Pet peeve: lumping Judaism together with a whole bunch of dogma that has nothing to do with it at all. It’s so hard not to do for the simple reason that we speak English. Our entire web of associations takes place in the context of our language and culture. When you hear the word “holiness”, you might have any number of associations ranging from solemn-looking old men walking slowly down a thin corridor in a room glutted with incense to singing at the top of your lungs in a chorus of off-key ten-year-olds. Could be. Could be something else. I’m just saying that where you are from, culturally and socially, creates your way of understanding the world.
It is simple to say but really not so easy to fully understand: Judaism is not like anything else. Especially not the culture and perspectives represented by the English language. Because Judaism is so unique, translations play smoke-and-mirror tricks at best and usually, at worst, are completely misleading. That’s why one of the fast days Jews are commanded to observe once a year is Asara B’Teves. It commemorates the day that the Torah was first translated. It so happened that the first time the Torah was translated, it was translated into Greek. But it didn’t really matter what language it was straight-jacketed into. The point was that the fulcrum, the marrow, the simple and utterly irreplaceable truth of what Torah was shattered.
Of course, the seventy rabbis whom the Greeks had holed up, each in individual solitary confinement, to go through with the translation project did produce the exact same Greek wording for the entire text. What do they say? Great minds think alike? Maybe. In this case, it was more like great minds take the same precautions.
Because their translation of the Torah wasn’t a full translation or a comprehensive translation or even what we mean when we say an authoritative translation, in the sense that when you read it you become an authority.
Rather, it was a tremendously careful translation that glossed over as many points as were necessary to avoid at least the grossest misconceptions that the foreign wording could have fallen into. It took a living, breathing, white dove, alive and glorious in flight against a pristine crystal blue sky, and turned it into a cartoon. Even worse – a stick figure. Sure, if you happened to know what a dove looked like you would have been able to decipher what the stick figure represented. But if you didn’t? At least you wouldn’t think it was an elephant. Hopefully.
We fast, we mourn that day, because even as much as the rabbis heroically tried to avoid the most blatant misconceptions, nonetheless misconceptions became almost inevitable. And today they are rife. If you don’t study Torah from a living, breathing, authentic representative of the living tradition, then you have never seen the dove. I promise you. Again, it’s simple but true: Judaism is not like anything else.
I want to explain to the world that Judaism – real Torah, the Torah that Rav Elyashiv practices, the Torah that we kept as we wandered through the Sinai desert following a pillar of fire three thousand-odd years ago – doesn’t discriminate against women, doesn’t participate in the universalism-versus-individualism conflict, doesn’t believe in an angry god. I want to take apart the ideas, the words, that lead people to believe that by covering my hair I am denying my right to – what? Freedom? Individuality? Social value?
I want to take the words apart like a puzzle, give the world a breath of fresh air on what Torah really has to say, the inside look, the perspective of a person who has learned Hebrew not from Ben Yehuda, whose so-called Hebrew is for the most part really just a translated English, but from people who actually learn the Book. Who know the Book in their skin. In their lives. In their relationships. In how and who and what they are.
I want to become one of those people and, like them, like my teachers, shine that clarity and simplicity and uniqueness to everyone I am privileged to connect with. And, yeah, I’m giving it a shot.
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