Answers: Reducing Anxiety

But this year I find myself thinking about answers, teshuvot. Answers are as complicated as questions. On one level, we think of answers as stopping that which questions start, as when a student solves the answer to a problem on her math homework. Answers like this can feel tremendously satisfying, because they reduce our anxiety. The moment of answering is a moment of stabilizing something that was previously unstable, closing a hole that was previously open.

On another level, just as answers can create islands in the waterways opened by questions, they are only oases—they demand further questions. Think of a chess match. White moves, and in so doing asks a question of black: What will you do now? Then black moves, and asks the same question of white. The players repeat this question-and-answer back and forth, and each answer becomes a question, each question an answer, until checkmate: the unanswerable question.

Both these models are evoked in Rabbi Elazar’s instruction in Pirkei Avot: Da mah lehashiv l’apikoros, Know how to answer a heretic (Avot  2:14). The heretic and the believer are not engaged in a dialogue in which they are both searching for something in common. The answer here is weapon, a sword to parry the thrust of the questioner—and the hole he could open by using it. It carries the satisfying sense of argumentation, where questions and answers score points on the way to a victory or defeat.

Question-and-answer as game is one kind of dialogue, most familiar to us as debate, or perhaps witty banter. Humor is also in this family. All of these variants of question-and-answer depend on the parties maintaining a certain distance, from which they can launch their arrows and raise their shields. If they draw too close, the questions-and-answer dialogue would take on a different form: not that of repartee or verbal duel, but of a more intimate conversation.

Question-and-Answer as Intimate Conversation

The goal of this more intimate variety is not to score points or keep the conversation going for the sake of the game, but to commune, to understand and be understood. This is a very different kind of question-and-answer. Here questions may not demand answers, but might simply linger. And answers may not stabilize an unstable situation, but rather seek to be heard and appreciated.

“If you see your fellow Israelite’s ox or sheep straying, do not ignore it but hashev tashiv lo, be sure to take it back to its owner. If they do not live near you or if you do not know who owns it, take it home with you and keep it ad drosh achikha oto, until they come looking for it, v’hashevoto lo, then give it back. Do the same if you find their donkey or cloak or l’chol avedat achicha asher tovad mimenu,  anything else they have lost. Do not ignore it.” (Deuteronomy 22:1-3)

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov reads this passage to refer to the process of teshuva: We lose parts of our souls as we go through life, and the work of the righteous is to help restore, l’hashiv, those lost pieces of us to ourselves (or, our selves). The language of soul repair fits well with the spirit of the High Holidays. But it also informs our understanding of the she’ela u-teshuva of Pesach: in asking and answering, we are restoring parts of ourselves, and restoring parts of our interlocutors to themselves.

This is further reflected in the language of avedah, that which is lost. Arami oved avi, begins the central Torah text of the Haggadah (Deuteronomy 26). The Mishnah instructs us to expound, doresh, on this short history of the Jewish people’s journey to Egypt, their enslavement there, and their liberation by God. These first words are Rabbinically interpreted as either “My ancestor was a wandering Aramean,” in which case it refers to Jacob, or “An Aramean sought to destroy my ancestor,” in which case it refers to Laban. The language of oved is derived from the same root, ABD, as the word avedah, a lost object—or a lost part of the soul, in Rebbe Nachman’s expansive understanding. And according to the verse in Deuteronomy, the teshuva can only happen ad drosh achikha, when we demand it.

What Kind of Answers Do We Seek?

If a teshuva is not simply a move in a game, but rather the process of restoring the lost part of ourselves, that which makes us oved, wandering, then the questions and answers in which we engage on Seder night are not simply about satisfying curiosity about this or that rule, or the historical reason for this or that custom. Our process of she’ela u-teshuva is about something far deeper, something that emerges from our own derisha, what we demand of ourselves, our interlocutors, and the Torah. Through our question-and-answer, we recognize that each of us is also an oved, there is something out there for which we must search. And each of us is able to offer teshuva, to help recover the part of us that is missing. This happens through a process of derisha and midrash.

“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. v’heshiv lev avot al banaim, v’lev banim al avotam: He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” These closing verses of the book of Malachi are the culmination of the haftarah for Shabbat Hagadol, the Shabbat immediately before Pesach. The teshuva of our seder conversation is this teshuva: not merely questions and answers about facts (as in the most common question: Is this kosher for Passover?), or questions and answers to score points (“Do you know how many times the Torah instructs us to remember we were slaves in Egypt? Let me show you what I know.”), but questions and answers that reflect and propel the relationship of parents and children, and of the ultimate Parent with all children. This is teshuva not merely as answer, but more as return, reply, response—evoking the sense of responsibility we have toward one another as members of the covenant. This the teshuva that Pesach demands of us.

Chag kasher v’sameach, and may we all be blessed with genuine she’elot u-teshuvot this Pesach.

There is something about sleeping children: we look at them and see innocence, we pick them up and feel protective and intimate. I remember moments when my children were younger, holding them in a rocking chair, willing myself to remember the feeling of the moment, sensing just how ephemeral it was. To hold a child, to carry a sleeping toddler to bed, is one of the great tender moments of life, overflowing with a feeling of generosity. We sense the holy in such moments.

I find myself thinking about children, and about carrying, on this Yom Kippur.

When we think of children and holidays, we usually think of Pesach. Of course, Pesach is a child-centered holiday, with its games and questions, its special foods and many meals. The youngest child asks the Four Questions; the cleverest child negotiates the best deal for returning the afikomen. Many a Jewish parent has carried a sleeping child from the couch to the bedroom at the end of the seder.

Not so Yom Kippur. Unlike Pesach, Yom Kippur is a quintessentially non-child-centered holiday. Parents of young children are challenged to figure out what to do with their kids on Yom Kippur, because Yom Kippur is made for adults: there is no meal, there are no stories, no games, no question-and-answer. Even when the grownups aren’t in shul, fasting makes them low-energy and not particularly available to children. Likewise the substance of Yom Kippur is for grownups. The concept of teshuva is a hard one for children to engage. To think about teshuva requires a long view, an ability to be self-reflective, to take in the scope of one’s actions in the past year, and to judge oneself. While children can grasp the idea of being sorry and granting forgiveness, the fullness of the idea of teshuva isn’t something to expect of a 7-year old.

Yet on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur our metaphors are frequently parental: k’rachem av al banim, ken terachem aleinu: As a father has mercy on his children, so may You have mercy on us. Or the many times we say avinu malkeinu, our father, our king. Or consider Rabbi Akiva’s famous words at the end of the Mishnah in Yoma: “Who purifies you? Your father in heaven!” This is language unique to the High Holidays. At Pesach we refer to Hashem as God, and ourselves as God’s servants. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, alongside the image of God as king and ruler, we evoke a different relationship, that of parent and child.

The language of carrying is also central on these days. In our selichot we repeatedly refer to God the way God describes Godself: nosei avon, the one who carries sin. We draw this language from two accounts in the Torah: God’s forgiveness after the sin of the Golden Calf, and God’s second act of forgiveness after the sin of the spies. In both instances, God refers to Godself as the one who carries sin.

The language of carrying is also evoked in the verse from Micah that we read in our Haftarah Yom Kippur afternoon, and in the central sacrificial act of Yom Kippur, the confession of Israel’s sins on the head of the se’ir l’azazel, the scapegoat: “The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place.”

The midrash reminds us of the earliest episode when this language is used. It comes in the story of Cain. Just after Cain has killed his brother Hevel, God famously asks him, “Where is Hevel your brother?” And Cain responds, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God tells Cain that his brother’s blood is crying out from the earth, and condemns Cain to be a wander, na v’nad, in the midst of the earth.

But, says the midrash, Cain prays.

Rabbi Eliezer said: See how great is the power of prayer. If it cannot transform everything, it at least transforms half. Cain stood over Hevel his brother and killed him. The decree went out against him: “Na v’nad, a wanderer you will be in the earth.” Immediately Cain stood and confessed before the Holy Blessed One, saying, “My sin is too great to carry.” He said, Master of the Universe, you carry the entire world, but my sin you will not carry? Did you not write, “Who bears sin and passes over wrongdoing?”  Forgive my sin, for it is great! Immediately he found mercy before the Holy Blessed One, who took away the Na part of the decree, for it is written, “And he lived in the land of Nod.” From here you learn how great is prayer before the Holy Blessed One. (Deut. Rabba 8:1)

Cain’s plaintive words in this midrash are striking. Helpless, overcome, he cries out to God: My sin is too great to bear. The burden is too heavy. I can’t carry it. And then he reminds God that God is the ultimate carrier: the one who is sovel, who bears the burdens of the world; the one who is nosei avon, who carries sin away. Cain does not ask God to carry him: just the opposite, Cain will have to carry himself. But God agrees to carry his sin, to lessen the severity of the decree. Cain will not have to carry the burden of both his own life and the sin he has committed. God grants forgiveness, God carries away Cain’s sin, and his burden is eased.

This is an adult moment. Cain’s forgiveness does not mean he recovers his childlike innocence. The very next verse of the story tells us as much: “And Cain knew his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Hanoch.” Immediately after his forgiveness, Cain finds a place to live, the land of Nod, and engages in the most basic definition of biological maturity, reproduction. He then has a son whose name signifies education. Cain does not become a child again. He becomes an adult, doing adult things, taking adult responsibilities. He finds a place to live. He has a child. He teaches his child. In just a few verses, Cain transforms from the teenager who kills his brother and shirks responsibility into a responsible adult who has children and educates them.

Yet the touchstone for this assumption of adulthood is an ironic twist. In order to become a fully responsible adult, Cain has to first surrender himself to God. He has to let go of the power he thinks he has–the power he has just proven, the power to kill–and acknowledge that in the presence of God, in the presence of ultimate conscience, ultimate judgment, he is powerless. In surrendering his power, Cain in effect becomes a small child again: the small child who is powerless, who is utterly dependent. The small child who cannot fight off sleep. The small child who needs us to carry him. This powerless small child is precisely the being that evokes our sympathy, our rachmanus, our tender love.

Cain is not a child, and his moment of returning to a child’s state is not permanent, but temporary. Through this moment of throwing himself on God’s mercy, of acknowledging his powerlessness, Cain is transformed. He is forgiven. He is redeemed. He grows up. By allowing God to carry his sin, and by begging God to carry it, Cain becomes capable of carrying himself.

There’s a famous Christian poem about a person having a dream of walking on the beach, looking back on the footprints of the journey. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, those of God and the person walking. Sometimes there were only one. As the poem famously puts it, “During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

I think we too easily resist this kind of language in Judaism. We’re more fond of intellectual arguments and text-heavy formulations of symbolism and signification. In the Modern Orthodox community, in particular, we tend to over-intellectualize the experience of the High Holidays. In doing so, we too often miss the core experience, the basic move that this time is about. It is about allowing ourselves to be carried.

Yom Kippur is about enabling God to forgive us of our sins, those accretions that build up in our adult lives of power. To be an adult is to be a bar da’at, one who knows. The old maxim goes that knowledge is power, but it is not simply an aphorism. To know is to be powerful. That’s what it means to be an adult, to have agency and to exercise it. But as the story of Cain poignantly illustrates, our knowledge, our power, the very thing that makes us tzelem elokim, can be used to dominate, to control, even to kill. That is the inherent dilemma of power. The corruptions that knowledge and power engender, those are our sins.

The great possibility of teshuva on Yom Kippur is to acknowledge those corruptions, and then to allow God to carry them away. It is about returning, for a moment, to being a child–not with a child’s innocence, but with a child’s capacity for surrendering. It is about giving up our da’at for a moment, liberating ourselves from the false trappings of our knowledge and power, and allowing ourselves to be ultimately powerless–on this day, this Shabbat shabbaton.

The other night, I took Micah and Jonah to their first night baseball game. Jonah caught a foul ball. The Tigers held off the White Sox. We stayed until the end. When we got home after 11 p.m., Micah threw himself on the couch and began to fall asleep. This time I looked at him and knew that I couldn’t carry him. He’s too big now, and I’m no weightlifter. I had to rouse him and help him walk up the stairs on his own two feet.

As we experience this Yom Kippur, I pray that we can all find the emotional and spiritual place where we can let ourselves be carried. Where we can stop being adults so fearful of losing power, and remember what it is to be a child who trusts in her parents to carry her.
Gemar chatima tova.

I. Stumbling On Big Questions

In 2005, four weeks after I received semikha, two weeks after our second son was born, my wife Natalie and I moved to Evanston. As the new rabbi at Northwestern Hillel, there were many things to do, many people to meet. But the biggest thing to do, programmatically anyway, was prepare for the High Holidays.

Like many campuses, Northwestern has an area where theater groups, political groups, fraternities and sororities hang big painted sheets to announce their upcoming events: “Party at Sig Ep Saturday night!” or “Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, Thursday to Sunday in Shanley.” So to publicize the High Holidays, I figured we could hang a painted sheet, something like, “Yom Kippur, Wednesday. Repent!”

But a funny thing happened on the way to Yom Kippur. We realized two things: First, we could afford to make something slightly nicer than a painted sheet. So we printed an 8-foot by 3-foot banner at Kinkos. Second, instead of making a statement, we could ask a question.

Statements and announcements, it seemed to me, could linger in the air and easily be ignored. A question, by contrast, enters into the mind. You can’t walk by a question, a good question, and ignore it with the same ease that you ignore a statement. The old TV ad is a perfect case in point. “It’s 10 pm: do you know where your children are?” is far more evocative than “It’s 10 pm. Make sure your kids are safe.”

So we made a banner that asked what we thought was the basic question of the High Holidays: What will you do better this year? Underneath we wrote, Experience the High Holidays, and we listed the website for Hillel.

It turned out that this banner, created in my first weeks as a rabbi on campus, would be the seed of a much larger project, one that has influenced my professional career and my approach to education, leadership, community, and spiritual life. A little over a year ago, I left Northwestern Hillel to lead the national development of Ask Big Questions, which this year will be active on over 20 campuses, training over 100 students in the skills of text-centered reflective community conversation, and reaching tens of thousands of people from various walks of life in-person, online, and in print.

As we journey through this Elul, I want to go back to that Elul seven years ago. Here we are again in Elul. Here we are again, preparing for the High Holidays. Here we are again, a full shemitta cycle later, with the chance to discover, or rediscover, some Big Questions.

II. Rediscovering Big Questions

Let’s begin with Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Religion is an answer to ultimate questions,” he writes. “The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in. The primary task of religious thinking is to rediscover the questions to which religion is an answer.”

Our lives our answers to questions. We go to work for a reason. We raise our children for a reason. We do mitzvot for a reason. We eat, sleep, exercise, get sick, heal, make love, rejoice and mourn in response to questions. Not necessarily questions we consciously ask ourselves, but inescapable questions. The kinds of questions the contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor refers to when he writes, “We take as basic that the human agent exists in a space of questions. And these are the questions to which our framework-definitions are answers, providing the horizon within which we know where we stand, and what meanings things have for us.”

What are those questions? How do we find them? In seven years of work, after a lot of trial and error and the helpful thinking of many good partners and friends, I can posit an answer. These are what we call Big Questions (capital B, capital Q), and they are defined by two basic criteria: First, they matter to everyone. Second, everyone can answer them. Additionally, they are directed at people, in the second or first person plural: at you or at us.

• What will you do better this year?
• Are we free?
• When do you conform?
• What have you learned so far?
• What could we sacrifice to change the world?

These are some good examples of Big Questions.

To better understand how Big Questions work, we have to move for a second to a different area, what I call Hard Questions. Hard Questions look a lot like Big Questions. They also matter to everyone. But only some people can answer Hard Questions. A lot of university life is filled with Hard Questions. How can we bring peace to the Middle East? is a classic. It matters to everyone, but not everyone can answer that question. To engage that discussion, you have to think you know something about the Middle East. The less you know—or, more accurately, the less you think you know—the less likely you are to participate. The question becomes unanswerable to you. (For a short, fun video that explains the difference between Big Questions and Hard Questions, click here.)

Some other examples of Hard Questions: Does God exist? Is truth objective or subjective? Is nature or nurture more important? All of these are important questions, but not everyone can answer them. Typically they lead to debate. Most of us have probably been at a Shabbat meal where the topic turned to a Hard Question—Who should you vote for this November?—and we have all seen the result: a couple of people get heated, other people find ways to avoid the conversation (hanging out in the kitchen or on the living room couch), and by the end, the combatants are simply more hardened in their positions, while the rest of us are resentful because we would have rather eaten a nice meal together.

Now what if we put a Big Question at the center of our conversation? Remember, it has to matter to everyone, and it has to be a question everyone can answer. “What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?” which is a classic ice-breaker question, is definitely a question everyone can answer, but it fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s not big. It’s a small question.

A good example of a Big Question would be, “Where do you feel at home?” Another is, “For whom are we responsible?” One many of us might be familiar with is, “What are you thankful for?”

All of these questions are ones that matter to everyone. They are significant. And they’re ones that everyone can answer. And when I say everyone, I really do mean everyone—from a six year-old to a 96-year old, regardless of ethnic, religious, gender, or socioeconomic background. Everyone can answer a Big Question. These are human questions.

What’s also important about Big Questions is that they lead to sharing stories. They lead to conversation, not debate. There are no reference books to use in a conversation about Where do you feel at home? No one is going to run to grab the dictionary or the encyclopedia (or google the answer on their phone) to look up some fact during a conversation like this. Instead, a Big Question invites us to share our stories, speak in the first person, and listen. In the words of our tagline, when we ask Big Questions, we come to understand others and understand ourselves.

III. Big Questions and Text Learning

In our work at Ask Big Questions, we’ve developed a four-stage approach to holding reflective conversation in community. The four stages are easy to remember: 1) Ask; 2) Share; 3) Learn; 4) Do. Ask refers to Asking Big Questions, questions that matter to everyone and that everyone can answer. Share refers to sharing personal stories. Do refers to asking, at the end of the conversation, what will we do based on this conversation—in our own lives, and in the life of our community?

I skipped over step 3, which is Learn, and that’s because it is both the hardest and the most significant of the four steps. When we say learn, we mean that a good reflective community conversation is centered around an interpretive thing—a text, an image, a video clip, a song. Putting the object at the center gives all the participants equal access to the conversation. It prevents the conversation from becoming simply people talking about themselves, which could easily become a therapy session. It gives the conversation dimensions beyond the people in the room, bringing in voices from other points in time and space.

As Jews we encounter texts all the time. But what we sometimes forget is that how we interact with those texts matters. Too often, and here I first and foremost indict myself, rabbis and teachers use Jewish texts as a means of demonstrating our own intelligence. Say something smart, dazzle the audience, and you’ve done your job. Show them how brilliant you are. I have given my share of such presentations, and I have been in the room for many more.

But as writer and educator Parker Palmer has helped many teachers to see, being smart is not what great teaching is all about. It’s not what texts are meant to be for. Being smart is in many ways the yetzer hara of the teacher, and using texts towards such ends warps them and cheapens them of their power. Great texts, and especially Torah, are meant to anchor an eternal conversation about questions that matter to all of us and that all of us can, and must, answer. This is what Heschel meant when he said that “the primary task of religious thinking is to rediscover the questions to which religion is an answer.” Our texts, from the first words of Bereshit to the poems of Marge Piercy, are the touchstones of a conversation that started before the creation of the world and will continue until the days of the Messiah.

In order for our texts to be that, we have to approach them with kavvanah. We have to be open to being changed by our encounter with a text. Havruta o mituta, says the Gemara. Poetically rendered, this means that our learning must take place in community. There is a place for hitbodedut, for silent reflection and meditation. But transformative learning happens when we are held by, and at the same time help to hold, the tent poles of our community—those who are here with us, and those who are not here with us today.

I would suggest that this kind of learning is possible—perhaps only possible—when we ask Big Questions. If our questions are big enough and yet accessible enough; if they invite us to reflect and share in a space that is both challenging and affirming, reflective and non-judgmental; if they invite us into the eternal conversation that is Torah and the story of human beings, then I believe we can experience the full meaning of the Rabbinic ideal of Talmud Torah k’neged kulam, the study of Torah equals all other mitzvot.

IV. Big Questions and Teshuva

In my final comments, I want to reflect on how this approach of Big Questions informs the season of teshuva. By now, I hope, you’ve picked up on the theme: when we ask Big Questions, we are not doing anything so terribly new. In fact, I like to say, the idea of Ask Big Questions is radically old.

Children have an incredible capacity for asking big questions. Spend time in a kindergarten classroom and you will remember what it feels like. “What are you thankful for?” is something kindergartners talk about at least once a week. Who is in your family? Who is in our community? Where do you feel at home? This is the bread and butter of age 6. Yet somewhere between age 6 and becoming a grownup, we forget those questions. We become more interested in knowledge acquisition, in showing that we’re smart and skilled and capable. To borrow another phrase from Heschel, we become more interested with information and less animated by appreciation.

Yet these questions frequently find their way back to our consciousness when we lose a parent. While thankfully my parents are still living, I have been to my share of shiva houses. If your experience at a shiva house is anything like mine, you’ll find that there is an openness to Big Questions, to a nurturing kind of reflection among community, during moments of mourning and remembrance.

I can suggest two reasons for this. First, death prompts us to confront questions that truly matter, questions of ultimate concern. Endings force us to think about everything that leads up to them, and the end of life leads us to consider what truly matters in our own lives. This, of course, is reflected in the High Holidays: these are days on which we see ourselves as on trial for our lives; Yom Kippur is a day of abstaining from the materiality of life, a day of confronting mortality. And so Elul and the High Holidays lead us to consider Big Questions.

Second, when confronted with the loss of a parent, we rediscover, as an adult, what it means to be a child. K’rachem av al banim, ken terachem aleinu. As a father has mercy on his children, so may You have mercy on us, we say on the High Holidays. If the process of teshuva is about rediscovering the nature of our parental relationship with the Holy Blessed One, then it is also about rediscovering something of that experience of being a child. Teshuva is both about learning and unlearning from the past year. We return, not to a state of innocence, but to a place where our hearts can be open—to each other, to God, to ourselves.

As I have said a few times, I believe the path to that openness, to the teshuva we truly, deeply seek, begins with asking better questions, bigger questions. I bless you, as I hope you will bless me, with an Elul of Big Questions, a Tishrei of great conversations, and year of renewal and transformation.

Ketiva v’chatima tova.

My dissertation is taking shape, and it surrounds Yitz Greenberg (who I know is a reader of the blog; not many doctoral candidates can say that!). In 1993, the Jewish intellectual historian Steven Katz wrote that Yitz was the most influential thinker in American Jewish life over the past two decades. Katz argued that Yitz’s work through CLAL and his various other pluralistic educational endeavors changed the way Federation and communal leaders thought of themselves and related to Jewish learning and tradition. Yitz helped to create a new kind of discourse in American Jewish life, where today it is not unusual for Federation meetings to include a dvar Torah or for communal leaders to study Jewish texts. Yitz’s influence can be felt every time someone deploys the idea of “tzelem elokim,” humans created in God’s image, or talks about Covenant as an organizing concept in Jewish thought. Yitz did not invent these terms, but he made them into powerful teachings that spoke to a wide audience across denominations. I share Katz’s assessment: there aren’t many figures who have been as influential across so many communities.

Within the Orthodox community, of course, ‘Yitz Greenberg’ means something very different. For nearly fifty years, Yitz has become a marker in the Modern Orthodox zeitgeist, denoting an alternative might-have-been to what mainstream Orthodoxy became. To both his supporters and his foes, Yitz represented something powerful–to his supporters, powerfully inspiring; to his foes, powerfully threatening.

One of the distinguishing features of Yitz’s biography and thought is that he is an historian. This is significant for a number of reasons. As Alan Brill has observed, most of the major figures of Modern Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 60s worked in philosophy: Most notably, of course, Rav Soloveitchik, but also figures like Samuel Belkin, Eliezer Berkovitz, Norman Lamm, Walter Wurzburger, and Sol Roth. Emanuel Rackman was a lawyer and wrote his PhD at Columbia on law, and his approach to Modern Orthodoxy–which was, in its day, an even more powerful challenge than Yitz’s–was through law and halakha.

Unlike these other figures, Yitz’s PhD was in American history (on Teddy Roosevelt and the American labor movement), and his teaching appointment at YU in 1959 was to teach just that. Within a few years, and particularly after his sabbatical in Israel in 1960-61, he taught modern Jewish history as well, and was among the first people to teach about the history of the Holocaust. Yitz was a very popular professor, and not only because of his charisma. There was something striking in his approach to history. He didn’t teach the past as dead. He taught it as living. Similar to what I wrote a blog post last year about Daniel Sperber, this represents a different approach to history than we often think of as the norm, one which doesn’t see nearly as firm a split between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ as Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor might argue. For Yitz, history represented something we learn from for the sake of our own lives. This enabled him to talk about even Biblical criticism, one of the most challenging areas not only for Orthodoxy, but even Conservative Judaism in the 1950s. The problem of academic Biblical critics, he taught, was not that they excavated the Bible, but that they ruled out the possibility that humans could have a relationship with God. Biblical criticism could show how humans in their time and place responded to God, and that could then inform us today about how we should do the same.

This approach to history thus had two compelling features: It made the past come alive, and it made the present a continuous flow from that past. Listen to what Yitz’s students at YU or Yavneh in the 1960s said about him, and this is what comes through. It led to Yitz’s calls for major halakhic adaptation and innovation, not only in internal Jewish areas like conversion or egalitarianism, but strikingly in the realm of American politics (social welfare legislation, civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, etc.). Yitz’s work as an historian made him unique within Orthodoxy, and beyond Orthodoxy as well. He is not an historian who lets the past simply live in the past.

I would argue that for many Orthodox Jews it is this challenge that is so difficult. Orthodoxy (a term which demands a great deal of excavation itself) has successfully encountered modern science, modern philosophy, and modern culture, and proved able. There are great examples of Orthodox scientists, philosophers, thinkers, writers, and performers. But the realm of modernity in which it has had the most difficult challenge is history, particularly Biblical history, but also history that challenges the saintliness of great figures of the past. That is why Yitz was, and remains, simultaneously inspiring and threatening–he was willing to embrace such histories without reducing the past to a purely man-made affair. As Yerushalmi argues, modern historiography is built on the idea that there is a radical break from the past, one that enables us to stand and gaze objectively at it. Yitz agrees with this, but then makes the dialectical move of saying, There is no break: we are the inheritors of that past, and the past demands our action in the present.For Orthodoxy, this is a significant challenge.

But why? As we approach Tisha b’Av, I think we see an answer. Tisha b’Av was a holiday that Rav Soloveitchik took very seriously. All day he would recite Kinnot and teach about them (a tradition which Rabbi J.J. Schacter now admirably continues). For the Rav, the halakha generated a requirement to feel the magnitude of the hurban (destruction), to feel God’s absence. And for Jews, as so many Jewish philosophers have told us, God’s presence or absence is felt primarily in history. Our narrative as a people is built on the idea of God intervening in history. Yet Tisha b’Av marks the first–sadly not the last–cataclysmic moment when God seemingly wasn’t there, when God hid Godself and allowed the destruction to happen. Though the challenge of God’s presence or absence is one we encounter every day through our prayers and performance of mitzvot, on many days we can go through the motions, or we can focus on the celebratory aspects in which we enjoy feeling the presence of God (a bris, a wedding, Shabbos dinner, holidays). Tisha b’Av, however, is the day of God’s absence, a day when the problem of Jewish history and its meaning for our individual and collective relationship with God is most forcefully expressed. The observances of Tisha b’Av are made meaningful not through joy, but through feeling the absence of God, longing for God’s return, and committing ourselves to bringing it about.

But then we come out of Tisha b’Av, and we don’t really have to deal with God in history any more–or so we tell ourselves. We can focus on our performance of mitzvot, we can feel God’s presence in other ways. Tisha b’Av can exist on its own, and we can be happy on any day when we don’t have to say Tachanun. We can engage ‘modernity’ through science and philosophy and culture, and we can avoid the challenge of confronting the question of God’s role in history. (I save the question of Israel and history for another time; this blog post is already long enough, and my focus is on American Judaism.)

Yitz Greenberg’s challenge to Orthodoxy, and to American Jewry, was not to put our heads in the sand. The elephant in the room is God’s place in history. Modern historiography had already made this a challenge; the Holocaust made it inescapable. And yet, 40 years after Yitz left Yeshiva University, the challenge is one with which we have yet to fully come to terms.

Shabbat shalom.

1. Jacob (CF). Yaakov Avinu makes this year’s team once again in the leadoff position, owing mostly to his ability to get on base and steal (Gen. 27). Jacob is also a solid center fielder, with a strong arm that can roll boulders off of wells (Gen. 29:10).

2. Abraham (3B). Avraham gets the nod in the second slot this year because of his uncanny ability to make the sacrifice bunt (Gen. 22). The third baseman needs particularly quick feet in order to handle the hot shots down the line, and Abraham has proven running ability (Gen. 18:2).

3. Aaron (SS). The power of the lineup for this year’s team begins with Aharon, who hit Egypt with his staff (i.e. bat). Aaron starts at short due to his outstanding ability to cover the gap (Num. 17:13).

4. Samson (LF). Cleanup goes to the strongest man in the Bible, whose arm will also serve him well in left. Shimshon is particularly excited to be playing the Philistine All-Stars this year.

5. Moses (2B). Moshe’s strong bat is legendary of course, and hitting behind Samson will keep the Philistines from pitching around him. Why is he at second? He is part of the dynamic duo that made so many dramatic double-plays on the Egyptians in their rookie season (Ex. 6:26-27).

6. David (P). David gets the nod to start for this year’s BAS team, because of his low ERA and outstanding pitch location, as demonstrated against the former Philistine All-Star, Goliath (1 Sam. 17:49).

7. Nachshon (C). Most famous for his bravery in the World Series game at the Red Sea against the Egyptians, Nachshon gets the start at catcher in tonight’s game. He is also a strong leader for the rest of the team (Num. 7:12), and will work well with his great-great-great grandson on the mound (Ruth 4:20).

8. Saul (1B). A tall first-baseman is a big plus, since he can catch balls thrown over his head. Saul fills this position nicely (1 Sam. 9:2).

9. Sara (RF). Sara brings vast experience to her position, based on her 127 years in the Biblical league (and we wanted the team to be co-ed).

Relief pitchers: Aaron and Hur, who were so important in the Biblical team’s victory over the Amalekites (Ex. 17:12).

Closing pitcher: Joshua.

Manager: Judah (Gen. 49:10: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah.”)

Base coach: Rebecca, who is outstanding at stealing the other team’s signals (Gen. 27:5).

Good luck in tonight’s game to all the Major League All-Stars!

One of the marvelous things about Parshat Balak is the way it transports us as readers outside the story of the children of Israel and onto the balcony. “Balak son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the Amorites,” begins the parasha (Num. 22:2). Immediately we are struck by the fact that it is not Moses or God speaking, it is not an event in the life of the people. The whole story is literally told from the balcony—from the high places overlooking the Israelite encampment. And what Balaam sees is ultimately a beautiful thing: “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (Num. 24:5).

Yet aside from the recent military victories they have been achieving in the preceding chapters, the narrative of the people has not been exemplary. Immediately after the story of Balak and Balaam, the narrative returns to yet another example of the people sinning, with the story of Zimri, Kozbi, and Pinchas. The parasha seems designed to highlight the gap between the way Balaam sees the people and the way the people see themselves. Balaam sees a people capable of greatness, a blessed people with a noble calling based on God’s taking them out of Egypt. But the people themselves are blind to this, and repeatedly see only what is right in front of them: a lack of food or water, the sexual temptations of Midian. In the case of the spies, they saw themselves as grasshoppers about to take on giants. The gap between what Balaam sees and what the people see is striking.

According to the plain text, Balaam is not the nefarious character that later Rabbinic interpretation will make him out to be. Balaam’s repeated insistence that he can only do the word of God seems intended to remind later readers, the descendents of the Israelites, that they too must seek to discern and live God’s word. The haftarah for Parshat Balak makes this point, drawing a parallel between the words of Balaam’s donkey and the words of God to the Jewish people: “My people, what wrong have I done you?” (Micah 6:3)  parallels the donkey’s plaintive cry, “What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?” (Num. 22:28). Balaam cannot see, just as the Israelites cannot see.

On Sunday we observe the fast of the 17^th of Tammuz, ushering in a period of intensifying mourning that concludes with Tisha b’Av in three weeks. This is meant to be a period of introspection, of standing on the balcony and looking at ourselves as individuals and as a people, seeing that which is right in front of us from a larger perspective. As the concluding lines of the haftarah remind us: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you; To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Such words are  not meant to exempt us from performing mitzvot; rather they are meant to help us remember that the details of our lives answers to larger questions. Balaam, along with Micah, helps us remember what those larger questions are.

Shabbat shalom.

Kayam Farm, at the Pearlstone Retreat Center, near Baltimore, MD.

I recently attended a retreat at the Pearlstone retreat center outside of Baltimore. Among the many things that make Pearlstone a lovely place, and a model for something that should exist in many more communities, is the Kayam Farm. Kayam is a working farm that produces vegetables, eggs, and goat milk and cheese—some of which is served at Pearlstone itself, and much of which goes to a community supported agriculture (CSA) initiative.

But what really distinguishes Kayam is the fact that it is rooted in serious Jewish learning. This is more than saying, ‘We are practicing tikkun olam with our farming.’ No—the folks who work at Kayam study the laws of Shabbat and more fully appreciate the meaning of resting from labor (it’s about a lot more than turning off your iphone). They study the laws of tza’ar ba’alei chayim, not causing suffering to animals, which applies not only to how we treat our pets, but to verses in the Torah that mostly have meaning in the context of farming: not yoking different species of animals together (Deut. 22:10), not muzzling an ox when it is threshing (Deut. 25:4), sending away the mother bird when fetching the eggs from a nest (Deut. 22:6-7), and many more.

But most striking, the Kayamers study the agricultural laws of the Torah related to planting. These laws form an entire order of the Mishnah (Zeraim) which has typically not been studied in depth by most Jews, even those who study in yeshivot. Why? Because the Rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud understood that most of these laws apply only in the land of Israel. With the advent of religious Zionism, these laws became a major area of study and application once again.

The association of Torah-informed farming with the land of Israel is thus one deeply etched into my mind. It’s the idea of the kibbutz hadati, the religious kibbutz. It’s the image of the farmer who rises early to put on tefillin, and then goes out to milk the goats, feed the chickens, and work in the fields. It’s the thought of all of that taking place in Hebrew.

So it was a jarring experience to see it all happening—in Maryland, not the Galil. What does it mean to imagine applying the Torah to agricultural settings outside the land of Israel? On the one hand, there’s something wonderful about it: Jews learning Torah, developing a language of Torah and farming that enables a richer, healthier, more sustainable life. Wonderful! But on the other hand, there was something deeply unsettling about it, as though these good things were happening, but in precisely the wrong place. Most Rabbinic literature deals with the notion of mitzvot teluyot ba-aretz, the commandments that are dependent on the land of Israel, as a question of whether a mitzvah applies outside the land of Israel, not whether one could voluntarily observe it. The very notion of observing the Sabbatical year outside of Israel, for instance, is a non-sequitur both because of the extra stringency inherent in the idea, and because, traditionally, observing Israel-dependent mitzvot has been viewed as a privilege of living in the land of Israel. To a traditional mind, the mitzvah simply doesn’t make sense outside of it.

All of this happened this week, in the days leading up to Shavuot. Shavuot, of course, has a double-identity. In its identity as z’man matan torateinu, the time of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai—outside the land of Israel—it is a holiday accessible and meaningful to all Jews in all places. Jews around the world can study Torah on the night of Shavuot and know that they are part of a people doing the same thing across the globe. But in its identity as chag habikkurim, the festival of first fruits, its significance is talui ba’aretz, dependent on the land of Israel. Outside of Israel, this notion doesn’t make sense, because the first fruits mentioned in the Torah are those of the land of Israel: “When you have entered the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, take some of the first fruits…” (Deut. 26:1-2).

We take as a given that Israel is interwoven into the fabric of Jewish life. Yet it is an old trope in American Jewish life that America itself could represent an Israel of its own, that not only can’t we make aliyah because of economic or family ties, but that we actively want to build a Jewish life here in this place. The Reformers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries took this as an article of faith. The Kayamers of the 21^st century are experimenting with a fascinating take on the same theme. Personally, I disagree with the impulse to observe Israel-specific mitzvot outside of Israel. I view the mitzvot of the land of Israel as only fulfillable there, whether they are understood as a legal obligation or a special spiritual privilege. But I can’t help but admire the dedication and creativity of people who are seriously engaging with the questions, who are farming and learning and bringing Israel into a larger contemporary conversation.

Ramban disagrees. “The real reason” for both mitzvot “is to cultivate in us the quality of mercy, that we may not become cruel, for cruelty envelops the entire personality of man, as is well known from the example of professional animal killers who often become hardened to human suffering” (Ramban on Deut. 22:6). Where Maimonides sees the purpose of the mitzvot here as focused on the suffering of the animals, Nachmanides sees them as addressing human moral development. Ramban cites the teaching of Abba Gurya in the Mishnah (Kiddushin 4:14), who evaluates a number of unfavorable occupations and concludes by saying “even the best of slaughterers is a companion of Amalek.” Which is to say, killing for a living ultimately leads to cruelty in human relations. (Nechama Leibowitz’s second essay on this parasha develops these positions further.)

Neither Rambam nor Ramban could have imagined a world in which meat came to the mouths of people without some exposure to the process of killing. While death was a more regular feature of pre-modern, and certainly pre-industrial life, its ubiquity also had the effect of humanizing it. It was normal to kill an animal for food, and it was known by sages throughout the ages that too much killing would make a person cruel. Today, however, most of us who eat meat never interact with the animals we’re eating. Indeed, the thought that the beef or chicken on our plate was once an actual living creature grosses us out. We are not used to animal life, and we’re not used to animal death either.

Thus animal-welfare conversations today tend to focus more on the Rambam’s line of thinking: it’s about animal welfare, or animal rights. If we’re vegetarians, or if we simply advocate for greater sensitivity in ritual slaughter or the raising of livestock, we make our arguments in terms of the welfare of the animal. We don’t tend to adopt the Ramban’s line of thinking, because we’ve industrialized the process of slaughter to the point that, like the gas in our cars that we never actually see, the meat that arrives on our supermarket shelves wrapped in plastic is divorced in our imagination from any human process other than stocking it on the counter.

But what if we did? What if the question in our consumption of meat, and food in general, was more about what kind of moral and ethical development it entails and leads to? This, after all, is the Rambam’s ultimate point: the purpose of showing compassion for animals is to cultivate our sense of compassion for all of God’s creation, including human beings. It is to fulfill the Rambam’s understanding of the ultimate imperative of the mitzvot, v’halachta bidrachav, to walk in God’s ways.

That is the greater challenge of kashrut (a challenge which my colleagues at Uri l’Tzedek tirelessly address). God is not mechanized. Our relationship with God, and with one another, shouldn’t be either.

Shabbat shalom.

• During a class in Jerusalem years ago, Levi Lauer remarked, “Zionism makes mincemeat out of aesthetics.”
• In my junior year of college, my friend Josh Cahan, sitting on my dorm room couch, told me, “Feigelson, you could make a really great leader, if you just stopped seeing what’s wrong with people and started seeing what’s right with them.”
• In my first year working at Hillel, Michael Brooks, the longtime director at the University of Michigan Hillel, was giving a talk in which he observed, “Most questions that matter are about membership.”

This observation of Michael’s has resonated with me ever since, and experience confirms it. On an emotional level, to be included or excluded in a group, to feel inside or outside, is a powerful experience from childhood through the rest of our lives. None of us wants to be left out, but we also don’t want to include everyone in everything. We want to be loved, but we also want to know that the love we give and receive is special.

On a cognitive level, we are constantly grouping together–creating in and out–all the time. As infants we begin to label people and things as in or out, this or that, same or different. As we get older, we get more sophisticated, but the move is the same: we group like with like, or we creatively mix like with not-like, or find ways that things that seemed to be different actually have a lot in common. A computer, at its core, comes down to 1 versus 0.

Rashi and Ramban famously diverge in their interpretation of the words kedoshim tih’yu, “you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2). Rashi interprets kedusha as separation from other things, while Ramban emphasizes the likeness that results from this move: kadesh atzmecha b’mutar lach, sanctify yourself within that which is permitted to you. Both begin with the act of separation. But where Rashi sees the thrust of the command on separating not-holy from holy, Ramban puts more weight on unifying the holy with the holy. One emphasizes the power of difference, the other emphasizes the power of similarity.

We can’t escape the divisions that make up our lives. We are physical creatures, limited in space and time. We can’t be in two places, or two times, at once. We are always outside something. And yet we have moments when we can transcend reality, and imagine ourselves as occupying more than one space and more than one time, when we can be inside everything. Throughout his drashot, the Sefas Emes draws on Shabbat as the embodiment of this kind of transcendent consciousness: a day of unification, when we step outside the time and space that define the regular material world. Shabbos enables us, for a moment, to go beyond the question of membership, to go beyond the inside-outside dichotomy. It is the full expression of kedusha according to both Rashi and Ramban: a day apart that is actually a day when we come together, when we sense that we are part of an exclusive club, of which everyone is a member.

Shabbat shalom.

Advertisement for the 1928 opening gala at Yeshiva College.

Given that the 1920s marked the height of Jewish exclusion from university life, it is perhaps not coincidental that the 1920s witnessed both a major attempt to found a national Jewish university (a forerunner to Brandeis University, which would only be created in 1948) and the opening of Yeshiva College (in 1928). Zev Eleff’s 2011 article on a proposed national Jewish university highlights the possibilities and tensions inherent in the former idea: Proponents, most notably Louis Newman, argued that Jews needed an outstanding institution of higher education that would welcome them, just like their non-Jewish counterparts had. Eleff points out that Newman was inspired by the contemporaneous founding of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. But the idea found many detractors, most of whom argued that Newman’s proposed ‘Menorah University’ would be essentially throwing in the towel on the effort at joining the American mainstream—it was, in their words, un-American. Instead, they encouraged Jews to continue going to state universities.

Where Newman’s vision had its roots in the assimilationist narrative of late-19^th and early-20^th century Reform Judaism, Bernard Revel’s vision of Yeshiva College, which he first outlined in 1923, had its roots in the yeshiva world. Revel himself was an iluy, a child Talmudic prodigy, and upon his arrival in the United States he earned the first doctorate at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, writing about Philo.

(As an aside, it is fascinating that Philo was the subject of research not only for Revel, but also for Samuel Belkin, his successor at Yeshiva, and for Harry Wolfson, the first chair of Judaic Studies at Harvard. After World War II, Philo would not be as prominent a topic of research—Maimonides came to replace him as the model of integration between Western and traditional Jewish thought. My own theory of this is that one couldn’t easily write on Maimonides in the context of a basically Christian university, since knowledge of Maimonides requires Talmudic knowledge, which had been avoided in university life. Philo can be read as a Bible commentary through a Greek philosophic lens, and therefore was an acceptable topic in early-20^th century American academe. For several reasons, not least of which was the development of university Talmud scholarship, Maimonides could become the exemplar of synthesis, displacing Philo, after World War II. More on this later.)

Revel’s vision received similar critiques to those leveled against Newman’s idea—essentially that it was un-American to develop parochial education; but Revel was also attacked by traditionalists who saw the idea of Yeshiva College as leading on a dangerous path away from tradition. Yet the idea for Yeshiva College was initially a concession to reality: students at the Yeshivat Rabbi Yitzhak Elchanan (RIETS) needed to get college degrees in order to get decent jobs. Their choices were thus to attend night school or drop out of yeshiva. Revel himself had some loftier visions for what the institution could be, and invoked language of integration and synthesis, but largely he was alone in this effort, one of only a handful of men with deep Talmudic backgrounds and PhDs. With the founding of Yeshiva, he began to collect others who shared similar training and commitments, but it would be left to Samuel Belkin and the generation after World War II to make Yeshiva into a University and truly flesh out a vision of synthesis.