Friday, January 31, 2014

Leah Vincent et. al.

I've read the New York Post and Unpious.com articles on Leah Vincent & her new book. Her story is both fascinating (in & of itself) and stomach-churning (that her parents could chuck her out because she corresponded with a boy & bought a clingy sweater for crying out loud). These people (her parents) and I share the same religion??!! Shame on them! Ugh. What a pity that some people have chosen "casting out of" instead of "reaching out to." I think it sad (very) and telling (also very) that in the Yeshivish world frei (free in Yiddish) means someone who has become unreligious, i.e. gone off the path.

I deplore both the hivemind/herd mentality and the tendency of some orthodox & ultra-orthodox Jews to circle the wagons and cry "Ultra-orthodox bashing!" at any and all criticism of any aspect of orthodox & ultra-orthodox life, as if our faith teaches that anyone or anything is infallible and immune to criticism. (This is not say that ultra-orthdox bashing doesn't exist of course. After 25+ years here in Israel I've come across all sorts of secular bigots who will gleefully bash and jeer at the ultra-orthodox.) You saw this in the reaction to the New York Post's initial coverage of the Stark murder as well. By the way, I thought that these articles (here & here)  in the Forward were the best I've seen on the stark murder.

What bugs me though about o'dox and u-o'dox lowlifes (as opposed to secular lowlifes) is that you would think that the bits of cloth we cover our heads with would mean something, that all this stuff in the Torah about morality & ethics and treating our fellow human beings (not just fellow Jews; I was at a Shabbat table last Friday when somone brought up the you're-not-really-required-to-break-Shabbat-to-help-a-goy-in-danger-but-we-do-it-anyway thing, I wanted to throw soup at him) would sink in just a little. There's a(n otherwise absent) terrible chilul Hashem aspect when it's an ostensibly (!) o'dox/u-o'dox person caught doing something nefarious.

On the immune-to-criticism thing, I find it disturbing that in many o'dox and u-o'dox circles criticism of "gedolim" is considered a huge no-no (#3, for example). I remember listening to the radio in the car on the way home the day Rav Ovadia Yosef (z"l) passed away. Someone criticized something he had said (he said lots of outrageous stuff) and the program host shut this person down right away and said, "You can't criticize the Maran." Why the hell not? Avraham Avinu questioned God Himself yet we cannot question other human beings? Sez who?

Good night!

nb

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

More ramblings






I read the first chapter of Rav Norman Lamm's book "Faith and Doubt." In it he writes:
 
...A doubt is spurious if it does not issue from a quest for truth. A genuine doubt must be a question that arises from a quest, not a specious excuse that spares the doubter the need to commit himself. It must be critical not only of the object of its concerns, but of itself as well, lest it be no more than an irresponsible evasion of the need to take a stand...
 
...The emet which cognitive emunah affirms is not given to us for the price of mere assent; it is the prize for which we must engage in a fierce intellectual struggle. Doubt, so conceived, becomes not an impediment, but a goad to reinvestigate and deepen cognitive faith assertions. Out of the agony of a faith which must constantly wrestle with doubt may emerge an emunah of far greater vision, scope, and attainment...This is, of course, a dangerous and risky kind of faith. But, as someone so rightly said, you cannot open your mind to truth without risking the entrance of falsehood; and you cannot close your mind to falsehood without risking the exclusion of truth. The only way to avoid cognitive doubt is to ignore it; worse yet, to abandon the enterprise of cognition, or daat Hashem. The path to the knowledge of God is strewn with the rocks and boulders of doubt; he who would despair of the journey because of the fear of doubt, must resign himself forever from attaining the greatest prize known to man...

I think about this alot.

 
There is a whole (short) masekhet about the Israelite Samaritans: Masekhet Kutim (the whole text in English) that sums up much of what the Mishna has to say about them. Chazal call them Kutim, based on II Kings 17:24. By calling them Kutim, Chazal are saying that they're from Cuthah & thus not from Samaria. The Samaritans, of course, dispute II Kings 17:24-41.

Testy relations between Jews & Israelite Samaitans dates as far back (at least) as the New Testament. The Gospel of John records some Jews insulting Jesus by calling him a devil and a Samaritan.


 
Bereshit Rabbah & Yalkut Shimoni record a very snippy exchange between Rabbi Yishmael and a certain Israelite Samaritan. Rabbi Yishmael was passing Mt. Gerizim on his way to pray in Jerusalem. The Israelite Samaritan asked him if it wouldn't be better to pray on Mt. Gerizim & not in "the cursed House". Rabbi Yishmael replied that the Samaritans are drawn to Mt. Gerizim because they know where Yaakov Avinu buried the idols (see Bereshit 35:4). What a nice (not) exchange of insults that does credit to neither group!
 
The Mishna (Rosh Hashanah, Chapter 2) tells us that Chazal stopped the practice of lighting beacons on certain mountain tops as a way of announcing Rosh Chodesh because the Samaritans would put them out. But the Tosefta on Masekhet Ohalot (Chap. 18) says that Jews looted a market belonging to either idolaters or Samaritans, depending on the version.  
 
But in spite of the foregoing, Chazal, at least initially, could not make up their minds about them, were they Jews, non-Jews or something in-between?  
 
Chapter 2 of the Tosefta on Masekhet Avoda Zara says: "A Jew who rents his home to a Kuti has no fear that the latter will bring in idolatry."  
 
Chapter 6 of the Tosefta on Masekhet Mikvaot says: "The land of the Kutim is clean as are its mikvaot, houses and roads."  
 
The Gemara (Kiddushin, 4th Chapter, Daf ayin-vav) records the following exchange: "A baraita: The matzot of the Kutim is permitted and a man fulfills his obligation with it on Pesah. Rabbi Eliezer forbids it because they are not aware of the details of mitzvot. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: Any mitzva that the Kutim hold to, they are more exact (mdakdakim) on than the Jews..."  
 
The Mishna (Nidda, Chapter 4:1) says that Samaritan women are to be considered nidda from birth (because they hold that any issue which a woman may have before her first regular period doesn't count & doesn't render her nidda, whereas we hold the opposite). Tuma, tahara, nidda, etc. are concepts that do not apply to Gentiles. So if the Mishna is saying that Samaritan woman can be nidda, it's saying that they're Jews.  
 
Hullin 3 & 4 detail Abayye's opinion that Samaritan schehitah is valid under certain conditions. (On the other hand, the Mishna in Sheviit says that eating Samaritans' bread is like eating pork.)  
 
But, as I said, attitudes toward the Samaritans hardened. The Yerushalmi (Masekhet Avoda Zara, Chapter 5) has a rather poignant (I think) account in which a group of Samaritans came to Rav Abbahu and said, "Your fathers were satisfied with us (hayu mistapkin b'shelanu) and you, for some reason, are not satisfied with us. He said to them, "Your fathers did not corrupt their ways but you have corrupted your ways."  
 
Rav Abbahu ruled that the Samaritans were no longer as strict as they once were vis-a-vis kashrut and is also likely referring to the determination in Hulin 6 by Rav Nachman Ben Yitzhak that the Samaritans were worshipping an idol in the shape of a dove on Mt. Gerizim. Rambam picks up on Hulin 6 in his perush on the Mishna in Brachot and says that the Samartans are much worse than goyim. (Not surprisingly, a contemporary Samaritan scholar cursed the Rambam.)  
 
Given, as I said, that this reference in Hulin 6 is the only reference to the worshipping-an-idol-in-the-shape-of-a-dove thing in any extant Jewish and/or non-Jewish source and that the Israelite Samaritans deny this utterly & vehemently, I conclude that either Chazal were misinformed or that other issues were involved. What do I mean by "other issues"? Look at when the Israelite Samaritans were given the boot, in the late 3rd-early 4th centuries CE. By then all the other groups that had challenged the position of the rabbanim (the Sadducees, the Zealots, the Essenes, etc.) were gone...except for one. At that time the Israelite Samaritans were prospering, were well-organized and numbered over a million. So, says jaded cynical me, in order for the rabbanim to be the unchallenged kings of the mountain (as it were), the Israelite Samaritans had to be disparaged, declared non-Jews and given the boot.
 
After we had been up to observe the Israelite Samaritan Passover on April 23, as an experiment, I told one of our neighbors (a native Israeli) where we had been. Her astonished reaction was, "Aval hem kofrim!" ("But they're heretics!") I told this to my Holon Israelite Samaritan friend & he agreed with me that she has never actually met a real Israelite Samaritan in her life. If all we know about them is Rambam's remark that they're much worse than goyim (see below), then of course we'll be suspicious-to-hostile.

nb

Intro Post, Part Five (final)

(...)

I've had two other dreams of note. About a month ago, I dreamed that I was in Jerusalem and had to get from one part of the city to another but a neighborhood on a huge hill stood in my way. I had never been to the neighborhood on the hill before. I could have gone around it; there was a large four-lane boulevard skirting the hill. But I saw steps, a looong staircase, leading straight up the hill & decided to walk. I wanted to see what I could see from the top. As I walked up the marble steps a section suddenly morphed into rickety wooden steps that led through a wooded part of the hill, an old playground I think. That's when I woke up.

My other dream,  two weeks ago, was that I was peeling, like I had been in the sun and hadn't used any suntan lotion or sunscreen or anything. But I hadn't been in the sun. I think the peeling was on one of my arms but I can't remember.

I do fantasize about adopting the Israelite Samaritan version of our faith (actually, I don't know if they accept male converts) sometime in the future after, say, our youngest has finished school & is in the IDF, or even later, and would be less likely to be affected by the scandal surrounding his eccentric old Abba. There is an authenticity, a trueness to the roots, about them that I think we, with all of our books and books (Ecclesiastes warns that there is no end to making books) have long since lost.

Last thing, for now. I adore and love my wife. She is the greatest blessing of my life. (I joke that I must've done something really good in a past gilgul to deserve a wife like her in this one.) I would never do anything to scandalize or (God forbid!) jeopardize our marriage and/or our family. She likes, and is comfortable with, her life and the way of life we have and would be loathe to give them up just so I can realize (what I think she thinks/hopes is) a passing meshugas. She has said that she does not want to move to Holon. I absolutely respect that (of course!). I will never go anywhere (figuratively) without her. Maybe her attitude will change; maybe mine will. Who knows? 

For right now I have to ride this tiger through and see where it goes. Maybe it will go nowhere & I'll be stuck in the spiritual rut that I currently find myself in and that will be that. I am drawn to the Israelite Samaritans & their faith & way of life. Right now, I think, I must study. I need to study. Hopefully the books I have ordered will arrive soon. Hopefully they will provide me with guidance and the clarity that I thought I used to have and which I desperately crave.

In the meantime, when I go to shul tonight or tomorrow morning, I will certainly wonder if I'm not bowing in the House of Rimmon.

L'chaim!

nb

Intro Post, Part Four

(...)

About that Mt.-Gerizim-and-not-the-Temple-Mount thing. One of the things that both attracts me to Mt. Gerizim (aside from its incredible beauty, far more pristine than the Temple Mount, you can actually hear yourself think up there) and puts me off about it is that the Israelite Samaritans have it all to themselves. Nobody (i.e. 900 zillion Muslims) is fighting with them over it. They have it all to themselves and can worship God there as they please, whenever they please. In Chinese astrology (I believe that astrology is utter male bovine excrement but it can be fun), I was born in the Year of the Rabbit; I'm a Water Rabbit to be exact. We Rabbits, "dislike fighting and aggression, prefering instead to find solutions through compromise and negotiation." We Rabbits are sensitive, moody and stubborn. Water Rabbits have an even greater, "natural inclination to avoid conflict." Now, am I attracted to Mt. Gerizim (and the Israelite Samaritans in general, see the paragraph above: "We are so rancorously...") because I dislike fighting and aggression, am sensitive, moody and stubborn, and have a natural inclination to avoid conflict? If so, then I think it is my bad impulse that is pulling me there and I do have the venom of doubt in my system. If not, then, well, like I said, I have much yet to study and must follow this journey where it goes, and it is only my bad impulse which is telling me I have venom in my system. That my good impulse could be pushing me to explore Mt. Gerizim (figuratively) was at first kind of scary but is becoming less so.

Last autumn, as we read & re-read the first part of the final regular portion of the Torah on Monday and Thursday morning & Shabbat afternoon in the run-up to Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah, we repeated Deuteronomy 33:15 alot. The last two words are givot olam -- timeless/everlasting/eternal hills. As I noted above, when my colleague & I went to Mt. Gerizim back in May, "I crouched down and ran my hands over the almost flat stretch of rock [which the Israelite Samaritans call Givot Olam and which they revere as the site of the altar of the Tabernacle], that was very cool." So every time we read that verse last autumn, I ran my hands over the bare rock which I could almost feel. I remember in the excellent movie "Witness" (with Harrison Ford & Kelly McGillis) how the old Amish grandfather told his young grandson "What you take into your hands, you take into your heart." It's like Mt Gerizim is in my heart. It's as if my hands remember how Givot Olam felt. I don't know how else to explain it but there was a definite presence on Mt. Gerizim. For all its stillness, the spirituality of the place positively crackled. And I keep hearing the words "Worship God on this mountain."

In John 4:20 the Israelite Samaritan woman tells Jesus, "Our fathers worshipped God on this mountain [i.e. Mt Gerizim]..." My Israelite Samaritan friend says that by "Our fathers," she means the ancestors of Israelite Samaritans and Jews. She wouldn't mean the former only because that would be obvious. She means that both Israelite Samaritans and Jews were once one peope that worshipped God on Mt. Gerizim before we Jews broke away to focus on Shilo and then Jerusalem. Much food for thought here (though it's giving me much spiritual indigestion of late).
 
Aside #1: I need all this??!! Like indigestion. Things were a lot easier, I didn't feel such spiritual turmoil back when I was comfortably numb (to quote Pink Floyd). For a while I tried to ignore it in the hope that it would go away. But it didn't.
 
I have ordered this edition of the Israelite Samaritan Torah in English translation (alongside the English of our version), as well as this collection of essays by two Israelite Samaritan High Priests explaining their faith. One little voice (yetzer hara? yetzer hatov?) told me not to order the books and another one  (yetzer hara? yetzer hatov?) said, "Go, do it." They should arrive any day. I can't wait. We live in an entirely religious area. Our friends and neighbors would think I'm a lunatic or a heretic or both if they knew where my mind/heart/neshama is right now. I won't keep the books on our bookshelves (where guests could see them) and I'll have to be careful about reading them on the bus to and from work. My sly, double life. I suppose this borders on the sad & pitiful but I don't see that I have much choice.  

So, we went to the Western Wall a few weeks ago for a friend's son's bar mitzvah and I felt like it was just another place. I contrasted the grandiosity of the Temples that stood there, huge monumental buildings, with the simplicity of a tent (i.e. the Mishkan, according to the Israelite Samaritans) stretched over the bare rock of Givat Olam. (Quoth Thoreau: "Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify, simplify.") For me at least, the latter is a much bigger draw; I find the former off-putting. (Who needs the big, grandiose, colossal buildings? God or our us?)

I even wrote a haiku about Givot Olam:
 
Windswept mountaintop
tear-cracked patch of barren rock
long scorned, Heaven's gate

 
Our Israelite Samaritan friend told us on April 23, "We're the ultimate Zionists. We never left the Land of Israel. You went to the four corners of the earth." And I reply in my head ('cause I didn't tell him at the time), "Yeah, but God Himself sent us to the four corners of the earth." And he replies to me in my head, "Yeah, but He didn't tell you to stay there." I can only admire the Israelite Samaritans over the centuries for being willing to endure abject poverty, humiliation and degradation to cling to the Land of Israel. This is Zionism, of the kind that members of, say, the Zionist Organization of America, who limit their "Zionism" to words don't know a thing about.

Back to the tzniut in dress thing. I stand by my remarks above. We have gone way, way overboard in this regard (whether by "pure" halachah per se or by social pressure is, I think, beside the point). As far as tzniut is concerned, there has ben a creeping haredization of the national religious / modern orthodox "camp" here in Israel in dress. Girls at the torani primary school here (boys are in a separate building) will get a note to their parents if any skin is visible between the tops of their socks and the hems of their long skirts or if they wear sandals (even with socks). This is beyond ludicrous!

A while back we went to a bat mitzvah dinner for the daughter of very good friends of ours at the local yeshiva high school. At one point, all the men were asked to go downstairs & outside to the school plaza to daven ma'ariv and becausde the bat mitzvah girl was going to sing. (We could hear her very well where we were.) To suggest, hint or believe that I could have been aroused by a 12-year-old girl's voice is both asinine and insulting (to me as both a Jew and a man). On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, we listened to Yehudit Ravitz & Sarit Hadad singing selichot. Was I aroused? Quoth Joan Rivers, puh-leeze. I really think we have lost our way here.
 
This past Rosh Hashanah, I was looking at the section of the Mishnah on Rosh Hashanah in my machzor. I marvel that the Torah mitzva of Shabbat was overriden by our Sages who allowed witnesses traveling to the Sanhedrin to attest to having seen the new moon to violate Shabbat in so many ways (and tell the dayanim what they already knew!) on the basis of their (our Sages) interpretation of Leviticus 23:2; to my chutzpadik mind, this seems very, very, very weak.
 
I stopped saying Bameh madlikin as part of kabbalat Shabbat because I cannot accept the mishna which says that women die in childbirth becausethey neglect challah, niddah & candle-lighting. Such as we (i.e. flesh-and-blood) can know why God takes a person's life??!! Again, I just cannot accept this simplistic view. Life and faith are never that clear-cut.
 
I also wrote:

Once the fence inspired awe
now I run atop the posts.
I could very well fall
but at least I'm alive.
I can tell because
the fencetop pricks my feet

Others see green grass
but I see weeds;
hallowed ground for them,
hollow ground for me
where my feet grow heavy
on the old familiar paths.

 
A responsible adult?
Ha! What of my family
if I lose my balance
and, tumbling, pull them down?
So I must pretend and fool the world.
If I could only fool myself.

 
I know the world is hollow
but I fear to touch the sky
lest it shatter
and my family be caught in the wreckage.
So on I run, well-balanced,
but at least my feet hurt
_____
The "fence" I refer to, of course, is the orthodox Jewish concept of "putting a fence around the Torah" to protect it as per the Talmudic dictum "The oral tradition is a protective fence for the Torah." And you will, of course, note the Star Trek reference. (Click here for a rewritten version.)
 
(...)

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Intro Post, Part Three

(...).

So, after our visit, we drove back to where I left my car; we went in my friend's car. On Monday, May 20, I took the day off to get stuff done at home in the morning & then drove off to the Israelite Samaritan neighborhood in Holon (one cul-de-sac street that they're starting to outgrow) to meet with an Israelite Samaritan gentleman with whom I have been emailing. I parked opposite one of their synagogues which looks just like one of ours except for the writing in their ancient Hebrew script.

We sat in his living room and spoke for several hours. I mainly asked questions about their beliefs & customs, and he answered. He and his wife are already grandparents (his wife was feeding & then putting to sleep one of their infant grandchildren) but he said about their views on family purity that, speaking from personal experience, that week in which the husband has to do everything gives the husband an insight into his wife's point-of-view and helps an Israelite Samaritan husband appreciate his wife all the more & not take her for granted. When I mentioned our extra five days, he said that in their view that borders on adding to the Torah (which the Torah itself says, more than once, is a big no-no). When I mentioned our view about building a fence around the Torah, he said a fence for what, to keep the Torah in or us out/away? He said that they see the Torah itself as their protective fence that doesn't need another fence. When I asked him if they use umbrellas on Shabbat, he smiled & said, "If it's raining, of course," and added that in their view an umbrella is an umbrella & not a kind of miniature portable tent. They reject the idea of an eruv ("Where is that written?") but will carry infants, prayer books, etc. on Shabbat, but not tools, phones, etc., the difference being, in their view, obvious. They do not fiddle with the calendar so that Yom Kippur, say, does not fall on a Friday or Sunday; if it does, it does & they deal with it. They wait six hours after eating meat before eating dairy, and vice-versa, but do not have separate dishes. Given that people generally eat off glass, china, glazed ceramic, etc. dishes, they simply wash the dishes very well & utterly reject the idea that the meat/dairy essence of the food can somehow be absorbed into the plate or baking dish (which is something else that seems lunatic to me). They also count the Omer from the first Saturday night that falls during Passover and honor the first of [the month of] Nisan as their New Year, not the first of Tishrei, the latter being a holyday for them and the start of the run-up to Yom Kippur, but not Rosh Hashanah. I must say that I find a certain logic and consistency (not to mention simplicity) to their plain-sense-of-the-text-based approach to the Torah (see a few paragraphs above for what I said about Oral Torah). They reject our slaughtering not because of anything wrong with the slaughtering per se but because we do not offer the right foreleg of every animal to a priest/cohen. BTW, their cohanim/priests are to them what our rabbis our to us (they'll cite Deuteronomy 17:9); they never developed a non-priestly spiritual leadership. And on Yom Kippur, everyone fasts, except nursing babies & those under doctor's orders not to. It's not dangerous & their kids get used to it I suppose; a person can get used to pretty much anything.

My host invited me to have lunch with him, home-made (by his wife) seasoned pasta. I saw that the pasta had chicken it. I recalled Hulin 3 and Hulin 4 where Rav Abayye says that we can accept Israelite Samaritan slaughtering provided that a Samaritan ate from the meat himself. My host was eating the same food I was, so I ate, with a clear conscience. (It was good.) I felt, I dunno, empowered by eating the chicken. I have not eaten treif meat since I decided to become frum and abhor the very thought. But to my mind, this was not treif.


My host gave me an Israelite Samaritan calendar, a few copies of their community newsletter & a little notebook for children learning to read their alphabet.

Where am I going with all this, with my newfound fascination with the Israelite Samaritans & their faith? At this stage I'mnot sure. Sometimes the point of a journey is the journey itself and not necessarily one's destination, assuming one ever arrives anywhere. A traveler simply travels and I'm enjoying myself so far. There is a beauty in their unity and a purity and simplicity in their approach to Torah that appeal to me. Now, I don't know how much of this is one doozy of a timhon levav-ish doubt with a good mixture of contrarian-ness and revulsion over our utter disunity thrown in. I mean is being an orthodox Jew merely my default program, and I'm borne along more by spiritual inertia than anything else? What fun, how exciting.

On June 6, I had a bizarre dream. I usually do not remember my dreams but this one was very vivid & I haven't been able to get it out of my head/heart. I dreamed that I was bitten by a snake. I dreamed that I was in our old neighborhood & that a small greenish-yellowish snake bit me on the right thigh.There was local swelling & discoloration. I did not feel systemic symptomns. I was wearing khaki shorts & the swelling & discoloration could not be seen by anyone. I knew it was there, I could feel it, but I had to either hike up the shorts or take them half-off to show anybody. I remember thinking that there was poison in my system but only I knew it was there.

I relate this to my ongoing spiritual confusion & my fascination with the Israelite Samaritans. I know what the snake symbolizes, a la Genesis, temptation, doubt, etc. Why our old neighborhood? Because when my colleague and I drove to Mt. Gerizim the Friday after Shavuot, we left from there. (I left my car there & we went in his car.) The snake's poison = doubt and that only I can feel it, that only I know it's there, the meaning of that is obvious. The doubt in my heart is apparent only to me; nobody else can tell.


About three weeks later, I dreamed that I was back in the city where I grew up in the US. I had to get to the center of town (I was on foot) and had to go through neighborhoods that I hardly ever went to but I had to go through them because they were on the shortest, the most direct route to the city center. I entered a vacant lot that was strewn with heaps of trash and could see the center of town looming in the distance. But there were various paths through the vacant lot, leading to various exits from it, and I wasn't sure which path to take. I tried one which seemed promising by was startled by the sight of a big snake, with mottled coloration, like a copperhead, moving through the piles of trash. I didn't see its head or its tail, only a section of its middle moving through the trash but I knew exactly what it was. I turned around and took another path that seemed to lead towards downtown...and then woke up when my alarm went off. Downtown represents my destination, where I need to go. The trash-strewn vacant lot is like a maze to be threaded, tho' I'm not sure what the trash represents. Does the snake still symbolize temptation? Is it a pitfall to be avoided or a challenge to be surmounted? Should I have continued on that path? And why did I see only part of the snake (not its head and not its tail)? This snake was much bigger than the one that bit me in my previous dream.
I had another dream, the third in this series, two weeks after that, in July. I dreamed that I was back in my Samaritan friend's home in Holon. It was Saturday, i.e. the Sabbath for both Jews & Israelite Samaritans. The young Israelite Samaritan that we spoke to back on April 23, on Mt. Gerizim, at their Passover offering, was also there. My younger friend welcomed me, like he expected to see me. I asked him how Sabbath morning prayers were (the main Israelite Samaritan Sabbath morning prayer service begins well before dawn); he clapped me on the shoulder and asked me when I would join them.

My Israelite Samaritan friend has invited to personally guide me around Mt. Gerizim. I'd love to take him up on his offer but part of me is kind of afraid to because maybe as an Israelite Samaritan asked Rabbi Ishmael, I should serve God on that mountain. That idea, to serve God on that mountain, i.e. Mt. Gerizim, the Israelite Samaritan's call to Rabbi Yishmael, has been echoing in my head.

I always say that running from temptation is no good because if you run from temptation, it'll just follow you, you have to turn and face it, and stare it down, and tell it to buzz off & show that it has no power over you. Now it is as if God has said, "You think it's that easy? You talk a good game but let's see how you actually play." And, like I said, I don't know whether it's my good impulse or my bad impulse (see above), or both, that's messing with me.

I must admit that I am very attracted to the Israelite Samaritan version of our faith (as I'll put it). As I said, there is a purity & a simplicity about their approach to Torah that appeals to me right now. Even their Mt.-Gerizim-and-not-the-Temple-Mount thing doesn't faze me so much. What does faze me is that I've become so blase about so much of what orthodox Judaism holds dear. That freaks me out a bit. OK, more than a bit.

I've become very jaded and cynical about a whole lot of things.


We Jews are so rancorously divided among ourselves and gratuitous hatred is having such a field day that it is gut-wrenching. The way Judaism is playing out in public life here (and the US) is sickening. No wonder the secular Israelis hate us. I've heard that it says somewhere in the Jerusalem Talmud that in every generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt it is as if in that generation it was destroyed. Well, if that's the case and given that our Sages say that the 2nd Temple was destroyed on account of gratuitous hatred among Jews, then this generation is hopeless & we certainly won't see it rebuilt any time soon.

To go back to something I said above. If, as I've concluded, much of what our sources (Mishna, Talmud and later works) say about them is false & based on prejudice, I'm wondering what else in those same sources is false (& maybe based on prejudice), given that said sources were written by fallible (learned, scholarly, maybe even saintly in some respects, but otherwise imperfect & fallible) human beings?? (I'll go more into the particular things that bug me in future posts.) This
 
There really isn't any dividing line between the Written Word and the Oral Law and Tradition. Because the Written word commands us that we shall do as the transmitters of Oral Law teach us...Our acceptance of Torah, Mitzvot [the commandments/precepts] and Halacha [Jewish law] is based on a complete faith, belief, trust, and confidence in G-d AND in those who teach us what G-d meant and who legislate Rabbinic law. Including the halachic authorities throughout the generations. Including those of our own time.
 
is from a well-known parsha sheet here in Israel. I find that while I do have "a complete faith, belief, trust, and confidence in God", I simply cannot sustain a similar "complete faith, belief, trust, and confidence in...those who teach us what God meant and who legislate Rabbinic law. Including the halachic authorities throughout the generations. Including those of our own time" anymore. This sounds to me an awful lot like the Catholic docrine of Papal infallibility. I cannot believe that God gave me a heart and a brain and now expects me not to use them and instead to just follow the herd like an automaton. I'm finding, as I go along, more and more things that I just cannot swallow (any more).

(...).

Intro Post, Part Two

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In Deuteronomy 28:28, God warns us that He'll zap us with (among many other things) timhon levav which various translations have as "astonishment of heart", "bewilderment," or "confusion of heart" and the like. None of our Sages really comment on what it is. Timhon levav is also the last al chet that we thump our chests over on Yom Kippur ("And for the sin of confusion of heart..."). I gave a talk on it once at our synagogue (Israel) and I said that it was doubts, not little-bitty doubts like "Does this brown spot here invalidate my etrog?" or "Has it been three hours since I ate that hot dog?" but great big existential doubts, the kind that if you admit them, have the potential to undermine your whole faith in Judaism, such as "Maybe the Torah was written by a committee (and a pretty amateurish one at that)?" or "Maybe we have no inherent right to this piece of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea?" Stuff like that; there are lots of others, to each their own. And it says timhon leVAV (with a double Hebrew letter vav) not timhon leV (with only one vav). Our sages say that the double vav in the word levav symbolizes the two impulses in our hearts, the good impulse and the bad impulse (which is not really bad per se as it is selfish & self-centered). So when a big ol' timhon levav-style doubt is gnawing away at you (and this is the really nasty, devious part), you won't know if it's your good impulse or your bad impulse, or both, that's messing with you.

In terms of observance, the flat is kosher (of course), I cover my head and pray twice a day (except on Shabbat I've kind of let mincha fall by the wayside). In the morning it's always in synagogue; in the evening almost always.

I've got no patience for such (in my mind) nit-picky details like pour the water over your left hand twice and then once over your right hand when saying the blessing...just throw the water over your hands, it doesn't make any difference, and say the blessing, or you've got to take the tefillin for the arm out of the bag first...just take them out and put them on, etc. I also don't think it matters a whit which shoe I put on first; in the general Jewish scheme of things, that doesn't even rate up to the level of small potatoes. I think we've become a nation of obsessive-compulsives.

I also lack that masochistic streak that leads many orthodox Jews to pile on chumrot. It's hard enough being a ordinary Jew; we don't need to pile on chumrot, basic Jewish law should be enough. (Actually, I have one chumra. I'm very careful about tashlikh & refuse to do it except in a natural source of water, which usually means sometime during the intermediate days of Sukkot; doing tashlikh while looking in the general direction of the Mediterranean Sea or some other natural body of water, or standing next to the mikveh, etc. just doesn't do it for me & seems like a waste of time, both God's and ours.

Nor do I subscribe to the make-believe view that if we just follow the wonderful examples of our Sages and conscientiously obey Jewish law, then we'll have good, happy fulfilled lives. A book (on part of the Book of Judges) I have actually contains the line: "If we are careful to fulfill our responsibilities toward our spouses according to the Torah standards, we will have happy homes, happy lives and happy children." Wowwww. If...then... Do people actually believe this? (I know that there are lots who do.) Would that life and faith were that simple!!

I think that we Jews, especially many of my fellow orthodox Jews are way overstuck on ourselves, which partly stems from a misunderstanding of the chosen people thing. One of my books on the prophets, the translation of the work of one of our great acharonim says: "...gentiles have a weaker urge to sin than do the Jews and repent more easily...the evil inclination does not pride itself on overpowering a non-Jew, for that is no formidable task." I'm sorry; I simply can't accept this. Aside from looking awfully like crass racism, it is smug, condescending and arrogant. If I hear one more orthodox or haredi Jew cite Rashi's citing of Rashbi: "It is a given law - it is known that Esau hates Jacob" as if it applies to all non-Jews, I think I'll scream. Here's a flash: Most non-Jews, especially when they're not being incited by their political and/or religious leaders, simply don't give a damn about us. As much as we like to think that we're the centers of the universe & that the universe revolves around us, we're not & it doesn't.

Stephen Crane wrote a brilliant little poem:

A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

Not to belittle the virulence and enduring nature of Jew-hatred but if we believe that the universe revolves around us, etc., and that all the goyim are out to get us, then well, doesn't that make us feel so self-important! I didn't know that being the chosen people means that we are to have such an inflated sense of self-importance. What does being the chosen people mean? In one sentence, quoth Amos 3:2, "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore, I will visit upon you all your iniquities," i.e. God chose us for a mission & blasts the crap out of us, both collectively & individually, when we don't fulfill it. At last, something in Judaism that's simple & easy to understand!!!

I am a theist at heart; I very much believe in God and the Torah as His means of revealing Himself to us.
 
I think that Reform-Conservative-Reconstructionist-Whateverist Judaism is make-it-up-as-you-go-along-(hence meaningless)-taking-care-to-be-politically-correct pale imitations of the real thing. A Jew molds him/herself to fit the faith, not the other way 'round.

I think that people who claim that science & religion don't jibe don't understand either one properly.

My absolute favorite book in the Tanakh is moody, brooding Ecclesiastes. If I can figure out 10% of it this time around I'll have done very well for myself.


The next-to-last verse in Ecclesiastes says:

"The end of the matter, all having been said, have reverent awe of God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole person."

I have reverent awe of God & I do my best to keep His commandments but the enthusiasm, the fervor I used to have is long since gone away and I feel like I'm just going through the motions, clutching at forms even as the content is gone. I go to synagogue, keep kosher, keep Shabbat, etc. because I have to and because I don't want not to. Sometimes I think that (since) everybody needs a code to live by & since this one is as good as any and better than most, I might as well stick with it. But is this it?! When I used to say the Shabbat eve prayers, I tried throwing myself into it as hard as I could and had the image in my mind of someone flailing with his arms, desperate to catch on to something, or have someone/thing catch my arms but I got nothing.

The most interesting spiritual experience I've had recently, if you can call it that, and one that's causing all these confused heart doubts to percolate, was that last  April 23, me, my wife & two friends drove to Kiryat Luza on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria, near the Jewish community of Har Bracha, and watched the Israelite Samaritans bring their Passover offering. (Mini-aside: I think "sacrifice" is a horrible mistranslation of the Hebrew word "korban", which actually comes from a root meaning "to approach" or "to draw near to".) I was impressed, very. Since then, I've been doing my homework (I've always loved doing research), reading up on them, in both Jewish sources (the Tanakh, Mishna & Gemara) and Israelite Samaritan sources, as well as general studies. While we were up there on Mt. Gerizim, after they lowered the skewered lambs into the fire pits (it's all over YouTube, in Hebrew & English), we spoke with one young Israelite Samaritan from Holon (a Tel Aviv 'burb), who's studying at the university in Ariel, who was only too happy to explain stuff to us.

I noticed, first of all, that the Israelite Samaritan women (from both Holon & Kiryat Luza; the whole community was there) had no uniform style of dress. There were women in pants, skirts, dresses, fancy robes, etc. My Israelite Samaritan friend said (in better Hebrew than mine) that how their women dress is not an issue for their men. He said that as long as the ladies aren't in bathing suits, they take a much more fluid approach to tzniut ("modesty") in dress. He said that if a man is so distracted by a woman in, say, pants, then the problem is with him and she shouldn't have to suffer for it. He said that women singing is absolutely not an issue for them, that married women need not cover their hair (unless they want to for style reasons) & that women pray together with the men in their synagogues (1 in Kiryat Luza & 2 in Holon), although he added that women generally don't come to synagogue much except on holydays. I must say that I like their approach & think that it's much more sensible than ours. (A number of women from Ukraine have married into the community & adopted the Israelite Samaritan faith, as have a few Jewish Israeli women. The women from Ukraine stood out that night like sore thumbs.) Here in Israel at least, the modern orthodox community is gradually becoming more and more ultra-orthodox in its outlook on women's tzniut.

A non-Jewish cyberfriend told me once:
My late father once said, half-jokingly, that women who cover themselves from the neck to the ankles are really saying "Look what I'm hiding." I thought at the time that this is the motivation of some men to pressure women into "modest clothing." It sets up a huge credibility gap between women & girls who experience ourselves as human consciousness within bodies and men who see us as T&A, even covered in layers of billowing cloth.

I think she & her late father are/were absolutely right. In January 2012, Debra Nussbaum Cohen wrote in The Forward:

(...)
 
But there is another point missing from all of the discussion of the new vigilance on modesty and the backlash against it. The extreme focus on distancing from women turns them into sexual objects. There is something perverse about the obsession with female dress of these “guardians of modesty,” and I don’t mean perverse just in the sociological sense. These men are so focused on sublimating their own sexual impulses that they see women only as sexual objects, whose images and very personhood must be contained to the point of invisibility.
 
And it is internalized all too quickly by too many religious women.
 
(...).
 
There are Haredi [ultra-orthodox] writers who have pointed to the sexualization of women in the general culture, visible in advertisements and commercials featuring scantily clad women, and I couldn’t agree more with that assessment. But there is a flipside to focusing on modesty to the point of seeing women almost only as sexual objects. It is a paradoxical sexualization amid all this repression of perceived sexual danger...

I also agree with Ms. Cohen. The excessive, and to my mind obsessive, over-insistence on modesty in dress in women, I think, posits that any contact or interaction between men and women is necessarily, and can only be, sexual and that women must, therefore, cover themselves. I think this is rubbish. No offense, but I think our insistence on the women singing thing is lunacy. On this overall issue, score it: Israelite Samaritans 1, Orthodox Jews 0.
On the issue of taharat hamishpacha, the Israelite Samaritans cite Leviticus 15:19 and hold that a woman need keep herself apart for only 7 days total. When I asked about the extra 5 days that we have, my Samaritan friend's response was (as it was to just about everything else we asked), "Where is that written?" During these 7 days, a married woman not only sleeps in a separate room but has separate dishes since she transfers her "impurity" to anything & anyone she touches. This means for those 7 days, her husband does all the cooking, cleaning & takes care of the kids, including dressing, diaper-changing, the works.

Their mezuzot are etched in the stone above the lintel. They cling to the literal meaning of the verse "and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house..." and reject our idea of writing on a piece of parchment and affixing it to the doorpost.

I know that the above two items entail a rejection of our concept of Oral Torah. (The Israelite Samaritans don't believe in gouging out eyes out & insist that is not what the verse means.) I suppose as an orthodox Jew I should have (more of) a problem with that but for some (confused heart-ish?) reason I don't. The Israelite Samaritans do have oral traditions, just not the same as ours and far more limited in scope. I would have more of a problem with this if I wasn't coming to the conclusion that much of what is written about them in our sources is sheer rubbish, especially the on-Mt.-Gerizim-they-worship-an-idol-in-the-shape-of-a-dove calumny in (the Talmud) Tractate Hulin 6a, that Maimonides picks up on in his commentary on Mishna Brachot, 8:8. This reference in Hulin is the only reference for this idea in any extant source; the Samaritans themselves deny this utterly & vehemently. Theirs is a purely monotheistic faith.
 
If a non-Jew was saying about Jews what some of our sources have to say about the Israelite Samaritans, we would be screaming "Anti-Semite!" This...

The Assyrians bring in a bunch of people from someplace else, who -- because they are now living in Shomron or Samaria -- come to be known as Samaritans.

The Samaritans are people who more or less adopt Judaism, but not properly or for the right reasons. Because their conversion is not complete or sincere, they are never accepted by the Jewish people, and they're very resentful.

Indeed, the Samaritans have a long history of animosity towards the Jews, and while many people are familiar with the story of the "good Samaritan" from the Christian gospels, in Jewish consciousness (and history) the Samaritans are rarely considered good.

Today there are only about 600 Samaritans left, their cult site is in Mount Grizim, which is right next to the city of Shechem, called Nablus in Arabic.
...is simplistic, condescending and one-sided, not to mention insulting. The author's bias are painfully obvious. Notice how "Mount Grizim" is a "cult site", not a "place of worship" or "holy place."

"the Samaritans have a long history of animosity towards the Jews..."

And we haven't returned the favor? "They worship a dove-shaped idol" is as ugly a canard as, say, Haman's remarks to Ahasuerus in Esther 3:8. And here's a flash: They are certainly not "very resentful", at least not today.

History, even sacred history (I'm coming to believe), is always written by the winners.

Accordingly, our sources have a winners' slant against the Israelite Samaritans. Anyone who really wants to learn about them, must go to them, and this I've done & am doing.

So, after our jaunt to Mt. Gerizim on April 23, my colleague/friend from work & I drove there (on Friday May 17; whilst our wives were overseas) to visit the national park on the summit (the Israel Nature and Parks Authority English site doesn't have a link, the Hebrew site does) and explore Kiryat Luza. We arranged to have a vegetarian lunch in the cafe/restaurant there. We parked right next to the area with the fire pits. I showed my friend the pits & explained how the Israelite Samaritans did their Passover offering & then we walked up to the park. We saw some of the Israelite Samaritan holy sites: Altar of Isaac, the Eternal (or "Everlasting") Hill/Givot Olam, (see Deuteronomy 33:15), I crouched down and ran my hands over the almost flat stretch of rock, that was very cool), and where Joshua set up the 12 stones, and took in the astounding view. We walked back down to Kiryat Luza, checked out some of the stuff in the local museum & then had lunch: Pitot, french fries, humus, green tehina, lemony olives, chopped veggie salad, tehina with diced tomatoes that gave it a reddish tint, something like zhoug, and falafel balls (green inside). Other than the pitot & fries, everything was home made entirely from scratch. It was very good.

They make their own raw tehina paste up there; I bought a (plastic) jar. The tehina has two Jewish kashrut certifications on it, the general rabbinate & an ultra-orthodox certification. We spoke with the owner/cook, who also runs the adjacent grocery store. I pointed to the two certifications on the tehina & said that they symbolized one of the things that is most whacked about us and one of the things that I admire most about them. We can't agree on a single @#$%ing thing! I've got a can of drinking chocolate powder here at home that has three certifications on it. This one won't accept that one's certification, etc. etc. ad nauseum. We are so rancorously and contentiously divided among ourselves, on so many issues, that it's sickening. Three certifications on one can of chocolate powder??!! Please do not insult my intelligence and my spirituality by telling me that it has anything to do with Jewish law; it has everything to do with money, politics, ego, neurosis, parochialism, and good old fashioned gratuitous hatred.

And the Israelite Samaritans? I know that there are only about 765 or so of them but the cool thing is that there are no Reform Samaritans, no Conservative Samaritans, no orthodox, ultra-orthodox or secular Samaritans, there are just Israelite Samaritans, all saying the same prayers, doing the same things, accepting the same spiritual leadership. This is a kind of unity and harmony that we can't even dream about in our wildest fantasies!!

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