Torah – Jewish Independent

Be sure to wash your hands

Before bed each night, our kids practise their reading, both in Hebrew and in English. We have a routine where I knit and sit next to a kid, listening to him reading his Hebrew Grade 3 stories, and their dad does English with the other kid. Then we switch. Recently, I’ve heard two separate easy-reader versions of the story about Hillel and the mitzvah of cleanliness.

For those of you who might not be up on Grade 3 curriculum, Hillel was a great teacher of Torah. One day, he is rushing off and his students ask him, “Where are you going?” He answers, “To do a mitzvah!” And they say, “What is the mitzvah?” And he says, “Cleaning is a mitzvah!” as he heads to the bathhouse.

In one story, it points out that Hillel was also trying to show that, in general, keeping clean is important. We should clean our fruits and vegetables before eating, clean our bodies, clean our houses, etc. This is obviously a useful lesson for kids. It’s good to know that Hillel taught us to keep clean. (I’ll need to mention this next time I’m asking everyone to tidy up their toys and things!)

Even in the Torah, there are multiple reminders to wash. While this isn’t news for Jews, frequent washing isn’t every culture’s practice. During outbreaks of the Black Death in Europe, Jewish communities were often spared because of their insistence on cleanliness, while those around them were dirty and, therefore, more prone to catching this illness. This meant most Jews avoided the plague (Black Death), which was transmitted by rats and fleas. Unfortunately, this also led to situations in which the Jewish community was blamed for the illness, because why weren’t the Jews getting sick, when everyone else was? Through the lens of history, we know why – they washed and, therefore, had fewer fleas and rats around.

In the Torah portion Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11-34:35), G-d tells Moses to construct a fancy washstand for Aaron and his sons in the Tent of Meeting. Essentially, being clean is part of doing holy work.

The weird thing about all this isn’t that our tradition spends a lot of time on how to properly wash and keep clean and, therefore, be ready for holy work. The weird thing is how often we forget to wash despite this information.

The outbreak of COVID-19 (the coronavirus) is a firm reminder of what we can do, every day, to stay well. We can wash our hands, with soap, with some frequency. You can recite the alphabet or the aleph-bet to be sure you’ve washed long enough. Washing well is not some mystical religious ritual. It’s essential to our health and well-being.

We can also practise social distancing, another tradition straight out of the Torah. Lepers had to stay outside the camp for several days, for example. This is not new information, folks! It was old news by the time the rabbis were creating our oral tradition, what became the Talmud.

The advice around a virus outbreak changes every day, so I cannot predict what officials will know or say when this article is published. However, disease outbreaks aren’t new. We’ve been wrestling with how to deal with them for as long as the Jewish people has been around. Considering things like skin diseases and leprosy as part of this, then, as mentioned, there’s information about how to deal with that going to the Torah.

One parallel that I can’t skip is – remember the golden calf? When Moses was getting the Ten Commandments, there was a mad rush to collect valuables and build the golden calf as a way to reassure the scared and frustrated Israelites. But it didn’t turn out so well. Acquiring wealth or idols didn’t help us avoid scary or frustrating things. We can’t know the future and alas, no amount of gold – or toilet paper – can keep us healthy.

The gold calf story reminds me of the reports of preppers, who are madly hoarding hand sanitizer, toilet paper, masks and other essentials. They are afraid, of course, but this illogical amount of acquisition causes shortages. It also gouges others by trying to resell these items at high prices. Of course, medical professionals haven’t advised anyone to do this hoarding – and Moses didn’t tell anyone to build a golden calf either.

We have to rely on the best medical advice we can get and do practical, everyday things to stay safe, like washing and social distancing.

I hope everybody stays healthy, but it would be wrong of me not to do my part in encouraging that. So? In the words of another famous character in our household, Ernie from Sesame Street, “Now everybody wash! Everybody – wash your hands!”

Some things just don’t change.

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.

When Joseph went missing

A friend recently went through a scary time and, as a result, I did, too. His niece in Minnesota, a young mother, simply disappeared. She went out on a date and didn’t come home. Her mother was with the woman’s children. When she didn’t know what to do, she contacted police, the story was in the media and the important, informal networks of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) swung into action.

Like many friends, I tried to pass the word along about a woman who was missing. Her family needed her. My friend couldn’t sleep. He worried. I worried. The worst part seemed to be not knowing how to help, what to do and what happened. Things seemed very dangerous.

Some in the Jewish community may say, this isn’t about me. They would be wrong on several levels. First, and most apparent, your prejudice is showing. There are many Jewish community members who have ties to multiple other communities in Canada. Yes, there are indigenous Jews; as well, there are many other cross-cultural, interreligious and inter-ethnic family connections of which you may not be aware.

Second, anyone can be at risk. Missing people and human trafficking are as old as time. When Joseph’s brothers throw him into a pit and then sell him to the Ishmaelites (Genesis 37:28), they’re participating in human trafficking and slavery. They turn Joseph into a missing person. His parents go through the anguish of not knowing what happened to their child. If you’re a parent or, heck, if you’ve ever lost a pet, it’s not hard to imagine this anguish.

Rashi’s commentary says that Joseph was sold several times. According to Midrash Tanhuma, he’s sold from the Ishmaelites to the Midianites and, from there, into Egypt. This description is not unlike what happens now to women captured in wartime. News reports offer similar stories of women enslaved today – by Boko Haram or, to mention refugees closer to home, Yazidi women who were enslaved by ISIS, some of whom have found homes in Canada.

Some believe slavery is a thing of the past, tied to faraway, evil people – like the narratives I’ve heard from Canadians about the American South. People might be evil, but they aren’t far away. This is a modern issue. Once a person is being trafficked, it’s very hard to break free. She’s possibly been forcibly confined, addicted to drugs, beaten and sexually assaulted. She may be hidden, unable to get help, and brainwashed by those who kidnapped her.

There are charities that work against human trafficking, and many nongovernmental organizations do, as well. However, I was recently invited to participate in a raffle. The business offered a prize in exchange for donating to an anti-trafficking organization. I got as far as clicking through to the organization’s donation page before I saw that it did its work through a lens of Christian evangelizing. Here’s what I found: “Agape International Missions has an incredible team of staff members and volunteers who faithfully carry out our mission, day in and day out. At AIM, we believe that Christ through His Church will defeat the evil of sex trafficking, so we invite you, the Church, to join us in this fight!”

Further, if you wanted to work for them, and you’re not Christian? Too bad. Here’s what their job search info looked like: “You should consider pursuing a career with AIM if: You’re a Christian; You agree wholeheartedly with our Statement of Faith. As the foundation for all we do, our Christian faith is a uniting factor among volunteers and staff.”

Essentially, this Christian organization uses an “us” versus them narrative, in which this religiously motivated group is all good. They are out to conquer this evil that happens to faraway (non-Christian) others. Sadly, if you change the religious ideology, I’m not sure Jewish communities are much different in how we portray social action issues.

Kidnapping, human trafficking, using sex as a weapon – many people like to think these terrible things don’t happen to “us.” However, this naïve view harms victims, perpetuating the idea that these things only happen to people far away or long ago, or who somehow did something wrong to deserve it.

Joseph, according to Jewish tradition, was our relative, a part of our family. His brothers kidnapped and sold him. My friend’s niece went missing this winter. This isn’t some ancient or distant problem. Some argue that, if Joseph hadn’t been his father’s favourite, or if he’d behaved better, this wouldn’t have happened to him – this is blaming a victim.

In Joseph’s case, he lived. He was found, and he flourished over time, in Egypt. My friend’s niece came home to her mother and children after a week. It’s still unclear what happened to her. It sounds like something like human trafficking may have taken place. We (helpers outside the family) may never know.

Every time a missing person is found safe, it’s lucky – but it’s not a sure thing. Often, many hundreds of people’s efforts go into finding someone, and keeping others safe.

If you’re sent a missing person’s information, don’t judge whether or not the person is “worthy.” Send it onwards. Just imagine if your relative or friend went missing – wouldn’t you want everyone’s help, without judgment or religious prejudice?

What is the worth of work?

Recently, I’ve had numerous encounters with middle-aged women. This isn’t strange. I’m talking to women who are a lot like me: dealing with school-aged kids, piano lessons, finding childcare, etc. What’s remarkable is that the same conversation pops up – about work.

One friend, an author and artist, said that she does the math every time she’s invited to do a workshop or a special event. Will the cost of travel, supplies and teaching preparation be worth the return? She’s often told, “Well, we can’t afford to pay you to teach” but, when she shows up for the single event she agreed to do for payment, what happens? People surround her, saying, “Well, if we’d only known you were coming, we would have paid for you to do a multi-day workshop!”

Another woman explained that she is only now, after years of staying at home, getting back to very part-time work in her field. Why? The cost of childcare would have canceled out anything she would have earned with part-time work.

Among women who juggle a full-time job with conventional hours, there’s an acknowledgement that it’s extremely hard to manage. In some cases, their partners step up to do the childrearing and run the household. In others, there are moms who are obligated to work full-time, be “on call” as the primary caretaker and either do, or hire someone to do, all the household chores. For many, this works because everyone’s healthy and they have support from extended family. In case of illness or lack of family support? Forget it. Of course, since these women do manage it, anyone who struggles is seen as “not as capable” as a woman who “has it all.”

This is a big topic, and it’s also (surprise!) a Jewish topic. We’ve been wrestling with it forever. In Exodus, the Israelites flee Egypt and slavery. Yet, in Exodus 14:12, the Israelites are afraid and they actually suggest to Moses that it would be better to return to Egypt and slavery (work without being paid) than to die in the wilderness. Lacking faith, they struggle with how they will be fed, and manna appears for them.

The first question is, what is the value of our work? For the Israelites, they were willing to live for nothing more than food and housing, as Egyptian slaves, rather than cope with being tossed out into the unknown. They didn’t value their work, and perhaps didn’t have the confidence that things could be different. Yet, when they take that risk, miraculously, their basic needs are met.

There are no guarantees. We can offer up our work for free – in whatever professional fields we’re qualified to do so – but there’s no surety that, at the end, we’ll have any offer of full-time, paying work. I see women doing this all around me. There’s an expectation that you’ll volunteer to offer your presentation, and you’ll also tack on free teaching, writing, editing, professional-level creative work or even childcare for others’ children. (Yes, I’ve been asked to do all these things for free.)

Here’s the second question. Is the Israelites’ manna in the desert the ancient equivalent of the “guaranteed minimum income” or “basic income” concept? At what point in modern society do we decide that everyone should get enough to eat? When is it acceptable to say, “Everyone should have a warm place to live, no matter what you earn or your special needs or other health challenges”?

In the Talmud, in Berachot 17a, the sages of Yavneh say that we are all G-d’s creatures, those who learn Torah in the city and those who labour in the fields. That both kinds of people rise early. Neither one is superior. Their work has equal merit as long as they “direct his heart towards Heaven.” This includes the idea that the labourer doesn’t presume to do the Torah scholar’s work and the scholar doesn’t presume to do the labourer’s. In this gendered ancient world, this leaves out women. Then Rav Hiyya acknowledges that women are offered “ease and confidence” because they do an enormous amount to sustain Jewish learning through raising their kids Jewishly and supporting their husbands who study Mishnah.

So, even in talmudic times, work was valuable and considered important, no matter what you did. Further, a woman who is doing “traditional” things like taking care of her children’s education or her husband is owed “ease and confidence” for her efforts.

Our work has meaning. It has important economic and social value. However, sometimes, when we compare our resumés, we feel lacking; certainly if we are being asked to do work for free. It turns out that we shouldn’t be expected to work for free, because our work, no matter what it is, is equivalent and necessary.

A more modern reminder: Martin Luther King, Jr., preached that all work is crucial and deserves fair pay. He supported the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike. To be healthy, we need trash collection. Garbage collectors matter.

There’s also no such thing as being out of the workforce. That dinner you cooked, the snow shoveled, the cleaning you did to keep someone healthy, the child you kept safe – according to the rabbis, if you do your work with the right intention, it’s all equally important.

I was recently invited by a favourite undergrad professor of mine to submit a short bio for the Cornell University Near Eastern studies department’s alumni page. I read some previous ones – doctors, rabbis, professors and others – and felt out of my league. Then I talked about it with my husband and thought about it. Being asked to share my work experience on that forum means, like the rabbis’ view of work, mine is valuable too – and so is yours.

The comfort in imperfection

We’re not perfect. Yes, and you’re saying, so, why is this in the newspaper? I’m writing this over winter break. Like many families, we chose a staycation. We’ve done some walks and games outside, and a lot of time just hibernating, resting and rejuvenating indoors. All the Chanukah treats were investments in this: new toys that our twins could play with for hours, books, warm socks – and a huge gift for all of us: my husband chose to repaint our main bathroom as part of his time off.

I know, you’re still thinking, why is this in the Jewish newspaper?

Well, first, if you’re a Jewish family who celebrates only Chanukah, winter break gets long. It’s a time when the radio and TV are full of someone else’s holiday celebrations. In a cone of silence, my family has always turned inwards, to hang out together. My parents used to joke it was the time of year for wallpapering. (My mom would choose the paper and my dad would hang it and curse about wallpaper!)

Aside from a much-improved colour and some very important anti-moisture paint, the bathroom fix-up also gives us a chance to seek comfort and self-improvement from within, by focusing solely on our household. I think my husband gets a great sense of satisfaction when he finishes a home repair project and feels it is a “job well done.” He dwells endlessly on the parts that aren’t perfect, and what might be better.

This is connected to the Torah portion Vayechi (Genesis 47:28-50:26) for a few reasons. This portion is very much about family, connections, our blessings and our imperfections. Joseph’s father, Jacob, is dying. Jacob’s dying blessings and wishes are both comforting to some and very uncomfortable for others. His need to include Ephraim and Menashe (his grandchildren) and to offer blessings out of birth order strike many as unfair. The rabbis discuss why Jacob crossed his arms and preferred the younger over the older grandchild. One wonders why he includes the children of his favourite child at all.

Yet, if you think back, Jacob has never been particularly even-handed with his kids. This is the dad that made Joseph the multicoloured coat. Joseph is the child of his old age. Jacob is unfair. He plays favourites, and this rubs us wrong as modern parents or family members. Dads shouldn’t play favourites, right?

When you read Jacob’s predictions (or blessings) for each of his children, some of them sound generous, and others are really harsh. It’s hard to imagine how this experience would feel from a modern perspective, it’s so out of whack with how we see modern family relationships. True, his sons have not been consistently upright people. However, at least Jacob mentions them. He doesn’t even acknowledge Dina – his daughter doesn’t exist here.

This story remains something I dwell upon because my twins’ Hebrew names, in part, are Ephraim and Menashe. Their dad’s Hebrew name is Yoseph (Joseph). Their grandfather’s name? Ya’akov (Jacob). You get the picture. Whenever we bless our kids on Friday nights, we say, in Hebrew, “May you be like Ephraim and Menashe.” Then we translate the prayer into English. We say, “May you be like …” and we use their English names. May they be like (true to) themselves.

When we reflect on it, we can see that, even among our patriarchs, like Jacob, we have imperfect role models. Jacob stole his twin brother’s birthright. He wrestled with the Divine. He played favourites with his children in harmful ways. He was by no means a perfect person. In a sense, this is comforting. No matter how crummy our mistakes or imperfect our efforts, we know that many biblical role models also weren’t perfect. Perfection may be overrated.

Our best hope is that we be true to ourselves – continually striving to seek peace and justice and pursue it, in a flawed world. We can commit to doing our best, within our own particular skill sets, to making things better.

As we start a new secular year, 2020, and decade, we have so many opportunities to reflect on what’s not right about the world. Yet, we can also gain comfort from the knowledge that imperfect people (and paint jobs!) can still make a positive difference for a long time to come.

Here’s to a better world in 2020 – imperfections, warts and all.

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?

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.