Judaism

Lag B’Omer & Vegetarianism: Making Every Day Count

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Lag B’Omer is considered a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, but even a minor holiday is still a holiday and therefore worth celebrating. A great way to celebrate Lag B’Omer is through vegetarianism, as Lag B’Omer is deeply connected to vegetarianism.

Christianity

Pagels’ “Revelations”: “Too Jewish” Means Not "Christian"?

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A perhaps surprising bestseller right now is a biblical scholar’s take on the Christian Bible’s final book: the “Apocalypse,” aka, “Revelation.” As someone who has done my own writing on this dramatic text (see Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now [1999]), it is exciting to see this fascinating book put into popular, intelligent discussion. However, a recent interview with the author, Princeton professor Elaine Pagels, made the hair on my neck stand up and my heart pound. Pagels’ argument seems to be that the book of Revelation is not “Christian” because it is “too Jewish.” She positions the author, John of Patmos, as someone seeking to preserve a “Jewish” way of life over against the supposedly less Jewish approach of the apostle Paul.

Judaism

Weekly Torah Commentary – Aharei Mot-Kedoshim – 2 essays, Fire & Fragmentation, The Situation of Holiness

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I. Perashat Aharei Mot- Fire and Fragmentation:
In the opening of this week’s perasha known as Aharei Mot (“after the death of”), we are once again reminded of the death of the two older sons of Aharon, who died, as was narrated in Perashat Shemini, while bringing a ‘foreign flame before Gd, of which they were not commanded’. Here, where the central concern is with the Day of Atonement rites, a prologue is provided, narrating how Gd spoke to Moshe after the tragic incident, followed by the cautionary command to Aharon regarding the proper way to approach the holiest part of the sanctuary. What I intend to do in the course of this piece is detail the changes in orientation towards the Nadav and Avihu texts, how there is a change in reading from that of a cautionary and harsh tale of sin and its punishment to an entirely different reading, which regards the episode of the sons of Aaron as one of heroic but premature spiritual achievement. The text tells us, in Vayiqra 10:1, that during the overall celebration of the initiation of the Mishkan, after the people were overcome by the visible appearance of the Divine Presence at the Tent of Meeting, the sons of Aharon, Nadav and Avihu spontaneously took censers, added fire and incense, and offered them before Gd, despite not having received a command to do so.

Inter-Culturalism

Weekly Torah Commentary: Perashiyot Tazria Metzora- Holiness as a Surface

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Michel Foucault, in his ‘Discourse on Language’ states:
I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers? Foucault identifies a number of excluded areas of discourse found in contemporary society, such as sexual speech, or speech not residing within the truth values of currently accepted paradigms of science. This week we will see how the textual commentators identify and characterize a more fundamental type of problematic speech, the pathology it evokes, and steps that can be taken towards prevention and healing. I. Marked and Marketing:
Our textual portion begins:
‘This is the Torah of the Metzora, the tzara’t patient on the day of his purification; he shall be brought to the Kohen’
The Midrash initiates its investigation of this verse with an oft quoted word play, where the unusual word ‘metzora’  (commonly translated as leper, though it is clear that is not the affliction described here) is viewed as an acronym for ‘motzi shem ra’, gossip or slander. The anecdote used in the Talmud regarding the motzi shem ra, the malignant gossip, is that of an itinerant peddler, a ‘rochel’, who like the snake oil peddlers of the nineteenth century, wandered among the towns around Zippori, proclaiming ‘who would like to buy the life elixir’?.

Culture

A Letter to Anne Frank on Holocaust Remembrance Day

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“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.” – Anne Frank
Dear Anne,
What would you make of it all? What would you think of what has become of the world? What would you feel about how we still behave? Would you be surprised at what has happened to the Jewish people since your death and how the Jewish story is unfolding in the 21st century?

Inter-Culturalism

Torah Commentary: Perashat Shemini — Food: Incorporation and Inclusion

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Foucault prefaces his book, The Order of Things, with a passage from Borges that leads him to the very same question which motivates this week’s essay on the classification of permissible and forbidden foods:
…This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that …animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that’is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that… In this week’s perasha we encounter a taxonomy of “our own”, the classification of the animals permitted to us for kosher consumption, and those forbidden to us. A set of lists, with a unique set of inclusionary and exclusionary criterion. It would perhaps be desirable to fully enunciate an “archaeology” of how Jewish thought looked at the concept of taxonomy; my preliminary analysis here I hope will be instructive and leads to some surprising unexpected ideas about overcoming differences between peoples in a great striving for spiritual ascent.

art

Sacred Snapshots Brings a Justice-Seeking Connection to the Holy

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On Saturday, April 21, Sacred Snapshots, a day-long Sampler for the Spirit, will invite participants to experience the divine, celebrate spiritual practices from a range of religions and traditions at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California (9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) Whether exploring religion in pop culture, engaging 12-step spirituality, or experiencing Hindu ritual, attendees will create a multi-religious, multicultural and international community for one day. Rumi wrote that “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” and at Sacred Snapshots, you will have the chance to try at least a dozen. When I heard about Saturday’s event, I was curious if Sacred Snapshots could deliver a hospitable space for those who belong to a congregation and those who do not to come together and experiment in spiritual practices new to both of them. After talking with the event organizers and looking at the web site, I realized the diversity of the presenters and traditions appearing in the Sacred Snapshots line-up provided an opportunity to dabble in something I have heard of or experience something I never knew existed from a location or community with which I’ve never had contact. There is so much to explore and to taste (and I do mean taste – there is a Flavors of Faith workshop that delves into the relationship between food and religious life.)
Curious?

General News

Torah Commentary: Seventh Day of Passover- Echoing Songs of Liberation

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Eyes talked into
blindness
Should a man come into the world, today, with
The shining beard of the
Patriarchs; he could,
If he spoke of this
Time, he
Could
Only babble and babble
Over, over,
Again again
(Pallaksh. Pallaksh)
Paul Celan, “Tubingen, Janner”
The Seventh day of Passover is a holiday, much like the first day. This is true of the fall festival of Sukkot as well, where the last day is a holiday as well, however, in that case, it is considered a new holiday with a different theme and context. The seventh day of Passover, on the other hand, is thematically similar to the first day, dealing with redemption, but celebrates another stage of the deliverance from Mitzrayim (Egypt), that of the splitting of the sea, allowing the Israelites to cross, and then returned to its natural state in order to swallow Pharoah’s cavalry, which had been in pursuit of the former slaves. The goal, of course, of the pursuit by the Egyptians was to bring them back to bondage; once the armies were destroyed it was clear to the people that their liberation was complete, there were no further pursuers, and their new history as a free people had truly begun.