Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5770 (2009): Tomorrow

For an audio recording, click here.

How many of you are familiar with the children’s stories of Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel? Frog and Toad are favorites of my kids. I have a hunch that Lobel drew some of his inspiration for them from the stories of the city of Chelm in Jewish folklore. They are humorous and usually reveal a moral lesson by way of something a little bit absurd.

One of my favorite Frog and Toad stories is called ‘Tomorrow.’ It goes like this:

Toad woke up. “Drat,” he said. “This house is a mess. I have so much work to do.”

Frog looked through the window. “Toad, you are right,” said Frog. “It is a mess.”

Toad pulled the covers over his head. “I will do it tomorrow,” said Toad. “Today I will take life easy.”

Frog came into the house. “Toad,” said Frog, “your pants and jacket are lying on the floor.”

“Tomorrow,” said Toad from under the covers.

“Your kitchen sink is filled with dirty dishes,” said Frog.

“Tomorrow,” said Toad.

“There is dust on your chairs.”

“Tomorrow,” said Toad.

“Your windows need scrubbing,” said Frog. “Your plants need watering.”

“Tomorrow!” cried Toad. “I will do it all tomorrow!”

Toad sat on the edge of his bed.

“Blah,” said Toad. “I feel down in the dumps.”

“Why?” asked Frog.

“I am thinking about tomorrow,” said Toad.

 

Weddings, Music, and Fusion

Snapshots from a weekend:

1. This afternoon we attended a wedding of two Jews. Backyard, simple, classy. Casting straight out of a Hugh Grant movie. The ceremony was performed by a judge. Beforehand the mother of the groom explained how the couple had “personalized” their wedding–everything from the huppah to the food to the music was their concoction, with a little help here and there from parents. Sheva Brachot, the traditional seven nuptial blessings, were recited later on. There was a ketubah, though it took the form of vows rather than a traditional Jewish marriage contract. Lots of men wore kippot.  After the ceremony the couple “spent a few moments together in yichud,” or seclusion.

My mother in law asked me afterwards if it was a kosher wedding, and I responded that according to halakha it wasn’t–there was no point at which the groom gave the bride a ring and said, “With this ring you are consecrated to me according to the law of Moses and Israel” in front of two sabbath-observant witnesses; the ketubah was not technically a ketubah. Yet the fact remains that, in these times, this was a pretty Jewish wedding.

2. One of the relatives coming to the wedding relayed the following story: Her flight from New York was delayed on Friday for hours and hours. An Orthodox-looking woman and her child were to get on the flight, and were clearly getting worried about whether they would make it to their destination for Shabbos. They get on the plane when it’s time to board, and as they are taxiing to the runway, they realize that they won’t make it. They ask the flight attendant if they can be let off the plane. Amazingly, the flight attendant says yes. The plane taxis back to the terminal, they are allowed off the plane, their luggage is removed, and the plane now has to get back in line to take off. It adds an hour to the flight, which itself was not direct–many people missed connections.

 

Va-Etchanan: Helping Others Love God

The book of Deuteronomy is divided into essentially three main parts. The first, which we read in last week’s Torah portion and which concludes this week, is Moses’s opening speech, which mostly serves to remind the Israelites of their history–their journey through the desert, their lack of faith that resulted in that journey, and Moses’s own personal desire to enter the land of Israel which was unfulfilled by God. The second, and longest, portion of Deuteronomy begins in chapter 5 and lasts until chapter 26 (or 28, depending on how you group things), and mostly consists of the laws that Moses ‘reviews’ (though many of them have never been delivered before).

Logically, the law-giving section begins with a recapitulation of the Ten Commandments, the moment when God spoke “face to face” to the Israelites. The force of the law, its commanding power, emanates from the moment of Revelation, and therefore it makes perfect sense that Moses would begin his long legal discourse with an appeal to the touchstone from which all the rest of the laws flow.

What is fascinating, however, is what commandment comes first after the Ten Commandments. After all, these are to be the laws that people are to go over again and again “Mishneh Torah,” which Deuteronomy refers to itself as, can be translated as “second Torah” or “review of the Torah,” but if in fact most of these laws have not been stated in the Torah itself before, then perhaps the meaning of “Mishneh” is not from “Shnaim” — second– or “l’Shanot”–to review–but instead “l’Shanen,” to constantly repeat. (This point is well-made by Menachem Liebtag.) Thus the laws given here are ones the Israelites are to regularly review, the ones perhaps most essential to maintaining their character.

And which one is first? It may sound familiar: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your means. Adn these words that I commande you today shall be on your heart.” (Deut. 6:4-6) That is, the first commandment after the necessary repetition of the Sinaitic code is none other than the Shema, the passage we recite twice daily in order to relive the moment of Sinai and renew our acceptance of the commandments and our relationship with God.

One can infer that the rest of the commandments are to be done in light of, or in fulfillment, of this one. And indeed, this is the understanding offered by Abaye in the Talmud (which I quoted recently in another post): “Abaye explained: As it was taught: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God’ (Deut. 6:5) i.e., that the Name of Heaven be beloved because of you.” (Yoma 86a)

Moses’s reminder to us, which we repeat twice every day, is that living a life of Torah is meant to be a kiddush Hashem, to sanctify God’s name. As Abaye elaborates, to be Jewish means to live one’s life in such a way that people will look on you and say, “What a marvelous thing is Torah!” Or as Moses himself says in the parsha this week: “You must observe them diligently, for htis will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people.’” (Deut. 4:5)

Shabbat shalom.

 

Who Writes Our Scripts?

I spent yesterday in downtown Chicago at a Federation-sponsored training seminar on professional-volunteer relations (morning) and e-philanthropy (afternoon). I was one of the only people there who does not have a “standard” Federation job (and I don’t technically work for Federation, either–my paycheck comes from Hillel–but since Hillel in Illinois is an agency of Federation, I was eligible to attend). So I was a bit unprepared for what set off the chain of thoughts that led to this post.

The presenting issue was a discussion in the lay-pro session on “how much you script your volunteers.” In the Federation world, and I’m sure in other volunteer organizations, the professional staff writes the scripts for big speeches by volunteer leaders. The staff in the room yesterday were talking about how they will often script even the running of meetings (not all staff do this, by any means; it depends on the federation’s culture and the people involved).

To me, this was a pretty foreign concept. I don’t staff our “grownup” board, so I’m not intimately involved in the preparation for board meetings. My experience is with students, who would chafe at the idea of being scripted–and who I wouldn’t want to script. Unless, of course, it were something really important. So, for instance, we script student callers during phonathons (“Hi, my name is ____ and I’m calling from Fiedler Hillel…”).

The basic theory here is that you script someone when you want to have complete alignment with the organization’s language. This leads to efficiency (meetings don’t go off on useless tangents) and common words and ideas (everyone is talking about the same stuff in the same language).

Okay, so that was round 1. Round 2 came from the afternoon presentation on e-philanthropy, courtesy of BlueState Digital, the people who brought you Barack Obama’s web presence last year. The conversation was about how to raise supporters and money online, as the Obama team did so well last year ($550 million). The major ideas: Invite your supporters to contribute their stories, their words, their pictures–more than just their money. And segment, segment, segment: Make sure you speak to your supporters the way they want to be spoken to. (The Obama campaign had 300 different market segments that they sent different emails to. Unbelievable.)

The message here: Communication has to be two-way, not one-way. Sound a little different than the morning session?

So all this is swimming in my head as I listen to a story on NPR this morning about a guy making a video game about the battle of Falluja.

 

On1Foot

One of the great inefficiencies in Jewish education stems from the fact that so many of we educators have to labor intensively to put together new materials. We have to find sources, we ask our colleagues for curricula and lessons. It’s cumbersome and time consuming. For a long time now I’ve dreamed that someone–please!–would create a central database of curricula and sources, tagged and searchable. And lo and behold, my good friend Aaron Dorfman and his crack team at AJWS have come through. (Full disclosure: I’m on their advisory board.)

Introducing www.on1foot.org, a major accomplishment in Jewish life as far as I’m concerned. It will be worth watching who uses the site and how, and what impact it has. A welcome innovation.

 

The Jewish Virtues of Reading Aloud

A nice piece in yesterday’s NYT about the lost art of reading aloud. The guts:

It’s part of a pattern. Instead of making music at home, we listen to recordings of professional musicians. When people talk about the books they’ve heard, they’re often talking about the quality of the readers, who are usually professional. The way we listen to books has been de-socialized, stripped of context, which has the solitary virtue of being extremely convenient.

But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.

It almost goes without saying that Jewish reading is reading aloud. Likro, ‘to read’ in Hebrew, is also ‘to call out.’ We read aloud from the Torah in synagogue, and we study Jewish texts by reading them aloud to one another. And there’s this great little story from the Talmud: “Beruriah once met a student who was studying quietly. She kicked him, and taught him that one’s learning will be preserved only if he engages all of his limbs in it.” (Eruvin 53b-54a)

What I think is most salient about the NYT article is that silent reading, and listening to audio books is, at root, about convenience. It is definitely inconvenient to read in community, just as it is inconvenient to live in community–even with only a single other person. “Hell is other people,” according to Sartre. The minute another person enters our world, we have to communicate, negotiate, agree on meanings. What a pain in the ass. How inconvenient, and therefore how at odds with the world we’ve built for ourselves.

Community requires sacrifice. It requires work. It demands inconvenience. But the reward, of course, is a deeper existence in which, ironically, we actually know ourselves more deeply.

 

New Podcast on Passover and Play

I just recorded a new podcast (12 minutes and change) exploring the idea of play and playfulness and the Passover seder. It’s available here.

 

Freedom and the Value of the Humanities

In the last couple of weeks, more than one student has emailed me a link to this New York Times article about how the humanities are struggling to prove their worth in this recession. Over Shabbat I read two articles in the current issue of The New Republic that address the question, by the two Big Leons: Wieseltier and Botstein.

As usual, Leon Wieseltier is both pugnacious and stirring. Unsurprisingly, for the Literary Editor of TNR, he writes “In tough times, of all times, the worth of the humanities needs no justifying.” Of course not. Yet evidently they do, at least according to the NYT. And here Wieseltier does surprise, not so much for the eloquence of his defense, as for the inspiring spirit that animates it:

The reason is that it will take many kinds of sustenance to help people through these troubles. Many people will now have to fall back more on inner resources than on outer ones. They are in need of loans, but they are also in need of meanings. The external world is no longer a source of strength. The temper of one’s existence will therefore be significantly determined by one’s attitude toward circumstance, its cruelties and its caprices. Poor people and hounded people have always known this, but now the middle class is getting its schooling in stoicism. After all, bourgeois life was devised as an insulation against physical and social vulnerabilities, as a system of protections and privileges secured honestly by work; but the insulation is ripping and the protections are vanishing. We are in need of fiscal policy and spiritual policy. And spiritually speaking, literature is a bailout, and so is art, and philosophy, and history, and the rest. These are assets in which we may all hold majority ownership; assets of which we cannot be stripped, except by ourselves. I do not mean to be too sentimental about the humanities as they are conducted in the American academy: just yesterday there arrived from the press of a distinguished university the galleys of a book called Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, written by the director of a humanities center at another university. That is not what Erich Auerbach had in mind. Still, what ails the humanities is not as egregious as the assault on them. Regression analysis will not get us through the long night. We need to know more about the human heart than the study of consumer behavior can teach. These are the hours when the old Penguin paperbacks must stand us in good stead. It was for now that we read them then.

This is a powerful argument, because Wieseltier sidesteps the question of financial efficacy, and instead reminds us of the other kinds of resources necessary to get through a depression. This is precisely the moment when the humanities are most valuable, because we are reminded of other frames of determining value besides money.

In the same issue, Leon Botstein–president of Bard College, educational theorist, orchestra conductor–writes about the commencement exercises for a degree-granting program Bard runs in an eastern New York prison. Sixteen students studied traditional liberal arts, including literature, philosophy, history, and mathematics. In a similar vein to Wieseltier, Botstein draws out the implications of his program for the rest of us:

What really moved me and my Bard colleagues to tears as we listened to the words of the four representatives of the Class of 2009 was the recognition of how weak the love of learning is among those for whom the privilege of moving seamlessly from high school into college is taken for granted. Why can we not engender the same motivation and attachment to a life of the mind when there are few real constraints on our students? In these times of economic distress, there is ever more skepticism about the utility of fields of study in the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences, which appear to have no immediate practical benefits. But, in the prisoners in Bard’s program, we saw something we rarely see on our own campuses: recognition of the deep value of the pursuit of inquiry for its own sake.

As we approach Passover on the Jewish calendar, and our thoughts turn to freedom, I am reminded in reading both of these pieces of the importance of the link between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot. While many many Jews celebrate Passover and the freedom it commemorates, far fewer observe Shavuot and the giving of the Torah that it commemorates. The freedom of Passover is incomplete without the commitment to a way of life of goodness and meaning. Somehow, seemingly in the absence of freedom, the prisoners educated by Botstein discovered meaning and the deeper freedom that many of us on the outside–who have the chance to participate in politics and society and the economy–fail to grasp. At Passover we praise God as the One who “took us out from servitude to freedom, from mourning to great joy.” Both the economy and the prisoners of Botstein’s story remind us that true freedom and true joy come from sources within.

 

Mishpatim: It’s in the Details

The Torah portion of Mishpatim represents a striking change from everything we have read in the Torah up until this point. With few exceptions, the Torah up until now has focused exclusively on telling a story. But beginning with Parshat Mishpatim, the Torah will begin to focus on law. In fact, there are no less than 55 different laws related in this Torah portion, with entire sections of the Talmud based on the verses we read this week.

This focus on law is one of the key distinguishing features of Judaism. (Parenthetically, it is one of the things that makes Judaism more akin to Islam than to Christianity, as both Judaism and Islam create widely-deployed legal systems–halakha and sharia, respectively–through textual exegesis.) Even among those movements within Judaism that reject a strict approach to halakha, the emphasis on legal thinking remains important.

Why law?

The short answer is that Judaism holds that details matter. It’s not enough to have good intentions. Rather, according to the Torah, our actions are ultimately more important. While good intentions can help to mitigate the severity of bad actions, in the end it’s the deed, and not the thought, that counts.

But more than this, law is the mechanism by which we make our beliefs real. Just last week we read about the Revelation at Sinai. The encounter with God is perhaps the show-stopping scene in the entire Torah. And yet we don’t stop the show there. We keep reading, because it’s not enough for us simply to have had an experience of the divine. The Torah mandates that we take the energy and power of that moment and repair and redeem the world. That’s work. It means being meticulous and thorough in all aspects of our lives, something brought about through a legal system.

We don’t always measure up, of course. For me this week, like any week, has involved apologies for ways in which I failed to perfect the details. Yet the Torah’s point in this effusion of law just after the theophany at Sinai is to inspire us to keep going, to always seek improvement in the minutia of our daily actions. Through that thoroughness we can bring about a repaired and redeemed world.

Shabbat shalom.

 

Yitro: The Beauty of Pardox

The highlight of the Torah reading of Yitro is the Revelation at Mount Sinai. Chapters 19 and 20 of Exodus, which narrate the story of the revelation, are some of the most mysterious and difficult of the entire Torah. What makes these chapters particularly challenging are the paradoxical motions of their words: it becomes unclear who is speaking when and what precisely is happening.

One good example of this is Exodus 20:14, which begins with the words, “And all the people saw the sounds.” Rashi comments that at the moment of revelation, the normal laws of nature itself were suspended, and one could see sound, and hear visions.

The Talmud glosses Ex. 19:19, “Moses would speak, and God answered him in a voice,” by asking, “What voice did God use to answer Moses? Moses’s own voice.” Similarly, the midrash relates that all the people heard the same thing, but heard it in the voice that was appropriate to them: Old people heard the voice of old people, babies heard the voice of babies, and so on.

On more than one occasion I have heard people criticize these chapters, arguing that they are good evidence of why the Torah needed a better editor. Yet, as Prof. Benjamin Sommer of the Jewish Theological Seminar (formerly of Northwestern) has described, the contradictory and paradoxical motions of the Torah’s narration are intentional. Paradox is the point. (Or, as a teacher of mine used to say, ‘It’s religion, it’s supposed to be spooky.’)

The moment of revelation is one that of necessity defies the ability of language, and even the human capacity of understanding. That doesn’t mean we can’t catch glimpses of it. The beauty of being human is our ability to occasionally ascend the heights, and sense what lies beyond the plain facts of the material world.

These are the moments of what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called Radical Amazement. They may come to us when we experience a profound moment of artistic genius, a poem that resounds in our souls, or beholding the miracles of God’s creation. These moments are a shadow of the moment at Sinai, the moments when life is made meaningful and we engage our deepest capacities as spiritual beings. They are moments beyond language, moments of paradox and beauty.

Shabbat shalom.