Amos Perlmutter Memorial Lecture, Daniel Gordis
28 de abril de 2016
Geniza Afegã
Page of the commentary of Rav Sa'adia Gaon to Isaiah 34, in Judeo Arabic (10th century)
(Afghan Genizah collection at the National Library of Israel)
The Afghan Geniza is a collection of thousands of Jewish manuscript fragments found in caves in Afghanistan. Genizah is Hebrew for storeroom. The manuscripts include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian, which are written in Hebrew letters. Some of them are 1,000 years old; they were found in caves that had been used as hideouts by Taliban. In 2013, the National Library of Israel announced that it had purchased 29 pages from this cache of document.
27 de abril de 2016
Klezmer
"Jegi Jegi", Sandaraa
Sandaraa has been hailed as “one of the most interesting and exciting things to happen in the New York music scene.” This new musical collaboration explores a vast repertoire of South Asian musical traditions blended with the sounds and sensibilities of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and New York. The band captivates audiences and fascinates listeners with their unique sound and inspired approach to musical and cultural synthesis. Sandaraa is co-fronted by one of Pakistan and Afghanistan's most loved vocalists, Zebunnisa (Zeb) Bangash, and Brooklyn's Klezmer clarinet virtuoso Michael Winograd.
Judaism is a 3,000-Year-Old Love Affair With a Land
Covered in prayer shawls, ultra-Orthodox
Jewish men read from a Torah scroll
during the Jewish holiday of Passover in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray,
in Jerusalem's Old City on April 24, 2016.
during the Jewish holiday of Passover in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray,
in Jerusalem's Old City on April 24, 2016.
On Passover, Jews all over the world
change one sentence in their daily prayers; instead of praying for rain,
we begin to pray for dew. For in Israel the time for the grain harvest
has begun, and if the winds blow and the rains fall, the grain cannot be
harvested and will will rot in the field. Dew on the other hand, will
moisten the grain without damaging it. That simple change in the prayer
marks a profound truth about Judaism that touches on modern politics as
well.
Twenty-five years ago I was returning
from a two-day trip to New York. I ran into my teacher, the late Rabbi
Henry Fisher. We began talking, and he asked me if I had changed my
watch to accommodate New York time. “No,” I said, “I kept it on Los
Angeles time.” “Why?” he asked? “Because,” I answered, “I would soon be
home.”
Rabbi Fisher then told me that that is
why Jews all over the world prayed for rain or dew when it was needed in
Israel, no matter where they lived. The assumption of Jewish history is
they would soon be back in Jerusalem. They kept their clocks to the
time at home.
It has also been a tradition for many
centuries in Judaism to leave a corner of one’s house unpainted, to
remind us that this is a temporary dwelling. We are here only until we
are gathered back to Israel.
Such practices remind us that politics
should not obscure a deep truth about Judaism—it is a 3,000-year-old
love affair with a land. Nobel Prize winning writer Shai Agnon expressed
this idea with his usual wit. Elie Wiesel writes: “Shai Agnon had a
marvelous word in Stockholm when he received the Nobel Prize. He said,
‘Majesty, like all Jews I was born in Jerusalem, but then the Romans
came and moved my cradle to Buczacz.’” Agnon recalls the destruction of
the Temple 2,000 years ago as scattering all Jews from their birthplace,
the place to which he returned in his lifetime to become a storyteller
for his people and the world.
The Western wall may be the least
aesthetic of all the world’s great shrines. But Jews coax the mute wall
to words by placing notes in its cracks and crevices, filling up the
yearning of the ages, reminding themselves that this is the heartland of
their history. Throughout unparalleled wanderings, it was always to
this spot that they hoped to return.
The realization of a dream, like the
landing of a plane, reintroduces the friction of hard surfaces, of
forces pushing against each other. The Jewish return to Zion and the
revival of Hebrew as a spoken language is an astonishment of history,
but it has also been fraught and painful. Yet anyone who questions the
Jewish attachment to Israel ignores an ancient, enduring passion. For
generations, Jews in every corner of the globe prayed for the land they
had never seen, that many would never see. But they believed their
children or their children’s children might one day walk its streets and
harvest its crops, for they remembered the prophecy of Amos: “For I
shall plant you in your land, and you shall no more be plucked up
(9:15).” Israel is home.
David Wolpe
26 de abril de 2016
25 de abril de 2016
21 de abril de 2016
20 de abril de 2016
19 de abril de 2016
18 de abril de 2016
17 de abril de 2016
16 de abril de 2016
14 de abril de 2016
13 de abril de 2016
12 de abril de 2016
11 de abril de 2016
10 de abril de 2016
In every generation
The night of the Passover seder is cloaked in an aura of sanctity and ancient times. The basic format of the evening is as follows: On the first night of the festival of Passover, one or more families gather together to recount the story of the Exodus from Egypt and to share a joyous family feast.
The structure of this celebration has its
roots in the original first night of Passover, when Israel left Egypt.
Such was its character in the days of the prophet Isaiah as well;
he speaks of “a night when a festival is hallowed” (Is. 30:29). This was
its basic nature during the Second Temple era, when the famed sage
Hillel would “wrap [the Pesacĥ offering] up with matzah and bitter herbs
and eat them together.”
Likewise, in the dark days that followed the
Destruction of the Holy Temple, R. Eliezer, R. Yehoshua, and their
colleagues sat together on this night in Bnei Brak. It continued in the
era of Yannai, the poet of the land of Israel who penned the hymn
entitled Az Rov Nissim while living under Byzantine rule. So it
was in the days of Rabbi Yosef Tuv-Elem in northern France, and in this
fashion its observance continued to the time when the classic song Ĥad
Gadya was composed, at the close of the Middle Ages.
This continuum of the Passover observance
endured not only in its basic appearance, but even in its finer details:
The child who asks the four questions (whether or not he can carry a
tune) voices words and phrases almost identical to those of the child
who asked those very same questions at his family’s seder when the Holy
Temple stood in Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago.
Thus, the Passover seder enables the members
of every generation to emulate their ancestors in an act of retelling
that is constantly reinvigorated. An eminence of yore lingers over the
rhetorical, ornate ceremony, each detail filled with recollections and
significance. Raising and placing down the cup, covering and uncovering
the matzah, opening the door, breaking the matzah: all of these acts are
parts of an established ceremony, perhaps the most ancient ceremony
observed continuously by Jewish people throughout the generations.
However, at the same time it should be noted
that despite its sanctity, ritual and ceremony, the seder night is not a
time of pompous, frozen decorum, of the precise and heavy repetition of
what has already been performed repeatedly for thousands of years. For
like the other Jewish holidays and festivals, each seder night unites
within itself elements of austerity with intimacy, sobriety with cheer,
and a set text with the possibility of endless variations and styles.
Although the external format of the seder is
fixed, it is not rigid. It is designed to accommodate changes and novel
interpretations, and this approach is even ideal. Not only have various
additions and new sections occasionally been added to the text of the
Haggadah over the course of the years, but the text of the Haggadah
itself practically beckons to be perfected by the seder participants
themselves.
In every generation, Jewish parents and
children must contemplate anew the messages of the Haggadah. The
Egyptian bondage and the redemption from Egypt are subjects that need to
be discussed. Upon investigation, we will find that many aspects of our
life meet, identify with, and collide with the Passover Haggadah.
Essentially, all the seder participants are asked to make additions and
improvements to the Haggadah, to “[tell] of the Exodus from Egypt…all
that night” — at the very least.
For this reason, there are no set, restrictive
rules that dictate how the Haggadah should be read, or who should read
it. If everyone agrees, the family members may ask the head of the
household to read and explain; alternatively, they may all read in
unison. If they wish, the family may sing the Haggadah, or if they so
prefer, they may recite it without singing. Whoever would like to ask a
question — the wise son, the wicked son, or the simple-natured son
— whether young or old, is invited to do so. And whoever is able to
answer, to participate in the discussion, may do so as well — the more
the better.
The seder night expresses the character of
Judaism in the fullest sense, as taught concisely by one of the hasidic
masters. The Torah teaches, “You shall be holy people to Me” (Ex.
22:30). When shall this be? When your holiness is human. Thus, the
atmosphere at the seder should not be one of irreverence or silliness; a
feeling of respect for the sacred should permeate it — but with
humanity. One is allowed to laugh; one is allowed to question; one is
allowed to have fun. The afikoman is “stolen,” the Exodus from
Egypt is reenacted, and this Jewish family, now celebrating the Passover
seder, renews its connection with the entire Jewish people, in all
their exiles and throughout all generations. We recall the past, give
thanks for God’s goodness, grieve over misfortune, and anticipate the
future redemption, when “for you there shall be singing as on a night
when a festival is hallowed” (Is. 30:29).
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
9 de abril de 2016
7 de abril de 2016
"The Eight Day", Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Our
parsha begins with childbirth and, in the case of a male child, “On the
eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised” (Lev. 12:3).
This became known not just as milah, “circumcision”, but something altogether more theological, brit milah, “the covenant
of circumcision”. That is because even before Sinai, almost at the dawn
of Jewish history, circumcision became the sign of God’s covenant with
Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14). Why circumcision? Why was this from the outset not just a mitzvah, one
command among others, but the very sign of our covenant with God and His
with us? And why on the eighth day? Last week’s parsha was called Shemini,
“the eighth [day]” (Lev. 9:1) because it dealt with the inauguration of
the Mishkan, the Sanctuary, which also took place on the eighth day. Is
there a connection between these two quite different events? The place to begin is a strange midrash recording an encounter between the Roman governor Tyranus Rufus 1 and
Rabbi Akiva. Rufus began the conversation by asking, “Whose works are
better, those of God or of man?” Surprisingly, the Rabbi replied, “Those
of man.” Rufus responded, “But look at the heavens and the earth. Can a
human being make anything like that?” Rabbi Akiva replied that the
comparison was unfair. “Creating heaven and earth is clearly beyond
human capacity. Give me an example drawn from matters that are within
human scope.” Rufus then said, “Why do you practise circumcision?” To
this, Rabbi Akiva replied, “I knew you would ask that question. That is
why I said in advance that the works of man are better than those of
God.” The rabbi then set before the governor ears of corn and cakes. The
unprocessed corn is the work of God. The cake is the work of man. Is it
not more pleasant to eat cake than raw ears of corn? Rufus then said,
“If God really wants us to practise circumcision, why did He not arrange
for babies to be born circumcised?” Rabbi Akiva replied, “God gave the
commands to Israel to refine our character.”2 This
is a very odd conversation, but, as we will see, a deeply significant
one. To understand it, we have to go back to the beginning of time.
The Torah tells us that for six days God created the universe and on the
seventh he rested, declaring it holy. His last creation, on the sixth
day, was humanity: the first man and the first woman. According to the
sages, Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit already on that
day and were sentenced to exile from the Garden of Eden. However, God
delayed the execution of sentence for a day to allow them to spend
Shabbat in the garden. As the day came to a close, the humans were about
to be sent out into the world in the darkness of night. God took pity
on them and showed them how to make light. That is why we light a
special candle at Havdalah, not just to mark the end of Shabbat but also
to show that we begin the workday week with the light God taught us to
make. The Havdalah candle therefore represents the light of the eighth day –
which marks the beginning of human creativity. Just as God began the
first day of creation with the words, “Let there be light”, so at the
start of the eighth day He showed humans how they too could make light.
Human creativity is thus conceived in Judaism as parallel to Divine
creativity,3 and its symbol is the eighth day. That is why the Mishkan was inaugurated on the eighth day. As Nechama
Leibowitz and others have noted, there is an unmistakable parallelism
between the language the Torah uses to describe God’s creation of the
universe and the Israelites’ creation of the Sanctuary. The Mishkan was a
microcosm – a cosmos in miniature. Thus Genesis begins and Exodus ends
with stories of creation, the first by God, the second by the
Israelites. The eighth day is when we celebrate the human contribution to creation. That is also why circumcision takes place on the eighth day. All life,
we believe, comes from God. Every human being bears His image and
likeness. We see each child as God’s gift: “Children are the provision
of the Lord; the fruit of the womb, His reward” (Ps, 127:3). Yet it
takes a human act – circumcision – to signal that a male Jewish child
has entered the covenant. That is why it takes place on the eighth day,
to emphasise that the act that symbolises entry into the covenant is a
human one – just as it was when the Israelites at the foot of Mount
Sinai said, “All that the Lord has said, we will do and obey” (Ex.
24:7). Mutuality and reciprocity mark the special nature of the specific
covenant God made, first with Abraham, then with Moses and the
Israelites. It is this that differentiates it from the universal
covenant God made with Noah and through him with all humanity. That
covenant, set out in Genesis 9, involved no human response. Its content
was the seven Noahide commands. Its sign was the rainbow. But God asked
nothing of Noah, not even his consent. Judaism embodies a unique duality
of the universal and the particular. We are all in covenant with God by
the mere fact of our humanity. We are bound, all of us, by the basic
laws of morality. This is part of what it means to be human. But to be Jewish is also to be part of a particular covenant of
reciprocity with God. God calls. We respond. God begins the work and
calls on us to complete it. That is what the act of circumcision
represents. God did not cause male children to be born circumcised, said
Rabbi Akiva, because He deliberately left this act, this sign of the
covenant, to us.
Now we begin to understand the full depth of the conversation between
Rabbi Akiva and the Roman governor Tineius Rufus. For the Romans, the
Greeks and the ancient world generally, the gods were to be found in
nature: the sun, the sea, the sky, the earth and its seasons, the fields
and their fertility. In Judaism, God is beyond nature, and his
covenant with us takes us beyond nature also. So for us, not everything
natural is good. War is natural. Conflict is natural. The violent
competition to be the alpha male is natural. Jews – and others inspired
by the God of Abraham – believe, as Kathryn Hepburn said to Humphrey
Bogart in The African Queen, that “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” The Romans found circumcision strange because it was unnatural. Why not
celebrate the human body as God made it? God, said Rabbi Akiva to the
Roman governor, values culture, not just nature, the work of humans not
just the work of God. It was this cluster of ideas – that God left
creation unfinished so that we could become partners in its completion;
that by responding to God’s commands we become refined; that God
delights in our creativity and helped us along the way by teaching the
first humans how to make light – that made Judaism unique in its faith
in God’s faith in humankind. All of this is implicit in the idea of the
eighth day as the day on which God sent humans out into the world to
become His partners in the work of creation. Why is this symbolised in the act of circumcision? Because if Darwin was
right, then the most primal of all human instincts is to seek to pass
on one’s genes to the next generation. That is the strongest force of
nature within us. Circumcision symbolises the idea that there is
something higher than nature. Passing on our genes to the next
generation should not simply be a blind instinct, a Darwinian drive. The
Abrahamic covenant was based on sexual fidelity, the sanctity of
marriage, and the consecration of the love that brings new life into the
world.4 It is a rejection of the ethic of the alpha male.
God created physical nature: the nature charted by science. But He asks
us to be co-creators, with Him, of human nature. As R. Abraham Mordecai
Alter of Ger said. “When God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’, to
whom was He speaking? To man himself. God said to man, Let us – you and I
– make man together.”5 The symbol of that co-creation is the eighth day, the day He helps us begin to create a world of light and love.
1 Quintus
Tineius Rufus, Roman governor of Judaea during the Bar Kochba uprising.
He is known in the rabbinic literature as “the wicked”. His hostility
to Jewish practice was one of the factors that provoked the uprising.
2 Tanhuma, Tazria, 5.
3 This is also signalled in the Havdalah prayer which mentions five havdalot, “distinctions”, between sacred and profane, light and darkness, Israel and the nations, Shabbat and the weekdays, and the final “who distinguishes between sacred and profane.” This parallels Genesis 1 in which the verb lehavdil – to distinguish, separate – appears five times.
4 That, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is why Genesis does not criticise idolatry but does implicitly criticise, on at least six occasions, the lack of a sexual ethic among the people with whom the patriarchs and their families come into contact.
5 R. Avraham Mordecai Alter of Ger, Likkutei Yehudah.
2 Tanhuma, Tazria, 5.
3 This is also signalled in the Havdalah prayer which mentions five havdalot, “distinctions”, between sacred and profane, light and darkness, Israel and the nations, Shabbat and the weekdays, and the final “who distinguishes between sacred and profane.” This parallels Genesis 1 in which the verb lehavdil – to distinguish, separate – appears five times.
4 That, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is why Genesis does not criticise idolatry but does implicitly criticise, on at least six occasions, the lack of a sexual ethic among the people with whom the patriarchs and their families come into contact.
5 R. Avraham Mordecai Alter of Ger, Likkutei Yehudah.
5 de abril de 2016
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