How, then, does a religious Jew who is deeply concerned about threats to the environment galvanize her community? Evonne Marzouk, the founder and executive director of Canfei Nesharim, a Jewish environmental organization, addressed that question for Vox Tablet. She spoke to host Sara Ivry about rabbinical and Torah-based justifications for making environmental sustainability a priority, her own journey to environmental advocacy, and the unique skills Orthodox Jews can bring to the challenges of sustainable living. [Running time: 19:38.]

In a 3-hour interview, Youlus is unable to provide a single name, date, place, photograph or document to back up the Auschwitz stories or any of the others. He says that until Save a Torah was founded in 2004, he kept no records. He refers all requests for documentation since then to the foundation’s president, investment banker Rick Zitelman of Rockville.

But in a late December meeting at The Washington Post, Zitelman, 54, shows no documentation for any of the scrolls, despite requests. Zitelman says the only paperwork he gets from Youlus is an invoice the rabbi himself writes up for each Torah. He says Youlus does not submit any airline tickets or hotel receipts for overseas missions. So where does he think Youlus finds the Torahs? “It’s my understanding these Torahs come from various locations, including monasteries, museums, antique shops, private owners and other places like that,” he says.

Menachem Rosensaft, a New York-based lawyer and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, has been crying foul about Youlus for some time now. In Februry 2010, Rosensaft disputed Youlus’ accounts, specifically a story that involved piecing together portions of a Torah hidden separately at Auschwitz and receiving the final piece from a local priest:

It gets worse. There are no records of any such priest ever having existed, and Youlus refuses to identify him by name. Youlus could not have come across a Torah scroll, or anything else for that matter, in the barracks of Bergen-Belsen, where both my parents were liberated, for the simple reason that all the barracks of that camp were burned in May 1945 in order to contain a raging typhus epidemic. And Youlus peddled the “Ukrainian mass-grave” scrolls to five separate congregations, assuring each that it was buying one of two, to use the art world term, limited editions.

Rosensaft got serious about Youlus owning up to his actions, asking politicians to take action. “He and Save a Torah,” Rosensaft wrote in the Huffington Post in March 2010, “which shamelessly continues to solicit funds on its website, must now be held accountable, both legally and morally.”

Over a year later, it seems that process has finally started.

Rabbi who claimed to rescue Holocaust Torahs arrested on fraud charges [JTA]
Rabbi Fabricated Swashbuckling Tales of Saving Holocaust Torahs, Prosecutors Say [NYT]
Two Torahs, Two Holocaust Stories and One Big Question [NYT]
Earlier: Save a Torah Controversy Prompts Deal

In this week’s parasha, one African rises to prove the venerable Kapuscinski wrong: As his leadership is called into question, Moses has the wherewithal to focus, as they say in Sinai, on the bigger, celestial picture.

The story begins when the leader, fed up with his stiff-necked people, kvetches to the Almighty. “Why have you treated your servant so badly?” Moses asks the Lord. “Why have I not found favor in your eyes that you place the burden of this entire people upon me? Did I conceive this entire people? Did I give birth to them, that you say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as the nurse carries the suckling,’ to the land you promised their forefathers? … Alone I cannot carry this entire people for it is too hard for me. If this is the way you treat me, please kill me if I have found favor in your eyes, so that I not see my misfortune.”

Feeling Moses’ pain, God instructs him to select 70 elders and bring them to the Tent of Meeting. There, the Creator promises, he’ll make a special appearance and charge the elders with helping Moses lead the people. The 70 are selected and carted off to the sacred spot, but just as they depart, two young dudes named Eldad and Medad have a divine moment and start prophesying.

To Joshua, Moses’ second-in-command, such a break with decorum is intolerable. A stickler for order, he runs to complain to his boss. “Moses, my master,” he cries out, “imprison them!” But Moses is unflappable. “Are you zealous for my sake?” he asks Joshua. “If only all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would bestow His spirit upon them!”

In the Five Books of Moses, there are, thankfully, many testaments to the man’s greatness, but none, arguably, is more profound than this brief episode. Here is Moses acknowledging his weakness, Moses asking for help, Moses realizing that sometimes what seems like a transgression or a challenge is truly a blessing.

Herein concludes the cheerful portion of this column. If, dear reader, you are not the sort that takes kindly to criticism, I would advise bidding our adieus and turning to less rankling pursuits. Because while Moses stands tall as a paragon of self-criticism, many of us, alas, do not.

I’ve nothing but anecdotal evidence to offer in support of such a cutting observation, but the anecdotes, I think, pile up and harden into a thick wall of obduracy. As someone who habitually writes about Israel, I frequently have the uproarious pleasure of reading this website’s comments section and discovering that I—scion of a great rabbi, ninth-generation Israeli, non-commissioned officer in the Israel Defense Forces, former low-ranking diplomat in Israel’s foreign service—am not only not a Jew, but someone who, if true to his hidden nature, would feel much more comfortable in the crisp, black shirt of a National Socialist stormtrooper. In conversations with Jewish communities across the nation, to which I am fortunate enough to be, from time to time, invited, I hear endless variations on the theme of criticism-is-racism: Bring up any observation that portrays the Jewish state—or those slivers of the Jewish community that support it unequivocally—in a critical light, and you’re guilty of being naïve or malicious or troubled or some impossible combination of all three. The Jewish state itself, alas, isn’t doing much better on the self-criticism front: Even in light of obvious and systematic failures, such as last year’s massive fires, Jerusalem’s captains are constantly engaged in a perpetual game of pass-the-buck.

In the late 20th century, the dominant cultural paradigm haunting Jewish communal life was that of the self-hating Jew; now, in the dawn of the 21st, the figure to watch out for is the self-infatuated Jew, incapable of introspection, resistant to censure, aggressively rejecting any bit of opprobrium as inherently and intolerably evil. It’s the self-infatuated Jew who drowns any attempt at dialogue with the din of accusations—but the Palestinians started it all! But we’re still more democratic than Syria! But the Iranians are denying the Holocaust!—and who is quick to draw the boundaries of communal belonging as passing somewhere between right and extreme right. And the rest of us, as smarter men have already observed, are left to either fight an uphill battle or walk away from the whole throbbing mess.

Amid the rancor, this week’s parasha comes as a much-needed reminder of our tradition and its attitudes toward leadership and dissent. Borrowing a favorite turn of mind from the self-infatuated hordes, I can say that self-infatuation and intolerance of criticism are fundamentally non-Jewish traits; real Jews, like Moses, admit their own shortcomings and embrace their passionate kinsmen even if the latter are defiant. Real Jews know how to tell prophesy from piffle. Real Jews reject thundering statements—in a website’s comments section or on the floor of Congress—in favor of difficult, often cantankerous, but always illuminating conversations. Like the one, dear reader, I hope we’re about to have soon.

Is it really possible to ask a man whom the Washington Post compared to medieval commentator Rashi a question that doesn’t sound stupid?

But during a recent visit to New York City, Steinsaltz proved exceedingly easy to talk to. He cracked jokes frequently, his cheeks turning red beneath his white beard, as he offered opinions on everything from the number of ultrasounds a woman should have during a pregnancy to Hemingway. He showed a genuine, gentle curiosity about everyone he encountered during the time we spent together, including—as we exited the office of Aleph, his American foundation, and walked down Sixth Ave.—a man dressed in an Elmo costume.

Steinsaltz was raised by secular parents in Jerusalem and studied math, physics, and chemistry, as well as Jewish studies. Steinsaltz’s father is purported to have said, “I don’t care if you’re an apikores [heretic], but no son of mine is going to be an am ha-aretz,” an ignoramus.

In his early twenties, he built a network of yeshivas in Israel and the former Soviet Union. The Israeli schools—serving students from elementary school age to hesder—are unusual for their relatively diverse student bodies, ranging from Modern Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox. Students are taught Hasidic philosophy alongside Talmud, which is uncommon, especially for a school that also encourages army service and higher education, sports and the arts.

Last year, Steinsaltz completed his translation of the Talmud into Modern Hebrew, a 45-year undertaking. Making the Talmud readable to those not enrolled in yeshiva full-time was no small task. In the traditional Vilna format, first paginated in 1835, the Talmud is a stream of unpunctuated Aramaic. Steinsaltz turned that stream into Hebrew sentences, added vowels, explanations, and his own commentary to the margins, a space traditionally reserved for medieval greats like Rashi. Steinsaltz also oversaw the subsequent translation of his edition into five other languages.

His translation was considered sacrilege by right-wing rabbis, who banned the volumes and protested their publication; Rav Shach, a prominent rabbi in the ulta-Orthodox enclave of Bnei Brak, called for the Steinsaltz editions to be immediately sent for burial.

Steinsaltz continues to carry on at a furious clip. He’s currently working on a translation of Bible commentary, a new interpretation of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and a book of personal anecdotes about the Lubavitcher Rebbe, among other projects. While we spoke, he sipped tea sweetened with five packets of sugar, wheezed a pipe filled with Captain Black tobacco, and nibbled rainbow cookies.

What brings you to New York City?

I must be punished by going to exile. There could be worse places to be exiled, although not so many. I am getting punished by being here.

What are you being punished for?

You don’t want my confessions. I have sinned a lot—there is a long list of sins that bring me to New York so many times over the years. I am in New York more than in Tel Aviv, and as a true Jerusalemite, I cannot stand Tel Aviv, which I think is just a smaller uglier version of New York.

Beautiful people have all kinds of blemishes, but somehow the blemishes enhance their beauty. Anne Boleyn, Henry the VIII’s second wife, was considered one of the most beautiful women of her time, and she had one green and one brown eye. In Jerusalem, it’s not easy to find a real beautiful building, but the city is beautiful. In New York there are many beautiful houses, but together it’s just New York, which is not beautiful.

Some people say that when an author translates a novel, he or she in effect creates a whole new piece of writing. Do you feel that’s the case with translating the Talmud?

Can you make a sculpture of a fountain that captures flowing water? There are very few of these. There is a very good one by Rodin. Think of almost any human conversation and put it verbatim into any language—it doesn’t make sense because you have to fill all the gaps that are in between. The whole Talmud is like this. If you wanted to translate it literally, it will mean very little. If you translate it in any way that is meaningful, it becomes different. It’s like with a play—the dialogue is a real part of the structure. When two people in the same field talk about their subject, they don’t explain everything; they jump around. It is hard to provide a very accurate report of an intimate talk. Any translation is, in a way, a part of killing it.

Did your background in physics help with the work of translating the Talmud?

On the one hand, the Talmud is very much like a stream of consciousness novel—say, Ulysses—and on the other hand it’s as precise as any book of mathematics. Sometimes it seems to be flowing in a strange way, but basically every sentence and choice of words is very accurate. The meta-language of science is very close to the meta-language of Jewish thinking.

Do you have any regrets about translating the Talmud? Has anything been lost?

Most things are lost, most things are changed. It’s a matter of making some kind of judgment of weighing different things. Teaching it in its original form means that a very small number of people will get to it, which means you create a very big population of ignorant people. It’s a matter of what’s more important. There are many areas where you have this kind of discussion. It’s a choice. I thought that the decision should be about giving people access. We don’t have a small closed group of people that are in the know. From Mt. Sinai on, we wanted everybody to participate. If you want it this way, you have to pay for it.

My understanding is there was much less resistance to Artscroll’s subsequent translation of the Gemara then there was to yours. Why is that?

The first effort is always more controversial. I don’t want to speak about lashon hara but part of the controversy was manufactured, and some people—there were interested parties—were doing it purposefully, so it was kind of an unpleasant time.

Can you tell me a bit about the new book you are working on, about the soul?

You want a fast answer? I will give you one sentence. We all believe we have a soul, and if so, we should be more interested in it.

In the 1990s, you spoke very critically about TV, calling it a force that undercut the culture of reading. I am wondering if you feel the same way about the Internet.

TV is worse because with TV you forget to read entirely. What I said in that speech is that TV—having things done in pictures—is a regressive move for human progress. The Internet, not as much. It has potential.

With the Internet, where you have all kinds of writing and other things, we are getting the malady of our age, which is too much information. It’s a different problem than TV: Too much information means you have to go into a whole new direction in order to find out what is meaningful and what is not meaningful, what is a complete lie and what has an existence.

You are writing a book about the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Can you tell me about your connection to him?

I was very connected—I visited him almost every time when I was in America. It’s a very special connection.

Why did you want to write about him?

We haven’t had many great leaders. I meet lots of people, famous people, but I’ve met very few great people—even people I respected. They had some part of greatness in them, like a peacock. They have a wonderful, beautiful tail but if they didn’t have that tail, really, what would they look like? If they had not been, for instance, a great mathematician, they would have been nothing. There are so many nothings all over the world; they have something great about them, but they were not great.

But to have a great man! So, I wanted to not to share gossip but to deal with more important subjects about him. There are already several books about the subject, but many are either hagiographic or they are just plain dirty gossip.

What do you think about the movement within Lubavitch where some people say the Rebbe is a semi-deity or is still alive?

It’s like the stories people tell about Elvis Presley. Maybe they play cards together. If they are alive, they are alive in the same realm, I am afraid.

“When the month of Adar enters, we increase in happiness,” the Talmud teaches. This slogan appears across Jerusalem, where I live, at this time of year, as many of the city’s storefronts are converted into costume bazaars (pirates, cowboys, fairies, and butterflies—the standard fare) and the stands in the shuk that sold dried fruit for Tu b’shvat now feature mini candy bars and Gummy Everything for inclusion in mishloach manot packages, the baskets of food that are traditionally exchanged on Purim. Walk into any of these shops and you hear the same recording of happy voices singing “Mishenichnas Adar Marbim B’simchah,” (Once Adar begins, we increase in happiness) like the ubiquitous Jingle Bells of American Decembers. Happiness, you might conclude, is about plastic sunglasses and glitter and colorful wigs.

You wouldn’t be entirely wrong: Happiness is indeed about costumes and mishloach manot. Because if Purim is about being happy, then the mitzvot we are obliged to perform on the holiday help teach us how we might stumble upon happiness.

For one, happiness is about community. All the deeds we are commanded to perform on Purim involve other people; they must be done in a communal context. To give gifts to the poor you must put yourself in a situation where you have contact with poor people; to send mishloach manot you must have friends to whom you can send them; to enjoy the festive Seudah, the holiday meal, there must be others with whom to share it; and even the megillah reading is supposed to be read publicly, in synagogue. Sitting alone at home and reading books about happiness is not going to make you happy. But going to shul to hear the megillah just might. The Jewish conception of happiness, as we learn from the mitzvot of Purim, is about surrounding yourself with other people, and involving yourself in their lives.

This is a lesson I was reminded of not long after the start of Adar, when I returned to daf yomi, my daily morning Talmud class, after a two-month hiatus. My tendency is to wake up feeling sad and overwhelmed. I am not a depressed person, but the start of the day always seems to bring with it an awareness of all the tasks that lie ahead, and I wake with the weight of the world on my shoulders. As the day unfolds and I begin to get to work, I tend to get progressively happier, and sometimes in the evenings I am positively giddy—until the next day dawns and the demons are back. But I’ve noticed that returning to daf yomi has had the magical effect of jump-starting my happiness. I love waking up knowing that I have a place to go, and that if I don’t hop out of bed at that very moment, I won’t make it in time. I love arriving at the class and seeing a host of familiar faces who take note of my presence and will wonder if I don’t show up one day. In short, I like starting my day as part of a community. Perhaps this is why we are supposed to pray with a minyan every morning—to remind ourselves, first thing, that we are part of something larger than ourselves. And perhaps this is why all the major mitzvot of Purim, the happiness holiday, must be performed in the presence of others.

The customs of Purim, too, offer lessons in being happy. On Purim we dress in costume so that we do not look or feel like ourselves. Sometimes, part of being happy is forgetting who we are or tricking ourselves into thinking that we can be somebody or something else. This custom reflects the awareness that it is difficult to make ourselves happy unless we can, at least in part, forget ourselves. This is surely what lies behind the custom of drinking alcohol—it is a desire to shed some of our inhibitions and our painful self-awareness. Purim reminds us that happiness is just sadness dressed in borrowed robes. We wear painted clown masks over our furrowed brows and can’t help smiling as we see our friends in their own silly disguises. Perhaps this is why Keats invokes the image of the veil to describe the close kinship between happiness and melancholy: “Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” Delight is just veiled melancholy, and Purim is the day we put on the veil and peer out at the world through it.

Purim, though, is not the only occasion for happiness in Judaism. The Torah also speaks of happiness in the context of the festival of Sukkot, where we are told V’samachta b’chagecha v’hayita ach sameach. And you shall be happy on your festivals, and you shall be surely happy (Deuteronomy 16:14-15). I read the words “surely happy” as suggesting that we have to be happy even in spite of ourselves. We must be happy on demand, like the bright yellow “Don’t worry be happy” bumper stickers. But as we know, emotions cannot be mandated—we cannot force ourselves to feel a certain way. And so it seems that in the Torah, happiness is not a feeling but rather a way of acting. “V’hayita ach sameach”—you must surely act happy! Because to act happy is to be happy, in spite of, ach, how you might otherwise feel.

I have tried, over the years, to internalize this Jewish concept of happiness. No matter how sad I am feeling, I always dance up a storm on Simchat Torah. I am convinced that if I circle just a bit faster, I’ll be so dizzy that I’ll manage to lose my bearings entirely. On Purim, too, I force myself to come up with ridiculously obscure costumes to delight my fellow Talmud-learning friends, even if the last thing I want to do on that day is dress up (or even get dressed at all). I regularly smile and act cheerful and try to greet everyone I meet with a sunny disposition, regardless of how I am feeling inside. It is, to some extent, an act, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous. I am aware that I stand the best chance for being happy if I act like a happy person.

On Purim we are commanded to take this to an extreme. We act a certain way and, in so doing, we transform our emotional state. This process of acting as a means to feeling reminds me of the Talmudic midrash about how God held Mount Sinai over the heads of the Israelites like a bucket until they accepted Torah.

“And they stood at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 19:17). In the Tractate Shabbat, Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa says: This teaches that God forced the mountain over them like a bucket, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, very well; and if not, this mountain will be your grave. … Rava said: Even so, they upheld accepted it upon themselves in the days of Achashverosh. That is, when the Jews were standing at the foot of Mount Sinai poised to receive the Torah, God threatened them by holding the mountain over their heads, so that the Jews had no choice but to receive it. It was only on Purim that they accepted Torah out of their own free will.

Torah, like happiness, was not easy to take on. The Jews accepted happiness under coercion, much as we “force” ourselves, through our observance of the mitzvot of Purim, to act happy. But the end result was that by Purim, the Jews found themselves accepting Torah out of their own volition. So too may we find ourselves, on Purim, surprised by joy—dancing to a rhythm we didn’t know we had, joking with people we wouldn’t have presumed to claim as friends. For those whose natural tendency is to go about the world somber and heavy with the weight of the world, Purim looms overhead like a very scary mountain indeed. For this one day alone, let us wear that mountain on our heads like a clown hat, casting our lots with those who are off making merry.

Ilana Kurshan works in book publishing and teaches Torah in Jerusalem.

In America today, thankfully, the ancient theological ire between Christians and Jews has been almost forgotten. But as Timothy Beal shows in his personal, accessible new book, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), there is still a profound difference between the ways the two faiths read their Bibles. The kind of Jewish education that most non-Orthodox American Jews receive leaves us familiar with the major biblical stories; and of course, many Jewish holidays revolve around biblical episodes, from the Exodus on Passover to the Maccabees on Hanukkah. Jews who receive a traditional Orthodox education learn the Bible much more thoroughly, but the core of their study has to do with the Talmud and commentaries—a way of thinking about Torah that treats the original divine text primarily as a subject for interpretation.

Neither of these Jewish approaches to Torah has anything in common with the fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity that is so potent in the United States—especially the parts where Jews do not live. Beal, a professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University, is now an academic scholar of the Bible, accustomed to thinking of it as the work of historically situated human beings. But he was raised in an evangelical Christian home, where the Bible was held to be quite literally the Word of God. He hastens to explain that this does not mean his parents were naive or uneducated: “My parents’ biblical faith … was as seriously intellectual as it was devout.” His mother, who studied Greek in college, would “sometimes … pull out her old Greek New Testament to see how else the text might be translated.”

Still, growing up in this bibliocentric culture gave Beal an early sense that the Bible was “the go-to book for any serious question we might have, from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to heaven, hell, and why bad things happen to good people.” The Bible was “God’s book of answers, which if opened and read rightly would speak directly to me with concrete, divinely authored advice about my life and how to live it.” In short, to use an evangelical acronym that I, for one, had never heard before, it was “B.I.B.L.E.: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”

The Rise and Fall of the Bible is Beal’s attempt to shatter this popular understanding of the Bible as a combination of divine instruction manual and self-help book. While there’s no denying that the Bible remains central—Beal quotes polls indicating that “65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible ‘answers all or most of the basic questions of life,’ ”—he, at the same time, notes that Americans are surprisingly ignorant of what is actually in it. “More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse,” he writes. Less than half of all adults can name the four Gospels; only one-third can name five of the Ten Commandments. In his own experience as a college teacher, Beal says, students “come to class on the first day with more ideas about the Bible derived from … The Da Vinci Code than from actual Biblical texts.”

What explains this disparity between Americans’ absolute faith in the Bible and their evident ignorance of it? To Beal, the problem lies with the notion that the Bible is “a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life.” For as soon as you open it and start reading, it becomes troublingly apparent that the Bible is no such thing. It does not offer answers to problems, especially not 21st-century problems; only in a few places does it even offer straightforward moral counsel. Depending on where you open it, the Bible might give the impression that it is mainly composed of genealogies and agricultural regulations.

The gulf between what readers expect to find in the Bible and what they are actually given produces a kind of paralysis, Beal writes. “For many Christians, this experience of feeling flummoxed by the Bible … [produces] not only frustration but also guilt for doubting the Bible’s integrity.” The Bible-publishing industry feeds on this anxiety, he argues, by endlessly repackaging the Biblical text in ever more watered-down and over-explained forms. Most Jewish readers will probably be unfamiliar with the world of Christian “Biblezines,” in which biblical texts are interspersed with magazine-style articles and quizzes: “There are Biblezines for just about everyone. Becoming targets college-age and young professional women. Explore is for preteen boys, and Refuel is for teenage boys. Blossom is for preteen girls, and Revolve is for teenage girls.”

What troubles Beal about these publications is not just the way they dumb down the Bible—Blossom is a long way from Beal’s mother reading the New Testament in Greek—but the way they translate and interpret the text according to an undeclared social and political agenda. Beal shows how the Manga Bible turns Eve into a simpering temptress (“Hee hee … girls can make guys do anything,” she titters in one panel), while the Life Application Study Bible makes Leviticus sound like an anti-gay tract.

All these quasi-Bibles are designed to eliminate what Beal regards as the Bible’s most inspiring feature—its refusal to speak with a single voice. The Bible isn’t really “a book” at all, but a library of books (the Greek word biblia, Beal points out, is a plural), written over a span of centuries, in a wide range of genres—myth, history, law codes, poems, proverbs. The middle section of The Rise and Fall of the Bible is devoted to a capsule history of the writing and editing of the Bible, designed to show readers new to the subject that the book in the hotel nightstand is not a divine artifact.

In asking “What Would Jesus Read?” Beal also ends up explaining what is still apparently unknown to many Christians—the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and Christianity initially a Jewish movement. The episode in Luke 4 where Jesus preaches in a synagogue leads Beal to discuss Torah reading and Shabbat services. Later on, he examines the Hebrew text of the Bible to demonstrate how every English translation is inevitably an interpretation—sometimes, a Christian apologetic interpretation, as when the Hebrew word almah in the Book of Isaiah is translated as “virign,” rather than “young woman,” in order to produce a Christological reading (“Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son …”)

By insisting on the Bible’s human making, however, Beal does not want to convince Christians to stop reading it—the way Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris would. Rather, he wants them to read the Bible with more tolerance for ambiguity, recognizing that the text cries out for interpretation. In short, as Beal puts it, Christians need to read more like Jews:

Here again we may find insight from Jewish tradition’s understanding of Torah. One legend says, ‘When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, he gave it only in the form of wheat, for us to make flour from it, and flax, to make a garment from it.’ The idea is that God depends on the community to fulfill biblical meaning. The Torah is incomplete without its interpreters who make something new of it.

Naturally, the kind of interpretation Beal has in mind is not the kind the rabbis had in mind. Talmudic interpretation is based on the premise that, since the Torah is God’s word, every meaning that can be found in it is divine. That is how a whole legal system, and then, in Kabbalah, a whole mystical system, could be deduced from the biblical text. Beal’s reading of the Bible depends, conversely, on the premise that the Bible is not divine writ, but rather a precious human inheritance, which can be used to support and enhance contemporary moral intuitions. As he puts it, the Bible “hosts the human quest for meaning without predestining a specific conclusion.”

This is not talmudic, but it is exactly the same spirit in which liberal Jewish theologians now interpret the Bible. Like Beal, the authors of a book such as Jewish Theology in Our Time are attempting to salvage the vocabulary of faith they grew up with, while discarding the dogmas in which they can no longer believe. The Bible, read this way, is historically and emotionally primary, but not theologically primary—not, in fact, essentially different from the sacred texts of every faith, or the great works of secular literature. Perhaps it is on these ironic terms that Jew and Christian, after so many centuries, can agree to read the same Bible after all.

So, I set out solo for the Catskills (Kerhonkson, New York, to be specific) with both anticipation and angst, listening to country music in the car so I could pretend to still have one foot in the secular world that I was temporarily leaving behind.

This is the candid diary of a first-time, ambivalent Limmudnik.

Friday, January 14, 2011

11:55 a.m.: I pull into the Hudson Valley Resort near New Paltz, a hulk of a building with faux classical statues lining the circular driveway, and rush in without my bags to register and get to class. I run to the bathroom for road relief and notice a note on the plastic bottle of dishwashing liquid next to the sink: “Use this to wash your Limmud mug.” I think, When do I get my Limmud mug? Have I already missed the party favor?

12 p.m.: In an L-shaped conference room with a pretty view of snow and trees, Rabbi William Friedman is already teaching: “Creating an Egalitarian Day for G-d.” I try to catch myself up with Friedman’s interesting analysis of Sabbath strictures in Exodus. He posits that Shabbat was the first labor law; we’re commanded to rest so that our servants can. Cessation of work is non-hierarchical. A rabbi in the audience puts it shrewdly: “According to Torah, rest is the context in which equality exists.”

12:50 p.m.: I hurry to Yaffa Epstein’s class on Hillel. Epstein is a 20-something spark plug of a Talmud teacher who speaks very fast. Before sending us off in pairs to study the texts, she asks us to illustrate with our hands the meaning of “chevrutah,” study partner. People tent their fingers, interlock them, or snap their hands open and close like mouths. But Yaffa pounds her fist into her palm saying, “The point of chevrutah is to push us somewhere we can’t get to on our own.”

1:55 p.m.: Many sessions tempt me for this time slot (there are sometimes as many as 10 happening simultaneously), including “How Do We Obtain Forgiveness on Yom Kippur?”; “Can We Get Serious About Meditation Practice?”; “Zionism 101.” I choose sex. Doreen Seidler-Feller, an elegant, silver-haired South African-raised professor who has been associated with the Human Sexuality Training Program at UCLA and counsels a range of couples—including Orthodox Jews—about sexuality, talks about how our “consumerist culture” (texting, IM-ing, Facebook) has changed the “sexual ethic.” She suggests there’s value in turning to Jewish tradition to get us back to genuine relationships and intimacy. I start worrying that my children, now in 6th and 8th grades, will never learn how to interact face-to-face; all they know is text-flirting.

3 p.m.: I have just a half-hour before the official welcome event, and as I run through the lobby to get my bags from the car, I notice the crowd is younger than I predicted. Alongside the seniors and my own 40s-to-50s cohort are hip klatches of people in their 20s and 30s, many with young kids careening around or being pushed in strollers. I find myself for a moment regretting that I didn’t take my children here years ago when they were too young to object. Not only would they have enjoyed it, I can hope (the Limmud day camp looks merry from afar), but they would have grown up with a familiarity of seeing this many Jews gathered simply to learn and hang out: not a bad snapshot of our people. Just as I idealize this, I hear a 4-year-old kvetching about needing more cookies right this minute! I know it’s never so simple.

3:15 p.m.: Schlepping my bags through the lobby feels like a walk of shame: I’ve over-packed and feel sure I look like Tevye’s family carrying all their belongings from Anatevka. When I get to my room, I see it has a view of the Shawangunk Mountains. I try to dismiss the bird smudge on the window because I don’t want to be the snobby New Yorker who can’t handle a worn hotel room. If I were a Zen Jew, I’d just be grateful for the nice view.

3:30 p.m.: I’m not Miss-Join-In, but the enthusiasm in the packed auditorium—there are more than 700 people here—is infectious. This New York incarnation of Limmud (“learning” in Hebrew) began six years ago, based on Limmud UK, which has been in existence for 30 years and draws huge numbers. This conference draws mostly from New York and New Jersey, with a sprinkling of foreigners from the U.K. and Australia. The two co-chairs, 20-somethings who’ve been put in charge of the conference this year, shout, “This is your Limmud!” People cheer. A charismatic facilitator asks us to group ourselves by how many Limmuds we’ve attended, and I make my way over to the largest cluster, the first-timers, which makes me feel less like the conspicuous-rookie-with-too-many-suitcases.

4:30 p.m.: There are rows of unlit tea lights arranged on tables in the lobby and handwritten signs encouraging us to light our own. It’s surprisingly sweet to say a private blessing, and I think of my family, who didn’t make me feel too guilty about leaving them to pursue my Jewish edification. I miss them.

6:30 p.m.: At dinner, I have seating anxiety because I don’t have a friend here. But then I spot Rabbi Jennifer Krause, an old pal and great teacher whom I didn’t know was attending, and she rescues me. Sitting on my other side is Karen Radowsky, the co-creator of Limmud NY, who explains that there are 55 Limmuds in the world, eight in the United States. It’s affirming to hear how it keeps on spawning. The blessings are recited and sung by the entire room; there are long lines for hand-washing, and I gauge how much wine won’t compromise my lucidity before my first talk in two hours. The fish doesn’t appeal, so I eat too much challah.

8:45 p.m.: My first presentation (“Bored Jews in Synagogue,” about the malaise of worship for so many of my peers and our children) is about to begin, and I feel like kissing every person who walks into the room. I had worried that no one would come. More than 50 people attend, and the talk sparks a spirited discussion, including ideas about how to reinvigorate Saturday mornings for many who feel stuck and uninspired.

10:15 p.m.: I hurry to one last session of the day, which is—I’ll use the hyperbolic word—awe-inspiring. Shai Held (from Mechon Hadar yeshiva in Manhattan) is a master communicator and makes text feel rich and crucial. His room is packed. He distributes a sermon by Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav about seeing the best qualities in even people we dislike. So many of Held’s questions are hard for me to confront personally: Do you believe that by seeing the good in someone, you can actually change them? Is there a power in just the effort to look for the best in someone? Nachman’s concluding idea: that true leaders are those who can find “a grain of good”—“some mitzvah”—in every human being. He maintains that this is what it means to lead and move other people: to see them generously. That’s the work of a rabbi. “How can you be a leader of other people and represent them before God if you don’t like them?” Held asks. I raise my hand to ask whether one good act or trait should be enough to redeem someone. Held ventures that Nachman might respond that “Even one little piece makes transformation possible—everyone is ‘tzadakable.’ ” He smiles at the made-up word.

11:30 p.m.: I stop by the “tisch” before going up to bed. Jen Krause had explained to me that it’s a time for people to sit around drinking, singing, “performing” Torah. When I duck my head in, it looks like a Poetry Slam—when a young, long-bearded man finishes rapping, others start humming a hearty niggun, pounding the tables like drunken sailors.

12 a.m.: When I climb into bed, I realize I feel happy. And I find a sweet coincidence when I pick up my book—Jonathan Galassi’s new translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s poetry. I turn to a random page and stumble on lines that echo exactly what I’d stressed in my talk on re-energizing our tradition:

“… how do you constantly
Bring our ancestors to life again;
And let them speak to this dead century
In its haze of tedium?
And, language of our fathers
Silent so long, how is it
We hear you loud and clear and often now?”

Saturday, January 15, 2011

8:15 a.m.: Since when is dipping a tea bag in hot water a violation of the Sabbath? No one I ask at my breakfast table seems to know, but they venture a guess that maybe it’s because the tea changes the water when it enters it, and, indeed, when I go on the Internet later to check (another Sabbath violation) I see that the hot water “cooks the leaves,” and cooking is obviously prohibited. This is all to say that—despite the Sanka (which I don’t count as coffee) and the hotel’s pre-made, room-temperature tea in a pitcher—there is no caffeine to be had at this early hour! Even rabbis are complaining quietly that they’re suffering from withdrawal.

9 a.m.: I’m in the conspicuous minority skipping morning services and sampling a different kind of spirituality: “Nefeshbliss Partner Yoga.” Our mats are close together in a room near the indoor swimming pool, and instructor Becca Rosen asks us to create our own “Kiddush cup” with our hands and get in touch with our “nefesh,” or soul. I leave early because I have to deliver my “Bored Jews” talk a second time in a half-hour, and I’d rather not give my speech sweaty.

1:30 p.m.: Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who runs UCLA’s Hillel (and is married to Doreen Seidler-Feller, the sex specialist), is like a brilliant mad scientist: so brimming with ideas and information that at times he seems to almost short out. I get hooked on the voltage of his delivery and attend three of his sessions during the weekend. In “Searching for God in Judaism,” he poses the perennial question: Why are Jews less inclined to be connected to God? The thrust of his lesson: Maimonides emphasized that if we learn and accept, as we should, that humans are not God, then we can aspire to godliness in the world.

4:30 p.m.: In the lobby, which has become a hub of snacking and schmoozing, there’s an endless stream of cookies and brownies on trays. After sampling too many, I’m hit with fatigue and go to my room to power nap and do a little of my own yoga without any nefesh.

6:30 p.m.: I drag myself hesitantly to the “community-wide Havdalah” service, and I don’t regret it. Rabbi David Ingber, of Renewal congregation Romemu on the Upper West Side, is a stirring speaker, and his band is rousing, though I don’t join the conga lines. The lit braided candles held aloft around the theater are letting off a lot of heat, and I’m hoping my deodorant is functioning when Nigel Savage of Hazon puts his arm around me to sway. Next thing I know, I find myself clapping my hands over my head to “L’cha Dodi”—something I don’t think I’ve ever done before in my life. I’m aware of feeling both giddy and awkward. If my kids were here, I might actually dance.

7:30 p.m.: Dinner on Styrofoam: I load up a sagging plate of lasagna and spaghetti (Jews and Buffets: A Love Story), preparing to eat on my lap in another Shai Held class—this one on Heschel and Maimonides.

9 p.m.: Lisa Klug’s “Cool Jew” slideshow is a welcome breather from the dense text study. My favorite in her collection of Jew kitsch: a pair of panties that read: “A Great Miracle Happened Here.”

10:30 p.m.: I skip karaoke but catch the end of a tribute to Debbie Friedman. People are standing up to sing her “Mi Shebeirach,” and I watch the tears from the back row, marveling at how this song will be sung in shuls forever.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

8 a.m.: At least the coffee urn is back up and running post-Shabbat.

8:30 a.m.: It’s too early in the morning to parse the Messiah, but Seidler-Feller is his own caffeine as he teaches “Zionism and Messianism: A Passion for Waiting.” I love how he summarizes Maimonides on Messianism: “If it’s worthy of the end of days, it’s worthy of today.” In other words, “Do the work of improving the world right now.”

9:45 a.m.: Another cookie. (Where is the session on “Carbs in the Diaspora”?)

10 a.m.: The second transcendent session of the weekend: Rabbi David Ingber and Joe Septimus on the Afikomen. Ingber’s words on the essentiality of brokenness make me choke up in a way that surprises me. “We all come broken,” he says, “and our brokenness can be that place that allows us to heal.” He posits that every child is a whole matzo, and only through maturity—i.e., breakage–do they grow up. I can’t count the ways this resonates. When I approach him afterward to introduce myself and thank him, he asks if I’m related to David Pogrebin. Yes, he’s my brother, I say, and he describes a literal brokenness: My brother apparently fractured the rabbi’s nose in a pick-up ice hockey game 10 years ago. He shows me where his nose is bent.

11:30 a.m: Ethan Tucker, yet another nimble teacher, is co-founder of the Upper West Side’s Mechon Hadar. Tucker compares the two tellings of Moses and the Rock—one in Exodus, one in Numbers—and asks why this event is credited, fairly or unfairly, with Moses getting barred from the Promised Land. His interesting proposition: Maybe the rabbis pegged this parable as the moment of Moses’ misstep because they had to find some moment of culpability; otherwise we were left with the notion that a righteous person can be punished severely for the sins of others.

1:15 p.m.: Third round of Seidler-Feller: This time, he gives a primer on Islam. My head is starting to explode, and my daughter Molly is texting me to come home.

2:45 p.m.: I give my last presentation, this one on famous Jews and whether a public life is incompatible with an observant one. Many people come and appear to enjoy it, although one man in the audience has such a pronounced, hysterical laugh that it’s ruining the funny lines. I want to hit him. Then I think of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav and try to find the good in this man.

4:30 p.m.: I check out of the hotel a day early. Partly because of my daughter’s pleas, partly because I’m filled up and want to leave sated, not over-saturated. It was enough for now. I head south on the Thruway, but I feel like my Jewish journey—“journey” is such an Oprah word, but it’s apt here—has really only just begun.

I first learned about Devorah—the judge, prophetess, and heroine of this week’s haftorah—as a fourth-grader at an all-girls yeshiva in Brooklyn. Sharing a name with her, and learning of her successful military campaign against the Canaanites, made me tremendously proud. Even at 8 years old, I was familiar enough with the Bible to recognize that her story was unique: a woman in a leadership role with no male significant other, a woman who didn’t need a man to be complete.

This was a reassuring discovery. My parents had split up a year earlier, and my father, embittered by illness and divorce, had moved to Florida, leaving my mother, my sister, and me by ourselves. We were a small tribe of women, with my mother at the helm, frequently stressing that I’d need a career in order to be able to support myself. “God knows, you can’t rely on anyone else,” she told me. By “anyone” she meant “ any man.” From my mother, I learned that it was possible to be independent. From Devorah, I learned that independence could be effortless, or at least seem that way.

Not that this was the lesson stressed by my teacher, Mrs. Goldberg. She did not emphasize Devorah’s origins or lack thereof, did not explore how the prophetess appears virtually out of thin air, unlinked to any prominent man. Instead, Mrs. Goldberg cited rabbinic arguments claiming that Devorah was, in fact, married: The text refers to her as “Eshet Lapidot,” which can mean the “wife of torches,” but can also mean “wife of Torches,” with a capital T, if you believe, as several rabbis do, that such a name was ever in fashion.

And even though I loved Devorah the self-made woman, I had no trouble accepting this interpretation or the myriad other arguments that the rabbis conjured to wed Devorah. I knew that my own, never-remarried mother was something of an unwanted anomaly in the Orthodox Jewish community, and while I admired her self-sufficiency, I didn’t want to share her fate. I wanted a career but a companion, too. I didn’t want to stand alone on my accomplishments. Singleness was survivable but not preferable.

This was nearly 20 years ago. Now, as I once again think of Devorah, I see the rabbinic attempts to marry her off as laughable. Some rabbis, for example, posit that Devorah was married to the only other man of note in the story, her general, Barak. How do they figure this? Observe: Since her name evokes fire, and Barak translates to lightning, and both terms have something to do with fire, then Devorah must have been married to Barak. Other, more progressive sages have come up with other, more progressive explanations, explaining that “lapidot” might suggest the prophetess’s fiery personalty. This certainly seems apt for a woman who brushed off her general’s almost romantic entreaty to join him in battle. “If you will go with me, I will go,” Barak tells Devorah. “But if you will not go with me, then I will not go.” It’s almost a marriage proposal, to which Devorah responds with a hearty dose of emasculation, telling him that the glory of victory will not belong to him. “For God,” she clarifies, “will have delivered Sisera into the hand of a woman.”

Devorah, then, has angered at least one man. But what of the women? Where are her sisters in arms? It’s hard, after all, to imagine a single Devorah brunching with her girlfriends. The Torah rarely depicts conversations, let alone friendships, between women. They are present in the text either as helpers or hinderers of men. Not that I even imagine that Devorah would’ve desired this sort of camaraderie. To me, she’s an early incarnation of Margaret Thatcher, more comfortable in the company of men and uninterested in the status of women.

Where does that leave Devorah? Accomplished, yes, but also alone. I think about Devorah, my namesake, each time I bemoan my own status as a single woman to my friends. Frequently, they advise me to work on myself some more. They mean well, but the implication is that I’m lacking something and am therefore without mate. Devorah, I believe, suffered the same fate: The Torah, with its knack for tragedy, assigns a flaw to each judge (Ehud was a southpaw, Samson vain, and so on), except for Devorah; her cardinal sin, we’re left to assume, was being a woman. And an impudent one at that: Devorah, the rabbis explain, sinned when she summoned Barak, her subordinate yet a male, to her, thus ignoring some ancient take on The Rules and waiting for the man to come to her. Her punishment appears in the following chapter when she seems to suffer a momentary lapse in prophecy.

Watching Devorah in her moment of weakness, the Israelites cry out to her to awaken and sing. In my dark days, I see this as a bit of taunting, the patriarchal community putting the vulnerable, single female in her place. When I think like that, I can’t help but think about my mother, still single after all of these years, who every week anxiously awaits an invitation from her neighbors to a Shabbat meal. It doesn’t matter that she raised two daughters on her own, was the first in her family to go to college, and spent decades teaching. When it comes to the Jewish community, she falls short. Without a husband, she is not enough.

But on my best days, reading about Devorah, I see a strong but flawed woman and a community eager to engage with her. The prophetess might’ve been single and seemingly unattainable, but her peers wanted to connect to her.  To them, Devorah was not invisible.

What follows is the stuff of legend: God appears, promising Jacob that the land on which he lies shall belong to his seed, and Jacob wakes up the next morning in a grateful mood. “How awesome is this place!” he declares. “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” With the thought in mind, he takes the stone on which he had placed his head the night before and erects a monument to God, renaming the hill Bet El, or the House of the Lord.

It’s a curious moment. If God, as we are brought up to believe, is everywhere, why is Jacob smitten with the particular location where he had just happened to lie down for a quick nap? And why does the Bible refer to that location so casually, identifying it merely as “the place”?

The second question is easier to answer. “The place” is the same spot where Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, once prepared to sacrifice his father, Isaac. It’s the same spot where Noah built his altar when he emerged from the ark. It’s the same spot where the Holy of the Holies would stand for nearly a thousand years during the times of the first and the second temples. It’s the place where heaven and earth meet, and more than half of the mitzvot make reference to it in one way or another.

Jacob realizes the holiness of the place instinctively, but to those of us who hadn’t had the pleasure of divine revelation the idea is a bit more difficult to swallow. How are we—we who had never seen the temple, we who move an average of 11.7 times in our lives, we who have come to think of space as primarily a virtual construct, as in “MySpace” or Space Wars—to understand just how holy and awesome space can be?

The answer: by playing Minecraft. Released last year, this computer game now has more than 1.6 million registered users, most of whom speak of it in religious terms and are perfectly willing to sacrifice careers, relationships, and personal hygiene to meet the game’s increasingly intricate demands.

The premise is simple: As the game begins, you, a poorly animated wretch—think early Doom—find yourself stranded alone on an island, the sun beating overhead. By the time it sets, you better have built a shelter; otherwise, Creepers—imagine green-tinted Peeps melted in the fires of hell—skeletons, and an assortment of other pixillated meanies are bound to nosh on your flesh. Herein lies the game’s genius—Minecraft’s world is an enormous virtual sandbox, and it allows you to manipulate its trees, rocks, and other natural resources. You can start by knocking down a few trees, improvising a few tools, and building yourself a humble hut; a few hours (days? weeks?) later, you might have graduated to a castle, a roller-coaster, or the U.S.S Enterprise, depending on your predilections. Then you begin mining the earth for goods. I’ll stop there—like sex, whiskey, or Twitter, Minecraft is one of those things that makes little sense until you try it out yourself.

The game’s appeal is more theological than technological. We’ve seen other “open-world” games before—Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption come to mind—games that allow the player to freely explore a vast digital universe at his or her own pace, interacting with objects and characters and setting one’s own course. And we’ve seen so-called sandbox games, like Sid Meier’s megapopular Civilization series, which allow players to build their own worlds from scratch. But Minecraft outdoes its predecessors in at least one important way: It provides both the sensation that the world is wide and infinite and the ability to seize one of its corners and build a room of one’s own. Play an open-world game and you’re just roaming about. Play a sandbox game and you’re just busy building edifices and fretting about infrastructure. Play Minecraft and you get a sense, uncommon in video games, that space is real, that it matters, that it’s yours. If you’re anything like me, no matter how far you advance in the game, you’d always look back fondly at that first hut you managed to build that first night on the island. It’s your shelter, the geographical point from which you could safely look up and imagine God.

In real life, of course, most of us have no such place. Home, much as we may love it, can never be solely sacred. It’s the place where we feel safest, but it’s also where we eat and clean and work and collapse on the couch in front of the television after a hard day. A synagogue is a holy place, but it is a holy place for us and a community of other people, a place for which we dress up and in which we act reverentially. Minecraft allows us the rare pleasure of having a private sanctuary, one we build ourselves and on which our survival depends. There’s no ladder to heaven—you could probably build one if you put your mind to it—but there’s no need for one, either. The place—or shall I say “the place”?—has already been built.

As this week’s parasha draws to an end, Jacob pulls off a Minecraft move of his own. Having begun by laying down a single stone to mark the spot of his weird, transcendental dream, he heads to the holy land—two wives and many years later—but stops at Mount Gal-Ed on the way and makes a pact with his father-in-law, Laban. This time, he lays down a whole pile of stones. Like us nerds clicking away furiously at our keyboards as we play the game, Jacob knows the temptation of building bigger and better things. He knows better than most the vagaries of wandering, and he knows the joys of settling down. That, after all, is why “the place” ended up being God’s own house; even he needed a permanent residence. We can no longer experience this kind of devotional purity in real life. But Minecraft awaits.

Do it properly, and you might convince your readers that the Tea Party is the uptight brainchild of the Beat movement, or that Mark Zuckerberg is really a slightly taller, slightly more Jewish version of Alberich, the villainous dwarf antagonist of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Such are the glories of hyperlinked thinking—anything could pass off for anything else. Which goes a long way toward explaining this week’s midterm elections: When our pundits amuse themselves with games of conflation, we might be forgiven for thinking that a politician could be simultaneously a communist and a Nazi.

How to better understand this curious condition? Allow me to attempt an explanation by offering a flamboyant turn of my own: Jacob, the protagonist of this week’s parasha, is just like the Tea Party.

It’s a riveting story. After forcing his starving brother, Esau, to give up his birthright in return for a mess of pottage, Jacob collaborates with his mother, puts on Esau’s clothes, wraps animal hides around his arms to simulate his brother’s hairy limbs, and walks up to his elderly father. Isaac, frail and blind, is suspicious. “The voice is the voice of Jacob,” he says, “but the hands are the hands of Esau.” His doubts, however, aren’t strong enough; he blesses the disguised Jacob all the same.

In so doing, Isaac is like the rest of us. No matter what we hear, it’s what we see—and feel—that carries the day. Consider “Taking Television Seriously: A Sound and Image Bite Analysis of Presidential Campaign Coverage, 1992-2004,” a recent study by Indiana University’s Erik P. Bucy and Maria Elizabeth Grabe. The two scholars set out to examine the state of the sound bite, that ever-diminishing nugget of speech that is often the only form of political sustenance we get on TV. Updating earlier research, Bucy and Grabe confirmed that while in the late 1960s the average length of the sound bite was more than 40 seconds, the average in 2000 dropped below the 8-second mark. But sound bites, the two researchers discovered, weren’t the primal form of political communication on television. Image bites were.

“Even as candidate sound bites continue to shrink over time,” they wrote, “image-bite time is increasing in duration—and candidates are being presented in image bites almost twice as much as journalists.”

Taking a biological approach, the authors argued that their conclusion shouldn’t come as much surprise. They cited the renowned argument made by neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes’ Error, claiming that reason is far from being the final arbiter of perception. As vision is the most developed and sophisticated of our senses, the use of language, reading, and other complex and abstract forms of making meaning are “experientially remote,” Damasio said, and therefore less likely to guide us. Humans, Bucy and Grabe conclude, “are not primarily thinking beings who also feel but feeling beings who also think.”

This explains Isaac. Despite having reason to question Jacob, he dispelled his doubts and went ahead with his blessing. He knew it was wrong, but he felt it was right. Sensation spoke louder than words.

To hear Bucy and Grabe tell it, that’s true for us all. We may not go as far as to act in a way that would have tremendous implications on the well being of our family, but we would certainly let this vague, thumping, irrational feeling guide us as we go into the polling station. Which, in part, is why we have abandoned lengthy sound bites for radically shorter ones, and then abandoned those, too, in favor of images. Images appeal to the primal urges we have but that our minds sublimate, refute, alter, or manipulate. Our minds might have told us that Michael Dukakis, for example, was a serious, committed and intelligent public servant deserving of our trust, but our eyes saw a man who looked funny wearing a helmet aboard a tank. The same is even more profoundly true today: No wonder one of the most successful Democratic candidates this election cycle, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, won his Senate seat in part thanks to a highly visual stunt in which he shot the cap-and-trade bill with a rifle.

Like many reasonable voters, Esau, too, gawks with astonishment at the shenanigans that deprived him of his primacy. He can’t believe that all it takes for him to be cast out is a few dirty tricks. He shouldn’t be surprised, and neither should we. If there’s anything to learn from Jacob, and from this election cycle, and from modern communications research, it is that we are predisposed in favor of the emotional, the visual, the sensational, the mad, the impulsive, the liberating. To transcend all those and move into the elevated spheres of reason requires work, the kind of work that sets apart making statements about cutting the budget and being able to name a single program one might cut once in power, the kind of work so many of our newly elected officials seem disinclined to undertake. If we don’t want to end up like the dejected Esau, we must be vigilant and demand, at the very least, that they try.

Enter the Absentees Property Law: Passed by the Knesset in 1950, it gave the newly minted Jewish state the authority to claim for itself the property of those Arab residents of Palestine who had fled their homes during the war. A masterpiece of creative legislation, the law stated that even if said Arab residents happened to return to their homes after the war and become Israeli citizens, the very act of having fled nullified their right to their property, no matter how well documented. These unfortunates were termed, in the tart language of the law, nokhakhim-nifkadim, or absentees who are present. In a state like Israel, where the greatest natural resource is irony, few thought this law absurd.

Some soon learned how to use it as an engine. In the mid-1980s, with Ariel Sharon presiding over the Ministry of Housing, Be’eri saw his chance. He formed a foundation called Ir David—Hebrew for the City of David—dedicated to promoting Silwan as a destination for Jewish tourism and settlement. Under the auspices of the Absentees Property Law, Be’eri claimed that many of Silwan’s Arab residents qualified as absentees who are present and therefore were not entitled to their homes. Officialdom did little to investigate: Be’eri’s claims were supported without so much as a visit to the actual site. Many families in Silwan, Israeli citizens for decades, were told that the homes that had been theirs for generations weren’t really theirs at all. Incensed, the Arab residents protested loudly. Few in Jewish Jerusalem paid any attention. The state continued to support Be’eri.

And Be’eri, for his part, delivered the goods. In 2008, the last year for which data is available, his foundation succeeded in bringing in more than 450,000 visitors to the historic neighborhood, an astounding number for a country in which the tourism industry, both international and domestic, is struggling. Construction was booming, too: By 2004, more than 50 Jewish families were living in Silwan, nestled in beautiful new homes built by Be’eri and his associates. A year later, the Israeli government announced its decision to demolish 88 homes in the al-Bustan section of Silwan, making room for several other of Be’eri’s projects, including a state park.

To the Israeli Arab residents of the neighborhood, this was a baffling turn. Aware that their property was coveted, they appealed to Jerusalem’s city government to stop the land grab. Nothing, claimed the municipality, could be done without an official proposal. The Arab residents drew one up. The city rejected it. Nothing, it seemed, could be done to stop Be’eri and his men.

Which might not have been so stinging if it weren’t for the fences and the guards. A dedicated soldier, Be’eri surrounded each of his construction projects with walls and entrusted Silwan’s Jewish newcomers to the care of sentinels. Arab kids who played or loitered next to one of the Jewish constructions were told to leave. Arabs began to demonstrate. The police showed up in full force. Anger turned to rage. Rage turned to violence.

Last Friday, David Be’eri and his teenage son were driving down one of the neighborhood’s streets en route to western Jerusalem. A group of boys and men—the youngest 12, the oldest 21—were standing by the side of the road. What happened next isn’t exactly clear. This is: The boys pelted Be’eri’s car with rocks, and Be’eri ran them over. Some were hurt. None were killed.

The incident was captured on camera. Watching the video, it appears that Be’eri is gunning for the kids, swerving to the left and heading straight into the children instead of veering to the right, away from the fusillade. Be’eri has been silent, but, directly after the incident, he told the police that he was hit by a rock first and then, in panic, turned the wheel the wrong way. That may be true, but it is, in one important sense, irrelevant: The real drama of the roadside rundown isn’t the moment—looking like some ghoulish ballet—of collision between car and child; the real drama is everything that has happened for the past four decades to bring Be’eri and his victims to that particular street on that particular day with those specific consequences.

To understand the true scope of the story, we need simply to read press reports of Be’eri’s conduct alongside this week’s parasha. First, the former. Reporting about the case, most of the Israeli media stressed that Be’eri’s life was in danger, and that all things considered—the former officer, noted some pundits, was armed and could have easily stopped and fired at the children rather than simply plowing them down with his car—the incident could have ended with more bloodshed. A day or two after the incident, I called a host of friends and family members in Israel and asked them about Be’eri. A good guy, most of them said, a decorated soldier, an educator, a benefactor of Jerusalem. So, he ran over some kids. So, what? You would’ve done the exact same thing if you’d been in his place, pelted with rocks with your son by your side.

No one seemed concerned with Be’eri’s background, with his tireless work to deprive families of their homes, with his imperious conduct in Silwan, with his penchant for Kafkaesque legal loopholes. His life, they seemed to suggest, was much like the incident itself: Given the circumstances, there was little else he could have done but trick and take, fight and win. There was no other way.

But there is. There has always been. It’s detailed in this week’s parasha, as Abraham, a truly courageous Jewish hero, grapples with God. The Almighty is fixing to strike down Sodom; Abraham is moved. What, he asks God, if there were 50 righteous men in the wicked city? Would you spare the rest for the sake of 50? The Lord agrees, and Abraham, emboldened, continues to plead: Would 45 do? Would 20? Would 10? At every turn, God is moved by Abraham’s outburst of mercy to spare Sodom his wrath.

In a book as momentous as the Bible, there are few moments more profound than this. By taking a principled stand, Abraham enters into what the philosopher Susan Neiman has called resolute universalism. “The Abraham who risked God’s wrath to argue for the lives of unknown innocents,” she writes, “is the kind of man who would face down injustice anywhere.”

It is never a good idea to compare any living man to the patriarchs. We all fall short of Abraham, of Moses, of Isaiah. But it is our duty to continue and strive to lead our lives according to the examples these men had set for us. Abraham, seeing strangers—evil strangers, sinners the lot of them—was willing to take the Creator to task to try and spare their lives. Be’eri travels on the opposite side of mercy. For him, the strangers in his path are targets, rivals, foes, fit for conquest but not for compassion.

Which one of these men we choose to emulate is a matter of our own conscience. Israel, it seems, has already made its choice. After the incident, the Israeli police briefly questioned Be’eri and then let him go. An indictment was drawn up against the oldest of the rock throwers.

The next day, she called the number she had seen on the screen, which turned out to be the hotline of the Israel Foundation for Handicapped Children. I want to be friends with the girl on TV, Adi told the person on the other end of the line, and then she listened patiently as the volunteer told her that the girl on TV already had many friends but that there were a lot of other handicapped children who were terribly lonely and could use someone to play with. Adi agreed to mentor one of them. It won’t take much, the volunteer on the other end of the line promised, just an hour a week of basic human contact.

Before she met her new friend for the first time, one of the foundation’s staff members met with Adi and told her to expect the worst. The boy, a toddler named Kfir, could neither walk nor talk, and he needed help to complete even the most rudimentary tasks. Spending time with him, the staffer said, might be difficult. Shaken, Adi knocked on Kfir’s door.

“It was like in the movies,” she says of that first meeting. “All I could see was a huge smile, ear to ear, and a million freckles, and a charming child who smiled and laughed constantly.”

Soon, the weekly hour stretched into two, then three, then four. Her presence, Adi noticed, gave Kfir something to look forward to—he had no social life to speak of and was engaged in no other extracurricular activities—but it also allowed his mother a few hours of relief and some time to herself. Before too long, Adi started referring to Kfir as her little brother and embracing his family as her own.

Now in high school, Adi decided to fill the rest of her free time by joining a youth movement. Out of the approximately 1.6 million Israelis who are 18 or younger, more than 175,000 belong to various youth organizations, one of the highest rates in the Western world. These movements vary in ideology and style, but all share a profound commitment to working toward social justice and civic involvement.

Adi was stirred by her experience in the movement, but also deeply troubled. While she was having a meaningful and enjoyable time with her friends, Kfir, she knew, couldn’t join in the activities. For all their good will, most Israeli youth movements reject children and teenagers with severe disabilities, arguing that the groups lack the training and the facilities to accommodate these special needs. That, Adi thought, was an excuse. All one really needed, as the battered trope goes, was love.

And so, at 15, Adi did the only thing she could think of: She started a youth movement of her own. And she gave it the first name that came to mind: Krembo Wings.

The Krembo, for those readers uninitiated in the wonders of Israeli snackdom, is a treat consisting of a biscuit topped with airy whipped marshmallow and coated with chocolate. It’s what Mallomars secretly wish they could be. It’s also the quintessential treat for Israeli children. And wings, Adi thought, symbolized hope.

The new movement, Adi thought, should do for handicapped children what she was able to do for Kfir. But it should also allow kids like Kfir to feel as if they were a part of the community, giving them the option to take part in the usual youth-movement volunteer activities. If a handicapped child and a non-handicapped child painted the school’s fence together, say, or cleaned up the local park, several things would happen, Adi argued—the handicapped kid would feel useful and empowered, his healthy peers would overcome whatever trepidation they might have had about the disabled, and the community at large would look on and realize that even its most unfortunate members can, when given a chance, give something back and play a part.

It was a winning argument. Young Israelis—disabled and not—signed up faster than Adi could handle them. She got in touch with municipalities, organized car services for the neediest children, roped in parents and teachers, secured a space to meet. Her enthusiasm and commitment were infectious. Today, eight years later, Krembo Wings has 10 regional branches across Israel, serving the needs of more than a thousand children. That number continues to grow.

One reason for the demand, Adi told me recently, had to do with technology. While the Internet has been a terrific fundraising tool for the movement—one member’s Facebook plea for donations went viral in Israel and raised tens of thousands of shekels virtually overnight—it also underscores the growing gap between non-handicapped and handicapped children. While the former spend more and more of their free time communicating with friends via social media, email or text messages, the latter—many of whom cannot see or hear or type—remain increasingly shut out of the digital cornucopia.

Their predicament is one we, following Adi’s example, should keep in mind and take to heart. As we do, we may take comfort in thinking about Abraham, the subject of this week’s parsha and the Bible’s ultimate outsider. As he crosses the river into Canaan, he is branded a Hebrew—in the original, the word ivri literally means river’s bank, a geographical demarcation connoting otherness—and marked as foreign. We, his descendants, blameless souls that we may be, were nonetheless doomed to keep the distinction alive and spend eternity as outcasts, strangers, perennial pariahs. It’s all the more reason to reach out to those still shunned.

The other instance related to her effusive 2006 introduction of Aharon Barak, the president of the Israeli Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006, who visited Harvard University’s School of Law when Kagan was dean, and who conservative critics said represents “judicial activism.” “I don’t think it’s a secret I am Jewish,” Kagan said. “The state of Israel has meant a lot to me and my family.” She went on to say, “I admire Justice Barak for what he’s done for the state of Israel and ensuring an independent judiciary.”

“[Barak] was central,” Kagan continued, “in creating an independent judiciary for Israel and in ensuring that Israel—a young nation, a nation threatened from its very beginning in existential ways and a nation without a written constitution—he was central in ensuring that Israel, with all those kinds of liabilities, would become a very strong rule of law nation.”

In her hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kagan stressed that she would not look to Barak’s judicial method as a model, saying the admiration she expressed in 2006 didn’t stem from his judicial philosophy or specific decisions.

But a third issue was raised at the hearings, and no one spoke of its Jewish antecedents. The elephant in the room was stare decisis (“let the decision stand” in legal Latin). It means refraining from overturning settled matters, regarding them as binding precedent. As we shall see, the controversy over stare decisis has a long history and dates back to the development of Jewish Law, known in Hebrew as halakhah. Interestingly, the Justice’s position in this regard accords with halakhah, even if eating in unsupervised Chinese restaurants does not.

Let’s look at American jurisprudence first.

As Jessica Gresko of the Associated Press noted, “At Sotomayor’s hearings, the phrase [stare decisis] was used about as often as the phrase ‘wise Latina,’ two words Sotomayor took a beating over. For senators, both Democrat and Republican, stare decisis is a big deal. They want to know that as a justice Kagan will be committed to past court decisions and want assurances she won’t overturn them.”

Stare decisis is not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution or in any specific law. In writing for the majority in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, citing precedent, that “stare decisis is neither an ‘inexorable command,’ nor ‘a mechanical formula of adherence to the latest decision.’” In this, Chief Justice Roberts (probably unbeknown to him, as a Catholic) reflected a basic tension in Jewish law.

As a nominee, Kagan termed recent Supreme Court rulings upholding gun rights (McDonald et. al. v. City of Chicago and D.C. v. Heller) “binding precedent.” In response to a question from Sen. Chuck Grassley, who asked her if she’ll follow stare decisis “to uphold Heller and McDonald,” Kagan said she will, as she will for “any case,” leaving herself, as we shall see, some wiggle room.

She also testified that the court’s rulings mandate that in any law regulating abortion “the woman’s life and the woman’s health have to be protected,” a reference to Roe v. Wade (which incidentally is also what Jewish law holds, according to a number of significant Jewish scholars).

Kagan also acknowledged that the case known as Citizens United is “settled law.” In that controversial 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court, overturning two precedents, struck down portions of the McCain-Feingold Act and held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment, potentially opening the floodgates for corporate campaign-finance expenditures. The Citizens United decision has been much vilified and, to a lesser extent, praised.

After demonstrating obedience to stare decisis, however, Kagan also testified, at a different time during the hearings, that the court should properly consider whether a “decision has proved unworkable over time, whether the decision’s doctrinal foundations have eroded, or whether the factual circumstances that were critical to the original decision have changed.” She thus apparently does not favor a doctrinaire application of stare decisis, but views it essentially as a rebuttable presumption; this is the “wiggle room” I referred to earlier and, as we shall see, accords well with the majority approach to halakhah.

There is ongoing tension between binding precedent and “advisory precedent” in U.S., British (common), and Israeli law, among other legal systems. This tension between precedent and innovation is not new; in fact, it has been going on for thousands of years.

It may be useful to consider the Talmud’s position.

Talmudic study has always been about competing in a marketplace of ideas and making sometimes hairsplitting distinctions, all in the name of finding truth. Not only is the Talmud itself replete with controversy, but in the standard editions of the Talmud, of course, the text is surrounded by commentaries and supercommentaries, and thousands more glosses have been written over the generations, many in flat contradiction to previous annotations.

What emerges out of all this seeming chaos is like the results of a spectroscopic analysis, with bands of different colors whose width represents the degree of consensus. On some issues, there is a wide band of a single color signifying broad agreement, while on others there is a colorful rainbow of narrow bands reflecting an enduring lack of consensus. Of course, the range of opinion is ultimately constrained by the Torah, which establishes immutable boundaries. The U.S. Constitution—even if, unlike the Torah, it is amended on rare occasions—functions somewhat similarly.

Over the years, in a lengthy and evolutionary process, Jewish law, which was oral and made by rabbis, based on and limited by Torah mandates, ultimately became codified. Given the Talmud’s preference for inclusion and respect for multiple opinions, such codification was, to say the least, not without criticism and was approached cautiously.

In fact, just the act of writing down rulings, or halakhot, was controversial. Writing the law down was opposed by the rabbis for more than a thousand years because written rulings are inherently less flexible. For this reason, other than the written Torah, known as Torah shebichtav, Jewish law was maintained as solely oral instruction, or Torah she-b’al pe, until political instability prompted Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi and his rabbinic colleagues to redact the Mishnah, the older portion of the “oral law” in the late second century CE.

Of course, judges and litigants alike all crave certainty, which well-written codes provide.

The tension between binding precedent and advisory precedent continued for a long time, as did the evolution of Jewish codes.

In the middle of the 11th century, Isaac b. Jacob ha-Kohen Alfasi, known as the Rif, compiled the Sefer ha-Halakhot, or Book of Laws, one of the earliest codes. It is arranged in the order of the Talmudic tractates, and embraces only the laws in practice at the time. Where earlier and later authorities disagree, Alfasi decided in favor of the latter, following the rule known as hilkheta ke-vatra’ei.

Maimonides’ 12th century Mishneh Torah created a new literary form for the Codes, that of a book of “pesakim,” or book of statutes without reference to the Talmud or other sources. Maimonides made the shocking but unequivocal statement that anyone who referred to the Written Law and to his own book would know each and every detail of halakhah and have no need for any other book.

This, exactly, was what Maimonides’ detractors objected to. Some, like Rabbi Yonah of Gerona even publicly burned copies of the Mishneh Torah (an action he later regretted). Codifications set the law in stone, and inherently violate the ancient precept that halakhah must be decided according to the later sages.

The principle of hilkheta ke-vatra’ei essentially stands in opposition to the idea of codification that stare decisis represents. Maimonides’ embrace of stare decisis (at least from his day forth) engendered much controversy, with Rav Abraham b. David of Posquières, known as the Rabad, leading the opposition.

Rabbi Menachem Elon, a professor who served as a justice on the Israeli Supreme Court from 1977 to 1993, and who was its deputy president from 1988 to 1993, commented on hilkheta ke-vatra’ei in his major work, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles. Elon notes that the rule that halakhah follows the later decisors dates from the Geonic period, from 589 to 1038. It laid down that until the time of Rabbis Abbaye and Rava, in the fourth century CE, halakhah was to be decided according to the views of the earlier scholars, but from that time onward, the halakhic opinions of post-Talmudic scholars would prevail over the contrary opinions of a previous generation.

Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, who lived from 1259 to 1327 and was known as the Asheri or Rabbenu Asher, or “our teacher, Rabbi Asher,” and is known to Yeshiva students simply as the Rosh, was a codifier. Despite this, he criticized Maimonides’ basic notion concerning the place of a “book of pesakim,” or codes, in Jewish law. He remarkably wrote, “If one does not find their [earlier] statements correct and sustains his own views with evidence that is acceptable to his contemporaries, he may contradict the earlier statements, since all matters that are not clarified in the Babylonian Talmud may be questioned and restated by any person, and even the statements of the Geonim may differ from his, just as the statements of the Amoraim [rabbis living from 200 to 500 CE] differed from the earlier ones.”

“On the contrary,” Rosh writes, “we regard the statements of later scholars to be more authoritative because they knew the reasoning of the earlier scholars as well as their own, and took it into consideration in making their decisions.” He also warns that “all teachers err if they instruct from the statements of Maimonides without being sufficiently familiar with the Gemara (later part of the Talmud) so as to know where they were taken from … therefore no person should be relied upon to judge and instruct on the strength of his book without finding supporting evidence in the Gemara.”

But historical events made the ongoing lack of a code untenable. The late 15th century saw the mass migration of Jewish communities, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and the establishment of new centers of Jewish learning. Just as instability prompted Rabbi Judah to redact the Mishnah, so too, Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488-1575), himself a transplant to Safed, in the North of Israel (from his native Toledo, Spain, via Portugal, Bulgaria, Egypt, Salonica, and Constantinople), saw the urgent need for a comprehensive code. He called his work the Shulchan Aruch, or “the set table,” and compiled it from 1555 to 1558. It was first printed in Venice in 1565. The work was soon adapted to the customs of Ashkenazi Jewry with glosses written by Rabbi Moshe Isserles, who lived from 1520 to 1572 and was known as the Maimonides of Polish Jewry and later called the Rema. His work is referred to as haMappah, or “the tablecloth,” and was first published together with the Shulchan Aruch in 1569, during the lifetime of Rabbi Karo.

Mindful of the criticisms leveled against Maimonides by the Rosh, Rabad, and others, the Rema cautioned against overreliance by judges on the Shulchan Aruch and on his own glosses, saying, “in any case, a judge must be guided only by what his own eyes can see,” sage advice that has all too often been forgotten. In any event, within a short time, the Shulchan Aruch together with HaMappah became the established starting point for deciding all questions of Jewish law in all Jewish communities worldwide, although Sephardic communities don’t always accept the opinions of Rabbi Isserles as binding.

Common law, also known as case law, evolved similarly and tends to follow the rule of hilkheta ke-vatra’ei. As Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, a professor of Law at Emory University, points out, common law is definitely influenced by Jewish law. He wrote, “The great early writers of the common law had Maimonides’ code of Jewish law in front of them in Latin translation.”

The British legal system has employed common law since the middle ages. It is also widely used in nations that trace their legal heritage to England as former colonies of the British Empire. These include the United States, to some extent, Malaysia, Singapore, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, Ghana, Cameroon, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Australia.

Common law is distinguished from statutory law in that decisions are based on previously decided cases, but prior cases need not be decisive. They are granted more or less weight in the deliberations of a court according to a number of factors:

• Is the precedent “on point”? That is, does it deal with a circumstance identical or very similar to the circumstance in the instant case?

• When and where was the precedent decided? A recent decision in the same jurisdiction as the instant case will be given great weight. Next in descending order would be recent precedent in jurisdictions whose law is the same as local law.

• Does the precedent stem from dissimilar circumstances, older cases that have since been contradicted, or cases in jurisdictions that have dissimilar law? (These would be given least weight.)

An example of the application of common law in a United States court is in the famous case of MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., where then New York Court of Appeals Judge Benjamin Cardozo, who would later become the second Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, established a broad principle of liability for foreseeable danger that was nowhere codified; he based his decision on the judicial trend of predecessor cases over the years that progressively increased the standard for liability, granting more weight to recent decisions. It serves as a good example of the application of hilkheta ke-vatra’ei. And once again, Justice Cardozo’s decision pretty much follows halakhah as it relates to tort liability, or nezikin.

At her confirmation hearing, Kagan was asked repeatedly whether her expressions of opinion in memos written when she was clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall reflected a proclivity for overturning precedent or viewing cases through a policy-minded prism. She answered cautiously, saying that in her opinion, mere disagreement is not enough to warrant overturning a precedent. This cautious posture is entirely accordant to Jewish law.

Perhaps it is Jewish law’s inherent elasticity and flexibility—bounded by the Torah but expressed in the freewheeling chaos of ongoing study—that has enabled Jewish law to renew itself and remain relevant after thousands of years. This might work in American law, as well.

David E. Y. Sarna is a writer, investor, and technologist. His book, History of Greed: Financial Fraud From Tulip Mania to Bernie Madoff, will be published by Wiley in September 2010. He blogs at David Bar Nahum.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer and activist, wrote to Maryland’s attorney general earlier this year alleging fraud and/or misrepresentation concerning Save a Torah rabbi Menachem Youlus’ contention that the Torah in question had been salvaged from Auschwitz by a Polish priest.

While Youlus had made this judgment in 2008, Rosensaft, who has taught legal classes on war crimes trials, disputed the provenances of the Auschwitz Torah and another authenticated by Save a Torah, this supposedly from Bergen-Belsen:

The original buildings at Bergen-Belsen, he said, were burned to stop a typhus epidemic and the survivors were moved to a former German military installation nearby in May 1945. Mr. Rosensaft said that he was born in that installation in 1948 and returned many times to visit.

“The brick barracks to which the survivors were moved did not have wooden floorboards,” Mr. Rosensaft said, “and they’re now a NATO base, populated by British military personnel, so there is no way Youlus could have gotten there, either.”

Deal Over Claims To Rescued Torahs’ Provenances [City Room]
Related: From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit [NYT]

“When you ask people what’s their favorite holiday, I’ve heard people say Passover, Hanukkah, Sukkot, Purim,” says Jonathan Sarna, who teaches American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “I think it’s harder for people to find an emotional attachment to Shavuot than to almost any other Jewish holiday.” According to Sarna and other historians, Shavuot’s trouble catching on is nothing new—it goes back, they say, to the fall of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.

In its earliest incarnation, Shavuot marked a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the sacrifice of the harvest’s first fruits and is one of a historical trio of harvest celebrations, along with Sukkot and Passover, known as the shalosh regalim. According to Paul Steinberg, a rabbi at the Conservative synagogue Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles and the author of a series of books on the Jewish holidays, rabbis in the Talmudic period needed to reinvent Shavuot after the Jews left Israel for the Diaspora and no longer traveled to Jerusalem with harvest offerings. So, through what Steinberg calls the use of “complicated mathematical formulas” that were debated for centuries, the sages associated Shavuot with the giving of the Torah. But that interpretive shift, says Steinberg, has not “captured the imagination of Jews in America or anywhere else.” (According to Reform rabbi Andy Bachman, who leads Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, some early Zionist settlers went so far as to explicitly reject the rabbinic interpretation of the holiday in favor of the agricultural one and celebrated Shavuot by dancing in the fields and riding on tractors.)

In the United States, Shavuot has met with particularly bad fortune. “They used to say that Jewish holidays needed mazel,” or luck, Sarna says. Hanukkah and Passover—located next to major Christian holidays that Jews want an alternative to—have mazel. Shavuot, marooned in the long stretch between Passover and the High Holidays, has the opposite. “Passover is the last Jewish gesture of the year before you disappear into summer camp, Memorial Day, et cetera,” Bachman says.

Until recently, Shavuot’s overlap with the end of the school year actually did confer some mazel at many Reform and Conservative synagogues, because Confirmation ceremonies—celebrations for high school students who have continued their Jewish education in addition to or instead of bar and bat mitzvahs—have traditionally been held on the holiday. But many congregations, including Bachman’s and Steinberg’s, have recently dropped Confirmation, which is increasingly seen an accommodation to Protestantism without authentic Jewish roots—another inadvertent blow to Shavuot.

Beyond the bad mazel, though, some conjecture that Shavuot may simply be too abstract to become popular among all but the most engaged or observant Jews. “The holidays that have done really well here are either firmly grounded in the home or allow for a kind of interplay between the synagogue and the home,” says Jenna Weissman Joselit, who teaches American Jewish history at George Washington University. Home-based holidays have strong elements of material and ritual—seders for Passover, sukkahs for Sukkot, menorahs for Hanukkah. But on Shavuot, “there’s no stuff and nothing to do, if you don’t go to shul,” Joselit says. “It’s a very serious holiday about law and responsibility and duty.” (All of this might be said as well for the High Holidays, which of course don’t lack for attendance. But the High Holidays make these themes personal, while Shavuot applies them to the Jews as a people—which, Joselit argues, makes them feel more remote.)

Shavuot is the consummate rabbis’ holiday: Its difficult themes of revelation, law, and collective responsibility make it a favorite among scholars—who struggle with how to share their enthusiasm with the laity. Elliot Dorff, a rabbi and professor of theology at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, calls it “my holiday”—precisely for the reasons their congregants may not. And Sarna says, “Shavuot is the holiday of books—it’s a harder sell, but we’re the People of the Book. Maybe it is our most authentic and distinctive holiday in that way.”

This idea might be starting to catch on: In the past few years, some synagogues have begun holding a tikkun leil Shavuot, or all-night study session, to celebrate the holiday. In its original form, the tikkun, first practiced in the 16th century by kabbalists who were themselves trying to revitalize Shavuot, involved prayer and Torah study from dusk until dawn; non-Orthodox congregations that hold the celebration now usually substitute lectures and roundtable discussions on a variety of subjects. Dorff said that Temple Beth Am, the Conservative synagogue he attends, can pull in 500 people for its tikkun (this year themed around “ethical, spiritual, halakhic implications of our food choices”), with 100 still remaining when the sun rises.

But some question whether the tikkun will ever catch on at most synagogues in a way that even approximates the success of lighter, more family-oriented holiday celebrations. “God bless Elliot Dorff, but Beth Am has a lot of academics and rabbis,” Steinberg said when asked whether he thought all-night study could save Shavuot. “That’s not the case for most synagogues. Most synagogues you get people till 10:00, then it dwindles.” (Indeed, some Jewish communities—in New York, California, and elsewhere—are trying to make the tikkun a more popular destination with performances, film screenings, and Israeli dancing.)

Steinberg’s own congregation is trying a different approach this year: bringing in a cow. Children at the synagogue will have an opportunity to watch a milking demonstration and churn their own butter in conjunction with the tradition of eating dairy on Shavuot. “We’ll see how it goes,” Steinberg says wryly. “It’s an intervention, if you will.”

Two Torahs, Two Holocaust Stories and One Big Question [NYT]

Until two years ago, I was no more familiar with the Torah than I was with Beverly Hills, 90210.

I admit that I knew both texts intimately: Growing up in Israel, I spent each Friday afternoon with one and each Saturday morning with the other. I followed closely the stories each told. I memorized the kind of negligible details only a youthful admirer might notice, like Noah’s age when he died (950) or the license plate on Steve Sanders’ Corvette (I8A4RE. Say it quickly). But I was not a thoughtful consumer of either sacred text. I read and watched, but I didn’t care much.

When I was asked to begin writing a weekly column for Tablet’s predecessor, Nextbook, commenting on the week’s parsha, or Torah portion, I approached the task with wry amusement. My mandate was to unearth any relevance the Torah may have to contemporary life, and to ascertain what, if anything, we young, secular, and not exceedingly educated Jews might learn from the Good Book. I looked forward to writing biting critiques that gently mocked the ancient book’s strange and antiquated stories. I expected to feel everything but enlightenment.

Two years into my journey—after a year of writing about the parsha, I moved on to commenting on the haftorah, the weekly reading from the Book of Prophets that supplements the Torah portion—I have changed in profound ways. I have no plans to observe the Sabbath, and I still consider my burger bereft unless veiled by a thick layer of Gruyère, but reading the Bible closely each week, and asked to grapple with its meanings, I feel more resilient than I’d ever been in my faith.

Some readers, I know, may be unwilling to free faith from the tethers of ritual and will consider my own brand of belief invalid or flawed. Without delving into details—the intricacies of the matter are too great to paint on such a modest canvass—I will say that at the core of my faith is a fervent belief in God, coupled with a strong skepticism that any one human, or any one book, could ever grasp the entirety, the enormity of his mysterious and ultimately unknowable will.

And while I don’t believe the Bible to be literally divine, I have come to see in it an astonishingly astute guide to human thought and behavior, a beacon in whose light us moderns—having ravaged with conviction every last bit of certainty, weary with knowledge and wary of truth—might do well to walk.

Of all the lessons the Torah had taught me, one stands above all: There is a God, but the rest is up to us.

Consider Sinai. If we look at the Bible as a tale, the moment at the foothill of the mount is its absolute peak. Everything we’ve read so far has been leading up to this. God chooses Noah, then Abraham, then makes Abraham into a nation, then banishes that nation into exile in Egypt. Finally, they are redeemed. Finally, God is willing to speak to the whole people. He’ll give them his living word, his law. He’ll tell them what it’s all about. But here’s what God has to say: “Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” That’s it.

Listening intently, the Israelites may be forgiven for feeling somewhat swindled. God, after all, had just told them that they were his Chosen People, but he hadn’t told them why, and, more bafflingly, he hadn’t told them what, now that he had conferred on them this most singular status, he expected them to do with it. A kingdom of priests? A holy nation? That’s hardly a blueprint for peoplehood.

At the heart of Divine Election—a chosenness that extends in time and applies not just to the particular people huddling in the desert millennia ago but to all Jews in perpetuity—is doubt. We understand, of course, that observing God’s laws is an irrevocable component of redemption, but it is not the only one. Sinai suggests something else, something spiritual. It invites us to wonder what it means, to question how we should act to prove worthy of being the Lord’s favorite sons and daughters. It puts the onus on us.

This, I believe, is one of the Bible’s most awesome tenets. Judaism shies away from heavenly arithmetic; it is not a world where the good and the bad are both calculated, measured against some divine standard, and used to determine life and fate. It’s not a religion that poses a straight and narrow path to salvation and punishes anyone who transgresses. Instead, in weekly portion after weekly portion, we get deliberate ambiguity and exhortations to take action.

Take Isaiah, for example. “This people I formed for Myself,” says the prophet, channeling the voice of God. “They shall recite My praise. But you did not call Me, O Jacob, for you wearied of Me, O Israel. You did not bring Me the lambs of your burnt offerings, nor did you honor Me with your sacrifices; neither did I overwork you with meal-offerings nor did I weary you with frankincense. Neither did you purchase cane for Me with money, nor have you sated Me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened Me with your sins; you have wearied Me with your iniquities. I, yea I, erase your transgressions for My sake, and your sins I will not remember.”

Writing about this passage a few weeks ago, I commented on its astounding lack of causality: The people sin grievously, yet God gracefully forgives. In Judaism, unlike its sister monotheistic religions, salvation doesn’t necessarily depend on prior action. Salvation comes first; what you choose to do with it is the whole point.

That is the message of Isaiah, the message of Sinai, the message of Moses and numerous others of our spiritual founding fathers. It’s a message of responsibility and of purposefulness. It’s also a message of freedom: Rather than a painting-by-numbers approach to morality and mortality—follow the rules and go straight to heaven—Judaism revolves around that chief faculty that distinguishes us from God’s other creations, namely free will. The rules are all set, but we’re free to rebel.

Which, needless to remind, we do. Forty days after receiving the Word of God, the Israelites make themselves a golden calf. For 40 years in the desert, they gripe and moan. They’re such incurable complainers that God himself calls them a stiff-necked people. And yet he seldom punishes them and never abandons them. He knows they’re human and that the only way they can be redeemed is not by accepting him unconditionally, or subjecting themselves to his every word, but by slowly overcoming their own weaknesses and learning to be a little bit more divine each day.

At its center, then, Judaism places Man. Blessed in his confusion, holy in his errors, searching. The search is the thing; the goal is less important. Not for us all this eschatology: Time and again, the rabbis remind us that there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except for removing the yoke of foreign bondage. Our Messiah is not only ordinary, he’s a paradox: As Michael Walzer astutely noted, the Jewish Messiah can only come when the entire people are worthy of him, by which point the Messiah is no longer needed. If it’s salvation we want, Judaism teaches us, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

These are some of the lessons I’ve learned from reading the Bible. I’d like to think that they’ve made me more observant, not in practice but in thought. Like those trembling Hebrews at Sinai, I’m overwhelmed by the peerless heights; I look up and can’t see the sky. And like them, too, I suspect that there’s a good 40-year-trek lying ahead, most likely with no Promised Land on the other side. Never mind; I’ve got one hell of a guidebook.

No doubt you’ve seen this black magic practiced before, and most likely, you’ve found it odious. But if you’ve never stopped to ponder the mechanics of this feeble act of conjuring, here’s a primer into the working of lazy journalistic minds: begin by taking a contemporary subject that’s popular and preferably controversial; find a historical subject that’s obscure; bend the rules of logic and decency until you can force both into the same intellectual framework.

You might, for example, claim an invisible affinity between the Na’vi, the heroes of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, and the followers of the French socialist Comte de Saint-Simon, or you might argue passionately that Snooki, the diminutive diva of MTV’s reality show Jersey Shore, is nothing but a modern-day reincarnation of the late Qing Dynasty’s Empress Dowager Cixi. In either case, a few well-placed historical facts may be selected to obscure other, equally pertinent and utterly contradictory historical facts and thus to endow you, the writer, with the everlasting halo of incomparable intelligence.

To demonstrate just how despicable I find this practice, allow me to repeat it: as I sat down to read this week’s haftorah, I opened the Book of Judges and was shocked to read about Sarah Palin.

In the book, her name was Deborah, and she was not the onetime, short-term governor of Alaska and current Fox News bloviator but rather a warrior and a judge. Still, there was little doubt: Sarah/Deborah spent most of her time speaking, simplistically, about God, about War, about people she hated and who were in no way like her and who would do well to just disappear.

It seemed a little strange, of course, that the book, describing events that took place circa 1280 BCE, during the reign of King Seti I, would so uncanninly capture the mindset of Queen Sarah, born 1964. But there was no mistaking it. The woman sitting under her tree between Ramah and Beth-el and the woman sitting on private jets between Wasilla and Washington were one and the same. Reading about Deborah, I could almost hear her claiming that she could see Canaan from her house.

Need proof? Here goes. Below are two quotes. Try to tell Sarah and Deborah apart.

“Why do you sit between the borders, to hear the bleatings of the flocks?” chided one of the two women, disparaging those of her fellow countrymen who did not support her zeal for war. “At the divisions of Reuben, [there are] great searchings of heart. Gilead abides beyond the Jordan; and Dan, why does he gather into the ships? Asher dwelt at the shore of the seas, and by his breaches he abides.”

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C.,” chided the other woman, disparaging her fellow countrymen who did not support her zeal for war. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

Which is which? Impossible to tell.

There is no need, of course, to carry this exercise any further. Mainly because it is not, alas, an exercise at all. While the historical comparison between the politician and the prophetess is a bit flimsy, the ideological underpinning, sadly, is not.

Lodged between Joshua—heir to Moses, practical fellow, conqueror of the land—and Samuel—holy man, anointer of kings—the judges represent, to modern, progressive eyes, a particularly dark period in Jewish history. Devoid, for the most part, of any concrete interest in governance or strong commitment to leadership, these swordsmen (and one woman) are blinding beacons of totality. For the glory of God and the love of the people, they will slay their enemies by the thousands, martyr themselves like Samson, or slaughter their daughters like the hapless Jephthah. With shedding blood their sole responsibility, they go about their business merrily, righteous and fierce and unquestioning.

Even in this flock of fanatics, however, none, perhaps, is more monolithic than Deborah. When we are first acquainted with the judge, she is concerned not with justice but with vengeance, summoning Barak, a local strongman, to her side and ordering him into war. Such, she claims plainly, is God’s will.

The battle, hallelujah, goes according to plan, but Deborah is just getting started. Elated, she breaks out in a thankful song, a stunning concoction of ecstasy and venom.

“Praise! Praise! Deborah,” goes one of its more feverish lines. “Praise! Praise!”

The rest isn’t much better. After disparaging those tribes that opposed the war, Deborah blesses Yael, the daughter of the Kenite king Heber. Approached by the defeated Canaanite general Sisera—bruised and bloody after losing to Barak and his men—Yael takes the weary soldier into her tent, feeds him warm milk, waits for him to fall asleep, and then takes one of her tent’s pegs and lodges it forcefully in Sisera’s temple, killing him instantly. For this act of treachery and murder, Deborah tells us, Yael should be blessed “above women in the tent.” Women, that is, like Sisera’s mother: not content merely with describing the general’s murder in gruesome detail, Deborah goes on to gloat with a ghoulish bit about the slain soldier’s mother, waiting in vain at the window for her son to return home from the battlefield. There’s no mercy here, no compassion, no justice. The haftorah’s end is stark. Deborah’s exhortation leaves little room for the imagination: “So may perish all Your enemies, O Lord.”

In case any reader becomes enamored with such murderous Manichaeism, the Book of Judges makes sure to conclude on a sour note: all war and no pray make Israel bad boys, and the nation is soon swayed by idol worshipping, punished for its sins, and is not redeemed until Samuel, the man of God, takes its helm.

This is one historical lesson we’d be well-rewarded to take to heart. From Deborah to Sarah, each generation is bound to have its own charismatic figure that speaks in tongues and blesses the ammunition and prefers the thundering marches of certainty to the subtle fugues of doubt. Before we follow these feverish few and go rogue, however, let us remember this: we’ve read this story before, and it never ends well.

*Correction, November 30: This post originally stated that the Muslim holiday Tabaski marked Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac.

Torah Scroll, Kabbalistic Circle of Shem Tov Ben Abraham Ibn Gaon, Northern Spain [Sotheby’s]
Related: Treasure Trove [Tablet]

Costco to Sell Torah [JTA]

Now, she’s formed a new band, Girls in Trouble, for a project by the same name. It’s a song cycle based on stories of women in the Bible. Rabins wrote the songs, and on a new album she sings, and plays electric and acoustic guitar, violin, and viola. She sees these works as a form of midrash, and bases them on extensive readings of commentary ranging from the popular to the obscure.

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Rabins in her Brooklyn apartment about betrayal, exile in the desert, loneliness, and seduction, as experienced by the likes of Bat Yiftach (Jephthah’s daughter), Miriam, and Tamar.

This week, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco takes a stab at changing that process through “As It Is Written: Project 304,805,” a public performance in which 34-year-old scribe Julie Seltzer will spend a year calligraphing a Torah scroll in one of the museum’s galleries. Referring to the number of letters in the Torah, “Project 304,805” makes Torah-creation an art event and a radical act, as the Talmud prohibits women from writing Torah scrolls. But Seltzer is part of a movement of female scribes, including Jen Taylor Friedman, credited as the first woman to complete the writing of a Torah in modern times, and the proponent of a halachic argument for why a woman would be allowed to write a Torah. When Seltzer is finished, her Torah will travel to Jewish communities around the country.

This early insight into the Torah’s visual aspect stayed with Buechler as she grew older, attended high school and college, traveled to Israel, and entered rabbinical school, at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York—and has culminated in an unusual practice. Each week, usually on Friday morning, Buechler reads the weekly parasha, or Torah portion, in Hebrew. Then she studies ancient commentaries, followed by modern ones. In the process, a particular image or scene, or occasionally a phrase, will emerge as a visual distillation of the reading that she paints on her fingernails. “This becomes a nice way of ending my study period for the morning,” Buechler says. “And this way I have something to look at and think about over Shabbat.”

Nearly every week for 10 years, she has painted iconic scenes (the great flood), powerful phrases (u’vcharta b’chaim—“choose life”), and holiday symbols (dreidels, sukkahs) on her nails. She invests small choices with great creativity and thought. When she paints the first Passover plague, rivers filled with blood, should a small fish be swimming around as a reminder that the river is a source of life? She associates her nail-painting with midrash, a type of commentary that fills in narrative and logical gaps in the Torah. Midrashic stories, often imaginative, are tools for thought. “This is not written midrash,” Buechler says, “but this is artistic midrash.”

Her current practice evolved from something much simpler. In middle school, inspired by teachers who got their nails done, she began to paint her nails each week, in solid colors according to the season: browns for the fall, mulberry and maroon for the winter, whites for the spring. In high school, she found that giving herself a manicure was a way to relieve stress, unwinding Thursday nights while watching television, sometimes with friends. She started by painting smiley faces, then seasonal icons—snowflakes for winter, turkeys for Thanksgiving. “And suddenly it hit me that I could make this something more meaningful,” she says.

Not only Buechler but the people around her find meaning in her nail-painting. Rabbinical-school classmates approach her with their own ideas for images and phrases, which means that somehow her practice has crept into their study sessions. And they ask questions. For Hanukkah this year, will she paint one menorah or one candle on each finger? (Undecided). Has she ever done the splitting of the Red Sea? (Yes.) She also gets noticed in the wider world. Curious shop owners get a crash course in parasha study. Buechler’s bat mitzvah student has negotiated a deal where after they finish studying the parasha together, Buechler will paint her nails with an image from it.

I visited Buechler last month, just before Rosh Hashanah and a few weeks before Simchat Torah, when congregations celebrate the completion of the year’s Torah cycle and prepare to begin reading it anew, starting from Genesis. She took a break from writing sermons to paint her nails with several favorite designs. For a brush, she used an unusual kind of toothpick that looks like a thin, flat rectangle, and which she buys whenever she comes across them. (She once used the point of a paper clip, until it started to hurt.) She worked quickly but precisely, using each hand with equal skill. In front of her sat more than 50 bottles of polish, which she picks with a particular subject in mind (“I was running low on brown, and I wanted it for my shofars,” she explained).

As we talked, Buechler interjected reflections about small details. Working on an intricate Sukkot design, she said, “I have to leave room for the schach” (the sukkah’s thatch roof). And later: “I’m not doing bamboo. Sorry.” Toward the end, she said, “I’m putting oranges in right now.” And the brush darted into the bottle of bright orange polish and dabbed each nail. “I think we’re going to do oranges and cherries. Or grapes. I’ll do grapes.”

Meantime, have a look for yourself at Crumb’s version of Eve, who looks a mite like Crumb’s wife, Aline.

Word Made Fresh [Bookforum]

For a dim-witted and jolly child like myself, Holocaust Day proved an intolerable burden. It wasn’t that the topic itself failed to fascinate; on the contrary, ever since stumbling across Anne Frank’s diary sometime in the second grade, I nursed few obsessions more persistent than the Nazis and their crimes. But Holocaust Day, with its demand of instantaneous sadness, with its recycled pageantry and terrifying iconography, struck me as grotesque. What lesson, I seethed quietly, was I supposed to take from this daylong commemoration that focused so much on pomp and so little on circumstances, on the concrete and complex set of historical developments of which this immense tragedy was composed? What was I supposed to learn?

The nation’s masters of ceremony thought of everything. They must have anticipated my question, as they had designed a one-word solution and printed it on a sticker we were all obliged to wear on Holocaust Day. It featured a red flower against a blue background with black block letters delivering the command: “Yizkor,” it read. Remember.

There could, perhaps, be no more profoundly Jewish concept. What are we, after all, if not a nation bound together by memory, sustained throughout millennia by the wisps of our shared history, the recollections of the past informing the longings of the future?

But memory is never without consequences. In 2007, for example, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, produced a hotly debated paper that claimed that if mankind wished to guarantee the thriving exchange of opinions and ideas, it must first teach computers to forget.

Beautifully titled “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing,” the paper claims that if we train our machines to continue and accumulate every bit of data, from the purchases we make on Amazon to the photos we post on Flickr, we will soon find ourselves living in a pixilated Panopticon, the notorious prison in which all inmates are constantly observed.

“If whatever we do can be held against us years later,” the paper states, “if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves. Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly.”

It is curious to imagine what Professor Mayer-Schönberger would have to say about this week’s parasha. A compendium of highly detailed laws and commandments read by Moses to the Israelites, it ends with a vague and ominous statement.

“You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you went out of Egypt,” read the portion’s last lines, “how he happened upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers at your rear, when you were faint and weary, and he did not fear God. [Therefore] it will be, when the Lord your God grants you respite from all your enemies around [you] in the land which the Lord, your God, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget!”

What a confusing construction, this: don’t forget to obliterate the remembrance of Amalek. Don’t forget to forget? Remember to remember? Just what should we make of this strange clause?

Later Biblical commentators were not as subtle as Moses. Addressing Saul, the newly minted King of Israel, the prophet Samuel provides the young leader with more specific instructions. “Now go and smite Amalek,” he orders, “and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox, and sheep, camel and ass.”

But this interpretation presents a problem. Taken literally, it advocates genocide. Isn’t that what obliterating the remembrance of a whole nation means? Shaken by this strange and dangerous edict, and wary of its possible wicked interpretations, generations of Jewish scholars addressed this verse at depth. The Talmud itself offered the definitive account, claiming that as the wars of Sancherib the Assyrian long ago “mixed up the nations” of the regions beyond recognition, it is impossible to tell who are the Amalekites anymore—and if we don’t know who they are, we can’t kill them. Going a step further, Maimonides, in his guide to the perplexed, suggested that it is not Amalek per se we must remove from the world but Amalekite, or nefarious, behavior, thereby obeying the command to remember by mending the world with education and good deeds. (For an excellent discussion of the Amalek conundrum, see here.)

If nothing else, these debates betray one fundamental truth—that memory isn’t easy. It’s a burden. And it’s one I’ve felt from a young age. Emboldened by the sticker plastered on my chest every Holocaust Day, I grew up and nurtured my desire to remember, to learn more, to better understand. In high school, I traveled with my classmates to Auschwitz, and was appalled to see them translate the traumatic experience of visiting the death camp into a surge of nationalistic pride, waving high the Israeli flag and talking loudly and proudly about their upcoming military service. To them, the commandment to remember was synonymous with strength; never forget meant never again be weak. The same sentiment resurfaced when I visited Yad Vashem for the first time as an adult and was dismayed to see the clear narrative thread that invaluable museum offered its visitors: the very last item on display is Israel’s Declaration of Independence, a curatorial choice that suggests that the sole lesson one must learn from the colossal suffering and demise of millions had to do neither with the ongoing fight against extremism and hate wherever they may roam, nor with the pursuit of the universal values of democracy and justice and freedom, but with the establishment of a strong and independent Jewish state. If this is how we remember, I thought, forgetting may not be so terrible after all.

I found an eloquent proponent of this flammable idea in the Israeli historian Yehuda Elkana. Publishing an article titled “In Praise of Forgetting” in 1988, Elkana, himself a survivor, put forth a highly controversial proposal to his fellow countrymen: forget the Holocaust.

“I do not envision today,” he wrote, “a more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to mobilize on behalf of life, to devote themselves to building our future and not to occupy themselves from sunrise to sunset with the symbols, the ceremonies, and the ‘lessons’ of the Holocaust. It is incumbent upon them to uproot the domination of historical ‘remembrance’ on our lives.”

Elkana, of course, was not advocating that we actively forget the Holocaust, its horrors and its effects. That would be folly. A historian, he was well aware of the need for continuing documentation, for factual evidence and analysis of modernity’s most harrowing massacre. What he was raging against was the manipulation of memory, the assigning of uniform political meaning to an act as introspective and fragile as remembrance.

Witnessing the enthusiasm with which some Jews have received Quentin Tarantino’s reprehensible new film—the film’s producer, Lawrence Bender, called the moronic revenge fantasy a “Jewish wet dream”—I wonder if it isn’t time to take Elkana seriously and, if just for a short while, if only as a thought experiment, learn how to forget.

The political climate is even hotter. Every town seems to hold town hall meetings, and in every town hall a gaggle of goons, screaming and making obscene charges, turns up the heat some more.

I would hate, dear readers, to add to the exhaustion and exasperation this summer has wrought. I would feel terrible knowing I’ve contributed yet another voice to the cacophonous choir screaming from every channel on air. And so, let us abandon the ides of summer for something completely different.

Like Moses.

If President Obama thinks the gun-toting maniacs lurking outside his public appearances are a tough lot to govern, he should take a peek at Deuteronomy; both physically and politically, the Israelites’ desert makes Washington’s swamps seem cool and calm in comparison.

Increasingly weary, nearing the end of his term and the end of his life, Moses speaks to the people. And as he orates, his tone grows angrier, more impatient. He has no time for platitudes. What he doesn’t get across, he realizes, might be forgotten as soon as he passes away. He speaks in growingly strong sentences.

Here’s one, from this week’s parasha, a short quip that had since come to adorn many a synagogue wall. “Justice,” Moses booms, “justice shall you pursue.”

To hear the aging leader tell it, it’s a fairly simple pursuit. As long as we are truthful and diligent, as long as we take great care before we wildly throw around accusations, as long as we respect and obey the hierarchy we set in place to govern us and adjudicate in our quarrels, we’ll be just fine.

Reading Moses’s dictates, however, it’s hard not to find oneself back in the present moment, in the thicket that is the debate over health-care reform. The pursuit of justice, the curbing of baseless accusations, the basic respect for our institutions, these are the fronts on which we fail miserably.

Consider the business of death panels. Distorting language in the proposed health care bill that seeks to require Medicare to cover counseling sessions on sensitive end-of-life issues if a person wishes to receive such consultation, Republicans—most notably former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Sen. Chuck Grassley—have been assiduously and insidiously promoting the patently false idea that the government was secretly interested in erecting committees that would determine who among the old and fragile is simply too expensive to be kept alive.

Or the equally hideous canard that health care reform is really just one big front for a devilish plan to divert federal funding into abortions. Having pulled the plug on grandma, goes this libelous logic, the government is now looking for ways to end little babies’ lives before they even begin. That the proposed bill says nothing about overriding the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal money for abortions, seems to matter not at all to the kooks who carry signs like “No Tax $$$ for Killing Babies.”

As many of the loudest liars purport to be religious folk, and as the Hebrew Bible is a staple both Jews and Christians share, here’s an idea: instead of repeating the scandalous allegations and giving them undue credibility, the media should consider running instead this week’s Torah portion. If it’s too long, or the language too archaic, here’s a fair summary: enough with the malicious falsehoods. Enough with the rabid disrespect for members of the House. Enough with the violent overtones, like the ones William Kostric, an armed New Hampshire citizen, menacingly expressed outside an Obama speech recently when he said, ominously, that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In even simpler terms, enough.

But this week’s parasha carries not only a condemnation of those who are malicious but also delivers a warning to those who witness evil and do nothing to stop it. Detailing the ceremony of Egla Arufa, or decapitated calf, Moses speaks of a particular form of sacrifice a community could perform to atone for bloodletting it was not able to stop. Even if the community’s members are innocent of the murder itself, by failing to prevent it they are nonetheless tainted with endless guilt.

Before an evil wingnut raises his arms and takes a shot at a congressman, before a town hall debate turns bloody, before more harm is inflicted, we must realize that it is we, no less than the maniacs, who are responsible for this intolerably hot summer. If we don’t intervene, if we don’t—regardless of our political worldviews—silence the lies and curb the violence, we may find ourselves with a chronicle of a death very much foretold.

But, dear readers, it’s summer – did I mention it? – and a thundering speech is far too stifling for such temperatures. Let us end, then, on a lighter note, with an example of just how we all should act and sound when encountered with our unhinged brethren. Barney Frank, the stage is all yours:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been commenting here on Moses’s farewell speech to the Israelites, marveling at how the nation’s fading father managed to vividly retell the story of the nation’s tortured past as well as admonish the people to remain faithful in the future.

As his speech nears its end in this week parasha, Moses delivers this same message again, with fiery clarity.

“Beware that you do not forget the Lord, your God, by not keeping His commandments, His ordinances, and His statutes, which I command you this day,” Moses says. “Lest you eat and be sated, and build good houses and dwell therein, and your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold increase, and all that you have increases and your heart grows haughty, and you forget the Lord, your God, Who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and you will say to yourself, ‘My strength and the might of my hand that has accumulated this wealth for me.’”

It’s a fascinating passage. For most peoples, history is a string of triumphs, a succession of victories that shape the shared consciousness and create a sense of community. But Moses has something very different in mind. Moses is advocating a humble history. He’s telling the people to remember not their glory days but their basic, fundamental, and incontrovertible meekness, because they’re all at the Lord’s mercy—and that, really, is Jewish history’s one and only theme.

And so, this week, let us experiment. As there’s nothing more humble a writer can do than give up his perch, I hereby turn this space over to you. Write me at blessedweekever@tabletmag.com, and share with me your own stories of humility, of realizing your own might would only go so far, of seeking help from heaven or on earth. Your contributions can be as short or as long as you’d like, signed or anonymous: as long as they’re appropriate, we’ll publish them all.

Humbly yours,

Liel

Jaws is still scary, despite the poor shark effects. Even Spielberg thinks so. He told a reporter, “I haven’t shown Jaws to my 10 or 11-year-old, and I won’t. I showed Jaws to Sawyer when he was, I think, 13. Because then they use the argument, ‘Dad, I was bar mitzvahed last week. Everybody said today I’m a man, and you still won’t let me see Jaws?’ Sometimes the kids outsmart me.”

While Spielberg might be basking in this anniversary, however, The Wrap’s Richard Stellar is outraged at the mogul’s recent donation of a Torah to the nonreligious Motion Picture and Television Fund home for seniors, which, says Stellar, is currently getting well-deserved bad press for cutting down on care.

Today in History, June 30
Spielberg’s Torah [The Wrap]
Related: Spielberg Q&A [Vanity Fair]

Young, reform-minded Iranians can ask for no better leader. They should adopt as their battle cry Allen’s famous quip, that 90 percent of life is just showing up.

I know, I know, it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” or “Hasta la victoria siempre,” but when it comes to the green-clad youth flooding the town squares of Persia, no slogan could be more poignant. Although it is too early to tell just what is going on in Iran, one thing is clear: wonderful things can happen if only one opened one’s door and stepped out to the street in protest.

I doubt that many Iranians, still governed by the crushing will of the mullahs, will be paying much attention to the weekly Torah portion. Pity. This week, the parasha is all about another rebellious people, the Israelites, who learn a priceless lesson in politics.

As the story begins, one is inclined to feel sorry for our exhausted ancestors. There they are, in the endless desert, with aching feet and doubting minds, when God instructs Moses to dispatch twelve of his finest fellows to see firsthand that greatly promised land. The spies hop over to Canaan, and return 40 days later. The look on their faces alone is enough to alert the people that there’s trouble in their promised paradise.

“The land we passed through to explore is a land that consumes its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of stature,” shrieks one of the returned spies. “There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, descended from the giants. In our eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.”

The Israelites, never ones to miss an opportunity for some operatic moaning, take their cue. Immediately after hearing these reports, the people begin to wail: “If only we had died in the land of Egypt, or if only we had died in this desert. Why does the Lord bring us to this land to fall by the sword; our wives and children will be as spoils. Is it not better for us to return to Egypt?”

Hold on, say two of Moses’s emissaries, Joshua and Caleb. Don’t turn around quite yet: the land is “an exceedingly good land,” with milk and honey and all that. And those giants are nothing compared to the glory of God, who would surely deliver them to us, you know, what with being His chosen people and all.

But Jews, historically, never really knew what to do with good news, and the congregation turns to the two cockeyed optimists and threatens to pelt them with stones.

Watching these shenanigans unfurl, God is not amused. Why not kill all of them, he suggests to Moses, and build a new, improved, and kvetch-free Jewish people? Moses, thankfully, turns down this kind offer, and God settles on a milder punishment: as the entire congregation failed to trust the Lord that the land is good, it shall never see it. The Israelites are doomed to wander in the desert for 40 years—one year for every day the spies spent in Canaan—until they all pass away and a new generation, free of sin, is ready to inherit and inhabit its home.

At first reading, the Israelites’ qualms with God may appear wholly justified. He had, after all, just appointed them as his elected few, and could have just as easily made them all disappear from Sinai in a cloud of purple smoke and reappear seconds later in downtown Jerusalem. That, the Israelites might have been forgiven for thinking, is how a god should roll.

Not our God. He is a Do-It-Yourself kind of deity. And when the Israelites balk, saying that there are too many other nations already occupying Canaan and that some consist of freakishly large men and that the whole thing is just too damn hard, He explodes.

More often than not, this story is taken as a lesson in the importance of faith. Joshua and Caleb, goes the perceived wisdom, believed that the Lord’s promises would come true, and that drove them to see Canaan not as it really was—a tiny and troubled country with too many folks fighting for too little space—but as God promised it would be, overflowing with earthly delights.

But faith may be beside the point. As in the anecdote of the pauper praying at the wall one more time, buying the ticket may be what it’s all about.

No one, perhaps, said it better than Michael Walzer. In his masterful Exodus and Revolution, he explained the story simply. “The land would never be all that it could be until its new inhabitants were all that they should be,” he wrote. In other words, it isn’t about believing, but about doing. The land itself is ordinary; it would be made special, promised, divine solely by the merit of its new inhabitants. If the Israelites took charge and obeyed God’s laws and set up a just and progressive society—the society that emerges from the intricate set of rules God had given his people at Sinai—the nation they would create would emerge as a beacon to all others, a true city on a hill. But if they sat and groaned and waited for readymade glory, all they would find is a desolate and divided strip of land, no better than Egypt and perhaps much worse.

It’s a stunning vision, and one we all too frequently forget. I wish there was a way to condense it to 140 characters and tweet it to Tehran. It would go something like this: 90 percent of life may be showing up, but it’s the other 10 percent, doing the right thing, that’s the hardest.

What, asked one of the group, was up with biblical Sodom? What had it done to earn its reputation?

I happily obliged, telling the tale of God’s wickedest town. You know: the angels visiting Lot, the townies knocking on the door looking for some good ol’ fashioned anal raping, Lot offering his virgin daughters instead, those same daughters getting their father drunk and having sex with him all night long.

“Come on,” said one friend, smiling. “Stop pulling our leg. Tell us the real story.”

It took a reading from the King James Bible to convince the assembled that my sordid little story was, indeed, the one recounted in the Good Book. And they were shocked. A fierce band of disbelievers who had long ago abandoned the faiths of their youth, my friends are often quick to view the Bible with a mixture of horror and bemusement, and regard those of us who embrace it warmly, if not always literally, with pity and ire. With their imaginations firmly planted in the landscape of Genesis, my friends inquired what my upcoming column was about.

I took a long sip of wine, and mumbled something soft and inaudible. I couldn’t bear to tell them that this week, I was writing about the parasha that specifies, in great and gruesome detail, the humiliating ceremony forced upon women suspected by their husbands of having been unfaithful.

Dragged before the priest on no other evidence other than her husband’s suspicions, an Israelite woman accused of cheating was then made to swear that she’d carnally known no other man. The priest would write an oath on a scroll, and place it in a vat of water, along with a handful of dust from the Tabernacle. The water would wash off the words of the oath, and the woman would then be made to drink the ghastly cocktail. If she had been unfaithful, the Bible tells us, horrible afflictions would come her way (consisting of infertility, if you read the text metaphorically, or of severe bodily disfigurement if you don’t). If, however, the woman had been true, the mixture would bless her with fertility and happiness.

Throughout the ages, many thinkers, on either end of modernity’s divide, rushed to interpret this harsh tradition. Some claimed that while the proceedings sound punishing, they’re still a step up from public lynching, the practice common with Israel’s neighbors in biblical times. Lacking the depth of knowledge or agility of mind to join in on this debate, I’d rather return to that far more mundane scene around my dinner table, a few nights ago.

Within a short while, my guests’ infatuation with Lot and his offspring dissipated, and the conversation hopped on to different subjects. Did you see, someone asked, the season premiere of Jon & Kate Plus 8, the TLC reality show whose stars, parents of eight young children, are on the brink of divorce? And what about The Real Housewives of New Jersey, another reality show featuring giddy and gaudy dames spending their time and their husband’s fortunes acquiring marble mansions and Botox injections?

I chatted happily. After all, I watch both the aforementioned shows with glee, and am not above, when the spirit stirs me, picking up a tabloid here or there to read about Danielle’s shady past or Kate’s affair with her bodyguard. But as the conversation progressed, an epiphany elbowed its way to the fore of my mind: its primitive and punitive aura aside, the biblical ceremony may treat women far better than most television shows do nowadays.

For one thing, the ancient and humiliating ceremony, for all of its vagaries, was approached with the utmost of gravity. So much so, that the oath, written and dissolved in water, contained the explicit name of God. The tried woman was believed to be literally consuming the spirit of the Lord, and that spirit alone—not an unruly mob or a stern priest or an angry family—would determine her fate.

The women paraded on our television screens aren’t taken quite as seriously. They’re left in our hands, and we want no inhibitions and no boundaries. Jon and Kate as a normal couple struggling to raise their brood? That’s nice. Jon and Kate as adulterous and greedy ghouls eager to whore themselves and neglect their children for fame and fortune? That’s ratings.

There are, of course, many reservations to be made here. Unlike the women wandering in the desert, the housewives of New Jersey willfully chose to partake in their own humiliation, from which they benefit handsomely. And a society that spends too much of its energies on the dolor of identity politics is one, I believe, at grave risk of intellectual ossification.

And still, as I put down the goblet and extinguished the smoking stub, I looked at my friends with calm.

“The portion this week,” I told them, unprovoked, “is about strange rituals and adulterous women. You should read it. You may find it enlightening.”

With Saddam’s steely emissaries raining on us for weeks, I, like many other Israelis, began to prepare myself for a bloated death toll. Some analysts spoke of dozens of casualties, others feared hundreds. The reality, we soon learned with great relief, was starkly different, and the antiquated weapons—not more than aged pipes, really, groaning under the burden of their long and strenuous flight—caused some damage to property and claimed the lives of two Israelis, with an additional three suffering fatal heart attacks as a result of war-related stress. Five people, I thought, five people was not bad at all. What I felt was relief. But judging by the media’s extensive coverage of the five victims, one could easily think that Baghdad’s attacks had annihilated a substantial portion of the population: profiles of the deceased were reported at length, their weeping relatives interviewed, government officials filmed rushing to comfort the bereaved.

I asked my mother why all the fuss. Trying my best to sound like a grown man, I said we should be grateful, as we’ve clearly avoided a much larger catastrophe. Five casualties, I stated in a voice that I thought was confident and macho and mature, is a price we could live with.

“No,” my mother said, so softly her words were almost drowned out by the din of the television news, “it’s not.” Her look suggested that our conversation was over, that I didn’t—couldn’t—understand. I went back to my room burning with shame, and listened to Lou Reed wail about heroin until the next missile hit later that afternoon.

My mother’s words, however, refused to leave me. It didn’t take much thought to realize the context of her sentiment, namely that each life was sacred and every needless loss a tragedy and five deaths just as horrible as five hundred. But the piercing gaze with which she stabbed me as she spoke suggested there was more to it than that. Confused, I sought distraction in mindless entertainment.

Like most Israelis during those strange days of that phantom war, I, too, was taken with Zehu Ze, the Israeli equivalent of Saturday Night Live, magnified a hundredfold by the fact that our televisions carried just one, state-run channel, and that Zehu Ze was, at the time, its solitary comedic offering. The most popular recurring character was the Babba Booba, a loopy rabbi who claimed to predict the war’s outcome using gematria, the Jewish system of assigning numerical values to letters and conducting complex calculations to try and unlock the hidden meaning of words—the meaning, mystics believe, that only numbers can reveal.

The skits were hilarious, but for a change, I wasn’t laughing. That crazed comedian, I thought, was demonstrating the same point my mother just had. He was demonstrating how, in times of crisis, we begin to ignore words and place our faith in numbers. Five casualties, then, becomes a national tragedy, not just because of the devastating sorrow of five families, but because the number itself, five, has become our albatross. The analysts might have had their hypothetical hundreds, but the concrete, real-life five somehow seemed like a more menacing, ominous figure that terrified us far more.

Numbers are also what this week’s parasha is all about. It begins with a strange request. Speaking to Moses, God demands the following: “Take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by families following their fathers’ houses; a head count of every male according to the number of their names.” One would think that a deity that had only recently torn the sea in half should not have much difficulty with a simple census. Still, the Lord insists, and the Israelites begin their counting.

Although the parasha itself, with its minute detail of each tribe’s count, is dry and technical—54,400 to Issachar! 57,400 to Zebulun!—there’s something irresistibly charming about imagining this tiny nation, lost in the wilderness, taking the time to painstakingly count each and every one of their numbers.

They had to, of course. Like Israelis during the Gulf War, numbers were all the Israelites had to go on in order to make sense of their other-worldly situation. This is why God instructs them to conduct a census. There’s nothing else he can offer by way of tangible reassurance save for ordering his chosen few to count their ranks and take solace in the figures. When we can’t comprehend or control our circumstances, we cling to the numbers, simple and incontrovertible, with all our might. Just think about the significance, almost mystical in its own right, that the number six million has taken on in our collective imagination. Call it the gematria of crisis.

Which, of course, suggests an interesting new facet to Bernie Madoff’s crimes. The betrayal of trust, the financial ruination, the savage blow to the global economy, all are valid points. But there’s also this: for millennia, Jews have taken comfort in numbers, turning to digits when words were somehow not enough. And Madoff violated this haven, using his prowess to create a false and dangerous trap that lured so many of us to damnation. Had he been around for the Israelites’ census, he might have reported Issachar as eight hundred thousand men strong, and Zebulun as having crossed the one million mark.

Madoff, then, is learning what Moses had already gleaned from God, what I learned the hard way from my mother, and what us Jews seem to have embedded in our genetic codes: false numbers are far worse than false words.

And while love has its day, its celebrants, its canon of songs and books and films, hate is rarely allowed into the limelight. When we speak of it, it’s always as love’s darker twin, the demon we must exorcise before we are able to become enlightened human beings, at peace with ourselves and at home in the universe. The only thing we can do with hate, we are told everywhere from kindergarten to cable TV, is to somehow miraculously transform it into love.

Once upon a time, there lived a Jew who was reportedly very good at doing just that. If someone slaps you, he told his buddies, just turn the other cheek. He loved the prostitutes and the lepers and the sinners. And he told his entourage to follow his lead: “This is my commandment,” he summed it up elegantly, “love one another as I have loved you.”

That Jew, alas, is long gone, and his followers in time have quite often chosen to replace the word love with other words—ike auto de fe, for example—that don’t quite square with the Boss’s vision of amity. Still, if you choose to follow his lead, his words couldn’t be clearer: all you need is love.

The rest of us, however, Jews who are not so much for Jesus, are left with a more nuanced narrative. A few weeks ago, the Torah told us all about love, instructing us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This week’s parasha, however, goes even further. It tells us how to hate.

As we begin the story, God is in a foul mood. He reiterates some laws, but then, like a sadistic parent a few vodkas into the afternoon, speaks at great length about what will happen to us, his children, if we fail to play by his rules.

“I will order upon you shock, consumption, fever, and diseases that cause hopeless longing and depression,” muses the Almighty. “You will sow your seed in vain, and your enemies will eat it.”

He’s nowhere near done: as the parasha continues, God riffs on various threats, beginning by not to partaking in his erring people’s pleasant fragrances, progressing by promising to incite the beasts of the field to swallow the sinners, and ending with the simple declarative sentence, “You will eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you will eat.”

So far, the whole invocation sounds like a bit of dialogue from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. But the Lord is not one for cascading fury. As He concludes his catalogue of catastrophes, He gets around to the point.

“But despite all this,” God says, “I will not despise them nor will I reject them to annihilate them, thereby breaking My covenant that is with them, for I am the Lord their God.”

A contemporary reader, sophisticated and educated, may be excused for feeling dumbfounded by this statement. To most of us moderns, a deity who resorts to familial devouring is, without doubt, a deity who has long decided to despise, reject and annihilate his folks.

If we were only told how to hate properly, this confusion might have been avoided.

And had we been taught how to hate properly, this parasha would have been the perfect primer. Hate, it tells us, is both natural and, sometimes, instructive. It can serve as an engine of change, often propelling us with great force and clarity to do noble and worthwhile things we wouldn’t have otherwise dared to do. But when we hate, we mustn’t forget the supreme lesson, the one rule without which our rancor turns reckless. It is this: hate, but don’t despise, reject, or annihilate. Hate, but realize that even the most abhorrent among us may one day be redeemed. Hate, but never neglect your primary covenant, that with God and the universe and your fellow man.

Next time you see that impossibly smug bloviator on television, then, or hear that neighbor who’s playing Midnight Oil after midnight, or encounter anything or anyone that makes your blood boil and your graces take their leave, rejoice: you’re a hater, my friend, and as long as you do it right, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Not in some feeble, inconsequential way, shrugging my shoulders and assigning divine origins to phenomena I’m too dim to understand. No, mine is a sort of faith that would have felt right at home on the hills of biblical Canaan. My God is a wrathful, awesome God, the sort of deeply involved deity that metes out rewards and punishments at will, withholding His grace when his subjects act abominably and bestowing it with abundance when they’ve been good.

As a young child, I toiled feverishly to develop some sort of system, some way to divine what the Divinity wanted. I would try to affix disparate occurrences to each other and create a sort of celestial Connect-the-Dots. That way, I thought, I might be able to trace out the outlines of God’s eternal plan.

As I grew older, of course, I realized such attempts were poppycock. The more I thought about the matter—a lot, I’m happy to report, particularly as I spent three years of my adolescence wearing the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces and having several opportunities to ponder the meaning of life, often while being shot at by gentlemen whose ponderings about the very same subject led them to radically different conclusions – I realized there was only one emotionally and intellectually honest way to commune with God, which is not to do it at all.

God, after all, is entirely unknowable to us. That is the point of His existence. He transcends the narrow realms of reason. We may have been created in His image, but His mind is not our mind, His language not our language, His perception endlessly vaster than ours. All we can do to get closer to Him, I believe, is strive to cultivate this wretched wilderness of a world we were given into a garden in bloom, peaceful and pleasant for all.

Which is where religion comes in. Although I adhere to very few of its strictures, I have often felt that Judaism held at its core a set of radically progressive values, that set it apart not only at the darkened historical time of its birth and ascendance but even today. As we read this week’s parasha, for example, we are commanded not to stand idly by as the blood of the innocent is spilled. We are warned – are you reading this, Mr. Madoff? – that we must approach business transactions with a pure heart and a cautious mind. And we’re given that most golden of all rules: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Amidst this register of righteous deeds, however, there’s this: “You shall not lie down with a male, as with a woman: this is an abomination.” The sin for said abomination? The bible doesn’t mince words: a man “who lies with a male as one would with a woman,” we’re told, “both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon themselves.”

As a proud member of Marriage Equality USA, an organization toiling to make same-sex marriages legal nationwide, and a supporter of numerous other organizations fighting for the rights of gays and lesbians, I read these paragraphs with a bitter sense of dismay, lamenting that amidst all these laws preaching kindness and compassion there was one advocating intolerance and violence. Love your neighbor, this week’s portion seems to be telling us, but if he or she happens to be gay, reach out for the nearest jagged rock and let the stoning begin.

I have no intention of adding to the already richly populated discussion about gay marriages, and possess little knowledge to argue the theological meaning of this particular statute and its implications for contemporary politics. What I would like to do is find a way for myself and others like me – those of us who believe in God and cherish the core values of Judaism but cannot adopt those of its edicts that so fundamentally negate our other set of values, those values which belong to the best traditions of the Western Enlightenment and the American spirit.

And this week, inspiration came from an unexpected source. This week, Jack Black gave me a Talmudic lesson.

Playing an obnoxious Christ in a new web video entitled “Proposition 8—The Musical,” Black reveals himself to a slew of famous comics pretending to be on either side of that notorious Californian legislation. Addressing John C. Reilly and Allison Janney, who play the leaders of the anti-gay Christian contingent, Black delivers a short list of biblical commandments: “you can stone your wife,” he sings, “or sell your daughter into slavery.” When the zealots respond that they’re opposed to such horrific acts and ignore those respective verse, Black retorts, “well, friend, it seems to me you pick and choose, so please choose love instead of hate.”

It’s much funnier when Black belts it out, but it is nonetheless deeply profound. With some exceptions, we all thumb through the bible and try to compile our own codex of personal laws for life. Like Thomas Jefferson – who took a pair of scissors, cut out his favorite bits of the New Testament, and pasted them into a new book he then considered his bible – we chart our own course and hope that one day it will lead us heavenward.

In the meantime, let us listen to the bible and to Jack Black, choose love, and pray God’s paying attention.

Olah

This “ascending offering” is “burned whole” at the altar as an offering to “God.” While some consider it “a terrible waste,” suggesting that “God” has no “corporeal body” and that therefore the entire ceremony is “a waste of a perfectly good bull,” most realize the “symbolic” meaning of this act, adding that “some smiting” might follow unless “God” gets His “meaty nosh.” Everyone, however, can agree that the “awesome barbecue smell” makes Olah a perennial favorite.

Minchah

“Fine flour,” “olive oil” and “frankincense” may not sound like the ingredients for “a perfect pancake,” but this “meal offering” still emits a “pleasing fragrance for the Lord” when set up in flames. This “no frills” kind of offering is “the poor man’s ritual sacrifice,” a good and affordable way to worship while traveling for “forty years” in “the desert.” Make sure you offer a portion of the Minchah to “the Cohens” if you want to get “a good table” in “the next world.”

Shelamim

Although forbidden to eat “any fat or any blood,” Israelites still find this sacrifice very popular because of its “personal meaning“ and “direct relation” to their “lives.” Meant as a ”peace offering” to “God,” a “bull, a sheep or a goat” are burnt at the altar, giving thanks for “good things that happened” as well as “good things that haven’t happened yet but we hope would happen soon.” Some say this system of “paying in advance” for “divine beneficence” is “stupid,” and want to “slaughter innocent animals” only after “God” has delivered “triumph,” but most Israelites agree that giving thanks “certainly can’t hurt ya.”

Chatat

A favorite with “transgressors” everywhere, this offering is designed to atone for “erroneously committed sins.” The elaborate menu offers options for “ordinary individuals,” as well as “priests” and even “the entirety of Israel,” and insists that no matter “how personal” the misdeed, “repentance” is still “a very public affair.” While you may be “super embarrassed” to share “your dirty little secrets” with “the entire freakin’ nation,” at least there’s a “delicious” meal waiting for you in the end. Even the harshest critics agree that Chatat is “much yummier than confession.”

Asham

Fans of “robberies” and “withholding funds” swear by this “guilt offering,” although “trespass” and “betrayal” may also get you in. With a few of “the right words” recited by the “Cohen,” you may even be “forgiven” and spared “a strange and horrible death from above.” Although no one is especially “fond” of giving Asham, “sweaty, nervous” Jews all agree it’s “far better than the alternative.” Some merciful ones even recommend it to “Bernie Madoff.”

It’s a big one, this. I still remember how furious I felt watching David Lynch’s twisted feat of television, Twin Peaks; at some point in the second season, when a conservatively dressed giant materializes and warns the show’s protagonist that “the owls are not what they seem,” I turned off the set. There was a limit, I told myself at the time, to how far I was willing to go to indulge some author’s inane and incoherent plot.

I still tell myself the same thing on occasion, watching, for example, the fourth season of Lost, the results of the recent elections in Israel, or any other convoluted drama that is impossible to follow over time and that pits one shady and unlikable bunch of boobs against another. Making a living telling tales, I’m adamant about this one small thing: a story is only worth my time if it delivers—subtly or bluntly, sooner or later, with a bang or with a whimper—a sensation or an idea. Keep the suspense going for too long, give me too little satisfaction, promise too much and deliver not enough and I lose interest, be it in Lost‘s John Locke, Lynch’s Leland Palmer, or Kadima’s Tzipi Livni.

But the Bible? That’s a different story.

Reading this week’s parasha, I was seized by a note of sour sentimentality, remembering my first encounter with the Good Book’s seminal moment, that moment in Sinai in which God finally reveals His divine plan.

I was in the third grade, and had spent the previous years following the story from Adam and Eve to Joseph and his scheming siblings. As a child, it was just that to me, a story, a strange narrative that seemed to skip and jump through time and bring up all sorts of awkward and icky bits—all that stuff about daughters sleeping with fathers and naked fathers being shamed by their sons—that made little sense to my prepubescent mind. And since I was one of those children who knew from a very young age that the only thing they wanted to do in life was be a writer, I was looking forward to the story of the Exodus. It was there, the older and better-informed dudes of the fourth grade told me, that the story comes together and God tells the Israelites what it’s all about.

And then came the big moment. I was sitting in class, with my teacher, Tzipi, presiding. The Jews, she said sweetly, were the chosen people. How do we know? The Lord says so himself. Here: “And now, if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of princes and a holy nation.” And with that, Tzipi slammed her Bible shut, smiling victoriously. She asked if there were any questions.

I raised my hand.

“Chosen for what?” I asked.

“Just chosen,” said Tzipi.

“And then?” I insisted.

“Nothing,” said Tzipi. “And then nothing.”

“So what does it mean, a holy nation?” I demanded.

“It means we’re chosen,” Tzipi said. “We’re special. Now let’s all sing a song.”

It went on, with me insisting and her obfuscating, me inquiring and her dodging the questions. I walked home that day pissed off. It was supposed to be the climax of the story, I thought, and all it says is that we’re a holy nation. No explanation, no word on why the Jews were chosen, or on how we were supposed to act now that we were divinely elected, with the exception, of course, of those rather general-sounding commandments, which, with pearls like “Thou shalt not kill,” seemed relevant to the entire universe, Jews and gentiles alike. The fourth graders were wrong, I muttered angrily; this story sucks.

It took me two decades and ample rereadings to learn this important lesson: The Lord is no David Lynch. He may imbue his work with plenty of bizarre occurrences and surreal characters, but when it comes to making a point, there’ll be no mysterious giants whispering cryptic catchphrases. He says what he means, straight and to the point. He’s an author supreme.

What does it all mean, then? How does one answer all these questions posed above? Why were we chosen, and what were we chosen for? Herein lies the magic: No matter how hard you stare at the page, no matter how much you try to decipher the meaning of this seemingly simple sentence, “a kingdom of princes and a holy nation,” you will never come close. Rabbis have been sparring for millennia, ideologies and sects have risen and fallen. All because God said precisely what he meant, and what he meant was to be as vague as possible. What’s a kingdom of princes? Whatever you make of it. What must we do to be deserving of the holiness of our nation? Whatever we think may make us holy.

Anything else, and the moment in Sinai would’ve been robbed of its magic, would’ve turned into an uninteresting case of deity barking down orders and mortals obeying. And God, to be sure, gave us his commandments alright, but when it came to the moment of truth, the moment of the covenant between us and Him, He was ambiguous. “You figure it out,” He told us, “it’s your story now.”

This being the case, let us remember the first rule of good authorship: as we write our own life into being, as we do our best to interpret this vague voice telling us that we’re princes all of us and holy every one, let’s do our best to be as clear and bold and forthcoming as we can. Otherwise, we’ll piss off our readers. And that never ends well.

Mr. President,

First of all, mazel tov! Up here, we’re all pretty psyched for you. Quite a few of us are registered Democrats—though not Esau, who’s a libertarian (go figure)—and we are immensely proud of your achievement. The Marx Brothers (Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, Zeppo, and Karl) threw one hell of a bash to celebrate your inauguration; Biggie and Tupac both performed, as did the Carpenters. Up here, they’ve got a lot of street cred.

But I’m digressing. The reason I decided to write to you, dear Barack, is to share with you a few pointers about leadership. I’m sure Lincoln would have loved to do so himself, but he and Liberace booked a cruise long before the election and didn’t want to lose their deposit.

It may seem a bit strange to you, taking advice from someone who’s been dead for a few millennia. After all, you may ask, what do I really know about modern issues like war or welfare or women’s rights? But what I have to say is priceless, the sort of wisdom that only gets truer with time. Don’t worry, I won’t be long. Here goes:

1. People suck: In a few months, something inevitable is going to happen. You’ll turn on the television one afternoon and discover that those throngs of people who support you now, all the millions who braved the cold to see you sworn in as president, no longer care. Even worse, you may find out that despite your passing sound legislation, working tirelessly to protect the nation’s well-being, and making all the right calls as commander-in-chief, the people inexplicably turn against you, distracted by some silly gaffe or filthy slander. You’ll sit there watching and, if you’re human (which Elvis, by the way, doubts), you’ll seethe with anger. In that moment, I want you to imagine how I felt when I ran happily down that mountain, carrying not the Constitution but the freakin’ word of God, and saw that it took my constituents less than a month to abandon everything sacred and make themselves a damn golden calf. And these were folks who had listened to the Good Lord with their very ears; I shudder to think what may happen to people who only listen to Fox News. Understand this, and take it to heart: people can be awful. Don’t get upset, and don’t try to be foolish and change human nature. Just work with what you’ve got.

2. Spare some change: Sure, you speak eloquently about the call of duty and the need for transformation, but don’t expect people to show up ready to work hard and be selfless just because you asked them to. I rescued my guys from a murderous tyrant, and made sure they were well-fed in the desert, and brought them into a covenant with their creator, and they still weren’t happy to follow me into the wilderness. Why? Because I gave them manna, and they wanted meat. Because I promised them holiness, and they wanted a homeland first. This is an important lesson, Barack: if you want people to march, make sure first that their stomachs are full, and that they have a place to lay their heads. Without concrete stuff, all talk is meaningless.

3. You need all the help you can get: At first, I was certain I could lead the Israelites all by myself. When relatives suggested I may be better off appointing deputies, I lost my cool. After all, so much of my campaign was about me—the hail, the frogs, the blood—that I found it hard to relinquish control. But when you’re dealing with stiff-necked people, you need good men and women by your side to help you govern. I see you’ve already begun to heed this advice; congratulations on choosing Dr. Sanjay Gupta as your surgeon general.

4. Get a Josh: I read an article about you and the civil rights movement that crowned you the leader of the so-called Joshua Generation, the youngsters who can safely conquer the promised land that those quote-unquote Moses-figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. could never reach. A sensitive topic with me, as you can imagine. But an important point nonetheless: make sure you, too, have your own Joshua, because none of us, no matter how fortunate, ever really get to enter Canaan. More often, we die on some mountain, alone, our Promised Land within sight but not within reach. And just before we do, we realize that it was really the journey that mattered. Still, make sure that when you step down in four years or eight, you have someone to pursue your vision, someone young and capable and passionate. There are quite a few of them in your party, so don’t worry about petty politics and start mentoring them from the very beginning. Otherwise, you’ll end up like LBJ; even here, he’s surly and lonely, and if it weren’t for the occasional tiff with Nixon, he’d have nothing to do.

5. Time is on your side: You, Mr. President, have four years to change the reality of your nation. I had 40. And I needed every day. As you may recall—and if you don’t, Rick Warren can surely remind you—I didn’t knock about in the desert for four decades because I couldn’t find Canaan. I did it because my people were not yet ready for the Promised Land, because they needed time to purify their hearts and steel their minds and strengthen their resolve. I had to wait for a lot of old people and old prejudices to pass away, had to wait for a lot of bad ideas to die out and for new, good ones to emerge naturally and organically in their stead. Sure, it’s easy for me to talk; there were no opinion polls in the desert, no bloggers to report on my every move. So do what you need to do to maintain your support, but remember that truly great accomplishments take time, and that time takes patience.

I’ll stop now, before I sound too much like Buddha, which happens to a lot of us up here after a while. I hope you find my thoughts helpful, and wish you again the best of luck. Oh, and if you see Bono, please tell him I’m a huge fan.

Yours across time,
Moses

He was not, despite his deepest wishes, the first man to make it to the South Pole; that would be the mustachioed mariner Roald Amundsen. He was not, in spite of his best efforts, the most famous explorer of his time; his former boss, the regally named Robert Falcon Scott, had that honor. He never even succeeded in translating his modest celebrity into a handsome income: when he died, at 47, on a small island in the southern Atlantic Ocean, he owed a small fortune that, in modern terms, would come to nearly a million-and-a-half pounds. Add to that his thick eyebrows, hangdog face, and penchant for spending most of his time by himself reciting poetry, and you begin to wonder if this is the same Shackleton who inspired generations of adventurers, not to mention a made-for-television film starring Kenneth Branagh.

And yet, despite his failures, Shackleton’s spirit was steadfast. “A live donkey,” he wrote to his wife, “is better than a dead lion.” And so it was with the donkey’s requisite stubbornness that he tried once more for Antarctica, aiming for the one record that hadn’t yet been broken: the crossing of the frozen continent. For nearly a year, Shackleton and his men fought with the treacherous ice and the creeping cold. Then the hull of their ship, exhausted by the extreme weather, cracked, forcing the crew to evacuate to the nearest secure landmass, the ominously named Elephant Island. The crew, Shackleton knew, would perish unless rapidly rescued. Along with five of his men, he boarded a small lifeboat and headed out for help, risking an ocean dense with icebergs and starved killer whales. He refused to pack supplies for more than four weeks, the amount of time he estimated the remainder of his men would survive without relief. So as not to burden the small vessel with unnecessary weight, nothing unnecessary, not even a Bible, was permitted on board. Instead, the captain instructed each of his men to tear their favorite passage out of the good book and place it in their shirt pockets, close to their hearts.

Were I fortunate enough to be there, among Shackleton’s men, I would have picked out this week’s parasha. One passage in particular, to be precise: the one about Moses dealing some street justice to an Egyptian officer. Here it is: “Now it came to pass in those days that Moses grew up and went out to his brothers and looked at their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man of his brothers. He turned this way and that way, and he saw that there was no man; so he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”

Growing up, I was puzzled by this story. Here, I thought, was Moses, future leader of the Israelites, purveyor of the Torah, and God’s BFF, acting all sly. Instead of standing up to the oppressor and making a statement, Moses looks around to make sure that no one’s watching and then makes his furtive move. It’s as if he subscribed to the Bart Simpson forensic school of thought: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove anything. Would Rambo ever turn this way and that way before dispensing his holy wrath? Would Dirty Harry? Would Charles Bronson? Why couldn’t Moses, our hero of heroes, simply mutter a cool catchphrase, like “yippie-kay-yay, sun worshipper” or “hasta la vista, Pharaoh” and then kill the Egyptian with a neat karate chop? Why so timid, even when kicking ass?

It took me years to learn that Moses’s hesitation had nothing to do with the fear of getting caught. He was not, I’ve come to realize (aided by some of our finest commentators), looking left and right to make sure no one was watching. He was looking left and right for a far less prosaic reason: as many of us often do when we witness an injustice, he was hoping that someone else would step in and do the right thing. He was hoping that someone else, someone more confident and strong and fearless, would show up and give the Egyptian his comeuppance. Anyone, he was hoping, anyone but him.

Although he preceded the Talmud, Moses was nonetheless operating on that precious and wise Talmudic dictum: “In a place where there is no person, strive to be one.” There he was, and there was the Egyptian beating the helpless Hebrew slave, and there was no other person present to put an end to the violence. There was no other person, and so Moses strove to be one. And he did.

And here’s the beautiful thing, the key lesson that makes even grand figures like Moses and Ernest Shackleton perfect role models for the rest of us dull, unwashed masses: they both failed. Moses may have succeeded in saving his Hebrew brother from a thrashing, but the very next day he was ratted out by his fellow tribesmen and was forced to flee to faraway Midian. And Shackleton may have succeeded in saving his men, but he failed in fulfilling his expedition and died broke and heartbroken. But the lesson of both lives had nothing to do with missions accomplished. It had to do with striving to be a person where there is no other person to be found. It has to do with knowing how to be that person even, or especially, in dangerous, unrewarding, but ultimately unavoidable circumstances. It has to do with stepping up to the occasion, whatever the occasion may be.

Wait, scratch that.

This week, the Bible is actually more depressing—and eerily more pertinent—than anything you’ll find on TV or online.

Since it may have been a while since many of us pondered the events that unfold in Genesis 6:9 to 11:32, here’s a very brief synopsis: God, furious at the world’s wickedness, instructs Noah, the only righteous dude around, to build an ark, load it with two members, male and female, of every species, and prepare for the flood. Forty very wet days and nights later, the flood finally ends, and God enters into a covenant with mankind, setting all sorts of helpful rules prohibiting murder and cruelty and such and promising, in return, never again to pull off any more diluvian stunts. Noah, thrilled to be on dry land, plants a vineyard, partakes of the wine and, like so many of us at one point or another in life, passes out on his bed, naked and drunk. Ham, his son, sees his father naked, while Ham’s two brothers, Shem and Japheth, refuse to look, covering Noah in cloth instead. Ham is cursed. Fast forward a few years, and the descendants of Noah, feeling frisky, build a very tall tower in a town called Babel. Angry at their vanity and ambition, and wishing, perhaps, that he’d never made that promise about no more floods, God confuses the tongues of men, and instead of speaking one universal language as they had before, the children of Noah now speak in many dialects. What they had there, presaging Cool Hand Luke by a couple millennia, was failure to communicate.

How is any of this relevant to our pre-election week? Ignoring the obvious metaphors—Wall Street as another tower of avarice, say, or the melting of the polar ice caps as precursor to a modern-day flood—this week’s parasha arrives just in time to teach us two very important lessons.

The first has to do with racism, a concept that can often trace its roots to the very Torah portion in question. While Genesis 9: 20-27 makes no overt reference to race, the story as it was told in subsequent centuries and in different cultures painted Ham’s face black, tying together sinfulness and servitude and providing a mighty, divine justification for oppressing the dark-skinned people of the world. As recently as a few decades ago, this so-called “Curse of Ham” was all some white Americans, including some influential ministers, needed to justify slavery and segregation.

Most likely, readers of Nextbook will find such bosh utterly laughable. But as we discuss the Bradley Effect—the concern that potential voters conceal their racial prejudice from pollsters but reveal it come election day—we may do well to remember the Ham Effect: the possibility that racism is resilient because it is effective at manipulating anything to its advantage, succeeding even in cementing a biblical story in which race is never mentioned into a concrete theological base from which to launch a millennia of violent racial assaults. Even if, come November 4, America elects its first black president, we must never assume that the forces that transformed seven verses in the book of Genesis into a divine justification for oppression are done trying.

But if Barack Obama took some time off this Shabbat and dropped by a shul in, I don’t know, maybe Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania, it is likely that the portion of the parasha that would most appeal to him would be the part that comes later, the bit about Babel and its tower.

After all, a candidate whose political fortunes turned forever as a result of his 2004 Democratic convention speech about a united America would surely revel in a vision of a united humanity. And the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia may find much to regret about the fact that God’s chosen form of punishment was not another flood—promises are promises—but the creation of many disparate tongues, a lingual lashing that kept people separated and confused.

And while the flood usually receives top billing—the disaster to end all disasters—it is, I believe, the tower that’s the real catastrophe. Think about how sad a story it really is: the only time in which we see humanity coming together as one to collaborate on a joint project, and what they choose to do, like Donald Trumps of antiquity, is say “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name.” If this is unity, God sighs, it’s best to keep them apart.

This, of course, is no hopeful message for election week. And as Jon Stewart has so diligently shown us, the descendants of the ancient bickering Babelers are alive and well on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. But the parasha doesn’t close on this sort of downer: just as the portion draws to an end, at the tail of a long genealogy of Shem’s offspring, it gives us a glimpse of a man who would come to play a very major role: Abraham, who we’re told is already en route with his family to Canaan, the soon-to-be-Promised Land.

And so it goes: from flood to dry and holy land, from curse to blessing, from men losing their common language to the man who will soon find common language with God. In other words, this week’s parasha is about change. And hope. I wonder where I’ve heard those words since.

If they can do it, why can’t I? Sure, they’ve spent years in rabbinical school studying the Torah, but I’ve spent hours, maybe even days, watching TV, playing video games, and reading blogs. When it comes to popular culture, I think it’s safe to assume that God, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, is on my side.

Welcome to “Blessed Week Ever,” a weekly drash written by one of the least likely Torah commentators you’ll ever meet.

This Shabbat, as synagogue-going Jews open the ark, I will turn on my Mac and play a new game called Spore. Created by Will Wright, the gaming guru who designed the Sims”the popular series of games that allow players to create and control small universes of virtual people”the game’s objective speaks to the central issue at the heart of this week’s parasha: the question of creation. In Spore, the player creates his own microcosmic organism, and then manipulates and tweaks it throughout a complex evolutionary process. Seeing one’s little virtual darlings grow from pixilated specks to spacefaring aliens, Spore‘s players get the satisfaction previously reserved only for He who, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth.

But while the game allows us the heady pleasure of playing God, it’s also more than enough to demonstrate just how far we really are from Our Father Which Art in Heaven. For God, creation is no biggie: some dust off the ground, the breath of life, and voila”Man. For Man, however, creation is slightly more difficult. Indeed, all subsequent human history, arguably, has been little but an attempt to replicate that most splendid of God’s miracles: making something out of nothing.

Consider the past few weeks alone, a time in which markets all over the world, like cows on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt, have been gawking at their own approaching doom with quiet desperation. The reasons for the meltdown, naturally, are many and complex; but at its heart there seems to be one common cause: Things fell apart because we’ve become increasingly apt at creation.

We created an economic infrastructure that encouraged people to borrow fortunes they couldn’t possibly pay back in order to acquire real estate they couldn’t possibly afford. And we created an emotional environment in which debt-based living was gently encouraged. We have created, in short, an alternative reality, one in which coarse and mundane things like balance sheets and bottom lines, things that told us that we could not be who we truly wanted to be but only who our bank accounts enabled us to be, were simply not welcome.

Judging by the sullen faces and somber tones of the men and women discussing the financial crisis on television, we’ve learned our lesson well. But that, alas, is highly unlikely: after all, the current collapse was born of the same mindset that spawned the Dot-com crash of the early 1990s, the war in Iraq, and most presidential campaigns since at least 1988, a mindset that too often conflates perception with reality, and that joyfully confuses our meaning with our means.

Here, for example, is what an unnamed senior aide to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind in 2004: reporters, the source said, as well as other critics of the administration, are “in what we call the reality-based community,” a community occupied by saps who believe “that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” That, the aide continued, is “not the way the world really works anymore.”

Such ontological juggling, of course, would have been unthinkable even a century ago, when the markets still greatly depended on our ability to produce actual goods, and life, for the most part, was largely observed firsthand rather than through the prism of all sorts of media. But now that so many of us make our livings off of ideas”inventing new kinds of subprime mortgages, say, or plotting political campaigns based more on imagery than on issues”we can transcend the inclement world we inherited and somehow force our way back into the Garden of Eden.

There is no use, then, in beating our chests and promising, in op-eds or on CNBC, that we will never again get ourselves into needless wars or financial freefalls. We will. It’s our nature; we haven’t changed much since the first man and the first woman bit into the apple and willingly exchanged bliss for wisdom and happiness for self-awareness. Mindless happiness was never enough for us; what we wanted was to know as much as the Man Upstairs.

And so, it seems, we’ve internalized the immortal words of Dusty Springfield: nothing is forever. Instead, all we want is a brief respite, a few years here or there during which we can actually believe that a small Internet startup delivering gourmet pet food might make us rich overnight, or that a lush estate with a private creek might be ours to own, or that a failed politician with a feeble mind might lead us to glory. Even though we know we’re headed for a fall, we don’t care all that much: we make the same mistakes again and again, knowingly and gleefully, because, like God, we, too, want to create our own universe, even if we realize that our creations are deeply and truly flawed.