God's Curriculum for Us - Parshat Behar 5774/2014

Parshat Behar 2014/5774

I’m finishing up a class on how to design curriculum.  One of the major lessons I learned this semester is something that, for sure, was not written into the syllabus and the teacher did not raise up this red flag: Is it really possible to teach something fully?

And what is the best way to teach a lesson? 

Do we write it up on the board, ask students to make notes, then test student memory?

Do we conduct a hands-on activity, and following the ideas of John Dewey, learn by doing?

Which lesson planning style do we use, Understanding by Design, 4Mat, Jigsaw method?

How do we figure out if anyone learned something (or not)?

And one of the more interesting issues is the way that a school teaches not only by what it chooses to teach and how but also by what it doesn’t teach explicitly, what is implicit, what is the message of what is left out?

In our Torah reading this week we notice just how artificial the distinction between curricular and extra-curricular can be.  With God as the teacher, life itself is the curriculum.  God creates the world itself with lessons and assessments built in. 

Every seventh year, farmers must let their fields lie fallow; planting and all farming activity must stop.  No sowing, reaping, pruning, or picking.  Only those things that grow naturally will be food. 

This shemittah, this release, this break for the land, is not just a nice idea.  It was a necessary part of the system.  Irrigation water for crops dumped a variety of chemicals into the soil, poisoning the soil.  High chemical content in the soil was a major cause of a civilization’s downfall.  The area of modern day Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates, experienced decline when chemicals built up around one of the rivers.  Crops would not grow.  The economy in the area failed.(Sarna, Excursus 10, JPS Leviticus)

The descendants of those who for hundreds of years had worked under Pharaoh’s orders, who now work the fields in their own Promised Land, cannot overwork them the same way that Pharaoh mistreated the slaves as expendable, killing their spirit and bodies until they had no option but to shout out to God.  It’s as though God wants to remind us that we came from the soil, God formed us from the ground and breathed life into us, and so we must nourish the source of our existence, the soil that in turn produces the food that gives us life.

Clearly, despite the fact that the lesson was written into nature, there were those who needed to hear it.  Caring for the soil was the only way the Promised Land could become a Land of Promise.

The chemical build up is not limited to the soil.  We see after a long winter, and the claustrophobia of staying inside month after month, that we are starving for fresh air, straining to take a walk, see the sun, plant seeds in the soil and watch them grow.  The weather affects our bodies and souls.  We want to be around other people to remind ourselves that we are alive, just like we do during shivah.

God also builds into nature the ways to revive our own souls, to nourish our spirits and selves.  Our voices and language allow us to speak and sing, and teach, our eyes enable us to read and study holy words.  Our hearts help us to match what we say and see to what we do, challenge us to create new growth in ourselves, in each other. 

2014 is in fact a Shemitah year, a 7^th year, and now, 7 months from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur there is a chance to begin the work that will get us ready for the New Year.  If we wait until summer turns to fall, it will be too late.

Nature is a curriculum.  Time is a curriculum.  However long we merit staying in God’s classroom, let’s get to work.

Shabbat Shalom.

Shabbat Chol Hamoed Pesach: Pi'se'ach to Pesach - Learning to Walk to Freedom...Again

October 1945, the leaders of the Yishuv, the Zionist community of Palestine, authorized the Palmach in its first major operation.  The goal was to free 208 ma’apilim, idividuals who sought to evade the British blockade and enter the Promised Land and ended up as prisoners in Atlit.  Yitzhak Rabin was an officer in that mission.  The first Palmach brigade completed its mission without firing a shot and without losing one soldier. 

When it was time for the next mission, to destroy the supplies of the British unit ‘Palestine Mobile forces’ Rabin and others carried out intelligence operations, and when he was ready to report and receive permission for the ‘go ahead’, he decided to drive up to Chaifa for the report on a motorcycle – and he did not have a license to drive one.  On the way, he was driving too fast and collided with a truck.  His left leg was completely broken.

Now out of the action, he felt like a prisoner, locked up in his house.  He wrote a letter to his sister and signed it, “Your brother, the cripple.”  ‘Achicha ha’pi’se’ach.”  When I read the way he signed the letter, I immediately heard the overtone in that word of Pesach.  Pis’each and Pesach, spelled the same way, pronounced differently, one referring in the letter to a person who is stuck, the other to a holiday of freedom, liberation, release from oppression.

Rabin’s leg would heal, and one day he would become the army chief of staff, and prime minister.  He would continue to fight for the Jewish people to be able to live safely and securely in our ancient land.  The people of ancient Israel would be free, but their difficult transition to freedom would lead to 40 years of wandering the wilderness, not a prison, but a challenging environment – no walls but requiring patience and strength of spirit that the first generation of freedom does not seem to possess.  None of that generation enters the Promised Land. 

The irony in this story does not stop there.  The Malbim in his extraordinary commentary to the Haggadah points out that after the 4 questions, we say ‘Avadim hayinu’, we were slaves, meaning we are no longer slaves, and we could ask, ‘Of what value is our freedom from Egypt?  We’re still prisoners or slaves to Achashverosh”, the King of Shushan, from the Purim story, standing in for every other dictator or government in the days after Egypt that persecutes us, the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Muslims, Christian Europe, the Nazis, the British mandate…

The lesson I learned this year in preparing for Passover is that there are two Hebrew words for freedom, and they both do not mean the same thing – it is the difference between the two that clarifies how the Jewish people not only can thrive but can flourish and grow in strength at this time, in this country, when there is no persecution – and so we are relatively relaxed, calm, and so the message of what we should do is more critical than ever, despite the fact that, as we’ve discussed, in the last survey of American Jews the reponse for components of Jewish identity showed that the the biggest percentage of Jewish identity today appears to still be a post-Holocaust survival and memory mentality.

One word for freedom is ‘chofesh’, chofshi, like liyot am chofshi, traditionally that word is understood to be free in the sense of no limits, nothing held back, kind of like the Dauntless in Veronica Roth’s ‘Divergent’.  The other term ‘cherut’, means freedom with a purpose, with a message, with limits, responsibilities and expectations of ourselves and others – Cherut does not mean that we cannot dream, actually, this type of freedom allows us to dream, giving us a firm foundation, the lesson that all the matzah we eat, the words we say at Seder, all these limits we impose on ourselves are not arbitrary – they point us in a specific direction, toward reclaiming the excitement, the hope, the mystery, the freshness of walking together and with God on our journey through time – through the scorched deserts of doubt and pain, through the calm valleys of friendship and community.

The light of Jewish faith burns brightest at Pesach, brighter even than Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  When the matzah is gone, when Seder leftovers are gone, and we go back to real pasta made from Semolina, we must not allow the light to get clouded over, dirty, until we cannot see it anymore – tape a piece of matzah to the inside of the front door, have horseradish more often, shout the message of freedom from the pen and from the rooftops, so that we can follow Yitzhak Rabin’s example, as he recovered from being pi’se’ach, unable to walk, to Pesach, walking out from Egypt proud, tall, and strong.

Shabbat Shalom.

Shabbat Haggadol: What holiday are we celebrating this week? 5774/2014

When we sit at the Seder table, and when we take our matzah to work, maybe even to school, in the spring, what holiday are we celebrating?

Passover, Pesach, Zeman Cheruteinu, Chag Ha’Aviv, Chag Ha’matzot – While this holiday is not the only one with more than one name, it is a defining holiday for us as the Jewish people.  Without the events that this holiday remembers, we would not even be a people, and so the confusion of its identity is a challenge to us. 

Are we celebrating ‘Passover’, the Anglicized name of the holiday based on a loose translation of the way God seems to ‘skip over’, lifsoach, the homes of the Israelites in Egypt and carry out the 10^th plague against the homes of the Egyptians.  We should be clear here that the ‘skip over’ translation is not the primary way to translate this verb.  A better translation is ‘to protect’, after all, God knows who lives in the house whether there is blood on the lintel or not. 

Are we celebrating Pesach? – the name of the holiday connected to a springtime sacrifice of a lamb to be eaten by a group of people.  In the spring lambing season, a sacrifice made to God that expresses thankfulness for the new life and bounty?  We no longer make this sacrifice.  We memorialize it with the Zeroa, the bone, that we put on our Seder plate.  The days of Jewish throngs making their Pesach sacrifices on the Temple Mount are long gone.

Are we celebrating Zeman Cheruteinu, the time of our freedom, appreciation to God for letting us go from Egypt?  We celebrate this freedom in the Torah with song and dance and immediately in the Torah we begin to regress into complaints, murmuring, and wishing we were back in Egypt where everything was “better”.

Are we celebrating ‘Chag Ha’Aviv’, the Holiday of Spring, the renewal of nature in connection with renewal of the people.  The egg (and green vegetable) on the Seder plate are symbols new life and the circle of life and time.  And yet this meaning carries a pastoral or peaceful sense of nature and its rhythm, rather than the harried and hurried way we leave Egypt.

Chag Ha’matzot – The matzah holiday, a feast of unleavened bread that reminds us of leaving Egypt, that connects with the harvest of new grain and throwing away the old sourdough leavening agent as we welcome the new crop, as we hold off on baking the new crop into bread.  Today, most of us are not farmers anymore, and waiting to eat from the new grain crop, chadash, instead of the old, yashon, is more an issue of whether our kosher bakery or restaurant advertises yashon.

These reflections on each name of the holiday suggest that each name tells part of the story, not the whole story.  We can observe a holiday with all these parts, maybe not in equal measure given who we are, but in proportions that are meaningful to us even though the conditions of the first Passover, and of the ancient Israelites, have morphed into the Jewish life we live today.

To the traditional names of the holiday we can add others that are meaningful – I would add Chag Ha’Haggadah, the Holiday of the Storybook, a holiday that celebrates the gift of joining together to tell our stories, to exchanges ideas, ask questions.  Or Zman Ha’Achdut, in the 1990s, statistics suggested that some 90% of American Jews participated in a Seder, now the numbers may be closer to 70%, still, that is a very good showing.  There is a sense of achdut, unity, that well more than half of Jews of all backgrounds will be participating in the event.

Any other ideas of what we might call this holiday?

Whatever name or names we use, may it be a happy, healthy, and meaningful holiday for us all.  Shabbat Shalom and Chag Same’ach.

Dvar Torah: Tazria/Shabbat Ha'Chodesh - God's Warning Signs

Parshat Tazria-Hachodesh

5774/2014

As I watch the preview for Noah, the new film about the famous family from the Book of Genesis that escapes alone from the destruction of the world, I can think of only one thing:  the actors in this movie look like they really are getting wet and cold. 

This story, while it is a story of utter destruction and a miraculous escape, is also a story about what is not supposed to happen again.  God promises that the world will go on, and God will not destroy the world again no matter how people think and act in the world, for good, evil, or somewhere in between.

Is God’s promise true?

While the world as we know it has not been destroyed in our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of our great grandparents, parts of the world have experienced war.  Post World War photos whether of nature, towns, or people certainly suggest a sense of large-scale loss, areas once populated with beautiful buildings now nothing more than a wasteland.  Nuclear weapons have the power to obliterate countries from the map.  Environmental degradation impacts the lives of animals and human beings all over the world. 

God may not destroy the world again, but sometimes it feels that we just might succeed doing it ourselves.

The promise not to bring a cataclysm like Noah’s flood does not mean, though, that God abandons humanity to a dismal fate.  We find in the way the Rabbis read our parsha, parshat Tazria, that God is still here, dropping hints to us, helping us to raise our awareness, giving us warning signs that we need to repair what is broken, and, on the other side of the coin, to celebrate what is good, what is right, and hopeful.

For the next two Shabbatot, we will study the ways that the ancient kohanim, the priests, acting like doctors of today, inspected, evaluated, and prescribed a response to an ailment called tza’ra’at.

We don’t know what tza’ra’at is.  We cannot identify it in modern medical literature.

It is peculiar because it also affects clothing and houses, and according to the Torah – it affects people, clothing, and houses in that order, or so it seems.

That’s not how the Midrash later read these passages.  They imagined that the order was completely reversed, even according to the order the Torah describes.  Tza’ra’at affects houses first, clothing next, and then the person last.  They discovered this in the story of Job whose misfortunes proceed just this way.

Why does God start with the house?

As a gentle warning from God that we are going astray and need to adjust our course.

If we do not do teshuvah, reconcile, change our ways, tza’ra’at will affect our clothing.

And in the end, God forbid, it will appear on our skin.

This is clearly a metaphor – a spiritual metaphor – a sign that starts outside of ourselves, a note of caution we feel inside, in our conscience, that may move closer and closer until it is so present and powerful that we can no longer avoid it.

A story to illustrate this point.

I was working on a school project with a colleague, a project about the meaning of Passover.  Her feeling is that the Seder is supposed to help us feel freedom, to feel we are part of the Exodus, but that she hasn’t felt that.  So there’s a structure, the Seder, something outside us that’s supposed to work in a certain way, over time maybe we also feel more and more that we’re not achieving that sense of feeling and connection, and eventually each of us feels just the opposite of free, locked into a pattern we cannot escape.

And thinking about this particular issue helps me figure out why the Torah starts with the person first – each of us has the gifts, the creativity, and the power to recast, reclaim, and reenergize any idea, any project that we care about, even the ancient Seder that we will observe in just a couple of weeks.

If we feel there is a warning sign in the world about something significant to who we are and what we believe, there is no better time than at the feast of freedom, to being the response.

The Seder is a relatively easy target, something that we can plan ourselves.  Let’s see the signs in the Seder itself and respond:  Are we really fulfilling the call of ‘All who are hungry let them come and eat?’ Are we using this time to remind ourselves what freedom is and to consider how we can help others to be more free?  Are we just going through the Seder motions – or are we telling the story in a way that engages us? 

But let’s not stop there – or we just might begin to feel as cold, soaked, and uncomfortable  as the characters in the Noah story even on the driest and warmest of spring days.

Shabbat Shalom

Shemini: Something to say?

Dvar Torah:  Shemini

Something to say?

Malaysia airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8.  Now, thirteen days later, there are no significant developments in the search, only a few potential clues. 

The silence in this case is overwhelming.  Satellite images show signs of a few pieces of floating debris.  Air and ship crew look out windows, watch radar, and lower buoys into the water.  Shrines and vigils appear in different forms.  There was silence in the way that the authorities in Malaysia were lax in checking passports.  Silence as different countries in the region seemed to be napping when it came to regular surveillance.  Except for the anguished cries of family members pleading for information, there is a great deal of silence – silence that is a reminder for us here in the US of another day, not 13 days ago, but 13 years ago.

Far from the tragic events of 9/11 and the disappearance of hundreds on a commercial airplane, we contend with silence.  Silence is increasingly difficult to find.  The cell phone buzzes even when the ringer is off.  The town siren wails.  The radio blares.  It is difficult to find a moment or place of real silence, not just the absence of sound but silence as an opportunity to think deeply, to process, to hear what our hearts are saying.

Our ancestor Aharon, Aaron, brother to Moshe, first of the high priest of Israel becomes silent after flames from heaven consume his two sons Nadav and Avihu at the altar.  Putting aside for a moment why they suffer this fate, Aaron’s reaction is, “Vayidom Aharon,” and Aaron was silent. 

Aaron receives praise for his silence.  Rashi explains that Aaron then merits God speaking to him directly, but Rabbi Lipman of Radomsk once told the Rebbe of Kotzk that King David received a greater reward since at the time of David’s suffering he was not silent.  As we say every morning in Psalm 30, “Le’ma’an yezamercha chavod velo yidom!”  “That we will sing Your glory and not be silent!”  Even at a time of pain and suffering, David was able to sing to God.  And let’s not forget the immortal words from Kohelet, “There is a time for everything….a time to be quiet and a time to speak.”

Notice here that David’s choice to break the silence does not come as a result of discomfort.  We’ve all been there.  It’s the elevator, or the car ride, when a silence falls and we need to break the apparent discomfort of the silence with something, anything.  With David, he breaks the silence with something significant, praise to the Source of Life.

For all the silence that we need in our lives – silence from constant connection and communication, silence from the bombardment we get from breaking news that too soon turns out to be incorrect, silence from all the distractions that lead us away from our priorities and what is most important to us.  For all the silence we need, we also need to learn, and relearn, when and how to speak and speak up. 

While I respect Aaron’s moment of silent shock, I do not accept that he had nothing to say.  In our postmodern world, I cannot accept that his mind was blank.  What did he want to say in that moment? 

What would have been constructive and helpful to say to God in that moment?  To say to Moses? To Miriam? 

And when we do speak and speak up, we know that not only the words we say but the way we say them is so significant.  How can we express real emotion without letting emotion take over?  How can we express ourselves thoughtfully and logically without separating ourselves from what makes us frail, human, and non-robotic?

When we stand with our ancestor Aaron in his moment of distress, we stand with our fellow human beings – friends and family of flight MH370 who stand in shocked silence, and wonder what we will say, what we will do, to transform silence into meaningful words – but not only words – in Hebrew the word for ‘word’ also means thing, action, idea.  We see that when our machines, and other powers, fail or when evil people use machines and human powers to inflict pain on people, words alone cannot repair the damage, but words and actions together just might bring healing. 

Shabbat Shalom.