements found in Jewish sacred texts maintains that these statements are provisional statements based on the scientific knowledge of the day and do not reflect absolute truths, and hence — unlike the Church — Judaism was not confronted with a clash between dogmatic statements and free scientific inquiry) is my personal conclusion after reading up on Jewish sources and history in relation to science. To mention only a few sources: Pesachim 94b; Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, part 3, chap. 14; Mishne Torah, Hilchot Kiddush HaChodesh; 17:24; Sefer HaTemunah, attributed to the Tanna Rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Kana; Rabbi Avraham ben haRambam, “Maamar al odot Drashot Chazal,” in Milchamot Hashem, (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1986); Rabbi Yitzchak Lampronti, Pachad Yitzchak, s.v. “Tzeidah”; Letter by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Ha-mayan 16, no. 2 (1976): 1-16; Rabbi Yisrael Lipschitz, commentary to the Mishna Tiferes Yisrael, “Drush Ohr Ha-Chaim” published in Mishnayot Tiferet Yisrael (New York: Pardes, 1953) in the back of vol. 1 of Seder Nezikin. See also Chief Rabbi Herzog’s letter to Professor Straus in Responsa Heichal Yitzchak, Orach Chaim, no. 29.

Others may disagree and accuse me of wishful thinking. In that case, Jewish thinkers have to work even harder to put the record straight! For me and many others, a Judaism that, for example, sincerely claims that the world is less than 5,800 years old is unacceptable. For an overview of the Jewish approach to science, see: http://www.aishdas.org/toratemet/science.html.

124 Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1954), 94.

125 Regarding the claim that the full text of the Torah is divine, or that miracles are possible, it is a matter of debate whether these are completely denied by scientific knowledge, or not. Many of these claims are not solely within the sphere of pure science. They touch on matters related to the philosophy of science or, in the case of Bible criticism, to literary interpretation.

126 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 234.

127 See Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 103.

128 I borrow this comparison from my dear friend Professor Yehuda Gellman of Ben Gurion University. See Gerome (Yehudah) Gellman, God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us: A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as the Chosen People (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 20-22.

On Silence, the Mishkan, and the Golden Calf

‫ ככל אשר אני מראה אותך את תבנית המשכן ואת תבנית‬.‫ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם‬ ‫כל־כליו וכן תעשו‬.

And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. Exactly as I show you — the pattern of the Tabernacle and the pattern of all its furnishings — so shall you make it. Shemot 25:8-9

Some of our greatest commentators have wrestled with the connection between the command to build the Mishkan (the Tent of Meeting or Tabernacle) and the sin of the Golden Calf. On the verse “And you shall make it” (Shemot 25:9), relating to the construction of the Tent of Meeting, the famous Italian commentator Ovadia Sforno (sixteenth century) made the following remarkable statement:

In order that I shall dwell between you, to speak with you and to accept the prayers and the service of Israel. This is not as it was before the sin of the Golden Calf, where it was said: “In any place where I shall have My name mentioned, I shall come to you and bless you.” (emphasis added)¹²

And a little later:

For at the end of the first forty days God gave the tablets made by Himself to

sanctify all as priests and a Holy nation, as He had promised. But they rebelled and became corrupt, and fell from this high spiritual level. (italics added)

The Tent of Meeting (and therefore the Temple), says Sforno, are the result of Israel’s choice to do evil — to opt for the Golden Calf. In other words, had the Golden Calf incident never taken place, the directive to build a Tent of Meeting would never have been given. What becomes exceedingly clear is that the real Temple, as the site of divine service, is not limited to the finite world. Its rightful place is the whole universe and that which is beyond the universe: “In any place where I shall have My Name mentioned I shall come to you.” Clearly, God’s greatness is beyond all physical limitations and encomes the universe and the “worlds” beyond the universe. If this is the thrust of God’s original intention, then what is the need for a physical place to symbolize God’s dwelling in this world? What purpose is served by the many ritual objects like the Altar, the Menorah, and the Ark in the Holy of Holies? Sforno suggests that the need for these “props” is the direct outcome of the sin of the Golden Calf.

The sin of the golden calf

What was the essence of this sin? What mental construct was reflected in this transgression, in which so many of the Jews were involved? The sin itself could obviously not have been a regular form of idol worship: Only a short while earlier, the Jewish People had experienced a divine revelation of unprecedented intensity. The spoken word of God reached them in an open encounter and was of unquestionable veracity. In one voice the entire people avowed their commitment — “Na’ase ve-Nishma.” (“We shall do and we shall hear”) (Exodus 24:7). Once and for all, the existence of God and His relationship to this world had been established. And still the question cries out to be

answered — after all this, how could the sin of the Golden Calf have come about? We must conclude that the creation of the Golden Calf has to be seen as an attempt to deal with this overwhelming experience. After all, to deal with an experience like this requires vast spiritual resources. It demands a spiritual level of unprecedented heights, and above all, the abolition of any physical symbol of the Divinity. In short, this is monotheism, which is the realization of the unitary and unique nature of God in its most advanced form. And even that which flows forth from God’s unity cannot fully be captured in the mundane. In its ideal state, Judaism should have had no need for symbolism altogether. Man would only be permitted to contemplate matters of the monotheistic world. This, however, was unattainable for the generation of the Exodus, which only shortly before had been steeped in a world of idol worship. To hold on to the unprecedented Sinai experience was only possible, so they believed, through a tangible and, therefore, more down-to-earth medium — otherwise it was in danger of slipping away, dissipating into a spiritual nothingness with no real implication, nor indeed eternal validity. This is undoubtedly the leitmotiv behind the episode of the Golden Calf. There was a perceived need to ensure that the revelatory experience of Sinai remain an ongoing experience. The form of a calf, symbolic of the godhead in the cultural milieu of Egypt, from which the people had so recently emerged (and also, later, seen by kabbalistic tradition as a symbol of immense spiritual power), was understood to be the most appropriate way to accomplish this goal. It was, however, clear to all involved that this was not meant to be, nor was it perceived as, the monotheistic godhead itself. It was merely a symbol of the Creator and Mover of the Universe in mundane . This, then, was the reason behind the fashioning of the Golden Calf. However, the creation of this image brought into being a completely different situation. Sforno’s level of monotheism was not yet within the reach of the Israelite people. The fashioning of the Golden Calf showed that the people still could not relate to God without resorting to symbolism. The symbol-less world of ultimate monotheism had, perforce, to accede to a symbol-full monotheism.

The dangers of symbolism

The use of symbolic representation is, however, not without its dangers. This is exactly what the incident of the Golden Calf demonstrates. Because of their great, emotive power in the world of human imagination, wrong conclusions may be drawn from a misplaced symbol. It is often beyond our capabilities to create appropriate representations ourselves. We may never grasp the metaphysical world to such an extent that we can reflect it within the mundane. Therefore, symbols of this kind can only be received. They cannot be deduced by the limited human mind. What the makers of the Golden Calf did not understand was that no symbol could ever encom the essence of God Himself. Even when a symbol might otherwise be called for, only God’s way of dealing in and with this world may be reflected in a symbol — not His essence. Only God Himself can adequately conjure up and command an appropriate, yet still approximate, symbol. Hence, the divine command to build the Mishkan was a more human, more mundane, and therefore more symbolic way of getting across the great values of monotheism, while still reminding us, however, of its ultimate symbol-less monotheism. As suggested by Sforno, the call for the Mishkan can only be seen as a concession to human weakness.

The impudence of prayer

Yet another reminder of what true monotheism is all about comes from the Siddur (prayer book). There, the chazan (communal reader) is instructed to open the main body of prayers with: “Barchu et Ha-Shem Ha-Mevorach” (Praise You the Lord, Who is ultimately praised). The congregation, however, is requested to simultaneously say: “His name is elevated above all praises and blessings.” This is intoned in silence, after which the community responds in a loud voice with: “Baruch Ha-Shem Ha-Mevorach Ie-olam va-ed” (Praised is the Lord, who is ultimately praised).

This is, to say the least, something of a paradox: First there is a call to praise God, which is simultaneously belied by a statement that His name is elevated beyond all praises and blessings. In other words, praising God is an impossibility — it is beyond man’s capabilities! After this, the community continues to praise God, as if to say that it is within the power of man to praise God after all. The same paradox may be found in the Kaddish prayer: “May [God’s] great Name be exalted and hallowed in the world of His creation.…He is…honored, exalted, glorified, adored [etc.].” Suddenly, the worshiper is asked to radically change direction: “[God] is beyond the power of all blessings, hymns, praise, and consolation that are said in this world and now say: Amen.” This paradox is reflected in a unique story related in the Talmud: Rabbi Chanina once observed a worshiper in the act of praising God with numerous additional laudations: not only was God “great,” “mighty,” and “powerful” but also “majestic,” “awesome,” “strong,” “fearless,” “sure,” honored,” and so forth.¹³ Rabbi Chanina waited for the worshiper to conclude and then asked him if he really thought he had praised God sufficiently! The Talmud tells us that one should only praise God by the three words that Moshe used and leave it at that. Man may begin praising God, but he can never do so sufficiently; therefore, any attempt only succeeds in limiting, however fulsome it may be. The more praises one heaps on, the more one ultimately confines God’s attributes. This is nothing short of blasphemy. The message of this story is that in reality, man should be speechless before God. To grasp the greatness of God should render him silent. No words can ever suffice to extol the awesomeness of this experience. Silence is therefore the highest expression of prayer. So why do we not stand in a prayer of silent contemplation? Why utter words if no words can ever suffice? The answer is now clear to us: the “prayer of words” is (once more) a concession to human weakness. We simply are unable to stand in contemplative silence; even in meaningful silence we cannot grasp the immense greatness of God. Our minds cannot grasp what our heart knows. In the midst of such a silence, our mind would wander, and paradoxically, the focus of our attention would shift away from our Creator. In this state of human weakness, we start to look for other ways to concentrate our minds on our Maker. This, then, is the function of the verbal prayer. It is more down-to-earth,

more tangible, and therefore, more appropriate to man’s condition. Such is the secret of prayer. Thus, the institution of formal spoken prayer was a direct continuation of the building of the Mishkan — a way to concretize our religious experience, while paving the way to true monotheism. Just as the true Mishkan is the entire universe, so true prayer can only be the silence of overwhelming wonder.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

What do you think really caused the “sin of the Golden Calf”? What was the Calf meant to represent?

Do you agree with Rabbi Cardozo’s assertion that the building of the Golden Calf was an attempt to deal with the overwhelming experience at Sinai?

Rabbi Cardozo writes, “Because of their great, emotive power in the world of human imagination, symbols can easily lead to a spiritual misunderstanding.” What other dangers exist in the usage of simple symbols to represent abstract concepts? Can you think of a way around these dangers?

Do you agree with the notion that the Mishkan was meant to bridge the gap between the human need for symbols and the ultimate abstractness of God? Today, when we have neither the Mishkan nor the Temple that replaced it, what else might bridge that gap?

129 On Shemot 25:9.

130 T. B. Berachot 33b.

Franz Rosenzweig and the Berliner Shtiebl

‫ונועדתי לך שם ודברתי אתך מעל הכפרת מבין שני הכרבים אשר על ארן העדת את כל‬ ‫אשר אצוה אותך אל בני ישראל‬

I will arrange My meetings with you there, and I will speak with you from atop the ark cover from between the two cherubim that are upon the Ark of the Testimony, all that I will command you unto the children of Israel. Shemot 25:22

The synagogue is often called a Mikdash me’at — a small version of the Temple that once stood in Jerusalem, or the Tent of Meeting in the desert before that. These were places that allowed for the direct Divine-human encounter, places where our neshamot¹³¹ (souls) could speak. It is time for us to find our way back to the synagogue and rediscover our neshamot. But this is easier said than done. Many have entered and left without sensing any spiritual significance. In fact, many have entered and been discouraged and dismayed. To attend synagogue is an art. People must come with a sincere urge to discover their Jewishness, to reconnect with their inner being and with the Jewish people. To enter the synagogue is to hope for a metamorphosis in one’s soul and a transformation of one’s personality. When the well-known Jewish Philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) decided to leave Judaism and be baptized, he enacted this resolution by first attending the High Holiday services in a shtiebl (a small Orthodox synagogue) in Berlin. This was a final farewell to his former religion with which he had never had a relationship. Arguing his case, he wrote: “We [Jews] are Christians in everything. We live in a Christian state, attend Christian schools, read Christian

books, in short, our whole culture rests entirely on Christian foundations. Therefore, where a man possesses nothing that holds him back, he needs only a very slight push…to make him accept Christianity.”¹³² To his utter surprise, profoundly touched by the services, he underwent a deep religious metamorphosis and left the small synagogue with such a love for Judaism that he not only called off his conversion to Christianity, he decided to try and become a religious Jew. Consequently, he made a very intensive study of Judaism, wrote some remarkable works about his newfound religion, and became one of the most important philosophers of Judaism in modern times.¹³³

Metamorphosis

What happened to Rosenzweig during those few hours in that small synagogue? What turned his whole life around and eventually transformed him into a deeply religious Jew? How is such a metamorphosis possible, especially in a man of such great intellectual perception? Rosenzweig, after all, had spent years contemplating the possibility of converting to Christianity. He had discussed this with many of his friends who had encouraged him to do so. Still, within a few hours he decided to disregard his earlier decision and become a committed Jew! The answer to these questions may be found in a highly significant midrash that tells of a Jewish apostate, by the name of Joseph Meshita, who helped the Romans destroy the Temple.

When the enemies [the Romans] desired to enter the Temple Mount, they said, “Let one of them (the Jews) enter first.” They said to Joseph Meshita, “Enter and whatever you bring out is yours.” So he went in and brought out a golden lamp. They said to him, “It is not fitting for a common person to use this, so go in again, and whatever you bring out is yours.” This time, he refused. They offered him three years’ taxes, yet he still refused and said, “Is it not enough that I have angered my God once that I should anger Him again?” What did they do to him? They put him into a carpenter’s clamp and sawed him and dismembered him. He

cried, “Woe to me that I angered my Creator!”¹³⁴

Rabbi Yosef Kahaneman, the famous Ponevicher Rav, once commented that this midrash conveys the mighty impact that the Temple had on human beings.¹³⁵ The moment Joseph Meshita entered the Temple he underwent a spiritual metamorphosis. He suddenly realized that he was a Jew; he was deeply touched by the unique and holy atmosphere in the Temple and by the symbols he found there. He still managed to take out a golden lamp, but once outside he realized that he could not enter the Temple a second time. His newfound neshamah did not allow him to do so. Even when the Romans offered him great amounts of money and then threatened to torture him to death, he could not defile the House of God again. In his weekly parshah commentary, Rabbi Yissocher Frand suggests that this midrash explains Franz Rosenzweig’s sudden transformation when he entered the small synagogue in Berlin.¹³ Once he saw Jews at prayer, tallitot (prayer shawls) over their heads and in deep concentration, his neshamah awoke, and his Jewishness was restored. This, however, needs further explanation. In what way can a synagogue and prayers suddenly awaken a Jewish soul that was totally removed from anything Jewish? What was in the Temple that made Joseph Meshita feel such overwhelming spiritual power, to the extent that he could not go in a second time? As suggested above, it relates, first of all, to the attitude one has even before entering the Temple, or a synagogue. After all, many have gone in and emerged disappointed, and even discouraged. Others defiled the sanctuary and showed no remorse. It is said that Titus entered the Temple and had intercourse with a harlot in the Holy of Holies.¹³⁷ But even if one enters with the right approach, what turns this experience into a religious metamorphosis?

The Impact of Ritual

Here, we encounter the world of Jewish symbolism. According to kabbalistic thought, the physical symbols in the Temple, such as the altar and the menorah, are tangible reflections of the Ein Sof (the Infinite Divine matter), which descends into this world. These symbols are not fully comprehensible, since their essence belongs to the metaphysical world. Like some rituals, they touch on an aspect of human existence that cannot be reached in any other way. They are, however, identified by the subconscious, which has its root in the Divine, since man was formed in the Divine image. Consequently, they evoke in people an overwhelming recognition of the higher world, which gives them the unique feeling that they are looking into their own soul. This is the apperception of the neshamah. The Temple was the representation of heaven on earth, and its symbols caused the soul to hear a perpetual murmur coming from waves far beyond the reach of any human. Such a divine manifestation would ultimately lead to the metamorphosis that Joseph Meshita experienced when he entered the Temple. Similarly, Franz Rosenzweig discovered his own neshamah while attending the service at the shtiebel in Berlin. Once he saw the symbolic objects, richly adorning the interior of the synagogue (representing the Temple), and simultaneously heard and read the prayers of the High Holidays, he entered the heavenly realm that had been continuously hovering within his soul. It revolutionized his inner being and brought heaven to earth. This happened not only from observing what took place in that small synagogue, but also from a desire to penetrate and become part of a highly significant religious experience.

The quality of religious experience

This is what all Jews should try to accomplish: to enter a small synagogue filled with dedicated and ionate worshippers, and then to release all external and artificial components from their souls; to penetrate the surroundings in which they find themselves, and then to let go. This is far from easy, and indeed requires great courage, but the sudden feeling of belonging, which will result from an encounter with what we call the world of the neshamah, will be unexpectedly blissful.

Much, however, depends on which synagogue the newcomer enters. Some synagogues are so devoid of any spiritual atmosphere that they repel the visitor who is seeking a religious experience. Many regular synagogue-goers do not realize the harm they do when they go through the motions of prayer without connecting with what they actually say. They show no enthusiasm or fire in their souls; in fact, they often look bored, as if waiting for the service to be over. While it is no doubt praiseworthy — and should not be underestimated — that they come, many of them daily, to the synagogue and participate in the services, for newcomers such behavior can be a letdown and often causes them to turn their backs on Judaism. Attending synagogue must be a homecoming; it will spare the Jewish world a great amount of self-imposed harm.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo brings two examples of Jews entering a sacred space (a synagogue and the Temple) and being seriously moved by the experience, resulting in each one going through a spiritual metamorphosis. Can you relate to such an experience on a personal level? Have you ever entered a sacred space and emerged a different person?

The story about Franz Rosenzweig as related here emphasizes that it occurred specifically in a shtiebl, a small and intimate sacred space, whereas the story about Joseph Meshita specifically relates to him entering the Temple, arguable the holiest place on Earth. Do you think there is a special significance about such places that enabled their respective metamorphoses to occur? Could this change in spiritual attitude have happened in any sacred space we associate with Judaism (such as a beit midrash, a mikvah, a large shul, a cemetery and the like) or is there something special about shtiebels and the Temple?

Whereas it is unclear exactly what caused the spiritual shift in both Rosenzweig and Meshita, Rabbi Cardozo implies that it has something to do with the symbology of the artifacts and objects present in both the Temple and a synagogue (many of the ritual objects in a synagogue represent the sacred objects that were once in the Temple). To what degree do you think that physical objects can have a spiritual effect on a person? Do they possess some ‘objective’ sacredness which can make a spiritual impression on a person or is it all just a matter of someone’s attitude and state of mind?

As is probably the experience of many readers, most people who enter a

synagogue, or even venture up to the Temple mount today, don’t experience what Rosenzweig or Meshita experienced. What do you think is lacking in the experience today which could turn a visit to such a sacred space into something spiritually moving? Do you have any suggestions as to how to make your sacred space (shul, shtiebel, meditation room, prayer space, and the like) more spiritually moving to visitors?

131 I use the word “neshomeh” in the title, instead of “neshamah”, because it conveys the connotation of a certain sensitive feeling developed throughout Jewish history, which is absent from the word “neshamah”.

132 Quoted by Samuel Hugo Bergman, Faith and Reason: Modern Jewish Thought, trans. and ed. by Alfred Jospe (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 57.

133 Rosenzweig’s most important work is The Star of Redemption. For a thorough critique, see Eliezer Berkovits, Major Themes in Modern Philosophies of Judaism (NY: Ktav Publishing House, 1974), chap. 2.

134 Yalkut Shimoni, Bereishit 115 on Bereshit 27:27.

135 Quoted by Rabbi Yissocher Frand. See below.

136 Rabbi Yissocher Frand, Rabbi Frand on the Parasha, vol. 1 (NY: Mesorah Publications, 2001), 51-53.

137 Gittin 56b.

Tetzaveh

Sanctification of the Heart

‫וקדשתי את־אהל מועד ואת־המזבח ואת־אהרן ואת־בניו אקדש לכהן לי‬

I will sanctify the Tent of Meeting and the altar, and I will consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve Me as priests. Shemot 29:44

The Holy of Holies — the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle and later the Temple in Yerushalayim — was an area that only the High Priest was allowed to enter, and only once a year, on Yom Kippur. Yet even the Holy of Holies was occasionally in need of repair. To provide for such an eventuality there were openings in the upper chamber leading down into this sacred area. Artisans, who were themselves Kohanim, were lowered from above in tevot (boxes). Each box was open only to the side of the wall so that the men could do their job but “could not feast their eyes on the Holy of Holies”.¹³⁸ In Chassidic thought, the above tradition was given an allegorical meaning. In Hebrew, tevot does not only mean “boxes” but also “words.” As such, the words of Jewish learning are seen as ways to enter the Holy of Holies, that is, the heart of every Jew, so as to repair and revive him spiritually. But just as in the Temple the repairmen in their tevot could touch nothing but the wall’s surface, so the tevot of the Torah can touch only the outer layer of the human heart. For them to penetrate into the inner chambers of the heart requires enormous effort. Through the words, we can grasp the perpetual, holy murmurs from a world beyond, but nothing more. What lies deeper can be accessed only with repair work to open the channels of the heart, which are often closed off and scarred over. Our walled heart allows no access to a ladder upon which we can climb to reach the knowledge of God.

It is words understood by the soul that alone can penetrate the heart. As in the case of musical notes, which are simply a vehicle through which the music itself is achieved, words, too, are merely the channel through which something deeper is felt. Only when the soul is involved can there be a chance for the words to become a song.

The need to reach the heart

Jewish education, like the Holy of Holies, may be in need of radical repair. We are living in times when the Jewish religious imagination seems to be exhausted. We no longer know how to lower ourselves, via the tevot, into the Holy of Holies of the human heart. We have fallen victim to a sociological and anthropological approach, which has led to the vulgarization of Jewish education. We often ask whether the Jews constitute a race; a people; a religion; a cultural entity; a historic group; or a linguistic unit. But we do not ask what we are spiritually; who we are morally; what we owe the world, and what our mission is. We may be busy repairing Judaism, but we are descending from the wrong upper chamber into an artificial temple, one of secularity. Jewish education has only one goal, and that is to inspire students to reach for Heaven (Yirat Shamayim) and to transform them into outstanding human beings, in which the concern for their fellow human beings and dedication towards the Jewish people and mankind are achieved through the commandments of the Torah. The moment any educational system is no longer able to achieve that goal it becomes outdated and dangerous, however much it may have greatly succeeded in earlier generations. The often repeated slogan in some Orthodox circles, “This is the way our forefathers taught Torah” is of no value unless it is abundantly clear that such a system indeed works in the 21st century. The heavy bombardment of external influences from which even the most Orthodox cannot escape requires constant

contemplation and innovation by highly competent Jewish educators. When this demands totally different approaches or drastic changes in the syllabi in schools or yeshivot, then nothing should hold back those responsible from making these changes. No doubt this requires courage. But courage, in the words of Mark Twain, is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of fear.

The need for motivation

Parts of the religious world today have fallen victim to a kind of religious behaviorism, the belief that Judaism glorifies the deed without proper motivation and inspiration. What we do is only the minimum of what we are. Deeds are outpourings; they are not the essence of the self. This does not minimize the importance of the Jewish belief that outer deeds create inner feelings and mentalities. The heart is, after all, a lonely voice in the marketplace of the living. But without constantly emphasizing the fact that all observance is ultimately for the sake of transformation of the whole person, Judaism will not be a beloved friend of the child or the student. This is the holy task of Jewish education about which the sages were concerned when in every generation they considered the need to change the rules of Jewish study programs so as to accomplish the maximum. We are blessed with synagogues and educational institutions, but how many of the worshippers are still connected with their “inner life” their neshamot (souls)? Lots of Jewish children receive plenty of excellent Jewish religious information, but how much do they learn to appreciate? How do we give them the tevoth with which to enter their own hearts?

Transformation not information

We speak a great deal about Jewish continuity as a goal of Jewish education. But we forget that it is transformation not information, that we are looking for. We

are told by our Sages that just walking into the Mishkan or the Temple could create “new” people, for they were astonished and amazed by the many miracles that took place in its confines. It was not Jewish continuity that the Temple guaranteed but a radical re-creation of the Jewish spirit, which made souls grow wings and fly. It served as a protest against the stale and the obsolete. It caused one to be so taken in by the spiritual power of the Torah that he was able to see God everywhere, like the Chassidic Rebbe who would walk in the forest to see the tall, swaying trees praying shemoneh esrei (The Eighteen Blessings). As if they were performing a transcendent dance, reaching towards Heaven. Jewish education must be like a work of music, which is capable of introducing us to emotions that we never cherished before. It is boring unless we are surprised by it. Every thought is a prison if it does not evoke in us an outburst of amazement. We must be wary of spiritual minimalism. The words of the Torah are not allowed to be stationary; they have to astonish. We must realize that we either ascend or descend. And we must never forget that at the core of each of us there resides a tzaddik, ready to take slip into the garments of priesthood in a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

“Jewish education has only one goal, and that is to inspire students to reach for Heaven (Yirat Shamayim) and to transform them into outstanding human beings.” Do you agree that this is the goal of Jewish education? What other goals do you feel that it should have?

What changes would you introduce into your community’s Jewish educational system in order to reignite the fires of amazement and bring about individual transformation?

Have you ever had an experience like the sort of transformation or “repair from within” described by Rabbi Cardozo? Can such an experience ever really be conveyed to another? What implications does this have on the revival of amazement, which Rabbi Cardozo believes to be so integral to Jewish education?

138 Middoth 4:5, Pesachim 26a

Asterix and Obelix: A Rabbinic Commentary

‫ואתה הקרב אליך את אהרן אחיך ואת בניו אתו מתוך בני ישראל לכהנו לי אהרן נדב‬ ‫ואביהוא אלעזר ואיתמר בני אהרן‬

And you bring near to yourself your brother Aaron, and his sons with him, from among the children of Israel to serve Me [as kohanim]: Aaron, Nadav, and Avihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar, Aaron’s sons. Shemot 28:1

One of the great blessings in life, which many of us benefit from, is that we often do not know what we have missed out on. Ignoti nulla cupido, “There is no desire for what is not known,” said Ovid in his Ars Amatoria (III. 397). This may sound rather strange, but when we examine our own lives, we see that many people can be satisfied with their material standard because they do not fully realize, or refuse to realize, that they could have had more. Or, in the words of Shakespeare:

The Jewel that we find we stoop and take’t

Because we see it, but what we do not see

We tread upon, and never think of it.

(Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 1.)

Today we have convinced ourselves that we cannot survive without electricity, refrigerators, cars and airplanes. We are therefore astonished when we realize that our forefathers lived their lives without any of these “necessities,” even though they belonged to the “upper class.” We are even more surprised to learn that they were often happier than we are. They neither possessed nor missed these belongings for the simple reason that such things did not exist.

Julius Caesar and the Menhirs

Two famous cartoonists, R. Goscinny and A. Uderzoin created a series of hilarious cartoons, “Asterix and Obelix” — a parody on modern society which no doubt is well known to our European readers. On edition, “Obelix and Co.” is about a time when the great emperor, Julius Caesar, was looking for ways to defeat the invincible Gauls. The latter lived in a small town in the north of what was later called . This small, but totally independent village is the hometown of the heroes of Asterix and Obelix, who frequently poke fun at the Romans. The Roman army is constantly defeated by the Gauls due to the fact that the latter possess a miraculous potion invented and brewed by the wise Druid, Getafix, which gives the drinker superhuman strength. This is obviously a thorn in the side of Caesar. In a meeting of Caesar’s inner cabinet, one unsympathetic figure suggests that they should try to make the Gauls so completely addicted to money that their interest in warfare and independence will dissipate. Following this advice, Caesar starts buying thousands of menhirs, massive, useless stones, from a company belonging to the Gauls. This company called “Obelix and Co” is run by the Gaul, Obelix. The plan is that Obelix will be seduced by the money he receives, and will thus be forced to employ all his fellow citizens so as to meet the demands of fulfilling Caesar’s order. In this

way, their attention will be diverted away from warfare, and Caesar will have his way and finally defeat them. After having acquired a large quantity of these stones, Caesar’s treasury is entirely depleted, and he is forced to sell these menhirs to his own people before his empire becomes bankrupt. Convincing his citizens to buy these menhirs is, however, a major headache. How to convince them of the absolute necessity of possessing these worthless stones? A major ment campaign is launched, and slowly, millions of people start buying these useless stones. Prices rise to absurd levels, and the entire Roman empire is convinced that life without these stones is not worth living. Some even contemplate suicide for the lack of them. A whole country is now funded and driven by enormous pieces of stone which have no other function but to get in the way. While this story is meant to be comical, its message is most serious. Almost nothing will be missed unless it has once been tasted. We feel deprived of something only once we are aware of its existence, or when we have experienced it even for a very short period of time. Cartoons are a remarkably effective means of communicating profound ideas. While we do not wish to equate the Torah with cartoons, our sages did teach us that God created the world in such a way that spiritual circumstances are represented in the secular realm. In this way, the profane holds a spark of that which takes place in the world of holiness.

Ignoti nulla cupido (there is no desire for what is unknown)

When Moshe is told to appoint Aharon and his sons to the priesthood in the Mishkan, he is told by God: “And you bring near to yourself your brother Aaron, and his sons with him, from among the children of Israel to serve Me…”¹³ Most unusual is the expression “bring near to you” (hakrev). We would have expected that the text would read “you shall appoint Aharon and his sons.”

Ohr Ha-Chaim, the great eighteenth-century commentator on the Torah, reminds us of the fact that it was originally God’s plan to have Moshe himself be the high priest. But since Moshe refused to respond to God’s request at the Burning Bush,¹⁴ to take full responsibility as leader and redeemer of the people of Israel, the task to become the high priest (in addition to being the leader) was denied to him and transferred to his brother Aharon.¹⁴¹ Most surprising, however, is the fact that Moshe did become the high priest, albeit for a short time. The Torah informs us that for seven days Moshe functioned as the high priest in the newly built Mishkan.¹⁴² Only then was Moshe asked to the priesthood on to Aharon, his brother. This requires an explanation. Why was the priesthood not immediately given to Aharon, as was already decided at the time of the Burning Bush? Ohr Ha-Chaim provides us with a powerful answer. He claims that God decided on this procedure to remind Moshe of what he had lost when he hesitated in complying with His request at the Burning Bush. By making Moshe a high priest for only a few days, God gave him a taste of the greatness, dignity and merit of this office. It is for this reason that he was asked to make sure that Aharon and his sons “come near” (“hakrev”) to him to become the new priests. The word “hakrev” has a double meaning, says Ohr Ha-Chaim. It means “to bring near” but it is also related to the word “korban.” Moshe was asked by God to bring a sacrifice as a kaparah, an atonement, for his earlier refusal, by giving the priesthood over to his brother after one week of office. He would not have known what he had lost had he not first tasted what it meant to be a high priest. This, says Ohr HaChaim, is the great sacrifice which Moshe brought. It should be understood that the sacrifice that Moshe had to undergo was not necessarily a punishment for his failure to appreciate what was offered to him, but was a message to future generations that a person has to learn to carefully contemplate and appreciate what is offered to him before he rejects it. Only when one recognizes the extent of one’s loss, will one appreciate what one could have had. Indeed, “Ignoti nulla cupido.”

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

In In Memoriam, Alfred Lord Tennyson writes that, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” If that is true, then God would have been granting Moshe a favor by allowing him to serve for seven days before taking that privilege away. The same could be said about showing Moshe the land of Israel from Mount Nevo before Moshe died. Do you agree that it is better to have loved and lost?

The People of Israel have loved and lost enormously. We still mourn the loss of the Temple and the loss of prophecy, and we struggle to love and be faithful to God without these means of communication with our Beloved. It has been 2,000 years. How long can love compensate for loss? How long can one sustain love in the face of loss?

Shakespeare asks, “To be or not to be?” through the mouth of Hamlet. The Gemara asks the same question in Eruvin 13b where it describes Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel’s debate about whether it would have been better for humans never to have been born. After two and a half years, they conclude that Beit Shammai is right, and that it is better not to be born. Does this imply that it is not better to love and to lose? Or, at least, that life is likely to contain more loss than the amount of love required to compensate for the loss? (Or are the issues unrelated? Is the age not talking about suffering, but rather making a dry calculation about the likelihood a person has of sinning too much to make life worthwhile? If that is the case, as some claim, why would God create people when it is likely that they will sin more than makes life worthwhile?!)

139 Shemot 28:1.

140 Shemot 3.

141 Ohr Ha-Chaim on Shemot 28:1. See Shemot Rabba, Vilna ed., 3:17.

142 Shemot 29.

Mixing with This World and Washing Your Hands of It

‫וידעו כי אני ה’ וידעו כי אני ה’ אלהיהם אשר הוצאתי אתם מארץ מצרים לשכני בתוכם‬ ‫אני ה’ אלהיהם‬

They shall know that I the Eternal am their God, who brought them out from the land of Egypt that I might abide among them, I the Eternal their God. Shemot 29:46

In an unusual age, the Talmud reports that King Solomon instituted the laws concerning the Eruv (i.e., “mixing of the realms”) through which one is allowed to carry objects from one domain to another on Shabbat, which would otherwise be forbidden.¹⁴³ The Talmud goes on to say that on another occasion King Solomon instituted the ritual washing of the hands. Both decrees were received with Divine favor and a heavenly voice issued forth and proclaimed, “My son, if your heart is wise, Mine will be glad…”¹⁴⁴ The great hassidic Sage, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, wondered what great wisdom lies hidden within these laws, such that the Heavenly Master was moved to joyfully approve of them in such a public manner. In his typically profound way, the Kotzker Rebbe explained that both laws demonstrate that a Jew must be both involved (“mixed”) in the world and simultaneously separated enough “to wash one’s hands of it.”¹⁴⁵ This observation is all the more remarkable since King Solomon was known for being deeply involved in the world (he negotiated international trade agreements and peace treaties, organized public works projects, adjudicated legal cases, etc.) and tasted all of its pleasures. Nevertheless, he maintained, according to the

Kotzker Rebbe, a certain distance from the world so that he could detach from it when necessary.

Involvement and detachment

To eat, to drink, to be fully involved, and yet to remain somehow disconnected from the world is indeed a great challenge, and to accomplish this feat requires great wisdom. In the construction of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, built in the days of Moshe, we find another expression of the same idea. As is well known, the Israelites constructed the Tabernacle in the desert, and afterwards brought it into the land of Israel to become the center of their Divine worship. Once they entered the land, the Jews ceased to live in a world of constant, open miracles, but suddenly found themselves obligated to build for themselves a society that would be both political and deeply religious. This too, was quite a challenge. A successful spiritual culture requires more than just the bare essentials. To foster religious fervor, the Jewish people needed some beauty and refinement (e.g., art and music), which are to some degree, necessary to nourish spirituality. Taken too far, though, luxuries can easily become an impediment to holiness, particularly when they are seen as goals in themselves. As such, a society needs them, but must simultaneously work to keep them connected to the Infinite. We can divide our needs into three categories:

Essential — for example, food, clothing, and shelter which are the elementary requirements for human existence.

Useful — anything that makes life easier, but without which we could still

survive (e.g., roads, bridges, tools, and other forms of technology).

Ornamental — arts that have no practical value, but which elevate the quality of our lives, and make the human experience more pleasant.

At all three levels, fulfilling these needs can be part of religious enrichment. However, taken past the point of moderation, each has the potential for great social evils — over-indulgence, envy, class struggle, corruption, etc.

Shabbat

In plans for the Tabernacle’s construction, we see that all three categories were represented. Some items were absolutely essential to the Tabernacle, such as the outer shell (shelter). Other elements, such as the ramp leading up to the altar, functioned solely to make the priests’ jobs easier. Certain fineries were also added that had no apparent practical value whatsoever, but greatly enhanced the beauty of the Mishkan and the religious experience of those who worshipped there, for example, the ornate embroidery and vivid dyes. Jewish Tradition states that every category of creative work was represented in the Tabernacle. As such, any human activity that was not needed at any phase in building the Mishkan does not have the status of “work” (melachah) as far as Shabbat is concerned, since it is not an activity that contributes to human society. This is the reason why all these activities are prohibited on Shabbat, when the Jew must abstain from creation and give “the world back to God.”¹⁴ When we put all these pieces together, a clear message emerges. Before the Jews began building their political state, they first built a place of worship that required them to employ every manner of craftsmanship and labor that they would ever use in the construction of their nation. To make sure that they aligned their priorities correctly, and fully integrated the idea that nothing should ever

become an object of over-indulgence, the Jewish people gave their initial bursts of creativity and labor to God. And so they dedicated their thoughts and talents — which would soon be used in the establishment of their new homeland — to Divine service. As the people toiled to make the Mishkan and all its accessories, the vestments and various articles, they remained constantly aware of God and their mission as of a holy nation. Later, when they used these same skills in their mundane day-to-day lives, they recalled that the very first time they involved themselves in such work, it was for purely spiritual-religious purposes. In this way, they were able to maintain an elevated state of consciousness while involved in their daily occupations.¹⁴⁷ Via this ingenious training program, the Jewish people were able to mix with worldly affairs and at the same time, knew how to artfully “wash their hands of it.” This ability to stay mentally focused on spiritual matters, while physically engaging with the world, is the wisdom the Kotzker Rebbe recognized in King Solomon’s dual decrees: the mixing of the realms and the washing of the hands.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

The most colorful and shocking reference to hand washing in the Torah is that surrounding the mitzva of the egla arufa, the “broken-necked calf” (Devarim, 21:1-9). When a body is discovered in an unpopulated place between cities in the land of Israel, the elders of the nearest city had to “wash their hands” of the murder by breaking the neck of a calf and washing their hands over its body, as they declared, “Our hands did not spill this blood and our eyes did not see.”

What do you think of this example of “washing one’s hands of responsibility”?

This ritual (of the egla arufa) is meant to be shocking — making stark a crime that may have resulted partially from the indifference of people who could have protected the victim. At the same time, it provides a ceremony that serves to place limits on responsibility and its consequences. Do you think it is good to have a system in place to limit responsibility? In the USA today, there is a culture of suing whereby the injured party sues everyone who could possibly have a connection to the crime, in the hope that blame, and a resulting payment, will “stick” somewhere. Should there be attempts to limit this behavior? Does a ritual or ceremony provide satisfaction that people in the modern world may otherwise seek in monetary compensation?

Lady Macbeth famously sought to wash her hands of a crime, and failed. Can one only wash one’s hands of something if one is entirely innocent? Partially innocent? Was the declaration of innocence of the elders over the egla arufa simply a statement of reality, or was it an act of expiation that made up for their partial guilt?

The Gemara in Eruvin 21b explains that King Solomon enacted the automatic washing of hands before meat offerings (kodshim) could be eaten because, prior to eating, one’s hands may have touched something unclean without one’s knowledge. Could it also be that washing one’s hands before eating something that was once alive is a ceremonial act that relieves one’s potential discomfort over this act by “washing one’s hands” of the responsibility?

143 Eruvin 21b. There are different types of eruvin. The eruv under discussion here is the setting up of a symbolic enclosure which turns a semi-public area into a private domain by surrounding it. The eruv has been adopted in cities all over the world, including parts of London, Amsterdam, New York, and, of course, Jerusalem, as well as most other cities in Israel. It allows people to carry things that they need, as well as alleviating situations when not being able to carry on Shabbat would result in undesirable circumstances — for example, by preventing young couples from attending synagogue because their children are too young to walk. The eruv is a typical example of how the Halakhah has to work with two opposing spiritual values. As in secular law, it suggests what legal philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin calls a trade-off for the sake of the realities of life.

144 See Mishlei 23:15.

145 See R. Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, Emet Ve-emuna, no. 102 (Jerusalem: Yeshivat Amshinov, 2005), 86.

146 See Dayan Dr. Isidor Grunfeld, The Sabbath: A Guide to Its Understanding and Observance (Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 1988).

147 This highly original observation is mentioned by Rabbi Yissachar Jacobson, Binah B’Mikra (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1964), 93, in the name of Moses Mendelsohn. Obviously many other symbolic, ethical and philosophical reasons have been given for the Mishkan and all its items.

Ki Tisa

Revelation and Moshe’s Mask

‫ויכל משה מדבר אתם ויתן על פניו מסוה‬

When Moses had finished speaking with them, he placed a covering over his face. Shemot 34:33

In this week’s parashah, we find a fascinating age concerning Moshe’s descent from Sinai. We are informed that Moshe decided to cover his face with a mask after realizing that his facial skin had become radiant, causing people to withdraw and not dare to approach him. Moshe walked daily throughout the Israelite camp with his mask on. What is utterly surprising, however, is that when Moshe had to convey the words of God to the people, he deliberately took the mask off, revealing his luminous face. Instead of accommodating them by making it easier to approach him, it seems he wanted to bring them into an altogether different spiritual setting before repeating the words of God as he had heard them.

When Moshe took off his mask

By taking the mask off only when he had to repeat the words of God, he exposed them to this divine radiance, which caught them completely by surprise. The purpose, then, was to catch them off guard. Human beings can quickly become desensitized to even the most astonishing

stimuli once they get used to them. The wonder wears off. For Moshe’s radiance to have an ongoing effect, it had to be hidden so that when he would reveal his face the Israelites would be deeply moved by its luminance. Only under those conditions could they fully appreciate and value God’s words, realizing that every word Moshe spoke in the name of God was authentic. Otherwise, even the words of God would become mediocre and dubious. Familiarity breeds contempt. Religion is the art of knowing what to do with amazement. To ensure that it does not fall back into complacency, it must never become everydayness. In fact, this has been of the greatest challenges to Judaism in the last few hundred years. While in the days of Moshe and the prophets, Judaism was experienced with deep religious excitement, as a majestic representation of the new, over the centuries this wonder has been replaced by a devastating familiarity. Judaism has put on a permanent mask that is never removed.

Retaining our capacity for surprise

The famous physicist Max Planck wrote ionately about the sense of wonder:

…This feeling of wonderment is the source and inexhaustible fountain-head of his desire for knowledge. It drives the child irresistibly on to solve the mystery, and if in his attempt he encounters a causal relationship, he will not tire of repeating the same experiment ten times, a hundred times, in order to taste the thrill of discovery over and over again… The reason why the adult no longer wonders is not because he has solved the riddle of life, but because he has grown accustomed to the laws governing his world picture. But the problem of why these particular laws and no others hold remains for him just as amazing and inexplicable as for the child. He who does not comprehend this situation misconstrues its profound significance, and he who has reached the stage where he no longer wonders about anything, merely demonstrates that he has lost the art of reflective reasoning.¹⁴⁸

Thoroughly misunderstanding what life is all about, and believing that we have solved most problems concerning its mystery, we become mentally cut off from the possibility of the extraordinary and unprecedented. We dull our capacity for surprise. And indeed, this is what has happened in our religious life. With the ing of time, we have turned Judaism into an institution, a dogma, and a ritual into which everything needs to fit neatly. But Judaism is really about an upheaval in the soul and the need to break with all sorts of idols. It is about living with spiritual trepidation in which we realize that while we were created from dust, we have the ability to reach Heaven. Whether or not we succeed will depend on our willingness to stand in awe. We have turned Judaism into a religion that comforts but does not challenge. We have made it into a lame doctrine in which the courage to shatter callousness has been sidetracked. It has been transformed into a sweet and comfortable religion in which man can slumber and never wake up. Today’s Judaism has paradoxically made us believe that divine revelation is impossible. How, after all, can it claim that the Divine can enter our world when it has utterly rejected the notion that surprise is the great spiritual mover for authentic religious life? How can one uphold a belief in the revelation at Sinai when one simultaneously has bought into spiritual stagnancy by thinking that scientific investigation is all there is, and that wonder is no longer to be part of our experience?

Revelation is sui generis

Revelation’s power is a function of its infrequency. Its authenticity and truth are to be found in its being different from all other experiences. Its uniqueness is that it cannot be compared to any other event. It is sui generis. Once we attempt to explain it, it loses its very essence and purpose. If we extinguish the spark of its singularity, it is reduced to insignificance.

Wonder is problematic for the law. The application of law would be much easier if the world were stagnant and consisted of endless repetition. The real difficulty arises when the sudden and the unconventional emerge. Such moments take the law by surprise. Definite judgments become irrelevant when they cannot cope with the new and the unheard-of. In such cases, the lawmakers are forced to leave their comfortable ivory towers. Either they it that the law has nothing to contribute, or they become inventors and show that the law leaves room for the unprecedented and the notion of wonder.

Sterile Halakhah

This is the great challenge for today’s halakhic authorities. Are their decisions made in a sterile vacuum, in which every surprise is ignored and even suppressed? Or are they made to stimulate a religious condition in which we live in a state of great awe, and through which we can grow and feel Halakhah’s inner spirit? Most Jews today are no longer observant; nor are they even inspired by Judaism. To them, it has become irrelevant and outdated. The reasons for this tragedy are many, but no doubt a major cause is the failure to convey Halakhah as something exciting and ennobling, like the music of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Only when a Jew is taught why halacha offers him the musical notes with which he can play his soul’s sonata will he be able to hear its magnificent music. Just as great scientists are fascinated when they investigate the properties of DNA, or the habits of a tiny creature under a microscope, so should even a secular Jew be deeply moved when he or she encounters the colors and fine subtleties of the world of Halakhah. Many religious Jews are nearsighted and in dire need of a wider vision. Is making sure that a chicken is kosher all there is to kashrut? Or, are the laws of kashrut just one element of a grand worldview that defines the mission of the People of Israel; a mission whose importance sures by far the single

question of a chicken’s kashrut? Such inquiries are but one small component of a larger question concerning the plague of consumerism and mankind’s obsessive pursuit of ever-increasing comfort. The first requirement of today’s posek (halakhic decisors) is to live in radical amazement and see God’s fingers in every dimension of human existence, including the Torah, Talmud, science, technology, and above all the constant changing of history, which may well mean that God demands different decisions from those of the past. Today’s halakhic living is severely impeded by observance having become mere habit. As Avraham Joshua Heschel put it so beautifully:

Indeed, the essence of observance has, at times, become encrusted with so many customs and conventions that the jewel was lost in the setting. Outward compliance with externalities of the law took the place of the engagement of the whole person to the living God.¹⁴

Are today’s rulings transformative, or do they promote stagnation? Shall we have prophetic Halakhah, or “sterile” Halakhah? What we need is a new approach. We have to re-create Jewish Law so that it once again becomes the manifestation of holy deeds that generate marvel and amazement in every part of our lives. We need religious teachers and decisors who can teach us to “take off our mask” — which by now has merged with our skin — and show us the original glow of God’s word, as Moshe did.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo says that people “can quickly become desensitized to even the most astonishing stimuli once they get used to them. The wonder wears off.” Do you think that the religious system encourages desensitization by insisting that we say blessings every time we eat? Or, rather, do the blessings force us to stop and consider the astonishing variety of foods available, and the fortune of a full plate? Does prayer do a better job of making us consider the wonder of the world or dulling us to wonder by the demand to engage in it three times every day? Would it be better for us to say blessing only once in a while, when we are moved to do so? Should prayer be spontaneous and unrehearsed?

Rabbi Cardozo asks, “How can one uphold a belief in the revelation at Sinai when one simultaneously has bought into spiritual stagnancy by thinking that scientific investigation is all there is, and wonder is no longer to be part of our experience?” Do you think that scientific investigation is or can be driven by wonder? Do you think scientific investigation can be religiously moving?

Rabbi Cardozo says that the authenticity and truth of revelation “is to be found in its being different from all other experiences. …Once we attempt to explain it, it loses its very essence and purpose. If we extinguish the spark of its singularity, it is reduced to insignificance.” Can the truth or authenticity of a proposition lie in the fact that it is different from the norm? Can the truth value of a proposition be changed by its being known or explained, or do these things affect the shock value of a proposition, rather than its truth value?

Tertullian’s Fideist approach, rejected by the Catholic Church, relies on the

mysterious or improbable nature of a proposition for proof of its truth: … Mortuus est Dei Filius, prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est;et sepultus resurrexit, certum est, quia impossibile. (…The Son of God died: it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because impossible. De Carne Christi V, 4.)

Should we rely on the singularity of an event for proof of its significance? What do we do with greater and greater exposure from other cultures to stories and myths similar to our own? If we cling to the conviction that our stories are unique and that their uniqueness is the source of their value, then will we ultimately be forced to lose our faith in the face of mounting evidence, or to further barricade ourselves? If we accept the universality of some of our stories and symbols, and seek the subtle twist or difference of the Jewish message and emphasis, will we erode our religious wonder or refine it? Is wonder dangerous by definition, and if so, does the potential reward outweigh the danger?

148 Max Planck, Scientific Biography and Other Papers, trans. Frank Gaynor (NY: Philosophical Library, 1949), 91-93.

149 A. J. Heschel, God In Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) p. 326.

Shabbat and the Holiness of Life

‫ואתה דבר אל בני ישראל לאמר אך את שבתתי תשמרו כי אות הוא ביני וביניכם‬ ‫לדרתיכם לדעת כי אני ה’ מקדשכם‬

And you, speak to the children of Israel and say: “Only keep My Sabbaths! For it is a sign between Me and you for your generations, to know that I, the Eternal, sanctify you.” Shemot 31:13

There is no stronger reminder of the holiness of the Shabbat than the categorical imperative not to violate this day while building the Mishkan (Tabernacle). While the children of Israel are commanded to build this most sacred place on earth, symbolizing the encounter between God and man, God makes it clear that the Shabbat is still not to be violated. There is a need to stop this holy work, even in the middle, to make space for this holy day: It is more holy than the Mishkan and (later) the Temple:

“But (“Ach”) My Shabbatot you shall keep. For that is a sign between Me and you throughout the generations that you may know that I, God, sanctify you.”¹⁵

Ramban, however points out that the word “but” (“ach”) also alludes to the fact that, in accordance with Talmudic tradition, this word means: With the exception of certain cases, you shall always observe the Shabbat. The most famous case of such an exception is saving a human life on the Shabbat. When human life (Jew or non-Jew)¹⁵¹ is in danger, the law actually requires the violation of the Shabbat so as to save this life even when it would be for only a few more minutes.

Failure to do so would be a clear transgression of God’s Torah. From this we learn two important facts: The Shabbat is more holy than the Mishkan, and human life is more holy than the Shabbat.

So that you may know that I sanctify you

We may now suggest a novel interpretation: God seems to be saying: Do you know why I gave you the Tabernacle and the institution of the Shabbat? You may think that they are the supreme manifestations of holiness in the world. But they are not! What I am trying to teach you is that there is one other manifestation of holiness that sures the holiness of the Tabernacle and of the Shabbat. And that is human life. This, says God, is the reason why I first introduced you to the Mishkan. No doubt you must have thought that there can’t be a more exalted form of holiness than the Tabernacle-Temple. After all, it is there that man and God can “meet” as nowhere else. I even told you that this place is so holy that only the High Priest on Yom Kippur would be allowed to enter the Tabernacle’s most sanctified inner spot, the Holy of Holies.¹⁵² And should he fail to live up to its supreme holiness, it could become the place of his undoing. What could be holier? And still, there is an even greater form of holiness: Not the holiness of space but, as Abraham Joshua Heschel famously called it, the holiness of time: The Shabbat.¹⁵³ You must observe the Shabbat even when you are building the Mishkan. So how holy is the Shabbat? Holier than the Holy of Holiness! Now, no doubt, you must have concluded that nothing can be more holy than that! The Shabbat! And again I, God, must warn you, that you are mistaken. There is something even more holy: human life. Not only will the holiness of the Tabernacle have to make space for the holiness of the Shabbat, but the Shabbat has to give way for the holiness of human life. Only when you have reached the sanctity of human life have you reached the supreme unchallenged manifestation of holiness. There is no greater holiness than that. And now, as a result, you are able to understand why I commanded

you that while building the Tabernacle you will have to observe the Shabbat: “So that you may know that I sanctify you.”¹⁵⁴ Not the Shabbat, but you! How else, after all, could I have made you aware of your unchallenged supreme holiness? This is only possible when I first introduce you to what you would have thought to be the peak of holiness: The Tabernacle, and afterwards to the even greater holiness of the Shabbat. Only then are you able to grasp the ultimate manifestation of holiness: The sanctity of human life. And this is the reason why I asked you to build Me a Mishkan and observe the Shabbat. The main reason for these “institutions” is not that they themselves merely need to be observed, but to teach you one unequaled lesson: the unparalleled holiness of you and your fellow human beings! At the same time, you should know that it is only through your observing the Shabbat that you will be able to grasp the unprecedented holiness of human life. Just as it is possible to violate the holiness of this day with what you believe to be a single, minor, or trivial act (such as lighting a candle), so could you violate a fellow human’s holiness and kavod (respect) by one “insignificant,” “trivial” wrong. Just one slightly unpleasant and unnecessary word may be all that’s needed to cause irreparable damage to another person.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Shabbat is called me’ein olam haba, a taste of the World to Come. What about the Shabbat is otherworldly?

Why do we need a taste of the World to Come in this world? Is it just to encourage us through the difficulties of this life, or is it so that we can use the example of Shabbat to create a better world — to shape our world into an ideal World to Come?

On Shabbat, there is no hierarchy — no one can make another person work for him or her. Is this taste of the world to come an ideal that it would be possible to maintain at all times in this world? Is it even an ideal that is possible to maintain for one day a week when one is running a modern state?

If it’s more important to keep Shabbat than to build the Mishkan/Mikdash — the means of communicating with God — then isn’t it more important to keep Shabbat than to build a railway in the modern State of Israel? Or can it be maintained that building the railway serves to maintain human life, and that therefore it is more important than Shabbat?

Is it the same to say that human life is holy and that human beings are holy, or are we confusing two separate things? Could it be that human life is holy because it furnishes the possibility for a human being to become holy?

If human beings are not automatically holy but rather have the potential to become holy, then how can one become holy or holier? Are Shabbat and the Mikdash vehicles to holiness? Are there other ways?

150 Shemot 31:13.

151 For a discussion about violating the Shabbat to save the life of a non-Jew, see see Avraham Steinberg, Encyclopedia Hilchatit Refu’it (Jerusalem: Falk Schlesinger Institute, 2006), 2:452-457.

152 See Vayikra chapter 16.

153 See Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951).

154 Shemot 31:13.

Faith, Death, and Certainty

‫ויאמר לא תוכל לראת את פני כי לא יראני האדם וחי‬

And He said, “You will not be able to see My face, for man shall not see Me and live.” Shemot 33:20

Faith is deeper than knowledge. While scientific data is absorbed only in the brain, faith permeates all parts of the human personality. Nothing is untouched, all spiritual limbs quiver, and everything is transformed. It is thus more difficult to acquire faith than knowledge, and faith has a more radical effect on the human being. Faith is difficult, especially in times of misery. Huge effort is required to maintain it, apply it and cherish it. “To relate your Kindness in the morning and Your faith in the nights”¹⁵⁵ can be understood in the following way. If one invests in one’s faith by singing God’s praises during times of prosperity and good health, then, in the loneliness of difficult and sorrowful times, one may be able to continue believing in God’s faithfulness even when there is little evidence of such Divine allegiance. One cannot inherit religiosity. One needs to discover it on one’s own. And this means struggle and spiritual warfare. It must be accompanied with some kind of a personal religious-spiritual crisis, doubt, and rebellion, perhaps even with psychological despair. If you have not been in the abyss, you cannot get to the peak of the mountain.

The struggle with religious ambiguity

In fact, this kind of religious struggle pervades the entire Torah. All the great biblical figures lived in constant ambiguity about God and about what He wants from us. Avraham’s great doubts concerning the reliability of God in connection with His request to sacrifice his son Yitzchak was a most traumatic experience. It was the pinnacle of religious uncertainty. In the desert, the Israelites asked whether God was among them. This came close to pantheism or even atheism. Nadav and Avihu’s unauthorized offering of a “strange fire” in the Mishkan came from a feeling of ambiguity about whether the only way to serve God was by following the strict demands of halakhah as given by God, or whether one could explore new avenues to divine service. On one occasion, the Israelites were not sure whether the Torah was indeed the word of God. Korach challenged this very belief and declared that it was not from heaven and that Moshe and Aaron were not prophets. This must have caused a major crisis of faith among the Israelites. The Torah gives evidence to a most difficult religious journey by the Israelites, full of doubt, struggle, and trauma. Surely some of these doubts were more existential than intellectual, but the latter cannot be disregarded. Once we realize that uncertainty was part of the biblical personality, we will have a much better grasp of the text and what Judaism is actually claiming. But this is only possible when we find ourselves challenged by those very existential doubts.

Seeing God’s back

Moshe’s request that God reveal Himself is the climax of intense religious struggle. Moshe asked of God, “Please show me Your glory.”¹⁵ He was eager to understand God’s presence, as well as His way of dealing with the world and with human beings. God responded, “You will see My back, but My face will not be seen.”¹⁵⁷

Indeed, this metaphor has great meaning. In our world everything looks topsyturvy, confusing and contrary to what reason dictates. The world stands with its back to reason. It’s not that Moshe simply “saw” God’s back and not His front; it’s that he saw the front from the perspective of the back. It was as if he was looking at an X ray whereby what is last is really first and what is in the front is really in the back. Had he been able to see the front as the front and the back as the back, everything would have made sense. He would have realized that time is “broken eternity”, that the real clock ticks to infinity. We are only able to see its flipside, like the letters on an ink stamp, which is a mirror image. Had Moshe indeed seen the final imprint, he would have immediately departed from this world, since humans, being bound by the limitations of time, can never grasp this face-to-face encounter and survive. To die is to be permitted to see the full story, in its infinity. For some, this takes a lifetime to realize; for others, it is altogether beyond their grasp. And then there are those individuals who, however young, seize it at a moment’s notice and are therefore asked to come Home.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo says that scientific knowledge is absorbed only in the brain. Have you ever been transformed by scientific study? Might reading The Biology of the Cell be a deeply religious and inspiring experience?

Rabbi Cardozo says that it is more difficult to acquire faith than knowledge. Does this depend on whether one begins with faith or with knowledge? Some people seem to acquire faith quite easily and unshakably. Certainly, an atheist scholar may have difficulty in acquiring faith. Would a traditionally believing Jew have equal difficulty in gaining certain kinds of knowledge?

Rabbi Cardozo says that had Moshe “been able to see the front as the front and the back as the back, everything would have made sense.” This is a faith-based statement based on no possible knowledge. Was this faith of Rabbi Cardozo’s easier or harder to acquire than the knowledge that would confirm or deny it?

Does knowledge endanger faith, enhance it, neither, or both?

A simple explanation for why things do not make sense is that they do not make sense. Is it more praiseworthy to believe a more complicated explanation, in which things actually make sense in a way verifiable only after we die? Does God have to make sense? Can we believe in a God who does not make sense?

Rabbi Cardozo appears to base his belief that to die is to be permitted to see the whole story on the verse fragment, “…humans shall not see me and live.” Do you think that this verse is a guarantee that when we die, we will see the whole story?

Rabbi Cardozo implies that at least some people who die young do so because they have understood that God cannot be fully grasped until one dies, or because they have indeed understood God. Where (and how easily) did Rabbi Cardozo come by this faith? This is an unverifiable claim. That doesn’t necessarily make it wrong, but does one have an obligation to try to believe it? Is one meritorious for believing or trying to believe it?

155 Tehillim 92:3.

156 Shemot 33:18.

157 Ibid. 33:23.

Vayakhel

The Paradox of Shabbat

‫ששת ימים תעשה מלאכה וביום השביעי יהיה לכם קדש שבת שבתון לה’…לא־תבערו‬ ‫אש בכל משבתיכם ביום השבת‬

On six days work should be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Eternal…You shall kindle no fire throughout your settlements on the Sabbath day. Shemot 35:1-2

Why is it that the Book of Shemot records the command by God to observe the institution of Shabbat immediately before He instructs Moshe to build the Mishkan (Tabernacle)?

…Let all among you who are skilled come and make all that the Lord has commanded: the Mishkan, its tent and its covering, its caps and its planks, its bars.¹⁵⁸

This, one could argue, is surprising and repetitious. After all, on a much earlier occasion, the Torah had already informed us that the Ten Commandments instructed the Jews to observe Shabbat: “ the Sabbath day to keep it holy”.¹⁵ Why this repetition of this command just before the construction of the Mishkan? Rashi (on Shemot 35:2), recognizing the difficulty, states:

He intentionally mentioned to them the prohibition in reference to the Sabbath

before the command about the building of the Tabernacle in order to intimate that it does not set aside (supersede) the Sabbath (cf. Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael 35:1:1).

This is indeed very surprising: Why should the observance of Shabbat be more important than building the Mishkan? After all, is not the Mishkan the symbol of an ongoing encounter between God and human being? Abravanel, in his (fifteenth-century) work Perush al Ha Torah alludes to this:

Since the Tent of Meeting and its vessels whose making God had commanded symbolize communion with Him and the resting of His presence on the nation, we might have thought that this activity outweighed in importance all the other biblical prescriptions and most certainly the Shabbat rest.…Actual work is a more eloquent witness of faith than cessation from work, since action is affirmation and inaction, negation. … It might well have been argued that the work of the Tent of Meeting would have sufficed to draw attention and testimony to the existence of the Divine Presence in our midst to His omnipotence as Creator of the world and all the creatures therein. The desistence from work would therefore not be required in this instance, to testify to these principles.¹

Abravanel, however, does not provide any answer to the puzzle.

The importance of fire

The answer may lie in the fact that the command to observe Shabbat specifically mentions the prohibition of lighting fire on Shabbat. A Midrash relates that at the conclusion of the first Shabbat, Adam HaRishon (the First Man) became frightened when the sun began to set. Seeing this, God brought him two stones and taught him how to make fire. Adam, realizing the meaning of this gift, burst

out in a spontaneous brachah (blessing): “Blessed is He who has created the light of fire.”¹ ¹ This became the brachah that we utter every Saturday night, just after the Sabbath has ended, and before we reassume our work as creators. As opposed to the Greek myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, here, it is God who willing hands over this great secret to human beings. Humanity is created in the image of God. This means, among other things, that we are blessed with creativity and intellectual comprehension. The very first commandment given to humans was to “fill the earth, master it and rule the fish of the sea” (Bereshit 1:28). The creative impetus is a divine gift, and the active expression of human creativity a divine injunction. The Creation is a call for human action, for involvement and partnership with the Creator. To be involved in technology, science, and other human endeavors is to be involved in a religious act: a mitzvah! The more we fashion the world, the more we fulfill God’s command. This, however, also means greater responsibility: The more we know how to operate and dominate the world, the more we become responsible for the consequences — for the outcome, the results of our deeds and creations.

The Mishkan and the Creation

It is expressive of God’s belief in human capabilities that He leaves humans with the responsibility of building Him a dwelling place in the form of the Mishkan. There is a striking parallelism between the of the Creation chapter and the narrative of the construction of the Tabernacle, which has been pointed out by many commentators.¹ ² Concerning the construction of the Mishkan, we read again about a sequence of six days consummated by a seventh day:

Moshe went up to the mountain and the cloud covered the mountain. Now the glory of the Lord rested upon Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it for six days, and on the seventh day He called upon Moshe out of the midst of the cloud.

(emphasis added)¹ ³

Concerning the Creation, it says (Bereshit 1:31): “Now God saw everything He had made and behold it was very good. And God blessed the seventh day.” Similarly with the Tabernacle: “And Moshe saw all the work, and behold they had done it. And Moshe blessed them” (Shemot 39:43). At the completion of the work of Creation we read: “Now the Heavens and the Earth and all their hosts were completed, and God completed on the seventh day His work which He had made” (Bereshit 2:1-2). And again, with the completion of the Tent: “Now was completed all the work of the Mishkan” (Shemot 39:32). And: “So Moshe completed the work” (Shemot 40:33). The human work on the Tent of Meeting is equated with God creating the universe (note the repetition of the word completed in both narratives). But what does the Torah mean by this equation?

The Tent of Meeting and the concept of work

The Talmud uses these parallels, as well as the juxtaposition of the commandment regarding the Mishkan and Shabbat in a very creative way: it derives its definition of the kinds of work prohibited on Shabbat from all the activities required in building the Mishkan:

To what do these forty but one key works correspond? Rabbi Chanina said: They correspond to the operations for constructing the Mishkan. There they were sowing, hence you may not sow, they were reaping, hence you may not reap.¹ ⁴

Agricultural work (plowing, sowing, reaping, etc.), food preparation (grinding, boiling, kneading, baking, etc.), and craftsmanship (sewing, weaving, spinning,

building, writing, etc.) were all necessary to build the Mishkan. What’s more, these activities stand as key activities (avot melachot) comprising all purposeful human interaction with the physical realm. For example, plowing includes digging, removing stones, fertilizing, and so forth. Baking includes boiling, frying, and melting iron; in other words, it is the general principle that changes the physical or chemical status of a substance by means of heat. In fact, we have here a complete overview of all skillful human creativity.¹ ⁵ The Mishkan, then, holds every single form of work through which we show our unprecedented mastery over the world. By building a dwelling place for God, we nearly become God’s equal. We create a microcosmos of such perfection that even God can symbolically “fit into it.” Our skillful masterpiece nearly replaces God’s own creation! But here, paradoxically, is a warning to us to remain humble. Instead of seeing our place in the world as a manifestation of absolute mastery over all creative powers, we are first called upon to dedicate all our creative talents toward a higher goal: the Mishkan. As in the case of the first fruits to be offered in the Temple, before we are permitted to fully enjoy all our talents, we are asked to give the “firstlings (maaser) of all these talents to God, our Creator. Only after the dedication of all our talents to building the Mishkan can we use these same talents to build and master the world.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo points to the parallels between the Creation and the building of the Mishkan as indicative of the human partnership with God. What other meanings might these parallels have?

What is the common denominator of all those categories of melachah, work that are forbidden on Shabbat?

One possibility is that they all involve conscious tool-making, and that on Shabbat, we turn back the clock on our own evolution and return to the Garden of Eden.¹ Does Rabbi Cardozo’s thesis this notion or contradict it?

Rabbi Cardozo characterizes Shabbat as playing primarily a religious role — it is meant to symbolize our partnership with God. However, earlier, we are told to observe Shabbat for a different reason: “Six days you may carry out your activities, but on the seventh day you must cease, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and your servants can relax, along with the resident alien.” This instruction includes the word “l’ma’an” — “in order that”. We are to cease working so that our families, our workers, and our farm animals may rest. In your opinion, is Shabbat a religious commandment or a social one? Is there a way that it might be both? If so, what does that say about the purpose (or goal) of religion?

158 Shemot 35:5

159 Shemot 20:8

160 Perush al Ha Torah on Shemot 35:1)

161 Genesis Rabbah 11.

162 See Nechama Leibowitz, Studies in Shemot (Jerusalem: World Zionest Organization, Department for Torah Education and Culture, 1972), pp. 696-699.

163 Shemot 24:16-17.

164 T. B. Shabbat 49a.

165 Rashi, loc. cit.

166 See for example: Yael Shahar, “B’reishit and Shabbat: a glimpse of what might have been”, accessible at: https://www.yaelshahar.com/breishit-shabbatglimpse-might/.

The Command That Came Too Late

‫וכל־חכם־לב בכם יבאו ויעשו את כל־אשר צוה ה’ את־המשכן את־אהלו ואת־מכסהו‬ ‫… את־קרסיו ואת־קרשיו את־בריחו את־עמדיו ואת־אדניו‬

And let all among you who are skilled come and make all that the Eternal has commanded: the Mishkan, its tent and its covering, its clasps and its planks, its bars, its posts, and its sockets… Shemot 35:10-11

The command to build the Mishkan (Tabernacle) was a huge mistake. Not because it was not a brilliant idea; it definitely was a superb divine brainwave! But it came much too late, and so it failed to do what it should have done: give the Israelites the strength to observe the commandments given them at Mount Sinai. God underestimated this structure’s importance. Sure, being God, He must have done so deliberately, but the price for doing so was huge. By waiting so long before instructing the Jews to build this Divine Tent, He seems to have overestimated the Jews and underestimated the psychological impact of this tiny construction. In fact, one wonders whether God did not miscalculate the whole enterprise of trying to get the Jews to accept the commandments and live by them. Instead of the Jews being grateful after He rescued them from hundreds of years of Egyptian slavery, and becoming His dedicated followers, disciples and irers, God encounters one problem after another with them. On numerous occasions, God and Moshe were forced to call the Jews to order, make them regret their refusal to listen, and ask them to repent, only to see the

obstinacy of the people overtake them again soon after. Even after the splitting of the Yam Suf, the Reed Sea, the historic miracle par excellence, the Jews rebel yet again (See Shemot chapters: 15 and 16). When God spoke openly to the nearly two million Israelites (six hundred thousand men and many more women and children) at Mount Sinai, telling them that it was He who had taken them out of Egypt, they became so afraid of the Divine voice that they asked Moshe to beg Him to stop this unprecedented heavenly communication. But only a little later, they had the chutzpah, the impertinence, to build a golden calf, dance around it, and worship it, declaring that this calf was their god who took them out of Egypt. As if God had never spoken to them, did not exist, and the experience at Sinai never happened! This abominable violation of God’s laws — and specifically the most primary one of all, never to make any image of God — is a totally incomprehensible act. How was this possible?

The dangers of ivity

Many of us who were not present at Sinai might claim that we would never have made such a blunder. And yet, any good psychologist could have warned God that this disaster was to be expected and that He Himself was the Cause of it. And worse, that things would never again be as God had hoped they would be. The problem of the Jews was that their whole experience in the desert, including the splitting the Red Sea and the giving of the Torah was based on a huge psychological mistake. God had, in His goodness, overacted: The Exodus, the miraculous bread (Mana), the fowl (Tzlav) which fell from the heavens, the splitting of the Reed Sea, the receiving of the Torah at Sinai, the cloud of Glory guiding them through the desert…all this laid the foundation for the Jews’ inability to observe the commandments and listen to God. In all these cases, there was one major problem: the Israelites were forced to

remain totally ive. They were not to have any active part in any of this; they just had to let it all come over them. They had to walk out of Egypt, eat the over lamb, consume matzot, and observe a few more small rituals, but for the rest, they were condemned to be merely ive onlookers. All that was asked of them was to hear and obey. One is reminded of Spinoza’ s (mistaken) claim that all that the Torah demands is obedience and piety. ¹ ⁷ But this ivity could only be experienced as a betrayal of the Israelites’ dignity. The worst pain a man can have is to know that he is impotent to act, said Herodotus. For all the time after they left Egypt, the Israelites were treated as immature people, who could not stand on their own feet, and had no say in any matter of importance. This was exactly what they had experienced in the last few hundred years while being slaves in Egypt. They were treated as “good for nothings”. Instead of finally feeling that they were free and treated as people of worth who could prove themselves, they were forced into a deep depression. All that they were asked to do was to obey without any creative input. This only got worse when God began to speak to them at mount Sinai. All they heard were prohibitions and commandments. There was no divine request to take initiative and be creative. In fact, in Egypt, they still had a feeling to contribute to society. They built Phitom and Raamses. They could at least have a feeling of accomplishment. “We may have been slaves,” they might have said, “but at least our work required creativity and ingenuity. We had to interact with our Egyptian supervisors, discuss with them how to build these two magnificent cities, be involved and execute the building plans.” Sure, it was hard labor but as Dostoevsky said: Originality and the feeling of one’s own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.¹ ⁸ But in the desert, there was nothing to build, nothing to contribute, nothing to do but walk, rest, to listen and obey. No wonder that the Israelites were seriously thinking of rebelling against Moshe and returning to Egypt! True, it would be slavery again, but at least it would be

accompanied by some feeling of worthiness and accomplishment. Which is worse, the slavery in Egypt, which at least allowed for some gratification, or the feeling of total nothingness in the desert?

The need to act

So, in the subconscious of the Israelites there was a thought slowly growing, a search for any opportunity to become active and to prove themselves — to free themselves from all this negativity and ivity. If such an opportunity was not forthcoming from God, they had to create it themselves! But when would be the moment to realize this dream? As long as Moshe was around, there was little chance to make this happen. His authority was too overwhelming. And then God made the “mistake” for which everybody had been waiting! He called Moshe to come to the top of the mountain. It was clear that the purpose of this was to give him yet more instructions for the Jews to obey. More ivity. This was the moment to act! Once Moshe was out of the way, and God was busy with Moshe at the top of Sinai, the Jews gathered and said: The way is free! Let us build something with our own hands, in which we can participate, be creative, and prove that we are not “good for nothings”; that we are not just slaves, not even to God, but free men of dignity and accomplishment. This structure will be our god, because it will symbolize our competence, give us self-respect, and pull us out of this ivity that is crushing us. And so it was. They danced around the golden edifice like an artist iring his work from every side: I am the maker of this! The artist is taken in by his own creativity and feels an enormous feeling of satisfaction. And so, when God and Moshe look down from the mountain, they find these people in a tumult of exaltation. Neither of them seems to understand what actually happened down there, nor what the motivation was behind this need to build the Golden Calf. Moshe even calls for the death penalty for all those who

were involved in this sin. And God made many more die.¹ Sure, the sin was terrible. To replace God with an idol is intolerable — even when it is the result of the need to create and to feel competent. Still, the motivation makes perfect sense. The Israelites’ mistake was not their desire to be active and to build something of meaning, but rather, that they declared this object to be their god. Art is nothing more than an attempt to transform an idea into an image. But that is only possible when such an idea is grounded in what the limited human mind can grasp. One can draw an atom on a blackboard, in order to have a figurative idea what it is all about. But we all know that this is not how an atom looks. The image is nothing more than an image, it is not Das Ding an Sich (the thing itself)! Once one starts to believe that it is, it becomes a lie, and in our case, a serious form of idol worship.

The Mishkan

It is only now that God realizes that He overestimated the Jews. He had believed that the Israelites would be so impressed by all the miracles He had performed that they would gladly submit to Him. They would find total satisfaction in serving Him and fulfilling His commandments. But God Himself had made human beings in His image, which means that just as He is a Creator, so are we. Mere submission to His will could not satisfy this need. And so, God realized that the Israelites would only follow His commandments if they simultaneously would be able to be creative and take action. It was this realization that brought about the command to build the Tabernacle. Not because God had any need for a dwelling place, but because the Jews were in need of building it and satisfying their need to be creative and to feel competent. Once that would be the case, they would be able to follow God’s commandments as people of dignity, capable of doing great innovative things. Submission to God’s commandments would only work when it would go hand-

in-hand with human self-esteem, and a feeling of being a partner with God in His creation. And so God’s commandment to build the tabernacle came as a replacement for the Golden Calf, a way to rectify the enormous mistake of the Golden Calf, and God’s own insistence that all that was needed was obedience. This was a different commandment than all commandments given before. It did not ask for submission, but rather the reverse: a call for human initiative and creativity. In fact, it had replaced the Egyptian cities of Phitom and Raamses in which the Jews had at least felt some satisfaction. Reading this story, we see with what enthusiasm the Israelites threw themselves into this sublime undertaking. They were able to “live it up” and realize this project. How revealing it is that we are constantly reminded that it was the Jews, and not God, who created this structure. Numerous times we are told that it was God who told them to create it: They will make it…; They will make the sanctuary; they will make the curtains, they will make the golden altar, etc. There was no divine intervention in the construction of the Mishkan; it was solely man-made. It even had human architects: Bezalel ben Uri and Oholiav ben Achisamach. The fact that it was all made by human beings seems to have so impressive that the Torah spends 250-300 verses on this small structure, compared to only 31 verses to describe the creation of the universe!

Only a partial answer

But it was God Himself who was responsible for the earlier debacle of the Golden Calf. Had He realized at the very beginning that it would be “mission impossible” for the Jews to submit themselves to His commandments without first asking them to be full partners in His creation, the Israelites would not have made so much trouble. Their honor would have been upheld, and they would have enjoyed the journey to becoming God’s people.

In fact some commentators, among them Ovadia Seforno,¹⁷ suggest that God would not have needed to give so many commandments — including some of the Kashrut laws, many of the laws concerning sexuality, and the laws concerning sacrifices — had it not been for the incident of the Golden Calf. These laws would have been unnecessary, for had the Israelites felt themselves to be people of standing, they would have been strong enough to become the Chosen people without the extra instructions. They would have felt themselves to be playing an important role in the creation of the world. Judaism would have looked very different. But it was no longer possible to rectify everything. The damage done by keeping the Jews ive at the beginning of their story never completely healed. And God and the Jews payed the price. The feeling of being commanded, and having just ively to obey, stayed with the Jews and was never completely relinquished. It has remained with us until this very day. And so, a sad chapter ended in Jewish history, but we live in its shadow. After all, every sin has its origin in a sense of inadequacy.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

In this essay, Rabbi Cardozo posits that the building of the Mishkan was commanded because “the Jews were in need of building it and satisfying their need to be creative and to feel competent.” Do you agree?

Do you agree with the contention (which has been put forward by many other commentators) that the Mishkan was a response to the incident of the Golden Calf? What other reasons for building the Mishkan can you think of?

It’s been pointed out that the Mishkan bears similarities to the traveling “palace” in which the Egyptian pharaoh would reside when out on campaign with his armies. Michael Homan famously showed the parallels between the structure of the Mishkan and the military tent of Ramses II, the very same pharaoh who is believed to have reigned at the time of the Exodus.¹⁷¹ If the Mishkan was meant to be like the military tent of an earthly king, does that undermine Rabbi Cardozo’s thesis that its building was meant to empower the Israelites?

Do you agree that “every sin has its origin in a sense of inadequacy”? Can you think of ing examples? Contradictory examples?

167 See: Tractatus Theologico Politicus, Chapter 14.

168 A Diary of a Writer, 1873

169 Shemot 32

170 See Seforno on Vayikra: 11:2.

171 Michael M. Homan, “The Tabernacle in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context” TheTorah.com (2018). https://thetorah.com/article/the-tabernacle-in-its-ancientnear-eastern-context

Zen and the Art of Keeping Shabbat

‫’ששת ימים תעשה מלאכה וביום השביעי יהיה לכם קדש שבת שבתון לה‬.

Six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have sanctity, a day of complete rest to the Eternal. Shemot 35:2

The institution of Shabbat is one of the greatest inventions God ever came up with. It no doubt qualifies Him to receive the Nobel Prize for innovative thinking, and the venerable judges in Sweden should sincerely consider bestowing this honor on the Lord of the Universe. Now that most of the world has adopted the concept of a weekly day of rest, the time has come to act. The idea is nearly six thousand years old; a Nobel Prize is long overdue. That we all need a weekly rest is common knowledge. What is much less known is that the Jewish Tradition believes such rest should not only consist of refraining from strenuous labor, but also from any kind of work that presents human beings as having dominion over the world. One day a week we are asked to return the world and all its potential to God and, instead of being creators, acknowledge that we are also creatures in God’s eyes — not much different from a flower, a leaf, or a small bird. By refraining from cooking, writing, creating electricity, driving cars, flying airplanes, and other such activities, we learn that the world has already been created and will no doubt survive without us. As Abraham Joshua Heschel pointed out: “The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.”¹⁷²

The worship of all the wrong things

Shabbat is a day when we stop worshiping technology, money, and power. Instead, we focus on our internal lives and our families — learning Torah, singing songs, and creating an inner palace of tranquility. Shabbat is holiness in time, when we allow for personal conversations with friends, reading a book, playing games with our children, and ungluing ourselves from the cellphone, tablet, and computer. Shabbat means living in full liberty, which is paradoxically achieved by heeding prohibitions. We free ourselves from all sorts of activities that often disturb our internal balance. What can be greater than abandoning the cell phone and suddenly discovering that we have a spouse and children? We find an island of stillness in a turbulent sea of worldliness. Yet there is one law that, while rarely applicable in Israel and large Jewish communities around the world, really sums up the whole message of this remarkable day: the prohibition against carrying any object in the public domain, besides our clothing and jewelry. Today, many cities are surrounded by an eruv,¹⁷³ so as to permit people to carry things they need for Shabbat for reasons of convenience. But it is really this prohibition against carrying that captures the essence of the Shabbat rest, and it is a pity that its message has been nearly forgotten. What is the secret behind this law?

A mountain stroll

The great Zen Buddhist monk Master Daokai of Mt. Furong (12th century, China) really hit the nail on the head when he said:

The green mountains are always walking…If you doubt mountains’ walking, you do not know your own walking; it is not that you do not walk, but that you do not know or understand your own walking.¹⁷⁴

What does this mean? There are two reasons for walking — one is to reach a destination, and the other is for the sake of strolling (le-tayel in Hebrew; spazieren in German). When someone walks to something, their goal is outside of themselves: they have to be at a business meeting or need to bring a package to a specific place. But when people take a stroll, the walking itself is the goal. It is not a means, but das ding an sich, the thing itself. Every step is its purpose. At such a moment, people are connected with their very being. They are walking with themselves in peace and in complete harmony. They carry only themselves. Green mountains walk in the sense that they, in an existential way, stroll with themselves. They need not do anything but be mountains. Nothing outside themselves disturbs them in being mountains. They need not go anywhere; they just stroll. People must know how to carry themselves. They should know that their inner being is the goal of their life. It is their internal life that needs to spiritually and morally grow. Their happiness depends not on outside circumstances, but on their attitude toward those conditions. The rare and simple pleasure of being themselves will compensate for all their misery. If they meet their family or friends, they will not want to own them as objects but rather relate to them in a mode in which they stroll with them, accompanying them while spiritually growing. They realize that being is becoming.

Sub specie aeternitatis

The goal of life is not about obtaining things or being somewhere for the sake of proving oneself, achieving external goals, or making money. When we

acknowledge this, we cease to be the slaves of our own inventions, whether it is our cars, our computers, or our cell phones. What one acquires on Shabbat is a way of life that brings the joy of tranquility or, as Spinoza calls it — sub specie aeternitatis — a perspective of eternity. When we are told not to carry in the public domain on Shabbat, we are essentially being asked not to see our life goals in the public sphere, where life is about getting somewhere. While for livelihood we no doubt need to travel, that activity remains a weekday endeavor; a means to something, but never das ding an sich. On Shabbat, we turn our outer mode into a being mode, and for one day a week we become people who by just carrying ourselves and nothing else, are able to deal with a world that has little knowledge of the soul’s needs. On Shabbat, we stroll even when we go to synagogue. In a world where we refuse to take notice of what is beyond our sight, where we turn mysteries into dogmas and facts, ideas into a multitude of words and routine, on Shabbat we are asked to sur ourselves by simply being ourselves; we are summoned to discover another world. Refraining from carrying is an act of protest against the shallowness of our world. And while today we are permitted to carry outside our homes if an eruv is in place, we should never forget the great symbolic meaning inherent in the prohibition against carrying on Shabbat, which can advance us — both spiritually and morally — further than anything else. Our society stands on the precipice, and one false step can plunge us into the abyss. We have, for the most part, become a civilization of notoriously unhappy people — lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, and dependent — people who are glad to kill the time that they are trying so hard to save. Shabbat is a day of truce in the midst of the human battle with the world. It teaches us that even pulling out a blade of grass is a breach of harmony, as is lighting a match. Shabbat teaches us that the survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. The time has come for all of humankind to observe Shabbat — whether on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. The Lord of the Universe has told us to do so, and we Jews owe it to our fellow human beings.

Perhaps the rabbis should suggest that even when there is an eruv, people should once a month abstain from carrying so as not to lose the important message of this prohibition.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo indicates that the Sabbath day is designed to give human beings a rest from their regular schedule, and to give the world a rest from human beings. How are these two “rests” related? Why are both necessary?

Some people find the prohibitions of Shabbat to be chains that do not permit desired activities. Others find those same prohibitions to release them from the bindings of the rest of the week. In what ways do you find the “full liberty” of Shabbat restful (or not)? In what ways do you find that kind of rest challenging (or not)? Explain how cell phones (and other technologies) upend our “internal balance” — and the degree to which taking the break of Shabbat can restore it.

In Jewish law, one of the main ways of taking possession of a movable object — that is, most possessions — is to lift it up (hagbahah). This kind of acquisition is called, “kinyan.” How does Rabbi Cardozo’s explanation about refraining from carrying in the public domain on Shabbat apply, philosophically speaking, to the Halakhah that one should not make “kinyanim” on Shabbat?

Rabbi Cardozo suggests that all week long, humanity battles with the world, and that Shabbat is therefore necessary for all humanity — to provide respite from that war. Yet those who prepare to convert to Judaism, and therefore largely observe Shabbat, are often told to be sure to “break Shabbat” in some small way each week until they have actually converted. How is this “Jewish” nature to the day of rest to be surmounted in the creation of some kind of Sabbath day for each and every stream of humanity?

172 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2005), 13.

173 The Talmud (Shabbat 14b; Eruvin 21b) attributes the institution of the eruv to King Solomon. There are different types of eruvin. The eruv under discussion here is the setting up of a symbolic enclosure which turns a semi-public area into a private domain by surrounding it. The eruv has been adopted in cities all over the world, including parts of London, Amsterdam, New York, and, of course, Jerusalem, as well as most other cities in Israel. It allows people to carry things that they need, as well as alleviating situations when not being able to carry on Shabbat would result in undesirable circumstances — for example, by preventing young couples from attending synagogue because their children are too young to walk.

174 Eihei Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra. I thank Prof. Yehuda Gellman of Jerusalem for bringing this text to my attention.

Pekudei

Johann Sebastian Bach and the Tent of Meeting ¹⁷⁵

‫ככל אשר צוה ה’ את משה כן עשו בני ישראל את כל העבדה‬

In accordance with all that the Lord had commanded Moses, so did the children of Israel do all the work. Shemot 39:42

Since the Torah is normally very parsimonious with its words, nothing is more surprising in Parashat Pekudei than the great amount of detail and repetition in the divine instructions relating to the building and the architecture of the Mishkan (Tabernacle). Not even the smallest nuance is excluded, and nothing is left to human imagination. The emphasis is on precision; every pin and string is mentioned. This seems to stand in total opposition to the spiritual condition and devotion that was required of every Israelite when busy building or helping to erect the Mishkan. It called for personal input, creativity and a great amount of inspiration, which could only come from the depths of the human heart. Yet the structure itself had to be built with ultimate precision, completely contradicting its purpose as a place that would cause a profound and spontaneous transformation in every human being. How do we reconcile these contradictions: formality versus spontaneity; total commitment to the letter of the law versus unprecedented emotional outbursts of religious devotion? Are such notions not mutually exclusive and irreconcilable? It is here that music becomes of vital interest, and Johann Sebastian Bach (16851750), probably the greatest musical genius ever to have lived, may provide an

answer. In his music, we find a pattern in which distinct rules of composition had to be followed with great precision and detail, yet Bach simultaneously gave birth to a phenomenal outburst of creativity. Bach’s method of structuring his Aria with Diverse Variation is beautifully described by Douglas R. Hofstadter in his book, Gödel, Escher, Bach:

…All the pieces — except the final one — are based on a single theme, which he called an “aria”… every third variation is a canon. First, a canon in which the two canonizing voices enter on the same note. Second, a canon in which one of the canonizing voices enters one note higher than the first. Third, one voice enters two notes higher than the other. And so on….¹⁷

With Bach, more than with any other composer, we find abundant repetition as well as a strict, almost mathematical, pattern combined with nearly limitless creativity. From the perspective of musical composition, we enter a world of unparalleled genius.

Commitment to detail

Dutch author and music critic Martin van Amerongen writes in his book His Lightning, His Thunder: About the St. Matthew ion: “When one hears Bach’s music, it feels as if he has been struck by an uppercut under the chin, remaining unconscious for the rest of the day.” Amerongen also mentions, “Bach is the man of the iron fist, of controlled emotions, yet he shows great personal ion.”¹⁷⁷ When Bach played the clavecin (harpsichord), he was able to keep an eye on seven diverse musical patterns simultaneously, correct them, and write variations on them without ever violating the rules of the traditional music of his day. It is the unyielding commitment to detail, accuracy and skill that stands out. True, there is the danger that one may fall into a routine and lose out on the real

music behind every note when one simply plays it by rote. This is the major concern of every conductor. He has to draw his orchestra out of its confinement and move it beyond itself. The crucial question is: What does this music note want in this very moment? But Bach did more. He went back to the original text and its score. He then discovered new perspectives, recreating the entire composition without changing one iota. I would suggest that the reason for this wonderful talent is the mathematical preciseness, which does not allow for any expansion. The composer, or musician, is then forced to use his creative talents to deepen what he has already given. Instead of remaining on the surface and broadening only the musical spectrum, the composer is duty-bound to venture into the depths, search for all possibilities inherent to the grundnorm, and bring them to the surface. Like the archeologist, he searches for every little item; but unlike the former, he infuses new life into it.

Venturing into the Depth

This, I believe, was the approach to the building of the Mishkan, and this understanding solves the paradox of the need for architectural precision and repetition of detail on the one hand, and genuine religious ion on the other. The Torah’s specifications of its architecture and emphasis on detail, in a way that left nothing to the imagination, are like Bach’s “iron fist” that forced him to delve deeper and search for various approaches that otherwise would have remained unnoticed. When listening to the nearly endless repetitions of musical patterns in Bach’s compositions, his genius is revealed by his capacity to add one more note, or one more instrument, or even to make a small change in vibration causing the same musical patterns to sound totally different. This is what was offered to the worshipper in the Mishkan. It was not the

quantity of religious notes but their quality that was to be found in every pin and string in the Mishkan. And this is what would lift the spirits of the worshipper. As in the case of Bach, each repetition added another dimension, depending on the context in which it appeared and the slight variations that accompanied it.¹⁷⁸ Just as every keen listener of Bach’s compositions is indeed knocked unconscious, so every visitor to the Tabernacle would undergo a radical transformation due to the depth of its components and feeling their religious vibrations. As Goethe would say, “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister/Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.” — The master proves himself first by limitations/And only law can give us freedom.¹⁷

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

It seems that the spontaneity in the Mishkan comes from the Jewish people but that the detailed structure comes from Bezalel, Oholiav, and Moshe, whereas Bach had both structure and originality. Do you think that Bezalel, Oholiav, and Moshe brought any creativity to the Mishkan or were the details dictated by God?

Despite all of these details, you can’t actually build the Mishkan from reading these parshiyot (I know because I tried to do it on the computer). There are critical details missing, like the width of the materials in question. Why put in so many details but not enough to actually build the structure?

Why all of these details for a temporary structure? Did the same principle of details and creativity apply to the Batei Mikdash? Or to some other aspect of Judaism?

A few years ago, a joke email/blog post went around, entitled “Hilchos Xmas”. Reading it, one might well think: Christians seem to manage perfectly well without having everything exactly defined for them. They buy trees and celebrate as they see fit, and all is well, and no one cares. Why do we Jews need to have everything so well-defined and bounded by law?

Standing in contrast to this, on the side of being detail oriented, is the “Broken Windows” policy, in which small flaws in urban areas were addressed before

they could degenerate further, something that led to a lowering of crime.

What do you feel when confronted with the many details of traditional Judaism? Do you think they stifle creativity or it? Do they prevent ethical behavior, in not allowing autonomy of movement and the building of personal moral muscle; or, on the contrary, nurture it by paying attention to minutiae that prevent total breakdown, as in the Broken Windows policy?

175 This essay was inspired by my conversations with several musicians. No doubt not all music critics will agree with its interpretation of Bach’s music. Also special thanks to Dr. Edwin Rabbie, the Netherlands. A longer version of this essay appears in Chapter 7 of my book Jewish Law as Rebellion.

176 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 392-393.

177 Martin van Amerongen, Zijn bliksem, zijn donder: over de Mattheus-ie van Johann Sebastian Bach (Baarn: Ambo, 1997), 87 [Dutch].

178 For a full understanding of the religious and inspirational meaning of all the items in the Mishkan, see the commentaries of Don Yitzchak Abarbanel (14371508) and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) on Vayikra.

179 From the sonnet “Natur und Kunst,” by J.W. von Goethe (1749-1832).

When Something is Nothing

‫ויכס הענן את־אהל מועד וכבוד ה’ מלא את־המשכן ולא־יכל משה לבוא אל־אהל מועד‬ ‫כי־שכן עליו הענן וכבוד ה’ מלא את־המשכן ובהעלות הענן מעל המשכן יסעו בני ישראל‬ ‫בכל מסעיהם ואם־לא יעלה הענן ולא יסעו עד־יום העלתו כי ענן ה’ על־המשכן יומם‬ ‫ואש תהיה לילה בו לעיני כל־בית־ישראל בכל־מסעיהם‬

The cloud covered the Tent of Meeting and the glory of the Eternal filled the Mishkan. Moshe could not enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud was over it and the glory of the Lord filled the Mishkan. Whenever the cloud lifted from over the Mishkan, the children of Israel continued all their journeys. But if the cloud was not lifted, they did not journey until the day it was lifted. For over the Mishkan a cloud of the Eternal rested by day and fire would appear in it by night, in view of all the house of Israel throughout their journeys. Shemot 40:3438

With these words the book of Shemot closes. In many ways these lasts verses reflect the dialectic inherit in Judaism and its relationship to God. At the same time, it is a retrospective view of all that happened until now and what still will happen in the future fom the biblical perspective.

Compared to God’s existence, nothing else exists.

We are told that when the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle, not even Moshe was able to enter the Tent of Meeting. When God’s glory is fully present, there is no place for the human being, not even for somebody as great and godly

as Moshe. God’s presence takes up all space and therefore there is no space for a human being. This does not mean that there is no place for the human being within the Tabernacle. Rather, it means that wherever God “is” in His full glory, there is no space for anything else. Not even for human beings, because where God is fully “present”, there is neither space nor time. Or, to put it differently, compared to God’s existence, we do not even really exist. There is only one real existence and that is the unconditional existence of God, which by definition is infinite and beyond anything and everything. Compared to His existence, nothing else exists. This is the meaning of the famous words uttered at the end of all prayers: “Ein Od”, “there is nothing but Him”. It is for this reason that the Kabbalists turned the tables on us and claimed that the universe was not created “Yesh me-Ayin”, out of nothing”, often called “creatio ex nihilo”, but that the reverse is true: The universe was created “Ayin me Yesh” — nothing from something. The Ayin, the nothingness, which reflects the conditional existence of the universe was created out of Yesh, the ultimate and the only real Somethingness that is God. Compared to God our reality does not really exist. Only God is a Yesh, a real absolute infinite existence, and when He created the finite universe, it could be nothing but naught compared to Himself.

Spinoza’s triangle and the unpreventable paradox.

The fact that “nothingness” shines through everywhere in all that what we experience as reality makes a paradox unpreventable. What we as human beings experience as nothingness is the result of the absolute infinite unconditional existence of God, the ultimate Somethingness. And what God sees as nothingness is for us the somethingness from which our very existence is built. When we look for God, He is not to be found in the place where we expect Him

to be; we expect Him to be in what we call somethingness in the same limited way we experience ourselves. The very fact that we use words like “is” and “existence” when we speak about God just highlights the paradox. God “is” not and does not “exist”. He is much more. To claim that He merely exists is the ultimate form of idol worship, the bringing down of God to human proportions. As Spinoza says:

I believe that if a triangle could speak, it would say… that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God and look on everything else as ill shaped.¹⁸

Indeed, His absolute existence is totally beyond. And in that world, we cannot exist, since we can live only in time and in space. It is for this reason that when the Glory of the Eternal filled the Tabernacle, nobody, not even Moshe, could enter. At that moment Moshe could not exist; there was no “moment” and there was no “existence” in human . In fact the Tabernacle itself did not “exist”, which is beautifully expressed by the sages when they claim that the Ark, which was at the center from which God “spoke” inside the Tabernacle, did not have any measurements.¹⁸¹ It represented God’s infinite “existence” and consequently could not “be” in human .

God’s absence and our existence

What this means is that what we experience as the great mystery of all existence becomes absolute nothingness once God’s existence breaks through. It is this “nothingness” which creates the problem of good and evil and all the paradoxes which confront us daily. They are the result of God’s absolute existence and the nothingness which is to us the reality in which we live. As such they remain

incomprehensible. They reflect the clash between God’s absolute “existence” beyond time and space and our finite existence. Only when the absolute existence of God leaves the (non-existing) Tabernacle and the Glory of God “lifted up from over the Mishkan” did Moshe “come into existence” and was able to enter. The fact that God could withdraw His own absolute existence so as to make space for the world in all its “non-existence” is one of the great mysteries with which the sages of the Kabbalah were confronted. For lack of a better explanation, they called this “Tzitzum”, the “withdrawal of God”. But this is nothing more than an ission that they could not explain this ultimate paradox on which all existence and nothingness is founded. How after all could God withdraw? This withdrawal is itself the pinnacle of the paradoxical. But it also is the foundation of why the Jewish Tradition sees God as very close, and why we can make with God at all. It is precisely His infinite (non) existence that makes it possible for God to make with us and be the Mover behind all human history. One way to understand this is that since God is beyond time and space, there are no limits on Him. As such, He is capable of doing anything, including entering space and time and being close to us. (That this explanation is not without its problems is well represented by the question of whether God can call Himself out of existence!)

Everything is God and God is everything

Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, (1747-1813) the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, seems to try to solve this problem in his famous work called “Tanya”. He introduces a rather controversial concept. Instead of holding on to the concept of creatio ex nihilo, (or, as we called it earlier, nihilo ex creatio), he maintains that there is actually no difference between existence and non-existence: Everything is God. He maintains that the universe cannot be compared to a vessel which once it has been fashioned by an artist, is now able to stand on its own without the help of

the artist. Such a thing is possible only when something is made from “something”. But in the case of the universe, it is a matter of creation from nothing (or nothing from something). What it definitely is not is something from something.

This [creatio ex nihilo] is [even] more wondrous than, for example, the splitting of the Red Sea. For then, God drove back the sea by a strong east wind all night, and the waters were split and not merely ceased their flow, but stood upright as a wall. If God had stopped the wind, the waters would have instantly flowed downward, as is their way and nature, and undoubtedly they would not have stood upright like a wall… How much more so is it in the creation of something out of nothing, which transcends nature, and is far more miraculous than the splitting of the Red Sea, that surely with the withdrawal of the power of the Creator from the thing created, God forbid, the created being would revert to naught and utter non-existence. Rather, the activating force of the Creator must continuously be present in the thing created to give it life and existence.¹⁸²

In other words, the water itself would turn into nothingness were it not that God keeps His hand on it, and so with the rest of the universe. If God is not in everything, it would not exist. The Tanya is seemingly arguing that everything “is” God. Rabbi Shneur Zalman came very close to Spinoza’s “Deus Siva Natura” (God is equal to nature), which is called Pantheism. The difference is that for Spinoza, God did not create the world but was always there, while the Tanya seems to say that God created the world by deciding to create the world from and out of Himself. For Spinoza, God is only immanent, while for Rabbi Shneur Zalman, He is also transcendent. This is called Panentheism.¹⁸³ According to the Tanya, God can easily be close to us and interact with us, since we can only exist as long as God is in us. Were He not, we would cease to exist.

The Biblical story as a dream

All these theories are remarkable and daring, confronting us with the many paradoxes inherent in the issue of the Somethingness of God and the Nothingness of the universe. It is as if the suggestion is made that God dreams up this world, which only exists from our perspective but not from the perspective of God, to Whom it is only a dream with no external reality. This throws a new light on the biblical stories themselves. It would mean that all these stories are dream-states in God. They only take place in God’s mind.¹⁸⁴ But human beings, being part of the dream, experience them as reality. This has far reaching-consequences, many of which are difficult to follow. One of them is whether we really have freedom of will. When all that we do is the result of a Divine dream, this would mean that we only believe that we have freedom of will, while in fact we do not. It reminds me of a statement by the famous Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer: We must believe in freedom of will; we have no choice!¹⁸⁵ So when the glory of God would enter the Tabernacle, God would be Himself and only within Himself as the only Somethingness. And when He dreamed that His glory would leave the Tabernacle, Moshe, the product of His dream would be able to enter. But if the biblical stories are dream-states of God, the same is true of all human history to this very day. We are still living in Biblical times! It is with this message that the book of Shemot ends. Or as John Ruskin (18111900) said: “God alone can finish”.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

Rabbi Cardozo distinguishes the Tanya’s “Panentheism” from Spinoza’s “Pantheism”. Do you think the difference is fundamental? What impact, if any, would adopting Spinoza’s view have on normative Halakhah? What about the Tanya’s view?

The Tanya seems to imply that creation is miraculous because without God’s hand constantly ing it, it would fall back into chaos. The Rambam (Maimonides) holds the opposite view:

For all forces are angels! How blind, how perniciously blind are the naive?! If you told someone who purports to be a sage of Israel that the Deity sends an angel who enters a woman’s womb and there forms an embryo, he would think this a miracle and accept it as a mark of the majesty and power of the Deity… But if you tell him that God placed in the sperm the power of forming and demarcating these organs…then he will recoil.

For he [the naive person] does not understand that the true majesty and power are in the bringing into being of forces which are active in a thing although they cannot be perceived by the senses …¹⁸

Is there a way to reconcile this view with that of the Tanya? Which of these views do you agree with?

How is Rabbi Cardozo’s suggestion that the physical world is God’s “dreamstate” different from the idea, popularized by the movie “The Matrix” that the world is a “simulated reality”? What impact would the truth of this idea have on Halakhic observance? Might the Torah itself be God’s dream-state even though the physical world has an independent reality?

Shemot ends on a rather uncertain note, with the Israelites stuck in the desert, but guided by God in a very intimate manner. Do you feel that this state of being is a metaphor for our reality, or is something completely unnatural? Would you be happy in such an existence?

180 Correspondence “Between Spinoza and Hugo Boxel on Ghosts”, in Improvement of the Understanding, Ethics and Correspondence, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (NY, Cosimo, 2006) p: 392.

181 See: Baba Batra 98b-99a; Yoma 21a; Megillah 10b.

182 Tanya, Sha’ar HaYichud Ve-HaEmunah, chapter 2, pp.153-154 (Vilna, 1930.)

183 See the interesting discussion of this matter by Rabbi Zvi Ashkenazi, also called the Chacham Zvi, the Chief Rabbi of Amsterdam (1660-1718) in his Responsa “Chacham Tzvi”, Responsum 18, in which he discusses whether Rabbi Chacham David Nietto (1654-1728) of London was a hidden follower of Spinoza’s “Deus Siva Natura”!

184 See my The Torah as God’s Mind, A Kabbalistic Look into the Pentateuch, BepRon Publications, Jerusalem, 1988.

185 See also: Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin, Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism. (The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 2003.) On the teachings of the Chassidic master, Rabbi Gershon Henokh of Radzin, determinism and freedom of will.

186 The Guide for the Perplexed II:4-6

Glossary

Books of the Torah

Bereshit: “At the beginning.” Genesis

Shemot: “Names.” Exodus

Vayikra: “He called” Leviticus

Bamidbar: “In the desert.” Numbers,

Devarim: “Words.” Deuteronomy

Hebrew

Aggadah: Interpretive story, usually based on a Biblical text.

Aguna: “Chained.” A woman who, for whatever reason, has been unable to receive from her husband a valid bill of divorces, and is thus not free to remarry.

Akedah: “Binding.” Generally used to refer to Avraham’s binding of Isaac, in fulfillment of the divine command to sacrifice his son.

Am Segulah: A treasured people. Often mistranslated as “chosen people”.

Am Yisrael: The People of Israel.

Am Kadosh: A “Holy People”. The phrase appears in the Torah in the context of the commandment to the newly-liberated Children of Israel to hold themselves to a higher standard than that of the societies around them.

Aravit: The evening prayer.

Aron Kodesh: The Ark in which the Torah is kept in a synagogue.

Ashkenazim: Jews from central and eastern Europe, as opposed to Sepharadim, referring to Spanish and some North African Jews.

Avodah: “Service.” Used to refer both to worship and to work, as in Avodat Hashem, serving God.

Beit ha-Mikdash: (or just Mikdash) The ancient Temple that stood in Jerusalem and was the spiritual center of the Jewish people where the ancient Israelites offered sacrifices until its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. It was rebuilt in 538 BC and destroyed again by the Romans in 70 CE. Currently only the western retaining wall remains, which is a focal point of prayer and devotion for the Jewish people.

Bet Knesset: (plural: batei knesset) Synagogue, House of Assembly.

Bet Midrash: House of study (of Torah).

Brachah: (plural: Brachot): Blessing. Usually refers to a short blessing of gratitude before eating or before performing a Mitzvah.

Counting the Omer: The verbal counting of each of the forty-nine days between the holidays of over and Shavuot, mandated by Leviticus 23:15–16.

Eruv: (literally “mixing”). In the context of these essays, an eruv is the halakhic combining of places into a single private space to allow Jews to carry things

from place to place on Shabbat, an activity which would otherwise be forbidden.

Eretz Yisrael: The Land of Israel.

Gemara: The part of the Talmud which comprises commentary on the primary code of Jewish law, the Mishnah.

Get: Bill of divorce.

Halakhah: (plural: Halakhot) Often defined as “Jewish Law”, it actually encomes the entire body of Jewish culture, tradition, and philosophy.

Hallel: A compilation of psalms of praise recited at special occasions throughout the Jewish year.

Hashem: “The Name.” The substitution in text or speech for the four-letter name of God, which, written out, is called the Shem HaMeforash (the Explicit Name).

Havdalah: Ceremony at the end of Shabbat that separates the sacred time from the mundane workaday week.

Hester Panim: “Hiding of the Face (of God)”. A term used in Deuteronomy to refer to a period of history when the Jews will be made to feel the complete absence of God.

Kapparah: Atonement.

Kashrut: Jewish dietary laws.

Kh’ruvim: Angelic creatures assigned to garden the way to the Garden of Eden. Two such creatures carved out of gold stood on top of the Ark of the Covenant.

Kiddush: “Sanctification.” A brief ceremony involving a blessing over wine to introduce the Sabbath and other festivals.

Kiddush Hashem: (opposite: Hillul Hashem) “Sanctification of the Name.” Any action by which a Jew acts as an ambassador of God by behaving in a way that brings honor to God in the eyes of others.

Kippah: A special cap traditionally worn by Jewish men.

Kohelet: Ecclesiastes, a book of wisdom literature attributed to King Solomon.

Kohen: (plural: kohanim) Priest, A male descendant of Aharon (Aaron), the brother of Moses.

Mashiach: “Anointed.” A descendant of the House of David, who according to Jewish tradition is prophesied to re-establish Jewish sovereignty in the Land of

Israel and bring back the exiles.

Mezuzah: A parchment contained in a decorative case and inscribed with specific Hebrew verses from the Torah. These verses include the Jewish “declaration of faith” — Shema Yisrael. A Mezuzah is affixed to the door post of each room in a Jewish home.

Midrash: “Explanation.” An expounding that brings out the deeper meaning of a text or of a Halachah. Midrashim are typically stories that are not meant to be taken literally, but which use evocative imagery to paint a picture in the mind of the listener.

Mikveh: Ritual bath used for purification.

Minhah: The afternoon prayer.

Mishnah: The primary collection of the Jewish oral tradition compiled and redacted by Judah ha-Nasi in 200 CE. It encomes case law and various opposing views of the early rabbis.

Mishkan: The Tent of Meeting built by the Israelites during their desert wanderings. The Miskhan included a courtyard where sacrifices were offered, an inner chamber where incense was burned, and an innermost chamber called the Holy of Holies (Kodesh hakodeshim) housing the Ark of the Covenant.

Mitzvah: (plural: mitzvot, Commandment): Any action undertaken in accordance

with God’s will, including acts of kindness.

Neshama: Higher soul.

Nefesh: The embodied soul, or life force.

Olam HaBa: “The Next World.” The afterlife.

Pesach: over; the Jewish holiday of liberation that falls in the Hebrew month of Nissan and corresponds with the beginning of spring.

Pirkei Avot: Hebrew for “Ethics of the Fathers”; a compilation of ethical teachings found in the tractate Avot of the Mishnah.

P’shat: The simple meaning of the text, as opposed to the deeper levels.

Seder: Hebrew; literally “order”; the festive meal and retelling of the liberation of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The Seder takes place on the first and second nights of over in the diaspora and on the first night of the holiday in Israel.

Shabbat: Hebrew for “Sabbath”; the day of rest that takes place from sunset on Friday night through nightfall on Saturday. Jewish law mandates that no intentional creative work be done on this day. Instead, the day is spent with family and friends or in quiet contemplation.

Shaharit: The morning prayer.

Sh’chinah: “The Presence.” Often referred to as the feminine aspect of God.

Shema Yisrael: The fundamental statement of Jewish loyalty to God: “Hear, O Israel, the Eternal (is) our God, the Eternal is one.” It is recited twice daily, and is traditionally also recited in the last moments before death.

Sh’losh Esre Ikarim: Thirteen Principles of the Rambam, considered by some to be the core beliefs and worldviews of Judaism.

Shoah: The Holocaust.

Shteibl: Yiddish for “small house”; a small and informal space for prayer gatherings, as opposed to a formal synagogue.

Siddur: (plural: Siddurim) Prayer book.

Slichot: Penitential poems and prayers, especially those said in the period leading up to the High Holidays, and on fast days.

Tallit: Prayer shawl — a four-cornered garment to which are attached Tzitzit, specially tied fringes.

Talmud: The central body of work of Rabbinic Judaism from which Jewish law is derived.

Tehillim: Psalms. A collection of songs and poems, some of which date back to the Kingdom of David.

T’fillah: Prayer. In Jewish traditional texts, it refers to the central prayer of Judaism, which is performed three times a day. Also known as the Shmonah Esre (Eighteen Benedictions), or the Amida (Standing Prayer).

Tikvah: Hope.

The Torah: This term may refer specifically to the first Five Books of Moses in the Bible (the Pentateuch), or to the entire set of laws, written and oral, that we believe we received at Mount Sinai, and the vast literature of commentary and interpretation surrounding those laws.

Teshuvah: “Return.” The process of repentance and rehabilitation from wrongdoing.

Tsaddik: Righteous person.

Tzitzit: Specially knotted ritual fringes that are attached to each corner of a four-cornered garment, which religious Jews wear under their shirts. See Bamidbar 15:38-40.

Viddui: The verbal confession of wrong-doing that accompanies the process of T’shuvah.

About the Author

Nathan Lopes Cardozo (b. 1946), hailing from the Portuguese-Spanish Jewish community in Amsterdam, is a philosopher, New Age halachist, author of 13 books, and lecturer in Jewish communities, yeshivot and universities in Israel and abroad. He studied for 12 years in Ultra Orthodox yeshivot but, after intensive studies in Jewish and general philosophy, carved out his own unprecedented approach to understanding Judaism. He is the founder and dean of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem and its think tank, which focus on finding new halachic and philosophical approaches to dealing with the crisis of religion and identity among Jews and non-Jews, including in the State of Israel. Rabbi Cardozo is known for his originality and fearlessness when presenting his controversial insights into Judaism. His ideas are widely debated internationally via books and social media.

Authors of Questions to Ponder

Anne Gordon Calev ben Dor Jay Gutovich Yehoshua Looks Dina Pinner Jonathan Rossner Elliot Sacks Yael Shahar Yael Valier Yael Unterman Shoshana Michael Zucker

Acknowledgments

Denes and Leia Ban Weil Michael Barth Bettina and Joe Blanga David and Nelly Blanga Family Marc Blanga Judith Blumenfrucht David Cassuto Justin de Winter Simon Feigin Elihu Gevirtz Sharon and Eli Gindi Sam Glaser Alexander Igel Michael and Hilla Kagan Michael and Judith Kaiser Eefje and Eddy Wolff van der Kar Dr David Katzin Danielle Klein

Joseph and Renee Krant Dr. David Katzin Terrence Klingman Larry Kraus Dr. George Kreisberg Ellie and Marshall Jaffe-Kulman Shimmy and Pearl Lopian Dr. Barry Mittelman Moshe Moskovits Robert Neis Family David Cohen Paraira Family Michael Pereira Family Joey Shamah Rabbi Ari Zeev Schwartz Yudit Sidikman David Suissa Caroline and Daniel Tamman Dr. Jaap N. Velleman Rabbi Harry Zeitlin Charles and Ariella Zeloof David Zeloof

Table of Contents

Praise for Cardozo on the Parashah Praise for Jewish Law as Rebellion A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage Preface Acknowledgments Encountering Shemot

The Theology of the Halachic Loophole

Shemot

The Unorthodox Education of Moshe Rabbenu The Need for Heresy Knowing How to Lose

Vaera

Jewish Law: In Praise of Chaos

Believing the Unbelievable Moshe’s Failure to Educate God

Bo

The Miracle of Israel The Challenge of Freedom Temporary vs Eternal Prophecies

Beshalach

Jewish Self Delusion and the Denial of the Future The Virtues of Insanity The Spliting of the Sea and the State of Israel

Yitro

The Challenge of Yitro: Would You Convert? What makes a Legal Case a “Major” one? Racism and Gentile Wisdom

Mishpatim

Law and Liberation The Sensitivity of the Torah and the Power of Language We Are All Strangers

Terumah

In Spite of Religion, God Is Still Around 121 On Silence, the Mishkan, and the Golden Calf Franz Rosenzweig and the Berliner Shtiebl

Tetzaveh

Sanctification of the Heart Asterix and Obelix: A Rabbinic Commentary Mixing with This World and Washing Your Hands of It

Ki Tisa

Revelation and Moshe’s Mask

Shabbat and the Holiness of Life Faith, Death, and Certainty

Vayakhel

The Paradox of Shabbat The Command That Came Too Late Zen and the Art of Keeping Shabbat

Pekudei

Johann Sebastian Bach and the Tent of Meeting175 When Something is Nothing Glossary

Books of the Torah Hebrew

About the Author Authors of Questions to Ponder Acknowledgments

Landmarks

Glossary Acknowledgments Title Page Copyright Page Epigraph Dedication Preface Body Matter Table of Contents