Intro Post, Part Two

(...) 

 

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!!

(...)