Reb Jeff

Yitro: The Altar and the Sword

2/14/2017

This week's Torah portion (Yitro) tells the dramatic story of the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The story is filled with thunder, lightening and blaring horns as God's words are heard by the Israelites. Yet, after all the drama, the Torah portion concludes with a brief and quiet epilogue in which God follows up on the Ten Commandments with a few more laws for the building of the altar. Among the laws is an unexpected instruction:

"And if you make for Me an altar, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for by wielding your sword upon it you shall profane it." –Exodus 20:22

There is no further explanation as to why cutting the stones would profane the altar. In fact, this prohibition against hewn stones appears to contradict other biblical passages that describe the cutting of stones for Solomon's Temple (see I Kings 6:7 and I Chronicles 22:2). So, why does Exodus say that the stones of the altar could not be hewn?

The sages of the Mishnah offer an explanation that seems to be more symbolic than historical. They teach, "It is because iron was created to shorten a person's life, and the altar was created to lengthen a person's life. It is not fitting that something that shortens life should be waved over that which lengthens life" (M. Middot 3:4).

The rabbis focussed on the word "sword" in the verse from Exodus and concluded that iron tools should not be used to cut the stones of the altar because such tools were associated with the weapons of violence and warfare. The purpose of the altar was to draw people close to the God of life through sacrificial offerings. (The Hebrew word for sacrifice, korban, comes from the root that means "to come close.") Swords and altars served opposite purposes: one takes life and one gives life. The two needed to be kept separate.

In our own time, we might have difficulty understanding how an altar where animals are brought to be slaughtered and burned can be a symbol of life. However, in the world of the Bible, the association was natural.

The ancient Israelites were shepherds and herders. The animals they raised were, literally, the source and support of their lives. They recognized that the birth of every animal was a miracle that could mean the difference between their own life and death. Expressing gratitude to God by returning a portion of their herds and flocks to God was a way to acknowledging that miracle.

For the ancients, the association between iron weapons and death was real, not just an abstraction. In a world without police departments, prisons, or home security systems, a sword in the wrong hands could bring death very quickly. Warfare was a much more frequent reality than we experience today, and every able-bodied male was expected to do his part by taking up a sword in a time of war.

What does this teaching mean for our times? We, too, have a need to identify and keep separate our celebrations of life and the tools we use to bring death. Like the ancients, we do not want to inadvertently place our sacred offerings on an altar of death.

In America today, there is a fascination with firearms. In Florida, where I used to serve as a rabbi, it is not uncommon for churches to sponsor events promoting gun ownership and sermons encouraging parishioners to arm themselves. Despite the 30,000+ gun-related deaths that occur every year in the United States, Congress this week voted to block a federal regulation that would keep guns out of the hands of people with serious mental illnesses.

Even in Rhode Island, where I now serve, I have testified before the state General Assembly on gun safety laws, only to hear opponents of those laws testify with bizarre conspiracy theories about how the government will use such laws to disarm the public and establish a police state. The cult of the gun has become almost a religion unto itself.

Have we built ourselves an altar of weapons? Have we confused the source of life with a source of death? The Torah does not deny the need for the sword in a dangerous world. However, it does want us to be careful not to worship our weapons. There is a need for our society to listen and to distinguish between life and death.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Guns and Talmud
Darkness

Yitro: Forgetting Sinai, and Remembering

1/27/2016

I love my job, and one of the things I love best about it is working with our intrepid office manager and administrator. Dottie has a deep love for our congregation, a determination to see it prosper, and a commitment to upholding high standards. She also has a playful sense of humor. I was reminded of that this week.

Dottie sent me a text on Tuesday that included a picture of an invoice that the Temple Sinai received from one of our vendors. Dottie's note said, "I have seen Temple Sinai spelled countless ways, but this one takes the cake!" On the invoice, the name of the congregation was spelled "Temple Syanide." I texted back to Dottie, "I wonder which is more upsetting… that they don’t know what 'Sinai' is, or that they don’t know how to spell 'cyanide.'"

No, we are not Temple Syanide. We are named for Sinai, the mountain where God appeared to all the Israelites and pronounced in their hearing the words of the Ten Commandments. In this week's Torah portion (Yitro), the Torah tells us that "…there was thunder and lightning, a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of a shofar; all the people in the camp trembled" (Exodus 19:16). The Torah wants to impress upon us what a singular moment it was when God was revealed on Mount Sinai, a moment that would be etched into the memory of humanity forever – and now, people don't even know how to spell it.

So, let's remember the moment of Sinai (of all places, at Temple Sinai!). How do we do that? I think it has to involve a little bit of listening for the sound of that shofar and it has to involve a bit of trembling.

We, as Jews, hear the heavenly shofar call us to pay attention and to take action when we see injustice. God's pronouncement of the Ten Commandments reminds us to stand up against hatred and discrimination, against the perversion of justice. That's how we remember Sinai.

We, as Jews, tremble when we consider the weight of our obligation to raise children who are caring and loving, and we tremble when we consider our own obligation to live for more than gratifying ourselves. That is another way of remembering Sinai.

So, on this Shabbat when we will again hear the words of the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, take a moment to consider what it really means to hear them and to make them a part of your life.

Other Posts on This Topic:
And After the Fire — a Still, Small Voice
Yitro: Science and Faith

And After the Fire — a Still, Small Voice

1/30/2013

"On the third day, as morning dawned, there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled.… Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for Adonai had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The blare of the horn grew louder and louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder."
—Exodus 19:16-19

Tonight, around 8:30 p.m., I interrupted my older daughter from her homework to tell her about the rocket launch that would be happening in fifteen minutes. I went to my wife, who was getting our younger daughter ready for bed, and told them about it, too. Then, at 8:44 p.m., we all went outside to our driveway, the little one in her pajamas, and looked up at the sky to watch the fire lifting up from Cape Canaveral, far to our north.

The bright orange-red glow appeared suddenly, tracking up from the horizon. Then we saw the first stage of the Atlas V rocket separate and the next stage ignite. The whole thing lasted only a few minutes and it was much too far away for us to hear anything. We couldn't see the smoke or feel the trembling of the ground. But, even from a distance of 90 miles, we could tell that the rocket's fireball was big, impressive, awe-inspiring.

My children are both fans of science fiction and fantasy. They have seen thousands of spacecraft fly on movie screens and in the pages of novels. This was the first time, though, that either of them had seen a real rocket launch. They stared up in wonder. For them, it was like a giant book had opened up above their heads. It revealed, in the place of words on a page, a burning sky.

When I read this week's Torah portion (Yitro) and its description of the moment before the revelation at Mount Sinai, I hear such similar images of fire, smoke, ground trembling, and a deafening blast of sound. This is the language of awe. It is the experience of being overwhelmed by something impossibly powerful and magnificent beyond our human scale.

Except that, for human beings of the 21st century, it's not.

The scale once reserved for divinity has become our own. The power to heave a 700,000-pound rocket into space, for us, is human scale. That which was beyond the imagination of the ancients has become, to us, accepted reality. Things that were once the stuff of fantasy and imagination are now real.

The problem modern people have with the miracles described in the Bible—like the revelation at Mount Sinai—is not that they are beyond our belief. Rather, they seem so puny to us. Why shouldn't we believe in a God who can fill the air with trumpet blasts, shake the ground with an earthquake, and light the sky with fire? To us, it's just another rocket launch that will appear on the back pages of the newspaper, if at all. It's the halftime show at the Superbowl. There is no deed so mighty, it seems, that we cannot do it.

It makes me wonder, then… Has Sinai lost the power to impress us? Have we become so awed by our own human power that we lack the ability to be awed by anything except ourselves?

If the answer is yes, it is a sad testimony for the state of the human soul. If we have reached the point at which nothing fascinates us more than our own triumphs, then we have become a race of hopeless narcissists. We have lost the spark of being able to marvel at the world beyond us.

Fortunately, our tradition has another metaphor—apart from the metaphor of fire, thunder and shofar blasts—for experiencing awe and wonder. It is the metaphor we find in the book of Kings when the prophet Elijah was led back to Mount Sinai by an angel. The text tells us that at the holy mountain, the prophet experienced…

"A mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of Adonai; but Adonai was not in the wind. After the wind—an earthquake, but Adonai was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake—fire; but Adonai was not in the fire. And after the fire—a still, small voice."
—I Kings 19:11-12

To recapture our sense of wonder, I believe we must turn our gaze away from the large and magnificent (were we only see ourselves), and look, instead, in the still small voice of ordinary and extraordinary human experience. Instead of using metaphors for God that refer to a powerful King, Sovereign and Ruler, we should instead talk about experiencing divinity in the moments that shape our lives—moments of insight and tenderness, moments of noticing the wonder in our children's eyes.

I had another such moment today. I sat with a family in the hospital that had just learned that their elderly patriarch would be entering hospice care as he prepares for life's final journey. I held the old man's hand, spoke gently to him about how much his family loves him, and turned to his daughters as I saw them daubing tears from the corners of their red eyes. The few quiet words we spoke after that were all we needed to feel God's breath upon us.

I don't need thunder and fire to understand Sinai. To me, the awe-inspiring moment of revelation is more clearly felt and more deeply experienced at a time like this. The world beyond ourselves has become the world within ourselves. It is not the might of our weapons, the speed of our computers, or the thrust of our rockets that show us God. Rather, it is in recognizing our frailty, and in remembering how much we need each other.

That is the moment when we stand again at the foot of God's holy mountain in the wilderness. That is where we know God.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Shemini: The Thing
Yitro: Science and Faith

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

Yitro's Rap

2/9/2012

Yitro's Rap
(After Exodus 18)

Moshe won't release himself from the burden that is crushing him.
And Yitro says, “What you are doing is not right."
"You're going to wear yourself out, and the people along with you."
And Isn't it true that there is nothing we fight for so fiercely
As the right to hold onto the thing that is killing us?

Alcohol, cigarettes, lousy boyfriends, jobs we hate,
Needing to be right, needing to be needed, needing to be afraid.
Being in charge, being in debt, being with someone, being left alone,
And money, money, money, money, money, money, money.

Now listen to me. I will set you straight (and You-Know-Who be with you).
You are holy and the only one who can save you.
You are the dispute. You are the resolution.
Set them all free and let yourself be.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Bo: Hitting Rock Bottom

Sinai

2/6/2012

Sinai

"I'm bored. There's nobody to play with. Play with me."
My sweet grumpy seven-year-old plops on my lap
Demanding attention and complaining her world
Is imperfect, somehow, and only I can help.

But my attention is trapped in some bit of work
That seems so important. Even her soft pouts can't
Convince me yet to give up the mind wheel I'm stuck
In. I suggest maybe trying Mama for now.

"Mama's napping!" But I look now and see her eyes.
The boney elbows and the impossible cheeks
Look just like the ones I had forty years ago,
When the world was strange and wouldn't answer my calls.

"Come here, sweet girl." And she wraps my head in bare arms.
We stay like that in one of those quiet moments,
When hormones of equanimity take over,
Breathing slows, and I want to hold her forever.

For three thousand years, I've wanted to hear Sinai's
Voice again—a moment when the sound of every
Bird chirp and rustling breeze speaks my eternity.
And here she is, in my lap, a perfect silence.

Other Posts on This Topic:
Shavuot: The Torah is Your Lover
Pekudei: A Love Letter

Yitro: Science and Faith

2/4/2012

In response to attacks on the teaching of evolution in public schools, Michael Zimmerman, then a biology professor at Butler University, initiated the Clergy Letter Project in 2004. By enlisting nearly 200 clergy members of different faiths to sign a letter, he helped persuade the school board of Grantsburg, Wisconsin, to drop opposition to teaching evolution.

Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition, by Cristiano Banti (1857)

Since 2006, the Clergy Letter Project has sponsored an annual "Evolution Weekend" for faith communities to address the relationship between religion and science. The weekend falls each year on or near February 12, the birthday of Charles Darwin. So, it is only a matter of delicious irony that, this year, the event falls on Shabbat Yitro, the Shabbat on which we read the story of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

It is delicious because Sinai is the quintessential moment of revelation in Jewish tradition—a moment in which knowledge comes directly from God to humanity. It is the very idea of revelation that is at the heart of the debate over evolution. What happens when theories developed by the scientific method appear to contradict the revealed word of sacred scriptures? Are devout believers obliged to refute such theories? Do scientific theories and revealed religious truths have equal standing in our society?

You can easily find people who stand on either extreme of these questions. There are secularists who say that only the testable and provable theories of science deserve to be called "truths." There are religious fundamentalists who will say that God's word is the only reliable source of truth and any deviation from that truth constitutes a false religion. For religious liberals (like me), understanding the relationship between science and divine revelation is a bit more complicated.

I begin by admitting that there are many different kinds of truth. There is no way to test statements like "murder is evil," "the stars are beautiful," or "I love my wife," in the same way that we can test the sum of two plus two. Yet, a person can be more certain of those truths in their heart and mind than anything that can be analyzed rationally. There are things that we know to be true without the need of proof.

Religion runs into difficulty, though, when it tries to read the non-rational, ethical, aesthetic and divine truths of scripture as if they were the same type of truths as those sought by science. If so-called "biblical literalists" insist that the first chapter of Genesis is a description of the world's physical origins, they eventually will earn and deserve the same reputation as those who condemned Galileo for placing the sun at the center of the solar system.

Science and religion, ultimately, are trying to answer different questions. Science seeks to describe the universe, what it is, how it works, and how it may change in the future. Religion has a different goal. Religion seeks to discover the meaning and purpose of reality—why we are here, how we are meant to live our lives, and how we understand ourselves. Looking for clues to the physical origin of species in the Bible makes about as much sense as looking for love in a test tube.

Most Jewish thinkers through the ages have been able to resolve perceived conflicts between revealed truths and scientific truths. Rambam (Maimonides), the great 12th century Jewish philosopher and legalist, wrote that since God gave humanity reason, it is our obligation to use our abilities to discover scientific truths about the natural world. 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.

Judaism offers no obligation to refute the evidence of our senses or the reasoning ability of our minds. Reason and revelation can coexist.

What does this say about the way we think about revelation and Sinai? The Torah that was revealed at Sinai is not a history textbook or a compendium of scientific knowledge. It is a way of viewing the world. It does not offer facts, it give us something greater. The revelation of Sinai is that we live in a universe that has a purpose and a moral order. By engaging with words of Torah, we discover how to live lives that matter and lives that can discover the joy of being true to ourselves and our yearning to know God.

Other Posts on This Topic:
The Problem with Certainty
Shavuot: The Torah is Your Lover

Yitro: The Altar and the Sword

Yitro: Forgetting Sinai, and Remembering

And After the Fire — a Still, Small Voice

Evolution Shabbat

Yitro's Rap

Sinai

Yitro: Science and Faith

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