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Pinchas: Freedom Must be Won

6/27/2013

 
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Tell me if this story sounds familiar to you.

A group of people who had been denied basic rights enjoyed by others approached the highest court in the land. Thousands of years of tradition stood against them. They were opposed by powerful interests that saw their cause as a threat. On their side, they had only the righteousness of their cause and the truth of their arguments. When their pleas for justice were heard, the honest sensibility of their position was so incontrovertible that the halls of power could not deny them. They won fair treatment that put them on the path toward freedom and equality. 

That is this week's story, both in the news and in the Torah. It is the story of the U.S. Supreme Court restoring equal marriage in California and ruling that the federal government must recognize all legal marriages equally — those of same-sex couples the same as those of straight couples. It is also the story of the daughters of Zelophechad in this week's Torah portion (Pinchas).

The Torah recounts how the five daughters of Zelophechad — Machlah, Noah, Choglah, Milkah and Tirzah — approached Moses after the death of their father. In front of all the elders of Israel, they explained that their father had no sons to carry on his name and inherit his land. Since women were not permitted to inherit, his name would be lost and his land holdings would be absorbed by others. They asked, given these circumstances, that they receive the right to inherit.

Traditionally, this is considered one of the four incidents in which Moses had to consult with God in order to answer a legal question (Sifre Shelach 113). Moses brought the case of the five sisters to God and God told Moses, "The plea of Zelophechad’s daughters is just. You should give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kin. Transfer their father’s share to them" (Numbers 27:7). In addition, God instructed Moses that this rule would apply any time a man died without a son. His daughters would be allowed to inherit. 

In the context of the time, this was a great victory for justice. But was the victory of the daughter's of Zelophechad complete? No. They won the right to inherit, but only when there were no sons to inherit ahead of them.  It took many centuries more for any human society to reach the point where men and women would be be accorded equal property rights. It was not a complete victory, but an important milestone on the way toward equality.

The same is true of Wednesday's victories in the Supreme Court. It was a great victory, but not a complete one. Two thirds of Americans still live in states that do not accord equal marriage rights to all of their citizens (and I am one of them). There is still a great deal of work left to do in the cause of justice.

We Americans are proud to live in a country that values liberty and freedom as much as we do. Sometimes, we assume that freedom comes as easily as breathing in our country — as if it were part of our society's culture and DNA. We forget that there are many Americans whose freedom is denied by persistent forms of discrimination. If some adult Americans do not have the right to marry the person they love, no matter what state they live in, we have not yet reached the full promise of being a free country. 

We also forget that winning freedom is not easy. Like the thousands of American men and women who have spoken up for equal marriage, the daughter's of Zelophechad did not sit in their tents waiting for justice to be delivered to them. They did not despair that the obstacles were too great, or that they had to accept inequality. They gathered their courage to stand in front of powerful men to ask for something no woman had received before. They made their case in such a powerful way that not even the mighty could deny the truth of a God who loves justice. They won because they dared to speak up and to fight for what they believed.

Tell me if this story sounds familiar to you. The task is not yet complete. There is so much more we need to do to create the society of our dreams. Keep standing up and speaking out for justice.


Other Posts on This Topic:
DOMA, the Supreme Court, and Love
Pinchas: Five Sisters Who Turned the Key to Unlock the Torah
Life's Do-Overs

Mas'ei: The Torah of Now

7/26/2011

 
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I have not posted much on the blog this week because I am in the midst of physically moving my home. As I write this, I am surrounded by boxes that contain ... well, you could say, they contain the artifacts of my life. 

In what used to be my home, there are boxes containing the clothes I wore at my wedding, boxes of  toys that my children will not give up, boxes holding the dishes I use at special occasions, boxes of photographs of relatives living and gone, and (many, many) boxes of books. Tomorrow morning, the truck will come to take all the boxes and move my life 1,366 miles, south by southwest.

It is at this moment—on this threshold that separates yesterday from tomorrow—that I can't help but think about how I got to this moment in life and where I am heading. I think of those corrugated cardboard boxes as telling a story about my life ... as if it were knowable.

It's easy to think that life can be reduced to an accumulation of stuff that can be separated, sorted, categorized and explained. We tend to forget, though, that, in day-to-day experience, the story of our lives is invisible to us. There are no sharp, defining corners. There are no neat bundles that can be carried one at a time. Our lives, as they are lived, are more complex than we can describe, with origins we do not understand, and a destination we cannot perceive.

There is a nice commentary on this week's Torah portion (Mas'ei) that points to this truth. The portion describes how the daughters of Zelophechad, whom we met two weeks ago in Parashat Pinchas, were required to marry within their tribe because they had inherited land from their father when he died without a male heir. The land must remain within their father's tribe, so the daughters are required to marry men of the same tribe. This becomes a law for all women in the identical situation. 

However, many commentators have noticed that this law does not prevent some, or even most, of the situations in which a woman might inherit land. If a woman is already married to a man from another tribe when her father dies without a male heir, according to the law, she will inherit the land and the land eventually will pass out of her father's tribe. Why isn't there something in the law to prevent that situation?

The Ramban (also known as Nachmanides) says of this seeming inconsistency that, "The Torah does not want to concern itself with things to come in the future." That is, the Torah does not wish to prevent women from marrying outside of their tribe because of the mere possibility that they might someday inherit land.  The Torah is about life in the now. We cannot live properly in the present if we are forever shadowed by what might be in the future.  

To strengthen his point, Ramban quotes the book of Ecclesiastes, which asks, "Who can straighten what God has twisted?” (Ecclesiastes 7:13).

Life is filled with a seemingly endless series of false starts, plot twists, and surprise endings. Nobody knows exactly what possibile turns of fate have led us to the moment we now inhabit. None of us can say where the future might take us. The Torah is not concerned with where we might end up in a year—or five, or ten, or a thousand—from now. The Torah can only speak to the situation we are in right now, at this moment.

At this moment, the boxes surround me. At this moment, I cannot be sure about how I got here, or where this collection of memories may accompany me in the future. The only thing that matters is now.  God is going to keep twisting my life around me, whether I like it or not. The only thing I can do is appreciate the journey, wherever it takes me, and enjoy the blessing of now.

Pinchas: Five Sisters Who Turned the Key to Unlock the Torah

7/15/2011

 
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This week's Torah portion, Pinchas, includes the story of five sisters who came before Moses to challenge a law. The story interests us from a feminist perspective because the sisters triumphed in the end and changed the law to their benefit and the benefit of all women. However, the story also is a great example of how Jewish tradition understands the need for Torah to change.

At some point, just about everyone who begins the serious study of Torah asks themselves this question: How did the rabbis get away with making up so many laws that have so little basis in the text of the Torah? To name just one example, the Torah says absolutely nothing about the fate of a woman whose husband divorces her, but the rabbis developed a complex marriage contract—the ketubah—to protect women from cruel poverty after divorce. Where did the rabbis get the right to alter the Torah to this extent?

The answer, of course, is that they got the right to change the Torah from the Torah itself.

The ancient rabbis knew that they went far afield in their interpretations. They admit it in the Mishnah, where they talk about the many laws they pronounced based on just a few scant verses. The sages say, "The laws concerning Shabbat, the festival offerings, and the transfer of sacred items for secular use are all mountains suspended by a hair! Scripture teaches little about them but the laws we derive are many!" (M. Chagigah 1:8).

In fact, rabbinic Judaism is based on exactly this kind of far-reaching interpretation. In the time of the rabbis, the survival of the Torah depended upon it.

The Torah is the product of an agricultural civilization built around a powerful king and a  Temple where priests oversaw sacrifices to earn God's protection for the nation. That civilization quickly was becoming irrelevant by the first century c.e. when the rabbis took center stage. The rabbis recognized that in order to maintain the core values of the Torah, they had to show that the Torah was really a guide that taught spiritual lessons hidden in the rules about herding cattle and offering sacrifices.

The rabbis had to adapt the Torah to the needs of an age that was predominantly urban, that had lost the sovereignty of its king, that was influenced by the universal ideals of Greek philosophy, and that was increasingly skeptical of the inherited authority of priests. The rabbis used interpretation to transform the Torah into a teaching fit for philosophers and ethicists, instead of for farmers, priests and kings.

But, how did they unlock the Torah to make such transforming interpretations? The key was there in the lock itself, only waiting for someone's hand to turn it.

In the story of the daughters of Zelophechad, the five sisters came before Moses to present a grievance. The law had stated that land could be inherited only by males. Since their recently deceased father had no male heirs, his inheritance would be scattered to the other men of the tribe. Their father's name would be lost to history and his land would permanently enter into the possession of other families. 

Machlah, Noah, Choglah, Milkah and Tirzah went to Moses and said, "Why should our father’s name be lost to his family just because he had no son! Give us land to possess along with the rest of our father’s kin!" (Numbers 27:4). Moses heard their protest and could say nothing until he "brought the case before Adonai" (verse 5). 

God instructed Moses that the daughters of Zelophechad were correct. When a man dies without leaving a male heir, God said, the daughters would be given possession of the land as the equals of their father's kinsmen. The previously pronounced law was challenged and changed through a new act of interpretation in order to meet an unforeseen need.  

That is the power of the Torah—and the power of interpreting the Torah, which is first exemplified by the Torah itself! The Torah contains within itself the flexibility to change and to be rediscovered and reinterpreted.

In our own times, when so much has changed in the way we view the dignity of human beings—regardless of gender, race and sexual orientation—we can view this story as a reminder that keeping the Torah does not mean refusing to change. The Torah itself asks that we look at moral implications to adapt the law to meet the needs of the times. Not only does that keep Torah relevant, it draws Torah out of stagnation and into the realm of the joy of the human spirit.

That is the way of ensuring that the Torah's central teachings survive and thrive in a changing world.

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