Friday night we had a service to honor our congregation's veterans. It was very moving, including some memories from as far back as WWII. I was surprised to learn how many veterans we have, and those just the ones who responded to a request to self-identify. Seeing a good number of them there, some in uniform (or at least parts thereof), felt indescribably special.

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Thought from the beit midrash (study session) after morning services: "sh'ma yisrael..." (ending "God is one") is a core tenet of Judaism and prominent in liturgy. We say this all the time. And toward the end of every service we say Aleinu, which says of the messianic era: on that day God will be one. I've wondered about the contradiction for a while and still have no answer after this discussion. Understanding this as "on that day everybody will finally agree that God is one" doesn't feel quite right to me. Does this bother anybody else?

* * *

I heard an excellent d'var torah from a fellow congregant Saturday that I've been meaning to write about, but this short note will have to do for now. The torah tells us that Yaakov loved Rachel pretty much right away, enough that he was willing to work an extra seven years to marry her after Lavan pulled a switch under the wedding canopy and slipped Leah in in Rachel's place. But the torah never actually gives us any reason to believe that she loved him. Did she? If she didn't love him, she might have been willing to help in that switch. The midrash says that she taught Leah the secret signs that she was supposed to make so that Yaakov would know it was here; the midrash's explanation of this is that Rachel was sparing Leah's honor, but another explanation might be possible as well. Interesting idea that had not occurred to me before.

This week was my congregation's annual shabbaton. I want more shabbatot like that. :-)

( Friday night )

( some Saturday activities )

( Pirke Avot and a question about Rabbi Akiva )

What I really love about the shabbaton is that it preserves the sense of Shabbat past the end of the schmoozing after the morning service. It's a full Shabbat, which I rarely get. Except in the winter I often find Shabbat afternoons hard; in the summer Shabbat doesn't end until 9 or 9:30 (or later, a couple times), but my community pretty much disbands by noon and we haven't really gotten the "lunch and songs and torah discussion for a few hours in someone's home" meme going. (I invite people occasionally and need to do more, but I'm not critical mass. And a couple people, including my rabbi, are allergic to cats, sigh.) So Shabbat afternoon usually feels pretty isolated and restrictive for me; I'm not finding that joy I'm supposed to, many weeks.

I've discussed this with my rabbi in the context of his desire to start summer Shabbat services (on Friday) even earlier for the sake of families; if Shabbat already drags for me when why would I want to add an hour or two to it? During a break at the shabbaton we talked some about this and I asked if he thought we could have the occasional gathering in the synagogue after morning services -- either brown-bag or someone organizes food in advance. He seems open to the idea (but doesn't want to organize it, which I wasn't asking him to), so I'll see what I can do about that. We could eat and sing and discuss things like Pirke Avot. :-) We do have a monthly beit midrash in that timeslot, but people who aren't interested in the day's topic leave, so I'd like to create something more open and free-form on some of the days when we don't have the beit midrash. We'll see what happens.

I have book lust that I can't immediately satisfy. Imrei Madrich is a copy of the torah text that shows the root of every word. Because it's not always obvious, and it would be a big help. Google found me someone who wrote about it on a mailing list, but I haven't found anyone who's selling it yet. I guess I'll call the local Jewish bookstore and see what they can do for me. (Do any of you know this book? Should I be looking for it under a different name?)

Apropos of that, I love studying with both of my rabbis. It is so cool that I get to do this. With one (known as "my rabbi") I'm studying talmud (and occasional other stuff), and with the other I'm reading midrash in Hebrew and not completely sucking at translation. :-) (Though I still have a long way to go.)

Speaking of my congregation (sort of), we are having a talent show in January, and the song I'm writing/arranging for it seems to be going well. kayre rocks for giving me some really great feedback on the piano part. I was also trying to get a quartet together for a Salamone Rossi piece (the organizer encouraged me even though I'm doing the other thing), but altos (among congregants) seem to be particularly elusive at the moment, so that might not work out.

Also speaking of my congregation, we sell Giant Eagle gift cards at face value and get a cut. (I know other congregations do this too.) If you're local and inclined to help us out in this, and we see each other frequently enough for it to work out, I would be happy to turn your check made out to the congregation into gift cards. Just ask.

Speaking not at all about my congregation now, a question for the "Stargate: SG-1" fans out there: do we eventually get an explanation for why almost everyone on various distant worlds speaks English, or am I supposed to just ignore that? The conceit is that many of these folks are humans who were taken from Earth, but that was thousands of years ago. Just wondering, since this show doesn't bother with the conceit of a universal translator. (Which is fine, since the show that did didn't always use it correctly. :-) )

Last Thursday after morning services the rabbi was telling me about a d'var torah on parshat Kedoshim, which begins "you shall be holy". The d'var (which I found online after he emailed me a copy of it) talks about the concept of the "naval birshut ha-torah", the one who is (essentially) a rogue within the domain of the torah. That is, you can fulfill the letter of the law and still be doing bad things; "kedoshim tih'yu" (you shall be holy) calls on us to do more than what's strictly required.

(Which, ok, raises the question that if it's the torah telling us this, then isn't that really within the scope of the black-letter law to begin with? But I digress.)

Anyway, the reason we were having this conversation is that the author of the d'var torah, Rabbi Artson at the Ziegler School, talks a lot about a guy named Naval who wasn't a nice person. The phrase "naval birshut ha-torah" originally comes from the Ramban (Nachmanides), who probably didn't use capitalization (Hebrew doesn't), and (according to the rabbi with whom I was speaking) the word "naval" has the more general meaning of a rogue or cheat or the like. So the question arose: was the Ramban talking about Naval or a naval? I don't have the correct references available; if someone reading this does, please speak up.

Why does it matter? If the Ramban meant Naval, then it might -- within the letter of the law :-) -- be correct to draw more specific conclusions about behaviors that are not in keeping with "you shall be holy". Anything Naval did would be included, but for other negative behaviors, you would have to make an argument tying them to Naval indirectly somehow. On the other hand, if we're talking about a naval, then broader interpretation is called for from the start.

In one sense it doesn't matter; I strive to go beyond the letter of the law and be a better person than I "have" to be no matter what the Ramban meant. But I'm still curious about what he actually meant and what his context was.

I chanted torah and gave the d'var torah yesterday. (I'll post the d'var separately.) I read the Akeidah, the binding of Yitzchak, which is a challenging passage.

The text itself is pretty sparse: God decides to test Avraham, telling him to offer up his son Yitzchak as a burnt offering in a land some distance away. Avraham gets up in the morning, gathers what he'll need, and heads off with Yitzchak and two servant-boys. Three days pass and then they arrive. Avraham tells the servants "wait here and we'll return". Avraham and Yitzchak head up together, and Yitzchak asks "err, dad, where's the lamb?" and Avraham dodges. Avraham builds an altar and binds Yitzchak on it, and just as he's about to slaughter his son an angel cries out "stop!". Avraham sees a ram and offers it instead. The angel then tells Avraham that he'll be rewarded through his descendants -- they'll be as numerous as the stars or as grains of sand on the shore, they'll possess the gates of their foes, and everyone will be blessed through them. Avraham then heads back to the servants (Yitzchak is not mentioned) and they leave for Be'er Sheva, where Avraham will live.

It says somewhere in the talmud that a sage who can't find 150 reasons for a beetle to be kosher is no sage at all. I don't have 150 interpretations of the Akeidah, but I can see more than one. Here's the one I brought out in my chanting:

God gives this command. Avraham reluctantly heads off to comply; God gives him three days to stew over it (either to be sure or to bail). Yitzchak questions him and, with tears in his eyes, he says "God's in charge". Once they arrive and things are set in motion, though, Avraham's approach changes: it's like pulling the big sticky bandage off your skin; you can try to do it slowly and make things worse, or you can just grit your teeth and yank. I read it as Avraham gritting his teeth and trying to get it over with, which is why the angel had to rush in (calling from heaven instead of arriving) and had to call Avraham's name twice. After a tense moment, Avraham snaps out of it and says "yes?". For the first time Avraham looks up and sees the ram, which he offers up in place of his son, while Yitzchak sits by, stunned. The angel gives his promise, Yitzchak bolts, and Avraham returns alone, knowing he can't go home to his wife now.

Last time I read it I read it differently, and presumably next time will be different too. Torah is like that.

Even though I made some mistakes and had to be corrected, I think this went pretty well and I got lots of compliments. People appreciated the effort I put into reading it interpretively. (They didn't have the text in front of them, so I gave a summary and some keywords to listen for in advance.) I'd like to be able to share that reading with interested friends, though I'm not sure how to do that usefully for folks not fluent in Hebrew. If I produced an audio file, is there an easy way to turn it into a video with "subtitles" timed to the chanting?

We had a visiting rabbi this morning. (Not known in advance and not official; this was a relative of a member of the minyan.) I noticed that she was very quietly chanting along with me. Alas, she and her family left right after the service, so I didn't get a chance to talk with her. It did strike me that, usually accidentally, the more-knowledgeable-than-most-laypeople visitors tend to show up disproportionately on my weeks. Hmm. (It's not always accidental; there was one time we were having a visiting cantor who declined the offer to chant the portion, and consensus was that I was the congregant least likely to freak.)

(This is somewhat stream-of-consciousness.)

This morning in torah study we talked about this part of Nitzavim: "And not with you alone will I make this covenant and this oath, but with him who stands here with us this day before the Lord our God, and also with him who is not here with us this day" (Deut 29:13-14). The context is Moshe's final address to Israel; we can prety much take as given that this is not referring to people who slept in that morning. The rabbis understand this as a source for the covenant being binding on all Jews, the ones who stood at Sinai as well as those who came later. In other words, Judaism claims you by virtue of your birth. (I knew that, of course, but I learned a new term for it: "birthright dogma".)

This is hardly unusual; some other religions do this either as a birth condition or based on an action that your parents take very soon thereafter. We say "once a Jew always a Jew"; the Roman Catholic church says the same thing once you've been baptised. Surely there are others. (I'm not sure if Muslim status is automatic at birth; I have the impression it is.)

Some modern Jews have a problem with this, but I don't. We're born into other obligations that we got no say over; why should this be different? The issue to me isn't what you're born to but what you're going to do about it and what anyone else can or should do about it. As a convert from one "we claim you forever" religion to another, I find myself in an interesting position.

There are folks out there who try to preach obligation to the people they see straying -- and that just doesn't work. The church thinks I'm a lapsed, sinning Catholic -- fine for them, but I don't care, because I don't subscribe to their belief system. That they think they have a claim on me means nothing to me; I think they're wrong. (No offense meant to my Catholic readers, of course.) Any attempt to reach me via the "but you have to" path would utterly fail. (Ok, any attempt to reach me at all would fail now, but there might have been times in my life when that was not true.) And we have this in Judaism too; there are people who are very concerned with bringing back those who've strayed by going down the "obligation" path. Going down the "benefit" path is much more likely to be productive. You'll almost never succeed (long-term) in intimidating people, but if you can show them the beauty, fulfillment, or richness of a religion or tradition, you might hook them. Chabad, for all its other problems, gets this; the people who stone cars on Shabbat do not.

If status is forever, then we should be picky about entrance criteria when we can be. If a gentile eats bacon cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur, so what? But once he becomes a Jew, he's sinning. if the members of the beit din (the rabbinic court) think he's not committed, they can and should tell him "not now". This is part of why Judaism requires a significant period of study and evaluation, which can take years. The rabbis on the beit din need to assure themselves that they aren't making things worse for K'lal Yisrael (the community of Israel), while of course also weighing the issues of the individual candidate. As a candidate I expected that kind of rigor and would have been unhappy if I hadn't gotten it. (In fact, during my studies I met one local rabbi who said "I always say yes", and I made sure that rabbi was not on my beit din.)

Somehow from here we ended up talking about interfaith families, but that's another set of topics for another time.

The rabbi pointed out an oddity in this week's portion this morning (for which he did not have an answer off the top of his head): at the beginning of Sh'lach L'cha, when the spies are enumerated, we have "from the tribe of Ephrayim, Yehoshua bin Nun" and then, later, "from the tribe of Yosef from Manashe, Gadi ben Susi". Yosef, one of the twelve sons of Yisrael, doesn't get his own tribe; instead, his sons Ephrayim and Manashe are elevated to full tribal status. So why does the torah give the extra lineage in one of these cases but not the other -- and especially skipping the first instance (where you would expect it were there only one)? The rabbi checked Mikrot Gedolot but didn't find anything there.

And is it significant that Yosef's name is attached not to one of the heroes of the story (Yehoshua), but to one of the defeatist spies who caused the forty-year delay on entering the land?

And on a much more minor note, why is Yehoshua bin Nun instead of ben Nun? (That's consistent, not just in this passage.)

In the passage I'll be reading for this coming Shabbat there is a small oddity. There is a pronoun, which must be feminine per the grammar, which is spelled "hei (chirik) vav alef" and understood to be "hi" (fem). "Hi" is correctly spelled with a yud, not a vav; "hu" (masc) is spelled "hei vav alef", so if reading without the vowels you'd normally read this "hu". Except, as I said, it's part of a phrase involving a feminine verb, so it can't be.

I've seen spelling errors before and the tikkun (reference text for torah readers) has always noted it, thus far. This time, no note. None of my chumashim have any commentary on this passage (or that part of it, anyway). I don't own the correct volume of Rashi. I asked another torah reader (experienced and fluent in Hebrew) and she shrugged and said this happens a lot and it probably doesn't mean anything.

I'm curious, though. If it is an anomoly, it happens in a particularly interesting place (i.e. I can see an interesting interpretation). But if this sort of thing is common, I don't want to read into it.

Do any of the torah readers among my readership have any thoughts on this?

Yes, Shavu'ot was a couple weeks ago, but between LJ outages and general busy-ness I haven't written about it before now.

My rabbi's tikkun leil Shavu'ot (late-night torah study for the holiday) always begins with a study of Exodus 19-20. This year I noticed, or had pointed out, things I had not previously noticed.

The first is in 19:1, which begins to set the scene. The text refers to a specific day, but instead of saying "bayom hahu" (on that day) it says "bayom hazeh", on this day. (My rabbi pointed this out.) There is a midrashic tradition that all the Jewish people, including (mystically) those not yet born, stood at Sinai; I wonder if this is related. Or, I wonder if it's part of the proof-text for the idea that revelation is ongoing. Or, maybe it's just a typo. :-)

A few verses later there's a bit of poetic repetition that I understand to be stylistic for biblical Hebrew -- God says "thus shall you say to the house of Ya'akov and tell the people of Israel". The house of Ya'akov and the people of Israel are, of course, one and the same. Saying and telling are similar; I wonder if there is nuance there or it's just part of the poetry. But something else struck me: the noun phrases there are "beit Ya'akov" and "b'nei Yisrael" (so "people" of Israel is a mistranslation; it says "sons of"). Is repetition just repetition, or does it try to hint at something? When you talk about your "house" you're looking backwards, to your ancestry; when you talk about your "sons" (or children) you're looking to the future. Maybe the torah is tellins us that both are important; this new enterprise isn't a clean slate (don't ignore your past) but it is a new opportunity (you can change going forward).

(Aside: I am growing to intensely dislike the translation "children of Israel". Too many people read it as "young children" and write divrei torah about how they needed to be taught as if newborns, couldn't be expected to think for themselves, etc. While they did need to be taught, that line of reasoning lets them off the hook for the things they did wrong, like the various rebellions. When someone becomes "bar mitzvah" ("bar" = "ben"; it's Araamic versus Hebrew) we say he's an adult. B'nei Yisrael were, likewise, adults. If we need a gender-neutral word, how about "descendants of Israel"?)

Another small thing: God says (to the people, via Moshe) "you have seen...how I carried you on eagles' wings". In talking about the exodus we talk a lot about divine might (including in the part of that verse I elided), but might alone, while impressive, probably wouldn't evoke buy-in from the people. Thus far they've seen a divine slug-fest; they might reasonably think that they're just trading one uncaring master for another. I think this might be the first indication to the people that it's (at least partly) about them and not just our God fighting it out with Egypt's false gods. The people probably needed that in order to be able to accept torah willingly instead of under duress. (Did they accept it willingly? That's another issue.)

The first and last of the ten commandments given directly to the people ("I am your God" and "don't covet") aren't about actions so much as intentions or belief. You can refrain from stealing or adultery, but refraining from the coveting that would lead you to steal or adulter seems a little less under your control. Judaism focuses more on action than belief, but you need both and maybe this bracketing of the active commandments is meant to indicate this.

Originally posted here: http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/cellio/1158.html

Ok, here's why I asked my question a couple days ago: the account I think I know isn't what's written in torah, and this was true of everyone in class Monday night when we discussed it, and I was curious about how widespread that is. Pretty widespread, as it turned out. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Mind, every year I read the relevant passages and have some reaction along the lines of "huh, that's odd", but that thought never seems to stick around long enough for me to actually do something about it. So I'm glad our teacher pointed it out.

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