Judaism for the Thinking Person

Believing in Miracles (or not) in 5 Minutes

One of my "standing on one foot while answering a humungous theological question" podcasts.  "Rabbi, what do we mean by miracles?  What is up with the Red Sea splitting?"  I give my on-one-foot 5 minute answer, but we should all go and study (as Hillel famously said after answering his on-one-foot answer) afterward.

By the way, I refer to seeing a red butterfly in the answer:  at a funeral and shivah I officiated at, it came up repeatedly that a butterfly would show up in their lives just at the time of remembering the widow's husband, who had a very special connection to butterflies.

Is the Wailing Wall an Orthodox Synagogue? The Kotel Agreement, Yuval Noah Harari and Anat Hoffman

At the same time as the Torah turns its pages to describe the creation and pattern of the Temple, with men, women, and children mixed together, and the haftarah describes the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem as the same, the Israeli government reneges on the Kotel Agreement to provide a separate space for mixed gender worship near the Wailing Wall, even while turning over the Wall officially to ultra extremist fundamentalist Jews who claim that the inclusion of women --or women leading prayer in the women's section-- is a fundamental affront to the original pattern (which is a lie).  In this presentation, I quote extensively from three sources:  the Haaretz article from 2020 called "What Yuval Noah Harari Thinks About Women’s Fight for Equal Rights at the Western Wall," David Golinkin's 2011 article "Is the Entire Kotel Plaza Really a Synagogue?" and Rabbinical Assembly's 2022 "Statement on Non-Implementation of Kotel Agreement."

Self-Improvement, Judgment, and Seeing God’s Back

While Judaism demands that one does not judge oneself too harshly, nor live in a place of self-defeating criticism, nevertheless there's a vital role for self-judgment to play in our learning from the past to walk with God and expand our ability to channel holiness into the world.  In fact, since God loves us as we are, and even provides a Shabbat that makes us feel that the world is made for us as we are, it is vital we judge ourselves, because that's not the job God wants, nor is it the job for others to do.

Clothing God? Sewing as an Act of Lovingkindness

The Talmud tells us that the first great act of God's love (chesed, lovingkindness) was making clothing for Adam and his wife.  Do we return the favor?

Does God Have a Plan for Us?

Joseph's dreams seem to predict the future and his role in it.  So does God have a plan for us?

Lecture: Halakhic Sources, the Fetus, and the Morality of Abortion

The source sheet I'm reading from is at:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R0Txiy6QvQiHo40hKSsHyafLernFjS8tXp0tJo7gPWA/edit?usp=sharing

This is a lecture to give the listener the Rabbinic sources that create distinctions and legal status for decisions around the criminalization of elective abortion, as discussed in the Supreme Court hearings.

Patriarchy, Gaze, Voice and Intersectionality? Exodus and bell hooks

Here I tease out the following ideas of bell hooks: 1. Our society valuing power over others as the paramount value, and rooted in the psychology of men. 2. This value playing out in drama as "the protagonist" as the center around which others must revolve, and often the only one whose name counts. 3. Oppositional gaze: the one who owns their justice perspective is the one who has the power to gaze at injustice [like Moses having the privilege to "gaze" at the taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave]. 4. Intersectional identity: our society tries to have our identities of oppression divided up -- say, of black, immigrant, poor, and woman-- because that plays into the system rather than seeing them all at once, at the "intersectionality" of our identites. 5. Finding our voice as loving ourselves enough to feel that we are fully ready to put that full loved identify forward, rather than perpetuating the system by finding ourselves falling short. 6. When we love ourselves, we can love others --meaning holding their ability to change into their full self-love and changing selves-- rather than fall back into power contests. These are applied the first six chapters of Exodus as: 1) Pharoah's actions about power over men, so he declares genocide on male babies (since they are a threat to him); men beating each other and finding this normal, and even threatening Moses with turning him in to show their power over him since his superior power identity is what they see, not his trying to help them. 2) Who has a name besides Moses? Not Pharoah. Not the Pharoah's daughter. Not Moses' parents, nor his sister. Not the handmaidens. Chapter 3 is all about "What is God's name?" to teach us that rather than the protagonist structure (one is important not the others), we are all equal as characters in God's story, rather than ego driving our own story where others play their parts in relation to us. 3) Oppositional gaze: Moses first leaves the palace grounds as a bar-mitzvah age teen, and he GAZES at what is happening and sees injustice. He "looks this way and that" because, as the midrash tells us, he is wondering why others aren't gazing at the injustice as he is. 4) Intersectionality: Is Moses Hebrew or Egyptian? He's both, and splitting the two up allows others to deny his subjectivity and power. Are the midwives Hebrew or Egyptian? Is Pharaoh's daughter powerful (as nobility) or powerless (as a woman)? The parashah continually plays on these ambiguous and intersectional identities. 5) Finding one's voice: this is the parashah of Moshe claiming he is poor of speech so he cannot speak truth to power, and he overcomes it. 6) Are the signs, wonders, and plagues just another power contest --the value basis of patriarchal society-- or is God trying to give Pharaoh chances over and over again to change, the basis of love though one must leave the relationship if one is not being treated the same in exchange?

Joseph‘s Brothers and Robert Bly‘s The Sibling Society

Robert Bly, one of America's great poets and poetry translators, recently died.  In this presentation, I apply Bly's books of social commentary to the end of Genesis.  Iron John described the effects of fathers turning over parenting duties to others --like the wrong-headed "kids learn from interacting with other kids" rather than with parents.  It also argued for the simultaneous absence of initiative rites in American society.  In The Sibling Society, Bly argued that American society represents an adolescent stage of development, not true adulthood.  I apply both books to the entire end of the Book of Genesis.

Joseph, Hanukkah, and the Assimilation Narrative

These are my reflections upon Arnold Eisen's 2015 essay, "Joseph, Hanukkah, and the Dilemmas of Assimilation."  Those who investigate the Hanukkah story quickly learn (simply by reading the Books of Maccabees in the apocrypha) that the events around the 186 BCE revolt of the Maccabees against the Hellenizing-Syrians do not involve a miracle of oil.  Rather, following the decree by Antiochus IV that the Temple in Jerusalem be dedicated to Hellistic religion, the Maccabees first attack Hellenized Jews themselves, who show little to no resistance to the decree.  (Josephus tells us, more or less, that the Greek sports stadium in Jerusalem was a far better draw to local Jews than the Temple.)  The second part of the story involves the Maccabees attacking the Syrian-Greek forces themselves, and achieving victory.  (Two hundred years later, living under the oppression of the Roman forces, and witnessing Roman massacres of Jews following rebellions, the Rabbis introduced the folktale of the oil to distract Jews from a story encouraging further rebellion against Hellenistic forces.)  So, when we today read the original tale, it creates uncomfortable questions about assimilation.  Aren't most American Jews going to sports games on Saturday rather than to temple?  Aren't most American Jews unrecognizable from their peers, as Joseph was unrecognizable to his brothers?  The simple narrative of assimilation states that American Jews were quick to assimilate for personal and social gain.  In this presentation, I argue that this little-challenged narrative is oversimplified, wrong and damaging.

The Incommunicability of Experience and the Rape of Dinah

[WARNING: The second half of the podcast discusses the rape of Dinah and I share an account of sexual harrassment from recent congressional testimony.]

If the early chapters of Genesis are about where we come from, the second half of Genesis is about the experiences that change us, that make us who we are as adults, not through our own achievements but through what happens to us, from tragedy to transcendence, from rejection to love, from struggles with mental health, sexual harrasment, being cheated, to seeing God in a place.  Little do we notice how in these chapters the experiences are incommunicable:  the experience is the words of Torah --as in our lives they are experiences of the ineffable depths in which we are changed, in which we receive a new name-- but the figures don't speak of them to others, and certainly don't record their experiences in the self confessional blogs and interviews that dominate our media world today.  And nowhere is this more poignant than the experience of sexual harrasment and rape, which I discuss using the reflections of Hadar's Rosh Yeshiva Aviva Richman.