Kol Yisrael Aravot

The tale is told of a group of 19th-century yeshiva students who got into a physical interaction with some maskilim (students of the Enlightenment). Their rosh yeshiva demanded to see them in his study to explain their actions.

 

The leader said: “Rebbe, did our Sages not say that the Four Species of Sukkot mirror the Jewish people? The etrog, which has a pleasing taste and smell, reflects those who have both Torah and good deeds, while the odorless, tasteless aravot represent those who have neither Torah nor good deeds. Well, don’t we beat the aravot on the ground on the last day of Sukkot? That is what we were doing to the maskilim!”

 

The rebbe frowned and replied: “Since you have twisted words of Torah to justify bad acts, it appears to me that you lot are the aravot!”

That may be my favorite traditional tale, possibly because I made it up yesterday. However, I think the moral still applies. The Midrash Rabba on Leviticus 23:40 does say the aravot represent those Jews who have neither the wisdom of Torah nor the compassion of good deeds, but it also says they could represent our Matriarch Rachel.  Or her son, Joseph. Or the stenographers who record the rulings of the Sanhedrin. Or God Himself.

Still, the most popular interpretation is undoubtedly the one in which taste represents Torah and smell represents good deeds. The lulav has the former, hadasim the latter, the etrog both and aravot neither. God binds them all together so that each may atone for the other.

It is a stirring message of ahdut, unity. But as often happens with ahdut, the underlying assumption has a certain undercurrent of condescension. We may paraphrase the Talmudic phrase “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh be-zeh” as: Kol Yisrael aravim zeh be-zeh. Each group considers the other to be deficient, but in the name of unity, the aravot/ aravim are tolerated. (Aravot is the plural in Mishnaic Hebrew, aravim in Biblical Hebrew.) Is that really ahdut? If we view others as less, as inferior, as here only by our sufferance, how much is that vision of unity worth?

In Temple times, everyone would approach and dance around the altar with aravot. No one would be so brazen as to consider themselves an etrog, or even lulav or hadasim. Everyone took humble aravot, every day of Sukkot, to come before God. Because if God is found in the aravot too, we can at least aspire to that level.

Yes, we do beat them at the end of Sukkot, not out of anger or contempt at the other, but to realize our own failures, the times we lack wisdom or compassion, with the hope that we will grow over the course of the next year. And yet, we never quite get there, as we always need a Yom Kippur to purify us before rejoicing before God on Sukkot.

Sometimes we’re the etrog, sometimes we’re the aravot. True ahdut means that we embrace Godliness, in ourselves and in others, even on the worst of days.

Don't let them

 Don’t let them tell you it’s too soon. The fact is that it’s too late for the next massacre, and the one after that, and the one after that. The stockpiling is ongoing. But we want to mitigate the first massacre of 2020.

Don’t let them say it’s not terrorism. When the public is so scared and intimidated that it throws up its hands and says, “Nothing to be done!”– that is the textbook definition of terrorism.

Don’t let them talk about rights. The unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness precede all others.

Don’t let them parse the classes of weapons. There is a reason we hand soldiers assault weapons, not rocks or pillows.

Don’t let them strawman you over self-defense or sports. Setting aside how sporting gunplay is or is not, setting aside the likelihood of homeowners being shot with their own weapons, this is not our goal. It never has been. Toddlers and suicidal people will still have free access to the guns in their homes, have no fear.

Don’t let them act shocked when weapons designed for no other purpose than to slaughter dozens of people are used to slaughter dozens of people.

Don’t let them offer thoughts and prayers. When those are cynical substitutes for plans and actions, they are far more abhorrent than silence.

Don’t let them pretend that they will hold off the artillery, ordnance and nuclear firepower of a superpower with their pea-shooters.

Don’t let them blame cable TV or video games or any other media. Imaginary guns are not implements of death.

Don’t let them perpetrate the myth of the “good guy with a gun.” Off-duty law enforcement officers and military personnel aside, it’s a myth.

Don’t let them ignore the experience of the rest of the planet.

Don’t let them portray an extremist minority as the moral backbone of the nation.

Don’t let them distract with talk about mental health (which they have no interest in addressing either) or domestic abuse (ditto) or international politics (of countries they can’t find on a map).

We are stronger. We are many. And we will prevail.

Kippurfest!

 You’d think the week leading up to Yom Kippur would be the time for Jews to be less judgemental, what with us all being Judged.

However, the raging topic on Frumbook, i.e., religiously observant social media, is Rabbi Aaron Potek of GatherDC’s Alternative Yom Kippur service at Sauf Haus Bier Hall & Garten. Many were so shocked they let go of the chickens they were swinging over their heads! (BTW if you don’t spread the entrails on the roof like the Rema says [OH 605:1], aren’t you basically a goy anyway?)

Look, Rabbi Aaron Potek isn’t trying to poach any of your congregants. No one who was headed to your seven-hour morning service is skipping out to Dupont Circle at 11 A.M. This is specifically designed for people who are intimidated by the synagogue setting, a concept which is nothing new in Israel, where many community rec centers hold services at the beginning of Yom Kippur for Kol Nidrei and its conclusion for Ne’ila. Yes, the same place folks were doing yoga and meditation just a few hours earlier. (Sauf Haus has those too.)

But they’re making Yom Kippur into a frat-house party, you say: fasting is the most important part! Halakhically, that’s true. And the fasting of all adults is equal. So I hope you give as much respect to a 12-year-old girl fasting as some rosh yeshiva with a long, flowing white beard. And you always stress that is far better for a husband and father to never set foot in a synagogue on this day if that’s what his wife needs to bear fasting in her pregnant, postpartum or nursing state? Or an elderly parent to do the same? And if someone’s health is genuinely in danger and they MUST eat halakhically, do you tell them they’re not really keeping Yom Kippur?

The fact is, if you bother to read past the headline, you’ll see that there’s no food or drink served. Attendees will not be accosted by guards pawing through their bags, but the nourishment offered is purely spiritual in nature.

Ah, but the location! What sort of hipster nudnick of a “rabbi” would be caught in such an inappropriate place on Yom Kippur, of all days?!

Funny you should mention that:

Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel said: Never were there any more joyous festivals in Israel than the 15th of Av and the Day of Atonement, for on them the maidens of Jerusalem used to go out dressed in white garments–borrowed ones, however, in order not to cause shame to those who had none of their own. These clothes were also to be previously immersed, and thus the maidens went out and danced in the vineyards, saying: Young men, look and observe well whom you are about to choose…(Mishna, Ta’anit 4:8)

Wow, that Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel must have been some upstart iconoclast, Notorious RSBG, right? Actually, he was as establishment as you can get, the Nasi (Prince), direct descendant of Hillel and father of Rabbi Judah the Prince, author of the Mishna. He knows the tradition that Yom Kippur was the day Israel finally achieved atonement for the hedonistic dancing around the Golden Calf. He concludes that it’s a perfect day for doing so, but in holiness and purity.

As a child, he witnessed the violent repression of the final of three Jewish revolts in less than a century. His generation was the first to realize that unlike the First Temple, which was rebuilt after only seventy years, the Second Temple would lie in ruins far longer. He would not see a High Priest perform the Yom Kippur service. Nevertheless, he finds the joy and vitality. To put it bluntly, he makes Yom Kippur sexy again. In the vineyards.

Yes, for many of us, Yom Kippur is shaped by liturgy written a millennium after RSBG, sung to tunes only a few centuries, or even decades, old. Is that “traditional”? It certainly may be for you. But every tradition starts with a shattering of norms. And this one has quite a pedigree.

Firstfruits: Giving Women a Voice

 The bikkurim (firstfruits) open this week’s Torah portion, as landowners are commanded to bring the premiere of their yield to the altar and make a declaration recognizing the long journey from “My father was a wandering Aramean” to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 26:5-9). In fact, we all expound these verses (at least the first four) at the Passover Seder. (Haggada is the term for both recountings.) But whose mitzva is it? The Midrash (Mekhilta Exodus 23:19) expounds the verses in our passage thusly:

Which the LORD swore to our fathers” excludes gerim and [freed] slaves. “To give to us” excludes women, the intersex and the androgynous. The implication is that they are excluded from bringing and excluded from reading, but the verse says “You shall bring” [including all]. So what is the difference between these and those? These [native-born freemen] bring and read, while those bring but do not read.

Everyone who has produce, the Mekhilta makes clear, fulfills the mitzva of bringing bikkurim; the limitation to the traditional landowning class (freeborn male Israelites) only applies to the declaration.

However, over the course of the generations, the mitzva evolves. Consider the priests and Levites, who do not receive territory, but only cities scattered throughout the land. Nevertheless, in the Tosefta (Bikkurim 1:4), Rabbi Jose says that although his colleague would exclude members of the thirteenth tribe, he includes priests, Levites and Israelites equally in this mitzva.

Gerim — sojourners in Scripture, converts in rabbinic literature — also overcome their exclusion, as the Jerusalem Talmud (Bikkurim 1:4) explains:

It has been taught in the name of Rabbi Judah: “The convert himself may bring and read. What is the reason? ‘You shall be the father of a multitude of nations (Genesis 17:4)’ — in the past you were the father of Aramea, but now, henceforth, you are the father of all nations.”

But what about women? Their exclusion from landownership, after all, has a famous caveat, as stated in Num. 27: daughters inherit when they have no brothers. This would seem to indicate that they are included in the command “To these you shall apportion the land” (Nahmanides ibid. 26:46 says this explicitly), and such an heiress could certainly say: “The LORD swore to our fathers to give to us.”

Indeed, when one sage in the Jerusalem Talmud (ibid.) questions how a person whose father is not biologically Jewish makes the bikkurim declaration, “Does he not mean Abraham, Isaac and Jacob [when saying “The Lord swore to our fathers”]? Were Abraham, Isaac and Jacob their fathers? The Holy One, blessed be He, swore only to males!” the laconic response is “Perhaps to females.”

The clearest indication is the teaching of the Talmud (Gittin 47b): “‘And to your house’ — this teaches us that a man brings the firstfruits of his wife and recites.” 14th-century French Talmudist Rabbenu Crescas explains:

This case is different, as it says “And to your house.” This is no mere allusion, but a biblical decree. Even though the husband possesses no land of his own, his wife is like his body.

Five centuries later, Tiferet Yaakov sharpens the point:

By Torah law, the husband has no right to the fruits [of the land she brings into the marriage], but it is solely a biblical decree: a woman does not recite, and an agent does not recite, but a husband bringing his wife’s first fruits may bring and recite, as he could have a portion in the land and may bring and recite on his wife’s behalf with the status of an agent, because his wife is like his body, and it is as if she were reciting. On the contrary, in his view the language is quite precise: “This teaches us that a man brings the firstfruits of his wife.”

Facing a culture unused to a woman’s voice in public, the rabbis deputize her husband to be her mouthpiece–an elegant solution, despite the hermeneutical gymnastics it requires.

This is just one example of the true breadth of expounding and expanding the Torah: a millennia-long journey to widen the circle and hear the voices of all segments of society.

—

For more sources, see my parallel article at TheTorah.com, Between Bringing and Reciting: How the Rabbis Made Bikkurim More Inclusive.

Game of Throes

This has been a difficult week for many people who consider themselves to be in touch with bedrock principles of morality, as they ask the question: Am I OK with incest now?
Incest, after all, is supposed to be something we can all agree on. This week's Torah portion takes hot stepmoms off the table: "A man shall not take his father's wife, so that he does not uncover his father's nakedness" (Deut. 22:30). It's repeated and expanded on next week (27:20-23):

‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his father’s wife, because he has uncovered his father’s nakedness.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen. 'Cursed be anyone who lies with any kind of animal.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ ‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his sister, whether the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ ‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his mother-in-law.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’

However, the world's most popular television show (though some authorities rule "It's not TV, it's HBO") has a different view on the issue of incest. Game of Thrones' premiere episode ended with a boy thrown out a window for witnessing a man having sex with his twin sister (daughter of his father AND daughter of his mother). And that man, Jaime Lannister, is arguably the hero of the show, or at least the one who has exhibited the most growth over seven seasons. His sister Cersei is now the first ruling Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.
Still, audiences were supposed to be repelled by that relationship. Surely, in the finale of the penultimate season, we wouldn't witness a Game of Throes of passionate incest between our two noblest heroes, Dany and Jon? Well, here's the thing: turns out Dany is Jon's aunt. Oops.
But is it really such a shanda? After all, you've probably heard of a guy named Moses. His parents (Exodus 6:20) were aunt (Jochebed) and nephew (Amram). And the very founders of Judaism, Abraham and Sarah, were brother and sister (Genesis 20:12)--or, at least, uncle and niece (Talmud Megilla 14a). And the Davidic line traces all the way back to Judah sleeping with his daughter-in-law Tamar (Genesis 38).
Still, all that is pre-Sinai. It's not like anyone would suggest keeping it all in the family in a post-Revelation world, right?

Concerning him who loves his neighbors, who befriends his relatives, marries his sister's daughter and lends a sela' to a poor man in the hour of his need, Scripture says (Isaiah 58:9), Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry and He will say: 'Here I am'. (Talmud Yevamot 62b)

I know what you're wondering: but that's my sister's daughter, what about my brother's daughter? That's a matter of some dispute among medieval Talmudists (Tosafot ad loc.):

R. Samuel b. Meir says the same applies to his brother's daughter; it merely mentions his sister because she plies him with words and it common for him to marry her daughter.
Rabbenu Tam says that it is specifically his sister's daughter, for she shares a temperament with him, as we say, "Most children are like their mother's brother."

To make this even more awkward, these two rabbis were brothers. No word on whether they married each other's daughters.
We get that Game of Thrones portrays a fictionalized medieval feudal society. But how often we forget that the greatest Torah minds of the past millennium actually lived in the real versions of those societies.
So if you want to ship Jon & Dany (on a ship), I get it. But let's hold on to the sexual morality we've developed over the centuries, in which consent and respect are the most sacred values. Otherwise, our journey of ethical evolution will end with the realization that we know nothing.

Pure SJW Territory

Look here!
No, seriously, that's what this week's Torah portion, Re'eh, literally means: Look! See! Observe! Over its 126 verses (Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17) and 55 mitzvot, Re'eh covers a lot of ground. And much of it is pure SJW territory.
"SJW," which in online insult "culture" stands for Social Justice Warrior, has become an epithet for liberals and leftists. Caring for the less fortunate is controversial nowadays, so why not mock people for it?
But the title of this post could very well stand for: Social Justice -- Why That's Frum. Frum, religious, mitzvah-observant, traditionally Jewish... these are terms which, for some odd reason, are considered to be antithetical to Social Justice Warrior status, but it is quite thetical. OK, that's not a word, but let's talk about the words which do pop up, over and over, in Re'eh.

Parts	Hand	17
	Eye	8
	Heart	4
Participants	Brother/ Sister	10
	Sons	10
	Daughters	6
	Manservant	11
	Maidservant	5
	Levite (Teacher)	7
	Pauper	6
	Stranger	4
	Orphan	3
	Widow	3
	Poor	2
	Foreigner	2
Participles	Giving	10
	Rejoicing	7
	Remitting	6
	Granting/ Lending	6
	Opening	4

It's not that Re'eh doesn't talk about ritualistic aspects of Judaism; it's just that everything in it has a social-justice element. The idolatry which is harshly condemned throughout the Torah is finally explained (13:29): "You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every taboo (to'avat) thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods." The fight against ancient paganism is not about theological debates, but the abuse of the defenseless. Just as God's angel told Abraham on Mt. Moriah "Set not your hand against the boy," we must do the same as God's children and representatives (14:1-2).
The laws of keeping kosher are set down, but they are bookended in the following way (14:3, 21): “You shall not eat anything taboo (to'eva)... You shall not eat anything that has died naturally. You may give it to the stranger who is within your towns, that he may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Do not cook a kid in its mother's milk." The dietary laws are not about creating an ethnically pure society, but inculcating values.
How punctilious we frum are when it comes to separating meat and milk, when it comes to denouncing foreign forms of worship. But when it comes to matters of social justice, should we mock and deride? Re'eh should make us open our eyes.

PTSD

Every year, as the Hebrew calendar flips from Tammuz to Av, we turn the mourning up to nine--The Nine Days, from the New Moon until after the Fast of 9 Av. "When Av enters, we reduce our joy" (Mishna, Taanit 4:6).
But that same source indicates that the twin tragedies of Tammuz and Av far predate the destruction of the Temple, or even its construction: to the Sin of the Golden Calf during the Israelites' first Tammuz in the desert and the Sin of the Spies thirteen months later, respectively.
This brings us to a famous question: what makes ten of the twelve Spies sent by Moses defame the land? Their bad report when they return on 8 Av spells disaster for their entire generation, but forty days earlier, as they set out, we are told "They were all men who were heads of the Israelites" (13:3) -- terminology denoting conspicuous virtue, according to the Midrash (Tanchuma 4). So what happened? When and why do they go bad?
Halfway through their mission would have been day twenty. Counting back from 8 Av, that would be... 17 Tammuz. The first anniversary of the Sin of the Golden Calf. The yahrtzeit of thousands of Israelites.
This is the part of the Golden Calf tale that we usually ignore, but it's quite brutal (Exodus 32:26-29):

 So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him. Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”

As the Talmud (Yoma 66b) notes, this death toll only takes into account those who were killed directly, by the sword. Many more die from drinking the water into which the Golden Calf had been ground (ibid. v. 20) and still more the from the ensuing plague (v. 35): "And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made."
Marking the first anniversary of that solemn occasion on a scouting mission, far away from family and friends, would have been extremely difficult. What makes it worse is the fact that the tribe wielding the executioner's axe is conspicuously absent. No Levite goes on this mission. Nevertheless, they are supposed to report back to Moses and Aaron, the latter of whom made the Calf and the former of whom ordered their loved ones' deaths for worshiping it. Nor is the situation improved by the two loyalists among the group. Joshua is Moses' aide-de-camp, while Caleb's grandfather Hur was a strong ally. Is it any wonder that the ten Spies who have no reason to be loyal to Moses, who have every reason to defy him, succumb to their post-Tammuz stress disorder?
Trauma begets trauma, on the individual and the national level. It is only natural for Tammuz to give way to Av. To break the cycle of tragedy takes uncommon courage, but that is the only way we can put an end to our mourning.