Don’t Make It Weird

The church fathers had a principle that scripture must always make sense, so it should be taken literally until it starts sounding strange. At that point, you’d probably better treat it metaphorically. This is a good rule of thumb for preventing scripture from ever looking too weird. But what if it actually is weird?

The purified man and the plague in the walls

This week’s Torah portion concerns a set of phenomena that do not exist in our world in any remotely plausible sense. While our Parsha is a bit extreme, it’s a good example for helping understand why most Jews either 1) basically just ignore the Torah 2) listen to it chanted in a language they don’t quite understand or 3) have someone explain that it’s actually a metaphor.

The title of this week’s portion, Meṣoraˁ, prescribes how to ceremonially purify someone from something called ṣaraˁat. It is an illness we cannot even really name let alone understand. Whatever it is, this affliction, classically translated “leprosy” in the King James Version, is definitely not leprosy. Look how it works:

When you enter the land of Canaan that I give you as a possession, and I inflict a plague of “leprosy” (ṣaraˁat) upon a house in the land you possess, the owner shall come and tell the priest, saying, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.” … If, when he examines the plague, the plague in the walls of the house is found to consist of greenish or reddish streaks that appear to go deep into the wall, the priest shall come out of the house to the entrance, and close up the house for seven days.

Leviticus 14:34-38

The house–like a human body affected with the illness–has to rest for a week, the length of time it took God to create the world in Genesis 1 and so the cosmic measure of a cycle of purification. After this, the stones infected with this illness are to be surgically removed and taken to an “unclean place” so it does not spread. Yet also like a body, the house can be reinfected:

Lev. 14:43    If the plague again breaks out in the house, after the stones have been pulled out and after the house has been scraped and replastered, the priest shall come to examine: if the plague has spread in the house, it is a malignant “leprosy” in the house; it is unclean

The final chapter describes how parallel impurities can saturate the male body. Having moved on from a cosmic illness we learn just how vulnerable men are to ordinary ritual contamination. A discharge from the male member, surely quite common in a period with no mechanisms for public hygiene or antibiotics, is so incredibly contagious that everything he touches becomes almost radioactive:

Any bedding on which the one with the discharge lies shall be unclean, and every object on which he sits shall be unclean. Anyone who touches his bedding shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. Whoever sits on an object on which the one with the discharge has sat shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. Whoever touches the body of the one with the discharge shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. … If one with a discharge, without having rinsed his hands in water, touches another person, that person shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. An earthen vessel that one with a discharge touches shall be broken; and any wooden implement shall be rinsed with water.

Leviticus 15:4-12

Now, there is much in Rabbinic literature about the holiness of the land of Israel, but the radioactive discharge of male members and malignant wall plague are mostly forgotten in the conversation for non-Orthodox readers. Yet the Torah itself envisions both dwellings and bodies in the Holy Land as exceedingly porous and contagious, a physical world virtually blooming with impurity and repurification.

As we saw last week, the male creators of the Rabbinic purity system shifted the Torah’s concerns, imposing a presumed status of impurity on women while giving men (and houses!) the benefit of the doubt.

Yet the Torah itself, from God’s creation by word to His coming to physically dwell and eat among us in the Tabernacle to commanding the violent conquest of the land of Israel and expulsion of its natives, often starts sounding weird, or alien, or unjust.

Should we ignore the Torah and just let the obscure language go in one ear and out the other? The great Polish Hasidic commentator Yehudah Leib Alter, known as the Sfat Emet (“Language of Truth”) was not content to do this. Addressing the plague in the walls he wrote:

What sort of strange announcement is this? (The great French commentator Rashi explains this in terms of violent conquest:) that the Canaanites [had been hiding gold treasures inside the walls of their houses, which the Israelites would find upon destroying the houses]. Now really! Did the Creator of the universe need to resort to such contortions? Why would He have given the Canaanites the idea of hiding [things in the walls] so that Israel would have to knock down the houses!

Instead, he writes, the point is the enchantment of the world:

The real meaning of these afflictions of houses is in fact
quite wondrous, a demonstration that Israel’s holiness is so
great that they can also draw sanctity and purity into their
dwelling-places. Scripture tells us: “A stone shall cry out from
the wall and a wooden beam shall answer it” (Hab. 2:11), regarding a person’s sin, to which the walls of his house bear witness. How much more fully does the righteous person have to bring a feeling of holiness into all that belongs to them, including both plants and ordinary physical objects!

Is he saying this is just a metaphor? Notice that his criterion for plausibility is justice. Did the Creator of the universe need to resort to such contortions? It may be a metaphor, but one that is also real and literal, played out in one’s actual physical place.

A distinctive feature of Judaism is that if we want to enter into the covenant, we can only do it deliberately with our bodies and blood. In the Sfat Emet’s spirit one could tie this together with the incantation-like theory of the poet Robert Duncan, where the material world of bodies and objects we see is fraught with potential divine enchantment, ones that reveal to him the originary mythic place:

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place,

that it is mine….created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

…Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.

“When She Bears Seed” (Leviticus 12:2)

Made With Bodies and Blood

When the chips are down we see things physically. We exist as bodies, and we only enter this world by being born–we are bodies that come from bodies, like plants are born from seeds. We are born in blood, bleed when cut, and if we die by violence we die bleeding.

Though the truth of bodies and blood bears with it an illusion: that we are nothing but them. But they alone do not decide or explain us, and nowhere is this more true than in the Torah and Jewish tradition, which are constituted by the covenant, a covenant that is deliberately made with bodies and blood. Yet in this world we are also inseparable from bodies, blood, and the biological seeds we consume, grow from, or bear. In the poetry of the seven Jewish wedding blessings, God “prepared for humanity, from Himself an eternal construct”–a mortal kind of immortality. * We need our bodies, blood, and seeds not just to see but to think and feel with, to live onward.

The name of this week’s Torah portion is Tazriaˁ, literally “when she bears seed:” When a woman bears seed and gives birth to a male, she shall be ceremonially impure for seven days…” The link it makes between human and plant would have carried almost as much biological weirdness in ancient Hebrew as it does in today’s English. While the verbal root for “seed” (ZRˁ) is frequent with the plain meaning of what a plant bears, and also often refers to “a man’s semen or offspring,” only once does it refer to the life a human woman bears. Indeed in this causative form meaning “seed-bearing” it appears in only one other place, at the beginning:

“And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants that are seed-bearing (mazriaˁ), fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so.” (Gen 1:11)

What larger conception does a mother “bearing seed” reflect? An illuminating analysis by Marianne Grohmann explains how until the end of the 19th century, the great minds of Western Civilization held a variety of flaky-sounding ideas about where babies came from including 1) a “one seed” idea shared by Aristotle, Mesopotamian, and some biblical writers that babies came from fathers alone, with the mother just serving as incubator 2) an alternative ancient idea “two seeds” idea that both male and female “sperm” combined to form a baby or 3) a later European idea the baby’s form came from whatever the mother was looking at or thinking about at the moment of conception.

The idea of us as seed confronts us with our nature in the crudest, most embarrassing way. Just the sheer fact that we are nature, and also that as nature our ruptures can be the subject of thought and ritual, that instead of working to keep our involvement in birth, death, and fertility tidy and out of the way, we can shine light on them, study these workings like natural phenomena, or decide them like law. As Charlotte Fonrobert, the great scholar of Rabbinic purity law, writes of the tradition around these laws:

Like few other cultures, rabbinic Judaism in this tractate transforms blood and bodies into language, analyzes the nature of blood and pads, of births and abortions or miscarriages. One detects no sense of embarrassment, shame, or disgust in those pages of the Talmud, feelings familiar to those of us who have grown up in the cultural context of the West, which allows mostly only euphemistic, hidden references to bodies and their messiness. The texts in Tractate Niddah might just as well be about zoology, astronomy, physics, or mathematics, judging by their tone.

Fonrobert, Menstrual purity : Rabbinic and Christian reconstructions of Biblical gender (Stanford UP, 2000)

But, as the joke has the white Lone Ranger’s companion Tonto reply to him when outnumbered by native warriors, “who do you mean ‘we’?”

For as Fonrobert’s study shows, ancient Hebrew ritual purity is in essence a men’s science. Priestly and Rabbinic laws around childbirth and menstruation are not just some general human thinking about human nature. They are a male expert tradition of scrutinizing and theorizing the workings of women’s bodies as cosmic mechanisms inadequately translated as “pure” and “impure.”

The Torah’s idea of ceremonial purity is simply not our ideas of “clean.” Being tahor “ceremonially pure” is in fact so far from modern cleanliness–or even basic hygiene–that it faces puke, piss, and shit undisturbed; one can be crusted in snot or caked in manure and completely tahor. And consider the term ṭame’, which applies to a new mother and which I translated “ceremonially impure.” Far from a mere physical condition, this purity and impurity is a cosmological term unaffected by things like hot showers.

Like a Crashed UFO

In an early argument for the religious and moral value of this system of ceremonial purity, Rabbi Rachel Adler argued that it would illuminate how all members of a society undergo bodily conditions of purity and impurity in shared ways. Her “Tumah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings,” (The Jewish Catalog, 1973) argued that bodily cycles of purity put us all on a level playing field. But as Gail Labovitz writes, Adler later realized that

this is no longer helpful for understanding tum’ah in the post-biblical and particularly rabbinic Judaisms that followed. Post-rabbinic tum’ah is gendered particularly female, such that all females are (treated as) suspect of being in the process of menstruating and hence impure, while men, who certainly must have come into contact with sources of impurity such as seminal emissions and proximity to a corpse, nonetheless experience themselves as pure at all times.

Labovitz, commentary on Adler in Kurtzer, ed. The New Jewish Canon

In other words, the cosmology was itself inseparable from its interpreters’ own bodies and what they meant in their own society, their identities as male experts in the system they ruled.

On reflection, after a mighty good-faith effort to uphold this worldview, Adler decided the whole system of purity was worthy of rejection.

I tried to make a theology to uphold this truth, and as hard as I tried to make it truthful, it unfolded itself to me as a theology of lies.

I do not believe the laws of purity will ever be reinstated, nor should they be. The worlds reflected in such rules are not worlds we inhabit. Neither should we seek to replicate such worlds. They are unjust.

Adler “In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theological Purity,” Tikkun 8 (1993)

I will not try to salvage or recuperate such a cosmology of the body here, only reflect on its familiarity and alienness. For the second chapter of our Parshah, Leviticus 13, hinges equally around an untranslatable term, ṣaraˁat. Classically rendered “leprosy” and carrying with it similar marks of rejection and isolation, it is actually one of those rare words that should probably not be translated at all.

For the Torah’s ṣaraˁat fits modern categories about as well as a crashed UFO. Leviticus 13:47-51 go on to explain what to do “when ṣaraˁat occurs in a cloth of wool or linen fabric, in the warp or in the woof of the linen or the wool, or in a skin or in anything made of skin.” Unlike any known human illness, it can spread to furniture, which is described as ceremonially impure and even “malignant, painful” (13:52).

Ṣaraˁat is a vision of the vulnerability of all organic matter, and like the Tabernacle it is a mythic vision. It is not an object we would ever directly encounter in this world. We only encounter it via the sacred text itself.

But I think what Fonrobert really shows is that this is true of women–and maybe men–in the Torah too. As in the title of the great Sanskritist Wendy Doniger’s book Women, Androgynes, and other Mythical Beasts, they are treated as mythical: cosmic icons in a ceremonial system, icons only mapped onto human individuals. Bodies and blood are icons that Priests and Rabbis thought with.

How would people in different bodies and lives think with them? One promise of a new understanding and enactment of this might come from feminist reuse of the rituals. As Labovitz writes,

For Adler, it was in fact seeing women create new rituals involving the mikveh that brought her to an insight of this very sort in “In Your Blood, Live”: “When Jewish women who were not Orthodox appropriated my reframing of immersion … to mark occurrences for which no ritual expression had existed, they taught me an important lesson about the possibility of salvage … for the feminist Jew, impurity seems to mean the violation of physical or sexual integrity, death by invasion” (41). She now holds that a truly new theological understanding must go hand in hand in hand with an actual feminist and female positive ritual expression.

If we want to enter into the covenant, we can only do it deliberately with our bodies and blood. But here the “deliberately” and the “our” are the most important parts.

*My translation of Sheva Brachot #4, וְהִתְקִין לוֹ מִמֶּנּוּ בִּנְיַן עֲדֵי עַד

On the Eighth Day

How The Torah Presents Itself as Myth

The iconic Rabbinic commentator Rashi’s first comment on the first word of Genesis is to correct it: the Torah shouldn’t have begun with creation at all. Instead it should have begun with the first commandment, because the point of the Torah is not to teach history or astrophysics but to give us a legacy of commandments to perform.

The Torah did not need to begin here, but rather should have started with “This month will be the beginning of the months for you” (Exodus 12:2) which is the first commandment given to Israel.

Rashi on Genesis 1:1

By this token the Torah could just as well have begun with this week’s reading, Leviticus 9-11. For it is here that regular human observance– being a Jew in what is probably the most original sense–first becomes possible. It depicts a new eighth day of creation.

Every year in the traditional Jewish reading cycle year we again recite this portion called Shemini, “(On the Eighth (Day).” It is the first day after the seven-day process required to intiate the priesthood (Cohanim), a small-scale creation which echoes God’s large-scale-creation of the world,. After priesthood is possible, God can physically dwell in the world. The priests share our acts of atonement and communion with Him, allowing Him to reside and take meals at His physical home address, the Temple, which one can walk right up to (though not enter!)

Leviticus 9 narrates what the Torah itself presents as a myth–a divine act located in a foundational time that is now lost–about the presence of God’s body (the Kavod or “glory”) and His first meal on earth. It lays out the rituals by which humans once became empowered to participate like God Himself in the creation of their universe, and to eat like Him. In this far-off ancient vision of the Temple the human-built universe happens through acts like sacrifice–sharing a meal in person with God Himself.

Via food, it portrays a lost miraculous past and a continuing mundane reality as both equally sacred. The lost miracle is when God, having physically arrived in our world to inhabit the sanctuary the Israelites just built for Him, eats His first meal. Leviticus 9 describes the astonishing event of God’s direct physical presence in which He Himself first appears to devour sacrifices with fire.

When [Moses and Aaron emerged from meeting the Lord], they blessed the people; and the Presence of the Lord appeared to all the people. Fire came forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fat parts on the altar. And all the people saw, and shouted, and fell on their faces.

Leviticus 9:23-24

In Hebrew, fire consumes (אכל, a word that means both “eat” and “burn up”). God’s first ritual meal is followed by a cautionary tale about this consuming fire: it is God’s alone (Leviticus 10). The two Priests who dare to offer their own fire are themselves consumed by God, because humans can no more replicate His devouring ritual presence than they can copy His voice. What is given to us is something different: the revelation of human ritual meals: Kosher law (Leviticus 11), which is what we ourselves have of this miracle.

For while the Torah does not tell us this, later Scripture reveals that the mythic world where God eats right in front of us was ended by God himself. We now live in the time after God’s direct physical presence, for as texts like 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Psalm 74 later narrate, the rules forever changed when God had the Temple destroyed. The old, weird physical intimacy with the divine is no longer possible. But the myth lives on, for this is also the Torah portion that defines what is left to us: the current, nearby counterpart of Temple ritual that is eating Kosher food.

As my Rabbi Tamar Manasseh says, Judaism is something you do here and now, not just something you are. Historical evidence verifies this: action, not identity, is the most concrete measure of Judaism. Commandments like keeping Kosher and observing the Sabbath are the oldest and most consistent aspect of being Jewish. Beyond the rich but squishy act of self-definition, the Mizvot most clearly define what it means to be part of Israel.

But according to the Bible’s text–which is, after all, the very thing that transmits the commandments–the Torah’s ritual actions are unable to explain or justify themselves. Most obviously, the Torah says nothing about why the Tabernacle no longer exists or about why so many of its Mizvot are no longer even physically possible in any simple, non-mystical or non-Midrashic sense.

This is because the Torah’s self-presentation is mythic. The commandments of Leviticus take place in a historical and moral vacuum, depicting a Tabernacle that nobody, even in the ancient Israel of David or Bathsheba, Isaiah or Huldah, had ever seen. Its text and commandments come from such a long time ago, such a galaxy far, far away that even Josiah, the most pious of Judahite kings, explicitly states he had never heard of them. Sripture depicts the commandments without context or motivation, without history and prophecy, as hollow and inadequate.

“If One Has No Shame, Their Ancestors Never Stood at Mount Sinai”

The Sfat Emet cites Rashi saying that when Moses told Aaron to approach the altar (Lev. 9:7), “Aaron was ashamed to draw near, but Moses said to him: “Why are you ashamed? For this you were chosen!”

Now, the commentators say that it was because of this shame he had that he was chosen. But it could also be read otherwise: that the goal of being chosen was to reach this state of shame. Thus Scripture itself says about the giving of the Torah: “so that His fear be upon your faces in order that you not sin” (Ex. 20:20). The rabbis said that this refers to shame and that “if one has no shame, it is known that his ancestors never stood at Mount Sinai.” So the purpose of Israel’s coming near to Mount Sinai was to merit shame.

For the Sfat Emet, having a sense of restraint and humility is what made Aaron deserve the divine presence. It was Aaron’s fear of heaven that enabled him to draw others near to Judaism, for

by means of shame you can really come close to each
of the commandments. Take true shame to heart, [thinking:]
“How can a clod of earth do the will of the Creator?” In this
way you will be able to fulfill the Mitzvot.

His translator and interpreter Arthur Green writes that it is this fear of heaven that allowed Aaron to encounter the very Glory of God.

This resonates with an absolutely jaw-dropping line in the Tamud:

Come and see how great is the power of shame: look, the Holy One Blessed be He, took the side [of someone shamed by a prominent Jerusalemite so vehemently that] He destroyed His Temple and burned His Sanctuary.

Babylonian Talmud Gittin 57a.5

This is a wild and audacious line, but in keeping with Jewish tradition’s often wild and audacious approach to the incomparable value of human dignity. The Kosher laws, this ritual discipline of preparing and eating food (not coincidentally again only the types of food that God Himself can consume), are a mundane embodiment of this radical sense of humility, that constitutes the fear of heaven. The Sfat Emet cites the Talmud’s commentary

“Had I brought Israel forth only so that they not defile themselves with creeping things, it would have been sufficient.” The One “who brought you forth” has to be greater than the Exodus itself. Thus we say: “who brought us forth from the Land of Egypt and redeemed us from the house of slaves.” There is a redemption from the
narrow straits (a Hebrew pun on Egypt as constraint: Miṣrayim/meṣar), but there is a still higher rung, one above all places of constriction, an “inheritance without constraints.”

How does he think such apparently empty and meaningless formal details like avoiding a pig but not a goat confer cosmic freedom?

Every year I teach a class on “Ritual, Myth, and Music” and this year a number of students chose meditation as their practice-based research project. The goal is to choose a constructive and positive ritual practice and they have chosen everything from musical “deep listening” to boxing or fencing to the Russian Orthodox “prayer of the heart” to Hindu “deity Yoga” depending on their own religious traditions and personal interests.

This year, meditation was both the most popular and the most challenging, and the biggest problem was sheer form. Students struggled with distracting thoughts, anxiety about achieving results, and the concern that what they were doing wasn’t enough. These projects too were the source of learning as they observed and confronted possible roadblocks. But the projects that got the most results ironically focused on the process itself, the simple form of the act of meditation.

A surprising emblem of the students’ focus on form was the Mudra, a traditional Buddhist way of holding the hands to make a cosmic shape. What is surprising about the Mudra is that it seems to do nothing–unlike controlled breathing or posture, which have been demonstrated to have profound physiological and cognitive effects, the Mudra seems purely “religious,” one is making the shape of the cosmos as if holding it in one’s hand. Yet students who took Zen sage Shunryu Suzuki’s advice to form a Mudra found it was an essential part of making their meditation click.

The wisdom that the Sfat Emet unlocks from the Talmud and Torah here lies in the nonrational sheer form of the Commandment, but one that cannot explain itself. Pure form cannot be mindlessly accepted; without the Sfat Emet’s form of shame, AKA “fear of heaven,” a devotion to sincere self-critique and wrestling with the Bible, it will remain empty. I feel that this radical excavation is what we now need to gain from our tradition.

“Does this Place Really Have a Hashgacha?” Performative Judaism and the Quest for Jewish Essence

The other day I think I began to understand what people now call “performative” identity, via the most jaw-droppingly performative act of Judaism I’ve ever seen. The place I was sitting in didn’t exactly feel like a Jewish fishbowl: an old time diner in South Lake Tahoe specializing in delicacies like biscuits and gravy with a side of Jalapeǹo bacon, deep in conversation with a stellar grad student. The staff seemed a mix of Latino and Arabic-speaking, the clientele had the same kind of vaguely redneck look that I do, and I was wearing a lovely watermelon-logo Palestine tee from Wearthepeace casually wondering if that mattered to anybody.

At that point I noticed a schlubby-looking white guy at the other end of the restaurant suddenly clock my shirt, and with a half-smile that I read as a smirk dig a tiny Kippah out of his pocket and balance it on his head. Now, I’m familiar with such acts of public flag-waving when people wish to address an audience “as a Jew,” but this was the first time I had ever seen someone literally perform an act of identification, in a turbo-Trayf diner no less, for an audience of one (me). What struck me as so batshit crazy about it is that wearing such a Kippah in daily life is typically the mark of an observant Jew, and with its panoply of pork this is no place an observant Jew would normally be caught dead eating in. In fact, many conventionally observant Jews would avoid even sitting in such a place because of the Orthodox principle of Mar’it Ha-Ayin (מַרְאִית הָעַיִן) avoiding even the appearance of transgression for fear it might mislead other observant people into making an authentic mistake.

I was tempted to walk up to him–sheepishly, of course, so as to avoid making more of a scene than I needed to–and asking, “does this place really have a Hashgacha??” The sad thing was I would have laid even odds he’d have no idea what the word (here, “legitimate Kosher supervision”) meant. How did we come to this pass, where so many define “Jewish” as “anti-Palestinian?”

Walter Sobchak’s famous rant from the Big Lebowski is a spiritual gemstone here: what is so disarming is that he’s angrily yelling about how Jews are a people whose life goes far deeper than current bullshit, able to inhabit everything and everywhere of Jewish history all at once: “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax--YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT I’M LIVING IN THE FUCKING PAST!” So beyond 21st century politics and the obvious machinations of US support for its biggest client state, why does so many people’s Judaism today sometimes seem little deeper than picking one side in what most of the world recognizes as a genocide? What has been forgotten?

My hunch is in the broad population, few of us today have much of a connection to the Judaism of our ancestors beyond some not-exactly-coherent catchphrases (“Never Again!” “Am Yisrael Chai!” “indigenous,” “What the hell is a ‘scooped bagel?‘”). We probably don’t know what Rambam’s 13 Middot are (what Maimonides, arguably the most influential Jewish religious thinker of all time, considered essential to Judaism). Do we really officially believe in the resurrection of the dead? What about the Messiah–do we have one like the Christians do (or did they actually borrow it from us in the first place?). How important is this Messianic idea, including the principle that only God Himself could return Jewish sovereignty to the Levant at the hands of a descendant of King David?

Some would just throw up their hands and say, hey, I was born Jewish, I’m Jewish! Or…are you actually just white, with a side of lox and capers? The idea that Jewish identity is something obvious that defaults to Ashkenazic or Israeli identity is, as my colleagues Andrew Tobolowsky and Tamar Manasseh have show, on shaky ground both historically and spiritually.

And shockingly, it turns out that the real performative Judaism–the performance of commandments like keeping Kosher–is actually a lot older than Jewish “blood,” because the definition of Jewish ethnicity has famously flip-flopped over time. In biblical times Jewish descent meant having a Jewish father (all the descendants of Abraham and Jacob were his, no matter the mother) but in Rabbinic times it shifted to exclusively having a Jewish mother. While these two definitions can converge, each can also totally exclude the other, meaning that a clear, consistent historical “essence” to Jewish ethnic identity is pretty hard to find. More essential to Jewish continuity across time is what the Torah and Rabbinic thought continued to share: following the commandments. The Mizvot may be the best bet for what has always defined what it means to be part of Israel.

A second, equally time-honored essence of Judaism is described by the political theorist and professor of urban studies Marshall Berman:

I have been a scholar for most of my life…But I am also a Jew, grown up with the feeling that the Bible was “my” book, that it was my job to wrestle with it, and this wrestling would be my way to be part of Israel.

Berman, “The Bible and Public Space,” in Modernism in the Streets (Verso, 2017) 350.

Today many Jews–including me–feel alienated from both of these original and long-lasting senses of Judaism. But we don’t have to be. I want to know what they offered the Jews of the past as well as those who learned from them. I think it’s still all there. I hope.

In this series I’ll try to briefly explore and unite these two oldest standbys, Torah and Commandments, divine teaching and human ritual, with the help of the radical Hasidic thinker known as the Sfat Emet–-the “language of truth.” My guide will be another time-honored habit, the weekly Torah portion or Parshat Ha-Shevua, starting this week with Shemini, “(On the) Eighth (Day).” Hit the subscribe thing ↓ if you want to join me!