Judaism for the Thinking Person

The Story of Five Puns: Making Community at Mount Sinai

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?

From Hollywood to Hazor: The Mother of Israel and the Foundational Jewish Story Arc

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.]

"What is God?" Part Two: Locusts, God, and the Fallacy of Individual Control

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.

What is God? The Scientific Explanation of the Plagues As Essential To Understanding What God Is

Judaism has long been in a theological crisis.  Under the shadow of classical Christian supernaturalism and American evangelicalism, most Jews tell me they don't believe in God because they believe in scientific explanations of Biblical narrative instead.  In this sermon, I take this on directly, arguing that the Torah juxtaposes the revelation of God's name as God's essence (in Exodus chapter 6) and the 10 plagues to make a theological point that most of us would agree with:  God's essence is the interconnectedness of everything natural and human.  The "scientific" explanation of the plagues (which I draw from a 2019 Time Magazine article by Olivia Waxman) is the demonstration of God's essence as the interconnectedness of all natural and human systems, and the massive chain reactions that occur when we throw them out of balance.  (In Kabbalah, Moses's revelation was of God's essence as Tiferet, ultimate balance.)  The hardening of hearts --not atheism-- is actually the very definition of avoiding connection to God because our normal mindset is to only see one effect from one cause, rather than radical disruption of systems.  (For example, we might see one toxic spill leading to one or two bad effects, rather than leading us to see the chain reaction to the endocrine system disruption of millions of people, which itself leads by chain reaction to massive upheaval in our natural-human systems.  The reaction, like the plagues, goes on and on, but we are resistant to see it.  Our hearts are hard because we don't want to follow the chain of effects beyond one or two.)  Please note that I extensively use the articulation of this from a short essay by Bill Shackman from the Conservative Yeshiva's Torah Sparks.

The Failing Language of Masculinity, For Moses and For Today

Moses, having been raised by a team of women, "goes out" to experience the world of men when he becomes a teenager.  He experiences fighting and injustice, and when he looks "to and fro" to see if any man is going to do anything about it, sees that no "man" is willing to step up.  So he steps up himself.  He then sees two Hebrew men fighting, one the aggressor and the other the victim, and he tries to engage them in conversation to stop the behavior.  But like a male locker room, rather than talk at all, they (even the victim!) threaten him.  The world of men does not allow for a conversation about abuse, dehumanization, and changed behavior.  So he must flee to Midian, where he then "rises up" in action to stop a group of young men from harrassing young women.  Though clearly 1) Moses knows what justice is, and 2) Moses is not afraid of action, just a few verses later 3) Moses says he is incapable of articulating either in words.  (This might indicate what the revelation of Sinai will be, by the way.)  This is remarkably similar to the recent book of Peggy Orenstein, who argues that young men today  1) know how they should be treating the world of women, 2) know what actions are the right ones, but 3) lack any language for explaining it all, for explaining what it means to be in the world of men (especially in any positive sense), and why they won't "rise up" in their lockerrooms or social groups to stop other boys from spreading offensive pornographic memes, sharing misogynist jokes, or encouraging conquests of women.  Such young men would have to risk their social capital, and even when willing to, don't have the language to persuade against the self-images of masculinity.  Like the Hebrew men threatening Moses for even beginning a conversation about their wrong, abusive behavior, Moses goes out to the world of men, sees the problems (including the treatment of women), but then tells God he would never be able to articulate true masculinity or the need for changed behavior in the world of men.

The Selfie and Your Halakhic Display

The Rabbis argue whether the first part of the Joseph saga displays Joseph's arrogance or whether he has no such intent.  I relate this to the act of taking a selfie, or posting successes and photos on social media... so similar to the Rabbis' concern that Joseph puts too much attention into his personal appearance and promise.  I then conduct an obscure halakhic exercise:  how do the legal codes understand "the right way to have an aliyah to the Torah?"  The Halakhic concern is that while a person who closes the scroll during their blessing might just be following the custom they learned growing up --since the majority of halakhic opinions is to leave the scroll open-- it sure looks like yoharah, a public display of one's higher personal piety.  Are we conscious of what we are doing with our customs, with our social media posts... are we at risk, as the Rabbis worry, of thinking we are "just posting" how we do things (which is really an act of NOT thinking), when we may be harboring the ambiguous, semi-conscious preciousness of the selfie?  

They Built the Tower of Babel with One Thought: Social Media Activism as Today's Tower of Babel

Using Shai Held's excellent article on the Rabbinic interpretation of the Tower of Babel as the builders having a mindless unanimity of thought, I ask us to consider the kind of Social Media Activism that Barack Obama recently criticized as the phenomenon the Rabbis were exactly worried about.

Desensitization, Jew Hatred, and the Hate of Cain: How To Love in the Face of Hate?

One year after the massacre of Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Torah was rolled to the story of Cain and Abel.  A year earlier, I had spoken forcefully about our need to combat Anti-Semitism without mercy in our country, and I was criticized by many for not responding to Hate with "words of Love."  Again at the one year anniversary much of the blogosphere was filled with slogans and platitudes that we can combat hate with love, and yet I could not find specifics anywhere about how we do that.  In this 11 minute reflection, I try to answer what this really could mean, using the Cain and Abel text, and drawing on the research that says that many who become racist or anti-Semites have had an experience at one time in their earlier lives of feeling that what they deserve was robbed from them by a member or members of the group they come to hate.  I also consider social media conglomerates accomplices to the spread of hate. A key part of this teaching is the role desensitizing young white men to hate through videos and memes that mock political correctness. After I recorded this, the following article came out about the billions of downloads of Dennis Prager's conservative funded organization whose mission is to do this:  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/josephbernstein/prager-university

FIXED: Anti-Semitism (Jew Hatred) & Gaslighting the Jews: Progressives Telling Us to "Go Fix Yourselves First"

I present new difficulties facing progressive rabbis from the Left, including a paucity of resources to even discuss the rise in anti-Semitic attacks because racism "cannot be perpetrated against people of privilege," by new progressive definitions.  This, combined with other progressive tropes, has created a situation whereby anti-Semitism can only be mentioned by white Jews of privilege (like rabbis like me) once we have "fixed ourselves" according to purity tests on the left, and which mainly mean leaving our Judaism and our Zionism behind.  In that sense, it's a "gaslighting" situation whereby every time we cry out for the injustice against ourselves, we are told first we must "get well" before anything will be addressed.

My reading of Jacob's Wrestling with the "Angel" is that it speaks to issues we are struggling with today around the prevalence and reality of depression and anxiety.  We want to say that Jacob overcame his fears in order to face his brother, when something closer to the truth is that Jacob only temporarily overcame his fears, but quickly returns to them (since he flees from his brother immediately after facing him and lying to him, and then he suffers great fear and depression ongoing in his life).  Similarly, we wish those who suffer depression and anxiety could overcome them in a way that we can celebrate, like the end of a Hallmark movie. I argue that this is a tendency to blame the victim, a tendency to say the problem is "in them" and must be "fixed" and "treated" in them, rather than consider that they, and many of us, live in a CRAZY-MAKING world, and the whole system needs to be fixed and addressed.  (In psychology, this is called the mistake of identifying "a target patient" rather than targetting the system.  Without acknowledging the system, we are "gaslighting" the victim when we tell them:  "Just get a better therapist, coach, self-help book... Learn to prioritize, do self-care, etc."  We do that to Yaakov/Jacob.

I never got to give a great sermon on this because there was a violent act of Anti-Semitism two days before.  And what I realized is that Jews are being told the problem is in many ways with themselves when it comes to Anti-Semitism.  We say, "We're anxious!  There is rising anti-Semitism!  The press isn't even covering the attacks!  I want to be able to be a public Jew!" and the reply from some progressive quarters is, "Well, maybe it's Israel's fault, or your own failing to reckon with your own racism or privilege, and maybe you could be cured by dropping your Judaism and by just voicing a fully secularized progressivism" which is another form of gaslighting, of telling Jews THEY NEED TO CHANGE rather than that THEY LIVE IN A CRAZY MAKING SITUATION.  I try to explore this comparison in this 16 minute teaching.

Change or Die: The Meaning of Lekh L'khah

In this 14 minute teaching, I use Alan Deutschman's book "Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life" as the best explanation of the meaning of the famous command to Avrah and Sarai to "Lekh L'kha," to go for your own sake, or, in Deutschman's terms, to spiritually "Change or Die."  The thesis of the sermon is that the totality of Genesis/Bereishit is intended to tell God's story that change cannot be effected by an individual without a community of norms, positivity, and reinforcing habits.  The Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Tower of Babel, and the Flood and Noah all teach us the futility that the world can change based on an individual transforming their own society.  Therefore the covenant with Avraham is that he must create a brand new society or tribe within which God's intended changes are possible.  This mirrors the precision with which Deutschman spells out change within our own lives:  what's holding us back from changing, and what might, if we are willing to have the faith to embrace a new community, make possible the leap forward to change.