Monday, August 26, 2013

Selichot; Nitzavim-VaYelech

Deuteronomy 29:9–31:30

This week's commentary was written by Rabbi Abigail Treu, rabbinic fellow and director of Donor Relations and Planned Giving, JTS.

My kids have a hard time taking turns speaking. While their mother tries to instill some manners, they have taken to shouting, "Pause!" in order to silence one another, a phrase they've adapted from their use of the TV remote control to temporarily stop the scene unfolding on screen.

An inviting metaphor: hitting pause on the forward motion of our lives, attending to what needs to be said or done, and then pressing the play button to continue the action. Of course, life doesn't work that way. The High Holiday season invites us to try it, though: before the new year unfolds we pause, take time off from work to be with our fellow Jews, and stand still for a few days.

Stand still, nitzavim, before we move forward, vayeilekh: the double parashah we read just before Rosh Hashanah invites us to recognize what we need to do. Stuck in the narrative while Moses talks—reviewing the history of forty years gone by and preparing for the future about to unfold—we hardly notice what the names of the parashah, Nitzavim-Vayeilekh, suggest.

The metaphors of "pause" and "play" or of "stopping" and "starting," however, do not do full justice to the rabbinic model. Yes, we are to stand still, to spend time reviewing and preparing before moving into a new year. But more than that, we must become a little disoriented, a little shaken up, in order to really be able to move forward in a meaningful way. If we simply hit pause, we haven't done what our tradition is asking us to do this month. We need to go deeper, and for that we need to be taken out of the regular, ordered rhythm of life and into someplace at once familiar and disquieting.

After reading straight through nearly four-fifths of the humash, we are almost at the end. The obvious way of concluding would be to hit pause, and then press play and read straight to the end. But that's not what we do. For the next month, we are going to skip around. Here at Nitzavim-Vayeilekh, we are nearing the end of Moses's last speech; but in a few days we will jump to the middle of Genesis for Rosh Hashanah. Not the beginning of Genesis, mind you, as the idea of a "new year" might suggest (in fact, for the birthday of the world it might make the most sense to read the Creation story). No: we read from the middle of that first book of our national story. We don't get too ensconced, however: for Yom Kippur, we land in Leviticus. A few days later, for Sukkot, we read from Numbers, until Shabbat, at which point we are plunged into a mini-revelation scene from Exodus. Finally, on Simhat Torah, we pick up where we left off, back towards the end, finishing out Deuteronomy and then in one fell swoop beginning again "in the beginning." Even the haftarot are jarring: after nine weeks straight of Isaiah, we will now be confronted with eleven different prophets in one month, eleven different voices and visions and understandings of what God wants from us. Until we finally land back with Joshua, with a narrative picking up where it left off, just as life will take its next steps as we settle again, "post-haggim," into the rhythm of the normal.

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Monday, August 19, 2013

KI TAVO

DEUTERONOMY 26:1–29:8

The Order of Disorder


A word and its opposite may be one and the same.


By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch Provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative rabbinical seminary and university of Jewish studies.

The Bible's most famous riddle was the brainchild of Samson.

"Out of the eater came something to eat; out of the strong came something sweet" (Judges 14:14). Samson posed it on the occasion of his seven-day wedding feast to 30 young Philistine men who came to celebrate his marriage to one of their own. On the last day, the young men responded gleefully: "What is sweeter than honey, and what is stronger than a lion?" Dismayed, Samson accused them of coercing his bride: "Had you not plowed with my heifer, you would not have guessed my riddle." And indeed, threatened by them with savage revenge, she had wheedled the answer out of Samson, only to betray him, exactly as Delilah would do later in his life.

Behind the riddle lay a real life experience. On his first trip to the land of the Philistines to arrange the marriage, Samson had killed bare-handed, a full grown lion on the attack. Upon his return for the wedding feast, he turned aside to inspect the carcass. A swarm of bees had taken up residence in its skeleton. Samson scooped up a handful of honey which he savored and shared with his parents without revealing its source. The riddle conveys the impact of the experience: Samson was intrigued by the phenomenon of an object becoming its opposite. Reality seemed more fluid than fixed.

Language of the Bible

That sense of impermanence is imbedded in the very language of the Bible. Biblical Hebrew contains a small number of words that bear antithetical meanings. These words are more than homonyms with dissimilar meanings like bear (to carry) and bear (the animal.) Their meanings are diametrically opposed to each other. Moreover, in English, homonyms usually derive fortuitously from different origins, whereas in biblical Hebrew the polarity of meanings seems to inhere by design in one and the same word. Like Samson's lion, the word morphs into its opposite.

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Monday, August 12, 2013

Ki Teizei

Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19

Our God, Our Matchmaker: Nurturing marriage


By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch

Provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative rabbinical seminary and university of Jewish studies.

It takes courage to get married.


Divorce statistics attest to the high risk of failure. Yet ours is not the first generation to appreciate the demanding complexity of matrimony. A charming rabbinic tale suggests that the rabbis already deemed every successful marriage a miracle, the blessed product of divine intervention.

The following dialogue, one of many, is reported in the name of R. Yosi ben Halafta, one of the Mishnah's most prominent sages, and an unnamed Roman woman of rank. She asked R. Yosi, "In how many days did God create the world?" "In six," he answered. "And since then," she asked, "what has God been doing?" "Matching couples for marriage," responded R. Yosi. "That's it!" she said dismissively. "Even I can do that. I have many slaves, both male and female. In no time at all, I can match them for marriage." To which R. Yosi countered, "Though this may be an easy thing for you to do, for God it is as difficult as splitting the Sea of Reeds."

Whereupon, she took her leave. The next day the aristocrat lined up a thousand male and a thousand female slaves and paired them off before nightfall. The morning after, her estate resembled a battlefield. One slave had his head bashed in, another had lost an eye, while a third hobbled because of a broken leg. No one seemed to want his or her assigned mate. Quickly, she summoned R. Yosi and acknowledged. "Your God is unique and your Torah is true, pleasing and praiseworthy. You spoke wisely"(Bereshit Rabba, 68:4).

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Monday, August 5, 2013

Shof'tim

Deuteronomy 16:18−21:9

Never Return to Egypt

Resisting the temptation to return, geographically or psychologically, to the site of our bondage

By Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz

Provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative rabbinical seminary and university of Jewish studies.

Several weeks ago, a book review in the New York Times caught my attention.


Janet Maslin, reviewing The Known World by Edward Jones wrote: "Mr. Jones explores the unsettling, contradiction-prone world of a Virginia slaveholder who happens to be black." (NYT, August 14, 2003).

Maslin observed that such situations actually existed in the antebellum south. A black slaveholder-- quite a jarring concept for our rational minds! Nevertheless, such situational opposites are sadly not uncommon throughout history. Indeed, what actually caught my eye in this review was a vignette that the reviewer cited. Augustus, a former slave himself, confronts his son, Henry, who is a black slave-owner: "Augustus, who became free at the age of twenty-two, is aghast to find his son . . . owning slaves. 'Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there,' Augustus warns."

One could hardly imagine a more powerful philosophical and historical statement; and it is this notion of not returning to Egypt that is rooted in this week's parashah, parashat Shoftim.

In Deuteronomy 17:14-20, we, the readers of the Torah, are advised of the stipulations placed on future kings of Israel. The king must be chosen by God, must be an Israelite, may not accumulate many horses, may not have many wives, cannot amass excess gold and silver, and must have a copy of this "Teaching" (i.e. the Torah) beside him.