Episodes
Monday Feb 24, 2020
Monday Feb 24, 2020
One of the halakhot of the Torah service is "Ein Midalgin ba-Torah," one may not skip [words, verses, or chapters] during the Torah reading." Underlying this strict practical rule is an important value: we must pay attention to all verses of the Torah, even uncomfortable ones, like those about slavery. In this sermon, I relate this principle to Exodus chapter 21, which includes rules about slavery rather than eliminates it; and then I look at a Bible that actually did skip verses, the so-called "Slave Bible." I will leave it to the listener to hear which verses of chapter 21 (and elsewhere) were included as appropriate for those enslaved by the British to fund the empire through sugar plantations, as I also compare the phenomenon to the 1619 Project's recent article "They sold human beings here."
Monday Feb 17, 2020
The Story of Five Puns: Making Community at Mount Sinai
Monday Feb 17, 2020
Monday Feb 17, 2020
In Exodus chapter 19, there is a swirl of mixtures and transitions of singulars and plurals in the Hebrew that don't translate into English. Here, I take you through them --even for those with no Hebrew knowledge-- and show how they tell the hidden meaning of what "community" really means at our "marriage covenant" to God at Mount Sinai. How do we go from our Jewish identity as associated with family and heritage and affiliation [the words "House of Jacob" and "Children of Israel" and relating to the "Elders of Israel"] to a Jewish identity as a community [which proceeds from the former phrases to the intermediary stage of "each individual of the nation" and finally to the phrase "nation" by itself? They are very far from the same thing, as Exodus 19 shows us. And then how does the Sinai Revelation reinforce the pathos of the situation by immediately reverting from God's "voice" [kol] to the revelation of the Decalogue as "voices" [kolot]? How do we put aside ourselves as kol --a homonym of two different words, one for "each individual of [the nation]" and "voice [of God"-- as an individual hearing the voice God sends to us but not to others-- in order to be a single nation?
Sunday Feb 09, 2020
Sunday Feb 09, 2020
What may just be the oldest section of the entire Bible? The Song of Deborah (in the Book of Judges), the ancient altar song about the prophetess Deborah uniting the Israelite tribes to attack and defeat the Canaanite king at Hazor, which is a archaeologically verified. She was known as "The Mother of Israel." As Jews, we do not have a Father of our Country, we have the Mother of our Country. What is her story arc? How would it be taken today? I put this powerful truth (that she is real, that the song describes real events, that we actually have the history of the Mother of our Country) up against the reflections of actress Brit Marling (of the TV show "The OA") in her piece in the New York Times called "I Don't Want to Be the Strong Female Lead" in which she reflects on the absence in our culture of a genuine female story arc that is strong, real, and not emerging from a male stereotype. I offer Deborah as our answer. [Footnote: When I teach that Deborah tells Barak she will get the credit, I am going with the plain meaning in that verse, not the narrative surprise (perhaps a later addition) later on that it turns out to be Yael.]
Monday Feb 03, 2020
"What is God?" Part Two: Locusts, God, and the Fallacy of Individual Control
Monday Feb 03, 2020
Monday Feb 03, 2020
The planet is in the midst of the worst locust plague in 70 years. Why locusts as the plague beginning Parashat Bo in Exodus? What do they signify? Here I continue the implications of the theology of God's name explained in the previous podcast. Those implications are that in order to address the truth of interconnectedness of our system, we must act collectively, and not live with the illusion that individual actions can combat the illnesses in our system. Individual actions, while admirable, do not cure cancer, solve poverty, heal the environment: the locusts teach us that thinking an individual can stop a locus plague shares in the same illusion Pharaoh had, that an individual can control the system. That is the opposite of recognizing God. That's the theological message of the plagues, and of their implications.