Still complaining but with a difference

It recently occurred to me that if you want to really understand someone, listen carefully to what they complain about.

In parashas Beha’aloscha the Jewish people show their true colours by voicing their nostalgic longing for free handouts.

Following that, the episode of the spies showed that the people didn’t grasp the fundamental nature of their relationship with God, or indeed of any meaningful relationship. By their complaints to Moses, they made it clear that they sought all the benefits of an intimate relationship with God in Eretz Yisrael, but without investing the effort needed to make it real. Only Yehoshua and Caleb understood that real love demands struggle.

That last episode sealed their fate. The generation that left Egypt would die in the Desert and only those whose character hadn’t been formed yet would accompany the yet unborn generation who would inherit the Land.

Aside from Korach’s rebellion, apparently the forty year period of wandering was uneventful, as the Chumash doesn’t record anything of what transpired during that time. In parshas Chukas we rejoin the Children of Israel at the end of their journeys as they make final preparations to enter the Promised Land.

However, the Chumash does give us a clear indication that the people’s hearts had changed for the better and that they had acquired the necessary strength of character to fully live God’s Torah in His Chosen Place. Look at what happens when Miriam dies. Her merit had provided the people with an ongoing supply of water throughout their travels and now all of a sudden it all went dry. Understandably they were quite upset and as expected they were quick to voice their complaints against Moses and Aaron.

But look at what they say! “Why have you brought us up from Egypt to this terrible place? For it is not suitable for planting, without figs, vines and pomegranates.”

Wait a second, what happened to the fish we ate for free in Egypt that they had longed for? There’s been a huge shift here: before they looked back to Egypt as their point of reference, the land of free food! Now they complain about the desert in reference to the destination! Why have you brought us here, they ask, to a place that has no potential for growth, for meaningful and rewarding work.

Imagine the nachas that God has when he hears that they’ve finally “got it”. They are raring to go and work the land, to plant seeds, trees and eat the fruit of their labours. Yes, they were still wrong to complain but look how far they had come.

The Old City: History, humility and community

I spent this past Shabbes in Jerusalem’s Old City catching up with some old friends. There’s something about the place that seems to nurture extremes of behaviour but I think that’s part of it’s magic. I don’t know why it’s so but people there seem less inhibited and more likely to throw themselves into a way of life that would be diluted were it lived outside of the city’s walls.

But despite the fact that there are so many pockets of extremists (for want of a less loaded term), or maybe because of this fact, people seem far more ready to live and let live than in other places. Perhaps it’s the humility that you can’t fail to have when over 2000 years of Jewish history speak to you from every nook and cranny.

Put it this way, if you live among 3000 similarly aged and dressed families, in housing units of regulation size and shape that have all been built within the last ten years, you are much more likely to see yourself as the only true carrier of Torah Tradition from Sinai till today, than if you live in close quarters with adherents of three major religions, in and around buildings that have seen the likes of Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakay and (lehavdil) Pontius Pilate. These surroundings offer a nice reminder that the way we do things today are not likely the way we did them at Sinai, or in Jerusalem of old.

But let me share with you my experience of one of these pockets of extremism.

I was woken at the crack of dawn on Shabbes morning by buzzing mosquitos and a very itchy and swollen hand. I realised that it was pointless to attempt to go back to sleep as the heat of the previous day had hardly dissipated and now it was starting to get light again. I decided to get up and go and pray with the vasikin at the Zilberman family’s yeshiva.

The Zilbermans are a Yerushalmi family who trace their customs to the Vilna Gaon and are known primarily in religious circles for their reintroduction of an ancient system of learning Torah for young children. They seem to epitomise the humility I mentioned above. Despite the fact that they and their students know the entire Torah with enviable clarity and fluency, despite their insistence on the precise application of many halachic minutae that other religious groups have let go of, they get on with it in the most understated way and they go out of their way to make a stranger feel welcome.

The Zilbermans are also (perhaps less) known for their quite unusual shul service, the most noteworthy feature of which is the fact that individual worshippers actually sit passively for one of the main sections of the service, namely the blessings before and after Shema. The sheliach tzibur – a title that takes on a new meaning here – says every word aloud and the rest of us just listen and answer amen and fulfil our prayer obligation through listening.

Although it’s hard to be passive yet awake at 5am after just three hours of sleep, this mode of prayer is such a refreshing contrast to the normal cacophony that is tens of men chanting out the words at different speeds, pitches and accents.

But much more than that, I think praying like this turns communal prayer into a true experience of community of which humility once again is the root. When the congregation appoints a chazan to lead the tefilla he isn’t just there to keep pace or sing a tune here and there, he is literally the representative of the people to perform the service. In this shul, even if the chazan is a 13 year old boy and you are a rosh yeshiva the efficacy of your prayers depends on that chazan.

There are many prayers in our siddur that were clearly intended to be said as a sort of conversation between the chazan and the congregants but what’s happened in most places is that individuals, perhaps nervous that they might not fulfil their obligations, repeat (or pre-empt) the chazan’s lines. Having experienced the Zilberman’s style of prayer, I think we’re losing out on something very important. I think that in our eagerness to say as many words as possible (surely the more the merrier) we lose out on the opportunity to throw our lot in with the community and recognise for a few precious moments that we can’t do without each other.

Of spies and prostitutes

Parshas Shelach Lecha begins with the tragic story of twelve spies who go to scout out (latur – לתור) Eretz Canaan for the Jewish people in the desert. We know it didn’t end well as they came back with the most terrifying reports that turned the will of the desert dwellers into jelly.

The sedra likewise ends with the prohibition of scouting out (ולא תתורו) with one’s eyes and heart in search of sin and corruption. As the spies of the body, the eyes and heart go out looking for some action (אשר אתם זנים אחריהם), each according to it’s nature. The eyes seek physical pleasures, in particular those derived from intimacy, while the heart steers the intellect towards a theology that will allow the indulgence that the body longs for.

It is no coincidence that the Hebrew word for prostitute is zonah, from the same root as zonim. In rabbinic colloquy, znus is the word for promiscuity. Whereas intimacy between man and wife is holy of holies, unchecked promiscuity is vanity of vanities, empty and corrupt.

There’s a strange law in the Torah (Deut 23:19) that the prostitute’s fee and the payment for a dog may not be used for sacrificial purposes. God doesn’t want the money earned by prostitution, neither does He want money given in exchange for a dog. We could readily understand the former, but why the latter? What’s so bad about buying a dog? How is it similar to buying personal services?

Well they do have something in common – both can be a solution for a person who wants the pleasures of a relationship without putting in the effort to build a real, lasting relationship, and I think this is the key to understanding the law, and the sin of the spies.

Sacrifices to God are prescribed precisely for the purpose of bringing man close to God, and they represent the idea that a person has to quite literally sacrifice himself in order to do this. The prostitute’s fee is the antithesis of the kind of closeness that we seek. Someone once quipped that you don’t pay the prostitute to be with you…you pay her to leave you when you’re done. That sums it up.

When we indulge in pleasures with no commitment, we take ourselves as far away from holiness as possible. When we seek the joys of love and intimacy without the hard work, we lower ourselves and cease to be worthy of real relationships.

So perhaps this was what brought about the tragedy of the spies. As representatives of the Jewish people, they went to scout out the potential of Canaan as a land of free opportunity. Was it possible to enjoy the goodness of life without effort? They wanted to continue living as they had become used to in Egypt, where they received as much as they needed for free. Instead they found a land flowing with milk and honey but that required sweat, blood and tears to realise it’s potential. That wasn’t what they bargained for and so they came back with their damning report.

Yehoshua and Caleb, of the twelve, saw things differently: tova ha’aretz me’od me’od. Why not just tov? Because they wanted to echo God’s own celebration of the completed Creation on the sixth day – vehineh tov me’od (Genesis 1:31). The Ramban explains that this means that God saw it as mostly good, and that this was the greatest cause for celebration! The fact that there remained an element of Evil makes it possible to fully reveal and appreciate Good.

In a deeper sense, chaza’l say that me’od is the yetzer hara – the evil inclination, for the only way for man to truly reach God is to engage in struggle with his inclination.

If we seek real love, we need to be prepared to work for it.

Good Heavens!

We tend to think of Heaven as if it’s a sort of place, out there somewhere far away. We imagine, I think, that when we reach the finish line after 120 years here on Earth, we will somehow be transported to Heaven. While we are on our way there, the heavenly accountants will compute our life’s work, the good deeds and the less good, and feed it through the heavenly formula to generate our eternal fate. Upon arrival, we’ll be met by a porter with ticket and directions to our room with a view, where we will feast on delicacies and delights in accordance with how well we scored.

But, for Heaven’s sake, it really isn’t like that at all. I mean I don’t know for sure because I haven’t been there, but from various traditions we have, it’s clear that chaza’l didn’t envisage anything like this.

For one thing, olam habah – the world to come – is not some distant fantasy land. We don’t go to heaven despite the colloquial use of that phrase. The world to come is a world of our own making, in the most individual way. We don’t so much go there, as much as transform our world into olam habah. Throughout our lives, with every thought, every word that passes our lips and every action that we perform, we are creating, refining, and furnishing our own unique eternal world. This world exists in potential as we continue to live out our lives, and is only actualised by physical death. At that point, we will shed those physical characteristics that hide the spiritual world from us and we will live in the world of the spirit.

If we dig a little deeper, it turns out that more than create the world that we will live in for eternity, we actually create our own selves that we will have to live as for eternity. Life in this world provides us with the tools and the opportunities to become a being that is capable of living forever as a recipient and a transmitter of God’s Light.

So, the saying “we are what we eat” is only partly true, for we are, not only what we eat, but what we think, say, and do. And what we are at the end of 120 is what we will be for eternity. We will have to live with ourselves so we had better make sure that we’ll be good company.

I hope to expand on this and flesh it out with some sources. PG, I’ll publish the finished article on Protekzia.com – Judaism for grown-ups. For further reference, you can have a look at Mesillas Yesharim on the how to acquire the trait of zehirus, esp. the motivation for the second type of person. Also see the first few chapters of Nefesh Hachaim, as well as sefer Da’as Tevunos, esp. para. 14.

Oh to be free!

The Jewish people complain to Moses: “we remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for free…” Oh to be free! They continued to rant about their present misery, in which they now have to eat this manna that they actually have to grind, cook or bake.

Doesn’t this sound a bit twisted? Nostalgia is one thing, but this seems like a blatantly false memory. Free? What kind of freedom is it when you are slaves from morning till night? So they were fed to keep them alive, but that’s what they are longing for now? The free food?

I had the following thought as I was trying to make sense of this: In Egypt they were worked to the bone, but their food was not given to them as wages. Their food was given, not according to how hard they worked, but according to their needs to keep them alive. So in a sense they were receiving food for free, in that there was no connection in their minds between their work and their livelihood.

The generation of slaves that left Egypt had grown up there, and knew no other type of life. They hadn’t the slightest concept of a society in which you were responsible for your own livelihood, and so one of the hardest things about leaving Egypt was the fact that suddenly they were slaves to no-one and had to take responsibility for their own lives. As much as the manna was given from Heaven, they still had to go and collect, and prepare it to make it edible, a new experience for them.

What’s so amazing is how it’s possible to be freed from the most oppressive regime, and yet still long for the “free food”. It seems that this is one more aspect of the slavery itself, in the sense that so long as they didn’t have to work for their own living, they would remain small minded, unable to innovate and imagine a better existence.

So from parshas Beha’alothcha, we have yet another vital lesson then from the Exodus from slavery. That is that responsibility for your own life is at the heart of being a faithful Jew. God wanted, not a nation of slaves who would forever be on the lookout for a free hand-out, but a nation of exuberant, lively people, who would take their lives into their hands and create their own future.