Mindless Purity

I’m hesitant to put my Mama Jean story in writing. There’s so much improper imbibing on Purim, so much regarding of “lib’sumi” (to become tipsy) as license instead of mitzvah

But the story’s too good, and its message too meaningful, to leave unshared.

“Mama Jean,” as she liked to be called, was the cook in a small yeshiva where I studied many, many years ago. She was a very large, very jovial, very middle-aged ethnic Italian from “the other side of the tracks.” While she was serving us pasta with meat sauce, her son was serving a life sentence in San Quentin.

Her first year with the yeshiva brought revelations to both us and her. We learned about fresh oregano. And she learned about strange Jews. How they could feast so incessantly on Sabbaths and holidays, eating odd things like cholent, and how they suddenly ate nothing at all on fast days.

When Purim was imminent, we thought Mama Jean should be prepared for yet a new strangeness. Gingerly, we told her about breaking the fast after Taanit Esther, about the festivities of that night and the next day, about the festive meal, about how some might be drinking a bit more than they otherwise might. She wasn’t fazed and not only prepared a royal spread (and special punch) for the yeshiva but watched the singing and dancing from the kitchen throughout the day.

It was a wonderful Purim, what I remember of it. What I clearly remember, though, was an early morning later that week. My mind is sharpest in pre-dawn hours, and I had entered the yeshiva’s beis medrash, or study hall. well before morning services.

Expecting an empty room, I was startled to see a formidable form sitting on the floor before a bookcase at the back of the hall. Mama Jean was oblivious to my arrival, deeply engrossed in an English holy book that had been on a shelf.

When she sensed my presence, she was startled, and I apologized. “But Mama Jean,” I said, “What are you doing here?”

She stood up and smiled sheepishly. “Avi,” she said. “I’m thinking about becoming Jewish.”

Mama Jean struck me as an unlikely convert (and, to the best of my knowledge, never became one).

“Why?” I asked, sincerely curious. “Purim” was her response.

Her elaboration has remained with me for decades since. “Over my years,” she explained, “I’ve seen a lot of people plenty drunk. But I’ve never seen so many people so drunk… without a single fight.” All that she had seen at the yeshiva, she explained, was friendship, joy, laughter, tears, and religious devotion.

Mama Jean, I realized, had sensed what the rabbis of the Talmud teach: that a person’s true character is evident in “his cup”—in how he acts when intoxicated. She had perceived Klal Yisrael.

The Talmud (Shabbos, 88a) teaches that something was missing when our ancestors received the Torah at Mt.Sinai, something only supplied centuries later by the Jews in Persia at the time of Mordechai and Esther.

Because the revelation at Sinai involved an element of coercion: “G-d held the mountain over the Jews’ heads like a gigis (a barrel).” Explains the Maharal: The powerful nature of the experience, the terrifying interaction of human and Divine, left no opportunity for true free choice.

And for years that “coercion” remained a moda’ah, a “remonstration,” against the Jewish People. Until the Purim story. Then, the Jews chose, entirely of their own volition, to perceive G-d’s presence where it was not obvious at all. Instead of seeing the threat against them in mundane terms, they recognized it as G-d’s message, and responded with prayer, fasting, and repentance. And by choosing to see G-d’s hand, they supplied what was missing at Sinai, confirming that the Jewish acceptance of the Torah was—and is—wholehearted, sincere and pure.

When I think of my early morning conversation with Mama Jean, I think of the Talmud’s image of G-d “holding the mountain over their heads,” and, especially, of the phrase “like a barrel.” What’s with that? Is a mountain overhead not frightening enough? Who ordered the barrel?

A gigis, however, throughout the Talmud, contains an intoxicating beverage.

In Pirkei Avos, we are taught not “to look at the container, but at what it holds.” I suspect that advice may apply here. The Jewish nation’s reaction to coercion may not reveal its truest nature; what does, though, is how we express our dedication in a state of mindless purity.

A Song From Beyond

My dear mother, of blessed memory, has been gone for 22 years. Her yahrtzeit, the Jewish anniversary of her passing, 22 Adar I, fell on a Shabbos this year, several weeks ago. All who knew her will readily testify that she was one of the kindest, most caring people they had ever met. Despite her transplantation from Poland to the U.S. as a little girl, and then the loss of her grandmother, a brother and her father when she was a teen, no scars of those challenges were ever evident in her interactions with people—the moment she met you she began caring for you—and she was the most wonderful mother any child could ask for.

And she was present at our Shabbos table on her yahrtzeit this year. She even taught my grandson a song.

Two year old Shmuel, who was visiting with his parents and little brother, is an adorable, rambunctious little boy; to his good fortune, his propensity to display his impressive pitching arm and ability to break things have been divinely counterbalanced with preternaturally blue eyes and a smile that could melt Pharaoh’s heart. He’s a quick learner too.

At one point, someone at the meal claimed to be directionally challenged, needing to consciously think about which way was right and which was left. I smiled as I realized, and explained, how I came to have a split-second recognition of which way is right.

When I was a little boy, probably a bit older than Shmuel, I would accompany my mother on Shabbos afternoons to the shul in Baltimore’s LowerParkHeights neighborhood where my father, may he be well, was rabbi. There, she would host a gathering of neighborhood children for snacks and songs and stories. One song has remained with me over the more than half-century since. It consisted of the verse “Kol rina viy’shua bi’oholei tzaddikim; yemin Hashem osoh choyil”: “The sound of rejoicing and salvation is in the tents of the righteous; Hashem’s right hand does valiantly” (Tehillim 118, 15). And, in the song, the word for “right hand”—“yemin”—was repeated with gusto thrice, each time with everyone thrusting a right fist into the air.

And so, I recounted, I need only think of the word yemin and my right arm starts automatically to move. I demonstrated the song and the motion, much to the amusement of Shmuel, who then shouted “Yemin!” three times, complete with hand motion. As we all laughed, I realized with a start that, my goodness!, my mother had just reached through the years—on her yahrtzeit no less!—and taught her great-grandson a song.

Of course, I think she is constantly teaching him, many other more important things as well. Every time I am moved to do something kind or considerate, I know it is her legacy (bequeathed to her no less by her parents) that I am, if imperfectly, embracing, and hopefully passing on to others. My wife and I, and our children—Shmuel’s mother among them—along with their spouses are all links in a chain of generations, passing on the Jewish beliefs and values we have absorbed from our forebears to the young with whom we have been entrusted. In fact, being such links is arguably our most important role in life. And whether we’re adequately filling it should be our constant concern.

More recently, my wife, perhaps in the spirit of chaos associated with the season, invited Shmuel’s parents to leave him with us for the Shabbos before Purim, an offer they couldn’t refuse. We had a wonderful time hosting our grandson. He managed to break only one child-proof gate, open only one child-proof cabinet (though several times) and drop just one book into the aquarium. (My wife’s quick move prevented Shmuel’s socks from following.)

That Friday night, when I returned from shul, the house was very quiet. Shmuel had been put to bed, but hadn’t yet fallen asleep. To soothe him and ensure that he didn’t climb out of his crib (something in which he has considerable expertise and experience) and wreak havoc, our daughter was sitting in the darkened room with him. He was babbling quietly, probably planning his mischief for the next day.

While we were waiting for the babble to fade to the peaceful slow breathing of well-deserved sleep, my wife excitedly motioned to me to come closer to the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar.

And then, bringing me a rush—and a smile leavened with a tear—I heard what she had: “Yemin!” Shmuel’s little-boy voice was piping. “Yemin! Yemin!”

Shedding Light on Anti-Semitism

A sampling of recent events – a senior Turkish official’s insinuation that Israel is behind the Wikileaks scandal; Iran’s unlocking of a website for devotees of Nazi Germany; a neo-Nazi’s spray-painting of swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs on headstones in a suburban Chicago Jewish cemetery; the brutal beating of a Jewish school teacher in the Chassidic Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn – is a timely thing to ponder as we head toward Chanukah.

To understand what all the above “spirit of the season” has to do with the Jewish time of year, one has to move beyond bemoaning anti-Semitism, toward understanding it.

It’s not an easy task. Irrational Jew-hatred’s astounding resiliency and its purveyors’ impressive creativity are baffling. And anti-Semitism has been around for centuries, indeed millennia. So, too, though, has been Jewish tradition’s take on the matter.

Classical Jewish thought’s approach to the question of anti-Semitism may have been most pithily rendered by the renowned Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik of Brisk (1820-1892), who wrote: “Know that the more that Jews minimize the ‘apartness’ that the Torah mandates through Torah study and the observance of the commandments, the more G-d allows hatred [within others] to bring about the necessary outcome – that the Jewish people remain a people apart.”

It says much about how far we Jews have drifted from the fundamentals of our spiritual heritage that such a thought strikes so many as outrageous. How, they ask, could our attempt to blend harmoniously into larger society and to jettison religious observances increase anti-Semitism?

Yet that is precisely what the Torah itself repeatedly and explicitly predicts (as in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28), what authentic Jewish religious leaders have always maintained, and what alone explains the reality around us. Once our initial umbrage at the idea subsides, what remains are the troubling but telling facts: Despite the Holocaust, and compulsory education in liberal values, and interfaith efforts, and Jews’ hearty embrace of the cultures in which they live – we are as hated as ever. Perhaps more than ever.

That is the point. Much as we may squirm, we Jews are meant to be “a people apart.” And if we try to be “just like all the nations,” in the Torah’s disapproving words, G-d allows others to remind us of our role.

Which brings us to Chanukah.

Some contemporary Jewish writers – even, sadly, some clergy – seem intent on minimizing the significance of the Jewish holiday of lights, claiming it is but a minor affair, artificially magnified by its proximity in the calendar to non-Jewish celebratory days. Nothing could be more misleading. Chanukah, to be sure, is not a Biblical holiday; it is based on an historical occurrence that took place after Biblical times. But it is the focus of a substantial amount of Jewish thought and lore, particularly in the mystical tradition.

What motivates the would-be Chanukah-diminishers, I suspect, is their discomfort with Chanukah’s elemental message.

Because according to Jewish tradition, the victory celebrated on Chanukah was only superficially about the routing of the Greek-Syrian Seleucid Empire’s forces from Judea. More essentially, it was about the routing of the Greek assimilationist inroads into Jewish life. To the rabbis who established the holiday, a greater enemy than the flesh-and-blood forces that had defiled the Holy Temple was the adoption by Jews of Hellenistic ideals.

For the Seleucids not only forbade observance of the Sabbath, circumcision, Jewish modesty and the study of Torah, they convinced some Jews to embrace their world-view. They installed not only a statue of Zeus in the Temple, but an assimilationist attitude in Jewish hearts. And Chanukah stands for the uprooting of that attitude, for the recognition that Jews are, and must be, different.

Which is why Chanukah’s observance does not involve a special feast – as does Purim’s, when the threat against us was physical – but rather only the lighting, and gazing at, the ethereal light of candles. The battle of Chanukah was, in its essence, a spiritual one. Light represents Torah. And Torah – its study and its observance – is the essence of the Jewish people. “A bit of light,” as the rabbis of the Talmud put it, “banishes much darkness.”

And so, as we light the Chanukah candles, watch their flames and consider events both ancient and current – “in those days, at this time” – we might give some thought, too, to both the spiritual state of the Jewish world today and to how widely, insanely we are hated.

And ponder the message of the lights flickering before us.

Vulnerable and Secure

Were our eyes permitted to perceive the legions of destructive demons surrounding us, the Talmud divulges (Berachos 6a), we would be unable to handle the sight.

The rabbis were referring to malevolent incorporeal beings, but the same might hold true about flesh-and-blood demons, some of whom occasionally slip into view.

Like Faisal Shahzad, the Connecticut man who tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square in May. Or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the one-time London college student who attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear on a plane to Detroit. Or Colorado resident Najibullah Zazi, who planned to plant incendiary chemicals on New York City subways last year. Or Virginia-born Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, who opened fire at Fort Hood last November, killing 13 and wounding 30. Or Shirwa Ahmed, the college student from Minneapolis who drove a truck full of explosives into a UN building in Somalia, who was identified through his finger found at the scene. Or the four men accused of plotting to bomb synagogues in the Bronx.

Imagine if we could suddenly see every would-be terrorist, brightly marked somehow as such. The sight would surely chase us off the street, if not out of our minds; the memory would keep us up at night.

And then, of course, there are the big demons, the mullahcracy in Iran or the dementocracy of North Korea, and entities like Hamas and Hezbollah and Al Qaeda.

The readily visible demonisphere, especially for Jews, is frightening enough. The thought of an invisible world of would-be destroyers skulking around to our rights and our lefts might well drive us mad. Yet it would be naïve to imagine any dearth of demons these days.

Which is why there is Sukkos.

If they haven’t appeared already, impermanent structures of varied materials, shapes and sizes will soon enough be sprouting like post-rain mushrooms across Israel and throughout Jewish neighborhoods in cities around the world.

The holiday of Sukkos takes its name from those structures, which Jews are enjoined by the Torah to inhabit for a week each year. The walls of sukkot can be made of any material. But, in fulfillment of Jewish tradition’s insistence that the dwellings be “temporary” in nature, their roofs must consist of pieces of unprocessed wood or vegetation, and the material may not be fastened in place.

At first glance, living in sukkot – by definition vulnerable to wind, rain and pests – would seem only to compound any innate Jewish proclivity to worry; the delicate dwellings might well only intensify Jewish anxiety. And yet, at least for Jews who appreciate the holiday’s import, just the opposite is true.

For Jewish tradition considers the sukkah symbolic of the divine “clouds of glory” that protected the ancestors of today’s Jews as they wandered in the desert after leaving Egypt. The miraculous clouds destroyed whatever obstacles or noxious creatures stood in the people’s path.

Thus, the sukkah represents a deep Jewish truth: Security is not a function of fortresses; it is a gift granted, ultimately, from above.

The Yiddish poem by Avraham Reisen (1876-1953) sung in countless sukkot well captures the idea. It paints the picture of a Jewish father sitting in his sukkah, as a storm rages. His anguished daughter tries to convince him that the sukkah is about to fall. He responds (rendered from the Yiddish):

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 little sukkah still stands upright.

Sukkos, of course, have in fact succumbed to storms. Jews, too, have fallen at the hands of ancient and modern murderers alike. But, as Reisen’s metaphor so poignantly reminds us, there is timeless meaning in the fact that the Jewish people has survived.

And the meaning lies in what the sukkah’s fragility implies – that true security, in the end, comes from only one place.

So all the world’s craziness and evil, all the unreason and hatred and plotting and violence and demons, cannot shake the serenity of the sukkah. We have, if only we merit it, an impenetrable shelter.

Beginning a month before Rosh Hashana, Psalm 27 is added to Jewish prayer services; it is recited twice a day, until the very end of the holiday when Jews live in sukkos. A verse in the Psalm, as it happens, even refers to one:

“For He will hide me in His sukkah,” King David sings of the Creator, “on the day of evil.”

Dispatching the Goat

One of the most remarkable elements of Yom Kippur in ancient times, when the Holy Temple stood in Jerusalem, was the ritual of “the Two Goats.”

Two indistinguishable members of that species were brought before the High Priest, who placed a randomly-pulled lot on the head of each animal. One lot read “to G-d” and the other “to Azazel” – the name of a steep cliff in a barren desert.

As the Torah prescribes, the first goat was solemnly sacrificed in the Temple, attention given to every detail of the offering; the second was taken to the cliff and thrown off, dying unceremoniously before even reaching the bottom.

Some moderns might find the fates of both goats troubling, but there are depths to Jewish rituals of which they don’t dream.

I lay no claim to conversance with those truly deep meanings. But pondering the “two goats” ritual before Yom Kippur (and anticipating its recollection during the day’s prayer-service), a thought occurs, and it may bear particular import for our times.

There are two ways to view human life, as mutually exclusive as they are fundamental. Our existence is either a result of intent, or of accident. And a corollary follows directly: Either our lives are meaningful, or they are not.

If the roots of our existence ultimately lie in pure randomness, there can be no more meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad movies; no more import to right and wrong than to right and left. Human beings remain but evolved animals, their Mother Theresas and Adolf Hitlers alike. To be sure, we might conceive a rationale for establishing societal norms, but a social contract is only a practical tool, not a moral imperative; it is, in the end, artificial. Only if there is a Creator in the larger picture can there be ultimate import to human life, placing it on a plane meaningfully above that of mosquitoes.

The Torah, of course, is based on the foundation – and in fact begins with an account – of a Divinely directed creation; and its most basic message is the meaningfulness of human life. Most of us harbor a similar, innate conviction.

Yet some resist that innate feeling, and adopt the perspective that what we can perceive with our physical senses is all that there is in the end. The apparent randomness of nature, in that approach, leaves no place for Divinity. It is not a difficult position to maintain; the Creator may be well evident to those of us primed to perceive Him, but He has not left clear fingerprints on His Creation.

Might those two diametric worldviews be somehow reflected in the Yom Kippur ritual?

The goat that becomes a sacrifice on the Temple altar might symbolize recognition of the idea that humans are beholden to something greater. And the counter-goat, which finds its fate in a desolate, unholy place, would then allude to the perspective of life as pointless, lacking higher purpose or meaning.

It’s not an unthinkable speculation, especially in light of how the Azazel-goat seems to be described by the Torah – so strangely – as carrying away the sins of the people.

The traditional Jewish commentaries all wonder at that concept. Some, including Maimonides, interpret it to mean that the people will be spurred by the dispatching of the Azazel-goat to repent.

If, indeed, the Azazel-goat alludes to the mindset of meaninglessness, we might approach an understanding of the inspiration born of its dispatching. The animal’s being “laden with the sins” of the people might refer to the recognition that sin stems from insufficient recognition of how meaningful in fact are our lives. The Talmudic rabbi Resh Lakish in fact said as much when he observed [Sotah 3a] that “A person does not sin unless a spirit of madness enters him.”

And so the sending off of the Azazel-goat could be seen as an acknowledgement of the idea that sin’s roots lie in the madness born of our self-doubt. And those who witnessed its dispatchment might well have been spurred by that thought to then turn and consider the other goat, the one sacrificed in dedication to G-d. So stirred on the holiest day of the Jewish year, they might then have been able to better commit themselves to re-embracing the grand meaningfulness that is a human life.

We may lack the Two Goats ritual today, but we can certainly try all the same to absorb that eternally timely thought.

Great Expectations

Thoughts of consequence can sometimes arise from the most mundane experiences, even a headache.

Opening the medicine cabinet one day, I was struck by a sticker on a prescription container.

“Not for use by pregnant women,” it read.

“And why not?” part of my aching head wondered.

Because, another part answered, a fetus is so much more sensitive to the effects of chemicals than a more developed person. Partly, of course, because of its very tininess, but more importantly because it is an explosively, developing thing. While a single cell is growing to a many-billions-of-unbelievably-variegated-cells organism in a matter of mere months it is easily and greatly affected by even subtle stimuli.

Which thought led, slowly but inexorably, to others, about the creation of the world – the subject, soon, of the parshas hashovua – and about the beginning of a new Jewish year.

“The Butterfly Effect” is the whimsical name science writers give to the concept of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – the idea that beginnings are unusually important. A diversion of a single degree of arc where the arrow leaves the bow – or an error of a single digit at the beginning of a long calculation – can yield a difference of miles, or millions, in the end. For all we know, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings halfway around the world yesterday might have set into motion a hurricane in the Atlantic today.

The most striking butterfly effects take place during formative stages, when much is transpiring with particular rapidity. Thus, the label on the medication; the gestation of a fetus, that single cell’s incredible journey toward personhood, is strikingly responsive to so much of what its mother does, eats and drinks. The developing child is exquisitely sensitive to even the most otherwise innocent chemicals because beginnings are formative, hence crucial, times.

Leaving the realm of the microcosm, our world itself also had a gestation period, six days’ worth. Interestingly, just as the initial developmental stage of a child takes place beyond our observation, so did that of the world itself. The event and processes of those days are entirely hidden from us, the Torah supplying only the most inscrutable generalities about what actually took place then. Thus, Chazal applied the posuk “the honor of Hashem is the concealment of the thing” (Mishlei, 25:2) to the days of creation. Honest scientists admit the same. E.A. Milne, a celebrated British astronomer, wrote “In the divine act of creation, G-d is unobserved and unwitnessed.”

Despite our inability, however, to truly know anything about the happenings of the creation week, to think of those days as a gestational time is enlightening. It may even help explain the apparent discrepancy between what we know from the Torah is the true age of the earth and what the geological and paleontological evidence seem to say

Consider: What would happen if the age of an adult human since his conception were being inferred by a scientist from Alpha Centauri, using only knowledge he has of the human’s present rate of growth and development? In other words, if our alien professor knew only that the individual standing before it developed from a single cell, and saw only the relatively plodding rate of growth currently evident in his subject, he would have no choice but to conclude that the 30-year-old human was, in truth, fantastically old. What the Alpha Centurion is missing, of course, is an awareness of the specialized nature of the gestational stage of life, the powerful, pregnant period before birth, with its rapid, astounding and unparalleled rate of development.

If we recognize that a similar gestational stage existed for the universe as a whole at its creation – and the Torah tells us to do precisely that – then it is only reasonable to expect that formative stage to evidence a similarly accelerated rate of development, with the results on the first Shabbos seeming in every detectable way to reflect millions of years of development, eons that occurred entirely within the six days of the world’s explosive, embryonic growth.

Rosh Hashana is called “the birthday of the world.” But the Hebrew word there translated as “birth of” – haras – really refers to the process of conception/gestation. And so, annually, at the start of the Jewish year, it seems in some way we relive the gestational days of creation. But more: those days are formative ones, the development period for the year that is to follow. Beginning with the “conception-day” of Rosh Hashana itself and continuing until Yom Kippur, the period of the early new Jewish year is to each year what the creation-week was to the world of our experience: a formative stage.

All of which may well lend some insight into a puzzling halacha.

We are instructed by the Shulchan Aruch to conduct ourselves in a particularly exemplary manner at the start of a new Jewish year. We are cautioned to avoid anger on Rosh Hashana itself. And for each year’s first ten days, we are encouraged to avoid eating even technically kosher foods that present other, less serious, problems (like kosher bread baked by a non-Jewish manufacturer), and to generally conduct ourselves, especially interpersonally, in a more careful manner than during the rest of the year.

It is a strange halacha. What is the point of pretending to a higher level of observance or refinement of personality when one may have no intention at all of maintaining those things beyond the week?

Might it be, though, that things not greatly significant under normal circumstances suddenly take on pointed importance during the year’s first week, because those days have their analogue in the concept of gestation?

Might those days, in other words, be particularly sensitive to minor influences because they are the days from which the coming year will develop?

Observance and good conduct are always in season, but our mesora teaches us that they have particular power during Rosh Hashana and the Aseres Yimei Teshuvah – that we should regard these days with the very same vigilance and care an expectant mother has for the rapidly developing, exquisitely sensitive being within her.

Let us seize the days and cherish them; they are conceptual butterfly-wings, the first unfoldings of a new Jewish year.

The Candle Within

It would make a good Chelm story. The resident philosopher sagely announces that since he can’t perceive his own face directly he must not have one. Besides, as anyone can plainly see, what seems to be his face clearly resides in his mirror.

The thought is inspired by “materialist” psychologists, who lament the persistence of the idea of “dualism,” the belief that human beings possess both physical and spiritual components. “The qualities of mental life that we associate with souls are purely corporeal,” asserts Professor Paul Bloom of Yale, for example. “They emerge from biochemical processes in the brain.”

Another would-be re-educator of the backward masses is Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who advises us to set aside “childlike intuitions and traditional dogmas” and recognize that what we conceive of as the soul is nothing more than “the activity of the brain.”

Or, as they might say back at the University of Chelm, since the soul seems perceptible only through the brain, the latter must define the former.

Sometimes, though, deep intuitions are right and interpretations of evidence (or the lack of it) wrong. And scientists, as the noted British psychologist H. J. Eyesenck famously observed, can be “just as ordinary, pig-headed and unreasonable as anybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous.”

Were the contemporary dualism debate merely academic, we might just ignore it. Unfortunately, though, the denial of humanity’s specialness – the ghost in the Bloom/Pinker philosophy-machine – is of formidable import.

Negating the concept of a soul – what makes human beings special and requires us to take responsibility for our choices – yields deep repercussions in broader society. It bears impact on a slew of contemporary social issues, from animal rights to abortion; from marriage’s meaning to the treatment of the terminally ill.

In the absence of the concept of a human soul, there is nothing to justify considering humans inherently more worthy than animals, nothing to prevent us from casually terminating a yet-unborn life or a life no longer “useful”; no reason to consider any way of life less proper than any other. Neither would we be justified to consider any insect our inferior, nor bound to any ethical or moral system. Put succinctly, a society that denies the soul-idea is, in the word’s deepest sense, soulless.

The game’s zero-sum: Either we humans are qualitatively different from the rest of the biosphere, sublimated by our souls and the responsibilities that attend them; or we are not. A soul-denying world might craft a utilitarian social contract. But right and wrong there could have no true meaning at all.

The materialist notion is not novel. De-spiritualizers of humanity’s essence served as the high priests of the Age of Reason and the glory days of Communism.

But the first “materialists” may have been the ancient Greeks, who placed capricious gods on the pedestal where, today, professors lay gray matter.

Hellas celebrated the physical world. The ancient Greeks developed geometry, calculated the earth’s circumference, proposed a heliocentric theory of the solar system and focused attention on the human being, too, but only as a physical specimen.

Accordingly, much of Hellenist thought revolved around the idea that the enjoyment of life was the most worthwhile goal of man. The words “cynic,” “epicurean,” and “hedonist” all stem from Greek philosophical schools.

And so it followed almost logically that the culture that was Greece saw the Jewish fixation on the divine as an affront. The Sabbath denied the unstopping nature of the physical world; circumcision implied that the body is imperfect; the Jewish calendar imparted holiness where there is only mundane periodicity; and modesty or any sort of limits on indulgence in physical pleasure were unnatural.

The Greeks had their “gods,” of course, but they were diametric to holiness, modeled entirely on the worst examples of human beings, evidencing the basest of inclinations. And when Hellenist philosophers spoke of the “soul,” they referred only to what we would call the personality or intellect. The idea of a self that can make meaningful choices and merit eternal reward was indigestible to the Greek world-view.

As indispensable as it is to the Jewish one, which insists that humans are unique within creation, and that we are charged with living special lives; that our souls are eternal and that what we do makes a difference.

Chanukah celebrates the crucial difference between the ideals that embodied Hellenism and those that animate the Jewish people.

In recent years it has become fashionable among the ignorant to dismiss Chanukah as a “minor” festival on the Jewish calendar. Anyone familiar with the centuries-old and voluminous mystical, conceptual and halachic Chanukah literature knows better

The Hellenism/Judaism philosophical battle continues to this day and its stakes are high. Gazing at the Chanukah candles this year, we might want to recall the words (Proverbs, 20:27) of King Solomon, the wisest of all men: “A flame of G-d is the soul of man.”

Thirteen Times Two Equals One

Oddly, a Hebrew phrase familiar to the Jewishly-educated is routinely used to refer to two entirely different and seemingly unrelated things.

The phrase is “Yud Gimmel Middos” – literally, “13 Measures” – and one of its usages was prominent over the days from before Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur. In that context, the phrase refers to the verses from Shemos (34:6-7) that begin with G-d’s name stated twice (with a pause signaled between them, representing, the Talmud says, one’s different relationship to G-d “before he has sinned and after he has sinned and repented”) and comprising in all a list of thirteen aspects (or, as commonly rendered, “attributes”) of His mercy. The verses form the centerpiece of the Selichos supplications recited throughout the High Holidays season and are prominent in the Yom Kippur services, including its concluding prayer Ne’ila.

According to Jewish tradition, the formula was taught to Moshe by G-d Himself after our ancestors’ sin of venerating the golden calf. Acceding to Moshe’s plea that He forgive the people their sin, Hashem then tells Moshe that, in the Talmud’s words, “when trouble comes upon the Jews because of their iniquities, let them stand together before Me and recite” the Attributes of Mercy. (Commentaries stress the need to do more than merely recite the verses, the need to emulate the Divine patience and understanding they embody.)

The “13 Middos” of mercy thus reflect Hashem’s compassion and love.

The other “13 Middos” refers to a list recited daily before the actual start of the first portion of morning prayers, at the conclusion of what is popularly referred to as the “Karbonos” portion of the traditional liturgy. This list, cited in Rabbi Yishmael’s name in the Sifri, a Midrash of halachic material, enumerates the “hermeneutical” rules by which Jewish laws are derived from the Torah’s verses. Some of that methodology, more completely known as the “13 Middos Through Which the Torah is Interpreted,” is logical, some of it not obviously so; all of it comprises a sacred part of the Oral Law itself.

That both the expressions of Hashem’s mercy and the hermeneutical principles number thirteen, and that both are described as “middos” is intriguing. And it may be meaningful too.

Everyone who has ever thought of G-d, certainly in the context of Judaism, has probably paused at the fact that, at least from human perspective, the Creator seems to present two different “faces.” On the one hand, He is the Merciful, the life-Giver, the Forgiver of sins and Bestower of blessings. And, on the other, He is the Lawgiver, instilling the laws of nature in the universe, and charging humanity with the foundational “Noachide” laws – and the Jews, with the laws of the Torah.

Christianity seized on that seeming dichotomy, choosing to emphasize G-d as Merciful and, to one or another degree, to “downgrade” G-d as Lawgiver. Circumcision and most other Jewish laws were abandoned by the early Church and, later, Thomas Aquinas expressly judged the Torah’s “ceremonial and judicial” laws to be no longer binding.

But even some Jews who would never think to affirm Christian theology have subtly come to effectively accept that bifurcation, laying claim to Hashem’s love but regarding His law, with all its complexity and detail, as off-putting and passé.

However difficult the idea may be for them to internalize, though, the same G-d is the Source of both love and demand. The opening words of a prayer recited throughout the Days of Repentance say it clearly: Hashem is “Avinu Malkeinu” (“Our Father, Our King”) – both a merciful Parent and a demanding Sovereign.

Perhaps that is the subtle implication of the strange fact of the two “13 Middos” – that the Source of mercy and patience is the very same Source of law and obligation. Indeed, that Divine mercy and Divine law are inseparable facets of the same Unity. The demands of Divine law are born of Divine love; they reflect G-d’s concern for our own ultimate wellbeing.

It’s a thought worth thinking as, after Yom Kippur, we emerge from days of focus on the Divine as forgiving Father immediately and seamlessly into days of preparing for Sukkos, paying heed, as commanded, to the myriad technical and exacting laws of the “four species” and the sukkah – laws based, of course, on the 13 hermeneutical principles of Rabbi Yishmael.

The Matrix

Your child damages a neighbor’s property, you feel responsible.

But that can mean two distinct things. Either, simply, that as the child’s parent you consider yourself where the buck stops.

Or it may mean something deeper. If the boy didn’t just accidentally hit a ball through the Jones’ picture window but rather aimed a rock at it – and had been influenced in his disregard for the property of others by some remarks you made – you should feel responsible in much more than the buck-stopping sense.

The Jewish concept of “arvus,” – the “interdependence” of all Jews – is sometimes understood as akin to the first, simple, sense of responsibility. Jews are to regard other Jews as family, and therefore to feel responsible for one another.

But, the celebrated Jewish thinker Rabbi E.E. Dessler teaches, Jews are responsible for one another in the word’s deeper sense too. When a Jew does something good, it reflects the entire Jewish people’s goodness. And the converse is no less true. Thus, when Achan, one man, misappropriated spoils after the first battle of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, the siege of Jericho, it is described as the sin of the entire people (Joshua, 7:1). Explains Rabbi Dessler: Had the people as a whole been sufficiently sensitive to the Divine commandment to shun the city’s spoils, Achan would never have been able to commit his sin.

The much publicized arrests last month of several Jews, amid a larger group, on a variety of financial charges caused all sensitive Jews acute embarrassment. But the vivid image of Jews – religious ones, no less – being carted off by federal agents needs to do something more than embarrass us. It needs to spur us.

Not because we have any right to assume the worst about the accused; we don’t. And if in fact there were violations of the law, we don’t know the circumstances, the motivations of the accused or even if they were aware of the pertinent laws (which might not make a difference to a trial judge but should to the rest of us). Trial by Tabloid is not Jewish jurisprudence.

But the images themselves must make us think. In particular about other, confirmed, cases of Jews – including religiously observant ones – who have in fact engaged in “white collar” crime. Not to mention several identifiably Jewish, if not particularly religious, Jews who have even achieved broad notoriety for their societal sins.

And so, the deeper concept of arvus leaves us to ponder the possibility that some less blatant and less outrageous – but still sinful – actions of other Jews, ourselves perhaps included, may have, little by little, provided a matrix on which greater sins subsequently came to grow.

Every child who received a Jewish education knows that even a small coin placed in a pushke, or charity box, is the fulfillment of a mitzvah, the commandment to give charity. It should be equally apparent, especially to all us grown-up children, that the misappropriation of even a similarly small amount of money is a sin.

And so Jews, whoever and wherever they are, who cut corners for financial gain – who underreport their income or avoid taxes illegally or are less than fully honest in their business dealings – contribute thereby to the thievery-matrix. And they bear responsibility, in however small the ways, for larger crimes committed by their fellows.

What is more, even those of us who are innocent of any financial indiscretions might also be unwitting contributors to the critical criminal mass. Because things other than money can also be “stolen.”

The Torah speaks, for example, about two forms of oppressive practices (ona’ah): financial (as in overcharging) and personal (as in causing pain to others with words). The Talmud also calls the act of misleading another person “stealing knowledge” (g’neivas da’as); and considers it “robbery” to not return another’s greeting. Halachic decisors, moreover, note the forbiddance to “steal sleep” – to wake someone unnecessarily or to keep him up when he wants to retire.

So even those of us whose financial ledgers are in order would do well to introspect. Are we sufficiently careful not to use words in hurtful ways, entirely meticulous in advice we offer, fully responsive to the good will of others, truly cautious about not disturbing their peace? If not, then we are – in a subtle but real way – part of the perp-walk picture ourselves.

Yom Kippur approaches. Jews the world over will repeatedly recite two confessional prayers, “Ashamnu” and “Al Chet Shechatanu.” Both, oddly, are in the first person plural. It is a collective “we” who have sinned. As the commentaries explain, that is because, among Jews, even sins of which the individual supplicant may be personally innocent, implicate us all.

Who We Are

The famous early 20^th century German-born American financier Otto Kahn, it is told, was once walking in New York with his friend, the humorist Marshall P. Wilder. They must have made a strange pair, the poised, dapper Mr. Kahn and the bent-over Mr. Wilder, who suffered from a spinal deformity.

As they passed a synagogue on Fifth Avenue, Kahn, whose ancestry was Jewish but who received no Jewish training from his parents, turned to Wilder and said, “You know, I used to be a Jew.”

“Really?” said Wilder. “And I used to be a hunchback.”

The story is in my head because Yom Kippur is coming. More specifically, Kol Nidrei.

That prayer’s solemnity and power are known well to every Jew who has ever attended the pre-evening service that ushers in the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. It is a cold soul that does not send a shudder to the body it inhabits when Kol Nidrei is intoned in its ancient, eerie melody. And yet the words of the prayer – “declaration” would be more accurate – do not overtly speak to the gravity of the day, the end of the period of repentance and Divine judgment.

They speak instead to the annulment of vows, specifically (according to prevailing Ashkenazi custom) to undermining vows we may inadvertently make in the coming year.

Vows, or verbalized commitments, the Torah teaches, have deep power; they truly bind those who utter them. And so, observant Jews take pains to avoid not only solemn vows but any declarative statements of intent that could be construed as vows. That Yom Kippur would be introduced by a nod to the gravity of vow-making isn’t terribly surprising. But the poignant mournfulness of the moment is harder to understand.

It has been speculated that the somber mood of Kol Nidrei may be a legacy of other places and times, in which Jews were coerced by social or economic pressures, or worse, to declare affiliations with other religions. The text, in that theory, took on the cast of an anguished renunciation of any such declarations born of duress.

Most Jews today face no such pressures. To be sure, missionaries of various types seek to exploit the ignorance of some Jews about their religious heritage. But most of us today do not feel any compulsion to shed our Jewish identities to live and work in peace.

Still and all, there are other ways to be unfaithful to one’s essence. Coercion comes in many colors.

We are all compelled, or at least strongly influenced, by any of a number of factors extrinsic to who we really are. We make pacts – unspoken, perhaps, but not unimportant – with an assortment of devils: self-centeredness, jealousy, anger, desire, laziness…

Such weaknesses, though, are with us but not of us. The sage Rabbi Alexandri, the Talmud teaches (Berachot, 17a), would recite a short prayer in which, addressing G-d, he said: “Master of the universes, it is revealed and known to You that our will is to do Your will, and what prevents us is the ‘leaven in the loaf’ [i.e. the inclination to do bad] …” What he was saying is that, stripped of the rust we so easily attract, sanded down to our essences, we want to do and be only good.

Might Kol Nidrei carry that message no less? Could its declared disassociation from vows strike our hearts as a renunciation of the “vows”, the unfortunate connections, we too often take upon ourselves? If so, it would be no wonder that the prayer moves us so.

Or that it introduces Yom Kippur.

One of the day’s most remarkable elements in ancient times, when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, was the ritual of “the two goats.” The High Priest would place a lot on the head of each animal; one read “to G-d” and the other “to Azazel” – according to Rashi, the name of a mountain with a steep cliff in a barren desert.

As the Torah prescribes, the first goat was sacrificed to G-d in the Temple; the second was taken through the desert to the cliff and cast off.

The Torah refers to “sins and iniquities” being “put upon the head” of the Azazel goat before its dispatch. The deepest meanings of the ritual, like those of all Jewish rituals in the end, are beyond human ken. But, on a simple level, it might not be wrong to see a symbolism here, a reflection of the fact that our sins are, in the end, foreign to our essences, extrinsic entities, things to be “sent away,” banished by our sincere repentance.

In 1934, when Otto Kahn died, Time Magazine reported that the magnate, who had been deeply dismayed at the ascension of Hitler, had, despite his secularist life, declared “I was born a Jew, I am a Jew, and I shall die a Jew.”

Considering his upbringing and way of life, it is unlikely that Mr. Kahn ever attended Kol Nidrei services. But perhaps a seed planted by a humorist and nourished with the bitter waters of Nazism helped him connect to something of the prayer’s meaning. May we all merit that same connection.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life