Reb Jeff

Tetzaveh: Games of Chance

2/28/2012

This week's Torah portion (Tetzaveh) includes a description of a strange pair of objects used by the ancient Israelites as tools of divination. The Urim and Tumim were kept in the breastplate worn by the High Priest, and, it appears, he used them to discover things seen only by God.

The idea of having a window that allows human beings to peek into the mind of God may make us feel both curious and wary. It seems that the Hebrew Bible itself also has mixed feelings about using games of chance to reveal the divine.

At the center of the seal of Yale University are two Hebrew words, "Urim and Tumim." these are the names of the oracular devices used by the High Priest of Israel to discover the will of God. There is an interpretive tradition of associating the words with "light and purity," hence the Latin phrase, Lux et Veritas, "Light and Truth."

The Torah says, "You shall place inside the breastplate of judgment the Urim and Tumim and they shall be over Aaron’s heart whenever he comes before Adonai. Thus, Aaron shall carry the judgment of the Israelites over his heart before Adonai always" (Exodus 28:30).

A passage in the book of Samuel shows the Urim and Tumim in action. When King Saul believed that a member of the Israelite army had committed a sin that removed God's favor, he used the Tumim to discover who was at fault. The text says that Saul separated himself and his son Jonathan from the troops and used the Tumim to determine whether the fault was with Jonathan or the rest of the army. The Tumim showed that it was Jonathan who had sinned. He then confessed his actions (I Samuel 14:41).

The idea of using special objects as oracles to divine secret knowledge existed in many cultures of the ancient world. Think of the Urim and Tumim as a special pair of dice that a king or high priest could throw to determine a propitious date for attacking an enemy or discovering a source of divine disfavor. The Urim and Tumim were instruments of selection that helped their user discover meaning and sense in a world of seeming chaos and uncertainty.

In that respect, the Urim and Tumim are rather like the Torah itself. They were a guide to finding a right path in a world that seems to be all wilderness.

The lovely irony is that, during the very time of year when we read about the Urim and Tumim in the Torah, their exact counterpart appears in an upcoming holiday. Purim, of course, is the holiday named for pur, the selection tool used by the evil Haman to discover the date for the destruction of the Jews. The book of Esther tells how, "In the first month, the month of Nisan, in the twelfth year of King Achashveirosh, pur (which means 'the lot') was cast before Haman concerning every day and every month, until it fell on the twelfth month, the month of Adar" (Esther 3:7).

In the Purim story, Haman's use of the pur is a kind of inside joke. Haman is depicted as an evil and superstitious man who denies God. He believes in a universe without rules that is governed only by strength and power, not by ethics or righteous divinity. His reliance on the pur is a statement about his allegiance to a random universe.

The joke is that, when Haman casts the pur, the date revealed—seemingly by chance—is nearly the last possible day on the calendar. Nisan is the first month of the year; Adar is the last. Poor Haman cast his dice on New Years Day to find out when he would realize his dream. The dice landed on the equivalent of December 15th. Haman would have to wait eleven and a half months—plenty of time for his intended victims to discover his plan and prepare their defense.

The book of Esther, famously, is the only book of the Hebrew Bible that does not contain the name of God. Yet, God's presence is felt everywhere in it. God appears as the unnamed source of strange coincidences that show a higher power at work against the forces that worship only human might.

The relationship between the Urim and Tumim, on one side, and the pur, on the other, is paradoxical. Both appear to be instruments of random selection, but their meaning is opposite. Haman selected his date with a pur because he believed in chaos. A random selection device, according to this view, would reflect the nature of a random universe. The high priests and kings of Israel, on the other hand, used the Urim and Tumim because they believed in an underlying order hidden beneath the seeming disorder of reality. This device that freely chooses among options, to them, would have been like a compass that points to the true north of God's will, revealing the hidden pulse of God's magnetic field of meaning.

What do you believe? Do you, at a fundamental level, believe that there are reasons and purposes within the universe that usually are hidden beyond the reach of our senses? Or, do you believe that your presence in the world is just the product of a long series of meaningless coincidences? Either position can be defended, yet it is difficult to see how both can be true.

Shall you choose one or leave it to chance?

Other Posts on This Topic:
Tetzaveh: Keeping the Fire Burning
Ekev: Deuteronomy vs. Job

Doug Cotler and the Joy of Musical Assimilation

2/26/2012

The wonderful Doug Cotler performed at our congregation's religious school this morning for about 130 of our children and adults. If you have a chance to hear him, don't miss him. He is a delight.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Doug's presentation was the way he showed how Jewish music has adopted the styles of its surrounding cultures. We have an endless parade of melodies ("David Melech Yisrael," "Dayeinu," "Siman Tov," etc.) that are lifted from Russian folk tunes. Amusingly, he calls these the "Chamber of Horas." We have other songs ("Ein K'Eiloheinu" and "Ma'oz Tzur," among many others) that sound suspiciously like German drinking songs. He even showed how contemporary favorites, like Dan Freelander and Jeff Klepper's "Shalom Rav," are inspired by the sound of Sixties folk rock. You can hear John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane" nestled in the chords.

I think there is an important lesson here for Judaism in general. People sometimes claim that the secret of Jewish survival has been our ability to resist cultural assimilation. I think that the opposite sometimes is also true. Jews have flourished when they have used the contemporary culture as a cue for innovation and creativity. As if to respond to this observation, Doug Cotler finished his concert today with a rap-inspired Purim song. Judaism often finds its greatest joy in being a sponge for different cultures, not a fortress against them.

Other Posts on This Topic:
What is Chanukah?
Superb Worship

"When Adar enters, we increase joy"

2/24/2012

Today is the first day of the Hebrew month of Adar, the month in which the joyful holiday of Purim occurs. According to a famous quote from the Talmud, "Mishenichnas Adar marbin b'simchah," "When Adar enters, we increase joy" (B. Ta'anit 29a). Since this is a blog about Jewish joy, I cannot really let the occasion pass without comment, can I?

An inspection of the passage in the Talmud reveals that the rabbis weren't really talking about the joy of Purim. Rather, they were talking about the misery of a different holy day—Tisha B'Av, the darkest day of the Jewish year, the day that marks the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

After a long discussion that details all of the woes of Tisha B'Av, the Ninth Day of Av, the rabbis state, "When Av enters, joy decreases." It is only as an apparent afterthought that "Rav Yehudah, the son of Rav Shmuel bar Shilat said in the name of Rav, 'Just as when Av enters, we decrease joy, thus when Adar enters we increase joy.'"

This statement is immediately followed by a comment about luck. The mazal (luck) is better in Adar than it is in Av. Adar is a much better time for you to enter risky endeavors, says the Talmud, "to give you a future and a hope" (Jeremiah 29:11).

Now, once the Talmud gets rolling with biblical quotations, it just cannot help itself from continuing with the interpretations. I won't go into all of the details, but the Talmud then goes on to compare the phrase "future and hope" to the values of living a simple, pastoral life. Hopefulness is the product of living with the smell of apple orchards in your nose and the feel of durable work clothes on your back. Av is associated with the destruction of cities. Adar is associated with the simple joys of living off the land.

This is a much different idea of the joy of Adar than what we usually think. When we think of Adar, we think of the silliness and over-the-top merriment of Purim. The quote from the Talmud that associates Adar with joy, though, has a different image in mind. It is the joy of the worker in the field, far away from the hustle, bustle and squabbling of the city. It is not the joy of drunken revelry. It is the joy of having a future and a hope.

We are entering springtime, or at least (depending on your latitude) we are entering the first whispers of spring in our ears. It is a time for renewing our sense of hope for warm days and plentiful harvests to come. It is the season of the deep joy of satisfaction, the season of cycles that renew themselves without our help or intervention. When Adar enters, we increase in joy. We increase in our sense of wellbeing in the world and the sense that, through simplicity, we discover the things that matter most in life.

Rosh chodesh tov! May you have a good month of Adar!

Other Posts on This Topic:
Joy and Obligation

Thoughts on Torah, Redemption and Spring Training

2/22/2012

Catchers and pitchers reported this week to spring training camps in baseball's annual ritual of renewal. Nothing can be wrong in the world when the smell of hot dogs and cut grass fills the nostrils and the sound of leather balls popping on leather gloves fills the ears. If baseball were a Jewish rite, spring training would be "Modeh Ani," a blessing of gratitude for returning from the long slumber.

Of course, it is hard to ignore the fact that there is plenty wrong in the world. The European economy has everyone on tenterhooks. Syria is a daily massacre. Iran shows no sign of slowing its drive toward nuclear weapons. The world is a holy mess. The indulgence of baseball seems out of place.

But there is also something Jewish about celebrations in the midst of hardship. In a few weeks, we will celebrate Purim, the holiday of festive rejoicing that emerges from a tale of ethnic cleansing. A few weeks beyond that, we will begin a new holiday cycle with Pesach and celebrate freedom while we eat the bread of affliction. There is something about the Jewish character that is always seeking redemption in the midst of misery, and, perhaps, we also look to spot the suffering hidden within joy.

For me, spring training is a hint of moshiach-zeit, the coming of the messianic age. The agonies of last year's failures fade into the background. (I am a Boston Red Sox fan). The promises of a new season fill the heart. As of yet, the dire predictions are only predictions. The players who report late because of injuries and the players who fumble through press conferences are just sideshows on the way to the great revelation which is Opening Day.

This is a useful form of cognitive dissonance. We need to forget the past in order to enter the future. We need the hope of a clean slate. If last month's Tu BiShvat was the Rosh Hashanah of the trees, the opening of training camps is the Yom Kippur of the mitts, bats and spikes. It heals us, cleanses us, and prepares us for a world that is not yet.

Play ball.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Why Torah is Like Baseball
The Tebow Effect

Terumah: What to Give the God Who Has Everything

2/20/2012

As I mentioned yesterday, this week's Torah portion (Terumah) opens with God describing to Moses the gifts that the Israelites should bring for the construction of the Mishkan. The portion opens, "Adonai spoke to Moses, 'Tell the Israelites to bring Me a gift; from every person who has a willing heart, bring My gifts.'" (Exodus 25:1-2).

There's a problem with this passage. How can anyone give a gift to God who is "koneh shamayim va-aretz," "The Possessor of heaven and the earth" (Genesis 14:19)? What do we truly posses that is not God's already? What does one give to the deity who has everything?

There is a possible answer to this question in rabbinic tradition. In the Talmud, Rabbi Haninah says, "Everything is in the hand of Heaven except for the fear (or, 'awe') of heaven" (B. Berachot 33b). The teaching is understood to be a statement about free will. God does indeed have control over all of space and time, yet God gives us the ability to make our own choices. We can choose to act with a reverent heart, or we can defy our own conscience and act as if there were no ethical constraints.

Our conscience and the conscious decisions we make are all we have to call our own. We have nothing to offer to God but our own willing hearts. The choices we make in life are the gold, silver and copper we bring up to God.

If the wise choices we make are the material that builds the Mishkan, the place where God presence dwells on earth, those choices are the very purpose of life. In the Tanya, the great work of early chasidic philosophy, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi states, "This is what humanity is all about. This is the purpose of God's creation and of the creation of all the worlds, higher and lower—that there be made for God a dwelling in the lower realms."

Other Posts on This Topic:
Shemot: Midwives, Morality and MeaningFearing God

Mishpatim: The Purpose of the Torah

2/17/2012

This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Beit HaYam.

We often think of the Torah as a storybook. It tells us the story of God creating the world, forming a covenant with the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and, through Moses, leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness for forty years until they reached the land of Israel. The Torah is the book that tells us our story.

That’s true. Yet, the Torah is a great deal more than storytelling. The Torah also is a book of mitzvot, commandments. In fact, Jewish tradition often puts more emphasis on the laws of the Torah than on those stories we learned as children. Torah, according to the rabbis, is primarily about the mitzvot.

This week's Torah portion is called Mishpatim, which means “laws.” It appears immediately after the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai and it contains more than fifty specific mitzvot ranging from the ritual, to the ethical, to the inexplicable.

For example, this week’s portion contains mitzvot for the ritual observances of Shabbat and the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Sukkot and Shavuot. It commands that we eat only unleavened bread for the seven days of Passover and that we stop working on Shabbat and take time to rest.

The portion also has some well known ethical mitzvot: the prohibitions against bribery, gossip, bestiality, giving false testimony, and mistreating widows and orphans. It contains the requirement to provide food for the needy. It includes the most often repeated mitzvah in the entire Torah: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). Good rules, all of those.

In the category of mitzvot that are “inexplicable” (or, at least, difficult to understand in the modern world), this week’s Torah portion commands that Hebrew slaves who refuse to be set free at the end of their term of service must have their ears pierced with an awl and remain slaves for life. It commands that a man who seduces a virgin must marry her. It also commands that children who insult their parents must be put to death. (Well, maybe that last one’s not so bad.)

There is no distinction made in the Torah between the different types of mitzvot. The ethical mitzvot, the criminal mitzvot, the ritual mitzvot, the sensible mitzvot and the inexplicable mitzvot, all are given together as one. God says that we are expected to observe them all.

This raises a problem for contemporary Jews. We are impressed by the wisdom of the ethical laws and feel their weight upon us. Even if we are sometimes tempted to gossip, we recognize the harm that gossip does and we recognize that this mitzvah makes sense for living a better life.

We also acknowledge that the ritual laws are important, but most of us think of them differently. We know how lighting Shabbat candles, for example, helps us preserve continuity with our ancestors and keeps alive the collective memory of our people. Yet, most of us probably do not feel that rituals are as critical as ethical laws. Lighting Shabbat candles every week just doesn’t feel like it carries the same weight as refraining from bribery and mistreating widows and orphans.

Mitzvot of the third category—those that make little sense to us—may not inspire any obligation in us. None of us will be looking this weekend for an awl to pierce the ears of our slaves. Those mitzvot that offend us, like the commandment to put a child to death for insulting his or her parents, should make us feel an obligation to reject them.

We want to sort the mitzvot into categories to know which are important, which are critical, which we consider, and which we reject. We want to pick and choose. Yet, the Torah does not admit a distinction. The mitzvot are the mitzvot. They are what God expects us to do.

How do we deal with that?

In the early decades of American Reform Judaism, the movement’s leaders attempted to answer that question by explicitly stating that the standards had changed. They wrote in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885:

We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.

Since the times of the Pittsburgh Platform, the Reform Movement has backed away from such a bald rejection of some parts of the Torah. We have slowly tried to find a balance between the concerns of the modern age that rejects the irrational, and the concerns of Jewish faith that hears the Torah as divinely inspired, transcendent beyond the passing tastes and preferences of our times. If Torah is holy, we must be willing to hear it even when it seems difficult or out of step with our times.

There is nothing new about this. Parts of the Torah were also a challenge to the ancient rabbis. You don’t like the way the Torah allows masters to treat their slaves? Neither did the sages of the Talmud. However, rather than just saying that the Torah was wrong, the rabbis used the power of interpretation to find deeper meaning in the Torah.

According to the Talmud, there is a hidden message in the mitzvah to pierce the ear of the slave who refuses freedom. The Torah says that this slave believes “tov lo imach” (Deuteronomy 15:16). The simplest reading of the phrase is “it is good for him to be with you,” meaning that the slave says he is happy to be your servant. However, the Hebrew could also be read to mean, “It is as good for him as it is for you.” The Talmud jumps to this reading and states that a Hebrew slave must be treated as his master’s equal—as good for him as it is for you. The rabbis say a Hebrew slave must be fed the same food as his master and given a feather bed like his master’s bed. They conclude from this that, “When you buy a Hebrew slave, it is like buying yourself a master” (B. Kiddushin 22a).

What at first seemed like a law for turning temporary slaves into a permanent slaves is actually, according to the rabbis, a spiritual lesson about the price we pay when we force or coerce others to do our will. The price of enslaving others is that we become slaves ourselves.

This is not just gamesmanship, flipping around the words of the Torah to get it to say whatever we want it to say. It is, rather, an act of love. The rabbis loved the Torah so much that they struggled to find meaning in it, even in the places where it seems harsh or difficult.

We do the same thing with the people we love. When you love someone who has a difficult personality, you take extra pains to know that person more deeply, to understand the experiences that have shaped him or her so you can respond compassionately and with forgiveness, even when that person is being difficult. The Torah is like that, too. It was raised in an age when slavery was common, when men had tremendous power over women, and when most people had little control over their destiny. The Torah is shaped by those experiences. Because the rabbis loved the Torah, they probed it deeply to understand it and to read it compassionately as a text that brings deeper spirituality and meaning into life.

In our own day, we continue the process of interpreting the Torah. We don’t need to reject Torah to deal with its difficulties. In fact, we embrace the idea that Torah should be difficult. It should challenge us to find meaning in our lives. Life, we know, is not easy and we need to learn how to negotiate life’s challenges and hardships while maintaining our ability to find joy in it.

The purpose of the Torah is not to instruct us in what to do and what not to do. The purpose of the Torah is to force us to be mindful about what we are doing and to hold it up to a standard that does not originate out of our own heads. The Torah is about disciplining ourselves to recognize that our lives belong to something greater than ourselves, and to make us aware that the choices we make in life reflect that truth.

Rather than thinking of the Torah’s mitzvot as a kind of check list of things we have to do to please God (and things we have to refrain from doing), think of them instead as part of a conversation we are having with God. Like a good teacher, Torah does not want us to just memorize facts that will be on the test. Torah wants us to consider what we are doing, learn to assess our actions against our values, to find new meaning in our lives by brightening our spiritual dimension, and deepening our relationship with God by continuing the conversation.

We don’t need to reject parts of the Torah, as the Pittsburgh Platform sought to do. We need to redefine it.

The Torah is a the book of wisdom that God gave us as a wedding gift on the day we were married at Mount Sinai. It is a book that wants to be read joyfully. It wants to be read actively, so the reader will draw upon his or her own experience and wisdom to interpret it. It wants us to linger over each phrase to discover hidden treasures that help us to understand ourselves more deeply, even in the difficult parts. Torah gives us mitzvot, not to enslave us to a legal code, but to free us to discover who we really are.

In this way, we discover the real reason why there are no distinctions in the Torah between the ethical, the ritual, the sensible and the inscrutable. All the mitzvot are there for us to savor and consider, to awaken us and to prepare us every day for the journey of life. The Torah is the song we sing, and the mitzvot are the path we walk, as we travel toward our purpose.

Shabbat shalom.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Chukat: The Reason for the Red Cow
Bechukotai: Being Commanded, Choosing Joy

Mishpatim

2/15/2012

Mishpatim
(Exodus 21-24)

Rules for eating matzah and
Rules for loving strangers
Stand beside the return of lost oxen,
Seducers who must marry maidens, and
A teenager stoned for calling her mom, "Bitch."

The legal jumble wants to be sorted
Like a box of samples and scraps.
What is cherished, what discarded,
What left-overs are sewn into my
Patchwork acceptance of the yoke?

When I carelessly cut selvage
While trimming ancient offense
Fraying edges mock my rebellion.
How I hate it when they ask,
"Did you get that pattern from a book?"

The way the quilt looks from a distance
Is governed by details up close.
When the smallest intentions
Turns accident into murder
We best be careful of the stitch work.

I attend to rules for bringing offerings
And rules for pressing seams
With loyalty, finesse and holy dread.
My ear is pierced for loving too dearly
My service to reclaiming this text.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Joy and Obligation

On Contraception, Religious Freedom and Joy

2/13/2012

There is a political fracas brewing this week about a rule announced by the Obama administration that requires most employers to offer free contraceptive services in their employees' health plans. What's so controversial about that? No one is required to use contraceptives under this rule. It just says that the services have to be made available.

The problem, as you probably know, is that the Roman Catholic church opposes the use of contraceptives and Catholic institutions employ a lot of people. As the rule was announced originally, actual churches would have been exempt from the mandate, but Catholic universities, hospitals and charities would not have been exempt. Under the original rule, they would have had to pay for contraceptive services, despite their religious objections.

American Catholic bishops were furious about this. They said that the rule went too far. They said that it violated the religious freedoms of people who are opposed to birth control. Why should they have to pay for something that they oppose?

Eventually, the Obama administration sought to minimize the damage caused by the uproar. They changed the rule so that religious organizations that object to birth control would not have to pay for contraceptives. Instead, the cost burden in such cases has been transferred to insurance companies. Employees who want birth control can get it and religious institutions that are opposed to birth control don't have to pay for it. That should solve the problem, right?

Apparently not. Some people, and not all of them Roman Catholics, want to keep the controversy going—a few for religious reasons, but most of them to score political points. (If you hadn't noticed, it's an election year.) The new claim is that no employer who objects to contraception for religious reasons should be required to offer birth control to their employees, even if they don't have to pay for it, even if their employees do not share their religious beliefs. Now who's going too far? Now who's infringing on religious freedoms?

And what on earth does any of this have to do with living a joyful Jewish life? (Which is, you know, the point of this blog).

The whole rhetoric of "religious freedom" in this country has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. It is deeply troubling to me as a religious person who values my freedom of religion. It is deeply troubling to my sense of what society owes me as a religious person, and what my obligations are to society.

We live in an era when religious freedom is equated with the idea that nobody should ever be asked to step outside the comfort zone of his or her own religious beliefs. No one should be asked to respect the beliefs of another person when those beliefs conflict with his or her own. That is not what religious freedom used to mean.

Jews are very well acquainted with what it used to mean to be deprived of religious freedom. It meant that you were not allowed to practice, or even believe, in your religion. It meant that you were not allowed to own land or practice certain professions without renouncing your religion. It meant that the state could coerce you to abandon your own religious beliefs and practices and adopt those of the majority religion.

That is not what is happening in the contraception controversy. No one is telling anyone that they must pay a penalty for observing the strictures of their faith. The objection to the contraception rule seems to be that it deprives employers of the right to coerce their religious beliefs upon their employees. That's not right. If we are going to be one society, we must care about the needs of people who think differently than we do.

Jewish tradition states clearly that communities have an obligation to care for the sick and to minister to each person's health. Whether you like it or not (put me in the "not" category), our society has decided to fulfill that obligation through a system of employer-based insurance plans. That means that society, primarily through employers, takes care of people's health, regardless of whether we share the same opinions, beliefs or religion. We don't put an asterisk on some healthcare services and say, in effect, "We will deny you this service because, as your employer, we can force our beliefs on you."

Freedom of religion does not convey the right to opt out of any social contract that involves something we don't endorse for ourselves. Can a Muslim employer refuse to provide lunch breaks for employees during the month of Ramadan? Can a Jewish health commissioner refuse to inspect non-kosher restaurants? Of course not. We live in a pluralistic society. It's time we stop pretending that we can ignore the needs of people with whom we disagree. We all need each other and our obligations to each other do not end at the boundaries of our own cannon law.

This is not just about Catholics or about Christians. There is no way to be a joyful member of your religion—any religion—if you use your beliefs as a weapon to deny other people the free exercise of their rights and beliefs. There is nothing joyful about coercion. (And, yes, I am also talking about those orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel who think it is their God-given right to impose their version of Judaism on the non-orthodox). To be a joyful Jew means to enter into a partnership with all humanity. It means to recognize that our differences with others do not have to make them our enemies.

We can rejoice in taking care of our neighbors without expecting them to knuckle under our way of thinking. We should remember that, if we do, we not only subvert their ability to live a joyful life, we subvert our own.

Other Posts on This Topic:
The Torah and the Constitution
What is Chanukah?

Mishpatim: Near and Far

2/11/2012

Where is God? Is God right here, with us and all around us? Or, is God distant from us, entirely removed from our perceptions and our capacity to understand?

Like Grover, the fuzzy blue monster of Sesame Street, we are befuddled by a simple question of "near" and "far." We want, simultaneously, to know God as an intimate experience and also to sense God as the infinite and ultimate power beyond our understanding. Which is it?

In this week's Torah portion, Mishpatim, there is a strange encounter between God and the elders of Israel. On the surface, the story suggests that there was a banquet at which God sat down with the Israelites: "They saw the God of Israel. Under God's feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. Yet God did not raise a hand against the leaders of the Israelites. They beheld God, and they ate and drank" (Exodus 24:10-11). It appears to be the most intimate possible meeting with God. They saw and had a meal together with God. You can't get much nearer than that.

Interestingly, though, the story is introduced by a statement of distance. Before the gathering, God instructs Moses, "Come up to Adonai, with Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, and seventy elders of Israel, and bow low from afar. Moses alone shall come near Adonai, but the others shall not come near, nor shall the people come up with him.” (Exodus 24:1). Why should there be all of this emphasis on the elders keeping their distance when they are about to have afternoon tea at the same table as the Holy One of Blessing?

It's the whole near and far thing. One cannot exist without the other. We need to be able to think of God as being the grounding source of all reality that is far beyond our ability to fathom. No other kind of God would be equal to the awe we experience when we consider the grandeur and immensity of creation and our tiny place within it. We need to be able to think of God as being our intimate partner who cares for us and enters our lives. No other kind of God would be equal to the inner peace and equanimity we experience when we know ourselves to be touched by divinity, loved and forgiven.

We each need to "bow low from afar," to reach deep into our selves and far beyond ourselves at the same time. We need God to be both near and far.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Fearing God

Evolution Shabbat

2/10/2012

This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Beit HaYam in Stuart, Florida, for the Shabbat of Evolution Weekend.

Tonight we begin Shabbat Yitro. This is the Shabbat on which we read the the story of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai—perhaps the signature moment of divine revelation in all of Western civilization. You’ve seen the movie. Moses goes up to the top of the mountain and God descends from the heavens to meet him. God speaks the words and all of Israel are witnesses. The Torah of God is revealed to Israel and to all humanity.

It is a moment we re-experience whenever we read Torah at any service. We lift the Torah scroll, and we sing,

וזאת התורה אשר שם משה לפני בני ישראל על פי יי ביד משה!

“This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses!”

Revelation is an idea at the heart of Judaism. We make the extraordinary and, perhaps, scandalous claim that we possess truths written in the Torah that are incontrovertible because our ancestors saw and heard them delivered directly from God.

It’s an idea that we struggle with, for we live in an age of science. We have learned that we gain understanding of the world around us by observation, by forming theories that explain how the world works, and by testing those theories through experimentation.

We live in an age of science, and science has brought unmistakable marvels. We live longer, healthier lives through science. We enjoy conveniences and we do wonders through science—like creating the internet and phones that are smarter than we are. With science, we build skyscrapers, supersonic jets, and we launch probes that travel through the solar system.

On the other hand, it is easy for us to ignore that there are truths that are outside of the realm of science. No scientific investigation, for example, could inform us of the truth that caring for people in need is the right thing to do, regardless of whether we benefit from it. No scientific theory could tell us that harming innocent people without cause is fundamentally wrong, not just because of the negative impact it has on individuals and society, but because it is evil. To understand morality as something that originates beyond human choices and circumstances, to see it as part of the fabric of our reality, we need the idea of revelation. We need the idea that there are some things that we know to be true, not because of material evidence, but because we come to recognize their wisdom in an ongoing process of revelation.

Our need for revealed truths is not limited to the realm of morality, either. For example, we know that science can shed light on the relationship between parents and children, and it can teach us something about successful parenting techniques. But, even science cannot displace the role of the heart in the way we love our children, help them to learn and develop, and the way we suffer when we see them grow up and leave us. Science can teach us about the chemical composition of the hormones that flow through you when you fall in love and their effects on heartbeat, respiration and appetite. But science can never really teach you what it feels like to be with the person you love, or how you feel heartbroken when you miss that person. Science teaches what a human being is. Torah teaches us what a human being is for, and how to be a human being.

וזאת התורה אשר שם משה לפני בני ישראל על פי יי ביד משה!

“This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses!”

It is ironic that this year the Shabbat on which we read the story of the revelation on Mount Sinai is also the Shabbat that falls closest to the birthday of Charles Darwin. Sunday, February 12, will be the 203rd birthday of the father of the modern theory of evolution—the guy that all of the so-called biblical literalists love to hate for his theory that all life on earth has a common origin and that through a process of competition and natural selection, the great variety of life developed into the species we see today.

The irony, for me, is not that Darwin and Sinai are incompatible with one another—just the opposite. For me, the delicious coincidence is that we have these two complementary views of the world packaged together in such a short amount of time. This is the way that Jews, traditionally, have viewed the relationship between science and faith—a partnership in which each can learn from the other.

Jewish tradition calls on us to be careful observers of the natural world and to use the power of our minds to discover its secrets. Moses Maimonides, known in Jewish tradition as the Rambam, was one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages and also a great Jewish legalist. He wrote that since God gave human beings minds that can reason, it is our obligation to use our abilities to discover scientific truths about the natural world. The Rambam went further to say that if truths proven by science appear to contradict Torah, we have an obligation to try to understand these natural truths more deeply, or to adjust our interpretation of Torah to allow for them.

Sometimes, people who are steeped in the scientific way of looking at the world reject religion because they notice that, when taken at face value, the Torah and other sacred texts cannot be reconciled with science. How is it possible for the world to have been created in six days, they ask, when science can show that it took billions of years? Such a reading of our scriptures misses the point entirely. The Bible was never meant to be read as a scientific text book. You wouldn’t reject Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”—because it is impossible for a person to be “a summer’s day.” The poem, of course, speaks truth through metaphor, and that is what the Torah does, too. It instructs us with fantastic stories and poetry that open our minds to life’s challenges and pitfalls, and Torah uses law and legend to inspire us to reach for our highest aspirations.

Ironically, some religious thinkers make the same mistake as the scientific skeptics by reading sacred texts as if they contain factual information about the physical structure of the universe. They see the teaching of evolution as a threat to religion because they want to read the Bible as the only source of knowledge about how we got here. Charles Darwin himself may have felt that threat and delayed publishing his theory of evolution because he feared it would offend religious sensibilities and the pious convictions of his own wife. More than 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the controversy remains. Yet, it is my belief that people who see the theories of Darwin as a threat to the words of Genesis, don’t really understand what Darwin was talking about. I’ll go further. They don’t understand what Genesis is talking about, either.

The stories of creation in the first two chapters of the Bible are not there to teach us how the world came into physical existence. They are there to teach us the meaning of our existence. Genesis teaches us that the world was created with a purpose. It teaches that, prior to our arrival on this planet, our lives were already invested with meaning and with a goal in mind. We are part of a plan, one that we did not devise ourselves, but which gives our lives direction and the possibility of nobility and fulfillment. We were created for blessing and holiness.

On this Shabbat Yitro, the Shabbat on which we once again hear the words of Torah from Sinai, and consider the truths that we receive from a source beyond our senses, we find renewal for our wonder and astonishment at the natural world. We recognize that this world it is not of our making; it is, rather, a gift we have received for a reason. Our existence is invested with the purpose of sanctifying creation by living lives of morality, meaning and purpose. We find that life is a process in which deep wisdom and truths are constantly being revealed to us. And we learn that these truths cannot be viewed through a microscope or derived from an equation. And this is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses.

Shabbat shalom.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Yitro: Science and Faith

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