Unclean!

My father used to say, “Beauty may be only skin deep, but ugly goes straight to the bone.” Not at all an out-of-place sentiment for this week’s parsha, Tazria. With its comments on skin conditions and the variety of…hrm…fluids discharged from the body, Tazria is surely the bane of B’not Mitvah world-wide. Imagine being a 13 year-old girl (or boy, for that matter) reading publically about nasty skin! Stop, Tevel…enough digressing.

So in short, Tazria talks, among other things, about a skin condition called Tzarat; this is a skin-based expression of an internal, spiritual ailment. Whereas my dad’s comment takes ugly from the outside in, the Torah says ugly goes from the inside out. Tzarat is the Biblical “leprosy,” not to be confused with what we know as leprosy today.But don’t worry about Tzarat: One of the commentaries I read this weekend flat-out says that Tzarat is unknown in the modern world, not in the sense that we don’t know what Tzarat “really” was, but that people just don’t get Tzarat anymore.

This assertion seems a bit premature in its finality. Perhaps people don’t manifest spiritual unwellness on their skin, but certainly folks in the contemporary world express their emotions in their actions. For example, I was speaking with a friend yesterday about her weekend; she was animated and conversational, until she started recounting an uncomfortable exchange she had with someone. At that point, she crossed her arms across her chest, crossed her legs, and sort of folded into herself.

The clarity of this moment hit me like a blast: without even meaning to, she was protecting herself as she remembered this uncomfortable exchange! The incident had passed, but talking about it had clearly dredged up the emotions she felt during the confrontation. As I empathized with her, she slowly unfolded herself from her shell, and the conversation continued.

Ok, so it’s not Tzarat, but my friend showed as clear as day that she was carrying her stress with her. How many people do exactly the same thing? It was such an object lesson to me that we are so wrapped up in our emotions, and that’s easier than we think to allow them to come out.

Whereas in the Torah, the cure for Tzarat involved the kohanim and a period of exile, today’s ailments can be addressed with comforting and kind words. So my advice: take a moment today and offer a little empathy and support to the folks around you.

And Aaron was Silent...

I don’t know what to say about one of the central aspects of last week’s Parsha. Nadav and Avihu, sons of Aaron, having been newly invested as kohanim, fill their incense pans and enter the Mishkan unbidden; their pans are filled with "אש זרה" (aish zarah), a foreign fire, and they are instantly struck dead. The haftarah echoes the sidra with a similar story, one wherein a soldier named Uzah attempts to steady the Ark as one of the Ark bearers stumbles; Uzah, too, is instantly struck dead.

Do you want to guess how much the sages wrote about these two incidents? The answer (SPOILERS!) is, technically speaking: a lot. The justifications for the deaths suggest that Nadav and Avihu were drunk, or that they were actually more holy than Moses and Aaron, or that their sin was really one of delivering halachic decisions in the presence of Moses, or that their deaths somehow acted as the last sanctification of the Mishkan. Some of these discussions carry a measure of reasonableness for me, while others—the human sacrifice one, for example—just make no sense whatsoever.

Of course, there’s more to the story. Before the deaths of his sons, Aaron is about to make the first sacrifice on the altar, but when he gets up to approach the altar, he hesitates before going forward; Moses exhorts him on, saying, “Do not be afraid—you were chosen for this job!” Aaron moves forward and performs his function, and all is well. You can rest assured that many poskim point out the difference between Aaron’s bidden, thoroughly-instructed sacrifice and his son’s spontaneous, uncalled-for aish zarah.

For me, I don’t feel the need to try to justify what happened. I’m horrified by it, and I’m almost entirely uncomfortable with the incident; I cannot help but feel that this is one of those moments where the Torah cannot be taken literally, and even if the deaths are a metaphor, I’m still not sure I’d be comfortable with them. It leaves too much room for blaming the victims, and that’s not a road that I want to travel down at all.

And so I’m left feeling uncomfortable after reading this section of the parsha, and I think that the discomfort comes from an underlying realization: no matter how much I try to understand, no matter how much I think I know, God remains God. By that, I mean that God—infinite, omnipotent, ubiquitous—remains inscrutable to us. In Mishlei, the sage writes, “The fear of Hashem is the beginning of wisdom.” and I’ll admit that “fear” of God has always struck me as a strange way to express the relationship. My mom used to talk about this idea in terms of great respect, that fear is really a deep and abiding respect for God, and I think she was on to something. Respect, certainly, and if not fear, than at least a discomfort, one that comes from knowing that God remains inscrutable.

If there’s any comfort to be had from this inscrutability, I think it comes from the sense that I am not responsible for everything that happens in the universe. I’m not entitled to an explanation—in fact, not only am I not entitled to an explanation from the Eternal, I probably couldn’t even understand any explanation offered. Certainly this lack of knowing contributes to my discomfort with the incidents in the Torah and Haftarah, but perhaps I can learn only to be comfortable in my discomfort.

Star Trek Online

A friend of mine sent me a buddy key for Cryptic’s new Star Trek Online (STO) game. This is a massively-multi-player online game set in a the future of the Star Trek universe. I’m not so much of a trek fan that I’d go with either term Trekkie or Trekker, but at the same time, Star Trek is near and dear to me, as are MMOs, so I thought I’d give this one a try. I’m not going to offer a full review of the game; instead, I’ll just throw out the impressions I’ve developed after two nights’ playing.

The short synopsis: you start the game in media res as an ensign aboard a ship involved in a Borg invasion; you save the day, naturally, through a series of away- and in-space missions that also act as your tutorial for the game. Once you’re done, you warp to the Sol System, where you’r e promoted to lieutenant and given your first command. After that, the game proceeds through missions, multistep quests that have you exploring and fighting in space and on planets.

First, the very cool: It is the Star Trek Universe. All of the ships you’re flying around in are 100% canonical and cool, and the space and phaser combat and the sound effects are all right-on Star Trek. It’s also a nice change from World of Warcraft (WoW), the MMO I’ve been playing for the better part of 5 and ½ years.

In terms of game-play, I’m still not entirely comfortable with the interface yet. When you’re on the ground, the controls seem soft; there’s a bit of a delay between pressing a movement key and your movement coming through the character. It’s not much of a delay, but it’s enough to make things feel just a little unresponsive, a little lacking in crispness.

So yay for Star Trek. And yet...in some important ways, it doesn’t quite feel like Star Trek to me. The ship interiors, for one, don’t seem right, especially on the smaller ships. Rooms and hallways seem cavernous, which doesn’t quite fit a small vessel, and the interior of the space station doesn’t seem particularly Star-Trekky. Don’t ask me to define that, please.

But here’s the big immersion killer for me, and it’s the same point that just broke my heart about Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS): You do not get to walk around on your ship. When you’re flying around in space, you become your ship, and you never have the option of being on board, walking around. Sure, you can go to the “bridge” but it’s a generic bridge with no windows and nowhere else to go. You can’t even sit in the captain’s chair.

As I note, this lack really kills immersion for me. I don’t want to be my ship; I want to command my ship. The ship interface is fine—it’s easy to use and easy to work with—but if I’m a starship captain, well, I want to walk around on my ship!

This player-on-board-ship is one of the aspects of space flight that Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed got right. You could fly either via an external view, of you could go to a cockpit view, and if you were on a ship that had more than one seat, you could actually get up from your pilot’s chair and walk around. You can see a ship here (a side note; you could use your ship as a place to hold all your stuff, too). I think that if STO had gone this route, I would have been a happy, happy person all around.

Something else that sits a bit oddly with me: almost all of the action in STO takes places in instances, so when you go to do a mission, you’re the only person there. Now, I have, in the past, claimed that this is my preferred way of playing, and it’s not untrue, but at the same time, it makes for a really odd world. There are public places where you can interact with other folks, but very often, it’s just you. That’s both ok and not so much ok.

Communities make or break MMOs. WoW doesn’t really require people to take care of or look after each other, so the overall community in WoW is pretty crappy; that’s the argument for instancing, I suppose. On the other hand, a great community makes for a phenomenal game; I think about the communities that developed in the first days of Star Wars Galaxies for proof that a good community can help you overlook major flaws in a game.

My feelings are mixed, then. In ways, STO plays more like an RPG than an MMO, and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good or bad thing.

The instancing, though, presents another danger: if leveling continues the same way (get a mission, fly to a system, enter your instance, do your thing, comm out), the game’s going to get a little stale. Even though game play mixes away missions in, still, looking at the same basic scenario for 50 levels will decrease my desire to play. Again I point to PotBS: leveling in PotBS worked this way, and it was dreadful how quickly I got tired of the same basic premise over and over. City of Heroes had the same flaw.

There you go. STO is, at this point, a mixed bag for me, and so I don’t predict a long career in Starfleet. I’m enjoying it for now, and it remains to be seen how long the game holds my attention.

Spiritual Heavy-lifting

Vayikra, this week’s portion, details some aspects of the sacrificial system, the central part of Jewish spiritual life from Antiquity until about 70 C.E when the Romans destroyed the second Temple. Some branches of Judaism still offer prayers in the daily T’fillah for a restoration of the sacrificial cult, as it was practiced in the first and second Temples, some 2000 years ago, at its most recent. I find it intriguing that Jews have now survived for longer without the sacrificial system than we did with it.

But as I noted, this week’s portion conveys how some of the sacrifices were to occur. I’ll spare you the gory details—and believe me, they are really gory in some places—so I can point out one thing about the old system: it was really a hands-on, time- and energy-intensive process. Ok, I know I said I’d spare you the details, but in broad strokes, some sacrifices involved preparing, slaughtering, carving, and burning to ash a full-sized bull. Tell me that didn’t take more than a little bit of effort.

Since the destruction of the Second Temple, many scholars have pointed out that the term for sacrifice in Hebrew can also mean “to draw near,” implying that God does not so much desire sacrifice as God desires us to bring ourselves closer to God; prayer, therefore, has taken the place of sacrifice as the chief method of drawing near to God. The external, hands-on approach to sacrifice transforms into an internal, thoughtful process of prayer.

Now, I don’t believe that we need to restore the sacrificial system, but I think that system offers an interesting comparison point to our time. I don’t think it’s uncommon for people to go to a prayer service expecting to be moved, or to be rejuvenated, or to be brought closer to God. It’s not that easy, however. Perhaps prayer doesn’t require the same visceral level of effort as sacrifice; at the same time, praying with sincerity—true, meaningful, in-depth prayer—can be even more difficult to achieve. There’s too much fighting for my attention, and it’s too easy for me to get distracted or for my mind to wander.

It’s not physical heavy lifting, but meaningful prayer requires work. For me, it comes to this: do not go into prayer thinking you will come out unchanged—but do not think the change can happen by itself. The words alone can only guide us so far; at best they can only take us part of the way. It is the intention, the words of the heart that make prayer successful.

You did what?!

Not only is it a newly weekly portion in front of us, it’s a new book of the Torah. Yup, we’ve begun Vayikra, Leviticus, the book known for its lists of dos and do nots and the corrective actions to take along the way. To me, Vayikra often reads as a law text, proscribing and prescribing the way things ought to be; it’s sort of like case law for the Torah.

There’s something about case law, though. If you’re familiar with the judicial idea of stare decisis, you know that that doctrine means we should let precedents stand; that is not, however, the way law always works. While some case law certainly stands as precedent, other law is overturned, and over time, certainly, laws adjust to fit the society in which they are enforced rather than the society in which they were enacted.

You might think you know where I’m going: perhaps it sounds like I’m going to say that the rules in Leviticus no longer apply since the society we live in is so different from the society these laws come from, there being 3500 years difference there. I suppose that would be one way to answer the question. But I don’t think it’s that easy. While I am not of the opinion that we need to follow the rules laid forth in Vayikra simply because they’re there, I also don’t think that we can toss them all out because of when they come from. To me, there’s a middle ground, and to me, that middle ground involves what the laws are telling us about living.

This first weekly portion deals so much with sacrifices of one kind or another, for instance, and I don’t think the point is the sacrifices themselves. Instead it’s the idea that underlies the sacrifices that’s important. In this first parsha, you see thanksgiving sacrifices, offerings for unintentional sin, offerings for possible sin, for individual wrongs, and communal wrongs, among others. To me, the point is that we are responsible for what we do; our actions, whether intentional or not, communal or single, definitive or possible, all have consequences, and that we need to be responsible for those actions—and responsibility means more than just feeling bad. Responsibility means getting up and doing something about it.

Certainly, society now finds it more fitting to go and speak to a person you’ve wronged, for example (the Torah does, too; sacrifices are only one part of the process), but the idea remains the same: when you do something you shouldn’t, whether you mean to or not, do something to rectify the situation, something definitive, so you and everyone else can get on with life. That’s the spirit, in my view, of this portion of Vayikra: we’re all gonna mess up. It’s how we handle it that’s important.

Pray Tell!

This week’s Torah portion repeats the instructions for and the events concerning the building of the Mikdash; as Rabbi Plaut points out, while this repetition might feel tedious to modern readers, it would have been reassuring to ancient listeners: the more clearly version A and version B connect, the more likely those facts were to be true.

The repetition also underscores the importance in the building of the Mikdash of a partnership; God cannot live among the people if the people don’t create a place for God. Moreover, the children of Israel can’t build the Mikdash individually. It’s up to all of them to work together to create the Mikdash. Partnership therefore works two ways: on the one hand, it takes a partnership of Jews to create a sacred space, and the relationship between Jews and God also requires a partnership.

What is it that makes a partnership successful? No matter what sort of pairing we’re talking about, communication forms the most important aspect of partnership. You can’t work together if you don’t know what the other party wants, right? Certainly the relationship between B’nai Yisrael and God might not be an equal partnership, but we still need to communicate with the Divine. To me, that’s where prayer comes in.

To pray with sincerity, as the Talmud exhorts us to do, is to pray with the belief that God hears us. Prayer is therefore an inherently affirmative, optimistic act: the very act of praying implies that we believe someone is listening—that God is listening. So pray with sincerity. Converse with God. Communicate with your partner. Allow prayer to be transformative. God is listening, so you might as well have something to say.

A well-lighted place?

This week's Torah portion contains another reminder that we're supposed to work for six days and then, fer crying out loud already people, take the seventh day off. No work on Shabbat! You're not even allowed to light a fire! Sorry for the yelling. It's not me, really, it's the repetition of the point.

So why no fire? Letting your fires go out is not a good thing when it took a bit more than striking a match or turning on the burner to get the flames a-jumping again. Part of it, according to the Rabbanim, is that lighting a fire is part of the 39 melachot, the professions and actions involved in creating the Beit HaMikdash; there's more to it, too, I'm certain.

Coincidentally, I was looking up another Shabbat no-no today, that we don't lay tefillin on Shabbat. Why no tefillin on Shabbat? In the Talmud, we're told in the name of Rabbi Akiva that since laying tefillin is a sign of the people's relationship with God and since Shabbat itself is a sign of that same relationship, well, we don't need to double-up our signs. In short, we don't lay tefillin on Shabbat because the day itself reminds us of the relationship we have with God.

So back to the fire--why no fire on Shabbat? I think it's because we already have a fire with us on Shabbat: our own, internal Aish Tamid, an eternal flame, the Divine Spark...our souls. That's right, in my view, we don't light a fire on Shabbat because we already have a fire going. On Shabbat, we should tend our own fires, our souls, and look to them for heat, warmth, and comfort. Six days for the other fires in our lives (make your own pun, please), and only the internal fire on Shabbat.

I miss my mom today. Something about the song I was just listening to, Sarah Maclachlan’s World on Fire reminded me of times gone by, and there I was. It wasn’t the same sort of missing that I’ve felt in the past, though; it wasn’t that desperate ache that I’d gotten use to, and it certainly wasn’t that uncontrollable sense of panic I felt at the beginning of avelut. Instead, this felt just like, well, sadness. It’s passing already, but it came to visit nonetheless.

Something I read a few weeks back opened up a new awareness for me when it came to memories of things past. I’ve long been a sucker for nostalgia, even though I know it’s a false feeling: it’s a way to reconnect with a past that isn’t exactly what you remember in the nostalgic moment. As I said, I’ve been a sucker for nostalgia, basking in those pseudo-memories, although basking isn’t the right term, really. Instead, those sweet almost-memories have caused me heartache, a sense of longing for a time that’s gone, for a moment that was fleeting.

The sense of loss, however, completely inverts the way things are. When I experience that heartache during nostalgia, I’m ignoring the context within which the memory takes place—contexts that are not as pleasant sometimes as the memory I’m remembering. For instance, the song “All These Things That I’ve Done” by the Killers, often reminds me of these beautiful carefree days I spent staying home with my kids; what I forget, though, is that the time period coincided with the hardest times in my marriage (problems resolved and over, B”H). The biggest problem, though, with these flights of nostalgia is that I invert what is really lost and what really remains.

A.J. Heschel writes in The Sabbath, “What is retained in the soul is the moment of insight rather than the place where the act came to pass,” and this is the heart of the inversion. My nostalgia prefers place over insight, so the “when” of what took place blurs the emotional and spiritual moment that took place. For me during so much of avelut, nostalgia corrupts my memories of my mother, corrupts in the sense that it places my her in a setting that is irretrievable, and that makes the memory mournful.

The truth of the matter is that the emotional connection I had with my mom remains always retrievable. While her space, her position in the world is gone, it’s folly, indulgent to think that her physical presence, her location, was somehow more important than what she communicated to me emotionally and spiritually.

Anything I recall via nostalgia should not come with a sense of lost. I have not lost anything; I am who I am, what I am because those moments remain an integral part of me. I can miss my mom since she’s not here any longer, certainly, but her touch lives in me, and that should be a cause of joy, not tears.

An earworm af Yiddish

I've been listening to this all day:



You can see a side-by-side translation and transliteration here.

As a Jew, I'm proudly Reform. I might lean more or less traditional here and there, depending on the issue, and depending on what makes sense to me. So why have I had this song about Moshiach in my head all day?

I'm not going to go too far into that today, but it does draw me to a conversation I've had recently with a fellow Blogger on the nature of belief; she attends minyamim religiou--er, regularly, but at the same time counts herself an agnostic. Her explanation is certainly interesting and worth reading, and I think Shnirele Perele ended up in my head because of my thoughts on the matter.

Every year at Pesach, we close the service by saying, "Next year in Jerusalem!" I don't think that most people, at the end of the Seder, really mean it; it has become the traditional closing for the meal, and certainly it hearkens to the hope that next year, HaShem willing, all Jews who want to celebrate Pesach in Jerusalem can do so; even more, it reflects the belief that Moshiach vet komen hayntiks yar--Moshiach will come this very year, so next year the exiles will be gathered in. I like the image of abiding hope that we maintain from year to year: this year, HaShem willing, will be a better year. This year will be the one where all works out. Hope, of course, doesn't require a religious perspective; the Seder can be just as enjoyable as a time when people get together.

While I understand the position taken by many cultural or ethnic Jews, to me I cannot be a Jew without being religious. Being a Jew without HaShem makes no sense to me; our traditions are so steeped in religious observance that the two should not be, really, cannot be separated. That's not to say that religious observance cannot change; in fact, changes in religious observance are part of what has allowed us as Jews to continue over the generations. But it doesn't make sense to me to teach my children to be Jews only to perpetuate the cultural aspects of our identity. It's critical to me that the religious aspect of that identity be integral to the definition.

As the saying goes, though, two Jews, three opinions. I'm glad the conversation can go on.