Naso: Passion

Embedded between burdens of the Levites and the twelve individual and identical offerings of the tribal princes are laws relating, implicitly, to passions. The wayward wife acts on her infatuation.  The jealous husband's imagination kindles his fury. They feel that these emotions spring from the unique parts of their being. The establishment of a ritual to deal with these seemingly private matters attests to their banality.  These suspicions and desires come from the river of species preservation that brought us into life and flows toward the preservation of our families, tribes and nations past individual mortality.

The evolutionary forces that made passion the driver toward procreation, like all Darwinian explanations, are post-hoc justifications. There are elements of intragroup re-selection. An element of competition is intrinsic to ardor. The most passionate, and those with the skills and strength to act on their desires, prevail. Thus, passion has an element of self-selection. QED

 

The sotah ritual deals with passions gone awry. The system of monandry assumed in the Torah is imagined violated. Should I apologize for this demeaning rite? It is a little more benign that expected.  The male imagination is not sufficient cause to condemn the wife. In the hands of the Talmud (we recently completed the tractate Sota) the accusations and fantasies are  subject to rules of evidence, including the standard two (valid) witnesses required to establish the facts. The penalty, the trial by ordeal, the drinking of the embittering waters is very unlikely to have true, physical, ill effects ( unless adulterated). The Mishna (written when the second temple stood) says that the ritual was abandoned when adultery became too commonplace. There was also a realization that the potion was ineffective. It was the end of an era.

I recently read D.H. Lawrence’s  Lady Chatterley’s Lover (not a recommendation). The book, on its surface, is a celebration of adultery and the passion that drives it. It comes at the beginning of an era that glorifies passion as a supreme value. That ethos is strong, I find it difficult to speak against it; that ethos is a stick in the eye of Gd.

The Talmud relates that the community of sages wanted to release the populace from the temptation of lust. This resulted in unacceptable consequences.  Hens would no longer lay eggs. The sages compromised and blinded the demiurge Lust in one eye; they reduced the passion, they did not kill her.

There is a sotah story embedded in the haftorah: the annunciation of the birth of (lusty) Samson. The (nameless) wife of Manoah is frustrated by her childlessness (like Lady Chatterley). She is approached by a man who is later (conveniently) revealed to be an angel. The text says that he appeared to her. But when she relates the event to her husband , the woman says   בָּ֣א אֵלַ֔י Ba. The word could also mean that they did something that might result in a child! When she reports this episode of seclusion to her husband, he celebrates the news of a child.  He wants to know more about the conditions that have been dictated: strict sobriety for mother and son and Nazerite status for the son. Manoah does not invoke the sotah ritual… and he could have. Is this his merit? Does his desire for a child cancel his possessiveness and jealousy? Is Manoah a modern?

The nazir is the outsider, the alienated one, zar. The restrictions: wine and grape products, contact with the dead, cutting (or combing) the hair – do not remove the nazir from life, they remove the nazir from the loss of reason. The prohibited matters are those that release a person from careful thought. Intoxication releases desire from the constraints of (imagined) consequences. Death, and the finitude it implies, asks the question “why not”. Our vestigial hair is in the service of passion. The nazir is distanced from the river of passion, at least partially. The rules allow life on another plane.

The parade of identical gifts is a redirection of passion. The gifts could have been demonstrative of the grandiosity of the tribes and their princes. The huge tribe of Judah could have brought far more than the small tribe of Benjamin. The rich tribes of Reuben and Gad (too wealthy to cross the Jordan) could have brought more ostentations gifts. Perhaps that would have been more just: from each according to the ability to give. No showing off here. Every gift identical – and not. At the level of description, they are all the same, but the worker who made the bowel and the herder who bred the sheep and cattle could tell them apart. But that escapes the description.

Gd gives history a direction. We can glorify our victories, enjoy the fleeting moments of our pleasures, agonize in the consequences of indulgence. All predictable small eddies in the giant river of time.  I prefer to believe that it is going somewhere, at least to the sea.

 

 

 

Bamidbar:  Reorganization

 

This week, we start the fourth book of the Torah: Bamidbar.  The name means: in the wilderness. The book describes the travels and travails of the Israelites after the Exodus, their Odyssey to the Promised Land.  The people are going into the unknown.  They have escaped from servitude, but they have also left civilization.  They have gone from a world of oppression to a place that might not be able to sustain human life. There is a need to set up a new political structure.  

 

This journey into the insecure is everyone's life story.  A person does not clearly know where the path she chooses will lead.  The model-story, Bamidbar, has a direction: the Promised Land. But that generation cannot enter. Instead, they wander. The wandering is not aimless, but the goal is off limits.   The path leads to a new set of opportunities - for the next generation.  This is the song that never ends.

This parsha describes some of the preparations for the wandering/journey.  The people are divided into tribes and the tribes are grouped to the four directions of the compass. There is security in numbers and separating into groups increases the chance that, at least some of the Israelites, will survive an attack.   The core is protected from all directions by the four parties of the proletariat.  They surround the Levites who, in turn surround the Tabernacle and the secretariat of Kohanim. Guidance comes from the cloud and fire that hover over the Tabernacle.

The parsha contains a significant political act: the firstborn are replaced by the Levites.  The prominence of the first born seems to have been a pre-Abrahamic edict, a custom born with creation, that needs no justification.  The first book of the Torah, Genesis, is devoted to undoing the, (seemingly) natural, prominence of the firstborn.  None of the patriarchs are first born.

 

In Exodus, the prominence of being firstborn becomes a liability. The firstborn are selected to demonstrate the lethal power of the Gd of Israel. On the night of Passover, all the firstborn are condemned to  die. The Hebrews are protected by their ritual, but their designation: as reprieved from death, the mark of (firstborn) Cain, remains.  In this week’s chapter, this stigma and honor is transferred to the Levites. The implication is that the work of Divine service would have been the purview of the firstborn. That responsibility is now transferred to the tribe of Moses, the Levites. The diversity of values, that differ from family to family, can now be minimized. Perhaps there is also a mollification of intrafamily conflict based upon birth order.  All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (Tolstoy). Creating a tribe  to perform the tasks can help steer the people in the desired directions.  

And the directions are always leading to the Promised Land and never get there.   And the directions are always changing. 

 

Come mothers and fathersThroughout the land

And don't criticizeWhat you can't understand

Your sons and your daughtersAre beyond your command

Your old road isRapidly agin'.

Please get out of the new one

If you can't lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin'.

 

 

Reworked from2018

 

Behar-Bechukothai: The Whisper

 

This week, as the Torah is read in synagogue, there is an act of stagecraft.  Suddenly, the listener’s attention is focused as the volume of the chant is reduced to a whisper. It is the tochachah, the admonition, the sequence of punishments for the rejection of Gd and the covenant. The hush tones punctuate the ugliness of the message and convey a hope that these tragedies will never come to pass.

My generation, the post Holocaust, grew up in the shadow of the tochahah.  Jews, and selected others, suffered punishments that exceeded those described in the parsha. In my home, the stories of that time were also told in a whisper and that murmur could not  help but color my religious life. How does one relate to the Gd that threatens punishment … and delivers.

The concept of discipline and instruction through penalty is antithetical to modern pedagogy.  Corporal punishment justifies the punitive acts. Violence begets violence begets violence. Our worldview wants to break that cycle of brutality. The litany of the tochachah conflicts with the modern worldview.

It is worse than that.  Failure to recognize misfortune as punishment, and failure to reform, is chastised with additional, more severe adversity and disaster. Until the penitent sees his error and repents, things just get worse; and it gets harder to see the errors while hungry, dirty, and enslaved.   How can the victim feel about the Disciplinarian after her family is wiped out; after living like a hunted, burrowing animal for years. A hush comes over the whole Jewish enterprise.

 

The survivors and their offspring are confused. Which parts of this conglomeration of text, tradition, superstition, values, assimilation, accomplishments, etc.  are at fault?  What needs to be abandoned to prevent further tragedy? What should be kept? What was worth the agony?

                                                                                

We did not raise our children like our parents raised us.  My parents did not hit me, but, rarely, they raised the threat. We did not even threaten to hit our children. Our children react to misbehavior in  their children, our grandchildren, with explanation.

The tochachah is surrounded by rules relating to economic value. The first parsha, Behar, ends with the obligation to redeem the Hebrew slave.  The Torah thereby recognizes the descent to slavery may be precipitated by circumstances.  Freedom is a commodity that may be sold… temporarily. Liberty is very valuable, but its price is finite.  The tochacha is followed by the shekel-value of people as a function of age and gender. There is a weight of silver that equals my value to the authorities.  This surround of monetary value provides a context for the tochacha. The admonition is a humiliation. Recognizing the possibility of victimhood demonstrates that we are not indispensable; we are fungible for the most part. The starkness of the human shekel-value that peaks between the ages of 20 and 50, is too abhorrent to accept…completely.  

There is another set of brackets that encase the reading. The laws of the Sabbatical year, when the land rests and the manor is open to all; and the Jubilee, when the Hebrew slaves are freed and the land returns to its ancestral status. These agricultural laws emphasize the guest status of the landlord.  Possession is a pretense.

 

I can love the Disciplinarian; the emotions are complex. Punishment helps me see my true value.

 Emor

 

The word emor, translated as “speak”, is used three times in the first sentence of this week's parsha. Emor is not the usual word used in the Torah for the transmission of instructions.  Daber, also translated as speak, is how communications, whether they are between humans, or between Gd and human, is the expected word. Often, when Gd delivers instructions via Moses, the phrase

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְ

אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃

 

And the Lrd spoke to Moshe, saying,

 

Is used. This mixture of daber and emor appears at least 89 times in Torah.

 

What is the difference between these words that are translated as if they are synonymous?

 

Emor appears first. When Gd makes the pronouncements that evoke creation, the word is emor. Throughout the first chapter of Genesis, emor is used, not daber.  It is only when Gd instructs Noah  to leave the ark that daber appears.

 

Emor is a word of creation, daber is a word of instruction. Daber implies that the listener has power over the object ( davar) discussed. For daber there is no question of existence; it is an issue of how the assumed power will be exercised. Emor, which contains the two letter aym, mother, makes something new.

 

The new thing for the priests was that they were to be separated from the tuma, the impurity, (the horror, the shame, the confusion, the inevitability) of the corpse.  This specialness was a new thing, said in the mother’s voice.

 

Most of the paragraphs in Emor, as in much of the Torah, are introduced by the  cliché:

 

 

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְ

אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃

 

And the Lrd spoke to Moshe, saying,

 

This  combination of daber and emor  implies that Gd instructs Moshe. Moshe has control over his speech. Moshe is to use the emor mode with  his audience. Moshe should convey the commandment, understanding that it is novel to the listener.

 

I need emor for this parsha. It has many things that I do not understand, uncomfortable things that are most easily considered unfortunate relics of the proto Bronze age society from which they arose. The hereditary, male priestly aristocracy, the disqualification of the disabled from service, the animal sacrificial rite, blasphemy as a capital offence are in this parsha.  These things are always new to me. These are introduced with Emor and detailed with daber.

 

Now, with the loss of faith in reportage ( some of it is justified) it is hard to allow myself to evaluate the conflict between the  values that I learned as a modern American and the ancient instructions.  They are both primarily honored in the breach. That partially excuses the Torah instructions.  By the time recognizable ( Rabbinic) Judaism evolved, the priests had lost almost all their power, a  more fluid and open meritocracy  of scholarship had been established (which is constantly trying to establish its own hereditary royalty [minimal success, so far]); the temple had been destroyed ( eliminating animal sacrifices [by virtue of Rabbinic edicts]; the legal system had become so hypercritical that capital punishment virtually disappeared.

 

"A Sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years is called a murderous one. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah said, 'Or even once in 70 years.' Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiba said, 'If we had been in the Sanhedrin, no death sentence would ever have been passed'; Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel said, 'If so, they would have multiplied murderers in Israel.'"^[45]

1.       Mishna, Makkoth 1:10

 

That Enlightenment values are more words than action detracts from their appeal. Probably neither the ancient nor the modern ideals can actually exist outside the fantasy world of ideas. There the battle rages.

 

The parsha ends with the story of the blasphemer. Some kind of damaging, piercing (nekev) speech, uttered in the passion of conflict,  outrages the listeners. This is not emor or daber, it is   וַ֠יִּקֹּ֠ב , vayikov, a puncturing speech and the people do not know what to do with this person. He is the son of an Egyptian, Perhaps the ordinances that apply to Israelites do not apply to him. The offence is mere speech, perhaps he should be spoken to. The sentence comes from Gd: death by stoning. The punishment pronouncement for this individual is embedded in penalties for murder, killing another person’s animal, battery, a piece of Hamurabi code, and the edict of equal justice for the stranger.  These are וְאֶל־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל תְּדַבֵּ֣ר לֵאמֹ֑ר

  daber leymors: commands to be introduced gently,  as novelties.

 

I am not happy not understanding. But it is better to know the truth.