Tonight, as my synagogue's service was due to start, my rabbi popped in and asked me to lead it because he was having the being-in-two-places-at-once problem. So I proceeded to do so. (I'd had to bow out of leading the morning service because of some temporary vision problems, but the factors were better tonight. Actually, I'm pretty sure I could lead our service from memory if I had to -- especially as it was mincha, which has less stuff than ma'ariv.)

Tonight there was a board meeting, so there was a large crowd at the service (25-30). It was also the first meeting for one-third of the board. My rabbi always gives a short talk at the evening service, and it's generally longer and a little more formal on board-meeting nights because learning is specifically built into the board job. I of course hadn't had any time to prepare anything, but these people deserved to hear some words of torah.

So I improvised, with my brain running about 30 seconds ahead of my mouth. (I can't usually do that! I can mentally outline and then talk, but I generally can't do that kind of parallel processing.) I got lots of compliments on it; one person told me if that's what I do when I'm not prepared, she wants to hear me when I am. :-) I did point out that some parshiyot are better than others for on-the-fly talks.

I started by giving a quick summary of the Korach story, mentioning his compatriots in passing and saying I'd get back to that. (So I got to use my parsha bit today after all. :-) ) I then said that while we could take from this story the lesson "just do what you're told and don't challenge your leaders", that's not the lesson of this parsha. People challenge leaders -- and God! -- in many places in torah, and Yaakov receives his charter only after wrestling with God's angel directly. Challenging is fine.

No, the problem with Korach is the way he went about it. He had a grievance, but not only did he not bring it to Moshe directly, but he refused to discuss it when Moshe came to him. He'd already decided to have a rebellion rather than a peaceful solution. As leaders of this community (I said to the crowd of mostly board members), we are sometimes in Korach's position and sometimes in Moshe's. There will be things we get upset about and things we want to do differently, and we will be on the receiving end of other people who are upset and want things to be different. Our lesson is to be like Moshe, looking for a solution rather than victory, and not like Korach.

I mentioned earlier that three consipirators were named along with Korach. The torah goes on to talk about two of them; what of the third? The talmud tells us that he was prevented from participating by his wife, who saw the danger and acted to prevent it. While it's easy to be too meddlesome, we have to be mindful of the dangers that await our fellow leaders, and fellow Jews; it's much easier to prevent a problem than to clean up after it most of the time.

In last week's parsha, Yitro, we read about the revelation at Sinai. Amidst thunder and smoke Yisrael received the aseret divriot, the ten utterances, and they said: enough! You go, Moshe; this is too much for us.

While the direct encounter with God certainly must have accounted for much of that reaction, it also seems possible that the commandments themselves were part of the motivation. These ten are broad; in fact, the rabbis of the talmud argue that all other mitzvot can be redued to these ten. These ten raise many questions: What exactly is this idolatry that we must avoid? How do we honor our parents -- and does that apply even when parents are evil? What does it mean to remember the sabbath and keep it holy -- indeed, what does this mean to Reform Jews in particular? We could spend weeks debating what these commandments mean. Is it not possible that Israel, too, saw that these were less than clear to them?

This week, in contrast, the parsha consists almost entirely of a long litany of commandments (mishpatim), most specific. We have laws of how to treat slaves, and what to do if you (or your ox, or the pit you dug) injure or kill someone. We have laws about what (not) to eat, and about gossip, and about judging fairly. There are many more, both ritual and ethical.

Two in particular speak to me. First, we are told that in addition to not favoring a powerful person in a court judgement (this seems a no-brainer), we must also not favor a poor person. We can't rule leniently out of pity. We are required to help the poor and weak, but not by perverting the courts. The other is the verse that says that if our enemy's donkey is over-burdened, we must nonetheless help him to unload it -- help him, but not do it for him. Perhaps by working together with an enemy on some task, there is the possibility that we will see each other as something other than enemies.

Last week's parsha gave broad directives; this week's parsha gives specific, detailed instructions, and it is this week that the people say "na'aseh v'nishma", we will do and we will hear.

We sometimes hear people dismiss the generation that left Egypt: they were ex-slaves, not ready to act on their own, and needed hand-holding as children do. But we do that generation a disservice by saying such things; we all sometimes need more concrete instruction, and there is nothing wrong with that. Faced with a general directive that we don't know how to interpret, we may freeze and do nothing. If we break it down into specific acts and do those, however, we are able to act. We take small steps, which is better than taking no steps. Any step toward God is a positive act; if we can connect through the larger directives that's great, but if we instead connect through the detailed directives, that too leads to God.

We read from the third aliyah of Eikev this week. The specific text I read is Deut 9:4-14. So that's the context for this d'var torah.

This portion begins with Moshe telling the people that they aren't getting the land on their own merits. No, he says, they're only getting the land because the current occupants are even worse, and because God made a promise to their ancestors. That sounds harsh.

First off -- to whom is Moshe talking? He goes on to talk about how "you" sinned with the golden calf and in other ways, but this is not the generation that left Egypt. They all died in the desert; these are their descendants. These people didn't do those things. The torah does tell us that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children, and maybe Moshe is thinking of that here, but maybe there's another way to look at his statement.

We've talked before about how the generation of slaves couldn't make the huge leap to worshipping God. There had to be a transition; they weren't ready but their children would be. When we consider the environment those slaves had lived their entire lives in save a couple months, the sin of the golden calf isn't that surprising. Sure, they'd witnessed God's miracles, but they'd then seen their leader ascend the mountain into the clouds, seemingly never to return. Is it that surprising that they reverted to what was familiar to them? I'm not excusing them for this sin, but I'd also point out that this is not the sin that caused them to die in the desert, either.

No, what led to that sentence was a lack of faith in God once they'd received the torah. They were on the border of the land, ready to enter with God in the lead, when the spies returned with a bad report and the people lost faith that God, who had led them out of Egypt and through the wilderness, could lead them into their land.

And now Moshe is talking to the next generation. These ones, unlike their parents, didn't know a lifetime of slavery; they have only known God. They are as yet untested. Their entry into the land isn't a reward; neither, however, are they being punished for their parents' sins. They have a chance at a clean start not unlike the chance that Adam and Chava had in the garden -- a truly fresh opportunity. Reward and punishment do not apply in this case, and Moshe's statement points this out.

( administrivia )

I mis-characterized this program before. (To be fair, so did one of the organizers.) I had said that last year was focused on information and this year was focused on practical skills. But that's not correct; we learned a lot about practical skills last year and we certainly had some classes this year that were not directly tied into skills we will use. No, a better characterization, I think, is that last year was about learning how and this year was about doing and being evaluated.

So, for example, when I saw two sessions about homiletics (think "preaching", but it's broader than that) on the schedule, I got excited. I thought these would be classes where we'd get a lot of practical instruction. I think the view of the program organizers is that we got that last year; what these sessions actually were were student presentations for critique. That's valuable (I certainly learned from mine), but I was also hoping for some more structured learning in this area. We barely scratched the surface of the topic last year and hadn't come together for any sort of "what have we learned about this in the last year in our own congregations?" discussion before we went off and did it. So there was a chunk missing.

The text studies were a little better in that regard, but here too I had different expectations based on the advance schedule. I saw daily text study and said "woo hoo! we're going to get down and dirty with our sources for a whole week with rabbis who can guide us!". I was practically salivating. This turned out to be the student-led sessions (after the first day). Now these were generally very good and it was certainly a valuable experience for all of us; I'm not dissing student-led study. But again, it violated my expectations. Here, unlike with homiletics, they did first give us one faculty-led text study (as a model) and a class about text study (specifically, learning styles), so they gave us more of the tools we needed before we went off and did it ourselves. I wanted that with homiletics too. Pretty much everything I know about homiletics comes from observing other people (most specifically my rabbi); I think I've figured out some things that way, but before doing it for critique it would have been valuable to formally look at some of those techniques.

( classes and stuff )

( next steps )

I chanted torah Saturday morning and it went pretty well -- despite my forgetting to do my "lucky" read-through right before leaving for services. I can't believe I forgot to chant it once at home on Shabbat morning; that's the first time I've failed to do that final sanity check. So I was a little nervous, but it went ok. Made a couple mistakes, but that's what the checker is for and Bruce is a very good checker. (There is an art to delivering a correction without throwing the reader.)

When I got there someone had already rolled the scroll, but it wasn't in the right place. He got the aliya starting point from Hertz. I made a similar mistake a month or so ago, and assumed that I had somehow misread the chumash. Once I was willing to attribute to human error; twice makes me suspicious. So far Eitz Chayim, Trope Trainer, and the K'tav tikkun all seem to agree on where the aliyot begin, and the couple of times we've consulted Hertz we've gone wrong. I conclude that Hertz is using a different system, though I don't know what. I'll warn the other readers to steer clear until we find out what's going on.

( d'var torah )

The rabbi Friday night didn't focus on the parts of lashon hara (evil speech) that I expected him to; he mostly talked about when you should speak up about someone and how to go about it. So that left me free to talk more about it Saturday morning, though I didn't want to come off as presumptuous by saying anything along the lines of "you should[n't] do X". I'm not a rabbi, after all; I have no standing to lecture people about behavior. (And anyway, there's the whole glass-houses thing; I should work on myself before I try to change others.)

As an aside, I've tried a few different approaches to giving these mini-sermons. They're long enough that speaking entirely from memory is iffy. The setting is informal enough that reading from a prepared text feels awkward; in addition, I just don't have the dynamic down yet of reading while looking at people. (When I've given Friday-night sermons I've done this, though; the podium-style reading desk helps hide the paper while putting it where I can see both it and the congregation.) This week, I tried just talking from an outline, something that has sometimes worked in the past. It worked pretty well this time, so I think that's my answer.

For the record, then, my outline read as follows:

tzara'at <-- LH
other sins?
pillow
no undo; must change
3 phases w/rebuke [all white?]
not punishment - prod
LH harm widespread

This is (approximately) what I said from that outline: ( Read more... )

The Thursday mincha (or, in the winter, ma'ariv) service includes a little mini-sermon (2 minutes or so). The rabbis are away and no one else wanted to lead today's service, so this fell to me. (This is, by the way, the aspect of leading a service that most intimidates me. I'm fine with other people's words...)

These ones are done informally, and reading from something prepared would just be wrong. (Besides, I'm not a good-enough public speaker to make that work.) So this is very approximately what I tried to say. ( Read more... )