Tag Archives: Maimonides

Yitz Greenburg on Sukkot and Covenantial Responsibility

06 Monday Oct 2014

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Here is what I heard from Rabbi Yitz Greenburg today:

In the Guide for the Perplexed III 32 (see also III 24) Maimonides discusses Exodus 13:17. There God says he will take the Jewish people to Israel in an indirect route. Maimonides says this is to improve the nation and transform them from a slaves into brave soldiers capable of conquering the Philistines.

Rabbi Greenburg asks, God could have changed the nature of Jews or He could have changed the Philistines to be weaker.  In short, He could have achieved the goal of getting the Jewish people into the Land of Israel through miraculous means.

But God’s way is to give people what they need now, not coercing them but having them grow and internalize values.

This is central model of Judaism.  It carries over not just from desert to Israel but from Egypt to Israel. Coming to Israel the Jews faced the challenge of creating a society based on common values, justice, equality, and of covenantial responsibility. This is the journey we are on: to evolve toward this society through our own action and through our self-transformation.  That went on for a 1000 years, then they were exiled, then again they came back.  And is some way the they succeeded in that they survived, but they didn’t transform the world.  And this journey continues from ancient times to medieval times, to modern, to post modern times. And at each step in this journey we need to refine our society and bring it closer to that ideal state we seek.  And now we again have challenge of power.

Journey requires maturation.  And it must be over the course of generations.  One generation change leads to Stalinism, a non multi-party system, coercion, violence. And you get a society that is supposedly living by this ideal standard, but it is full of coercion and injustice.  So too today where people try to create an ideal Jihad based society overnight. You end up with a not perfect society, but one with a lot of killing and oppression. The price we need to pay for the slow transformation is to give legitimacy to the opposition.  So the journey is to deal with reality and to transform over time.  This is what the halacha is doing, the next best thing to the ideal, not total equality, but using taxes and tzadakka and shmitah to bring society closer to equality.

The Torah ideal is veganism. I Gan Eden (Gen. 1:29) even the animals are vegetarian, there is no predation. But we are not in that ideal state today, we need to compromise with real world, so the halacha allows only certain animals, a very limited number of species, killing is swift, can’t eat blood, i.e. I acknowledge that I don’t own the animal’s life, its blood,. No milk with meat to recognize that life and death is are in opposition, there is a penalty of eating meat, you must wait 6 hours to have milk.

In the real world, women are bought and sold.  There is a covenantial change. Look at Exodus 21.  It limits slavery:  6 year limit, and six day limit (on the sabbath slave are freed from work). Regarding women, only a father can sell his daughter, a stranger cannot, this prevents trafficking in women.  If the buyer doesn’t marry her, she is free, again this prevents trafficking.  But another covenantial step was taken regarding slavery, the Rabbis added restriction of hours, and comforts. They removed economic incentives.  The Rabbinic ketubah guarantees money in case of divorce. How does married life look if woman is afraid to be kicked out and destitute? The ketubah creates and equal relationship in the marriage.  This is the rabbinic role. Tikkun Olam

Best guarantee for a good loving marriage is a communal property law! So the rabbis pushed things toward a more ideal state.

But, if you can’t get there, so what to do? You have children, or teach other people’s children.  You pass on the covenantial responsibility. You convince the next generation to take on the task.

Devarim 29:  Losing Moses is a crisis. Nitzavim lists from the elite to the marginal member of the nation. They are entering the covenant. Covenant is not a one time event. “But with those who are not with us here this day.”  i.e. us! Not that our souls were really there back then but that we need to make the covenant now again in this generation. The verse is not saying that we were actually there, but that we can be there again now by reaffirming this covenant in this, the next generation. And by passing it on.

Kaddish, God’s kingdom will be established, that is universal equality.  So kaddish is a summery of all Judaism. The journey toward the ideal society. But why is it a prayer for the dead.  In my life I expected to complete the task.  But I didn’t. My life was a failure.  It was all useless.  But the answer is, no, it was not a failure if first of all I did as much as I could to move us toward goal, but also if I found someone to continue the task.  The one saying the kaddish is my continuation. He has taken up the mantle of covenantial responsibility. That my be my son or my student. Believing that I have to complete the journey means I am saying those others out there are jerks and won’t do it.  Have some trust in others, you are not the only one who has a vision of a better world. Depend on them, even on the future people you have never met. Respect other people’s capacities.  Covenant, the task, is open to future generations.

Joshua 24: My neighbors are saying that the only way to get a good crop is the worship Baal.  Maybe they do get better crops, I am tempted.  So Joshua recounts Jewish history. This is the journey. Verse 13: You inherited towns, you relied on the previous generation.  Now you must chose to take on the covenant.  Make a choice. Continue work of your predecessors.

Skip 800 years forward.  Coming back from the Exile in Babylon, the nation celebrated sukkot, Nehemia 9:6. Why does Nehemia open with ‘God created all’? To embrace the entire story, not just the Jewish people, but all of creation. The human being is seen as a partner with God.  We will complete the ideal started in create.  We are part of humanities journey, and we have our own journey as well.

Nehemia 10:32, God never gave up on us, now write down covenant.  And all signed it.  Sense the journey journey. I as a Jew experience that I am carrying on a journey, the rituals are not the goal, but are signs of a covenantial life.  I am doing my stretch of the journey. I am carrying on, doing my part.

Covenant respects people and helps them grow   This covenant is not static. It is attuned to the capacities of the people (ref. Guide of the Perplexed 3:32).  When the people’s capacity changes, the rule, the roles of the covenant change. After 1800 years, the people are a capable of higher level of participation.  For example, the Biblical God who intervenes , send miracles is no more. There is no longer a open God. God becomes more hidden.  A self limited God, referred to as the shchina, can be closer to the individual. The term shchina is not found in the Tanach. It is more feminine, mothering.  Now you can meet God in your home. Any meal can bring the shchina to you.  When you visit the sick, the shchina is there at the head of the bed. When making love, when feeding the poor, praying, shchina is there.  There is no more prophecy, but we can speak to God now. He is closer to us.

How can we know what God wants from us? Study, use our minds. We can look at the past record of God’s communication and interpret. That means it has many levels of meaning,  we can uncover meanings that are uniquely for us.  How else can we use are minds? We can use past advice from the Bible and apply it differently. The ketuba of old was meant to ensure women’s dignity in marriage by putting them on a firm financial standing. How can we ensure women’s dignity right now? How can we draw an analogy?  Maybe a halachic prenuptial.  Maybe with greater equality in communal decision making, leadership roles. We can study God directly, but we can also study the past behavior of covenantial community, look to the goals they sought and apply their thinking to our times.

Blu says equality does not mean identical function.

We are now in another zimzum. God is completely hidden. We are completely responsible.  There are dangers and opportunities in this.

The journey is an unfinished journey.  Celebrate not just that journey, but that it continues and that I am taking responsibility to be a part of it. This is sobering, but the consolation is that just as there are setbacks there are gains. Sukkot is the holiday of happiness.  This is not a simple-minded glee, but happiness that comes from the fulfillment I get out of being a part of this journey and task.

The Exodus pattern: the 10 commandments are the basis of our relationship.  “I am the Lord, God who took you out of Egypt.”  Exodus is a core teaching.  What us the historicity of the Exodus?  If believe it never happened, how can I live through it, by it? We cannot predicate the Torah’s authority on its historicity. Creation too is not scientific. But the story is shaped by our capacity to hear.  Moses at Rabbi Akiva’s beit medrash.  It is a paradox. The revelation was there all the time.  R. Akiva created a receiver that could capture it. So the story is not a story of history, but a story of narrative. Existence is bigger than we are.  We are the latest show on that stage.  But we can join in and use our godlike capacities. Do it because you understand why God wants this, not because simply because God’s will in absolute morality. If we keep the Torah because God says to, you remove your personal responsibility. This is the danger of appeal to Torah on the grounds of absolute morality.

(This a very soft sell of halacha, merely as a sign of covenant. A Reform Jew can also be part of this kind of covenant.  This is unlike a hard sell that ethics can only be based on an absolute, the will of God.  That is an all or nothing approach.)

Yom Kippur: In Mathematics We Find Forgiveness

02 Thursday Oct 2014

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There are no guilty men in prison. So it is said. No person considers himself to be a bad person. He thinks, ‘Even if I did something wrong once, I am still basically a good person.  And when you look at all the circumstances, you will see that I had no choice, so I am not to blame.’  This feeling is, fundamentally, essential for self-preservation. No one can last long thinking he is a downright evil guy. But a person’s healthy positive self-image should not blind him to his own wrong doings. But it does tend to, so it is necessary to investigate deeply and find one’s wrong doings.

But this investigation is only useful if it helps you to change. If you won’t change anyway, then better not to bother.  And so, in Maimonides’ description of repentance along with recounting one’s sins goes the resolve to change, tshuva. In fact, there are 4 elements, remorse for the past errors, restitution where needed, commitment not to repeat them in the future, and the verbalization of all them. In other words, you must list, out loud, all your past wrong doings and you must state your commitment not to do the anymore. Verbalizing your commitment makes it more real and more binding. And by repeating this often, you reinforce your commitment.  So like an AA member, a Jew should recommit himself to his new path, yearly, monthly, even daily. He should go over his past sins, remind himself of the harm he caused, remorse and resolve again never to repeat them.  This is called Cheshbon HaNefesh, literally, the mathematics of the soul, or to give a more useful translation, an accounting of the soul.

People often think of big sins and small sins.  I may do some things wrong, but the big stuff, the Ten Commandments, that stuff I do keep.  This is another way of feeling good about yourself.  You turn all your sins into trivial matters but the elusive, illusionary big stuff you keep.  What that big stuff really is, your are not sure.  But you keep it, or at least you think you keep it.  Maimonides provides a method for determining what the Torah considers to be something big or something little (or in between), and he describes how each is forgiven.  And so we reach some more soul math:

  1. If a person violates a positive command which is not punishable by premature death, he is forgiven at the moment he repents.
  2. If a person violates a prohibition which is not punishable by death, he is forgiven on the Yom Kippur following his repentance.
  3. If a person violates a law which is punishable by death, he must repent, live through a Yom Kippur, and endure suffering in this world to be forgiven.
  4. If a person sinned and desecrated Gods name in so doing, he must do the above, but he is not forgiven until he dies.

Always in this list, there must be repentance, whether big sin or little.  And so nothing can be left out of the Cheshbon HaNefesh, nothing can be trivialized.  But why exactly is Yom Kippur pushed into the equation? What does Yom Kippur do for us?  Is it just an arbitrary time frame to see if the person does not go back to his wrong ways? Perhaps.  Or maybe it just an appendix left over from a time when it was really used.

Let’s ask, ‘Can a person ever be forgiven without repenting?’  Yes …kind of.  The scapegoat, sent to the desert on Yom Kippur would atone for case 2 above without the person having to repent.  But that is because the High Priest in the Temple repented the sins of all the Jews before he took the goat out to the desert.  So the individual didn’t need to repent, but there did need to be a kind of surrogate repentance. Today without a Temple, the Jew must verbally repent his sins to be forgiven, and by doing this on Yom Kippur he gains atonement for case 2 and possible case 3 sins (what Jew hasn’t suffered a little?)  Let’s not think about case 4. In the past, Yom Kippur served an essential role for atonement.  Today, without a high priest, we must take a more active role in our own gaining forgiveness. As the mussaf prayer recounts the procedures the High Priest followed, we should put ourselves in his shoes, or rather, his bare feet.

It is worth noting that the High Priest could not possible have listed every particular sin each Jew committed.  He must have only listed general categories of sins, and this too worked.  This is the source for the current practice in the Yom Kippur prayer of confessing the acrostic list of categories of sin, Al Chet.  Like the High Priest, we can minimally fulfill our obligation to recount our particular sins by stating all their categories.

Math has its beginnings in counting. What role does counting, enumerating, recounting our sins have?  I once showed my resume to a friend.  He pointed out that I need to give numbers to things.  How many people did I mange, how many servers did I administer. Giving numbers gives a clearer idea of what is going on.  People might think they did nothing wrong, or worse they might think they did innumerable things wrong.  By counting our deeds, and putting a number on them, it brings us down to Earth. We see that the wrong things are not innumerable.  And suddenly we can fix them.  When we have a vague feeling of some things out there that we did, we can’t assess them and they start to seem larger than they are.  Counting makes our mission doable.

Repentance: The 614th Commandment

21 Sunday Sep 2014

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It always bothers me when I read the first sentence of the Laws of Repentance from Maimonides’ Mishne Torah. He writes there the following (my translation):

Regarding all the mitzvoth of the Torah, whether positive or negative, if someone violates any one of them, whether intentionally or accidentally, when he repents and ceases sinning, he must confess his sins before God … this confessing is a positive commandment.

What is strange about his description is that we would expect Maimonides to write that repenting itself is a mitzvah. But by writing “when he repents” Maimonides seems to be saying that if a person should happen to repent then he gets to do the mitzvah of confession. So is a person required to repent in the first place?

Maimonides uses the word “when” not “if” so that seems to imply a person is expected, even required to repent from his sins. Still this is a pretty vague way of commanding people to repent. And when it comes to counting mitzvoth, Maimonides only considers the act of confession to be a mitzvah, not the actual repentance. He titles this section of his book, Laws of Repentance, but does not consider repentance to be a law!

So if there is no commandment to repent but there is nevertheless a requirement to repent, what is the source of this requirement? Usually when a person has a job, his employer has certain expectation of his employee that may be communicated orally or in writing. For example, Come on time, Don’t use social media on work time, Work on your assignments. If the employee comes late or does not do his assignments, the employer should not have to tell the worker to to stop coming late or stop neglecting his work. The expectation to cease breaking the rules is subsumed within each
work rule. The employer does not say, And if you break any of these rules, stop breaking them! That is the meaning of the rules themselves.

Similarly each Torah laws contains within it the obligation to stop violating it, that is what a law is. If the Torah says eat kosher food, then the Torah is saying to stop eating that cheese burger. So the concept of repentance, tshuva , is concomitant to any law system and there cannot be a separate law prohibiting the violation the law. So too, there cannot be a mitzvah that we must keep the Torah. It is a logical redundancy.

That is the reason Maimonides does not count tshuva as a commandment but nevertheless assumes there is a requirement to do tshuva. The only mitzvah left to actually count is the act of confession. Maimonides considers this act to be crucial. Without expressing one’s commitment in words, a person will begin to view his commitment as ephemeral and will begin to create excuses for his laxity. Tshuva itself is part of every law of the Torah.