The Idea of Order at Mount Sinai

During the Yamim Norayim we often repeat and reflect on Exodus 34:6-7:

"And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed: 'The LORD, the LORD, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin"

This pasuk, also known as the 13 Middot of Mercy (Yud Gimmel Midot Harachamim), is treated at length in the Talmud treatise that deals with the laws of Rosh Hashanah. What interests me here is the Gemara on the setting of the 13 Middot: "And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed":

"'And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed' - Rabbi Yochanan said: if it hadn't been written we couldn't have said it; it teaches that the Holy One Blessed Be He wrapped himself [in a tallit] like a shaliach tzibbur [prayer leader] and showed to Moshe the order of prayer; he told him: every time that Yisrael sins let them perform this order before me and I will forgive [mochel] them." (Rosh Hashanah 17b; Hebrew English)

Rabbi Yochanan finds license in the anthropomorphic Torah line "passed before him" for his own outlandish anthropomorphic dramatization of God as a prayer leader wrapped in a tallit. But what is interesting here is the insistence that God doesn't merely teach prayer, he teaches the ORDER of prayer, the siddur. Why does prayer have to be ordered? Why does anything have to be ordered?

In his musar book, "Cheshbon hanefesh", Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Satanov lists Order (Seder) as one of the traits we are supposed to internalize and practice in our daily lives:

"This is the trait of order: allocating a set time for each and every thought and analysis [yiunim], freeing time and space for each and every affair in the world of action, and demarcating the bounds of each with set boundaries so that one not intrude upon the other."

Not only our prayers, but also our possessions and our actions have to be ordered. There is an implication here that this is not merely an aesthetic issue, but a moral one and we have to ask again: why is order a musar issue of such high order that God himself is imagined as coming down to teach it to us?

Sins are those behaviors that act to separate us from God. We sin by acting to turn away or by increasing the distance between us and God. And we can also sin by cluttering the space between us and God with objects and actions that promote separation. As Rabbi Ira Stone teaches, our serving God, the ultimate Other, can only be effected thru clearing the space that enables us to serve the signifincant and less significant others around us. Order acts against forgetfulness, forgetfulness of birthdays, appointments, plane departures, deadlines, mynian times. Orderliness clears the clutter of our minds and of the places where we live and opens up a space for teshuvah.

Gmar chatima tova!

Zinedine Zidane and the W(T)C

It turns out that not only does anger lose one's place in the World-To-Come, but it also loses one's game in the World Cup...

Parashat Chukat: Bringing the Living to Death

In Parashat Chukat we learn that Moses and Aaron have been condemned to die before reaching the promised land of Canaan. God's sentence is rather abrupt, since we're not really told what the reason is for such harsh punishment.
I found a very moving midrash that tries to mitigate this abruptness: Moses studies Torah in chevruta with his brother and breaks the news of his impending demise by weaving Aaron's death into the story of the world (all the mistakes in translation are mine):

The Holy One Blessed Be He said to Moses "Do me a favor and tell Aaron about his death, because I’m ashamed to tell him myself".
Said Rabbi Huna in the name of Rabbi Tanchuma bar Chyia, what did Moses do? He got up at dawn and went to Aaron and started calling "Aaron my brother". Aaron came down and said: "What did you see that made you get up so early and come here today?" Said Moses "I was pondering a matter [דבר] from the Torah overnight and had a very hard time with it and that's why I got up and came to you. He said to him: "And what was that matter?" Moses replied: "I don't know what it was, but I do know it's in the book of Genesis; bring it over and let's read in it." So they took the book of Genesis and read in it parasha after parasha and about each of them he said "He did well, He created well, the Holy One Blessed Be He and when they got to the creation of Man he said "And what can one say about Man, who brought death into the world" and Aaron said "Moses, my brother, you don't want to say now that the matter that brought you here is that we shouldn't accept God's decree?" And they read on [about the great things God did for Adam and Eve] and he was told "For you are dust" and Moses said to him "After all this praise it still came down to that [ie Adam and Eve were condemned to mortality] and Aaron said to Moses "And I who have ruled over the angels and you who stopped death, isn't our fate going to be the same? How many years do we have left to live? Twenty?" and Moses said "Less" and Aaron kept going lower and lower until he got to the day of his death. And immediately Aaron felt the touch of death in his bones and said "Moses, perhaps the matter that bothered you last night was about me". And Moses said "Yes".(Yalkut Shimoni, Chukat)

mydrash: the burning bush

וַיֵּרָא מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה אֵלָיו, בְּלַבַּת-אֵשׁ--מִתּוֹךְ הַסְּנֶה; וַיַּרְא, וְהִנֵּה הַסְּנֶה בֹּעֵר בָּאֵשׁ, וְהַסְּנֶה, אֵינֶנּוּ אֻכָּל

"And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed, etc" (Exodus 3:2)

When he saw the burning bush Moses asked: "How is it possible for this bush [sneh] to burn and yet not be consumed by the flames?" God replied: "Because the ground in which this bush grows is holy. Take off therefore your sandals, Moses, when you step on this ground." And Moses took off his sandals and stepped on the ground that the Lord had made holy and he too was engulfed in a burning flame that burnt him not.
When Tzipora saw him like this she thought to herself: "The Lord has turned his hatred [sinah] toward my husband and wants to kill him." She picked a sharp rock off the ground and cut her son’s foreskin off right there and with the blood put out the flame. Then Moses said: "What have you done to me, woman, cutting me away like this, for the Lord was with me." But she said: "A bridegroom of blood you are now to me." But the Lord said: "Fear not for I shall give this thing to you and your children and the generations of your children."

And what did God mean by "this thing"?
He meant Sinai.


(NB: the vision of the burning Moses comes from Simone Zelitch's "Moses in Sinai")

Korach and the politics of holiness

The traditional commentators have exerted great inventive efforts to indict Korach and justify the punishment meted out to his followers. But the very inventiveness necessary for these explanations highlights the difficulty of the matter: at first blush, it is hard to say what Korach did wrong.

In the beggining of parashat Korach, Korach the Levite and his followers address Moses and Aaron:"
רַב-לָכֶם-כִּי כָל-הָעֵדָה כֻּלָּם קְדֹשִׁים, וּבְתוֹכָם יְהוָה; וּמַדּוּעַ תִּתְנַשְּׂאוּ, עַל-קְהַליְהוָה יְהוָה..."
('Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them; wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the assembly of the LORD?' - Bemidbar 16:3). This is pretty much all we learn about the reasons of their revolt.

What is wrong with this? Is it not true that all Israel has been declared holy? and if so, why are certain people elevated over the others in relation to this holiness?

The issue here is subtle but crucial. If we look back to the end of the preceding parasha we find the pasuk about tzitzit, where God tells Israel:" לְמַעַן תִּזְכְּרוּ, וַעֲשִׂיתֶם אֶת-כָּל-מִצְו‍ֹתָי; וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים,לֵאלֹהֵיכֶם " ("that ye may remember and do all My commandments, and be holy unto your God." - Bamidbar 15:40). Looking even further back, to the first mention of the holiness of Israel, we see a similar declaration:"דַּבֵּר אֶל-כָּל-עֲדַת בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם--קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ: כִּי קָדוֹשׁ, אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם" ("Speak unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them: Ye shall be holy; for I the LORD your God am holy." - VaYikra19:2).
No doubt, this is what Korach is referring to, but note the difference between what he is saying and the instances he purportedly refers to: the Korachite formulation doesn't include the injunctive 'hayitem', it simply declares that everybody is holy. For the faction of Korach holiness has already been achieved and is immanent in each person in the community. The Korachite politics of holiness derive from this that the current hierarchical order is unbalanced.
Yet the state of holiness is not something that Israel had reached: they "shall be holy" if they accept the yoke of Adonai, perform her mitzvot. The grammatical particle that Korach drops has the form of the past tense, but it is injunctive and projective at the same time: it is a "messianic" future tense.
Similarly, Korach takes for granted that "the Lord is among them". But is he? He is when his people follow his lead, but there are times when Israel rebels or forgets or cannot take the hardships of desert and uncertainty any more. This is when they sin and then the Lord is not among them any more (his absence being the very condition that gets to be defined as 'sin').
So this is Korach's error, the assumption that each Israelite has already reached a state of holiness and that polical claims can be based on this state of affairs. It is no small error, and its punishment is proportional to its dangers. If you think that the consequences are overkill, consider this: even being swallowed by the earth didn't eradicate the Korachite faction. It kept living underground only to resurface in modern Israel in the teachings of Merkaz Harav that inspired Gush Emunim and the settlement enterprise.

patience and the WTC

I am greatly annoyed by the habit of some congregants to use the time when the Torah is read as an opportunity to shmooze in the back of the room. They are not showing respect for the Torah. If the service bores them so much, why bother to come to shul at all? Is it just a social occasion for them? If it is, take it outside, don't force the rest of us to choose between listening to them and listening to the Torah reading. Surely, they will lose their place in the World To Come.

And on and on. By the time all these angry thoughts have gone thru my mind I didn't pay attention to the Torah reading, didn't respond to the barekhu and most likely have also lost my place in the WTC.

"When something bad happens to you and you did not have the power to avoid it, do not aggravate the situation even more through wasted grief."
(Rav Mendel of Satanov, "Cheshbon Hanefesh")

kol hakoes...

Of the angry person it is said that he forgets his teachings (kol hakoes shocheach et torato).A variation on the same claims that being angry is like worshipping idols (kol hakoes keilu oved avodah zarah).
But is this so? Can anger not teach us something, in the sense of reminding us of something that we wanted to forget? Can anger not be a means for reaching to God rather than to the disconnection from God that leads to idolatry?