Passover 5782 What is a prophesy? A story about the future. And a self-fulfilling prophecy? By definition, it is a story that generates a future. This common wisdom about the self-fulfilling potential of articulated predictions, is especially apt on Passover, the holiday of “Telling”. “Haggada”, the booklet we read during the Seder dinner, literally means “The Telling”. The instruction, clearly spelled out for us in the Torah, “...you shall tell to your child on that day (Passover)… (the story beginning with) I left Egypt” (Exodus 13: 8), teaches us that one of the core practices of the Passover seder is telling our story of origin. The Seder tradition is in essence an exercise in passing on “The Story” to our children. Even though on Passover we tell a story about our past, yet, the way we approach the telling may indeed be self-fulfilling. As we know, a positive tone draws positive outcomes, and to the contrary a negative texture attracts and perpetuates negativity. This is illustrated by the hidden meanings of two key Passover terms, Pesah פסח, Hebrew for Passover, and Pharaoh פרעה the name of our ancient oppressor. These Hebrew words, Pesah and Pharaoh respectively, include the phonetics and letter construct that translate as “mouth”, “Peh, פ or פה”. The name of the festival (Pesah), when divided into its two syllables, Peh and Sah, takes on a whole new meaning. “Peh”, as we already know, means mouth and Sah means “conversation”. In other words, Pesah, a “speaking mouth”. In the context of commemorating our people’s sacred origins and cherished values, this means a mouth that speaks sacred words and meaningful speech. The term Pesah, then, joins the word “Haggada” in illustrating the centrality of storytelling on the Seder night. The Hebrew word Pharaoh, on the other hand, when scrambled and divided into two syllables, spells the words Peh פה, mouth, and Rah רע, evil - evil mouth or evil speech. We learn that speech, in both its positive and negative aspects, is central to the observance of Passover, as well as to how we live our lives. The former generates freedom, and the latter generates oppression and ultimately self-destruction, “The waters turned back and covered the chariots and the riders, Pharaoh’s entire army… not one of them remained” (Exodus 14: 28). I am writing these reflections as the news-cycle continues to challenge. This morning a shooting in the Brooklyn subway system, preceded by a weekend of mass shootings around the country, in addition to the ongoing tragic war in Ukraine. A heavy cloud of escalating violence is overshadowing the holiday. The news can easily diminish our appetite for festivities or for telling stories about freedom gained, or a long journey to a promised land, a long time ago. It is hard though to ignore the parallels between ancient and current events, a Russian Pharaoh insisting on oppressing and murdering freedom-loving Ukrainians, who are led by non other than a descendant of Moses. Our storytelling at this year’s Seder, whether in the form of reading from the Haggada held in our hands or spontaneous conversations around the Seder table, is bound to be colored by the stresses and weightiness of the news-cycle environment. Can we mitigate that? Can we consciously choose to tell stories that generate a path to a “promised land” of peace, justice, and tranquility, in addition to, if not instead of, bemoaning a complicated and distressing present? At our Seder, can we share words that calm the fears, ease the pain and alleviate the worries? Can we Peh-Sah, converse from a place of positive vision, a place of sacred and generative consciousness? The wise author of the book of Proverbs says “Death and Life are in the power of the tongue” (Pro. 18: 21). Can we beat the Pharaoh, Peh-Rah, evil mouth, with a defiance of a higher order, weaving a prophecy, our own perhaps, a prophecy that is worthy of its fulfillment? Yes, we can. Let us dream big about a “promised world”. As a result we will eventually pass-over these challenges as we Jews have done for over three millennia. We have been, and continue to be, the carriers, throughout time, of a vision for peace שלום. In fact, we have lived “to tell the story”, or rather remain alive as a nation and culture because we stubbornly never ceased the telling. This is due to our intuitive knowledge, held deep down in our collective consciousness, that today’s intentional speech does become tomorrow’s better story. Each Passover, as we ritually read and tell our story, we draw a bit closer to the fulfillment of a prophecy. Each Passover when we conclude the seder with the words, “next year in Jerusalem” we place another brick in the wall of the utopian “Holy City”, where, according to the prophet Isaiah, all peoples of the world will mingle in peace (Isaiah 56: 7). This is certainly a prophecy worth its fulfillment, let us continue to perpetuate its storyline. Pesah Same’ah שמח, happy Passover, Rabbi Reuben Modek
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A society and its culture are measured amongst other things by how it regulates killing. The recent not-guilty verdict for a teen shooter claiming self-defense raises great concern about the direction of our American society. We can learn a great deal from the experience of the ancient Israelites. Their law allowed killing, even when forbidding murder (see the ten commandments). For example, capital punishment is allowed in response to certain crimes, i.e. murder (Exodus 21: 12). War is justified under defined conditions, and killing in self-defense can be forgiven depending on circumstances (Exodus 22: 2-3). The sages of that time recognized that killing is an unfortunate reality whether accidental or intentional. Though, they also recognized that humans, individually and collectively, had a choice of attitude. The spectrum of choices runs from willing participation on one hand to profound circumspection on the other. The predominant attitude chosen at any given time indicates a culture’s ethical compass and social cohesiveness. The sages of the Talmud clearly demonstrate this spectrum. They state that “If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him/her first” (Sanhedrin 72a). In other words, if your life is in danger, you must preserve it by killing your attacker. While this stands to reason, the discussion does not end there. Elsewhere the Rabbis warn: “A Sanhedrin (court) that sentences a person to death (even if only) once in seven years, is considered (a) murderous (court)… Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say: “Had we been members of a Sanhedrin, no person would ever be put to death” (Mishna Makot 1). The ancient court had the authority to execute, yet was expected to make killing the rare exception, if any. Elsewhere in scripture, God proclaims human society “murderous”, and therefore floods the entire earth (Genesis 6:13). The Noah story teaches that a society, fast and loose with its killing, does not justify its own existence. The ancient Israelites, thus teach us that a society’s institutions and culture, can and should set legal standards and social norms that discourage killing, even when technically justified. Last week’s not-guilty verdict seems to be another milestone in the growing American vigilante and gun culture that will lead us to mayhem and social breakdown. The loose standards for a self-defense claim, enshrined into law by the Wisconsin legislator, are egregiously wrong. It enabled the rebranding of horribly poor judgement by an immature young man as justified self-defense. According to the spirit of Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva’s pronouncement, these are a “murderous” legislator and by extension a “murderous” court. A tragic commentary indeed on the degrading moral state of Wisconsin’s civil society, as well as civil societies across America who have established similar irresponsible laws. Killing a person may be justified at times, and yet such claims must meet a rigorously high bar, whether executed by government, by courts, or by private citizens defending themselves. Israeli society, where I was raised, and with which armed forces I served as a soldier, is a case in point. Life in Isreal is almost perpetually in a state of self-defense due to the ongoing violent conflict, yet moral standards apply. The state of Israel drafts, trains, and arms most of its citizens with high capacity firearms. Training is typically extensive and grueling. Rules of engagement are precise even under combat conditions. Safety procedures for handling weapons in battle and in civilian spaces are strict and enforced. Possession of firearms is highly regulated. The expectation for compliance with clear standards of responsibility, and accountability keep citizens safe and society civil. The wild-west-style US gun culture has little guardrails, if any, and pales by comparison. Last week’s verdict has exposed the low bar for regulating killing in America. We are living through a historical moment marked by a growing flood of misguided gun and vigilante laws and norms. Our response to this moment will determine whether American democracy, American civil society, and American exceptionalism thrive or disintegrate. While the judicial procedures and the jury’s considerations that led to the young killer’s verdict seem to have been mostly proper, his acquittal on all charges is socially injurious and morally far from right. The Hebrews or Ivrim עברים discovered YHVH, the divine presence, while in
the Desert. During their journeys they encountered the threshold between this world and the world of spirit. They recognized the limitations of the material world and the vastness of the spirit world. They named this spiritual threshold Adonai אדני, which derives from the Hebrew word Eden אדן, threshold. When the Hebrews settled in the land of Israel they built a sanctuary for Adonai, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. King Solomon built it in about 1000 BCE. For a long stretch of about a thousand years the Hebrews, who were later called Judaeans or ״Jews״ for short, attended the Temple in Jerusalem for rites and rituals that kept them in awareness of… connection with The Threshold, with Adonai. Their spiritual life, their culture, their national identity depended on the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. In 70 c.e. the Jews rebelled against the Roman empire, which now ruled the civilized world including Judaea. The Romans in turn crushed the rebellion by placing a siege on Jerusalem… eventually conquering the city... burning the thousand-year-old Temple down to the ground. They killed many... exiling the rest to Rome as POWs and slaves. Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakai, a contemporaneous sage, escaped the besieged city before its destruction and struck a deal with Titus the Roman general. (Continued from part 2)
EINSTEIN’S INSIGHT Not enough is known about how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic in spite of a century long history of reductionist medical successes, including past vaccination campaigns. We have been caught by surprise by a new magnitude of health crisis. The pandemic apparently is revealing critical fault lines in the reductionist sciences that have been shaping our lifestyles. The pandemic is revealing profound systemic and slow-moving crises such as the obesity pandemic, a toxin-saturated agricultural system, climate and environmental degradation, to mention just a few. (Continued from part 1)
GREATER THAN OUR PARTS Scientism, or Reductionism, which currently frames our reaction to disease in general and to COVID-19 and its variants in particular, has also been a strong motivator for civilization’s progress during the past century. Reductionism, Materialism, and Isolationism, at the time of their emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offered refreshing alternatives to the prevailing medieval religious superstitions of the day. And indeed, the scientific method at the heart of the reductionist paradigm has solved many problems and improved our quality of life for a time. The campaign to vaccinate a nation during a pandemic has brought into sharp relief a dimension that we, individual-freedoms-loving Americans often resist, that of the “common good”. “In ordinary political discourse, the “common good” refers to those facilities… that the members of a community provide to all... in order to fulfill a relational obligation they all have to care for certain interests that they have in common.... The term itself may refer either to the interests that members have in common or to the facilities that serve common interests (The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy).”
It takes everyone to fight a pandemic, and as such embracing our common interest becomes necessary so we can prevail over COVID 19 and its variants. The transmissibility of the virus taught us early on that as individuals we must protect not only ourselves but also those around us, as we did originally with the simple COVID 19 prevention practices of social distancing, and mask wearing, followed later with the “Warp Speed” vaccine campaign. This demanded that we act as a collective. We learned that a scaled up response coordinated by the highest levels of government would be best suited for this level of challenge, as the virus did not recognize local, regional, or state borders, nor did it distinguish between people’s conservative or liberal ideologies. |
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