The Book of the Desert

Parashas BaMidbar, Sefer BaMidbar

 

The desert sands grow cold at night. I lie on my back looking up at the stars.

The sky splashes a wave of light, galaxies rippling above me in layers. Sands mirror the symphony of stars. Untold grains dance to form vivid undulations of hard rock face and soft sand bank. On one of these I find my perch, prone and level with the earth and sky around and above me. Who I am amongst all this? In the absence of distractions, the fundamental elements of nature, including my human nature, grow vivid and defined. A deep quiet enters my head, my breath, my body, and I seem to float between the great yawn of barren earth and the music of the galaxies.

This environment was the true melting pot of the Jews. New York in the 1920s screamed and echoed with anxieties and distractions, turning many away from the voice within. Egypt, with its wild-eyed gluttonousness and graceless cruelty, did the same. We lost ourselves in these places. The original melting pot, where the impurities of the gold of our hearts burned away, was the desert. There were no distractions there.

After receiving the Torah in fire and light at Mount Sinai, the Jewish People were still not ready to re-enter the fray of ancient society. Israel was the promised land, but the promised land at that time seeped with the sickly-sweet odors of incense and burning flesh: the scents of idol worship. From human sacrifice to institutionalized sexual abuse to petty crime and rampant violence, Canaan of the ancient world was not a pleasant place before the Jews inherited the land. The Children of Israel would have to face these harsh realities and cut them down – but not yet. They weren’t ready.

A period of forty years separated between the exodus from Egypt and the conquering of the land of Israel. These forty years were spent in the desert. It wasn’t a settled existence – constant travel and upheaval characterized Jewish life at that time, yet incredible miracles didn’t allowed this instability to become too much of a burden. Water flowed from rocks. The people were guided by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night. All common desert dangers and maladies were warded away by divine protection. Manna rained down from heaven, a source of nutrition so perfect that the human body produced no waste. It was a womb-like experience that allowed us to take a national deep breath and process who we had become and who we would choose to be.

Who are you today? Are you who you want to be? Are you whom you believe that you can be? The desert, in moments of quiet, in moments where stillness asks great questions in a voice of loud silence, allows us to become our potential by finding it within.

Sefer BaMidbar (Numbers) literally means “the book in the desert”. Thirty-two parashos (portions) in this volume of the Five Books of Moses map the way the Children of Israel journeyed from broken slave nation to empowered, unified people. We journeyed through the desert, a place of deep quiet, neither here nor there, blowing sands and the insoluble structures of earth and sky speaking volumes without words. Identity is forged when listening and thinking and breathing grow like seeds in the fertile soil of noiselessness.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Visit the desert, where sand and sky roll on forever, and who you can become is masked by nothing. 

Inspired by Parasha U’ Pishra by Rabbi Moshe Grylak

Written for http://www.arachimusa.org/

Thanks to Anthony Citrano for use of his beautiful photograph.

Does God Bribe Us?

Parashas BaChukosai, Sefer VaYikra

Reward and punishment are funny ideas when you try to apply them to God. You see, reward and punishment are ways of manipulating people to do what you want. Think lab rats. If they go to the right, they get zapped. If they go to the left, tasty rat kibble. Do we think of God in such immature terms?

Torah defines the concept of God as the omnipotent, omniscient, loving Source of everything. By “everything”, Torah really does mean everything. Anything you can think of, God made it. Some people like to play a cute little game called “Who Made God?” but they always lose. The Judaic definition of God means that God created the idea of creation. So much for that.

Anyway, it’s very strange to apply the idea of reward and punishment to such a Being. Why would God manipulate anybody? His creation of you, me, and the entirety of the universe we live in took place free of charge – He needs nothing. He created “need”.

As such, although we have no ability to grasp who or what He is, the closest we can come to recognizing Him is as a giver. He gave us life, flowers, the nuclear strong force, kiwis and sunsets with no strings attached. It would be impossible to have any strings attached for G-d. Again, He doesn’t need anything.

So why does He offer us reward in return for keeping His commandments?

Is This Love?

The question gets even stranger when you consider the Jewish value system. Sechar and onesh are some of the central tenets of the Judaic perception of reality. A quick flip through the Chumash (Pentateuch) and Nevi’im (Prophets) displays the concept on almost every page. Yet the western definitions of reward and punishment – manipulative bribery and retaliation – are not particularly congruent with Judaic values.

Rather, Judaism explains that we were created in order to develop and enjoy the most extraordinary relationship humanly possible, a relationship with God Himself. That is what Torah is for.

This relationship encompasses and includes all our other relationships, all our possessions, and indeed every element of our lives. Grab a minute to look up from the computer screen and take in your surroundings with those eyes. It’s a thrill, isn’t it?

Because an amazing relationship is never fifty-fifty. An amazing relationship is 100-100. In an amazing relationship, both partners give their one hundred percent to care for, honor, support, and delight their beloved. Anything less isn’t love; it’s business. If you wanted business, you would go to a job placement agency, not stand under a chuppa.

Cutting a deal – “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” – leaves us jaded. The truth about relationships is that we are not deeply fulfilled by taking. We are deeply fulfilled by giving. We want to love another so much that every time we see him or her it feels like the sun rising inside our chests. We want to feel inspired and virtuous and present. Having our love reciprocated in kind is only an affirmation of how fulfilling it feels to be a giver, a connector.

Yet picture this: A friend of yours sits down on the couch with you and says, “Do you care about me? Because I need you to do something for our relationship, but I only want you to do it out of real caring. Otherwise, it isn’t really real.”

You love your friend, so you say yes, of course you’ll do whatever he needs of you. But then he adds a strange rejoinder, “And by the way, I’ll pay you fifty thousand dollars. But don’t do it for the money…”

Strange, right? Even stranger:

“Be not like servants who serve their master for the sake of receiving a reward; instead be like servants who serve their master not for the sake of receiving a reward. And let the awe of heaven be upon you.” (Pirkei Avos 1:3)

In light of the Jewish value system of giving and connection, why does God offer us a reward for what ought to be done out of unconditional love?

Telling It Like It Is

So far we have seen that God is not trying to manipulate us for His own needs because He doesn’t have needs. We have also seen that the Jewish value system does not support doing mitzvos out of a desire to selfishly accrue stars on some sort of childish heavenly sticker chart. In short, He isn’t trying to manipulate us and He wouldn’t want us to serve Him out of manipulation anyway.

We are left with an odd but inevitable conclusion: God promises us reward just because He wants to give. Imagine that! He likes you! He’s looking for any excuse to bring you a dozen roses.

But on a deeper level, the concept of reward for mitzvos is an existential truth. As we perform His will, we become more and more capable of receiving His love. It just so happens that receiving His love feels very, very good. Were you to experience all the pleasures this world has to offer throughout the entirety of space and time, all compacted into one severely exquisite moment, you would probably feel so electrified that you would lose consciousness – but it still wouldn’t come close to the pleasure of what it will feel like to directly experience intimacy with God in Olam HaBa (the World to Come).

He promises to reward us because that is the truth. He’s just telling it like it is: “A God of faith without iniquity, righteous and fair is He.” (Devarim-Deuteronomy 32:4)

Making Great Even Greater

The benefits of mitzvos in both this world and the next are unbelievable. In this world, consequences for doing the right thing usually mean that you will receive further resources to do more and better of the right thing. For example, give tzedaka – get more money. Use your body properly – enjoy good health. The Torah repeats predictions like this again and again:

“It will be that if you hearken to My commandments that I command you today, to love Hashem, your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, then I shall provide rain for your land in its proper time...that you may gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil…and you will eat and you will be satisfied.” (ibid 11:13-15)

“If you will follow My decrees and observe My commandments and perform them; then I will provide your rains in their time, and the land will give its produce and the tree of the field will give its fruit… You will eat your bread to satiety and you will dwell securely in the land. I will provide peace in the land, and you will lie down with none to frighten you…” (VaYikra-Leviticus 26:3-6)

Of course, this-worldly consequences are not cut and dry because this world is for growth, not reward. This world is not the last stop on the train. This world is called the prozdor, the corridor, leading to the traklin, the palace. We are just passing through, and whatever needs to happen in this world to help us best develop our potentials for enjoyment of the next world is what will take place.

But in the next world? You think it’s your pleasure? Believe me, it’s His pleasure. And all He wants to do, no strings attached, is to share it with you. It really is beautiful.

Using the Carrot

The big concern about the heavenly reward issue is that it could be a distraction from the altruism we are supposed to be growing in to. Promises of infinitely more than fifty thousand dollars could make a person feel a little selfish, a little taavadig, yes?

Herein lies one of the juiciest secrets of Torah. We are meant to be in this world, but not of it. We are meant to elevate material reality, yet not be dragged down by it. We are meant to involve ourselves in various physical pursuits in order to serve God with them, yet not become enslaved by them. We are meant to be the rider, not the horse.

God’s dual promise and challenge of pleasurable reward shows us that we can. We can use our selfish interests as motivation but not purpose. We can get in on God’s game and use promises of reward as a carrot to dangle in front of our bodies’ noses, leading ourselves to do what is good and right, all the while knowing that our true purpose is not selfish pleasure, but the selfless pleasure of altruistic, unconditional giving, connection, and love.

God is nothing if not clever. As much as He promises us reward because He wants to give, and because receiving reward for mitzvos is an existential truth, He also promises us reward in order to bait us to make good choices despite ourselves. But the objective is not to stay baited. The real opportunity in the heavenly-reward conundrum is to join Him in baiting ourselves. To cross over to the other side of the line and be like God.

Mitzvos L’Shma

Pirkei Avos promises that doing mitzvos lo l’shma, for selfish motivations, leads to doing them l’shma, for their own sake. In other words, the Torah endorses bribing yourself to do the right thing.

Yet our sages explain that this promise only works when one is doing mitzvos lo l’shma in order to reach l’shma. One may use superficial, selfish motivations – money, candy, promises of infinite heavenly pleasure – but only in order to eventually come to a place where one does not need those impetuses.

Your heart has to be in the right place. The objective must be to eventually become motivated by love of God alone. What is it that you really want, the candy or the connection with God? If what you really want is the candy, don’t bother. You’re not fooling anyone. But if what you really want is the connection with God, and you’re just using the candy as a crutch, go ahead and use the candy to motivate your mitzvos. You’re only human and growth takes a lifetime. As long as it is growth that you are aiming for.

We can do it. We can dive into our relationships with our loved ones, especially HaKadosh Baruch Hu, with one hundred percent commitment. We can do mitzvos not selfishly, in order to get reward, but with genuine love, just because we want to make Him happy.

Even if we need to use a carrot to lead ourselves on sometimes, we can keep the true yearnings of our hearts focused on Avinu Shebashamayim (our Father in heaven). We can become tzadikim and it can feel great.

Written for www.ArachimUSA.org

Special Attention

Parashas Behar, Sefer VaYikra

What your life would be like if you knew, really knew, that you were being taken care of? Torah teaches a radical spiritual principle that flies in the face of everything our five senses take for granted: nothing happens automatically, and nothing happens by accident. Throw a rock at a window and see it shatter. Think the pressure of the rock smashed the glass?

Think again. Torah explains that God didn’t just create the world over 5,000 years ago. He re-creates the world every moment of existence. Visualize throwing the rock in slow motion. You lift your hand, slowly open your fist, wrist sliding forward…

The picture speeds up as the rock whisks through the air headed straight for the window and then – freeze-frame! The rock stops short one millisecond before touching the glass.

Take a look at the picture in your mind. The rock is hanging in midair. Take a walk around it. Look at it. The glass, vulnerable and empty, shimmers a fraction of an inch away. What will happen?

Everything you have ever experienced leads you to believe that the rock will hit the glass and that in all likelihood the glass will shatter. But Torah peels open the moment like a fresh fruit and squeezes out the secrets inside: God created time, God created matter, and God created everything else. He does whatever He wants! If He wants the rock to hit the glass, it will. If He doesn’t want it to, it won’t, no matter how strange that seems.

Now press play again for the movie in your mind. SMASH! The glass shatters, the rock flies through the window, but you realize that nothing is ever as it seems.

The Reason Behind All Reasons

God is compelled by nothing. He is the reason behind all reasons. “Why” doesn’t apply to Him – He created “why”. The purpose of human existence is for every one of us to become like God. This world is a 3-D playscape designed to allow us the ultimate rush: independent self-actualization. A spark of Godliness within allows us the miraculous ability to exercise genuine free choice in the face of moral issues. Nothing compels us to actualize the heroic and beautiful potentials we have waiting inside of us like so many golden eggs. Nothing forces our hands. We create our own destinies.

It is an opportunity only God could give, and He doesn’t like to ruin it for us. That’s why miracles are scarce. Sure, they happen when we really need them, but He doesn’t like to show His hand very often. He hides behind the veil of “nature” (His creation) in order to make free choice just challenging enough. Amazing modern discoveries in cosmology, neuroscience, and quantum physics notwithstanding.

What we perceive as reality is all just a game, but He provides us with some rules to make playing it a little easier. Call it “the Divine cheat-sheet”. The commandments of the Torah show us how to exercise our spiritual muscles in such a way that eventually, with enough practice, we can break through the illusion. One of those exercises is called Shemitah.

Letting Go of “Nature”

Shemitah asks us to suspend our soporous obsession with nature just long enough to feel our way around it. At first glance, it appears daunting:

“For six years you may sow your field and for six years you may prune your vineyard; and you may gather in its crop. But the seventh year shall be a complete rest for the land, a Sabbath for Hashem; your field you shall not sow and your vineyard you shall not prune…it shall be a year of rest for the land.” (VaYikra-Leviticus 25:3-5)

Nervous? God is ten steps ahead of you:

“If you will say: What will we eat in the seventh year? – behold! We will not sow and not gather in our crops! I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year and it will yield a crop sufficient for the three-year period.”

And just to make sure that you don’t miss the point, He adds:

“You will sow in the eighth year, but you will eat from the old crop; until the ninth year, until the arrival of its crop, you will eat the old.” (ibid 19-22)

When farmers and vintners in Israel followed the laws of Shemitah, they knew beyond a doubt what Torah had promised all along: nature is not “natural”. Nature is just of much an expression of His personal attention to us as miracles are. What we call nature is just a series of miracles taking place over and over again.

Another hint on the “cheat-sheet” is that it’s a good idea to live in Israel. One of the many benefits of living in Israel is, whether during Shemitah or not, in Israel it is always easier to see God’s Hand in your life. Rain doesn’t pour out of the sky on a predictable basis like in the Brazilian Amazon or in Mobile, Alabama. You have to pray for it:

“For the Land to which you come, to possess it – it is not like the land of Egypt that you left, where you would plant your seed and water it on foot like a vegetable garden. But the Land to which you cross over it is a land of mountains and valleys; from the rain of heaven it drinks water; a Land that Hashem, your God, seeks out; the eyes of Hashem, your God, are always upon it…” (Devarim-Deuteronomy 11:10-12)

Authentic Relationship

Which leads into another important detail. Did you think having an on-going, meaningful relationship with God was easy? C’mon, easy is for wimps. Real love, and real happiness, take time and effort.

Having an on-going, meaningful relationship with anyone is challenging, and God is no exception. The trick is that living in Israel provides a context for your spiritual efforts. You have to pray for rain because water is scarce. You have to pray for money because employment is scarce. You have to pray for a cool breeze because air conditioning is scarce.

Living in Israel isn’t easy, but just like any great relationship, it’s exciting and joyful. Rain isn’t just rain – it’s bracha, blessing, pouring out of the sky on to your windows in living color. The bus pulls up at just the right moment and you step on knowing that, against all odds, you will make it to work on time. Your two-year-old falls down and everyone on the street rushes over to make sure that she didn’t scrape her knee. Nobody walks on by. Manhattan is far, far away from Jerusalem. Israel is a place of warmth, caring – and special attention.

But even outside of Israel, God’s attention to you at every moment is there to be seen. You just might have to open your eyes and your heart a little more. Stretch… Is it worth it? It’s worth everything.

Imagine the world moving around you like a dance choreographed just for you. The people you meet, the cars whizzing by, even the leaves drifting slowly from the trees… It’s you, Him, and the rest of your life. What are you waiting for?

Written for http://www.arachimusa.org/

Rules of the Game

Parashas Emor, Sefer VaYikra

To play basketball, you need to know the rules. Otherwise, what you’re playing won’t be basketball, it will be make-believe.

The same applies to Judaism. Jewish law is derived from the written  verses of the Torah, but you can’t just derive anything you want. There are rules about how verses may be interpreted, and any interpretation that doesn’t fit within those rules is not Judaism, it’s make-believe. 

The rules of the game of Judaism are called the Oral Torah. Without the Oral Torah, there would be no way of knowing exactly what the Almighty meant to be telling us in His book.

Any of the verses in the Written Torah could serve as an example. Let’s look at these:

“But (ach) on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you gather in the crop of the land, you shall celebrate Hashem’s festival for a seven-day period... You shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of a citron tree, the branches of date palms, twigs of a plaited tree, and brook willows, and you shall rejoice before Hashem, your God, for a seven-day period... You shall dwell in booths for a seven-day period; every native in Israel shall dwell in booths” (VaYikra-Leviticus 23:39-42).

These verses describe the commandments forming the holiday of Sukkos. If we tried to celebrate the holiday based on a superficial reading of the verses, we wouldn’t know where to begin or what to do. Booths? Take fruit? What does that mean? The bare-bone verses need some fleshing out in order to apply them to our lives.

Hidden Treasures

How long is the rule-book of the NBA?

In Judaism, there are 613 rules that you need to follow in order to derive the practices and lifestyle choices that the Almighty wanted us to learn from His verses. These rules allow us to examine the etymological source of each word, the grammatical relationship between the words vis-a-vis each other, sentence structure, and many other telling details that hoard treasures of meaning if we just take the trouble to look.

The Talmud, also called the Gemara, teaches these rules in a debate format. This format allows students to analyze the competing premises of various perspectives on the same issue, leading to a broad and thorough appreciation of both the issue at hand and the intellectual game rules that apply to it.

But let’s get more detailed in our example. The first of the verses says, “But (ach) on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you gather in the crop of the land, you shall celebrate Hashem’s festival for a seven-day period” (ibid).

Some of the words in this verse have already been defined. Many other verses in the Torah use the word “celebrate” to mean “bring korbanos (offerings)”. In biblical times, Jews celebrated the holidays by taking a family vacation to Jerusalem in order to bring korbanos in the Beis HaMikdash (temple). That’s not new.

What we don’t know from previous verses is whether we are supposed to bring these particular offerings even on Shabbos. A superficial reading of the verse leaves us confused about how to handle this eventuality. Shabbos? Sukkos offerings? A Jew living in Israel at that time needed to know what to do.

Game On

The Gemara steps in to resolve our problem: “The academy of Hillel declare: May a person celebrate [by bringing an offering] on Shabbos? It teaches to say: ‘ach’ on the holiday you celebrate, and you do not celebrate on Shabbos” (Sifra on VaYikra).

The Ayelet HaShachar, Rabbi Meir Leibush Weiser’s classic corpus of Hebrew grammar rules, explains, “The word ach limits [the statement of] the sentence in which it appears.” Rabbi Weiser, better known by the acronym of his Hebrew initials, the Malbim, was a Torah leader in the eighteen hundreds whose authority regarding Hebrew grammar rules is universally acknowledged to this day. His observations and teachings make consistent sense through the entire corpus of Torah texts, illuminating concepts and fine points that might otherwise have been obscured or less clear.

His explanation of this Gemara is a perfect example. By applying the grammar rule as the Malbim explained, the sages of Hillel’s academy informed us that Jewish law prohibits bringing holiday offerings on Shabbos. Their decision wasn’t dictatorial. The law was right there in the words of the verse. Hillel’s academy simply told us where to find it: in the word “ach”.

Now whenever we encounter the word ach, we will know that it was placed there to limit the application of the verse it appears in. A quick review of the literature will prove that this rule applies to every verse using the word ach in the entire written Torah.

Without the rules of the game, we wouldn’t know how to play. We would have the ball in our hands, but we wouldn’t know how to score with it. We would have the Written Torah in our hands, but we wouldn’t know how to practically apply what it says.

Bringing Torah to Life

The Oral Torah teaches us the rules of the game, how to apply them, and how to actualize the Almighty’s beautiful vision for every situation in our lives. The Oral Torah brings the Written Torah to life.

Importantly, the rules described in the Oral Torah are nothing but logical imperatives flowing from the linguistic structure of the words themselves. The etymological, grammatical relationship between words, sentences, and sections is not given to flights of fancy. Rather, anyone who masters an accurate understanding of Hebrew etymology and grammar is free to gain his own footing and join the dialogue of Jewish scholars spanning generations.

Conversely, any effort to interpret a verse with even a single word unjustified by these rules sends the entire structure of Torah philosophy and law spinning into no-man’s-land. The secret of the Torah’s brilliance is in its interconnectedness – every rule of the game works together to form a whole picture.

With a puzzle, if one piece is missing, you might still be able to enjoy the rest of the picture, but Torah is more like a bowl of marbles. If you move one marble, all the rest must adjust to settle around it. It’s not that just one part of the picture changes; the whole picture changes. The integrity of every part is crucial for the integrity of all parts, and the integrity of the whole.

And as the secrets of the Written Torah are unlocked by the Oral Torah, oh, what an amazing whole it is. Crack the code – let Torah study unlock the secrets you were born to know. Getting to know the Torah from the inside out will astound you. Pick up a Gemara, find a teacher, and get in the game.

Based on Parasha U’Pishra by Rabbi Moshe Grylak

Written for http://www.arachimusa.org/