Andy Bachman strikes again: “regrettable” that Reform truncated Shma

Andy Bachman, senior rabbi of the Reform Beth Elohim in Brooklyn always has smart things to say at his blog, Water Over Rocks. I saw this post from him this morning about the Reform excision of the second paragraph of the Shma. Here’s part of it:

In Reform Judaism, for the better part of the last century, Reform Jews have recited the Shma while standing as a public expression of faith, doctrine, pronounced creed.  And Reform prayerbooks have, additionally, eliminated from the liturgy the paragraph following the Shma (the original Torah text of which appears in next week’s Torah portion) mostly because in its articulation of why one ought to observe God’s commandments, there is an explicit articulation of the Biblical doctrine of reward and punishment, to wit, if you follow My commandments, I will give rain in its proper season, God warns; but if you don’t, the earth you hope to cultivate for sustenance will not yield its fruit in its proper season.

It’s always struck me as a regrettable loss that the early Reformers excised such ideas, depriving generations of Reform Jews the opportunity to engage prayer and Torah text as metaphor, and especially in our own day with fears and threats of global warming, of engaging the notion of how we treat the earth with a sense of the sacred.

Here’s the rest of it.

If I stick my foot in my mouth and there is no one around, do I still make an ass out of myself?

Last week, in the first of what is quickly becoming a lot of posts about Beth El of South Orange, NJ, I incorrectly identified one of the service leaders as “Abigail, who I’m guessing is like 15 years old.”

She pointed out to me during services yesterday that she is not Abigail, but Sharon. And that she is 20, not 15. For a 22-year-old who still doesn’t need to shave every single day to look clean-shaven, that’s quite an idiotic assumption on my part.

I apologized to Sharon when she pointed it out to me and then made fun of myself a little bit. I thought I’d go ahead and do that here too. I’ve also corrected the original post.

The good news is that I didn’t pull the name Abigail totally out of my ass. Sharon’s younger sister is named Abigail and she is–you guessed it–actually 15. She’s also, like her sisters, an accomplished Torah reader.

In other news, I’m on a train to Baltimore right now. From there, it’s on to whatever The Conversation NY is. While I’m there, I hope to figure out why something called The Conversation NY is being held in a place that is decidedly not New York.

I’m back in Jersey on the 14th. The next day, it’s off to Austin for about 10 days.

Shavua tov.

Book notes | “Jewish Literacy” #112, Baruch Spinoza

Since the beginning of last semester, “Jewish Literacy,” the tome of short entries on everything a Jew should know by Joseph Telushkin, has been my bathroom book. It’s perfectly suited to that because it’s dived into one- to three-page summaries of each topic.

In entry #112, Baruch Spinoza, Telushkin writes (emphasis mine):

Spinoza’s excommunication by the rabbis of Amsterdam when he was in his mid-twenties was caused by his denial of angels, the immortality of the soul, and God’s authorship of the Torah. Communal leaders warned Spinoza the desist from such heresies, and when the warnings went unheeded, they issued this ban: “Cursed shall he be when he goes out and cursed shall he be when comes in. May the Lord not forgive his sins. May the Lord’s anger and wrath rage against this man, and cast upon him all the curses that are written in the Torah. May the Lord wipe his name out from under the Heavens; and may the Lord destroy him and cast him from all the tribes of Israel…”

Which is darkly hilarious, if you think about it. Today, Spinoza is widely studied and known, both by Jews and non-Jews. His name is far from wiped out? But who can name any of the rabbis that excommunicated him?

Shabbat Shalom.

Limmud NY Notes: Mahzor Lev Shalem with one of its editors

I went to Limmud NY 2011 and wrote a lot of posts about it. Here’s a guide to them.

Rob Scheinberg rolled in for the Sunday of Limmud NY only. I hope he comes back next year for the full conference. He did a session called “Praying with a Full Heart: Mahzor Lev Shalem | Encountering the ‘Next-Gen’ Prayerbook.”

Mahzor Lev Shalem, left and Machzor Eit Ratzon, right

I arrived to the session early and was about to introduce myself to him when he looked at my conference name badge and said, “I just read your review of mahzor. And I just bought Machzor Eit Ratzon on your recommendation.” (BTW, you can buy MER too, if you click here.) And then I totally regret not having brought MLS with me for him to sign.

Here are my notes, with minimal enhancement:

Rob Scheinberg:

• He was on the Rabbinical Assembly’s editorial committee of MLS, “junior member of sorts” he says
• He is at the only shul in Hoboken, the United Synagogue of Hoboken
• He also teaches liturgy at JTS, where he is working on a PhD in liturgy

My kind of dude: One guy in the session, Mat, called himself a “High Holy Days junkie”

The best: MLS, as I’ve said here before, is my favorite machzor. One older gentleman in the session said that he thought that MLS “raised the bar” for machzorim. I’m not the only one who thinks it’s the machzor to beat now.

The title: We talked a lot about the title of the machzor. “It wasn’t until May 2009 that we considered titles,” Rob said. “Over time, we realized just how well this title works.”

Harlow: Rob talked a lot about the Jules Harlow machzor, the Conservative movement’s previous machzor. “My shul has used this for 15 years. We do a lot of gender neutrifying on the fly!” Rob said that he believes that siddurim (and machzorim) have a shelf life of about 30 or 40 years. This is a pretty good assessment. Gates of Prayer in 1973, replaced by Mishkan T’filah in 2007. Silverman siddur in 1946 (ish? I don’t recall exactly right now) replaced by Sim Shalom in 1985 (ish?). In this case, Harlow was from the 70s, so MLS is right on schedule.

The name is so good because: Rob cites four ways of using the term Lev Shalem:

1. “With joy,” “With devotion:” Isaiah 38:2; I Chron. 28:9; I Chron. 29:9
2. “With a heart united with the hearts of others:” I Chron. 12:38; HHD Amidah “Uv’chen ten pachdecha”
3. “With a hear that is united, not divided:” Menachem Mendel of Kotzk; comment from Jacob Emden in Siddur Amudei Shamayimbased on Mishna Berachot 9:5
4. “With kavvanah (prayerful intention):” Mishnah Taanit 2:2; Midrash Tanhuma Pinhas 15

• Yetzer Hara and the film “Serenity:” In discussing what it means to have a heart that is united, Rob discussed uniting the Yetzer Hara and Yetzer Hatov, best translated here as the “inclination toward the self” and “the inclination toward others.” He tells a story from Talmud where the rabbis capture the Yetzer Hara and put it in a cage. But they have to let it go because no one is doing anything and the chickens aren’t even laying eggs. It immediately struck me that this is also the plot of the film “Serenity.” My brain then began planning a combo text study/”Firefly” and “Serenity” viewing session.

Reflecting diversity in the machzor: Copied from Rob’s handouts:

• Geographical/cultural diversity:
  • Spanish piyyutim:
    • For Erev Rosh Hashanah, p. 2
    • For Erev Yom Kippur, p. 231
      • By Solomon ibn Gabirol!
  • Italian piyyutim:
    • For Erev Yom Kippur, p. 230
    • For Avodah, p. 329
    • For Neilah, p. 418
  • Yiddish poetry:
    • For Eleh Ezkerah, p. 341-341 (Jacob Glatstein)
  • Ladino prayer:
    • For Erev Rosh Hashanah at home, p. 30
• Gender:
  • “Hannah, sad and depressed,” p. 239 and various other locations
  • Hu Yaaneinu, “May the One who answered…” p. 240
  • Hineni “I stand,” p. 140
    • About this one, Rob notes that this is the only place in the liturgy where the gender of the prayer leader him/herself is at issue.
    • Yet, points out a Yeshivat Hadar Fellow named Hannah something (also mentioned here), the male version of Hineni is still on the right–or “default”–side of the page. I point out that this hearkens back to the editions of Sim Shalom that include Avot and with Imahot on separate pages, one after the other
• Diversity of life circumstances:
  • Prayer for those unable to fast, p. 200
    • Dad, I’m looking at you
  • Yizkor meditation when remembering a hurtful parent (Certain other people, I’m looking at you)
  • Prayers for caregivers, economic challenges, emotional challenges, p. 115-116
  • Heschel reading on religious universalism, p. 87

The wholeness of our tradition (also from his handout):

• Alternative Avinu Malkeinu, p. 93
  • MLS contains two versions: the usual and an alternative version. The alternative version uses and an aleph-betic acrostic of different ways to refer to God from the Tanach in place of Avinu Malkeinu in each line, which Rob mentions when I say that I’m surprised that the word Imeinu isn’t in it. At the end of the alt. version, it returns to Avinu Malkeinu language for a few lines as a return to the dominant theological metaphor of the season. Rob himself points out that Shechinateinu, also a fem. metaphor is missing from the alt. version and that Ed Feld, head of the MLS cmte wrote this version.
  • The older guy from earlier chimes in to say that this alt. Av.Malk. wouldn’t have flown shortly post-Holocaust, when Harlow was composing his machzor. Rob says, “Harlow is the the primary document for post-Holocaust Conservative theology.”
• Comment on doubt opposition V’Khol Maaminim, p. 320
  • I think it’s way cool to have a piece on doubt, a major theme in Jewish theology, opposite a piece titled “We all believe!”
• Denise Levertov poem, “The Thread,” opposite Melekh Elyon, p. 155
• Admiel Kosman poem on Unetaneh Tokef, p. 144
• Merle Feld poem for Kol Nidre, p. 204
• Torah reading commentary, p. 100

Layout:

• I wrote this next bit down just for you, Larry Kaufman. Upon looking at a copy of MLS for the first time, Mat says, “I was struck by how much the layout resembles Mishkan T’filah.” Indeed. Rob says that this was not intentional, but noted that the two groups were aware of each other as they worked.
• He also showed us his new copy of Machzor Eit Ratzon, which has a similar layout also. MER has four columns: commentary, translation, transliteration and Hebrew. MLS has a more flexible layout, but it’s similar. It’s also more flexible, but similar to MT.
• He noted, very interestingly, that their choice to put the commentary around the sides and the bottom was twofold: On the one hand, it causes the pages to resemble a classical Jewish text like the Talmud more closely than any other liturgy I’ve seen, and on the other hand, it places the commentary in a place of increased importance. This is as opposed to MT or ArtScroll, which places liturgical commentary at the bottom of the page only.

Translation and translation: Pay close attention here folks. Rob said that the Conservative approach to problematic liturgy in the past, up to and including Sim Shalom, was to translate around problematic passages. He said that the editors of MLS categorically rejected that approach. He said it is played out, it doesn’t work and it’s not respectful of the users. On a similar note, he said the Conservative attempt to force Jews to learn Hebrew by depriving them of transliteration had not worked and that they had given up. “That strategy has failed,” he said. However, because of space and layout concerns, they hadn’t included a full transliteration in MLS, though they did include much more translit than Harlow and SS.

Limmud NY Notes: An alternate Kiddush

I went to Limmud NY 2011 and wrote a lot of posts about it. Here’s a guide to them.

I’m at Limmud NY 2011! Here are some notes from a session called Creating an Egalitarian Day for God, taught by William Friedman. I have a more full set of notes on the session over at Jewschool, but this bit is very liturgy-centric, so I’m posting it here at The Shuckle.

So Friedman, by way of introducing Deut. 5, mentioned that it’s a great text on Shabbat and that he wishes we used it in some ritual context–other than reading it on the week that it’s read, obviously. he said:

If I were a braver person, I’d start saying this at Kiddush every week.

Which is cool. Here’s the passage he was referring to:

Deut. 5

(12) Six days shall you work and do all of your labor.

(13) The seventh day is a Sabbath to Adonai your God; do not labor on it, neither you nor your son, daughter, male-servant, female-servant, ox, donkey, any of your animals, nor the stranger in your gates–in order that you male- and female-servant may rest like you.

(14) Remember that you were servants in the land of Egypt, and that Adonai your God brought you out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm; thus Adonai your God commanded you to do the Sabbath day.

Daily blessings–I have some questions

I’ve got a few questions. Any answers, half-answers, comments on a similar theme, etc are welcome in the comments.

1. When did morning blessings get moved into communal prayer?

I know that the bulk of Birchot Hashachar was once–some of it still is–said in the home as one performed a variety of daily actions. So at what point and with what motivation did it get moved into the service and out of the home?

2. Is there any support for saying “…al netilat yadayim” when washing one’s hands for sanitary, rather than ritual purposes?

Surely some have argued that a reason for ritual hand washing is rudimentary sanitation. I know it’s been said that the relative health of Jews during the Black Plague can be attributed to regular hand washing. I’m wondering if there’s any support for using the same brachah when washing one’s hand from a sink–meaning, without pouring water over your hands from a cup–with soap.

3. Is there anyone out there thinking about new blessings or new applications of extant blessings for elements of the modern daily routine?

I’m thinking about taking daily medications, showering, brushing teeth etc.

Thoughts, anyone? Answers? Tangents?

Annual Tzitzit check-up

It’s been four years and one month since I started wearing tzitzit daily. A few times a year, I do a little check-up on my tzitzit practice here at The Shuckle.

The latest is actually a comment that I just wrote in response to a comment on this recent post about the TSA and tzitzit.

Isak BK Aasvestad asked:

David,

Why do you refuse to wear s kippah?

Don’t you get weird looks from other Jews trying to figure out a guy who wears tzitzit out, but goes bareheaded? (I’m not saying that avoiding weird looks is a reason in itself to wear a kippah, but to me the two goes together like a horse and carriage…)

And my response was:

Reason #1: I hate being told what to do. No one will ever tell you to use this siddur, not that one you brought with you. No one will ever tell you that you can’t daven in this community or that community if you don’t have tzitzit on. There is no reason I can find as to why this ritual, out of all of the Jewish rituals out there, has become a line in the sand. Yet, kippot have come to occupy a bizarre emblematic place in Jewish life, which leads me to the second reason….

Reason #2: The kippah seems to occupy a mere symbolic place in Jewish life. Despite what everyone says about being reminded that God is above you, there is no consensus on the historical reason for kippot. I don’t like doing things for no reason. And if the only reason we can come up with is that kippot symbolize God’s location at a higher altitude than us, then I am not interested in engaging with this ritual. It becomes a theological absurdity.

And as for the notion that kippah and tzitzit are a natural pair, let’s consider first that they have no relationship whatsoever, except that both are articles of clothing. One is a biblical injunction, the other a minhag–albeit a minhag with tremendous traction. (But, given my distaste for the literal application of minhag hu halachah, I’m not interested.)

Isak, it is interesting that you think the two articles of clothing are tied together. Most Jews I meet think it’s totally ordinary–whether they think it good or not–to wear a kippah, but not tzitzit. So it’s normative, in the collective Jewish consciousness, to engage in a particular minhag, but to ignore a full-fledged law that bears a resemblance to the minhag. That brings me to my third reason….

Reason #3: Not only do I not think that there’s a whole lot in the discussion of tzitzit and kippot that makes no sense, but I also think that people have an obligation to point out things to make no sense. So, in wearing tzitzit, but no kippah, I am a living testament to why the whole thing makes no sense.

As an aside, on this historic occasion of my four-years-and-a-little-more-than-one-month anniversary, here is the best of my tzitzit-related blogging, starting with the post I wrote on the first day that I wore them:

Jewish weddings don’t need God

Crossposted to Jewschool.

How did the creation of this new blog, JTA’s The Life Cyclist, pass me by?

At The Life Cyclist, Dasee Berkowitz (full disclosure–I know her) writes:

As a Jewish life cycle consultant who guides couples and families toward creating meaningful ceremonies, I am presented with all sorts of creative, sometimes puzzling requests from couples planning their weddings.

One client had a particularly interesting request — a Jewish wedding ceremony that left God out of it.

Apparently, the couple in question are scientists–which Dasee informs us of as though that should explain why they’re atheists, reinforcing a dichotomy I’m far from comfortable with. The point is, the are atheists, but they both feel connected to their Jewish heritage. They want a Jewish wedding, but they want God to stay out of it.

Their request made me wonder: While adapting a Jewish life cycle event to reflect a couples’ lived values makes the event meaningful for them, does altering it by leaving God out undermine what makes it Jewish in the first place?

Maybe this an obvious question to many, but to me it seems odd. Is the presence of God in a wedding ceremony what makes it Jewish? Obviously, that can’t be the only thing that makes it Jewish. Many wedding ceremonies involving non-Jews include God. So that must not be Berkowitz’s point.

I’d argue that what makes a Jewish wedding Jewish is a commitment on the part of the two people being joined to keep a Jewish household and raise Jewish children. Of course, that can’t be the whole purpose either. Lots of groups have weddings in which it is assumed or required that the happy couple will raise children in whatever tradition that group has. What gives a Jewish wedding its Jewish character and content is treating it like a legal arrangement.

As a liberal, modernist Jew, I wouldn’t want my wedding’s legal content to be my acquisition of my wife from her family. However, the ceremony’s legal character is still important to me. I would treat it, as I think many do these days, as a mutually binding contract in which my wife and would acquire each other, so to speak.

In thinking about the content and character of Jewish wedding, God is far from my mind. In the Torah, God has nothing to say about weddings or marriage. Marriage in the Torah is a human construction. God expects us to marry, Genesis suggests, but we arrange the marriages ourselves. Unlike a ritual like prayer, where God is inherent, the wedding ceremony seems to employ God only as part of a Jewish ritual idiom. God appears not as God, but as part of our dominant idiom.

Would a Jewish wedding still be Jewish wedding without God? I think so.

Read the whole post here.

Re-writing Korbanot, part I: intro and the Harlow approach

This is a two-parter. Part II is here.

Korbanot is a highly variable recitation of biblical and talmudic passages on the minutiae of sacrificial ritual in The Temple. The notion is that sacrifice was the most legitimate way to access God and that reciting the laws about how to do it was equal to actually performing the sacrifices.

The dominant modern view is that sacrifice is over and it’s not coming back. Prayer suffices in its stead. I once had an idea about how to create a replacement for the Korbanot section of the service that would reflect this reality. That’s what Part II is about.

While flipping through Or Hadash, Reuven Hammer’s commentary on Siddur Sim Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals, I noticed that Jules Harlow, Sim Shalom‘s editor, had created a replacement for Korbanot.

Like the Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, Morris Silverman’s 1946 Conservative siddur, Harlow included the last passage in the Korbanot section, Rabbi Ishmael’s 13 principles of biblical interpretation, in SS. Building on Silverman’s minimal acknowledgment of the Korbanot passages, Harlow went one step further. Rather then merely excising the bulk of the section, he added several passages from rabbinic literature in their stead.

The first is perfect. It’s Avot d’Rabbi Natan 11a, which describes Yochanan Ben Zakai walking with his disciple away from Jerusalem. From where they are, they can see the Temple in ruins. The disciple is distraught, but Ben Zakai says, “There is another way of gaining atonement even though The Temple is destroyed. We must now gain atonement through deeds of lovingkindness.”

From there, Harlow presents a selection of passages from rabbinic literature. The way Harlow arranges them, they seem to be explanations of how to do what Ben Zakai suggests. They are all about lovingkindness. It’s not exactly what I would have done if I’d ever gotten it together to do my version of this, but I think it’s pretty damn clever..

Re-writing Korbanot, part II: my approach

This is a two-parter. Part I is here.

Many moons ago, when I was working on a siddur or my own (I won’t link back to any of those old posts because I sound like a moron in a lot of it, but if you do some looking around, they’re still here somewhere), I had an idea about how to redo the Korbanot section of the service, a lengthy section of readings that detail the textual basis for the sacrificial ritual system in place in The Temple back in the day.

Rambam himself saw prayer as the superior form of ritual, saying that God knew that primitive Israelites needed sacrifice to access God, but that we evolved away from that. So I had the idea that we could replace Korbanot with a selection of biblical and Talmudic passages about how to pray with kavanah or intention. I never actually did this, but the idea was there nonetheless.

Like I said in Part I, the Conservative approach is quite clever, but it’s not what I would have done. However, seeing that Harlow created a version of Korbanot for modernity, I’m inspired to think about what I would include in my version.

The problem I have with Harlow’s approach is that it almost ignores the ritual at hand. Ben Zakai’s statement that we can atone through acts of lonvingkindness is lovely, but from what I know, it seems like Judaism does not actually treat acts of great chesed as the replacement for sacrifice. Rather, we take prayer to be the one-to-one replacement. Each Amidah (except for the evening, which is a whole other story) stands in for a sacrifice in The Temple. Shacharit is the morning sacrifice. Minchah is the afternoon sacrifice. And Musaf is the additional sacrifice offered on special days.

So I would begin with biblical passages. There are definitely some talmudic and midrashic and otherwise rabbinic passages out there that should go into this idea, but I don’t know those texts as well as I’d like to yet, so I’ll stay away from those and leave that to the commenters below.

Biblical passages that come to mind immediately:

Psalm 51:17-19, verse 17 already being the opening line of the Amidah:

O Lord, open my lips, and let my mouth declare Your praise.

You do not want me to bring sacrifices; You do not desire burnt offerings;

True sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit; God, You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart.

Bamidbar 12:11-13

And Aaron said to Moses, “O my lord, account not to use the sin which we committed in our folly. Let her not be as one dead, who emerges from his mother’s womb with half his flesh eaten away.”

So Moses cried out to the Lord, saying, “O God, pray heal her!”

Shmuel A 1:4-13. This passage details Hannah’s prayer to God asking for a child. It’s especially good because it takes place in The Temple among sacrifices. Her husband even offers sacrifices in this passage, but on Hannah’s prayer brings her a child. I might also include part of chapter 2, which is Hannah’s extended prayer of thanksgiving after her child is born.

There’s also a passage somewhere in the Talmud where Shacharit, Minchah and Maariv are described as having been established by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, respectively. That passage and its proof texts would obviously be a must-have in this section.

I’d also want to maintain Rabbi Ishmael’s 13 principles as the final passage of the section.

That’s as far as my thinking has taken me so far in this. Anyone else have ideas?