Torah – Jewish Independent

The supporting cast in our lives

Shabbat, Dec. 21
Vayeishev, Genesis 37:1-40:23

I am a rabbi because of a game of catch I played at camp with a rabbi more than three times my age. I found love and happiness and my partner in life because my best friend and my family helped me through a very difficult time. I survived the social pressure cooker of high school because my woodshop teacher took a personal interest in my well-being. I am alive today, I truly believe, because an anonymous man pulled me back from the curb as I was about to step into oncoming traffic in Manchester, England. (I was looking in the wrong direction for British traffic patterns.)

We have all sorts of names for these people in our lives. Some call them guardian angels, some call them heroes, and our tradition calls them shlichim, “messengers” or “emissaries” from God. I call them supporting actors. A rabbi, a friend, family, a teacher and an anonymous man in the movie that is my life: these are the people who have enabled me to play a starring role!

These are the people who, intentionally or not, gave the trajectory of my life a nudge at just the right moment and kept it on track, or steered it in a new and better direction. If awards were given to supporting actors in life as they are to movie actors, then they would each deserve an Oscar for the roles they played and for how their playing of their roles enabled me to play mine.

Who are the supporting actors in your life? Who are the people, past or present, who, at critical crossroads in your life’s journey, gave you directions, held your hand and walked a bit of the way with you? Who are the people who, upon reflection, were it not for them, everything would be different and so much would not have been possible?

Consider for a moment the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours in this week’s Torah portion, Vayeishev.

Here, we meet Joseph, son of Jacob, grandson of Isaac, great-grandson of Abraham, who, by all accounts, is a leading man in the story of the Jewish people. Joseph, in my estimation, is the second most pivotal person in Jewish history. The most pivotal one is a man whose name we don’t know and the Torah doesn’t record, but whose role as a supporting actor in one scene of Joseph’s life changes the arc of Jewish history.

In this week’s portion, Joseph goes out searching for his brothers, who are supposed to be in the field tending the flock. He searches in all the usual places but can’t find them. Along the way, he meets a man whose name we never know: the Torah refers to him simply as ha-ish, “the man” who saw Joseph wandering in the field (Genesis 37:15).

There is an allusion here to the nameless man or angel that Jacob, Joseph’s father, wrestled with in the previous parashah, Vayishlach. We note that, sometimes, when the Torah does not name a character, that character comes to play a pivotal role in the unfolding story. Such is the case in this instance. The man sees that Joseph appears to be lost and approaches him. He asks: “What are you looking for?” Joseph responds, “I’m looking for my brothers. Can you tell me please where they are tending the flock?” (See Genesis 37:15-16.)

The nameless man remembers seeing Joseph’s brothers, he overheard them talking about heading toward a place called Dothan. On the anonymous man’s advice, Joseph seeks his brothers there and finds them. Shockingly, they are not happy to see him. They conspire against him, abuse him, threaten to kill him and, eventually, sell him into slavery to a band of traveling nomads who are headed to Egypt. Through a series of events, Joseph, the boy who looked for his brothers in a field, becomes the chief advisor to Pharaoh and ascends to the second-most powerful position in all of Egypt.

Meanwhile, a famine occurs in the Land of Israel and these same brothers are sent by the leader of the Israelites, their father Jacob, to find food. They travel to Egypt and, this time, it is they who are surprised to find their brother – not only alive, but also in a position to help them. After a series of encounters, Joseph embraces them, asks after his father and makes all the arrangements for the entire nation of Israel to immigrate to Egypt. His position and power save the Jewish people and, for many years, they live well in Egypt and thrive.

Then, a new pharaoh comes to power and forces the Israelites into slavery. A prophet named Moses rises up from among them and, through plagues of frogs, lice, boils and so on; the splitting of the Red Sea; and, ultimately, the giving of the Torah, the people return to the Land of Israel. And that’s pretty much the story of our people.

But what about this nameless man? Who or what was he?

The commentators offer a variety of answers. The 11th-century scholar, Abraham ibn Ezra, reads the text of Genesis 37:15 with a p’shat, a “straightforward” interpretation and concludes this was a passerby. Rashi, on the other hand, delves further and concludes: “This [the man] was the angel Gabriel, as it says (Daniel 10:21), ‘and the man Gabriel.’” (Rashi on Genesis 37:15) Rashi draws inference from the definite article that is used to identify “the” man.

Ramban explains that he was an ordinary man (a passerby), yet he was unwittingly fulfiling God’s design. He was actually “sent” by God to guide Joseph, though he himself was not aware of the significance of his actions. In Hebrew, the word malach means both “angel” and “messenger,” because every malach, human or supernatural, is one of God’s messengers, activated to implement His will on earth. (See Ramban on Genesis 37:15.)

Menachem Mendel Morgensztern of Kotzk, known as the Kotzker Rebbe (1787-1859), goes in a completely different direction: “The angel taught Joseph that, whenever one is straying in the ways of life, when one is downtrodden or downcast, one should speak to oneself and clarify for oneself what one is really asking for, looking for, seeking, and what one really desires, so that one can return and first explain to oneself what one needs.”

The Kotzker Rebbe seems to disagree with Ramban, Rashi and Ibn Ezra, saying, it’s not a passerby, God or an angel that points the way. Rather, he says that the supporting actor in this unfolding mystery is Joseph’s inner voice and that, sometimes, our inner voice can be our own supporting actor.

Whatever or whoever he was, were it not for ha-ish, the man Joseph met along the way, the man who told Joseph where to find his brothers, how different it all could have been.

We never know in the present tense which people or events will be the most instrumental and transformative in our lives but, in hindsight, nothing is clearer. Upon reflection, the pieces of the puzzle and the paths of our lives are perfectly clear, even if they may be filled with uncomfortable observations.

This week’s parashah is a reminder to all of us to recognize the supporting actors who have guided us on our path and pointed us to our direction. It compels us to acknowledge, honour and thank them – even to give them awards – for the important roles that they’ve played, for doing so teaches us something greater still: in recognizing the transformative influence of supporting actors in our lives, we become keenly aware of how important we are in the lives of others. And we come to appreciate the capacity each of us has to help our friends, neighbours, even strangers achieve wholeness in life and find what they are seeking.

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is senior rabbi at Temple Sholom and author of The Men’s Seder (MRJ Publishing). He is also chair of the Reform Rabbis of Canada. His writing and perspective on Judaism appear in major print and digital media internationally. This article originally appeared on reformjudaism.org.

Living’s Jewish aspects

A still from the Netflix show Living With Yourself, co-starring Paul Rudd.

As the secular New Year approaches, many people make resolutions, in an effort to become a better person. What if there were a shortcut? What if, for a tidy sum, you could be transformed, virtually overnight, into the person you’ve dreamed of being?

This the conundrum posed by the Netflix show Living With Yourself, an eight-part series released in late October, starring Paul Rudd and Aisling Bea, who play spouses Miles and Kate Elliot. Rudd is also one of the executive producers.

The premise is this: Miles, a shlub discontent with and disconnected from his wife, and suffering career ennui, discovers a “spa” that offers a treatment to improve his charm and confidence. For a small fortune, they promise, a “new you.” And so, a shlemiel enters and a gentleman exits. Just one problem: [spoiler] it’s actually a cloning lab and, unbeknownst to Miles and Clone Miles, the two men exist and, later, each must contend with the other in his life.

Rudd’s 25 years of movie experience includes Ant Man, Anchorman, Knocked Up, 40-Year-Old Virgin and Clueless. On television, he played Mike Hannigan in Friends and appeared in Reno 911, among other things.

The New Jersey-born actor hasn’t been shy in publicly discussing his Jewish identity. He kibitzed a bit about his Jewishness in an interview segment of Between Two Ferns. In an episode of Finding Your Roots, he found out that his grandfather, Davis Rudnitsky, fought the Nazis, only to return home to England to face antisemitism. In 2017, Rudd played his first (overtly) Jewish character, Moe Berg, in the biopic The Catcher Was a Spy, about a baseball player who joins the Second World War effort as an undercover agent.

In Living With Yourself, there is one explicit Jewish moment, when a Holocaust survivor tells Miles an off-colour anecdote about the Shoah, involving pork. But there are also hidden Jewish themes. For example, envious of a colleague’s extraordinary success in the office, Miles is spurred by the prospect that his technological makeover could help him outperform this coworker. Though Judaism has no problem with someone being motivated to accomplish because of another’s success, the Torah warns against jealousy. The ninth commandment is one obvious caution against such sentiment: “Thou shalt not covet.” Another is Joseph’s brothers (Genesis 36), who, enraged with jealousy, sell Joseph into slavery. In a sense, Miles and Clone Miles are like brothers, and they develop petty and spiteful jealousies, wanting the best of both worlds, but not able to have it.

If only Miles initially had derived fulfilment and was grateful for what he had, he wouldn’t be in this much trouble. Ethics of Our Fathers (Pirkei Avot) (4:1) advises just that: “Who has wealth? The one who is pleased with his lot.” The meaning isn’t limited to “wealth” of materials, of course, but the wealth of blessings that are bestowed upon us, including, for most of us, our loved ones, our safety, our employment and access to the necessities of life.

Notably, though, Miles versus Clone Miles is illustrative of the yetzer hara (good inclination) and the yetzer hatov (bad inclination) at battle with each other. Interestingly, neither character is completely good nor bad, but a combination, reflecting the real, complicated, human condition, where we have both inclinations competing inside us.

Often, we are able to convince ourselves of the nobility of our decisions – that is, find a good reason for our perhaps less-than-good action; explain away the importance of a choice’s potential harm. Paradoxically, the yetzer hatov has a sneaky side. To explain this, author and radio host Dennis Prager often cites the late Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, former head of the Conservative rabbinate. He once told Prager that he had his yetzer hara under control, but his yetzer hatov “always got him into trouble.”

Rarely do ordinary people wake up each morning and strive to make another human miserable. Still, we must wrestle with our “other” selves, overcome our justifications and egos, to make principled choices. Every day is a lesson in living with ourselves.

Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 100 publications around the world.

Doing work he believes holy

Irwin Keller will share some of his eclectic interests at Limmud Vancouver in March. (photo from Limmud Vancouver)

Irwin Keller is the kind of person most of us would like to be: curious about everything, smart, creative, always learning, always teaching. As one of the invited presenters for Limmud Vancouver ’20, he’ll be sharing some of his interests with the local community.

Keller’s first career was a long stint as a human rights lawyer specializing in AIDS and HIV-related discrimination. But, as a lifelong amateur musician, he also co-created the drag group the Kinsey Sicks. In 2006, he ended up serving as a lay leader for his congregation, which finally pushed him to go to rabbinical school, where he is now finishing up his training.

“I had always wanted to be a rabbi. When I had finished my undergraduate and was looking at applying to rabbinical school, in those days, there were no seminaries that accepted openly gay students,” Keller said. “I couldn’t do it unless I was willing to go back in the closet that I had just come out of – the closet was still warm – and I wasn’t willing to. It felt wrong. It was important for me to be in the rabbinate as who I was.”

Within just a year of deciding he couldn’t be a closeted rabbi, the AIDS epidemic began to tear through the gay community, and Keller began working on civil rights cases.

“Things can happen to people whether they’re legal or not. Often through some sort of ruse, or subterfuge,” he said. “As long as people didn’t want people with AIDS renting from them or working for them, they were going to find some way to get rid of them. That was our work.”

This work, which Keller describes as both holy and harrowing, led to the creation of the Kinsey Sicks. “Our community needed to laugh, needed to be delighted out of what we were experiencing every day.”

Momentum built and, after a few years, the group had an offer to produce their show off-Broadway.

“That was the point when we all quit our jobs. That was the last I ever practised law,” he said.

In all, Keller performed with the group for 21 years. Along the way, he taught himself enough Yiddish to be able to bring Yiddish music into the show, to both hilarious and touching effect. He had a recording of his great-grandmother singing the heart-tugging “Papirosn,” about an orphan boy trying to get by selling cigarettes on a street corner. Usually sung by women performers to mimic a child’s voice, Keller performed it in his drag persona Winnie, channeling the spirit of his great-grandmother and Yiddish theatre divas of a bygone era. You can watch it on YouTube: Keller playing a much older Jewish woman playing a young boy – gender collapses à la Victor/Victoria.

“Over the course of the maybe 18 years that I performed it, it was the most commented-on piece of music that we performed,” he said. “People were so moved – including non-Jews – that they were getting a window into Jewish culture that they were not getting from modern American culture.”

Keller’s U-turn into the rabbinate is perhaps long in coming, but not surprising. He describes both his civil rights law career and his drag performing career as holy work: the yin and yang of what a gay community needed at a devastating moment in its history. Moving onto the pulpit only took that energy to a different place.

“I moved to Sonoma County and joined a synagogue whose rabbi was in the process of leaving and there was a lot of turmoil. I volunteered to do some of the rabbinical work while they were searching,” he said. “But what came out of me was a lifetime of longing.”

And the congregation needed his brand of leadership, too. “I think my being the singing drag queen rabbi gave people a different kind of welcome,” he said.

At Limmud Vancouver, Keller will be sharing two more of his interests: Yiddish poetry, and queer readings of Torah. In a session on the Yiddish poet Itsik Manger, Keller will lead discussion on the playful Bible-inspired poem cycle known as the “Khumesh lider.”

“The way he plays with the looping of time, the anachronisms, in a way that is also invited by rabbinic tradition – there is no before or after Torah, everything can take place in any order,” explained Keller. “So you can get the Turkish sultan visiting Hagar, you can get Ruth and Polish peasants, and it’s still Torah.”

Keller’s other Limmud seminar will examine the story of Joseph.

“I try to identify where there are queer currents running through Torah,” he said. “I don’t specifically mean exclusively gay-themed moments, but moments that seem to suggest a certain kind of outsiderness and outsider outlook and alternative biography from what you’ve come to expect from ancient tales.”

Joseph falls into this category because of his distance from the normative family. Joseph spends most of his life at odds with a family that made him unsafe. His power comes when he is able to be away from this family and incognito, and his unmasking is both dangerous and liberating.

“What’s interesting to me here,” said Keller, “is that the rabbinic tradition finds him to be problematic. They have a tendency to locate his problematicity in his gender and sexuality. So, it’s not like we as modern people are for the first time noticing that there might be a queer angle to this story. For 1,000 years he’s been alarming the rabbis.”

Keller speaks of human rights, Jewish drag, Yiddish poetry and queer Torah with unflagging energy. But this isn’t even all. Get Keller talking about angels in the Jewish imagination, and it’s off to the races again: “There is a tradition around angels who densely populate all our mystical texts, as well as running rampant through Torah,” he said. “It’s interesting to me the worldview that holds angels as present in every space and every function. Every natural force is controlled by an angel, every period of time. Every hour of the day has an angel that oversees it.”

Perhaps another year, Keller will share more at Limmud about angels. In the meanwhile, his joyous brand of learning and thinking will be available in two presentations on March 1 at Limmud Vancouver, held at Congregation Beth Israel. Registration is now open at limmudvancouver.ca.

Faith Jones is a librarian and Yiddish translator in Vancouver. She is a regular teacher and attendee at Limmud Vancouver.

You take care now, y’hear?

I just realized that, lately, I had unconsciously changed the way I say goodbye, particularly when I am speaking with women. As a younger person, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to say “Take care!” when parting with people. What’s more? It’s happening even when I have casual interactions. I started thinking about where my new-to-me phrase comes from and where I’d heard it before.

I was out walking my dogs when one of them (the young, spry Setter mix) kicked me in the shin. I looked down, in pain, when I saw that she, too, was surprised. She’d slipped on the slick sidewalk and certainly hadn’t meant to hurt me. A man at the bus stop remarked how icy it was, and I agreed. I said, “Take care!”

Later, my household was in bed when we heard an ominous thump outside. My husband made a joke, we laughed and went to sleep. In the morning, I saw a thoroughly smashed car, its front end bashed in. It faced the wrong way on a busy street near our home. Across the intersection, there was a truck, also facing the wrong direction, somehow wedged into someone’s yard. It was slippery, indeed.

Often the habit of suggesting people take care is aligned with another statement though, something like, “Things are more dangerous these days.” However, our Torah readings from this time of year, in Genesis, remind us that things have always been dicey out there, particularly for women and for those in positions of less power in society.

For instance, when the three strangers tell Abraham that Sarah will have Isaac, she laughs (Genesis 18:12-15). However, this is quickly followed by Abraham’s question about why she laughed and she says, “I didn’t laugh.” Why? “Because she was frightened.” Why did she lie? Well, she was an old woman. Strangers told her something ridiculous and then she was asked to take it seriously. She was afraid. Sarah wouldn’t be the first or last woman to feel threatened and unsafe. If something like this situation happened today, I wouldn’t leave until I’d said, “Take care.”

Not much further along in Genesis, Abraham bargains with G-d, asking how many people in Sodom have to be righteous for G-d to save the city. Abraham has some power here. He feels emboldened to speak out, but he also gets to stay home rather than go to Sodom to try and fix things. Instead, two angels go to Sodom.

Lot takes the angels in as his guests, but when a crowd gathers to do the visitors harm, Lot suggests an unsettling exchange. He says that, rather than let the crowd “be intimate with them,” he’ll send out his two young daughters instead. He will sacrifice his daughters to be violated by the crowd (Genesis 19:8) rather than let his male guests be endangered.

Reading Genesis, I am reminded by how these dangerous situations, and particularly ones that threaten women, are not at all new. These are issues of power, control and sexuality. In a modern political comparison: we act as though the MMIWG (missing and murdered indigenous women and girls) report and its findings are new or different. In fact, violence against women, and specifically minority women in vulnerable situations, is a bad news story played on repeat. These threats are close to home, and they remain frightening.

When I hear myself telling a friend – a single mom whose father just died – to take care, I realize who I am echoing in my head. I hear older African-American women in my Virginia neighbourhood saying goodbye to me: “You take care now, y’hear?” I hear my mom sighing as she hung up the phone (it was avocado green, with a long cord so she could cook while talking) at home when I was younger. She said goodbye with a worried expression that her friend couldn’t see, saying “Bye! Take care.”

This is the closing comment of women, all over, who know that the world can be dangerous. We’re sending out our concern to those we love. We’re acknowledging that, sometimes, we must depend solely on ourselves, because it doesn’t look like anyone (including G-d) is stepping up to keep us safe.

Sometimes, Bereishit (Genesis) offers stories to dig into. I enjoy their meaty narrative. I love interpreting what it all means. Other sections cause me to sigh just as my mom did. In a world where women still don’t have any assurance of safety from war, crowds and violence, and where those who have less power are at the mercy of the powerful, it’s hard not to feel sadness. How little things change.

This also is a continuing opportunity for social justice. We can fight for a better place for everyone. We can seek out and care for those around us, rather than choosing to discriminate or discard lives, as Lot would have done to his daughters. In the meanwhile, I’m often slipping down the icy street, worrying and wondering over how I can spread a sukkat shalom (a shelter of peace) over those I love and care for. So, I’ll say what many wise women have said before me. You take care now, y’hear?

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Generations struggle together

I’ve heard some unsettling real-life stories lately. These weren’t news, but family stories, in my social media inbox. One friend is wrestling with how to best cope with family members struggling with addiction. (This is, unfortunately, a common problem.) In another note, I heard of how an estate is being divided after a parent died; in this case, a sibling told his sister and her family (who stayed local to care for the parents) that she will be homeless within two months unless she can manage to get a mortgage to buy the family’s home. Another message concerns the arrival of a baby, and how scared the new mother is about being sent home early from the hospital. Finally, another friend and I shared our cultures’ rituals as we worked through a discussion about miscarriage, premature babies, infertility and pregnancy loss.

There is both love and struggling out there. These challenges are just part of dealing with our families and lives. No matter what your religion, you may encounter things like this in your life. But, while none of the stories I’ve mentioned is a “Jewish” one, neither are they not Jewish.

With these burdens in mind, I thought about the stories we hear in synagogue this time of year. This week’s parashah, Toldot (Genesis 25:19-28:9), offers vignettes about life. There’s Rebecca’s story about what it’s like to struggle with infertility and pregnancy difficulties. There’s sibling favouritism, as Isaac and Rebecca raise their twins, Jacob and Esau. There’s inheritance trickery when the twins struggle over their father’s blessing. Their dying father, Isaac, shows what some might call poor judgment, as he mixes up his children’s identity and offers them unequal blessings.

This section of Genesis contains a lot: wealth, poverty, lying, distrust, water rights, and discord between neighbours, intermarriage, family relationship troubles and even possibly some mental health issues. What happens to Rebecca, for instance, when Isaac dies? She needs to know that Jacob will marry someone with whom she can cope, as she mentions with the phrase, “I am disgusted with my life….” (Genesis 27:46)

When we wrestle with similar family and community relations issues in a 21st-century context, many feel isolated. Despite plentiful online information, we can feel overwhelmed and lost when life throws us big challenges.

Our tradition gives us support. When I hear the Torah read or read it on my own, I’m reminded that these stories come with centuries of commentary. When using a modern tool like sefaria.org, I can pull up the portion, but also see commentaries (in both English and Hebrew) that allow me to learn from that scholarship.

It’s true that, for some, nothing beats seeking out an elder or a rabbi who might offer in-person wisdom. For others, the struggles are deeply private. It can be good to have access to knowledge online when dealing with hard issues like addiction, infertility or other family issues. Sometimes, the backlash from older family members can be such that a young person might never again want to talk with them about it. For instance, the pressure to “start a Jewish family” or even “accept being childless” from an older family member can be anguishing.

This Torah portion is called Toldot, which translates to Generations. We’re often in a North American generational struggle, as the phrase “OK, Boomer” currently echoes around the internet. Millennials seek help, guidance and a place in society, while their elders respond with comments like the AARP’s senior vice-president Myrna Blyth, who said, “OK, Millennials, but we’re the people that actually have the money.” (Even as a Gen Xer, I’ve long known how the Millennials might feel. Yes, Boomers have the money. The rest of us, largely, don’t.)

Elders do often have the money, power and influence in society. They sometimes, like Isaac and Rebecca, make selfish or complicated decisions. So, the question is, how does Judaism and its leaders respond to younger generations who seek out help? Are we doing this on a local level to help those in need? These sound like institutional questions, and perhaps our institutions can help. Yet, the last step is a personal one. What can we do as individuals when we see someone in need of support? We can reflect on how our words, actions and contributions help others along life’s path.

I go back to what I heard about how that estate was managed after a parent died. What parent would want to turn out their child and her family from their home? What sibling declares that “it’s only fair” to insist his sister pay off the other siblings or be homeless within two months? (Especially considering this was after she did most of the daily caretaking of their parents for years.)

Of course, families are complicated and have their difficulties, but being an upstanding elder might mean thinking ahead. How does your child/executor behave? Is he or she without compassion? Good, fair estate planning should protect all your children. It should recognize and support those who took time off to care for you. That’s a sign that you’re helping all your generations along their way.

None of these are new problems, but they’re hard. Luckily, we have voices of experience, love and compassion in our tradition to help us do the right thing. It might be time to listen.

The wisdom of an oxymoron

Shabbat, Nov. 23
Chayei Sarah, Genesis 23:1-25:18
Haftarah, I Kings 1:1-31

I am an American citizen living in Vancouver, B.C., and serving a Reform congregation for the past six years. This juxtaposition of two increasingly disparate identities has given me a unique perspective on this week’s parashah, Chayei Sarah, and its introduction of the term ger toshav, resident alien.

In Chayei Sarah, we read the rather peculiar line, “Ger v’toshav anochi imachem” – “I am a resident alien [foreigner] living for a time among you; sell me a gravesite among you, that I may bury my dead here.” (Genesis 23:4) This is what Abraham says as he petitions the owner of a field for the right to purchase land for a gravesite for his wife Sarah.

To both the student of Torah and the student of the English language, this phrase, ger v’toshav, resident alien, piques interest and draws attention. It is an example of one of those delightful and often poignant turns of a phrase in any language, an oxymoron – the bringing together of two seemingly incompatible and opposite terms, like sweet sorrow, recorded live, act naturally, good grief, passive aggressive and, though not kosher, but still illustrative, jumbo shrimp.

I have always enjoyed how this literary device can be used to construct biting commentary on the incongruity of frequently paired things. That commentary can have a powerful effect, causing a moment of silence to hover over a room as we contemplate the phrase’s meaning. We recognize this when we dwell on the underlining message of ger v’toshav, resident alien. The oxymoron challenges us to see compatibility – even harmony – in seemingly incompatible things.

So, what is a ger v’toshav, a resident alien? In our Torah portion, and in Jewish legal texts that have followed, a ger v’toshav was an individual of special status in the community, one who lived permanently among the citizens of a place but did not have the status of a citizen. A ger toshav enjoyed all the protections a society offered its citizens but was exempt by virtue of his (it was not gender inclusive back then) special status from many of the requirements of citizenship. A ger toshav was a protected visitor and honoured guest in a society. Central to this was the public obligation for the health and welfare of a ger toshav. This was the sacred responsibility of each citizen in that society and of the society as a whole.

Jewish law is emphatic about our responsibility to the stranger who lives within our midst. Thirty-six times in Torah we are commanded to “love the stranger.” Every year at Passover, this theme serves as the narrative thread of the seder. At the very centre of the Torah, in the Holiness Code, we read, “The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:34)

In this week’s parashah, Abraham, the emissary of Judaism to the world, the individual whose merit and relationship with God, above all others, is the reason we were given the Torah, is presented not as a powerful, wealthy businessman or as a man who regularly talks with God. Instead, he is presented as a helpless stranger in a land that he now calls home, seeking aid and assistance from its citizenship.

The text is both graphic and poignant. His dead wife literally lays at his feet, he owns nothing in this land and he asks to purchase a place so he may bury her. He does not seek a handout; he is willing to pay a fair price for the land, but wants permission to do so. And the Hittites who owned the land sell him a burial plot, breaking with their tradition, breaking the law against allowing aliens, even resident aliens, from owning land. (See Manfred R. Lehmann, “Abraham’s Purchase of Machpelah and Hittite Law,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, February 1953.) They sell him the land because they see themselves in his shoes; they imagine their own dead lying at their feet and they make a new law – and they help.

We hear the echo of this story in our own times, at borders north and south, east and west of wherever we are. How do we treat the strangers who show up in our land? Are they to be feared, incarcerated and ostracized? Or are they to be allowed some comfort, as our forefather Abraham was in his hour of great sorrow and despair?

When we are reminded of the kindness shown to our ancestors, when we are reminded that it was also a kindness shown to us, because we too were once strangers in the land, then the solution Judaism demands of us is obvious no matter the challenges. We must care for those who cross freeways, deserts, oceans and mountain ranges to get here, just as (or better than) our nations cared for our parents and grandparents as they were running for their lives. We must reach out to the strangers in our midst, to the resident aliens who live and work here, but for whom economic, social, medical and educational systems have no place. Torah commands us to make a place.

As is our tradition, when Abraham buried Sarah, he placed a stone on her grave as a sign to all who would see it: a sign with its own double meaning, like an oxymoron. The stone signified that beneath this ground lay Sarah, the wife of Abraham, the mother of Isaac. But it also said that this ground, this portion, belonged to Abraham, a resident alien in the land of the Hittites, who purchased this land though he had no legal claim to it. The stone is a sign for all times, a symbol of the kindness and sense of responsibility shown by the Hittites to the ger toshav, the resident alien, the stranger in their land, and a symbol of the universality of human life.

We all mourn our dead. Every person’s life has meaning, even if he or she speaks a different language than ours, comes from a different country, is a member of a different tribe. When we fail to act to heed this mitzvah, our Torah is clearly misunderstood.

People are not bricks in a wall

Shabbat, Nov. 2
Noach, Genesis 6:9-11:32
Haftarah, Isaiah 54:1-55:5

W.C. Fields said, “Never work with animals or children, [they steal the spotlight].” Though no one ever accused him of being a Torah scholar, his insight was certainly applicable to last week’s Torah portion.

Parashat Noach, the second portion in the Book of Genesis (and my bar mitzvah portion) is perhaps the most universally known and, at least by children, most adored portion in the entire Torah. This is in part, no doubt, because it has not one animal, but all animals – and they come in pairs! So beloved and recognizable is this Torah portion that we tend to forget that there is more to it than the animals coming on the ark, two by two, the dove sent to find dry land, the rainbow, and our ancient ship builder, Noah. Tucked in at the end of the portion that bears his name is a small, poignant story about how the people (Noah’s descendants) focused their energies after the waters and fear receded, and they were once again on dry land.

We are told: “All the earth had the same language and the same words … they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there…. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over all the earth!’” (Genesis 11:1-:4)

A midrash explains: “Many, many years passed in building the tower. It reached so great a height that it took a year to mount to the top. A brick was, therefore, more precious in the sight of the builders than a human being. If a man fell down and met his death, none took notice of it: but, if a brick dropped, they wept, because it would take a year to replace it. So intent were they upon accomplishing their purpose that they would not permit a pregnant woman to interrupt herself in her work of brick-making when she went into labour. Molding bricks, she gave birth to her child and, tying it round her body in a sheet, she went on molding bricks.” (“Yashar Noah,” in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 1909)

How do you measure your day? I once asked my friend who is a bricklayer this question, and he explained that the universal standard for a good day of bricklaying is 1,000 bricks day. It got me thinking, what would my 1,000-brick-day look like? What is my universal standard for a successful day?

As a parent, I could say it’s getting all the kids washed, fed, off to school and then to soccer or hockey, and back home again. Then it’s getting them to do their homework, brush their teeth and get to bed at a reasonable hour.

As a working adult, I could say it’s getting to work on time and responding to all my emails and messages – the modern-day equivalent of bricks. Then it’s meeting with constituents, handling synagogue programs and business, and getting home in time for dinner with my family.

What makes those days good days is not the quantity of work I do or the number of interactions I have, it’s the quality. The bricklayer, if reasonably competent at his task, can be irritable, antisocial, half asleep and day dreaming as he lays each brick. He can take his anger out on the bricks; he can curse at the bricks as he shleps them up the wall. He can listen to music, talk on his cellphone; it doesn’t matter. As long as the wall is solid at the end of his day and it contains 1,000 new bricks, it’s a good day of bricklaying.

But people are not bricks: we can’t take out our anger on people without consequence. We can’t ignore them or tune them out if the purpose of our day is to interact with them with care, compassion and attention. The great sin of the Tower of Babel’s builders was that they treated people like bricks and bricks like people. They wasted the one thing that set them apart from machines, which, had they existed in ancient times, could have helped build the Tower even better – they neglected their own humanity. When the bricks of our life become more important than the people in it, we, too, build a tower that is an affront to the purpose of our creation.

The midrash continues that, after God confounded the people’s language and scattered the people throughout the globe, the tower

remained: “a part sank into the earth and another part was consumed by fire; only one-third of it remained standing. The place of the tower has never lost its peculiar quality. Whoever passes it forgets all he knows.” (ibid., Ginzberg)

When we treat people like bricks, we forget what we know about ourselves and about others. We forget that the measure of our day is not how many bricks we lay, how many emails we answer, how many lunches we pack, how many children we shlep: the measure of our day is whether each person we touch, including ourselves, feels valued as a person, a blessing and a gift from God in our lives – not a brick.

From beginning again

Recently, I decided to conquer an inner anxiety and do something new. It wasn’t skydiving or anything dangerous. I was hoping to follow a pattern and sew myself some clothes. I write knitting patterns, so am very familiar with the notion of “winging it” and making my own design, but I needed to go back to the beginning with sewing.

As a teen, my mom insisted I take sewing lessons and my dad did them with me. (My dad was good at it and made himself a bathrobe and the upholstery for a convertible he restored!) The sewing assignment was to counteract my terrifying enthusiasm for my mom’s fabric and yarn stash. I’d dive into her stuff, grab scissors, cut fabric up and make things. For instance, I made myself shorts out of some old Winnie-the-Pooh curtains – and my mom was livid. Why? Well, she’d sewn those curtains for me as a kid in the first place. As a teenager, I couldn’t figure what she was saving them for, and I likely upset her by “taking her stuff” and hurting her feelings. She made something, and I remade it without asking. Worse than that, I didn’t use a pattern to do it!

My mom’s discipline as a seamstress came from required dressmaker/tailoring coursework she’d taken at Cornell University. When she was a student there, young women had to take home economics. My mom already could sew like nobody’s business, but she learned a lot from those required courses. It made her crazy to see me break all the rules.

Her reaction to my freeform creativity is probably what made me so anxious about my ability to follow a pattern as an adult. It was a mental block. Even though I am fully capable of it, I still feel anxiety when I face the tissue paper cutouts and instructions.

Now that I have sewn one dress, following a pattern exactly, I’ll let the truth out. I’m halfway through a second sort of vest/tunic based on the first dress pattern, and I’m already winging it. Once I started again from the beginning, I regained my crazy freeform gusto. I can’t hold back!

Each year, we, as a Jewish people, start something right from the beginning. We begin reading the Torah, starting with the creation of the world. We jump into B’reishit, Genesis, and we hear a familiar story. Some people roll their eyes, saying, I’ve heard this before. However, like learning anything new (sewing, for instance), the learning curve is steep. There is a lot in there.

As a sewer, I saw things I missed the first time I followed a pattern. I didn’t do something wrong, I was just less practised before; I was a beginner. Those of us who have been studying Jewish texts every year, reading the Torah portion or commentaries or Midrash – well, we all start out as beginners and eventually become more immersed in the material. There is always something rich, new and different to consider or pursue as we read it again.

It’s like rereading a favourite novel. Now that I know how it’s going to end, I don’t have to rush. I can enjoy all the twists, the foreshadowing, the way the writer uses the language in telling us the story. I see and understand things that I might have missed in a first reading.

I’m not going to lie. Just like sewing, knitting, cooking or building something you’ve made before, rereading the text can feel rote, like you are on autopilot. Sometimes reading a familiar text is actually an opportunity to meditate on something different altogether.

This morning, I dug into making that vest because I needed something with pockets to go with my Shabbat skirts or dress pants. I wanted to make something that would come out OK in a life or world that sometimes seems very unpredictable.

By the time you read this, Simchat Torah and the Canadian federal election will be weeks over, but our new year is really just beginning. It’s a time of great potential, even as the light fades earlier each day. We have so much good and creative work ahead of us. Rereading B’reishit gives a chance to relive something magical and important to our identity as Jewish people – an origin story. At the same time, the characters of Genesis offer us insights into today, into our lives, identities, families and communities.

It’s true that sewing is an old-fashioned skill that I’m getting a hold of again. However, like Genesis, we can say “Look! Everything old is new again!” and jump into learning with emotion – and enthusiasm.

The knowledge that we die

Shabbat, Oct. 26
B’reishit, Genesis 1:1-6:8
Haftarah, Isaiah 42:5-43:10

One Yom Kippur, a rabbi was warning his congregation about the fragility of life.

“One day, everyone in this congregation is going to die,” he thundered from the bimah.

Seated in the front row was an elderly woman who laughed out loud when she heard this.

Irritated, the rabbi said, “What’s so funny?”

“Well!” she said, “I’m not a member of this congregation.”

Membership and affiliation aside, the most important lesson we learn in life is that one day it will end: one day we are going to die.

This is the great lesson and gift of the parashah B’reishit, with its iconic tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Amid all the lush greenery, flowing rivers and natural beauty of the garden, at its centre stood two trees. All of the trees and their fruits were permitted to human beings as food, except for the Tree of All Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We read: “God Eternal then commanded the man, saying, ‘You may eat all you like of every tree in the garden – but of the Tree of All Knowledge you may not eat, for the moment you eat of it you shall be doomed to die.’” (Genesis 2:16-17)

When they eat from the Tree of All Knowledge, the knowledge they get is that, one day, they are going to die. Before the forbidden fruit, they didn’t even know death was part of the equation. Now they know and it scares them – to death. They like the garden: life there is beautiful, they don’t want it to end and, standing right next to the Tree of All Knowledge, is the answer to their anxiety – the Tree of Life. One bite from that fruit and they will live forever. This terrifies God. We read: “God Eternal then said, ‘Look, the humans are like us, knowing all things. Now they may even reach out to take fruit from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever!’ So the Eternal God drove them out of the Garden of Eden to work the soil from which they had been taken.” (Genesis 3:22-23)

God kicks them out of the garden – not as punishment, but as a blessing. If they think they will never die, then how will they truly live? If you have eternity, then there is no urgency for anything; with unlimited tomorrows, everything can wait.

The German existentialist Martin Heidegger, in his masterwork Being and Time, taught this: he said that, in order to truly live authentically, we have to confront death head-on. In other words, knowing that I am going to die is what allows me to truly live. Heidegger wrote: “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.”

But, as Ernest Becker wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork The Denial of Death, even though we objectively know that we are all going to die, we don’t actually believe what we know to be true.

Becker’s work is important because of his astute observation that our obsession with not dying actually gets in the way of our fully living.

We are so focused on outwitting, outlasting and outplaying death, staying in our own Garden of Eden, that we make amazingly selfish choices in life. We set up what Becker calls “immortality systems” – non-rational belief structures that give way to the belief that we are immortal.

For example, we try to buy immortality by accumulating possessions and wealth, as if our things will somehow protect us when death comes knocking. We take on heroic roles in our business or our household: we think that, if we make ourselves indispensable, death can’t touch us. “I can’t die this week; I have a sales meeting on Thursday.”

Judaism suggests a different approach to death and to life. Rather than deny death, Jewish tradition instructs us to embrace it. Judaism teaches that we should live each day as if it is our last because we don’t know, it very well may be (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 153a).

Imagine, as God does in this parashah, if human beings directed all the energy they focus on not dying toward the more sacred goal of truly living. How would you fill each moment of every day if you truly knew and understood that you will never get that moment back once it has passed; that it is gone forever?

The psalmist declares: “The span of our life is 70 years or, given the strength, 80 years … and they pass by speedily and we are in darkness; teach us to count our days rightly, that we may attain a wise heart.” (Psalm 90:10, 12)

The wise person, our rabbis teach, counts each day and makes each day count. Knowing that our days are numbered helps us clarify our priorities and our purpose. Our most precious possession is not money or things: you can always get more of those. No, our most precious and finite possession is time.

Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life, and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived.” (Walden, reissue edition, Princeton University Press, 2016)

When Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden, the Torah records the very first thing they do. “And Adam knew his wife Eve and she bore him a son.” (Genesis 4:1) They have a child: the very realization of “I’m not going to live forever” is answered with our best attempt at immortality – progeny.

And so, a final question remains. Where is the true paradise? Is it in the Garden of Eden where no one ever dies and time is limitless? Or is it East of Eden, outside the garden, where every moment is precious, every decision is life-changing and the fruit, sometimes bitter, compels us to appreciate the sweet?

Visit complexities of Nablus

Joseph’s Tomb, inside the gate. (photo by Gil Zohar)

“The bones of Joseph, which the Children of Israel brought up from Egypt, were buried in Shechem in the portion of the field that had been purchased by Jacob.” – Joshua 24:32

“‘And he bought the field where he pitched his tent.’ (Genesis 13:19) Said Rav Yudan bar Simon, ‘This is one of the three places regarding which the nations of the world cannot slander Israel and say, “You stole them!” The places are the Cave of Machpelah [in Hebron], the Temple [in Jerusalem] and the Tomb of Joseph [in Shechem/Nablus].” – Bereshit Rabba, 79:4

There’s little inspiration to be found in the unadorned tomb of Joseph, the favourite of Jacob’s 12 sons. The holy site, located in the gritty eastern outskirts of Nablus among parched olive groves and graveyards of wrecked cars, is today a flashpoint between those who revere the site – Israeli Jews, Palestinian Muslims, Christians of all stripes, and the 600-member Samaritan community living on Mount Gerizim overlooking this West Bank city of 160,000. The traditional anniversary of Joseph’s death on Tammuz 27 (which fell on July 31 this year) is considered an especially auspicious pilgrimage time.

The group of 1,200 pious Jews, armed with permits and prayer books, arrived at the shrine in a convoy of bulletproof buses protected by the Israel Defence Forces. Most were Bratslaver Chassidim, who set great store in their practice of praying at the graves of tzadikim (righteous ones).

The IDF-escorted pilgrimage on the first Tuesday of every month often leads to riots. IDF sappers neutralized a pipe bomb hidden at Joseph’s Tomb prior to the visit of the 1,200 pilgrims and 12 Palestinians were injured during clashes with the IDF. The list of security incidents, arson and terrorism is long and bloody.

In the secular West, the story of Joseph – whose 11 jealous brothers sold their 17-year-old sibling into slavery in Egypt – has been popularized by the rock opera Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Librettist Tim Rice and fellow Academy Award-winning composer Andrew Lloyd Weber, along with actor Donny Osmond as Joseph, captivated audiences from Broadway to the West End with their account of Joseph’s rise to become the vizier, second only to Pharaoh in the Egyptian empire.

But Joseph, the hero of Bible and Quran stories, has hardly been given the royal treatment by Middle East politics. Dotan, where Joseph was thrown into a pit, called Jubb Yussef (Joseph’s Well) today is a ruined caravanserai that collapsed in an earthquake in 1837. Joseph’s tomb, enshrining the bones brought back from Egypt by the Children of Israel some 3,300 years ago together with the remains of Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, has fared better.

The plain one-storey is called Qabr an-Nabi Yúsuf (Tomb of the Prophet Yúsuf) in Arabic and is revered by Jews as Kever Yosef ha-Tzadik (Tomb of Yosef the Righteous). The whitewashed limestone building is capped with a cupula and protected by a massive black gate. Barbed wire crowns the looming walls. Signposts in Arabic and English indicate the nearby sites of Tel Balata and Jacob’s Well. None directs visitors to Joseph’s Tomb.

photo - Balata refugee camp — Balata refugee camp. *(photo by Gil Zohar)*

Tel Balata is the nondescript Canaanite/Israelite Iron Age stratified archeological mound that few tourists bother to visit. Jacob’s Well is covered by a 20th-century Greek Orthodox basilica marking where the patriarch camped when returning to Shechem (ancient Nablus) from Paddan Aram in today’s Iraq. In one of the Torah’s three real estate deals – along with Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron and David’s acquiring of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem – Jacob bought the plot of land from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem. There, Jacob pitched his tent and erected an altar (Genesis 33:18-20).

Some 1,500 years later, Jesus “came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the field which Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s Well was there.” (John 4:5-10) Drinking water, he chatted up a Samaritan woman, known in Greek as Photine (the luminous one; hence, the church’s name, St. Photini). Christian pilgrims flock to the site to reverently drink drafts of cool water from the deep well in the church’s vault.

Across the street is Balata Refugee Camp, administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Today the largest camp in the West Bank, it houses 27,000 people in a quarter-square-kilometre site that was designated for 5,000 refugees when it was established in 1950.

photo - Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s clocktower, erected in 1906 — Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s clocktower, erected in 1906. *(photo by Gil Zohar)*

Even for an intrepid, multilingual tour guide like this writer, it is daunting to find the unmarked way to the holy site. The drab building is located next to the Qadari Tuqan School, along a dusty unnamed road where only recently were sidewalks laid. The easiest way to find the landmark is to look for the Palestinian Authority police vehicle parked outside the locked gate. Then, one must locate the pair of PA police officers loitering in the shade nearby, smoking cigarettes and nervously fidgeting with their rifles. Ask politely in Arabic and they’ll let you in, no questions asked, no baksheesh (tip or bribe) required – just don’t mention that you’re Jewish.

Inside the locked gate, you’ll find a simple barrel tomb and the stump of a column of indeterminate age. There’s no evidence of the repeated vandalism that has punctuated the tragic history of Joseph’s Tomb since 1995, when Israel withdrew from the West Bank city, ending the occupation that began in 1967 with the Six Day War.

A photo from 1900 shows the well-maintained compound around Joseph’s Tomb. A carriage road facilitated the pilgrimage of pious Jews from the Old Yishuv who regularly came to pray there. The holy site stood in isolation. Nearby was the Arab hamlet of Balata, with eight houses.

The name Nablus is a corruption of the Latin Colonia Julia Neapolis, which was founded by the Roman emperor Vespasian in 72 CE. In the old city, in 1906, Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II erected a clocktower to celebrate 30 years on the throne of the Sublime Porte.

In the Six Day War, Israel captured the territory, which had been occupied by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan since 1948. Once-somnolent Nablus experienced a burst of prosperity, though today, under PA self-rule, the Palestinian economy is floundering. Expanding from a population of 30,000, the city spread out to swallow the nearby villages, including Balata. Joseph’s Tomb became entangled in urban sprawl.

Jewish settlers began to frequent the mausoleum. By 1975, Muslims were prohibited from visiting the site, which some claimed was the tomb of Sheikh Yúsuf Dawiqat, an 18th-century Sufi saint. In 1982, St. Louis, Mo.-born kabbalist Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh established the Od Yosef Chai (Joseph Still Lives) yeshivah at the site.

photo - Palestinian Authority police by Joseph’s Tomb — Palestinian Authority police by Joseph’s Tomb. *(photo by Gil Zohar)*

Conflict mounted following the Oslo Accords. Tensions boiled over in September 2000, in the wake of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. A full-scale battle broke out.

On Oct. 1, 2000, Border Police Cpl. Madhat Yusuf, 19, of Beit Jann in the Upper Galilee, was wounded in the neck in a clash with Palestinians at Joseph’s Tomb. Over the course of four hours, the Druze warrior bled to death because the IDF considered it too risky to evacuate him without a ceasefire.

A week later, on Oct. 7, 2000, the site was handed over to PA police. Within hours, Joseph’s Tomb was pillaged by Palestinian protesters. Using pickaxes, sledgehammers and their bare hands, they demolished the holy site. It was rebuilt by Italian stonemasons.

In the Bible, Joseph – the chaste and handsome prisoner – is wooed by an unnamed would-be lover only identified as Potiphar’s wife. Though many midrashim about Joseph are incorporated in the Quran’s 12th chapter, known as Surat Yusuf, the lady’s name is similarly omitted. However, within several centuries, various Islamic sources identified her as Zuleika. Among these medieval texts, the most popular was the epic Farsi poem “Yusuf and Zulaikha,” composed in 7,000 Persian couplets by 15th-century poet Jami.

The Sufi master regarded the story of Joseph’s temptations as an allegory for the mystical striving after divinity. In Nablus today, pilgrims continue to come to Joseph’s Tomb seeking that union. Alas, Israelis and Palestinians have not found a coat of many cultures to fit them both equally.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem, Israel.