Always Volunteer...A Drash for Parashat Miketz, Saturday, 30 November 2013

My father, of blessed memory, once told me a story about his army days.  The entire company was standing for muster, and the First Sergeant stood in front of the men and asked:  Who can type?  My father, who had taken business courses in high school, raised his hand along with several others.  They were pulled out of ranks and, after the rest of the company was dismissed, they were led to the kitchen and set to work emptying the rubbish bins into trucks and then emptying the trucks into the rubbish heap.  Of course, when they raised their hands, they thought they would be detailed to do some light work in a comfortable office.  And the point of my father’s story was the well-known principle:  Never volunteer!

          Yes, never volunteer!  Surely you’ve heard that maxim before; we all have.  And there’s a certain wisdom in it.  Volunteer, and you’ll single yourself out for extra work or extra scrutiny.  For my father, it was a lesson in surviving the army.  But most of us have internalised it as a way of surviving life.  Never volunteer.  Sooner or later, someone else will.  And someone else will have to do the extra work.  But it won’t be me.

          I have to be honest with you.  I never internalised this lesson.  Not when I was in the military, and not since.  If there’s something that needs to be done, and I can do it, I almost always volunteer.  And I am far richer, in the only kind of richness that matters, from this proclivity to volunteer.

          When our children were young, we bought them a disc with kid’s songs, each having an important moral lesson.  One of them was, The more you give, the more you get.  When you give to others, you get back manifold what you’ve given.  Not necessarily in-kind.  More likely, knowing that you’ve done a good turn for someone else, you will get back in satisfaction.  I like to think that Clara and I modeled this mindset well to our children.  The way their young adult lives are shaping up, it certainly seems that they’ve taken this lesson to heart.

          That the more you give, the more you get is morally far better than never volunteer, is self-evident.  If you want the world to be a better place, you cannot just wait for someone else to do it.  You have to step forward.  Even if the task involves carrying rubbish, rather than something like typing.

          As our Torah reading this morning opens, Joseph addresses his ten sons:  Jacob learned that there provisions in Egypt, and he said to his sons, “Lama titra’u?  I have heard that there are supplies in Egypt,” he explained.  “You can go there and buy food.  Let us live and not die.”  The phrase, lama titra’u is one whose meaning is not self-evident.  Different commentators understood it in different ways.  I like the explanation that S’forno gives, the one carried by the Plaut Chumash, best.  He translates it:  Why are you looking at one another??!

          I have to admit, I am predisposed to think of Jacob’s sons as slothful.  Why wouldn’t I be?  They started out the Joseph sequence being jealous of their younger sibling.  So jealous, that they wanted to kill him.  As it ended up, they only sold him into slavery.  If they are capable of such wanton cruelty, then it is easy to imagine them as being slothful as well.  To imagine them as lying about while famine rages all around them and the family’s provisions run low.  Each one is looking at his brothers, waiting for them to do something about it.  It is easy to imagine the aged Jacob, who has his own character flaws, getting flustered and asking his sons:  Why are you sitting around looking at one another?

          I know the feeling.  As with Jacob, you could probably look at my character and find ample flaws.  But also like him, I cannot stand to watch people sit around, looking at one another and waiting for someone else to act.  When that happens, I usually just get up and do it myself.

          I’ve seen this inactivity, this looking at one another and waiting for the other guy to do something, everywhere I’ve been.  I’ve seen it in the military, and even among chaplains.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in a staff meeting where the boss had an important tasking for one of his chaplains.  He asked the chaplains at the table:  Who will take this?  And they looked at one another, afraid to open their mouths.  Until Levy raised his hand.

          Every new tasking is an opportunity.  An opportunity to stretch beyond your current competencies.  An opportunity to contribute to the Greater Good in a way that you might not have imagined before.  An opportunity to take a load off someone else.  An opportunity to shine.

          It’s natural to shy away from new responsibilities.  A lifetime of conditioning counsels, Never volunteer.  A lifetime of understanding that raising your hand is going to put more work in your lap, but often not an extra cent.  Yes, it’s natural to internalize the lesson, Never volunteer.

          But it is a blessing to be able to volunteer.  And it is a blessing to stretch your competencies, contribute to the Greater Good, and take a load off someone else.

          One can be like Joseph’s brothers, and look dumbly at one another, each waiting of the others to take an initiative.  But the brothers are not the heroes of the story, are they?  Joseph is.  Did he keep his mouth shut when the Pharaoh told him of his dream?  No, he interpreted it.  And then he advised him.  And as a result, he was elevated to a high position.  When his brothers saw him, not recognizing him as their long-lost brother, they described him as a sort of dictator.  Think of that term, in this instance, as a positive.  Joseph was calling the shots in Egypt.  Because he hadn’t been shy about raising his hand.  With all due respect to those who counsel us to never volunteer, I think Joseph’s example teaches us a far better principle.  Always volunteer.  Try it.  Shabbat shalom.  

  

What Goes Around, Comes Around...A Drash for Parashat Miketz, Friday, 29 November 2013

How many times have you done something to aggrieve another person?  How many times have you done something to aggrieve another person, and later regretted it because your ‘victim’ was able to return the ‘favour’?  How many times have you reveled at the chance to return the ‘favour’ to someone who had aggrieved you?  If you’re like nine-tenths of humanity, chances are you’ve been on both sides of this equation.  Because even when we’re not trying, we can easily aggrieve another person.  How much more so, when we want to!  And the person who has never wanted to hurt another, in some way, has not been born.

          So one person aggrieves another.  And that person, in turn, delights when he can respond in kind.  Either the next day, the next week, or many years down the line.  I’m guessing that, when you were young, you were taught not to aggrieve other people.  But chances are, your parents did not teach you so on ethical grounds.  No, their instruction was more likely backed by the well-known proverb:  What goes around, comes around.

          Everybody knows this saying.  It means that a person’s actions will ultimately have consequences.  And that applies to both positive and negative actions, although the maxim is usually used as a warning against negative actions.  Don’t mess with someone else, because ultimately, they may be in the position of messing with you.  So you can’t find it within yourself to treat others well just because?  Then treat them well because, sooner or later, they may in turn be in a position to treat you poorly.

          It’s an important principle.  It should be a motivator to keep people treating one another well.  But since there has been no recent pandemic of people treating one another well, we have to assume that it’s an imperfect motivator at best.  And the reason is really not that hard to intuit.  Poor treatment that is inadvertent or a result of a passing bad mood aside, people who habitually treat others poorly, simply feel superior to others.  They can’t believe that the ones they treat poorly will ever be in the position to treat them poorly.  Their contempt for the other makes them believe they are immune to others’ poor treatment.

          Perhaps that’s what Joseph’s brothers thought of their younger brother, the full-of-himself kid who dreamt of his older siblings bowing down to him.  When they saw him approaching them out in the middle of nowhere, where they were pasturing their father’s flocks, their contempt for the Dreamer was such that they couldn’t imagine their actions against him would ever bring serious consequences.  Well, in today’s Torah reading we see the brothers realizing otherwise.  And they don’t even yet know that Joseph himself is their tormentor.  They only know that they are being accused, by the ruler of Egypt, of being spies.  And they say to one another:  We deserve to be punished because of what we did to our brother.  We saw him suffering when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen.  That’s why this great misfortune has come upon us now.

          The brothers have come to the realisation that what goes around, comes around.  And this, without even knowing that it is Joseph himself who is tormenting them.  They realise that their sin against Joseph was so severe that anything bad happening to them, whoever might be making it happen, is well-deserved.  After all, they sold Joseph into slavery and told their father that wild beasts killed him.  In this version of what goes around, comes around, it isn’t necessary for the aggrieved party himself to be the one meting out the punishment.  The fact that they are being punished at all, is proof enough that they deserve what they are getting.  This is what our Hindu friends call ‘karma.’

            I like the principle of karma.  It seems right and just.  Imagine that, when I commit an act to aggrieve someone else, that that lets loose some force which disturbs the equilibrium of the universe.  And that equilibrium will be restored only when something equally aggrieving happens to me.  No matter who the actor might be.  We sometimes joke that No good deed goes unpunished.  In other words, it seems that when we do good things for others, there’s always someone waiting to hurt us.  But the principle of karma says the opposite and actually appeals to our sense of fairness.  The Jewish sources do not repudiate the idea of karma being part of the natural order.  But in our tradition, karmas decree is mitigated by our ability to repent.  Repentence trumps karma. 

          Joseph’s brothers, as we read in today’s reading, are terrified that they are being punished for their earlier misdeeds.  And because their misdeeds were pretty bad, they understandably think that terrible things are in store for them.  As we’ll see when we read from the Torah next week, that isn’t exactly the way things will turn out.  Oh, they’ll get a big scare.  But then Joseph will restrain himself and not send around, when came to him.  And why?  Because Joseph will see his brothers as repenting.  And he will relent in his anger.

          If you can’t be motivated not to aggrieve your brother just because, then what goes around, comes around is probably a good principle to keep in mind.  Perhaps it will remind you to treat others well, even when you don’t want to.  Because what goes around, usually does come around.  Not every aggrieved party is like a Joseph.  It’s something to think about.  Shabbat shalom.

Achieving Greatness; a Drash for Saturday, 23 November 2013

Guido Reni, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife

I think that I have revealed this to you before, but I really like the character of Joseph, son of Jacob.  He comes to us as a very capable person, but one who must fight and overcome a variety of demons before he can achieve greatness.  In that sense, I think that most of us can relate to him.  Most of us truly believe that greatness is within us.  Isn’t that true?  Most of us will in our lifetimes only achieve a fraction of that, of which we’re capable.  But almost nobody sees himself as being mediocre.  No, most of us see ourselves as having almost limitless potential.  And most of us spend much of our lives in a degree of frustration at our seeming inability to reach that potential.

          And when we ascribe to ourselves the potential for greatness but see ourselves not achieving it, we generally have two choices.  We can grouse about how others have denied us the attainment of greatness.  In other words, we can see ourselves as victims.  Or, we can look deep within ourselves and understand that we, ourselves are the biggest impediment to our achieving greatness.  If we take this latter course, that means that we have taken responsibility for our own destinies.  And that is a big responsibility.  But it also means that we have limitless opportunities.  Because if we aspire to greatness, and if we recognize that achieving it is in our own hands, then that means that we have the opportunity to achieve it, and nobody can deny it to us.  But that’s a big jump from me-as-victim.

          Joseph made that jump, and he therefore achieved greatness.  He was born with profound gifts of ability.  But also of vision.  His early dreams show us that he had the vision of himself that achieving greatness requires.  That vision, and that incredible self-confidence, of course, grated on his brothers.  They saw him as a spoiled little, self-centered brat.  Their father’s ‘pet.’  The one who, because he was their father’s favourite, would achieve greatness at their, his brothers’, expense.  On the other hand, almost everybody who has ever achieved greatness, has evoked in some others that spirit of jealousy.  Just watch how people react to a successful man.  There are always those who believe that success or greatness is only achieved at the expense of someone else.  I’ve addressed this mindset before.  It’s called ‘zero sum’ thought, and it is very popular.  But it is patently false.  If you’re curious about this phenomenon, I invite you to look back at the archives on my blog, to Yom Kippur morning this year, where I wrote about it.

          Joseph experienced many setbacks in life.  He experienced setbacks that would have set many of us to wondering how we could check out of life.  But Joseph did not react in that way.  Instead, he took his knocks and learned important lessons from each of his setbacks.  And each time, he arose stronger and greater than before.

          In today’s Torah reading, from the 39^th chapter of Genesis, Joseph has been elevated to the head of Potiphar’s household.  Potiphar, as we remember, is the man who bought Joseph from the slavers, to whom Joseph was sold by his brothers.  For a slave to attain the position that Joseph did in Potiphar’s house, was quite an achievement.  It was a position of great trust and responsibility.  And Joseph discharged it well.

          But Potiphar’s wife, Zuleikha, took a shine to Joseph.  We are not told whether Joseph encouraged her obsession in any way.  She is most probably a neglected wife.  She repeated begs Joseph to sleep with her.  But Joseph refuses.

          A lesser man than Joseph might have succumbed to Zuleikha’s advances.  And might have managed to keep the dalliances hidden without apparent consequence.  But Joseph resists his owner’s wife to the end.  Whether he does so out of fear of his master, or on principle, we do not know for sure.  But I like to think that Joseph’s stand is principled more than anything else.  Because through all his tribulations, Joseph offers us a picture of a principled man.

          In any case Zuleikha, angry over being turned down sexually by her husband’s slave, denounces Joseph to Potiphar and sees Joseph thrown into prison, ostensibly to rot for the rest of his life.  Since we know the story, we know that that’s not exactly how things turned out in the end.

          I therefore suggest that we look to that end that we know, for the moral to the story.  It would be easy to draw a simple conclusion about avoiding unnecessary contact with a neglected woman.  It’s probably a very good lesson to avoid any hint of behavior that might be construed as welcoming sexual advances.  There is certainly danger enough out there in that area.  But instead I’d like to use our prior knowledge of the story’s outcome, and draw a lesson about learning from life’s disappointments and rising above them.

          Joseph repeatedly made mistakes, and we can probably safely assume that he erred somehow in attracting the attention of his master’s wife.  And the reason I make that assumption, is that it did not send Joseph deep into despair.  Instead of wallowing in his misery for being victimized, he seems to have accepted his setback with equanimity.  He keeps his wits about him and is therefore ready to help the baker and cup bearer when they present him with their dreams in prison.  And to respond to the Pharaoh himself when he asks Joseph to interpret his troubling dreams.

          Take from this narrative a message about avoiding possibly compromising sexual situations.  But even better, take from it a message about seeing your greatness as being in your own hands.  Not in somebody else’s that they have the power to keep you from achieving it.  This clear vision, of seeing yourself being in control of your own destiny, is surely what separated Joseph from those who surrounded him.  What separates him from those not-quite-great of our own age.  It wasn’t that Joseph was any smarter, or more capable than you or me.  Rather that, more than the rest of us, he had the gift of accepting responsibility for his own fate.  Shabbat shalom.

Sex in Vayeishev; a Drash for Friday, 22 November 2013

Arent de Gelder, Judah and Tamar

You have heard me talk about sex without embarrassment.  Or at least, you’ve heard me try to talk about it that way, and hopefully succeed at times.  The attraction of two human beings for one another, for the purpose of, as the Torah euphemistically calls, ‘knowledge’ of one another, is a natural and important part of life.  The whole subject of sexual attraction, and the behaviors that it leads us to engage in, should not in and of itself be a cause for embarrassment.

The Torah has much to say about sex, as one would expect of a book that is at its heart a book about life and successful living.  But to some contemporary readers, the Torah’s concern about sex is jarring.  Because the Torah is part of ‘the Bible,’ and ‘the Bible’ is often seen as a book primarily and perhaps, exclusively about religion.  And in the contemporary mindset, sex is not the business of religion.  When religion talks about sex, according to popular thought in the wake of the Sexual Revolution, it is treading on ground where it does not belong.  This is surely because many believe that religion’s role in moderating and directing sexual behavior over the centuries had resulted, more than anything else, in sexual oppression.  And the sexual revolution was at its heart about removing any oppressiveness from our attitudes concerning sex.

So, the idea that religious tradition should have any influence over our sexual behavior, is today reflexively rejected by much of the population.  Even by many religious people.  The sexual ‘rules’ that one might collect from the Torah, or from the entirety of the Bible – either the Jewish or the Christian version – are seen as being made outdated and extraneous by The Pill.  By the easy availability of effective birth control.  If sex is no longer necessarily about making babies, then it is simply a matter of choice and religion shouldn’t really be telling us what we can or cannot do, correct?

But the Torah can be a voice in the creation of a sexual ethic, if we understand what the Torah is really saying at various key points where it addresses sexual behavior.  And therein lies a problem.  Religious traditions have, over the centuries, made a repeated mistake of misunderstanding the Torah’s message.  This has been done inadvertently, by taking verses and passages out of context.  And it has been done deliberately…by taking verses and passages out of context!

For example, in this week’s Torah portion, Vayeishev, there are several narratives that point to a need for rules and restraint in sexual behavior.  Tomorrow, when we read from the 39^th chapter of Genesis, I’ll talk a bit about the encounter between Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.  But first there is the 38^th chapter of Genesis, which tells of the hapless life of Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah.

Judah is the fourth of Jacob’s sons, the fourth son to be born of his marriage with his first wife, Leah.  Judah married a woman named Shu’a.  Their first child was a son, whom they named Er.  Er married a woman named Tamar.  After a marriage of a number of years, Er died, leaving Tamar a childless widow.  Onan was the next of Judah’s sons; Judah instructed Onan to marry Tamar in order to give her a child, who would then carry the name of his older brother, Er.  This practice, of marrying one’s brother’s childless widow to give her and the dead brother a child, is known as yibum, or levirate marriage.  But Onan wasn’t interested in fulfilling this obligation.  That being the case, there was an ‘out’ available to him.  Through the act and ritual of halitza, or release, he could have publicly refused to marry Tamar and freed her to make a child with someone else.  But instead, Onan marries Tamar and then, as the Torah tells us, spills his seed on the ground whilst having relations with her, so that their coupling would not produce a child. 

In other words, Onan practices coitus interruptus, which is a commonly-used method of birth control even today.  An unreliable method, I might add.  Unreliable because it requires a great deal of restraint to pull out right at the moment of ejaculation.  And unreliable because there is a small amount of semen present in the vas deferens long before the moment of ejaculation, and if this semen enters the vagina it could easily be sufficient for fertilization.  But it is a common conception that coitus interruptus is a safe and effective method of birth control, and surely it does work at times.

What Onan did, is represented as being evil in God’s sight.  It led to Onan’s death sentence.

Some traditions have taken these events as a Divine condemnation of the practice of masturbation.  This, even though masturbation is clearly not what is happening here.  But the connection has been made between coitus interruptus and masturbation, because both lead to the spilling of seed outside a woman’s vagina.  In fact, the term Onanism historically became a euphemism for the practice of masturbation.  Some religious traditions have thus seen masturbation as an offence worthy of a Divine death sentence.  Not to mention coitus interruptus.

But another possible understanding of this passage was suggested by my colleague, Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins of Congregation Emmanuel.  He suggested that the condemned act was not the spilling of seed in and of itself.  It was, rather, the sexual exploitation of a woman.  And I think he’s on solid ground.

Had Onan refused to marry Tamar and performed the ritual of halitza, that might have brought him some embarrassment or private condemnation.  But instead of thus releasing his sister-in-law publicly, he outwardly goes through with the marriage and then, in private, does not fulfill his obligation.  Whilst using subterfuge to avoid discharging his duty to Tamar and Er, Onan uses Tamar as a sexual plaything.  By outwardly taking on an obligation whilst clearly having no intention of fulfilling this obligation at all, he deceives all and has what amounts to a fling with Tamar.

 In this context, the sin of Onan is the deception that brought him to use his sister-in-law for a gratuitous fling.  This, rather than fulfilling a serious social obligation to her, to his dead brother, and to his entire family by extension.  The sin is not masturbation.  Nor is it, in and of itself, the practice of coitus interruptus.  It is the way that he deceives, uses, and exploits a situation.

Part of the reason why this is so difficult for us to see, is because the idea of yibum, levirate marriage being a family obligation, doesn’t resonate with us.  It seems at best archaic, and at worst repugnant.  It isn’t practiced by Jews today.  But some traditionalist Jews do practice the related ritual of halitza.  In our circles, both yibum and halitza are both seen as exploitive rather than as ameliorations of childless widowhood.  It’s an example imposing a contemporary sensibility upon the Torah, which was written and promulgated for an entirely different audience than us.  It’s why we have a tendency to reject outright any and all of the Torah’s attempts to create an operative sexual ethic.

But if we would take the time and effort to understand the Torah’s context, then we would see the Torah’s incredible wisdom.  And we would be able to avail ourselves of its wisdom, and apply it to the realities of our own age.  And that’s the tragedy resulting from our unwillingness to look beyond the text, into the context, and understand what the Torah is trying to tell us.  We close ourselves off to an incredible source of wisdom.

From me, you’ll not often hear a condemnation when we do not behave in specific ways prescribed in the Torah.  But when, in rejecting the specific behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions, we fail to try to grasp the Torah’s intent.  Then we in effect, throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Because there is sublime wisdom to draw out of these narratives.  Wisdom that can bring us much happiness as we struggle with life’s challenges.  May we have the wisdom to consult it.  Shabbat shalom.  

...All Others, We Monitor! A Drash for Parashat Vayigash, Saturday 16 November 2013

NSA Headquarters, Ft G G Meade Maryland

An agency of the US Government, for which I used to work, has been in the news a lot lately.  It is called the NSA.  The initials stand for ‘National Security Agency.’  The NSA is an agency so secretive that, until recently, most Americans did not even know of its existence.  Everybody knew the name and the identity of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, which is much maligned in books, media and film.  The evil, or at least bumbling, CIA field officer is almost a trope in espionage and military story-telling.  The CIA is a ‘villain’ that we love to hate.  But until recently, the NSA had managed to stay largely out of the public eye.  Its mission is signals intelligence:  electronic snooping.  Nothing particularly exciting or glamorous about that.

In 1982 James Bamford published a book exposing the NSA, called The Puzzle Palace.  Bamford had been a military cryptologist briefly, during the Vietnam War, before going on to earn a law degree and then working as an investigative reporter.  The book’s title is an affectionate nickname by which NSA employees used to call their agency.  Nowadays, they just call it ‘The Fort.’

The book was a mild success.  It was a popular joke at the time that more copies were sold to employees of the NSA, and military personnel stationed there, than to the general public.  That’s because the NSA was so secretive, and so compartmented, that most of us who worked there lacked much of a ‘big picture’ of what the agency did.

The agency is now far more familiar worldwide thanks to the recent disclosures by Edward Snowdon who continues to hide from prosecution in Russia.  I think that the US government shouldn’t pressure the Russians to give him up.  Spending the rest of one’s lifetime as a ‘guest’ of the Russian government seems like a far more onerous prospect than a period as a ‘guest’ of the US Department of Justice.  I haven’t spent time in Russia, but I did work for the DOJ as a prison chaplain.  Trust me on this one!

So now many of the NSA’s once-shadowy operations are laid bare for the world to see, and the world is not happy about it.  A revelation that has caused particular consternation among US allies is that the NSA routinely monitors the mobile phones of world leaders.  The Germans were recently in a tizzy about the prospect that Premier Angela Merkel’s mobile might have been one of them.

Reaction in Israel was much more sanguine.  Meh!  Who cares!  Countries monitor one another!  I laughed when I read that, because I used to monitor Israeli communications for the NSA.  People who knew, would ask me if I was conflicted on my job, but I wasn’t.  As we used to blithely say:  In God we trust…all others, we monitor.  And yes, even Israel!

In this week’s Torah portion, we see Jacob behaving in a similar spirit.  Returning to Canaan after a 14-year absence, he has sent spies ahead.  As we remember, when he went to Haran he was fleeing his brother’s wrath.  And Esau had every reason to be of a fratricidal mindset, given that Jacob had twice connived to get what belonged to Esau by birthright.  The spies reported back that Esau was coming out to meet Jacob, with 400 men accompanying him.  Tradition understands that this represented specifically a military formation:  Esau was coming to meet his brother with malevolent intent.  And Jacob clearly understood this as well, immediately taking as he did a defensive posture.

Jacob greets Esau

Jacob has grown and matured during his exile in Haran, his servitude to his father-in-law, and his ‘acquisition’ of two wives and starting a large family.  He still has his flaws, but he has learned to trust in God.

He has also learned that he must make peace with his brother.  As difficult as it will be, he must march up to his brother and take the initiative that might make it possible for them to live in the same land.  He knows that he is supposed to live and raise his family in the Promised Land.  He understands that it is God’s will that his progeny will inherit this land.  And he knows that the only way to make this happen, is to make peace with Esau.  Whom he fears.

So he sends spies to scope out Esau’s intent.  Because he trusts God.  But all others, he monitors.

Told unequivocally of Esau’s murderous intent, Jacob realises that he must nevertheless complete the assignation and face his brother.  But he cannot trust him.  So he assumes a defensive posture.  And then he makes exaggerated gestures of obeisance to Esau.  Because again, the fulfilment of his destiny requires it.  But he’s not trusting Esau.  For all his faults, Jacob is not an utter fool.

So he meets Esau and greets him deferentially.  And then he deflects Esau’s suggestions that the two proceed together.  He manages to diplomatically demur from the escort, fearing that it will ultimately lead to an ambush.  Because he trusts in God.  But all others, and especially his brother with whom his relationship has been problematic, he holds at arm’s length.

It’s an important lesson for us to learn.  We should make peace with our enemies.  We should keep the peace with our friends.  But we should never be embarrassed to hold people at arm’s length, at least until we have strong evidence that their intent is only positive and beneficial.  And this is a difficult lesson to learn. 

Just the other day, I opened up to someone and then later regretted it.  It doesn’t matter who, or what the subject was.  I simply let my guard down, and the result was not positive.  Most of us do this all the time.  We fundamentally want to be able to trust people completely.  And we believe that not trusting people indicates some kind of character flaw on our part.  So we open ourselves to undesired result by trusting people more than we should.  Even when, in the back of our mind, we sense that the person is not a complete ally.  But we treat them so, in the hope that they will be so.

Jacob has clearly learnt this lesson.  He has learnt it, in part from his own behaviour.  He, himself has not acted in a trustworthy manner, and as a result he hurt his brother.  And he has also been on the receiving end of trickery, from his father-in-law.  So he has learnt this important lesson.  He must make peace with Esau.  But that doesn’t mean he must trust Esau.  All reason argues against that idea.

Let us also learn this lesson.  Love your neighbour.  Assume good intent on his part when there’s no evidence to the contrary.  But don’t be embarrassed to hold him at arm’s length until you’re really sure.  It does not help to unnecessarily open yourself to being somehow hurt.  The next time, you’ll hold the person at far more than arm’s length.  Trust in God.  All others, view with just a drop of healthy cynicism.  Shabbat shalom.

Get It from the source; a Drash for Friday night, 15 November 2013

Some years back, I led several tours to Israel for mixed Jewish-Christian groups that usually turned out to be dominated numerically by Christians.  On one tour, we were in the bus and just past a particularly tense moment – I think it had to do with several of the group’s members not showing up on time for a departure from Kibbutz Ein Gedi.  It was also late in the day, and we were all tired.  There was a cloud of conflict that had settled over the bus.  Someone asked me to lead a song, and I probably hurumphed the idea.  So they took over.

          “I know!” a Christian woman shouted out. “Let’s sing Jehovah Jirah!”  And then, she turned to me and asked, “Rabbi, do you know Jehovah Jireh?”

          The name meant nothing to me, but even more, the title didn’t sound at all like that of a song I would know.

          I knew the origins of the word Jehovah.  This is what many Christians think we Jews call God.  When they talk about God and want to make a connection with us Jews and our relationship with God, they sometimes use the name Jehovah as a marker.  I remembered how, in a high school English class, we were reading the historical novel Johnny Tremaine, set in the eighteenth century, and one of the characters kept using Jehovah as a name for God.  Perplexed because I’d never heard it, I asked the teacher.  She was a lovely African-American lady, certainly a Christian.  “Jehovah?” the teacher responded. “Why, Donald, that’s what you Jews call God.”

          Now the sweet lady happened not to be talking to a Jew from the most religious of families.  But still, I had served enough ‘punishment’ hours in synagogues and had never heard the name Jehovah uttered, not once.  So I wrote off the teacher’s response to something beyond my comprehension and forgot it for a long time.

          Fast forward to Bible class in the second year of rabbinical school.  It was one of those afternoon classes that just seem to drag on forever, in large part because the professor was not always the most compelling lecturer.  With my Stuttgart Bible open on the desk in front of me, I fought the onset of sleep.  My eyes clouded over, and my head began to fill with questions as to why I hadn’t enrolled in law school.  Had I chosen that path, I would then be in the second of three years of study, but since I’d chosen to be a rabbi, I was in the second of five years.  Oy!

          So my eyesight blurred and I began seeing the Hebrew words appear to swim around on the page under my nose.  And then, suddenly, I focused on the Tetragrammon, the four-letter name of God that appeared on the centre of the page we were studying.  You know, the name Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey.  When it appears in a printed Bible or Siddur, it is accompanied by the vowels for the word Adonai.  Of course, that is an acknowledgement that, instead of trying to pronounce God’s four-letter name, we say Adonai, meaning ‘my Lord’ as a substitute.  So the three vowels of Adonai, ‘uh-o-ah’ are superimposed over the consonants Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey.  But in my torpor that day, I had an instant of clarity.  The vowels uh-o-ah combined with Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey yield Yehovah.  Seeing that clearly for the first time, I uttered in a low voice: Ye-ho-vah.

          “Just a minute,” the teacher said, interrupting the student who had been reading and explaining. “I think Mr Levy is having an epiphany of some kind.”  Dr Steve Kaufman, of blessed memory, turned to me. “Mr Levy, would you like to share your insight with the class?”

          “Ye-ho-vah,” I said, too excited to be embarrassed.  “If you try to pronounce Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey with the vowels uh-o-ah, it comes out Ye-ho-vah.  In medieval English, as in modern German, the ‘J’ is pronounced ‘Y.’  But because today we see a ‘J’ and pronounce it ‘J,’ that’s where Jehovah comes from.”

          “Very good, Mr Levy,” Dr Kaufman said somewhat sarcastically. “For that, I won’t fail you for falling asleep in my class.  The medieval Christians saw an early Jewish manuscript with that vowelling for the Tetragrammon, and they assumed that Jews call God, Yehovah.”

          “Why didn’t they just ask their Jewish neighbours?” I asked.

          “That,” the teacher said, “is one of life’s great mysteries.  Why do we usually waste time and effort speculating rather than ask directly?”

          Indeed, why do we waste time and effort speculating on what other people think, rather than just ask them?  It is one of the great mysteries of life.  Okay, in truth it isn’t much of a mystery.  But it is a bit complex.

          Part of why we don’t just ask them, is that we’re embarrassed.  Somebody will tell us something, and we’re a bit perplexed and don’t understand where he or she is coming from.  But we’re too embarrassed to ask for a clarification.  So instead we often let the opportunity pass.  And then we turn afterwards to someone else who was there, and we discuss what the speaker might have meant.  And in so doing, we almost never arrive at the full understanding that we would have achieved, had we just asked.  Because we simply cannot avoid superimposing our own attitudes and preconceived notions, over what the speaker said.  So, out of a mild embarrassment over not getting it from the start, we often end up with a complete mis-understanding.  But then the problem is that, we’re now convinced that we now truly understand the speaker’s intent.  So, we’re unlikely to be convinced otherwise, even if we subsequently ask the original speaker.

          But in truth, this embarrassment is only a small part of why we do this.  A bigger part is that speculating, rather than just asking, makes us feel much more powerful.  Think about it.  If I can determine through my speculations what someone meant in saying something, then I suddenly have the power to in effect determine what someone else is saying.  Look, we don’t do this deliberately, in a way that we can articulate that it’s what we’re doing.  But let me challenge you.  The next time you catch yourself doing this very thing, think about what I’ve said tonight.  And reflect honestly on why you didn’t just ask the person what they meant.  This, instead of discussing behind the person’s back what he or she might have meant.  And if you truly are honest, you are likely to realise that doing it this way has ‘empowered’ you to determine what the person ‘really’ said.  And thereby, to fit the person’s words into your own agenda of what you wanted his or her words to mean.

          As I said, we do it all the time.  Without thinking about it.  But whatever our intent or lack thereof, the result is the same.  We end up not communicating clearly.  And that results in interpersonal tensions that are completely avoidable.  If only we had just asked.

          So the well-meaning Christian lady on the bus asked me if I knew the song Jehovah Jireh.  Choosing not to respond immediately, I took a moment to reflect.  And then I realised that Jehovah Jireh is Adonai Yir’eh.  Adonai will see.  It’s what Abraham called the place where he almost sacrificed Isaac, his son.  At the last moment, an angel called out to him and told him to stop and not kill his son.  Holding his arm still, Abraham was startled by a movement in an adjacent thicket, and he saw a ram.  So he quickly took the ram and slaughtered it in place of his son.  Because he was thankful to God for not requiring him to go through with the sacrifice.  Because he felt that God had seen his, Abraham’s, devotion, and honoured it by calling off the sacrifice.  Adonai Yir’eh.  Adonai will see.

          “I know the words to Jehovah Jireh,” I told the lady in the bus. “But I’m not sure of the tune.  So why don’t you lead it?”  And she did.  And all the Christians sang along.  And it didn’t resemble any Torah-based song I’d ever heard.  But never mind.  They sang out their devotion to the God of Israel.  Even if they didn’t quite get His Name right.  So what?  Adonai isn’t really His Name, either.

          But had the medieval Christians simply asked their Jewish neighbours about the name of God that appeared in their Bibles, then centuries of mis-understanding would not have ensued.  And maybe those Christians would have attained some deeper understanding about the Jewish conception of God.  And maybe it would have helped them in their approach to that God.

          Directness.  Just asking the source.  Avoiding the behind-the-back speculation.  It’s a powerful idea whose implementation is long overdue.  But the very minute we internalise this and begin working at doing better, we benefit.  Think about it.  And learn to just ask.  Get it from the source.  Shabbat shalom.

Worthy Sacrifice? A Drash for Parashat Vayetzei, 9 November 2013

In this morning’s Torah reading, we read the account of Jacob’s love for Rachel.  Of how he loved Rachel so much, that he agreed to indenture himself to her father for seven years, for the opportunity to marry her.  And we all know the story.  Laban tricked Jacob into marrying Leah, Rachel’s older sister instead.  When Jacob protested, Laban responded and told Jacob that it wasn’t their custom to marry off the younger daughter before the older.

Laban’s response drips with sarcasm.  It sounds as if he thinks he’s reminding Jacob of a custom, about which the latter should have known.  This, despite that Jacob was born and grew up in the Land of Canaan, not Haran.  In any case, we traditionally read the chapter with the understanding that Laban tricked Jacob.  That there was no such custom.  Or at least if there was, it wasn’t something that Jacob would be assumed to know.  After all, when Jacob asked to marry Rachel, Laban did not tell him, “Okay, after you will have served me seven years…and subject to her older sister being married in the interim.  Since Laban did not respond in this manner, we can probably safely assume that he had in mind all along to trick Jacob, the naïve rustic, into marrying Leah instead.

There is a tradition that the Jewish custom of a bride being veiled at her chuppah by her groom – only after her groom gets a chance to actually see who he’s marrying – has its origin in this event.  So that a groom would avoid being similarly tricked by his father-in-law.

Laban offers Jacob the option of completing the week of celebration over his wedding with Leah.  And then marrying Rachel.  And then serving him, Laban, another seven years in return for Rachel.  When we read these words, it’s hard to hear anything other than Laban’s cackling over his having bested his nephew, the chump.  But Jacob is so crazy in love with Rachel that he agrees to the terms.

Chump or not, Jacob teaches us an important lesson.  About the power of love.  And the importance of sacrificing for it, when necessary.  That sense of sacrifice is hard to find today.  And unfortunately, the resulting loss is not, for most of us, especially liberating.

Much has been said about the sense of entitlement today.  And I have personally said some of it.  It permeates our society at every level.  It is easy to adopt a mindset that says, in effect, because I’m here, I’m entitled.  And it is easy to criticise it.  And I’m sure it bores you to hear me do so, as I do from time to time.  But it is important for me to say this, repeatedly.  Because that sense of entitlement is one of the major stumbling-blocks to happiness, in our world today.  If I’m entitled, and I don’t think I’m getting what I’m entitled to, then how can I be happy?  That’s the rub…I cannot be happy.  Since the entitlement-addicted never thinks he’s getting what he’s entitled to, how can he be happy?

Contrast this spirit, with that of Jacob.  Out of his love for Rachel, he is willing to serve his father-in-law seven years.  And then another seven!

We’re told of how Jacob was willing to serve 14 years for Rachel’s love.  We’re not told of how Rachel reciprocated.  By we sense that Rachel’s devotion to Jacob was as strong as his for her.  Because we know that a one-way devotion cannot endure.  We have another name for a one-way devotion.  We call it an obsession.  And we recognise it as being patently unhealthy.  So devotion has to be two-way.

When one makes sacrifices for the one they love, it is necessary for the partner to make sacrifices in at least similar measure.  If not at the same moment, then over time.  And love has the patience to wait and not ‘keep accounts’ of how much reciprocation is necessary.

What about tremendous sacrifice to one’s country, which we shall memorialise on Monday, Remembrance Day?  If the patriotic instinct is to be sustained, the soldier has to feel that his service is appreciated by his nation.  That the military command structure, as much as possible, is watching his back.  That the nation is ready to make good for him if he is severely wounded.  Or for his family if he is killed.

Service in war is not the only sacrifice one can make to one’s country.  Did John F. Kennedy not hit the nail on the head when he stated in his inaugural address to the American people:  Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.  (You insert ‘proper’ Bostonian accent here…)  Kennedy wasn’t talking only about military service.  After all, it was Kennedy who, in one of his first executive actions after taking office, established the Peace Corps. 

But ask what you can do for your country is not to be understood only in terms of the most intense and deep commitments such as volunteering years of your life to a specific kind of service.  In the way that we live from day to day, we should be asking what we can do for our country.  In small, everyday acts.  They are the only opportunity that most of us will have, to give back to our country.  But they are a very important opportunity.  An opportunity to be grasped and cherished.

Serve to others is a worthy enterprise.  It is a necessary enterprise if we’re going to reach our potential as human beings.  This morning we read the narrative from the 29^th chapter of Genesis, about what Jacob had to do to get Rachel as his wife.  It is only natural to read this as an account of the trickery of Laban, Rachel’s father.  It is only natural to read this as an account of Jacob’s gullibility.  I am proposing to you that we read it differently.  That we read it as a love story.  As an account of the power of love that would make Jacob agree to serve his father-in-law 14 years.  As an example of one man’s willing sacrifice for the love that meant everything to him.  As a lesson in the importance of being willing to sacrifice ourselves for love.  Because in reality, love is not possible without that willingness.  Perhaps your love will not require of you a sacrifice of 14 years of service.  But it will, at some point and in some degree, require of you a sacrifice.  Will you consider your love to be worthy of that sacrifice?  Our patriarch, Jacob, clearly though Rachel’s love worthy of a very big sacrifice.  Shabbat shalom.

War and Remembrance; a Drash for Shabbat before Remembrance Day, 8 November 2013

Royal Irish Rifles during the Battle of the Somme

About 14 years ago, Clara and I lived in England.  We lived in Beck Row, a tiny village outside of Mildenhall High Town.  People we would meet, mostly in and around London would ask us:  Where is Mildenhall?  What is it near?  Well, it’s in Suffolk.  And in truth, it isn’t near much of anything.

Unless, of course, the person to whom we were speaking liked horse racing.  Then, we could say it was near Newmarket, which is a big centre for breeding and training of racehorses.  Then they would understand where it was.  Or, if the person we were talking to was one heads out on summer weekends to the Norfolk Broads.  Then they’d recognise Mildenhall as the town adjacent to the Five-Way Roundabout on the A11.  The Five-Way is a driver’s nightmare on the A11.  I used to kid people that Five-Way was the name of a roundabout in England, but in Cincinnati where we had lived for a time, it was a way to eat chili. (Chili, spaghetti, cheddar cheese, onions and beans.)  And if we had been in California, there Five-Way would be…oh, never mind!

So we lived just off the A11, the highway that carries traffic from London and Cambridge, northeast across the East Anglian countryside to Norwich and ultimately, The Broads.  On a Sunday afternoon soon after we arrived in England, we got into the car and took a drive up the A11.  We wanted to see Norwich Castle, which is actually a medieval prison and a popular attraction in the area.

Driving up the highway just before Thetford, we came upon a very tall column, clearly a memorial of sorts, placed at the side of the road in a rural spot.  When we reached it, I pulled off into the car park to take a good look.  It was a monument to the sons of the three townships that meet on that spot, who died in The Great War.

Now, I knew immediately that ‘The Great War’ is what nowadays we call, ‘World War One.’  And as an American, even though we give it ‘world war’ status, in truth we seldom think about it much.  After all, appending it with the Roman numeral ‘I’ is tantamount to saying, ‘Well, it’s just the first chapter of a multi-chapter book.’  Americans tend to think of World War II was the real world war.  I knew that my father’s father had fought in World War I, but because of the spacing of the generations I never knew him well enough to ask about ‘his’ war.  And I don’t remember ever meeting another veteran of that war.  After all, the Americans’ involvement came fairly late in the war, even though it was arguably quite decisive to the outcome.

We Americans only have one major monument to the World War I dead, at least that I know of.  And there is a museum dedicated to that war, co-located with the monument.  But it’s in Kansas City, for goodness’ sake!  Who goes to Kansas City??!

So, being something of an armchair historian, I contemplated the monument on the A11 that day, and then I began learning about why The Great War weighs so heavily on the public consciousness in England.

Australians don’t have to wonder about it at all, because The Great War weighs heavily on your public consciousness as well.  And how could it be otherwise?  From a national population of less than five million at the time, Australian casualties of the war were 60,000 dead, and 156,000 wounded.  Such losses are staggering when you think about it.  They defined a generation.  They practically wiped out a generation.  So Australians’ consciousness of World War I is a memory of sadness and tragedy.  Of young men shipping off to fight a war half a world away, whose causes were murky at best.  Of the youth of Australia being cut down by the Turks in a place called Gallipoli.

But if truth be told, very few who are alive today anywhere, unless they are military history buffs, have a firm idea what the war was about.  And please don’t tell me about man’s inborn need to destroy one another.  Or the need to prove oneself superior to another.  Or the pride of Empire.  Perhaps all that psycho-babble is interesting on a certain level.  But I mean the immediate cause of the war. 

It was the murder of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist-or freedom fighter, whichever you prefer.  That hardly sounds like a likely cause for a war that set into motion two great alliances.  And eventually drew in all the world’s great powers and cost nine million lives all told.

That aside, it’s hard to talk rationally about the ugliness of war without advocating pacifism, but I’m going to try.  As you know, I am a retired military man.  True, I was a chaplain and not a combatant.  But that was only the second half of my military career.  Before that I was in intelligence.  I have over a thousand flight hours in real-world intelligence collection.  I was definitely a war-fighter.

There is a popular notion of soldiers itching for a fight.  For glory.  For medals.  For promotions.  To satisfy their blood lust.  It would be silly for me to deny that any soldiers display such attitudes.  But those who do are exceptional and rare.  Really, I can’t remember meeting a single one personally in my 26 years of service.  Sometimes military men talk in a jingoistic way.  This is a device for getting themselves in the mindset necessary for what they have to do.  But they very seldom really think that way.

No, the truth is that most soldiers, whether professional or conscript, loathe war.  Their first prayer upon waking in the morning, and their last prayer before retiring in the evening, are one and the same.  And soldiers tend to pray a lot.  No offense to my atheist friends, but the old saw, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’ does jibe with my experience.  That’s hard to understand here in a contemporary Australia where religious faith is definitely on the wane.

Anyway, the soldier who is worthy of the title, prays constantly that his skills and preparedness will be enough to deter a war.  Because when a war does break out, the soldier might be called upon to pay with his own life.  Or, face the rest of his life as an invalid.  Or at least, scarred emotionally by the experience of seeing others killed and maimed.  It’s the rare soldier who thinks that glory, or medals, or promotions are worth that.

So there’s no argument that war is ugly.  For the war-fighter.  For the civilian caught in war’s tide.  And for everybody else.  And that’s regardless of whether there’s a justness to the cause of the war.

But I keep coming back to what John Stuart Mill said about war.  And having been in war myself, it rings true for me:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

There are a lot of things I wish I had had the clarity of thought to have said first, and this is definitely one of those.  War is ugly.  But not having anything worth fighting for, is far uglier.  For a young man or woman to die is tragic.  But for people to live under tyranny, is far more tragic.

It is easy today, here in Australia, to take these words for granted.  True, Australia has been involved in two wars over recent years:  in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The former ended without making much apparent difference.  And the latter is now winding down to probably the same lack of tangible result.  And Australia’s involvement is so small – really Australia’s armed forces nowadays are so small – that few Australians are personally touched by the casualties of these conflicts.

And that’s why we need Remembrance Day.  Why we need to take even a moment to remember our war dead.  And contemplate the sacrifice they made.  And why they made it.  And why the country sent them to make it.

Now, Frank Selch and I are going to make a musical offering of two songs in a medley.  The first should be familiar to many of you:  No Man’s Land-the Green Fields of France, by Eric Bogle.  Bogle was an Australian of Irish extraction, and he wrote his famous song whilst contemplating the tremendous losses of The Great War.  Stephen L Suffitt listened to Bogle’s song and, as someone who was perhaps less reflexively anti-war, wrote a response that a Willie McBride might have offered.  We offer you the two songs to aid your own reflection as we approach this Remembrance Day.  Shabbat shalom.

(You can find the two songs, sung serially, at the following link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id040EEqbbE)