Posts
Parasha Emor: Leviticus 21:00-24:23
Via Shamash Org on-line class service
Jewish Renewal
Jewish Spiritual Renewal
Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA
"Don't Follow Leaders, Watch Those Parking Meters"
Judaism is a beautiful religion - and much more than that - it is a wondrous way of life. One of cornerstones of Judaism is continuous learning and exploration.
We are indeed the people of the Book - and of many books. Judaism gives us an obligation to study and to question. While the Torah has literary allusions to us being the sheep of God, we are certainly not expected to act like cattle. We are the children of
As Jews, and especially as modern Jews, we need to reevaluate continually and personally our relationships to God and to our traditions. King David asked in Psalm 27 to be lead "on the path of integrity." As long as we strive to stay on this path, we will maintain the true essence of a Jew, which is to have moral and ethical direction. Our Jewish Spiritual Renewal depends on this.
When Judaism encountered the modernity of enlightenment and emancipation in the late 1700s the intellectual walls that we erected were collapsing along with the political, social, and physical (ghetto) walls. In Hebrew, enlightenment is "haskalah," from the root word s-kh-l, to understand. Understanding and its partner, wisdom (binah in Hebrew), brought with it the obligations of continual study. The Reform movement was Judaism's eventual response to these transformations in
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant saw enlightenment as "the human being's release from self-imposed tutelage." Kant meant that we as humans tend to accept an external authority as our guide in determining how we are to believe and to live. It implied that men take the easy way out and invent self-imposed rules to avoid grappling with philosophical issues.
Many Jews, too, had forgotten how to wrestle with issues and were content to listen to their schtetle's rebbe for advice and wisdom. Politically, these two movements of enlightenment and emancipation saw the abandonment of the divine right of kings. This was replaced by Thomas Hobbes's doctrine of the social contract whereby the state was founded on agreement among people. The people decided on an order that would protect their rights and interests. This lead to both the American and the French Revolutions. As Americans and as Jews we must stay educated or our rights of self-determination can and will be limited.
This parasha talks about the period known as the Counting of the Omer. During the period from Passover to Shavuot we traditionally study a book of the Mishna called Pirkei Avot, Chapters (or Teachings or Ethics) of the Fathers. You can find 100 percent of this text in every traditional sidur and about 20 percent in liberal sidurim.
"The world is sustained by three things: by the Torah, by worship, and by deeds of loving kindness." (1:02). "Do not say when I have leisure time I will study as you may never have any leisure." (2:05). Why do I remind you of this in this d'var Torah?
"You shall not desecrate (lo te-chal-lu) my Holy Name (shem)." (Lev. 22:32). The concept of "chillul ha Shem" is now introduced to us. Desecration of God's name, according to Talmud Bavli Tractate Yoma 86A, is one of the most serious of sins and one for which it is the most difficult to atone.
As Jews we are to know what proper man-to-man behavior is and not let anyone lead us astray from this regardless of their title. We saw in history how Pope Urban II said, "Deus vult" (God wills it), and the Crusades began. We saw in recent times how a rabbi told his student that Prime Minister Itzchak Rabin was a "rodef," a stalker against the Jewish people, and Rabin was assassinated. These are the true "chillul ha Shems." This is why we need to be informed modern Jews so that we cannot be led astray.
A most interesting case of chillul ha Shem unfolded in southern
A male congregant of the rabbi, whom he had also counseled, came forth to the police and confessed to the murder. However, he stated that his rabbi allegedly told him to murder the rebbitzin because she was someone who hated
Now how many of you are seeing this rabbi with a long, white flowing beard dressed in black? Well, please erase that image from your eyes. The rabbi and his congregant are members of the CCAR and URJ. What is so perverse about this, besides the murder, is that the alleged murderer, whether his rabbi told him to do it or not, thought that this is how religion works. It is just as spiritually deficient as a Jew gunning down Moslems in prayer in
The rabbis in Talmud Bavli Tractate Kiddushin 46A tell us we should always consider ourselves to be in equipoise, where one positive action will bring salvation, but one sin could bring condemnation. We must think. We must study. We must grapple. Bernard Shaw said, "most people would rather die than think, and most do."
The way one does this in Jewish Spiritual Renewal is with a daily chesbon ha nefesh, a moral accounting of our thoughts and actions.
The rabbi and his co-conspirator congregant were eventually found guilty and are serving time. His dead wife was our baker in NJ, and a piece of her wedding cake, a wheatless chocolate torte, is still in our freezer. Never did we think a slice of her cake would outlast Diane, OBM.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow recently wrote that chillul ha shem literally means the hollowing out of the Name of God. It means one is taking all the life out of the Name while pretending it is still there, like a hollow tree. He says, "It is acting in such a way to teach Jews and non-Jews that a profoundly anti-religious act is carried out for the sake of God." This is why the rabbis in Tractate Yoma of the Talmud Bavli said chillul ha Shem is the worst of sins.
As the rabbis said in Pirkei Avot, quoted above, study is one of the three pillars on which the world rests. As we can see from above, these words are not just hyperbole. Judaism has a long-standing tradition that when the Messiah comes, the law will be changed. And Judaism has had its share of false messiahs that have attracted large numbers of Jewish followers.
Jacob Frank and Sabbetai Zvi were two of these false saviors. In the Midrash Aleph Bait of Rabbi Akiva 3:27 it states, "The Holy One, blessed be He, will expound to all the meaning of a new Torah which He will give through the Messiah." In Mishna Ecclesiastes Rab. 11:1, Rabbi Hizquaya in the name of Rabbi Simon bar Zibdi said, "The whole Torah which you will learn in this world is vanity compared to the Torah of the world to come."
In the Yemenite Midrash (p. 349) the rabbis say, "The messiah will sit in the supernal House of Study and all those who walk on earth will come and sit before him to hear a new Torah and new Commandments." Furthermore in Halakhot Gadolot it states that, "Elijah will come in the Messianic age and explain and expound all the secrets of the Torah and all that which is crooked and distorted in it." Will our children and we be able to debate intellectually with those who wish to teach us to distort our teachings if we do not study continually?
In teaching the rules of the Omer, our parasha in Lev. 23:15 states, "You shall count for yourselves." We have an obligation not to trust others to count for us or to lead us in counting.
The count starts on the second night of Pesach and ends on the 50th day on Shavuot. Shavuot, as you recall, is traditionally when we received the Torah on Mt Sinai. The omer was a measure of barley, about 3 1/3 dry quarts of grain, which we were commanded to bring to the
Why were we commanded to count for ourselves (lo-chem)? There is no benefit to God for our action. We are to use these 50 days to refine ourselves to get ready for the Torah. The Torah uses the word ve-so-phar-to for counting. Sepher connotes books and study. Sephirah has the same root as sapphire, a clear jewel. We are to try to shine like a jewel in our studies.
We do not just count, as Rabbi Dovid Green has written. We as Jews must make each day count. The 50 days of the (counting of the omer) lead us to the Kabballot Ha Torah (the receiving of the Torah). The omer counting is also the period of time in which Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai revealed the hidden secrets of the Zohar and Kabballah circa 80 C.E.
The Sepher Yetzirah is one of the most famous texts of the Kabballah. It was written in 200 C.E. It means Book of Formation. Rabbi Judah Ha Levi in 1120 wrote that this text "teaches us the existence of a single divine power by showing us that in the bosom of variety and multiplicity there is unity and harmony and that such a universal concord could only arise from the rule of a Supreme Unity."
Part of this book is the "Fifty Gates of Binah" (Understanding). These 50 gates correspond to each of the 50 days from Pesach to Shavuot. It is said in a Midrash that Moses only achieved 49 of these gates. The Kabbalists said that one must pass through these 50 gates before attempting to attain the 32 Paths of Wisdom.
The 50th gate is knowing God, the Ayn Sof. Ayn in Hebrew means "no thing," as God is beyond existence. Sof means "without end." God has no real attributes because they can manifest only within existence, and existence is finite, and God is infinite. The kabala says the reason for existence is that "God wished to behold God." The previous phase of nonexistence was a time when "face did not gaze upon face." God then of His own free will, withdrew His absolute all, the Ayn Sof. This contraction is called zimzum by the kabballists. The rabbis say, based on this concept, "God's place is the world, but the world is not God's place."
The 32nd Path of Wisdom, in comparison, is called Administrative Intelligence. It is the wisdom to direct and administer the motions of the planets in their proper courses. Thirty-two is written in Hebrew as the letters lamed-beth, and these are the last and first letters of the Chumash.
The number 32 is obtained 2 to the fifth power. We can see easily that the path to wisdom and understanding is never ending. Laib, LB, as a Hebrew word, means heart. Thus, knowledge and wisdom, enlightenment and emancipation, begin in our hearts with the love of God, love of our fellows, and the love of study. This parallels the verse in Pirkei Avot quoted above in this d'var.
Carl Jung, the renowned psychiatrist wrote, "You trust your unconscious as if it were a loving father. But it is inhuman and it needs the human mind to function usefully. The unconscious is useless without the human mind. It always seeks its collective purposes and never your individual destiny. Your destiny is the result of the collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious."
As King David wrote in Psalm 139:13, "It was You who created my inmost self, and put me together in my mother's womb." As informed modern Jews, committed to study, our children and we will never, to quote Dylan again, "need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Shabbat Shalom:
Rabbi Arthur Segal
Via Shamash Org on-line class service
Jewish Renewal
Jewish Spiritual Renewal
Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA
Member Temple Oseh Shalom
