Bein HaMetzarim: The Days of Distress to which we are still contributing

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The three weeks that separate the fast of the 17th Tammuz, the date that the walls of Jerusalem were breached, and the 9th Av, the date on which we commemorate the destruction of both the first and second temple are known as “bein ha’metzarim – בֵּין הַמְּצָרִים – within the straits.” It is a phrase taken from the third verse of the book of Lamentations which speaks of the desolation of post destruction Jerusalem, and of the exile and wanderings of her surviving displaced people.

The three weeks have become a discrete period of time, characterised by mourning customs and by an increasing sense of danger, and have their own flavour and liturgical reminders – the three haftarot of rebuke which take us up to Tisha b’Av are related to the date rather than the Torah reading for example, and many Jews forgo eating meat or drinking wine and eat more simple meals. The idea is to immerse in the mourning, to give up the ordinary joys of good meals or new clothes. Instead we are supposed to be reflecting on our mortality, on the limited time we have to act in this world. We are supposed to be finding a way through all the busyness of life to the core business of being alive – to connect to each other and to the world, to make the world a better place for our being in it.

The quasi mourning customs for the three weeks increase in intensity up till Tisha b’Av itself, from 17th Tammuz till Rosh Chodesh Av, from Rosh Chodesh Av till the end of the 8th day, and then the black fast itself. There are different traditions in different parts of the Jewish community to signify the mourning period, but an awareness of the period of bein ha’metzarim thrums in the background. In a time of mourning for the unity and safety of the Jewish people in their ancestral and promised homeland we are all that bit more thoughtful, aware of each other and their sensitivities, aware of the Talmudic description (Yoma 9b) of sinat hinam – that Jerusalem was destroyed because of Jewish disunity and the baseless hatred the Jews of the time had for each other.

So here we are bein ha’metzarim, in the days of distress, the narrow straits of danger and fear where we are supposed to be reflecting on our own contributions to sinat hinam. And it comes as no real surprise that the disunity in Israel is growing, that the gap between rich and poor, haves and have nots, men and women, Jews and others, Haredim of all hats and footwear, Dati’im (people very strict in Jewish law) and those who have other ways of being a religious Jew, Religious and secular – the gap is widening; There is quite the opposite of a physical bein ha’metzarim growing in Israeli society – there is a gulf between people and peoples, but sadly the sinat hinam is still there and flourishing, contributing to that abyss that separates the human beings.

On Rosh Chodesh Av, the women of the wall went, as they do every Rosh Chodesh except that of Tishri, to pray at the foot of the wall that retains and supports the Temple Mount, the Kotel. They have been praying on Rosh Chodesh there, early in the morning, for over a quarter of a century. Women who come together from the very orthodox through the religious spectrum through to the cultural and feminist women who support their sister’s needs. For the last few months, having been forbidden to use a Torah scroll from the many that are kept at the Kotel, they have brought in their own. They have had to smuggle their scroll into the Kotel, as now no one is supposed to bring their own scroll for their own use, an exercise of power and control by the ultra-fundamentalist group currently in charge of the Kotel plaza. There is no religious meaning behind this rule – women can read from scrolls and do so all over the world.

And on Rosh Chodesh Av this year, Rachel Cohen Yeshurun, a board member of Women of the Wall, was arrested not at the checkpoint, but after she had entered the Kotel Plaza with a scroll in her backpack. The arrest warrant reads: “The suspect was arrested on 17.07.2015. From her hands was confiscated a Torah scroll in the colours of blue and gold which was involved in the conducting of the crime. Also confiscated was an orange and grey rucksack.”

On Rosh Chodesh Av, the date on which the mourning intensifies for the nine days that lead to Tisha b’Av, a woman was arrested and handcuffed and taken to the police station at the Kotel, and the warrant also apparently arrested the Torah Scroll “which was involved in the conducting of the crime”

Words fail me at this point. We are truly bein ha’metzarim, in the days of distress, of narrow vision, of causeless hatred.

We managed, with the help of God, to leave Mitzraim – the place of slavery, the doubly narrow place, the slavery in Egypt. But having left Egypt and having returned to the Land, we have brought the narrowness of vision, the narrowness of self-interest, the narrowness of a failed empathy and imagination with us.

Will we be able to leave it again?

photo of Rachel Cohen Yeshurun with her arrest warrant taken from facebook wall of Women of the Wall Nashot haKotelrachel cohen yeshurun with her arrest warrant

Parashat Pinchas: What do we notice and what do we value?

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Pinchas has always been a problem. We are told that this sidra begins where it does, in the middle of the narrative – to cause an interruption between the violent act and the divine response, in order the record the disapproval of the Babylonian rabbis who divided the sidrot.  A distance is created between the horror of what he did, and the reward that God seems to offer.  To read the story straight through would cause us many problems with God – how can such a terrible act be so calmly and gladly acceptable?

The Rabbis of the Talmud (San 82b) struggle with the story too. The act of Pinchas is repugnant. Rabbi Yochanan deals with the problem by giving all the responsibility to God :

Rabbi Yochanan taught that Pinchas was able to accomplish his act of zealotry only because God performed six miracles: [First, upon hearing Pinchas’s warning, Zimri should have withdrawn from Cozbi and ended his transgression, but he did not. Second, Zimri should have cried out for help from his fellow Simeonites, but he did not. Third, Pinchas was able to drive his spear exactly through the sexual organs of Zimri and Cozbi as they were engaged in the act. Fourth, Zimri and Cozbi did not slip off the spear, but remained fixed so that others could witness their transgression. Fifth, an angel came and lifted up the lintel so that Pinchas could exit holding the spear. And sixth, an angel came and sowed destruction among the people, distracting the Simeonites from killing Pinchas. (B Talmud Sanhedrin 82b.)]

Pinchas becomes simply the conduit of God’s will, and his act of individual violence is subsumed under the divine plan. But this isn’t the only rabbinic struggle with the text: on the same page of Talmud we read that after Pinchas killed Zimri and Cozbi, the Israelites began berating him for his presumption, as he himself was descended from a Midianite idolater, Jethro. ..To counter this attack, God detailed Pinchas’s descent from the peaceful Aaron the Priest. And then God told Moses to extend a greeting of peace to Pinchas, so as to calm the crowd. (B Talmud Sanhedrin 82b.)]

Here the Rabbis show the Israelites shifting the responsibility for Pinchas’ actions not onto God, but onto Pinchas’ own mixed ancestry, implying that Pinchas maybe wasn’t quite ‘one of us’, his actions not those of a mensch.

In these examples we see that the Rabbinic tradition felt both a revulsion for what Pinchas did, and a need to transform the event in some way; to try to reconcile our disgust at his act, with God’s approval of it. While God may have valued Pinchas’ actions enough to offer him the reward of the priesthood, our tradition remains uncomfortable. We find reasons for this reward – it was given because the plague stopped, it is because he saved the people, it is for anything but the actual act of violent murder without judicial process that it seems to be.

The story of the daughters of Zelophehad is easier to the modern mind – in fact often the modern mind finds it hard to see the problem in the first place. Zelophehad has died and left no son. So who will inherit from him, and what will be the status of his five daughters?  It isn’t an issue for Moses either, until the daughters come before him to remind him of their existence and to request that they inherit the estate. Moses is so surprised he has no answer – this is simply not part of his world view – and he goes to God for a response.  Luckily God proves to be a feminist and the women get to inherit in their own right.  Today we find this solution to be clearly right. Yet for the Rabbis of the Talmud again they needed to explicate the result – the claims of gender equality were not part of their world, not noticed and not valued.

So we are told, for example: Rabbi Joshua taught that Zelophehad’s daughters petitioned first the assembly, then the chieftains, then Eleazar, and finally Moses” B Talmud Baba Batra 119b) as if it was their following due process was somehow the deciding factor in the decision.  We are also told in a Baraita that Zelophehad’s daughters were wise, Torah students, and righteous.  That they demonstrated their wisdom by raising their case in a timely fashion, just as Moses was expounding the law of levirate marriage; and they argued for their inheritance by reference to that law. (Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 119b.).

According to the midrash they saw the world very clearly, so that “When the daughters of Zelophehad heard that the land was being divided among the tribes but not among the women, they convened to discuss the matter. They said, “God’s mercy and compassion is not like the compassion of humankind. Humankind favours men over women. God is not like that. God’s compassion extends to men and women alike…” ( Yalkut Shimoni, Pinchas, 27; Sifri 27:1).

Both Pinchas and the daughters of Zelophehad caused real problems to the rabbis – they notice that Pinchas’ act of violence goes against all the values and rules of their world, yet it seems to be welcomed by God, so they struggled to signal their own disapproval, to reframe the act so that it is not possible for anyone else to repeat it, and to deal with the apparent delight of God. In this story they notice what is going on, and their job is to try to keep it together with the values and judgements they are hoping to transmit into the future.

The daughters of Zelophehad however are simply less visible or accessible to the rabbis, as they are clearly barely visible to Moses until they bring themselves forward. I would posit that because the idea of gender equality is not part of the ancient world view, they simply cannot conceive of it, even when it is presented to them with clarity and due process. They do not notice it and so they do not value it. One might add that in certain streams of the Jewish world that has not changed much! But that isn’t my point.

What I do want to say is this: What we do not notice for whatever reason, we do not value. And what we do not value for whatever reason, we do not notice. While something may be clearly apparent to someone else – think of Pinchas’ instinctive response to the actions of Cozbi and Zimri – if the tramlines of our mind don’t run on that route, we just won’t see it. And because Moses and the others didn’t see that they had to take action on the behaviour of the people rather than simply lecture them, they didn’t take any action and they didn’t value the action that was taken. It was left to God to show that Pinchas, while clearly hot-headed and over the top, was at least on the right lines. I have always felt that the reward of the covenant of eternal priesthood was at the very least an ironic reward – it would rein in the impulsive nature of a Pinchas into the very disciplined world of ritual purity and choreography and leave no space for him to behave that way again. God may have valued what Pinchas did, but he also noticed that such a zealous personality needed some serious boundaries – and so God provided them.

When Moses brings the request of the daughters of Zelophehad to God, the response is “The daughters of Zelophehad speak rightly…”  Rashi explains that God was saying : “[As the daughters of Zelophehad spoke it] so is this section of Torah written before Me on high.” This informs us that their eyes saw what the eye of Moses did not see.” (on Num 27:7)

Moses is the greatest prophet who ever lived, and yet the daughters of Zelophehad apparently saw something that he did not see. Each of us notices and values what is of meaning and importance to us, and each of us can teach the others in our world about the things that have meaning for us, so that we can all learn to value and to notice what may otherwise go unvalued and unnoticed. If we teach each other to see what we can see, we increase the richness of our understanding of our world, and so grow closer to its Creator.

Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests …..

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At the age of ten I went to live with my grandmother in Switzerland for a year. I can still remember handing over to her my shiny new stiff covered blue and gold British passport for safekeeping. She took it and held it, stroked its cover and opened it to the page which informed the world that Her Britannic Majesty requested my safe passage in the world. She told me how lucky I was to possess such a wonderful document and how I must never do anything to lose it.

I remember the scene vividly. We were standing together in her bedroom by the elegant Venetian writing desk she kept there. I remember her voice, the urgency of her words, and something else: something that communicated itself to me and resonates within me almost fifty years later.

At the time it seemed an important conversation and one I should pay attention to but I didn’t really understand why or what it was she was trying to communicate.

Now I do. My grandmother, the pampered only child of wealthy Berlin parents who grew up with all the advantages that money could buy in that cultured elegant world of the late 1800’s fell in love with and married a Jewish lawyer from Hannover in late 1922. With a young son, my father, born in 1924 they should have been set to live a comfortable and happy life together. My grandfather rose in the ranks of the legal system and was becoming a respected Judge, but within ten years of their marriage their idyll was ended as the political situation in Germany worsened and the Nazis, having come to power in January 1933 began to implement their policy of removing all Jews from public office and public service. My grandfather had no job, no position, and life became intolerable. They moved within Germany to another family home in Baden-Baden, suffering a kind of internal exile. My father was sent away to school first in Switzerland and then in the UK and on 9th November 1938 as the synagogue was destroyed by fire on Kristallnacht, and the men of the community humiliated in public, my grandfather was arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp.

The story continues – of my grandparents fruitless attempts to protect extended family from being transported to the gas chambers. Of my grandmother’s extraordinary efforts to protect her husband and bring him to a family home in Switzerland which she achieved in 1939.Because of this they were stripped of their German nationality and became officially stateless. There are intrigues and horrors galore in the family archives, but the upshot was this. They left Germany having bribed and paid heaven knows what kinds of fines in money and kind, my grandfather desperately ill after the various arrests and incarcerations and beatings, my grandmother frantically learning how to deal with a world she had not been brought up to even imagine, and they ended up in French Switzerland living on favours from friends and from various refugee agencies, moving to ever cheaper accommodation, often with barely enough to eat or to warm themselves with, let alone pay the necessary medical bills. All the time they were uncertain as to how long they could take shelter in Switzerland, their papers were endlessly circulated among bureaucrats, their permissions to stay always temporary and for short periods. The last letter refusing any more extension of permission to stay arrived only two or so days before my grandfather died in 1950. His death certificate describes him as “sans papiers” – a man without papers, with no nationality or right to stay as citizen or even as refugee. His grave, provided by the Jewish community of Lausanne, is so modest that currently even his name is worn away.

My grandmother eventually took Swiss nationality, helped by the fact of a family home and presence in the country. She was grateful to Switzerland for giving her this eventual security. She was desperately grateful that her son had settled in England, been given British nationality and that his children too were under the protection of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government. She wanted me to know, without telling me any details of the story which we only fully uncovered years after her death, that the most basic security that had been denied to her and my grandfather was beyond precious. To be a refugee, a seeker of asylum running from a chaotic government that seeks your destruction is to have nothing and nowhere. It is destabilising, it prevents any normal development or relationship in life, it causes your family to scatter or worse, it means you scream in your sleep as you remember what your waking mind suppresses. To be a refugee and seeker of asylum is to be the most vulnerable kind of human being it is possible to be. Just holding onto identity, to remember the person inside you, not to fall apart into a dislocated existence takes all the energy and resilience one has.

Yesterday I took part in a day of study and prayer with imams and rabbis and priests, in a tent close to Harmondsworth detention centre. We called in Abraham’s Tent. We looked at the texts of our tradition that speak of caring for the vulnerable, the stranger, the one whose world has fallen apart and who looks for help from others. Yesterday we fasted, the coincidence of both Muslim and Jewish fast days with the concomitant introspection they call for gave us yet another dimension in common. I was proud to join with the others to draw attention to the conditions facing many of those who seek asylum in the UK and who find they can be detained indefinitely in what is essentially a high security prison, while the process to accept or reject their application grinds on. They are there not because of any criminal activity or intent, but because they have fled their own country, requested asylum in the UK, and their papers are not in order. We are the only country in Europe with no time limit on how long someone can be kept in detention while the process takes place. The treatment of vulnerable people, many of whom are already traumatised by earlier experiences that caused them to flee their own countries, is against the British values my grandmother so idolised. Tens of thousands of people are put into detention each year, with 30,902 entering detention in 2014 and the rate is increasing.

I am proud to hold a British Passport, and I am grateful. My grandfather died without any passport at all, despite having been an upholder of Justice all his life. I understand what my grandmother wanted me to know – to be stateless and without official identity or secure place to live is to truly have nothing, to be at the mercy of everyone and to feel no mercy at all. Surely in the UK it is time to treat all people with dignity and respect whether they ultimately receive the right to remain or not. It is time to limit indefinite detention to the all-party parliamentary group recommendation of 28 days and to remember that everyone in this system is a fellow human being.

http://www.appgmigration.org.uk/news       #Time4aLimit

packing abrahams tent

What we can learn from Balak : acceptance of the other is the best strategy for survival

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Twice in Torah, we are privy to the thoughts of a powerful leader about the children of Israel. The first time, at the beginning of the book of Exodus, we see the rise of the melech hadash – the new king who did not know Joseph, and his view that “Hinei Am b’nei Yisrael rav v’atzum mimenu”, “Behold the people who are the children of Israel are more and mightier than we” (Exod. 1:9).  From this fearful perception came the enslavement of the Israelites, and eventually their liberation from Egypt to journey towards the Promised Land. And now here, Balak, the king of Moab, having seen what the journeying Israelites had done to the Amorites, and distressed at the power and size of the Israelites, calls to Balaam: “V’attah l’cha na ara li et ha’am hazeh, ki atzum hu mimeni”, “And now come pray, and curse for me this people, for it is too great for me” (Num. 22:6).

There are many parallels between the narratives in Egypt from enslavement to liberation and the narratives of Balaam’s attempted cursing for Balak, but it is the phrase describing the mightiness of the people Israel that draws attention.  For when the Pharaoh describes this group of descendants of Jacob as “Am”, “a people”, he ascribes to them for the first time coherence beyond family connectedness. He has changed them from a genealogical group into peoplehood. The category shift is vast. Whatever we may know about Abraham and Sarah making Jewish souls and converting the people they met into their way of being, here for the first time is textual evidence that Bnei Yisrael is more than a family or genetic inheritance; it is peoplehood, a community brought together by something other than ancestry. Posited against the Egyptian peoplehood (rav v’atzum mimenu, “more and mightier than we are”), they are perceived to be a threat to the Egyptian way of being and must, in the eyes of Pharaoh and his court, be constrained.

But for Balak, something different is happening, albeit in almost the same words. V’attah l’cha na ara li et ha’am hazeh, ki atzum hu mimeni, “And now come pray, and curse for me this people, for it is too great for me.” (Num. 22:6). This is personal, something to do with Balak king of Moab himself, and so we must look into his own history and his future to determine what it could be.

Balak is a Moabite, a member of a people said to be born from the drunken coupling of Lot and his older daughter in a cave after the destruction of Sodom, when they thought they were the only survivors of a destroyed world. Her son, Moab (the name meaning literally “from my father”) is the progenitor of this people, though we do not have any direct chain of genealogy back to Lot (Gen. 19:37). So Balak is of the family of Abraham through Lot, someone who represents “what might have been” had different choices been made. Unlike Pharaoh he has a connection with the children of Israel, albeit a tenuous one, and a connection to the covenant that Abraham made with God.

The Hebrew phrase “atzum hu mimeni”, besides being cast in the singular and personal frame, can also be translated as: “This people is mighty from me.”

Balak may have been asserting that had Lot not chosen to separate from Abraham and go to Sodom, the line of transmission would have been different, with Lot’s descendants claiming the covenant. But there is another way of viewing this phrase, one that may speak to us more in the struggles of today’s Jewish world. Rabbi Isaiah ben Avraham Halevi Horowitz (1565-1630) chose to understand this verse as referring not to what might have been in the past, but to what would certainly be in the future: that the anointed kingly and messianic line of David would descend from Balak.

Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David was herself a Moabite woman, descended from Eglon [the grandson of Balak], king of Moab (Nazir 23b).

And their direct connection is made plain at the end of her eponymous book. From King Balak would ultimately come King David – No wonder Balak felt that the strength of Israel was coming from himself! He was inadvertently contributing to the continuation and wellbeing of the people Israel.

In an added twist we have the story told as a moral tale twice in Talmud: “Rav Judah, citing Rav, said: A man should always occupy himself with the Torah and [its] precepts, even though it be for some ulterior motive, for the result will be that he will eventually do them without ulterior motive. For as reward for the forty-two sacrifices which the wicked Balak offered, he was privileged to be the progenitor of Ruth, for R. Jose son of R. Hanina has said that Ruth was descended from Eglon [the grandson of Balak], king of Moab (Nazir 23b and Horayot 10b).”

What Balak is recognising, albeit in his case with horror, is that the merging and mingling of other people into Judaism is of enormous benefit to the people of Israel. Like Pharaoh, he sees not a bloodline, but a covenant line, an “Am” a people whom one can join and in joining can benefit.

His horror is because he is an enemy of the Israelites. One can only wonder what the dismay of modern naysayers of conversion into Judaism can be based upon.

The recent trend in some parts of the Dati Jewish world towards the annulment of some conversions for perceived breaches of behaviour, and the disbelief of the sincerity of Jews by choice is the curse that Balak asked for Balaam to give come into fruition in our own time.  When Balak asks Balaam “V’attah l’cha na ara li”, we can read him as saying “come now and curse me,” understanding that in his spite he is asking to be cursed himself, rather than allow his descendants to enter into and to strengthen the Jewish people. Today we seem to have those willing to place a curse on the Jewish people rather than accept the benefit and goodwill of those who have chosen to join us.  They would rather rip apart the Jewish world in their quest to follow their own desire single-mindedly for some notional (and decidedly not traditional) purity, rather than work to include and welcome those who wish to join us. One might ask, “Where is the donkey of Balaam now when we need a clear sighted and generous spirit?”

Conversion procedure and law in Judaism is based on the texts surrounding Ruth, a Moabite woman, descendant of Balak, who would rather not have mixed his bloodline with ours. And about Ruth and her conversion there is nothing but praise: Rabbi Abahu said, “Come and see how precious are proselytes to the Holy One, blessed be He. Once she [Ruth] had set her heart on converting, Scripture placed her in the same rank as Naomi, as it is said: “And they both walked till they came to Bethlehem” (Ruth 1:19) (Yalkut Shimoni, Ruth, Chapter 1, 601).  There was no need for her to prove by her subsequent life choices that her conversion continued to be valid. The famous phrase “Al tifg’ivi l’ozveych lashuv may’acharayich”, “Do not entreat me to leave you, or to return from following after you, for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge, your people will be my people and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16),  can be translated somewhat differently. The verb peh, gimmel, ayin means “to meet, encounter, reach” and can mean both to encounter with kindness or with hostility, to encounter with a request as in “entreat” or more frequently  “to fall upon and kill”  (1 Sam. 22:17-18 ; Judges 8:21. etc.)

So what if Ruth was saying, “Do not destroy me by making me leave you or not allowing me to be with you”? The verse would then have a whole extra dimension. Instead of asking Ruth to go away (the traditional three time refusal of a person wishing to convert that is derived selectively from these verses) and putting the onus on the convert to be brave enough to return to ask once more, and yet again, the problem becomes ours: we would bear responsibility for the sin of destroying another person by our cold shouldering of the prospective convert.

In Talmud Yevamot 24b we find the following :

MISHNAH. “If a man is suspected of [intercourse] with a slave who was later emancipated, or with a heathen who subsequently became a proselyte, lo, he must not marry her. If, however, he did marry her they need not be parted. If a man is suspected of intercourse with a married woman who, [in consequence,] was taken away from her husband, he must let her go even though he had married her.” GEMARA. “This implies that she may become a proper proselyte. But against this a contradiction is raised. Both a man who became a proselyte for the sake of a woman and a woman who became a proselyte for the sake of a man, and, similarly, a man who became a proselyte for the sake of a royal board, or for the sake of joining Solomon’s servants, are no proper proselytes. These are the words of R. Nehemiah, for R. Nehemiah used to say: Neither lion-proselytes, nor dream-proselytes nor the proselytes of Mordecai and Esther are proper proselytes unless they become converted at the present time (ie when there was no benefit to becoming a proselyte). How can it be said, ‘at the present time’?-Say ‘as at the present time’! -Surely concerning this it was stated that R. Isaac b. Samuel b. Martha said in the name of Rav: The Halachah is in accordance with the opinion of him who maintained that they were all proper proselytes. If so, this should have been permitted altogether! – On account of [the reason given by] R. Assi. For R. Assi said, ‘Put away from you a disobedient mouth, and perverse lips, etc.’”

In other words, there were always those who found a reason not to accept proselytes. There were those who worried that behind someone’s wish to join the Jewish world there would be some material benefit they could claim, so their request could not be said to be pure or acceptable. But the Halachah does not go that way, even if the discussion has to proceed in order to make clear that the point of view is recorded in order to be invalidated. And later commentary on the Mishnah records an overwhelming majority of halachists who agree with the opinion of Maimonides that conversion in order to marry a Jew (which may not be of noticeable benefit) also does not invalidate a conversion.

So back to Balak. Why was he so afraid that the Children of Israel would become stronger through him? Why would he rather have been cursed himself with no descendants than accept the existence and energy of the Israelites. Well we have no idea, just as we can have no sensible idea for the balagan that is conversion in Israel at the moment. Any logical analysis is both too depressing and too frightening to contemplate. Can we have removed ourselves so far from the golden rules – to be a holy people as God is holy, to care for others as we care for ourselves, to concern ourselves with the strangers and the vulnerable and the defenceless – that we have removed ourselves from the divine force that nourishes and sustains us? Only time will tell.

Balak himself failed in his curse, and his hatred and enmity was turned into acceptance of the other and the messianic promise. May the curse that stalks our people now go the same way so that once again we will be able to say, and to mean, Mah tovu ohalecha Ya’akov, mishk’notecha Yisrael, “How good are your tents O Jacob, and your dwelling places O Israel”

 (a version of a draft first written for Leo Baeck College Parashat HaShavuah 2008

Chukkat: how to remove the ritual impurity that is confusion so that we see the world more clearly

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The sidra Chukkat is named after the instructions about the red heifer – instructions that even the learned commentators on Hebrew bible found mysterious and puzzling beyond understanding. A person made ‘tum’ah’ – unclean through contact with a corpse, was to be sprinkled with special water made with the ashes of a sacrificed perfectly red cow with absolutely no blemish upon it. The ritual is given in great detail over five verses, and is described as Chukkat Olam – a law for all time.

In the midrash Tanhuma, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai is described as telling the outer world that this ritual is one of exorcism, of ridding oneself of something awful – but tellingly to his own disciples he declares “the corpse does not defile, nor does the water cleanse. The truth is that the ritual of the red heifer is simply a decree of the Sovereign above all Sovereigns, and we are not permitted to transgress it…”

So our portion is named for a ritual that has no rational meaning, and that we cannot in truth really understand – something that we just do because God tells us to do it. It is a difficult concept to embrace in the twenty first century for modern progressive Jews.

But maybe we might understand it more if we don’t focus on the nature of this law as being an illogical diktat from on high, but we look instead at the nature of tum’ah that the ritual is designed to remove.

In the 19th Century, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch commented on the relationship between tum’ah – described as ritual impurity, and timtum – confusion. He suggested that the connection between them was that of the intensity of physical experience, that what renders a person ‘tam’ei’(ritually impure) is the state of being emotionally overwhelmed and unable to focus on the present context. This idea builds on the Talmudic comment that the nature of tum’ah is one ‘she’metamem et halev’ – one that blocks or paralyses the heart. Essentially to be ritually impure means to lack any mindfulness of self or context, to not be able to locate oneself fully in the world.

Ritual impurity – tum’ah – then can be seen as a function of the clarity of our consciousness, or lack of it. It is something that has to be removed, unblocked, or given a new frame and lens through which to understand what is happening and so change our response to it.

Suddenly this apparently irrational ritual of the red heifer has meaning – we have to do something to change our world view, do something to clarify our perceptions and to move on.

It is no accident I think that the sidra also contains the reporting of the deaths of first Miriam and then Aaron. When Aaron dies the community mourns and sheds tears for him for thirty days, but in the case of Miriam’s death the mourning is not reported – instead we are told that the source of the water dried up and the Israelites became thirsty and frightened.

A frequently quoted Midrash on this text tells us that Miriam had been the source of water for the Israelites, so that when she died the water too went away, but Rabbi Moshe Alsheich’s comment is I think more interesting – “Because they did not shed tears over the loss of Miriam the source of their water dried up”.

Because the children of Israel did not know what to do at the sudden loss of the woman who was the source of water, the source of life, their response was one of confusion – timtum – and of anger. We know about the anger because its most potent expression was that of Moses in response to the anger of the people. Against God’s instruction simply to speak to the rock he made an emotional speech accusing the people of rebellion and then he struck the rock not once but twice in front of the community, and the water poured out of it. Moses’ anger almost burns the page as we read it. Bereaved, lost, his world turned upside down, and with a community who are simply unable to cope with what has happened, his response is to give way to his fury – a completely human reaction but unfortunately not one that was helpful to anyone. Both he and the community are trapped in a state of tum’ah – blind confusion where no possibilities of renewal can be perceived, where everything is terrible and lost and lonely, and the future a bleak and frightening place.

The anger is the first response of the timtum, but it is ultimately a very damaging one – for this anger Moses and Aaron will not enter the Promised Land. The healing response comes after the death of Aaron when we are told “All the house of Israel bewailed Aaron for thirty days”. These tears are curative, part of the necessary process of mourning. And restorative life giving water comes in response to the waters shed in the tears.

The tears bring relief from tum’ah, from the intense confusion and pain and depression caused by the loss of Miriam and Aaron. But tears alone do not bring full cleansing – the waters of the ritual are mixed with the ashes of the red heifer, the emblematically perfect animal sacrificed for this ritual.

What can we use instead of the ashes to help ourselves out of the state of tum’ah?

Some mix whiskey with their water, but it will only help the tears to flow and ultimately prolong the state of timtum.

Some sacrifice themselves, their joy in life, their interest in the world, sinking into depression and despair.

Some sacrifice their future, holding on the state of anger and confusion, in order to punish the one who put them there.

Many rabbinic traditions (BB10a) suggest that instead of ashes we use tzedakah – for as our liturgy for the Yamim Noraim tells us, tzedakah, acts of righteousness and charity, save from death (proverbs10:2) or at least will blunt the severity of the decree against us.

Tzedakah, deeds of righteousness and charity, along with our freely flowing tears and expressions of our inner pain, do seem to be the way towards cleansing ourselves from our state of tum’ah, our pain filled confusion of timtum. But it is hard to do. Maybe this is why the heifer of the bible had to be so perfect, so completely red, so unusual that few have ever been born. It is hard but not impossible. For the people did it – they learned to mourn for Aaron fully, they learned to let go of the feelings of fear and confusion and express them in a structured and ultimately contained way. Only after that did they begin to live again, and to go on to new things, symbolised by the water which once again was accessible to them, the living waters of restoration and new ways of being.

Korach: being alongside each other signifies the presence of God. Standing over each other to dominate signifies the end of our purpose

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The story of Korach is, at one level, the story of the tension between the individual and the community. Korach gathers together a group of interested parties in order to challenge the authority of Moses and Aaron saying “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, and the Eternal is in their midst. Why do you raise yourself above the congregation of the Eternal?” (Numbers 16:3)

Two phrases are used in this verse to describe community – kol ha’eidah, and kehal Adonai.  The community is both eidah: a group of people who share the same ‘witnessing’ or belief systems, and kehillah a group of people who assemble together in an organised fashion in order to share certain functions for mutual benefit.

Community has always been of critical importance to us Jews. Isaiah tells us “Ameich kulam tzadikim” and continues “They shall inherit the land for all time.” (Isaiah 60:21) We can read this verse as either “the people are all tzadikim (righteous) ” or that “the people when together, are tzadikim, and will inherit the land….

The former seems unlikely to say the least – indeed in our High Holy Day liturgy right before the vidui (confessional prayer) we actually remind God that we don’t have the right to say we are all tzadikim but ask for God’s mercy in the light of the zechut Avot, the relationship God had with our forebears. The latter – the idea that together we become better than we are individually, is a much more resonant idea for us and is one of the reasons for the obligation for communal prayer in a minyan. We are taught that when we pray together we will be heard, while our individual prayers may not have the power to reach the heavens.

There is a folk story that a young child on first learning the Hebrew alphabet pointed to the letter yod which is much smaller than the other letters, and asked her teacher ‘What is this small mark?’ to be told ‘It is the letter yod.’

Then she pointed to two yods written together and asked what they signified to be told that when the two small letters were written together, it was to indicate the reader must understand the particular name of God was being pointed to.

Fascinated, the child looked very carefully in the Chumash to find other examples of these two marks together, to see again the name of God, and then found that occasionally the two letters yod could be found one on top of the other. The teacher told her “this is a sign to mark the end of the sentence” “But they look so similar” said the child, “how do I know which is which?” And she was told “no, they are very different. For when the two sit next to each other as equals, they are the Name of God. When one stands over the other and dominates it, then they are not the Name of God and everything comes to an end.’

Isaiah speaks of a collective righteousness that depends on us being alongside each other, maintaining our equality and creating community. The folk story reminds us that if we don’t do this, but instead put ourselves over the other, dominate or suppress or even just not notice them as being people too, then the logical conclusion is that our history and being will come to an end.

Interestingly it is clear that Korach knows at some level the importance of communal activity. The two phrases he uses here for community – kol ha’eidah – the shared nature of our beliefs, and kehal Adonai – the shared nature of our activities which bring mutual benefit, remind us that we create community together based on shared purpose and values and that we must organise so that all of us are part of something greater than our individual desires. Korach failed because he wanted something more for himself than for the good of the community. He did what he had accused Moses of doing and set himself above the community rather than alongside it. We create community by working with each other, not through a set of top down policies. And if we address the needs of each other with compassion and care, we create a community that will last. Otherwise, when one stands over the other and dominates it, then we no longer represent the Name of God and everything comes to an end.’

Forty Years of Women Rabbis in Britain: From Regina Jonas to Jackie Tabick

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In bible, the number ‘forty’ is code for ‘a very long time’. The years marked in tranches of ‘forty’ are also usually times of trial or probation. Forty years ago Jackie Tabick was ordained by the Leo Baeck College as the first woman Rabbi in the UK. Forty years before that, in 1935, Regina Jonas was ordained privately in Germany. Before Jonas there had been other women who had achieved the scholarship required to function as a rabbi, and there were a number who had sought to be ordained as rabbis and failed. The question about women’s ordination was asked yet somehow never answered, responded to instead with ridicule or outrage or dissembling. Even where there appeared to be a rabbinic will to ensure religious equality, somehow this never got past the ideological stage. The father of German Reform Judaism Abraham Geiger called for equality for women as long as it did not transgress “the natural laws governing the sexes”, while those who left Germany to develop Reform Judaism in the USA also called for full religious emancipation for women but failed to either discuss the measures needed, or vote upon the call at the 1846 Breslau Conference due, they said, “to lack of time”, and had anyway moderated their call for women’s religious equality “so far as it is possible”.

Until Regina Jonas, many women studied but none took away more than a certificate that qualified them to teach Judaic studies. Jonas was different. Clearly formidably determined, with no status to lose either within the Jewish world or the rapidly disintegrating secular environment, she pushed and pushed, writing her thesis on the question “May a woman hold rabbinic office?” and having examined the rabbinic literature concluding “Almost nothing halachically but prejudice and lack of familiarity stand against women holding rabbinic office” .

Jonas studied at the Berlin Hochshule, where a number of teachers at both Leo Baeck College in London and Hebrew Union College in the USA had trained. They must have been aware of her and her struggle to overcome the prevailing culture that mitigated against the early ideology of Reform Judaism, and yet they never spoke of her. They didn’t tell us of her semicha, or her work as rabbi and teacher in Berlin albeit not in the synagogue setting. After her death in Theresienstadt she vanished into history until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of archives, ironically to be rescued by Dr Katerina von Kellenbach, a Christian researcher who had written on anti-Jewish themes in feminist theology.

In the daughter seminaries of the Hochshule women came to study, but fell by the wayside before reaching ordination. It is noticeable that Sally Priesand and Jackie Tabick, the two women first ordained in the States and in the UK, were women who entered their respective seminaries unsure that they would be seeking semicha, women who were by nature private and introspective people, who chose ordination after beginning their studies. Somehow it seemed they flew under the radar, not challenging the rabbinic faculty, not interested in what Priesand called “the unbelievable and almost unbearable pressures of being the first woman rabbi”, and possibly because of their unconfrontational natures they found themselves at the end of their studies with the majority of their teachers willing to give them ordination – though this was not unanimous.

Both became associate rabbis in large synagogues and both left after serving well and faithfully when it became clear that they would not become the Senior Rabbi. As Sally Priesand said she believed that “ability, sincerity, and dedication would outweigh gender” but she learned that “competence and commitment are enough for a man, but not for a woman.” There was certainly a view among the pioneering women rabbis in this country that we had to work extra hard and extra well to justify our desire to enter the rabbinate, though this fear has weakened over time.

Biblically forty years describes a long time characterised by trial and probation. In the forty plus years women have been ordained by seminaries, have we passed the test? And has the Jewish world come to terms with women rabbis? In the non-Orthodox world women rabbis are a fact of life. Leo Baeck College has ordained 52 women for progressive movements around the world, HUC many more. In the UK women are the Senior Rabbis of both the flagship mother synagogues for Reform and Liberal Judaism, both Rabbinic bodies are chaired by women Rabbis, the Leo Baeck College Principal is a woman as is the Senior Rabbi to the Movement for Reform Judaism. And Rabbi Jackie Tabick is the Convenor of the Reform Beit Din. So it looks good for women – but….

Comments are still made about the bodies of women on the bimah, as are derogatory remarks about the feminisation of the Rabbinate, about women not having the authority or gravitas of men. More worryingly there is still a view that there can be ‘too many women’, and here the fact that women have risen to prominent roles is seen as a negative rather than a positive phenomenon. More than one person suggested to me that celebrating the 40th anniversary of the ordination of the first woman rabbi in the UK might not be a good idea as it would ‘draw attention to the number of women in senior roles”.

Colleagues tell anecdotes showing that for those who are familiar with women rabbis, the phenomenon is unremarkable, but for those who have not been so exposed it remains alien and ‘not quite right’. People still ask if for a male rabbi for their life cycle events, or comment if there is more than one woman rabbi at a service, or tell male rabbis that they are pleased to have a ‘real’ rabbi. The voices, bodies and family choices of women rabbis are still seen as fair game for comment, whereas for male rabbis appearance is unremarked, and children seen as a positive asset. Some women rabbis speak their gratitude for the generation that came before them having opened the doors, and others speak irritation in encountering patronising comments about gender and people who cheerfully transgress personal boundaries. Often difficulties are coded, people will say they want a ‘more traditional’ rabbi when they mean male, and certainly there is a pay differential that is closely tied to the gender of the rabbi.

Forty years is just over one generation. It has certainly been a testing time for the women blazing this trail. Clearly women have brought new energy and perspectives to the rabbinate, have shaped it and helped it understand and reflect women’s experience. Now many more life cycle events have rituals and liturgies to help us navigate them. Now more women take a full part in the religious life of the community they pray in, are engaging with texts and bringing their views to enrich our understanding. The orthodox world has taken note and is now creating women rabbis in all but title, recognising the value of women to this role.

It took forty years in the wilderness for the Jewish people to transition from Egypt to Israel. After twice forty years it’s time to step into the new world and see role of rabbi as fit for both women and men of ability, sincerity, and dedication.

(this is a longer version of an article written for Jewish Chronicle. Photo of Regina Jonas found in the archive in East Germany)

Parashat Behar: the obligation to look after each other sooner rather than later

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Again and again in sidra Behar we are told some variation of the scenario: “if your brother becomes poor so that he has to sell his possessions or himself, then his kinsman (go’el) shall come and redeem that which he has sold”. In other words, when someone experiences financial difficulty such that they have to sell their possessions or even enter bonded labour, their family or extended community are expected to provide a safety net, helping them recover their ability to maintain themselves. And if they do not, then time will come to his rescue, and the Jubilee will release him from his debts and return to him his economic means of survival.

Perhaps the most powerful formulation of the statement is that found in Leviticus 25:35-36 “ V’chi yamuch achi’cha, umattah yado imach, v’che’che’zakta bo, ger v’toshav v’chai imach. If your brother becomes poor and his means fail in comparison to yours, then you shall uphold him, as a stranger and a settler shall he live with you. Take no interest from him or increase, but fear your God, so that your brother may live with you”.

Two ideas spring out from these texts which read together become an unmistakable chorus of social concern – the first is the repetition of the word ‘imach – with you. The second the imperative ‘v’che’che’zakta bo’ and you will uphold, or strengthen him.

The bible is legislating here for a society of mutual responsibility. From its point of view we are all in relationship with each other, obligated to ensure the continued existence of each other, and unable to say “what happens to someone else is none of my business”; or else ”there are structures and systems to help these people, I need not get involved”.   Instead, we are described as being ‘achim’ – siblings, and we live amongst each other in an interdependent symbiotic world. We have the responsibility to pay attention to how others are managing in the world, to compare their resources with our own, and to support them when it seems that they will otherwise be unable to cope. Rashi tells us that this verse also teaches that we should help others as soon as they show signs of being unable to manage, a comment based on the Tannaitic midrash the Sifra which says:

“In other words, don’t allow him to fall unto utter poverty. The mitzvah may be explained with the analogy of a donkey which is carrying a heavy load. While the donkey continues to stand under the load, it is a relatively easy task to grab him and to steady him so that he is able to remain upright. But if he falls over, then even 5 people do not have the strength to raise him up again” (Sifra Behar 109b).

I love this analogy, because it works in such fine contra-distinction to the sibling analogy. Calling someone else your ‘brother’ and seeing them as an integral part of your own world requires one kind of world view – the slightly saintly sort that says “we are all children of the same God, we are all of equal value and worth, we must help each other out”. It is a beautiful ideology and one that I aspire to consistently holding, but I confess that sometimes it is almost too hard to see the spark of the divine in the soul of some people.

But the Midrash appeals to a different part of us – the pragmatic part that says “think of how difficult it would be to help someone if they reached real poverty – think of how many resources we would need to provide, of how inefficient it would be to have them in some sort of revolving door of social or medical care”. Better to help them BEFORE they start to sink to the point they won’t find it easy to rise from, better to help them NOW so that they won’t need so much more help later….

It is, I suppose, the ultimate political argument. It appeals to our pockets rather more than to our souls, to our selfishness rather than to our altruism. And it provides for members of society who are in need, earlier rather than later.

It seems to me that we ought to take more note of the wisdom of these texts. Clearly a society where some are allowed to subsist in abject poverty is not a healthy society, nor one which would be able to continue for very long – once an underclass is created, it undermines the very foundation of the society of which it is no longer a part. We all know that, and in various ways we try, as a society, to provide a system of checks and balances, of material benefits and of inducements to become self-sufficient. But there are many people who fall between the various services and who are not helped in any way. Asylum seekers find themselves unable to work, and unable to live on the restricted funds they are given. Mentally ill people frequently are helped to the point where they are beginning to get better, only to be then left to their own devices until their illness spirals downward to a point where they need radical assistance once more. Single parents unable to cope with the isolation, young people who have never, ever held down a job, the list could go on and on.

We struggle with all this, complain that we are already heavily taxed and what more can we do? We might toss a coin or donate to a charity working with vulnerable groups of people, but essentially we get on with our own lives, feeling regret when faced with such misery and pain, but otherwise pushing most social problems into the back of our minds. There is a limit to the responsibility we feel for the other, and we assume the State will take on the role of provider, while we tell ourselves that charity begins at home.

But bible challenges our comfortable complacency. Again and again we are told about our brother who becomes less and less able to sustain himself, and about our responsibility towards the one who is amongst and of us. How it is so important that each person have the rights and the resources to run their own lives that even if there is no one who can redeem their debts, they should be able to live as a hired servant in someone else’s household until the jubilee year itself will set them free.   But it is that one little phrase “ve’che’che’zakta bo” – you will uphold him – and its ancient interpretation – you will help him BEFORE he gets to the point where his life seems to be hopeless to him – that seems to me to be the essence of the matter. It is a way of ensuring that no one enters into the realms of degradation, that no one loses their basic right to self-determination, their claim to humanity, no one should become so poor or so hopeless that returning to take their part in society is just too big a task.

We all see people who seem to have fallen into a trap so enormous and so energy sapping that they don’t ever seem able to see a way out of it. Vulnerable people treated in hospital and then left unsupported when they go home, often too early in terms of their rehabilitation and the recovery of their confidence in their own ability to live independently. People who would like to train for a profession or trade, but who will lose the small financial support they are receiving if they do so. Our systems often maintain people at the lowest levels of society, and this is because we have seen only one part of the text, we have created boundaries around how much we are prepared to care and have delegated the responsibility to others, paying them to deal with it.

We have recently read the golden rule of torah – the command to love our neighbour as ourself – and one commentary on this rule always catches me – ‘you never say about yourself that you have loved yourself enough, that you need do no more for yourself but have fulfilled your obligation to yourself. In the same way you should love others”

It is an ideal for us to aspire to. Mostly we try to do about enough, but there are limits to our giving, to our patience, to our sense of connection and obligation. This is where the ingenious interpretation of the Sifra comes in. Yes it says, there are limits, and the calculation we must make is this one – which will be the most efficient way of caring for someone? Caring just enough so as to keep them in the revolving door of needing support? Or caring more than that, to help them change direction BEFORE things get too hard, to look after them until they are not simply not-ill, but actively able to live their own lives and support themselves properly? It may take more resources in the immediate term, but ultimately it is by far the most efficient way to create a healthy and harmonious society.

In the days before the State took on the role of provider of care for the vulnerable, bible created a structure where the nearest relatives would help those in need – and failing that there would be an amnesty of the debt – the jubilee. The expectation was that everyone would be able to own their own means of production. That they could sell first possessions, then land, then their own bonded labour. It was a system that allowed dignity and honour even for the poorest person. You might say that it was way ahead of its time. But the biggest innovation – and the one most relevant to us today is the timing of the rescuing of the vulnerable people. If they got to the point where they had to sell possessions, one redeemed the possessions to put them back to where they were. If they had to sell land, the land was to be bought back and given to them, if they were to sell themselves, even then they could be redeemed and given the freedom to work for themselves. The bible didn’t wait till people were at rock bottom but required intervention as soon as need became apparent. It is a lesson that if we were to put into practise today, would not only would create a more efficient and caring society, but would prevent a great deal of misery.

Today we have a new Government in the UK. I hope and pray they will strengthen and uphold all the people who live in our society, so that all may have the dignity of having enough and none may have to reach the hopelessness of despair before a helping hand is offered to them.

image of poverty statistics uk 2015 from fabian society http://www.fabians.org.uk

Lag B’omer. A moral tale for election day

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Election Day will fall on Lag b’Omer –the thirty third day of the omer period where we count the days between Pesach and Shavuot, between Exodus and Revelation, between Freedom and Purpose.

The period of the counting of the omer is traditionally a quiet and introspective one, a time of semi mourning, although it is not clear for what we are mourning. One tradition says we are mourning the deaths of the students of Rabbi Akiva who died in a plague because they had not shown enough respect to each other. The plague ended on the 33rd day of the omer, and so this is a day taken out of the mourning period, a day for celebration and bonfires, before we go back into our counting the days till Shavuot. The story does not make sense – why would we mourn those who behaved so badly? Why do we go back into mourning after lag b’omer? But what does make sense is the idea of why God sent the plague – because these students of the celebrated rabbi were disrespectful of each other.

There is a long tradition in seeing the hand of the divine in natural disasters – from the ten plagues in Egypt onwards Jewish teachers have linked what insurers call ‘Acts of God’ to spiritual lessons about God’. Sometimes, as with the story trying to add meaning to the minor festival of Lag b’Omer there is a morality tale that we can understand. When people do not value each other and treat each other with respect, catastrophe can ensue. Indeed we also have the tradition that the fall of Jerusaelm was essentially down to sinat chinam, to the populace hating each other without reason.

But sometimes this tradition gets out of hand. This week after the terrible earthquake in Nepal with thousands of people dead and many thousands more struggling to survive in desperate circumstances, two rabbis chose to make a linkage. One, Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi posted approvingly on his Facebook page “All the idol worshiping places in Nepal are now destroyed”. And then The chief of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox religious court, Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, told followers that the earthquake was meant as a lesson to the Jewish people to stop the conversions of people to Judaism done by Government paid rabbis within the IDF (and not under the control of his court)

I guess if we are going to have a habit of interpreting events in the natural world to give us moral lessons from the divinity we are always going to risk those voices who are so sure that their agenda is also God’s agenda come to the fore. And in the days of social media (a facebook page noch) these people will put their ideology across.

It is always difficult to be sure that we hear the authentic voice of God, but there is one sure fire test – if it is harmful to any people or peoples, all of whom our bible reminds us right at the start are created in the image of God, then we can be pretty sure this may be our viewpoint but it isn’t God’s.

We are counting the days between Pesach and Shavuot, we are in a strange period of quiet and reflection, we are readying ourselves for Revelation, for meeting with God, for learning what our purpose is to be. We will remember the students of Rabbi Akiva who died, either because they were disrespectful of each other or, in another tradition, because they were rebelling against the harsh Roman Government of the day and fell in a great battle. Maybe both – revolting against a government that did not care about them, and passing on the lack of care to their fellows.

The next few days and weeks will see the election promises recede into the past and real politik take over. But whatever the colour and shape of our new governing body, it behoves them to remember to treat all of us with respect, to remember that we are all valuable human beings and equal before the creator, and that while God may not intervene in a dramatic way to show Divine pleasure or displeasure, there will most certainly be another election and we, the masses of ordinary people, will be able to affirm or dislodge them.

Parashat Emor: the importance of knowing our boundaries.

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And the Eternal said to Moses: Speak to the priests the sons of Aaron, and say to them: None shall defile himself for the dead among his people”(Leviticus 21:1)

Judaism likes the idea of boundaries and separations, of creating different categories in order for the world to work properly. From the moment the Torah narrative begins with the chaos of primeval creation, God first creates the earth and the heavens and then begins to separate everything out – light from darkness, dry land from the sea, the firmaments from the earth, day from night.   The psalmist tells us that God gave the earth to people to live on, while the heavens belong to God. They are different and separate domains.

Biblically the Jewish people were divided into the Levitical priesthood (descendants of the tribe of Levi) and the rest of the Israelites; and the Levitical priesthood itself was divided into the Cohanim (the priests who were direct descendants of Aaron), and the Levi’im – the priests whose work was to service the Cohanim in their duties. Different and separate domains.

Creating categories and boundaries is what we do. We filter and we sort, we include and exclude, we oblige and prohibit.

In the case of the priesthood there are rules which separate them from the rest of the Jewish people. So, for example, even today someone whose family tradition is that they are Kohen will avoid going too close to a dead body – Jewish cemeteries will have rooms and paths to allow the Kohanim to approach in an halachically acceptable way. Whatever we Reform Jews may think about the division amongst the Jewish people which still puts an extra load on the families of the Levitical priesthood, (the Reform response takes into account both the reality that whatever you may believe about your family the hereditary priesthood cannot be a status you can be certain about; and also has moved away from laws specifically to enable Temple ritual, so given that there are substantial disabilities in Jewish law for people identified as Cohanim, we have decided that this category is no longer of importance to us and have effectively removed this particular boundary), we are aware of its ramifications.

 Why must a priest not come into contact with a dead body? It may be a matter of chukkat ha’goy, of copying and assimilating the traditions of the people with whom we live until we are indistinguishable from them, blurring the boundaries of our identity. Egypt we know had a cult of death, with huge tombs and sarcophagi in which the embalmed bodies of the dead were prepared for the afterlife. The rich would stay rich; the poor would stay poor even after death. Torah most certainly is reacting to some of this cult as it reacts to many of the practices of the people amongst whom the Israelites were living. Our whole imperative rejects the cult of death for the cult of life and living, with Moses reminding us in parashat Nitzavim to “Choose Life”.

It may be that the ritual impurity is less to do with the problem of being in a fit state to offer a Temple sacrifice as keeping in a fit state a very important boundary. The separation boundary between life and death is the most powerful that we experience and it must be kept as tight and impermeable as possible. The verse that ended last week’s portion Kedoshim, (Lev 20:27) reminds us “a man or a woman that divines by a ghost or a familiar spirit shall surely be put to death… their blood shall be upon them”

We must keep our focus on this life, in this world. We must pay attention to how we live here and now, rather than make assumptions about, or even try to make forays into, whatever exists outside of our own domain.

Parashat Emor reminds us of the importance of operating within our own world, and within our own time. It contains the laws around sanctifying time – the festivals are given within this sidra, Shabbat, Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. All of these not only set aside time for particular worship, they also remind us of the boundaries of nature, the limits of our behaviour, the importance of stopping the everyday and mundane and remembering the reason for our being.

We are known as an Am Kadosh – often translated as a holy people. But Kedushah is not about holiness in the sense that we are specially sacred and righteous and blessed. We are an Am Kadosh because we follow the rules of Kedushah – of separating out and making (and keeping) boundaries. The root of the word k’d’sh means to make different or separate – hence when we marry (Kiddushin) we make that relationship a different one, we separate our partner for a unique relationship. When we think about our dietary habits, eat certain foods and not eat others, separate milk and meat products and so on, we are forcing ourselves to think about what we consume, rather than mindlessly devouring anything presented to us. When we give a proportion of our income to help others as a matter of principle rather than viewing all our income as being rightfully only to be spent on ourselves; When we choose not to automatically adopt the customs of the surrounding culture but to think about our own identity and absorb the best of what we see around us BECAUSE it is the best of what we see; When we keep in place these boundaries we may find we are able to negotiate the world with more clarity. I am not suggesting that we pull down the defences in order to protect any notional purity or to keep out the modern world, but that knowing who we are and in what area we should focus our energies will give us a greater chance in partnering with God in the work of completing the creation.

Parashat Emor reminds us of the importance of knowing our boundaries. It reminds us that to be Kedoshim – the imperative of last week’s sidra – we have to clarify our context and so to understand it and be able to work within it.