From Friday, October 2 through Thursday, October 8 this year, corresponding to the 15th through 21st of Tishrei in the Hebrew calendar, we celebrate one of my all-time favorite Jewish holidays: Sukkot. Also called “the Season of Our Joy,” “the Festival of Booths,” and “the Festival of the Ingathering,” this biblically ordained festival is one of three pilgrimage festivals observed long ago by bringing offerings to the Temple in Jerusalem to give thanks to God for a bountiful harvest. Sukkot, celebrated today in homes and synagogues (and by Zoom!), also commemorates Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness accompanied by God’s presence in the form of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The seven-day festival is rich with spiritual and historical meaning and is celebrated with the most engaging, evocative rituals of any holiday in the Jewish calendar. 

The signature mitzvot (commandments) of Sukkot involve the sukkah and the “four species,” or plants. In this week’s Torah portion, we read: “You will dwell in booths (sukkot) for seven days: all natives of Israel shall dwell in booths” (Leviticus 23:42). In order to fulfill the mitzvah, one must either build one’s own sukkah or visit someone else’s. A temporary structure, a sukkah can be a variety of dimensions but must be free-standing and have at least two and a half sides and a roof made only of natural materials. The roof is typically covered with just enough tree branches to allow more shade than sun and for a person sitting in the sukkah to be able to see the stars at night. Once constructed, the booth symbolizes God’s guidance and protection throughout the desert sojourn, reminds us of the temporary dwellings our ancestors live in during those years, and resembles the kinds of structures farmers would have constructed in their fields during the harvest season.

The degree to which people actually “dwell” in the sukkah varies. Since the Hebrew word for “dwell” can be translated as “sit,” most people spend short periods of time sitting in the sukkah eating meals, socializing, reading and playing games. Some people, though, do actually live in the sukkah for the entire festival. In any case, though, we are to feel joyous in the sukkah and, therefore, should refrain from spending too much time there in unpleasant weather.

During Sukkot, one also fulfills the commandment of Leviticus 23:40 to take hold of “four species”: myrtle and willow branches, palm fronds and the fruit of “goodly trees.” This fourth item is a lemon-like citron called an etrog and is held next to the other three, which are bundled together with knotted palm fronds. With these in hand, one is to “rejoice before Adonai your God seven days.” The ritual itself entails standing in the sukkah or in the synagogue during worship and waving the lulav, the name given to the set of the four species, in the four directions of the compass, up and down. In this way, we show our gratitude to God, whose presence fills the universe.

Sukkot is not just a holiday: it’s a happening! Sukkot is a festival best celebrated with friends, family and community. I’m always amazed by how many people can actually fit into even the smallest of sukkot! What’s more, to truly fulfill the mitzvah of rejoicing during Sukkot, one must utilize the whole body and all the senses. There is literally something for everyone in the celebration of Sukkot: praying, building, moving, eating, enjoying the outdoors, and on and on. What’s not to love?Sukkot is not to be missed even if only by participating in Zoom services, learning online or checking out YouTube videos. Hopefully we’ll all be able to squeeze into our sukkot next year and shake, shake, shake the lulav!

Parashat Chukat / פרשת חקת
Torah Portion: Numbers 19:1 – 22:1

(Originally published here June 26, 2015.)

This week’s parashah reads like a board game, with the Israelites moving ahead a space, hitting misfortune, moving back several spaces, and then getting lucky and moving forward toward the finish line. The opening chapter of the parashah, rather than fitting in with the game itself, feels like the game’s complicated instructions that will only make sense once you start playing the game. Much happens to the Israelites in this parashah board game for better and for worse, and by the time it is over we’ve discovered an important lesson about dealing with life’s travails.

Let’s start with the instructions. Parashat Chukat begins with the bizarre details of the ritual of the “red heifer” (Numbers 19:1-22) through which one is spiritually cleansed after having become spiritually contaminated by coming into close contact with a corpse. Part of this ritual requires someone to burn the heifer, reducing it to ashes, and as that person executes his responsibilities, he and the presiding priest are made impure. That is, their contact with the ashes of the heifer that will cleanse another person will, in the end, defile them and require them to wash their clothes and bathe their bodies in order to become clean once again.

It’s hard to make sense of this ritual. Why does it unfold the way it does? Why do the ashes purify one person and contaminate another? What did the heifer look like in actuality, and where did it come from? We cannot know the whys and wherefores of the red heifer ritual for sure because it could only be performed in the Temple in Jerusalem by the priests, and, of course, neither the Temple nor the priests themselves longer exist. It’s all a mystery beyond our comprehension, which, the rabbis teach, is exactly the point: sometimes God commands us to do things we do not understand, but the idea is to do them out of faith without questioning. Similarly, I’ve read and heard the instructions to complex board games that I simply could not understand, but I had faith that somehow by following the instructions the game would proceed as it was supposed to and things would begin to make sense. The only problem with the Red Heifer game, though, is that it’s a “game” that can’t be played anymore! How frustrating!

So, with the instructions/prelude behind us, we see that the Israelites move one step forward to Kadesh in the “wilderness of Zin” (Num. 20:1). Just as they are settling in, however, Miriam, the prophetess and Moses’ sister, dies. Then, things really spiral out of control: the Israelites find themselves without water (20:2); Moses strikes a rock twice to produce water, despite God’s explicit instruction to simply “order the rock to yield its water” (20:6-11); Moses and Aaron get the news from God that neither of them will get to cross into the Promised Land (20:12-12); the king of Edom refuses to give the Israelites passage through his territory and turns them away. In the span of just 21 verses, Israel hits upon hard times and their forward movement is halted. Unfortunately, their next advance from Kadesh to Mount Hor (20:22) is followed by a string of more setbacks: Aaron dies (20:28); Israel is attacked by the king of Arad (21:1); serpents attack the people, killing many of them (21:6). By this point, it looks like the Israelites are on a losing path.

Just then, a miracle occurs and the forward momentum kicks in once again: Israel comes upon a well at Beer and breaks out in song (21:16-20). Refreshed, Israel defeats in succession the Amorites (21:21-32) and King Og of Bashan (21:33-35), neither of whom granted Israel the right to pass through their territory in peace. Finally, the game ends with Israel making it as far as “the steppes of Moab, across the Jordan from Jericho” (22:1). Victory! (Well, almost. We’ll have to wait until the Book of Joshua for the next installment of the game.)

What are we to learn from Israel’s experience in this “game”? There are two lessons. First, life can be messy, complicated and hard to understand from time to time, but we must strive to accept our reality and keep our sights set on what we deem truly important. In the case of the Red Heifer, biblical Israel enacted this ritual with all its mystery and believed that being do so they could deal with death effectively. They neither refused to follow God’s strange commandment nor stopped caring for their dead. They accepted the ritual of the Red Heifer at face value, and this allowed them to carry on. We, too, don’t need to understand our reality all the time, but we do need to work with what we’ve been given in order to move forward.

The second lesson is simply that, while life is full of setbacks, the setbacks should neither define us nor deter us from striving for success. In Chukat, lots of bad stuff happens to the Israelites. They grumble and say they wish to be back in Egypt. However, they eventually find their stride, gain confidence, and enjoy a series of major successes. The Israelites do not give up on God, and God does not give up on them.

Had we chosen to read the parashah only through the death of Aaron, we never would have come to the well at Beer. We certainly wouldn’t have seen Moses and the Israelites camping in the steppes of Moab. Were we to give up on life with every defeat — floods, acts of hatred, the death of loved ones — we would never be able to experience the great blessings God has in store for us.

As we play the game of life, it behooves us to assess our circumstances realistically, come to peace with where we’re at and keep on playing. Though we may suffer setbacks from time to time, let us recover quickly and prepare ourselves to keep progressing toward the winner’s circle, which is where, after all, we belong.

Parashat Kedoshim / פרשת קדשים
Torah Portion: Leviticus 19:1 – 20:27

“Love your fellow as yourself: I am the Lord.” (Lev. 19:18)

This week’s parashah opens with “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” What follows is essentially a handbook on how to be holy. In fact, this parashah, which contains 51 mitzvot (commandments) by a traditional counting, enumerates some of the most important mitzvot in the entire Torah. It is clear that the way become holy is by following as many of the mitzvot as possible. By doing so, we are more likely to become the most ethical, loving people we can be and also distinguish ourselves from a society whose values and norms are sometimes questionable, sometimes antithetical to the whole idea of holiness.

At the core of what it means to be holy is the teaching “love your fellow as yourself.” Hillel, paraphrasing this verse as “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” says to an eager student for conversion to Judaism: “This is the entire Torah. All else is commentary!” Rabbi Akiva, a sage who lived from about 40 to 137 CE, considers loving your fellow as yourself a central principle of all of Torah. The verdict is in: loving our fellows as ourselves is key to our mission of becoming a holy people.

Exactly what the verse “love your neighbor as yourself” means, however, is open for interpretation. One interpretation comes from Moses ben Nahman, also known as Nahmanides or Ramban. This great thinker, who lived from 1195 CE to about 1270 CE and lived in Spain and Israel, offers this commentary:

One’s love for others should be equivalent to one’s love for oneself. For sometimes a person might love another in some respects but not all, treating him well (for example) with regard to money matters but not to intellectual ones. If he loved him completely, he would want him to have wealth and property, honor, knowledge and wisdom — but it is human nature that he will always want more of them for himself. The text commands that one should not nurture these petty jealousies, but love one’s fellow with the same unlimited love that one has for oneself.

Nahmanides points to the love of Jonathan, who loved David “as himself” (I Samuel 20:17). Jonathan was the son of Saul, the first king of Israel. Though Jonathan would have been the logical successor to Saul, Jonathan knew that the throne would pass to David. Rather than sabotage David’s ascent to the kingship and grab it for himself, Jonathan “eliminated all jealousy from his heart” and supported David. In other words, Jonathan’s desire for David to become king was as strong as his own desire to become king. Thus, for Nahmanides, at least, Jonathan’s love for David exemplifies the Torah’s ideal.

Among the many ways we could understand “loving our fellows,” Nahmanide’s prescription is certainly among the most difficult to achieve. It’s much easier to treat someone nicely or to not steal from them than it is to extend to them the same heartfelt wishes that you harbor for yourself without falling down the black hole of jealousy. Everyday we interact with people who have things that we wish we had: money, a nice home, a loving family, a high i.q., a winning personality, and on and on. Sometimes they lack what we are fortunate to possess. In any case, how often do we find ourselves saying to ourselves, “I wish I had that more than him or her!” or the opposite “Thank God, I don’t have that.”? The problem is that viewing through the filter of self-interest or judgment is an obstacle to the kind of love that Nahmanides is talking about.

Imagine if we suspended judgment and envy in all our relationships. Not only would we extend to others the kindness we associate with “love,” but we would also work with those against whom we harbor ill feelings to achieve outcomes that allow for the other to feel truly fulfilled. In this scenario, the other would do the same for us. This kind of love may exist in the world, but only in scattered and remote locations. True altruism rarely makes the evening news, but what a world it would be if altruism did trump self-interest in international affairs, business, and personal relationships!

Nahmanides lays down the gauntlet, challenging us to put our egos aside and offer the fullness of our beings to our family, friends and strangers in our midst. In other word, we need to get over ourselves. If we can meet this challenge, we will know what it means to love and we will be on our way to becoming holy.

© Rabbi Daniel Aronson, 2014

I recently gave a Powerpoint presentation on “Passover’s Magic Number: 4” in which I shared the following cartoon (http://www.jr.co.il/humor/pass93.htm):

Anyone who has ever attended a Passover seder can relate to this humor. We’ve all sat through seders that seemed to go on and on even as our stomachs grumbled and we wondered when the matzah ball soup would finally be served.

As funny as this cartoon is, it hints at a serious lesson: whatever is worthwhile in life is worth waiting for. This is certainly true when it comes to freedom. In fact, this teaching about delayed gratification is deeply embedded in the story of our liberation from Egypt. The Torah’s account of the Exodus reminds us how long we were in slavery, how the night the Angel of Death passed over Egypt was a night of vigil, and how the ongoing celebration of Passover would be delayed by forty years. During the seder, too, we taste salt water, bland greens, bitter herbs, charoset (a sweet fruit and nut mixture), and of course, matzah. We wait a long time before the prepared meal, often a masterpiece that has taken days to prepare, makes its way to our tables. It is a meal worth waiting for, and wait we do. So it goes for freedom: nothing is sweeter than freedom and, boy, is it worth waiting for!

The Torah reading for the first day of Passover, when it falls on Shabbat as it does this year, comes from Exodus 21, verses 21 through 51. It is there that we read (verses 40-41): “The length of time that the Israelites lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years; at the end of the four hundred and thirtieth year, to the very day, all the ranks of the Lord departed from the land of Egypt.” Four hundred thirty years before the Exodus, our ancestors made their way to Egypt in search of relief from famine. There they found a government and a society that welcomed them. There they prospered. But only for a while.

Most of our sojourn in Egypt was marked by oppression and misery beginning with a pharaoh who “knew not Joseph.” It is legitimate to ask why we suffered for hundreds of years. I will not touch that question here. Suffice it to say, it was our reality and there wasn’t much we could do about it. We had to wait for hundreds of years before God would charge Moses with the task of confronting Pharaoh and that God would ultimately kill the first born of Egypt before Pharaoh would “let our people go.” It would have been better had we not suffered at all, but in the end our freedom was worth waiting for. This despite occasional protests from the masses that it would have been better to die as slaves in Egypt than to withstand the hardships that increased once Moses stood up to Pharaoh and that would continue through the 40 year trek through the wilderness. By the time we made it to the Land of Israel, the Israelites understood how precious their freedom was and how it was worth the wait.

Immediately following the recounting of the length of time we were in Egypt, the Torah tells us (verse 42) “That was for the Lord a night of vigil to bring them out of the land of Egypt; that same night is the Lord’s, one of vigil for all the children of Israel throughout the ages.” On the eve of our liberation, we did not simply pack our bags and leave. Our hasty departure followed a night in which our people at the pesach offering while the screams of the terrified Egyptians arose all around them. That night, a night of vigil, must have felt like an eternity. Because their liberation was delayed ever so slightly, the first taste of freedom was ever so sweeter.

What often gets lost in the telling of the Exodus is what the Torah tells us in verse 25: “And when you enter the land that the Lord will give you, as He has promised, you shall observe this rite.” When would that be? Forty years later! After the first Passover, the next one didn’t happen for another forty years. Perhaps this is because in verses 43 through 49 we learn that males could partake of the pascal offering only after they had been circumcised upon entering the Holy Land.

Or maybe the 40-year gap between the first and second Passovers existed to remind us how some things are worth waiting for. In this case, what was worth waiting for was taking possession of the land that God had promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Settling the land was the final act of their liberation. Imagine the feeling of stepping into the Land of Israel that first time! No one would have argued that they should return to Egypt, such was the thrill of witnessing this chapter in their people’s history.

No wonder the very first ritual our ancestors performed in Israel was the same one they had performed on the eve of the exodus. The Passover sacrifice bookended the experience of our liberation. This time, like the first time, was well worth the wait. As we sit down for our seders with family and friends in a free and open America and then delay taking our first bite of matzah, but even more so as we delay partaking of our sumptuous seder meals, let us remember all that has come before us and how special this moment is.

Let us drink four times to freedom. It was well worth the wait!

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!
Rabbi Dan

Parashat Shemini / פרשת שמיני

Torah Portion: Leviticus 9:1 – 11:47

Toward the end of parashat Shemini, we read about which animals are considered kosher, i.e. permissible to be eaten when properly slaughtered: “These are the animals that can be eaten from amongst all of the animals of the land. All those that have split-hooves and chew their cud . . . [11:2-3]” Thus: cows, goats, sheep — all kosher; pigs and camels — not kosher.

While the Torah’s use of split-hooves and cud-chewing to differentiate prohibited animals from permissible animals provides an easy-to-follow guide for those new to the kosher scene, the reason for choosing split-hooves and cud-chewing as the determinative criteria for what constitutes a kosher animal is all but clear. Unfortunately, neither the rabbinic sages of the Talmud nor the great biblical commentators of the middle ages bring much light to this issue. While Maimonides posits health as a rationale for the laws of kashrut (keeping kosher) over all, a rationale that has been roundly rejected over the centuries, he doesn’t ever venture a guess as to why God deems those animals with split hooves and who chew their cud as more clean than those who have just one or neither of these traits.

It is easy to say, “because God says so” to all those rules and regulations in the Torah that are beyond our comprehension, the rule about hooves and cud being one of them. I don’t entirely reject that notion. Sometimes doing something because “that’s what Jews do,” even when we don’t know why, has its own value: it can instill self-discipline and mindfulness and theoretically unite the Jewish people through uniformity of practice. Even so, I for one would like a “real” reason for this dictate.

While there might not be a practical reason for defining a kosher animal as one whose hooves are cloven and who chews its cud, there is an ethical rationale: to teach us about the importance of integrity. To this end, the pig is a case-in-point. The rabbis write: “When the pig pauses from his gluttony and lies down to rest he stretches out his foot to show his cloven hoof, and pretends that he belongs to the clean kind of animals” (Genesis Rabba 65). The pig wants us to think he’s kosher by showing us his cloven hoof. In reality, though, he fails the second test of a kosher animal: pigs don’t chew their cud. By presenting himself as a kosher animal, the pig stands out as the consummate hypocrite.

Another lesson about integrity comes from a midrash in the Talmud about why the Holy Ark was gilded with gold inside and out: “Raba said: Any scholar whose inside is not like his outside, is no scholar… woe unto the enemies of the scholars, who occupy themselves with the Torah, but have no fear of heaven!” (Yoma 72b). Clearly, the rabbis place a premium on having one’s outer being reflect one’s inner being. They consider it deplorable to present oneself as righteous and erudite while engaging in activities that debase one’s fellow human beings.

The list of people in public life who defy the rabbis’ standard of integrity is all too lengthy. Too many people in whom we place our trust show themselves to be “pigs,” appearing pure and holy but, in truth, seeking their own gratification and power. Perhaps we even know some people like this in our own lives. Perhaps, too, we find ourselves lapsing into hypocrisy and self-interest from time to time. Let’s face it: when it comes to maintaining our integrity, we can all use a reminder from time to time.

Let the Torah’s criteria for what constitutes a kosher animal be our criteria for what constitutes a “kosher” person, i.e. that our inner lives be in concert with our outer lives. This lesson alone is sufficient rationale, in my opinion, for requiring kosher animals to have split hooves on the outside and to chew their cud on the inside.