Judaism for the Thinking Person

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.  

Dara Horn‘s ”People Love Dead Jews” and the Erasure of Jewish Difference

In this sermon -- playing on the Rabbinic commentary that the name of the Torah portion that mentions Sarah's death is called "The Life [or Lives] of Sarah" because we should celebrate the lives she lead rather than think of her death-- I discuss Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews, which argues that the non-Jewish world loves books about Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel because the stories of these dead Jews teaches us something universal and moralistic about ourselves, rather than challenging us to think of what Jewish lives are like, how they are different, how they might challenge us.  How is it that Wiesel's Night went from its original form, a scathing accusation against the Euopean bystanders who let the Holocaust happen to a book about God's hiding?  Because God's hiding happens in each of our lives, like a universalistic lesson about life's tragedies, and allows us to avoid the deep questions of Jewish difference and anti-Semitism.  In this teaching, I also ask whether we Jews are guilty of this:  inviting in our own Romantic visions of our ancestors --which allows us to live a two dimensional moralizing vision of them-- rather than embracing their difference, and practicing our own.

Changing our Relationship with Time from Productivity to Presence

It hasn't been very long in human history (two or three generations) that we live our lives according to a clock rather than according to the processes of our lives (waking up, milking the cow, putting the hay in the barn, taking the goats for their grazing...).  This has changed our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to each other.  We judge ourselves by our productivity, how much we can get done using this resource of time, how much demand we can meet from others before our next appointments. We live outside of time, in a negative relationship, rather than in time, in a positive relationship.  Using Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I reflect on how the pandemic first connected us to a positive relationship with time, vis a vis the Sabbatical Year, but then jerked us back to the negative relationship, as demands for productivity --now virtually impossible and harder than before-- were placed on our backs.  How can we live in time, not through the standard of productivity, but through the invitation of presence?

The Potentially Limitless Commandment of Honoring Parents As They Age

In this dvar Torah, I share Talmudic stories of rabbis trying to honor their mothers in ways that are both comical and also poignant in their alluding to our individual (and often lonely) struggles to honor God and them, especially as they age, with seemingly no yardstick to compare ourselves and manage expectations.

Combatting the Curses Against Israel with History, not more Scapegoating

The last sections of the book of Numbers deal with the local tribes, themselves fighting and displacing each other, refusing to grant the Israelite refugees safe passage through their lands.  As a consequence of this moral failing, they lose the right to keep the land --an important message of Torah.  In fact, coupled with their denials of safe passage, they hire the famous Near-Eastern Bilaam to magically curse the Israelites with fraught words justifying violence against them.  It's like this entire section was relived in the years approaching 1948, when local Arab populations opposed Jewish refugees buying land and living peacefully in British Mandate Palestine, and instead attacked them.  Ever since they resort to Bilaam curses, the use of factually incorrect curse words of "Genocide," "Apartheid," "Settler Colonialism," "Ethnic Cleansing," "Daily Massacres of Children," and "Not Indigenous" to scapegoat Jews and justify violence against them, not just in Israel but in intimidation and harrassment on the campuses in the U.S.  In this Yom Kippur morning sermon, I name this reenactment of the end of Numbers and propose that Jews respond not with compaints about anti-Semitism, but with a campaign of history, along with a renewed consciousness that is not a victim consciousness but is a creator consciousness that is inclusive of Arabs, so we don't lose our moral authority in the Land.

Instagram, Depression and the Serpent Voice: ”And They Knew They Were Naked”

The creation stories of Genesis blend mythological motifs with reflections on the moral consequences of human evolution.  When we understand the serpent voice to be the appearance of the human inner voice --the beginnings of evolutionary, human self-consciousness, a consequence of eating of the fruit of the garden-- then the hiding that Adam does, not because they have disobeyed God (as one presumes on a first read) but because for the first time they know they are naked, is crucial to notice.  The possibilities of self-consciousness are immense --they include becoming like God by living in past, present, and future at once, they include radical intentionality and subjectivity-- but also include the dark side, a preoccupation with self-consciousness in its most mundane meaning, a preoccupation with wondering what people think of one, the feeling of being naked in front of others, the nightmare of showing up at school in one's underwear.  What do people think of us?  Do they like us?  What about our physical appearance are they reacting to?  How do they compare us to others, favorably or unfavorably?  This is the serpent voice in our heads, of our inner "I," the one that nips at our heels and we try to clobber on the head but only goes away only temporarily but always returns.  Research shows that this serpent voice is amplified to monstrous degrees by social media:  Are my posts liked?  Are others making fun of my appearance in the photo?  Am I totally ignored?  Am I left out?  How can I cultivate a persona that garners "likes"?  How can I grown that persona, maintain it, even as it detaches from any connection to my authentic self, so when God says, "Ayekah?"  Where/who are you really?  God knows the self I'm wearing is the product of the serpent voice, my cultivated and emotionally crushing phony self?

The Halakhah of Zoom Minyan: Adding Windows to the House of Israel

Synagogues like mine have resorted to making virtual community over much of the pandemic.  How do we do a heshbon nefesh of the experience:  a reckoning of the pluses and minuses as we enter a new future of self-creation?  What is the halakhah of it, what have we learned, what are the issues?  In this Kol Nidrei sermon, I address these issues, as we consider who we wish to be as we enter the future.

The Victim Triangle: Moving from Blame to Self-Creation, from Drama to Authenticity

Our society is permeated with a victim mentality that presents itself as prophetic, but is punitive.  Caught in the Victim Triangle, everyone must fit into a role of Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer --both in individual dramas and in societal theory.  Change presents itself only in the options of shifting roles in the triangle:  persecutors must become victims, victims will fix things by teaching them (and society) a lesson, someone gets stuck in rescuer role.  Is teshuvah, repentance, about being forced to experience the karma of society's ills, or is that a blame game?  In this sermon, I present an alternative framework, rooted in systems psychology and in Torah:  teshuvah is an act of Creation, and when one transcends the triangle, one reaches true authenticity in one's walking with others, walking with oneself, and walking with God.