Jewish Life
Learning from the Imperfection of Religion
MISHPATIM, EXODUS 21:1−24:18
D’VAR TORAH BY: RABBI SARAH BASSIN
Religion is the source of most atrocities in the world. Religion makes us better people.
Well, which is it? You can look to almost any sacred text in any tradition, and find those passages that condone and even encourage violence. And you can also find those that compel us to strive to help others, and live more compassionately. Religious apologists often pretend that the texts of terror don’t exist. New atheists1 often pretend that the texts of compassion don’t.
It becomes harder to ignore one kind of text or the other when they are right next to each other. We find examples of both texts of terror and texts of compassion in this week’s Torah portion Mishpatim. On the one hand, we are instructed not to mistreat or taunt the stranger (Exodus 22:20). On the other, we are told that God will drive out the inhabitants of the Promised Land little by little (Exodus 23:30). (Later in Torah, the story is a bit modified in that we are the ones who will actually be doing the driving out. But nonetheless, point taken: the other nations must leave).
Love the stranger. Kill the nations. Parashat Mishpatim reminds us that our tradition isn’t as neat as we want it to be. But before we get discouraged that this renders religion largely useless, perhaps an even deeper truth lies within this juxtaposition.
When we are told not to harm the stranger, we are talking about one person. We have to watch out for one person. That sounds about right, doesn’t it? We have the capacity to hold compassion for a single individual. After all, we can know this person. One person has a face and a story. She may have made some missteps along the way, but she has a good soul. A single person is complicated, after all.
A group of people, however, is easier to write off. That group of people is violent. That group of people is lazy. That group of people is good at math. That group of people is (fill in the blank).
When we come face-to-face with a single individual, we can take in all of his or her complexities. When we face a group our capacity for compassion overloads, and we rely on the part of our brain that simplifies and categorizes. We may see a group, but we fail to see individual people.
A person is a story. People are statistics.
Parashat Mishpatim sets before us a choice: will we see people as the stranger we are obligated to protect, or will we group them together and see them as a collective that we are sanctioned to separate from for our own protection?
Both impulses exist. Both serve a purpose. In an open and pluralistic society, we may prefer the rhetoric of the stranger over the rhetoric of wiping out the other nations, but we cannot ignore our need for security. If we don’t embrace some preservationist tendencies, we leave ourselves vulnerable to attack. It’s a sad truth that our people know well.
But if preservation becomes the totality of our identity, what is it that we are preserving?
By placing these two commandments to care for the stranger and to destroy other nations so close in proximity, our tradition owns its contradictions.
It oversimplifies to claim that religion is all about compassion (as the apologists argue) or that religion is the primary reason for evil (as detractors do). And these extremes miss the point.
In most cases, we don’t need religion to tell us what is good and what is bad. We all know plenty of secular humanists who don’t need God to live moral lives.
Instead, I would argue that religion in general (and Judaism in particular) provides us with the context to wrestle with our own impulses. It lets us check our gut — to ensure that our gut isn’t misleading us in an increasingly complex world.
Judaism gives us the opportunity to check ourselves against millennia of tradition. Sometimes, we strive to be better than our ancestors. Sometimes, we have trouble just keeping up.
Our Torah functions less as an instruction manual and more as a mirror. We are compelled to look at ourselves in the context of a long conversation and to gauge how our voice will be heard not just today but in generations down the line.
In providing us with contradictory moral teachings, Parashat Mishpatim forces us to hold a mirror up to ourselves and ask not only how we want to relate to foreigners, but also who we want to be. Do we want to treat them as (we’re bid to treat) the stranger and come with compassion? Is it more prudent to see them as dangerous nations and circle the wagons? Can I learn something from the Sages that preceded me? Or does their perspective seem too limited to be helpful?
The answers don’t come easily because the questions aren’t easy. But rather than congratulating ourselves for whatever initial decision our gut has made, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to hold up a mirror and engage with tradition as an opportunity to really look at ourselves. No religion is perfect. But religion can be extremely effective when we need to be reminded that we aren’t perfect either.
1. Note: I put “new atheists” in a very different category from the vast majority of secular humanists who simply find their spirituality and morality without the need for the concept of God. In my mind, new atheists embody exactly the same kind of simplistic fundamentalism that they rail against existing in religion.
Rabbi Sarah Bassin is the associate rabbi at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, in Beverly Hills, CA, and former executive director and board member of NewGround: A Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change.
This Tu BiSh’vat, May We Begin with the Trees
BY RABBI EMMA GOTTLIEB 1/25/2018
Science can now confirm that hugging trees is good for you.
If the idea of hugging a tree makes you a little uncomfortable, rest easy. You don’t have to hug them to derive benefits. Just being in their vicinity can positively affect your health.
In a recently published book called Blinded by Science, author Matthew Silverstone explains that the vibrational properties of trees can improve many health issues, including concentration, reaction times, depression, stress, and other forms of mental illness – even headaches!
Although the term “vibrational properties” sounds complex, it’s actually quite simple: Everything vibrates, and different vibrations can affect our biology. Thus, when you touch a tree, or spend time in close proximity to one, the tree’s rate of vibration – which differs from your own – can affect you in positive ways.
It’s pretty fascinating. What’s even more fascinating, though, is that science is only recently understanding what religions have known for thousands of years.
In Jewish tradition, a tree is one of the most potent symbols we have. Trees symbolize a bridge between heaven and earth, as well as Torah, human beings, and God’s Divine structure.
But it is now clear that trees are more than just symbols of power. Trees have power – transformative power.
Even the first humans sensed this. Adam and Eve were drawn to the Tree of Knowledge long before anyone could scientifically explain why.
“Once upon a time,” writes Rabbi Daniel Swartz in an article about Judaism and nature, “we knew less about the natural world than we do today. [Yet] we understood that world better [for] we lived ever so much closer to its rhythms.” Rabbi Swarz reminds us that the Bible is a story about people with intimate knowledge of the land, knowledge that is reflected in the language and poetry of our prophets, psalmists, and wisdom literature.
When Isaiah compared Israel to a terebinth oak in the fall, his audience could immediately appreciate the double-edged nature of his metaphor, for while the terebinth is at its most glorious just before all its leaves drop away, it is also one of the hardiest of trees and can even re-sprout from a stump. To our modern ears, though, the metaphor is lost. Most of us aren’t intimately familiar with the characteristics of the terebinth. We live among trees, if we’re lucky, but how many of us really take the time to learn about them? And how many of us stop to notice whether or not we feel differently around them?
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, in the 18th century, knew that he felt differently when surrounded by trees. He wrote this now-famous prayer:
May it be my custom to go outdoors each day among the trees (and) enter into prayer…may all the foliage of the field – all grasses, trees, and plants …send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer so that my prayer and speech are made whole through the life and spirit of all growing things…
Rabbi Nachman knew the transformative power of trees. They transformed him and his ability to pray and connect with God. They transformed the prayers themselves.
We know now that Rabbi Nachman, a great teacher, scholar, and spiritual seeker, struggled with mental illness throughout his life. He experienced mood swings and bouts of paranoia – but under the trees, it seems, he felt better.
How many of our daily aches and pains, how many of our daily sorrows and woes, how much of our unhappiness, could be alleviated by spending a little more time around trees?
Rabbi Swartz writes, “We have set ourselves apart from the world of the seasons, the world of floods and rainbows and new moons…”
But our Torah, our very own Tree of Life, urges us to engage with nature, to care for trees and to learn from them. In a war, we can destroy just about everything except for fruit trees, and even if the Messiah himself arrives, should we be in the middle of planting a tree, we must finish planting before going to greet him.
That’s how important trees are! Adam and Eve knew it. Our psalmists and sages knew it. Rabbi Nachman most certainly knew it. Children know it. Maybe you knew it, too, once?
Rabbi Swarz questions whether “we can move from our discord with nature to an informed harmony with this, God’s universe.”
If we can, it begins with hugging trees.
May each of us, at this Tu BiSh’vat – the New Year of the Trees – refuse to be complacent in accepting the ills and sorrows of our lives. May we seek out ancient and modern cures alike – and may we begin with the trees.
Rabbi Emma Gottlieb is the director of education and family programming at Makom: Creative Downtown Judaism in Toronto, Canada.
How Golda Meir Helped Make the State of Israel Possible
BY RABBI STEVEN STARK LOWENSTEIN 1/31/2018
Last month at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, our guide off-handedly mentioned that if we wanted to read a great speech, we should read the speech Golda Meir gave in Chicago. Immediately, I Googled the speech.
It was January of 1948 and the Jews in Palestine already were fighting neighboring Arabs on a regular basis. Convoys of cars going up to Jerusalem were being ambushed; skirmishes were breaking out all through the country. To help finance the fighting, David Ben-Gurion sent Golda Meir to the United States to raise funds from the American Jewish community, the strongest and wealthiest such community in the world.
Although Ben-Gurion himself wanted to go, the executive council of the provisional government voted that Meir should go instead, leaving him to do the groundwork necessary to establish the Jewish State since the British would be leaving the country in a few months. Eliezer Kaplan, the treasurer of the Jewish Agency, had made an earlier trip to raise $7 million, but had failed in his mission.
Meir was relatively unknown within the American Jewish community, but upon her arrival in New York – back in the U.S. for the first time since she had left Milwaukee years earlier to live in Israel – her sister, Clara, suggested she try to speak at the annual conference of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. The body would be meeting that weekend at the Sheraton Blackstone Hotel in Chicago.
Francis Klagsbrun, in her new book, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, quotes Meir: “‘I was terribly afraid of going to these people who didn’t know me from Adam,’ she recalled. ‘I admit I was shaking. I had no idea what was going to happen.’”
Nonetheless, she addressed the gathering:
Friends… These young boys and girls, many in their teens, are bearing the burden of what is happening in the country with a spirit that no words can describe…. All we ask of Jews the world over, and mainly of the Jews in the United States, is to give us the possibility of going on with the struggle…. We are not a better breed; we are not the best Jews of the Jewish people. It so happened that we are there, and you are here. I am certain that if you were in Palestine and we were in the United States, you would be doing what we are doing there…. You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will.… That decision is taken. Nobody can change it.
After speaking, cigarette – but no notes – in hand, for 35 minutes, Meir unapologetically asked for between $25 and $30 million. She closed her speech with these words: “I beg of you – don’t be too late. Don’t be bitterly sorry three months from now for what you failed to do today. The time is now.”
The next day, according to Steve Nasatir, president of the Chicago Federation, with whom I spoke recently, JUF Chicago leaders took out a loan for $5 million and handed it directly to Meir.
Upon leaving Chicago, she visited 19 other cities across the country, returning to Israel on March 19 with $50 million, enabling Ben-Gurion to buy Jeeps, guns, planes, and ammunition in Czechoslovakia for the soldiers fighting desperately to create the Jewish state. Ben-Gurion later wrote in his diary: “Someday when history will be written it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the Jewish state possible.”
Indeed, less than two months after Meir returned from the U.S., several hundred people gathered in Independence Hall in Tel Aviv to hear Ben-Gurion declare the establishment of the Jewish State on Friday, May 14, 1948. Among the 37 signers of Israel’s Declaration of Independence were only two women, one of whom, of course, was Golda Meir.
Thank you, Golda, and thank you, too, to the American leaders who listened to a little-known woman speak in Chicago and heeded her words. Indeed, Golda was right; I’m glad we were not too
Tu Bi’Shvat Seder!
Please join us for a special Tu Bi’Shvat Seder this Wednesday, January 31st at 4:00 pm.
Both Hebrew classes should attend for this, our fun seder in anticipation of spring. Refreshments will be served. Parents are encouraged to attend.
Encounters that Can Make Us Become Better Jews
YITRO, EXODUS 18:1–20:23
D’VAR TORAH BY: RABBI SARAH BASSIN
Jews are good at nostalgia. We remember with fondness the tenements of the Lower East Side when our community was tight knit and intact. We remember the quaintness of shtetl life untouched by outsiders. We yearn for the sovereignty of Ancient Israel where we controlled our own fate, unmolested by other nations.
But as Rabbi Rachel Adler reminds us, “there never was a time when ancient Israelite religion or the Judaism that succeeded it were not being influenced by the cultures and religions they encountered.”1
To be Jewish is to mix with others. In our early days, we called ourselves Hebrews, iv’rim — boundary crossers. For most of the last two thousand years, we have wandered throughout the world, adopting elements of our host cultures as our own. Today, we engage the question of a more complete assimilation with non-Jews around us. At every stage, we have been defined by how we engage with others. And it makes us nervous.
We may yearn for a time when we were free of outside influences. But “a nostalgia for such a time is a nostalgia for what never was.”2
Enough with the nostalgia for a simpler era.
We should stop seeing these encounters with “the Other” as problems and start seeing them as opportunities. What if the story we told ourselves about the Other was one in which our encounters made us stronger?
We have substantial precedent for that narrative with Moses in this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Yitro. Moses struggles to the lead the Jewish people. He finds himself exhausted listening to a litany of cases as the only judge for the entire Israelite community. He cannot dig himself and his people out of this rut, and he doesn’t even know how to start trying. It is an encounter with his non-Jewish father-in-law, Yitro that enables his breakthrough. He embraces the recommendation of this Midianite priest in how to structure the Israelite community.
Yitro tells Moses, “Make it easier for yourself by letting them [additional leaders] share the burden with you. If you do this — and God so commands you,” you and the people won’t be so tired. “Moses heeded his father-in-law and did just as he said” (Exodus 18:22-24).
A non-Jewish pagan priest saved our community from implosion and gave us a blueprint for how to function.
In that moment, Moses could have rejected his father-in-law’s advice. After all, what does an outsider know about our community that gives him the credibility to weigh in?
Moses teaches us that our encounter with “the Other” can be an asset for our evolution, not an obstacle to our survival. That interfaith encounter made Moses a better Israelite leader. Sometimes, we need insight from the outside to demonstrate what else is possible for us.
I had my own transformative “Yitro” encounter a few years ago. In December 2015, I attended Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, six months after a white supremacist opened fire and killed nine members of their community. I was shocked to witness a church united in forgiveness. They drew strength from the fact that Jesus forgave his tormentors. They applied his model in their own lives to forgive a murderer. They refused to allow hatred into their hearts.
I envied that spiritual disposition to forgiveness. It made me recognize the utter pettiness of grudges I held in my own life.
That Christian community facilitated a spiritual breakthrough I was not going to reach on my own. It made me take more seriously the language of forgiveness that already exists within Judaism. I dug into Jewish texts. I studied. I did my best to implement changes in my life. That encounter with Christians made me a better Jew.
In my interfaith work, I have witnessed so many Yitro encounters. I have witnessed Jews yearning for the deeply personal relationship with God that Muslims speak of so naturally. I have witnessed Muslims hungry for the culture of argument lived out in the Jewish sacred texts. The phenomenon is a kind of “holy envy.” It is the idea that our own lives and tradition can be enriched by learning from the faith, spirituality, and action of “the Other.”
We have grown accustomed to telling ourselves a bad story about our history with the Other. The Other has tried to defeat us, expel us, extort us, and kill us. There is truth to that narrative historically, but it’s only half of the truth. And I think that we would benefit from drawing out the untold good that has come — and can come — from encounters with the Other.
Moses’ relationship with Yitro reminds us that transformation by the Other is not peripheral to our tradition. It is the very core foundation upon which our community was built. For too long, we have told ourselves that the Other should be a source of fear. That fear blinded us from the possibility that we actually need the Other to become better Jews.
1 Rachel Adler, “‘To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest’ — Boundaries, Borderlands and the Ethics of Cultural Negotiation” The Reconstructionist, Spring 2004
2 Ibid.
Rabbi Sarah Bassin is the associate rabbi at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, in Beverly Hills, CA, and former executive director and board member of NewGround: A Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change.
Seeing the Other as Revelation
DAVAR ACHER BY: RABBI ADAM STOCK SPILKER
Two hands reach for each otherThe Rabbis knew what they were doing when they divided the Five Books of Moses into portions. It was no accident that they joined the giving of Torah with the story of Yitro. They could have started the parashah with chapter 19 calling it Bachodesh, which is the first word of that chapter. Instead, their choice to begin with chapter 18 means that when we speak of Sinai, we often do so quoting from Parashat Yitro. Our source of Revelation is forever linked to the name of a Midianite priest. As Rabbi Bassin teaches, our interconnected relationship with the Other is core to our essential way of being in the world.
How could it be otherwise?
It would be shortsighted to say we have nothing to learn from outside our community. Moses realized this. He likely didn’t even question it. In his environment, he was immersed in many worlds even as he championed the rights of one.
What did he learn? Yitro taught him how to manage his business of justice better. Yitro was masterful in making sure Moses could “hear” his advice. He offered greeting (Exodus 18:6-7), gratitude (Exodus 18:10), and graciousness (Exodus 18:12) before offering a clear critique, “The thing you are doing is not right” (Exodus 18:17).
While Moses learned from Yitro about management, Yitro “rejoiced over all the kindness that the Eternal had shown Israel when delivering them from the Egyptians” (Exodus 18: 9). Moses shared his own story of God’s goodness, opening Yitro’s heart to the teachings of the Eternal. In this way, the learning went both ways.
Could we say their encounter was even revelatory? Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas explains: “[T]he Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me.”1 “[T]he face is what forbids us to kill.” 2 Yitro and Moses model in the human dimension what will be revealed in the divine dimension two chapters later. The Rabbis reinforce this reading by naming it Parashat Yitro.
1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 207
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,, 1995, p. 86
Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker is the rabbi at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul, MN.
English Wedding Cake for Tu B’Shevat
By Jessica Halfin January 2018
One thing that Julia Child and I have in common is that we both dealt with culinary figures of authority who didn’t believe in us. Child’s was Madame Brassart, owner of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Mine was Miriam, my baking teacher at Dan Gourmet in Haifa in 2010, where I studied intensive baking. I followed Miriam’s every movement, learning from her a solid knowledge of baking—especially bread baking—that I call upon every day of my life. But when it came down to it, she just didn’t think I had it.
When she gave me a mark of 70 for my classroom studies, I was floored—gutted you could even say. I went to her office to contest the grade to no avail. If I was certain of anything in the world, it was that I could bake. I knew the techniques and executed them well, but sometimes it’s not just about ability. I was the quiet, studious American in a classroom filled with raucous and warmly charming Israelis, and my shell of formality irked her.
Despite the setback, thumbing through my old Hebrew recipes from Miriam’s class, I still experience waves of nostalgia. And though I have expanded my knowledge over the years in a never-ending quest of self-improvement, I still refer to my former instructor’s recipes when I’m looking for Israeli inspiration with a twist.
The following is a version of one such recipe—a classic English wedding cake of all things—that manifests itself as a light fruit cake. Each year in the runup to Tu B’Shevat, it crosses my mind to make the cake when I see stores start to fill up with displays of dried fruits. Made in the style of a classic pound cake—which originally required a whole pound of eggs, butter and sugar for two cakes!—it is filled with sugary dried fruits as well as home-made candied orange peels. (Take the extra time to make the candied orange peels yourself, don’t use store bought.)
The cake, which also contains pieces of finely chopped yellow raisins, dried cranberries and dried apricot, makes a pleasant snacking cake that will perk up any afternoon tea or coffee break during the dark winter months. Chag sameach!
Candied Citrus Peels
This recipe makes more candied peels than you will need for the cake. Store the remainder in an airtight container once fully dry, or dip the ends in melted chocolate to create classic orangettes.
The peel and pith of 4 large oranges cut into half-inch-thick strips
4 cups sugar, divided
3 cups water
1 cup sugar, for rolling
Bring a large pot of water to boil, add orange peels and simmer for 15 minutes. Strain and set aside.
Bring 3 cups sugar and water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook the sugar has just dissolved. Add the orange peels let cook for 40-45 minutes, or until tender.
Place peels in a strainer and rinse off, draining the excess syrup and then cool by washing with cold water.
Dry peels completely, then roll in the remaining 1 cup sugar to coat.
Lay candied peels flat on a cooling rack placed over a parchment paper-covered tray and let air dry until set (a few hours to overnight).
Fruited Citrus Pound Cake
Makes 2, 12-inch loaf cakes
The method in which this cake is formed is very important to a successful outcome. That is because most of the leavening work is done by whipping air into the butter-and-sugar mixture, which is then supported by the slow emulsification of the eggs entering the batter one by one. That said, this sacred process only requires you to have a bit of patience—not a special baking skill. The cakes themselves are very rich, and taste even better when aged for a few days. They slice and freeze well and hold up wonderfully in transport. A nod to the good old days—when the only thing considered healthy was a good appetite!
FRUIT MIXTURE
Scant 1/2 cup golden raisins
Scant 1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup dried apricots
3 tablespoons orange juice
1 tablespoon rum (optional)
Using a food processor, pulse the dried fruit until finely chopped. Add to a small bowl and top with orange juice and rum if, using. Stir to mix, and let set at least 1 hour before baking. (This step can be done the night before.)
CAKE BATTER
3 1/4 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
Pinch salt
2 1/4 cups sugar
2 cups butter
Zest of 1 lemon
Zest of 1/2 orange
8 eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 cup sour cream
Heaping 1/2 cup candied orange peels, finely chopped
Confectioners’ sugar for dusting
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
In a stand mixer, beat sugar, butter, lemon and orange zest together for 10 minutes, until pale in color and fluffy.
On medium low speed, add eggs one at a time, incorporating each egg completely before adding the next. When all the eggs have been incorporated, add the extracts and beat to mix.
Add 1/3 of the flour mixture, and beat until just combined. Add 1/3 of the sour cream, and beat until just combined. Continue in this pattern ending with the last of the flour mixture.
Fold the dried fruit and orange juice mixture and chopped candied orange peel into the batter.
Split the batter between two large loaf pans, and bake for 55-60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out with a few dry crumbs attached. Let cakes cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then gently dump out of the loaf pans, to continue cooling. Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar using a small sieve to decorate just before serving.