David Hazony

Revolution in Jewish Life Called Limmud

Where will we go once the synagogues are gone?

In a Jewish religious landscape dominated by denominations struggling to compete for dollars and daveners, the idea that the three big faith streams might fade into irrelevance, supplanted by a robust “just Jewish” identity, sounds like a fantasy.

But what if it turned out that the demise of synagogue-based life is actually just around the bend — that a new generation of Members of the Tribe, enervated by treacly litanies and tired Talmudic classification, may soon figure out that the greatest sources of Jewish spiritual inspiration, intellectual growth and artistic expression (I lump them together and so can you) might come not from pulpit-pounders and the familiar rituals they command, nor even from the plaque-plagued schools that teach the cantors to cant, the professors to profess and the rabbis to rab — but from somewhere else entirely?

What if something came along that threatened to permanently dislodge the federations and foundations, with their fetes and fiscal décolletage, as the bookends holding up our sense of collective self, and put the core of Jewish identity back where it was always meant to be — in direct engagement with content?

I’m talking about Limmud.

Before I take another step, a disclaimer: In exchange for my giving four talks and participating in two panels over the weeklong Limmud conference in Coventry, United Kingdom, this past December, the folks who ran it were kind enough to fly me there and give me a bed to sleep in. But I’ve had far more lucrative speaking engagements and never once wrote about them afterward. Indeed, I was on such a high when Limmud finished on December 29 that I decided to wait a bit before writing, just to make sure the Kool-Aid had passed through my system.

For those of you permanently stationed in Antarctica, Limmud is an annual multi-day conference of Jewish learning. Since it started in the U.K. three decades ago, it has spread to communities around the world. But the British Limmud Conference remains the original, the biggest and — in my view — the most threatening to established Jewish life.

A few numbers: more than 2,500 participants; 400 presenters, including some of the most influential scholars, journalists, rabbis, artists and institutional leaders in Israel and the Diaspora; 1,000 different sessions. As one of the organizers told me, you can meet someone the first day and literally not see that person again until the closing event. Every hour of every day, if you are not presenting, you’ll need to make the impossible choice among at least two or three simultaneous sessions (out of about 20) that you have defined as must-see, or spend an hour chatting with some extremely interesting people you’ve always wanted to meet. For someone who doesn’t boggle easy, it was boggling — and enchanting.

There are a few unstated principles that make Limmud glow. One is that the mind and the spirit, the body and the soul, are one. Social, religious and intellectual stimuli are mixed inseparably. In addition to the classes going on, there is a cavernous, cacophonous central commons filled with hundreds of chairs and tables and couches for the never-ending conversations that Limmud triggers. During the day, coffee and cookies and live jazz flow freely. At night, beer on tap and harder stuff transform it into an English pub. (Still later at night, they bring out the kosher burgers as, well, a kind of exclamation point on the whole day.) This rejection of the Platonic separation of mind, spirit and body applies to the sessions, as well, which range from panels to lectures to seminars to performances to workshops. You can attend a session on “Aikido and the Talmud,” on Israel’s “cottage cheese rebellion” or on heavier questions of prayer, Zionism, philosophy, demography, dance or poetry. Or just join some people hanging out with a guitar and lighting Hanukkah candles.

Second, your place of work does not appear on your nametag. Neither do markers of formal hierarchy of knowledge, like “professor” and “rabbi.” This is because Limmud’s conceivers have realized that by developing a deferential rather than a creative atmosphere, such titles can encourage other people to plead ignorance rather than cure it by taking their learning into their own hands. The suspicion at Limmud, in other words, is that titles and affiliations, when tossed into a bubbling cauldron of intellectual ferment, can often do more harm than good.

And the third, and perhaps most beguiling, principle: There are almost no professional Limmudniks. While the international Limmud body’s paid staff is minimal, the volunteers run the conference almost exclusively. Participation fees cover more than half of the conference’s budget. There is a glaring absence of freebies. Which means that Limmud is largely immune to the pressures of philanthropic organizations and professional-caste standards. It is open-source Judaism: People there can chart their course, thankfully ignorant of what is expected of them — making contacts, coming up with ideas, changing their lives. In the process, Limmud is developing a powerful, unique brand unlike anything seen in the Jewish world in a generation.

Which is why Limmud may end up overturning the apple cart of Jewish life.

It’s not just a nice getaway; it’s by far the most interesting thing happening in Jewish life. It is more spiritual than synagogue, more challenging than yeshiva, more fun than youth groups, more effective than day school, more creative than Jewish community centers, more intellectual than grad school. Or at least it has the potential to be all these things, depending on who is leading a session, who is in the audience and who is on the other side of your Guinness at any given moment. That potential is evident every moment of the conference, and it leaves you wondering where, exactly, all this energy and identity has been all your life.

The main challenges for Limmud, it seems, are now twofold. First, it must find a way to successfully replicate the experience I just witnessed in places other than England. Although “Limmud” conferences have popped up around the world, not all of them have re-created the magic of Limmud-U.K. or followed its set of principles. Keeping the brand meaningful will be hard.

But more important, Limmud will have to find the appropriate way to extend that experience into the rest of the year. Critics have likened the conferences to summer camp, where the shortness of the period and the unreality of the environment make fantasies come true, but is much harder to translate into real life.

The thing is, I went to summer camp. The best ones aren’t stand-alone but are connected with youth movements, where the whole point is not the summer experience as much as finding a way to carry the enthusiasm through the year — local club meetings, biannual conventions and more. What my own camp experience taught me was that it was anything but an unreal bubble. It was the highlight of a whole year of redoubled expectations. And eventually it became the engine that drove my identity. In the end, the camping experience contributed decisively to my decision to make aliyah. And I am far from alone.

But regardless of how Limmud evolves, its effects will soon be felt across the Diaspora and in Israel, as well. Limmud is not just a name, but also a style, an attitude and, at its best, a hope. This is what revolutions look like; if you find it hard to believe, it’s because Diaspora Jewry hasn’t seen one in a long time.

To read the original piece at the Forward, click here.

Israel's Upcoming Election

Elections are in the air—and not just in the United States. In December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for early primaries in his Likud Party, a likely indicator that he may dissolve the Knesset sometime in 2012 and call a general election. The ball has begun to roll.

Some commentators will point to this move as proof of Netanyahu’s weak hold on his conservative coalition. They are wrong. In the two decades since I moved to Israel, I’ve never seen a coalition so stable. In fact, the move shows Netanyahu’s strength. In the Israeli system, it is always better to call elections than to have them foisted on you, to pick the optimal moment rather than scramble to get ready. Whoever makes the elections happen gets the jump on the campaign and looks like the one in charge. Even the rumor of elections creates a dynamic in which every party digs in on ideological issues, trying to appeal to prospective voters. So once the Prime Minister sends out the election vibe, it’s usually just a matter of time. 

A primer of likely political developments in 2012: 

1. The demise of Kadima. It’s been a fun ride, but Kadima’s days as the main opposition party are over. The party that was founded on the strength of Ariel Sharon’s personality, and his determination to withdraw from the Gaza Strip over his own Likud party’s objections, found unexpected life after Sharon’s departure for a simple reason: There are hundreds of thousands of Israelis on the left who, despite having abandoned the peace camp in light of the second intifada, nonetheless could never stomach voting for Likud. That was enough to give Kadima a huge mandate despite having no clear ideology, charismatic leadership, governing experience or (post-disengagement) clear policies. 

That grace period is over—thanks in part to the coalition tactics of Netanyahu. By bringing the Labor Party, then headed by Ehud Barak, into the government, Netanayahu effectively outflanked Kadima on the left, creating a pincer movement that left Kadima unable to offer a plausible alternative. Their fall will set the stage for:

2. The return of Labor as a viable governing party. The evisceration of Kadima was so thorough that it has had a radical, unintended consequence: the effective disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of left-leaning Israelis. For if the purpose of an opposition is to give voice (and therefore release) to whole parts of the country dissatisfied with government, in Israel there has been no such voice. The result: The eruption of a massive protest movement that filled the streets with tents, concerts and (frankly) a lot of fun and silliness throughout the summer. The Israeli social justice movement, in other words, was primarily an expression brought about by the lack of politicians speaking for left-leaning middle-class Israelis struggling to get by.

That is, until along came Shelly Yachimovich, the former talk radio star who, during 2011, won the Labor Party election for chairman and became the real leader of the opposition. A fast-talking, young-sounding standard-bearer for progressive causes, Yachimovich did the one thing no Labor leader in a generation has dared to do: She convincingly put social justice, rather than the peace process, at the top of her agenda. By dropping the blame-settlements-first attitude of her predecessors, she has been able to win back the masses of ex-Laborites who left in droves because of the failures of Oslo, disengagement and the peace camp. According to polls, Labor will be the number two party in Israel after the next election.

3. The staying power of Likud. Despite the above, Likud under Netanyahu has made itself a political force that will be difficult to defeat in an election. While the farther-right parties will probably remain stable, polls have Likud increasing its Knesset representation. Why? Two big factors: 

First, the economy. Despite the social-justice rallies, the fact is that a decade of responsibility in both fiscal and monetary policy has helped Israel sidestep the West’s economic turmoil and turned it into its most promising economy. Although these policies have been undertaken by successive governments and Bank of Israel chairmen, most Israelis credit Netanyahu, who instituted key reforms as finance minister in 2003-2005. 

Second, security. Israelis have rarely enjoyed a period so thoroughly devoid of major terrorism or full-scale military conflict as in the nearly three years since Netanyahu took office—whether despite or because of Likud’s hawkish stance. True, there hasn’t been much progress in negotiations with the Arab world, either. But in a country where no news is almost always good news, a prolonged period of non-war and non-peace will inevitably work in the favor of the incumbent. 

There are other factors as well. With Ehud Barak cut off from Labor, Netanyahu is today the only present or former Prime Minister in a major party—creating a huge gap of political experience between Likud and everyone else. Bringing Gilad Shalit home didn’t hurt, either.

So when will it happen? The Likud bylaws say primaries have to happen at least six months before an election. So I would guess around September—before Americans vote. And Netanyahu will again have chosen stability, and the relatively quiet summer news cycle, over chaos.

To read the original piece at Moment Magazine, click here.

Zealotry and Tolerance

The time of patriarchs was reaching its end. Jacob was dying, and alongside his dictation of burial arrangements, he also gave final words to his twelve sons, words in which he would tell them "what will befall you in the end of days." We usually read them as his final "blessings." But in the case of two sons, Simeon and Levi, they are assuredly curses.

Simeon and Levi are brothers; instruments of cruelty are their swords. Let my soul not come into their council; to their assembly let my honor not be united. For in their anger they slew a man, and in their willfulness they lamed an ox. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel. I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel. (49:1–4)

Jacob knew full well the power of a father's deathbed will: He had caused unspeakable pain to be inflicted on his brother Esau through words much milder than these. But the actions of Simeon and Levi, who deceived and slaughtered the men of Shechem in retaliation for the rape of their sister Dina, were too much for Jacob to suffer.

Does the Bible endorse Jacob's view? Not necessarily. While Simeon's offspring ultimately descend into historical irrelevance, the Levites become the guardians of the Temple, priests to God, teachers of the people.

This is not a small problem in the text. The stories of the twelve brothers are meant to tell us something about the fate of the tribes they sired. If Jacob's curse on Levi doesn't come true, it raises the possibility that he deeply misunderstood at least one of his own sons.

To unravel the mess, we need to reread the saga of Simeon and Levi, as individuals and tribes, as a five-act play. It's a story of extremism, zealotry, and violence—and the difficulty in telling right from wrong in the high-stakes game of the love of God.

Act 1: Shechem. After the king of Shechem helps himself to Jacob's only daughter Dina, Simeon and Levi conspire to vanquish the whole city. They pretend to cut a deal in which the Shechemites first circumcise themselves, and will then be allowed to marry Israelite women. They agree, and when they are at the height of their physical weakness, the brothers kill them all. Jacob is livid, on the grounds that all the other peoples will descend upon him and his family. The brothers respond, "Should he deal with our sister as with a harlot?" And here things get strange.

The brothers' retort is left hanging in the air, at the very least suggesting they have fought to a draw. Later on, it becomes clear that Jacob's fears were unfounded: "The terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob." We are left with a sense that Jacob's judgment is not the same as that of the text itself.

Act 2: The Curse. In this week's reading, Jacob curses Simeon and Levi, calling them "brothers"—the emphasis suggesting that he saw them as identical to each other, motivated principally by anger, deserving the same fate.

Act 3: The Test. Generations later, in the wake of the Golden Calf in the book of Exodus, Moses famously calls out "Whoever is with the Lord, come with me!" Only the Levites come to Moses' side, and they slay two thousand Israelites with the sword as retribution and purification of the camp. Simeon's tribe, for all its presumptive bloodlust, is nowhere to be found. And so, at a crucial moment, we discover that while Levi and Simeon may both have indulged in violence, their deeper nature was in fact different.  To put it bluntly, Levites are zealots for the Lord, while Simeonites are thugs.

The Levites are rewarded with the priesthood. It's a double-edged reward: Their violent zealotry, so repugnant to Jacob, is channeled away from physical violence and towards extreme ritual, where any mistake can mean death, but where the consequences are purely religious. They are to be left out of military affairs and without land of their own. Their violence neutralized, their zealotry can be expressed in a more useful manner.

Act 4: The Last Battle. To make the point clear, in Numbers we find the head of the tribe of Simeon, Zimri ben Salu, publicly bedding the daughter of the king of Midian—an act not just of licentiousness but, in context, of idolatry as well. With Moses and Aaron standing by, powerless to stop it, Aaron's grandson Pinhas, heir to the leadership of the Levite priests, hurls his javelin through Zimri and his concubine, killing them both. This is the final act of Levite violence, and it is aimed at none other than the chief of Simeon. Zealotry takes out thuggery, Levi defeats Simeon once and for all, thereby distinguishing himself and disproving Jacob's claim that they are "brothers."

Act 5: The Inheritance. In the book of Joshua, upon entry into the Promised Land, the Levites receive just the minimal land around urban centers and are teachers of God's word and servants in the Temple. In this sense only, Jacob's curse comes true. Simeon, on the other hand, is lost to history, his descendants unable to find a coherent piece of territory and utterly subsumed into Judah.

The message of all this? Our human world is a complex one, with some people built for the nasty business of diplomacy, nuance, and gracious maneuvering; while others are preternaturally primed for ideological purity, simplicity of principle, and extremity of action. Jacob was clearly the former, and had no room in his world for Levi. Somehow, however, biblical religion did make room for the Levite, not just by giving a place of honor and productive purpose to his otherwise uncontrolled zealotry—but also in requiring that the rest of us take care not only of the poor and orphaned, but also the "Levite in our gates"—as well as their spiritual heirs, the zealots, mystics, absolutists and other difficult individuals who, in spite of everything, are entrusted to our care.

To read the original at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

Joseph's Torture

How to make sense of Joseph?

This week we learn of his nearly pathological efforts to ensnare, baffle, accuse, imprison, and shame his brothers—the same brothers who, decades earlier, sold him into slavery. Now he is Grand Vizier of Egypt, and he gets a chance to show them who's boss.

A famine has struck the region. Jacob hears there is grain to be bought in Egypt, and sends ten of his remaining eleven sons down. Three full chapters carry us from their initial appearance before Joseph asking for grain, until the story's surprising dénouement. In between, Joseph is portrayed as conniving, self-centered, and cruel—but also confused and curiously human.

Upon seeing his brothers, Joseph hatches a plan. He disguises himself and pretends not to recognize them, and accuses them of being spies. He will sell them grain, but to prove their good intentions, they will have to leave one of them, Simeon, behind as a prisoner, while they return to their home and bring back Benjamin, the one who stayed behind with Jacob. On the way, the brothers mysteriously find that the money they paid for the grain has reappeared in their sacks. Then, after they arrive home and the grain has again run out, famine forces Jacob to give in, and he allows Benjamin to head to Egypt with the brothers. This time, Joseph releases Simeon and gives them all a feast, "miraculously" seating them in order of age.

When they set off again, they are stopped by Joseph's guard, who has secretly planted his boss' goblet in Benjamin's sack. Joseph, having framed Benjamin, imprisons him and claims he won't release him at all, while the others are free to go. Finally, Judah makes a plea that such a tragic turn will destroy their father, and Joseph loses his composure, bursts into tears, and reveals himself.

To understand this story, we need to first note that all along, Joseph is driven by two conflicting, powerful forces: the insistence that his dreams have divine meaning, and his passionate commitment to his family. In the end, and after months of misery, the latter wins out over the former—and this sends a powerful message to the world.

First: Are dreams a form of revelation? Joseph clearly believes they are. It is on this premise that his entire meteoric rise from prison to power in Egypt, depicted this week as well, rests. When Pharaoh's imprisoned ex-aides need their dreams interpreted, Joseph asks rhetorically, "Do not interpretations belong to God?" (40:8)—and then he interprets them himself. Later, when interpreting Pharaoh's own dreams, he says more than once, "God has declared to Pharaoh what he is about to do" (41:25). The point here is not that Joseph is arrogant. He succeeds in Egypt precisely because his interpretations prove accurate; they really do seem to be a vehicle for prophecy.

And so, when his brothers, who want to ward off the famine that Joseph accurately saw in Pharaoh's dreams, appear before him, Joseph undertakes to make sure his own childhood dreams come true. "And Joseph remembered the dreams he had dreamed about them." (42:9) Those dreams, we'll recall, had his brothers and parents symbolically prostrating themselves to him. Joseph embarks on a complex scheme to make them reality. For if Pharaoh's dreams are prophecy, and so are those of his servants, then shouldn't the same hold true for his own?

Throughout all this, however, there's another, contradictory force at play, an overwhelming emotion roiling beneath the surface and confounding his plans. Time after time, Joseph has to step aside and control his tears. Time and again he asks after his father's well-being. Something is bubbling up—something that wants to stop the charade and call out, as Joseph finally does, "I am Joseph—is my father alive? . . . I am Joseph your brother."

In Joseph's inner conflict, it turns out, lies the inner particle accelerator, the nuclear reactor core, of religion. On the one hand, you have the imposition of truth from above, the divine revelation, the theory of what should and can be that is born of abstract or metaphysical ideas. These are symbolized by Joseph's commitment to the dreams. On the other, you have the truth that seems inherent in our world, that is transmitted by tradition, that includes blood loyalties and commitment to family. These are symbolized by Joseph's constant need to cry when talking to his own kin.

The entire history of religion can be boiled down to this secret, inner tension (or even contradiction) between revelation and tradition. We see it in modern Judaism, when, for example, many Reform Jews abandon their own belief in radical non-observance in favor of a more accepting and flexible approach to classical Jewish practice. And we see it as well in the many ultra-Orthodox Jews who adopt ever more clever new stringencies that have no basis in tradition whatsoever.

Sometimes reason poses as tradition; sometimes the reverse. The question of which of these carries God's message, or what is the most divine combination of the two, is never addressed head-on, for to ask it is to admit the single fact that threatens all organized religion to its very core—namely, that we might actually have no reliable sense of what God wants of us at all.

In our story, Joseph ultimately sacrifices his beliefs, his theories, and his revelation to a truth much more compelling: the love for his father and brothers. And while in many cases revelation trumps tradition and family loyalty, here the Bible—that paragon of top-down, revelatory texts—seems to go the other way entirely.

To read the original piece at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

A Dissenting View on "Aba-Gate"

This is a difficult moment for American Jews.

To wake up and discover, as did the Forward’s Gal Beckerman, that the Israeli Ministry of Absorption is actively trying to convince Israeli expatriates living in the U.S. that they should come back to Israel by dramatizing the risk of assimilation of their kids and grandkids — this is a cause for outrage.

Gal is not alone. Writing in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg is appalled. “I don’t think I have ever seen a demonstration of Israeli contempt for American Jews as obvious as these ads,” he writes. Over at the Daily Beast, Allison Yarrow calls the ads “pandering” and “ham-handed,” drawing the conclusion that “many Israeli writers, thought-leaders, politicians, and rabbis believe assimilated American Jews are not Jews at all.”

Don’t get me wrong. These critics are probably right about the infelicity of the ads. I doubt the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption had any inkling of what it was getting itself into — or why they neglected to realize that these ads would drive American Jews bananas.

Yet in the hysteria of the response, the insecurity of American Jewish life is laid bare. This, rather than the campaign itself, is the real story.

Say what you will about the political wisdom, the fear-mongering, and so forth, on the part of the Israelis. The fact is, at the heart of the campaign lies a truth too painful for many American Jews to handle: That the chances of one’s grandkids ending up identifying as Jewish are indeed significantly higher in Israel than they are in the U.S. — and that this is important in thinking about our future. I really do believe that if American Jews were to step outside their own emotions for just a moment, to stop changing the subject and actually focus on the issue being raised, they’d admit that, seen from an Israeli perspective, the fear expressed in these ads is, to a large extent, quite justified.

But most of them can’t, because it’s the Israeli perspective itself that they find so threatening — that same Israeli challenge that for generations has been suggesting that having our own country is better for us spiritually, culturally, and physically, than not having one. Suddenly, people who usually champion Jewish self-criticism circle their wagons. Remember the outrage when the author A.B. Yehoshua likened Jewish identity in the diaspora to a jacket that can be taken off at will? Sorry, Jeffrey Goldberg, this has nothing to do with Netanyahu (as he implies in his headline), for assimilation of American Jewry troubles Israelis on the left just as much as those on the right.

The hyper-sensitivity to criticism is unfortunate, because these ads inadvertently offer a real opportunity for discussion among American Jews, who should be desperate for new perspectives on their future, wherever they may come from. And so, as a public service, I toss out the following smoke bombs — a list of potentially offensive statements that could legitimately be seen as deducible from the American Jewish outrage, but whose central aim is to stoke a more fruitful debate:

1. Many American Jews, who justify saying the most outrageous things about Israel on the grounds that “self-criticism” among Jews is good, cannot handle criticism of them coming from Israel — even if that criticism is implicit and made in Hebrew. Instead of asking whether there’s truth to the criticism, they reflexively guffaw at Israeli “ham-handedness” (love it!) and blame Netanyahu.

2. Many American Jews, suddenly realizing that there exists another Jewish perspective that is judging them, cannot stand having their assimilation statistics revealed or discussed by others “in public,” as it were.

3. Many American Jews have so little historical self-awareness, or cultural coherence, that they must express their outrage in places like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, for fear that otherwise most Jews will not read them. What does that say about Jewish identity in America?

4. Many American Jews cannot imagine that there’s something really special in Israeli identity, and that Israelis are right to try and protect it by discouraging this new form of intermarriage. The very idea sends a shiver down the American Jewish spine — but isn’t it based on the very same cultural protectiveness that causes American Jewish leaders to discourage the old kind of intermarriage, with non-Jews?

5. Many American Jews cannot countenance the possibility that the time of their leadership of world Jewry is reaching its end, or that the main language of Jewish culture, of music and literature and poetry and film, has shifted from English to Hebrew, or that the richest experiences of Jewish life today are happening overseas. Faced with actual criticism from any non-American Jews, they blow a fuse at the thought of losing the leading role.

These ads are ill-thought out. But a secure, self-assured, thriving Jewish culture would have just shrugged them off. Instead, we get responses that are totally out of whack — suggesting that the Israelis really stepped on a live wire in the American Jewish psyche.

So hey, American Jews, consider this a wake-up call. It’s too easy to change the subject, to blame Netanyahu or the “clinical-sounding” Ministry of Immigrant Absorption for that uncomfortable feeling you get when Jews in other countries look at your numbers and worry about our collective future. But it’s just a mirror to your own “willingness to criticize Israel.” It reflects that same level of mutual Jewish concern, the same parochial yet profound wish for a vibrant, unified Jewish civilization — the same dream that grows more distant every day.

To read the original post at the Forward, click here.

But Is It Really About Lies?

Response to Avraham Burg's commentary on Parashat Toldot, Genesis 25:19 - 28-9. To read Burg's piece, click here.

Do you remember when Ross Perot, in a debate against Al Gore back in the early 1990s, got flustered by something Gore said, maybe about NAFTA or Perot’s computer company, and at a certain point he started yelling out, “Now you’re lying!” “He’s lying!” Nobody could tell who was right at that moment. But everybody knew that Perot had lost the debate. The accusation, it turned out, revealed more than did the deception itself.

Avraham Burg, of course, is no Ross Perot. Yet we ought to be exceptionally careful when we focus too intently on the falsehoods that biblical characters allow themselves. Our reaction may say more about us than them.

To understand what’s troubling in Burg’s approach, we should start by taking note of the one “liar” that he oddly neglects to mention: God. God, after all, deceives twice. He famously twists Sarah’s words when asking Abraham why she laughed at the prospect of having a baby at her age (she had actually laughed about Abraham’s age, not hers). And he later deceives Abraham into thinking that he would have to kill his own son in the Binding of Isaac. In both cases, God’s example points to a problem in Burg’s reasoning: If deception equals corruption, then God too is corrupt, and we have a lot more to worry about than Jacob’s character.

The trouble is, neither of God’s lies are really “dishonest” in the way we usually think of the term. One was meant to protect Sarah’s dignity in Abraham’s eyes, the other to test Abraham’s commitment. Yet the same can be said for many of the “lies” Burg tallies. Rebecca and Jacob deceive Isaac into getting the blessing meant for Esau — but only after God had sworn to Rebecca that the “older [Esau] would serve the younger [Jacob].” Yes, Simeon and Levi deceive everyone before killing off Shechem — but that’s in retaliation for the rape and kidnapping of their sister Dina, which Burg neglects to mention. Their evil, such as it was, was in their vengefulness and violence, much more than their deception.

And clearly, what Burg points to as the “family’s greatest lie of all” is anything but. Jacob’s sons committed a great and stupid evil in brutally selling their brother Joseph to slavery. Yet even if we condemn their decision to hide it from Jacob, we can also understand their motivation. They truly wanted to protect their father from the horrible deed. Again, the cover-up pales in light of the crime.

The rabbis taught us that in rare cases you are allowed to lie — such as if a groom asks you on his wedding day what you think of his bride. And the Ten Commandments are oddly lacking the line “Thou Shalt Not Lie.” Instead we are told to “Distance yourself from the lying word,” and to be honest in your business dealings. Lying is a very bad habit; but not every deception is inherently evil, nor is every truthful statement worth saying. To lump them together, ignoring the subtleties of the actual motivations or results, branding the whole patriarchal world a “culture of lies and deceit”—is to reveal our own bugaboos more than to understand a difficult text we call our own.

To read this as it originally appeared at the Forward, click here.

The Blinding of Isaac

If you take a fresh, unadorned look at the life of Isaac, son of Abraham, you might feel like you've walked into a bad remake of a great film. Many of the same plot lines are there, but without much of the magic.

Isaac's whole adult life is covered in this week's reading—and all of it a pale reflection of his father's adventures. Like Abraham's wife Sarah, Isaac's wife Rebecca is barren until the intervention of the Divine. When she finally gives birth to twins, Isaac prefers the (slightly) older Esau while Rebecca prefers Jacob—mirroring Abraham's preference for the older Ishmael over Sarah's preference for Isaac. God clearly sides with the women in both cases: He tells Abraham to "harken to [Sarah's] voice," while in our reading he tells Rebecca that "the older [Esau] shall serve the younger [Jacob]."

Soon after, God speaks to Isaac (the only such direct communication he receives) and tells him not to go to Egypt despite the famine, but rather to stay "in this land . . . and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father; and I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven . . . " Again, the parallel to God's promise to Abraham is sharp and clear.

The parallels continue with Isaac's encounter with Avimelekh, King of Gerar. To protect his life, Isaac lies to Avimelekh, telling him that Rebecca is his sister—just as Abraham did with Sarah. (This time around, however, Avimelekh doesn't take the bait.) Isaac grows rich under Avimelekh's protection—as did his father. Then he re-digs the same wells that Abraham did in his day. Finally, Isaac makes a deal with Avimelekh, taking an oath of alliance, as his father did, and even naming the city of Beersheva after the oath, as his father likewise did. 

The final story of Isaac, in which Jacob tricks Isaac into giving him a blessing that he had intended for Esau, may not seem at first like a replay of an episode in Abraham's life. But in some ways it is. We may call it "the Blinding of Isaac," for the similarities it shares with Abraham's Binding of Isaac. Again, we have a story in which the patriarch is deceived: Abraham by God, into putting Isaac on the altar; Isaac by Jacob and Rebecca, who swindle Esau's blessing out of him. In both cases, what's at stake is a father sacrificing his beloved son.

And yet, despite the parallels, all along the way we have a sense that Isaac is no Abraham.

Isaac never clashes with Rebecca over their two children, the way Abraham does with Sarah. When Abraham goes to Avimelekh and lies about his wife, he packs it with a moral punch: "Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place." Isaac merely says, "Because I said, Lest I die for her." Abraham digs new wells, while Isaac merely re-digs old ones—a striking symbol of the original, creative actor versus the pale imitator. Abraham makes his wealth as a freewheeling shepherd, while Isaac makes his as a farmer. (The Bible everywhere prefers the shepherd over the farmer; think Cain and Abel.) Isaac speaks with God just once, while Abraham has various, fascinating discussions with the Divine.

The difference is clearest in the final story: While Abraham plays an active role in the Binding of Isaac, Isaac's role in his final story is passive, that of the dupe. While Abraham passes his test, Isaac fails his. Indeed, the symbolism in the stories couldn't be more striking: While Abraham's story invokes vision—Abraham "lifted up his eyes" to see the mountain, and then again "lifted up his eyes" to see the angel—Isaac is blind.

Indeed, we are left with two strikingly different figures, whose differences are made all the more apparent by their similarities. In many ways Isaac is the anti-Abraham, passive, imitative, and cautious where his father was active, original, and bold even to a fault.

These are the two figures that Jacob carries with him as he begins his own tale, two paradigms that end up laying the groundwork for the whole Israelite nation. In everything he does, Jacob will be choosing between Abraham and Isaac—creating a tumultuous, complex, and ferociously contradictory inner story of Israel that resonates throughout the Bible, and onward in history.

To read the original piece at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

The Binding of Abraham

Our weekly reading gives us two radically different stories about Abraham—with two contradictory messages.

First, God decides to destroy the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. When He tells Abraham of his plan, Abraham jumps to their defense: "Will you destroy the righteous with the wicked? Perhaps there are fifty righteous people in the city . . . Shall the judge of all the world not do justice?" This is followed by a famous bargaining session, with Abraham lowering the threshold at every step. In the end, God agrees to spare the cities even if they have only ten righteous men (which, apparently, they don't).

The message here is that man is so independent in his moral thinking, so alive and judgmental and grand, that even God must come under his critical gaze.

But then, at the end of this week's reading, we have what feels like the opposite story. God "tested Abraham," telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham rushes to do the deed. At the last minute, an angel appears, telling him to stay his hand, "for now I know that you fear God."

The message here is that man should be so subservient to God in his moral thinking that he will do even transparently abhorrent things if it's what God instructs. 

How can we reconcile the two? Should we rise up to challenge God's injustice, or defer meekly, and accept God's will?

Here's one easy answer: These two stories are talking about two different matters. Sodom is about a man's thoughts, the Binding of Isaac about a man's actions. Think independently, we are being told, but as soon as it comes to acting on God's will, we must suppress our concerns, even moral ones, and get moving.

I don't buy that answer. First, because you can't really separate thought from action this way. In the episode with Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham wasn't just thinking, he was acting—attempting to prevent the actual destruction of the cities through an appeal to God's sense of justice. Second, in our lives, God doesn't actually tell us what to do. As none of us—including the intended readers of these stories—is a prophet, the possibility of having something "revealed" to you that contradicts your understanding of right and wrong is zero. As thinking people, all we have are traditions of right and wrong that we believe coincide with God's will. So unless this was meant to be a moral lesson for future prophets only, we'll need a better answer.

The answer, I suggest, is revealed by a third Abraham story in this week's reading, one which appears between the other two.

In this third story, Abraham travels to the Philistine city of Gerar, visiting the local King Avimelekh. Out of fear that the king will kill him to take his wife Sarah, Abraham tells Avimelekh that Sarah is his sister—whereupon the king takes Sarah to bed with him. Fortunately, he prematurely passes out before completing his conquest. That night, God comes to Avimelekh in a dream, and tells him to give her back, as she's really Abraham's wife. Avimelekh pleads ignorance, and innocence, and God tells him: I know you're innocent, just give her back.

The next day, Avimelekh confronts Abraham to ask him why he lied.  Abraham says: "Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will slay me for my wife's sake."

This is not really a good answer. Effectively, Abraham is saying: I thought you were evil, so I lied and tricked you into (almost) committing adultery. Avimelekh responds by sending Abraham away, with some lovely parting gifts to keep things civil. Yet there is something very troubling about this story.

Abraham, it seems, misjudged Avimelekh. He assumed his host was thoroughly evil, and as a result, he ended up deceiving the king and sacrificing his innocent wife, all to save himself from a wrongheaded fear.  In other words, he did precisely what he accused God of doing to Sodom and Gomorrah—judging without doing justice. Having gone head-to-head with God over morality, we now suspect Abraham's morality has gone to his head.

God seems to share in this suspicion as well. Later on, Abraham and Avimelekh reconcile over a seven-lamb dinner, followed immediately by the Binding of Isaac episode. 

Is it possible that God is responding to the Avimelekh debacle by testing Abraham? The text gives us a clue. Both episodes speak of the "fear of God"—a term very rarely used in the Books of Moses.  Abraham, we surmise, sinned because he wrongfully presumed that Avimelekh had no fear of God, so God tests Abraham to see if he, who so blithely issued judgments of others, has that fear himself.

I have often heard it suggested that Abraham knew all along that he was being tested, and that in the end he wouldn't have to sacrifice his son. I can accept that, for it's the only way to believe that the Abraham who challenged God over Sodom is the same man as the one who gets up early in the morning to slay his own son at God's instruction. At the same time, we have to assume that even if he did know how it would all turn out, the experience must still have been utterly horrifying—and exceptionally humbling. Having accused the world of lacking the fear of God, he now has to prove his own, in the most awful way.

What we're left with, in other words, is a case of character development. Over the course of three stories, Abraham grapples with his own moral independence and outrage, and discovers that sometimes the very act of judging others risks making you worse than them. In his failure, Abraham discovers that life's burdens are far too complex to allow us to turn moral judgment into a discus that we hurl at other people to affirm our own stature.  And that in the end, when God tests us, the test is often a direct consequence of our own actions.

To read the original at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

Tower of Power

What's wrong with the Tower of Babel?

At first glance, the famous story that closes out this week's reading seems pretty
straightforward. The men of Babel build a tower to Heaven. God doesn't like being challenged this way, so He disperses them and confounds their tongues. It's a parable, a story of origins—of human language and perhaps of Babylonia—as well as a rejection of hubris.

But as so often happens with these ultra-concise biblical tales, the closer you read it, the weirder it gets.

First of all, I could be wrong, but this might be the only story in the entire Bible (other than the first days of Creation) in which there are absolutely no individual human beings. Decisions and actions in Babel are undertaken by an unnamed, collective mass acting in perfect unity. The people of Babel "say to each other": Let's build a tower! So they do, and God responds.

A second issue concerns the text's bizarre focus on materials. For a story just nine verses long, why focus a particularly long one on the bricks they used to build the Tower? "And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar" (Genesis 11:3). 

Lastly is a far more difficult problem which has troubled me for years: The text never tells us what's so bad about what they did. The men of Babel never say they want to challenge God, only that they want to "build us a city and a tower whose top may reach to heaven," so that they could "make a name" for themselves (Genesis 11:4). But is that so bad? What's so wrong with unifying mankind, with joining together to reach the heavens? Isn't harmony an ideal, and discord a curse?

To begin to answer these questions, we look to parallels. The obvious one is to the Garden of Eden. There, too, mankind (at this point, made up entirely of Adam and Eve) sins together by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, embraces powers beyond their legitimate ken, threatens to break through the impossible barrier between man and God, and is punished with exile. That's a tough story to parse as well, but what seems to emerge is a warning against trying too hard to be too powerful, against seeing ourselves as gods. ("Like one of us," God says in Genesis 3:22.)  

So part of the problem in the Tower of Babel is clearly the classic warning against arrogance, the sheer cheek of thinking that if there are no humans to oppose us, then we might as well be gods.

But I think there is more to the Tower of Babel. While Adam and Eve are individual humans, the people of Babel are so unified as to eliminate any sense of their individuality, their capacity for thinking or acting independently. The Bible is telling us that we must never allow ourselves to be cogs in a machine, to act in absolute collective coordination. The story suggests that perfect unity is evil—that the future of mankind rests not in our ability to work together but rather to (in the current parlance) "think different," to hold on to our differentiating, individuating, sore-thumb selves. This is, in a sense, a total repudiation of some of the most devastating cultural and political forces over the last few centuries, and it's pretty amazing to see it so clearly in a text so old. 

Again we find our text in dialogue with the Garden of Eden. "It is not good for man to be alone," Genesis teaches us (2:18). For the first man, multiplicity was the solution to loneliness. In the Tower of Babel, it's the solution to blindness, one that comes from subordinating our will and conscience to that of the masses. Elsewhere the Torah warns judges never to follow the will of the mob. The Israelites were not an undifferentiated nation, but individuals divided into twelve tribes, their nation a linked federation, their stories the stories of individual prophets and kings and judges, their kingdom divided for most of their history. 

Now, add to it the question of the material, the bizarre focus on the bricks, and suddenly you have a commentary that sounds eerily post-modern. "Bricks for stone"—the men of Babel saw their power as expressed in their technology. The invention of brick was probably for them like flight was a century ago. Suddenly buildings could soar to heaven! All hail the works of our hands! If modernity is about technological progress leading to moral progress, this story says: Not so fast. Sometimes, technology can be our own undoing. 

Ultimately, of course, these two issues—the loss of individuality and the reverence for technology—are two sides of a coin. For when we believe we are all part of a great big machine or that we may be easily explained through the mechanistic eye of science, love and passion and creativity become but an illusion. In nine short verses, the Tower of Babel exposes these beliefs as a threat to our very humanity, to love, to individual passion, and to the deepest, most divine truths about our special, creative, human souls.

The Tower of Babel is at once comedy, tragedy, and devastating critique. Comedy, because of its farcical treatment of man's caprice and hubris; tragedy, because we all know about the horrific effects of a whole society reaching too far and falling over. 

Above all, though, it's the critique that grabs us. This critique tells us that in unity we are not always at peace, but sometimes at war with God; not always good, but sometimes deeply evil; not always our true selves, but sometimes trying too hard to be someone else. Our inventions, from gadgets to grand systems of governance, may well empower us, but as soon as we let them overtake our judgment and humility and humanity, let them convince us we can achieve anything as long as we submit wholly to their magic—then we begin climbing a tower so tall that we might just run out of oxygen before we get anywhere close to Heaven.

To read the original piece at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

 

Moses' Other Song

It’s one of the least-sung songs in the Bible. Known as the “Song of Moses,” or shirat ha’azinu among traditional Jews, the poem that takes up almost the entirety of this week’s Torah reading is twice as long as Moses’ better-known Song of the Sea, which appears right after the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus and is part of Judaism’s traditional daily morning prayers. If the Song of the Sea was Moses’ hit single, the Song of Moses was the B-side.

Yet in many ways, the Song of Moses is by far the more important of the two. Nearing the end of his final address to Israel, just after being told he is about to die, Moses calls upon the Israelites “to write this poem for yourselves, and teach it the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this poem may be a witness for me against the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 31:19).

Witness, indeed. On the cusp of the Promised Land and what looks like the end of their seemingly endless trials, Moses serves up a shocking warning to the Israelites: My song may be over, but yours is just beginning. If today you have learned to revere God and accept his leadership, tomorrow you will inevitably slip up, forgetting the eternal truths that brought you here and taking everything your forefathers struggled to achieve for granted.

Though its language is lofty, the song’s central themes are straightforward. After some preliminaries (“My doctrine shall drop as the rain / my speech shall distil as the dew” (32:2), Moses recaps all of human history as a tale of love and betrayal between Israel and God.

At first, God lovingly cared for the Children of Israel (“He kept them as the apple of his eye. / As an eagle stirs up her nest, / broods over her young… / so the Lord alone did lead him, / there was no strange God with him”). But Israel couldn’t keep its head clear, and began following false gods (“With abominations they provoked him to anger. / They sacrificed to powerless spirits; to gods whom they knew not” (32:16-17). God withdrew his protective cover, and the Israelites were left to the mercy of other powers. The Israelites were devastated and scattered by cruel nations whose “grapes are the grapes of wrath,” and God is left wishing that his people had a little more wisdom, gratitude and memory. The song concludes with a reminder of who God really is: “See now that I, even I, am He / and there is no god with me. / I kill, and make alive; / I wound, and I heal. / Neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand” (32:39).

There’s enough in the Song of Moses to keep theologians busy for millennia. What’s missing? No mention of keeping mitzvot per se, nor even of the covenant in its formal sense. In this final song-as-witness, the Ten Commandments are but a vague memory, the Tabernacle and its services suddenly trivial. Only one thing is important: a deep, emotional, unbreakable loyalty to God. That is, the subordination of all our calculations to Him, the absolute and unconditional refusal to bring “other gods” into the picture.

Scholars often have a hard time with the Song of Moses. For some, who scour the Torah for legal jots and tittles, there is little of interest here. Others will quickly point to the stylistic differences with the rest of Deuteronomy, and they too will avert their gaze from the contents because questions of authorship and dating are more meaningful to them. 

These scholars ignore the contents of the Song of Moses at their own expense. What we have is a soaring song, unparalleled in its scope and expressiveness, positioned in such a way as to make it the bottom line of the whole Torah, a declaration of eternal verities, a cornerstone of faith, a motion to adjourn. With it comes a message no modern-day Child of Israel can ignore, regardless of denomination or ideology: Without gratitude to the Creator we are nothing; without loyalty to him we are tossed to the winds; without the hope he gives us, we are left relying solely on our own works—and against the roaring tide of human history, these are but dust. 

Can a more powerful message be voiced just days before Yom Kippur?