Torat Moishe - Moishe's Torah

CHOOSING NEW LEADERSHIP

CHOOSING NEW LEADERSHIP

Shabbat Balak (The Book of Numbers/ Sefer Bamidbar 22:2 – 25:9)
14 Tammuz 5770 / June 26th, 2010

Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes!

In this week's Torah portion we read about King Balak of Moav who enlists the prophet Baalam ben Be'Or to curse the Israelites for fear that they will destroy Moav in battle.

The story goes that G-d becomes angry that Baalam went without waiting for the King's messengers to come get him first, and thus, an angel with a fiery sword is sent to block his way. On three occasions the angel appears in Baalam and his donkey's path. Baalam is blind to the angel, though the donkey can see the swinging flaming sword held by the celestial being. The donkey avoids the angel at each point and Baalam, angrily punishes the donkey for skirting the path.

How is the donkey able to see the angel and Baalam not? This is a great question for the month of Tammuz, which has a Kabalisic association with the quality of site. Both people and animals have ways of being on auto-pilot. It seems that for non-human creatures (from rocks to trees to donkeys), being alive is somewhat simple. They just go with the flow following the rules of biology. They interact with the world with the goal of survival, and see what they need to see to enact this goal. It is natural for them. For humans, things can be more complicated. What does it mean for you to simply be yourself in this world? There is no ONE authentic way to be you! And so, sometimes it is easy to switch to autopilot, moving in one direction by solely focusing on what serves your chosen momentum.

The problem with this kind of autopilot, as we see with Baalam, is that we might begin to ignore the signs that beckon us to shift directions. We can begin to become insensitive to both the beauty and pain that calls to our attention. This week's portion can serve as a reminder for us to keep looking at the world with fresh eyes. As human beings with have the opportunity to live life with astounding awareness, ensuring that in each moment we are living with our highest vision of self in mind.      

While doing some research on Tu b’Shvat, the New Year of Trees that’s coming up this Shabbat, I found an unbelievable teaching from the Talmud:

A tree that has lost its fruit due to illness, we paint it and place stones around it.
It’s obvious why we place stones around it - to strengthen the tree and weaken the sickness, but why paint it with paint? So that when people see it that will pray for love for the tree. This is like what it is taught about humans - that a person with leprosy must cry out, “unclean, unclean.” This person needs to make known her pain to the community, so that the community will pray for love for her.
Talmud Bavli, Masekhet Shabbat 67a

The hinge of this Torah is a crucial change in perspective. One could easily walk through this world understand the earth as massive, full of grandeur, forbidding and kind at the same time, but primarily as the cradle of human life, the only thing that we all truly own in common, and that which sustains us all.

But our activist Torah uses the tools of stones and paint to invert the equation. Marking leads to strengthening and praying; strengthening and praying changes the way we understand ourselves. We are not children, the beneficiaries of the parents. We are part of the parent itself.

My blessing this Tu b’Shvat is that we come to understand our true place in the scheme of the earth, and that this understanding alters the way we live.

Parshat Vayishlah,
17 Kislev, 5770; December 4th, 2009

     There are questions you expect out of life, and then there are those you never see coming. The issues that Transgendered and Transsexual Jews have brought to Judaism surprised, shall we say, the hell out of me.
     In fact the intersection between Torah and questions of gender identity is growing and developing. One rabbi in particular, Rabbi Elliot Kukla is speaking to the Jewish world as one who both fully inhabits her genderqueer and religious identities (check out www.transtorah.com).
And there is a home for this issue in the Parsha.:

Genesis 32:25   
And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until dawn broke.

     The paradox here, that he was both alone but wrestling with someone else, is an elegant metaphor for issues of identity, especially sexual and gender identities: they are issues that live in an individual life, or an individual relationship, but they are argued out there in the public forum. We are both deeply alone and completely in the presence of the public in our sexual identity and gender roles; and no group more so than those who change what most think of as fundamental nature, whether we are a man, or a woman.
     This questioning through action of our sexual identity provokes often brutal backlash, including violence and murder.  The gender theorist David Halperin explains by saying “It is this alienated queer perspective on socially validated values that reveals those values to be not essences but performance.”* What he means is that trans people question whether deeply held values are immutable truth, and some would rather kill the question, even if that includes killing a person, than answer it.
    But not only can’t we kill the question - technology, psychology, and the worldwide flow of information have taken care of that - we shouldn’t want to.
    We live in an age of such questions. What will define this generation, possibly even this century and the last, is the upheaval in questions of identity: this is what it used to mean to be a Jew, but no more; this is what it used to mean to be an American (or any citizenship), but no more; this is what the roles of men and women used to be, but no more. There are a lot of ways in which things aren’t the way they used to be. And we should recognize, at the very least, an immense bravery that those asking the most difficult of these questions possess.
     Torah’s blessing on these matters is also the genesis of our people’s name. “And the angel said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but rather Yisrael. For you struggled (ki sarita) with God and human beings and were able.” (Genesis 23:29)
May we up to the struggle.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Scott Perlo

Parshat Toldot
3 Kislev 5770
November 20th, 2009


After the Other* went over to the wicked culture, he asked Rabbi Meir, “what is the meaning of the verse, gam zeh leumat zeh asah elohim, ‘Also, God made one thing as well as the other?’ (Kohelet, 7:14)” Rabbi Meir said to him, “Everything that the Blessed Holy One made, God also created something in relative to it: God created mountains, and created hills; created seas, and created riviers...”
Talmud, Masekhet Hagigah 15a
      Every time I come to Washington D.C., I end up taking the tour of the city’s finest conference rooms. So this time, when I came back for our Moishe House East Coast retreat, I promised myself I’d see some of the sights of an extraordinary city.
    So that’s how I found myself at the Lincoln Memorial, looking up at the Gettysburg Address written in gold upon the walls; feeling deep emotion in words whose cost in blood is staggering; remembering the history that brought them to be, and also the history they made come to pass.
    As I read those words, “last, full measure of devotion,” “of the people, by the people, for the people,” I said a blessing for the fact that my sense of wonder at our world hadn’t yet dimmed from my eyes, even at a monument that now functions as a TV news backdrops.
    So what does this have to do with Moishe House? It wouldn’t make sense to compare Moishe House to the Lincoln Monument, nor vice versa. But know that both my days in D.C. were days with wonder, each on a different scale. I do feel wonder in the possibilities that Moishe House brings. I especially feel wonder at all of you; that you come together of your own will to live in Moishe houses, to plan programs, to bring others into your communities, to engage in Judaism, Jewish identity, God, Torah, Israel - the works.
    These two very different wonders remind me of a verse from Tanakh (the Bible), from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), which I quoted above: gam zeh leumat zeh asah elohim, “Also, God made one thing as well as the other.” (Kohelet 7:14). Rabbi Meir’s (one of the biggies) explanation, that God made both mountains and hills, is not plebian, as it might seem, it is subtle and brilliant: God created both Mt. Everest and the hill on the Mall on which I now sit out of the same cosmic stuff: and though Everest is infinitely more grand, the fact of the hill is no less wonderful.
    To explain further, there is often a sense in the great forum of our world that certain realities dwarf everyday life: how can one be happy when hundreds of thousands of people are dying in Darfur? How can one be proud of a world that allowed the Holocaust? But the Torah of zeh leumat zeh teaches us that wonder exists in microcosm just as it does in the macrocosm, in the small as the large. And though small wonders are eclipsed in size and momentousness by events that shake our world, they in no way lose their significance.
    This concept includes the modest wonder of being able to be with all of you, for one day, to think about this revolution of ours. It is a small revolution, to be sure, affecting a small part of the world, but great in its importance and its promise to whomever it touches.
    I bless us all with the Torah of zeh leumat zeh, that we should never be taken from wonder, big or small, wherever it is to be found.

Shabbat Shalom.


*How Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah got the name Aher, or "The Other" is a very interesting story, one to which many of us will relate, that will surely make its way into a Moishe's Torah someday soon. But if you're impatient, read the amazing historical novel about him - As A Driven Leaf, by Rabbi Milton Steinberg.

תלמוד בבלי מסכת חגיגה דף טו עמוד א
שאל אחר את רבי מאיר לאחר שיצא לתרבות רעה, אמר ליה: מאי דכתיב +קהלת ז'+ גם את זה לעמת זה עשה האלהים? - אמר לו: כל מה שברא הקדוש ברוך הוא - ברא כנגדו, ברא הרים - ברא גבעות, ברא ימים - ברא נהרות.

Parshat Hayyei Sarah
26 Heshvan, 5770
13 November, 2009

And this is the life of Sarah: 100 years, 20 years, and 7 years, the years of the life of Sarah.
Bereishit 23:1

    I turned thirty over the summer. It’s been, frankly, a little crazy to watch as I climb out of my twenties. I once promised myself I would never be thirty. Whoops.
    But the transition into actual adulthood, something I once strenuously avoided, has been a surprising pleasure. Jobs and relationships have gifts of stability and satisfaction that hit you sideways, and you finally realize what the hell your parents were thinking.
    And one of the really fascinating pieces of growing up is that you realize that you never really leave behind the age that you have passed by; rather, we carry with us the flotsam of years past, qualities, attitude, opinions, habits that are a mark of earlier time. I had figured that we were all complicated enough already, but it seems that there’s always more to add.
    This parsha is Hayyei Sarah, “The Life of Sara” - and I suppose its true, in a way. But it begins with the death of Sarah, the age at which she died, to be specific, letting us know that she reached 127. The Torah’s way of expressing her age is unusual, however, broken into parts - 100 years, 20 years, 7 years - and the verse has always been a place where commentators spend time.
    “When she was 100 years old, she was like a  20 year-old in beauty, and when she was 20, she was like a 7 year old in innocence.” (Yalkut Tehillim 37)
    Sarah’s blessing is that age was never her prison, it was the sea in which she swam. Though she laughed, she bore a son past her 90th birthday. And, as we learn here, she carried beauty and innocence with her far past the age where such things would be fashionable.
    Sarah’s message to us is that the pieces of ourselves we carry from when we were younger are treasures, not detritus. But also that growing older simply increases our store of those precious objects. To see age as more than an emptying hourglass, that is Sarah’s teaching.