Where are
you?

What does it mean to feel small? Earlier this week, I attended a series of lectures from acclaimed physicist Pekka Sinervo, who works to understand the basic building blocks of the universe. His research examines the forces that cause particles to interact and create complex structures that we see as atoms and molecules. Pekka's field is known as Experimental High Energy Physics, and to put it mildly, he confounded the group of rabbis and cantors in our group. At the very least, we learned enough only to know about how much we don't know. But my ignorance isn't why I felt so small. After all, another astrophysicist, Neil Degrasse Tyson reminds his readers: "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." What made me feel no larger than the size of an atom, was learning about the actual size of the universe.

There are, I learned, 200 billion trillion stars in our universe, all of which are light years away, which means that when we looked through an advanced telescope one evening and saw a new supernova that just emerged in the Pinwheel Galaxy, the exploding star wasn't really new at all; it was 21 million light years away. In other words, the star exploded 21 million years ago, and we're just seeing it now. One can circumambulate the globe 7.5 times in one second traveling at the speed of light. Traveling at that insanely fast speed, you would be traveling 128 trillion trillion miles to the Pinwheel Galaxy, which is the equivalent distance of 4.96 trillion trillion times around the Earth. When thinking about these insanely large numbers, it's hard not to feel miniscule.

The earth's relative size compared to the universe is equivalent to the relative size of an atom in relation to the earth. When you factor in the variable of time, a human being's life appears even more insignificant. In the history of the earth, humans only occupy .007% of Earth's history. From this universal macro perspective, believing that we matter seems arrogant.

Our parasha this week, Shelach Lecha, reminds us that long before we had any scientific perception of the universe, we still were plagued with the feeling of smallness. Moses sends out spies to Canaan to learn about the people and the land. 10 of 12 come back with a report about how small they feel. They report that compared to the people of they land, they are like grasshoppers, and the inhabitants of the land like giants. That is, they feel small and inadequate. What force is a grasshopper against a giant, after all? What difference can a grasshopper actually make!

וַנְּהִי בְעֵינֵינוּ כַּחֲגָבִים וְכֵן הָיִינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶם׃

We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, therefore we must have appeared all the more so in their eyes (Numbers 13:33)

When the Israelites do eventually confront the Cananites, they aren't seen as small at all, to the contrary, they're perceived as mighty. The Israelites have a distorted self-perception detached from reality. According to the midrash, God would have pardoned them for feeling like insignificant insects. Their true transgression lies in projecting their own feelings of anxiety onto the Canaanites, assuming that the Canaanites would view them in the same diminutive manner they view themselves.

King Saul, who happened to be the tallest of all the Israelites, suffered this same psychological complex. The prophet Samuel comes to him and says "even though you are so small in your eyes – nevertheless you are the head of the tribes of the people of Israel (1 Samuel 15:17)." His feelings are incongruous with his potential to lead the people Israel.

I understand the feeling of the Israelites, and I understand the feeling of Saul; it's exactly how I felt studying the universe. It feels like we are too small to matter. We are insignificant. At our relative scale to the universe, we are perhaps nothing more than a predictable math equation with behavior that varies insignificantly in the scheme of things. Thinking like this is nothing short of depressing, but more importantly, it's simply untrue.

The rabbis in the Talmud present a math equation that should readjust how we see ourselves: "Anyone who saves a single life, it's as if they've saved an entire world; anyone who destroys a human life, it's as if they've destroyed an entire world (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)." This isn't a metaphoric statement that each person is a world, rather this highlights a mathematical projection about the exponential impact of each person. For starters, Adam and Eve were only a pair, and they begat every person on earth; every single individual possesses that same potential. If you save one person's life, and that person has an average of two children; at an average familial rate of growth over 500 years, you would have about 22 generations, and you would have saved 4,194,304 people.

We tend to vastly underestimate our size relative to the universe, but we also radically underestimate our ability to make an impact on our world. We shouldn't even concern ourselves about mattering to the universe, because mattering to the universe doesn't matter. Concern yourself about mattering in your world, in your orbit, in your community, in your family, and among your friends. The exponential impact in that equation ensures that you will matter substantially. Your only question is, will you matter for a blessing. Will your impact be chesed — loving kindness, rachamim — compassion, chochma — wisdom, or will it be exponentially negative with lashon hara — gossip, anger, hatred, and pessimism.

Whenever my birthday rolls around, my daughter Lilah has a habit of asking me what I want for a gift. My wife Stephanie asks me the same thing. To their disappointment, my answer has been simple, I have everything that I need.

I suppose I could say that I want a new set of golf clubs, a new bike, maybe even a boat…. if they were being generous. But I have golf clubs, a bike, and I really don't need the hassle of a boat. But more importantly, I have a sense of simply not wanting.

"לא אחסר — I lack for nothing," says the Psalmist (Psalm 23:1). And I feel this too. The Jewish spiritual practice of Mussar labels this sentiment a virtue called "Histapkut." You might recognize this word; it comes from the root: ס–פ–ק. It means "enough." It's related to the commonly used Hebrew word "maspik." If someone fills your glass with wine, when they pour to the point you'd like, you'd say "maspik," enough. Histapkut, which is a reflexive form of this word, means to find enough in your life.

On a recent morning bike ride with a friend named David, he shared with me that in moving toward retirement, he gave back a major chunk of the shares of his company to his younger partners, significantly more so than he was expected to. There was nothing financially in it for him. When I asked him why, he shared with me that "I have enough." Of course, it might seem like a rather noble act, but it was more an act of developing enoughness in his own life than it was giving to others.

The way to find enough, is not the same as seeking out more. Those who constantly strive for more will never find satisfaction; rather, they will perpetually crave a bit more wealth, a touch more extravagance, or a few more possessions, and will never truly find contentment in what they already possess.

Can you appreciate that which is simple? "Adonai is my Shepherd, I lack nothing," says the Psalmist. Well, what is it that the Psalmist does have? The simple repose of being out in the beauty of green pastures and still waters. When we train ourselves to lack nothing more, we gain a great deal.

In singing the song Dayeinu on Passover, we are singing about this very virtue of being content with the simple. We cry out the refrain over and over again: Dayeinu, it's enough for us. God if you had given us this blessing, it would have been enough. If you had just given us that blessing, it would have been enough — dayeinu! We can use this word as a mantra for exercising histapkut. Sit, close your eyes, think of what you have, and say dayeinu!

Have you ever felt this sense of having everything that you need? It generally happens when we remove the distractions and find ourselves in a barren place. Of course, this suggests an interesting paradox. That is, the more that we give up, and the more stuff we remove from our surroundings, the more we feel a sense of lacking nothing.

It was in eleventh-century Spain that the Jewish poet-philosopher and rabbi Shlomo ibn Gabirol wrote: "Seek what you need and give up what you do not need. For in giving up what you do not need, you will learn what you really do need." Do you really need that avocado pitter from amazon, how about a strawberry huller? Of desire, the Talmud says, "Satisfy it, and it becomes ravenous; starve it, and it becomes satiated." Become happy with what you have. Say "dayeinu," I have enough. "Who is rich" asks the rabbinic sage Ben Zoma, "one who is content with what they already have." Those who endlessly crave will not even enjoy what they already have. It's not that you need nothing more, it's that you have everything that you actually need.

Dear Author of the Haggadah,

As Passover approached, I feel compelled to revisit a section of the Haggadah that has always troubled me. The Haggadah tells of four different types of children, and I'm concerned particularly about what you label as the "wise child," the chacham. I'm bothered that we characterize such a child as "wise," when they ask a question that seems nothing more than trivial and boring.

מָה הָעֵדוֹת וְהַחֻקִּים וְהַמִּשְׁפָּטִים אֲשֶׁר צִוָּה ה' אֱלֹהֵינוּ אֶתְכֶם

What are the testimonies, the statutes, and the laws that God, our God, has commanded you?

One need not even begin to answer this child, simply direct him to open up a book, or better yet, type his question into Google, which will spit out a list of enumerated laws and statutes that are as bland and dry as the taste of matzah. If you're going to ask the same question year after year, your question should at least be expansive and generative, provoking new thoughts and interpretations on the narrative of the Exodus. Even if the criteria for wisdom were to be knowing a finite set of laws and statutes, the fact that you need to ask your lame question annually proclaims your ignorance and inability to learn.

I raise my children to ask thoughtful questions, and to add value to the conversation. I care little whether they are able to give me correct answers so long as they generate curiosity and intrigue. Ironically, the only person who asks a question worthy of the label of wisdom is the child who you call rasha, wicked. מָה הָעֲבֹדָה הַזֹּאת לָכֶם. What is this ritual that you are doing? You call this child wicked because they say "lachem," referencing the 2nd person plural, and thus, as you suggest, excluding themself from the community of the Jewish people. Did you forget that he is quoting the Torah directly? God tells Moses:

וְהָיָה כִּי־יֹאמְרוּ אֲלֵיכֶם בְּנֵיכֶם מָה הָעֲבֹדָה הַזֹּאת לָכֶם

It will be that your children ask you, "What is this ritual that you are doing (Exodus 12:26)?" This is a question that should not only be lauded, but should be the spark of a conversation worthy to be had each and every year at the Passover Seder. We should consistently be asking ourselves what these rituals mean to us, and how we might be making them relevant in each and every successive generation. The "wicked" child's question is perpetually relevant.

Perhaps we shouldn't blame the "wise" child for their lackluster performance. The parents surely bear a great deal of responsibility in raising their child. Knowing and following all the laws and statutes of Passover is not a marker of wisdom, but obedience, and for some parents, this feels paramount. You might say that the seder, which means order, should value order. But we Jews are troublemakers of the best kind. We are the disruptors of that which is normative, we set ablaze the social order with ingenuity. Going all the way back to Moses, who demanded that Jews revolt against slavery. Einstein, Freud, and Marx, all took a hammer to conventional wisdom and smashed it. They were all the wicked child who called everything into question, who saw the world differently, and were thus compelled to change it.

Society hates those who defy the established order, and we Jews have been persecuted for millennium because we don't always fit into a normative box. We are a tradition of counter-culture, pushing the status quo to think. Our persistent and endless questions demonstrate our freedom, and inspire movements that forever impact the world at large. We created Shabbat in a time when tyrants demanded that slaves work without rest to build their great cities. We proclaimed one God in an era of idols and vain deities. And we reinvented our identity through Zionism when everyone told us that we were a people that simply belonged to nowhere. And for all of our questions that challenged authority, we became subjected to libels, pogroms, ghettoization, expulsions, and genocide. Yet we never stop questioning, we persist in the forward thinking mentality that seeks a world more perfected.

"I think, therefore I am," wrote Descartes. We are Jews because we think for ourselves and question what is, even when we are persecuted for it. Our currency is thought, and our most valuable bill is the question. The child who asks simple queries requiring little contemplation is not our paradigm of wisdom, but of complacency. I reject the label of the "wise child," and I pray that my children should never grow to be such bores. Let us remember to never reject the child who many call wicked, for they often emerge the genius. For as the Psalmist wrote, אֶבֶן מָאֲסוּ הַבּוֹנִים הָיְתָה לְרֹאשׁ פִּנָּה — the stone that the builders rejected shall become the chief cornerstone.

"Who is wise?" asks the rabbinic sage Ben Azzai. He answers himself: the person who learns from everyone. But there needs to be more. Learning from all those around you is a start to wisdom, but wisdom also requires the ability to synthesize different ideas, world-views, and opinions, in order to elevate any given conversation. The key lies in the simple task of asking the right question. "Who is wise?" The one whose question pierces our soul, who can generate an idea that shakes the foundations of society, who is far too often confused to be wicked, when they are really just a revolutionary genius.

Yours truly,

A "wicked" child.

Some years ago, a British documentarian was exploring world religions. When it came to Judaism, he explored the noisy Beit Midrash, the house of study, and captured all the students debating and yelling at each other. To his eye, this was complete chaos and noise. He asked Elie Wiesel, who was joining him for this segment, the following question:

"Is there such a thing as a silence in Judaism?"

Wiesel replied: "Judaism is full of silences . . . but we don't talk about them."

Different cultures have different ways of valuing silences. Western cultures, mostly deride it. Author Susan Cain argues that the West lives in what she calls the extrovert ideal, where we extol the virtues of a swift and sharp tongue. "Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates," says Thomas Mann.

Eastern Civilizations on the other hand, particularly Asian cultures, emphasize the quietness and silence. A famous Chinese proverb by Lao Zi exclaims: "Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know." Ghandi similarly wrote about the spirituality of silence, saying: "Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth."

So what about Judaism? Back to the documentarian's question, does Judaism have silences, and is Wiesel really correct that we just don't talk about them?

The two most common words in the Torah are: אמר — to say, and דבר, to speak. At first glance we seem to be more of the Western ideal. Yet when we dig deeper, we might notice something curious about the Midbar, the place where the Israelites spend the majority of time in the Torah. The Midbar literally means the wilderness, but the word itself has the same root as speech — דבר. The Midbar, the place of speaking, is not, however, in the city with its hustle and bustle, its raging conversations at every turn, rather it's the place free of noise. It's the place where you go to be able to hear and listen to the sounds of silence, or to the soft voice that's inaudible through the noises of civilization. It's the place where the prophet Elijah goes when he's in distress, 40 days into the Midbar. And Elijah doesn't hear God in the noises of the whirlwind, the fire, and the earthquake, but in the קל דממה דקה, in the still small silence. The Midbar is the place that is empty of distraction, and full of spiritual and divine sounds that carry a pregnant emptiness.

You may think that silence is really the absence of sound or speech, but quite often silence is laden with meaning and emotion. If you have ever sat in the room with someone stricken with grief or a tragic loss, you should know that silence is more powerful than words. In silence we hear each other, in silence we see each other, and we connect in the most human way possible. We don't know the words to say, because there are no words to say. But we communicate in silence.

In Chaim Potok's book, The Chosen, one of my favorite books, the son of the Hassidic Rebbe, Danny Saunders explains his father's unusual practice of raising him in silence:

"'My father doesn't write,' Danny said. 'He reads a lot, but he never writes. He says that words distort what a person really feels in his heart. He doesn't like to talk too much, either. Oh, he talks plenty when we're studying Talmud together. But otherwise he doesn't say much. He told me once he wishes everyone could talk in silence.'"

The Rebbe later explains his logic:

"Once my father took me to visit a hospital—ah, what an experience that was!—and often he took me to visit the poor, the beggars, to listen to them talk. My father himself never talked to me, except when we studied together. He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. When his people would ask him why he was so silent with his son, he would say to them that he did not like to talk, words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence."

Instead of being the thing that wasn't talked about, silence has become a part of Jewish spiritual practice. Yes, we have our Batei Midrash, our houses of study with rigorous and rowdy debate. But Jews have developed meditation practices; we have seen the emergence of the Hassidic art of התבודדות, spiritual solitude. Hassidism also developed the idea of a תענית דיבור, a fasting of words. Silence and introversion have found a comfortable place in Judaism alongside its proclivity to noise and hubbub. Just because we don't talk about our silences, doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate them more.

Consider spending some time in a midbar, a place free of noise, free of distraction, and filled with a special kind of spiritual speaking. Find your place quiet enough for you to speak to your heart, and where God might speak to you.

There are two significant problems with the Four Questions in the Haggadah. Let's start out with the fact that there are really 5 questions, or 1 header, and 4 sub questions. Why do we call them "Four Questions" when there are really five? Perhaps it's so that someone will ask about it, thus leading to more questions. The four questions originally functioned as a guide for the child at the table who didn't know how to ask questions, thus enabling him to fulfill his obligation to ask questions even though he didn't have any of his own. Eventually, these four questions morphed into a prescribed part of the Passover liturgy. Nonetheless, questioning at the Passover table isn't limited to the 4/5 questions; the rituals are meant to provoke questions. The rabbis in the Talmud say that during a Passover Seder, someone should pick up and remove the table from the room. This bizarre ritual, the rabbis note, is meant to elicit the children who are no longer at the table to ask: "What's going on here?" or "Why is this night different than all other nights (Pesachim 115b)?" Why do we have two hand washings in the Haggadah (Urchatz and Rochtzah), the first of which has no blessing, yet the second one does? For the very same reason it seems; to confound participants into inquiry. In other words, we should build strangeness into the narrative in order to provoke questions.

But here's another important point: The Four Questions aren't grammatically questions, they're answers. The only part that is actually a question is "Why is this night different than all other nights?" The preposition ש, which prefaces each of the "Four Questions" means "that," or "which," and never introduces a question, only answers and statements of fact. מה, which means "what" or "why" at the very beginning of the preface is the only question. Each of the four points are actually answers to the prefacing question. The Four Questions act both as answers and questions, teaching that the best kinds of questions are the ones that speak answers in and of themselves.

מַה נִּשְׁתַּנָּה הַלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה מִכָּל הַלֵּילוֹת?

1. Why is this night different from all other nights?
2. On all other nights we eat matzah and chametz, but tonight only matzah.
3. On all other nights we eat all sorts of vegetables, but tonight we eat a bitter one in particular.
4. On all other nights we don't dip even once, but tonight we dip twice.
5. On all other nights we eat either upright or reclining, but tonight only reclining.

It seems odd that in a book of the Bible entitled "Shemot," or "Names" in English, the Torah omits the name of the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. Instead, the Pharaoh is simply called "Pharaoh." The opening of Exodus (Shemot) begins with genealogical details about each of the seventy children of Jacob who go down to Egypt, and even takes the time to name two Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Puah, but the Pharaoh goes unidentified. Why does Pharaoh's name go unmentioned? The answer, I believe, is because the paradigm of Pharaoh plays out in every generation. Pharaoh is not just one person, Pharaoh is every tyrant who subjugates people.

Pharaoh is every leader more concerned about themselves, than about the people who he or she leads. Pharaoh is the person so obsessed with power, that they can't imagine not having it. We see Pharaohs all the time, and everywhere. Remember the Passover Haggadah which declares:

הִיא שֶׁעָמְדָה לַאֲבוֹתֵינוּ וְלָנוּ

This stood true for our ancestors as it does for us;

שֶׁלֹּא אֶחָד בִּלְבָד עָמַד עָלֵינוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנוּ אֶלָּא שֶׁבְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר עוֹמְדִים עָלֵינוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנוּ

It's not just one person who stood to destroy us, but in every generation there stands a tyrant to destroy us.

In every generation, there is a Pharaoh. That Pharaoh has a name, but we need not use it. Because using a name tells us that they are a unique individual, when in fact they are not. Their names don't deserve to be glorified. Like Amalek, another Pharaoh who the Israelites encounter, a Pharaoh's name deserves to be blotted out. תִּמְחֶה אֶת־זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק, you shall blot their memory out. לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח, but do not forget their legacy, teaches the Torah, do not forget that Pharaohs seek to destroy the foundations of our way of life, and sometimes destroy us (Deuteronomy 25:19). Blot out their name, because these megalomaniacs believe they should be glorified, whereas Pharaohs deserve to have their names erased from history. We know that they are not unique, they are just another iteration in a long line of Pharaohs.

Later in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Ezekiel is charged with speaking to another non-distinct Pharaoh who is the king of Egypt at his time.

"Behold, there is a Pharaoh, a king of Egypt among you, who is a great serpent that crouches in the Nile and says: 'This is my river, and I created myself' (Ezekiel 29:3)."

The mega ego of the Pharaoh believes that he or she not just owns the natural elements, according to Ezekiel, but this Pharaoh believes that they created themselves. The Pharaohs believe that they are all powerful, that they are Gods, and that they are beyond reproach. The Torah reminds us, they are none of these things. Only God is all powerful, there is only one God, that's Adonai, and every generation with a Pharaoh — be it a person or a system of tyranny — requires a Moses.

Just as we shouldn't see Pharaoh as an individual, but as a paradigm of tyranny across time and space, we might find that every generation has its own Moses or Moseses. The man Moses might have been special in regard to his relationship with God and his ability to bring about God's wonders. But there have, in fact, been many Moseses, men and women, who have stood up to Pharaohs in their times to relieve the yoke of oppression, subjugation, and hatred. Whenever there arises a Pharaoh, it's the responsibility of individuals to become liberators, redeemers, and justice seekers. Those who passively accept the reign of Pharaoh perpetuate his or her tyranny. Historian Ian Kershaw to this end famously remarked: "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference."

We omit Pharaoh's name from our narrative because Pharaoh wasn't a man who ruled once upon a time; Pharaohs exist all the time. Some people may find life under a Pharaoh comforting, but our tradition demands that we play Moses to every Pharaoh around us. The Psalmist asks the rhetorical question: "Can a wicked ruler [a Pharaoh] be allied with God when they frame injustice as the law? (Psalm 94:20)" The answer of course, is: No! For every Pharaoh that arises, God calls us to be Moses.

One of the crowning achievements of Charles Darwin was the work on his theory of natural selection. According to Darwin, all animals in the world compete for resources, and only the fittest survive. Darwin believed that homo sapiens followed this same trend, and that in the struggle to survive, the strongest will always win. In such an arena of survival, ruthlessness and individualism conquer kindness and selflessness. But Darwin ran into a problem with applying this model to human beings, that is, all societies value altruism. Humanity esteems virtues of kindness, empathy, generosity, and humility — all vices when it comes to darwinian survival. Without moral virtues, we are just animals; and without primal instincts, we would all perish.

For millennium Judaism has viewed the balance of being virtuous and primal in the dichotomy of our having what it calls a יצר הטוב yetzer hatov, and a יצר הרע yetzer hara. A literal translation of these competing proclivities would be a good inclination and an evil inclination. But the tension within humanity isn't between good and evil, but rather between our moral inclinations and our animalistic ones. To this end, the rabbis often project the yetzer hara as some kind of animal or beast. One talmudic tale tells of the rabbis who try to subdue the yetzer hara, which comes to them in the form of a fiery lion (גוריא דנורא) from the Holy of Holies (Yoma 69b). In another talmudic parable, a man named Chiyah Bar Ashi חייה בר אשי suffers from a persistent yetzer hara. His very name means "Beast son of Fire (Kiddushin 81b)." Animals are not a metaphor for evil (רע), but for the primal nature of man that is amoral.

Our yetzer hatov and our yetzer hara are not just inherent to who we are, but both are blessings of God upon us. The question is asked by Rabbi Nachman ben Shmuel as to how we can possibly call our yetzer hara (our evil inclination) "good." The answer is that were it not for the primal inclinations within us, humanity wouldn't build, marry, procreate, and engage in business. Greed, lust, and ego are potentially harmful forces, but God's world needs them to endure (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). Similarly, we should note that in the above talmudic tale (Yoma 69b), when the yetzer hara manifests in the form of a fiery lion, it emerges specifically from the Holy of Holies. That is, the yetzer hara is a manifestation of holiness. While we might call these inclinations "evil," they are necessary evils in this world that, when tempered, drive the success of civilization. When left unchecked by our moral compass, the excess of these qualities breeds crime, fraud, war, inequity, and injustice. What sets us apart from the animal kingdom is that only humans can employ a moral conscience (our yetzer hatov) to supersede our base instincts (our yetzer hara).

We like to paint individuals — either in real life or in literature — as heroes or villains. Jewish wisdom teaches that we are neither good nor evil, but rather that both a yetzer hatov and a yetzer hara exist within each and every one of us. When Dr. Henry Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," figures out how to separate his primal inclination and his moral inclination into two separate beings, he creates a monster on the one hand, and a feeble wimp on the other. Living a purposeful and meaningful life requires that we are driven by a healthy balance between our moral and primal natures.

Once a year we all dress up for Purim as a character or a person we are not. Whether you choose to dress up as one of the Purim characters — Vashti, Haman, King Ahasuerus, Mordecai, or Esther — or a costume of any sort, we find ourselves occupying an alter-ego on Purim. Why drink so much on Purim, according to the rabbis? To act like not yourself. (1)

We might think that this process of wearing a mask happens only once a year. But perhaps it happens more often than we think. People have a tendency to present an image to the world that is not really who they are. Many of us wear masks everyday offering others only a look at who we think we're supposed to be, and hide our true selves. We conceal our imperfect, jagged, and broken parts of us; our scars, our baggage, our neuroses, and our metaphoric (and perhaps literal) love handles that we refuse to let just hang out. The thing is, Purim shouldn't be every day of the year, just one day. Every other day we should be showing our authentic selves as we are, not ourselves draped in a manufactured exterior.

To borrow a term from author Brené Brown, we should be living wholeheartedly. (2) Wholeheartedness is about waking up in the morning and realizing that "I am enough." It's about understanding that vulnerability and authenticity lead us on a path toward our most holy, spiritual, and fulfilled selves. It's living life without a mask, and being totally comfortable with what people see. That's wholehearted living in a nutshell.

Of course, easier said than done. There are so many roadblocks impeding us from showing our wholehearted selves. For starters: shame, the desire to fit in, and the fear of not being enough. E. E. Cummings wrote, "To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight—and never stop fighting." Living wholeheartedly requires struggle, but the price we pay for masking ourselves to the world is high. We don't just lose ourselves when we hide our faces, we also become prone to anxiety, resentment, addictions, and emotional disorders. The fight for being authentic is daunting, but it's absolutely worth fighting for.

I've been thinking about wholeheartedness lately in relation to a type of sacrificial offering mentioned in our Torah portion this week, Vayikra (Leviticus 1:5–5:26). There are a number of offerings mentioned: the olah offering, for example, is the burnt offering; there is the chatat offering, the sin offering; but then there is what's called the zevach shlamim.

"If you are to sacrifice a zevach shlamim; be it from cattle, be it male or female, it must be whole before God (Leviticus 3:1)."

You'll notice translations of the Torah tend to have an asterisk with a note saying the meaning of zevach shlamim is uncertain. Some people translate it as a "peace offering," connected to the word "shalom." One common translation is a "well-being offering." And still, yet another translation renders zevach shlamim as "whole offering," recognizing the word "shalem" means "whole." In the Talmud, Rabbi Shimon teaches the following as to how we are to understand this offering:

"The offering is called shlamim to teach that only when a person is whole [shalem] can he bring his offering (Zevachim 99b)."

To this end, the zevach shlamim offering is about bringing our wholehearted selves before God.

The very beginning of Leviticus reminds us of this instruction: אָדָם כִּי־יַקְרִיב מִכֶּם (Leviticus 1:2). The Hebrew syntax here is weird, to say the least, giving the following possible reading of the Hebrew: "When a person makes an offering of themselves." Rabbi Schneur Zalman takes note of the nuanced grammar and remarks: "The essence of sacrifice is that we offer ourselves. We bring to God our faculties, our energies, our thoughts and emotions. The physical form of sacrifice — an animal offered on the altar — is only an external manifestation of an inner act. The real sacrifice is mikem, 'of you.' We give God something of ourselves." (3)

Ever wonder why Abel's offering is accepted by God back in Genesis, and Cain's is not? Well, one midrash debates what kind of offering Abel makes before God. It wasn't about the content of the offering. That is, it didn't matter that Cain brings fruits and Abel brings fat from the firstlings of his flock. Rather, God takes note of the kind of offering. One of the rabbis argues that Abel brought a zevach shlamim offering, that is, his wholehearted offering. (4) We find justification for this in the text:

"Abel brought gam hu, from the firstlings of his offering and their fat (Genesis 4:4)."

What is this phrase "gam hu" doing here? It's seemingly superfluous, but as the rabbis teach, no words in the Torah are there that don't have meaning. Gam hu means, "also himself!"

Abel brought forth his wholehearted self, and that is perhaps what God considered most important in an offering. This is seemingly why the rabbis say Abel brings forth a zevach shlamim, because it is his wholehearted presentation of who Abel really is — no masks, no pretending, just his authentic self. Nowhere do we learn that Abel's offering is perfect, because that's not what God wants of us. God wants us to embrace our vulnerabilities and our imperfections, that is, to live wholeheartedly.

No one says wholehearted living is easy. Our biggest challenge is to let go of who we think others want us to be, and simply be who we are. It's to make sure that we are putting forth our zevach shlamim, our wholehearted offerings to the world. It's to live Purim only one day of the year, and on the other 364, to show others our beautifully authentic and imperfect selves.

1. 1. Megillah 7b
2. 2. Brown, Brené. 2010. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.
3. 3. R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Likkutei Torah, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1984, Vayikra 2aff.
4. 4. Bereshit Rabbah 22:5

Lately, I've been rethinking how we light the Chanukkah menorah. For thousands of years, Jews have been starting with a single candle on the first night, and increasing each successive night of the holiday. This tradition stems from a well-known talmudic debate between the houses of Hillel and Shammai as to how one should light the Chanukkah menorah. For the most dedicated observers of the holiday, the House of Shammai teaches that a person should start with eight lights, and each night they should reduce one light until there are no more. The House of Hillel, by contrast, teaches that a person should light one candle on the first night, and increase by one light each night of Chanukkah. The reasoning behind the divergence of opinions seems unclear, and a later generation of rabbis debate the rationale for the two approaches.

Rabbi Yosi ben Avin and Rabbi Yosi ben Zevida (4th Century CE) offered two explanations: "Shammai's custom corresponds to the days which are entering, and Hillel's to the days that are going out," claimed the first. The other reasoned that "Shammai's custom corresponds to the bulls offered on Sukkot, and Hillel's reminds us that we raise up in holiness and we do not lower (Shabbat 21b)." The latter view has always been given deference in explaining Beit Hillel's practice, but I've always felt Shammai's opinion has been shortchanged and not properly explained. The association of Shammai's ritual with the sacrifices of the bulls on Sukkot seems a bit contrived. We find in Numbers 29 that on the 15th day of the seventh month (Sukkot), one is to bring 13 bull offerings to begin the seven day holiday. The following days count down the number of bulls from twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, and then seven bulls. On the eighth day, one is to bring a single bull for an offering. Other than the successive decreases in the number of bulls, the numbers don't correspond to how Shammai lights his Chanukkah menorah. There must be some other significance to Shammai's custom.

A hint as to the proper symbolism of Shammai's menorah might be found in a rather obscure Talmudic tale. The Talmud relates that in at least one town, Lod, Chanukkah was lamented and not celebrated. A custom emerged in which Jews fasted on Chanukkah because in their day, the Temple was destroyed. It's not clear as to whether the fast was an eight day fast (probably not), or just a single day. Either way, one would not be eating latkes or sufganyot on Chanukkah in the town of Lod. Two rabbis, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, revolted against the idea that Chanukkah should be anything but a celebration. "You should fast for having fasted," they tell the people of Lod. Or in other words, "you should atone for having fasted (Rosh HaShanah 18b)." Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua would have been in the camp of the House of Hillel. The people of Lod, I believe, were preserving Shammai's tradition of understanding the lights of Chanukkah differently.

The lights of Chanukkah from the perspective of Beit Shammai seem to be a representation not of holiness, but destruction. When one looks at the lights of Chanukkah, according to this view, one sees that the Temple is no longer standing, that the Maccabean story is one of war, and that fire is often more destructive than it is holy. Shammai's tradition recalls that we pray each night of Chanukkah that the fires of destruction and violence will diminish until they are no more.

Should we light our Chanukkah menorahs differently? Probably not, but Shammai's view certainly feels a little more appropriate in this light.

The poet Chaucer famously said: "All good things must come to an end."

Last year during Sukkot, I learned this lesson when a wind storm tested the strength of my sukkah. I had spent time decorating it with my daughter Lilah, placing branches on the roof, and carefully hanging gourds and other decorations on its walls. The flimsy structure was no match for 50 mph winds. Although the sukkah was staked down, the gusts were so strong that the metal structure sheared into pieces. Not much could be salvaged.

When I called my sukkah retailer this year, the Sukkah Project, I relayed what had happened to my sukkah. The man on the phone told me that he had received calls after the storm complaining about the integrity of their sukkot. People felt that the structure should have endured the strong winds. I shared with him my view that any sukkah that could survive such a storm probably wasn't a kosher sukkah. A sukkah by definition is a temporary structure. If it rains, you're supposed to get wet. If there is wind, then your sukkah might get blown over. A sukkah isn't a shelter, as much as it's a reminder that life is fragile and ephemeral.

That's why on Sukkot, we read the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). Kohelet uses the word Hevel, meaning breath or vapor, 38 times.

הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים אָמַר קֹהֶלֶת הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל׃

Merest breath, says Kohelet, all is but mere breath (Kohelet 1:2).

Life is ephemeral. Our days are fleeting. Even the best of people eventually die. All good things must come to an end. That is the reminder of Sukkot.

But then comes Simchat Torah immediately following Sukkot, and we come to realize that Chaucer isn't exactly right. Life is ephemeral, yes! But there are good things in this world that are eternal. Simchat Torah is the reminder that the Torah never ends. As the prophet Isaiah teaches: "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the D'var Adonai, the word of God endures forever (Isaiah 40:8)." We come to the end of Deuteronomy, and then we go right back to Genesis without missing a beat. We don't count how many times we've finished the Torah, because we've never really finished the Torah. Its pages extend to infinity, because its words are never meant to be concluded. And that makes it different than your run of the mill book.

There are those of you out there who read books over and over. I've read the Harry Potter series a few times. Same with several of Dan Brown's books. I've watched certain TV shows multiple times. But the series finale or the closing chapter is always an ending. The Torah doesn't conclude the way that typical books do. The Torah doesn't have an ending, rather it has a restart point. Simchat Torah is the reminder that not everything is ephemeral, that there are things that are eternal. Objects and things are ephemeral. But ideas and concepts can be eternal. A torah scroll will eventually break down, fade, tear, and need to be buried. But the Torah will endure.

It's not just the Torah that's eternal. I want to share two additional eternal and timeless concepts. The first is the idea of the soul. While our bodies grow old, sick, and are limited in their life span, Judaism teaches that there is a part of us that lives on into eternity. The soul, or the neshama. I'm not referring to some ectoplasmic substance that has weight, or is composed of measurable energy. Judaism has many views as to what this soul actually is, but it is clear that it's something that lives beyond the physical. I like to think of the soul as the memory and the legacy of our lives that continue to impact the world long after our bodies are gone.

The Psalmist asks: "Shall we live forever and avoid the sight of the grave?" Of course the answer is NO. "Alike the wise and foolish end their days, leaving their wealth to others. . . . Human splendor does not last . . . we pass away. But God, taking me, will redeem my soul" (Psalm 49:10–11, 13, 16). Something lives on in each and every life. Something that gets passed on to others. The memories of our loved ones are spiritually always present in our lives. Their memories never fade, their legacies grow in the world as we carry out the lessons they taught us, and as we see their qualities in our lives, and in our children. Something from them endures. Their neshama lives in our lives.

On a Jewish gravestone, you often see the acronym ת.נ.צ.ב.ה. These letters stand for תהא נפשו/ה צרורה בצרור החיים (t'hay nafsho/ah tzrurah b'tzror hachaim), "May his/her soul be bound up in the bond of life." This means that the souls of our loved ones will continue to live on in our lives. The memory of our loved ones continues to inspire us, and we keep them alive through memory. The neshama, like the Torah, is eternal.

What else is eternal? Hope! The obscure and relatively unknown poet Naftali Herz Imber (1856–1909) wrote a single line of poetry that became engrained in the consciousness of nearly every Jew of the latter part of the 20th Century. His 1878 poem "Tikvateinu (Our Hope)" included the line "עוד לא אבדה תקותנו, Our hope is not yet lost." These words were a part of the two stanzas from Imber's poem that were eventually put to music and adopted as the national anthem for the State of Israel. Those two stanzas are now well known as "Hatikva (the Hope)." The power of these terse words comes not in their eloquence, but in that they speak to an age-old feeling that has nurtured the Jewish people through millennia of persecution. Hope has been a part of our crisis toolbox, and has helped us weather even the darkest times of history.

It's not that our hope is not yet lost. Our hope is never lost. It's what sustains us. The Psalmist writes:

מִמַּעֲמַקִּים קְרָאתִיךָ יְהוָה׃

Out of the depths I call to you;

קִוִּיתִי יְהוָה קִוְּתָה נַפְשִׁי

I hope for you O' God, my soul sits in hope for you;

נַפְשִׁי לַאדֹנָי מִשֹּׁמְרִים לַבֹּקֶר שֹׁמְרִים לַבֹּקֶר׃

My soul hopes for you God like the night watchman hopes for the morning, like the night watchman for morning (Psalm 130:1, 5–6).

Hope is what gets us out of the depths and out of the darkness. Hope doesn't die, though it can be repressed. Hope is tenacious, persistent, and eternal. Our hope is not yet lost. Our hope is never lost. Because hope isn't an object that's ephemeral, it's a concept that is eternal. Hope has kept us alive through destruction, pogrom, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, and our hope is not yet lost. Hope will get us through whatever it is we struggle with.

Sukkot reminds us that things and our physical lives eventually come to an end. But Judaism forbids us from taking this bitter pill without a chaser. The chaser is Simchat Torah. Yes, physical things always come to an end; but eternal concepts keep us alive, sustain us, and bring our lives meaning, purpose, and tools to get through whatever it is we might face: The Torah never ends, the soul never dies, and our hope is not yet lost.

As we ritualize the Passover story each year, we often lighten the mood of serious subjects with kid-friendly songs and games. A few years ago, I bought my wife plague-themed nail decals, one for every finger. At our seder table, we have frogs hanging from our ceiling, and plush toy plagues that are distributed to each participant. My daughter's favorite Passover song has become "10 Plagues in Egypt Land," by Ellen Allard, a fun and upbeat tune that will stay with you months after Passover has come to an end. At some point last year though, my daughter asked me a critical question: "what is a plague?" I explained that a plague is when something bad happens that hurts people. This year, I will have a more simple answer that she will surely understand. What's a plague? COVID-19, AKA the coronavirus.

I'm not sure though that the coronavirus should be counted as a new plague. When we look at the wrath of this pandemic upon the world, we realize that it is, in effect, both the ninth and the tenth plagues combined. Instead of being wrought upon the Egyptians, however, these plagues are targeting us.

How is coronavirus like the plague of darkness, the ninth plague? You might recall that the darkness brought upon Egypt wasn't just a regular darkness. It was so thick, tells the Torah, "וְיָמֵשׁ חֹשֶׁךְ" that you could feel it. The Torah adds that "לֹא־רָאוּ אִישׁ אֶת־אָחִיו," a person was not able to see his brother, "וְלֹא־קָמוּ אִישׁ מִתַּחְתָּיו," and a person could not get up from where he was. This seems to be the exact effect of the corona plague. In our social quarantines, we are unable to physically see others, nor are we able to leave where we are. Social distancing is a far cry from a vacation; it creates a darkness that physically obscures our relationships, and prevents us from seeing the places that we love. Remember, this wasn't a darkness that was seen, rather it was a darkness that you could feel. The feeling of darkness is loneliness, isolation, depression, fear, anxiety, and cabin fever. We are living the ninth plague this Passover, except we call it by a different name, the coronavirus.

What's worse is that this isn't just a plague of isolation, it's a deadly malady. No, this plague isn't slaying the first born. But like the tenth plague, the coronavirus discriminately attacks a discrete part of our population, our elders and those who are immunocompromised. They are the people we love, our spouses, our parents, our grandparents, our friends, and our immunocompromised children too. Make no mistake, this virus is a plague. When we pour out ten drops of wine onto our plates, we do so as a memorial to the innocent Egyptians who suffered the plagues. When we do so this year, I'm sure that we will have heightened empathy as we too are suffering some of the very same plagues. I would much rather have frogs, locusts, lice, and boils than suffer the coronavirus pandemic. But here we are. The Haggadah asks of us that we see ourselves as part of the Passover narrative. This year, we aren't playing the Israelites. Rather, we are the suffering Egyptians enduring unfathomable plagues. Next year, I pray that we can once again share more in common with the experiences of the Israelites.

One day when I was living in Jerusalem, I felt a little homesick. I decided to make some American comfort food for breakfast, which for me, was pancakes. The only problem was that I didn't have a spatula, nor any ingredients in my apartment. While I knew how to say "eggs," beitzim, and "flour," kemach, I had no idea about the Hebrew word for "spatula." This was before the days when you could pull out an iPhone and simply look it up, and I didn't think to grab a Hebrew-English dictionary from my library shelf before I headed to the market to purchase eggs, flour, and a spatula.

On my way over, I used my Hebrew grammar to construct a word that I believed would mean "spatula." The root הפך, meaning to flip, combined with the grammatical construct for a tool, should yield "spatula." At the market, I asked someone אני מחפש מהפך, which judging by the person's perplexed face, I knew did not mean what I thought it meant. I was asking for a מהפך (mahpach), a revolution.

The Hebrew word for "spatula" is actually מרית (marit), which is derived from the Aramaic מר (mar), meaning a garden spade. That day, I learned two new words in Hebrew: 1. מהפך (mahpach), a revolution, and 2. מרית (marit), a spatula. Both words offer us insight into understanding the upcoming holiday of Purim.

When we read from the Megillah, one of the key lines that has stood out for generations reads: "וְנַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא (nahafoch hu), the opposite happened" of everything that Haman had intended. Haman sought to execute the Jews, whereas he and his family ended up with the fate he decreed for them. Purim has thus become a day of opposites, where, like a pancake, everything gets flipped upside down. Or perhaps, to put it another way, Purim is the ultimate spatula (marit) of Jewish holidays. It flips everything we do upside down. But most importantly, Purim flips us upside down.

One custom on Purim is that Jews are supposed to become intoxicated. The tradition offers that Jews should drink to the point that we don't know the difference between Haman and Mordechai. In other words, drink so much that we become our upside down selves. And of course, we are supposed to dress up on Purim. But maybe dress "up" is not the right turn of phrase. On Yom Kippur, and at other major life events, we dress "up." In other words, we dress to be more like ourselves, or better versions of ourselves. The rabbis note that Yom HaKippurim (Yom Kippur) is the nahafoch, the opposite of Purim, because on Yom Kippur we dress up, but on Purim, we dress to be the opposite of ourselves. We aren't masking ourselves, rather, Purim transforms us into someone we are not. You might simply conclude that we dress up because it's enjoyable. After all, it's novel and fun to pretend to be someone that we are not. And, yes, Purim is to a large degree about having fun. But the rabbis again note the similarities not just in name between Purim and Yom HaKippurim. Both holidays, they point out, teach us about who it is that we really are. When things in our lives get turned upside down, we discover a truer sense of what is really right side up.

Ask anyone who has gone through an experience in their lives when the world seemed turned upside down. The story will likely end with a conclusion of self-discovery. The Talmud tells a story that echoes the experiences of many people whose lives get turned upside down through death, illness, injury, or some other catastrophe. Rabbi Yosef becomes critically ill and goes into a coma. Miraculously, he comes to, and makes a full recovery. His father asks him, "What did you see when you were unconscious?" "I saw the world upside down (olam hafuch)," he responds, "what was above was below and what was below was above." His father said to him, "My son, you have seen an olam barur (a clear world), you have seen the world clearly (Talmud Bavli, Pesachim 50a)."

As we approach Purim, I want to encourage you to use the holiday as a spatula for flipping your life upside down. It's not supposed to be comfortable, though it may be a little fun. Be someone you are not for the day, or just for the evening. Purim may seem like a kids' holiday, but it isn't. No one is too grown up for Purim. We could all use a little nahafoch hu, life turned topsy turvy at least one day of the year.

Back in the late 1980s, five young men were wrongfully convicted of raping and brutally assaulting a woman in Central Park. Those young men were dubbed the "Central Park Five." A recent Netflix mini-series called "When They See Us" portrayed the story of these boys, and reminded me about the absurdity of the whole ordeal. Almost all of the evidence pointed toward their innocence. Yet the arresting officers and the District Attorney presumed the guilt of all of these boys, and selectively looked at evidence, while ignoring the massive amount of exonerating proof staring them right in the face.

The boys were arrested and served prison time, until the real perpetrator came forward and confessed to having committed the crime on his own. With the new confession, the arresting officers and the DA still refused to believe in the innocence of the five boys they had convicted. Why? Because of what behavioral economists call "confirmation bias," our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs and feelings.

Confirmation bias explains why two people with opposing views can look at the same data, and each feel validated in their own views. Under the influence of this effect, the officers and the DA tried to argue that the boys must have been in some way involved. They were convinced despite the clear-cut evidence to the contrary.

Where does confirmation bias come from? It comes partially from our desire to always be right. So when we have a belief or feeling about a matter, we force everything to fit that interpretation. We search for information that confirms our feelings, we recall only what we want to remember, and we prejudice information to confirm the concrete ideas we have about the world. And we see this tendency play out over and over in our lives, and throughout history.

In pre-science medicine, bloodletting was used to cure and relieve just about every ailment known to man. We know today that it was almost never effective, but people nonetheless believed in its efficacy because of confirmation bias. Doctors ignored the results of patients who died, and instead focused on the patients who recovered naturally in order to confirm their belief that the treatment worked.

Confirmation bias may sound ridiculous, because we like to think that we are all able to see past our own prejudices. But we can't! Everyone wants to think that they have an open mind, but our opinions are less malleable than we want to admit.

One of the most clear cases of confirmation bias in the Torah is Pharaoh. After witnessing his own magicians' ability to replicate Moses's wonder of transforming his staff into a serpent, Pharaoh's heart hardens — וַיֶּחֱזַק לֵב פַּרְעֹה (Exodus 7:13). What does it mean that his heart hardens? It infers that he is unable to see what's right before him. He has already formed the opinion that Moses and Aaron are rabble rousers, and not the agents of God. Once he believes that, he can't change his mind. I don't think it's fair to blame Pharaoh for having a hardened heart. That's the tendency of humanity. We have hardened hearts, and too often fail when it comes to making good judgments when evidence conflicts with the opinions we have already formed.

After Pharaoh hardens his own heart, we learn that God continues to harden Pharaoh's heart. "God says to Moses, go to Pharaoh for I have hardened his heart (Exodus 10:1)." In case you were wondering why God would harden Pharaoh's heart, I would remind you that God hardens your heart too. We are all created with and susceptible to confirmation bias. Or is your heart too hardened to admit that you have confirmation bias? The reason that people are continually perplexed by God hardening Pharaoh's heart, it seems, is that they aren't aware that this psychological phenomenon extends beyond Pharaoh. They think it's a sole case, but really it's representative of all of us. God hardens our hearts.

The political divides in our country are perhaps the pinnacle example of our confirmation biases. The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump illustrates quite remarkably how Democratic and Republican views are each entrenched. Evidence and data concerning the President's case will only confirm their already strongly held beliefs and views. The votes — with few exceptions — have gone along party lines. God has not hardened their hearts as an act of divine intervention, but as the way that God created each one of us.

The good news is that people do possess the ability to overcome confirmation bias and change their minds. Stupidly, the political world disparages this type of person as a "flip-flopper." Any politician willing to change their mind or their position demonstrates great strength among a chorus of pharaohs.

Here are several ways that we can avoid being the victims of confirmation bias:

1. Simply being aware of confirmation bias offsets its power to harden our hearts. Pharaoh didn't know that his heart was hardened. Maybe if he did, he would have simply understood that you don't mess with God. If you want to beat confirmation bias, simply remind yourself that you may be under its grip.
2. Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral economist, has another trick that he recommends: "When someone says something, don't ask if it is true. Ask what it might be true of." Kahneman employed this practice in his work, and sought to make sense of someone's statement as opposed to tearing it down. We always want to show why we are right and someone else is wrong. And that's not the way the power of persuasion works. In fact, it will have the opposite effect, it will more deeply entrench someone else in their own argument.
3. In the Talmud, amidst the two competing schools of thought, the rabbis always favor Rabbi Hillel's view over that of his rival, Shammai. The reason the rabbis give is that he would first explain the opposing position, and only after he thoroughly explained Shammai's view, did he explain his own. To avoid confirmation bias, try not just to understand opposing views, but seek to explain them from the perspective that is not your own. It's hard, but it's a great exercise.

We all have hardened hearts. And if you don't believe me, then that's because your heart is too hard. We are all susceptible to confirmation bias, and we will surely dig into our own positions as best we can, because that's what humans do. But the next time you are about to scream at the TV because of a politician, the next time someone says something that sounds like lunacy — but the idea is held by a great number of people — or the next time you are confident in your convictions, ask yourself if you're not the victim of confirmation bias.

When I was in college, I enrolled in the class "Rescue and Resistance" with my mentor, Dr. Debórah Dwork, who co-taught the seminar with a woman named Marion Pritchard. Pritchard was a Dutch teenager when the Nazis invaded Holland, and throughout the course of the class, we began to learn her story. She was not Jewish, but she rescued hundreds of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

Pritchard's entrance into this line of work began when she witnessed Nazi soldiers loading Jewish children into the back of a truck. Appalled by the scene unfolding, several women ran to the aid of the children, beating the Nazi soldiers to try and do something in the face of this moral horror. Pritchard looked on as the Nazis picked up the women and loaded them onto the truck, as well. This would be the only time she was paralyzed in the face of Nazi barbarism. Though she was only a teenager, she knew that she couldn't ever stand idly by again. Throughout the war, Pritchard registered Jewish infants as her own children, helped falsify papers so that Jews could flee Nazi-occupied Europe, found homes for people to hide in, obtained ration cards for Jews, and she even shot dead a Dutch collaborator who sought to expose a family who she had been hiding. By her estimate, she helped rescue 150 Jews. She risked her life and put herself in harm's way on countless occasions, because she felt that it was her responsibility to help others in need.

Pritchard's story has always stuck with me. Her lesson, and the lesson that we all should take away from the Holocaust, is one about how we act when the world around us cries out for help. I thought of Mrs. Pritchard this past week when I read an appalling article in The New York Times. "The Road to Auschwitz Wasn't Paved with Indifference," read the headline, a negation of the aphorism coined by the historian Ian Kershaw. The author, Rivka Weinberg, argued that Auschwitz wasn't paved with indifference, it was paved with collaboration. That is, if only the gentile communities of Europe hadn't collaborated with the Nazis, if only Jewish leadership hadn't been a part of the Nazi machine, the Holocaust would have been less horrific. In the article, she argued:

"It's hard to be a hero, to risk your safety and personal commitments in order to help a stranger. That's a big ask. And by asking people too much, we make being moral too hard."

"Heroism is exceptional, saintly; that's not who most of us are, nor who most of us can be, so we're kind of off the hook."

"Heroism is aspirational and worthy of admiration, but it is a pedagogical, moral and historical error to spend our moral capital insisting on it."

"What history teaches us is: Don't perpetrate; don't collaborate. If you can be heroic, that is laudable."

"Next time the murderers come, it's understandable if it's too much to ask for us to risk our lives, our children, or even our jobs, to save others."

And if you read this article and nodded in agreement with Mrs. Weinberg, then perhaps I can shake you out of the comforting notion that our responsibility in the wake of Auschwitz is simply "don't collaborate." On the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, our takeaway from all that we have reflected on over the last three quarters of a century should instead be a reminder of the very morals that Judaism teaches when we face tyranny, peril, and suffering.

לא תוכל להתעלם

You cannot abdicate your responsibility, even if it's inconvenient for you, even if it's a burden, even if it puts you at risk (Deuteronomy 22:3).

לא תעמוד על דם רעך

Don't stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Leviticus 19:16).

These two laws from the Torah are the basis for a law the rabbis later established in the Talmud called the Din Rodef, the Law of the Pursuer (Sanhedrin 73a). If you see a person pursuing another to kill him or her, you are responsible to put yourself in harm's way in order to save the life of the victim. Your responsibility includes killing the pursuer, if necessary, before he or she is able to commit murder. "Don't stand idly by," the rabbis emphasize. This includes rescuing someone from drowning, from being attacked by a wild animal, or from being robbed by bandits. You must intervene to save a life. It's not enough to simply "not collaborate." Your moral mandate is to help, no matter what.

If you thought being Jewish was a piece of cake, then you thought wrong. It's not! Being Jewish requires an enormous amount of responsibility. Helping others almost always requires making self-sacrifice. Sometimes, it's putting yourself in danger, at other times, it may be a commitment of time. And there will be times where helping others means putting ourselves and those we care about at risk. The obligation is nonetheless to help.

Think for example of Moses who sees an Egyptian striking down a Hebrew slave:

"Some time after that, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors. He saw an Egyptian striking down a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen (Exodus 2:11)."

It would have been easy for Moses not to care. He had a comfortable social status; after all, he grew up in Pharaoh's house. Why would he intervene to help this Hebrew?

"Moses turns this way, and then the other way, and sees that no one is going to help, and so he strikes the Egyptian, and kills him (Exodus 2:12)."

When Pharaoh hears what Moses has done, Moses needs to flee to Midian. In his leaving Egypt, he loses his home, his family, and his status. People often say that the reason Moses wasn't allowed to enter the Promised Land was because he had killed someone. That's false! Moses wasn't allowed to enter because he later disobeyed God and struck a rock to bring out water, when he was supposed to speak to it.

The killing sounds like a much more problematic sin, but Moses was actually fulfilling the obligation of Din Rodef, interceding when a pursuer is seeking to kill another. This incident demonstrates the character that enables Moses to be qualified to lead the Jewish people. Moses does not stand idly by.

The big takeaway from Moses's behavior is not that he is an exceptional hero. Rather, Moses is our example of required moral behavior in such a situation. To be a Jew is to be like Moses. To be a Jew is to take on the obligation of helping others even when it's not in our own best interest. That's what you sign on for when you choose a Jewish life. And it's not just for Jews. Marion Pritchard was the most Moses-like woman that I've ever met!

The best way to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is not to simply remember. If you want to remember the liberation, then play the role of the liberator. If you want to commemorate the Holocaust, do so by making sure that it doesn't happen again. Being a bystander isn't morally normative, as Weinberg argues, it's morally unacceptable. The maxim "Never Again" sounds nice, but it's meaningless without the pledge to intercede in injustice. And Never Again doesn't just mean "Never Again to us," it means "Never Again to Anyone."

We often talk about freedom as if there were only one flavor. I want to suggest that freedom comes in different varieties. The fact that we have two Hebrew words for freedom — חופש (chofesh) and חירות (cheirut) — gives us an indication that there are nuanced differences between the freedoms that exist.

So what's the difference between the two kinds of freedom? I'll start out by describing חופש (chofesh). חופש is the freedom to do whatever you want. When I went to Jewish summer camp, my favorite part of the day was חופש, which is free time or freedom. After a very regimented schedule, campers could wander around and do whatever they pleased. Leave a bunch of kids to do whatever they want in camp, and obviously, kids get into trouble because it's hard to deal with complete freedom.

חופש is the freedom that is granted to slaves when they are set free. In the wake of bondage, there is an excitement to exercise our individual right to choose. Yet there is a problem in a society where everyone is free to do as they choose. It's a collective chaos. You might describe this kind of freedom as an anarchy, or to use another Hebrew word, a בלגן (balagan), a mess. In the days of the Judges, when the Israelites first begin to take hold of Canaan, the closing verse of the book of Judges describes the state of things:

בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם אֵין מֶלֶךְ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל אִישׁ הַיָּשָׁר בְּעֵינָיו יַעֲשֶׂה׃

In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did as he pleased (Judges 21:25).

Israel, in other words, lived in anarchy, a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority. With this chofesh freedom, they go worship idols and other gods, and they fight one another. Israel is plagued with chaos. Chofesh is a slave's idea of freedom, not a collective society's. This begs the question: What do you need for collective freedom? The answer is laws, and for the Israelites, they need Torah. Cheirut is the special kind of freedom in which laws help us live orderly, democratic, and empowered lives. During Passover, we rejoice that it is זמן חירותינו, the time of our freedom. Note that it is not the time of our חופשינו, our chofesh, but rather our cheirut.

When my brother Andrew got married, my gift for him was a set of cufflinks from Israel. The cufflinks were made from coins minted in the year 67 CE by the Jews as they were rebelling against the Romans. The Hebrew on these coins reads לחירות ציון (L'Cheirut Tzion), to the free society of Zion. That's a bold statement when living in the Roman Empire. But notice, the word cheirut, freedom, is different than the word chofesh, which also means freedom. The freedom that the rebels sought after was the free and autonomous society of the Jewish people living in Israel.

The word חירות, interestingly, does not appear in the Hebrew Bible. We do, however, get a hint of its meaning from a well known passage in Exodus. The two tablets that Moses brings down the mountain are described as:

וְהַמִּכְתָּב מִכְתַּב אֱלֹהִים הוּא חָרוּת עַל־הַלֻּחֹת׃

God's writing charut (engraved) on the tablets (Exodus 32:16).

The rabbis note the parallel between the word חרות (charut) and חירות (cheirut) by saying: "Don't read it as charut (engraved), instead, read it as cheirut (freedom). For whoever doesn't follow the laws of Torah is not really a free person."

Laws create this kind of free society that enables us to live with the joys of life, to make conscious and good choices, to protect each other and hold one another accountable. That's a society that's free, versus an individual who is free from laws in an anarchy.

I wonder, when Americans talk about freedoms, what kind of freedom are we referring to? By the way, when Americans are asked what makes America great, one of the most popular responses according to Gallup is freedom. It's an inherent value, but perhaps it's also a potential problem if we mean chofesh, the ability to do whatever we want.

I would remind us that our first amendment rights are still regulated freedoms. Free speech is curtailed to prevent an individual causing a panic or danger to other Americans. Free speech doesn't permit an individual to incite violence. We have freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the freedom to peacefully assemble and petition the government. And yet all of these freedoms are regulated in such a way that they provide societal harmony. They are in essence, חירות cheirut, the freedoms that are regulated by law.

When we see these rights as chofesh, complete individual freedom, then we begin to have problems. This is especially true when Americans interpret the second amendment of the Constitution as an individual freedom to own a gun. This kind of idealized freedom is not cheirut, where laws enable us to live with rights that protect us. It's chofesh, the freedom that slaves dream of, it's a giant mess, it's every man for themselves. Freedom of gun ownership is enslavement to guns.

I don't believe gun ownership is inherent in the Constitution of the United States. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." To me, this appears as a societal right to form an armed military or police force, and not an individual right. But in practice, the interpretation of freedom for an individual to own a gun has become the common practice, and it is valued by millions of Americans. Unregulated choice to make decisions will ultimately lead to people making poor decisions.

And when it comes to guns, Americans have somehow gone down the path of deregulation and upholding individual freedom at the cost of the 33,000 gun related deaths each year. These deaths have very little to nothing to do with video games and mental health. It has everything to do with the amount of guns in our country, and freedoms which we have granted to own guns without significant regulation. Too much individual freedom leads to too much societal enslavement. Too much individual freedom leads to far too many mass shootings, gun deaths, suicides, accidents with children, and anxious students at schools who don't feel safe. The individual freedoms of gun ownership brought us Columbine, Newtown, Pulse Night Club, Las Vegas, The Tree of Life Synagogue, Aurora, Parkland, San Bernardino, Dayton, El Paso, and Gilroy, CA. What we need more than individual freedoms is law! We need to restrict gun sales, ban assault rifles, close gun-show loopholes, tighten background checks, and I would go as far as to say that we should require a license for anyone who wants to own a gun in our country… and even then, I think we would have more individual gun ownership freedoms than any other civilized country…. perhaps even still too much freedom.

I value the lives of my children over anyone's individual freedom of gun ownership. I value the lives of the tens of thousands who could be saved annually, over someone's unnecessary desire to own an assault rifle. I value a specific kind of freedom which is cheirut, a free society regulated with laws, because whoever isn't living under laws, is not really a free person.

Questions for thought:

When are we going to realize that an individual freedom to own a gun is the enslavement of American society?

When are we going to enact laws that protect our citizens from gun violence, that protect our schools from school shootings, that protect our community from antisemites who want to do us harm?

When is gun legislation going to be a bipartisan issue?

When will we transform our chofesh, our individual freedoms, into cheirut, our free society with laws?

When will I be able to stop speaking about gun violence, because I really don't want to have to keep speaking about it?

A curious soul once walked into my office while I was the student rabbi in Beckley, West Virginia. He was a good Christian who knew his Bible backwards and forwards, including the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament as he called it. I don't think this man had ever met a Jew before, and his assumption about Judaism was that it was the religion of the "Old Testament." He was genuinely curious, and wanted to understand what Judaism was. I patiently sat and answered his questions.

"Do Jews still celebrate the Jubilee year that it asks about in Leviticus 25?" "Well, no," I answered, "there isn't even a recorded history of the Jubilee year ever being celebrated." The questions continued, "do Jews not eat pork or shellfish as it commands in Leviticus 11?" I tried to explain how I keep Kashrut, but for a lot of my congregation, the dietary laws weren't so important. Then came an interesting question about membership dues, "Do Jews still tithe, that is give a tenth of their income annually to the synagogue?" With a big grin, I responded with a chuckle, "I wish!"

As the questions went on, I began to shift the conversation to explaining the essence of Judaism, instead of trying to explain Jewish positions on the Bible. The Torah and the rest of the Bible are starting points for Judaism. They record what it meant to live as an Israelite thousands of years ago, but the religion has changed significantly. In the transitions from desert wandering, to living in the Promised Land, to the monarchy of Israel, to the destruction of the Temple, to exile, to return, and back to destruction again, Judaism has evolved. And then came a big philosophical question that couldn't be answered with a simple response:

"How much can something change and still be the same thing?"

To begin to answer this philosophical question, we go to the ancient Greek thinker, Plutarch, who poses the thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus was a Greek mythological hero, founder of Athens, slayer of the Minotaur, and experienced sailor. According to Plutarch, the ship of Theseus was mended over time. Each and every plank of the ship was eventually replaced. Thus the famous question, "Was it the same ship, or a new one altogether?" I'm not going to leave the question open-ended; I believe that we can answer this conundrum.

We might first turn to the Talmud, which offers us a parallel example of the Ship of Theseus using a sandal. The rabbis suppose that a sandal that is ritually impure is not made pure by replacing one of its two straps. However, if both straps of the sandal are replaced, the sandal is considered a new entity all-together (Eruvin 24a). By this logic, Theseus has a new ship, not the same one that he had before.

If we were to think of the Ship of Theseus in regard to identity, we might point out that every seven years, the human body has replaced nearly every one of its 50–75 trillion cells. Certain cells die off after a few days, and are replaced by new ones. Colon cells last about four days, skin cells two or three weeks, red blood cells about four months, and white blood cells about a year. Might that mean that I was a completely different person seven years ago than I am today? I would like to think that I'm still the same person.

In fact, many modern philosophers assume the view that the Ship of Theseus remains the same object because of what they call "spatiotemporal continuity." When an object, person, or idea continues to be used consistently, even though it is evolving incrementally over time, it holds spatiotemporal continuity, and is thus the same object.

One way to paint a picture of spatiotemporal continuity is through the metaphor of a rope. Dr. Michael Meyer, my professor at Hebrew Union College, equates Jewish history to a rope. There are strands at one end that are connected to the strands at the other end. But if you understand how rope is made, you'll know that no strand at the beginning is the same as at the end. You'll see that strands fray after mere inches or feet, yet they are interconnected and a part of the same whole. The strands at the beginning and the end are indeed the same rope. This is spatiotemporal continuity.

In other words, Judaism might have been radically different in the time of Abraham, Moses, and King David, but it is still the same Judaism that we have today because of spatiotemporal continuity. Arcane sections of Torah might seem irrelevant to the modern day Jewish experience, but they are a part of the Jewish Ship of Theseus. They are a strand of Judaism that frayed long ago, but are still interconnected to the Judaism of the present. By the same token, we are the same Jewish people of the Bible, and we practice the very same Judaism of our ancient ancestors. Even though it may look different, it is the same.

One of the scariest things to discover as a homeowner is mold growing on or in the walls of your house. Mold causes an array of health problems. Remediation of mold can also be expensive, and might not even correct the moisture issue that caused the mold in the first place. So what's the best solution when you're a home owner and you suspect that you might have mold? While I generally suggest using the Talmud as a guide to living life, the rabbinic sages' advice might seem hard to abide. I want to introduce a rabbinic discussion that isn't about mold, but about tzaraat, the bizarre affliction that can appear not just on human skin, but on the walls of your house. One might imagine that this affliction is at least on par with the worst case of modern mold, if not worse.

Rabbi Eliezer says that if you are in a dark house that might have this kind of tzaraat growing, אין פותחין לו חלונות לראות נגעו, don't open the windows, because if you do, you might find the tzaraat, and if you don't, it's better to be in the dark. One might say "see no evil, there is no evil," "ignorance is bliss," or "you're better off not knowing the truth." If I were to have a mold issue in my house, I DO want to know, and I would expect better advice from the wisdom of our sages. But just when you think that the rabbis are out of their minds, they drop a line of brilliance that brings to light so much of Jewish thought and thinking. לעולם תהיה חשוך ותתקיים, Always be obscure, so that you can endure (Sanhedrin 92a)!

There are a few things that this obscure aphorism can mean, so let me begin to unpack it a bit.

1. Living in darkness is better than living in a world illuminated with truth. If you remember the movie The Matrix, which is now 20 years old, you might recall the main character Neo is offered a pill, much like the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2). He can live in the world that he thinks he knows, or he can take the pill and be exposed to a truth about the world that will change everything! This is a truth that most people in the know wish that they had never learned. Better to live in the dark, some people think, than to be able to see the world for the scary place that it actually is.
2. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz offers another interpretation of this saying in his commentary to the Talmud. He says that the more humble and unknown you make yourself, the longer you will live. To this end, one should "live in the shadows," "don't make waves," "don't stand out," or "fly under the radar." In less cliché terms, live a life of obscurity, and you will live. This seems to me a rather boring way to live.
3. Let me now tell you what I think this seemingly obscure aphorism about obscurity is all about. Living life when the world around you is obscure helps fill our time with intrigue, wonder, and a never-ending journey of asking questions to which we may never find the answer. One saying that I find advice worth taking, is to never trust people who claim to have the truth. That is, don't trust people who claim to have all the answers. Instead, trust people who are in the never-ending search for the truth, because truth is elusive, and obscure.

Living in obscurity is about living life with a question mark, and being comfortable without the answers. Because we know that life doesn't come with definitive explanations to our ultimate questions. Living a Jewish life is about basking in the obscurity. It's about not opening the window to figure out whether or not you have tzaraat on your walls.

If the Torah was filled with 613 easy laws and guidelines that made perfect sense, and were timelessly applicable, Judaism would be easy, yet ultimately boring. Instead, the Torah is filled with a whole host of laws that don't make sense, that don't apply to our time, but we read them anyways, because obscurity helps us to timelessly find meaning in the density of difficult text.

Tzaraat might not be profoundly relevant to the modern dermatologist or even mold remediator, but it's important for Jews. NO, we don't actually care about the antiquated questions of whether a person or home is pure or impure, but we do care about big questions. We care about curiosity. We care about rituals that we don't always know why we are performing. Judaism is a religion of embracing the obscure, and that's largely why we always have something to talk about.

There is perhaps no better example of obscurity enabling us to live better than the holiday of Passover. Passover celebrates the act of questioning things and not expecting the answers. While most people are familiar with the famous four questions of Passover, a seder should be filled with questions beyond merely the famous four. The rabbis teach that the ritual of Passover requires that we ask one another questions about Passover. Children ask their parents, someone who is alone asks himself, and two wise sages who know all the answers already ask one another (Pesachim 116a). We're meant to realize that it's not all about answering these questions. For why would two people who already know all the laws of Passover ask a question of one another? Asking unanswerable questions is the ultimate form of living in obscurity. Endlessly debating ideas is the method for how Jews transform obscurity into spirituality. When Jews question on Passover: "why is this night different than all other nights," they don't expect an answer. Perhaps, though, one might say that Passover night is more obscure than all other nights, which makes it different.

When life is obscure, we never stop being curious, we are always forced to think, we continuously ask questions, we endlessly seek to uncover truth, we keep growing, the conversation goes on, and life endures.

The Torah overflows with moments that we might see as troubling amidst the #metoo movement. From Abraham's pimping of his wife Sarah, to the rape of Dina, to the trope of stripping women of agency, we find texts troubling to our modern sensibilities. Perhaps nothing is as cringeworthy to read as the case of the Sotah, the suspected adulteress of parashat Naso. According to the text, if a man suspects that his wife has committed adultery, even if his suspicion stems merely from jealousy, a husband can subject his wife to a trial by ordeal. The suspected adulteress would drink a sacred concoction of bitter water. If she was innocent, nothing would happen, but if she was guilty, her belly would distend, and her thighs sag. According to the Mishnah, she would turn green, her eyes would bulge, and her veins would swell (Sotah 3:4). Essentially, she would become barren and deformed.

We might be inclined to shy away from the horror of such a repulsive trial by ordeal. Yet in thinking about the text further, I wonder whether we haven't been misunderstanding the true intention of the bitter waters. We might turn to the book How to Think Like a Freak by Stephen Dubner and Stephen Levitt for some insight. In the chapter entitled "Teach Your Garden to Weed Itself," they discuss what behavioral economists call "separating equilibrium." The trick, according to the two economists, is to create incentives that will coax a guilty party into confession. Perhaps the most known biblical example of a separating equilibrium is the famous story of Solomon's judgment concerning the disputed rightful mother of an infant baby. When two mothers both claim to be the child's parent, Solomon orders a sword to be brought, and the baby to be split in half. Upon seeing this, the true mother calls out for the baby to be given to the other woman so long as he isn't harmed. From the reactions of the two women, Solomon is able to discern the true parentage.

Dubner and Levitt go further and explore trials by ordeal as a tool for creating a separating equilibrium. They explore, in particular, the medieval cases of priests carrying out trial by ordeal upon suspected criminals. They would either dip the hand of the accused in boiling water or make them grip a hot iron rod. Out of 308 cases that entered a trial by ordeal according to 13th Century Hungarian records, 100 of the accused confessed before the ordeal. Amongst the remaining 208 people, only 78 were badly burned. So what happened here? Well, it would behoove the guilty party to confess his or her crime and receive a lesser sentence, otherwise he or she would face mutilation and a higher prison sentence. Those who were innocent and truly believed in the efficacy of the ordeal would likely go through the trial. The kicker, it seems, is that most priests would rig the ordeal so as not to harm the accused, who they believed innocent. After all, no one but an innocent party would partake in ordeal if they believed in the system. This might give us a clue into the psychology behind the trial by bitter waters. Just as it was easy to rig the temperature of a pot of water or an iron bar, a "magical" water concoction might be the easiest of all ordeals to fake. Perhaps then the bitter waters ordeal was a scare tactic to warn would-be adulterers. But maybe there is something more to it.

Let us not forget that according to the Torah, women should have no agency in a case where a jealous husband suspects her of adultery. But the laws of Sotah offer them another back-handed incentive — to study Torah. In the Mishnah, we learn that if a woman has merit, her fate is protected from any ordeal by bitter waters. Ben Azzai elucidates that a woman gains merit through the study of Torah (Sotah 3:4). In other words, if a woman wants to ensure complete immunity from the bitter waters and the potential jealousy of her husband, she need only study Torah. In this way, the ordeal of bitter waters becomes a separating equilibrium to incentivize Torah study for women. While it might seem despicable on the surface, perhaps the case of the sotah is really a brilliant tactic to encourage universal Torah learning for women.

In a world of patents, copyrights, and "intellectual property," we often obsess over the ownership of our creativity. We want credit for it, we want to possess it, and sometimes even to capitalize on it. Too often we fail to put our creativity out in the world, unless it's marketable. This mentality cries out: "don't you dare steal my product!" Everybody has got to make a living, but we often guard technology, creativity, art, and ideas with the security of a bank vault. We don't share with the world, rather we keep it for ourselves. Such is true in the field of art, education, music, technology, and much of the world. And that saddens me.

A little over a year ago, one of my teenage students, Asa Kaplan, shared with me and a group of other teens a story that I will never forget. Asa had gone to a wilderness camp for many years, and spent a great deal of time in the woods on his own with very basic supplies. He was expected to forage, to fish, and to build his own fire. He talked in detail about building a fire, and related that he saw the process of creating a fire as an art form. "Before you light it," he said, "you have to decide how you want it to look, how it will burn, and how it will dance." Asa talked about the intricacies of stacking and spacing the logs so that you know exactly how the fire will react. Logs close together, for example, will burn slower, and not as hot. He took a great deal of pride in the art of creating a fire. And then Asa offered his Torah, a teaching that has stuck with me. "Once the fire is lit, it's no longer your creation. The fire is its own thing, and it's the world's!"

The fire may burn predictably, but ultimately it remains uncontrolled. You can no longer touch it. You can no longer correct it. You can only reap its blessing of heat and comfort. Since hearing Asa's story, I've thought about my own art and ideas with significantly less ownership.

Asa's story echoes a Hassidic tale about the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism. When the Baal Shem Tov was near his death, a student came to him with a hand-written book and said, "These are your words, which I have written down. This is the Torah of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov." The Master read what was written and said, "Not one word of this is my Torah." It wasn't that the student was a poor note taker or recorder, rather the words that we speak, our Torah, is like fire. Once we speak it, it's no longer ours. It's the world's.

Artists often speak about a part of a creative process where they simply let go! They relinquish their sense of ownership, and instead see themselves as channeling their experiences and the world onto a canvas. In this sense, creativity comes when we realize that our work and ideas aren't ours to own, but ours to share.

When I read the biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance, I became inspired by Musk's views on intellectual property. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, relinquished all of the company's patents for electric vehicles so that other companies would be able to utilize Tesla's designs and processes to create better electric vehicles. Tesla Motors states that "all our patents belong to you!" Elon Musk goes on to write that "Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor . . . . We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla's position in this regard." Tesla serves as a corporate model that we shouldn't obsess over intellectual property, and that the free flow of ideas will only enrich the world and the mission of our companies.

Every time I write something or speak in public, I don't own the words coming from my mouth. I garner ideas from my life experiences, from the world around me, and from the Torah, and I give them shape and tone. But once I speak them, they are no longer mine. Just like fire, I hope that they become their own entity. I hope people will take my fire, use it freely, talk about my ideas (I don't need credit or attribution), build upon them, and let the fire spread.

As we opened up the book of Leviticus this week, I let out a long sigh. Thank God Judaism has long abandoned the practice of offering sacrifices. I often struggle to make meaning of the words of Leviticus, which might best be described as a priestly guide for ritual animal sacrifice. It's not just because the material is obsolete in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, but also because the idea of butchering animals, and throwing them onto a giant barbecue seems less than appealing to me. I am grateful that we are through with blood drenched altars and blood spattering in our holy spaces. I throw my hands into the air and exclaim: "No more sacrifices!"

I cringe at the thought of ever resurrecting this ghastly ritual. If you were to try to bring back animal sacrifice, you wouldn't even need PETA or the ASPCA to throw a protest. The level of outrage would sweep our country at lightning speed. Why then, I ask, can we be so outraged by animal sacrifice to God, and NOT outraged by the sacrifices of our children for the sake of our gun culture? If you ask me, I'm just as sickened by animal sacrifices as I am by our needless sacrifices of American lives!

This past Wednesday I drove to East Hampton High School and stood at 10 AM outside with a group of parents to support the hundreds of students who walked out of their school. They did so in solidarity with the victims of the mass shooting in Parkland, FL. Along with students nationwide, these teens were terrified, angry, outraged, and at the same time motivated. I was moved by their outpouring of emotion, by their courage, and by their conviction. They know that their lives are at risk of being sacrificed, because far too often, our schools are the altar upon which we sacrifice our children.

We sacrifice our children so that every American has the right to buy an assault rifle with a high capacity magazine and a bump stock. We sacrifice American lives for a laissez faire process of buying a gun. We sacrifice children for a right to bear arms. I'm done with sacrifices. No more sacrifices!

There is one sacrifice that is absolutely prohibited, even in the period when animal sacrifices were the norm. The sacrifice of children was, and always has been, an abomination! "Never offer up your children as a sacrifice," declares God, "because doing so profanes the name of God (Leviticus 18:21)." The prophet Jeremiah says it clearly as well: "you are sacrificing your children, burning them, and this is a sacrifice that I never commanded, and would never even cross my mind (Jeremiah 19:5)." It was an abhorrence when the Israelites witnessed their own people sacrificing children in the valley of Hinom outside Jerusalem, and it's just as horrendous today in the halls and classrooms of our schools. No more sacrifices!

I'm reminded of the Jewish mandate called pikuach nefesh, the obligation to save a human life. This mandate overrides many of the most sacrosanct mitzvot in the Torah. You can violate Shabbat to save another human life, you can lie in order to save another human life, and you can break your fast on Yom Kippur, all in order to save another life. We place tremendous value on every human being, because Jewish tradition sees each life as a potential world in and of itself (Sanhedrin 4:5). If we're required to preserve human life even at the cost of violating some of the most sacred Jewish traditions, why on earth wouldn't we value our children's lives over lax gun legislation? No more sacrifices!

Recent Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler tells a compelling story about human response to temptation. He was hosting a dinner-party at his home, and while his guests were waiting with cocktails for the meal, Thaler put out a bowl of cashews as a light snack. Unexpectedly, a cashew feeding frenzy broke out. Thaler soon realized that there weren't nearly enough cashews for the hungry herd. Worried that his guests would spoil their appetite, he whisked the bowl away to the kitchen. When he returned, something unusual happened. His friends thanked him! They knew that eating the cashews would spoil their dinner, but they needed the temptation removed.

Being a group comprised of graduate students studying behavioral economics, the group began discussing their odd behavior. A conversation erupted about human behavior in the face of temptation. They began to realize that we have much less self-control than we think we do. Thaler later unpacked these observations about temptation, highlighting that we give into shortsighted pleasure at the cost of long term benefit. From eating huge quantities of stale movie-theatre popcorn drenched in nauseatingly artificial butter, to smoking cigarettes despite knowing the health risks, to neglecting to join a retirement plan because money in the pocket feels nicer than a heavily subsidized company savings plan, human beings knowingly opt to make poor choices. Think about the biblical Eve, who sacrifices paradise for a mere apple. We might also point to our forefather Isaac, who favors his hunter son Esau over his bookish son Jacob simply because ציד בפיו, Isaac had a taste for game.

You might feel disheartened about the magnitude of human propensity towards bad decisions. But Thaler offers us some great wisdom in his book called "Nudge." That is, behavior can be directed for better or worse through simple incentives that he refers to as "nudges." Nudges are the low-hanging-fruit of encouraging steps that we can take to direct our behavior, and the behavior of others. In parashat Toldot, Jacob convinces his brother to squander his birthright (the entire inheritance of his father's estate) for a mere bowl of red lentils. We have already established human proclivity to acting against our long time interests, so it should come as no surprise that the temptation of food can be used to nudge Esau to make a terrible choice.

If you are thinking that Esau is merely a dumb brute, think again! Esau is human. Esau is us. Let me give you an example. You have told yourself that you are going to eat healthy tonight when you go out to dinner with your friends. You even order the healthiest thing on the menu, a garden salad. As you begin to pat yourself on the shoulder, the waiter asks if you want a drink. You're ready to say "I'm fine with water," but before you can, your friends decide to order a bottle of wine. You may have decided previously that you were not going to drink, but if you don't partake, they're not going to finish the bottle! All of a sudden, you've made a poor choice. The wine is there, and you think to yourself: "it would be silly for me not to have a glass." Before your salad arrives, the waiter places a basket of fresh bread at the center of the table. How could you not just take a small nibble? Then later in the evening, the waiter comes around with the dessert menu. You think to yourself: "I'm really too full." Your friends entertain the idea of just taking a peek at the menu. Just when you're about to ask for the check, your friends decide that they are going to order several desserts for the table. Of course, when the waiter brings a bowl of ice-cream, bread pudding, and a mammoth piece of chocolate cake, he places a spoon in front of you. Can you really resist the temptation of a bite? Before you know it, your healthy intentions have lost out to temptation.

And this is where Thaler comes in, and offers us some great advice. Create incentives for good behavior, and more importantly, set up nudges and simple systems to nudge you toward better decisions. Not to diminish the importance of Thaler's work, I feel the need to point out that some of his ideas sound strikingly similar to Jewish wisdom. The rabbinic sages teach in Mishnah Avot that we should "עֲשׂוּ סְיָג לַתּוֹרָה, build a fence around the Torah (Avot 1:1)." In other words, protect and fortify not just Jewish law, but Jewish values and ethical behavior. And just as Thaler suggests small ways of doing so, our sages offer us some sweet low-hanging-fruit.

Why for example do Jews wear a tzitzit (the fringes of a tallit)? וּזְכַרְתֶּם אֶת־כָּל־מִצְוֹת יְהֹוָה וַעֲשִׂיתֶם אֹתָם, so that you should remember all of God's mitzvot and do them (Numbers 15:39). Tzitzit are nudges towards mitzvot. The rabbis tell a story in the Talmud about a man who had a liking for the temptations of the flesh. This Jewish man once tracked down one of the most expensive and famous prostitutes in the land. As he started to undress in her presence, his tzitzit brushed against his face. He remembered the mitzvot, became conscious that what he was doing was not just wrong, but going against the grain of how he envisioned living a life of Torah (Menachot 44a).

By the same token, every time you walk past a mezuzah, you're supposed to remember that you are bound to mitzvot, and that your values as a Jew are affixed to your home, the very foundation of your life. In every room within your house, you should be living the values of being a Jew and making conscious choices leading down the path of Torah.

Why wear a kippah? According to Joseph Caro, perhaps the most important legal mind in Jewish history, it's so that you should remember that the divine presence is over your head. If you are walking on the street with a kippah, you become conscious that your actions are being judged not just by God, but by the world around you that has a spotlight on your Jewishness. There is a story in the Talmud related about a boy who the rabbis thought would become a thief. To prevent her son from going down this road, his mother didn't allow him to uncover his head. She said to her son: "Cover your head so that the fear of Heaven will be upon you." When one day his kippah fell off, he was overcome with an urge to steal (Shabbat 156b). The kippah, in other words, is a ritual nudge toward living an ethical life.

These Jewish nudges will not just help you live a more Jewish life, they may even act as incentives to make good life choices. Whether your nudges are Jewish or non-Jewish, it's not enough to just have lots of will-power. The world is filled with temptations that will eat away at even the best of your intentions. If I haven't yet made the case for the power of temptation, I'll sum it up very simply: No one's will power is impervious to a well-placed piece of chocolate cake. But never underestimate the power of a nudge to lead you away from the cake, and toward Torah.

On a recent fall day, I woke up ready to spend the day fishing with a friend. The air was mild, a cool calming autumn breeze wafted through the trees, and the sky was a crisp blue with the accent of a marshmallow cloud here and there. I have little experience fishing in the waters of the East End, but this seemed like an ideal day for fishing. As we pulled up to the dock and began to unload our poles, the boat captain greeted us with an apprehensive face. "Before we go out," he said, "I want to show you something." He took us to a nearby beach, and pointed out to the distance. "There are sustained 20 mph winds out there," he began, "and it's only going to get worse." He talked more about how the tides made the conditions even treacherous; all things that were a little bit beyond my level of nautical comprehension. What had seemed like a nice day, was actually a dangerous day to go out.

The captain's methodical thinking reminded me of a concise piece of rabbinic wisdom from the proverbial book Pirke Avot (The Lessons of the Fathers). הֱווּ מְתוּנִים בַּדִּין, be deliberate in judgement. Far too often we invest a great deal of faith in our gut feelings and our instincts. And while sometimes we are correct, we more often than not fail to think through decisions with the proper amount of deliberation and patience. Trusting our amateur instinct about fishing would have proved dangerous that day; we needed a calculated and data-driven judgement about the conditions on the water. So too, our tradition teaches, should we judge others and the world around us with careful and measured consideration.

Two thousand years after Pirke Avot was written, the Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman echoed some of the Jewish wisdom of his ancestors in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman points out that each of us processes the problems and situations around us with two kinds of judgement. The first is the intuitive fast-thinking response that we tend to favor. And the second, a slower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking. Kahneman through this book demonstrates how we invest too much faith in fast thinking, and neglect slow and deliberate thinking. We do so with weighty consequences. The simple rabbinic dictum summarizes Kahneman's 500 plus page masterpiece, הֱווּ מְתוּנִים בַּדִּין, be deliberate in judgement (it's still worth the read). There is a time and place for fast thinking, but wisdom is born from slow intentional thought and judgement.

Malcolm Gladwell, on the other hand, has suggested in his book Blink that we don't completely disregard fast thinking. He notes that:

there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

One compelling example that Gladwell relates is a story of a group of firemen from Cleveland who entered a one story house to combat a fire in the kitchen. After charging in with their hoses blasting, the flames wouldn't abate. They doused the fire with more water, but still the flames persisted. Without knowing why, the lieutenant had a feeling that something was wrong, and ordered everyone out of the house. As they were leaving, the floor collapsed under them. The fire had been coming from the basement. This judgement wasn't deliberate, rather it came from his instinct which told him that something was wrong. There may be times when fast thinking is not just beneficial, but our only option. There was no time for the lieutenant to stop, think, and solve the mystery of why the fire in the kitchen refused to abate. Gladwell would ask us to reconsider our fast judgement, but Kahneman would rebut that while fast thinking is sometimes on the money, more often than not we are over-confident in our ability to intuit. If time is a luxury that we do have, utilize it to navigate the complexities of life.

In his book "How to Think," Alan Jacobs offers a simple, yet useful suggestion. "Give it 5 minutes." Our minds are stimulated with certain triggers that bias our judgement of people and the things that they say. Jacobs offers that if someone is saying something that you don't agree with, give five minutes of your attention before passing judgement. Once upon a time during a teaching of mine, I referred to God with the gender pronoun "Him." Normally I try my best to refrain from using a pronoun that portrays God with a gender, but it's hard to navigate this with the biases of English rhetoric. A woman approached me after the class and told me: "I stopped listening to you as soon as you referred to God as a Him." She missed everything that I had to say because she focused in on a word that I used unintentionally. How often are we triggered by words and ideas that cause us to pass judgement and stop listening?

Pirke Avot offers more insight on how we might exercise deliberate judgement. The great Rabbi Hillel follows up noting that וְאַל תָּדִין אֶת חֲבֵרְךָ עַד שֶׁתַּגִּיעַ לִמְקוֹמוֹ, don't judge another person until you have come to his place, or perhaps more colloquially, don't judge someone else until you've stood in their shoes. Take the time to have empathy, Hillel demands of us. The one way that we can properly judge others is to take the time to balance our judgement with an empathetic compassion. This would take at least five minutes. The rabbis offer the parable of a thin glass. If you put hot water (judgement) in it, then it will expand and break. If you put cold water (compassion) in it, then it will contract and shatter. If the world is filled simply with compassion, then no one would be concerned with the consequences of their actions and our society would be lawless. If it's filled only with unadulterated judgement, then it would shatter from the harshness of justice. When our judgement is tempered with deliberate compassion, we not only improve communal and social relations, but we find ourselves exercising better judgement.

Pirke Avot's wisdom about judgement isn't framed with a nice sounding aphorism that would cause us to make a snap judgement about its value. Would "be deliberate in judgement" have been better phrased as "haste makes waste (Proverbs 21:5)," "look before you leap," or "don't judge a book by its cover?" Perhaps, but the mundane and succinct phrasing forces us to think about why a sage would leave as his only legacy three simple words. We are meant to think about them for at least five minutes, and we should reflect on how we ought to take extra time to exercise methodical, thoughtful, and deliberate judgement.

For years, I've always had trouble translating the last three verses of the Torah. It's not because I don't understand the words, but rather because the syntax is bizarre. Most of us simply see the last three sentences as one giant run-on thought, rendering the text:

Never again has there arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses who knew YHWH face to face, in regard to all the signs and portents that YHWH sent to him to display in Egypt against Pharaoh and all his servants, and his whole country, and for all of his strength of hand, and for all of his great wonder that which Moses did before the eyes of all of Israel (Deuteronomy 34).

Remember, the Torah was written without punctuation (it was added later), making its content seem elusive at times. At its best, the Torah ends as it does above, with a poorly constructed Hebrew sentence. We would expect that the most legendary story of all time would — like most classics — end clearly and succinctly. Take for example one of the greatest book endings, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The final words are crisp, clear, and offer us closure. Fitzgerald concludes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Unlike The Great Gatsby, the Torah's ending throws us a major linguistic hurdle. Whether we translate the word לכל (l'chol) as "in regard to," or as "for all," the word appears to begin a new idea separate from the previous line. The Masorah (the 9th Century collection of comments and punctuation of the Bible) recognizes this by adding a sof pasuk, a biblical equivalent of a period, to the last word of Deuteronomy 34:10:

וְלֹא־קָם נָבִיא עוֹד בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל כְּמֹשֶׁה אֲשֶׁר יְדָעוֹ יְהֹוָה פָּנִים אֶל־פָּנִים

Never again has there arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses who knew YHWH face to face.

The next line would thus begin a new idea. The problem, however, is that without the previous sentence linked, the last two verses of the Torah leave us with a hanging thought. This would be like an English-language equivalent of having several dependent clauses without having an independent clause; or in other words, an incomplete sentence. The last two verses would thus read:

For all the signs and portents that YHWH sent to him to do in the land of Egypt, towards Pharaoh, towards all of his servants, and all of the land; and for all of his strength of hand, and for all of his great wonder that which Moses did before the eyes of all of Israel . . .

In this latter reading, there seems to be a thought missing. An ellipsis isn't a part of biblical Hebrew punctuation, but perhaps here it might be in order. We might expect a thought to follow like: "the people would once again come to stray from the ways of YHWH." Or perhaps a more positive conclusion of "the Israelites needed to leave Moses behind to continue on in their journey." I have trouble translating the last verse not because it's a run-on, but because the ending is wanting for a concluding thought.

This year, I became comfortable with a Torah bereft of a logical closing line. Nothing honors the holiday of Simchat Torah more than simply understanding that the Torah ends with an ellipsis. On Simchat Torah, we are reminded that the Torah never really concludes, it only begins anew. Instead of closure, the final words offer us a segue into beginning the never ending story of Torah.

Humanity desires to feel in control. One of the first instructions that we receive from God in the Torah is to control and master the world (Genesis 1:28). We are imbued with the drive to navigate the winding road of life by harnessing control. And then it slips...

At my very first Yom Kippur service as the rabbi of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, I lost control. As I began to offer my sermon, rain began to drop down onto the roof of our High Holy Day tent. Soon the drops turned to torrents, and the torrents to hail. It was so loud that people couldn't hear their own voices, let alone mine. I had to stop the service. Within minutes, a flash flood swept through the tent. Control was lost. All I could do was embrace the chaos and the disorder.

I'm reminded that the very foundation of the world was built upon chaos and disorder. Before anything was created, we find that:

וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ

The land was chaos and disorder (Genesis 1:2).

Order wasn't created upon nothing, but rather on the canvas of chaos and disorder. Too often we try to control the world around us, and we forget that chaos and disorder might actually enrich our lives. The holiday of Sukkot is the ultimate reminder of this. You are required to be outside in nature with nothing permanent. The roof of a sukkah won't protect you from the elements, and worst of all, Sukkot isn't in the gentle breezes of early summer or late spring. It's in the fall with all of its cold, wet, and sometimes disgusting nights. Sukkot — in a nutshell — is a reminder to put yourself in a place without complete control, and enjoy it.

Every Sukkot we read from the book of Kohelet (AKA Ecclesiastes) who reminds us that הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים ... הַכֹּל הָבֶל׃, everything is but mere breath, everything is breath (Ecclesiastes 1:2). The word הבל (often inappropriately translated as absurdity, nothingness or vanity) appears 29 times throughout the book. All life, Kohelet teaches, is but a mere ephemeral breath on a cold winter day. We glimpse it for only a moment before entropy takes over, and it dissipates. We can't control life any more than we can harness vapor. Kohelet reminds us that although life is breath, we can enjoy it through moments of joy (שמחה). On Sukkot, we are thus commanded ושמחת בחגך... והיית אך שמח, you should be joyful, celebrate . . . and be nothing but joyful.

All we can do is enjoy the chaos and be transformed by it! From chaos and disorder we create, we build, and we are transformed. This past Yom Kippur I felt as if Sukkot had come early. I knew that there was nothing I could do to stop the storm. There was no solution to a flooded tent that didn't have negative consequences. All I could do is throw my hands up in the air, breathe, and continue with my day of repentance. And for me, I felt transformed. All of my nervousness, angst, and preparedness was transformed simply into being present.

We cleave to the structure and order that guide us through life's twists and turns. But we must never forget to let go once and a while so that we might let in a bit of chaos and disorder. Only then can we become partners in creation, rebuilding what is broken, and giving meaning to what lays in disarray.

"Inside every man there is a struggle between good and evil that cannot be resolved," exclaims Homer Simpson. This wisdom echoes rabbinic discussions in the Talmud about the יצר טוב (yetzer tov), our good inclination, and the יצר הרע (yetzer hara), our evil inclination. The Jewish tradition teaches us that God imbued humankind with a healthy balance of good and evil. Each proclivity cannot exist without the counterbalance of the other. While we might gravitate to work towards a world bereft of evil inclinations, the rabbis advise us otherwise:

אלולי יצר הרע לא בנה אדם בית ולא נשא אשה ולא הוליד בנים

Were it not for the evil inclination, a person would not build houses, would not marry, and would not bear children (Bereshit Rabbah 9:7).

A world without the yetzer hara's manifestations of competition, jealousy, greed, sexuality, and anger also lacks the fundamental components of society: business, government, and procreation. Balance is the ideal, but we should never underestimate the power of the yetzer hara. Despite Homer Simpson's wise words about the coexistence of good and evil, he visualizes his evil inclination (Evil Homer) dancing over the tombstone of his yetzer tov (Good Homer), and shaking maracas singing: "I am Evil Homer, I am Evil Homer." The yetzer hara exists within all of us, and sometimes it flares up to tempt us into sinful action.

No one is immune from the yetzer hara, not even the most righteous of rabbinic sages in the Talmud. In fact, the rabbis teach that the most prominent figures in society are the most susceptible. "כל הגדול מחבירו יצרו גדול הימנו, the greater the person, the greater the evil inclination (B. Sukkot 52a)." This principle emerges most prevalently in relation to sexual sin. In tractate Kiddushin, the rabbis relate a series of stories about famous rabbis whose evil inclinations for sexual lust nearly or actually overpower their yetzer tov (B. Kiddushin 81a–b). Each tale offers a moral about understanding the yetzer hara within us.

• Rav Amram the Pious ascends a ladder (a) to proposition a group of beautiful women. Realizing he is about to give in to his temptation, he screams out "fire in the house of Amram!" By openly declaring his temptation, he is able to subdue his inclination, and create a group to support him in tempering his burning fire of lust.
• Rabbi Akiva has a tendency to mock sinners (people who give in to their yetzer hara), so Satan decides to test him. Satan transforms himself into a beautiful woman atop a palm tree (a) to lure Akiva. As Akiva begins to climb the tree, Satan releases him from his grip. The story teaches us not to belittle the power of the yetzer hara, for no one is immune from it.
• Chiyah Bar Ashi (b) would pray for God to save him from his sexual yetzer hara. His wife overhears his prayer. Although a husband is required to provide for his wife sexually every week, the text tells us that he had not done so in a number of years. Chiyah Bar Ashi's wife decides to dress up like the town's famous prostitute Charuta (c). In seducing her husband, she deceives him into believing that he committed adultery; she also teaches an important lesson. Complete repression of the yetzer hara leads to its explosive and sinful manifestation.

We cannot escape the yetzer hara, nor should we try. God implanted within us both good and evil for a practical purpose. Life should be lived in a healthy balance of good and evil. Rav Amram (the man on fire) teaches later in the Talmud that no single day can pass without a person considering sinful thought (B. Baba Batra 164b). The important thing is to act in ways that favor our yetzer tov, while letting our yetzer hara remain only as an unfulfilled propensity.

(a) The image of a ladder and the image of a palm tree appear to be sexual euphemisms for arousal.

(b) The name used here puns on the yetzer hara being both animalistic and a burning fire: חיה — animal; אש — fire.

(c) The name חרותה is another play on the idea of the yetzer hara being like fire. An English translation of this name might be "Hottie."

What measures of beauty do Jewish men value when choosing a prospective wife? Some might say that looks matter a great deal. Others might follow the conventional proverbial wisdom that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," or that "true beauty is on the inside!" On Seinfeld, George Costanza's girlfriend Paula once commented that "looks aren't important to me." She goes on to tell George that "You can wear sweatpants. You could drape yourself in velvet, for all I care!" Keeping in mind that beauty is a subjective measure, I would imagine that few men would dismiss physical beauty altogether.

In the rabbinic world of the Mishnah and the Talmud, the rabbis tend to place particular emphasis on the role of physical appearance. They exclusively limited beauty to the external body. It is taught in the Talmud that "three things comfort a man, and they are: a beautiful abode, a beautiful bride, and beautiful vessels (B. Berachot 57b)." A beautiful wife, in this case, appears as an extension of a man's house. (1) He appreciates her beauty in the same way that he values the aesthetic appeal of his property. Rabbi Chiya, a notoriously chauvinistic amora, argues that women are nothing more than show pieces and baby makers:

אין אשה אלא ליופי, אין אשה אלא לבנים . . . אין אשה אלא לתכשיטי אשה . . . . הרוצה שיעדן את אשתו ילבישנה כלי פשתן

A wife is only for beauty, a wife is only to make children . . . and a wife is only for feminine adornments. He who wants to brighten his wife's countenance should clothe her in linen garments (B. Ketubot 59b).

In reading these statements centered on physical attractiveness, we might imagine that husbands chose their wives based almost solely on looks. A woman's character serves little purpose under this mindset.

When the rabbis detailed their standards for beauty, marriages were arranged by the parents of each party. Men and women who had been fixed up scarcely knew their chosen partner, let alone had the opportunity to converse and get to know the other's inner qualities. This system necessitated the judgement and consideration of a potential mate based on superficial qualities. The culture of arranged marriages set the stage for a society that appreciated superficial and sometimes trivial attributes.

Notwithstanding the seemingly antiquated rabbinic perception of beauty, one key story from the Mishnah might offer the modern Jew insight on this subject. In tractate Nedarim there is the case of a man who vowed not to marry his niece because she was ugly. The story highlights that Rabbi Ishmael brought the girl into his house, and helped uncover her beauty so that the man would agree to marry her. After Ishmael asks the man whether he really vowed that he would not marry the girl, the man responds "no!" The story continues that:

בְּאוֹתָה שָׁעָה בָּכָה רַבִּי יִשְׁמָעֵאל וְאָמַר, בְּנוֹת יִשְׂרָאֵל נָאוֹת הֵן אֶלָּא שֶׁהָעֲנִיוּת מְנַוַּלְתָּן

At that very hour, Rabbi Ishmael cried out and said that "all the daughters of Israel are beautiful! It's only that poverty can make them look ugly [on the outside] (Nedarim 9:10)."

Rabbi Ishmael teaches us that all Jewish women possess attributes of beauty. These traits may or may not be outward because cultural destitution obscures them. Because Ishmael helped reveal the beauty of Jewish women in the world, we learn that when Rabbi Ishmael died, the daughters of Israel raised a lament and said: "The daughters of Israel weep for Rabbi Ishmael."

The honor due to Ishmael need not only come from the women of Israel. We might see Ishmael's lesson applied for all of humanity. God created all men and women in the image of God. Every individual is beautiful! While we often fail to see beyond the divides and exteriors that mask God's gifts to us, it is up to each person to help uncover the beauty that hides beneath the surface. In searching for love in the world, we might find beauty on someone's outside, but we should never forget to look deeper.

(1) In rabbinic literature, a man's wife is, in fact, called "ביתו," his house. We learn in Yoma 1:1 that "בֵּיתוֹ, זוֹ אִשְׁתּוֹ, when 'his house' is referenced, it refers to his wife."

More than a millennium has passed since the act of vowing engendered significant religious obligations and consequences in the Jewish world. As early as the seventh century, Rav Yehudai Gaon, one of the prolific rabbinical scholars of the time, highlights the lapsed trend of vowing by declaring: "we do not study Nedarim [the talmudic tractate that deals with vows], nor do we know how to rule strictly or leniently in this area." In modern lingo, a vow has become a way to express emotions of anger, exasperation, annoyance, and aggravation, while often lacking sincerity. "I swear to God, if the Yankees don't win this game, I'm going to kill myself!" On the other hand, some people will only make a vow — especially in God's name — if they really mean it, or not make any declaration at all. When we look back at the tradition of making a neder (a vow) within the Hebrew Bible and within rabbinical literature, we find that vowing was not only a common Jewish practice, but that Jews did it with a stringent binding force and severe legal consequence.

In addition to the dedication of an entire tractate in the Mishnah and the Talmud called נדרים on the legal implications of making vows, we find circumstances in other sections of the Talmud that also deal with making a neder. Parts of tractate Ketubot deal with vows that a husband might make against his wife. In these cases, a husband makes a neder prohibiting his wife from pleasures, property, intercourse, and rights in which she is granted in her ketubah (marriage contract). Such cases deal with a husband who abuses his wife through spitefully vowing away her pleasures and her legal rights. Because of this abuse, the rabbis demand that such marriages be dissolved unless the neder can somehow be annulled. The Mishnah supposes the following scenarios:

If one pronounces a vow prohibiting his wife to derive benefit from him for up to thirty days, he must set up a steward to support her. If it is more than thirty days, he must divorce her and pay her ketubah (Ketubot 7:1).

If a husband pronounces a vow on his wife to the effect that she should not taste any type of fruit, he must divorce her and pay the value of the ketubah (Ketubot 7:2).

If one pronounces a vow on his wife that she should not adorn herself with jewelry or perfume, he must divorce her and pay the value of her ketubah (Ketubot 7:3).

If one pronounces a vow prohibiting his wife to go to her father's house when they are in the same city, the vow is acceptable if made for up to one month. If it is made for two months, then he divorces her and pays the value stated in the ketubah. If the father is in a different city, then a vow for the term of up to one festival is acceptable, but if the duration of the vow is for three festivals or more, then he must divorce her and pay the value of the ketubah (Ketubot 7:4).

If one pronounces a vow prohibiting his wife to go to the house of mourning or to the house of feasting (a wedding), then he should divorce her [immediately] and pay the value of the ketubah. This is because by doing so, he locks the door in front of her [so to speak] (Ketubot 7:5).

If one pronounces a vow prohibiting his wife from conjugal relations with him, the house of Shammai says that if the term of the vow was up to two weeks, he need not divorce her. The house of Hillel says that if the term was no longer than one week, then he need not divorce her (Ketubot 5:6).

These discussions on abusive vowing might not directly translate to the modern world in which vowing holds little bearing. Notwithstanding, we can draw out key values from the texts that offer us sound advice for fostering healthy marriages. It might seem difficult to abide by the legal code set out in tractate Ketubot, but we can abide by the spirit of the law.

Spousal abuse comes in many forms. While we are most apt to consider physical battery as a determining qualifier, abuse can be emotional and verbal. Abuse also need not be aggressive, but can manifest in passive aggressive forms. Today, abusing a loved one through vows may be a difficult concept to grasp. Jewish men no longer make prohibitory vows like the ones we see in the Mishnah. But we do find similar types of abuse in our time; and it is not just the husband who abuses his spouse. When an individual spitefully deprives his or her spouse of any type of physical, material, social, or familial pleasure, divorce may certainly be warranted. Love is about fostering these pleasures with each other, and not about depriving one another of them.

To understand the rabbinic legacy with which these texts leave us, we need only reword the rabbinic vows to become the promises that we make to each other. Vowing can enrich our covenantal relationships with each other and with God when we vow with intentionality and with love. No longer should we see vows in the light of prohibition or dedication, but rather with commitment to our partners. Reimagining the Mishnah for the modern Jew, our tradition might read:

When couples vow to enrich each other's lives with the benefits of love; when they vow to commit to healthy intimacy with each other; when they vow to enjoy food together; when they vow to adorn each other with gifts; when they vow to love and support each other's families; when they vow to celebrate the joys in the lives of their friends and families together; and when they vow to join together to support their communities in times of mourning; then with the blessing of the One who ordains love in the world, their marriage will know love, companionship, happiness, and tranquility.