This year, as in many, these two Torah portions are combined into one reading in order to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of the lunar calendar. Behar iterates the laws of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, to occur every seventh and fiftieth year respectively. At these times the fields and vineyards of the Israelites are to remain untouched, except for gathering produce from past years, which could be shared with others and eaten, but could not be sold for profit. All land is to be returned to its previous owner; this requires adjustments in payments as the Jubilee year approaches. One is prohibited from charging interest on a loan to an indigent Israelite. Hebrew slaves are to be treated with respect and can be redeemed by a relative. Finally, Hebrew slaves can go free, although gentile slaves are to remain captive, and possessions are to be passed down to the next generation.

In contrast, Behukotai is viewed as an epilogue to the last ten chapters of laws, known as the Holiness Code. It is a unique parashah within Leviticus, as it does not contain legal or ritual material. (The JPS Torah Commentary, p. 182) What it does include instead are promises and threats from God. The gist is that if Israel obeys the Holy One’s injunctions, God will enrich the land and the nation with peace and prosperity. If, however, the commandments are trespassed, a debacle will follow: famine, disease, wild beasts, and devastation, culminating in exile. Eventually, the Sabbaths, which were withheld as punishment, will return, and the Israelites will come back to God, repentant. At that point the Holy One will renew the covenant with them. One of my earliest memories of Behukotai has to do with my first B’nai Mitzvah student whose portion this was. I instructed her to focus on the first few pages and to skim through the rest, essentially to ignore the latter section. I was not prepared to explain this text to a trusting adolescent who was encountering Judaism for the first time in a positive, meaningful way. Twenty years later, I still find difficulty with this parashah and can only read it as a parable within a historic context, where, in order to establish and implement a social order, the redactors of the Torah utilized reward and punishment because they did not know about positive reinforcement. Yet now I understand that this parashah, as well as Behar, beyond insisting upon obedience, depicts a God yearning for blind faith.

“And should you ask, ‘What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?’  I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years” (Lev. 25:20-21). Here and elsewhere in this chapter God asks the Israelites for a trust that parallels his demand of Abraham.

“Sustenance for each day on its day” (Exodus 16:4). “He who created the day creates the sustenance for it. From this verse R. Eleazar of Modim inters: He who has enough to eat today but wonders, ‘What will I eat tomorrow?’ is lacking in faith. (Mekhilta, Be-shallah, Va-yassa, 2) Interestingly enough, the trust that God pursues in Behar, when the Holy One stipulates no sowing, doubles back in the form of admonition and destruction in Behukotai – basically, if you don’t believe in Me, you’ll be sorry. These bookends reveal that our ancestors struggle with and are as cautious about faitihfuness and obedienience as we are today. (Ever wonder how many of them had active vegetable patches hidden under the cedars of Lebanon?)  Whereas in modernity many of us romanticize our forebears as being pure and constant in their trust, the sages viewed them with greater realism.

“You find that any observance for which Israel were willing to give up their lives has been preserved…But any…for which Israel were not willing to give up their lives has not been preserved…Thus the Sabbath, circumcision…for which Israel were willing to give up their lives, have been retained by them. But such institutions as…sabbatical and jubilee years, for which Israel were not willing to give up their lives have not been retained by them.” (Mekhilta, Ki-Tissa, Shabbata, 1; Yalkut Shimoni, Ki Tissa, 391)

Clearly the Sabbatical and Jubilee years disappeared because the Israelites were fearful of starving to death and did not have sufficient faith to leave their field and vineyards fallow. Abrabanel (15th century Portuguese Jewish commentator) in the JPS Miqra’ot Gedolot, Leviticus, p. 204, proposes that the 50th year of a person’s life be used to expiate sin in order to live the remainder of one’s life “in holiness, free from the toil of the material world.“

He may be on to something. Were we to have faith in and practice Abrabanel’s suggested observance of the jubilee year, we might bring it back.

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Rabbi Judith Edelstein, D.Min, BCC is the part-time rabbi of Congregation Shirat HaYam in Nantucket, MA. She teaches at the JCC in Manhattan and works independently with private students for conversion, B’nai Mitzvah and other life cycle events.

The theme of our week will be “night encampments”— moments in Torah when individuals confront crises, initiations, and meetings with the Divine during the dark hours. Each of the days of the intensive will begin with a warm-up and then text study: biblical, midrashic, and mystical. Text study will be on multiple levels. We’ll meet Jacob at Bethel and explore his dream, journey with Moses and Tziporah through an encounter with the angel of death, and meet the Israelites on their way out of Egypt—and there will be opportunities to probe other night encounters as well.

Participants will choose from three workshops. Arthur Strimling, the renowned Jewish storyteller, will be leading a storytelling workshop, working with the night encounter as story, incorporating participants’ life experience. Peter Pitzele, a founder of bibliodrama and a midrashic artist, will be leading a mixed media art workshop, assisted by artist Elizabeth Yaari. This workshop will explore the night encounter as a time when we see the unseeable, and will enrich participants’ capacity to “see Torah” through the lens of visual art. Finally, Jill Hammer (yours truly) will be leading “Divine Letters” — a workshop where participants create liturgy and poetry on the theme of the “night encounter as the mysterious meeting with the divine.” Each of these workshops will meet before and after lunch on each of the four days of the intensive. You can see fuller descriptions of the workshops below.

The intensive will include an educational workshop so participants can learn how to bring sacred arts to their own communities, as well as lunch and a creative minhah service each day. Thursday afternoon and evening there will be performances and a gallery showing, so all the participants can share their work.

This week will be an extraordinary gift: a chance to dive into a compelling practice that is both personally transformative and professionally useful. We hope that as many of you as possible will take advantage of this opportunity. Space in the workshops is limited: 12 per workshop. We will be accepting advance registration from students and alumni from now until May 7 (students will get priority until May 1). We feel confident there will be room for students and alumni who want to attend, but we recommend you register soon. You can register by calling the office or by filling out the on-line form at www.ajrsem.org. The fee for alumni and community members not interested in receiving credit will be $1,000.

Please feel free to write me at jhammer@ajrsem.org with any questions. I wish you a revelatory Omer journey.

To read more about the workshops click here. If you would like to register, please click here. To learn more about our other summer offerings, please read the course descriptions here.

Chapter 19 of Leviticus is one of the most sublime-and one of the most puzzling-in the entire Bible. Imitate God through being “holy”; honor your parents; keep the Sabbath; do not put a stumbling-block before the blind; love your neighbor as yourself-what could be more ennobling and uplifting? But then there are the puzzling parts: don’t desecrate your sacrifice by keeping it till the third day; avoid mixtures in plowing, seeding, and clothing; don’t eat the fruit of immature trees. What does the one set of rules have to do with the other?

The seemingly indiscriminate mixture of ethical and ritual precepts is quite characteristic of the vision of the author of this section of Leviticus (dubbed “the Holiness Code” by modern Biblical scholars). The late Jacob Milgrom suggested, appropriately, that this author had heard the prophet Isaiah’s denunciation of those who observe priestly rituals and neglect ethics, and decided that he needed to articulate a vision in which attention to priestly detail and ethical dedication could be welded into a higher synthesis.

The English anthropologist Mary Douglas (in Purity and Danger, 1970) put her finger on the connection by invoking the idea of “wholeness,” rooted in the divine order of creation. God created an orderly world. Plants, trees, animals and human beings have their proper place in that world, and their boundaries must be respected. The social order builds on the natural order.

The Holiness Code teaches us to live in both realms, and to respect the divine intention in each. In the natural realm, it teaches us to respect the integrity of species and the natural rhythms of their life-cycles and growing conditions. In the social sphere, it teaches us to practice integrity in our dealings with one another. “Developing the idea of holiness as order, not confusion, this list [of injunctions] upholds rectitude and straight-dealing as holy, and contradiction and double-dealing as against holiness.” (Purity and Danger, p. 68) The rabbis played on the similarity of words hen (“yes”) and hin (a liquid measure): “An honest hin-this means your yes should be yes, and your no should be no.” (Sifra on Leviticus 19:36)

The priestly sanctum is a model and imitation of the divinely created world; respecting its rules inculcates respect for God and for the created order of nature.

Already in ancient times clever livestock managers produced mules by cross-breeding donkeys and horses, but mankind’s capacity for wholesale alteration of the natural environment was meager. Today, genetic engineering has multiplied exponentially our capability of changing the boundaries and characteristics of natural forms of life. On the other hand, the rampant expansion of human population centers has radically altered natural habitats, resulting in an alarming destruction of native species, while our emission of greenhouse gases throws the very future of the planet itself into peril.

The explosion in physical technology has been matched by the explosive development in complexity of our social order. We are governed by huge bureaucracies, and ruled by legal codes that fill libraries. We shop in a marketplace of wares of bewildering variety and innumerable ingredients, hawked by advertisers schooled in duplicity, who so creatively stretch the boundaries of language that we are no longer sure what any word (let alone “yes” or “no”) means any more. We are more distant than ever from the ideal of wholeness, of “you shall be holy.” Yet we need it more desperately than ever.

If we were to write our own code for holy living in the spirit of this parashah, we could adopt many of its injunctions as is, and update the rest to address our contemporary reality. Among the items of this new code might be:

-Keep the Sabbath as a holy sanctum and model of back-to-basics living.
-Honor parents and keep family ties strong, a bulwark against the hyper-mobility of today’s world.
-Eat real food, from healthy sources-the fewer ingredients the better.
-Uphold fairness and justice in our business and personal dealings, in our social governance, and in the market wares we patronize.
-Have regular contact with the natural world, as close to the way God created it as possible, and try to keep it that way.
-Belong to a community that celebrates our connection to God.
-Be holy-try to see the world through God’s eyes, and act in the world the way God would have wanted.

It is no longer the same world as the author of Leviticus envisioned. But we can still learn from his vision to make our world the best it can be.

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Rabbi Len Levin teaches Jewish philosophy at AJR.
 

Great joy resounded in the halls of modern science when the long-sought after “God particle”, the Higgs-boson element, was recently confirmed in the special, underground, womb-like fission testing chamber in Switzerland. While it is entirely wonderful to think that we can now have measurable evidence of how matter begins to be formed at the level of the smallest perceivable particles, yet there is nothing here emotionally or spiritually that can compare to the experience of giving birth to a child, a truly unforgettable spiritual event in our lives. Personally, I recall the birth of my children as a physically exhausting, but emotionally exhilarating time, where closeness of life AND death were tangibly experienced. During and immediately following my daughters’ births, I experienced a closeness to God like never before and which is hard to express in words. Because we are unable to remember our own birth or death, I believe that this is why the birthing experience is so filled with kedushah, with holiness, and yirat Shamayim, awe of the Divine, in our tradition.

The basis for childbirth rituals is found in this week’s Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora, in the opening section, Leviticus 12:1-8. While the childbearing woman is considered “temeah“, impure, with the flow of blood that ensues following birth, this is not meant as a physical or moral uncleanness, but rather a spiritual state; it creates a separation for her, similar to that of her menstrual state, so that she and the world around her can appreciate the power of life that is symbolized by our blood. Rashi understands the words “teishev be’edmei taharah“- “she shall remain in a state of blood purification” (Lev.12:4) to mean that the woman is thus allowed to let her body and her spirit recover from this tremendous experience. Fathers, too, get to spend time to appreciate the new life brought into this world, to spread the news to others, and to make the arrangements for the celebration of Brit Milah, circumcision, for a boy, or Brit Bat, a daughter’s entering the Covenant, for a girl. As England’s Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Saks explained in his article Holiness and Childbirth, “She [the mother] now knows what it is for a life to beget life and in the midst of mortality to be touched by intimations of immortality.”

While there is probably a strong desire to go to the synagogue to offer public prayers of thanks to God, replacing the olah and hattat sacrifices specified in Temple times, the Law tells us to wait even longer – 40 days after the birth of a boy and 80 days after the birth of a girl. Why?

First, because even though the initial danger of childbirth has passed, the halakhah deems an infant not “viable” until a minimum of 30 days after birth (Shabbat 135b). This respect for the fragility of life and the accompanying superstitions spawned many customs to protect both infant and mother during this first month. Amulets and charms with Biblical verses, garlic, and pieces of ivory or coral were hung around the bedroom; mothers in medieval Germany wore iron bracelets, since the Hebrew word for iron, barzel, was considered an acronym for Bilhah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Leah, the four wives of Jacob, whose spiritual presence is called upon this way. In Kurdistan, a mother was not to leave the house after sunset for the first forty days. (here) And far from being burdensome, there may be some related numerical significance to these numbers of resting days, especially when we recall other historical events such as the forty days of the Flood, the days Moses was on Mt. Sinai, the years of King David and Solomon’s reigns, etc. Most clearly, this is a time of deep bonding for parents with their newborn child, and parallels the lifetime care that God has for each of us. As Rabbi Lord Saks pointed out, “One who is caring for a newborn child is already engaged in a work of kedushah, of holiness, and has that closeness to God which others seek through prayers.” (“Holiness and Childbirth”, ibid.)

When the time to give thanks comes, it is to be honored and enjoyed communally, with blessings of Shehehiyanu, for preserving and keeping us alive, and  HaTov ve-ha-Meitiv, to the One Who Is Good and Brings Goodness into our lives. Whatever the scientific world may add to our knowledge, may we each preserve this spiritual awareness and awe of the preciousness of life that begins at birth, and do all we can as God’s creations to support and nurture all life in our world.

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Rabbi Dorit Edut (’06) is the head of the Detroit Interfaith Outreach Network and teaches at the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue

Parashat Shemini begins with the ‘grand opening’ of the Tabernacle. Aaron and his sons have been properly garbed and consecrated for their task of serving as priests. Aaron offers the very first sacrifices upon the altar, and to the astonishment of all those gathered, God responds by sending forth a fire that consumes the offering on the altar. “Fire came forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering.” (Lev. 9:24) The people are overwhelmed by this display of God’s presence. The text relates “all the people saw and shouted and fell on their faces.” (Lev. 9:24) The sacrificial relationship between the people and God, that has been meticulously instructed, designed and carried out to perfection, has been consummated. The people have put forth their offerings for expiation from the sin of the Golden Calf and God has responded with acceptance. One might see this event as a second peak spiritual experience for the people after Sinai.

Following immediately on the heels of this event, the lens of Torah zooms in on Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons and newly minted priests. They each take some incense and place it in their pans with some fire and “offer before the Lord an alien fire, which God had not commanded them to do.” (Lev. 10:1)

In rather ironically parallel language the text states, “Fire came forth from the Lord and consumed them; thus they died before the Lord” (Lev. 10:2) Many commentators have interpreted their death as a punishment for not obeying the rules. Some commentators blame them for bringing “an alien fire, not commanded by God.” Others see this event as a punishment to Aaron for participating in the Golden Calf. Such interpretations present major theological difficulties, for it presents God as a rigid, merciless, and vengeful deity.

Moses’ own comments to Aaron at the time do not reflect a punitive outlook. Rather, he tries to comfort his brother by saying, “This is what the Lord meant when he said ‘through those near to Me, I show Myself holy…” (Lev.10:3)

(Theirs was) a death by Divine kiss like that experienced by the perfectly righteous- it is only that the righteous die when the Divine kiss approaches them, while they died by approaching it… Although they sensed their own demise, this did not prevent them from drawing near (to God) in attachment, delight, delectability, fellowship, love, kiss, and sweetness to the point that their souls ceased from them.

Having just witnessed the presence of God in the fire that descended and consumed the offering, Nadav (whose name means free-will offering) and Avihu cannot contain themselves. With desire for more spiritual connection, these newly ordained priests rush to the altar to make another offering. They are met with the same response as the first sacrifice. That same fire issues forth, receiving their complete sacrifice. One senses that they did not understand the nature of the fire with which they were dealing. One can view their actions as stemming from a kind of spiritual greed mixed with naiveté. It is as if, intoxicated by the presence of God, they crave more spiritual intensity and sadly, find their actions resulting in a spiritual and physical overdose. Leviticus Rabbah 12:1, a fifth century collection of midrashic commentary on Leviticus, touches on this line of thinking by explaining that the admonition for priests to not enter the Tent of Meeting while intoxicated (Lev. 10:9) is based on the event of Nadav and Avihu.

“So it was that wine separated Aaron and his sons, for death. According to R. Shimon, the sons of Aaron died only because they entered the tent of meeting intoxicated with wine.”

Physical/spiritual intoxication is an altered state which can open the heart and allow for a deeper sense of connection with spiritual reality, but can also be taken to a dangerous and lethal extreme. The spiritual desires of Nadav and Avihu overcame their physical selves. The Torah responds with rules regarding intoxication while in the service of God.

In contradistinction to this section, the remaining text of the parashah shifts focus to the laws of kashrut. The reader is immersed in the rules for proper consumption of animals. The parashah appears to swing from the dangers of unbounded spiritual practice to the admonitions against unbounded physical consumption. The laws of kashrut put a check on our physical desires, requiring us to establish personal boundaries around food. The entire Torah portion of Shemini can be seen as establishing rules and boundaries regarding one’s physical and spiritual desires. Unbounded spiritual desire can lead to self-destruction on the one hand, and at its worst, a dangerous zealotry that destroys others and community. Unbounded physical consumption, leads to similar ends at a personal level as well as globally.

Judaism has always advocated walking the middle path. Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher and one of the most prolific and pre-eminent Rabbinic scholars of the medieval period, for example, in his work the Mishneh Torah (Hilchot Deot, chapter 1), describes human beings as unique in specific character traits. Some people may have an excess of certain traits such as humility on the one hand or pride on the other, greed or self-satisfaction, anger or equanimity, etc. In line with earlier sages, he cautions against extremes of temperament and advocates the middle path in the development of the personality. The middle path eschews extremes, embraces balance, and requires commitment. The Torah lays down the middle path before us, in ancient terms but with contemporary resonance. May we all strive to find the middle path for ourselves, for our families and our communities. The middle path is the path of balance, of tikkun and ultimately leads us to the path of peace.

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Freedom From or Freedom To

The Pesah holiday is referred to in our liturgy as zman heruteinu, the time of our freedom. The reference is of course to our freedom from Egypt, our release from slavery. Interestingly, the word heruteinu or any form thereof does not appear in the Hebrew Bible. The standard Biblical word for freedom in its root form, especially freedom from slavery, is hofesh, as in Ex. 21:2, where the Torah instructs us that a slave shall work for six years and go out to freedom (yezei la-hofshi) in the seventh. We also find the word dror used in the general sense of freedom or liberty, as in Lev. 25:10, which is the source for the famous quote on the Liberty Bell – “Proclaim liberty (dror) throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” The Biblical words hofesh and dror were ignored by the Rabbis who opted for a Mishnaic/Midrashic locution in reference to Passover, and the obvious question is why.

The word herut or its related term ben-horin, as a reference to an individual who is a freeman and not a slave, is fairly common in Rabbinic literature (see, e.g. Gittin 4:4, Bava Kamma 1:3, Gittin 42a, etc.). The word appears to be related to the Biblical term hor, which means “a hole.” In II Kings 12:10 the priest Jehoiada, we are told, bored a hole (hor) in a chest in the Temple. Just as a hole is free of any content, a slave who is now a ben-horin is free of obligation to his former master. The word herut, as a general term for freedom, is also etymologically related to the Hebrew word for a hole.

Apparently the Rabbis felt that the term herut more closely resembles their concept of what freedom means in connection with Passover than the more common Biblical terms. The latter convey a sense of physical freedom that references the past. The slave is no longer bound to his overlord – he is free from the enslavement of the past. The Rabbis wished to instill in their description of Passover not only the notion of freedom from the slavery of the past, but also the freedom to worship God in a manner that they had not been able to do heretofore. As in the Ten Commandments, the opening statement (or first commandment) declares that God took the Jewish people out from Egypt but only in order to lead to the other commandments, indeed freedom from that leads to freedom to.

That the word herut, coming from hor, conveys this notion may be related to the idea that a hole was usually made for a purpose. Whether it was done to allow entry into a space or for storage purposes, or for some other use, one made a hole to allow some future benefit. One didn’t create a hole to erase the past, but rather to secure something for the future. Similarly, our freedom from Egypt was granted to us not just to escape the bondage of Egypt but also and foremost to embrace the Torah of the Almighty, as God tells Moses (Exodus 3:12) – “…when you bring forth the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God upon this mountain.”

This special connotation of “freedom,” is beautifully expressed in a rabbinic teaching ascribed to R. Joshua ben Levi as found in Avot (6:2). The Torah in describing the writing on the Tablets that Moses received at Sinai refers to it as engraved on the tablets and uses the term harut. The Rabbis (see also Eruvin 54a) suggest homiletically that the reading should be herut (freedom) instead of harut, implying, as R. Joshua ben Levi suggests, that one is free only if he is occupied in the study (and presumably observance) of the Law.

In contrast to the word herut, the Rabbis saw in the word hofesh or hofshi the opposite sense. Based on the juxtaposition of the latter word to the word for the dead (meitim) in Psalm 88:6, they coined the term hofshi min ha-mitzvot (free from observing the commandments) (Niddah 61b). Hofesh refers to freedom from, as the dead are free from observance. Similarly, in modern Hebrew, the term is used to refer to vacation or recess – freedom from work, freedom from school. Passover, however, celebrates for us freedom to – freedom to connect or reconnect with God and the Torah and raise ourselves spiritually as we remind ourselves and speak about the freedom that we received when we left Egypt at the time of the Exodus and embarked towards Sinai.

May you all be blessed with a happy zman heruteinu.

Shabbat Hagadol

This “Great Shabbat,” which falls before Pesah, can be viewed as a paradigm for Judaism itself, as well as for the changing role of the rabbi over the centuries. There are a variety of explanations for the nomenclature and unique customs associated with this unique Shabbat.

Another explanation for the title of this Shabbat is that it describes the length of the rabbi’s talk, which was substantially longer than usual because of the myriad of intricate laws of Pesah. This resulted in congregants remaining in synagogue much later in the day. The community experienced this Shabbat as greater (actually longer) than other Shabbatot as they were held captive, needing to familiarize themselves with the holiday’s requirements.(Ibid.) Apparently, in earlier unspecified times the rabbis only preached on Shabbat Shuvah (The Sabbath of Repentance) and Shabbat Hagadol. (Ibid, 206) It was also the custom in Ashkenazic congregations to review the Haggadah that same afternoon up to the point when Rabban Gamliel explains the symbols on the Seder plate. This was done to remind the congregants of the content of the Haggadah before the Seder actually took place.

How the rabbi’s job has changed! From twice a year sermons to a minimum of one a week, monthly bulletin articles, regular divrei Torah that must be uploaded to the Internet, social and educational programming, counseling, teaching, spearheading social justice efforts, officiating at all life cycle events, including blessing the animals, at the very least. And how the congregation has been transformed!  Imagine a contemporary audience sitting well into the afternoon to learn the details of Pesah observance, followed by studying the Haggadah – without a Kiddush hour to break it up.

The most rational explanation for the name Shabbat Hagadol is based upon the haftarah, Malachai 3:23, which refers to the great and awesome day of the final redemption. For even before we speak of the redemption from slavery at the first Seder, we anticipate the final redemption that Elijah will proclaim.

Shabbat Hagadol‘s origins are a bit hazy, despite the various possibilities that are summarized here. Similarly, our origins as a people are not quite clear. While we can read about the miracles in scriptural and midrashic sources and study history, archeology, anthropology, etc, we cannot be definitive about where or how we started as a people.

A zissin Pesah.

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Rabbi Judith Edelstein, D.Min, BCC is the part-time rabbi of Congregation Shirat HaYam in Nantucket, MA. She teaches at the JCC in Manhattan and works independently with private students for conversion, B’nai Mitzvah and other life cycle events.