Parshat Metzora

                This week and last week the Parsha discusses the spiritual disease of tzara’at (often translated as leprosy but it is, in fact, something entirely different).  If a person found a certain type of blemish on their skin, clothing, or home, they would be taken to a cohen (Jewish priest) for the diagnosis.  If the diagnosis was that the blemish was tzara’at, part of the cure to this spiritual disease was for the person to be removed from society for a period of time.  What is the spiritual ailment that causes tzara’at and what does it have to do with being removed from society?

                The most dominant opinion in the Jewish tradition about the cause of this spiritual disease is that it is a result of speaking badly about other people and gossiping. There is a Midrash that broadens the explanation of tzara’at to a much larger scale.  The Midrash comments on the opening verse of this week’s Parsha (Leviticus 14:2), “This shall be the Torah of the one stricken with tzara’at.”, it says:

“this is in accordance with the verse, “there are six things which the Lord hates, and seven which are an abomination to Him: a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked thoughts, feet that are swift in running to mischief, false witness that breathes out lies, and one that sows discord among brethren (Proverbs 6:16-19).  Rabbi Yohanan said, “The punishment for all these is tzara’at.”

All of the things described in the Midrash above can be seen as things which undermine the cohesiveness of the community.  One possible lesson to take from this Midrash is that God hates a person who tears apart the fabric of society and causes rifts in community. 

                When a person acts in such a manner, it is clear that they are lacking an appreciation for the importance of the community and the responsibilities of every person in the community.  The lack of appreciation for the community is a disease which causes a person to act in ways that are in opposition to the betterment of their community.  In order for such a person to begin a healing process, the Torah is telling us that they should be removed from society.  Once they are no longer a part of the community, and they are forced to spend a considerable amount of time alone, then they might begin to reflect on the way they interact with society.

The loneliness of seclusion is supposed to give them a greater appreciation for the importance of a cohesive community.  Only once they appreciate the good that the community does for them and everyone else, will they desire to change the ways they act against that community.  This is how the process of healing begins. 

It is interesting to me how the intellectual experience of the person with tzara’at is such an important part of healing process.  It is not enough for the person to simply not do the despised act anymore.  In order for them to be healed from tzara’at, they needed to go through an intense process of introspection.  I think that this is an important tool that the Torah is giving us as a way to grow spiritually.  True spiritual growth is not a matter of changing the way we act; it is really a process of making sure that our perspective on the world is a spiritually healthy one.  Our actions should reflect a perspective on the world that we attain by careful and constant introspection.

Parshat Hachodesh (week of Parshat Tazria)

Thousands of years ago, the father of humanity inclined himself to speak with a small group of men and women. This group might have been the most downtrodden and oppressed nation on Earth.  Upon birth their children were drowned.  Their marriages were forcibly broken up.  The nation’s back was bent; they were a people without hope. 

There is a Mishna in tractate Pesachim which declares that in each generation every person is required to regard themselves as if they themselves were taken out of Egypt.  When I consider how downtrodden and oppressed the Jewish people were before they were taken out of Egypt, I don’t feel like I can ever fulfill the obligation to view myself as having been taken out of Egypt. 

The redemption they experienced was an immediate relief from hundreds of years of oppression.  Suddenly, from seemingly out of nowhere, the Father of all humanity performed incredible miracles, and brought the most powerful nation on the face of the earth to their knees just to redeem this tiny, pathetic group of people and make them his treasured nation. 

It is impossible for me to relate to the experience of slavery.  I feel inadequately prepared to feel the feelings and experience the experience of redemption like the generation who came out of Egypt.  I’m sure that I’m not alone; In fact, the Brisker Rav (Rabbi Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik 1886-1959) commented that this requirement is probably the most difficult of all the various obligations we are commanded to fulfill at the Seder. 

There are many interpretations of what the Mishna could possibly mean by making such a difficult demand on us.  This has led some to argue that it is just a mental exercise; we only have to try to perceive ourselves as slaves who have just experienced the joy of redemption from bondage.    Some say that this exercise is impossible to do on our own, and it is the format of the Seder which functions to trigger these emotions for us. 

Maimonides’s understanding of this Mishna is not to simply try in vain to regard oneself mentally as a personal participant in the exodus, but to demonstrate this attitude with a personal relevance.  Therefore a person must do certain actions in order to demonstrate their awareness of their personal participation in the exodus.  Which is why, he explains, we recline in the manner of people of leisure, and are required to drink four cups of wine. 

I believe that the message of Parshat Hachodesh can be a possible insight into how to fulfill the words of the Mishna, that in every generation each individual is required to view themselves as if they personally were brought out of Egypt. 

Just like Maimonides, I believe that Parshat Hachodesh introduces to the preparation for Passover an element of personal relevance.  The Mishna does not say that each person is obligated to consider themselves exactly like they were personally freed, rather, it says as if they were personally freed.  The Hebrew for that term is כאילו (Ke’ilu), literally means, similar to but not exactly.  Therefore I think that the Mishna is teaching us that we need to personally relate similar feelings to those of the generation of Egypt, and not necessarily to emulate their exact emotions.

The emotions which the Jewish calendar attempts to evoke in us do not always coincide with what we are feeling naturally.  As with all mitzvoth, in order to fully experience their beauty and impact on our lives, we need to have Kavannah, spiritual intention.  We must prepare ourselves to fully experience a mitzvah, and we must prepare ourselves to achieve a meaningful experience of a holiday. 

Passover is also called חג האביב, not only because it comes at the beginning of spring, but because the spiritual experience of Passover mirrors the physical experience of spring.  With spring we experience the renewal of life in the world.  Flowers bloom, trees come to life, birds begin to sing, it’s like the world is re-awakening.  In spring the world comes to life after a long dreary winter.  Similarly, Passover commemorates the springing to life of the Jewish people after the cold lifeless winter of slavery. 

The command of the Mishna to regard yourself as if you had come out of Egypt is saying attach your personal experience to the reality around you.  For the world, for the Jewish nation, the feelings of renewal, rebirth, and awakening are occurring whether you, the individual, are apart of it or not.   Be part of the world around you, latch on to this reality as a time for rejuvenation in your own life.

The spiritual elation we may have felt in the wake of the Jewish New Year, with the back to back holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Succoth, has long been forgotten.  At this point of the year we have become habituated to the routine cycle of our lives.  With this external experience of winter, and the internal experience of the monotony of the Jewish calendar without a single Yom Tov for almost 6 months, it is difficult for the Jewish person not to be feeling a lack of spiritual passion.  Parshat Hachodesh comes as a wake-up call to move past winter and experience spring. 

For the ancient Israelites, many springs came and went.  Seasons changed many times over, but their redemption never came.  The people were a nation without dreams, and without the hope of freedom.  They were the lowest most disgraced nation on earth, the last people anyone would ever expect the Master of the Universe to enter into a close relationship with. 

Before they could experience a full redemption, God paved the way by giving the Jewish people the very first mitzvah of ראש חודש (the new month).  By making the sanctification of the month the first step in the continuous relationship with the Jewish people, God was saying to them, everything has its renewal and rebirth, even you.  For generations you have had no ties to the elation and rejuvenation most people feel when spring comes, from now on, you will have reason to rejoice with this change.  When the world awakens at spring, you will remember that you were brought out of Egypt by the strong hand of God, and you too will awaken. 

That was the lesson then, and it is the lesson today.   Now, when you are feeling most uninspired, lost in the humdrum monotony of daily life, it will be very difficult for you to break that feeling without any preparation.  Therefore before you can feel the liberation of Passover, you have to awaken from the spiritual rut you might have fallen into. 

As I mentioned earlier, the commandment to view yourself as if you were taken out of Egypt is incredibly difficult.  With all mitzvoth, there must be preparation.  Parshat Hachodesh is your refreshing wake-up call, it is a reminder that spring is coming and the world is about to come to life.  It also a reminder that the Jewish people began their redemption during this season, and it’s almost time for you to work towards an experience a personal redemption as part of the Jewish people.  The Jewish people were stuck in a rut way deeper than you can even imagine, but they were rejuvenated. 

Parshat Hachodesh is telling us to use Passover, the celebration of the rejuvenation of your people as an opportunity for your own personal rejuvenation.  May each of us heed the call of Parshat Hachodesh; so that each of us can experience liberation at the Seder, and the ultimate redemption may it come soon.

Parshat Shemini

Parshat Shemini

Rabbi Daniel Levitt

There’s a lot of scary stuff happening in the world and to the Jewish people these days.  Political unrest, War, bombs at busstops in Israel, the return of rocket attacks against the Israeli civilian population, gruesome murders of children, natural disasters, threat of impending nuclear disasters, the list goes on and on.  I can’t recall so much happening in such a short period of time ever before in my lifetime.  

I used to get in the car and turn on the radio to listen to music, but recently I have been switching my radio to news instead.  I’m sure that most, if not all, of us have been affected in one way or another by the realities we are hearing about on a daily basis.  It’s scary.  Times like these prompt many of us ask where God is in all of this.  It is not uncommon when faced with overwhelming tragedies for the human person to wonder about God’s involvement in the world.  This is the classic philosophical question known as theodicy.  This problem was summed up by the English philosopher David Hume: "Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but unable? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then where does the evil we see come from?"

Many people take this problem as proof that there is no God; or if there is a God, it is either a God that doesn’t care, isn’t involved in the world, or is powerless to stop Evil.  The great Jewish sage Nachmanides highlights this saying, that the problem of evil is "the most difficult matter which is at the root both of faith and of apostasy, with which scholars of all ages, people and tongues have struggled."  So how do we as Jews deal with this problem of faith?

Full disclosure: For a number of reasons, this is a REALLY difficult problem to address adequately in general, especially from the pulpit.  Judaism doesn’t have a single answer, the Talmud has a number of conflicting stories and approaches which can confuse and frustrate us sometimes.  My goal is to provide a glimpse into the way our tradition has dealt with these realities, because they are so prevalent in our minds these days.  But, as the prophet Isaiah says: “because your thoughts are not our thoughts and your ways are not our ways.”  We are not God, we will never be able to see the world from God’s perspective, so we can never know for sure.  It is a sad reality, but something we all have to deal with that one way or another in order to maintain faith. 

The first Jewish obvious source to deal outright with suffering is the book of Job.  In the beginning of the story we are introduced to Job, a righteous man who was very well off.  At the urging of the Satan, God tests Job and makes him suffer terribly.  The majority of the book is the conversation between Job and his friends who help him try to make sense of the tragedies that have befallen him.  His first three friends that come to visit him and try to make sense of what has happened, place the blame on Job, their argument is that it is impossible for God to make Job suffer if he didn’t deserve it in some way.  According to this perspective, suffering must be punishment of some kind. 

Afterwards, another friend enters the story, Elihu.   He tells Job that we don’t know why he is suffering but he should know that there is justice.  God is all merciful and all wise and therefore even if we can’t see it, there is an adequate answer out there if we could only find the correct perspective.  This is sometimes called the Tapestry theory.  Meaning, that a tapestry when viewed from the correct perspective is seen as a work of art, but if you were to see the tapestry from the back it would just look like a chaotic mix of strings.  Elihu’s opinion is saying that the perspective of the sufferer is like a person seeing the wrong side of the tapestry and that we have to have faith that if we would see it from the correct perspective we would understand.  But Job is not comforted by any of his friends, so at the end of the book God speaks and then only then does Job accept his fate.  I will leave a discussion of the content of what God said for a later point. 

It would go way beyond the scope of this sermon to adequately cover all the different ways in which the Talmud handles these issues, but I will highlight a few points that I think are useful for the point I want to make.

There is a story in Talmud in tractate brachot (ה.-ה:) which is thematically similar to Job’s experience.  Job experienced suffering and went about trying to figure out why he was suffering. The Talmud says that if a person experiences suffering he should scrutinize his deeds.  If he does that and can’t find any faults, then he should attribute the suffering to a neglect of torah study.  If that also doesn’t apply to the individual, then you know that it is a suffering of love. 

What you may ask is a suffering of love?  Rashi explains to us that sometimes God makes the righteous suffer in this life even though they have not sinned in order for them to merit greater reward in the afterlife.  This Talmudic approach is a decent way to deal with the problem intellectually.  The Talmud here is giving us an explanation of what the proper perspective from which to view suffering, which elaborates on what Elihu was trying to teach Job.

 But emotionally, we are still left without any clue about how to interpret our suffering when we actually experience it or how to deal with suffering on a national or global level.  As I mentioned, there are many other sources which deal with suffering in the Talmud, but there isn’t one Jewish answer to the problem found in the Talmud because many of the passages in the Talmud even conflict with each other. 

We have passages in the Talmud which state that we must believe that God rewards those for their deeds and punishes for sins.  Then we have statements that say health, life and wealth don’t depend on merit, but rather on luck.  If we had the time I could show you passage after passage in the Talmud that seem to offer conflicting approaches to this problem.   The bottom line is that there isn’t one answer; it is difficult for us to know.  

There are a number of possible approaches to explain away the problem of theodicy, but there isn’t one absolute answer.  The advantage to Judaism’s lack of a clear answer to this problem is that there is room for a number of perspectives.  This is so necessary when the question of Theodicy pushes so many people to the extremes of their acceptance of God.  We can incorporate a number of approaches on how to deal with this problem.  There is room for us to find an approach which gives us comfort even if it is not the same approach as the next person.

Whether we find an adequate answer to this theological problem or not, I believe that there is still an important religious lesson in this issue.  I think that this approach is hinted at in this week’s parsha.

In this week’s parsha there is the story of the death of Aaron’s two eldest son’s, Nadav and Avihu.  Their death was, according to most commentators, a punishment for the infraction of bringing a foreign fire in front of the lord.  The Torah is unclear what the infraction really was or why it incurred such a harsh punishment.  What we do know is that losing his two oldest sons must have been traumatic to Aaron.  How does Aaron deal with his suffering?  We don’t really know, because the Torah says Aaron fell silent.  Aaron deals with it, it is difficult, no question about that.  But when faced his own personal suffering, the Torah seems to be showing us that Aaron accepts it.  In reward for this, Rashi tells us that he merited for God to address him personally a few verses later.

There is room to question, we are permitted to go through the intellectual excercises of trying to figure these things out.  This is one reason that the book of Job makes it into the Jewish canon, the desire to figure out this question is real.   But, sometimes we have to accept the will of God too, we aren’t God so we can’t always know the answer. 

Going back to the book of Job, God goes on in detail, with very poetic language, for 4 chapters explaining to Job that there is no way for Mankind to ever totally understand the ways of God.  The verse acknowledges the confusion this leaves us in when it says that God begins his response to Job out of the whirlwind.  Our confusion is acknowledged, but God doesn’t try to minimize the confusion, he instructs us to accept it.  We can spend lots of time and mental energy trying to figure out these important questions, but in the end we’ll never really know. 

So where does that leave us?  What do we do with that?  How are you or I supposed to grapple with our emotions and our faith in the face of all the tragedies going on around the world in general and in Israel in particular?

In his book “Fate and Destiny,” the great teacher and inspiration to the Modern Orthodox world, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik provides us with some worthwhile advice.  Rabbi Soloveitchik differentiates between the person whose attitude about life is to be a victim of fate, verses the person whose attitude is to choose to be the master of their own destiny.  When faced with tragedy the person of fate will be stuck in question of why does this happen, they are stuck in a never ending desire to understand the fate that they are subjected to.  But the person who is master of their own destiny doesn’t get stuck in the why of what has occurred to them.  The reason is irrelevant to the person who is focused on carving out their own destiny.  For that person, the relevant question is what now.  Yes, bad things happen in this world, we could spend our lives trying to figure out why they happen without getting anywhere.  But if we focus on what to do when they happen, we can be the masters of our own destiny. 

The lesson here, is that the question is a good question, our desire to know is a valid desire.  But don’t get bogged down in the question, we still need to carry on no matter what is happening.  We can at the very least use the strong feelings that bad situations give us as an inspiration to do more good.

Parshat Pekudei

This week’s Parsha describes the completion of all of the work done for the building of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle.  At the completion of the work done for the Mishkan, the Torah says (Exodus 39:32), “and the children of Israel did according to all the Lord commanded.”  The strange thing about this verse is that throughout the description of the building of the Mishkan, the children of Israel as a whole, have never been credited with doing all the work before.  The people doing the work were usually qualified as “wise hearted craftsmen” or Bezalel, the chief architect, and his staff.  So the question is:  Why does the Torah here credit the entirety of the Jewish people with all of the work done for the Mishkan if they didn’t all actually do all of the work?

I really like the answer to this question which is given by the Torah commentary Or Ha-hayyim, which I will share with you. 

The Or Ha-hayyim comments:

“Evidently the text wished to indicate the mutual, interlocking character of Torah observances, by means of which the children of Israel brought reciprocal benefits on each other.  The Torah was given to be collectively observed by Israel as a whole.  Each individual would contribute his best to their mutual benefit.  Perhaps an allusion to this can be found in the Scriptural admonition: “And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”, implying “who IS as thyself”.  Thy neighbor’s welfare will contribute to yours and through him you complement your own perfection, so that he is not someone else, but you yourself and like a part of you.  The Almighty gave us 613 precepts and it is impossible for one person to observe them all.  There are, for example: Priests, Levites and Israelite men and women.  Some precepts apply only to Priests, others can only be fulfilled by Israelite men, and others only by the women.  In what way is it feasible for the individual to observe all the precepts, attaining the complete perfection symbolized in the correspondence between the number of precepts, negative and positive, and the 248 limbs and 265 sinews respectively of the human body?  The answer must be that the Torah can be observed collectively, by the people as a whole, each individual deriving benefit from the observance of his neighbor and each individual’s performance complementing that of the other.”

I would like to add that it follows from this lesson by the Or Ha-hayyim that we need to appreciate all members of our community.  Regardless of a person’s level of observance, gender, age, mental ability, etc., every member of our community adds something to the community just by being a part of it.