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Words of Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld
President of Hebrew College One month from today, Jewish communities around the world will gather to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of a new year in the sacred rhythm of Jewish time. Hope for renewal stirs especially deeply within us during this season. We imagine ourselves standing before the gates of a new year, the gates of possibility, the gates of repentance, return, and repair. But, of course, the real question Is whether we will take the risk of unlocking the gates inside of us. There is a dramatic refrain included in the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah. Immediately after each blast of the ram’s horn, as the sound of the shofar still echoes in the room, We stand together and say... Hayom Harat olam. Today the world is conceived. A mythic claim is being made Since, according to tradition, Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of the world. But more importantly an existential demand is being made. Stand up, listen, and let yourself see the world with new eyes. Clear away the debris of disappointment and despair. Do not think you are too late, too tired, too old, too weak, too scared, too hurt, too flawed. We are all just beginning, we are all just beginners. Today the world is conceived. The Rosh Hashanah liturgy beckons us back to the beginning of time. We are invited to imagine the world as utterly new. A pristine universe of potentiality stretched out before us. We are asked to consider the possibility of such vast possibility. It is a big ask. And then Ten Days later, on Yom Kippur, we are asked to exercise a different set of soul muscles. We’re asked to consider the possibility that we are out of time. This is the act of imagination at the heart of Yom Kippur. We abstain from eating, drinking, and making love. We utter a variation of the death bed confessional. Many of us wear white, like the shrouds we’ll be buried in. The confrontation with our mortality reaches its peak at Ne’ilah. The whole season points to that moment when we stand before the gates of repentance and plead one more time. Enough denial. Enough distraction. Enough excuses. Enough equivocation. Enough. We have reached the end of the road. We are running out of time. The same gates that have been beckoning us for weeks Will begin to threaten. We will not stay open forever. What will you do with the time you have left? Another big ask. Today, as we enter the Hebrew month of Elul, I want to invite us back to the middle. To refrain from imagining the beginning of the world. To refrain from imagining the end of the world. And to open our hearts to beginning again right from the middle of wherever we are. Which, after all, is the only place to begin. The middle, where, in the words of the poet Billy Collins... “Things have had time to get complicated, Messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore . . . Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent.” The middle, when, in the Torah’s central narrative so disappointment and betrayal, after the gold of the calf has been turn to dust after the fragments of the first tablets lie shattered at the base of the mountain Moses climbs to the heights a second time and begs God, “Oh, let me behold your presence.” And in a great moment of forgiveness, in which divine compassion overtakes divine judgment, God tells Moses, once again, to take two tablets of stone and carve into them the words that were on the first. The same words, but this time the hand that writes is human rather than divine. This is the act of imagination at the heart of Rosh Hodesh Elul. We who are imperfect and infinitely precious take the risk of trying a second time. May we begin again from the middle of wherever we are. May we begin again in love.
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Ki Teitzei is actually one of our favorite parshiyot, why?
It is full of mitzvot! More than 12% of the 613 mitzvot command us to obey. But the opening of Ki Teitzei may seem completely irrelevant to our daily existence. That opening reads... “Ki tetzei lamilcham al oiyecha, unesana Hashem Elokecha beyadecha veshavisa sivyo.” “When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, and you take some of them captive. . . “ And the rest of the Aliyah goes on to describe the rules for taking a beautiful woman captive and whether you can marry her and how long you have to wait if you DO want to marry her. Now I don’t think anyone here is worried about taking women captive in wartime. So, we may be inclined to dismiss this passage as part of another era, as something that is no longer - and happily no longer - relevant to our lives. Or as I think Mary Belgard suggested a couple of years ago, this passage is truly ICKY. Ironically, some argue that this passage shows that Judaism, in our long-ago past, was concerned with treating women with respect. But many of us might think that that’s stretching it. So, we are left thinking that the passage is either embarrassing OR irrelevant. BUT let me try to convince you that there might be another alternative. To do so, I want to take a little poetic license with one of the Hebrew words in the opening of the passage - the word is VESHAVISA. The root of that word is SH’V’H - to take captive, and that gives the pasuk - the verse - its literal sense. But - and here’s the poetic license - doesn’t that root also look like something else? That something else is SH’U’V - to RETURN. Another possible translation might be to “take back.” Let's think about that in the context of the month of Elul. We are getting ever closer to the High Holy Days, and we know that those days are a period of time when we look inward, when we ask ourselves what we could have done differently, whom we have hurt, and how we can be better people in the year ahead. What keeps us from being the best people that we can be? I think we all know the answer to that question. It is the YETZER HARA - the evil voice inside of each of us that is always tempting us to go astray, to take the path of least resistance, to cheat on our goals. That yetzer hara is constantly trying to take the US captive, to hold us in its spell. But if we think about this passage in Ki Tetzei, we might imagine a kind of war between good and evil in each one of us.
So, let’s think about this concept as we approach the holidays. Let’s use Shabbat as a time for heightened awareness and as preparation for the awesome days to come. Let’s remember that beauty - THE SURFACE - fades over time. But INTEGRITY - what lies BELOW the surface - cannot be muted by time or place. I know that we are frequently challenged, when we read the Torah, to understand how to make what we read there relevant to today. There are places where we might either reject or re-explain practices, laws, or policies that we encounter there.
For example, when the Torah describes the institution of slavery, it concerns us that slavery is not wholeheartedly condemned. Some scholars have even claimed that God knows (and knew) that slavery was wrong, but was aware that the Jewish people were not ready to reject that institution entirely. So, He offered a compromise where the Torah gives us rules for HOW WE CAN TREAT SLAVES, even if the institution itself doesn’t go away. I don’t know if you’re happy with that explanation or that compromise, but it seems to me to be a stretch. If God could command the Jewish people to practice 613 mitzvot, couldn’t He have also commanded them - US - to abolish slavery? Another troubling concern is the Torah’s treatment of women - what do you do when you read about SOTAH, the practice of making a suspected wife of straying condemned to a terrible ordeal, for example? Do you just dismiss it?
But in this week’s parsha, SHOFTIM, what we see is actually an amazingly radical, very contemporary idea. What do I mean by that? I am thinking about the idea of a SANCTUARY CITY. Shoftim includes a discussion of sanctuary cities, and though we know the term “sanctuary city,” it means something different today than it did then. For the ancient Israelites, a sanctuary city was a place of refuge where someone who had ACCIDENTALLY killed someone else could live. The idea was that you could safely stay there until the anger of the victim’s family had abated. Today, we would say, “until the heat dies down.” What’s so radical about that? Well, think about one of the many codes that came before the Torah. One I have in mind is the Code of Hammurabi (about 1754 BCE). If a doctor bungled a surgery and the patient died, the doctor would have his hands cut off. And the code LITERALLY says that if a person causes someone else to lose an eye, then that person’s eye will be removed. SO what we have is a very literal, very strict notion of liability. There’s something different about the message of Shoftim, and the instructions for the sanctuary city provide the evidence for that interpretation. Because the Torah tells us that it’s not just WHAT YOU DO; it’s also whether you meant to do what you did. For the Torah, and for Jewish custom and practice, we care about the INTENTION of the agent. If something is an accident, you need to go away for a while, until cooler heads prevail, but you are not killed or maimed in turn. And we carry that philosophy over into other areas of Jewish practice. For example, it’s always good to do a mitzvah. But if you do that mitzvah with KEVANAH, with intention, with spirit, then that mitzvah is much more beautiful. Of course, there are times when we do what we do because we know that it is our duty, or because we know that it is what is expected. No one can have kevanah all the time. But doing the right thing with the right state of mind makes a mitzvah more meaningful. The importance of sanctuary cities and the role that intention plays in punishment is also a statement about the developing maturity of the Israelites. Think for a minute about a young child. Why do children do the right thing? Until a certain age, they fear punishment. Maybe a little later in life, they hope to please their parents or fit into society. But it’s only later in life when people, fully mature moral people, realize that doing the right thing should be done for its own sake. And children also don’t understand the idea of intention. Like Hammurabi, they only see the end results. If you accidentally fall and break the dinner plate that you are carrying, then you should be punished. The accidental nature doesn’t matter to a child. But, as we age, we see that it’s not only the end result that matters. It’s the question of whether you meant to do what you did. So, the presence of sanctuary cities is a sign that, here, at the end of Moshe’s life, the Jewish people are maturing. They are becoming less dependent on miracles and the fear of God’s punishment and more aware of morality as part of character - as something INTERNAL, not something imposed by outside forces. Unlike SOTAH or slavery, that’s not anything we have to apologize for. This week’s parsha includes, among other things, a discussion of what is kosher and what is not.
Re'eh makes very clear something I think all of us know... in order to be kosher, an animal has to have both cleft hooves AND “bring up its cud.” It mentions a number of animals that DO meet these criteria...
We are also told that we can’t eat any animal that has died a natural death - that we can give to a stranger or sell to a foreigner, but we can’t eat it ourselves. And the parsha also includes the famous prohibition: we cannot boil a kid in its mother’s milk. But there’s an interesting word in Re'eh that I want to consider just for a moment. The word is ZEMER, and it’s the last word in verse 5 that lists kosher animals, animals that have cleft hooves AND chew their cud. The Chumash translates that word as “mountain sheep.” But Rabbi Ed Davis translates that word not as “mountain goat,” but as GIRAFFE. I thought that was sort of interesting - that there is no prohibition on eating giraffes. Two things to note here: first, who would ever eat a giraffe? I don’t know any Jew who has been tempted by giraffe meat; and I’m not sure there are very many non-Jews who would eat it, either. So why is giraffe kosher and yet not eaten by Jews? It turns out that, according to one tradition, even though giraffe IS kosher to eat, we do not eat it because the neck is so long that no one knows where to perform the shechitah. But that view has also been criticized because the Talmud spells out precisely where ON EVERY ANIMAL the shechitah should take place. Another view is that we don’t eat giraffe simply because our people don’t have a tradition of eating it. You can decide which of these reasons is your reason for not eating giraffe. But there’s something else that’s really interesting about the word ZEMER. It also means SONG or SINGER. That makes the translation of the word as “giraffe” even more intriguing, doesn’t it? The giraffe, as we know, makes no sound. Maybe we wish some singers would do the same. So what might this mean here? Maybe the connection between the song and the giraffe represents a way to remind us that some songs are songs of the heart and they don’t have to be sung out loud. God tested Bnei Yisrael in the desert. The tests went both ways.
Rav Ovadiah Bartenura wrote (on Avot 5:4) that the initial test that Hashem gave the people was in telling them “don’t go out” and yet they did go out. They were further told “do not leave over to the next day” and they did that as well. The only way they could pass the test of the mannah was for Hashem to extend the test. As it turned out, that is exactly what did occur and over the forty-year period there were no problems. The people got used to the test of the mannah. The entire sojourn in the wilderness could be understood in this fashion. It is not only that they were being punished for the sin of the spies; it was also that by being under Hashem’s protection in every physical way they learned to trust Hashem. On the eve of their entry into the Promised Land, Moshe understood that the conditions under which this new generation was raised would change drastically, and unfortunately the people would fail the future tests. Moshe knew this and spoke about it in today’s Parsha and throughout the entire book of Devarim. The Torah gives us the list of the seven fruits with which Eretz Yisrael is blessed (8:8) “a land of wheat and barley… a land of olives that produce oil, and honey.” It is interesting to note that the Torah says that olive oil is one of the blessed fruits of Eretz Yisrael.
When praising the land of Israel, the Torah used the most useful forms of the produce of the land. It is of note that for many years Israel was an exporter of olives. This was true in the Roman period 2,000 year ago. Rome was actually importing olives from Israel and they could be found sold in the marketplaces in Rome. This is bizarre considering that Italy is a major producer of olive oil in the modern period. But in ancient times this was obviously not so. As it turned out, this was not always a major blessing as it was economically. Because of the trade agreement the Romans had, ships were coming to Israel for economic trade as in olive oil and olives, and became knowledgeable of the geography and topography of the land of Israel, which proved helpful when the Romans invaded and conquered the land in the 1st century C.E. |
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