I’d like to respond to David’s observation with 3 points.

First, David affirmed that his work is not lacking in clear stands, pointing especially to the sections on business and speech ethics. I agree about business ethics, which is among the most Jewish-textually rich portions of book. I’ll apply to this section what I said in my original post regarding the Tzedaka section: it does a stronger job of locating ethical principles in specific norms. I thought the speech ethics section is very edifying, but I think it generally instantiates my main point – again, as an observation of our different paths, not a condemnation of the more liberal path – that Teutsch’s work focuses on broad general values we all share (“Tzelem Elohim,” “God’s seal is truth”) rather than on tightly examining the behaviors which the Jewish normative tradition has applied. I would think Teutsch would wear that mantle happily, since it is what he more or less said about himself. I didn’t say the Reconstructionist book never takes clear stances. I said that this work is mainly a conversation among contemporary liberal rabbis and the Jews who love them about how to apply our values, but too rarely – given my interpretation of Jewish tradition – an ongoing conversation with the normative tradition about specific problems and specific norms. And it is in those areas, about particularly Jewish behaviors, that this work remains less specific.

Second, Teutsch reminds me that “ordering” Jews to follow Halakha won’t work. Ordering? Who said anything about ordering? This language is an almost Pavlovian reflex among liberal Jews. When someone mentions Halakha, liberals accuse them of trying to “order” Jews around or bully them into obedience, as if the only reason anyone would follow Jewish law is that they were coerced to do so. What if they do so as acts of devotion? I and my fellow Observant Life authors attempt to reveal the meaning, beauty and wisdom of the normative tradition. As Franz Rosenzweig wrote in the great essay “the Builders,” people love the law because of its inner power, “the law of everyday and of the day of death, petty yet sublime, sober yet woven in legend; the law that knows both the fire of the Shabbat candle and that of the martyr’s stake. [p. 77 ]” For moderns, the law thrives not primarily because of authoritarian claims, because God or the Shulhan Arukh said so, but rather because its wise spiritual discipline is authoritative, enduring and powerful. It is, as FR said, because “the voice of the commandment causes the spark to leap from ‘I must’ to ‘I can’ [p. 86].” I strongly think that this implied accusation that Conservative Judaism “orders” people to behave is misplaced. I would do nothing but persuade. But the authors of these 2 respective works clearly differ on what sorts of behaviors they would persuade about.

Finally, David implies that that my position on traditional Jewish sexual norms depends on a combination of ignorance of the messy historical reality and “wishful” thinking about a pious past. First, of all, I hope I am guilty of neither transgression. But even if I were, I’m not sure this would undermine my position. I thank David for directing me to Yom Tov Assis’ research on sexual behaviors in medieval Iberia. But what should this contribute to our conversation? I think we’re having a conversation about Jewish norms, the behavior that realizes our values in deeds. That is, by definition, a prescriptive account. Let us grant that 700 years ago, medieval Spanish reality included all kinds of ugly things, like adultery, prostitution, the exploitation of household maids, and the unhappy coexistence of “sister wives.” (All of which, as Assis notes, were condemned by Jewish society’s moral leaders.) Why should we bring these exploitative realities into today’s Jewish virtue-conversation? Like all history, these are descriptive accounts.

But one cannot derive prescriptive norms from social descriptions. You cannot make an ought out of an is. You can only make an ought out of an ought: an argument for which virtues constitute the good life. My argument does not depend on a sanitized or romantic view of sainted ancestors. In fact, no one who studies Halakhic literature could ever think that it is a record of perfect piety. There would be no responsa literature at all if everyone always did what rabbinic authority would have wanted.

I can only repeat what I think should be an uncontroversial – virtually self-evident – tenet of Jewish sexual ethics: monogamous fidelity is the ideal and extra-marital sex is forbidden for both husbands and wives. This position doesn’t depend on whether all Jewish societies attained these virtues, or even whether they all accepted them as virtues. That is an interesting question of academic interest. But the fact that medieval Spanish Jews kept concubines does not undermine my moral claim. Nor is my position vitiated by the existence of bad marriages today. I remain certain that rabbis should teach in accordance with the overwhelming consensus of the Jewish prescriptive tradition: the virtuous life is found in monogamy and fidelity, not polyamory.

If we do not eat differently than our non-Jewish neighbors, do not marry differently, do not work and rest, nor buy and sell differently, then maybe our Judaism amounts to nothing more than vestigial, aesthetic and sentimental ethnic rituals.

Modern Jews spill lakes of ink over what we should believe about God, the Torah, good and evil, ethics and the rest. All of which is important. But how do ideas impress themselves upon life’s raw details? If our non-Jewish neighbors think very similar things to what liberal Jews believe, then what is Jewish about our Judaism?

Give credit to our Orthodox brothers and sisters. They know how to live Jewishly. From my perspective, they are wrong about important theoretical and practical questions. But they clearly are Jews, from clothes to kitchens to bedrooms, on Tuesday and Saturday alike.

Liberal Jews are well-aware of our shortcomings. So it is particularly interesting that in the last half-year, both my own Conservative stream and the Reconstructionist movement have published major works on Jewish practice.

We Conservatives produced The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews, a collection of 40 Halakhic essays [two of which I wrote], edited by my good friend Martin Cohen. The Reconstructionists published David Teutsch’s A Guide to Jewish Practice: Volume 1 – Everyday Living, which won last year’s Koret National Jewish Book Award. [A forthcoming volume will treat Shabbat and holidays, and then another will take up the life cycle and personal status.] Teutsch notes the problem I named: “Often described as a way of life, Judaism must shape the everyday conduct of Jews to deserve that description. But in our time, Jewish approaches to moral thought and action do not usually shape the lives of American Jews” [p. 579]. His book, like ours, addresses this need.

Earlier this year I published an essay “Good Neighbors,” (available here) comparing liberal Orthodox discourse with that of Conservative Judaism, believing that we understand ourselves better by looking at our neighbors, seeing differences and similarities. I’ll follow a similar path here, pointing up some patterns about the way these books show how these two movements practice liberal Judaism. [Reform Judaism, to my knowledge, has not produced a similar work. But some of my comments about the Reconstructionist Guide might also apply to the style of that other, very large, liberal movement.] I offer these in the spirit of a modest apologia, a respectful argument for my own faith.

While The Observant Life is a book about classical Jewish law applied in modern times, Teutsch’s Reconstructionist Guide is proudly not beholden to Halakha. It is a post-legal guide, not a code [p. xxiii], replacing law with “values-based decision-making,” a process of analyzing Jewish tradition to identify the values behind the rules as well as examining modern thought and its mores, and attempting to build a practice upon both those two sources. The Reconstructionist Guide only rarely identifies specific practices to follow. Its point is to help Jews and their communities ask [p. 21]: “How do I weave behavior that reflects my highest moral and spiritual commitments into my daily life?” And “What spiritual activities and disciplines would improve my life, character, family, community, people and the world?”

Those are indubitably the crucial questions, and I admire Teutsch for posing them. But in my view, this Guide falls short, by the yardsticks of Jewish tradition, in leaving the values and virtues too general, too abstract, and insufficiently concrete in specific norms. In this religion, we have always applied rules, specific deeds, by which abstractions become realized in deeds. I think we should continue to walk the path of Halakha [plausibly translated “walking the walk”]. The Reconstructionist guidance often remains too general and indeterminate [“some do this,” “some find that meaningful”], that neither tackles hard questions of what actually to do, nor really opens its ears to the demands of Jewish norms. The book is at its best in chapters on Tzedaka and social activism, which locate value commitments in more precise behaviors. More commonly, its guidance resembles its position on prayer: it’s a good skill to develop, but there is “no one right answer” about how to acquire it; so worshippers should pick “what feels most accessible” to begin with, such as birkot hashachar or pesukei d’zimra, or even “summarizing thoughts” that help one focus [p. 42]. What kind of guidance is that? Myself, I find this bizarrely vague for describing Jewish worship, which classically enshrined the Shema as a twice daily biblical obligation, and the Amida as a shared text for standard worship. It is thanks to those requirements that Jews know these prayers, and share them as foundational texts for mind and heart.

I admire the Reconstructionist book’s distinctive format. It presents Teutsch’s core text, with marginal commentaries by 68 different writers, most of whom are Reconstructionist rabbis, but including bankers, physicians, activists, etc. I admire the participation both of professional teachers and engaged amateurs. This approximates a classical Jewish style, in which other writers’ expansions and criticisms are printed right there on the page in conversation with the central text. Here, it also matches the modern liberal preference for plural voices over unanimity.

Our book has a different style: it consists of 40 stand-alone essays, each written by a Conservative rabbi who labored in research on a given topic. These read more like distinct lectures, without respondents. Different writers may clash in this book, but not because they explicitly comment on each other. Each chapter has a single author, but the various writers’ voices were melded into something like homogeneity. There is less personality on the pages of our work than in Teutsch’s. These are our individual words and our own views, but we’re speaking for more or less authoritatively for a movement, not necessarily for ourselves.

But the limited back-and-forth format of the Reconstructionist book prompts me to ask: who is participating here? Teutsch’s book is a conversation among North American Reconstructionist Jews about living out their values in the early 21st century, in a specific context. Their community aspires, spiritually and ethically. In style, they are vaguely counter-cultural, very liberal with a small l and un-orthodox with a small o. They like yoga and mindfulness meditation [pp. 65-67, 73-75]. They praise “communities of conscience” that oppose the Israeli occupation [p. 252] and critique American tax policy [p. 391]. They urge American consumers to have post-colonial consciousness regarding the exploitation of third-world producers [p. 520]. I share each of these positions, and see their general connections to Jewish values. But I would observe that these constitute Jewish living only in attenuated ways and overly tightly identify Jewish values with specific policy stances.

The Guide’s “values-based decisions” emerge from a conversation among contemporary Jews. But the practices these writers favor generally do not emerge from a conversation with the dozens of layers of Jewish scholars through the ages – not in the tight way that a page of Talmud is a multi-century conversation quoting Moses, Isaiah, Akiva, Abbaye, Rashi, and R. Akiva Eiger all talking about the same thing. These Reconstructionist reflections fit the moment. Certainly these writers bring Bible references and citations from rabbinic tradition. But these are usually the obvious ones, usually homiletical rather than practical, and rarely enter deeply an ongoing transhistorical discussion with historic Sages over how to live.

I mean this observation not as a condemnation – although I certainly prefer my own approach – but as a comparison between our styles. I am sure it is a source of pride to the authors that they place any and all practices on the table for evaluation and re-evaluation as they try to pursue their value commitments. I am sure they think of themselves as free from slavish, unreflective adherence to the old, and more attentive to the demands of the moment than are we hidebound Conservatives.

But I would observe that these two works present very different approaches to the concept of behavioral norms. The Reconstructionist approach is highly selective, sifting the tradition to select those kernels they believe should be replanted. But for me and my colleagues, the Reconstructionist approach is inadequate. To quote a friend of mine, Prof. Don Seeman of Emory University, a deep thinker and Orthodox rabbi: “Selectivity is too simple a language for my relationship to religious authority and the weight of the past.” I know Don would level against me the very criticism I apply to the Teutsch Guide. But I think this phrase is right on: It is not merely a matter of sifting through tradition for ideas you like. It involves really living the holy path, to the greatest extent possible, following the teachings of our Sages, to realize our values in normative deeds, shared by Jews across the world and contiguous through time.

That is what The Observant Life demonstrates, I think: the richness that emerges when one makes the covenant not only with those who are here today, but woven with words of those who are not here today. Our conversation is rich with biblical, rabbinic and medieval authorities. I think this makes our approach deeper, more subtle, less faddish, more learned and wiser. Ultimately, I think it makes it more faithful. It certainly makes it more recognizably Jewish, as an indexical marker of how we live.

Reconstructionist Judaism trumpets Mordecai Kaplan’s phrase that we should give tradition “a vote, not a veto.” But that means only that traditional norms are invited to vote yes to confirm what liberal Jews already want, but are not permitted to vote no. But it is all too easy and lazy to reject uncongenial norms as outmoded, and hastily sprinkle ourselves with self-congratulatory fairy dust for “wrestling” with the tradition.

Admittedly, I am vulnerable to the same objection from traditionalists. Isn’t that just what I’ve done in espousing gender egalitarianism and celebrating gay relationships – refuse to let the tradition vote no? Fair enough, I guess. But I regard those as principled critiques of tradition, even in the service of sustaining it. As the Talmud itself [Menachot 99b] says: “Sometimes violating the Torah turns out to be its fulfillment.” Meanwhile, I keep the mitzvot, and try to learn their wisdom by doing them. Absent a compelling moral claim, I think traditional norms should stand with their yesses and nos. I give the halakha the benefit of the doubt, and strive to fulfill it as an act of worship and virtue.

But Teutsch and the other writers, it seems to me, don’t avoid the trap, or even try very hard to. In most cases when modern and traditional mores clash, the tradition is silenced. Reconstructionists are true modernists: I think they think the modern ways are better, and the old ones should fade. It’s like that old Minnesota Jew said: “Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one.”

This work – and I suppose by extension Reconstructionist Judaism in general and maybe all non-Halakhic Judaism – seems unable to say that anything is assur, just plain forbidden. Its alternative ethos is that if good values can be attained through a given practice, if individuals or communities can make something work, then classical Jewish norms have no business stopping them. But for me, this is no prescription for Jewish integrity or keeping faith with the Torah and Sages, and risks a kind of self-indulgent narcissism. Here are two comparatively smaller examples, and one very big one.

Tattoos come in for positive evaluation in the Reconstructionist Guide, with no discussion at all of the biblical prohibition, because they can “evoke spiritual meaning or use Hebrew words that connect to the act of prayer as a form of walking meditation” [pp. 87-88]. When Teutsch proposes [p. 27] mixing-and-matching different forms of address and different divine names when composing blessings (e.g. Nevarekh et haShekhina, ruach ha’olam instead of Barukh ata Adonay, Eloheinu melekh haOlam) he is motivated by today’s theological concerns and feels no need even to discuss classical norms of Jewish liturgy.

And very dismayingly, this work of Jewish practice cannot even bring itself to affirm monogamy and sexual fidelity within marriage, gay or straight, as absolute Jewish norms. While Jews have generally favored monogamy, Teutsch writes, “it is not obvious that monogamy is automatically a morally higher form of relationship than polygamy.” If “polyamory” – multiple romantic and sex partners – were practiced with honesty, flexibility, egalitarian rules for men and women, with trust and without jealousy, it could help couples “avoid some possible forms of exploitation” and avoids “the violation of vows and the need for secrecy” as found in most affairs. “Perhaps some people can manage it successfully and live enriched lives as a result” [pp. 217-227].

Wait … what?! What did I just read? To his credit, one of the Guide’s commentators, Lewis J. Eron, seems as scandalized as I on this point. Forgive me, but this disgraces a Jewish work that speaks in the name of Torah. Is this Marin County, 1975? Are we supposed to self-actualize, not be so possessive and just be free, man? Sorry, no. No. No. No. Ten thousand times, no.

Also no, there is not a “complex history” to Jewish norms of monogamy and polygamy, as Teutsch claims [p. 222], as if this has been a contested question over our history, with multiple nuances and ample precedents for divergent views. [See p. 261 in our Observant Life book, or Avraham Grossman’s book Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe.] In point of fact, the Bible itself consistently portrays polygamy as the source of family strife. And to the extent there was polygyny in the Middle Ages, it was unpopular with women, their parents and their rabbis [e.g. Rambam], and happened usually when merchant husbands left home for years at a time, when the first wife was infertile or in the case of yibum, the childless widow. None of which has anything whatsoever to do with modern people who choose to have sex with partners other than their spouses.

Despite Teutsch’s disclaim, it is indeed obvious that fidelity to a single sexual partner in a permanent union is the ideal relationship, promoting maximal loyalty, mutuality, trust and care, and minimizing the narcissistic tendency to please one’s self at the expense of the degradation and heart break of others. I sincerely hope my Reconstructionist colleagues know they are playing with fire. God forbid – God forbid! – that Jews should learn from their religious teachers that some couples are mature and trusting and unselfish enough to enhance their marriages by sleeping with other partners. That sounds, frankly, like a sexual abuse accusation waiting to happen. If I were a parent and heard such nonsense from a rabbi, I would find another synagogue. Hakhamim, hizharu bidivreikhem. Sages, take care with your words, and retract when you’ve made a foolish mistake.

Well, long as this is, it is only a blog post. So I will bring this to an end, now, by posing a question: What can it mean for non-halakhic Judaism to speak of guides to behavior? Values and virtues are critical elements in a Jewish ethos. But I believe they require binding norms to hook onto the pragmatic world, and to keep faith with Jewish tradition. That is the most crucial question before us liberals. I hope our Conservative book The Observant Life helps people figure out not only what to value, but how to act. For me, the Teutsch Guide has many merits, but its non-normative commitments prevent it from giving enough real guidance to the perplexed.

A century ago the great poet Bialik summed up what modern Jews need in a new, heterodox religion. Not the Shulhan Arukh, but Halakha nonetheless. He concludes his classic essay Halakha ve’Aggada, or “Law and Lore” this way: “We stretch forth our necks. Where is the yoke?”

Dov’s Friday night TV program Mekablim Shabbat “Greeting Shabbat” on the weekly Torah reading is a hit – at least among that sector of the population who watch TV on Shabbat, but who want to discuss the weekly Parasha. I’m tempted to wonder how many of those can there possibly be. But he said he draws about 10 percent of the Friday night viewing audience. You can see examples on YouTube.

Elboim was here in America connected with his work with the Bina Center for Jewish Culture , a fabulous organization where my own son will be studying next year. (A great organization deserves support.) In my humble opinion, the most critical cultural question in Jewish life is the Jewish character of Israeli life. What Jewish values does Israeli society hold dear? What is its connection to our intellectual and spiritual heritage? What texts and teachings shape the inner life of the “secular” Israeli? What kind of Jew does she or he aspire to be?

Along with a few other organizations, Bina and its incredibly engaging and deep teachers seek to develop a new Jewish language that will permit so-called “secular” people to build meaning through an engagement with classical Jewish sources. The woeful Judaic ignorance on the part the secular majority is – to borrow a term from the political realm – an “existential threat” to Jewish society. We liberal American Jews are also vastly ignorant. But of course the Israelis speak Hebrew, which is both worse (more indefensible) and better (more easily remedied).

But public ignorance is maybe only 49 percent of the problem. It is matched by the inappropriateness of the conventional religious vocabulary, which bars the “secular” population from the richness of the Jewish religious tradition. Jewish life is all too fragmented in Israel, with precious little contact among different population sectors, and precious little exposure to Torah discourse in a compelling way.

What does Torah have say to the lives of people who are not conventionally observant? In truth, EVERYTHING. But you wouldn’t know it from Israeli public life. The spokespeople for the religious tradition are all too often associated with the fanaticism, superstition, bigotry and hypocrisy of ultra-Orthodox enclaves, and the messianism and triumphalism of religious Zionism, difficult to extricate from right-wing politics. How is any one supposed to discover the subtlety, depth and humanism in the Torah from those guys?

My Israeli religious heroes include those of the religious Zionist center-left – still kicking, in a few hardy corners – and especially the folks around secular initiatives like Bina, who are striving to develop a whole new language for talking about Torah and religion. This language won’t resolve into simplistic binary questions about authority: do you or don’t you submit to Jewish law? It won’t be a reactionary loyalty to traditional norms. And by the way, I am loyal to traditional norms. But I don’t think the ultimate point of religion is conformity.

The point instead is to discover the spiritual and moral aspirations within our norms, and apply them to our world and to our lives.

On this point, Elboim said one of the best things I ever heard. This past Shabbat, someone asked him about why he left his own ultra-Orthodox world as a high schooler. “I was too religious to be Orthodox,” he replied.

He meant, I think, that life and Torah hold too much sacred possibility to be exhausted by microscopic conformity to rules – even holy and beautiful rules – in self-segregated “gated communities.” And that life is too full of meaningful sanctity to be restricted to what we conventionally call “religious observance.” (Admittedly, if it is to be Jewish it must find expression in shared communal norms and deeds. These new Torah norms are still forming.)

We all still only stammer this new vocabulary. Words like hiloni/”secular” and dati/”religious” are overly crude binaries to describe what I, at least, would like to see the Jewish people learn to become. We’ve only begun to discover life’s latent possibilities for that special mix of virtue, refinement, spiritual aspiration, social responsibility, learning and worship worthy of the name Torah.

That’s what I aspire to, at any rate. At my best, I should be fortunate to emulate Elboim and be “too religious to be Orthodox.”

A truly inspiring figure and one of the great rabbis in Orthodox America, R. Yosef Blau – the “Spiritual Guide” or Mashgiach Ruchani at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical seminary – spoke a year ago of the power of meeting Palestinians and hearing their own narratives, through the Encounter Program. Here is a report about it, including a video of his speech at the 2011 Encounter fundraising dinner. Yes, you can be an empathetic and universalist Zionist.

Leonard Fein has been “curating” a discussion on the Huffington Post called Liberal Zionists Speak Out. It is quite stimulating. We Liberal Zionists have been most embattled and this conversation needs to be broadcast widely, affirming the ethical standing of Jewish peoplehood, and our need for political sovereignty in a world where not that long ago our enemies murdered millions of us and where real enemies continue to see us as little better than “Jewish Arabs” who should do well to live as a minority in an Islamic state. But the sad but real transformation is that a liberal Zionism of most of the 20th century gave way to a right-wing Zionism of the late 20th century. Myself, I still believe in a liberal Zionism, sensitive both to the claims of Jewish destiny, Jewish cultural commitments and those of our neighbors, both those who are citizens of the state and those who are subject to its rule. Anyway, you’ll enjoy most of these articles, including those by Muki Tsur, Michael Walzer, Stuart Schoffman and Ruth Gavison.

An important discussion in Israel happened this year regarding Hatikva, the national anthem. Supreme Court Justice Salim Jubran stood in silence as Hatikva was played, causing national apoplexy. But, as Bibi Netanyahu recognized, it is not fair to expect an Israeli Arab to sing with reverence the words “as long as a Jewish soul longs within the heart … “

What can Israeli citizenship mean to the 20% who are non-Jewish? The Forward has taken up this question with an interesting proposal about the text of the national anthem, as advanced by their columnist Philologos. That pseudo-nonymous writer is no post-Zionist leftist, but a true paleo-Zionist ideologue, who presses the question of the multi-cultural components of the Jewish state. The Forward site has Neshama Carlebach singing the revised words. See what you think. Compare this to the version sung by survivors in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

Finally, let me offer you an old poem by an old poet, Yehuda Karni, an early immigrant, an early editor of HaAretz, who died in 1949. A moving piece of romantic retro-Zionism, longing to become a single stone in a wall of safety in a rebuilt Israel. I feel it.

Put me in the breach, like every other rolling stone
Fasten me strongly with a hammer
Perhaps I may atone for my homeland and pay off
The sin of a people who has not mended it ruins.

How good to know that I am a stone like every other stone of Jerusalem
How fortunate I am, for my bones are bound into the wall
For why should my body be any less than my soul, which in fire and water
Walked along with its people, screaming and silent?

Take me with all the Jerusalem stones, and place me into the walls
Cover me with mortar
And as they wear away within the wall, my bones will sing
To greet the Messiah.

How should a synagogue community mark Yom HaShoah?

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s *Zakhor* made us pay attention to the uneasy alignment of Jewish “history” – empirical, critical research into the past – and “memory” – emotionally and culturally laden bonds we share with people who lived long ago, who are dead but never really gone, whose lives we carry forward. Contemporary Jews marking the Shoah almost always stumble as we weave history & memory. Too much historical analysis, and we’re really just examining cadavers. But it is so easy to slide into manipulative sentimentality, and our nostalgic veneration of a supposedly authentic, saintly Eastern Europe. No thank you.

Then there are the problems of theology, politics and ethics. Bringing God into the conversation is totally necessary and totally impossible. As R. Eliezer Berkovits said in *Faith After the Holocaust*, it is blasphemy against the God of Israel to fail to ask where He was while His children were being slaughtered. Yet no religious answer makes more than fragmentary sense of the extreme bestiality of the Nazis and their friends. Certainly no answer can be compelling enough for our communities to davven it together as a faith statement. Politically, too often the Shoah becomes a spade to dig with, merely a pretext to talk about Iran or the Palestinians or Pat Buchanan. On the ethical front, you cannot cede either the Jewish meaning of these events or the universal ones. It is bizarrely deracinated to mark the obliteration of European Jewish civilization by talking about Darfur. Yet it is bizarrely self-assertive to talk about *einsatzgruppen*without considering the moral imperative to fight further mass murders. As Ruth Messinger of AJWS likes to say: “*Never Again* cannot mean *Never again should Germans kill Jews in the 1940s*.” All true. All difficult.

How should we mark it? The old stand-by – a survivor sharing his or her story – is in its final act. There are about 200,000 survivors in Israel and about 125,000 in America (according to various newspaper accounts). The youngest camp survivors would be in their 80s, and hidden children would have to be 70. About 12,000 survivors died in Israel last year, or an average of one every 44 minutes. We are the last generation that will hear from them in person.

At Ansche Chesed last year (2011) we had an exceptional presentation from the historian Sam Kassow about his book “Who Will Write Our History“ on the Oyneg Shabbos archives, the efforts by Warsaw Ghetto residents to document the misery going on around them, and the efforts at spiritual survival.

This year we followed up by showing *A Film Unfinished”, an amazing edition of Nazi propaganda footage taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in May, 1942, interleaved with contemporary interviews and additional material. The Nazi film aims to portray rich Jews ignoring the starvation of their poor brothers and sisters as they lived in luxury. The Nazis abandoned the project, apparently because the real cause of all the misery – the sidewalks full of corpses, the courtyards full of human feces, the people in dressed in rags – was all too obvious. Ghetto survivors, now in their 70s and 80s are shown here watching the film, pointing out individuals they recognize among the footage, fearing they will see images of their own parents. People have posted the whole film on Youtube, but I recommend you buy it. Here is a trailer.

Most haunting for me were two things: First, the Nazi camera’s focus on so many *faces* of the Ghetto residents. When you say the number *6 million, *how difficult it is to think of individuals. But staring into these faces – a mix of rich, well-fed faces, and gaunt, starving, scarred, grotesquely suffering faces – is a harrowing experience. As I looked at those faces, I thought to myself – this film is shot in May 1942. Within four months, by September of that year, most of you will have been gassed at Treblinka. You and you and you and you and you are all headed for the *brausebad* and then it will be over. This visual experience was helpful for absorbing the Shoah not as a pile of 6 million dead bodies, but as a passing parade of 6 million living people.

That is the same reason I find very moving the all-night reading of names, as we do here on the Upper West Side every Yom HaShoah. Reading the long list of names, I try to imagine something about these people. I try to imagine the person that goes with this name … let’s say Mordecai Goldberg, Sarah Cohen … attending school, playing childhood games, getting married, giving birth, mourning a loved one.

The other intensely moving part of the film had to do with food and hunger. One scene of the film, apparently a propaganda trope, shows a ghetto resident arranging flowers in a vase. To which one of the survivors comments: “Flowers? When were there ever flowers? If we had one, we would have eaten that flower.” You see scenes in this film that you never see in the worst urban poverty in America. True starvation and people too weak to move. At one point a man takes out a spoon and scrapes something off the pavement to eat it. (Similarly, you see what it looks like when people are literally dressed in rags – literally bags of rags – something you never see even among the saddest NYC street people.) When the film was being shot there were 4,000-5,000 people dying per month in the ghetto, dozens every day, their corpses left in the streets overnight for circulating burial squads to pick them up and lay them into mass graves (also shown in the film).

I came away from these images with a renewed sense of gratitude for the mind-bogglingly abundant food that we have in this country, a renewed desire to recite blessings for every morsel of food I enjoy, and a renewed desire to feed this country’s poor. As I like to, I gave to two of my favorite food organizations, the West Side Campaign Against Hunger in New York and Meir Panim in Israel.

Yet I still feel the enormous power of prayer to re-orient the self, to help us connect to our deepest, wisest and noblest wishes for the world. At least it helps me. The best prayers are a rare combination of mind, heart and will.

These days I am leading a group at the Prozdor high school program at Jewish Theological Seminary on the meaning of prayer for modern Conservative Jews. Last Sunday I thought to bring some examples of powerful prayers in film. (Because, let’s face it, teenagers love video. So do adults. So do I. I love these videos. I LOVE these videos.)

So as long as I’m being honest to God, here are some of my favorite movie prayers.

Check this out, from O Brother Where Art Thou? The opening is hysterical (“Care for some gopher, Everett? No thanks, Delmer, a third of a gopher would only arouse my appetite”). But start at about 1:18 where the escaped convicts find themselves amid a congregation baptizing itself.

Here is a different version with the studio version of the song laid over the entire video reel. 

OK, admittedly, there is some satire of what deep Christian thinkers call “cheap grace” – easy forgiveness. But there is also real grace. Real surrender. Real beauty, as people are really carried away, entering the well living waters and being renewed. I find it moving.

Now for something totally different. This is from The Apostle, the 1997 film about a sinful, faithful evangelical preacher, one of the best movies about religion I’ve ever seen, with some amazing acting, by Robert Duvall, who may not be a wartime consigliere, but he can sure act.)

Check out this scene, 

especially beginning at 5:30, where the main character Sonny, has just been fired from his church because of his infidelity. He goes to the attic and speaks to God, with anger, honesty, love, rebellion and human personality. All authentic modern prayer has those elements. It’s ferocious: “I love you, Lord, but I am mad at you.” My favorite line: “I always called you Jesus and you always called me Sonny.” We’ve got a relationship here. So what should I do now? What should I do? That’s real prayer. 

Let’s get back to Judaism to visit a true classic Jewish American text, The Jazz Singer (1927), the first movie to blend silent and talkie film. It’s the story of a young man who rebels against his family – who wants him to be a synagogue cantor – to become instead a “jazz singer.” In this climactic scene, he returns to sing Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur eve, as his father dies, satisfied with the knowledge that his boy has come home. 

This scene is extremely dated, being about 85 years old, but strangely affecting still. Part of what works in prayer is the knowledge, as the Jewish liturgy says, “you are our God, and the God of our ancestors.” Real prayer connects us to the traditions of our forebears. This gives us strength and meaning. Every regularly davvening Jew knows what it is like to feel the ancestor’s hand upon our shoulder, at Kol Nidre or even an ordinary morning.

Finally, a great modern Israeli Jewish text, the film Ushpizin (2005), the work of the great actor/writer Shuli Rand. In this film, Rand plays a former criminal who has repented to become a Hasidic Jew, following the peculiar path of R. Nachman of Breslov, the 18^th-19^th century sage who insists on the power of personal prayer. The character Moshe’s troubles include severe poverty and childlessness, the classical crises which Jewish texts associate with prayer. Moshe especially has to overcome his tendency to violent anger, from his criminal past. In the first clip, at around 9:40, with the holiday of Sukkot about begin, he and his wife, Mali, pray intensely for a miracle, since they lack enough money for the basics of the holiday. 

Sure enough, they are given a $1,000 charitable gift, enabling them to buy, among other things, the most perfect etrog in Jerusalem. The story is a little complicated, but suffice it to say that Moshe faces some tribulations, as he hides two escaped prisoners, lowlifes from his past, which prompts his wife to leave him. And when the convicts mistake his precious etrog for a lemon, squeezing it over a salad, Moshe is about to blow. But instead he has this prayerful confrontation with God, which begins around 4:40. 

I hope you enjoy these. What do you think? What are your favorite movie prayers? Or other religious scenes?

What I admire about Ash Wednesday is its AWESOME ritual: the smearing of a cross of ashes upon the foreheads of adherents. Walking around New York today, I was so moved by the sight of many Catholics (I think only a very few Protestants do this) bearing the sign of their faith. In this secular age, I admire those who walk around wearing the badge.

First, especially in New York City, one cannot fail to notice the rich ethnic diversity of the Catholic Church: many, many, many Hispanics, some blacks, a few Asians, and still plenty of what we used to call “white ethnics,” Italians, Poles, Germans and Irish. That’s just so cool and broad. That’s what Catholic means, after all: the whole world.

Even more, I admire the symbolic depth of this ritual. Symbols are those evocative mythic and poetic deeds, gestures and words that seize us, and bring us into contact with the ultimate story, what’s really real. For a Christian, I can only imagine, this is an amazingly deep gesture: inscribing your face with a mark that comprehends both your inevitable death – for “you are dust and to dust you shall return” [Genesis 3.19] – and the possibility of your eternal life, symbolized for the Christian by the cross. That’s religion, my friends: You will die; face it. You will live forever; be worthy of it.

We Jews don’t do much with ashes any more. But we should! And we used to. We do have some old practices in this vein that deserve mention. During the communal crisis of a drought, Mishna Taanit 2.1 [=15b-16a in the Talmud] records, they would bring the Torah ark into the public square and place ashes upon it, while the communal leaders would smear the ashes upon their heads. And since the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, grooms were to place ashes upon their foreheads, to fulfill the verse “If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my mouth seal shut if I do not recall Jerusalem even at my greatest happiness [Psalm 137.5-6; Talmud Bava Batra 60b].” These practices connote God’s participation in Israel’s human suffering [cf Isaiah 63 and Psalm 91], and inevitable human mortality. Hmmm. Seems like some Jewish and Christian parallel themes at work here …

At any rate, I wish my neighbors a meaningful day with a powerful symbol. And I wish us all that we may be privileged to see the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah 61.3, that God will “grant joy [*pe’er*] in place of ashes [*efer*] to those who mourn for Zion.”

The most notable example of the Torah’s androcentric orientation is Moses’ command to the Israelites to prepare for revelation [Exod 19.15]: “Be ready in three days – do not come near a woman.” Could any proof be clearer that our Torah speaks mainly to men, and considers women worse than marginal, practically inimical to the religious experience? Almost undeniable, and instantiated by plenty of commentators.

And yet… amazingly, some of the Sages read this verse precisely against the grain, to extract from it a mandate for women’s inclusion in the revelation – precisely the opposite of the apparent semantic meaning. I will paraphrase/explicate the rabbinic teaching, associated with Rabbi Eleazar ben Azarya (2nd century CE), which can be found in the Talmud Shabbat 86a, paralleled in the Midrash on Exodus called Mekhilta [Bahodesh 3] as well as in Rashi’s commentary to Exodus 19.15. (Warning: minor sexual explicitness follows.)

Be ready in three days – do not come near a woman. Seminal emission renders a person ritually impure. This is true whether the semen came from a man in the usual course, or whether it re-emerged from the body of a woman following sex. Whoever’s body emitted semen, male or female, would be considered equally ritually impure. (See Leviticus 15.16-18 for all this.) Semen deposited within a woman’s body could re-emerge for as many as three days, the Talmud says, but may be ignored after that time. Therefore, in warning “do not come near a woman,” Moses is telling his male listeners: do not compromise your wife’s eligibility to be present for God’s revelation. You might come and go, so to speak, but three days later she could still experience ritual impurity from an earlier encounter. You must abstain, Moses says, so that she too can be ready to stand at Sinai, the first time. According to this teaching, men are commanded to avoiding sex for the sake of the women’s experience of God, not for the sake of the men’s own experience.

Now, if a modern traditionalist offered such an interpretation, we’d sniff and call it apologetics, and accuse him of distorting the simple meaning of the Torah. But Rabbi Eleazar ben Azarya lived in the 2nd century! He certainly never knew he should be embarrassed by the Torah’s latent misogyny or androcentrism. He never heard a feminist critique of anything. He is not apologizing. He’s just explaining what seems to him the fullest meaning of the Torah.

And to our great surprise, this position turns out to be actually quite egalitarian. The ritual purity rules for males and females are, in this case, the same. And for R. Eleazar ben Azarya, so too the opportunity for men and women to stand at Sinai is fundamentally egalitarian.

Now, I would not deny Plaskow’s argument, which has a lot going for it. Certainly one midrash cannot disprove the reality of pervasive androcentrism in classical Judaism. Plaskow herself notes this text (p.27 in Standing), citing it as an example of a positive rabbinic instinct for women’s inclusion, although those same rabbis would “continually re-enact” exclusion.

Fair enough. But as a religious Jew and a student of the Sages, my deepest held belief is that the Torah contains the seeds of its own renewal. We certainly must be honest about where the Torah tradition has turned into blind alleys, where it is difficult for us moderns to find meaning. But this ancient text is an amazing counter example, I think, of the power of interpretation to keep Torah alive. It’s the never-dying, ceaselessly growing tree. From two millennia ago, an echo of an ancient rabbinic voice insists that everyone in Israel must be able to share the covenant. If that’s not the Tree of Life, I don’t know what is. I feel we’re all still standing at Sinai the first time.

Last month I posted the earlier comment called “Not So Honest Kars-4-Kids” about the charity which would seem to be intentionally obscuring its Orthodox affiliations, perhaps to attract gifts from Jews and non-Jews who would not otherwise support their mission.

I want to give a big shout out to Josh Nathan-Kazis of the Forward who has been carrying this story … umm…. Forward, with a couple of excellent pieces about that group’s dodgy use of money.

Check out these pieces: http://forward.com/articles/149879/ and http://forward.com/articles/149459/

Well done!

Nonetheless, I keep this fast and the other minor ones, including those whose meanings I do connect with intensely, like mourning Moses’ smashed tablets on the 17th of Tammuz, political extremism on Tzom Gedalya.

I like fasting – it’s physical and spiritual and intense, even as you feel a bit weakened. I realize that not so many people in my corner of the world observe the minor fasts. And I wonder about why that is.

Modern liberal people choose not to fast not only because they don’t connect to ostensibly historical events, long forgotten by everyone. Rather, I think we liberal Jews are not so good at incorporating difficult and trying experiences into our religion. We do what we like to do, and rarely feel called to endure any pain.

Not that I favor religious self-mortification for its own sake, or to emphasize basic human abjection. But I do think that – if religion is to be a rounded spiritual experience, not just a birthday party – it needs to confront the bad news as well as the good, and ritualize them and internalize them. Furthermore religion – at least this one – requires you to bear the yoke. You have to carry practices that try your endurance, not only those which celebrate your pleasure.

That’s how I experience fasting and why I continue it: it helps me internalize and ritualize life’s failures and suffering, and trains me in bearing the yoke of service, even in ways I don’t really enjoy bearing.

It all reminds me of a passage in the short story “My Quarrel with Hirsch Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Grade>, the great Yiddish writer (who just happens to be buried in the Ansche Chesed cemetery). In this work, Chaim Vilner, the narrator, an apostate Yiddish writer who left the world of the yeshiva – obviously Grade himself – encounters an old fellow student, who remains a fierce defender of traditional pietism. The story takes place mostly in 1948, in Paris, and the two hammer out their world views, in the wake of all that each suffered in the Shoah. One gets the impression that Grade is having this conversation in his own head, hearing both the power of the pietistic argument, as well as the inevitability of secularism and apostasy as they force unanswerable questions upon tradition.

The pietist, Hirsch Rasseyner, complains that the liberals only know how to lighten the yoke of Jewish commitment; they never know how to intensify it, until it grabs your whole heart and soul, down into your internal organs. “Lighten the weight a little, they said, so what is left can be borne more easily,” Hirsch says. “But the more they lightened the burden the heavier the remainder seemed. I fast twice a week without difficulty, and they can hardly do it once a year. Furthermore, what the father rejected in part, the son rejected in its entirety. And the son was right! Better nothing than so little. A half-truth is no truth at all. Everyone, and particularly a young man, needs a faith that will command all his intellect and ardor.”

There is a lot of depth to this, even though I have no desire whatsoever to practice ultra-Orthodox religion. But it is certainly true that in my corner of the world we should build up our necks more, so we can bear the yoke better, even when it hurts. We need to, we need these fasts, so we can train ourselves to make religious meaning out of life’s ugliest moments.

See you on Taanit Esther.