The Process of Being Alive: Tazria-Metzora

The Process of Being Alive

D’var Torah for Parashat Tazria-Metzora

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

April 24, 2015

As some of you know, I’m an avid Facebook fan.  In fact, just a few days ago, one of my friends—both on Facebook and personally—posted a comment that I’ve been quite the “FB posting madman lately.”

I replied with a “like,” thinking how in fact that was only the tip of the iceberg. No matter how hard I tried to, I couldn’t possibly share everything that has been on my mind lately.  Not that I would want to, of course; Facebook isn’t necessarily the right forum for that.  But nevertheless, there it was—the sheer number and importance of topics that have been occupying my mind as of late.

Aside from personal issues, of course.   Rabbis are entitled to those too, you know.

So there’s been, for example, the matter of Yom Hashoah V’hagvura, Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day.  The magic of the Internet is in its connectivity, and I used that this year to connect to Israel and witness the official ceremonies at Yad Vashem, followed by some of the other programs on Israel’s state television.  This year, more than ever, almost outnumbering first-hand accounts were the interviews with second- and third-generation survivors—children and even grandchildren of survivors.

I was most affected by the power of the two-minute siren at 7 pm that signals the start of Yom Hashoah in Israel, and then again at 10 the next morning.  On both of those occasions, everybody stops whatever they are doing—walking, working, running, biking or driving.  They stop in mid-flow; drivers pull to the side or just stop in their lane and get out of their cars.  All stand still for the full two minutes, uniting with painful memories, with sorrowful stories, with unexpected follow-ups.  It’s a serious and sad 24 hours for all Jews, all over the world.

Then, less than a week later, it’s that all over again, with Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers of Israel’s wars.  Again 24 hours, again the sirens, again the ceremonies, the flame lighting, the tearful chanting of El Maleh Rachamim.  This year the commemoration was especially sad in light of the most recent war—the Gaza War of Summer 2014 with its 72 losses.  All together, Israel has lost to Arab violence 23,320 of its finest, most promising youth.  There is hardly a family in the whole country that hasn’t been touched, and that has made the Israeli nation more of a family than anything else in its history.

The 24 hours of Memorial Day come and go, marked, like Yom Hashoah, by the two-minute sirens we have come to know so well.  Only now, something quite new and joyous begins, with no transition to speak of.  The sadness turns instantly into rejoicing as Israel begins to celebrate—with fireworks, campfires and all-night dancing—its Independence Day.  This year marked 67 years since the day when David Ben Gurion announced the creation of the new State of Israel, an announcement that was recorded in sound and video and can still be watched today, sending shivers down our backs and tears coursing down our faces.

But that wasn’t all for me these past few days.  Not by a long shot.  There was also the issue of justice—justice deliberated, justice carried out.  In Boston courthouses, Tsarnaev was found guilty; Aaron Hernandez was found guilty.

And in Germany, an Auschwitz guard came on trial a few days ago for the role he played in the Holocaust.  Yes, back to the Holocaust.  It seems we just can’t escape its hold, its moral, emotional or physical clutches on us.  Oskar Groening, the accused guard, didn’t actually kill anyone; his duty was merely to watch the suitcases of the deported, to take their money, count it and then send it on to Berlin.  “After all,” he stated coolly, “they weren’t going to need any of it again.”

70 years after the liberation of the camps, this guard came forth as witness.  He did so, he said, because there were so many Holocaust deniers, and he was there.  He saw what was happening.  He could give witness to the atrocities he saw.  He felt a moral responsibility to do so now, before it was too late.

It wasn’t only his accounts that chilled my soul.  It was the feelings and thoughts that he said he had at the time, his recollections of how he truly believed then—as did all his partners in the genocide—that it was a necessary thing to do.  Necessary.  Necessary to kill men, women and children even after all their possessions, all their money, their clothes, their hair, their shoes, their very identity, were taken away from them.

Still, justice was being carried out.   70 years later, his testimony keeps it going even to this day.

My reactions to these happenings have been intensified by studying Torah.  I’ve come to see them as part of a long process, illuminated by the sacred process that Torah is.  Contrary to popular perception, the Torah isn’t simply a codex of laws, any of which can be taken out of context and quoted as God’s unchangeable word. Torah is a continuous process; it teaches and describes the path that we must follow if civilization is to survive.  Torah teaches justice—but not as vengeance.  Vengeance, teaches the Torah, isn’t justice. Vengeance is instinct, a momentary response that rises from some murky depth within us.  For the Torah, justice is the process we must follow.  It’s a process that begins with an act—premeditated or not (that makes a difference in the path of the process)—that then goes on to a court trial, replete with judges and witnesses, and concludes with verdict and sentence.  Through the process of justice the Torah has us undergo a gradual rise from animalistic instinct to divine justice.  This is how we can best fulfill the commandment tzedek, tzedek tirdof—“justice, justice shall you pursue.” Justice is a process that brings us closer to the Divine.

But it isn’t the only one.  This week’s Torah portion and its haftarah describe a similar process.  Only the subject matter changes.  Before, it was justice.  This week, it is health.  In this week’s readings we get a glimpse of medicine as it was commonly practiced 3000 years ago—not a time I would want to be sick in.  In this haftarah, from II Kings 7, the general of the Aramean army, Na’aman, suffers from a serious skin condition and comes to the Israelite prophet Elisha, for a cure.  Elisha tells him to go dip in the Jordan River 7 times.  Hearing this, Na’aman is incensed.  He was hoping, he says, that the man of God would wave his arms about, say a magic incantation and—lo and behold—the psoriasis would be gone.  What’s this dipping in some puny, stony stream? Still, Na’aman’s servants manage to convince him to do as he was told, and of course, no sooner does he do that than he is cured.

This is the process:  Back in the year 1000 BCE, they resorted to voodoo and magical incantations to bring healing.  That was the belief, that was the practice.  Spiritual healers abounded, but aside from sprinkling some magic waters and burning fragrant branches and leaves, they usually managed to bring very little improvement to the person’s health.

Yet among the Jews, even as early as 3000 years ago, there was a process working.  It was the beginning of the scientific method.  In Tazria-Metzora, this week’s Torah portion (Lev. 12:1—15:33), we learn that the Jewish priest must not only diagnose an illness; he also has to check periodically on its progress.  He has to provide caring, food and compassion—but most of all he had to observe the ongoing course of the illness:  So many days for the symptoms to appear or conversely, to go away; so many days for convalescence, and so many for return to full health and readmission into society.

It isn’t only about justice and health, of course.  Life itself, the Torah teaches us, is a process.  It’s a journey that takes us from basic instinct to something a bit more God-like.  A journey from taking to sharing.  From casting out, to caring.  There is no magic.  Life is real.  There is no room for voodoo in survival. 

The process that the Torah prescribes is more than isolated deeds.  It’s a progression, an evolution, that we go through with open eyes, ears, minds and hearts.  It’s a course of mindful, soulful, living.  By following it step by step, we get better.  Little by little, we get closer to our ultimate goal.

So there you have it—that’s what I’ve had on my mind lately, and possibly why I’ve been posting on Facebook like a madman.  I’ve been watching, thinking, learning—living through the process of justice, through the process of health and care-giving, living through the process of loss and rebirth, of Holocaust and Independence, of failure and redemption.

It’s a lot.  But if that’s what it means to say that I am a human being, then I am glad.  Because although we are all animal-kind, we can be, above and beyond all that, human-kind; what the rabbis describe as “just less than angels;” or perhaps, just a bit more than angels, since angels don’t get to choose what they do, and we do.  They simply obey.  We learn.  We choose.  We find our own path, sometimes by falling, always by rising again.  It’s a process.

It’s the process of being alive. 

Thank God. 

© 2015 by Boaz D. Heilman

Of The Lord’s Vengeance and Human Justice

Of The Lord’s Vengeance and Human Justice

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

This week’s Torah reading, called Shemini, comes from the book of Leviticus, chapters 9-11.  A terrible thing happens in the story.  Immediately after Moses and Aaron offer a sacrifice to God, two of Aaron’s four sons take it upon themselves to do the same thing.  However, their sacrifice isn’t accepted by God, and in fact they are killed by a fire that “surges forth from God’s presence.”  The Torah uses vague terminology to explain what they did wrong. All it says is that they offered “a strange fire.” 

Don’t play with God’s fire, the passage seems to teach us.  A “strange fire” is no match for the fires of God.

Yet what was the “strange fire” which Aaron’s sons offered?

About two thousand years ago, some of the ancient rabbis explained that the two young men were simply intoxicated. Drunk.  Or perhaps, as others suggested, they were drunk with power.  As sons and nephews of the two most powerful men in the nation, they might have felt that they could do anything, and get away with it.

At first reading, we might assume that God is the cause of the death of the two young men.  Yet it wasn’t God.  It was their own overconfidence that brought about their demise.

We human beings have amazing power.  More than any other animal, we have the power to imagine.  We have the power to create.  But we also have the power to hate, and the power to destroy.  We can create life—or at least RE-create life—but we also have the power to take life away, to hate, to maim, to kill.

This week we’ve been watching two trials here in Boston.  One, of course, was the trial of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing two years ago.  The other was Aaron Hernandez, convicted of killing an ex-friend of his.  The cases were of course very different from each other.  The Marathon bombing caused much more than just physical damage, as painful and tragic as that was.  It was an attack on all of us, on Boston, on America as a whole.  Hernandez, on the other hand, carried out a more personal vendetta.  His crime didn’t affect more than himself and his family, not to mention, of course, his victim, Odin Lloyd, and that poor man’s family.

Yet both cases also share a common theme.  Both Tsarnaev and Hernandez thought they could get away with murder.  For a moment, they took justice into their own hands and became judge, jury, witness and executioner all rolled into one.

That’s a lot of power to put into one person’s hands.

Jealousy and hate are powerful forces.  They both come from somewhere very deep within us.  A rage, a crazed fury rises up from the turmoils of our soul.  We hatch a plot, we carry it out.  We don’t stop to think whether it’s the right thing to do or not.  We don’t stop to think who might be hurt by our actions.  It feels right at the moment, and that’s enough for us.

In Shemini, the Torah portion that Jews all over the world read and discuss this week, Aaron’s sons do something similar.  They decide to do something that, deep down, they know is wrong. The instructions were right there, spelled out to the minutest detail by Moses, God’s most trusted servant!  Here is what you do, here is what you don’t do. Yet, suppressing their innate sense of right and wrong, the two young men decide to do what felt right, what felt good, without giving a thought to what might result from such a wrong choice. 

Power, in the wrong hands, is a dangerous weapon. 

Only yesterday, Jewish people all over the world commemorated Yom HaShoah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.  There were many ceremonies to mark the day, including one right here in this temple.  Yom HaShoah is a tough day, especially if you are a survivor or a child or grandchild of a survivor, or even if you just know a survivor.  It’s a day on which Jews focus on a period in our recent history that has shaped our entire existence.  For 24 hours we go back 70 or more years, to the nightmare we call the Holocaust, in which Jews were hunted down, packed into concentration camps and then transferred to extermination camps.  6 million Jews, among them 1.5 million children 13 years and younger, were systematically murdered, many of the killings meticulously documented on paper and camera by the Germans and their willing partners. 

It took massive efforts and the most advanced technology then known to humankind to carry out such a mass murder.

Yet it came from the same dark place within the human soul, the place where hate lives.  Whether it is the murder of one or four people, or of six million, it’s still the result of the kind of thinking that has us believing that we have the authority—the ultimate power—not only to give life, but also to take it away.

But, as the Torah portion teaches us, there ARE consequences to all our deeds.  There is a higher system of justice in this universe. There is an ultimate Judge who, as witnesses, calls upon the victims of hate and oppression.  It is up to this Judge to decide ultimately how justice is to be meted out, and no matter how long it seems to take, this justice does come to be.

That’s why civilization created a court system.  Vengeance is the Lord’s, we read elsewhere in the Bible.  However, for us human beings, no matter how much like God we would like to be, vengeance is not an option.  We have to resort to courts, to justice, a much slower system, at times inefficient, at times so slow as to seem to stop and disappear altogether.  And yet, justice, not vengeance, is the right path.

15 years after the end of the Holocaust, in 1961, Adolf Eichmann of cursed memory, the mastermind of the Holocaust, was captured and brought to justice in Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Israel.  Eichmann was that one individual in whose demonic mind hatched the evil notion of gassing Jewish men, women and children and then disposing of their bodies by burning them in mass crematoria.

Eichmann had the greatest and most dangerous power in his hands.  The entire German military and the most advanced technology then known to the world were concentrated in his hands. Eichmann stoked the fires with an ancient hate, “a strange fire” indeed, and his success outstripped his wildest dreams.

When, fifteen years later, Israeli soldiers put their hands on him, they knew who the monster was.  They knew what he had done.  It would have been easy to dispose of him right then and there.

Yet Israel did not resort to vengeance.  It brought Eichmann to trial, instead.  For 8 months the trial languished on.  A mountain of evidence was brought by scores of witnesses, many of whom still bore physical and emotional scars from the wounds that Eichmann and his henchmen inflicted on them.  In his defense, Eichmann claimed that he was merely a tool of the state, that he was merely following orders.  The judges never bought this defense, however, and Eichmann was convicted of his crimes.

Israel didn’t then—nor does it now—have the death penalty.  Yet this once, for this one case alone, it enacted just such a law.  Eichmann was hanged for the crime of genocide.

Does that mean that Dzokhar Tsarnaev should be executed too?  In the state of Massachusetts, there is no death penalty, and Aaron Hernandez will spend the rest of his days in jail.  But Tsarnaev?  His is a federal case, and the United States of America does have the death penalty in its law books.

In scope, the Boston Marathon Bombing was a small act of hatred.  Yet it was disruptive for our whole society and nation.  It wasn’t only limbs and families that were torn—it was our entire national sense of security.  Yet is this enough to bring about a death sentence?

Before the State of Israel imposed the harshest penalty on Eichmann, it was petitioned by poets, professors and philosophers, as well as by judges, government officials and even rabbis.  “We are not bloodthirsty,” was one opinion. Another was that sparing Eichmann’s life would be seen as a victory of goodness over evil.  Yet Israel went on with the execution.

Was it the right thing to do or the wrong thing? 

To kill another human being is to dip into the secret and deep well of hatred that resides within our human souls.  Is the death penalty justice, or is it, despite everything, still only an act of vengeance?

The jury is still out on that one.  We simply do not know.  We are still struggling with this question today.

That’s why, over the next weeks, months and perhaps years, Americans will be discussing the Tsarnaev case. And even if, years down the pike, after all the appeals are done and the books shut, and Tsarnaev is executed, we will still be asking if we did the right thing.  And that is good.  We should be doing exactly that—asking whether it was justice or vengeance, whether it was moral or immoral, right or wrong.

Some questions have easy answers, others less so. Justice is never simple. I guess that is what is meant by the Torah’s commandment, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”  Justice is sometimes elusive.  Yet justice is the course we must follow—indeed, pursue—no matter how difficult that might be.

Let us pray, instead, that we might always keep shut within our souls the doors to the furnace of hate, to the fires of prejudice and bigotry, so that we might not be consumed by their flames, as were Nadab and Abihu, the two sons of Aaron who “offered a strange fire unto the Lord,” that justice, not vengeance, be the path we follow all the days of our lives.

Kein y’hi ratzon, may this be God’s will, Amen.

© 2015 by Boaz D. Heilman

Passover Greetings

Passover Greetings

by Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

April 3, 2015

Passover, as we all know, is the Festival of Freedom.  At least for one night, we eat like kings, reclining on pillows, dipping in sauces and spices, with story telling and singing as our entertainment the entire evening.

What is different about Passover from all other holidays?  That it is more family oriented than all other holidays. In ancient days, when the Temple yet stood, Passover was one of the three pilgrimages, and Jerusalem was filled with Judaeans bringing their families and clans for the celebration.  Today, we gather around our own mini-altars; wherever we dwell, our homes become our Tabernacle.  Yet, even as we still observe the ancient traditions and the basic laws of Passover, so we add our own family traditions.  We interweave the story of the Exodus with stories of our own folk—where we came from and how we got to where we are today.

Our history is not like the history of other peoples.  Alone among other nations, we Jews recognize the Hand of God in our history.  As we recount the many harrowing escapes of our people—in ancient as well as in modern days—we realize how many miracles it took for us to be able to gather around the festive table, our families and friends around us, our tables overflowing with food and our cups with wine.

Passover, in addition to being a family, national and religious holiday, is also known as the Festival of Spring:  Chag ha-aviv.  For all of us, whether Jews or people of other faiths, this season brings to us all renewal of faith.  As the winter cold begins to dissipate and the first few sprigs of green appear, so do we begin to emerge from the long slumber that winter imposes on us.  We feel rejuvenated and restored.  Our spring festivals help us celebrate this new beginning that we see outside us and which we also sense within us.

Not all our stories are happy.  There are losses along the way, and for many of us, there are vacant chairs around the tables where once loved ones used to sit.  Yet tonight all our loved ones are gathered together, even if through the blessing of memory.  Tonight, our past and present intermingle, with future at the doorway.

This year, as we open the door for the Prophet Elijah, may we all be filled with the spirit of hope.   May we look to the future as through the eyes of the youngest children at our tables, who look at the proceedings with both wonder and amazement; who do not know enough to question life, but who keep seeking meaning in a story that goes back thousands of years.

A sweet, happy and delicious Passover to all of us; and to those of our family and kin who celebrate Easter—may the blessings of this season bring renewal and assurance, happiness and fulfillment to us all.