Romancing the Scroll

Reposting this from last year in honor of this week’s Torah portion, Ekev …

So Here’s the Backstory.

My husband and I are now devoted groupies of an organization called Nehirim, from a Hebrew word for “lights.” Founded by author and activist Jay Michaelson, Nehirim hosts retreats, trips, conferences, you name it — all with the goal of building community among LGBT Jews, partners, and allies and helping them take that spark back home.

Retreats that coincide with Shabbat include full services — some traditional, mostly Renewal-style, but always complete with Torah readings. When the organizers of this year’s Men’s Summer Camp reached out for volunteers to read from the scroll, I raised my hand, and before I knew it, I was practicing an hour or two a day every day for about three weeks. Two aliyot, portions of about half a dozen verses each, from the triennial cycle.

Did I Mention the Bar Mitzvah Thing?

I only volunteered because Brian and I have been studying for the past few months with one of our community’s wonderful rabbis, in preparation for what might be, for all we know, the world’s first joint adult bar mitzvah ceremony for two married, gay converts.

Bar mitzvah (or the female version, bat mitzvah) is an Aramaic phrase meaning “son of commandment.” Since the early middle ages, and for girls since the late 20th century, it’s been a rite of passage whereby children become adults under Jewish law, fully entrusted with the tradition and its joys and obligations. In more recent decades, “a bar/bat mitzvah” has become a community celebration, too, with big parties and social justice projects, and it’s also become a common step for adults who didn’t go through the process at age thirteen, either by choice or circumstance or because they converted.

So that’s where Brian and I are, having decided to take our commitment to Jewish living up a notch or two, in April of 2012, when each of us will read from a Torah scroll.

And That Is No Small Feat.

A Torah scroll is a copy of the entire Five Books of Moses, a roll of stitched-together parchment pages, every letter reproduced by hand from an unbroken chain of manuscripts going back to at least the early Middle Ages.

Each scroll is a dramatic work in its own right, with critical moments in the text reflected in spacing and lettering. When the Sea of Reeds parts on the way out of Egypt, the text pulls apart into two jagged, parallel lines. When the Ten Commandments are given, each is set apart from the rest of the text in a way that’s impossible to overlook.

The text itself is right out of ancient Semitic literary culture, which means its primary function is to aid the memory of readers who are presumed to know every word by heart. The alphabet is made up only of consonants, with some letters doubling as vowels under conditions that take a while to explain.

To give you an idea, here’s how a Torah scroll would render Hamlet’s famous soliloquy:

To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of struggles, and, by opposing, end them. 

TW B’ ‘R NT TW B’ THT ‘S THQWSTYN WHTHR T’S NWBLR ‘N THMND TW SFR THSLYNGS ND ‘RWS ‘F ‘WTRGYS FWRTN ‘R TW TK ‘RMS ‘GNST ‘SY ‘F STRGLS ‘ND BY ‘PSYNG ‘ND THM

Did I mention there’s no real punctuation, either? What’s more, every line of text is meant to be chanted according to a prescribed set of melodies, which must also be memorized.

So Here’s What I Was Looking At.

The Torah portion from the week of the Nehirim retreat is called ‘Ekev, from Deuteronomy chapters 7 through 11. This is what the first bit of ‘Ekev looks like in a Torah scroll (via Navigating the Bible):

And this is what the text looks like when overlaid with all the information you really need to chant it. If you have a RealAudio plugin, you can hear roughly what it comes out sounding like.

Except for some of the dots in the middle of the letters, every little doohickey is either a vowel sound or a melodic sequence to be memorized.

Difficult But Doable

Just ask any of the millions of bar/bat mitzvah kids who met the challenge and went back to eighth grade homeroom all the stronger and more affirmed for it. After several lessons with our rabbi, I felt I had enough preparation to manage a moderately sized reading, using the notation and audio files at bible.ort.org.

And so began one of the most remarkable encounters in my short life as a Jew. Every day for about three weeks, I listened and repeated, quizzed and corrected myself, adding phrase by phrase, verse by verse to the parts I could recite from memory.

Without much in the way of conscious thought, I started to feel the emotional shapes of the melodic inventory — tenderness, alarm, solemn awe, comfort, and more, all packed into little scales almost anyone can sing.

And bit by bit, the text itself opened up to me in a way that’s hard to put into words.

I’m no literary noob, you see. I got enough graduate coursework under my belt to critically engage with any text, day or night, with one hand tied behind my back. I’ve spliced and diced Torah plenty, applying literary-critical approaches, queer hermeneutics, structural and cross-cultural analysis galore.

This was different. I think the realization came to me when I was working on the text one day over my lunch hour. There I was, sitting in a little room, reading and repeating, over and over again, letting the text and its melodies, its consonants and its vowels and subtle structures wash over me like sheets of rain.

The lines stopped being a thing under my microscope, an item on my to-do list, a test of my cognitive abilities. Somewhere along the line, ‘Ekev became my companion.

That meant I could start taking the text at something deeper than face value. ‘Ekev is a fraught little package of Divine reward and punishment and a seeming endorsement of the ethnic cleansing of Canaan. I think I’ve read some settlers in the the West Bank use it, along with other portions, to justify displacing and assaulting the Arabs who live there. There it is, in black and white:

v’achalta et kol ha-amim asher Adonai eloheicha notein lach lo’ tachos eincha ‘aleihem v’lo’ ta’avod et eloheihem.

And when you have consumed all the peoples that HaShem your G-d has given to you, show them no mercy and do not worship their gods.

But with all the lines and their melodies in my head, I couldn’t just magnify one part of the text, as I had plenty in the past, and say, “this is its unforgivable flaw, this goes too far, this is too much.” That would be cutting my best friend out of my life because she disappointed me or lied to me once. That would utterly negate her beauty, her compassion, her love for me.

And her wisdom. You’re going up against immense odds, she’s telling me, with nothing but a strange and invisible G-d on your side, One Who values action more than objects, justice more than jewels. You won’t be able to hold onto your values if you try to accommodate the people waiting for you by, say, agreeing on an acceptable level of ritual prostitution, human sacrifice, idol worship, and oppression of the poor. Whatever happens, don’t ever become like them.

ki t’omar bil’vav’cha rabim ha-goyim ha-eileh mimeni eichah ‘uchal l’horisham

You might say in your heart, these nations are greater than I am. How will I be able to drive them out?

You’re not going to make it if you accept the geopolitical realities at face value. You’re not going to make it if your vision is fixed on the world as it is, not as it could be.

lo’ ta’arotz mipneihem ki Adonai eloheicha b’qirbecha el gadol v’nora’

Do not cringe before them, for Adonai your G-d is with you, a great and awesome G-d.

The values you are taking with you are more powerful than any of the armies you will face, but only if you believe in them and remember where they came from and never stop fighting for them.

The day before I was called up to read, I was alone, swinging in a hammock on a beautiful country day, having practiced the reading a dozen or more times, and it hit me. This text is radiant with love. And my tears fell.

Showtime

I rehearsed a few times with generous rabbi friends, including in front of the actual scroll at our Nehirim retreat, one with tiny little letters and variations on some shapes I hadn’t seen before.

At first, I approached the reading the way I do a lot of things — softly and with meek self-effacement. I felt so much tenderness in the words and the melodies that I hadn’t really thought about the broader context.

One of my rabbi friends, David Dunn Bauer, reminded me that this is Moses’s dying speech to his people near the end of their long journey. He’s heaping upon them his admonishment and warnings, love and awe and frustration and his desperate hope that, in spite of all the failures and setbacks of the last forty years, it will all be enough.

So it was kinda written to be belted out, not softly murmured. Project. Butch it up a little why don’t you. Put some masculine oomph into it and let it be beautiful just that way.

So on a Friday afternoon while the rest of the gang was off tubing or mud bathing or something, I took a hiking trail into the woods and chanted at the top of my lungs, over and over, until I started going hoarse. At one point I saw a large doe on the trail ahead of me, scrutinizing me. I smiled and wished her a good Shabbos, and then I started belting out my lines again. She turned and trundled off into the woods.

Come Saturday morning, a group of about thirty men sat davenning together, singing and bowing and speaking our ancient words. When the Torah scroll was lifted up and carried around like a newborn baby, I was connected to all the other times I’d encountered a scroll.

One time in particular I’ve never told anyone about. I was at an evening study session at our synagogue, and one of our scrolls was on the table from a previous session. I volunteered to return it to its arc, the stone cabinet that holds all our community’s scrolls.

This one in particular was very special — it was found, along with hundreds of others, in Prague after the Second World War. The Nazis had stolen it from a small Bohemian community just before deporting or murdering every Jew they found there. Along with the other scrolls, it was intended for a museum  to commemorate the total destruction of Jewish civilization. After the war, the scrolls were restored and adopted out to Jewish communities all over the world, including ours.

The sanctuary was empty as I carried our scroll, our survivor, to the arc, cradling it like a baby. My steps slowed and I started to cry as I remembered the last time I had held it, on the day of my conversion, in front of a whole community that had come to welcome me as a brother.

I had stood there that day only because Torah, with all its seams and scars and beauty, had opened my heart wider than I ever thought possible.

“I love you so much,” I said as I kissed it gently and laid it to rest in the arc.

I had to contain those same tears that morning at Nehirim as I approached a sister scroll. After all, I couldn’t very well chant if I was crying and sniffling.

I watched and prayed as the blessings were recited and then I pointed at the spot where the reading was about to begin. Men who had come up for special blessings touched the corners to their prayer shawls to the scroll and kissed them, and then it was time.

Breathe In. Breathe Out.

All the men there, we’d all been through so much.

So much doubt and rejection, so many years lost trying to be what we weren’t, so much struggle just to find safe places to love and live and pray.

“V’haya-a-a-a-a ‘e-KEV tishme’u-u-u-un,” I sang. It’s up to you to guard this relationship with G-d, these transcendent values that have brought you so far.

My legs were shaking, and my voice was quivering, but I kept on, my whole body moving in tune with the melody.

“Ve-sha-ma-a-a-a-ar AdoNAI elo-HEI-cha le-cha-a-a-ah et ha-BRIT ve-et-ha-CHESED …” G-d will protect you, G-d’s covenant and lovingkindness will go with you. I missed a trope and started out on the wrong note for the next one, but I just kept going.

“Va-ahe-e-ev’cha u-ve-ra-che-cha v’hirb-ECHA …” G-d will love you and bless you and multiply you.

Such deep longing for our happiness and well-being. I tried to keep all the men in the room in my heart as I put everything I had into each word.

“V’chol mad-ve-e-e-e-ei mitzRAYIM ha-ra’IM…” all the terrible afflictions of Egypt. Your freedom and liberation came at such a heavy price. What will you do to honor and remember that?

“V’lo-o-O ta-a-VOD et-elo-o-o-hei-he-e-m, ki MOKESH HU LA-A-A-ACH.” No matter how far you come, you must not fall into worshiping power and control the way your oppressors do. You are love. You are justice. Don’t forget that.

The first aliyah was done. I stepped back. Another group was called to the Torah. More blessings, more love and inclusion.

Second aliyah. “Ki-i-i to-MAR bi-l’VA-a-a-ve-CHA-a-a ra-BI-i-i-im ha-goyim ha-EIL-eh mimeni…” You’re going to doubt yourself. You’re going to see yourself as your oppressors see you, as small and weak and divided. It’s okay.

“Lo-o-o ti-RAH-A-AH mei-hem! Za-CHOR TIZ-KO-o-o-or eh-eh-et asher a-SAH Adonai elo-HEI-chem le-pha-ROH u-le-chol mitz-RA-yim…” Don’t be afraid. The G-d of history, the G-d of all creation is on your side. Carry that knowledge and let it make you strong.

“Ken ya-ah-SEH-eh-eh-eh-eh Adonai elo-HEI-CHA le-chol-ha-a-MI-i-i-im asher atah yar-EH-EH-EH mi-pnei-HEH-em.” The people who oppress you, the people who put power and fear ahead of love, they will know what it means to be powerless, to lose the control they thought they had over you.

“Ki Ado-NA-a-ai elo-HEI-CHA be-kir-BECHA. EL GADOH-O-L VE-NOH-O-O-O-RA-A.” Don’t be afraid. G-d is with you. G-d’s great love and justice and passion will win out in the end. Nothing on earth is more powerful.

I looked up. There was so much love in that room. Such a perfect, radiant moment with this strange document at the center of it, this one improbable survivor.

I got it. I really got it. Torah is beautiful in ways that nothing else on earth can be beautiful. And in that one crystalline moment, I saw it. Just like Torah, the men in that room could not have been more beautiful, more perfect than with their joys and scars and wrinkles.

Since it was my first time ever reading during a Torah service, we sang and danced around the scroll and said shehecheyanu, the blessing of gratitude for perfect moments.

Lots of praise and affirmation afterwards. Lots of gratitude for the love and passion that came out of me.

But the love and passion came right out of that scroll. All I did was put in the hard work to channel it to the men then and there in that space, which was a joy any way you slice it.

Romancing the Scroll II

I think it’s official now, so I might as well admit it. My name is Michael, and I am a leynaholic.

Leyn or leynen is an old Yiddish word that just means ‘to read,’ but when used in English, the word means to read in public from a Torah scroll. It’s good that Yiddish gave us a distinct word, because when you leyn, you don’t just read. You melodically chant, using timings and structures that have been mapped onto each line of Torah over the centuries.

I’ve leyned three times in the past year, but it’s important you understand that I don’t have much in the way of training. I worked with one of our teachers, the inimitable Rabbi James Stone Goodman, for a few weeks before leyning for the first time last year, in one of the most intense experiences of my short life as a Jew. But almost a year later, I still haven’t gotten around to learning the rules.

That means I have to practice with recordings. As in chanting the text hundreds of times until I’ve basically memorized it. That seems to unlock the spiritual intensity, so when we signed up for a June retreat with one of our favorite organizations, Nehrim, I leapt at the chance to leyn again as part of Shabbat services with Rabbi Jill Hammer and Shoshana Jedwab.

Of All the Portions …

This year’s Nehirim retreat fell in the yearly cycle of Torah readings at the portion of Numbers we call sh’lach lecha. It’s the episode with the ‘spies,’ the twelve tribal leaders sent by Moses to scope out the Land of Israel in preparation for settlement.

In the story, ten of the spies come back consumed by fear. The land is as rich and beautiful as G-d promised, they say, but it is occupied by powerful, well-defended enemies, they say, even giants, and it would be crazy to move there.

The people panic. They weep. They long to go back to Egypt and die as slaves rather than face their fear. They ignore and then try to murder Kalev and Y’hoshuah, the two scouts who come back with a clearer vision.

At this point in the story, G-d has a dramatic meltdown, arguably G-d’s worst moment in the story, and has to be talked down — by a human, Moses — from killing all but a handful of the people and starting over.

That’s the narrative backdrop to the portion Rabbi Jill let me pick, Numbers 14:28 through 35. And so I started practicing. I went through the lines a few hundred times before the text started to open up to me.

And then I couldn’t stop crying.

So Much Pain.

Numbers 14:28 picks up just moments after Moses has talked G-d out of mass extermination, but G-d is still seething with rage and betrayal.

e-MO-or a-lei-HE-E-E-em, chai A-NI, me’um a-do-NA-AI, im LO-O-O-o k’a-sher di-bar-TE-E-em be-oz-NAI, KE-E-en e-e-seh la-CHE-em. Ba-mid-BA-AR ha-ZE-E-E-E-EH yi-PLU fi-grei-CHE-em

Tell them, Moses, you tell them. I am so angry with them, with every fiber of My being, that I’m going to do to them exactly what they said they wanted. Their corpses will rot in the desert. This desert. You tell them that.

ve-chol pe-ku-dei-CHEM le-chol-mis-par-CHEM mi-BE-E-E-en es-rim sh-NA-A-a va-ma-A-LAH a-sher ha-li-no-TA-A-am a-LA-i

Everything I did to give meaning and purpose to their lives, it’s all going to die with them. Everyone who let their loss of faith in Me control them, in spite of everything I did for them, in spite of all the death and destruction it took to set them free — their corpses will drop in this desert.

im a-TEM ta-VO-u el-ha-A-retz a-sher na-SA-TI et ya-DI-i le-sha-ken et-CHEM BA-AH, KI-i-i ka-LEV ben ye-fu-NEH vi-ye-ho-shu-A-A-ah ben NU-n. 

Not one of you is going into the land I swore to give you. Not one of you.  Only Kalev and Y’hoshuah.

The G-d of these early stories is such an intensely emotional Being, and despite all the jokes about G-d’s anger management issues, my encounter with this text was the first time I really got what’s important.

In this wrenching moment in our story, G-d is in intense pain.

Even as G-d lashes out, G-d is hurting G-d’s own Self. G-d is destroying G-d’s own hope for this generation.

I read from the scroll on a perfect, sunny day with a circle of fellow travelers, praying outdoors. I read G-d’s words condemning a generation to wander in the desert, and the pain of the story washed over me. I read through my tears, through the trembling in my voice.

Over and over, the text reads yip’lu figreichem bamidbar hazeh. Your corpses will drop in this desert. A death sentence, a cry of anger and hurt, a self-inflicted wound.

I never expected to feel boundless compassion for the Angry Being of the Five Books. But there I was, weeping. So much longing. So much love spurned. None of the usual qualifications mattered — not the lingering slave mentality of the human characters, not G-d’s insecurity or outsized expectations. All I felt was pain. G-d’s pain, the people’s pain, it’s all the same.

That’s What Compassion Is, I Suppose. 

Empathy without blame. Weeping with each other without looking at the scorecard. As usual, Torah teaches us this in a way no other text can.

And all this leyning has taught me there’s a level of understanding Torah that comes only from immersion, from living with the letters and lines and letting them permeate past my rational mind.

The experience is utterly transfixing, and all I can think about is how to get back up there.

Poor Shmuel: A One-Act D’var Torah on Leviticus

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A married gay couple in their forties, neither of them born in to Jewish families, decide to convert to Judaism. A few years after their respective trips to the mikvah, the ritual bath that marks the end of the conversion journey, they decide to become b’nei mitzvah together.

They end up choosing a date in April that corresponds to a double portion from the Torah, arguably the two ickiest parts of the Book of Leviticus. Verse after verse of skin diseases and bodily fluids. They work really hard — maybe a little too hard — to find the positive message in the text, and this is what comes out…

The Characters

 Shmuel
The Main Character and Narrator, appearing as an adult

Young Shmuel
Shmuel’s younger self, about sixteen

Hannah
Young Shmuel’s best friend and protector, about the same age as Shmuel

Shmuel’s father, a priest of the First Temple

Shmuel’s mother

Boy 1 and Boy 2
Young Shmuel’s tormentors, about his age

Introduction

Tazria’ and M’tzorah — two portions of the Book of Leviticus that read, at least on the surface of things, like a technical manual for managing different kinds of ritual purity. These are among the oldest layers of Torah, deeply alien to our modern sensibilities. The rules on blood and bodily fluids and skin diseases offer us an ancient consciousness that sees life and death, creation and decay, virtue and sin as so dangerously intermingled that only constant attention can keep them apart. In a very peculiar language of images and analogies, it seems to be telling us  –

Be careful. Watch what you do. Your every action has cosmic significance.

The text is deeply concerned with childbirth and menstruation but also with (and there’s just no more delicate way to put this) male emissions. Rabbi Susan taught us that one of the ways to understand this is to see each of those things as representing, in the most concrete way you could imagine, human potential. So maybe in its own way, the text is broadcasting to us at full volume –

Don’t be casual around the unfolding of God’s creation. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you’ve got people figured out, that you know everything they are and will be, because you don’t. You can’t.

All of this came together in our minds — during a few weeks when the headlines were filled with the awful story of another dead gay teenager — with one of the text’s main technical concerns, which is how to deal with an outbreak of ‘leprosy,’ or tzara’at in Hebrew. We actually have no idea what condition this was; all we really know is that it couldn’t have been leprosy as we know it, because it’s also described as infecting clothing and houses.

As it happens, the Hebrew word tzara’at has counterparts in Arabic and Aramaic that mean something like ‘putting down’ or ‘oppressing.’ That works pretty well, because later in the Bible, Miriam is struck with tzara’at when she (and Aaron) start saying bad things about Moses in public. So maybe this strange disease is a warning to us –

Don’t put people down, because you have no idea where or how the damage you do will show up.

But we didn’t want to just stand here this morning and tell you these things; we wanted a way to bring you into the text and the many difficult propositions it put in front of us –chief among them the idea that isolating people from a community could ever our best first move.  So with the help of the CRC Players, we’re going to create for you something a little like ancient Jerusalem. I’ll let our main character introduce himself to you.

Opening Scene

[Shmuel appears stage right or stage left, and narrates as events from the past unfold center-stage]

SHMUEL: Hi, my name is Shmuel, and I have a story for you that’s related to this week’s Torah portion. I think you’ll want to hear it, because you see, my father was one of the priests who worked on the first draft. Hi Dad!

[Father, in distance, waves back]

SHMUEL: All my brothers became priests, all my sisters married priests. But I never wanted the priestly life. I just liked to stay home and help mom around the house.

SHMUEL: My best friend Hannah was the same way. She and I were little terrors at school, and it didn’t help that my dad was the teacher.

CUTAWAY:

[Scene of Father chanting from a scroll as Young Shmuel and Hannah sit behind him, squirming and giggling. Shmuel’s mother is nearby, giving them dirty looks.]

FATHER: Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them, if any man has a discharge from his flesh, his discharge is unclean …

[Young Shmuel and Hannah giggle harder. Father turns and gives Young Shmuel and Hannah a dirty look. They quiet down. Father turns back to the scroll]

FATHER: And this shall be his uncleanness due to his discharge: if his flesh runs with his discharge, or if his flesh is plugged up by his discharge …

[Young Shmuel and Hannah lose it, start cracking up]

MOTHER: [Annoyed] Shmuel!

SHMUEL: My dad tried for a long time to get me to study the Teaching, which is what the word ‘Torah’ really means.

CUTAWAY:

[Father and Young Shmuel sitting across from each other, studying the scroll. Mother is in the background, sewing.]

FATHER: So anybody who sits on an object that’s been sat on by somebody with a discharge has to wash their clothes and bathe and they’re impure until the evening.

YOUNG SHMUEL: This is gross. Why does it even matter?

FATHER: It’s the Teaching.

YOUNG SHMUEL: Well it’s dumb. How does this help us create a better world? That is what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?

FATHER: This has to be a part of it.

YOUNG SHMUEL: Why?

FATHER: I don’t know why. Maybe you’ll be the one who figures it out.

YOUNG SHMUEL: [Sighs deeply, rolls his eyes]

MOTHER: [Annoyed] Shmuel!

SHMUEL: I always felt like I was the only one in Jerusalem who just didn’t get it. At least when Hannah wasn’t there. We were inseparable, Hannah and I. I think our families always thought we’d get married, but we were, you know, just friends.

CUTAWAY: [Young Shmuel and Hannah sitting together. Hannah laughing uncontrollably as Shmuel talks]

YOUNG SHMUEL: Did you see that girl Miriam at services the other day? I wanna know where she got the money for that dress! One day she’s wearing burlap sacks and the next she looks like the Queen of Egypt. Who knows, maybe she’s found some work as — you know … [They crack up. Young Shmuel starts rubbing his forehead]

SHMUEL: But the truth is, Hannah was my protector, too. I got bullied every day because I was, you know, different.

CUTAWAY:

[Two boys are shoving Young Shmuel around, hurling insults at him.]

BOY 1: Sissy!

BOY 2:  I saw you doing it with another boy. I’m going to tell everyone, starting with
your father!

YOUNG SHMUEL: That wasn’t a boy, that was Hannah dressed up as a boy.

BOY 1: So what, Hannah’s your girlfriend?

YOUNG SHMUEL: Yeah! We do it all the time. She loves it. [Young Shmuel rubs forehead]

BOY 2: You’re lying.

[Hannah walks up, her hands on her hips, forcefully shouts]

HANNAH: Hey! Knock it off!

[The boys shove Young Shmuel one last time and walk away in a huff]

HANNAH: Shmuel, why did you say those things? Why did you tell lies about me?

YOUNG SHMUEL: Don’t you get it? I gotta fit in somehow.  [Walks off, rubbing forehead]

SHMUEL: And then one day, something happened.

CUTAWAY:

[Young Shmuel and Hannah are standing alone together. Young Shmuel has a big white blotch on his forehead. He’s rubbing his forehead near the spot.]

HANNAH: Shmuel, what’s that on your forehead?

YOUNG SHMUEL: What’s what? [He touches it]. Oh. [Takes out a mirror and looks at himself, grimaces.]

HANNAH: Does it hurt?

YOUNG SHMUEL: No, it’s fine, it’s just — I don’t know. I’ll be fine.

HANNAH: We should tell your dad.

YOUNG SHMUEL: Are you crazy? We’ll never hear the end of it. Here, just give me your hat. It’s never looked good on you anyway.

HANNAH: No!

[They start struggling over the hat. Shmuel’s father walks up, and they stop. Young Shmuel keeps his back to his father]

FATHER: Shmuel, people in the neighborhood have been talking. They said they saw you … with someone. Is this true? Because if it is, then we need to talk. Shmuel, look at me. I SAID LOOK AT ME.

[Young Shmuel turns to look at his father]

FATHER: Shmuel, what’s that on your forehead?

YOUNG SHMUEL: What’s what?

FATHER: Come here.

YOUNG SHMUEL: [Walks up to his father.]

FATHER: Get your things. You’re leaving. You might be impure. We can’t have you here until we know for certain.

SHMUEL: I couldn’t believe it. I was outside the city, away from my mom and dad, away from Hannah, all on my own for the first time. I kept a diary during the whole experience. Here, I’ll read a few excerpts for you:

Day 1. This is stupid. [Turns the page]

Day 2. I’m bored. I still don’t understand why I’m here. [Turns the page]

Day 3. I miss Mom. I miss Hannah. I even miss my dad.

Day 4. I can’t stand this. I didn’t do anything wrong! This thing on my skin just happened.

Day 5. I’m lonely.

Day 6. I feel like crying all the time.

Day 7. Dad came to see me. If I’d paid attention in school, I guess I would have known he’d come see me on the seventh day. He wouldn’t even talk to me. He just looked at the thing on my head, turned around, and left.

Day 8. I can’t stand having no one to talk to. They’re never going to let me go back home. And maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t fit in there. I’m never going to fit in there. They all hate me.

Day 9. Mom came to visit. And this is what happened.

CUTAWAY:

[Young Shmuel is sitting inside a pup tent, with the flap closed. His mother walks up.]

MOTHER: [Quietly] Shmuel! Shmuel! [Looks around warily]

YOUNG SHMUEL: Mom? [He opens the flap] Mom! I’m so happy to see you!

MOTHER: SHHH! Keep it quiet! If your father finds out I’m here, I’ll never hear the end of it.

YOUNG SHMUEL: Mom, this is stupid. I want to come home.

MOTHER: Is that thing still on your forehead?

YOUNG SHMUEL: Yes.

MOTHER: Then you can’t come home. Oh, this is all my fault. The shame on our family, I can’t bear it. [Cries] Here. I brought you something to eat… [Tosses a bag of food in front of the tent, then pauses, looking at her hands]. Shmuel …

YOUNG SHMUEL: Yes, Mom?

MOTHER: I know you’re … different from other boys, but do you have to make fun of the priests, the Teaching? Your father?

YOUNG SHMUEL: [Silent]

Day 10. Hannah came to visit! And this is what happened.

CUTAWAY:

[Young Shmuel is still inside the tent, the flap closed. Hannah walks up]

HANNAH: [Quietly] Shmuel! Shmuel! [Looks around warily]

YOUNG SHMUEL: Hannah? [Opens the flap] Hannah! It’s about time you got here.

HANNAH: SHHH! Keep it down. If your father finds out I’m here, I’ll never hear the end of it.

YOUNG SHMUEL: Hannah, I miss you so much! You have to get me out of here.

HANNAH: I miss you, too, Shmuel, it’s just…

YOUNG SHMUEL: What?

HANNAH: Having you gone, it’s helped me understand a few things.

YOUNG SHMUEL: [Defensively] Like what?

HANNAH: Listen, I know you and I don’t fit in, but do you really think lying and making fun of people is the way to deal with it?

YOUNG SHMUEL: What do you mean? Nobody cares about us anyway, so what’s the point? Besides, it’s fun.

HANNAH: I know it feels that way, Shmuel, but what if we’re wrong?

SHMUEL: [Closes the journal] Look, I’ll level with you. Sometimes the Teaching drives me crazy. So many strange rules, so hard to understand. But it’s wiser than we know, in ways we don’t always see at first. If it hadn’t been for the Teaching, I would never have gotten to be alone — alone with all the hurt I carried inside me, alone with the hurt I caused others. And as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

CUTAWAY: [Mother is mopping a floor. Father walks up]

FATHER: What are you doing?

MOTHER: What does it look like I’m doing? I’m cleaning.

FATHER: Didn’t you just do this part?

MOTHER: Shmuel usually helps me, but with him gone, I can’t seem to get it clean. [Keeps mopping while father watches uncertainly]. I miss him.

FATHER: I miss him, too, but the Teaching is the Teaching.

MOTHER: But what if we’re the ones who brought this on? What if we’re not loving him the way we’re supposed to?

SHMUEL: My father came again on Day 14, and this is what happened.

CUTAWAY:

[Young Shmuel is in the tent, the flap closed.]

FATHER: Shmuel? It’s me. Come out so I can look at you.

[Silence]

FATHER: [Concerned] Shmuel! Come out here, I need to inspect that thing on your forehead.

[More silence. Father opens the tent and finds Young Shmuel, one arm covered in blood]

FATHER: SHMUEL! What have you done?!

YOUNG SHMUEL: I … I was going to …I didn’t want to go on… But then I got to thinking-

FATHER: [Holding Young Shmuel close] Shmuel, my poor boy!

YOUNG SHMUEL: I put a bandage on it. I stopped the bleeding.

FATHER: I love you. You’re my flesh and blood.

YOUNG SHMUEL: I’ve been so cruel to everyone. I’m so sorry. I just wanted to fit in.

FATHER: Oh Shmuel. [Puts a cloth on Shmuel’s wound] Poor Shmuel. I’m sorry. We’re all sorry.

[They hug, after which Father inspects Young Shmuel’s forehead]. Well, your lesion isn’t getting any bigger, so I have news for you, son. You’re pure. We just have to wash your clothes, go to the mikvah and then you can come home.

[Mother and Hannah enter the stage.]

MOTHER: Shmuel, come home. We miss you. Everything else we can work on. [Glares at father] And we’re ALL going to the mikvah; we all have things we need to wash away.

HANNAH: [Holding out the hat from earlier] I brought you the hat.

YOUNG SHMUEL: [Smiles] Keep it, Hannah. It looks good on you. [They hug]

SHMUEL: You notice I still had that thing on my forehead, but it went away eventually. How? Well, maybe I’ll tell you about it the next time we see each other.

[From out of view, Shmuel retrieves a priest’s garment, puts it on]

SHMUEL: Shabbat shalom, everyone [Exits]

Learning to Love Leviticus: Parashat Vayikra

This post is dedicated to the memory of Steve Miller, one of our community’s Torah study leaders, who passed away unexpectedly around this time two years ago. We miss you, Steve.

From the folks at G-dcast:

I Didn’t Believe My Eyes When I Saw It Happen.

I was in a synagogue on a Saturday morning for the first time. I was at the beginning of a two-year journey that would lead me to the waters of the mikvah, the ritual immersion central to Jewish ceremonial life, coming out as Shim’on, son of Abraham and Sarah, and finding my radiant spiritual home at that very synagogue.

But I knew none of that at the time. Instead, I was just a bemused tourist of sorts, watching as dozens of highly educated people danced and clapped and grinned like little kids. One of the rabbis carried a Torah scroll as big as his upper body, and people crowded into the aisles to touch it, some with their fingertips, some with their prayer shawls, which they then brought to their lips.

Until that day, I had only known the Hebrew scriptures as a weapon — with Leviticus as its poison-laced tip — aimed at me and anyone else who didn’t live up to a ruthlessly gendered culture of conformity.

As soon as I could, I fell into the sweet embrace of a Bible-free grown-up life. I bought prime stock in the belief that the scriptures, especially those dreadful first five books, were not something a thinking person would ever want to engage with.

My draw to Judaism was at first an intellectual one — its commitment to ethics, to social justice, to learning, and the way Jewish observance seemed to help people live mindfully. I wanted that. I figured I didn’t really have to deal with the G-d part, or the Bible part, since there is no real credal test in Judaism. So that morning I let the Torah scroll pass by as I clapped along politely with the congregation.

But the sight of those people’s faces I’ll never forget.

They greeted that Torah scroll like it was an ice cream truck on the hottest day of summer.

How Could That Possibly Be?

That’s what I asked myself as I began the year of study and observance that is the first requirement of a would-be Jew by Choice. I studied on my own and with a weekly Torah study group at our synagogue. That was a lovely introduction into the way Jews approach the scriptures — as the starting point of a gorgeous mess, commentary on commentary, storytelling, and debates that unfold over centuries. Through it all, an expectation of agreement is pretty much the last thing on anyone’s mind.

No one tries to gloss over the text’s obvious seams and contradictions, because Torah is sublime and imperfect, grand and petty, otherworldly and flesh-and-bones. The text isn’t really about floods and begats and homicidal livestock. It’s about us. It’s about making sense of the world and what role a divine being might or might not play in it.

Book after book, story after story, the text opened itself to me, almost always in the presence of my passionate, irreverent, and mostly female teachers and study partners.

About six months into my journey, I reached out and touched the scroll as it passed by, and I kissed my fingers, and I felt a sweetness like none other.

And Then There’s Leviticus

Jewish congregations read the entire five books of Moses in a regular cycle, usually lasting about one solar year. We’re just starting Leviticus, and we’ll be in it until the end of May.

That is a very, very long time to spend reading about the ritual slaughter of animals, the sprinkling of blood, sexual hygiene, how to deal with skin conditions of one kind or another.

For someone who grew up in the tradition, Leviticus is mostly just another quirky anachronism you live with. Most Jews don’t understand Hebrew anyway, so it’s easy enough to not pay attention.

But for someone who first engages with the tradition with an overactive adult mind — and the passion of a convert — it is anguishing. It is deeply painful to encounter something so repellent, so alien to the concept of Judaism as justice and mindful, ethical living.

But no one who celebrates the procession of the Torah scroll sits on their hands when it’s Leviticus time.

I had to confront this strange book head on. And until I found a little volume by an unlikely author, I had no idea how to do that.

Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature

Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses, was the first readable English version of the text I’d ever picked up. Not just readable, but literary, fluid and full of character. But not even Alter can make Leviticus less alien than it seems, and as he tries to make sense of its ritual obsessions, he refers to Mary Douglas’s Leviticus as Literature.

Mary Douglas (z”l) was a lifelong Roman Catholic and trained anthropologist, with an interest in how a culture’s theories of cosmology and ritual shape everyday life. She did field work among traditional African tribes in the 1940s and then found herself studying, alongside other interests, notions of ritual purity and rigorousness in social organization.

Douglas was already in her seventies when Leviticus as Literature came out in 1999, and I imagine it took an old career lady’s sense of self to wade into such a fiercely guarded layer of Bible scholarship. The book is witty, fearless, and even laugh-out-loud funny at times, about the last thing you’d expect from a study of a volume she sums up thusly:

Sacrifice means killing and cutting up large animals and disposing of their blood. The book gives gory instructions for how to sprinkle the blood seven times, dash it against the side of the altar, pour it out at the base, smear it on the altar and on the priests. Its descriptions of skin diseases are fit to turn the appetite, its sins lusty and punishments violent.

Although the formal style softens the macabre effect by making it all seem unreal, it is not a book for squeamish. Yet, Leviticus is the Bible book to which many little Jewish children are first introduced. There does not seem to be much here to attract the young mind. A child is not likely to enjoy the literary finesse, the subtle cross-referenceing and elaborate balancing of themes. Friends have confided that theis early confrontation has put them off the book for life. Others revere it as one would a family heirloom. (p. 14)

A common starting point, certainly for me. But Douglas tackles the whole gory volume with such a sense of delight and wonder. She gets there with the perspective of a trained anthropological field worker — one traditional Bible scholars might not arrive at on their own in a million years. She even spent time learning from kosher butchers, many of whose procedures originated in Leviticus.

Take the opening verses of Vayikra, instructing your average Israelite on how to bring a sacrifice to the Tabernacle, that portable temple described in lavish detail in the closing portions of Exodus:

And he shall slaughter the young bull before the Lord. And Aaron’s descendants, the kohanim [priests], shall bring the blood, and dash the blood upon the altar, around [the altar] which is at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. And he shall skin the burnt offering, and cut it into its [prescribed] sections. And the descendants of Aaron the kohen shall place fire on the altar, and arrange wood on the fire. And Aaron’s descendants, the kohanim, shall then arrange the pieces, the head and the fat, on top of the wood which is on the fire that is on the altar. (1:5-8)

What’s the dashing of blood about? Why cut the animal into pieces? Why put the head and the fat (eww!) on top? Sensible questions, but Douglas teaches us they’re the wrong questions for this culture:

Leviticus’ literary style is correlative, it works through analogies. Instead of explaining why an instruction has been given, or even what it means, it adds another similar instruction, and another and another, thus producing its highly schematized effect …

They serve in place of causal explanations. If one asks, Why this rule? the answer is that it conforms to that other rule. If, Why both those rules? the answer is a larger category of rules in which they are embedded as subsets or from which they are distinguished as exceptions. Many law books proceed in this concentric, hierarchical way. In Leviticus, the patterning of oppositions and inclusions is generally all the explaining that we are going to get. Instead of argument there is analogy. (p. 18)

For that matter, why have a sacrificial cult at all? For that, of course, you have to keep the Israelites in their own time and place — a vulnerable minority worshipping a strange and invisible deity. Without sacrifice, no one, least of all the Israelites themselves, would have taken the religion seriously.

It is all very well for the God of Genesis to tell his creatures to go forth with his blessing on their breeding, or to declare that he will give numerous descendants to Abraham and Isaac. There has to be something that these anxious worshippers can do in the here-and-now to bring their particular cases to his mind. There have to be offerings that they can make to direct his life-giving power to their own lives and to the vegetation and animals on which they depend …

Redirecting the postive cults that honoured Baal to the worship of the God of Israel is an easy accommodation to monothesim. But what to do about cults to aver the harm caused by demons? … To take demons out of the religion would leave a huge gap. It is not just that the worshippers are wishing for fertility, but also that they are wanting to understand the innumerable losses and diseases which they are in the habit of ascribing to demons. If they are told not to fear demons any more, how are they to explain their misfortunes? …

So instead of demons, we get a system of ritual purity, a relationship in which G-d’s favor depends on the people’s adherence to a divinely ordained instruction manual.

Leviticus separated the theory of impurity from belief in demons, and classified impurity as  … an attack on God’s honor as the covenanted lord of the people of Israel. The simple move, expressed in rules for controlling ritual contagion, teaches the people not to blame non-existent demons for misfortunes. The rules prescribe action to remove impurity, washing in the case of minor impurities, sacrifice in the case of bloodshed, genital discharges, and the set of skin afflictions called leprosy.

But ritual purity is really only the beginning. What we have in Douglas’s Leviticus is an entire system of cosmology, an understanding of an ordered universe created by G-d out of what Alter translates as ‘welter and waste’ (tohu wa-bohu, Genesis 1:2).

Looked at this way, the ritual laws of Leviticus must have been of tremendous help to a fragile, isolated culture, a way to remember and honor their deity and ensure divine favor by ordered action in ordered settings.

The actions which Leviticus describes for sacrifice unfold in spatial and temporal sequences, lessons are given by analogies between one physical object and another. Nothing can be justified in this universe except in terms of the proper position in the spatial/temporal order whose rightness is the only justification for anything.

Leviticus presents its philosophical doctrines in the form of rules of behaviour. Its paradigm lesson about God and existence is enacted on the body of a sacrificial animal, or on the altar, or on the body of a human person. There is no need to make the simple moral principles of reciprocity and fairness more explicit, since they are known already. As well as the gain in vividenss and power, the practical lessons on sacrifice afford rich intertextual references to the rest of the Torah. (p. 39)

The connection to the rest of Torah is very important, most especially to the complex analogies between the giving of the covenant between G-d and Israel at Mount Sinai and the building of the Tabernacle, the portable Temple in the desert in which G-d establishes a permanent presence (mishkan in Hebrew) among the people of Israel. The rules for butchering animals and sacrificing their specific body parts are the third leg of this analogical stool. Here’s how Douglas puts it together (p. 79):

Lowest Level
SINAI: Consecration of the mountain (Ex 19:23) –> TABERNACLE: Consecration  (Lev 16) –> ANIMAL: Consecration (Lev 1-7)

Next Level:
SINAI: Lower slopes of the mountain; open access –> TABERNACLE: Outer court and main altar  –> ANIMAL: Head and meat, food for the people and the priests

Next Level:
SINAI: The dense cloud around the summit of the mountain; access only by priests and elders –> TABERNACLE: The Sanctuary, clouds of incense –> ANIMAL: Burnt offerings from the midriff of the animal, dense fat covering, kidneys, lobe of the liver

Highest Level:
SINAI: The summit of the mountain, G-d’s phyiscal presence; Moses only –> TABERNACLE: Holy of Holies, Ark of the Covenant –> ANIMAL: Entrails, intestines, genital organs of the sacrificial animal

So as downright repellent as the Levitical code is to us, to our ancestors and especially to the priestly caste, it was an expression of G-d’s love that could be seen and heard and felt and smelled.

Every piece of the puzzle is sublime, suffused with meaning, as Alter puts it:

The chief instruments for protecting the separation of ontological spheres are fire, blood, oil, and water. These are all, of course, substances associated with the sacrificial cult that long antedate biblical monotheism, but one may follow Mary Douglas’s general line of thought in viewing them as reflections of an implicit symbolic order.

Fire … is associated with the deity… Blood, as Leviticus reminds us, is the very life (nefesh) of the living animal. As such, it categorically must not be consumed as food, but in ritual procedure it has a purgative virtue and is to be sprinkled, cast, or smeared in designated ways during the sanctuary right in oder to effect purgation.

Oil (it is specifically olive oil) has, by contrast, an association with the quotidian and with the social and political realms in ancient culture … oil is the substance of dedication, poured on the head, for kings as well as for priests. It is chiefly the dedicatory function of oil that is carried over into its various stipulated uses here in the cult … olive oil is a product of agriculture, of the land, which sets it over against water, a manifestation of nature without human intervention. (p. 544)

So there it is, a complete system for your average working Israelite to relate to G-d that takes everyday materials, everyday livestock, and projects upon them the most profound statements of divine order, understanding, and love.

How sublime, how wonderful it must have seemed to them.

To Close, A Take from the House of Angela

When I first started studying Torah, I went at it as if I were back in graduate school. I intellectualized. I did research. And I would have kept on doing that way had it not been for Angela, one of my Torah study partners.

Angela is a large, laughing, big-hearted mother of three who, like me, found her way to Judaism as an adult. I think we were somewhere in Exodus one day, trying to understand how the plagues in the liberation story might have related to actual events. I think we were talking about ancient Egyptian historiography or something, and we were getting quite carried away with ourselves.

Then Angela chimed in with this.

“Look,” she said. “I’m a single mother. I got three kids and bills to pay. I need to know how this is going to help me now!“

Angela brought us back down to earth, and now I try to bring Beit Angela, the school of thought she opened up that day, to all my wrestling matches with the text.

Our ancient ancestors figured out what they needed to keep G-d’s presence clear in their minds, in their daily lives, to hold on to their identity as a people in a transformative relationship with the divine. They weren’t shy about working with what they had in front of them, opening up and reconfiguring ancient traditions in radical ways. Not breaking with the past entirely, but not holding on to it for dear life either.

Leviticus was their road map to doing just that. If nothing else, doesn’t it ask us what our roadmap should be? How we map our relationship with G-d onto the things around us?

I think this text, this detailed technical manual for ritual slaughter and purity, is screaming at us, “EVERYTHING MATTERS!”

In a world awash in stuff, drowning in distractions and details, maybe Leviticus is telling us, in the only way it knows how, that we need to pare down, simplify, reduce the number of things in our lives so that we can give each of them our full attention, as if the very structure of the universe depended on how we deal with them.

The Holy Society by Rabbi Hyim Shafner

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

"Hyim we will need your help tonight with a tahara,” said my father.

“But I have never done one,” I replied.

“There are only two of us available, and I hear the man was heavy, bloated, so we will need you.”

A tahara (literally “purification”) is the Jewish process of washing, dressing and preparing a dead body for burial. It is performed by a quiet dedicated group in every Jewish community called the, …

Read more… 957 more words

Let My People Marry! Parashat Va’eira

Reviving this oldie but goodie from 2010 as we pass from Va’eira into Bo’ …

The Basics of Va’eira

• Diary on last week’s parshah, Shemot, by ramara
• Guide for the Perplexed: What’s a parshah?
• Here’s the full text of this week’s portion, Va’eira, and an animated summary and commentary by the wonderful crew at the G-dcast:
  

Va’eira is the second act in the violent disruption of history and memory that is the Exodus story, the struggle between the ancient Israelites and their Egyptian enslavers, formerly their gracious hosts, under a monarch “who did not know Joseph,” (1:8) the Israelites’ savior centuries prior and favored son of their patriarch, Jacob.

This portion begins the tortured bargaining between the Pharaoh and Moses for the Israelites’ liberation, with G-d calling the shots and raining down plague after plague on the Egyptians.

The story is an archetype of absolutism in crisis. Pharaoh is the tyrant who knows the game has changed, totally and irrevocably, but won’t let go. He holds out longer than any sane person would. He tries to find the smallest quantum of dignity he can give out just to get rid of the smelly frogs. Then the boils, then the lice, and so on.

This Isn’t Just Any Bible Story

The Exodus story is the only one we are encouraged — even commanded — to tell every year at the Passover table, where we’ll be just over two lunar months from now. But we don’t just read it out loud. We re-live it. We tell each other, usually in Aramaic, “Today, we are slaves. Next year, we will be free.”

This is happening to us now. This is today’s news.

This year, Va’eira comes at a delicate moment. This year, I can only read the story through the prism I live inside every day — that of a married gay American.

As I write this, Paul Katami, one of the plaintiffs in the gutsy federal lawsuit against Proposition 8 in California, is choking back tears on the stand. He is begging to be allowed to marry the love of his life. He is asking how their commitment could be lumped together with pedophilia as a ‘threat to children.’

Last year, we encountered Va’eira with the joyous noise of President Obama’s election and inauguration still ringing in our ears. My husband and I had worked our tails off for the Obama field office in our south St. Louis neighborhood, and after so many losses four years prior — Dean, Kerry, the fight against Missouri’s marriage amendment — it felt so good to be on the winning side.

Every hour and dollar we put into the Obama campaign we also put into the fight to save marriage equality in California from Proposition 8. We hosted a fundraiser in our home, phone-banked over the Internet, you name it. After we left the election night celebration just before midnight, we turned on the computer at home, and the results coming in from California hit us in the gut.

There we were again — how many times now? We’ve lost count — having the central relationship of our lives put to the whim of voters, legislators, judges — people who didn’t know us.

It was crushing.

So much had been riding on California, and when the vote was finally called, it was the death of hope.

It was the death of hope that someday soon, we could take care of each other without our own government working against us.

It was also a sentence. You’re going to spend years, the voters told us, maybe decades more in your legal no-man’s land, begging your neighbors to recognize you. Now go back into your little box and be grateful for it, faggots.

Thank G-d We Have the Exodus Story

We Jews read our exodus from Egypt as a piercing beacon for social justice. Without it, we might just lose the will to fight against seemingly impossible odds.

We have been exactly where Moses and Aaron stood in last week’s parashah, just as they first approached Pharaoh with the words, “So said YHWH, God of Israel, ‘Send out My People.” (5:1)

How Pharaoh must have shimmered with raw political power. He must have looked like a god compared to the shabby, sandal-wearing sheep herders in his presence. He had no idea who or what this so-called god of theirs was. Why should he? Why should he budge even one bit?

It isn’t until we get into Va’eira that Pharaoh starts to understand the power working through Moses and Aaron. The bit with the snakes (7:10-12) is nice enough, but right away, YHWH exponentially raises the stakes by turning every drop of water in the land to blood (7:19).

Then YHWH covers the land in frogs, which the magicians can match well enough, but it’s at this point that Pharaoh first acknowledges he is in a different game than he might have thought at first: “Entreat YHWH to remove the frogs from me and my people, and I will let out the people so that they may sacrifice to YHWH.” (8:4)

Once the frogs are gone, of course, Pharaoh again refuses to let the people go.

Fine. We all knew his heart wasn’t in the bargain. We all knew this was going to escalate. But the lice, the beasts, the death of the livestock? We’re not even halfway through the plagues yet, and already, the people of Egypt are writhing in agony, reduced to poverty in the blink of an eye.

We’re long past the point where Pharaoh’s magicians tell him they’re outmatched, that Moses and Aaron’s god is real and too powerful to mess with. Still Pharaoh bargains. After the beasts, he agrees to let the people go out, but not far (8:24). Then he changes his mind again. And again.

From the text, we know that the plot is rigged. G-d knows that Pharaoh isn’t going to do the right thing, and even if he decided to, G-d has rigged the whole story to end in ever greater atrocities (6:3-4). But we’re not there yet. We’re still in a story about human beings with free will, and we can’t stop hoping that Pharaoh — in the face of overwhelming proof that there will be no return to the way things were — will do the right thing.

But he doesn’t. And it drives us mad.

Why can’t he just let them go? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t he care about his people? Is he so blind to what this YHWH is capable of that he would stick to his defiance? And out of what? Pride? Stubbornness? His own sense of misguided godhood?

The Outstretched Hand of Truth. Slow Motion.

Since gay couples in North America (like us) started getting married in 2003, it’s been obvious to anyone with a brain that none of the dire predictions made by equality’s enemies have come true. Nor will they. There is no bestiality, no group marriage, and by every measure, children — all children — are better off in jurisdictions with legal equality for gay couples.

Unless you’re married to your own anti-gay bias, equality is a simply a win-win.

People who are against equality for LGBT couples have run out of ‘facts’ to hide behind. Bias is all they have left — clothed, at its very best, in some religious-looking garment.

That was made as clear as day in the debates leading up the defeat of marriage equality bills in New York in December and New Jersey earlier this month. In the New York Senate, the only opponent of equality who stood up to defend his views was a Pentecostal minister. Everyone else was silent.

In America, naked expression of social bias isn’t generally cool. You’d have to be a royal putz to get up in front of live cameras and tell everyone that gay people are less worthy than their neighbors, even if they are good for upping real estate values.

And behind it all, the demographic clock keeps ticking. The marriage issue has lost its power (if it ever had any) as a Republican get-out-the-vote instrument. Every day, tens of thousands of older voters pass from this life and are replaced by teens and twenty-somethings for whom out, committed gay couples are an unremarkable part of the world as it is.

So What Is Va’eira Trying to Teach Us?

We don’t have Pharaoh today. We have millions of lesser pharaohs instead.

Perfectly nice people most of the time, and may G-d bless them always. But a twisted reading of democracy has empowered them to vote their neighbors’ rights into or out of existence.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that when it comes to the dignity of our families, we can’t bargain with people who don’t know us, who don’t recognize the fullness of our humanity.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us we can’t bargain with people who are consumed with holding on to a dying image of their privileged place in the order of things.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that when it comes to justice for something so important, our civil actions must be big, swift, unmistakable, and game-changing. Like the Olson-Boies lawsuit underway at this very moment.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that if we send mixed signals or accept compromise, all we do is prolong the pain of the status quo. Fighting for marriage is gutsy, risky, and not everyone thinks it’s the best idea.

But if we ask for anything less than our rights as equals, should the pharaohs deal with us as equals?

Why Does It Have to Be Like This?

Why does there have to be so much suffering in Va’eira? Why couldn’t G-d just beam the Israelites out of Egypt? Or prevent them from falling into slavery in the first place? Why couldn’t G-d just turn Pharaoh into a mensch? Or put him and his army into a trance while the Israelites made a hasty exit?

Or why, in a society built on the simple truth of equal justice under law, do we have to fight to be treated as equals?

The answer of course is that our story had to be what it is for us to be who we are.

We have to learn every year that in a world of free will, equality and dignity can come at a staggering price, one we have to be ready to pay. Or exact from our oppressors.

We have to live through powerlessness, facing betrayal and denial at the hands of our neighbors over and over again to be — when we finally come out on the other side — better, more compassionate people.

Look no further than the many thousands of American children being raised by gay and lesbian couples. They turn out perfectly fine and just like everyone else’s kids but for one thing: a more developed sense of empathy for the outcast.

Torah teaches that we were created with a divine sense of justice within us. It is universal and indestructable, but it needs be lived out and experienced with our whole bodies and all their senses. Daily, if at all possible.

But imagine this. Imagine we could convince G-d to intervene in a big way, to erase the past and bring about total and instant equality for LGBT people throughout the land.

No more crippling memories of being shut out and shut down. No more separate tax returns, no more sobbing outside closed emergency room doors. No more children torn from loving parents, no more careers ended out of bias. Acceptance. Inclusion. Bliss.

But suppose that in exchange, we had to give up the sharpened sense of compassion that only our pain could have given us. Instead of who we are in this world, we would be some breezy, happy-go-lucky tribe with with not a care in the world, free to immerse ourselves in our relatively prosperous lives.

Would we want that?

Would we want that as Jews, as people committed to a G-d of justice?

If we were those people, would we be the right ones to bring about a better world for all the rest of its outcasts?

While We Meditate the Long View…

In the midst of Va’eira, all that is happening is that G-d is raising the stakes. G-d is making the status quo unbearably painful.

Right now, we are nothing but a frightened, downtrodden mass of flawed, deeply self-doubting people about to take the first steps towards freedom. There’s nothing pretty about it, and we have no idea what’s coming next.

But maybe G-d does, and maybe that will be enough.

Cross-posted, with thanks to ramara, from StreetProphets

Save the Date, Saint Louis! Jay Michaelson’s Gay vs. God February 23 @ 7 p.m.

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