from the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

From the desk of …                    

 Rabbi Barry Schwartz

    

TRUTH TO POWER

I am honored that my rabbinical colleagues here in Bergen County have asked me to deliver the keynote address at the Sweet Tastes of Torah community night of study, Saturday night, Feb. 3, 2018 (7:00 PM) at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center.

My talk is entitled "Truth to Power: Prophetic Ethics in Troubled Times". It’s inspired by my new book, Path of the Prophets: The Ethics-Driven Life. I extend an invitation to you to join the several hundred people who gather at this annual evening of community learning. This year my address will be followed by break-out sessions led by a dozen of my colleagues. Each session will discuss a chapter of my book that elaborates on the prophetic path.

It gives me no pleasure to say that the publication of this book could not be more timely. It seems that we read about another sexual misconduct or political malfeasance scandal every week. As I will ask at the community event: “When will it end? Where will it end? How are we supposed to react? Is it enough to shake our heads or wring our hands? Is it enough to tusk-tusk and move on? Is it enough to forgive and forget? If this is a 'transformative' moment, then what have we learned? If this is a 'teachable' moment, then what do we say to our children?"

Enter the prophets. Even in their day they understood that the corruption of power is nothing new. They understood that the complicity of the elite is nothing new. And they understood that the apathy of the masses is nothing new.

Yet none of this stopped the prophets from speaking truth to power. None of this stopped the prophets from standing up when everyone else stood aside. None of this stopped the prophets from advocating for the path that I call “the ethics-driven life”.

Now more than ever, we need to rediscover these forgotten provocateurs who incited the most remarkable revolution in Western Civilization; who gave us the Great Commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves; who gave us the Ten Commandments that forbid murder and theft and adultery and lying; who gave us the charge to love the stranger, the widow and the orphan; who gave us the demand “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly”.

I hope to see you there!

Homo Moralis

We recently posted Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Kol Nidre 5778, which was entitled "Homo Moralis" and included a discussion of two books by Israeli history professor Yuval Noah Harari, and we are pleased to share with you that he followed this up with a book review in Tikkun, also entitled "Homo Moralis" and subtitled "A Review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" dated October 11th.

Based as it is on his sermon, there is much in one that bears repeating in the other. And so, here now is the review:

A child asked his mother, “Where do people come from?”

“Well,” the mother said, “Adam and Eve were the first parents on earth. They had babies who became grownups. Then those grownups had babies who eventually became grownups, and so on and so forth, until today.”

Later, the child decided to ask his father the same question. The father had a different explanation. “Long ago, there were no people on earth-just monkeys. Slowly the monkeys developed and changed into people. We call this process ‘evolution.’”

The children ran back to his mother and tearfully blurted, “You lied to me! You said people came from Adam and Eve, but Dad just old me that people came from monkeys!”

“I did not lie,” the mother replied calmly. “Your father was talking about his side of the family.”

Where do we come from? And where are we going? Those are two really big questions.. And the buzz these days is about a pair of books written to answer these questions that have become global bestsellers.

Yuval Noah Harari is a 40 something year old professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem… and now an international celebrity. His first book is called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. His new book is called Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Both are on the short list of many a world leader, from Bill Gates to Barak Obama. You need a good block of time to read and digest these formidable tomes. But the writing is surprisingly accessible and the discussion provocative. The author pulls no punches and tells you where he stands. Soon enough you will discern that Yuval Harari is a secular Jew and a skeptical academic. He is a student of Spinoza, a devotee of Darwin, and an acolyte of Einstein. Harari has little use for the Bible in particular and religion in general.

א א א א א א א א א א א א א א   א א א א א א 

Harari’s provocative thesis about the future is embodied in the title of his second work: Homo Deus. To explain: The first humans on the evolutionary tree were homo habilis, “handy man” if you will, who mastered primitive tool making. They were followed by homo erectus, “upright man”, who not only walked solidly on two feet, but mastered fire. A long time later we finally arrived: homo sapien, “wise man” (or is it “wise guy”), who mastered language and writing and computer science. It is Harari’s belief that we will soon become homo deus, “god-man”; super-human, god-like creatures, part carbon, part silicon; part man, part machine; an indistinguishable blend of human and robot. This revolutionary-evolutionary great leap forward will ironically lead to the extinction of the human race as we now know it. As Harari says in his attention grabbing quote at the top of his website: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

What does Harari mean when he says we will become gods? He explains that “The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.” The first will involve the intentional rewriting of our genetic code and the altering of our biochemical composition. The second will involve the intentional merging of our organic body with non-organic devices such as bionic hands, artificial eyes, and nano-robots infused into our bloodstream. The third will involve the supplementing and eventual replacement of our neural network, meaning our brain, with artificial intelligence.

The reason we will want to do all this, according to Harari, is that it will be the final fulfillment of humanity’s three deepest desires: immortality, bliss and omnipotence. We want to live forever, we want to be happy forever, and we want to be all powerful. Harari points out that that the march toward this holy trinity is unstoppable. The desire is unquenchable. The progress is inexorable. The technology is inevitable. After all, Harari grandly notes, over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible: turn the uncontrollable forces of nature-namely famine, plague and war, the big three scourges of human history, into manageable challenges. Today more people die from eating too much then from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases, and more people commit suicide than are killed by war or crime.

Harari cheerfully cautions against calling this future world populated by homo deus dystopian. He emphasizes how homo deus will alleviate human suffering, enable us to survive on Earth, and embolden us to populate the planets. But in the process Harari does admit that freedom and equality, humanism, liberalism, rationalism- all the isms we cherish, will collapse and disappear. He further concedes that the rate of change is accelerating so quickly that we have no idea how society will truly function by the end of the century. Homo deus will be more different from homo sapien than we were from homo erectus. In the pursuit of health, happiness and power we will upend every assumption about human life that you can possibly make.

Harari has a sub-chapter heading “Can Someone Please Hit the Brakes?” Then he proceeds to say, um, no we can’t. Firstly, nobody knows where the brakes are. And secondly, our economy and society will crash if we try. It’s that first contention, I would offer, that reveals his not-so-hidden bias, or moral blind-spot; the malady of many a great thinker. Harari is heir to a great religious tradition even if he downplays it to a point just short of denial. Why do I say this about someone of such astute intellect and passion? Not because Harari doesn’t believe in God. He’s entitled, and anyway, Judaism is a big-tent religion that has room for believers and non-believers alike. Not because he is, evidently, a non-practicing Jew. He’s entitled, and anyway, Judaism is a big tent ethnicity that has room for secular Jews, cultural Jews, and Jews who, like Harari, embrace Eastern meditation. And not because Harari agrees with Marx that religion is an opiate for the masses, and the faithful simply deluded followers of now discredited myths.

Harari’s blind-spot is that he chooses to ignore the great ethical revolution of ancient Israel, known as Prophetic Judaism, which changed the course of Western Civilization. The Prophets who gave to the world a moral imperative that is as essential today as it was two millennia ago; who gave us the Golden Rule that we should do unto others as we would others do unto us; who gave us the Great Commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves; who gave us the Ten Commandments that forbid murder and theft; who gave us the charge to love the stranger, the widow, the orphan…those most vulnerable in our society; those without a voice; who gave us the demand “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly”.

We do well to ponder anew that old and famous distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. The Greeks gave us reason and science, the Hebrews gave us compassion and ethics. Leo Strauss opined that “Western man became what he is, and is what he is, through the coming together of biblical faith and Greek thought”. Matthew Arnold wrote that “Hebraism and Hellenism are the two essential philosophies of life between which civilized man must choose.” 

Solomon Freehof clarified that, “The Greek is interested in nature’s law; the Hebrew in nature’s lawgiver. The Greek is interested in peace of heart; the Hebrew in progress of character. The Greek said: Seek harmony and your will find serenity; the Hebrews said: Seek holiness and you will find nobility.”

As we hurtle toward the future we need Athens and we need Jerusalem. We need the Greek sensibility that the unexamined life is not worth living, and we need the Hebraic sensibility that the immoral life is not worth living. We cannot fear the advance of science, and anyway Harari is right that it will speed ahead whether we like it or not. But neither should we abandon the insights of religion that will tap the brakes, and slow us down just enough to temper knowledge with wisdom. It’s a touch ironic that the brave new world depicted by Harari was in a way anticipated by the opening myth of Genesis. Adam and Eve want to eat not just from the Tree of Knowledge but also from the Tree of Life; they want to be omniscient and immortal. That is why God says in Gen.3:22, “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad, what if he should stretch our his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!”

But remember that the full name of the second tree is The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. Humankind is unique in its moral discernment. That is why it God can pose the question to Adam and Eve, “What is this you have done?” (Gen. 3:13). And that is why the question is repeated to Cain (Gen.4:10), after he is explicitly warned, “Sin crouches at the door; its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” (Gen.4:7)

It makes no sense to judge ourselves if we don’t know right from wrong or to warn ourselves if we can’t control our actions, or to even question ourselves if we can’t take responsibility for those actions. When Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” the answer is yes! “Your brother’s blood cries out to me!” (Gen.4:9-10). If we are going to reprogram our brains the software package better contain an ethical decision making file, or we will not become homo deus, but homo roboticus, mere robotic drones in human look-alike costume.

Read Harari. Take all the time you need; it’s worth it. You will feel challenged and exalted…but by the end of the second work, you will also be depressed. But remember that if we are truly homo sapien/wise the next stage of human evolution will not be homo deus, but homo moralis, moral man. And perhaps our brave new world will be not a nightmare, but a dream. Or as the poet Judy Chicago penned it, “And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.”

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Kol Nidre 5778

HOMO MORALIS

EREV YOM KIPPUR 5778

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

A child asked his mother, “Where do people come from?”

“Well,” the mother said, “Adam and Eve were the first parents on earth. They had babies who became grownups. Then those grownups had babies who eventually became grownups, and so on and so forth, until today.”

Later, the child decided to ask his father the same question. The father had a different explanation. “Long ago, there were no people on earth⏤just monkeys. Slowly the monkeys developed and changed into people. We call this process ‘evolution.’”

The children ran back to his mother and tearfully blurted, “You lied to me! You said people came from Adam and Eve, but Dad just told me that people came from monkeys!”

“I did not lie,” the mother replied calmly. “Your father was talking about his side of the family.”

Where do we come from?

And where are we going?

Those are two really big questions.

And the buzz these days is about a pair of books written to answer these questions… that have become global bestsellers.
Yuval Noah Harari is a 40 something year old professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem… and now an international celebrity. His first book is called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. His new book is called Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Both are on the short list of many a world leader, from Bill Gates to Barak Obama. I decided to tackle them this summer. You need a good block of time. But the writing is surprisingly accessible and the discussion provocative. The author pulls no punches and tells you where he stands. For me this was at once delighting and disconcerting.

⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪

You see, Yuval Harari is a secular Jew and a skeptical academic. He is a student of Spinoza, a devotee of Darwin, and an acolyte of Einstein. Harari has little use for the Bible in particular and religion in general. He would certainly side with the father in my opening story.

Harari’s provocative thesis about the future is embodied in the title of his second work: Homo Deus. To explain: The first humans on the evolutionary tree were homo habilis, handy man if you will, who mastered primitive tool making. They were followed by homo erectus, upright man, who not only walked solidly on two feet, but mastered fire. A long time later we finally arrived: homo sapien, wise man (or is it wise guy), who mastered language and writing and computer science.

It is Harari’s belief that we will soon become homo deus, god-man; super-human, god-like creatures, part carbon, part silicon; part man, part machine; an indistinguishable blend of human and robot.

This revolutionary, evolutionary great leap forward will ironically lead to the extinction of the human race as we now know it. As Harari says in his attention grabbing quote at the top of his website: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

What does Harari mean when he says we will become gods? He explains that, “The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.”

The first will involve the intentional rewriting of our genetic code and the altering of our biochemical composition.

The second will involve the intentional merging of our organic body with non-organic devices such as bionic hands, artificial eyes, and nano-robots infused into our bloodstream.

The third will involve the supplementing and eventual replacement of our neural network, meaning our brain, with artificial intelligence.

The reason we will want to do all this, according to Harari, is that it will be the final fulfillment of humanity’s three deepest desires: immortality, bliss and omnipotence. We want to live forever, we want to be happy forever, and we want to be all powerful.

Harari points out that that the march toward this holy trinity is unstoppable. The desire is unquenchable. The progress is inexorable. And the technology is inevitable.

After all, Harari grandly notes, over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible: turn the uncontrollable forces of nature⏤namely famine, plague and war, the big three scourges of human history, into manageable challenges. Today more people die from eating too much then from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by war or crime.

Harari cheerfully cautions against calling this future world populated by homo deus dystopian. He emphasizes how homo deus will alleviate human suffering, enable us to survive on Earth, and embolden us to populate the planets. But in the process Harari does admit that freedom and equality, humanism, liberalism, rationalism⏤all the isms we cherish⏤will collapse and disappear. He further concedes that the rate of change is accelerating so quickly that we have no idea how society will truly function by the end of the century. Homo deus will be more different from homo sapiens than we were from homo erectus. In the pursuit of health, happiness and power we will upend every assumption about human life that you can possibly make.

Harari has a sub-chapter heading, “Can Someone Please Hit the Brakes?” Then he proceeds to say, um, no we can’t. Firstly, nobody knows where the brakes are. And secondly, our economy and society will crash if we try.

Well, I can hit the brakes. With my remaining five minutes. So here goes.

Yuval Noah Harari is heir to a great religious tradition. I feel badly that he scorns his birthright.

Not because he doesn’t believe in God. He’s entitled, and anyway, Judaism is a big-tent religion that has room for believers and non-believers alike.

Not because he is, evidently, a non-practicing Jew. He’s entitled, and anyway, Judaism is a big tent ethnicity that has room for secular Jews, cultural Jews, and even Jews who, like Harari, embrace Eastern meditation, call them Bu-Jews (or is it Jew-bus).

And not because he agrees with Marx that religion is an opiate for the masses, and its adherents deluded followers of now discredited myths.

No, what makes me sad is that Harari ignores the great ethical revolution of ancient Israel, known as Prophetic Judaism, which changed the course of Western Civilization.

The Prophets gave to the world a moral imperative that is as essential today as it was two millennia ago… and maybe even more so.

They gave us the Golden Rule that we should do unto others as we would others do unto us.

They gave us the Great Commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.

They gave us the Ten Commandments that forbid murder and theft.

They gave us the charge to love the stranger, the widow, the orphan… those most vulnerable in our society, those without a voice.

They gave us the demand “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly”.

While the Greeks gave us reason and science, the Hebrews gave us compassion and ethics.

Leo Strauss said that “Western man became what he is, and is what he is, through the coming together of Greek thought and biblical faith” [emphasis and order mine].

Matthew Arnold wrote that “Hebraism and Hellenism are the two essential philosophies of life between which civilized man must choose.”

Solomon Freehof clarified that, “The Greek is interested in nature’s law; the Hebrew in nature’s lawgiver. The Greek is interested in peace of heart; the Hebrew in progress of character. The Greek said: Seek harmony and your will find serenity; the Hebrews said: Seek holiness and you will find nobility.”

As we hurtle toward the future we need Athens and we need Jerusalem.

We need the Greek sensibility that the unexamined life is not worth living, and we need the Hebraic sensibility that the immoral life is not worth living.

We cannot fear the advance of science, and anyway Harari is right that it will speed ahead whether we like it or not.

But neither should we abandon the insights of religion that will tap the brakes, and slow us down just enough to temper knowledge with wisdom.

It’s a touch ironic that the brave new world depicted by Harari was in a way anticipated by the opening myth of Genesis. Adam and Eve want to eat not just from the Tree of Knowledge but also from the Tree of Life; they want to be omniscient and immortal. That is why God says in Gen.3:22, “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad, what if he should stretch our his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!”

But remember that the full name of the second tree is The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. Humankind is unique in its moral discernment. That is why God can pose the question to Adam and Eve, “What is this you have done?” (Gen. 3:13). And that is why the question is repeated to Cain (Gen.4:10), after he is explicitly warned, “Sin crouches at the door; its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” (Gen.4:7)

It makes no sense to judge ourselves if we don’t know right from wrong.

It makes no sense to warn ourselves if we can’t control our actions.

If makes no sense to even question ourselves if we can’t take responsibility for those actions.

When Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” the answer is yes! “Your brother’s blood cries out to me!” (Gen.4:9-10).

If we are going to reprogram our brains the software package better contain an ethical decision making file, or we will not become homo deus, but homo roboticus, mere robotic drones in human look-alike costume.

The clock is ticking… but my time is up. This leaves me only a minute for a shameless promotion. After you read Homo Deus you need to read one volume on the prophetic revolution of Ancient Israel that I have posited as the ethical antidote to unbridled technology.

Have no fear… that book has now been written, and will appear this spring. It is called, Path of the Prophets: The Ethics Driven Life. It is five years to a lifetime in the making. It is written by yours truly. I will even give you a good discount on the work, and sign it for free.

You see, if we are truly wise the next stage of human evolution will not be homo deus, but homo moralis, moral man.

And our brave new world will be not a nightmare, but a dream. In the words of the poet:

And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another's will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life's creatures
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again. (Judy Chicago, 1979)

 From the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

A Message From Our President

Dr. Lance Strate

Buildings and Grounds

As a religious tradition, Judaism emphasizes the importance of spiritual communion and transcendence. Unlike many other religions, however, for the most part we do not advocate complete separation from the material world. Jewish teachings generally do not focus on the nature of the divine or the hereafter, or on trying to know the unknowable, but rather ask us to direct our attention to the world we inhabit and the question of how we should live in our lives, on the practical concerns of education, ethics and social justice.

In other words, we are asked and tasked to remain well grounded, even as we acknowledge the presence of something greater than ourselves, and aspire to the heights of religious experience. We enter the sacred space of our sanctuary, and observe the sacred time of the high holy days, festivals, holidays, and Shabbat, only to return to the profane space and time of our everyday lives. As others have pointed out, the Fourth Commandment not only directs us to "remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy," but goes on to instruct us that "six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Adonai your God." We are commanded both to observe the Sabbath and also to fulfill our earthly responsibilities and get our work done.

With this in mind, I would like to point out that our labor, as a congregation, includes the maintenance and repair of our buildings and grounds. This includes our sanctuary and social hall, our religious school building, the rabbi's residence next to our religious school, the garden area alongside and behind the religious school, and our front lawn, driveways, and sidewalks. We are fortunate indeed that our congregation owns these properties outright, with no mortgage or liens against them, and to have our Buildings and Grounds Committee ably chaired by Michael Fishbein for many years.

The tasks that fall under the heading of buildings and grounds are familiar and numerous, and as profane as they come, whether it's taking out the garbage, cleaning bathrooms, changing light bulbs, shoveling snow, mowing the grass, fixing and maintaining heating and air conditioning, painting, replacing worn carpeting, fixing and replacing school equipment, and so on, and so on, and so on. I think we all pretty much know what it's like, after all.

It's not the sort of stuff we associate with a house of worship, and it's not the sort of stuff we like to think about anyway, but it's an important part of our earthly responsibilities, it's work that has to get done if we want to have a sanctuary, social hall, and school. And I think we all know that the costs associated with this sort of maintenance have only gone up over the years.

At our April Board of Trustees meeting, we took a long hard look at our revenues and expenses, and our membership dues, religious school tuition, and b'nai mitzvah fees. And we also looked at the building maintenance fee we ask all of our members to contribute to. And the funny thing is, no one could remember when it was last adjusted. Was it a decade ago? More? No one knew, but in the end, it didn't really matter. A long time ago the fee was set at $200, and it might as well have been a galaxy far, far away, given how much has changed since then.

I want to be honest with you. No one on the board wants to raise any of our dues or fees, we agonize over the issue, and over our fiduciary responsibility to our temple. The truth is that we are running at a deficit, and we need to increase our revenue to reduce the degree to which we are in the red. For this reason, the board voted to raise the building maintenance fee to $350, while agreeing not to raise membership dues, religious school tuition, and b'nai mitzvah fees. As this is the first time this fee has been raised in many, many years, we hope that you will understand and support this decision.

Our buildings and grounds are not our congregation. Our congregation consists of you and me, of us, together. But our buildings and grounds make most of what we do as a congregation possible. They are our common inheritance as a congregation, and our common responsibility, and it is incumbent on us to take proper care of our properties, so that we can pass them on to future generations.

I end this message with a further plea for donations above and beyond our dues and fees, because membership, tuition, and the like do not cover all our expenses. If you can afford to give something extra, please consider supporting our little shul on the hill, so that we can continue to be the little shul that could.

Religious School Wrap-Up

From the pages of Kadima, the Newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

Religious School News 

     from


Cantor Sandy Horowitz

Religious School Director

There is a tradition called “counting the omer” which involves blessing and counting each of the 49 days between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot. On Passover our ancestors were freed from slavery, on Shavuot they received the Ten Commandments.

As another religious school year comes to a close, we will have counted 31 school days since we began last September. 31 days of parents making sure your children made it to Adas Emuno on a Sunday morning; 31 days of coming together as a learning community; 31 days of endeavoring to inspire the hearts and minds of our next Jewish generation.

A special thank you goes out to the religious school parents for all the ways you have volunteered this year–as “parent in charge”, helping with holiday celebrations, class pot-luck dinners and more. Gratitude abounds especially to the school committee for their constant leadership and support.

We are grateful to each of our teachers for their commitment and creativity. Ably assisted by the madrichim, we owe thanks to them as well for helping out in the classroom and acting as role models for the younger students. A special shout-out goes to seniors Steven Chartoff, Julian Pecht and Ollie Racciatti who are heading off to college in the fall. We will miss you!

Lastly, we acknowledge the rebirth of our teen Youth Group this past spring; appreciation goes out to Rabbi Schwartz for leading this effort, and to the group leaders Sabina Albirt and Samantha Rosenbloom for making it happen each month.

We want to keep this good thing going, and growing: Please spread the word about our wonderful Religious School! If you know of families with children from preschool age through seventh grade who might be interested in a dynamic Jewish education, please reach out to them and encourage them to contact us at adasschool at gmail.com.



DATES TO REMEMBER:

Saturday May 6
7:30 PM School Committee Meeting

Friday, January 20
10:00 AM Bat Mitzvah of Lily Futeran

Friday May 19
7:30 PM Shabbat Family Service
Confirmation Ceremony

Saturday June 24
10:00 AM Bar Mitzvah of Jack Schuller

Confirmation Class Schedule:
Sunday May 7
Sunday May 14
Thursday May 18 (rehearsal)

The Rabbi’s Top Ten: The Best of Everything Jewish

Did you know that our own Rabbi Schwartz is now writing an online column, in other words a blog, for the Times of Israel? His first entry, dated April 13, is entitled The Rabbi’s Top Ten: The Best of Everything Jewish.  You can see it over on their site by clicking on the title, or read it here:

With apologies to (the retiring) David Letterman, I love top ten lists. 

Maybe it’s genetic….  I’ve been making lists all my life. So does my mother. I’m one of those people who have a daily to-do list. I write out a fresh one every day. I have short range lists and medium range lists and long range lists. I have lists of books to read and books I have already read. Sometimes I even make a list of my lists.

Maybe it’s religious…. I am a rabbi and have been for a long time. As a rabbi I deal with lists of people and lists of prayers and lists of Torah portions. I read the Bible quite a bit and there sure are lots of lists in Scripture. Take the Ten Commandments for example. Now that may be the ultimate Top Ten!

Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher….  I like to use lists in the classroom. They are a practical and useful way to organize and prioritize information. Lists, for example, naturally lend themselves to ranking. My wife says that I am obsessed with rankings; both useful and not-so-useful… like the greatest tennis players of all time, the greatest basketball players of all time, the greatest movies of all time, the greatest television shows of all time, the greatest presidents of all time…you get the point.

So this new blog (my first) is a labor of love. It’s just plain fun. At the same time it’s harder than you think, because being a perfectionist and a list maker can be a dangerous combination. I had to justify all my lists and rankings to myself. Only you will judge if I got it right. This collection is entirely personal and subjective. Now l invite you to lend a hand in making them better. I’m happy to hear your comments. Believe it or not I already have 52 top ten lists covering units like: books, movers and shakers, thinkers and dreamers, the arts, history, geography, celebration, vocabulary… even a whole section called Jewish macho that deals with soldiers, spies, rebels, criminals and athletes. So, yes, if all goes well, I plan to share one list a week… for a year (starting next week). That is, unless you send me a suggestion for a new top ten list… that makes my top ten.

Organized By Law

From the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

A Message From Our President

Dr. Lance Strate

Organized By Law

Moses is sometimes referred to as The Lawgiver, one of the first to appear in the ancient world, but there were others as well. Some of the earlier examples of codified law include the Code of Ur-Nammu, the king of Ur, the birthplace of our patriarch Abraham; the Laws of Eshnunna, a city-state to the north of Ur; and the famous Code of Hammurabi, the Amorite (a Semitic tribe) king who ruled over the Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia (that included the city-states of Ur and Eshnunna). Some later examples include Draco of Athens (whose harsh laws gave us the term draconian), Lycurgus of Sparta, and the Byzantine Roman Emperor Justinian I, whose codification of Roman law forms the basis of the civil law system used in many western societies (but not the United States, where we follow common law, a system originating in England, but resembling Talmudic law in many ways).

The Mosaic code consists of the Ten Commandments, which are only the first ten of a total of 613 laws and commandments contained within the Five Books of Moses, which is why Torah is often translated as The Law. Our religious tradition attributes Mosaic Law to God, who wrote down the Law on the first set of tablets that Moses brought down with him from Mount Sinai, and then dictated the second set after Moses shattered the first. Historians, however, believe that the system of law found in the Torah was derived, in part, from the earlier Semitic codes of Mesopotamia, and that the laws it contains evolved over the course of several centuries before it was finally canonized. In addition to the written law of the Torah, Jewish law includes the oral Torah, the interpretative oral tradition that was later codified as the Talmud. And in addition to Talmudic law, there has been further elaboration in the form of Rabbinic law. Taken as a whole, Biblical law, Talmudic law, and Rabbinic law are known as Halakha, the Hebrew word for walk or go (paralleling the Chinese concept of Tao or Dao, meaning the way or path).

For our ancestors in ancient Israel, the Torah was their constitution, providing them with guidance not only about how to worship God, but about how to govern their affairs. And for most of the history of the Diaspora, Halkha was the constitution for Jewish communities as they were allowed to function autonomously under the sovereignty of other nations. This changed with the coming of the Enlightenment and emancipation, as Jews in many European lands were granted equal status as citizens, and nowhere more so than in the New World, in our American republic. And we may indeed take pride in the fact that our founding fathers, in framing the Constitution of the United States, looked to the Torah and the tradition of Jewish law as one of their practical models, as well as a source of inspiration.

And this brings me to my main point, that it is not just peoples and nations and religions that adopt constitutions, but also modern organizations, such as our own—indeed, it is pretty much a requirement for any nonprofit or not-for-profit entity. Did you know that Adas Emuno has a set of By-Laws? I'm guessing that you probably didn't. And they haven't been much of a concern for us, as our congregation has been fortunate in being free from the politics that plague the governance of many other temples and in not experiencing any major conflicts on our Board or among our membership for many, many years.

But it is part of our responsibility, for our Officers, Trustees, and membership, to review our By-Laws periodically, to make sure that we are acting in concert with them, and if not, to either adjust our policies and procedures, or to amend our constitution. The Torah, as a sacred text, cannot be amended, which is why it was necessary to add the interpretations and supplemental rulings of Talmudic and Rabbinic Law. But other documents, such as our nation's constitution and our congregation's by-laws, contain clauses that allow us to make changes to them, to correct and improve and adjust these systems of law to better serve people's needs and adapt to changing conditions.

Over the past year our Board, led by Fred Friedman and Norman Rosen, conducted a review of our By-Laws, and have come up with a set of changes that are needed to bring them in line with current practice, and otherwise better serve the interests of our congregation. The Board has voted to approve the amended By-Laws and put them forward to the membership for approval. To this end, we will schedule a special meeting of the congregation to discuss and vote on the changes. We'll let you know about the date in a separate mailing, and include the proposed changes to the By-Laws so you'll be able to vote on them fully informed. And according to our present By-Laws, "Amendments to the By-Laws shall require an affirmative vote of two-thirds of the members present and voting" (a provision that is not one we are looking to change). The By-Laws also specify that a quorum consisting of twenty percent of eligible voting members is required, so I want to make a special appeal to you to attend this meeting, and if you cannot, please give your proxy to someone who will be attending.

I don't think there is anything especially controversial in the proposed changes, and that's because we decided not to include any changes in one area that is controversial, which has to do with the membership status and privileges of non-Jewish spouses and family members. What we would like to do at our special meeting, in addition to approving the relatively non-controversial changes, is to open a dialogue on this more controversial topic, and get your thoughts and opinions on whether non-Jewish family members should have voting rights, the right to serve as an officer, trustee, or committee member, and other such issues. The question of whether to make any changes to our existing, longstanding policy in this area, and if so, what changes to make, is an important one, and requires serious discussion and deliberation. I invite you to beginning thinking about it, keep an open mind, and come ready to speak your mind and listen to what others have to say when we hold our special meeting. Based on the feedback we get at that time, we will consider additional amendment to the constitution that can be considered at our annual congregational meeting in June.

As Jews, we trace our history back to Abraham entering into a covenant with God, and covenant is a term that means contract or legally binding agreement. And we tell the story of how the covenant was completed when Moses the Lawgiver gave us the Torah, The Law, our Tree of Life. And as a congregation, we are organized according to our By-Laws, and as a Jewish congregation we owe it to ourselves and to those who will follow in our footsteps to keep them in good working order in the same way that we maintain our buildings and grounds, our religious school and our rituals and services.

Passover and Plato

The following is a repost from my own blog that is relevant to the discussions of Judaism and Greek philosophy that have come up repeatedly in this year's Torah study, with its focus on Maimonides. In this instance, it's not the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem that is emphasized, but the commonality of the two worldviews, both with roots in the first truly literate cultures of antiquity. 

The post involves a response to another blog post by Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem, and while the Academy and Rabbi Cardozo are Orthodox in orientation, the conclusion has much relevance for Reform Judaism in the 21st century.

And the post is relevant as well to the 4,000 year old Pesach festival that we have been observing over this past week:  



Apart from its other potential benefits in areas such as ethics and spirituality, religion can lead to important insights associated with a media ecology perspective.   

For example, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman mentions how he learned about the Ten Commandments of Moses as a child, presumably in Hebrew School, and was particularly taken with the Second Commandment's prohibition against graven images of any kind, independent of their content, which in practical terms can be said to be the first historical expression of a media ecology approach.  

For Walter Ong, as a Jesuit priest learning about religious traditions, he explains how a big breakthrough came for him when he realized that the emphasis on the visual sense, which has it roots in the literate culture of ancient Greece, is not present in the literate culture of ancient Israel, and that a high degree of residual orality persists in Jewish religious tradition, to this day. The visualism that first started to coalesce in Greece and Rome did not fully come to dominant western culture until after the printing revolution begun in the 15th century, but from that point on, it is integral to all that is, or was, distinctive about modern western culture.  

Now, Ong and Postman, along with other media ecology scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, have identified Plato's Phaedrus  as including the first form of scholarship in the field of media ecology, insofar as that dialogue includes some discussion of the differences between speech and writing as modes of communication. That discussion is supplemented by further observation in Plato's Seventh Letter. 

  So now, with all that in mind, I was particularly interested to see a blog post entitled Plato, the Haggada and the Art of Reading written by Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem. The post appeared on March 14, in advance of the Passover holiday, and begins like this:
 

Now that Jews all over the world will once again assemble around the Seder table and read the Haggada—the story of the exodus from Egypt—it may be worthwhile to put some thought into the art of reading.

In The Phaedrus (275a-278a) and in his Seventh Letter (344c), Plato questioned—and in fact attacked—the written word as being completely inadequate. This may explain why philosophers have scarcely written about the art of writing, although they extensively engaged in that very craft!

It is well known that Plato used to write in the form of dialogues, and it is clear to anyone reading these conversations that his main purpose in doing so was to hide the characteristics of the texts. He worked for years on polishing this literary form. Cicero maintains that Plato actually died at his writing table at the age of eighty one. “Plato uno et octogesimo anno scribens est mortuus.” (1)

 
The footnote reads: "Cicero, 'On Old Age,' Section 5." And let me note at this point that within the dialogue, it is Socrates who takes this position, and there is at least some question as to whether these are arguments made by Socrates, who left us no written works and appears to us as a champion of orality. Is Plato a reporter, in this sense, relating what Socrates said, or is Socrates just a literary character, a mouthpiece for Plato's own thought? Whether the truth lies more in one direction or another, we can assume that the concerns expressed were those of Plato, but also note the irony that he did in fact put them into writing, or else we would never have known about them.  

Okay, back to Rabbi Cardozo...
 

What bothered Plato was that he believed the written word would fall prey to evil or incompetent readers who would do anything they want with the text, leaving the writer unable to defend or explain himself. He feared the text would take on a life of its own, independent of its author, as is indeed characteristic of the written word. Even more interesting is his observation that a written text actually becomes a “pharmakon”—a drug that can either heal or kill, depending on how it is applied. It may even be used as a prompt, but will ultimately lead to memory loss since it will make the brain idle. Years later, Immanuel Kant wrote along similar lines, saying that the “script” wreaked havoc on the “body of memory.” (2)

 
This second footnote reads: "Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht, Suhrkamp, STW 193, Frankfurt am Main, p 489-490." The point about memory is well-taken, of course, and speaks to the fundamental notion of use it or lose it. But beyond memory is the gradual erosion and loss of mnemotechy, of mnemonic techniques that were developed in oral cultures, and continued to be used and supplemented in scribal cultures. That's on the technical side, but Rabbi Cardozo points to a different aspect of memory:
 

However, according to Plato, this means far more than just losing information, or being deprived of the skill of memorizing. For him, real knowledge was a matter of “intrinsic understanding,” demanding a person’s total presence within what he reads or says. Only that with which I totally identify and which has become united with my Self can be called knowledge and is in-scribed in my whole personality. That which I have simply read or learned superficially is not really knowledge.

 

This is an important point as well.   We learn, memorize, internalize with our whole body. Ong refers to the Jesuit scholar Marcel Jousse who used the term "verbomotor lifestyle" to refer to this involvement of the whole body. In Jewish tradition, in praying and also in studying Talmud (which Ong mentions), individuals daven, a Hebrew word with the connotation of rocking back and forth, although the denotative meaning is pray. One of our most important prayers, the V'Ahavta (which comes from the book of Deuteronomy) begins with, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." In other words, with complete involvement of body, mind, and spirit. And getting back to the point about memory, McLuhan's colleague, Edmund Carpenter, noted that we use the phrase, learning by heart, where heart is a metaphor for the body—it's not just a mental activity.  

Alright then, it's time now for Rabbi Cardozo to apply this understanding to the Jewish observance of Passover:
 

Unwittingly, Plato touched on a most fundamental aspect of the Jewish Tradition. We Jews are called “the people of the book.” But we are not; we are the people of the ear. The Torah is not to be read, but rather is to be heard. It was not written in the conventional sense. It was the Divine word spoken at Sinai, which had to be heard and which afterwards, out of pure necessity, became frozen in a text, but with the sole intention of being immediately “defrosted” through the art of hearing. This, then, became the great foundation of the Jewish Oral Tradition. 

This brings up some interesting points about what went on with God and Moses according to the Torah. My understanding is that God wrote the Torah down on stone tablets, typically depicted as the Ten Commandments, but the Torah has 613 laws all told, plus the narrative that makes up the Five Books of Moses. Traditionally, it's said that the entire Torah was delivered in this way, but whatever it consisted of, the story has it that Moses threw the tablets down when he saw the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, so that they were broken into fragments, then went back up the mount, and the second time around God dictated them and Moses wrote them down in his own hand.  

But there's more! By the time of the Roman conquest of Judah, which they renamed Judea, there were two groups vying for dominance . One, the Sadducees, who were members of the upper class, including the priests who controlled the Second Temple, only acknowledged the written law as found in the Torah as a document. The other group was the Pharisees, from whom Rabbinic Judaism emerged, and who have been unfairly maligned within the Christian New Testament (especially given the fact that much of what Jesus says in the New Testament is essentially an extreme Pharisaic position). The Pharisees argued that in addition to the written Torah, God also gave Moses the oral Torah, which is the tradition of oral interpretation of the written text. This allowed for much greater flexibility, and from this comes the document known as the Talmud, which is a written record of that oral tradition. 
   

But note that it is an oral tradition quite different from the oral tradition we associate with oral cultures, but rather an oral tradition that responds to a written text. The answer to Plato's criticism that a text cannot answer questions is this act of interpretation. That is the role of the teacher, and that is what is meant by a rabbi, or in eastern tradition a guru, someone who can speak for, answer for, and interpret a text.  

All right now, let's return to Rabbi Cardozo and the distinction between seeing and hearing:

 

Reading entails using one’s eyes and, as such, the act remains external. The words are not carved into the very soul of the reader. Rabbi Yaakov Leiner, son of the famous Ishbitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner, and one of the keenest minds in the Chassidic tradition, speaks about seeing. He makes the valuable observation that sight discloses the external aspect of things while hearing reveals the internal. (3) One must hear a text, not read it. This is the reason why the body of Torah consists of minimum words and maximum oral interpretation.

Footnote 3 reads: "Rabbi Yaacov Leiner, Beis Yaakov: Rosh Chodesh Av." And this is a very important point. Vision gives us exteriors. Voice comes from inside us, with the breath of life, so that the interior is exteriorized, and then internalized again through the act of hearing.  

Now, let's return to Rabbi Cardozo and the question of the Talmud as oral tradition:

 

Still, does the open-endedness of the Torah not present the opportunity for anyone to read his own thoughts into the text and violate its very spirit? The Jewish Tradition responded to this challenge with great profundity. It created an ongoing oral tradition in which unwritten rules of interpretation were handed down, thereby securing the inner meaning of the text while at the same time allowing the student to use all of his creative imagination. Even after the Oral Torah was written down in the form of the Talmud, it remained unwritten, as any Talmud student can testify. No other text is so succinct and “understaffed” in written words while simultaneously given to such vast interpretation. The fact that the art of reading the Talmud can only be learned through a teacher–student relationship, and not merely through the written word, proves our point. Only when the student hears his master’s oral interpretation of the text is he able to read it, because the teacher will not only give him explanations but will also convey the inner vibrations that were once heard at the revelation on Mount Sinai. This is the deeper knowledge that the teacher received from his masters, taking him all the way back to the supreme moment at Sinai. In that way, the student can free himself from a mechanical approach to the text. He will hear new voices in the old text, without deviating from its inner meaning. This will give him the courage to think on his own and rid himself of prejudice. The text, then, is not read but heard.

Given our visualist tradition in the west, we tend to assume that reading means reading silently to ourselves, which transforms us into isolated individuals. Reading out loud binds us together as an audience and community, it creates a relationship, whether it is teacher-student, parent-child, or from a religious perspective, God and humanity. Interpretation, an open approach to meaning-making, is linked to a social, relational approach to understanding, and in some sense in constructing our view of the world, our reality. 
   

At this point, you might be asking, what does all this have to do with Passover. And well you should ask because here is what Rabbi Cardozo has to say:

 

Jewish law states that even if one is alone on the Seder night, one must pronounce the text of the Haggada and not just read it. He must hear himself, explain the text to himself in a verbal way, and be in continuous dialogue with himself so as to understand and feel what happened thousands of years ago. Plato alluded to this matter without fully realizing why his own teachings never came close to receiving the treatment they perhaps deserved. They are read too much and heard too little.

 

 As someone who has made a career in higher education, I must note that this has profound implications for education in general, and Postman emphasized the importance of a balance between the spoken and written word that was achieved in the classroom, and how reliance on electronic technologies for teaching might disrupt that balance. If nothing else, it is a point to consider, as is the point about reading out loud even if we are by ourselves, to enter into a dialogue with ourselves.  And from a religious point of view, we are never completely alone, are we?  

In that respect, Rabbi Cardozo continues with a discussion of the spiritual dimension of all this:

 

This may be the difference between the Divine word and the human word. The Divine is a dimension where words have no spiritual space. Human words are too grounded in the text. The Divine word goes beyond these textual limitations and can find its way only through the act of listening, because it is through this particular one of our senses that we are able to hear the “perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.” (4)

The footnote reads: "Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) p. 8." The reference to spiritual space in this passage is quite interesting. Whether the space is sacred or profane, writing fixes and freezes language in space. While space is perceived through all the senses, it is most closely connected to vision. Visual space is distinct from acoustic space, a realization central to McLuhan's media ecology (and that of Carpenter as well). But sound is best understood with respect to time rather than space. Sound is an event, a happening, as Ong reminds us, sound is ephemeral and only exists as it is going out of existence. And Ong too notes the intimate connection between the oral-aural world and the sacred.

  Rabbi Cardozo concludes with the following:

 

When we read the text on the Seder night, we should be aware that it only provides the opening words. The real Haggada has no text. It is not to be read, but is rather to be heard. And just as with the Torah, we have not even begun to understand its full meaning. We are simply perpetual beginners.

This is a wonderful sentiment, that we are all learners, all seekers. Jack Goody makes this point about religious understanding in oral cultures, that it is about being a seeker rather than about adhering to fixed dogma. Put another way, the sacred text and the oral tradition are media environments, and as environments they are too vast to fully comprehend or map, but they are open to ongoing exploration.

  Rabbi Cardozo ends his post with, "moadim le-simcha," which means happy holidays, and I would like to return the sentiment to him, "chag sameach" (another Hebrew phrase meaning happy holiday), and happy holidays to people of good will of all faiths and beliefs.