Today I delivered a drash (commentary) on the weekly Torah portion, which was Tzav (Leviticus 6:1 through 8:36). I won’t reprint the entire thing here, just the part I liked the most. :-)
Tzav primarily focuses on the role of the priests in carrying out sacrifices on behalf of the Israelites. Moses instructs Aaron and his sons on where to make the sacrifices, what to wear, how to dispose of the ashes, etc.
I was struck by the repeated use of language about “turning sacrifices into smoke.” This is the phrasing the writers of Tzav use to say that an offering should be completely burned up. For instance:
“The token portion of the meal offering shall be turned into smoke on the altar as a pleasing odor to the Lord.”
“The priest shall turn the (fat of the guilt offering) into smoke on the altar as an offering by fire to the Lord.”
“Moses washed the entrails and the legs with water and turned all of the ram into smoke.”
And so on.
Not a sacrifice! Someone is cooking potatoes on a DIY stove. But it still produces smoke. Photo: Frank Benson
Now, there are so many ways one could describe what is being done with these offerings. You could simply say that Moses burned up the entire ram. Or that Moses incinerated the ram. That he turned it into ash, that he turned it into cinders, that he burned it so thoroughly that the amount left was smaller than a pebble.
But over and over, Leviticus tells us that these offerings were “turned into smoke.”
Why this emphasis on smoke?
Thinking historically, perhaps this was another of many steps in differentiating Judaism from the surrounding religions. Many ancient religions saw gods as similar to humans in that they needed to eat, and these societies viewed sacrifices as literally feeding the gods. Judaism took a different view of God—as being above and beyond human needs such as eating— and wanted to make clear that these ritual sacrifices were not Doordash for God. The sacrifices were not food for God’s survival. Instead, they were something intangible to please and connect with God: a “pleasing odor to the Lord.”
But I also like to think about it metaphorically, especially as it applies to the guilt and sin offerings. The fiery sacrifice turns something solid and heavy and bloody into something light and airy and (to God, at least) pleasant smelling.
Isn’t that what we’d like to have happen with our transgressions and regrets? They weigh us down, we carry them heavily… but wouldn’t it be nice if we could let them float away into the air? Through the ritual of the sacrifice, that’s what these ancient Israelites were doing.
Candle smoke. Photo: Tigerzeng.
So, with your indulgence, let’s do a little thought experiment.
Close your eyes. Think of one thing you’ve done in the past week that you regret because it was wrong. It doesn’t have to be a big thing: In fact, it’s most likely a small thing. Were you rude to the clerk at Safeway? Did you snap at your spouse? Did you read a news story and respond with cynicism rather than open-hearted empathy? Did you share a piece of gossip that, inside, you knew you probably shouldn’t? Did you gloat over someone else’s troubles?
Take a minute. Think of one small thing that you regret. We’re going to sit here quietly while you come up with that thing.
(wait)
Okay, now picture that small thing as a heavy block of wood. It’s hard to lift. You’ve been lugging it around all week. You don’t want it, but there it is. It’s heavy.
And now — keep those eyes closed! — envision setting that block of wood on fire. You know what you did was wrong and you’ll think twice the next time such a situation comes up. You’ll do better. The block of wood is burning and getting smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter and this thing you regret is turning into smoke. There! It’s past. It’s floating away. You’ve learned something and will do better next time. The wood is gone and the weight is gone and the smoke is dissolving into a broad blue sky.
Take a deep breath now, a full breath. You’ll do better. You’re learning, all the time. It’s never too late to learn. Your lungs fill with fresh, clean air and the smoke is no longer even visible, but God smells the smoke from your offering and, indeed, it is a pleasing odor to Adonai.
It’s no longer Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but I just found out about this YouTube video of some of Dr. King’s speeches chanted to the trope (melodies) of the Haftarah. It’s amazing!
Elise Barber chanting from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “trope” refers to the traditional melodies used to chant from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue. There’s one set of melodies for the Torah (Pentateuch), and another set for Haftarah, the weekly readings from books of the Prophets.
This video is of Massachusetts Cantor Elise Barber chanting excerpts from Dr. King’s speeches to Haftarah trope, the melodies used for the Prophets. It’s an appropriate choice because Dr. King was the embodiment of a contemporary prophet, a Micah or Isaiah for our times.
Listen to how particular phrases are paired with rises and falls of the melody to emphasize their meaning.
Within American Judaism—particular the Reform denomination within Judaism—there is a long tradition of social justice advocacy and support for the civil rights movement. I found this video moving because it musically expresses this connection, blending centuries-old Jewish liturgical chanting with Dr. King’s visionary words.
Want to see more? Here’s a link to the words of this chant, plus some background, the cantillation marks, and an audio recording by Cantor Jack Kessler, who set the phrases to trope in partnership with Rabbi Marcia Prager.
On Saturday, while an assailant was holding Jews hostage inside a Texas synagogue, I was reading about the Chmielnicki pogroms.
Thankfully, the Texas synagogue assault ended with the safe release of the victims. And based on the limited information that’s been released so far, it seems to have been the work of a lone attacker. So I’m not comparing its details with the Chmielnicki pogroms, a 1648 uprising by decommissioned Cossack soldiers and Ukrainian peasants that killed tens of thousands of Jews.
It was just… unsettling to be reading about pogroms while Jews were being threatened with death RIGHT NOW inside a U.S. synagogue.
I’d heard mention of the Chmielnicki pogroms, the worst disaster in Jewish history between the Iberian expulsions and the Holocaust. But—like many American Jews, I suspect—I knew almost nothing about them. I was researching the pogroms as background for a potential novel set in the 1600s. But the book I was reading wasn’t a secondary source or historical work: It was a contemporary account by a rabbi who survived the pogroms, originally published in Hebrew in 1652.
It is stunning.
Abyss of Despair, by Nathan Hanover, is astonishingly readable for a work that is 370 years old. It’s only about 120 pages and straightforward in its style, almost conversational. In his summary of the history leading up to the pogroms, Hanover is surprisingly honest about the social position that Jews held in Polish-run Ukraine, and how that fed into the pogroms.
Excerpt from original manuscript of Abyss of Despair, or Yeven Metzulah / Courtesy of Wikipedia
Here’s my still-evolving understanding, based on Hanover’s book and some secondary histories:
At the time—early and mid-1600s—the kingdom of Poland extended far beyond today’s Polish borders to include much of Lithuania and the Ukraine. While there was a king, there were also many dukes and nobles who ruled chunks of territory and lived off of the labor and taxes of peasants there.
Jews were relative newcomers to Eastern Europe. Following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, many moved to Holland and what today is Germany. But the decentralized states of Germany had their own waves of expulsions, and by 1570 Jews had been expelled from nearly every German city. Many of these exiled Jews moved east: The Jewish population of Poland/Lithuania rose from about 30,000 in 1500 to between 100,000 and 150,000 in 1575, according to European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism by Jonathan I. Israel.
Map of Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth and surrounding states in 1648 / Creative Commons by MathiasrexMap of pogrom sites during the Chmielnicki upraising, from the Jewish Encyclopedia
The Polish kings and nobles welcomed the Jews, who filled a role of intermediaries between the nobility and the peasantry. Jews served as tax collectors for Polish noblemen and also ran estates, mills, and distilleries for them. (They also were innkeepers and engaged in crafts such as soapmaking and tanning.)
The Polish nobility tended to be Roman Catholic while the Ukraine peasantry tended to be Greek Orthodox. Hanover writes:
“King Sigismund [ruler of Poland from 1596 to 1632] raised the status of the Catholic dukes and princes above those of the Ukrainians…. and the masses that followed the Greek Orthodox Church became gradually impoverished. They were looked upon as lowly and inferior beings and became the slaves and handmaids of the Polish people and of the Jews….”
Meanwhile, the Polish king had recruited Ukrainian fighting men into a military force—called Cossacks—to guard the frontier with the Tatars, a Muslim people occupying the region of Crimea, vassals of the Ottoman Empire. The Cossacks held privileges such as being exempt from taxes. But after several unsuccessful Cossack-led Ukrainian revolts, the king decommissioned tens of thousands of them—creating a powder keg of downwardly-mobile and unemployed armed men.
A wealthy and charismatic Cossack named Chmielnicki launched another revolt against the Polish overlords in 1648. But this time there was a crucial shift in the power balance: Chmielnicki formed an alliance with Ukraine’s neighbor and traditional enemy, the Tatars.
The rebel forces targeted Jews as well as Polish nobles and Roman Catholic priests. Hanover explains the dynamic when describing a particular Jewish man who “was the nobleman’s tax farmer, as was the customary occupation of most Jews in the kingdom of [Little] Russia. For they ruled in every part of [Little] Russia, a condition which aroused the jealousy of the peasants, and which was the cause for the massacres.”
The title of Hanover’s book in its original Hebrew was “Yeven Metzulah,” which literally translated means “Deep Mire,” a reference to Psalm 69, which says, “Deliver me, O God, for the waters have reached my neck; I am sinking into the deep mire and find no foothold.”
Most of the book is a description of one massacre after another.
As Chmielnicki’s army advanced, Jews fled from small towns and the countryside to the fortified cities held by Polish nobles. But in one city after another, they were slaughtered. In one case, the Polish defenders of the city struck a deal to hand over the Jews to the rebels. In another, the Ukrainian rebels gained entrance by waving Polish flags and pretending to be Polish reinforcements. In yet another, Ukrainian peasants working as guards along the city walls let their countrymen ford the walls with ladders. In other cases, cities were stormed and burned.
Hanover’s descriptions of what happened in captured towns are stark and appalling. Even if we allow that some of the atrocities were exaggerated, as often happens in war, there is still enough to horrify:
“These persons died cruel and bitter deaths. Some were skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs; some had their hands and limbs chopped off, and their bodies thrown on the highway only to be trampled by wagons and crushed by horses; some had wounds inflicted upon them, and thrown on the street to die a slow death; they writhed in their blood until their breathed their last; others were buried alive. The enemy slaughtered infants in the laps of their mothers. They were sliced into pieces like fish They slashed the bellies of pregnant women, removed their infants, and tossed them in their faces. Some women had their bellies torn open and live cats placed in them. The bellies were then sew up with the live cats remaining within. They chopped off the hands of the victims so they would not be able to remove the cats from their bellies…
“Women and young girls were ravished but some of the women and maidens jumped into the moat surrounding the fortress in order that the uncircumcised should not defile them. They drowned in the waters. Many of them who were able to swim jumped into water, believing they would escape the slaughter, but the Ukrainians swam after them with their swords and their scythes, and killed them in the water… till the water became red with the blood of the slain.”
Print of massacre of Poles by Ukrainian rebels after a 1652 battle / Wikipedia
These descriptions sound histrionic, but Hanover’s narrative is more nuanced than that. He describes rivalries among the Polish nobility that hampered them from putting down the rebellion. He notes a successful survival strategy of some Jewish communities: Letting themselves be captured by the Tatar troops, who would enslave rather than kill them. (The enslaved Jews were sold south to the Ottoman Empire, where Jewish communities in Constantinople and Venice ransomed at least some of them.) Hanover pens a dramatic narrative of the rebels’ advance over time—one city falling, news arriving at the next town, those inhabitants fleeing to the next fortified city, which in turn falls, and so on.
Really, it is worth reading.
But what are we to make of these horrific events today, over three centuries later?
Some initial thoughts, still evolving:
The Chmielnicki pogroms are a reminder that anti-Semitism didn’t begin with the Nazis. The Holocaust was unique in its vast scale, its technology of death, and its systematic approach to wiping out Jewry, but it was one of many, many expulsions and massacres that Jews faced in Europe over the past millennium. There were multiple centuries when Jews were not allowed to live in countries like England that today we view as icons of liberal tolerance. The saga of one forced exodus after another—from Spain to Germany, from Germany to Poland, from Poland back to Germany— is sobering.
Yet the fatalistic conclusion that “everyone will always hate us, no matter what we do” is not necessarily warranted. Granted, Christian theologians and clerics vilified Jews as despicable Christ-killers for much of European history. But Hanover’s account spotlights the vulnerability of Jews’ position in the Ukraine—as the most close-at-hand and thus most easily hated representative of an oppressive, foreign overclass. The pogroms grew out of specific economic and social circumstances, not pure religious dogma.
Those 16th century Jews threw their lot in with the Polish nobles and counted on the nobles’ protection. That protection turned out to be absent or inadequate once faced with a massive peasant revolt. Jews living in the Diaspora will always be a minority, and faced with a similar choice of where to place their allegiance—the current regime? the regime’s challengers? the suffering masses?
Would it have been wiser to ally with the masses of impoverished Ukrainians? Would it have even been possible?
One of the founding visions of Zionism was a society where Jews would not be at the mercy of a host regime—would not be at risk of expulsion, would not be limited in their professions, would not have to be landless, powerless “middlemen” trapped between powerful nobles and angry masses. How has that worked out? That’s a complicated discussion for another day.
No answers here, just questions. I’m a novice when it comes to pre-modern Jewish history. If you’re someone with more expertise, feel free to weigh in via the comments! I welcome corrections, additions, or simply more questions.
And in the meantime: read Abyss of Despair. (I was lucky enough to find an inexpensive used copy online.) It’s gripping, sobering, and documents a piece of history that deserves to be known and discussed.
It was my turn this Shabbat to deliver a d’var Torah (commentary) after the group discussion in Temple Sinai’s weekly Torah study class. This week’s portion, Vayetzei, covers Genesis 28:10 to 32:3, but the class discussion focused only on the final third. So I chose to center my presentation on an earlier section, the rivalry between Rachel and Leah. Here it is.
Like many of the parshot in Genesis, a lot happens during Vayetzei. Jacob sets out from his family’s home in Beersheva, both to flee the anger of Esau and to find a wife from among his mother Rebecca’s family. Lying down to sleep on a rock, he dreams of a ladder or ramp to heaven with angels going up and down. In his dream, God stands beside him and blesses him, saying his descendants shall spread out to the four corners of the earth and all the families of the earth will be blessed by them.
Jacob wakes and names the site Beth-el, House of God, which is located about ten miles north of Jerusalem, near what today is the Palestinian city of Ramallah on the West Bank.
Jacob continues on to Haran, which is quite a long journey, up through Syria into what is today Turkey. He meets his cousin Rachel at a well, much as Abraham’s servant found Isaac’s future wife Rebecca at a well. Rachel’s father Laban agrees to let him marry Rachel if he works unpaid for seven years; then on the wedding night, Laban tricks him by substituting Rachel’s older sister Leah—a parallel with how Jacob tricked his own father by pretending to be Esau. Laban requires Jacob to work without pay for another seven years in order to marry Rachel too.
The Torah then enters into an extended section on the two sisters’ childbearing—or lack of childbearing. Eventually Jacob decides to return home, and there is an episode of one trickster tricking another trickster, with Jacob slyly arranging to get possession of many of Laban’s sheep and goats. That gets us up to the portion of Vayetzei that we read together today in class.
But I’m going to return to that long section about childbearing and the relationship between Leah and Rachel.
Rachel and Leah, as imagined by 19th century English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (It looks a little more like a romanticized Renaissance England than the ancient Middle East, don’t you think?)
The Torah tells us that Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah. “And God saw that Leah was unloved and he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.” Leah conceives and bears one son—Reuben—then another, and another, and another— four sons in a row while Rachel can’t get pregnant.
Both of these sisters are in deep emotional pain.
Infertility is certainly traumatic, especially in a society like the ancient middle east where women were valued only as mothers of sons. “Give me children, or I shall die,” Rachel pleads to Jacob in a dramatic statement of how crucial childbearing was to her.
But I felt an even deeper identification with Leah. She was married, presumably without any say in the matter, to a man who didn’t love her. When her first son is born she chooses the name Reuben, saying “It means the Lord has seen my affliction. It also means, ‘ Now my husband will love me.” But it doesn’t help. Whenher second son comes, shge says, “The Lord heard that I was unloved and has given me this one also.” And it doesn’t help. And then the third. She says, “This time my husband will become attached to me for I have borne him three sons.” And it still didn’t help.
She is doing everything in her power to win Jacob’s love —everything possible to fulfill the role expected of her, to provide healthy male heirs, everything that anyone in her world would ask of her—and it still doesn’t help.
I imagine this desperate young woman, getting her hopes up over and over—this time it will work! this time it really will!—and each time it doesn’t. Haven’t we all been there at some time, trying so hard and yet knocked down over and over again?
Perhaps when we were in our teens, infatuated with some boy or girl, convinced that If I wear my new red miniskirt, they’ll notice me! If I bake chocolate chip cookies, they’ll notice me! If I help them with their math homework, they’ll notice me! Trying over and over, so sincerely, and of course they don’t notice.
Or perhaps at work, trying to get a promotion: If I stay until 6 pm each night, they’ll notice me! If I turn in the most thorough report ever, they’ll notice me! If I learn to play golf, they’ll notice me! Trying over and over, playing by all the rules, and of course they don’t notice. Because you’re female, or Black, or you’ll never be one of the “old boys,” or whatever….
In those modern scenarios, the advice is clear: Leave. Find a new crush, find a new job. But Leah, as a wife in the ancient Middle East, had no option of leaving. And the stakes for her were so much higher than a junior-high crush or a promotion. This was pregnancy and childbirth—nine months of pregnancy, hours or days of labor, things that in those days truly risked death. But none of it made Jacob love her.
So the competition went on, dragging in other parties like a world war. After Leah’s fourth son, Rachel still can’t conceive and so gives her servant—her handmaid— Bilhah to Jacob as a concubine.
(Just an aside: The Torah has Rachel saying to Jacob, “Here is my maid Bilhah. Consort with her, that she may bear on my knees and that through her I too may have children.” Some commenters including Robert Alter say that “bearing on my knees” refers to an ancient practice of placing children on someone’s knees as a ritual of adoption. But writer Margaret Atwood chose to take this literally in her patriarchal dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale—this is the source for the horrible practice of the handmaid literally giving birth between the knees of the patriarch’s wife.)
But back to Rachel and Leah and their childbearing competition. Leah is ahead, 4 to nothing. But then Rachel’s servant Bilhah bears two sons by Jacob, and Rachel says “A fateful contest I waged with my sister, and I have prevailed.” You can imagine her doing an ancient Mesopatamian fist punch in the air.
So Leah then gives Jacob her servant Zilpah, who bears two sons. This is starting to sound like the US-Soviet arms race. It parallels the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau, yet in some ways it is more intense and painful because both siblings were so aware of it—two women living side by side in the same family compound for 20 years, with close-up, unavoidable views of each other’s ongoing victories and failings.
It’s horrible to think of these two sisters in a permanent state of war. Some of the commentators seemed to think so too: There are midrashim that weave stories of empathy and solidarity between Leah and Rachel.
One midrash from the Talmud says that Rachel knew in advance of Laban’s wedding-night trick, warned Jacob, and he came up with a way to defeat Laban’s scheme.
Jacob gave Rachel signs [so that he would be able to recognize her on their wedding night].
When Leah was brought under the wedding canopy, Rachel thought: “Now my sister will be shamed [when Jacob discovers the fraud and does not marry her].” She gave the signs to Leah. (BT Bava Batra 123a).
According to the Rabbis, Laban would not have succeeded in deceiving Jacob without Rachel’s involvement. Rachel had to choose between her love for Jacob and her compassion for her sister, and she decided in favor of the latter. The most extreme description of Rachel’s act of self-sacrifice appears in Lam. Rabbah, according to which Rachel entered under Jacob and Leah’s bed on their wedding night. When Jacob spoke with Leah, Rachel would answer him, so that he would not identify Leah’s voice (Lam. Rabbah [ed. Vilna] petihtah 24).
I would like to think that, alongside the pain of infertility or being the second-choice wife, there was also empathy and solidarity between the sisters. Like the rest of the Torah, this parshah was written by men, from stories handed down by men, and this reproductive arms race may be their outsider’s view of what was going on within the family tent while the men were away with the flocks.
Let’s look at what happens next, after Bilhah and Zilpah have each birthed two sons and the total son count is up to eight. Reuben, Leah’s oldest son, brings her some mandrakes that he finds in the field. (Mandrakes, having a root that is bizarrely shaped like a human figure, have been imagined in many cultures to bring fertility.)
Mandrake root / Photo by Jenny Laird
Rachel asks Leah for some of the mandrakes, hoping to cure her infertility. Leah at first refuses, saying, “Was it not enough for you to take away my husband, that you would also take my son’s mandrakes?” But then Rachel promises that Leah can sleep with Jacob that evening in exchange for the mandrakes, and Leah agrees.
Leah goes out to meet Jacob that evening and tells him. “You are to sleep with me, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.”
This is a truly shocking moment. Leah is in command for once—unlike her own wedding night, she has the power here. She is commanding Jacob to sleep with her. And not just commanding him, she is saying that she hired him, like you would hire a prostitute, like you would hire an ox to plow a field.
Perhaps her grief all those years was not just at being unloved—it was at being powerless, manipulated by her father in order to get more work out of Jacob, unable to choose her own fate. Here for once she is able to take fate into her own hands and turn the tables. Jacob in effect becomes a sex object here.
It’s not pretty, but perhaps it was satisfying or even restorative for Leah. Perhaps Rachel wanted to give her this gift of momentary power.
We don’t know. What we do know is that, three sons later, when Jacob is ready to leave Haran, the two sisters respond in unison.
“Then Rachel and Leah answered him, saying, ‘Have we still a share in the inheritance of our father’s house? Surely he regards us as outsiders, now that he has sold us and has used up our purchase price. Truly, all the wealth that God has taken away fronm our father belongs to us and to our children. Now then, do just what God as told you.”
In current slang, we might say there’s no daylight between the two sisters here. No rivalry, no disagreement. They have long been done with their father’s manipulation and are ready to leave—together—for Jacob’s promised land.
It was my turn to give the D’var Torah (commentary on the weekly reading) for my Torah study group at Temple Sinai. This week’s parsha (portion) covered Exodus 10:1 through 13:16. The most prominent parts ofParshat Bo are the dramatic final plagues of darkness and death of the Egyptians’ first-born, and God’s instructions to Moses on how Passover is to be celebrated through the coming generations. But I chose instead to focus on a small part: The Israelites taking valuable items from the Egyptians as they prepare to flee Egypt.
One reference occurs in Exodus 11:1:
And the Lord said unto Moses… Speak now in the ears of the people, and let them ask every man of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor, jewels of silver and jewels of gold. And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharoah’s servants, and in the sight of the people.
The other occurs slightly into next week’s reading, Parshat B’shalach, in Exodus 13:35:
And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they asked of the Egyptians jewels of silver and jewels of gold and raiment. And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians.
There is ambiguity in the Hebrew about whether the Israelites are asking to be given or to borrow all this wealth. Robert Alter and JPS translate it as “borrow,” while Soncino translates it as “ask.” The medieval commentator Rashbam, the grandson of Rashi, interpreted the word as a gift, not a loan.
The Israelites taking the Egyptians’ gold and silver, The Golden Haggadah, f. 13, 1325–1349.
Personally I prefer the translation as “ask,” since it avoids the morally uncomfortable situation of requesting to “borrow” things that were never intended to be returned. So for now let’s assume it is an ask and a gift, not borrowing or a loan.
How then should we understand the decision of the Egyptians to give so many of their valuables to the Hebrews, who until then had been slaves, the lowest of the low?
One likely motivation might have been sheer terror. The Egyptians had just suffered the ten plagues; in the final plague, their oldest sons had been killed. In fact, the Torah tells us that “the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, to send them out of the land in haste, for they said, ‘We are all dead men.'” So possibly the Egyptians may have been thinking, “Here, take whatever you want, take everything, just get out the Hell of here before your God does something even worse to us.”
Yet the verses talk about the Israelites finding favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, which seems to be something positive rather than the negative motivation of terror. It implies a relationship of friendship between at least some Egyptians and some Israelites: “every man ask of his neighbor and every woman ask of her neighbor.” It implies a relationship where they lived close to each other: I imagine a Jewish woman crossing her yard to borrow salt or olive oil from the Egyptian woman next door, or an Egyptian man knocking on the door of his Jewish friend for help patching a hole in the roof.
In this case, perhaps the valuables were given out of personal affection, the way many of us would chip in to help a neighbor whose house had just burned down. Yet that personal connection doesn’t quite seem to cover this situation, since so many Egyptians gave so much—not just blankets or food or even an extra donkey or two, but vast amounts of gold and silver.
So perhaps the valuable were given because of something broader than personal friendship. The verses talk about Moses being “very great” in the eyes of Pharoah’s advisers and the Egyptian people. That leads me to picture a person with the status of a Martin Luther King Jr., a Nelson Mandela, or a Mahatma Gandhi—a liberator of the oppressed whose integrity, perseverance, and eloquence won the respect even of many who had benefitted from that oppression. The verses talk about “the people finding favor” with the Egyptians, which could imply that the Egyptians understood the Israelites’ collective suffering as slaves and wanted to help them as a group, not just as an individual helping out a neighbor.
Which bring us to the modern-day issue of reparations for slavery and oppression. Could we view the Egyptians’ donations of valuables as a form of reparations for 400 years of unpaid servitude?
There’s a story in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 91A) that indirectly supports such a view.
This story says that in the time of Alexander the Great, the Egyptians summoned the Israelites before Alexander, demanding that they repay the gold and silver that the Israelites had “borrowed” when they fled Egypt many centuries earlier. The sages granted a prominent Jew named Gebiah ben Pesisa permission to advocate for the people of Israel.
Gebiah asked the Egyptians what the evidence was for their claim, and the Egyptians answered that the Torah itself provided their evidence.
Gebiah responded that he would also bring evidence from the Torah in Israel’s defense. He quoted the sections that talk about the Hebrews’ 430 years of enslavement, and how they left Egypt with 600,000 men, and he demanded back wages from the Egyptians for 600,000 men working for 430 years—which would have been a staggering amount of money.
Alexander turned to the Egyptians for a proper answer. The Egyptians said they’d respond in three days but couldn’t find a satisfactory answer and fled.
Today we as Americans have an opportunity to address the damage caused by 401 years of slavery and its aftermath of systemic racism. The first African slaves were brought here in 1619. Their forced labor didn’t just make individual white landowners rich; they provided the basis for the cotton and textile industry that built and underpinned the economy of our young country. In that sense, we all benefited, even if our ancestors never set foot in the south or owned a slave.
The abolition of slavery in 1863 didn’t end the inequality and exploitation of Black Americans. Jim Crow laws in the south and discriminatory policies and culture in the north meant that whites have had unfair advantages throughout the past century, up through the present day.
Many of us who are Jews of European descent have traditionally taken moral comfort in thinking, “My ancestors were poor immigrants who came here in 1880, or 1920, or 1950. I never benefited from slavery or racism.” But in fact, white Jews—even those who came as poor immigrants to the tenements of the Lower East Side—HAVE benefited from what journalist Isabel Wilkerson describes in her recent book as a caste system.
Because blacks were defined as the “other”—the lowest caste—European Jewish immigrants could define themselves as white. Yes, we faced anti-Semitism but we could also fit under the umbrella of being white. We were allowed to join labor unions, enter elite colleges (albeit with quotas), enter professions, obtain government-backed loans and mortgages, buy homes in many (though not all) white neighborhoods.
Our immigrant grandparents, just a week off the boat, could apply for entry-level jobs that were not open to Black Americans who had been in this country for 300 years.
Yes, we were poor immigrants, but we were also white, which gave us privilege. It allowed our grandparents and parents to start accumulating generational wealth—owning a home, building up savings accounts, perhaps investing in stocks—that they could pass on to our generation, either directly or through financing the education that allowed us to become doctors, lawyers, and other professionals.
So even if our ancestors didn’t arrive here until 1920 or 1950, we benefited from these four centuries of subjugation of Black people. We have a moral obligation to take part in repairing that damage: The word “reparations” comes from the word “repair.”
There has been so much written on this in the past few years, including Ta-Nehisi Coates’ seminal 2014 essay in The Atlantic. I can’t possibly do it justice in a short commentary. If you’d like to learn more about the history of systemic racism and the idea of reparations, there are many resources including Coates’ essay, Wilkerson’s Caste, and Richard Rothstein’s book The Color of Law.
Over the past four years, we watched a presidential administration try to turn back the clock on civil rights. My hope with this week’s new administration is that, instead, we can enter into a national discussion of how to repair the economic and social damage done by slavery and institutionalized racism.
It’s not just about giving people money. It’s not about expiating guilt. The gold and silver given by the Egyptians to the freed Israelites ended up providing the building materials for the tabernacle.So those Egyptian treasures were a kind of capital used to launch a new society—they helped take the Hebrews further than they’d ever been before—beyond that single family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, beyond twelves tribes—into the creation of an actual nation with a distinct and revolutionary monotheism and culture. Those Egyptian reparations helped build a new and better society.
Similarly, a plan for American reparations should be something that acknowledges past oppression and uses that understanding to build something new and larger and better. Something that will provide more opportunity, dignity, and security for the broad community of Black Americans, and in so doing a better and more inspiring country for white Americans too.
Let us move from a shehecheyanu for reaching this inaugural week, to a yihi ratzon for racial justice:
This past weekend it was my turn to deliver the D’var Torah (commentary on Torah, like a sermon) at Temple Sinai’s Zoom Shabbat service. The weekly Torah portion covered Genesis 37:1−40:23. Here’s what I wrote.
This week we begin the saga of Joseph, whose brothers bitterly called him “the master of dreams.” This will be a drash about dreams and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
But this week also happens to be Chanukah, which gives us the opportunity to compare two very different set of brothers in Jewish history.
The Maccabees were five brothers—sons of a Jewish priest—who with their father led a revolt against the Greek rulers of Judaea in the second century BCE; the success of their revolt is commemorated by Chanukah. We don’t have details about how those Maccabee brothers got along with each other. But to win a guerrilla war against such a powerful establishment they would have had to work together very well, to communicate with each other—in short to be unified.
Joseph and his 11 brothers are a different matter.
Rather than standing behind his father, one son, Reuben, sleeps with his father’s concubine. The sons identify themselves in factions based on their four different mothers—for instance, one verse tells us how Joseph worked as a helper “to the sons of his father’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah.” And the brothers are in conflict with Joseph from the very start of the story, partly due to Jacob favoring Joseph.
“And when [Joseph’s] brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of his brothers, they hated him so that they could not speak a friendly word to him.”
The brothers hate Joseph so much they decide to kill him—then with a slight change in plans sell him into slavery—and lie to their father about his fate.
Given a choice, of course we would all want our children to be Maccabee siblings rather than Joseph’s siblings.
So this is another way to think about the Chanukah miracle—not just the oil burning miraculously for eight days, not just feisty farmers miraculously defeating an imperial power—but five siblings who miraculously manage to respect each other and work together and learn from each other.
In the unhappier story of Joseph, one of the things that turns his brothers against him are two dreams that he recounts to them—one where they’re all gathering wheat, and the brothers’ sheaves bow down to Joseph’s sheaves, and the other where the sun, moon, and eleven stars bow down to him.
“His brothers answered, ‘Do you mean to reign over us? Do you mean to rule over us?’ And they hated him even more for his talk about his dreams.”
Dreams are perplexing. From the beginning of humankind, we’ve been mystified and terrified and inspired by dreams, and have struggled to understand where they come from and what they mean.
One of the oldest ways of making sense of dreams is to view them as direct messages from a supernatural being. We see that earlier in the Torah, when we are told that God came to King Abimelech in a dream and ordered him not to marry Sarah.
Another approach is to view dreams as portents of the future—not as direct as Abimelech’s “phone call” from God, but something that, if interpreted properly, lets you know in advance what will happen. Joseph does this kind of interpreting in Egypt when he says that Pharoah’s dream of seven fat cows followed by seven gaunt cows is a prediction of good harvests followed by famine.
More than a century ago, Freud suggested that dreams are the upwelling of uncomfortable or taboo thoughts that we shut out from our conscious minds.
Neuroscientists today would give us an explanation based on brain circuitry. Our Aunt Sadie might say bad dreams are a result of too many latkes and sufganiot. The Talmud suggests that a dream is 1/60th of a prophecy…. and these are just some of the different ways that people have to tried make sense of the phenomenon of dreaming.
I’d like to go in a slightly different direction. Let’s set aside the biological or mystical reasons Joseph had those dreams, and not worry about whether they came from God or from a latke overdose.
Let’s think about Joseph’s dreams as stories. And let’s look at the function that those dreams—or stories—played within his already-conflicted family.
Here we have a family riven by power inequity. As the late-in-life child of Jacob’s favorite wife Rachel, Joseph came into the world with an advantage over his brothers. He was Jacob’s favorite from the start, even though the others were older. Jacob showed his favoritism with the gift of that famous, beautiful, many-colored coat. You might say Joseph was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. You might say he was born with privilege.
His brothers didn’t like that. Joseph must surely have been aware of their resentment.
And so—here we are getting away from text and into speculation, but bear with me—perhaps these stories of the sheaves and the stars were intended to justify his privilege.
Perhaps Joseph shared those dreams of the bowing sheaves and stars to explain why he deserved his special status within the family:
“See? Dad was right to give me that coat—Dad is right to single me out—because I’m special! These dreams say so, and dreams don’t lie!”
Even if Joseph didn’t intend it that way, that could easily have been the message that his brothers took from those dreams.
The dreams were stories that filled a function—rightly or wrongly—of justifying Joseph’s status as the privileged, favorite child.
The dreams provided a rationale for injustice in the small, intimate world of Jacob’s family.
Similarly, societies create stories to rationalize their injustices. This can happen through scientific and historic myth-making—for instance, when 19th century white male scientists claimed that women and black people were naturally inferior because they supposedly had smaller skull sizes.
Today we live in a society that, like Joseph’s family, is riven by power inequity. Whatever metric you choose—money, housing, healthy food, good medical care, job options, a sense of physical safety, connections to people who run our institutions—some people have a lot and others have very little.
The people who have a lot often tell stories that explain why they deserve it. Like Joseph’s dream, their stories paint their privilege as part of the natural order—logical, unarguable, even just.
“I came up with a better idea.” “I’m smarter than those other guys.” “I worked my butt off, and they’re just plain lazy.” “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.”
Parts of those stories may be true. But there’s usually more to it than that.
Most of us in this Zoom service benefit from some kind of privilege. You don’t have to be Bill Gates or live in a mansion to benefit from privilege. We can be powerful in one facet of our lives, yet vulnerable in other facets.
For instance, as a white person I feel a sense of physical safety around police officers that many people of color wouldn’t feel. That’s privilege. Yet as a woman, I feel vulnerable walking past a construction site of cat-calling men. Powerful in one area; not so powerful in the other.
As a child, I grew up with immense class and race privilege that I took for granted. I never noticed it because it seemed so normal to me. I had a father who earned enough money that my mother could stay home and give us huge amounts of attention. A public school that was wealthy enough to have an orchestra and lend us violins to take home! Streets that were safe and stores that welcomed our teenage browsing, even if we didn’t buy anything. Relatives who were lawyers and doctors and so made the question for me not IF I would go to college but WHERE I would go to college….
Put that all together, and I grew up with a sense that the world valued me and was safe for me. A belief that I could go out into that world and use my voice and take risks and succeed.
That all seemed as natural as air to me, just as Jacob’s preferential love must have seemed as natural as air to Joseph.
And yet so many people don’t have all or even a part of that.
In telling the story of our own successes, honesty requires us to acknowledge our privilege—the places where we’ve benefitted from an uneven playing field.
Jewish ethics then requires us to seek ways to even out that playing field.
I invite you to take a minute now to think about your own life. In what ways, are you privileged?
Have you benefited from advantages of economic class, race, gender, sexual orientation? From being part of a religious or ethnic majority? From birth order? From other kinds of privilege?
Now consider the stories that you use to explain your own successes—to yourself, and also to others. How honest are your stories? Do they acknowledge the role of privilege as well as personal initiative? Do your stories provide room for other people to succeed too?
Do your stories build other people up or tear them down?
Imagine, for a moment, if Joseph had dreamed a different dream and told his brothers a different story. Say it was a story that instead of aggrandizing his own success, showed how he was connected with his brothers. That acknowledged his privilege, but showed how he could use it to elevate all of them. Perhaps:
I dreamed that twelve sheaves of wheat stood in a circle, side by side. One sheaf was taller since those stalks had received a lot more water. Its height attracted the notice of the king’s steward, who bought all twelve sheaves for a very high price and had them milled into flour for the most exquisite cakes—cakes whose recipes have been passed down through 4000 years of history.
With such a story, Joseph might not have ended up in a pit. He and his siblings might have been a family of Maccabees after all.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been taking part in my synagogue’s weekly Torah study group. We read the weekly parshah—portion of Torah—and discuss it. After the group discussion, one person delivers a short talkon the week’s portion. This past week it was my turn to speak about the portion called Eikev, which covers Deuteronomy 7:12 to 11:25.
(The book of Deuteronomy, the last of the five books of Torah, consists of Moses’ instructions to the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land without him, after 40 years in the desert.)
After writing and sharing my Eikev comments, it occurred to me that they might also be of interest to some of my blog followers. If that’s you, here you go! And if you’re not interested, please skip this. Either way, have a good week, stay masked, and stay healthy.
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This week’s Torah portion, Eikev, along with last week’s portion, are the source of much of the language of the Shema, the most important prayer in Judaism. But while we in Reform Judaism include the language from last week’s portion in our recitation of the shma, our prayerbooks don’t include the language from Eikev.
Because I’m always interested in the source and evolution of our rituals, I’m going to talk about the origins of the Shema, what the different sections of the Shema say, why Reform Judaism dropped the wording that came from Eikev, and what Eikev tells us about divine reward and punishment.
I suspect the history of the shema may be old hat to some of you, but it will be new to others of us, so please bear with me if some of this feels familiar.
You all probably know the first two lines of the shema by heart: Shema Yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad. Baruch shem k’vod malchuto, l’olam va’ed.
We say these lines every Shabbat when we take the Torah from the ark, as well as at the climax of Yom Kippur services; if we were Orthodox Jews, we would say them twice daily in morning and evening prayers. They are supposed to be the last words we speak before death, and throughout history Jewish martyrs have died with the shema on their lips.
The first line comes from last week’s Torah portion, Deuteronomy 6:4. It is often translated as Hear, o Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one. But it can also be translated as Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai alone. How you choose to translate it makes for a subtle but meaningful difference – one of them emphasizes the unified nature of God, while the other emphasizes that we worship only one God. Take a moment and think about which translate resonates and is more meaningful for you – or perhaps a combination of both of them: Adonai is my God, Adonai is one. Or: Adonai is my God, Adonai alone.
That line was recited by the priests in the days of the Temple, and the assembled worshippers answered back with the second line: Baruch shem k’vod malchuto, l’olam va’ed. Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever. That line is the only one in the shema that doesn’t come from Torah, which may be why we recite it quietly.
Since it’s not from the Torah, it’s not clear where that second line came from. The Talmud makes up a story about Jacob and his sons to explain its origins: On his deathbed, Jacob was worried that his sons might stray and worship other gods, so he asked them about their beliefs, and they said Shma Yisraeladonai eloheinu, adonai echad. And Jacob was relieved and responded, Baruch shem k’vod malchuto, l’olam va’ed.
Jacob and his sons
That second line evolved historically, though. At one point in ancient times, it was simply Baruch shem kvod olam, Blessed be his glorious name forever, which was the response whenever the name of God was mentioned. The phrase malchuto, his kingdom, was added during Roman times to emphasize that God, not Rome, was the true ruler. The phrase va’ed, emphasizing eternity, was added during the Second Temple period to counter the view of some Jews that there was no life after death. So that second line evolved to meet the political and cultural challenges of the day – changing from Blessed be his glorious name forever to Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.
But back to our Torah portion, Eikev, and its role in the shema. So far we’ve talked about the opening two lines, which is what we commonly think of as the shema. But the full shema actually includes an additional three long paragraphs, two from Deuteronomy and one from Numbers.
The first paragraph is what we recite as the Ve’ahavta. It comes from last week’s Torah portion, Deuteronomy 6:5-9.
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thy house, and upon thy gates.
The second paragraph is from Eikev, and we Reform Jews don’t recite it. It’s Deuteronomy 11:13-21, if any of you want to follow along. I’ll read it.
If, then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving Adonai your God and serving God with all your heart and soul, I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil— I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle—and thus you shall eat your fill. Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. For God’s anger will flare up against you, and God will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that God is assigning to you. Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, and teach them to your children—reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up; and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates— to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that God swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.
This second section of the shema repeats some elements of the first paragraph, such as the injunction to take God’s words into our hearts, and teach our children, and recite them when we get up and when we lie down, and inscribe them on the doorposts of our house and on the gates.
But what it also has – which makes up a central part of the Eikev portion – is a system of material rewards and punishments for our religious behavior. If we are good, then God will make it rain for our crops and give us enough food. If we are bad, God will cause drought and we will be killed or exiled.
Worship idols, suffer from drought? / Photo by CSIRO
The 19th century Reform movement was uncomfortable with this, for reasons that make a lot of sense to me. We live in an era of science, where we understand that droughts and crop failures are due to weather patterns like El Nino, not whether we have been worshipping idols. In addition, we have seen enough injustice – the Holocaust is only the most obvious example – to know that bad things happen to even the most pious and virtuous people.
Rabbi Audrey Korotkin wrote, “We Reform Jews have trouble praying what we do not believe. And our experience tells us not to believe in Deuteronomic theology.”
So the Reform movement kept the commandments in the shema but removed the promises of material bliss for the virtuous and the threats of death and destruction for sinners.
Our Reform predecessors may have updated the shema, but we still face this dilemma when reading Eikev and Deuteronomy.
Moses tells us that if we obey the rules, God will multiply us, bless the issue from our wombs and the produce of our grain and wine and oil, our calves and lambs. God will ward off sickness and infertility, and will inflict diseases on our enemies. But if we follow other gods or intermarry with other peoples, God will wipe us out.
What are we to make of this? I can’t believe that God rewards the virtuous with material wealth and health. There are so many instances of mass injustice that wiped out both the pious and impious, from the Holocaust to American slavery to the genocide of native American peoples. On an individual level, all of us know good people who have died untimely deaths or faced terrible traumas or financial reversals. My mother would have died of ovarian cancer at age 54 even if she were the most devout Lubavitcher.
I also can’t respect any religion that in today’s world relies on supernatural threats to get people to comply with moral teachings. Preschoolers may need the threat of a time-out to learn to share their toys, but I believe adults should do the right thing because it is right, not because God will give us bountiful herds of cattle or a FedEx box full of bitcoins.
It is possible to step back from the actual words and take these kinds of rewards and punishments on a symbolic level. We can interpret it as, “A society that treats people morally and ethically will flourish.” Or on an environmental level, “If we aren’t careful stewards of the land, the land will cease to be fruitful.”
Another way to look at these rewards and threats is to consider whether they are coming from God or from Moses. Here is Moses, nearing the end of his life, knowing the Israelites will continue into the promised land without him, wanting them to succeed but also knowing how easily they backslide into idolatry and nostalgia for Egypt. Maybe he doesn’t know how they will manage without him. Maybe he’s worried that they will fail. He’s wracking his brain trying to figure out what he can say that will persuade them – over a future of years, decades, centuries – to fulfill the commandments he delivered from God. Desperate, he turns to wild promises – follow the commandments and you’ll never get sick! You’ll be rich! Your enemies will perish! as well as threats of destruction. In that case, the warnings of material reward and punishment are Moses’s, not God’s.
But those are rationalizations – my effort as a liberal, science-based 21st century Jew to find a way to live with yet another part of the Torah that I can’t accept on its face value.
I don’t have an answer here, so I’m going to leave you with some open-ended questions.
How do you feel about a theology of material rewards and punishments by God?
Do you think God materially punishes those who don’t obey the commandments, and rewards those who do?
Do you think rewards and punishments are good reasons to follow the commandments?
And if not – and say you were in Moses’s shoes, delivering a farewell address to a stiff-necked people who have backslid over and over — what arguments would you make to convince them to follow the moral and ethical commandments laid out by a distant God?
Shabbat shalom. Have a good week. Stay masked, stay safe, stay hopeful.
One of my favorite Jewish activities is delivering a d’var Torah — commentary on the weekly Torah portion read at Shabbat services. Here’s one I wrote last week for the Bamidbar portion (or parsha in Hebrew), the opening section of the book of Numbers. I start with a basic summary of the section and then go on to some reflections about it.
Bamidbar is the first parsha in the book also named Bamidbar, or in English, Numbers. Bamidbar means “in the desert:” It speaks broadly to both the geographic status and spiritual status of the Israelites as they continue their journey from Egypt to the promised land. “Numbers” – from the Greek translation of the Bible — is a narrower title, and refers to the census that takes up the bulk of this parsha and to another census at the end of the book as the Israelites prepare to enter the promised land.
In this week’s parsha, God commands Moses to take a census of the Israelites, by tribe, which he does with the help of a designated leader from each tribe. The parsha reports the number of adult men (aged 20 through 60, basically men capable of fighting in battle) in each tribe, which adds up to a total of 603,550 adult men. The community as a whole – adding in women, children, and the elderly – probably adds up to at least 1.5 million.
A 19th century imagining of the census: Engraving by Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux (1815–1884)
God assigns specific campsites to each tribe on the four sides of the tent of meeting, where God abides while the Israelites travel through the desert. God also assigns them specific marching spots.
God excludes the Levites from the census and gives them a special status of being in charge of setting up, dismantling and carrying all the equipment for the tent of meeting. The Levites receive this special designation as a follow-up to a condition that God set back in Egypt. When God killed all the first-born of the Egyptians, s/he told Moses that the first-born sons and cattle of the Israelites should be consecrated to God in recompense. Here God tells Moses to have the Levites stand in as replacements for all those Jewish first-born.
Stepping back to think about this parsha, why all this attention to numbers and to organizational structure?
One way to view this census is creating order out of chaos. As the Israelites travel through the silent, empty desert, they find it a place of reflection, for hearing the voice of God, and purging old, unwanted slave ways of being, but they also find it a place of confusion, anarchy, and despair. (As we see in their frequent wails to return to Egypt and in the chaotic episode of the Golden Calf.)
It’s a place of silence and emptiness. But as humans, we need structure and order in our lives.
We need a structure to our time. Those of us with children in their 20s – or those of us who can remember our own 20s – know how disorienting it can be to finish college, the first time in our lives we are without the structure of classes and homework.
Or looking at the other end of the age spectrum, retirement. It can be disorienting, even depressing, to suddenly find oneself without the familiar structure and demands of paid work. One response is to seek out new structures – volunteer commitments, weekly babysitting for grandchildren, adult ed classes or gym routines, as a way to provide structure to all that open time.
Think about the Israelites. They came from an even more structured world than we live in — a world of slavery, where every aspect of their time and life was determined by others. And suddenly they are in the desert, no hierarchy, no structure, no knowledge of where exactly they are going or how long it will take to get there. We can only imagine how disoriented they felt, and how reassuring it must have been to know at least where in the line they were supposed to march and where they were to set up camp.
Along with the structure of time, we also crave the structure of community – feeling that we belong to something more intimate than “homo sapiens.”
On the most intimate level, that means being part of a family, a couple, or a close friendship circle. Many of us, including myself, take pleasure these days in trying to deepen our knowledge of our families through genealogy. We are doing our own kind of census, but one that goes back in time – identifying as many great-great-great grandparents and far-flung cousins as we can.
Then there are the less intimate ways that we sort ourselves into communities – we’re Jews, or Democrats and Republicans, or Warriors fans, or Grateful Dead heads, or African-Americans, or yoga practitioners, or Oakland Tech parents, or Star Trek fans.
Being part of a tribe helps us feel rooted and less alone in the desert. It gives us a sense of connection with others — shared joy at successes, shared sorrow at setbacks.
But it also has its risks. Today, our modern version of tribalism has run amok. People from the coasts talk contemptuously about flyover country. (Guilty!) People who watch Fox News disregard anything that challenges their world-view as “fake news.” Many white people refuse to acknowledge the historical pain of African-Americans. A vicious nationalism that targets minority groups like Jews and Muslims is spreading in Europe. The president of the United States reduces everything to an “us versus them” smackdown with taunts and bullying. And I don’t even want to start about the damage done by “tribal” identities in today’s Middle East. These things all represent the dark side of tribal identity.
In Bamidbar, Moses takes a census by tribe but he also records the names of each individual person.
“On the first day of the second month, they convoked the whole company, who were registered by the clans of their ancestral houses – the names of those aged twenty and over being listed head by head. As the Eternal had commanded Moses, so he listed them in the wilderness of Sinai.”
Yes, the census records just the adult men: This is yet another place in the Bible where we have to sigh and make allowances for it as a historical text from a time of unquestioned patriarchy. (I don’t quite know how Moses could have managed to record 603,000 names, but we can let that go too.)
The key thing is that in addition to recognizing tribes, he is recognizing individuals.
Think about how validating this must have been for those Israelite men – former slaves, with no rights to own property or enter legal contracts or even determine what they were going to do when they woke up in the morning, now being asked to step forward and state their name for God and the world to hear. It sent a message to the Israelites that each individual was important and autonomous and valued.
To us, it also sends a message of diversity within community. They are part of a tribe, but they are also individuals.
Take a moment and think about the tribal boxes that you mentally put people in. Nearly all of us do it – I certainly do, even if I don’t do it intentionally.
“All those Trump voters.”
“All those cops.”
“All those Arabs.”
“All those tech bro’s.”
“All those gun owners.”
Let’s stop here and think. What boxes do you lump people into?
The next time you are tempted to do that, remember they are individuals. Part of a tribe, yes, but also an individual name. Each with her or his own story – their own aspirations and loves and hidden wounds. With individual reasons for the choices they make and lives they lead.
Think of them as individuals like yourself. Don’t do this just because it’s the warm and fuzzy thing to do, but because it’s true. And it will determine the success of your interactions with others, whether those are individual conversations or political campaign strategies.
It’s how God and Moses viewed the Israelites – members of tribes but also unique individuals. Each of us should aim to do the same.
My mother’s family came from Germany in the mid-1800s. In the course of pursuing my genealogy addiction – oops, I mean research — I’ve identified three of their villages of origin.
For two of those villages, Markt Erlbach and Mitwitz, I’ve found little or no information about the historic Jewish community.
The third village – Jebenhausen, about 27 miles east of Stuttgart – is a jackpot.
Scholars have written articles and books on the Jews of Jebenhausen. The Jewish cemetery there is well preserved and documented. There is even a museum devoted to the Jews of Jebenhausen!
These resources were all easily accessible to me. I didn’t have to learn German or spend weeks sifting through dusty, hard-to-decipher handwritten archives. There are many people to thank for this, including other Jewish descendants who’ve shared their knowledge, Christian residents who restored the town’s Jewish cemetery after the Holocaust, and more.
But the wealth of information is mostly due to the work of two men – Rabbi Aron Tänzer and Dr. Karl-Heinz Ruess.
Tänzer (1871-1937) was the last rabbi in Göppingen, a larger neighboring town that eventually subsumed the village of Jebenhausen. Among his many accomplishments was a 662-page history of the Jews of Jebenhausen and Göppingen, which included family trees. It’s because of Rabbi Tänzer’s charts that I’m able to trace my Jebenhausen family line back to the 1700s.
Portrait of Rabbi Aron Tänzer in the Jewish Museum
Dr. Ruess is the museum director for Göppingen, who decided to create a Jewish museum there in 1985 – a time when even big cities like Berlin and Munich didn’t yet have a Jewish museum.
Because of Dr. Ruess’s efforts, the life and eventual destruction of Jebenhausen’s Jewish community is documented far beyond what one might expect for a town whose Jewish population never passed 600.
Last month, my husband Sam and I traveled to Germany to visit our daughter, who was doing an artist’s residency in Berlin. It was our first time in Germany. Ten years ago, before I started doing genealogy, I’d never even heard of Jebenhausen. Now, I eagerly arranged a rental car for the day-long drive south to visit it.
Our first stop was the museum, located in a decommissioned one-room Protestant church.
The museum’s location in the church is part of its story.
In 1777, the barons who controlled the village of Jebenhausen agreed in writing to allow a small number of Jews – initially just 20 families – to move there. In return, the Jews paid them annual “protection fees.” Over the next fifty years, the Jewish community grew to a peak of 550 people, about equal to the Christian population of 600.
Exhibit in the Göppingen Jewish Museum showing the 1777 document that allowed Jews to settle in Jebenhausen. Note the Hebrew signatures on the right.
Then in the mid-1800s, Jews started moving out of Jebenhausen – many to America, like my ancestors, and others to larger German towns that offered more industrial infrastructure and economic opportunity. By 1900, there were so few Jews left that the synagogue was closed and the chandeliers and pews were donated to the local church.
By the 1980s, that church had also been closed and turned over to the city of Göppingen. Dr. Ruess realized that the state of Baden-Württemburg had over 1,000 museums but not a single one focused on Judaism. With the synagogue’s furnishings already in the church, he convinced city officials to turn it into the Gföppingen Jewish Museum, which opened in 1992.
Dr. Ruess met us at the museum and guided us through, which was helpful since the labels for the exhibits don’t – yet – have English translations. It includes sections on Jewish holidays and rituals, the growth of the Jebenhausen and Göppingen Jewish communities, and their destruction under Nazism, told movingly through stories and photos of some of the individuals who were killed or displaced.
Göppingen Jewish Museum in Jebenhausen
Chandelier from the synagogue
Göppingen Jewish Museum, with pews from the synagogue
The synagogue chandeliers and pews are still there, along with portraits of the barons who first opened Jebenhausen to Jews. Among the artifacts is a colorful hanging sign of King David with a lyre that marked the King David Inn, the first of several Jebenhausen inns serving Jewish travelers in the 1800s.
Me with the King David Inn sign in the Göppingen Jewish Museum
After touring the museum, Dr. Ruess led us on a walk through what used to be the Jewish section of the village. The main street still exists – now paved and busy with automobiles, while back then it would have been dirt and horse carts. Many of the original houses still line it, although most have been updated with third floors, modern windows, new siding, etc.
The main street of the onetime Jewish section of Jebenhausen / Photo by Ilana DeBare
To be honest, it felt less like a historic street than a modest, nondescript European suburb. It would be easy to drive down the street and not be aware of its past. But Dr. Ruess pointed out where the Jewish communal institutions used to stand – the synagogue, the school, the large house built by the Jewish community to accommodate families who were too poor to build their own houses.
The rabbi’s residence was still standing. And next door to it – also still standing, although a victim of some unfortunate remodel decisions – was the house that belonged to my ancestors.
The rabbi’s house (yellow) and the house that belonged to my Einstein ancestors (brown/grey) / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Community housing for poor families, around 1870-80
Jebenhausen synagogue, around 1890
My great-great grandparents Rosa Einstein and Salomon Wormser – the ones who brought those two silver kiddush cups with them to the U.S. – met and married in Jebenhausen in 1866. According to Tänzer’s book, the house at Poststrasse 103 was occupied by Rosa’s family members from 1842 through 1865. Rosa would probably have grown up there.
Some of Jebenhausen’s Jewish residents took advantage of opportunities created by the start of industrial development in the early 1800s. Rosa’s family, like many others, became involved in the new, growing textile industry. Her father, Salomon Einstein, started a weaving mill together with his brother Joseph Leopold Einstein in 1842, and in 1852 the brothers opened another factory that manufactured corsets.
Salomon Wormser wasn’t from Jebenhausen, but Tänzer says he was a partner in the corset factory. He was much younger than the Einstein brothers: In 1860, he would have been 23, while the brothers were around 60. Perhaps he boarded with the Einsteins.
Did Salomon and Rosa fall in love in the Einstein home while he learned the corset business from her father and uncle? Or was their marriage a calculated economic move – partners cementing a business relationship, or an ambitious young man angling to marry the boss’s daughter?
We’ll never know. But an unpublished memoir by my uncle Ira Skutch offers a glimpse of Rosa and Salomon’s relationship decades later in New York, where he became a corset importer. (Presumably developing a new market for the family business.)
As my grandmother told Ira:
“Grandma and Grandpa used to fight and bicker all the time. She didn’t use his first name or ‘Mister’ – she never called him anything but ‘Wormser.’ He had a pair of old brown shoes that he wore all the time because they were comfortable. Grandma kept at him constantly to get a new pair, until he finally couldn’t stand the nagging any more. When he returned from the store he said to Grandma, ‘All right. I have new shoes. But I’m going to keep these old ones, and I’m going to wear them to your funeral.’ And he did.”
Rosa and Salomon were hardly the only young Jews to leave Jebenhausen. Neighboring Göppingen had a river, which made it a better site for manufacturing. And America offered an escape from the anti-Semitism that was deeply ingrained in German society.
Between 1830 and 1870, 300 Jews from Jebenhausen emigrated to the U.S. – such a dramatic exodus that one scholar wrote an article titled “From Württemburg to America: A Nineteenth Century German-Jewish Village on its Way to the New World.”
Dr. Ruess shows a chart tracking the rise and decline of the Jewish populations of Jebenhausen (left) and Goppingen / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Today the only Jewish denizens of Jebenhausen are the ones resting underground. We followed Dr. Ruess up the street, about ten minutes past the Einstein home, to the Jewish cemetery. There he directed us to the graves of Salomon and Babette Gutmann Einstein, Rosa’s parents. We also found the grave of my oldest known Jebenhausen foremother – Rifke Einstein, who was Rosa’s great-grandmother and thus my 5th great-grandmother (my great-great-great-great-great grandmother).
Cemetery with stone of Rifke Einstein (in front)
Rifke’s stone
My daughter and me at Salomon Einstein’s grave
Hebrew and German lettering on Salomon Einstein’s stone / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Rifke was born in 1733 and died in 1817, part of the first generation of Jews to move to Jebenhausen. We don’t know her maiden name or anything else about her. She may mark the outer limits of how far I can trace my family, at least with the currently available digital resources.
One of the striking things about my Jebenhausen family history is how it mirrors the broader trends in German Jewish history, as described in Amos Elon’s excellent book, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.
Placing my family’s story within these broad brush strokes:
Before Napoleon’s conquest of Germany in the early 1800s, Jews were completely excluded from German society. They were barred from owning land and from entering skilled trades and professions. They were prohibited from living in many cities.
The first Jewish families who settled in Jebenhausen were cattle traders and peddlers, two of the few occupations open to Jews. Their houses were built by local Christian craftsmen, since Jews were not allowed to practice trades such as carpentry.
Until the 19thcentury, German Jews often did not have surnames and were known simply as “Isaac son of David” or “David son of Salomon.” (This poses obvious challenges for tracing family history.)
In Jebenhausen, Jews made an active decision to adopt surnames around 1818-20, earlier than in some other parts of Germany. Tänzer quotes an 1818 letter from two Jewish leaders to local officials:
“Royal esteemed district office: There are several family fathers (heads of household) without a family surname and that has caused many disputes, and also created difficulties in recording the Jewish families in the noble books. We therefore have initiated that every Jewish Family should establish a permanent family surname. We therefore request to publicly distribute the following list of newly adopted surnames, so the nuisance of having two or three of the same name will finally stop.”
As German Jews won more economic and social freedom through the 1800s, they increasingly identified with and assimilated into German culture.
The gravestones of the Jebenhausen cemetery reflect this gradual assimilation of Jews into German society. The oldest stones like Rifke’s are entirely in Hebrew. Salomon Einstein’s mid-century stone is mostly Hebrew, but his name is also written in German letters. Then there are stones from the early 1900s that are entirely in German, like Christian gravestones of that time.
The exodus of Jews from Jebenhausen to Göppingen and Stuttgart reflected the larger movement of Jews to urban areas through the 19th century, as Germany industrialized and cities dropped their restrictions on Jewish residency.
And of course the decimation of the Göppingen Jewish community during the Holocaust mirrored the fate of German Jewry overall. Although Rosa Einstein moved to America, several of her siblings stayed behind. Some of their descendants – my distant cousins – died in concentration camps. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, one of them was Fritz Elsas, a former mayor of Berlin and part of the liberal opposition to Hitler.
No one in my family was aware of these distant relations. I never knew until exploring my Jebenhausen roots that we had relatives who died in the Holocaust.
There are so many factors that shape our lives – our parents’ economic class and social milieu, the values with which they raise us, the schools we attend and the friends we make. If any of those were different, I would be a different person.
But sometimes I feel that all those factors are dwarfed by a single decision made 150 years ago by people I never knew – the decision by Salomon Wormser and Rosa Einstein to move from Jebenhausen to America.
Postscript: In my last blog post, I promised to disclose my connection to that other Einstein — the one who didn’t sell corsets. Albert, who was born 38 miles away from Jebenhausen in Ulm, is apparently my fifth cousin, three times removed. Don’t ask me to detail the path. My head will explode.
My daughter, me, and Dr. Ruess in front of the Göppingen Jewish Museum
I’d like to express my deep thanks to Dr. Ruess for his work on the museum and on the history of Jebenhausen’s Jews, and to other Jebenhausen descendants who have helped piece together the community’s story.
In particular, thank you to Stephen Weil of Chicago – a descendant of Rosa Einstein’s sister Ricke and thus my fourth cousin – who recently commissioned an English translation of Rabbi Tanzer’s book that is available for free online through the Leo Baeck Institute.
Each Passover, I polish two silver kiddish cups from my mother’s family for our Seder table.
As a child, I never paid the cups any attention: They were just part of the fancy silverware that my mom kept in the dining room credenza. As an adult, I knew they were heirlooms but had no idea where they came from. The cups were engraved, but no one knew what the inscriptions and initials meant.
Our two heirloom kiddish cups / Photo by Ilana DeBare
Then, over the past five years, I started exploring my family history through online resources like Ancestry.com and Jewishgen.org. I discovered that the kiddush cups – and part of my family – have their roots in the Bavarian towns of Jebenhausen and Goppingen.
One line of my mother’s family – my Wormser and Einstein ancestors – emigrated from Jebenhausen to the United States in 1868. They brought the cups with them.
Here’s what I know about their story:
On June 10, 1868, a young family made up of Salomon Wormser, Rosa (Rachle) Einstein Wormser, and their one-year-old son Max sailed out of Hamburg on a ship called the Holsatia.
Salomon was 31 years old and Rosa was 23. They had been married two years earlier in Jebenhausen, then moved to Stuttgart where they had Max before departing for America.
The taller silver cup bears the initials SW – which presumably refers to Salomon Wormser. I suspect it was a wedding present when he and Rosa were married.
The smaller cup bears the inscription “Zum andenken von S. Landauer,” which is German for “a souvenir of S. Lindauer.” As I learned more about my family tree, I saw that Rosa had a sister – Sara Einstein – who married a man named Salomon Lindauer in 1861 in Jebenhausen. My guess is that this cup was a memento from that wedding: Perhaps the couple or their parents gave commemorative cups to the people closest to them.
Our Lindauer kiddush cup / Photo by Ilana DeBare
But back to the story of Salomon Wormser, Rosa, and Max. Twelve days after they set sail from Hamburg, they arrived in New York. On July 23, 1869, they had a second son – Louis Wormser, who ultimately became my great grandfather.
In New York, Salomon ran a corset importing business – probably buying inventory from family and friends in Jebenhausen, which had an active corset manufacturing industry. He was not wealthy but not poor either. The fact that his family could buy silver kiddush cups as wedding gifts indicates they had some resources, as does the fact that Salomon emigrated together with his wife and baby son. (German Jewish men from poor families typically emigrated alone, and married or sent for their wives only after they had established some financial security in America.)
Census records list the occupation of Louis Wormser, my great grandfather, as a manufacturer of children’s clothing. My mother knew him as “Papa Lou,” but he died long before I was born. Lou’s daughter was my grandmother Ethel. When she died, the cups were passed on to my mother and then, with my mother’s death, to me.
My great-great grandmother Rosa Wormser’s grave marker in Westchester County, New York
When Salomon and Rosa traveled across the ocean to start a new life in America, these cups must have been a precious reminder of home and the loved ones they left behind.
The tall SW cup is interesting in that the pictures encircling it are not traditional Jewish religious images. Cherubs and dragons, they’re more typical of German Romantic imagery. To me, they indicate how German Jews of the mid-1800s identified with German culture and aspired to be part of German society. They held the same ideas about beauty and art as their Christian neighbors. Yet Jewish efforts to assimilate into German society in the 19th century were consistently rebuffed: Even if they converted to Christianity, even if they served in the German military, they were not accepted as “real” Germans.
Just last week, noodling around with my online family tree, I started wondering about the line of the family that stayed behind — in particular, the descendants of the “S. Lindauer” on my cup.
It turns out that Salomon Lindauer and Sara Einstein had a daughter Bertha, who married a man named Julius Elsas. They in turn had a son named Fritz Julius Elsas. Born in 1890 in Stuttgart, Fritz converted to Christianity like many Jews of that era who aspired to acceptance in Germany society. He studied politics and law and married a Christian woman of Jewish descent.
Elsas entered politics – running briefly for mayor of Stuttgart but then withdrawing because of anti-Semitic attacks. In 1931 he was elected mayor of Berlin by the city council there, but had to resign his position when the Nazis took power.
Fritz Julius Elsas / Photo from Ha’aretz
Because of his “privileged mixed marriage,” Elsas didn’t face the same persecution as other German Jews, according to an informative biographical article in Ha’aretz. He became involved in the liberal resistance to Hitler, writing secret position papers to help plan for a post-Hitler Germany.
In the wake of the 1944 failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, Elsas was rounded up with many others in the German resistance. He was executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in December 1945.
Elsas would have been my grandmother’s second cousin — thus my second cousin twice removed. He and my grandmother shared the same great-grandparents. But my American branch of the family long ago lost touch with the German branches. Until delving into genealogy, I never knew we had relatives who remained in Germany or who died in the Holocaust.
This spring, my daughter Becca is living in Berlin and working on a creative project that involves our family history. I polished the kiddish cups early this year, so I could send photos of them to a small Jewish museum in Jebenhausen, which we will visit when we go see her.
This Friday evening, the cups will again be placed on our Seder table — but with more levels of meaning than before. Initially a memento of my childhood, they’ve also become a connection with my German Jewish origins, with those 1860s ancestors who decided to move to America, and with the distant branch of the family that did not make such a fortunate decision.
Can a nice Jewish atheist
feminist find fulfillment as a Bat Mitzvah in her fifties? Can she reach her lifelong dream of becoming a successful novelist? And how the heck do you reinvent yourself after your industry - newspapers - implodes?
(And then there's the parent-of-a-teenager thing.)
Midlife Bat Mitzvah 
Smoke and (our own private) mirrors
March 19, 2022Today I delivered a drash (commentary) on the weekly Torah portion, which was Tzav (Leviticus 6:1 through 8:36). I won’t reprint the entire thing here, just the part I liked the most. :-)
Tzav primarily focuses on the role of the priests in carrying out sacrifices on behalf of the Israelites. Moses instructs Aaron and his sons on where to make the sacrifices, what to wear, how to dispose of the ashes, etc.
I was struck by the repeated use of language about “turning sacrifices into smoke.” This is the phrasing the writers of Tzav use to say that an offering should be completely burned up. For instance:
“The token portion of the meal offering shall be turned into smoke on the altar as a pleasing odor to the Lord.”
“The priest shall turn the (fat of the guilt offering) into smoke on the altar as an offering by fire to the Lord.”
“Moses washed the entrails and the legs with water and turned all of the ram into smoke.”
And so on.
Now, there are so many ways one could describe what is being done with these offerings. You could simply say that Moses burned up the entire ram. Or that Moses incinerated the ram. That he turned it into ash, that he turned it into cinders, that he burned it so thoroughly that the amount left was smaller than a pebble.
But over and over, Leviticus tells us that these offerings were “turned into smoke.”
Why this emphasis on smoke?
Thinking historically, perhaps this was another of many steps in differentiating Judaism from the surrounding religions. Many ancient religions saw gods as similar to humans in that they needed to eat, and these societies viewed sacrifices as literally feeding the gods. Judaism took a different view of God—as being above and beyond human needs such as eating— and wanted to make clear that these ritual sacrifices were not Doordash for God. The sacrifices were not food for God’s survival. Instead, they were something intangible to please and connect with God: a “pleasing odor to the Lord.”
But I also like to think about it metaphorically, especially as it applies to the guilt and sin offerings. The fiery sacrifice turns something solid and heavy and bloody into something light and airy and (to God, at least) pleasant smelling.
Isn’t that what we’d like to have happen with our transgressions and regrets? They weigh us down, we carry them heavily… but wouldn’t it be nice if we could let them float away into the air? Through the ritual of the sacrifice, that’s what these ancient Israelites were doing.
So, with your indulgence, let’s do a little thought experiment.
Close your eyes. Think of one thing you’ve done in the past week that you regret because it was wrong. It doesn’t have to be a big thing: In fact, it’s most likely a small thing. Were you rude to the clerk at Safeway? Did you snap at your spouse? Did you read a news story and respond with cynicism rather than open-hearted empathy? Did you share a piece of gossip that, inside, you knew you probably shouldn’t? Did you gloat over someone else’s troubles?
Take a minute. Think of one small thing that you regret. We’re going to sit here quietly while you come up with that thing.
(wait)
Okay, now picture that small thing as a heavy block of wood. It’s hard to lift. You’ve been lugging it around all week. You don’t want it, but there it is. It’s heavy.
And now — keep those eyes closed! — envision setting that block of wood on fire. You know what you did was wrong and you’ll think twice the next time such a situation comes up. You’ll do better. The block of wood is burning and getting smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter and this thing you regret is turning into smoke. There! It’s past. It’s floating away. You’ve learned something and will do better next time. The wood is gone and the weight is gone and the smoke is dissolving into a broad blue sky.
Take a deep breath now, a full breath. You’ll do better. You’re learning, all the time. It’s never too late to learn. Your lungs fill with fresh, clean air and the smoke is no longer even visible, but God smells the smoke from your offering and, indeed, it is a pleasing odor to Adonai.
Open your eyes.
Shabbat Shalom.
Tags:Dvar Torah, Leviticus, Priestly sacrifices, Sacrifices, Teshuvah, Torah commentary, Tzav
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