Morethodoxy: Exploring the Breadth, Depth and Passion of Orthodox Judaism

“Halachikly alive.” It’s a term that, ironically enough, is only used when we’re in a situation of death and dying. My mother-in-law, who until a few months ago was a vivacious wife, mother, grandmother and Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Nutrition, is today, heart wrenchingly, only halachikly alive. This, the result of a stroke and its aftermath, which have left her without consciousness, yet breathing on her own.  

 No matter how many times I’ve been called upon for pastoral and halachik counseling in situations like this, it looks different when you’re a member of the immediate family. I’m thinking about different things, asking different questions.

 Is “halachikly alive” simply a legal category? Is it just the mathematical sum of our sacred imperative to preserve life and our legal definition of death? Or, might it be a spiritual category as well? It would a great help if it were.

 During davening this morning I was thinking about the times I’ve stood on the beach and watched the sun setting over the ocean. There always comes that point at which the setting sun no longer serves any function. It is too close to the western horizon to be providing warmth or light any longer. But we are nonetheless transfixed by it. It is the reminder, even as it disappears, of the gift that we had been given, the gift we had barely thought about, the miracle that was. It is a melancholy moment. And also wondrous.

 There is something there. Something to be near, and to touch and to wonder at. In between the letters and the words, the laws and the principles, there is the spirit.

This one is in our hands.

Quinoa has been a breath of fresh culinary air in the non-kitniyot Pesach kitchen, and has restored dietary sanity to us Ashkenazim. But the kitniyot zealots are lurking. The OU, for example, is equivocating on quinoa’s non-kitniyot status . The battle for quinoa is underway, but if we all work together, we can win this one.

Remember when peanuts were not considered kitniyot? Probably you don’t. But when Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l was asked about peanuts in 1956, most Ashkenazim were eating them on Pesach. And not only that, but Rav Moshe argued clearly and unequivocally that peanuts should remain permissible, and that they should NOT be lumped in with beans and legumes. (Igrot Moshe, Orach Chaim 3, 63) The only reason we don’t pack up peanut butter and jelly on matzo for our Chol HaMoed outings today, is that our forbearers buckled before the kitniyot zealots of their day. And those of us who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

The kitniyot zealots of Rav Moshe’s day used arguments quite similar to those being raised by the forces conspiring to deprive us of quinoa today. The rabbi who posed the peanuts question was “astonished” that Ashkenazim were eating peanuts, for “he had heard that there is a place somewhere in which people are making flour ” out of peanuts, and further, “he had heard that peanuts are planted in fields in the same manner as other kitniyot are (i.e. they too share uncomfortable proximity to grains) ”.

But Rav Moshe, while acknowledging that these are the concerns that motivated the custom of not eating kitniyot, nonetheless dismissed the idea that the peanuts ought to now be added to the prohibition. To begin with, he points out, not everything out of which flour can be made is kitniyot, with potatoes being exhibit “A”. Additionally, not everything that may come into contact with grain is considered kitniyot, as pointed out by Taz and Magen Avraham, the classic commentaries on the Shulchan Aruch. In short, Rav Moshe concludes, the category of kitniyot includes only those items which “were explicitly prohibited, and those which are widely known [to be included]”. Further, he states, “the Sages of recent generations did not want to add new items”  to the kitniyot basket, even as they would not permit that which already was customarily not eaten. . Rav Moshe continued, “and accordingly, in many places the rabbis did not want to prohibit peanuts. And in places where there is no custom prohibiting them, one should not prohibit them, for in matter such as these one should not be machmir (stringent).” Rav Moshe spoke. But we just didn’t want our peanuts badly enough.

The quinoa game is ours to lose my friends. To win, all we need to do is to keep eating it (and to check the raw quinoa for any foreign matter before cooking it, the same way Sefardim check rice). If it becomes our minhag (custom) that we eat quinoa, then the halachik argument is settled. So let’s fight for our quinoa! And then turn our attention to cooking up the most meaningful, inspiring Pesach that we can.

 Dr. Ruth Calderon’s Knesset speech has created more buzz around the Jewish world than any speech like it in the history of the State of Israel. Probably because nothing remotely like it has ever happened before. The unexpected, unprecedented, yet incredibly moving sight of a non-Dati woman passionately teaching Gemara in the Knesset has captured the attention of Jews everywhere. Most of the reaction has been extremely enthusiastic. I think it might turn out to be one of the most pivotal moments in the last 300 years of Jewish history.

 As a religious people, we still haven’t figured out how to engage modernity. Since the mid-18^th century we have been trying to figure out how Judaism should respond to the opportunities and challenges presented by the Enlightenment and Jewish political equality. To this end, we have created political Zionism and Haskallah, Reform and Reform’s counterpoint Orthodoxy, Historical Judaism, Conservative Judaism and host of other movements and frameworks, each one  intended to help us live Jewishly either in concert with, or despite, modernity. None of these approaches has proved completely successful, which is why there are so many Jews who are not connected to their roots, but each has made contributions, some of enormous historical import.

 For the most part, the State of Israel has known only two of the models, Orthodoxy and secular Zionism. Both have contributed enormously to the strength and vitality of Israeli society and the rebirth of our people in its land. At the same time though, each is irremediably limited in its ability to forge a Jewish-Israeli identity that can carry the country forward. Even as we are eternally indebted to secular-Zionist ideology for creating and building the State of Israel, its weakening grip on successive generations of Israelis is well-documented and a cause of great concern. And while Orthodoxy can rightly claim credit for numerous important achievements, such as Israel’s living by the Jewish calendar in a meaningful way, and largely preserving Jewish tradition around life-cycle events, it has not – and by its internal rules frankly cannot – accommodate the thinking, the needs and the choices of most Israelis. As an Orthodox rabbi here in the States, I know only too well that the Orthodox community lacks the halachik tools and the theological leeway to satisfactorily address many people’s principled, ethical concerns around issues of universalism, intellectual honesty, and the religious inclusion of women and of gays. I obviously believe that Orthodoxy nonetheless has enormous contributions to make (through, for example, its joyful acceptance of the Divine will, and its willingness to be counter-cultural in its approach to standards of physical modesty), but like secular Zionism, it will not lead the Jewish people to redemption, at least not in the foreseeable future.

 With the emergence of people like Ruth Calderon however, and with the emergence of self-described “secular” institutions of classical Jewish learning such as Alma, and Elul, and Bina, we are seeing a development that just might step into the breach. A new way of thinking and learning and behaving as a Jew in the modern world  which can actually serve as a vital partner and ally of traditional Orthodoxy, living in dynamic intellectual and spiritual interchange with it, and with it weaving a net of Jewish life that will capture so many who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

 It takes great courage of course to enter this kind of partnership and alliance, but the first signs of a willingness to do so where on display as Ruth Calderon offered her “shiur” in the Knesset.

I began reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables during the summer, around the time that my wife started rehearsing for the Jewish Women’s Reparatory Company’s production of the musical version. (The show was staged a month ago. I’m still reading…). Naturally, we rushed right out to the theater when the movie version came out a few weekends ago. The film is mercilessly true to its title, of course. I never drink, but I really felt that I could have used a shot of something as the credits were rolling.

 But the story also features a great redemptive theme of course. And although Jean Valjean’s fall and rise is a great Christian drama of grace and self-sacrifice, Jews can easily enough transpose it into a story of profound teshuva, repentance. The sort of teshuva that Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik described as “redemptive”. It was for this reason that I was disappointed that one particular scene from Hugo’s tome was not chosen for the film (nor for the show I presume, but who can remember that far back?) I’m referring to the scene which portrays the essential moment and the primal power of teshuva, in a way that rivals and indeed exceeds almost any composition on the topic.

After leaving the bishop of Digne’s home with the additional gift of the silver candlesticks in tow, having been granted another chance and having been told by the bishop that his soul no longer belonged to evil but to good, Jean Valjean comes across a child who is in possession of a forty-sou piece. When the coin drops from the child’s hand and rolls toward Jean Valjean, he brings his heavy boot down upon it, and is deaf to the child’s pathetic pleadings that he lift his boot and return the coin to him. Soon enough, the child runs away, weeping. Jean Valjean watches until the child disappears into the darkness. And then, a moment later,

 ”…he shuddered; he had begun to feel the cold night air. He pulled his cap over his forehead, fumbling mechanically to do up his smock, took a step forward and stooped to pick his stick up off the ground. At that moment he spotted the forty-sou coin that he had half-ground into the dirt with his foot, and that was glistening among the pebbles. The sight of it was a bolt from the blue.“What the hell is that?” he hissed between clenched teeth.”

 Jean Valjean searches frantically for the child, screaming his name like a wildman and asking every passer-by if they had seen him. But all this proves futile, and the child is nowhere to be found.

“…his legs suddenly gave way beneath him as if an invisible power had suddenly bowled him over with the weight of his guilty conscience. He dropped, exhausted, onto a big slab of rock, his hands balled into fists and buried in his hair, his head propped on his knees, And he cried, “I am a miserable bastard”. He burst into tears. It was the first time he had cried in nineteen years.”

 And the story of course pivots right there. This is teshuva’s primal essence.

All of us have felt regret over particular deeds that we’ve done. But how often do we part the clouds and see that it’s not the deeds, but the doer that is twisted and corrupt. How often does out introspection and reflection bore through the layer of specific actions we wish we could retrieve, and touch the heart the matter, the person who we are? It’s not that we don’t know that is what we need to do if we hope to change, to redeem, ourselves. But we are often frightened by the sheer amount of courage and inner strength that parting the clouds requires.

Maybe it’s better that this scene didn’t make it from the page to the screen. This way, I have the freedom to imagine myself within it, rather than only having the image of its happening to 24601.

This one goes straight into my memoirs (if I ever write them).

This past Sunday, I had the privilege to officiate at the headstone unveiling for one of our shul’s most beloved members, who died just about a year ago. For privacy’s sake, I’ll call her Rose.

The unveiling ceremony opened with Rose’s daughter reading a letter she had found in her Mom’s house a few months earlier. It was a letter to her children filled with practical advice for living. Everything from how to dress for certain occasions, to how to hold on to Jewish tradition. Prominently featured in the letter was the advice to not get into squabbles and arguments with family members. “Always ask yourself”, Rose instructed, “whether you are quarrelling over something that’s really trivial”.  Family bonds were precious as gold, Rose wrote, and should be treated as such. All of us present in the cemetery that morning had known Rose well. And we smiled through our tears as we could hear her voice saying all those things that were in her letter.  

As is my custom when I officiate at unveilings, I asked everyone assembled to share his or her favorite memory of Rose. Some recalled the Passover Seders at Auntie Rose’s home, others remembered the birthday gifts she sent cross-country, a granddaughter recounted going shopping with Bubbe Rose. And then, without warning, it happened. One member of the family, roughly of Rose’s generation, stood up and faced the group. She said, “I always wanted to be like Rose when I grew up”. She then turned to a younger woman in the crowd, also a member of the family, and asked if they could finally reconcile, right there and then.  And as we all watched silent and spellbound, the younger woman took several steps forward as well, and then literally over Rose’s grave, the two women embraced and wept. I heard myself simply whisper,”wow”.

We all aspire to be a source of blessing to our family and friends. And what I see now, as I never saw before, is that this aspiration need not be confined to the span of time when we actually walk the earth.

As the Elul moon waxes and the peak of our religious year nears, we each begin asking ourselves our “big questions”. This Elul, the big question that’s rattling me is “what, in the end, is our goal?” 

We, who put on tefillin every morning (if we are men), and maintain separate sponges and towels for milchig and fleishig, we who tear toilet paper before Shabbat and don’t touch our spouses 12 days out of each month, what, in the end, is our goal? What is that we really want? 

Do we want our children to don tefillin, maintain kosher homes and observe Shabbat as we do? Well, yes, this is something we want. But is this our goal? In the end, is the simple perpetuation of religious activity the sum total of what we are striving for? Or is it just the means? And if so, the means toward what?

 Along similar lines: we, who daily pray for, worry about, and support Israel, we who send our children to study and to serve there, what, in the end, is our hope? What is that we really want? 

 Do we want the State of Israel to be physically secure and materially prosperous? Well, yes. But is this it?  Are these the totality of our goals?

We are well-practiced in, and passionate about, the sacred activities of our Orthodox and Zionist lives. Yet as my Orthodox and Zionist life goes on, I suspect more and more deeply that the satisfactory fulfillment of these sacred activities does not constitute the goal at all, rather an elaborate set of means. And the big question that is jumping out at me from every corner this Elul is what then, is the goal?

There are surely many possible responses to this question, and please feel welcome to add yours to this discussion! As for myself, I am thinking about the following two statements, the first by the prophet Yishayahu, the second from our Sages. They strike me as articulations of ultimate Jewish goals.

“In the days to come… the many nations shall come and say, ‘let us go up to the Mount of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that He may instruct us in His ways, and that we may walk in His paths’, and instruction will come forth from Zion, and the word of God from Jerusalem”

“Our rabbis have taught: We support the non-Jewish poor with the poor of Israel, visit their sick with the sick of Israel, eulogize their dead, and comfort their mourners, in the interest of the ways of peace.”

Worthy goals for us to place in our sights, for the short and long term.  My own challenge for this Elul is to better understand how our various sacred means lead us to them.

The Book of Eicha (Lamentations) offers many grim images as it recounts the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slaughter and exiling of its population.  Surely one of the most gruesome is that of parents so racked with hunger that they resort to cooking their own children.  It’s an unfathomable idea, one so depraved that we struggle to imagine it.

And yet. And yet it’s becoming clearer and clearer that we are all cooking our children. If not our children, then our grandchildren. Or perhaps it will be our great-grandchildren.  But the time seems to be coming closer and closer when the temperature on this earth which God created for us will be too high for life as we know it to continue. We are, slowly, cooking our children.

According to Halacha, we must not wait until we are absolutely certain that someone’s life is in danger before we intervene. In the presence of even the possibility that life is in danger, we are mandated to violate Shabbat, Yom Kippur, or virtually any of the commandments, in order to preserve and maintain life. This is because life is the central value, and we are prohibited to stand idly by when it is endangered. And we are our bothers’ keepers. And our children’s and grandchildren’s keepers.

I think we need to start being scared. And to think about the world our loved ones, the fruit of our loins and of our wombs, the children whom we hug and the grandchildren whom we kiss, will inhabit. And even as we always place our faith in the compassionate and beneficent God, we simultaneously need to remember what God said to Adam and Eve when He placed them in the garden (Kohellet Rabah, 7) “Be mindful then to not ruin and destroy My world, for if you ruin it, there is no one after you to repair it.”

 I ride my bike a lot, and my wife and I are installing solar panels on our roof. But this won’t save anyone’s children. Only unprecedented cooperation among God’s nations will. Only the broad willingness to endure hardship today so that our children may live tomorrow will. Only heroic and noble leadership on the part of this, the most powerful and blessed nation in the world will.

Along with the faith that we are not cooked yet.

A few years ago, on the last Shabbat of Tammuz, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly moved during morning davening. Josh, our Mussaf leader that day, was reciting the blessing for the new moon, as the month of Av would be starting that week. For the short middle paragraph of the blessing, Josh chose the mournful melody of “Elli Zion” familiar to us from the Tisha B’av liturgy. And when we reached the words “all of Israel are friends”, a chill went down my spine. Usually this phrase is one of the most difficult and ironic phrases from our liturgy, given the sad and ongoing story of friction within our tribe. But intoned to the melody of “Elli Zion”, which evokes all of the darkest chapters of our history of the past thousands of years, the words rung startlingly true. We do all share the same stories. We have all walked the same tortured path. When it comes to all the things that we remember every Tisha B’av, all of Israel are indeed friends. Brothers, sisters, and comrades.

 Which makes Tisha B’av, strange as this might sound, a true gift for us. It is a special and unique annual opportunity for Jews to sit together, remember together, and even articulate aspirations for the future, together. My dear friend David challenged me a few weeks after Josh’s Mussaf, asking, “is there a way that we could observe Tisha B’av next year with a broader swath of the Jewish community? Isn’t that what the day is about?”

Those experiences, combined with the enthusiasm for the idea that came from my neighborhood colleagues, brought forth an extraordinary Tisha B’av observance that it is about to mark its third year. Our (Orthodox) shul, Temple Beth Am (Conservative), and IKAR (non-denominational) now spend the last 2+ hours of the day together in learning, and soulful Tisha B’av singing. Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, Rabbi Sharon Brous and I have formed a most wonderful partnership, creating the learning materials and implementing the program. The program takes place at Beth Am where Rabbi Kligfeld has, so magnificently, given the chevra from our shul a beautiful classroom where we set up a mechitza and have an Orthodox davening for Mincha and Ma’ariv, parallel to the minyanim taking place in the chapel down the stairs. And as we break fast together, the sense of family, of peoplehood, of possibility and optimism, the sense that all Israel are friends, is tangible and exhilarating.

I am sharing this with you not simply to praise my colleagues and their congregations (and my own), but to describe the possible. We’d each be happy to help you and your congregation create something similar to what, with God’s help, we’ve created here.

We need not wait for Mashiach to create this kind of meaningful Jewish friendship. Probably, Mashiach is waiting for us.

A meaningful fast to all.

When a candidate runs as a devoutly religious person, what kinds of public positions does he or she take? In the political contest playing out in presently, the foreign policy positions of the devoutly religious are hawkish, and their social policy positions are conservative. The devoutly religious politician is anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and anti-feminism. The same general pattern (with shades of difference) holds true among devoutly religious politicians in many other countries, regardless of which one of the world’s major religions is being practiced there.

 Is this the only voice that the devoutly religious can bring to the political sphere? We know that it isn’t. When Isaiah brought his voice to the political sphere for example, he spoke neither of God’s demand that we utilize military force to uproot idolaters, nor of the need to insure that our womenfolk are properly chaste. He spoke instead about how the widows and orphans can’t get justice, how small landowners are being forced off their land by the larger, more powerful owners, and how the elite political class is too self-absorbed in material pleasure to care or even know. He spoke of the urgent need to fill the world with knowledge of God so that warfare would become obsolete. He cautioned against reflexively seeking military solutions to all threats, emphasizing that the nation’s security will ultimately be determined by its pursuit of social righteousness and its consciousness of God. 

There is no shortage, tragically, of evils in today’s world.  Every devoutly religious person is undoubtedly moved by and concerned about the fact that 15 million American children live in poverty, that 40 % of minority students nationally aren’t graduating high school. Every devoutly religious person can’t help but be horrified at the rape and killing of women and children in the Congo or in Southern Sudan, or by the carnage created by the drug wars just south of our border – drug wars funded by drug consumption here at home. Wouldn’t it be inspiring if these issues were the ones most that were central to the platforms of our devoutly religious politicians? Which is not at all to say that the defense of our homeland, the thwarting of terrorism and the promotion of a sexual ethic that honors sacred relationships, are not vitally important issues as well. But they occupy just a portion of what the religious person sees when he looks out at the world and the people who live inhabit it.

I am a devoutly religious person.  And I believe that our deepest religious values should inform our political views. And I am befuddled and disturbed by the fact that our leaders who wear their religion on their sleeves, exhaust their passions on our military challenges abroad and birth-control pills at home. The world awaits the expression of America’s deep historical religious passions for justice, compassion, and peace for all humankind.

I remember the Purim that fell during the year that I was mourning the loss of my father. Early on, I mentioned to my wife that I just wasn’t going to be in the mood to go to the Purim Seuda being held at shul, and she lovingly and generously offered to make a low-key Seudah at home with just family and maybe some close friends. But I turned this offer down as well, and wound up eating the Seuda by myself, in the kitchen. Which for me at least, felt about right.

 Halachikly – and more than just halachikly – Purim isn’t Yom Tov. The arrival of Purim does not terminate a shiva or a shloshim that is in progress, the way that the arrival of a Yom Tov does.  And the Halacha concerning the mourner and the Purim Seuda is actually rather unworked out, with opinions ranging the gamut. This is very different from Yom Tov meals, which even a mourner is to enjoy in the company of family and friends. There’s clearly a fundamental difference between the nature of the joy of Yom Tov, and the nature of the joy of Purim.

 This difference is expressed in another way as well. Purim features this very unusual encouragement toward drunkenness, raucous noisemaking, and the wearing of masks and costumes, none of which are associated with the joy of Yom Tov. Which leaves us asking, “What exactly IS Purim? And what exactly are we doing when we celebrate it? “

 I remember once hearing a theory, quoted in the name of Rabbi Soloveitchik, which explained the distinction between the joy of Yom Tov and the joy Purim. The joy of Yom Tov – ideally at least – is organic, naturally occurring. On the anniversary of our redemption from slavery, or on the anniversary of the Revelation, or as we sit beneath the schach, and celebrate the plenty with which we’ve been blessed, the joy wells up within us, organically, almost irrepressibly. “And you shall rejoice on your festivals” is as much a description of what will be, as it is a command.   And when this organic state of joy collides for someone with his or her personal state of mourning, the Halacha presumes that one of them must step aside for the other.  And by halachik tradition, it is the mourning that yields, and the joy that is given expression. This is also the reason that there’s no need to artificially manufacture joy on Yom Tov through wearing outlandish costumes or imbibing intoxicating amounts of drink. The joy is there; it’s in the glow on everyone’s faces as they recite Kiddush at the Seder, or sit down at the table that first night in the Sukkah

 But the nature of Purim, the joy of Purim, is entirely different. This was first expressed in the Talmud, which notes that we don’t recite Hallel on Purim. Why was Purim not a day of Hallel?  Because on the day after the great victory over our foes, we woke up to find ourselves still in Shushan, still ruled the “great fool”, as the Sages delicately refer to Achashverosh. We knew that the next Haman could already be waiting in the wings. We had dodged a bullet this time, but there was no guarantee that there wasn’t going to be a next time.

 As my friend Joelle Keene put in a 1997 column in the short-lived but much-beloved Jewish Voice of Greater Los Angeles,

 “On Purim we are giddy the way people are giddy after narrowly escaping a car crash, or following a biopsy that came back normal. Contained in that kind of relief is the freshly irrefutable evidence that we’re terribly, terribly vulnerable. In Shushan, a whole community came within a hair’s breadth of annihilation. Next time we may not be so lucky, and in other places and times, we haven’t been.”

 Purim does not generate organic, naturally-occurring joy. As such, there is no head-on emotional collision between Purim and mourning, There is no need for mourning to give way. The two will co-exist, awkwardly perhaps, but without pushing one another off the table. And this is why Purim is characterized by noisemaking, costume-wearing and even drinking. We need to consciously manufacture the joy, to work ourselves up into a state of celebration, to employ external stimulants to bring us into the Yom Tov proclaimed by Esther and Mordechai – the Yom Tov beneath whose surface vulnerability stubbornly lurks.

 But if this is so, what is the point of celebrating Purim at all? Why push ourselves to feel a state of joy? The answer, I think, is that Purim is a metaphor for life. And life must be celebrated.

 I won’t ever forget what seemed at the time to be an unremarkable visit to 7/11 a little over a decade ago. Our older boys (12 and 8 at the time) were negotiating loudly and insistently with my wife over what size Slurpees that were entitled to, all while she holding our infant, who was crying. I was standing at the cash register looking exasperated, doing all I could to contain myself as I said, “two medium Slurpees, please”. The man at the cash register looked up at me and without even a hint of sarcasm said, “You are a very lucky man”.   Six words out of the mouth of a stranger. The best “mussar shmooes” I have received in my life.

 Purim’s gift was not liberation from slavery, or the hearing of God’s voice from atop the mountain. Purim’s gift was not the recapturing of the Temple from the hands of Antiouchus and the Syrian-Greeks. Purim’s gift was simply giving people a new lease on their ordinary, everyday lives. The upshot of the Purim story was that the Jews of Persia were given the renewed opportunity to go to work and to derive the satisfaction that their work brought to them, to experience the warmth of friendship, and the intimacy of family. They were given the gift of more days of ordinary, everyday life. It’s true that when our alarm clock rings at 6:30 AM at the beginning of another ordinary day, we aren’t usually possessed of irrepressible, Yom Tov-like joy. But on the 14^th of Adar many years ago we realized that we would do well to find a way to celebrate the blessing of ordinary days. And we understood that if we are unable to arouse ourselves to celebrate ordinary living, than we are probably not really living at all.

 This is the reason that we work so hard to rejoice on Purim. This is what we are doing when we celebrate the day.  And yes, the ways we celebrate Purim are over the top, an extreme effort at generating joy. But that’s because we need for Purim to echo through a whole year of ordinary, regular days, till Purim comes round to remind us again.