“The child at the Seder asks: “Why is this night different from all other nights?  On all other nights we eat leavened or unleavened bread but on this night only unleavened.  On all other nights we eat regular vegetables but on this night bitter herbs….””                                                                                                -The Talmud

If the Passover Seder meal is one of remembering that God redeemed the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery, why not do precisely that?  Read the Biblical account of the Exodus (which we do not); ask about slavery and freedom, divinely brought plagues and miracles, nationhood and history.  Why all the questions about why this night is different?

Children live in the present, their questions straight forward; they observe and ask, observe and ask.  According to some Jewish sources we do strange actions at the Seder meal, like dipping our food, drinking many cups of wine and delaying the meal, precisely so that the children will notice and ask: “Why is this night different?”

“When your child shall ask you: “What is all of this ritual?” Then you shall answer them, “With a strong hand did God take us out of Egypt.””        -Exodus 13:14

God did not take “us” out of Egypt, God took our ancestors out, and that was over 3500 years ago.

The past is long gone, yet always at hand.   Only the present is real, yet always a product of our past.  The Passover Seder is paradoxical, a meal of recalling the 3500 year old Exodus, an experience very much lived in the present:  “Why is this night different?”  It is the child, who always lives in the present from whom we must learn this.

One hundred years ago Sigmund Freud and his circle of psychoanalysts discovered that though we live in the present, we do so almost entirely conditioned by experiences we have had, and ways we have lived, in the past.  The past can not really be integrated or changed through remembering what is past; it must be experienced and understood in the powerful present.   The past is formative but, as a memory, impotent.  The present integrates our past.  The here and now is colored by our past but much more powerful.  Thus the present can lead us to insights about the past and about whom we are, more so that remembering and analyzing past experience.

The Passover Seder is like the process of psychotherapy.  Its function is to understand, to clarify, to integrate the exodus of the past in our present lives, yet this can only be accomplished in any real way, though living in the present.

We do not ask: Why did we leave Egypt? How did we leave? What did it mean to leave Egypt? Why did God think it so important that the Jews be enslaved and redeemed?  Such would only be an intellectual process of remembering the past.

Instead it is the child who asks:  Why are we dipping twice now?  Why are we reclining now when we eat?  Why the flat unleavened bread?

Children know how to be in the present.  All they have is now.  On Passover we must all be children.  Living the past in the fully present we must leave Egypt in our lives now -a gift from the past.

“But I have never done one,” I replied.

“There are only two of us available, and I hear the man was heavy, bloated, so we will need you.”

A tahara (literally “purification”) is the Jewish process of washing, dressing and preparing a dead body for burial. It is performed by a quiet dedicated group in every Jewish community called the, chevrah kadisha, literally, “the Holy Society.”  Since Jews do not delay burial, the process invariably occurs late at night, on short notice, in preparation for burial the next day.

The groups’ name comes from the modest, profoundly giving work it does without any recompense. It is a Jewish holy act to bury the dead, a chesed shel emet, a “true kindness.” An act with no expectation of repayment, for its recipient cannot. Even the deceased’s family usually has no idea who washed and dressed their loved one, who like a baby can do nothing for themselves and is treated with care by the holy group.

At 11pm that night my father, my cousin, and myself, rendezvoused in the funeral home’s deserted parking lot. We slipped into the building through its back door, entering the section of the building blocked off from the public. Like being behind stage, the area is unseen, I imagine, in an effort to shield the public from the reality of death and the hands-on concreteness of body they would rather not know.

Sinks, tables, sponges, buckets, mops, crazy glue and a prayer book and box of tachrichim, white linen shrouds with no pockets (since you can’t take it with you), that we had brought along. Tucked in the box was a small sack of dirt from the ground of Israel to place under the dead man’s head; a little piece of the ancestral holy land in which Jewish people since Abraham have made fervent efforts to be interred.

The man lay before us, covered from head to toe by a plain sheet on an operating room like table. Long after the doctors of the living have left, we have come to carefully cleanse and meticulously dress, to cut nails and glue cuts, to recite psalms, and ultimately to return the final product of our intense work to the dirt from whence it came.

It is eerily quiet since we do not converse in the presence of the dead. He cannot join in, and we are entirely focused on him, the one lying before us. There is much ritual and respect, but no place for emotion. In its stead we have work, lifting dead weight, washing him, drying him; his private parts covered with a towel, as the body is holy and deserves modesty and respect.

“Do not pass anything over him,” cautions my cousin, “it is the law, out of respect for the dead.” Indeed, the body is not an object to be moved like a sack of potatoes, and yet we must grapple with this weighty corpse.  We treat him with more quiet deference than we might a living being. In the stark face of death, we are all equal, all there to serve each other. Something unsaid intimately links him and us: as we do the burdensome, precarious work, of clothing him by hand, in the back of our minds we know one day someone will do this to us, for us.

I was quietly grateful that there was no talking, my mind racing anxiously faced with the first dead body I had seen up close. I recited the traditional psalms, taking comfort in an act that only the living can do, reading, praying, reciting.

“Lift…carefully,” says my father, “he is heavy. Hold his legs while I turn him to get the water under him. If you want gloves I think there are some.”

For generations my family has been the chevrah kadisha in our home town, a small Jewish community on the east coast. In the late 19th century my great grandfather, the head of the Holy Society, did taharahs in houses and in the linoleum tiled front parlor of his home.

Though I never had the guts for the real work of the taharah when I was young, I remember, as a youth filling graves with my father after a funeral of adults whom I did not know. When everyone had left but the grave was not completely filled my father told me to stay with him and complete the duty with shovels by hand. “The burial of the dead should be complete,” he would say.

The dead man oozes a bit of blood from a sore. “Use the crazy glue there,” says my cousin.

We mop the blood with a paper towel and place it in the coffin, as the human body must be respected and entirely buried, not thrown away. “You are dirt and to dirt you shall return,” fulfilling the words of God as stated in the Bible at the very beginning of Genesis.

When he is cleaned and dried we pour the water. Nine kabim, an ancient Talmudic measure of water, as specified in Jewish law. Three large buckets worth, uninterrupted, for the waters that purify must be poured without lapses in between. We recite Hebrew words of prayer as we tie his plain rope belt, put on his linen booties, lifting him, turning him, getting his shirt on straight; the loose, clean, white clothing of a newborn. When I was young and would ask my mother what death is like, she would tell me, “it is like before you were born.”

The experience, my first of the kind, was shocking but also a bit exhilarating. I felt initiated into the clandestine Holy Society. In the middle of the night, fueled by humility, ritual and profound respect for others; an other I did not know, an other who could never repay us.

To look death in the face without belittling it, with out denying it, to see in it the deep respect and caring owed to one made in the image of God, this is the work of the chevrah kadisha.

I have often wondered what it would be like to know I was dying.  We all are, you know.  Religion runs the risk of missing this.  Often it either focuses on a different world after death, and so misses the impact of living here and now in a way informed by the reality of our death, or fixated on how to perform the details of this life, its proscriptions, beliefs and rituals, shrinking the space humans have in which to sit back and really feel the great reality of death; that we are dying and on some level, for even the most profound believer, death brings with it annihilation, nonbeing as we know it.

Some will instinctively dismiss this notion with, “yes, but for a better life with God.”   Perhaps, but even if that is so, if we do not give ourselves the opportunity to know we are dying, to feel the dread of oblivion first, then we have ignored an important gift.   Being human, truly being present in the here and now, means knowing we will cease to be.   Many deny death, ignore death in these and other much more superficial ways, but to live in a state of avoidance is perhaps to not really live.

How would you live if you knew we are dying?  (Which again I remind you, we are.)  What regrets do you have?   What changes can be made?  What letters written?  What experiences had?  What really is meaningful and what is not?  Why are we here?   What is my unique place and mission in this mysterious, but I believe meaningful, world?

“…Though one should run to do mitzvoth (commandments)…there are times when they can lead to quarrel, such that the mitzvah and the name of Heaven will desecrated instead of sanctified.  In such cases certainly the Chasid (pious person) is obligated to put aside the commandment and not to run after it.

Though we are obligated to perform the mitzvoth with all their details and not to be afraid or ashamed, even so mitzvoth require great discernment, for this statement was said only about absolute obligations; but any added piety that if a person performs it the public will mock them for it, should not be performed; as the prophet says: “Walk humbly with your God.”

Thus a person who wishes to be pious must weigh all their deeds with attention to what their deeds’ repercussions will be according to the time, place and culture in which one is living.  If not acting will cause greater sanctification of God’s name, we must hold back and not act.  All acts must be judged according to their repercussions not according to whether the act itself seems good.  These things can only be discerned by one who has an understanding heart and common sense; for it is impossible to codify the details of this which are infinite….This should be our vision of the path which shall bring true light and faith, to do what is straight in the eyes of God.”

-Chapter 21: On the Balancing of Chasidut (Piety)

Perhaps Jacob, whose whole life has revolved around the question of blessings from his brother to his fight with the angel, understands that a true blessing is not a prophecy, or good wishes, or a hope for some future bounty, but rather a deeper look at the self and one’s potential.  To help the receiver of the blessing truly create their own blessing.

Human beings have strengths and weaknesses and usually they are two sides of the same characteristic.  As the Talmud says “whoever is greater than his neighbor so too is his yetzer (his [evil] inclination) greater than his neighbor.”  All aspects of our personality are both a strength and a weakness.   A true beracha is not a mystical incantation bestowing good luck; it is a kind of therapeutic interpretation, a highlighting of one’s midot, ones character traits, and shedding light upon how they can be used as a strength instead of a weakness.

This idea can help us understand several Rabbinic ideas regarding berachot.

Why is the beracha of a hedyot, a regular person, not to be taken lightly (Talmud Berachot 7a)?  Because a beracha is not prophecy or powerful incantation, rather it is insight into the receiver, a reflection on who they are.  Perhaps this is also why we do not bless ourselves, since one can not usually see themselves and their own strengths and weakness clearly.

The Talmud says when we judge a person wrongly; we must make up for this by blessing them.  The logical undoing of judging someone wrongly (seeing their characteristics as weakness rather than strength, bad rather than good) is to bless them, to judge their personality licaf zecut, meritoriously, and find in them their strengths.

What about blessing God, which we do so often? It is in this vain quite appropriate to bless God.  In blessing Hashem we are finding Hashem where Hashem seemingly is not.  Looking deeper into life and the world and finding the tov, the good, the force of the Divine in the physical.  This finding of God’s goodness, as it were, is to bless God.  Berachot on food, on mitzvoth or natural wonders are all to find God where he is hidden, in this world.

This approach to blessings can help us to understand the following particularly strange piece of Talmud.

It was taught: Rabbi Ishmael bbn Elisha says: I once entered into the innermost part [of the Sanctuary] to offer incense and saw Akathriel Jah, the Lord of Hosts, seated upon a high and exalted throne. He said to me: Ishmael, My son, bless Me! l replied: May it be Thy will that Thy mercy may suppress Thy anger and Thy mercy may prevail over Thy other attributes, so that Thou mayest deal with Thy children according to the attribute of mercy and mayest, on their behalf, stop short of the limit of strict justice! And He nodded to me with His head.  -Berachot 7a

God is blessed to use God’s midot, God’s characteristics, to benefit people.  This is the essence of a beracha, to help another to see the strengths of their midot and use them for good and not bad, even God in this case.

In our Torah portion, Vayichi, Yaakov, after a lifetime of wrangling for berachot, finds that he is the master of berachot.  He is a good parent in that he stays connected to all of his children no matter what they do and sees their different sides, their strengths and weaknesses, clearly.  He then points them out, like a good therapist, in the hopes that they will learn from the blessing and indeed be “blessed.”

In Israel religion is inextricably interwoven with politics and politics is about power.   It would be nice if this were a symbiotic relationship, resulting in a Jewish democratic state in which politics could be informed by the spiritual and the religious, but unfortunately it has resulted in a parasitic relationship in which religion is all too often colored by, and utilized in, the service of power.

I am not grouping all Orthodox Jews together and I am not stereotyping all Charedi (anti-Zionist, strongly insular) Jews together.   I well realize that though there are hundreds of Charedim who have been involved in violence over the past few years, in protest to co-gender public busses, in response to state involvement in the welfare of children in parts of Jerusalem, or in this recent episode in Beit Shemesh, it is hundreds of Charedim, not thousands or tens of thousands.  Why do they do it?  Several reasons I think.

Though some have political power due to Israel’s parliamentary system, the majority feel powerless.  Just as haughtiness is perpetrated by individuals to counteract strong feelings of insecurity, violence does the same for feelings of powerlessness.    Indeed, religion is a perfect guise for such violence since it paints violence as indignant and vindicated, righteous and productive.

Why do some Charedi in Israel feel powerless?  Among several causes that loom large are that they do not serve in the army, something that in the state of Israel is considered the badge of honor, and an important factor in securing latter employment in the civil sector.  Recently, due to a rabbinical edict, they are not permitted to study secular subjects even if it will assist them in finding a job, rendering the job search incredibly difficult.  http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/151133#.Tv0hKVYkKSo

Many live below the poverty line, http://www.haaretz.com/themarker/more-than-half-of-israel-s-ultra-orthodox-living-in-poverty-1.323309  subsisting on government handouts in order to study for many years and thus avoid army service, considered spiritually dangerous by Charedi Orthodox communities.  Without serving in the army in Israel and without secular academic education, theirs is a poor sub-culture seen as backward by Israel’s general society, and even by Zionist Orthodox co-religionists.

The second reason for the violence is that Orthodox Jews who live in insular communities in Israel often have no real sense of others.  If one lives in an enclosed enough community and is taught that only one’s own way of seeing every detail in life, religion, and the world is right, soon there is no vision, soon such preaching becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.   To not know or value those who are different from oneself breeds fear of the other and disregard, or worse, toward them.

I am told that in many communities Charedi women are forbidden from wearing ankle length skirts and are only allowed calf length skirts.  Why?  Because the Zionist orthodox women often wear ankle length skirts.   This is to me a fear and loathing of the other that is so strong it has led to the absurdly xenophobic.

The third reason I would suggest for the violence is that those perpetrating it have mistakenly done what many fringe groups and sects in Jewish history have done, harped on one Jewish idea or element to the (partial) exclusion of the colorful range of important ideas and commandments in Judaism.  Whether Reform Judaism which stressed the commandments between people, minimizing the ritual commandments, or some Charedim who stress the ritual commandments to the detriment of those between humans outside of their close knit communities.

Judaism deeply values seeing different Jewish points of view even when they differ from our own.  This is the great lesson we learn from Hillel and Shamai, who disagreed about most of Jewish law and yet married their children off to each other.  Let us speak out against the violence and against the teachers of the who perpetrate it and do not take their followers to task, and let us bring back the true Jewish perspective of Hillel and Shamai, that, “Both these and those are the word of God” and erase the false outlook that seems to dominate in our day of, “Its my way or the highway.”

Hanukkah commemorates the war in the year 166 B.C.E. between the Jews in Israel and the Greek empire within which Israel of that era found itself. No two cultures could be more different than that of the Greeks and the Jews. The Greeks were polytheistic and emphasized the esthetic, as their statues that we visit in our museums illustrate. Their perfect physical body chiseled in the Olympics and cultivated in Greek art and writing is iconic. In contrast the Jewish people were monotheists and a nation not known for their esthetic accomplishments, but rather their theological, judicial, and ethical ones. The Jewish people fought a war against the Greeks to retain their unique religion and not assimilate into Hellenistic culture and beliefs.

We light candles on Hanukkah because Hanukkah is about bringing the light of ethical monotheism into the world, about bringing the light of spirituality into a time of deified physicality, epitomized by the pervasive Greek culture of physicality and its worship. Hanukkah is indeed a battle of light and dark, polytheism and monotheism, the physical and the spiritual, the outside culture against the small Jewish nation trying to withstand assimilation and disappearance.

How ironic that Hanukkah, an anti-assimilationist holiday, has become the holiday of Jewish assimilationism, with the giving of gifts to imitate the Christmas tradition and the extravagant spending on parties which recall their non-Jewish counterparts.

For the previous generation of American Jews the opportunity of the American melting pot was Judaism’s undoing. Jewish people in alarming numbers from that generation assimilated into American culture, and feeling they could not be both Jews and Americans, exchanged their Jewish identity for the promise of American prosperity.

Though we live in a new era, one whose watchword is multiculturalism and not assimilation, it alas has come too late for the high percentage of American Jews whose grandparents were Jewish but whose grandchildren are not. At this time of year, when we might be tempted to use Hanukkah as a way of feeling part and parcel of the outside culture, of having our winter holiday also, let us resist this temptation to fit in, and instead take back our winter holidays for what they should be. A time of learning what it means to resist the American melting pot, a time for all of us, Jew, Christian, Muslim and Hindu, to celebrate our difference and separateness; -to see each of our uniqueness as more valuable than fitting in.

The culmination of Hanukkah’s successful military campaign two millennia ago was the rededication of the Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The symbol of this rededication was the lighting of the oil lamps, the menorah, with pure olive oil. This act, the bringing of light into the darkness, symbolizes the true Jewish take on Hanukkah. This Hanukkah let us celebrate, not presents and fanfare, but a single small light, adding one additional light on each subsequent night of Hanukkah and taking in the message that bringing light into the darkness is really what Hanukkah is about.

I received several responses from individuals of various religions who found my suggestion that Abraham failed, to say the least, highly objectionable.   Many asked how I could suggest that a better decision would have been for Abraham to refuse to kill his son when the bible and so many religious traditions clearly see this as Abraham’s greatest moment of faith and religious success.

To these concerns I would answer that Judaism, my tradition, has a particularly unique view of the Bible, that multiple interpretations, even when in contradiction with each other can be simultaneously true.   There are several levels on which the bible is understood in Jewish tradition, from that of the plain meaning of the text to more mystical levels, and several in between.  On the level of the text’s plain meaning perhaps there are fewer legitimate interpretations but when it comes to deeper levels, especially those of the Midrash, the narrative and homiletically level, we have many examples from Jewish tradition in which we are presented with ancient interpretations which are contradictory, yet simultaneously seen as valid.   Thus it can be true that while on one level Abraham indeed performed an act of great faith, on another level he failed to care for his weak child and caused his wife’s death of shock.

Another criticism some had of the suggestion that Abraham failed his final test was the supposition that the righteous individuals in the Bible are perfectly righteous.   How could I have the audacity to suggest that the people upon whom many religions are founded, were flawed?

There is a very long Jewish tradition of not seeing our ancestors as perfect.   For instance the rabbis of the Talmud suggest that Jacob was fooled by his wife Leah as punishment for fooling his brother Esau when he surreptitiously took the first born blessing from him, or ancient Rabbis who suggest that the Jewish people were punished much latter in the time of Queen Esther for what Jacob did to his brother, showing in effect, that what he did was wrong.  Some ancient Jewish commentaries even understand that the Jewish people had to go down to Egypt into slavery as a punishment for Abraham putting his wife in danger in the beginning of the Book of Genesis, when he told Pharaoh, in an attempt to save himself from harm, that Sara was not his wife but his sister.  And on and on.

I would suggest that, seeing the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs as righteous, but none the less flawed, -rather than threaten theological soundness of religious life, actually strengthens and deepens it.  If our founders and mentors are perfect, and thus like Gods, then who are we to learn from them? To model our lives after them?   But if they are human, and flawed, like us but none the less paradigms of constant religious striving, self reflection, and spiritual work.  Men such as King David, about whom the prophet Natan in the Biblical book of Samuel says “You are the (sinful) man,” who sinned and yet repented and rose above his sin to a better and more holy place, only then can they truly be our spiritual mentors.

One other thing (my thanks to a respected Rabbi in our field for pointing it out)-Though I said that batey din (Jewish courts) do not rely on Rav Moshe’s leniency regarding to ger katan (converting a child) out of fear, this is perhaps incorrect, their motivation may be (and judging others favorably would demand I assume it so), a halachic one, not wanting for halachic reasons to rely on such a leniency.   Though knowing the individuals on the ground and our sociological reality today, in my opinion we should rely on it, nevertheless, I apologize for my tone and assumption of wrong intent.