Judaism

Torah Commentary: Behaalotcha

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Perashat Beha’alotcha I
A Perfect Circle, Like a Ring
What do we understand about desire? Other than being led around most of our life by desire, we have a hard time attempting to understand it, and harness it. A popular teacher has built an entire career around explaining and analyzing it; students of all sorts gathered around him to perhaps get a handle on “desire”, the “holy erotic”, etc, until this teacher himself entirely self destructed (taking some victims along with him down an ugly path). It is no wonder then, that Hassidic teachings on desire are found where one might least expect them, perhaps its an area that must always be approached by sneak attack. We too will begin with a classical teaching and then move carefully towards a more direct encounter with the subject, in two essays that grapple with the concept from different angles.

General News

Torah Commentary: Perashat Bamidbar

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I have just been notified that my mother has passed away, so I am reposting an essay I wrote previously as is. Interesting that the subject matter is appropriate. I. Come In Under the Shadow of This Red Rock (or, Shelter in the Wasteland)
Bamidbar 1:1- And Gd spoke to Moshe in the Sinai Desert within the Ohel Moed (the Appointed Tent) on the First of the Second Month in the Second year from the Exodus from Egypt saying… This week we begin the fourth of the books which comprise the Torah. This book, known most commonly as “Bamidbar”, “In the desert”, is also known as “Homesh Hapequdim” or as it is conveniently translated, as “Numbers”.

Judaism

Shavuot: Sweet Dreams

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The holiday of Shavuot is distinct among the major festivals of Jewish life in that it has no obvious distinctive ritual elements. Whereas Pesach has its seder and marror, and Sukkot has its, well, sukkot, Shavuot is not given any particular unique commandments, not in its Biblical textual source, nor in the halachic sources. In the Rabbinic texts, however, this holiday was considered to be related to the date of the giving of the Torah at Sinai (although even that is somewhat problematic; the Talmud calculates the actual event as being the day after Shavuot). Given that the holiday was felt to reflect the giving of the Torah, it became customary in many communities to study Torah all night and then read the text relating to Sinai in the morning service at dawn. The source for this is found in the Midrash (Shir hashirim Rabba 1:57 and Pirkei D’Rav Elazar 40), where it explains that the night prior to Sinai was short, and sleep was sweet, so the people of Israel slept that whole night.

Judaism

Weekly Torah Commentary: Perashat Behukotai- Walk This Way

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Here we are, at the close of the book of Vayikra, “Leviticus”, the Book of Holiness, concerned primarily with what was intended to be the highest service, that of the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood. However, as the Bet Yaakov points out, this Torah portion does not begin as do most of the others, with a speech act to Moshe, that is, with the usual “And God spoke to Moshe”. Here, the segment begins with Im behklotai tailaichu, “if only you would walk in My ways and keep My commandments and make them happen”. This “if only” is read by the Bet Yaakov as describing not a command, but a prayer on God’s part. It is not a command that is needed after the presentation of so much holiness, for a command can not actualize holiness; what is needed to make holiness happen is a personal prayer.

Judaism

Tikkun Torah Commentary: Perashat Emor- The Priest Within

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Nietzche was preoccupied with the question of where the “good” came from, and who was responsible for it, that is, what is its “genealogy”. Here is his summary statement on the matter:
The judgement “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves , that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebian. It was out of this pathos of nobility and distance, as aforesaid, the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a “below”- that is the origin of the antithesis “good” and “bad”‘ (The Genealogy of Morals, Kauffman edition pp 25-26). Thus, to Nietzche, those who have power are those who create morals for a society.

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’?.

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.

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.

Judaism

Torah Commentary: The Passover Seder- The "Four Sons"

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The Torah tells us of four sons… One of the central passages of the seder involves a presentation of the questions of, and the responses to four paradigmatic sons. We are told of a wise son, a wicked son, an innocent or naive son, and one who does not know how to initiate a question. Each of these “sons”  is uncertain, in one way or another, about the meaning of the ritual observances surrounding Passover, and for each one an appropriate answer is given, depending on the personality of the son. This haggada aggada is problematic on several fronts, and one supposes that that is the reason for its inclusion; the haggada being zen-koan-like in its textual strangeness and paradoxicality,  a textual device clearly meant to provoke response (and thus perhaps the secret of its enduring popularity).