Rabbi Zeitlin

Although it’s too late for this year’s seder(s), I want to share an observation that Rabbi Twerski zt”l (Malchut Shlomo, p.17) made about Seder.  He points out that we should go into the seder without any specific expectations.  Rather we should enter the experience “as a child with an open heart…. who has only questions”.  He warns that if we enter the seder with the idea of receiving particular spiritual inspirations we’ll come out of it with absolutely nothing.

Ironically, the more knowledgeable we are, the greater the danger of thinking that we’ve “got this seder routine figured out”.  By anticipating an experience in too great detail, we close our eyes to whatever might actually occur.  It takes a lot of courage as well as faith to jump into something, relinquishing our sense of personal control, while allowing it to be whatever it will be.

In many ways, this points to the trend of thinking that each year’s seder has to be “original”, “contemporary”, “timely”, “relevant” and “addressing today’s issues”.  Rather than letting go, we want to pre-program the seder experience.  A danger here is that while you might well achieve emotional and even intellectual satisfaction, even a sense of creativity, spiritual development will, at the very best, be much less than it could have been.  All of us in these times simply lack the technology of our early sages and tzadikim to create a general framework which enables every individual to advance their own, unique spiritual progress.

Of course, you can say that the spiritual side is “just superstition” and that only “objective reality” is “real”.  The inference is that the social, political and/or psychological is all there is so the seder should restrict itself to being aimed at “improving” only those dimensions. Once again, that limits our experience to our current understanding and imagination, making the supremely arrogant statement that we already know all that can be known.  And, of course, if Rabbi Twerski is correct, that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy since you never learn anything until you realize/admit that you don’t already know everything!

I’m certainly not saying we should jump into every new situation deliberately unprepared.  To continue the paradigm of Pesach, we’re mandated to begin studying the laws of Pesach thirty days before, each and every year.  But this is to become familiar with the form the Seder will take.  But if we approach it as, for example, a unique performance, structured, indeed, but not frozen, we increase our open heart to directly experience the Seder without the intervention/insulation of our expectations.

It takes courage to face any adventure with this kind of open heart and courage.  But, as the cliché goes, it’s never easy to be a Jew…..but it sure teaches us a lot!

As Pesach arrives this evening, I’ve experienced a feeling over the last two weeks of more and more of what I usually think essential being systematically stripped away.  With the beginning of the month of Nissan we shed our twice-daily recitation of the Tachanun prayer (immediately after the morning and afternoon Amida).  Perhaps the phrase that resonates most for me in Tachanun is, “And David said to Gad, I am in great distress.  Let us fall into the hand of God;  I will not fall into the hand of man”.  How can I possibly get through the day without the reminder that God’s hand is always open, always there to support me (and that Man’s, including my own, hand is always inadequate)?

Leaving Tachanun behind also brings us to refrain from the short prayers just before the daily Psalm.  We are not allowed to join David Ha-Melech when he calls for God to turn his ear and answer us.

Arriving at the morning before the holiday begins, I realize this is the final day, for more than a week, that I’ll wear Tefillin.  These mysterious black leather boxes with which I bind verses of the Torah to my head and heart, to my mind and my body, will lie, unused throughout the festival.  Even being reassured that the holiday itself is an אות, Ot, a sign of my intimate connection to The Creator, I fear feeling naked, unprotected, unfortified.

Along with Tefillin, I leave behind the connection to the תודה, Todah, Thanksgiving Offering.  In the daily Mishna recital of the sacrifices I omit to request that my mentioning this offering count as if I actually brought it, and later in the service I leave behind the Psalm, מזמור לתודה, Mizmor L’Todah, that accompanied that offering.  It seems inconceivable to go through the day without declaring my gratitude to The Almighty.

Then, for the duration, I also skip the למנצח מזמור לדוד, a Psalm that describes the Redemption, “some by chariots, some on horses”.

Yes, starting tonight I’ll add Hallel, a set of Psalms offering extra praise which we sing together on special days.  I’ll also add the Musaf, additional, prayer for the week.  I’ll remember to include יעלה ויבא, Ya’al’e V’Ya’vo, in my daily prayers and also after eating.  These are all, indeed, special, but somehow they don’t feel like they make up for what I’m leaving out.

Our redemption from Egypt is described as God lifting us out בכנפי נשרים, B’Kanfei Nesahrim, on the wings of eagles.  It strikes me that celebrating our escape from slavery, our transformation into a nation, requires a tremendous amount of trust,  בטחון, Bitachon. Transferring our allegiance from the material, symbolized by Pharaoh, to the Infinite, perhaps we need to insure that we’re also transferring our allegiance from the physical, represented by our own egos.  We need to let go of some of our daily practice and understand that our efforts, no matter how great or how small, diminish to irrelevance when compared to The Infinite.  It’s not that God, symbolized as the eagle’s wings, is weak, but rather than our baggage is excess.

I look forward to joining with all of you on our Pesach journey.

Chag Sameach v’Kasher

Acknowledging that this is a work in progress since my thoughts are always evolving, I want to remind everyone that this is really a snapshot rather than eternal truth.  Also, I apologize before the fact that this article is more rambling and less polished than many–it’s the nature of this particular beast.

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Since I’ve never worked, nor really aspired to work, as a congregational rabbi, I spend a lot of time, probably more than I should, thinking about what my job is really supposed to be.  Largely creating my own role, I have the freedom to observe what I want to emulate from great rabbis of the past as well as what I want to avoid from the not-so-great.  I’m also challenged to discover how, in the 21st century, living in the US (for now), I can attempt to actually meet those goals.

It seems so obvious, almost tautological, that a rabbi’s role is to pass forward the Torah he’s received, processed by his own experiences, to the future.  Actually, I’ve been surprised through the years to discover many rabbis for whom that doesn’t even enter their minds.  I realize that many rabbis fill congregational roles where much of their time, these years especially, is diverted to fundraising and cultivating donors as well as to an entire host of administrative duties.  Since congregational life in America is shrinking, many rabbis have moved into hospital and hospice chaplaincy, a taste of which I also experience in my role as a “rabbinic counselor”, but a common complaint I hear from friends and colleagues in this field is that it really has nothing to do with their years of rabbinic studies.  It’s certainly a necessary and potentially fulfilling thing to do, but it’s rarely “actively Jewish”.

Many others in the rabbinic world use their title to promote a wide range of political and social causes.  I’ve never been drawn to that since I don’t feel that the Torah generates any specific political agenda.  While many of our values indeed speak to social issues, there is no Divine Mandate to be a Democrat or a Republican, a Laborite or a Likudnik, a capitalist or a socialist, a developer or an environmental activist.  As I’ve written previously, I find the concept of “Da’as Torah“, the Torah mandating specific behavior and decisions that are outside the realm of halacha (the spiritual walking on the path to our dual refinement of ourselves and of our portion of the world) insidious, counterproductive and just plain wrong.  Growing along the path of Torah teaches us how to think while, on the other hand, telling us what to think prevents us from ever actually thinking.  We are mandated to discover our inner truth, the root of our neshama, soul.

A beautiful teaching of Rabbi Twerski zt”l brings out that idea.  Examining a famous statement of Rabbi Elazar Ben Azarya, found in the Mishna of Berachot and repeated in the Haggadah, אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן עֲזַרְיָה, הֲרֵי אֲנִי כְּבֶן שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה, וְלֹא זָכִיתִי שֶׁתֵּאָמֵר יְצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם בַּלֵּילוֹת, עַד שֶׁדְּרָשָׁהּ בֶּן זוֹמָא, Rabbi Elazar Ben Azarya said, “Here I am like a man of seventy and I never succeeded (in having my opinion accepted) that we need to mention the redemption from Egypt at night until it was proposed and explained by Ben Zoma“.  The Rabbi zt”l explains that everyone has their unique portion of Torah which only they can bring into the world.  Thus, even though he was correct, this wasn’t a Torah that was uniquely attached to Rabbi Elazar’s neshama, but rather to Ben Zoma’s.  Thus, until Ben Zoma, himself, introduced this Torah, the world was incapable of accepting it, even if someone as wise, holy and prestigious as Rabbi Elazar proposed the exact same thing.

So, this leads me to a direction that I think is a worthwhile goal for a rabbi, at least for myself as a rabbi.  This is to lead/coach/encourage people to find the Torah that is within them, that is uniquely and expression of their soul, of who they are.

Expanding from this point, especially in today’s world it seems that a rabbi, or similar Torah teacher even without the title, might possibly teach that our entire system, outwardly reflected in our behavior as it’s molded and directed by halacha, is geared to lead each of us to our unique relationship with the Infinite God.  Between too many rabbis who try to coerce uniformity and conformity through halacha, in the name of Torah, and too many rabbis at the other extreme who reject the entire system of halacha (often in reaction to the previous rabbis), throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, the need to inspire people to explore and discover their own halachic paths (within the traditionally devoloped framework of halachic options) emerges in all its urgency.  As we’ve said and written and often repeated, there is no such thing as “one-size-fits-all” halacha.  Just as each of us possesses and embodies our unique portion of Torah, each of us has a unique path within, and hopefully utilizing, the halachic system.  Another rabbinic function I try to perform is helping friends, students and interested people in general discover and navigate theirs.

My main “rabbinic activity” over the years has been teaching Torah.  Teaching Torah is not teaching “about” Judaism, “about” the Bible (even if you call it the Torah), “about” the liturgy, “about” the Talmud or “about” anything at all.  While, of course, one needs to learn a minimum amount of Torah in order to properly address the mitzvot, and that is a legitimate reason to study Torah, that’s really a minimalist involvement.

Rather, we talk about תורה לשמה, Torah LiShma, Torah study for its own sake.  Beyond the basics (and I feel sad for folks who have merely experienced endless repetitions of Judaism 101, year after year after year), Torah Study is a process, not a product, an end in itself rather than a means to something else.  Since, as we’ve mentioned, everyone has their unique portion of Torah, which also means their unique way of engaging with Torah in general, I find my greatest rabbinic satisfaction helping people discover their own relationship, enabling them to utilize Torah Study as a direct way to experience and commune with God, at least through the intellectual and imagination channels.

Everyone is different.  The way I seem to be configured, I enjoy manipulating the abstract concepts as they often appear just beneath the surface of Talmudic writings as well as the wild imagery and poetry of our Kabbalah masters.  Over the years I’ve developed a criterion to evaluate whether I’ve entered the realm of Torah LiShma!  Simply stated, it’s when I realize how much fun I’m having!  This isn’t a skill I self-developed, however, but one that has been crafted over the years by many wonderful rabbis and teachers, most of whom have been frequently mentioned in these pages.  Thus I respond to the rabbinic role of training and enabling students to experience the sheer joy as the intellect leads the spirit to ever higher feelings of unity and oneness.

I’m not a fan of the institution of Chief Rabbis.  One of the greatest strengths of our tradition has been the relative anarchy of competing and often contradicting authorities and interpretations of our Torah and Mitzvot.  On a “local” basis, rabbis and students/congregants/friends can form intimate bonds of trust and respect so the two can work together to discover each person’s unique role and path.  With centralized authority, we find ourselves too often left with a franchise-feeling, off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all דרך, derech, way.  Rather, our uniqueness is so strong that I can safely say that if two people are observing Torah and Mitzvot in the exact same way, at least one of them, if not both (i.e. they’re both imitating a third, standardized, דרך, relevant to neither) , are “wrong”.

This leads, in conclusion, to my greeting and blessing for Pesach, חג שמח וכשר, Chag Sameach v’Kasher, may your Pesach be joyous first and kosher second.  While this reverses the traditional, especially orthodox, custom, I’m not stating that joy is primary and kashrut is optional.  Rather, both are essential, but not equivalent.  While the laws of Pesach create and clear the way for the energy of liberation and freedom (ironic, since freedom is derived from devotion to external rules!  I guess I have a new topic to write about…..), the goal isn’t conformity but, rather, the joy one feels at those rare moments of one-ness.

Thus, I wish everyone a Pesach where we utilize our resources to reach a new, ever-higher level of joy.

חג שמח וכשר

This is another of the series of Mussar workshops I assist with.  It’s especially timely as we look forward to Pesach.  We transform our allegiance from a limited human, Pharaoh, to the Infinite God, lifting our upper limit from the finite to the Infinite.  Perhaps the most insidious Pharaoh we need to free ourselves from is ourselves.  Trust is a necessary emotion to enable our reliance on God.

Mussar Midot and Mitzvot

ביטחון  Bitachon (Trust)

שבת (Shabbat)

(וְיוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי שַׁבָּת לַיהוָֹה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לֹא־תַעֲשֶׂה כָל־מְלָאכָה  (שמות כ:י

And the seventh day is Shabbat for HaShem, your God.  Do no labor.  (Shemot 20:10)

 וְהָיָה אִם־שָׁמֹעַ תִּשְׁמְעוּ אֶל־מִצְוֹתַי…וְנָתַתִּי מְטַר־אַרְצְכֶם בְּעִתּוֹ

(דברים י”א:י”ג-י”ד)

And if you deeply listen to my mitzvot… and I will bring timely rain to your land. (Devorim 11:13-14)

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Judaism is entirely based on trust.  We’re asked to validate experiences of that which we cannot perceive.  Although semi-proofs, lacking all rigor, are easy to find, in truth it’s impossible to prove God’s existence, the objective value of mitzvot or any other reason to participate in Jewish tradition.

ביטחון, Bitachon (trust), and אמונה, Emunah (belief), are closely related and are often used interchangeably.  We continuously work on our faith (Emunah (אמונה) is related to Omanut (אמנות), which means craft–in other words, Jewish tradition sees “faith” as a work in progress!).  The deeper we’re able to forge our belief that God exists and that He is a benevolent God, the more we feel safe in trusting Him.

In general, a lack of trust encourages power and control issues.  “If I can’t trust anyone (or any “power”) to do something, I better take care of it myself.”  While, superficially, this can seem like a healthy and mature relationship with responsibility, quite often what it really displays is pure narcissism, the actual emotional statement being “Only I am capable and trustworthy and good enough to do what needs to be done”.  In other words, “I’m better than everyone!”

Thus, the central mitzva of Judaism, Shabbat observance, directly, and  almost in a heavy-handed way, forces us to give up control, at least for one day a week.  To one degree or another, each of us needs to remove ourselves from the center of our universe.  On both a figurative and literal level, coming to terms with the fact that even if we don’t personally provide for our needs the world will still go on.  No one, ourselves included, is indispensable.  The world will continue to exist after we, individually, are no longer here, just as it will continue to function even if we occasionally disengage our efforts at production.

God, we learn, is patient and can bear infinite insult from us.  We, and our fellows, are remote from this (in our cases human) level of development.  Thus, since God can, as it were, “take care of Himself”, we really have to worry about the effects of our actions on other people. So, while the ultimate goal is in terms of our relationship with The Creator, in “real life” (and also, the path to refining our relationship with God is through our relationships with our fellow men), it’s the people around us, whom we increasingly learn to trust, who benefit.  Thus Shabbat provides our best exercise in developing these spiritual “muscles”.

If the world were, indeed, random and chaotic, it would be insane to trust anyone or anything.  The more predictable things are, the more secure and confident we feel and that makes us much more likely to be trusting.

Even if we inexactly understand the “rules” and the deep, underlying connections of cause and effect, our experience tells us that, to some extent, at least, the general concept of cause and effect is true.  The second paragraph of the Sh’ma explains this phenomenon on the basis of covenant:  If we perform our duties (observe the mitzvot), God will preserve us in The Land.  But if we don’t, we’ll surely be lost, as we have time and time again.  The reminder from our twice-daily recital of this, along with our historical experience, reinforces our understanding the world as organized and directed rather than pointless and random.  On a personal basis, we’re reassured that our actions have predictable (even if not necessarily foreseeable by us) consequences.  As we gain confidence in this area, our ability to place trust beyond our own limited selves grows.  We can begin to evict ourselves from the center of the universe as well as to understand our own identities as human and not divine.  This allows us better relations both with our fellow men, whom we see as our equals, as well as with God, Whom we see infinitely transcends us.

I often wonder what’s the attraction of a worldview that excludes God.  The only thing I can think of is that it enable the opposite worldview, one that is entirely anthrocentric.  The need to take center-stage, to literally coronate oneself, can completely overcome anyone.

When this narcissistic self-image is challenged, and how much greater can the challenge be than the demonstration of a force infinitely higher and more powerful than man be than the Revelation at Sinai, it can either acknowledge reality or it becomes desperate to reassert itself.   Just a few weeks after the culmination of the ten plagues which overturned normal reality in Egypt, after the miracle at the sea where the very physical nature of water was transformed, every Jewish soul, including all of us who will ever live, witnessed the infusion of the Infinite into the finite.  Not only did the mountain shake, but our senses were so transformed as to hear visions and see sounds!  An entire people experienced in historical time and physical space the “voice of God”.  After even a brief glimpse, reality was unavoidable.

Nonetheless, some egos are just too insistent.  Rather than feeling secure in reality, they long to prevail even if they have to invent their own alternate reality in which to reign.

Some, perhaps many, people wanted to challenge what they just experienced.  It did, remember, just compel a complete transformation in our understanding.  Perhaps these people needed to question in order to verify for themselves that the world wasn’t as they’d previously understood it, but was, rather, totally different, and much more profound and mysterious, than they’d ever imagined.  But there’s a world of difference between questioning and trying to destroy.

There were others, so invested in themselves and their presumed supremacy, who would just never let themselves be convinced.  In order to “prove” their centrality, even becoming “god-makers”, they were willing to totally impoverish themselves–these were the people willing to hand over to Aaron the Cohen Godol all of their gold in order to create golden calf, a lesser “god” that is created by, rather than Creating, man.

It’s not only in such dramatic circumstances will people, counterintuitively, put their all to work for their own detriment.  I think that if you dig deeply enough you’ll find that here, too, the underlying motivation is often the same narcissism.  Our tradition frequently warns of worshipping false gods, really meaning self-worship, an unbalanced ego out of control.  If you’re willing to “pay any price”, for what you want, perhaps that’s evidence of judgement impaired by egotism.

Now that Purim has passed, I wonder what lessons we will take forward this time around.  One insidious trap in Jewish practice is to merely repeat, year-to-year, exactly what we did, said and (supposedly) learned each previous year.  While continuity is vital, it should only provide the כלי, k’li, the vessel/form of the experience, not the content.  Rather than a flat circle, perhaps the image of an ever-climbing spiral is more accurate.  As we return, year-to-year, we need to bring all of our new insights in order to experience anew each of our observances.  We need to fill this vessel with ever-new insights and wisdom!

As often seems to happen these days, Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo wrote and distributed an article, anticipating what I was about to post, tentatively called “Purim and the Butterfly Effect” (don’t bother looking for it since I decided that R’Cardozo already said everything I planned to, but much more eloquently).  The main thrust is that we too often see the world as a nexus of unrelated forces and events which somehow resolve into our current realities.

Much has been written through the millennia of the hidden nature of Purim.  Alone in the entire Tanach, Megillat Esther is the only book in which God’s name does not appear, even once.  The story itself is one of seemingly unrelated incidents, Vashti’s refusal to make a spectacle of herself for Ahashueros’s feast, the subsequent selection of Esther, a Jewish woman, to replace Vashti as Queen, Mordechai’s convenient overhearing of a plot to assassinate Ahashueros, Ahashueros‘ insomnia and the “chance” opening of the Book of Persian Chronicles at the very page describing Mordechai’s service to the king, and more.  Against this background, the existence of the entire Jewish people is threatened by Haman’s hatred, but the long chain of “coincidence” leads to our salvation.

Traditionally, we’re taught that God “hid His face” during this entire period.  Perhaps because the Jews of Persia were more interested in assimilating into Persian society than in reinforcing Jewish culture.  ארץ ישראל, Eretz Yisrael, and our dream return to sovereignty there, faded as a collective dream.  (It’s important to note that only a tiny portion of the Jews who were originally exiled even bothered to return when that became possible (through Darius, the son of Esther and Ahashueros).

The question I ask is did God hide His face in order to, somehow, teach us something about this specific salvation or, perhaps, is the point that even though we refused to see His face, i.e. to recognize that the world is not arbitrary and random, nor is it impersonally mechanistic, nevertheless, God, indeed, does direct the universe?  Our survival, whether we see it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, is only a result of His direct involvement with the world.

As we start to prepare for Pesach, we begin to enter the consciousness of that set of miracles.  A well-known question has to do with why He had to subject Egypt to all ten plagues.  Couldn’t He have redeemed and rescued Israel in a single step?  Many answers over the centuries emphasize the need to show Bnei Yisrael, apparently in great detail, God’s active participation.  When we finally experience the miraculous escape across the Reed Sea, we’re told that even the humblest handmaiden saw more than the Ezekiel in his deepest prophetic visions.  One of the reasons we have so much to talk about on Pesach (the main activity of seder nights–also Pesach, פסח, can be written פה סח, Peh Sach, the mouth speaks) is because of how much we saw surrounding these miracles.

When the triumphal song of thanksgiving after the sea crossing is introduced, the Torah says, עז ישיר משה ובני ישראל, Az Yashir Moshe U’Vnei Yisrael, Then Moshe and the Children of Israel will sing.  Rabbi Twerski zt”l, in his precious sefer, Malchut Shlomo, reminds us of the famous question–what’s the great praise for Moshe and Bnei Yisrael?  They just witnessed many months of huge, visible and public miracles!  One would be surprised if they didn’t praise and acknowlege The Creator for all this.  The Rabbi answers that if a person is sufficiently stubborn, even if the facts are right in front of his eyes he can refuse to see reality.

Likewise, with the Purim story, even though the entire Jewish people experienced a miraculous salvation from a well-devised and almost executed “Final Solution”, most of us refused to open our eyes.  Perhaps it’s not so much that God hid His face from us as our deliberately shutting our eyes led to His face being hidden.  We were, and too often still are, the active “concealer” of God’s face, his active presence in the universe.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?  What if the forest is well-populated, but we’re all wearing ear plugs?

Perhaps it’s so obvious that it almost disappears, but it strikes me in this year’s reading, more than any other message, is the simple reality of an entire people pooling their efforts and resources to honor the Transcendant  God.  The paradox of twelve uniquely distinct groups becoming one and thus creating a greater beauty than the total of the twelve each working alone.

Yale Law Professor Amy Chua created quite a stir a couple years ago with her book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, advocating parents’ high expectations for their children.  Much of the contemporary media rose up to attack her since her position runs counter to what has become “accepted wisdom”, that self-esteem is much more important than achievement.  The opposition to her book illustrates many of the reasons that American society is in such rapid decline.  Feel-good complacence cripples much of modern western civilization.

I grew up in the 1950s and was blessed with parents who expected me to excel.  All the kids at my schools, both the Jewish Day School I attended and the public junior and senior high schools, were brought up with the same demands.  Not only that, but our teachers also took it for granted that we would study hard, learn our subjects and be an entire classroom of excellent students.  No, we didn’t alway meet those expectations and we certainly weren’t angels (I and my best friend seemed to spend most of our fifth grade year in the sixth grade classroom–not because we were so smart, but because the sixth grade rabbi was also the school principal and we were almost daily sent to stand in opposite corners of his room because our high spirits disrupted our own classroom!).  But when we fell short the expectations remained high.  No one considered us incapable just because we’d occasionally fail.  They also taught us that failing is part of the process and that it’s bad only if we let it stop our continuing efforts.

It should go without saying that frustration is frustrating.  But it can be a vital tool instead of an unbearable agony.  Avoiding frustration doesn’t lead to success, but rather guarantees failure.  Complacence with mediocrity, at the end of the day, won’t increase self-esteem.

Among the many general lessons from our Talmud, we repeatedly see the tension of premise and resistance, challenge and objection, attempt and failure, resolving into solutions and insights.  We also learn to develop and adapt our abilities to our entire environment rather than avoid possible failure in our areas of lesser strength.  This is part of the six-sectional nature of ש”ס, Shas, the Six Orders of Mishna.  (For one thing, six represents the four directions plus up and down, in other words, our entire three-dimensional physical world.  It is also a “multi-purpose tool”, giving us skills to succeed in such diverse areas as agriculture, holidays/liturgy, emotion, relationship, ritual and the totally abstract/intangible).  Our entire tradition assures us that we can succeed, no matter what the field.  Challenges are to savor as opportunities to grow, not feared as pitfalls of feeling bad.

The Shulchan Aruch, one of two master-configurations of halacha, begins with the phrase, יתגבר כארי לעמוד בבוקר, Yitgaber c’Ari l’amod ba’boker“, Invigorate yourself like a lion to stand in the morning.  Only slightly facetiously, perhaps we can learn to be equally fierce as the tiger, to be as loving, supporting and demanding of our children as the Tiger Mothers (and as were our own parents).

The parsha, Torah portion, we read this past week, Mishpatim, presents the basis for a civil society based on law.

Interestingly, the word, משפט, mishpat, also means a sentence, a group of words which work together to communicate a specific meaning with much more power and precision than residing in the individual words.  Like a civil society, it’s based on rules, in this case the rules of grammer.  Just as people need to work cooperatively together in order to benefit from being part of a community, words need to work together in order to communicate.

One feature of Hebrew, לשון הקודש, lashon hakodesh, the holy tongue, is that words sharing a core of letters are connected.  Changing just one letter, the ט, tet, for a ח, chet (these two letters are adjacent in the Hebrew alphabet and, thus, differ by only one number, 9/8, in our system of assigning numeric value to each letter), and adding the feminine ending, ה, hei, we transform משפט, mishpat to משפחה, mishpacha, family, the smallest unit and most fundamental building block of a functioning society.  Because of the intimacy of a family, it is even more dependent than society as a whole on structures and rules.  Parents are given authority, not because they’re inherently “better” than children, but because this authority, which creates order and structure, is absolutely critical to the functioning of the family.

Families, greater societies and language all benefit from a phenomenon known as synergy where the total is greater than the sum of individual members/parts.  This is one explanation of our millennia-long commitment to community that has been so central to the Jewish people.  The reason we emphasize living and working with community, אַל תִּפְרוֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר, al tifros min ha-tzibur, don’t separate yourself from the community (Avot, 2:4), is not to support separatism nor to say that, somehow, Jews are better than others, but rather because only by living and working within the group do we internalize the values and structures of our tradition and begin to appreciate their inner logic and beauty.  In general, complaints about the arbitrariness of halacha, Jewish law, usually come from people who try to analyze it from outside, rarely from those who actually experience it.

Of course there are those people with exceptional inner strength and commitment, I’m certainly not one of them, who are able to “stay the course” in isolation.  The rest of us receive much of our self-identity from our surroundings.  Perhaps a trivial example, but if you shop for groceries in an upscale market, you really do “feel like a million dollars”, while shopping at the “bargain center” can easily make you feel like a loser, although the actual prices are generally not that far apart.  Living a halachically-based life in an observant community makes you feel part of your world, but without that community you feel like an outcast.

We’re taught that God is not far away, but in our very midst, לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִוא, lo b’shamayim, not in heaven,  and וְלֹא־מֵעֵבֶר לַיָּם, v’lo me’ever l’yam, and not across the sea (דברים ל:י”ב-י”ג, Devarim 30, 12 and 13).  We begin from our center and work outward, within our family and then within our people, to create the supportive, synergistic society, structured through משפטים, mishpatim, basic laws, that allows us to flourish as individuals and raise Creation to its highest potential.