Category Archives: Jewish Thought

Sukkah-Vision

The defining element of the sukkah is the once-growing but now detached material that must comprise the structure’s roof.

Some use untreated bamboo canes; others, mats woven for the purpose from slivers of the same material; others still, branches or leaves or thin, unfinished wooden slats. Whatever its particular identity, the s’chach takes its name from the Hebrew word meaning to “cover” or “hover”; the word sukkah itself refers to the same.

But there is another Hebrew word associated with the word sukkah – “socheh” – and its meaning is “to see” or “to perceive.” That association would seem to imply that a sukkah somehow provides some perspective. Which, in fact, it does.

That is surely true on a mystical plane, but there is prosaic vision to be gained no less. It doesn’t take inordinate sensitivity to see things a bit differently while spending a week in a small rudimentary hut, within sight of, yet apart from, one’s more comfortable, more spacious home.

One realizes quickly, for example, how dependent one is on “the elements” – which, in Judaism’s teaching, means on G-d’s mercy. The house is nearby, and if it rains hard enough one can – indeed should – return to surer shelter. But the lesson remains, because homes aren’t impervious to disruptions either, as we have witnessed all too often of late. Nature is a humbling force, or should be; that is certainly part of the perspective granted the sukkah-dweller.

But there is more. What the sukkah allows those within it to perceive, if they try, is that our homes and possessions are not what really matter. That ultimately, it is not, as the crass bumper sticker has it, “the one who dies with the most toys” who “wins.” When we sit in our primitive week-house, we come to know that the accumulation of stuff we consider important is not essential. We can exist without it. It does not define us. We will not take it with us.

It may seem an odd thing to say, but that thought is a joyous one.

Sukkos has simcha, joy, as its theme. In our prayers on the days of the holiday we reference not “freedom” as on Pesach, nor “the giving of our Torah” as on Shavuos, but, simply, simchaseinu, “our happiness.” One might assume at first thought that depriving oneself of the comforts of home is anything but a road to joy. But one would be wrong.

For true happiness begins with the realization of what doesn’t really make us happy. Possessions may provide a rush of sorts when first acquired, but that soon enough wears off, like any drug. The soul is not satiated, which is why – again, like a drug – possessions beget the desire, even the need, for yet more of the same. In the words of Chazal, “he who has a hundred wants two hundred.” And, in another place but the same vein, “No man dies with half his desires in hand.”

Need we look further than the possession-endowed of whom we may have heard – the entertainers, sports figures, best-selling authors, the old-moneyed and lottery-winners alike? They may zip around in Lamborghinis but their happiness quotient is no greater than that of those who take the bus. Their grand estates are no more of a home (and all too often considerably less of one) than the simplest, cozy cottage.

In the end, dependency on having as the means to fulfillment dashes all hope of truly attaining the goal.

Because true joy comes from things more rarified than what we can buy. It comes from our relationships not with things, but with other people – parents, spouses, children, friends, neighbors – and our relationships with our community, and with the Creator.

And so, a deeper perspective afforded us by the sukkah may lie in the realization that, ultimately, what we really have is not what we own, but what we are – to other people and to G-d.

And so, while countless Jewish eyes will soon gaze up at bamboo slats, leaves and branches, they will in fact be seeing far beyond.

Momentous Moments

The weeks before a presidential election provide spiritual fodder for the week between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

Throughout political campaigns, candidates and their handlers are keenly aware of the great toll a simple gaffe or misjudgment can take. Four years ago, Howard Dean, the then-governor of Vermont (today Democratic National Committee chairman) was a credible candidate for the Democratic nomination for President.

But he crashed and burned, according to many because of what came to be dubbed his “I Have a Scream” speech. After an unexpectedly weak showing in the Iowa caucus, Dr. Dean declared his undeterred determination to forge on, in a rousing address that culminated in a vocalization somewhere between a Zulu war cry and a locomotive horn. That single moment’s decision to let loose in that way at that juncture spelled the end of the doctor’s road to the highest office in the land.

There have been other such moments for presidential candidates: Edmund Muskie’s tears of pain, Gary Hart’s infelicitous mugging for his “Monkey Business” snapshot, Michael Dukakis’s donning of an ill-fitting combat helmet. Each unguarded moment, deservedly or not, brought a national campaign to a screeching halt.

Every one of us, too, in our personal lives, comes face to face at times with opportunities of our own that, wrongly handled, can lead to places we don’t want to go.

And we are vying for something infinitely more important than a mere nomination for President. We’re in the running, after all, for the achievement of worth, racing to achieve meaning in our lives.

In the bustle and haste of everyday existence, it is alarmingly easy to forget that decisions we make, sometimes almost unthinkingly, can be crucial; that seemingly insignificant forks in the roads of our lives can lead either to achievement and holiness, or, G-d forbid, to setbacks, even ruin.

Every single decision we make, of course, is important. Each day of our lives presents occasions for choices, chances to seize meaningful things – a mitzvah, a heartfelt prayer, an act of charity – or to forgo them. Every opportunity to be morose or angry is a chance to hurt others, and ourselves – and likewise a chance to do neither, and achieve something priceless.

But there are also particularly momentous opportunities, when we are presented with roads that diverge in entirely different directions. The Talmud teaches that “one can acquire his universe” – the one that counts: the world-to-come – or “destroy” it “in a single moment.”

Potentially transformative decisions are more common to our lives than we may realize. When we make a decision about, say, where to live or what synagogue to attend – not to mention more obviously critical decisions like whom to marry or how to raise and educate our children – we are defining our futures, and others’. And it is of great importance that we recognize the import of our decisions, and accord them the gravity they are due.

We can even, through sheer determination, create our own critical moments. Consider the Talmudic case of the “conditional husband.”

In Jewish law, a marriage is effected by the proposal of a man to a woman – the declaration of the woman’s kiddushin, or “specialness” to her husband, followed by the acceptance by the woman of a coin or item of worth from her suitor. If the declaration is made on the condition that an assertion is true, the marriage is valid only if the assertion indeed is. Thus, if a man betroths a woman on the condition that he owns a car, or still has his own teeth, unless he does, they aren’t married.

What if a man offers a woman a coin or item and makes the kiddushin-declaration “on the condition that I am a tzaddik,” a “totally righteous person”? The Talmud informs us that even if the man in question has no such flawless reputation the marriage must be assumed to be valid (and only a divorce can dissolve it).

Why? Because, the Talmud explains, the man “may have contemplated repentance” just before his proposal.

That determined choice of a moment, in other words, if sincere, would have transformed the man completely, placed him on an entirely new life-road. The lesson is obvious: Each of us can transform himself or herself – at any point we choose – through sheer, sincere will.

This season of the Jewish year, our tradition teaches, is particularly fertile for making choices, for embarking on new roads. All we need are the sensitivity and wisdom to be open to crucial opportunities, and the determination to craft some of our own – to make choices that will change our lives and futures for the holier.

No Laughing Matter

It’s never a good idea to analyze a joke. All the same, I recently found myself deconstructing a stand-up comedian’s one-liner quoted in a newspaper article. It may have been because Rosh Hashana was approaching.

“I used to do drugs,” the hapless performer had deadpanned. “I still do, but I used to, too.”

Why was the line funny? It could be that the comedian had simply found an amusing, absurd way to characterize his long-time substance abuse. But what I think he meant to communicate was something more: that he had once (perhaps more than once) quit his drugs, only to re-embrace them. When he was clean, he “used to do drugs”; now, fallen off the wagon, he does them once again.

And so my thoughts, understandably (no?), went to the Yom HaDin and Aseres Y’mei Teshuva.

No, I don’t abuse drugs. I take my daily blood-thinner responsibly, pop an occasional Tylenol and have a glass or two of red wine with Shabbos seudos, but that’s about it. Nevertheless, I related well to the comedian’s self-description. Because I find myself resolving each year to improve in some of the very same ways I had resolved to improve the year before. Indeed, the years – plural – before, in more cases than I care to ponder. I, too, “used to” do things that I currently do too.

Among the collected letters of Rav Yitzchok Hutner, zt”l, is one that was written to a talmid whose own, earlier, letter to the Rosh Yeshiva had apparently evidenced the student’s despondence over his personal spiritual failures. The Rosh Yeshiva’s response provides nourishing food for thought.

Citing the saying that one can “lose battles but win wars,” Rav Hutner explains that what makes life meaningful is not beatific basking in the exclusive company of one’s yetzer tov” but rather the dynamic struggle of one’s battle with the yetzer hora.

Shlomo Hamelech’s maxim that “Seven times does the righteous one fall and get up” (Mishlei, 24:16), continues Rav Hutner, does not mean that “even after falling seven times, the righteous one manages to gets up again.” What it really means, he explains, is that it is only and precisely through repeated falls that a person truly achieves righteousness. The struggles – even the failures – are inherent elements of what can, with determination and perseverance, become an ultimate victory.

Rav Hutner’s words are timely indeed at this Jewish season, as thoughtful Jews everywhere recall their own personal failures. For facing our mistakes squarely, and feeling the regret that is the bedrock of repentance, carries a risk: despondence born of battles lost. But allowing failures to breed hopelessness, says Rav Hutner, is both self-defeating and wrong. A battle waged, even if lost, can be an integral step toward an ultimate victory to come. No matter how many battles there may have been, the war is not over. We must pick ourselves up. Again. And, if need be, again.

Still, it’s a balancing act. The knowledge, after the fact, that falling isn’t forever cannot permit us to treat aveiros lightly. Even while not allowing failures to leave us dejected, we must maintain the determination to be better people tomorrow than we are today. If, after raising ourselves from the ground, we don’t renew the battle with resolve, if we become complacent about our sins, seeing them not as boons to redoubled effort but as fodder for jokes, we flirt with true failure – the ultimate kind.

The article containing the one-liner, as it happens, was an obituary. The comedian who “used to do drugs” and still did died of an overdose, at 37.

The Four Answers

It is not only the Torah’s words that hold multiple layers of meaning. So do those of the Talmudic and Midrashic Sages – even the words of the prayers and rituals they formulated.

Such passages have their p’shat, or straightforward intent. But they also have less obvious layers, like that of remez – or “hinting” – unexpected subtexts that can be revealed by learned, insightful scholars.

One such meaning was mined from the Four Questions that are asked, usually by a child, at the Passover Seder service. The famous questions are actually one, with four examples provided. The overarching query is: Why is this night [of Passover] different from all the other nights [of the year]?

“Night,” however, can mean something deeper than the hours of darkness between afternoon and dawn. In Talmudic literature it can be a metaphor for exile, specifically the periods of history when the Jewish People were, at least superficially, estranged from G-d. The sojourn in Egypt is known as the “Egyptian Exile,” and the years between the destruction of the FirstHolyTemple in Jerusalem and its rebuilding is the “Babylonian Exile.”

“Why,” goes the “‘hinting’ approach” to the Four Questions, “is this night” – the current Jewish exile – “different” – so much longer – than previous ones? Nearly 2000 years, after all, have passed since the SecondTemple’s destruction.

In this reading, the four examples of unusual Seder practices take on a new role; they are answers to that question.

“On all other nights,” goes the first, “we eat leavened and unleavened bread; but on this night… we eat only unleavened.” The Hebrew word for unleavened bread, matza, can also mean “strife.” And so, through the remez-lens, we perceive the first reason for the current extended Jewish exile: personal and pointless anger among Jews. The thought should not puzzle. The SecondTemple, the Talmud teaches, was destroyed over “causeless hatred.” That it has not yet been rebuilt could well reflect an inadequate addressing of its destruction’s cause.

The second: “On all other nights we eat all sorts of vegetables; but on this night, bitter ones.” In the Talmud, eating vegetation is a sign of simplicity and privation. Amassing money, by contrast, is associated with worries and bitterness. “One who has one hundred silver pieces,” the Talmudic rabbis said, “desires two hundred.” So the hint in this declaration is that the exile continues in part because of misplaced focus on possessions, which brings only “bitterness” in the end.

“On all other nights,” goes the third example, “we need not dip vegetables [in relish or saltwater] even once; this night we do so twice.” Dipped vegetables are intended as appetizers – means of stimulating one’s appetite to more heartily enjoy the forthcoming meal. In the remez reading here, such “dipping” refers to the contemporary predilection to seek out new pleasures. Hedonism, the very opposite of the Jewish ideal of “his’tapkut,” or “sufficing” with less, is thus another element extending our current exile.

And finally, “On all other nights, we sit [at meals] at times upright, at times reclining; this night we all recline.” During other exiles, the “hint” approach has it, there were times when Jews felt downtrodden in relation to the surrounding society, and others when they felt exalted, respected, “arrived.” In this exile, according to the remez approach, we have become too comfortable, constantly “reclining.” We view ourselves at the top of the societal hill, and wax prideful over our achievements and status.

Thus, the Four Questions hint at four contemporary Jewish societal ills that prolong our exile: internal strife, obsession with possessions, hedonism and haughtiness.

However one may view that “hint” approach to the Seder’s Four Questions, looking around we certainly see that much of modern Jewish society indeed exhibits such spiritually debilitating symptoms. Arguments, which should be principled, are all too often personal. “Keeping up with the Cohens” has become a way of life for many. Pleasure-seeking is often a consuming passion. And pride is commonly taken in petty, temporal things instead of meaningful ones.

Most remarkable, though, is that the above remez approach to the Four Questions is that of Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, best known for his commentary on the Bible, the Kli Yakar.

He died in 1619. Imagine what he would say today.

Accidents Don’t Happen

With time, those with open eyes come to recognize that life is peppered with strange, small ironies – “coincidences” that others don’t even notice, or unthinkingly dismiss.

The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung puzzled over such happenings, which he felt were evidence of some “acausal connecting principle” in the world. In a famous essay, he named the phenomenon “synchronicity.”

To those of us who believe in a Higher Power, synchronistic events, no matter how trivial they may seem, are subtle reminders that there is pattern in the universe, evidence of an ultimate plan.

My family has come to notice what appears to us to be an increase of such quirky happenings in our lives during the month (or, as this year, months) of Adar.

That would make sense, of course, since Adar is the month of Purim, the Jewish holiday that is saturated with seemingly insignificant “twists of fate” that turn out to be fateful indeed. From King Achashverosh’s execution of his queen to suit his advisor and later execution of his advisor to suit his new queen; to Mordechai’s happenstance overhearing and exposure of a plot that comes to play a pivotal role in his people’s salvation; to Haman’s visiting the king at the very moment when the monarch’s insomnia has him wondering how to honor Mordechai; to the gallows’ employment to hang its builder… The list of drolly fortuitous happenings goes on, and its upshot is what might be called The Purim Principle: Nothing is an Accident.

The holiday’s very name is taken from an act of chance – “purim” are the lots cast by Haman, who thinks he is accessing randomness but is in fact casting his own downfall. He rejoices at his lottery’s yield of the month during which he will have the Jews destroyed: the month of Moses’ death. He does not realize that it was the month, too, of his birth.

The contemporary Adar coincidences I’ve come to expect are often about trivial things, but they still fill me with joy, as little cosmic “jokes” that remind me of the Eternal. One recent evening, for example, I remarked to my wife and daughter how annoying musical ringtones in public places are, especially when the cellphones are programmed, as they usually are, to assault innocent bystanders with jungle beats and rude shouting. “Why can’t they use the Moonlight Sonata?” I quipped.

The very next day at afternoon services, someone’s cellphone went off during the silent prayer. Usually my concentration is disturbed by such things but this time the synchronicity of the sound only made me more aware of the Divine. Never before had I heard a phone play the Moonlight Sonata.

Only days later, my daughter saw a license plate that intrigued her. It read: “Psalm 128.” What a strange legend for a car, she thought. That very night she accompanied her mother and me to a wedding. Under the chuppah, unexpectedly, a group of young men sang a lovely rendition of… yes, you guessed it.

Other times, the Adar coincidences are more obviously meaningful, clearly linked to Purim. A few Adars ago, a striking irony emerged from a new book about Joseph Stalin. It related something previously unknown: that after the infamous 1953 “Doctors Plot,” a fabricated collusion of doctors and Jews to kill top Communist leaders, the Soviet dictator had ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Siberia, “apparently,” as a New York Times article about the book put it, “in preparation for a second great terror – this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent.”

Two weeks later, though, Stalin took suddenly ill at a dinner party and, four days later, it was announced that he had died. His successor Nikita Khrushchev recounted how the dictator had gotten thoroughly drunk at the dinner party, which ended in the early hours of March 1. Which, that year, fell on the 14^th of Adar, Purim.

This year, too, I was synchronicity-struck by an unexpected piece of Adar information. It materialized as I did research for a speech I was to give about the destruction of a small Lithuanian town’s Jewish community during the Holocaust.

The most famous extant document about Nazi actions in Lithuania is what has come to be known as the Jager Report, after SS-Standartenfuehrer Karl Jager (whose surname, incidentally, means “hunter” in German; “as his name so was he”: he hunted Jews). Filed on December 1, 1941, and labeled “Secret Reich Business,” the report meticulously details a “complete list of executions carried out in the EK [Einsatzkommando] 3 area” that year.

It records the number of men, women and children murdered in each of dozens of towns and ends with the grand total of the operation’s victims – 137,346 – and the words: “Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK3…”

Standartenfuehrer Jager, however, only oversaw the operation; he didn’t get his hands dirty with the actual work of shooting Jews. That he left to a “raiding squad” of “8-10 reliable men from the Einsatzkommando,” led by a young Oberstumfuherer called Hamann. Joachim Hamann.

May his name, and that of his ancient namesake, be blotted out, and our days be transformed, in the Book of Esther’s words, “from sorrow to gladness and from mourning to festivity.”

The Nature of Nature

It is a strange and disorienting panorama that Rabbi E. E. Dessler, the celebrated Jewish thinker (1892-1953) asks us to ponder: a world where the dead routinely rise from their graves but no grain or vegetation has ever grown.

The thought experiment continues with the sudden appearance of a man who procures a seed, something never seen before in this bizarre universe, and plants it in the ground. The inhabitants regard the act as no different from burying a stone, and are flabbergasted when, several days later, a sprout pierces the soil where the seed had been consigned, and eventually develops into a full-fledged plant, bearing – most astonishing of all – seeds of its own!

Notes Rabbi Dessler, there is no inherent difference between nature and what we call the miraculous. We simply use the former word “nature” for the miracles to which we are accustomed, and the latter one for those we have not before experienced. All there is, in the end, is G-d’s will.

It is a thought poetically rendered by Emerson, who wrote: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore…”

A thought, in fact, that subtly informed famed physicist Paul Davies’ recent op-ed in The New York Times, where he wrote that “the very notion of physical law is a theological one.”

And it is a thought, too, that, according to several renowned Jewish thinkers, has pertinence to Chanukah.

The supernatural nature of nature lies at the heart of the answer he suggests for one of the most famous questions in the canon of Jewish religious law, posed in the 1500s by the author of the authoritative Code of Jewish Law, the Shulchan Aruch, Rabbi Yosef Karo: Why, if oil sufficient for one day was discovered in Jerusalem’s Holy Temple when the Macabees reclaimed it from Seleucid control, is Chanuka eight days long? True, that is how long the candles burned, allowing the priests to prepare new, uncontaminated oil. But was not one of those eight days simply the day for which the found oil sufficed, and thus not itself a miracle-day worthy of commemoration?

Suggest those sources: Seven of Chanukah’s days commemorate the miracle that, in the time of the Maccabees, the candelabrum’s flames burned without oil. The eighth commemorates the miracle of the fact that oil burns at all.

The suggestion pithily echoes an account in the Talmud (Ta’anit, 25a), in which the daughter of the Talmudic sage Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa realized shortly before the Sabbath that she had accidentally poured vinegar instead of oil into the Sabbath lamps, and began to panic. Rabbi Chanina, a man who vividly perceived G-d’s hand in all and thus particularly merited what most people would call miracles, reassured her. “The One Who commanded oil to burn,” he said, “can command vinegar [as well] to burn.”

There is, in fact, one day of Chanukah’s eight that is set apart from the others, designated with a special appellation. The final day of the holiday – this year beginning with the candle-lighting on the night of Tuesday, December 11 and continuing through the next day – is known as “Zos Chanukah,” after the Torah passage beginning “Zos chanukas hamizbe’ach” (“This is the dedication of the altar”) read in the synagogue that day.

The Jewish mystical sources consider that day to be the final reverberation of the Days of Awe marked many weeks earlier. Although Rosh Hashana was the year’s day of judgment and Yom Kippur was the culmination of the days of repentance, later “time-stones” of the period of G-d’s judgment of our actions are cited as well. One is Hoshana Rabba, the last day of Sukkot. And the final one, according to the sources, is “Zos Chanukah.”

It would indeed seem to be a fitting day for thinking hard about the “supernature” in nature, the miraculous in the seemingly mundane. For what is what we call a miracle if not a more-clear-than-usual manifestation of G-d? And what are the Days of Awe if not a time when He is “close” to us, when G-d-consciousness is at front and center?

And so, perhaps the final day of Chanukah presents us with a singular opportunity to ponder how, just as the ubiquity and predictability of nature can mislead us, allowing us to forget that all is, in truth, G-d’s will, so too can the weeks elapsed since the late summer Days of Awe lull us into a state of unmindfulness regarding the import of our actions.

If so, the final night of Chanukah might be a particularly apt time to gaze at the eight flames leaking enlightenment into the world and, as we prepare to head into the dismal darkness of what some might consider a “G-d-forsaken winter,” know that, still and all, as always, “His glory fills the universe.”

The Sukkah Still Stands

There is simply no describing the plaintive, moving melody to which Yiddish writer Avraham Reisen’s poem was set. As a song, it is familiar to many of us who were introduced to it by immigrant parents or grandparents. And, remarkably, the strains of “A Sukkeleh,” no matter how often we may have heard them, still tend to choke us up.

Based on Reisen’s “In Sukkeh,” the song really concerns two sukkos, one literal, the other metaphorical, and the poem, though it was written at the beginning of the last century, remains tender, profound and timely.

Several years ago, thinking about the song, as so many invariably do every year this season, it occurred to me to try to render it into English for readers unfamiliar with either the song or the language in which it was written. I’m not a professional translator, and my rendering, below, is not perfectly literal. But it’s close, and is faithful to the rhyme scheme and meter of the original.

Here goes:

A sukkaleh, quite small,

Wooden planks for each wall;

Lovingly I stood them upright.

I laid thatch as a ceiling

And now, filled with deep feeling,

I sit in my sukkaleh at night.

A chill wind attacks,

Blowing through the cracks;

The candles, they flicker and yearn.

It’s so strange a thing

That as the Kiddush I sing,

The flames, calmed, now quietly burn.

In comes my daughter,

Bearing hot food and water;

Worry on her face like a pall.

She just stands there shaking

And, her voice nearly breaking,

Says “Tattenyu, the sukkah’s going to fall!”

Dear daughter, don’t fret;

It hasn’t fallen yet.

The sukkah’s fine; banish your fright.

There have been many such fears,

For nigh two thousand years;

Yet the sukkeleh’s still standing upright.

As we approach the holiday of Sukkos and celebrate the divine protection our ancestors were afforded during their forty years’ wandering in the Sinai desert, we are supposed – indeed, commanded – to be happy. We refer to Sukkos, in our prayers as z’man simchoseinu, “the time of our joy.”

And yet, at least seen superficially, Jewish joy seems misplaced and elusive these days. Jews are brazenly and cruelly murdered in our ancestral homeland, hated and attacked on the streets of not only European cities but places like Canada and Australia as well – and here in the United States, our numbers are falling to the internal adversaries of intermarriage and assimilation.

The poet, however, well captured a transcendent Sukkos-truth. With temperatures dropping and winter’s gloom not a great distance away, our sukkah-dwelling is indeed a quiet but powerful statement: We are secure, ultimately protected as a people if not necessarily as individuals.

And Klal Yisroel’s security is sourced in nothing so flimsy as a fortified edifice; it is protection provided us by Hakodosh Boruch Hu Himself, in the merit of our foreparents, and of our own emulation of their dedication to the Divine.

So, no matter how loudly the winds and the tyrants may howl, no matter how vulnerable our physical fortresses may be, we give harbor to neither despair nor insecurity. No, instead we redouble our recognition that, in the end, the Creator is in charge, that all is in His hands.

And that, as it has for millennia, the sukkah continues to stand.

Food For Rosh Hashana Thought

An odd Rosh Hashana custom, duly recorded in the Talmud and halachic codes, is the lavishing of puns on holiday foods.

Most Jews know that on the first night of the new Jewish year, it is customary to eat a piece of apple dipped in honey, to symbolize our hope for a sweet year. Less known is the Rosh Hashana night custom of eating foods whose names augur well for the future. Though the Talmud’s examples are, of course, in Hebrew or Aramaic, at least one halachic commentary directs us to find pun-foods in whatever language we may speak.

“Help us pare away our sins” before consuming a pear might thus be an appropriate example. Or an entreaty that G-d be our advocate, before eating a piece of avocado. “Lettuce have a wonderful year” might be pushing it a bit, but maybe not. One respected rabbi once smilingly suggested partaking of a raisin and stalk of celery after expressing the hope for a “raise in salary.”

Such exercises might seem a bit out of place on the Jewish holy “day of judgment.” But that is only because we regard the custom simplistically, as some quaint superstition. In truth, though, it is precisely Rosh Hashana’s austere gravity that lies at the custom’s source.

There are other telling Jewish customs regarding Rosh Hashana, like the recommendation that the Jewish new year be carefully utilized to the fullest for prayer, Torah-study and good deeds, that not a moment of its time be squandered. Mitzvos and good conduct, of course, are always “in season,” but they seem to have particular power on Rosh Hashana. Similarly, Jewish sources caution against expressing anger on Rosh Hashana. The Jewish new year days are to reflect only the highest Jewish ideals.

The 16th century Jewish luminary Rabbi Yehudah Loewy, known as the Maharal, stresses the crucial nature of beginnings. He explains that the trajectory of a projectile – or, we might similarly note, the outcome of a mathematical computation – can be affected to an often astounding degree by a very small change at the start of the process. A diversion of a single degree of arc where the arrow leaves the bow – or an error of a single digit at the first step of a long calculation – can yield a surprisingly large difference in the end. Modern scientific terminology has given the concept both the unwieldy name “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” and the playful one “the butterfly effect,” an allusion to the influence the flapping of a butterfly’s wings halfway around the world could presumably have on next week’s local weather.

Rosh Hashana is thus much more than the start of the Jewish year. It is the day from which the balance of the year unfolds, a time of “initial conditions” exquisitely sensitive to our actions.

Perhaps the Rosh Hashana puns, too, reflect that sensitivity. After all, word-play is not suggested for any other day of the year.

Maybe by imbuing even things as seemingly inconsequential as our choice of foods with meaning on Rosh Hashana, we symbolically affirm the idea that beginnings have unusual potential. That there are times when the import of each of our actions is magnified. By seizing even the most wispy opportunities to try to bestow blessing on the Jewish new year aborning, we declare our determination to start the year as right as we possibly can.

While we are not explicitly informed by the Talmud about whether the puns actually have any direct effect on our year, they unarguably impress upon us the extraordinary degree to which our actions at the start of a Jewish year affect how we will live its balance.

And that is an invaluable lesson, one that should lead us to begin the new Jewish year working to make ourselves better Jews in our relations both to one another and to our Creator.

May all we Jews merit a Rosh Hashana with only sweetness and joy, devoid of sadness and anger. And may we seize every chance to make the start of 5768 as perfect as we can – ushering in a year in which the Jewish People’s collective life and all of our individual lives take a distinct and substantial turnip for the better.

A Call To Arms

The thesis that is the Jewish Nation has an antithesis: Amalek. And just as the Jewish People is defined by its Torah, so is its polar opposite associated with a particular system of thought and attitude.

Amalek the nation is unknown to us today; the Biblical command to destroy it to avert the mortal threat it poses to all that is good and holy is thus moot.

Amalek the notion, though, is very much present – in the broader world, the Jewish one and perhaps, to a degree, within each of us as well. And its undermining remains an obligation both urgent and clear.

A hint to the attitude defining Amalek lies in the Torah’s words immediately preceding that nation’s first appearance. In Exodus (17:7), just before the words “And Amalek came,” the Jews wonder “Is G-d in our midst or not?” The Hebrew word for “not” – “ayin” – literally means “nothing.” That Amalek’s attack comes on the heels of that word is fitting, because Amalekism stands for precisely that: nothing. Or, better: Nothing – the conviction that all, in the end, is without meaning or consequence.

In Hebrew, letters have numerical values. The number-value of the word “Amalek,” Jewish sources note, equals that of “safek,” or “doubt.” Not “doubt” in the word’s simplest sense, implying some lack of evidence, but rather doubt as a belief: the philosophical shunning of the very idea of surety – the embrace of cynicism, the championing of meaninglessness.

For there are two diametric ways to approach life, history and the universe. One approach perceives direction and purpose; the other regards all as the products of randomness – cold, indifferent chaos.

The latter approach is the essence of Amalekism. It is a worship of chance, reflected in things like the Purim story’s Amalekite villain Haman’s choice to cast lots – putting his trust in chance – in choosing a date to annihilate the PersianKingdom’s Jews.

The religion that is Amalekism is often regarded as a harmless agnosticism. But it is hardly benign. Because if nature is but a series of dice-rollings, its pinnacle, the human being, is just another pointless payoff. Man’s actions do not make – indeed, cannot make – any difference at all. Yes, he may benefit or harm his fellows or his world, but so what? There is no ultimate import to either accomplishment

In fact, asserts the chance-worshipper, he is no different from the animals whom he considers, through the lottery of natural selection, his ancestors. He may be more evolved, but in the end is no less an expression than they of purely random events.

Amalek’s credo is proudly and publicly proclaimed today. From “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” (PETA), which contends that “meat is murder”; to Princeton University’s Professor Peter Singer, who asserts that “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee”; to books like “Eternal Treblinka,” which makes the loathsome comparison of animals slaughtered for food with (one winces to even repeat it) the victims of the Nazis

And it lurks, more subtly but no less surely, in the contemporary insistence that chance-based evolutionary theory is the only explanation for the diversity of species.

One who sees only random forces as the engine of that diversity may be able to offer an explanation of the human belief in right and wrong – claiming, for instance, that such belief evolved through “natural selection” to confer some biological advantage to humans. But he cannot justify the belief itself as having any more import than any other utilitarian evolutionary adaptation

And so, faced with the Jewish conviction that ultimate meaning exists, and that the human being is the pinnacle not of blind evolution but of purposeful Creation, Amalek mocks. Men, he sneers, are no different than the monkeys they so closely resemble, and the actions of both of no ultimate import

Interestingly, our resemblance to apes may figure in the pivotal account of Amalek’s attack on the Jews after the exodus from Egypt. When Moses lifted his hands, the Torah recounts, the tide of the fight turned in favor of the Jewish People; when he lowered them, the opposite occurred.

“And do the [lifted] arms of Moses wage war?” asks the Talmud. “Rather,” it explains, “when the Jews lifted their eyes heavenward, they were victorious…” And so the lifting of Moses’ hands signifies the Jews’ beseeching G-d.

The etymology of the word Amalek is unclear. But one might consider it a contraction of the Hebrew word “amal” – “labor” – and the letter with a “k” sound: “kuf,” whose letters spell the Hebrew word that means, of all things, “monkey.”

It is intriguing and perhaps significant that among all the earth’s creatures, only humans and primates can lift their arms above their heads. And little short of astounding that precisely that movement figures so pivotally in the context of a battle between the nation proclaiming that human life has no special meaning – that men are but smooth-skinned apes – and the nation that proclaims human life has unique meaning.

Because, while primates can also lift their arms, the gesture is an empty one; when humans do the same thing, it can be the most potent expression of relating to the Divine.

When Moses lifts his arms, indicating the Jews’ turning to G-d, it can be seen as a declaration that our “amal,” our labor, is not the action of a monkey but the meaningful expression of human beings.

“And his hands were belief” – says the verse there, strangely. Or not so strangely. Moses’ hands declared belief in humanity’s unique relationship to G-d.

The Jews thus prevailed in the battle by negating Amalekism – by demonstrating their conviction that G-d exists and that we are beholden to Him.

On Purim, Jews the world over commemorate the crucial, if not final, victory over Amalek that took place in Persia in the time of Mordechai and Esther, by publicly reading the Book of Esther. As has often been remarked, it is a unique scroll in the Jewish canon, the only one that makes no overt reference to G-d. Instead, it forces us to seek Him in the account’s “chance” happenings, to perceive Him in seemingly “random” events.

By doing precisely that, our ancestors merited G-d’s protection and emerged victorious. May our own rejection of the Amalek-idea in our time merit us the same.

A Lesson in Love

I used to pass the fellow each morning as I walked up Broadway in lower Manhattan on my way to work. He would stand at the same spot and hold aloft, for the benefit of all passers-by, one of several poster-board and marker signs he had made. One read “I love you!” Another: “You are wonderful!” The words of the others escape me, but the sentiments were similar.

He seemed fairly normal, well-groomed and decently dressed, and he smiled broadly as he offered his written expressions of ardor to all of us rushing to our offices. I never knew what had inspired his mission, but I know that something about it bothered me.

Then one day I put my finger on it. It is ridiculously easy to profess true love for all the world, but it is simply not possible. If one gushes good will at everyone, one offers it in fact to no one at all.

By definition, love must exist within boundaries, and our love for those close to us is of a different nature than our empathy for others with whom we don’t share our personal lives. And what is more, only those who make the effort to love their immediate families and friends have any chance of truly caring, on any level, about all of mankind.

Likewise, those with the most well-honed sense of concern for their own particular communities are the ones best suited to experience true empathy for people who do not share their own national, ethnic or religious identity.

The thought, it happens, is most appropriate for this time of Jewish year, as Sukkos gives way, without so much as a second’s pause, to Shemini Atzeres (in the Gemara’s words, “a yom tov unto itself.”)

While most Jewish holidays tend to focus on the Jewish people and its particular historical narrative, Sukkos, interestingly, also includes something of a “universalist” element. In the times of the Beis HaMikdosh, the seven days of Sukkos saw a total of seventy calf-sacrifices offered on the altar, corresponding, says the Gemara, to “the seventy nations of the world.”

Those nations – the various families of the people on earth – are not written off by our mesorah. A mere four days before Sukkos’s arrival, on Yom Kippur, Jews in synagogues around the world read Sefer Yonah, the story of the prophet who was sent to warn a distant people to repent, and who, in the end, saved them from destruction. Similarly, the sacrifices in the Beis HaMikdosh, the Gemara informs us, brought divine blessings down upon all the world’s peoples. Had the ancient Romans known just how greatly they benefited from the merit of the sacrificial service, Chazal remarked, instead of destroying the structure, they would have placed protective guards around it.

And yet, curiously but pointedly, Sukkos’s recognition of the worth of all humanity is made real by the holiday that directly follows it, Shemini Atzeres.

The Hebrew word atzeres can mean “refraining” or “detaining,” and the Gemara (Sukkah, 55b) teaches that Shemini Atzeres (literally: “the eighth day [after the start of Sukkos], a detaining”) gives expression to Hashem’s special relationship with Klal Yisroel.

A parable is offered:

A king invited his servants to a large feast that lasted a number of days. On the final day of the festivities, the king told the one most beloved to him, “Prepare a small repast for me so that I can enjoy your exclusive company.”

That is Shemini Atzeres, when Hashem “detains” the people He chose to be an example to the rest of mankind, when, after the seventy sacrifices of the preceding seven days, a single par, corresponding to Klal Yisroel, is brought on the altar.

We Jews are often assailed for our belief that Hashem chose us from among the nations to proclaim His existence and to call on all humankind to recognize our collective immeasurable debt to Him.

And those who are irritated by that message like to characterize the special bond Jews feel for one another as hubris, even as contempt for others.

The very contrary, however, is the truth. The special relationship we Jews have with each other and with HaKodosh Boruch Hu, the relationships we acknowledge in particular on Shemini Atzeres, are what provide us the ability to truly care – with our hearts, not our mere lips or poster boards – about the rest of the world. They are what allow us to hope – as we declare in Aleinu thrice daily – that, even as we reject the idolatries that have infected the human race over history, “all the peoples of the world” will one day come to join together with us and “pay homage to the glory of Your name.”

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life