Parshat Chayei Sarah and the Importance of Clarity

Abbott: I say, Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third and then you… 

Costello: You the manager?Abbott: Yes. 

Costello: You know the guys’ names? 

Abbott: I’m telling you their names! 

Costello: Well who’s on first? 

Abbott: Yeah. 

Costello: Go ahead and tell me. 

Abbott: Who. 

Costello: The guy on first. 

Abbott: Who. 

Costello: The guy playin’ first base. 

Abbott: Who. 

Costello: The guy on first. 

Abbott: Who is on first! 

The dialogue I just referenced is of course not my own but rather that of Abbott and Costello from the classic 1930s skit “Who’s On First?” Besides being a hilarious episode between two particularly humorous comedians, it is also a classic tale of miscommunication. Another moment that comes to mind is the scene from Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye goes to talk with the butcher about his milk cow and the butcher thinks he is talking about the prospect of marrying his daughter. In both instances what would have tremendously helped was an infusion of clarity. The difference between a moment of understanding and a moment of conflict can rest many times on the precise discourse of those involved.


In this week’s parsha we confront the death of the patriarch and matriarch of our people. The great risk-taking, iconoclasts who began forging a new approach to human conduct and our relationship to the Divine pass away and in so doing leave open the potential for a real void in leadership, succession and continuity. History is full of stories of failed movements after the death of the charismatic founder or founders. Perhaps the most difficult task a leader has before their retirement or passing away is to successfully pass the mantle on to the next generation of leadership. 


It is at the very end of our parsha that we find the moment where Avraham ensured a successful transfer of the covenantal destiny to Yitzchak. In Genesis 25:5 the Torah states: “And Avraham gave all that he possessed to Yitzchak.” The next verse records Avraham giving gifts to his other children and then immediately after we encounter the death of Avraham. That is to say that this bequeathing of his possessions to Yitzchak was his last living act; the future vitality of this ethical monotheistic endeavor hinged on the success of this action. I also believe that if we examine this moment a bit closer we can learn some important lessons for our own lives as well. 


Rashi commenting on this verse quotes the Midrash in Bereshit Rabbah to say that Avraham bestowed an everlasting blessing on Yitzchak. Earlier in the Divine selection process of Avraham, God declares that “and you shall be a blessing,” and the Midrash here understands that to mean that Avraham had the ability to bless whomever he chose and he chose to offer his final and full blessing to his son Yitzchak. Perhaps the most effective way in appointing a successor is by taking them under your wing, mentoring them and guiding them and a bracha from one person to the next is the deepest expression of relationship and connection. 


However, when we turn to the Torah Temimah, the insightful commentary authored by the great early 20th century Lithuanian rabbi, Rav Baruch Epstein zt"l, we find a tremendous teaching with great relevance for our own lives. The Torah Temimah conceives of Avraham’s last act as essentially a way of resolving all doubt before his passing: “For the children of Yishmael come into adjudication with Yisrael and they said, the Land of Israel is ours and theirs as it says, ‘These are the generations of Yishmael the son of Avraham’ and ‘These are the generations of Yitzchak the son of Avraham.'” In other words, we are both the heirs to Avraham – the legacy must be split down the middle; one father, one leader becomes two sons and two competing legacies. 


This scenario though is both anticipated and rejected by Avraham. The act of bequeathing all that he possessed to Yitzchak right before his death was a clear and unequivocal method of eliminating confusion that would subsequently arise after he passed away. The last thing Avraham does with his few remaining breaths of life than is nothing less than guaranteeing and establishing clarity; clarity of vision and clarity of succession. 


The goal the parsha challenges us to work towards is not to live an Abbott and Costello life but rather to strive towards achieving a holistic precision in what we want to do or what we say and what we actually accomplish. We do not need to wait for our last breath to achieve this but rather every transitional period in our lives, from college graduation to retirement, offers us the opportunity to achieve a bit more clarity in our actions with others and in our own inner life.

Light a Candle for Gilad and Remember Our Shared Humanity

This Friday night, the Hebrew date of the 29th of Sivan, will mark five years since the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted by the terrorist organization Hamas. It has been five years since anyone besides Hamas, not his family, government or even international aid organizations such as the Red Cross have seen him. It is a travesty of justice that Hamas has not allowed their prisoner to be examined by, at the very least, competent medical professionals, to assess his health and well being.

To mark the five year anniversary of his capture, Rabbi Avi Weiss has called upon all Jews to light an extra candle for Gilad on Friday afternoon prior to sunset. The hope is that all these candles as Rabbi Weiss describes will help "dispel the darkness of Hamas' terrorism."

My family will be lighting a candle for Gilad this Friday afternoon but before we do it is important to reflect further on what we are doing. In a world where casualties from wars across the globe reach staggering numbers and where close to 4,000 crimes were committed for every 100,000 people in the United States in 2009, what does it mean to raise world consciousness about the fate of a lone individual? The heartbreaking stories of suffering and despair cry out from every corner of our planet, why focus in on the misfortune of one person?

The Shulchan Aruch (Y"D 251:3) lays out an order of prioritization for the giving of charity. The vast majority of us have limited funds to distribute to the needy and therefore it becomes essential to understand where to begin. First one begins with their own needs, if you are not properly taken care of you will not be able to help anyone else then the Shulchan Aruch expands to one's family, moving next to one's neighborhood then one's city and ending with the rest of the world. While this intuitively makes sense, the idea that underlies this halacha is critical in understanding what we will be doing when we light a candle for Gilad this coming Friday.

True love and care for others is possible when I truly love and care for myself. When I have a positive self-image then I can incorporate other people into my orbit of concern and love. Thus a healthy respect for one's self is essential. The people that one is most intimately connected to is one's family. A person is born into their immediate family and later in life many will make the choice to commit themselves to a single person and by doing create an entirely new branch of that family. These are people that you know better than any other people on the planet. Their faces, voices and personalities are etched into your mind in a way that no one else is.

The combination of a healthy self-respect and self-care with a genuine love and concern for one's family creates the foundation for which sustainable and long-lasting giving can be accomplished. The roots need to be firmly grounded before a tall and confident tree can emerge. It is after these roots of self and family are solidly established and continue to be nurtured that one's network of care reaches out beyond to one's community and on from there.

In other words, I can most care for the world when I care for myself and my family. My love and concern needs to be directed and focused so that when the cries of people throughout the globe reach my ears, I can hear it and respond accordingly. When my family lights a candle for Gilad Shalit this Friday we will be reaching out our hearts and souls to a single individual who is suffering and in tremendous pain. We will zoom in on his face, his name and his story out of the thousands and thousands of other stories of misfortune that cry out from all over the world. All of the numbers and the statistics of casualties of war and casualties of crime have names and identities, they have stories and personalities, they are unique lives, people created in the image of God. By lighting a small flame for one of these numbers, transforming him from a statistic to a person, we can begin to feel the humanity of all the others. Lighting a candle for Gilad this Friday is to affirm our shared humanity, which begins at home and reaches out from there.

I hope you will join us in lighting a candle for Gilad.

Marital Commitment and Social Media

By now all the syndicated news outlets are talking about a certain New York Congressman and his online behavior. They are debating his political future, his marriage and all other sorts of sundry details. In my opinion, the most interesting element of this story is the medium by which his actions were committed. As Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker pointed out this scandal is "the first to have been conducted entirely via e-mail, and online social media." 

Is an affair an affair when it is conducted entirely online? Is it cheating when a spouse engages in intimate communications with another person but never meets them in person? If this situation transpired with a Congressman then it is most likely occurring in the lives of other people as well, although their stories do not make the evening news.


It seems to me that while this is one area where traditional Judaism gets criticized, it is also the specific teachings from this aspect of Judaism that can contribute much to the conversation. The Talmudic sages understood that acts of marital indiscretion do not, for the most part, manifest spontaneously but rather are the product of emotional attachment and lustful yearning. The power of these hirhurei aveirah - passing thoughts of indiscretion, to build and gather until a person finds themselves in a scenario they would later regret is tremendous.

In fact, the rabbis argued that these thoughts can be even worse than the act itself (Yoma 29a). The reason being that these thoughts of fantasy and lust can be so utterly overpowering that they end up consuming the life of a person thereby disrupting their marital harmony and could even extend into other areas of their personal and professional life.

It is because of these concerns that Jewish tradition has taken a very cautious stance towards casual relationships between people. One should be thoughtful about the sort of friend one chooses as inevitably friends come to influence and shape each other. This caution is even more strongly adhered to when it comes to relationships between people who have the potential to be attracted to each other. While some in contemporary society may find this caution to be overdoing it, like whether one can shake the hand of a person of the opposite gender (see for example Igrot Moshe Orach Chayim 1:113 and Even HaEzer 1:56) the values that form the foundation for these practices are values that ought to be well heeded in our modern era.

The wisdom from Jewish tradition tells us that a relationship is a relationship regardless of whether or not a physical encounter occurred. Indeed, by the time one meets in person, the relationship is most likely well established and the damage to one's moral life is well under way. It behooves us to inject an element of caution, perhaps even some formality, into our societal norms, even in the arena of Twitter and Facebook.

Life Lessons From My Newborn Son

My newborn son will be two months old soon and on reflecting on the past two months I would like to share some of the things I have learned from him:

• Remember to take a nap: Most things worth doing will be done better when you are well rested so don't be afraid to take a mid-afternoon nap.
• Express yourself: Upset about something? Don't feel the need to hide it and keep it in. Let those who care about you know and together you can find a solution.
• Light fixtures are amazing: Pay attention to the small things in life. Let the ordinary amaze you and feel the wonder of our magnificent world. Even a door knob can be captivating.
• Go outside: Nothing can be as refreshing as a crisp breeze or as beautiful as the rustling of the leaves. Listen to the birds chirp and watch the ants on their march.
• Live fully in the world: Grab something. Immerse yourself in the tactile world. Feel the contours of the world around you. Don't live only in the visual and auditory to the exclusion of the tactile. 

Shopping as Relationship Building

An older gentleman sat down next to me in the courtyard of a mall this afternoon, and as he sat he let out a long sigh. A moment passed and he turned to me and exclaimed, "there should be a law against going to the mall with your wife!" I smiled back at him but in reality it is shopping excursions with your spouse that can be one of the best things for strengthening your relationship that you can do.

It does not have to be shopping outings necessarily but taking an active interest in what your spouse is interested in is a fundamental key for a successful marriage. Nothing could be easier than saying, "have a nice time and see you when you get home," but by doing so a person misses out on a significant opportunity to show, not just in words but with deeds, how much they care about their partner in life.

When someone asks their spouse to join them on an outing they are going on, it is not just because they want someone to hold their bags or find the parking space, it is because they value their time with you and want to journey with you as they do some of their enjoyable activities. If there was a contemporary Shulchan Aruch on maintaining a strong marriage, going shopping with your spouse would be considered an obligation expressed in the strongest language.

So the next time your wife or husband says "want to join me at the mall?" the answer should be an exuberant (or at least not kvetched) yes!

Parshat Zakhor: Remembering to Remember

This week in synagogue we will read a selection of the Torah that the Torah itself commands us to recall: Parshat Zakhor. It is within the narrative of Zakhor that we replay the story of Amalek attacking the Jewish people on their way out of slavery in Egypt towards the Land of Israel. The Torah tells us in Parshat Zakhor, as we might expect, to zakhor, to remember what injustice Amalek performed against us while we were weak in the desert: zachor... v'lo tishkah! Remember and do not forget! 

The global community has experienced tremendous tragedy this past week. We were witness to a horrific earthquake, tsunami and now the continuing saga of the nuclear reactors in Japan. Untold numbers of people have been lost and it may take decades for the people of Japan to fully recover. This tragedy betrays any possibility of explanation and all we can and must do in the face of it is to galvanize whatever support we can offer to the Japanese people. I encourage everyone reading this to donate to a trusted relief agency whatever they are able to. 

In addition to the catastrophic events that are still unfolding in Japan, the Jewish community suffered a great loss as members of the Fogel family in Israel, including the parents and three of their children (Yoav, 11, Elad 4 and Hadas, 3 months), were savagely and ruthlessly butchered in their home late Friday night last week. It is beyond all grasp or possibility of reason to comprehend how anyone could stand over the crib of a 3 month old baby and murder her. Our hearts scream with agony and pain and there exists no words that could possibly offer any nehama, comfort, to the remaining family or all of Klal Yisrael. 

What are we to do in response to this horrific event? It is a tragic coincidence that we read Parshat Zakhor this week as the Torah itself provides us with a way to begin to cope with the enormity of the tragedy that lays in front of us.

In recounting the savagery of Amalek and its desperate, unending desire to rid the world of Am Yisrael, the  first act the Torah enjoins upon us to do is zakhor, remember. Sit in the pain and the suffering with the mourners, listen to their cries, be there to hold them in their agony. In the immediate aftermath of such a savage act, speeches must be restrained and responses must be silenced. First, zakhor, remember and mourn. Do not look past the human suffering of those most impacted as plans of response are drawn up and debated. 

Eventually some action must be taken, those who commit acts of savagery must face justice, but as the Torah states, first mourn, grieve and remember until one can begin to experience some solace and comfort, "be'haniah Hashem Elokecha lekha mi'kol oyvekha," then we can be sure our response comes from a place of justice and not a lashing out in pain and revenge. 

Sephardic Tradition and Modern Life

The Jerusalem Post reports today that MK Haim Amsalem has created a new "social movement" in Israel called Am Shalem that will promote the "moderate Sephardi halachic approach in public life" and strive to restore "the crown of moderate religious and Sephardi social activism to its former glory." This news follows the recent approval by both former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and current Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar of conversions to Judaism performed through the IDF. I believe both of these events tell us a tremendous amount about the spirit of the Sephardic approach to halakhah and tradition and how it represents a powerful paradigm for observant Jews in the modern world.

The approval of the military conversions by the two Sephardic Chief Rabbis caused an uproar amongst the Ashkenazi Israeli Haredi rabbinic establishment because they claimed many of the converts did not remain as observant Jews post their conversion. Rav Amar responded to their critique by outlining the essential halakhot of conversion; what the halakha requires and what it does not. Rav Amar by insisting on the actual halakhah (Rambam, Hilkhot Issurei Biah 13:4, 14, 17; Shulhan Arukh, Yorah Deah 268:3, 12) and not taking on unnecessary stringencies tells us that in matters of personal status and in matters that impact the very nature of the State of Israel, we have an obligation to act in accordance with the authentic tradition. Furthermore, it demonstrates true sensitivity to the plight of the individual and by so doing continues the Sephardic tradition on this topic (see for example She'alot U'Teshuvot Piskei Uziel, She'alot HaZman 64).

The report in the Jerusalem Post about MK Amsalem's new social movement makes it clear that he alone is not starting this movement but rather "it was the outcome of a grassroots movement that saw in the MK a leader who represented their beliefs." There is a real need in our world for religious leadership, and in Israel also political leadership, that has a clear grasp of both the details and of the beauty of the Jewish tradition with an appreciation for what it means to be a Torah Jew who does not reject the modern world but embraces it within the context of the mesorah. The Sephardic tradition has both the intellectual weight and the historical precedent to truly lead this renaissance in modern Jewish life.