avakesh

In praise of Cholent

Religious extremism

An ignoramus cannot be a chasid (Avos 2:6).

Interpretation: A Chasid is someone who goes to exremes (Rambam: Deyos, Ch. 1). Only a scholar can understand what is an extreme and how far one can go and not cause harm to others. "If an ignoramus is a chasid, do not live in his neighborhood (Shabbos 63a)."

A true scholar will not ever cause harm through excessive stringency, ".for the book and the sword came together from heaven, and Israel was obliged to choose between them (Sifre, Deut. 40, end). If scribe, not robber and if robber, not scribe (Avodah Zara 18a). 

 
 

Interesting Resource on the Torah of the Rebbeim

I want to bring http://theyeshiva.net/ to the readers' atention. It is a good place to start for those who want an introduction to Chabad Chassidus on an intellectual level. It contains well organized presentations of key concepts in Chassidus, well arranged and well explained. mostly from LIkkutei Torah and Torah Oh but also from other classic Chabad works. It sticks closely to the published maamorim without the fluff.

Those who are not familiar with Chabad literature have little concept of its extent and rigor. Otzar Hachchma has an optional Chabad module for purchase - 7000.00 volumes. The Maamorim of various Rebbes are built on one another and interlace in various ways. presenting a profound, complex and self-referential approach to Kabbala in its Beshtian interpretation that I would put on par with, say, Ramchal's approach, except that it is a living tradition that is revered and studied by thousands in our own day (most of whom do not understand it or shrink from its potential implications). It is deeply paradoxical and properly understood is not for the faint of heart. This site is a good beginner's introduction to the actual maamorim, without undue emphasis on the complexity and paradoxes.

If you are interested davka in the paradoxes, consider these two books: by Levin and Wolfson. The former is clearly written; the latter will strain your mind to integrate disparate concepts and your ability to understand English sentences.

 

Adults at risk

A troubling phenomenon is asserting tiself in our midst. Periodicals, such as Mishpacha and Hamodia (Kids of Hope issue) devote issues to it, educators discuss at at conventions (Agudah and Torah U'Mesorah convention this year) and parents and mechanchim talk and talk and try to wrap their minds around it.

What is it? Language fails. Some call it rebels without rebellion, others call it adults at risk, others are desperately seeking for it a name and an explantion that encompasses and explains. It is children and adults who do not rebel  and are comfortable with remaining in our communities and living a religious lifestyle, who do not struggle or agonize about existential questions. They do not seek out answers or explanations; these do not matter. They are disconnected and unaware of what religion and religious life is all about and they don't miss it. They are chilonim in religious garb, walking through life in black hats and shtreimels - without G-d, without prayer, without an awareness of belonging to a tradition and a thought system. They do not sweat little stuff, and sometimes big staff either. They experience no confilcts of conscience and are not bothered by contradictions between their lives and their ideals or more correctly, their absence of ideals. Good, shomer Shabbos kids text on Shabbos with nary a pang of conscience, adults dissemble and turn away those in pain without help, and don't worry about moving around pots of Cholent on Shabbos either. They are facultative observers, dropping or disregarding major porhibitions when they do not suit them. If they are hungry, they will eat treif, if kosher is not available, and, if confronted give patently untenable excuses. They will drive on Shabbos if they got stuck in traffic. They may not daven and do not really believe in G-d, or they say that they believe in Him but He is not to them a reality in their lives. Never before in Jewish history had we such large groups of people who are so in but also so out.

I believe that we cannot understand this development or do anything about it if we do not understand that our world is a different world than the world of our children. We grew up in modernity, a set of beliefs that rejected the values of the past but had its own ideology and values. Hence, religion was in opposition to the prevailing mindset but it was also in conversation with it and used the same language. The "isms" were dying, true, but they were still in the air and people still understood words such as "loyalty", "obligation", "aspiration", "duty" etc. Our children are growing up in a world where these concepts are not merely rejected but do not exist and they speak a different and post-modern idiom.

Used to be, people had few choices. They were born into and belonged and organized themselves in  hierachical levels, within which they were bound by a web or relationships, rights and responsibilities. It was possible to be a good member of the group and it was desirable and meritorious to accomplish all that was possible in that place and time. There was less freedom but also less alienation. One could be a Renaissance man because there was a ceiling to what was possible.

Our lives are not like that. We live in flat world in which there are many choices. One can be whatever one wants to be... only that one can't have everything. Life presents unending choices. One choice is not another choice and no choice is bad or good... it's just that if you select A, you won't have B. The State asks littlle of you. It exists not to promote an ideology and a set of beliefs but as a bureucracy, to manage flows of free agents and to allow them maximal freedom without causing injury to one another. The underlying sense of our times is that there are innumerable choices and possibilities and that life is all about choosing... and no choice is beter or worse than another.

Max Weber made a point eighty years ago that  in the modern society the links between ritual and goals of behavior are broken. Instead of integrating religious and economic values, modernity reduces every process to its most efficient components and it also enshrines constant change and renewal.

For example, envision a small farming village somewhere. Every spring, its irrigation channels  open with a religious ceremony, a sacrifice and a feast. That is how it had been for generations and in this way religion, history, economics and daily life have always been integrated. Now, let's say, a visitor imports a more efficient agricultural method. Now, the ritual is decoupled from the economics and becomes irrelevant to it and the experience of growing crops becomes a more nakedly economic activity and not a religious activity. The integration of various ares of life under a religious umbrella is lost. The village is also alienated from its past and its heritage. Thus, the new order in the village is more efficient and rational but less integrated and the price for efficiency is alienation.

The following example is mine but in the spirit of Weber.

The Torah demands that fields return to the original owners every seventh year because economic and rational values were not the most impootant. Instead they were subordinated to religious ritual and the importance of ensuring economic justice through redistribution of wealth.  Ancient man made integrative choices. He was willing to have less but to be more whole. Modern society, instead, strips economics of anything that is not efficient and rational.  Charging interest is not the most religious activity but it is the most rational way to use money (the burrower should pay for the loss of economic opportunity) and therefore our generation has trouble understanding the proscription on charging interest, except as the dry letter of imposed law. Instead of religion and ritual being integrated with society's processes and structure, if needed, at the expense of efficiency, they are separated from them. Religion is given credence only is so far as it assists the efficiencies of production. Chaplains are OK because they help people function in hospitals and deal with illness and they are also necessary for armies and prisons. Otherwise religion is peripheral to society.

Our children now grow up in a pradigm in which the supreme value is making rational, efficient and value free choices. There are many possible choices and one makes them based on what one wants and desires and not based on overarching conisderations. One can have a mitzva or a a cell phone adn this choice is on the same order of reality as the choice between two items in a restaurant. It is not that one choice is moral and the other immoral. Post-modern child or adult does not think in those terms. Is it then a surprise to us that religious considerations fall by wayside? It is not that our children and young adults choose one way of life over another, they think and function in a different sphere, only a sphere of rational and efficient choices. Religion is not a part of such choices and they see and experience no conflict in making choices without reference to religion. They are not in the "parsha".

How then do we get past this? Panelists in various discussions argued that children must be taught Yiras Shomayim as an antidote to materialism. I don't agree because I do not believe that these children and adults can even grasp these concepts or relate to them. Instead, in a prior essay I argued that the language of post-modernism is not logical and conceptual but image and sound-bite based. Religion will only succeed is it can touch our kids on a level below the rational. We lost their minds to the accursed culture but their hearts are still open, perhaps more open than every before. More years in Kollel will not do it. We must use music, story, and film as the way to penetrate below the level of the mind and world-view upon which Religion lies as a dead letter sacrificed to efficiency. Groups that do this, which appeal to emotion and not the mind, Breslav and Chabad are actually succeeding. Activist religion is where need to go to save our children. More zemiros and farbrengens, more vodka, more peer-group activities and more public action is where we need to go.

 

Jewish Moslem Co-operation in the Bronx

Viral heretics

 

 

A video has recently gone viral on the internet. In it an yeshiva guy gives a "vort" based on the fact that Avos kept all of the Torah and a respondent ridicules him for naivette and simple-mindedness. "How could Yakov have the entire Torah", he asks, " and not just look at it to find out what happened to Yosef, etc".

Several responses *R. Yair Hoffman) and commentaries have appeared in the blogosphere. They discuss what the "accepted" position is, what points the author had made erroneously and what is the "public" position that should be taught about Avos learning Torah. See here and here. Some responses are indignant, others are supportive; this is an improtant issue and it touched a sensitive nerve.

I have a minor issue with R. Hoffman's comment but I understand where he is coming from. There is no question that a Rav and teacher in Israel has a responsibility to teach that which strenghtens his congregants and charges and not what weakens them. As pointed out on another blog, he is not unique in this feelign of stewardship; a famed "rationalist" Jew felt the same way. Most peopel cannot abide rationalism and faith at the same time and the chosen few who can, must exercize stewardship and not "farshter" the faith of the many. The idea of necessary versus popular truth was already taught by Rambam and the Sages of the Talmud (halacha vlo morin ken). Here is an quote from Yosef Kaspi Amudei Hakessef Umaskiyot Hakessef, p. 8a: "If the people were to find out about this doctrine, they would not be able to tolerate this truth, and would grow wild and uncontrollable in their conduct." What should be the public position varies from generation and  setting to generation and setting and should be determined by the "gedolim" and consensus. Blogwriters do not share the sense of responsibility of their rabbinically involved brothers and often do not realize that there words have an effect on others, far and wide.

The minor issue is that R. Hoffman concludes on the basis of his review of sources that the maximalist position is the more common one and should be the one publicly taught, except in the kiruv situation where all three positions can be presented. However, his review did not comprehensively include kabbalistic and chassidic surces and had they been included, the minimalist position would, in my opinion win by numbers.

I also, like R. Hoffman,  find the mocking of simple faith and gedolm to be off-putting and unpleasant.

This is important not only as a "body count" but in esence and approach. I believe that the post-modern age demands a post-rationalist approach. The only sure way of transcending troublesome issues of philosophy, science and religion is by rising into the exalted sphere of feeling, imagination and direct mystical experience in which questions are answered in ways that cannot be communicated and probems become springboards for increased perception and growth.

For those schooled in this manner of religious expression, there is no disconnect between actual physical performaance of the mitzvos and their experiential, emotional, symbolic and spiritual effects. It is not that they lose interst in the narrow question of whether Avrohom put on tefillin or fulfilled the mitzva of writing Sefer Torah - it is that their mitzva experience transcends this question so much that it no longer even makes sense and the historical issues do not occupy them at all.

Some might see this as an excape into fantasy. To them I say, your are missing the heart of religion which is in the heart and not in the mind. You live in the improverished  and limited world of sense-perception and experience. Do you not hear the Torah's clarion call to leave behind the body and its world of sense-percepton and, yes, even logic and thought, and enter a world of elevated feeling and Holy inspiration. The choice is clear. You can remain on the level of the physical and concrete or rise to the levels that cannot be expressed. The color of the sefira of Keter is black. Why? Because it so bright and  so light that it cannot be perceived on lower levels. What some peopel think to be fantasy is other's spiritual bread. If you believe in Prophecy, believe then also  in the world beyond, which is not concrete and graspable, and many of the questions that arise in the Great Void, of themselves dissappear, like vapor before Spirit.

 

 

"Signs" in the Midrash

Midrash can be mysterious. There are passages that are difficult to understand or to interpret in any kind of literal sense. Unfortunately, the intended, or at least, a plausible non-literal interpretation often seems elusive. There is a tendency to aimlessly flounder over the text, searching one's mind for some possible interpretation that would unlock its intended meaning. Let us discuss an approach that employs the concept of exegetical motif as a systematic aid to interpreting difficult Midrashic passages.

What is an exegetical motif.[1] In its simplest sense it is a statement, description or event that is stated in various midrashim to have occurred to different scriptural characters, on different occasions, and at different times. To make it work as an aid to interpretation, one must make an assumption that motifs serve as encoding devices and they mean to suggest or allude to the same idea or meaning in each different context. A review of different Midrashic texts that employ the same motif can guide us to its intended meaning, clearer in some source passages than in others.

Nothing clarifies better than an example; let us see an example. We focus on a passage in the middle of the Midrash Asara Harugei Malchus.[2]

When the brothers of Yosef saw those Ishmaelites, they brought him up from the pit naked and sold him so. The Holy One Blessed be He said: tsadik like this shall stand naked before all? A kamea (amulet) hang around his neck. The Holy One Blessed be He sent Gabriel and he brought out of it a cloak. When the brothers of Yoself saw it, they said to the Ishmaelites: Return to us this cloak for we sold him to you naked. The Ishmelites said: We will not return it to you. (They argued) until the Ishmaelites added 4 pairs of shoes (to the price)...

As we attempt to explicate this midrash, we must note that the motif of an ornament that hangs around the neck is found in Midrash in reference to Abraham as well as Asnas.

A precious stone hang around the neck of Abraham, our Patriarch, so that any sick person that saw immediately was healed (Bava Bathra 16b)

Shchem violated Dina and she conceived and gave birth to Asnas. The sons of Issrael said to kill her, "for now all the people of the earth will say that there was immorality in the house of Yakov". What did Yakov do? He took a plate and wrote a holy name on it. He hung it around her neck and sent her out and she went....when Yosef descended to Egypt, he took her for a wife...(PRDR'E 38).[3]

A possible approach to these passages may take into account the pioneering mission of these three individuals, Abraham, Yosef and Asnas. All three of them left their homes and environment to be exiled in a different and spiritually inhospitable land. In this context, an ornament around the neck signifies a reminder of their origin and of the faith in which they were born.

An infant that is born with a kamea of writing or of herbs - is not a foundling (Kidushin 73b).[4]
A father who transgressed and did not redeem his son...some say that we write on a plate of silver that he has not been redeemed and we hang it on his neck so that he may know to redeem himself when he grows up (Yore Deah 305,15).

Let us now return to the midrash that we started out with.

Yosef is now being exiled into a foreign land. We need to realize that there has not been a precedent until then of a member of the chosen family who has left the family and still remained within the unfolding "bechira process". Lot has left and dropped out, Ishmael has left and dropped out - so also Esau, so, they thought, also Asnas.

The midrash tells us that Yosef was clothed in a cloak that folded out of the amulet around his neck; in other words, he was clothed in armor that derived out of his awareness that he remains a part of the chosen nation, even if exiled. When the brothers saw this they were understandably distraught. That was definitely not the course that they expected his exile to take. They wished, perhaps assumed, that Yosef, that vain and flighty lad that they thought him to be, would only welcome, perhaps pursue an opportunity for adventure and to travel to faraway lands, as Esau and Lot had done before him. He would then leave and be lost to the Abrahamitic covenant. The spiritual grounding and fortitude that they perceived in him at that moment must have greatly discomfited them, for it threatened all of their facile assumptions about who Yosef was and what he was likely to become. No longer could they accept Yosef going to the land of Ishmael - it was too close to home, proximally as well as spiritually. They, therefore, insisted that his new masters sell him far, far away, to a truly inimical civilization.
Why four pairs of shoes? "...teaches us that Yosef was sold many times (Rashi to 37,28)". According to the verse he was sold four times : to traders, to Midianites, to Ishmaelites, and finally to Potiphar, the Egyptian. Hence, four additional pairs of shoes.

The amulet of Yosef may relfect of another motif. When Yoseph becomes the second to Pharaoh, Pharaoh hangs a "revid" around his neck. Rashi says that "revid' is a chain. Rashbam understands it to be some kind of a cloak. Midrash may want to ensure that before Yosef wears an Egyptian chain or coat, he first wear a Jewish chain or cloak.

There are, of course, many other ways to approach this perplexing Midrashic passage. Yet, exegetical motifs, as a method can give a direction and bring order to the search for meaning in which we engage every time that a difficult passage such as this one comes our way. It can at least serve as a starting point for this exploration and bring order and direction to an admittedly difficult task.

---

1 Some have seen exetegical motif as nothing more than a literary device; what's more, they claim that it represents an unthinking generalization from one Midrashic legend to another. This is, for example, how James Kugel uses this term in In Potiphar's House. As will become clearer in the subsequent discussion, that is not how I use this term here. Rather, exegetical motifs are deliberate symbolic and exegetical signs that are meant to guide us to a deeper interpretation.

2 The full text can be found in Torah Sheleima, Vayeshev 166.

3 This midrash is available in at least 9 versions, see Torah Sheleima, Mikets, 111

4 and is not subject to suspicion of bastardy.

Josef selling to all the land...

'Joseph, Overseer of the Pharaoh's Granaries'

Painter: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)

Year: 1874

 

Computer Smashing Ceremony

Panim Chadashos: an explanation of an obscure halacha.

The light of a man's face during the day during the week is not the same as it is on Shabbos (Gen.Rabbah 11:2)

On Shabbos the face of every person is transformed. The gemara in Ketubot 7b says that Rabi Yehuda rules that sheva berachot are recited for all seven days so long as "panim chadashot," literally "new faces," have come to celebrate. If there are no panim chadashot, the law is that only the last of the sheva berachot ("asher bara") is recited.Tosafot note that Shabbat and holidays are also referred to as panim chadashot, based on a Midrash where Hashem refers to Shabbat as such (the logical extension to holidays is made by the various commentators).This is why on Shabbos each person has a "A New Face (Panim Chadashos) ", and can be counted for a minyan for Sheva Brochos, even he already attended a previous sheva brochos (Sefas Emes).

"The face of a person shows his internal situation (matsav ruach), if it is setteld or he is upset ( Klach 32)". In Daas Tevunos 2:9 , Ramchal farther explains that the face is called Panim while the inner world of a person is called pnim. This is because the face reflects what is deeper and inside. "After all, we can clearly determine if a person is alive or dead by the pallor of his face, or whether he’s ill or well by the hue and tone of his face, and we could even be said to “read” a person’s thoughts on his face thanks to its affect, color, and configuration. For, the very physical human face is capable of reflecting the soul to the eye that’s sensitive enough to read it."

Thus, on Shabbos the inner state of a person is different, whch in turns is reflected in his countenance. In what way is it different?

As is well known, the soul of a person is elevated on Shabbos. With Borechu in the Friday night, he receives the “Ru’ah” portion of the extra soul with which we are endowed on Shabbat. The “Neshama” aspect of the extra soul descends upon a person later during Maariv, during the recitation of “U’fros Alenu Sukat Shelomecha.”

So what we have is that on Shabbos the inner state of person changes, which changes his face as well. In this sense, we can speak of Panim Chadashos on Shabbos and explain the halacha of Panim Chadashos on Shabbos.