of superheroes and soothsayers

December 13, 2015 by Leave a Comment

I gave this d’var Torah at Nehar Shalom Community Synagogue on December 11, 2015.

Over Thanksgiving I was able to go home, to Texas, where all of my family lives. The most precious time was with my two nephews and my niece. The day after Thanksgiving, Archer, the four-year-old, pulled me upstairs to play. He decided he wanted to wear his Halloween costume, and so he showed me the basket for his dress-up clothes. He begin pulling out his pink tutu, cowboy hat, green dress, etc. He finally got to his firefighter costume. He carefully donned the hat and coat and asked me what I thought. When I suggested he might need shoes to be a firefighter, he obligingly strapped on his pink sandals. Ready? I said. Not yet, he replied. He pulled out of the pocket of his coat a laminated card with four illustrations. Okay, he announced. This is what we have to do. These are the different things that can happen, he said, pointing to the card. And so we went from room to room, first putting out a house fire; then a forest fire that spread from a campfire; and finally a kitchen fire that started from a pot left on the stove. And then we rescued a cat in a tree. What else can we do?, I asked. That’s all there is, he replied. Let’s do them again!

My brother is an engineer — and my grandfather was an engineer — and Archer has certainly inherited their exactitude and penchant for following directions precisely. So I know that it’s not just a child’s assurance of safety that encompasses his approach to make-believe. For Archer, the card that comes with the jacket tells you what to do. These, and only these, are the threats that firefighters face. They are circumscribed, and they are predictable.

I came to Texas for Thanksgiving with the heavy weight of the brokenness of the world. I continue to be sickened by the terrorist attacks at home and abroad, whether by knife-wielders in Jerusalem — where many of my classmates are now studying — or gun-toters here. The sense of insecurity that I feel on a daily basis is profound, and as I took part in Archer’s highly circumscribed set of crises, I wondered whether I will be able to give him — and my other nephew and niece — anything other than a world of out-of-control unpredictability.

I felt this again on Wednesday night, when a small group of us from Nehar Shalom went together to the Boston Candlelight Vigil Against Gun Violence, part of a week of similar events nationwide. The event took place in what I assume was the small sanctuary of the very large First Church of Boston in Back Bay.

There was a modest crowd, at least in comparison to my expectations — which provided a marked contrast to the number of victims of gun violence who were remembered. A candle was lit for each of the victims of gun violence this year in the Boston area. And then attendees were invited to light candles for their own loved ones who had been victims of gun violence. And then the pastor lit a candle for each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia while the number of victims of gun violence in each place were read aloud. I worried we might burn the church down with all of that fire. (And this was not one of the scenarios on Archer’s card!) Even the presence of the large Boston police officer who spoke briefly was diminished in the shadow of the flames. Before and after the service, on a large screen at the front of the sanctuary, a tribute video played, with pictures of victims of gun violence — a name, date, and location with each. The dates ranged back as far as 1990, with the dead all over the country. The enormity of what we face overwhelmed me, and I felt helpless and scared. I don’t mean to criticize the organizers of this important event — I mean only to share my experience.

In that moment, sitting in a small chapel memorializing the victims of this seemingly unending, volatile scourge, what we call “Gun Violence in the United States,” I flashed to an episode of my favorite TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yes, you can laugh. What, you thought I was going to say the parshah? Themes of Chanukah? Words from our venerable rabbinic tradition? In my world, there are at least two Torahs, and one of them is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show is about a superhero in Southern California who fights the forces of darkness — but on a metaphorical level, it’s also about what we do as human beings when the monsters come. In Buffy’s world, as in ours, the monsters always come. Of course, in Buffy’s case, it’s because the town of Sunnydale also happens to sit on the hellmouth.

The episode “The Wish” explores an alternate reality: What would the town be like if Buffy weren’t there? The vampires have taken over, but most of its human residents have adjusted to the constant fear. They have curfews, avoid the bright clothing that attracts vampires, and have weekly memorial services for the ever-accumulating dead. They can’t take on the vampires directly. Horrific death is a matter of when, not if. This is just how things are.

Throughout the episode, we see Buffy’s would-be mentor begin to realize that they’re living in an parallel universe. He came to the town to help Buffy, but she never showed up. And in the meantime, the town of Sunnydale surrendered to the darkness. He finally figures out that this reality is the result of a magical spell — and that he can break the spell by destroying the amulet that was used to cast it. As he prepares to smash it, the demon who cast the spell taunts him: How does he know the other world is any better than this one? “Because it has to be,” he says. With that leap of faith, he rights the world — monsters still exist, but does the person who fights those monsters.

Sitting in that sanctuary, I felt like the residents of Sunnydale. I don’t want for us Americans to accept gun violence as they do vampires — but we don’t have a superhero, and we don’t have a magic amulet. We do, however, have an example in the Jewish tradition. (Yes, now we’re getting to that Torah!)

Parshat Miketz also contains a looming menace that threatens death. In this part of Genesis we see the long-forgotten Yosef finally remembered by Paro’s cupbearer and called to interpret Paro’s dreams of fat and lean cows and of full and withered ears of grain. Like Archer’s firefighter card that precisely delineates scenarios, Yosef accurately predicts seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. And then he recommends preparation. The job is given to Yosef himself, who successfully executes his task — and then some, as he’s ultimately able during the famine to feed more than just the people of Egypt because of his careful planning.

As an activist, there is so much that I like about this story. I think we can see it as the beginning of community organizing in Jewish tradition. After the cosmology of the story of creation at the beginning of Genesis, the Torah focuses narrowly on family narrative: Avraham and Sarah, Yitzchak and Rivka, Ya’akov, Rachel, Leah. When Yosef’s brothers sell him into slavery down into Egypt, the scope begins to widen. With Yosef’s eventual rise to power, the actions of our ancestors begin to have national and historical implications. What we do matters to others.

Importantly, Yosef doesn’t just tell Paro what his dreams predict: He proposes a solution. And the solution, significantly, does not assume deliverance: Gd may have enabled Yosef to know what was coming, but Yosef suggests what to do about it.  The text attributes the idea for action to Yosef — not Gd. לֵאלֹהִים פִּתְרֹנִים, “interpretations belong to Gd,” Yosef says — but the story shows that action belongs to human beings.

I imagine that the prospect of famine, of the potential starvation of the people of Egypt, was quite frightening. Knowing the threat is coming doesn’t blunt fear. The famine looms, but Yosef isn’t cowered by it. He doesn’t accept it. He sees a different world, and he works to bring it into being.

Like Archer’s fires, and Buffy’s monsters, and Joseph’s famine, there are and will continue be destructive forces in the world. We create them in these fictional forms to manage our fear. We can also do it in this world. We can and we must end gun violence. Let’s change this era of daily gun deaths so radically as to make it seem like it was an alternate universe. I want our moral imagination in this area to be as vibrant as our creative imagination.

Like the Maccabees of old, who defied the culture of their time that said that destiny could not be changed and instead, jumped in to write a new story, my hope for us is that we dare to dream of a different world — and then work together to bring it about. It’s not a superhero or a soothsayer — we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Filed Under: Boston, rabbinical school, social justice Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

the buffyverse talmud

June 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

For a creative writing assignment for my Talmud class last semester, I was asked to write a mishnah and accompanying sugya. A mishnah refers to the smallest unit of the Mishnah, redacted in 200 CE, a part of the Talmud, and therefore in this case to a few, generally unattributed, rabbinic statements on a particular topic.

The other part of the Talmud is the gemara, the debates of the generations of rabbis subsequent to the Mishnah; the Talmud was redacted between 350 and 500 CE (depending on the edition). A sugya is a building block of gemara, a proof-based elucidation of an aspect of the mishnah.

As readers of this blog well know, I am a huge Joss Whedon fan. So for this assignment I chose Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my source text. I wrote a mishnah about the power of words in hevruta (the paired learning that takes place in the beit midrash), and then I used episodes of Buffy to write the gemara to explain that mishnah.

After I mentioned the project on Facebook, several people asked to read the finished product. So here it is. (It’s a PDF because of the formatting, which mimics a page of Talmud.)

I will note that the document will likely be nearly incomprehensible unless you know a great deal about both Buffy and Talmud. (And since I know more about Buffy than I do about Talmud, I’ll admit that Talmud studiers might find that aspect incomprehensible as well.)

For those only mildly curious, here’s the mishnah — with Hebrew “signal words” in parentheses — which contains a quote from Buffy. Who can name the episode and speaker (without Google)?

original mishnah about the power of words and hevruta study, to be elucidated by buffy the vampire slayer

original mishnah about the power of words and hevruta study, to be elucidated by buffy the vampire slayer

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asking g-d

May 6, 2013 by 2 Comments

In my Talmud class we’re reading a section from Baba Metzia called the “gold chapter”; it deals first with honesty in business exchanges and then moves on to honesty in personal interactions, or ona’at devarim, “oppression with words.” As is typical of gemara, the rabbis discuss the nature of the issue at hand and use Biblical passages and stories to back up their arguments. In an extreme moment, one of the rabbis notes that if someone embarrasses a friend, it is as if that person has spilled blood. They are especially concerned with ona’at devarim because, they say, the gates of prayer are always open to tears; that is, G-d always hears the petitions of those who have been oppressed by words.

rabban gamliel's alleged grave in yavneh

rabban gamliel’s alleged grave in yavneh (photograph used under wikipedia creative commons license)

They tell the story of Rabbi Eliezer, the head of the yeshiva, who was excommunicated for his unpopular opinions. When Rabbi Akiva tells Eliezer of the decision, his anguish causes everything he looks upon to be burned up. It happens that at that time Rabban Gamliel, who took over the yeshiva, is on a ship, and the sea begins storm. Gamliel knows immediately that his safety is threatened because of Eliezer. It also turns out that Rabbi Eliezer’s wife is Gamliel’s sister, and she is worried for Gamliel’s life. In perhaps not the most effective method, she begins to watch Eliezer constantly to keep him from praying tachanun, a supplicatory prayer. (Elsewhere in the Talmud, tachanun is called “a time of divine goodwill,” during which supplication is more likely to be received.) On Rosh Hodesh (the first day of a Jewish month, determined by a new moon), tachanun is not recited. One day Eliezer’s wife gets confused, erroneously thinks it’s Rosh Hodesh, and abandons her vigilant watch over Eliezer. In her absence, he prays tachanun, and Rabban Gamliel dies.

It’s a bizarre story, but certainly one that gives some insight into how powerful the rabbis consider both words to others and words to G-d.

More than a month ago in my tefila group, we were looking at the amidah, often just referred to as “the prayer.” It consists of 18 (well, really 19, but I don’t need to get into that here) blessings, several of which are called bakashot, or prayers of asking. The person who led davennen that morning first asked us to think about why we struggle with petitionary prayer. Not if — but why. The assumption was that we all did, and indeed, we all did. Among those in my group, someone cited a lack of a conception of a personal g-d; another, the association with the common Christian practice of ad hoc prayer; a third, a doubt that G-d does (or even should) intervene in our lives. Added someone else, “G-d wouldn’t bother with me. My needs are too small. I am too small.” Our prayer leader said, and I can still hear her saying it, so powerful was it,

“Where did the idea of G-d as a scant resource come from?”

Yes: Any divine being I want to believe in would be able to handle everything, the small stuff as well as the big stuff. Why not ask?

At the Rabbis Without Borders retreat that I attended a few weeks ago, one of the facilitators asked us to share a time when “prayer worked for us,” as a way of opening a conversation about how to make prayer services work for our congregants. Many shared stories of times of distress, of getting on their knees and begging for intervention or answers from G-d.

I haven’t had that experience. So I thought about the efficacy of prayer a little differently. My beloved cousin, who I grew up with and who is like a sister to me, is expecting a child in the fall, a child she has been wanting for a very long time. When she called to tell me her good news, I immediately thought, I want to pray for a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child. And I then almost immediately thought, That’s ridiculous. Pregnancy is a scientific process of cell growth, not subject to divine intervention: If I pray and something goes wrong, would that mean my prayer was somehow deficient? If I pray and everything goes well, would that mean that I had reached G-d? What would that mean for other folks whose pregnancies or children had not fared well?

hannah victors

hannah giving her son samuel to the priest, by jan victors (photograph used under wikipedia creative commons license)

I have a hard time with petitionary prayer for all the reasons above — and because I have a hard time asking for help, admitting that I need something, acknowledging that I want what is out of my control. And there’s certainly a perceived resistance to the prayer of asking in Judaism: On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, we don’t petition G-d. The implication is then that asking is somehow not holy. But the rabbis also saw the value in petitionary prayer: On Rosh Hashanah, another holy day, we read the story of Hannah. Bitter and distraught at her childlessness, she goes up to the temple and prays — her lips moving but with no sounds — and weeps, and promises any child she will have to the service of G-d. Hannah is the first to call G-d “the Lord of Hosts” (יהוה צבאות), and the rabbis say that Hannah’s silent prayer should be a model for for our own. (It should be noted that Hannah’s request proves highly effective, as a short time later she has Samuel.)

One of the wisest things I ever read about prayer was in the book The Unlikely Disciple. Nonbeliever Kevin Roose enrolls at Liberty University, the erstwhile institution of Dr. Jerry Fallwell, and goes about doing all that is required of him, including prayer. He notes that in spite of his lack of belief, his daily prayer becomes meaningful. It changes him. As I noted in my post about the book, “[H]e begins by articulating his hopes for his family and friends, and he comes to find that — non-belief in G-d notwithstanding — he actually enjoys the opportunity for reflection.” A friend from Hebrew College writes something similar in this thoughtful piece about praying as an atheist.

So I decided to pray for my cousin’s child. And to me, that means prayer has “worked.”

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the dovekeepers

January 6, 2012 by 4 Comments

Trigger warning: The book and this post, albeit briefly, explore the subject of sexual violence, which may be upsetting to survivors.

On New Year’s Eve I finished Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers, my first by her. I picked it up because it’s the next book of a Jewish Reads book club I just started getting emails from (not sure yet if I will go to a discussion).

The book is the about the settlement at Masada, where Jewish rebels in 70 C.E. resisted the Roman army for months before killing themselves in a mass suicide when their destruction was inevitable. The story is told in four parts, each by a woman who took a different path to arrive at the mountain in the Judean desert.

Yael begins the story. Her father is one of the Sicarii, assassins who kill Jews complying with Romans bent on the destruction of the Temple. It’s in this environment of civil war and anti-Semitism that Yael’s brother, also an assassin, and eventually Yael and her father, are forced to flee Jerusalem. On the way across the desert, Yael and one of her traveling companions become lovers, but he and his family don’t survive the journey. She arrives pregnant at Masada and begins to work in the dovecotes with three other women.

One of them, Revka, picks up the thread of the story. A baker’s wife in Shiloh, she leaves with her daughter, scholar son-in-law, and their two sons after her husband is killed by the Romans. En route to Masada, on Yom Kippur, they are set upon by Roman army deserters, who brutally gang rape her daughter. Her son-in-law returns from prayers to find his wife and her attackers dead. They arrive at Masada, her grandsons rendered mute by the trauma and her son-in-law, a brutal warrior with a death wish.

Aziza speaks next. Raised as a boy in the land of Moab, across the Dead Sea, she becomes a skilled warrior. She arrives at Masada, along with her half-brother and beloved half-sister, after being sent for by her mother’s lover.

Her mother, Shirah, the last of the dovekeepers, finishes the story proper. Born in Alexandria, she is raised by her mother to practice magic. But when her mother falls out of favor with the Jewish community, Shirah is sent to her mother’s family in Jerusalem. Unmarried, she is banished after she gives birth to Aziza but is rescued by a Moabite, who takes her to his homeland. She arrives at Masada from Moab, with Aziza and two other children, to reunite with her Jerusalem lover.

The historian Josephus, the main source of the siege of Masada, reports that the only survivors were two women and five children. The Dovekeepers is Alice Hoffman’s imaging of how a settlement of nine hundred got winnowed to seven. But it doesn’t just seek to humanize those who in modern times would be considered akin to the Branch Davidians or the Peoples Temple. It is a story of women in the society of ancient Israel that is constructed by and for men. As Hoffman notes in the acknowledgements, “[T]he stories of women have gone unwritten . . . It is my hope that . . . I can give voice to those who have remained silent for so long.”

Hoffman immediately sets up the dichotomy between the world of men and the world of women when Yael seeks out the kephashim for a protection charm for her brother as he begins to kill as part of the Sicarii. She notes,

In the Temple there was the magic of the priests, holy men who were anointed by prayer, chosen to give sacrifices and attempt miracles and perform exorcisms, driving out the evil that can often possess men. In the streets there was the magic of the minim, who were looked down upon by the priests, called charlatans and imposters by some, yet who were still respected by many. Houses of keshaphim, however, were considered to engage in the foulest sort of magic, women’s work, evil, vengeful, practiced by those who were denounced as witches.

But in the book, kephashim magic runs the world. Indeed, the conventional wisdom, explained by Yael at the outset, is tuned on its head as the reader is left with the clear feeling that women’s magic, over and over again, sets right the world that is continually destroyed by men. It is not the women who want a civil war, or to fight the Romans (they are used to doing that they need to do in secret), or, least of all, to make a stand at Masada. And that is probably why only women (and children, their wards) survive. Though the men of Masada are fierce warriors, it is the women of Masada who have the real strength.

I am sorry to say that I don’t know how accurate the portrayal of ancient Israel is, although it has been reported that Hoffman researched the book for five years. She explains how moved she was by a visit to Masada — and how her story is built around the remains that were found in the archeological excavation of the site. To the extent that it’s true to life, it did help me understand, at least a little, the motivations of the Jewish rebels. When I visited Masada, in contrast to Hoffman, I was struck by the fact that we might be lionizing crazy people.

In the world of ancient Israel, men set the rules — and time and time again, women break them. And that world is better because of it. In Hoffman’s beautiful and haunting narrative, each of the women gets to tell her story and how she became who she is against the backdrop of impending disaster.

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