Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Sh'lach L'cha


Numbers 13:1−15:41

The Power Of Perception


The survival and success of the Jewish people stems from our ability to mold reality to match our dreams and ideals.


By Rabbi Bradley Artson

Moses instructs 12 spies, one for each of Israel's tribes, to investigate the characteristics of the land the people are about to enter.

They travel throughout the land of Israel during the course of 40 days, and they return to the camp bearing an enormous load of the fruit of the land.

Yet when they return, their testimony is contradictory. On the one hand, they assert that the land is one which "flows with milk and honey," a land bounteous and fertile. On the other hand, they also insist that the people in the land are giants--nefillim--who cause the hearts of those who see them to collapse. Based on the perceived strength of the inhabitants, the spies urge Israel not to occupy the land, despite the assurances of God and of Moses that they would do so successfully. Alone among the spies, Caleb and Joshua assert, with complete faith, that Israel should enter and take the land immediately.

What is striking about the spies' report is the central role of subjectivity in any report of reality. What mattered to them was not a simple compilation of facts, but rather an internal sense of what those facts mean: "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them."

The spies, faced with the sight of fortified cities and armed soldiers, looked at each other. And what they imagined revealed a lack of imagination, a failure of vision. Rather than envisioning themselves as carried by God's promise, sustained by the covenant of Israel, they became overwhelmed by the facts as they appeared on the surface.

Caleb, on the other hand, saw the same facts and refused to bow before them. Infused with passion, conviction, and Torah, he intended to shape reality to conform to his vision. And his vision was one of a faithful Israel, led by a loving God, occupying the land of its promise. The facts looked glum--they demonstrated just how unlikely Israel's occupation of the land would be. Yet Caleb, with his idealism and his energy, proved to be correct.

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Monday, May 20, 2013

B'haalot'cha


Numbers 8:1−12:16

Trying To Remember The Reason I Forgot


Being constantly engaged in learning allows us to guard against the pervasive forgetfulness around us.
By Rabbi Bradley Artson
The human mind presents us with both a marvel and a mystery.

Capable of mastering a remarkable range of complex tasks, of remembering obscure experiences or facts, that same organ will also forget an important appointment, an acquaintance's name, or the contents of this morning's breakfast. Simultaneously able to outperform a computer in our manipulation of data into concepts, each of us also faces the unpleasant reality that we continually forget information we desperately desire or need.

Anyone who has reviewed notes taken in college or remarks scribbled in the margins of books read years ago has admitted to the enormity of what is routinely forgotten. It is not uncommon for authors to report rereading their own writing after the passage of several years with the uncomfortable sense that they are no longer the masters of what those essays or books contain.

Today's Torah portion hints at this problem, and the rabbinic tradition suggests a remarkable reason for such frustrating lapses of memory. In our portion, Moses "told the people of Israel that they should keep the Passover." Nothing surprising here, Moses often tells the Jewish people what they should or should not be doing.

But the midrash Sifrei Bamidbar objects that, in this case, the information he conveys is redundant. Didn't the Torah already relate in the Book of Leviticus that "Moses declared the festival seasons of the Lord to the people of Israel?" So why does he have to repeat himself now?

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Monday, May 13, 2013

Naso


Numbers 4:21−7:89

Situational Ethics And God

The importance of preserving the relationship between a husband and wife provides an example of the Torah's use of relative morality.


By Rabbi Bradley Artson

Often, we define the moral position as the one that adheres to objective standards of right and wrong. Consequently, someone who evaluates an action in the light of eternal, immutable values demonstrates a higher level of moral development than a person who uses other, more situational standards. The roots of this perspective lie in ancient Greek thought, which associated the true with the eternal--what was perfect never changed. Similarly, the highest level of morality would be immutable.

The Greek mind sought out "laws of nature" which functioned in the realm of human morality no less than in the realm of astronomy. Modern psychologists of moral development--primarily students of the late Lawrence Kohlberg--looked to those Greek suppositions and found confirmation in the moral development of boys and men. Apparently, the highest level of moral development among males involves recourse to external rules of ethical standards that are always true and always definitive.

A Feminist View A challenge to this notion of moral objectivity emerges in the work of Carol Gilligan, who argues that girls and women base moral decisions on how the decision will affect human relationships. Rather than rules, Gilligan argues that women govern their moral lives by weighing the cost among different human beings. Consequently, their view of morality is situational and relative.

The Torah anticipates this feminist view of morality, also holding that ethics ought to be dynamic and inter-subjective: whether between one person and another, or between a person and God.

The Torah considers a jealous husband who accuses his wife of committing adultery. She appears before the koheyn (priest) in the Temple and drinks a mixture of bitter water (Sotah water), dust from the Temple floor, and a charcoal curse containing God's name which is melted into the water potion. After drinking the water, if her body begins to deteriorate, she is considered guilty by the court and the entire people. But, as is much more likely, if nothing happens (after all, the only thing she did was to drink some dirty water), her innocence is established beyond doubt.

The ritual of the Sotah (suspected adulteress) provides a method for vindicating an innocent wife in the face of a paranoid husband. But what caught the rabbi's attention was God's role in the process: God allows erasing the divine name--mixing it in the waters--to confirm the wife's innocence.

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Monday, May 6, 2013

B'midbar


Numbers 1:1−4:20

What Is Parenting?

Transmitting Jewish culture by embodying Jewish practice is part of the responsibilities of Jewish parenting.
By Rabbi Bradley Artson

One of the greatest mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah, the very first command given to humanity, is that of bearing children.

"Be fruitful and multiply" is the necessary underpinning of any Jewish community, since without renewed Jewish people, there can be no Torah, nor any Judaism either.

But parenting is more than simple biology. Any animal can spawn, and most animals have the necessary instincts to guide their young through a relatively brief infancy before the new generation takes off on its own, guided by its own internal barometer. Humans are distinctive in the extraordinary length of our infancy and youth, the extreme degree of dependence of our young, and by a lack of instincts on which to fall back to guide us in raising our children.

Instead of biological drives, we rely on social norms and religious values to guide our parenting and to mold our children. Our friends, our parents, books, rabbis, magazines and popular psychologists all instruct us about how to raise our children and what standards and expectations we can rightly apply to them. Human parenting, then, is executed within a network of other adults, and is guided by the cumulative experience of our own communities.

In this sense, anthropologists also speak of the transmission of a traditional culture in similar terms. A culture is normally passed from one generation to another, from knowledgeable adult to learning child. Since the adult has imbibed the norms and practices of the culture from older acculturated adults, this transmission is often simply through exposure and through example--the stuff that memories are made of, i.e., watching Bubbe lighting Shabbos candles, sitting next to Zeyde at a Seder.

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