Rabbi Zeitlin

This year is unusual in that the eighth day here in the diaspora falls on Shabbat.  For the next number of weeks, our weekly Torah reading will be out of sync with that in Israel where this upcoming Shabbat will already be after Pesach.  This underlines the distance between where we are and where we’ll eventually (במהרה בימינו Bimhayra B’Yameynu, speedily, in our days) arrive.  (As an aside, it’s also the anniversary of my own Bar Mitzva!)

It’s not accidental, either that we in exile observe two-day chaggim or that this can lead to an extended period of reminder of how far we still have to come.  For all our singing at the end of each seder, l’shana ha’ba’a b’Yerushalayim, for most of us it remains merely a song rather than a resolve and a pledge.  We’re not alone, of course–throughout Jewish history, even though it was much more difficult at some times than it is now, Jews could make the effort to live in Israel and some always did.  However, most of our greatest leaders through the generations never did.  The great Rambam, who finally settled in Egypt after an earlier and less-well-known Spanish Expulsion in the twelfth century, occasionally referred to himself as one who daily commits the sin of not living in the Land of Israel.

While it is much easier today, with the establishment sixty-plus years ago of the modern State of Israel, there are still obstacles for many of us, especially those of us who do dream of living there.  Sometimes these obstacles are significant, including financial (I’m not talking about those not willing to give up relative comfort in affluent western countries, but those who don’t have the financial resources to even get themselves, not to mention their belongings, there in the first place.) and family considerations.  For many of us, it’s not just a matter of laziness or complacency or liking our “luxurious” lifestyle too much, but, rather, agonizing challenges and doubts.

It’s not coincidental that, here in the diaspora, the gateway to the eighth day is the seventh, the anniversary of crossing the Yam Suf, Sea of Reeds, physically leaving all of Egypt behind.  The story which is filled in rabbinically from the written Torah is that we were filled with terror with the Egyptian army pursuing us from behind and a raging sea blocking our path forward.  It was only after one Jew, Nachshon Ben Aminadav in this case, conquered his fear and relied on his trust in God’s beneficence, walking into the water until he was literally over his head, did the water miraculously part and allow our escape.

Our sages tell us that at that moment, even the lowliest hand-maiden experience a greater direct revelation of the Shechina, the Divine Presence, than did the greatest prophets of our tradition.  Everyone was energized by this revelation and able to conquer their own fear and doubts.

I don’t think it’s likely that many of us can logically address our various fears which prevent us from pursuing our unique paths.  In terms of my example for this article, moving to Israel, perhaps some folks can find a job before they actually move.  Some very lucky people are able to go with all, or at least most of their family.  But even solving those issues isn’t a guarantee that one will successfully integrate and find their place in Israel–trust me, I’ve tried in the past and have been, “back at the drawing board” for more than twenty agonizing years.

The lesson we all, myself included, need to draw from this upcoming holiday, is that the real key, counterintuitive as it might seem in our modern empirical, non-intuitive world, is trust.  Trust that everything we’ve been taught for millennia about The Creator is true.  That He really does have the world arranged so that we will, eventually, succeed.  That He wants us to overcome our fears, which is why He places them in front of us in the first place, so we can experience first-hand that the Divine Will really is the foundation of the universe and not a mere after-thought dreamed up by “the religious”.  Rather, if we can, like Nachshon, give our complete trust to God, we, like the hand-maiden, will directly experience life on the level of the miraculous.

It’s been more than three millennia since we left Egypt and, presumably, exited slave consciousness.  It’s now more than six decades since the State of Israel was established in the modern world.  The irony, really the tragedy, is that while we sat at our seder tables talking about and celebrating freedom, in many ways we continue to act as if we’re still slaves to Pharoah in Egypt.

At this point in our history, we should not be apologetic for merely existing.  We should not feel obligated to receive outside approval to settle our land and to build homes to house our families.  We should be proud of our spiritual connection to The Creator and shouldn’t feel we need to justify, or, even worse, censor our traditions and insights and rituals to make them acceptable to political, cultural or academic fashion.  We should have confidence and pride in who we are, what we’ve achieved and what we’ve given and continue to give to the world.

We should also have the confidence that we needn’t cut ourselves off from the rest of the world because, somehow, we’ll be too tempted to throw our own culture aside.  Rather, we should value, treasure and celebrate our reality, freely share it with others.  We must also learn what we can from other traditions without fear that ours, somehow, won’t measure up–it will!.  If we’re confident that there is only One God, and if we honestly trust Him, we needn’t feel threatened where no threat exists.

However, we also need to feel free to defend ourselves against the very real threats that do, in fact, exist.  We needn’t rely on a “master”, a “stronger nation” to protect us, but need to develop our own abilities and strengths.  When people threaten to annihilate our people, to throw us into the sea, we need the self-confidence to take them seriously and to respond as needed.

It’s long past time to see ourselves as either the “field hands”, lost to despair and feelings of worthlessness, or as the “house servants”, privileged and, somehow, more acceptable if we remember to mind our manners, i.e. if only we’d just stop insisting on acting like Jews all the time!

The upcoming Seventh Day of Pesach, the anniversary of our crossing the Sea, is the day in our calendar which most emphasizes our trust in God.  It reminds us that even if we don’t ourselves see how our path eventually arrives at a full resolution, a completion of our mission of, partnering with The Creator Himself, putting the final touches on the world, as well as bringing ourselves to our fullest possible experience of the Eternal and Divine Infinite, we know that’s where we’re going.  We’re reminded that even when it seems almost impossible to continue, as it has so many times in the past, we, like our ancestors, will somehow find the inner strength and the Divine help we need to carry on, to rebuild if necessary, but to see our responsibilities through.

Judaism is a system based on obligation, but when it’s based in love, it’s easier to make these obligations also our desires.  It’s also based on covenant which, itself, is based in love.  Although it’s buried deep within each of our hearts, that God will fulfill his promises to us, we should, finally, feel safe enough, free enough, to allow that truth to emerge into the entirety of our beings.

May we finally become free to trust, both in ourselves and, even moreso, of course, The Creator.

Remember, Judaism is the art of eternal optimism.

Chag Sameach.

We’ve already entered the month of Nissan, with Pesach less than two week away.  One of the lesser-talked-about facts about Nissan is that we refrain from saying Tachanun, a very powerful and evocative cry for Divine help which follows that Amidah (the standing prayer, also known as the Shemona Esray) the entire month.

The reasoning behind this omission is very telling.  Not only does the month contain seven days (in Israel) of Pesach, as well as the following day, Isru Chag in Israel and the eighth day of the festival everywhere else, as well as the day before, Erev Chag, which gives us nine days already that we wouldn’t say Tachanun.  In addition to that, we’re reminded that the Mishkan, the portable Temple, was dedicated at the beginning of Nissan, with each of the twelve tribes’s leaders making a special offering, one day at a time, each of these days, thus, becoming a holiday.  This brings our running total to twenty-one days we wouldn’t say Tachanun anyway, and this is before we add several days for the Shabbatot in the month.

At this point, we apply the often-used general principle of following the majority.  Since most days of the month exclude Tachanun because of their additional Kedusha, holiness, we make the entire month Kodesh, holy.  This additional holiness makes our Tachanun prayers superfluous since we’re already relating to The Creator in a much higher mode.

I’ve always been struck with the beauty of the verse that, in most liturgies, precedes the actual Tachanun psalm.  “And David said to Gad, ‘I am in deep torment.  I’ll fall into the Hand of God because His mercies are infinite.  I will not fall into the hand of man.'”

If we can become sufficiently mindful of the spiritual reality we inhabit in Nissan, we realize that we don’t need to fall into the Hand of God since, in it’s Kedusha, we’re already surrounded by It.

The next step, of course, is to bring that consciousness into the entire year, to realize that we’re always living in the Hand of God where we can always rely on His Infinite love.

The Meor Eynayim (Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, a first generation chassidic master) explores the very beginning of Parshat Vayikra.  It begins ויקרא אל משה, Viyikra El Moshe, And He called to Moshe, both without explicitly specifying who called to Moshe and with a very curious tiny א, aleph, instead of one the normal size.  The verse continues, וידבר ה” אליו מאהל מעוד לאמר, And God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting (the משקן, Mishkan), saying….

First, it’s curious that the verse begins without specifying who called to Moshe, even though the subject, God, is obvious.  And after calling to Moshe, He then spoke to him–the obvious question is why repeat that he then spoke to him.  Isn’t that obvious?  He then goes on to discuss the shrunken א, aleph, as referring to the אלופו של עולם, the Alufo (Chief) of the Universe, i.e. God.

The Chernobler’s explanation is that when God first calls, he’s calling each of us to return to Him.  But He reduces/restricts Himself (צמצום, tzimtzum) to a scale appropriate to each and every individual.  This voluntary restriction, contrasting to, for example, appearing in an explicit miracle, often results in subtle thoughts and longings, but the voice is so hidden, so quiet that we might not even recognize it for what it is–a call to return to our purest, highest selves.

But when we do heed this call, then we can recognize that the longing is, truly, for God and we’re eager to make ourselves fit for that relationship, to make of ourselves a vessel for His Light.  The rebbe continues that from the very first, God’s desire in creating the universe is always ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם, and make be a holy place so I can dwell within each of you.

He discusses how this hidden calling out can often take the form of circumstances seeming to conspire to prevent us from doing something we shouldn’t.  We’re prevented from an aveira, a sin, in ways that seem beyond our control, although, of course, if we’re really determined to go ahead, we can eventually accomplish it.

That reminded me of a teaching in Tamar Devora, (The Palm Tree of Devora), a small book by the Ramak, Rabbi Moshe Cordevero, the famous Kabbala master of Tzfat who was teacher to both Yosef Karo and the Ari.  One of the attributes of The Creator that he describes, while encouraging us to imitate it, is that God continues to lovingly sustain in life each of us, even when we persist in destructive behavior, described as insulting God Himself, all with the hope that we’ll eventually see our errors and change our ways.  He’ll continually call out quietly to each of us, knowing that, eventually, we will finally begin to hear.

These thoughts brought me to think about the story of Elisha Ben Abahu, known as the Acher, the “other”.  You might remember that he was one of the four who ascended to פרדס, Pardes (paradise, but also an acronym for the four levels, each ever deeper, of understanding the subtle and fundamental wisdom of the Torah).  One of his companions died from the experience, another went mad, only Rabbi Akiva “came in peace and left in peace” while he, Elisha, became the Acher, “cut his plantings”, became an apostate.  The remainder of his life is described as following an evil culture and we see him publicly violating the Shabbat.  But all this while, his student, the great Rabbi Meir, continues to learn Torah from him as well as tries to inspire him to return to his spiritual roots.  The story (Talmud, Tractate Chagiga, 14-15) continues with Acher hearing a Bat Kol, a heavenly voice, calling everyone to return, except for himself.  Rabbi Meir continues to try to show Acher a way back, but at each moment it seems that God Himself is rejecting Elisha.  He dies and his soul is sent to hell.  Rabbi Meir and his cohorts, however, do not give up and eventually, at Rabbi Meir’s own death, he resolves to descend himself in order to pull Acher into a final redemption.

This is a very difficult story to both understand and to accept.  First, assuming as always that God doesn’t take time off for a coffee at Starbucks, He Himself is behind Elisha’s apostasy.  Not only that, but He continues to sustain Acher in life as he purposefully mocks the teachings of the Torah of which he was once one of the greatest masters.  It appears that even the enormous amount of Torah that he had once integrated is not counted as a merit for him.  Like Job, his punishment and torment seems arbitrary.

One of the most difficult things to understand in life, especially through the lens of hashgacha pratit, God’s individual oversight of each of our lives, is why bad things happen to good people.  Some of what we experience makes sense when seen as part of the feedback system of reward (encouragement for good choices) and punishment (discouragement for bad).  At the same time, each moment places us at exactly the best decision point to make a choice which will maximally bring us higher, make us more completed.  But often times, our lives just aren’t about us, but, rather, we’re playing roles in other people’s feedback cycles.  While there are certainly elements of reward and punishment and our future decisions, they’re deeply hidden.  We, and everything in our lives, can seem completely out of control.

It’s possible to see the story of Acher through this lens.  His apostasy was never about him in the first place, nor was his suffering, both in this life and the next.  The role he played, however, gave opportunity to Rabbi Meir to develop his own greatness, to continue extending hope and encouragement, friendship and respect for his once-great teacher.  Acher’s fate enables Rabbi Meir to exceed himself, indeed to exceed the effort anyone before or since has ever made to redeem another.  It, indeed, wasn’t about him at all.  And, in final fairness, he does achieve the eternal peace of Olam HaBah.

Of course, you question what about Rabbi Meir was so special that his teacher, Acher, was sacrificed for his eventual benefit.  סתם משנה רבי מאיר היא, stam mishneh Rebbe Meir he.  Rabbi Meir is generally considered to be the author of almost every anonymous majority opinion teaching in the Mishna.  His greatness is that he was able to voice the consensus of many different hearts and minds.  His ability to see the merit in even the most fallen, his own former teacher and master, his humanity to care for someone everyone else had given up on, his belief that God’s actions are never arbitrary, but always calls to us, no matter how soft and hidden the voice, was the key to his own greatness.

The parsha, indeed the entire book of Vayikra (Leviticus), focuses on the  קרבנות, karbanot, the sacrifices in the Holy Temple.  The root of קרבן, is קרב, kavov, closeness.  As we’ll learn, the only purposes of these sacrifices is to help us come closer to God, with the reminder that in the spiritual world, which is not made of matter at all, there is no geomentric/spacial dimension–closeness means similarity in action.  Rabbi Meir’s actions on behalf of Acher should inspire us to, like The Creator Himself, act for the benefit of others (literally, אחרים, acherim).  By following Rabbi Meir’s example, his imitation of the nature of God, to be a Creator for them benefit of others, we, like Rabbi Meir, more close approach God.

Shabbat Shalom

I put a lot of thought and energy explaining that Halacha, religious law, isn’t arbitrary, that it’s directed to stimulate growth both in each individual and in the world at large.  And for the most part, that is true.  But, as this past Shabbat, Shabbat Parah, reminds us, there are laws and rituals which will never make sense in a logical way.  The entire matter of the red heifer has always left us baffled.

To begin with, the likelihood of a purely red calf being born is almost zero.  Secondly, as it’s processed and utilized, all with the aim of removing the ritual impurity which is associated with proximity to death, everyone involved, who must be ritually pure to begin with, becomes ritually defiled and will require their own purification, all so the “end-user” will become pure.  This is the template for the class of halacha known as חוק, Chok, which, by definition, cannot be rationalized.  It’s related to the word, חקק, chakek, to engrave, as being an integral part of the fabric of the world, far beyond our limited ability to understand.

Thus, in terms of not being explainable, it is arbitrary.  But there is a major difference between arbitrary and capricious.  Arbitrary, in this sense, means without an explanation we can understand beyond the fact that it’s integrated into the structure of reality.  Capricious, of course, means “as a whim”, not transcending reason but, rather, defying it.

Because some highly visible “religious authorities” have, in fact, developed capricious חומרות, chumrot, stingencies and present them as do-or-die baseline halacha, many people mistakenly conclude that all halacha is, indeed, arbitrary, merely reflecting the urges of some people to relish the power of controlling others.  And if, chas v’shalom, that’s all our spiritual path is–an arena for one small group to oppress us all, we wouldn’t have much to talk about.

But that attitude not only steals our free will and our map to reality, it also misses the distinction between that which is and that which isn’t arbitrary.  And, furthermore, it loses the value of having some truly arbitrary elements built into our tradition and what we can learn from them.

The intentionally arbitrary, and there are very few of them, mandates in Torah are there to help us overcome and transcend our lowest, ego-obsessed selves.  The force us to confront our very finiteness.  This is echoed in the long-standing argument between the two early hasidic masters, the Rebbe Reb Zusia and the Rebbe Reb Elimelech.  One argued that we should approach God with a sense of our own limitations which would lead to awe and wonder at God’s infinite One-ness.  The other argued we should begin in awe of God and realize, from that, our own finite nature.  When the holy Maggid of Mezeritch was asked to decide the matter, he answered that both are, indeed, the words of the Living God, but starting with our limitations first is higher.  These chokim, in carefully measured doses, serve to free us by reminding us that we are not, indeed, God.

Through the years, I’ve been amazed with many fellow Jews who, finding nothing comfortable or profound in Judaism, have turned to eastern spiritual paths.  Often they’ll sit silently for hours, or they’ll repeat a foreign phrase over and over as a mantra.  I’ll certainly grant that one can experience deeply and receive profound insights with these methods.  However, many of these same people will refuse to leave their cars or their cellphones or their computers for a day, often because they resent being told what to do or not to do by their own leaders who, unfortunately represent a culture even more foreign to them than those of India or Japan.  Macrobiotic, veganism or raw food are all reasonable alternatives, but kosher is, at best, superstition and it limits freedom!

I was always struck by the arbitrary actions of the historic Zen masters in their tales.  Somehow, I always found them very Jewish.  The point, at least in the stories I read and studied, was basically to silence our ever-running egos.  Part of my painting studies many years ago with Hisashi Ohta, Living National Treasure of Japan in sumi-e (black ink painting) and a profound Zen scholar, comprised his marking up by best and most careful painting efforts with his ubiquitous red magic marker!  But when confronted by the same lessons, often told by someone wearing a dark business suit and spoken with a New York accent, these same messages too often become unpalatable, pathetic attempts at control, manipulation and coercion.  I’ve always been fascinated by this disconnect.

I’m not, and the Torah doesn’t advocate mindless obedience.  But it is valuable, as an exercise or, perhaps, a discipline, to some times just let go, to fall into the mikve (ritual bath) of action without demanding a full explanation before starting.

It’s been taught throughout our tradition that Avoda Zora, idol-worship, generally consists of worshiping ourselves as gods.  One of the many reasons it’s such a bad practice is simply because we are not God, and trying to live with the illusion that we are guarantees a life of always falling short, of always seeing ourselves fail.  As soon as we’re able to see ourselves as the magnificently limited, flawed but filled with potential humans that we are, the happier and healthier we’ll naturally feel.

While trying to slog through yet another, let me say well-intentioned, book on New Age consciousness, I was struck with the reason I can never get beyond the first few chapters with my eyes open.  There is an underlying assumption, deeply embedded in western thought, that we really are clever enough to figure everything out.  The quest for a “magic bullet”, complete theory of everything, all-encompassing ideology just won’t go away.

Immediately after ritually washing hands upon awakening, we traditionally recite the phrase ‘ראשית חכמה יראת ה, Reishit Chachma Yirat HaShem,  the beginning of wisdom is awareness/awe of God (focusing on the root of the word,  יראה, Yira, which is ראה, Re’eh, to see, rather than fear).

Beyond simplistic “God is the boss/I am the servant” models, what we’re really called on is to realize that God is the uniquely infinite while we are, each of us, ultimately limited.  Although we can make infinitely more new connections and innovations, this is the same principle in basic mathematics that between any two fixed points on a line, an infinite number of points exist.  This is a bounded infinity, a paradox, of course, but a distinction we often lose sight of.  The infinite nature of God is a totally different concept, first in that we can’t even comprehend it, but second in that it involves no boundaries whatsoever.

In other words, the first requirement to acquire wisdom is the realization that not only do we not know everything to begin with, but that no matter how much we do learn, there will always be infinitely more that we can never know. There is no “magic bullet” that will fully explain everything, no instant or even complete “enlightenment”.

Judaism is, among other things, the art of relishing paradox.  While we’re commanded to “know God”, we’re also told that this is an impossible task.  Even the story-level telling of our tradition emphasizes that our greatest mind, Moses, was imperfect and limited.  And even for him, there wasn’t a moment of “Total Knowledge”, but a slow process of endless effort in order to learn.  We often think of the supernatural revelation on Sinai, but seem to forget the forty sleepless, foodless days and nights Moses spent acquiring the Torah.

The genius of our tradition, for me, is that we can acknowledge the material and the empirical while, at the same time, reminding ourselves daily that it’s really just a “drop in the ocean”.  Rather than presenting our deepest ideas as the complete truth, every Torah book I’ve ever encountered or even heard of, repeatedly reminds the reader that it’s only talking in metaphor and that the true reality is, by definition, beyond our possible grasp.  I’ve yet to find another wisdom tradition that allows for infinite growth and discovery while avoiding the arrogant illusion of being able to know it all.

Ultimately, when we warn of Avoda Zara, strange (idol) worship, it’s not a triumphalism or evolving beyond “primitive” superstitions that “sticks and stones” might be God, but rather worshiping our own egos which pretend to understand everything.  Any attempt to define and delineate God/Reality/The Universe (or which tries to equate those three) implies that either we are infinite or that God is finite.

Of course this is very tempting–it’s hard-wired into our very natures as humans.  Which is why we have the daily vaccine of Reishit Chachma Yirat HaShem.

Once we step into Purim, a few days from now, I’ll feel pulled into a whirlpool with Pesach arriving before I know it.  Yesterday, Shabbat Zachor, was a good day to reflect, to recalibrate goals and to examine strategies.  It’s necessary, and can be painful, to take an honest look at motivations, as well as to clarify, lest I fool myself and others and divert us from our journeys.

The goal of our Jewish tradition has always been to bring both the individual, עולם קטן, Olam Katan (miniaturized universe/microcosm) and the universal, אדם גדול, Adam Gadol (living universe/macrocosm), simultaneously, to a state of  as complete perfection and merging as possible for finite beings with the Infinite, with God.  As our world evolves, the Torah continuously self-updates to realistically guide us through each phase and how to bring ourselves and our world into alignment as we move closer and closer to the ultimate resolution.

Examining and sometimes challenging what has been is a delicate responsibility.  If the idea is merely to advance my own agenda, ego or power, my obligation is clear–to keep my mouth shut.  But when I see that some old paths are now counter-productive, that some new paths are necessary as ways to engage ourselves in the world as it is, I need to speak up.  I also need to speak with honest humility, with the realization that I could be 100% wrong, but with the honest intention of trying to be at least mostly correct.

When I complain about much of the observant world getting lost in the trivialities of ever stricter interpretations, I’m not challenging the logical/halachic process that can generate these ideas.  Rather, I worry that the larger goal, bringing ourselves, our fellows and the world into a state of devekut, merging with The One, is inadvertently  pushed aside.

When I call for innovations such as engaging and empowering women within the orthodox context, I’m not trying to win a popularity contest or to pander to various political agendas, nor to provocatively indulge in being some kind of enfant terrible.  Rather, it appears clear to me that in order to move forward, in order to fulfill  not only the empirical/halachic requirements, but also spiritual/mystical ones, we need to elevate the feminine to co-equality.

When I talk about shaking things up, letting go of last years’ lessons, I don’t intend to say that our former insights were wrong.  Merely that they, like our coming year’s, will be incomplete.  It’s the sense of feeling complete and complacent with what we’ve done that needs to be shattered.  The progress and insights we’ve reached, rather than final conclusions, need to be transformed into foundations upon which we’ll build in the future.

I don’t advocate lowering standards, but calibrating, as they have always been calibrated and re-calibrated, to be most effective.  We live in a world where most Jews are no longer consciously engaged in our endeavor.  I don’t think that marketing or patronizing will re-engage them any more than attempts at coercion will.  The Torah has always spoken in the language of man–of contemporary man in each age.  We need to rephrase, perhaps, as well as to inspire with our own actions, to make our tradition attractive for its self.  We need to lift up and inspire rather than dumb down, to lead from the front rather than, as is somehow reaching a sort of “respectability” “leading” from the rear.

In a discussing with a new friend about the idea of “peace of mind”, I was reminded of something Rabbi Twerski zt”l said, probably more than once.  “There is plenty of time for peace of mind once we reach one-hundred-and-twenty.”  I also remember, daily, what Rabbi Daniel Goldberger, z”l, told me when I first decided to become a rabbi (almost fifteen years before I fulfilled that goal).  “Zeitlin,” he said to me, looking me in the eye, “the one luxury I’ve never afforded myself is 100% certainty”.  I don’t claim to be right all, or even much of the time.  However, I do strive to approach doing and teaching the right things, those things which bring us closer to our goal.

I remember when “Jewish Intellectual” was a curse, usually from the right.  Today the curse has transformed to “Jewish/Israeli Bully”, this time from the left.  It seems like you can’t win for losing.  And recent performances of the Israeli government and the Jewish people in general has not appeared overwhelmingly brilliant when it comes to combatting this second cliché, the Big Lie.

Actually, I don’t think history has ever seen such reluctant warriors as the Jewish people.  I don’t know a single person in Israel who wouldn’t gladly put away all our weapons if we could feel truly safe in our land, if we weren’t surrounded by people whose major motivation in this world appears to be to destroy Israel and annihilate us worldwide.

On the other hand, the first insult is actually pretty strong praise.  Realize and celebrate that we are the heirs of the culture that first evolved away from the Warrior template. Rather than the strongest or most ruthless, we’re the first to and continue to admire the smartest and the humblest.  Our historical heroes fill massive libraries with descriptions of reality ranging from the empirical/logical/legal to the wildly poetic and mystic.

There aren’t many books on Jewish Generals, but bookshelves full on Jewish scholars.  So, just as Bilam’s intended curses were transformed to praise, thanks to all of you who cursed me as a Jewish Intellectual.

It’s pretty well understood among those who have taught and studied Kabbalah, the mystic side of our tradition, that a major imbalance in the world, and one which must be corrected in order for the world to enter a new and much higher state, often code-named World to Come or Mashiach (Messiah), is the relationship between the masculine and the feminine.  We describe our present state of universal turmoil, as well as the continuing, despite the establishment of the State of Israel, exile as the galut, exile, of the Shechina, the Divine Feminine.

Purim, with the central role of Esther who co-leads, along with Mordechai, the Jewish people, leads to thoughts of women’s roles in our tradition.  My thoughts turn to how we can actually contribute to this process, often described as the יחוד, yichud, uniting of Keter and Malchut, the sources of Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine.  So much of what I observe seems to be at best, merely tokenism and often actually counter-productive.

I will “come out” here stating that I enthusiastically endorse and support ordaining women as rabbis, or whatever other label you please, within the orthodox tradition.  Teaching women who are engaged in other denominations for many years now, my heart has been repeatedly broken with the tragedy of how much essential wisdom the orthodox world loses.  Merely allowing our most gifted women to only teach other women and address their specific halachic issues does not even begin to allow the Torah tradition to continue growing.  There is absolutely no way that men can, on our own, learn the full reality.  We need to enable our gifted women teachers and we, orthodox men, need to open ourselves to enthusiastically welcome what only they can teach us.

That being said, I’m extremely skeptical of women adopting specifically masculine practices such as tefillin and kippah (phylacteries and male head-covering).  It seems to be tokenism to me.  Additionally, the energy spent focusing on these particular practices is energy diverted from discovering and developing practices which will engage and enlarge the feminine, which should be the goal.  Even more than that, it displays a total lack of understanding the purpose of many of these male-only rituals.

Take tefillin, for example.  Often overlooked in this mitzva, we place the tefilla shel yad, the box and strap for the hand, on our left arms (or functionally “left” for lefties (i.e. our right arm).  Generally, our left side, standing in for the Kabbalistic Tree of Life arrangement of the Sephirot, the spiritual energies that sustain and power the universe, represents the feminine.  When a man places his tefillin on his feminine arm, he is activating and strengthening his own feminine nature.  In other words, one of the important functions that occurs when men wear tefillin is that they open themselves to engage with the still-not-fully-activated feminine energy.  It’s been my experience and observation, though, that when women pointedly perform this ritual, they’re making a statement of equality with men, i.e. masculinizing themselves.  It not only misses the point, but works against it.

Granted, this is a single ritual practice, but it seems to have become central to “feminist Judaism”.  I think it misses the boat.

No, I don’t have specific suggestions as to “appropriate” or effective new feminine rituals.  If they are really needed, I’m pretty confident that they will be developed and evolved by women.  I do observe that women are about equally non-observant of mitzvot already aimed at them as men are of mitzvot aimed at them.

This situation, really, is one of the main reasons I do so strongly support feminine leadership in traditional Judaism.  Just as our Gedolim, great (male) leaders, have an understanding that goes beyond the linear/binary and an intuition how to work with men, our Gedolot, great female leaders, will develop the intuition based on Torah, rather than on passing political enthusiasms, to guide Jewish women to a position of equality and balance (not imitation and identity) which will enable and herald our final, complete and perfect evolution.

Purim, along with the costumes and drinking and fun, is also the holiday when the Jewish People fully accepted the Torah they only provisionally did at Sinai.  I look forward to a more fully revealed and understood Torah to be fully and wholeheartedly accepted soon, in our days.

A common and well-discussed theme of Purim is the hidden miracle.  We are not saved through any obvious miracle, but rather through a series of events which develop in consensual reality–it’s only the chain of them which, when seen in retrospect, reveal the hidden Hand of God.  In fact, of all the books of the Torah, this is the only one which does not include even a single mention of any of God’s names.  Even when the Jewish people are faced with the threat of total annihilation, God does not make an explicit appearance.

Throughout our lives, we go through periods where everything seems perfect as well as periods when all seems lost, and everything in between.  As we grow older, we begin to realize that we’re not necessarily in control of our situations.  Living with the assumption of Hasgacha Pratit, divine involvement in every aspect of our lives, we face the obvious question, why does God want me to undergo these travails?

A fundamental assumption of our tradition is מלא כל הארץ כבודו, m’lo kol ha’aretz kvodo, God fills all of reality with his presence and  לית אתר פנוי מיניה, leyt atar p’nui minei, there is no place devoid of Him.  Likewise, the holy sparks, n’tzutzot, which are our mission to redeem and restore exist everywhere.  Thus, when we’re in a safe, secure and pleasant place and when we’re in a state of pain and fear, we still have the same mission–finding and restoring these n’tzutzot which are uniquely related to our unique souls.  Seen this way, our success is less a matter of preserving a pleasant situation or escaping a terrible one, but rather how well we’ve engaged with and lifted these sparks.

Obviously, it won’t completely change our attitudes and our comfort levels, but if we refocus on these challenges, to at least a small degree we can better survive our downs and not be paralyzed with fear and insecurity with our highs.  The trips up, just like the trips down, can be seen as simply delivering us to the venue of our next opportunity.

Perhaps it was the very mundaneness of our salvation in the Purim story enabled the Jewish people to finally accept the Torah fully, as described by a number of commentators.  Believing in God and participating in the Torah is much more obvious when things are going well or when God visibly comes to our rescue.  But when we’re forced to find God even when He’s making himself hard to see, we’re finally able to understand מלא כל הארץ, m’lo kol ha’aretz (He fills all the world….) and thus have the strength and courage to face whatever comes to our lives with at least some equanimity.

Chag Purim Sameach