Leap Day

On the civil calendar, today's date, February 29, comes once in four years. Those years are always Summer Olympics and, in the United States, presidential election years. The day and the calendar have an interesting history, and one that is marginally relevant to Jewish ritual. The ancients noted that the solar year does not consist of a whole number of days; 365 is too few and 366 too many. They estimated the true year to consist of 365.25 days, and intercalated a leap day every four years to synchronize the calendar with the actual motion of the earth around the sun. They also believed that the sun revolved around the earth, and when that was proven false in the sixteenth century a few gedolim of the time announced that the new heliocentric model was heretical. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose (see also here). This intercalation became known as the Julian Calendar, promulgated by Julius Caesar, and was used throughout the Christian world until the sixteenth century. The problem was that the period of earth's rotation is not exactly 365-1/4 days. The year was too long by several minutes, leading to an error of a day roughly every century-and-a-third. Astronomers observed that the solstices and equinoxes were occurring earlier than they used to, and farmers noted that the agricultural seasons - planting, harvest, sheep-shearing and the like - were falling behind. Already in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede, an English monk, calculated the error and proposed a solution, but nothing was done until 1582, when Pope Gregory XII promulgated the calendar that bears his name. All Catholic countries immediately adopted the new calendar, but it spread more slowly in Protestant countries including England and its American colonies, where it was adopted in 1752. Thus, dates prior to that are designated "Old Style" and followed by the "New Style" equivalent. George Washington, for instance, was born on February 11, Old Style or February 22, New Style. Russia did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar until after the Bolshevik Revolution, and it is now in use throughout the world, at least for commercial and business purposes. Most Eastern Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar, so Orthodox Christmas, for example, comes on Janurary 6 on the Gregorian calendar. Besides advancing the date by eleven days (in 1752), the calendar mandates that century years (those that end with two zeros) are not leap years even though they are divisible by four, unless they are divisible by 400. Thus, as most of us remember, 2000 was a leap year. As we do not remember, 1800 and 1900 were not. The upcoming century year, 2100, will not be a leap year. Most of us, and most of our children, will not be around then. However, children born in the coming decades, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, will be. Given the attentiveness of most of our children to math, especially in yeshivot, I expect schools to have a tough time teaching children why 2100 is not a leap year.
The Jewish calendar was promulgated by Hillel II in the fourth century C.E., when the Byzantines (Christian Romans) ruled Eretz Yisrael, which they had been calling Palestine for three centuries. The Byzantines were still on the Julian Calendar. The date we begin to say tal umatar was fixed as 60 days after the autumnal equinox, so it fell out of sync as the autumnal equinox did. In the 20th and 21st centuries the date was December 4 or, in years before a civil leap year, December 5. After 2100 it will be December 5 or 6, unless a reestablished Sanhedrin rules otherwise.
The Jewish calendar has a similar problem. It is a bit too long and Pesah, which needs to be in "the month of spring," is slowly drifting toward summer. This is beginning to be noticeable in some Jewish leap years when the first day of Pesah is more than a month after the spring equinox, and/or the last day of Pesah is May 1. A number of solutions have been proposed. One is a return to observational determination of Rosh Hodesh and leap years; the Karaites still do this. To me this is not practical, since housewives (sorry, homemakers) need to know more than a month in advance, when Pesah comes and business people and calendar printers need to know the civil dates of Jewish holidays several years in advance. Any solution will require a Sanhedrin to promulgate; may we soon have the unity necessary to reestablish the Sanhedrin and fix what is broken.

A Pregnant Year

This coming year, 5771, will be a Jewish leap year. The Hebrew term is "Shana Me'uberet," which literally means a "pregnant" year. We add a thirteenth month every few years to keep the lunar and solar years in synch. You might have noticed that Pesah and Rosh Hashanah came out unusually early this civil year. The lunar year is eleven days short, and if the regression were allowed to continue Pesah would be celebrated in winter, not in spring as the Torah dictates. Next year, starting with Purim, the holidays come unusually late.
Jewish mysticism has a "pregnant" year carrying "excess baggage," blessings or, God forbid, curses. 5708, the year Israel became a state, was a leap year; the state was declared May 14, which is as late as Yom Ha-atzma'ut ever comes. Similarly, Jerusalem was liberated in 5727, also a "pregnant" year, and Yom Yerushalayim rarely comes later than June 7, the civil date of the miracle of 1967.
May the coming year be "pregnant" with even greater miracles and "give birth" to the ge'ulah shelemah, the final redemption.
I wish my readers and klal Yisrael a ktiva va-hatima tova.

One Nation Indivisible

In a recent issue of the Jewish Press, one Lewis Regenstein, a Jewish writer in Atlanta, Georgia, defends and praises his ancestors who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I cannot stand seeing the Confederacy praised. If I had my way, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy and Alexander Stephens, its vice president and the whole Confederate cabinet including its Jewish secretary of state Judah Benjamin, would have been hanged for treason.
Regenstein's article, my posted comment and those of several others - I'm gratified that I was not the only one motivated to take pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard - in protest, can be seen here. Note well the quote, brought by Josh Meyers, of the above-mentioned Alexander Stephens, defending slavery in fine style worthy of Adolf Hitler.
My letter in the printed edition was chopped by the editor (no hard feelings - he was just doing his job) and can be seen here.
Those who romanticize Confederates and the Confederacy are generally neo-isolationists who are not comfortable with the U.S.A. being a superpower or, as they put it, the world's policeman. But the world has plenty of robbers, and I do believe in American exceptionalism, that America's unprecedented military and political power is no accident and what with it comes a sacred obligation to confront the robbers of the world and defeat them. Google Lewis Regenstein and you will find him keeping company with some real right-wing anti-government kooks.
Thank God the Union won and we are and, with God's help will forever be, one nation indivisible.

Dem Dry Bones

Yesterday being Shabbat Hol Ha-moed Pesah, we read the famous prophecy from Ezekiel about the dry bones. That haftara always has a powerful emotional pull on me, with its climactic ending, "I am Hashem; I have spoken and I have performed," more than hinting at the events that we will commemmorate in the upcoming month of Iyar. I used it as the theme for a shirt in which I ran the New York City Half Marathon.
The prophecy is also the inspiration for a well-known Negro spiritual.

Allow me to tweak the song a little (I believe it's in the public domain):

Dem bones dem bones gonna walk around

Dem bones dem bones gonna run around

Dem bones dem bones gonna fly around. . . .

"Disconnect dem bones dem dry bones. . . .?" Never! They - we - shall go from strength to strength until the final ge'ula, quickly and in our time.

V'Nahafokh Hu

And it was reversed. . . .(Esther 9:1)

No, this is not a leftover Purim shpiel. We are about to celebrate Pesah, zman heruteinu, the season of our freedom. Those of us who daven Nusakh Sefarad will recite Hallel tonight and tomorrow night. I never heard a good explanation of why we say Hallel at night specifically on Pesah, and certainly why Nusakh Sefarad says it and Nusakh Ashkenaz not. So let me venture an explanation at least of the first question. The miracle of Pesah occurred at night. "And it came to pass at midnight, that Hashem struck every firstborn in Egypt. . . ." Rashi comments that Moshe told Pharaoh that the plague would strike about midnight, so that if the Egyptian astronomers erred in the calculation of midnight they would not be able to claim that the plague did not happen as Moshe said it would and therefore it was not Hashem's doing. But the plague actually occurred at the stroke of midnight, as the Jews were eating the sheep, which the Egyptians worshiped as a deity. We are also told that even the firstborn of males were struck down, and in a place as licentious as ancient Egypt only God could know their identity. Thus there could be no room for doubt that the plague was God's doing, and that His people were safe and secure as destruction was abroad in the land in the middle of the night.

Bayamim ha-hem bazman ha-zeh. As it was then, so it is now. We now have, praise God, another holiday when we will recite Hallel at night, a holiday that is also zman heruteinu, Yom Ha'atzmaut. And here too, the miracle occurred at night, for at the stroke of midnight of May 14-15, 1948, 6 Iyar 5708, the Union Jack came down for the last time and the Jewish people assumed among the peoples of the earth the sovereignty to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle it, but which it had not exercised since Hasmonean times in the first century B.C.E. That's right, the Sixth of Iyar. That fateful midnight occurred on Shabbat that year, and to prevent desecration of Shabbat the secular, socialist provisional government that had nothing but contempt for everything holy decided to jump the gun and declare the state on Friday afternoon, against the advice of the Americans and all the experts who were telling us that it was not the right time, and that the state, if declared, could not possibly survive. Hence, Yom Ha'atzmaut is celebrated on the Fifth of Iyar, except when the celebration or that of Yom Hazikaron the previous day might engender Sabbath desecration. Such will be the case this year, when to forestall preparations on Shabbat for Yom Hazikaron on Sunday, Yom Hazikaron will be commemmorated on Monday, with Yom Ha'atzmaut on Tuesday, the Sixth of Iyar, when the state actually came into being. I learned this from a booklet sent several years ago my Yeshivat Merkaz Harav.

On the second night of Pesah we begin counting Sefirat ha-Omer, the seven-week period beginning with Pesah and building up to Shavu'ot. Most of us will observe the sefirah, or part of it, as a period of semi-mourning for the disaster that befell us in 135 C.E. when the Roman legions brutally crushed our last hope for independence. Rabbi Akiva and his students figured prominently in that hope, since Rabbi Akiva supported Bar Kokhba's revolt against Rome, and sent his students to fight in Bar Kokhba's army. It is no accident that the Religious Zionist youth movement is named for Rabbi Akiva. And now, here we are with our flag flying proudly over our country, an army that kicks butt, the best flyboys on earth, an economy that is the envy of the Middle East, a flourishing democracy unique in that region, and where are the ancient Romans? Sefirat Ha'omer, before it became a time of mourning, was an occasion for intense joy. It was harvest season, bracketed by the bringing of the omer of barley on 16 Nissan and the two loaves of wheat bread seven weeks later. And now the fertility of our soil, lost during nineteen centuries of foreign occupation, given up on by one commission after another of foreign rulers, was restored as soon as Eretz Yisrael was watered again with Jewish sweat. For this we are to mourn? What is happening here is the reverse of what happens to an avel on Shabbat. Shiva is suspended, the avel dresses for Shabbat and goes to synagogue, publicly he is not showing any signs of mourning, but inwardly he grieves for his departed relative as a mourner. Today's sefirah occasions outward signs of mourning while inside we experience the joy of freedom, of our soil's fertility, of renewed physical strength as we labor on the land and bring forth its fruits.
May we soon see this process of ge'ulah come to its glorious conclusion with the bringing of the Omer and the two loaves of bread amid joyous celebration.

Hag Kasher V'sameah.

Mah Nishtanah? Is Israel another Iran?

The chief scientist of Israel's Ministry of Education, Dr. Gavriel Avital, questioned the validity of the theory of evolution, and the reality of climate change, and seemingly opened the door for Israeli high school students to be taught pseudoscientific nonsense instead of or alongside mainstream science. The story appeared in Ha'aretz and Ynet, and was picked up by the National Center for Science Education, a watchdog group defending the teaching of evolution of which I am a member. The Education Minister, Gideon Saar, said on taking office that he wants to reverse the decline in Israeli students' performance in science and math. But the "chief scientist" that he appointed is not even a scientist but an engineer from the Technion with no background in science education, and it shows. Engineers apply the findings of science to improve our lives; as a rule they are not involved in the creation or dissemination of new knowledge. Practicing physicians, as opposed to physicians engaged in research, are thus engineers more than scientists, and indeed many Orthodox physicians deny evolution, mostly out of ignorance. Dr. Avital would perpetuate that ignorance in Israeli schoolchildren as well.
Here in the United States there was a celebrated "Monkey Trial" in 1925 where a teacher was tried for teaching evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law prohibiting it. It seems that we retry that case every decade or so, the latest iteration occurring in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005. Israel does not need to import this dark side of American history. It does not need to throw itself back into the Dark Ages and to make itself a laughingstock throughout the world. It has enough bad press as it is, most of it undeserved, and the intellectual opinion leaders on American campuses are already biased against it. This imbecility will only make a bad situation worse. Why should America support Israel's struggle with the nuclear ambitions of Iran when both states are benighted theocratic cesspools, they will ask. What is the difference?
Thankfully, there is a difference. Israel is a democracy, and as seen in an editorial in Ha'aretz, there already is a grounswell of opposition in the scientific community and the Israeli secular public to Avital's policy. The editorial, in fact, calls for Saar to let him go. I hope he does. Free speech and a free press are the bulwarks of an enlightened society against just this sort of obscurantism.
I wish this whole affair was a premature Purim shpiel, but unfortunately it is not. We don't know how the story will play out, but we can keep following it and make our opinions known. Israel will NOT turn into a theocratic cesspool as long as I have anything to do with it.

A Tale of Two Levi Yitzhaks

Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev - The famous "defense attorney for Israel" who lived in the 18th century and might have been an ancestor of the Lubavitcher Rebbe זצ''ל , whose father bore the same name. One of many stories about him is set on Erev Pesah. He is said to have disguised himself as a merchant, visited a diamond smuggler in the morning and negotiated a deal for the purchase of diamonds. In the afternoon he disguised himself as a beggar and knocked on the door of one Jewish house after another. When the door opened the rabbi would stick his hand out and ask for a piece of bread. The response was always the same: Bread? Have you gone mad? It's afternoon on Erev Pesah and I'm supposed to have bread? After a while, Levi Yitzhak exclaimed: God, look at your children! The Tsar has an army. The Tsar has police. The Tsar has a border patrol. The Tsar says you can't bring diamonds into the country. I can get all the diamonds I want. You have no army, no police, no border patrol. All you have is a few words in your Torah: No hametz in the house after noon on Erev Pesah. Comes the appointed time - and not a crumb can be found in any Jewish home. Does a people like that not deserve to be redeemed?

Levi Yitzhak Rosenbaum - Early 21st century America. Arrested for trafficking in human kidneys, buying them from desperately poor Israelis for $10,000 apiece and flipping them to desperately sick Americans for $160,000. Allegedly caught on tape boasting that he had been doing this for ten years. Causes unparalleled shame and embarrassment to observant Jews and massive hillul Hashem.

The first Levi Yitzhak lived in a culture of poverty and anti-Semitic persecution. The second lives in the wealthiest Jewish community ever, where the law protects our religious practice and we are equal to anyone else in the country. Could it be that for all the material success and religious freedom we have here, our values and priorities are all screwed up?

Runs With the Sun

Several years ago I took an education course in Brooklyn College with the goal of impoving my teaching skills. The professor had each of us pick an "Indian name" on the model of "Dances with Wolves" and explain it to the class. The exercise made me "think outside the box": not all cultures make us prisoners of the names our parents pick for us. Not that I ever had a problem with my Hebrew name, but many of us, girls in particular, are saddled with Yiddish names we would just as soon be rid of. Many such girls, upon reaching adulthood, adopt a Hebrew name. They often encounter opprobrium from the community, and might even experience halakhic problems when documents such as a ketubah or, God forbid, a get, which require the person's name, need to be drawn up. Several Native American cultures require boys about the time of puberty to go off alone on a "vision quest" or journey of self-discovery, and return with the name by which he would thenceforth be known.

I picked as my Indian name, "Runs With the Sun." I explained to the class how I love the feel of the sun on my strong shoulders when I run in summertime, how John Denver's song "Sunshine on My Shoulders Makes Me Happy" resonates powerfully with me. Unlike most runners, I acclimatize to heat easily. The sunshine and the sweat it induces put me in touch with my physical self, a part of my being long neglected in our culture. I feel connected with an earlier time in our history, when we were strong and vital, when we were not ashamed of working in the fields (ve'asafta deganekha), when we were "normal." In these topsy-turvy times men are encouraged to "get in touch with their feminine side." Not me. We've been doing that for far too long. Running with the sun, I am in touch with my essential, robust maleness, and that is when I feel closest to God. And when I finish running and take a shower, well, ha-meivin yavin.







I am RUNS WITH THE SUN - At the Staten Island Half Marathon in 2007













I am reminded of that classroom exercise today because we recited Birkat Ha-hama, the Blessing of the Sun, recited every 28 years. Once in a generation we have the opportunity to thank God for the wonderful gift He gave us in that yellow orb, that medium size star somewhere on the fringes of a mediocre galaxy. How it is just the right distance from earth for life, and ultimately humankind, to flourish. How its light is mostly in that middle portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to be captured by plants and transformed into energy that I can use to make me feel so powerful and energetic. The shorter wavelengths are so energetic that they destroy DNA; the longer ones lack sufficient energy to be used in photosynthesis. Of course, it works the other way around too; living things evolved to make use of the resources that are available. Those of a mystical bent will rhapsodize about the sun being in the exact position it was when God "hung it in the sky" at the beginning of time. There's nothing wrong with mysticism as long as it doesn't ask us to deny observable reality; Rav Kook was a mystic. But this dyed-in-the-wool scientist was always put off by mystical speculation. I prefer to find God in what I can explain, not in what I cannot.

A ritual performed once in a generation inevitably engenders stock taking. Where was I 28 years ago? What have I accomplished in the intervening time? Where do I hope to be 28 years from now? Has our community gotten stronger or weaker? What do the next 28 years hold in store? Last time we recited Birkat Ha-hama, in 1981, Ronald Reagan had just assumed the Presidency. We were experiencing hard times economically, but Reagan assured us that things will be better; he talked of Morning in America. There was no Internet, no personal computers, we typed everything from letters to doctoral theses on electric typewriters and either covered up our mistakes with unsightly white fluid or retyped the whole page. The Cold War was raging; half of Europe was held in slavery to the Soviet Union, and Soviet Jews were not allowed to leave the country (neither was anybody else). Nuclear holocaust topped our list of fears. Reagan called the Soviet Union what it was: an evil empire. He was derided by the liberal press and the "intelligentsia," but calling a spade a spade was the first step in dealing with it. He dedicated his presidency to winning the Cold War, and when he left office the evil empire was teetering. A year later the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down and Eastern Europe would be free. Two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed. I had gotten married two years prior, in 1979, my children had not been born yet, and I had yet to purchase the home where I now live. I was still working on my Ph.D. in biology. Giants like R. Moshe Feinstein, R. Zvi Yehuda Kook and the Lubavitcher Rebbe were still with us. R. Slifkin was a baby, but "his" ideas were so mainstream that no one bothered writing about them. We did not have all the craziness that plagues our community today. My running times were at their peak and the highlight of my year was the New York City Marathon, when I would tour the five boroughs in a singlet with the Israeli flag across the chest. 28 years and two knee surgeries later, my running times are nowhere near what they used to be. I have to be grateful that, to my doctors' surprise, I am able to run at all. In the community, all sorts of lawlessness run rampant; the thinking seems to be that it's okay to lie, cheat and steal as long as you don't get caught. Young men who work and earn an honest living are Grade B on the marriage market. Relative birth rates over a generation resulted in the haredi lunatic fringe taking over the community and pushing the rest of us to the fringe. An anti-intellectual and anti-scientific mindset became the norm. The community seems to be following senile "leaders" over a precipice, not knowing or caring that their present lifestyle is unsustainable.
What will the future be? Next time we gather for Birkat Ha-hama will be 5797, or 2037 on the civil calendar. Holocaust survivors will have all died out, as will World War II veterans. Germany and Eastern Europe will no longer have living perpetrators; will that change how we view those countries? What new inventions will transform the lives of our children and grandchildren, as computers and the Internet transformed ours? Will I be able to gather with others for the ritual at all? I will be 84 years old if I live that long. Will I be institutionalized, unable to care for myself, eating what others want me to eat, lying in my own filth until others decide to clean me? As a teenager, I saw my father caring for his father who had Alzheimer's disease, and I knew in the marrow of my bones that that kind of life is not for me. I long ago stopped asking for long life when we bentsch Rosh Hodesh, having seen long life turn into a curse. My peregrinations on the planet lead me to believe that many others share that view, though not as much in the frum community. Will science come up with replacements for cartilage and synovial fluid so that we don't lose mobility? Will it come up with a way to stop the loss of muscle mass so we can get old without getting weak? Will my children, now 23 and 26, be married with children of their own, or will they find their fulfillment elsewhere? Will we as a community pull back from the cliff in time, or dwindle into an Amish-like existence, irrelevant to the rest of society and with most of our young dropping out? Will there be a strong "normal" Orthodox or Conservative movement for them to drop into, or will they simply be lost to Judaism? Or will Mashiach have come and redeemed us and the world?

I wish all my readers a happy and kosher Pesah.

We work and they work. . . .

This morning I attended the traditional siyum for firstborn males. We are supposed to fast the day before Pesah in commemmoration of God sparing us when he struck down all Egyptian human and animal firstborn males in the final plague. Attending a siyum, when a tractate of Talmud is finished, and partaking of the se'udat mitzva, the festive meal marking this happy occasion, absolves us of the obligation to fast.
The rabbinic intern at Kingsway Jewish Center in Brooklyn expounded on the final paragraph in Masekhet Megilla, then read the traditional prayer that says in part: We work and they [those who do not study Torah] work; we work and receive a reward, they work and do not receive a reward. We run and they run; we run to eternal life and they run to the pit. . . .

A while ago I stumbled on a gay-oriented sport site featuring a photo they call "Leather Fighter." Brooklyn has its own favorite son, boxer Dmitry Salita, who happens to be an observant Jew. He davens in a Habad shul in the Midwood section. He refuses to fight on Shabbat, forfeiting paydays from popular Friday night fights. As he puts it, "Anyone who wants a whupping from me has to wait till after sundown [on Saturday]."









Dmitry may look like a wimpy Jewish kid, but don't mess with him. His right arm is naturally strong. His left is fortified with tefilin.









Salita pursues an opponent that he has
cornered up against the ropes


We wear black leather and they wear black leather. . . .

Ashreinu.

Yom Ha-bikkurim

We are about to celebrate Shavu'ot, and many of us will stay up all night learning Torah. Tomorrow we will hear the Ten Commandments in shul, and refer to the holiday in the Amida as "z'man mattan torateinu" - the time of the giving of the Torah. But if we look in the Torah shebikhtav, there is no mention of Shavu'ot as commemorating the giving of the Torah. Torah was supposed to be as fresh and new every day as the day it was given. And indeed, Shavu'ot is the only holiday that does not have a fixed date on the calendar. It is celebrated seven weeks after the second day of Pesah. Before the adoption of a fixed calendar in the fourth century C.E., each month had either 29 or 30 days depending on when witnesses saw the new moon in Jerusalem; one never knew in advance how many days a month would have. Depending on whether Nisan and Iyar had 29 or 30 days, Shavu'ot could come on the fifth, sixth or seventh of Sivan. The seventh is the day of Mattan Torah only according to R. Yosi, and the fifth is not the day according to anybody!
The holiday is charcacterized in Torah shebikhtav two ways: Shavu'ot, since it occurs seven weeks after Pesah, and Yom Ha-bikkurim, the day when the first of the wheat crop was brought up to the Beit Ha-mikdash and given to the Kohanim. The Mattan Torah angle apparently is post-exilic, a cultural accretion that developed when we no longer had a Beit Mikdash and therefore could not bring Bikkurim.
Shavu'ot is also referred to in the Mishna is Atzeret, a conclusion. Just as Sh'mini Atzeret is the conclusion of Sukkot, Shavu'ot is a conclusion of Pesah. We've all heard, and most of us will hear again tomorrow or the day after, drashot explaining that the purpose of yetzi'at Mitzraim was fulfilled with Mattan Torah seven weeks later. Freedom without law is not freedom but chaos. Without detracting from this explanation, I would like to offer an additional one. As slaves our lives were not our own; we did what our masters told us to do when they told us to do it. Even our food was dictated by our masters, who set a pot of food in front of us the way one would feed animals (see the commentaries on sir ha-basar, the fleshpots of Egypt). The fruits of our labor belonged not to us but to our oppressors. As free men, our lives would be very different. We would have our own country, work its soil, and enjoy its produce. The temptation to attribute our success to our own efforts - kohi v'otzem yadi (see Parshat Eikev) must have been strong. Therefore, we were commanded to take the first fruits of each year's crop, bring it up to the Beit Ha-mikdash, and recite a confession which became the basis of the Haggadah Shel Pesah [see the beginning of Parshat Ki-Tavo]. But the Haggadah stops in the middle, after the miraculous deliverance from Egypt. The remaining verses are not read at the Seder: And He brought us to this place, and He gave us this land flowing with milk and honey. And now I brought the first fruits of the land that You, Hashem, gave me, and he [the one who brings the Bikkurim] shall leave it before Hashem your God and He shall bow down to Hashem your God. And he shall rejoice in all the good that Hashem your God gave you and your house. . . . Shavu'ot becomes the conclusion of Pesah, in that we confim our freedom by thanking Hashem for the privilege of working our soil and eating its produce, and acknowledge that our material success comes from Hashem! Is this the same people that developed a culture of parasitism where working for a living is denigrated and the ideal is to study Torah full time and live off the labor of others? If I had my druthers we would be reading Parshat Ha-bikkurim on Shavu'ot along with the Ten Commandments.

The Bikkurim were to be brought up in a basket, in Hebrew not the usual sal (as in kadursal, basketball), but a tene, a word that sounds Egyptian. A tene held things. It resembles a Latin root meaning "to hold," i.e. tenir in French. In English the word "tennis" originates from the racket that a tennis player holds in his hand, and Cold War defeatists told us that West Berlin was untenable, we couldn't hold onto it. I wonder if the Hebrew-Egyptian and Latin words are related, or if they simply resemble each other by accident. At any rate, in a good year the contents of a tene must have been heavy, and it had to be held in the hand at least the final few hundred meters to the Beit Ha-mikdash. Shavu'ot - Yom Ha-bikkurim was no holiday for Jewish weaklings!
Let us pray that we will soon celebrate Shavu'ot as we were commanded, as normal Jews in a normal country once did, with heavy baskets carried on strong Jewish shoulders to the rebuilt Beit Ha-mikdash, quickly and in our time.

Yom Ha-zikron and Yom Ha'atzma'ut

Since 5 Iyar comes on Shabbat this year and the Israeli government does not want holiday observances to engender hillul Shabbat (they don't give a damn about Torah, right?), Yom Ha'atzma'ut is celebrated tomorrow. That makes today Yom Ha-zikaron, Israel's Memorial Day. As with Yom Ha-shoah last week, air raid sirens wail and everybody stands still in mourning. Even drivers on the road stop their cars, get out and stand. The whole country is stock still for a minute, except in haredi neighborhoods; what do they care for our national observances? But there is a difference between last week and today. Last week resembled Tisha B'Av - kulo maror. Today is bittersweet - matza and maror mixed and eaten together. We mourn our losses, since to us but not to our enemies every life is a precious gift from God. But at the same time we rejoice in having children (male and female) who are strong, brave and willing to fight. There is a qualitative difference between walking helplessly into a gas chamber and falling in battle - dying on one's feet so that the rest of us won't have to live on our knees. They are the guarantors of "Never Again" and I thank God for the privilege of raising a son who heard the call from across the ocean, went over and served in Zahal during the second intifada, when he could have been enjoying the party scene at college.
Tonight the sirens will wail again, and we will begin to celebrate Yom Ha'atzma'ut. Ma'ariv with the Yom Tov niggun, Hallel at night and again tomorrow morning, the haftara of Od Hayom B'Nov (same as the eighth day of Pesah, which Israelis don't celebrate) in anticipation of the completion of the ge'ula. Don't let anything interfere with the joy of having lived to see the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. May the process that began 60 years ago reach its glorious conclusion speedily in our time.

We were slaves. . .

One of the beautiful things about being American is different groups being able to enjoy one another's culture and learn from their positive aspects. African-Americans deliberately drew on our Torah for encouragement in their struggle against slavery and, later, against Jim Crow. And Jewish musicians, Subliminal in particular comes to mind, draw upon hip-hop to express their love of Israel and defiance of the evil forces seeking its destruction.

There is a rich trove of narratives handed down by successive generations of African-American slaves and later committed to writing (sounds like our gemara?). Many of these tales are included in the anthology "To Be A Slave" that is used in New York's public schools. When my sister was waiting several years for her get (!), she and her children would come to me for the sedarim and I could not rush through the Haggada as I am often tempted to do when we do not have "guests." I selected several slave narratives from that book and had each of the children read one. One of those narratives spoke of how each slave had a quota of cotton to pick, and would be beaten if he failed to meet it. When I first read that it hit me like - like a ton of bricks. Doing my best to keep a poker face, I asked the child whom I asked to read the narrative if it reminded him of anything. I got a blank look and a negative answer. Going around the table, I got the same look and the same answer. I had to explain to the kids (all three of my nephews and my niece were going to haredi yeshivot, but my children's yeshivot were no better) about the quota of bricks that Parshat Shemot tells us had to be made by each Jewish slave, and the whippings if the quota was not met.

Let us keep this in mind whenever racist thoughs enter our heads and whenever we are tempted to let racist words escape our lips. It is at the core of our belief system (see Parshat Lekh-lekha) that we did not end up in Egypt by happenstance. We were sent there for a purpose; it was all planned out centuries in advance, if not before the creation of the world. Time and again we are told to observe various mitzvot bein adam la-havero "because you were slaves [or strangers] in Egypt." It never ceases to amaze me that Jews in the ante-bellum South fought for the Confederacy - how did they keep a straight face when they sat their children down and repeated the age-old formula beginning with the four Hebrew words for "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt?" It was no coincidence that Jewish Americans were in the forefront of the struggle against Jim Crow half a century ago (as I tell my students, I'm old enough to remember Martin Luther King but a mite too young to have been a freedom rider). And when people say that Jewish Americans live like WASPs and vote like Puerto Ricans I take it as a compliment: it confirms that we are being true to our calling.

Hag Kasher V'sameah.

Special hametz pickups

Once again we in Brooklyn will benefit from special garbage pickups by the Sanitation Dep't arranged through our local elected officials so we can have the hametz out of our sight before the zman ha-bi'ur (see my previous post). Remember, the sanitationmen are doing us a favor, above and beyond their normal duties. Hakarat Ha-tov is a desideratum in the Jewish scheme of things. True, they are being paid overtime out of our taxes, but that does not absolve us of our obligation to treat people who work for us, Jewish or not, like human beings. Everybody likes to feel appreciated, and sanitationmen are still too often the targets of undeserved derision and abuse. So let's follow the guidelines set out in the leaflets we received. And if we see the sanitationmen going about their duties, a "Hello" or "Good morning" will brighten up their day at no cost to us. This applies all the time, but especially Friday morning when they will be doing the extra pick-ups as a favor to us.

Take your shoe off your feet

In the Haftara of the first day of Pesah, read tomorrow, we read how Yehoshua conducts a mass brit mila (one wonders if he did metzitza b'peh [oral suction of blood] on all those adult males), celebrates the Pesah with matza and roasted dry kernels (who would dare eat the latter on Pesah today?), whereupon the man [manna], the supernatural food that sustained us for 40 years in the desert, ceases forever and we eat the produce of the earth. Then a figure with a drawn sword appears to Yehoshua, who asks him if he is for us or for our enemies. The figure replies that he is God's heavenly Chief of Staff, just as Yehoshua is God's "Ramatkal" [Chief of Staff] on earth. The angel then, in a scene recalling Moshe at the burning bush, tells Yehoshua to take off his shoe, for the ground on which Yehoshua stands is holy. But now there is a twist. Moshe is told to take his shoes - ne'alekha - off his feet - raglekha, plural. Yehoshua is to take his shoe - ne'alkha, singular, off his feet - raglekha, plural. Presumably God's Chief of Staff did not attend a black yeshiva and could hold up his end of a Hebrew conversation. Something calls for an explanation but the classical mefarshim [commentators] (at least the ones Artscroll quotes) are silent. And the plot thickens. We read raglekha as plural, but the unvoweled Hebrew text is singular, without the yod. In the absense of commentary from the classical sources, I will venture an explanation. Moshe and the generation he led had a unique existence, not duplicated before or since. He and his people could immerse themselves totally in kedusha [holiness]. They were completely free from the cares of daily material existence. No worries about parnassa [making a living]; food came down from the sky. Water came from an inexhaustible traveling well. Their clothes not only never wore out, but the children's clothes grew with the children. Ananei kavod ["clouds of glory"]protected them from enemies - no need for an army. Those people had nothing to do but study Torah! Not so with Yehoshua. He and his people would have to involve themselves in the hurly-burly of statecraft. They had to conquer Eretz Yisrael from formidable enemies who (except for the Girgashi) were not going to leave on their own. Then they would be burdened with all the political and economic cares of running a state. Total immersion in kedusha would not be possible; only one shoe can come off as it were. But, Yeshoshua is told, aim high. He is not the head of another Uganda. His nation has a higher calling. Even if Moshe's level was impossible to attain, it is the goal nevertheless. His reach should exceed his grasp, or what's an Israel for?
Hag Kasher v'Sameah.

Eliyahu Ha-navi

In last week's Haftara we read of the mission of Eliyahu Ha-navi "before the arrival of the great and awesome day of Hashem." I read the same Haftara for myself when I review the Sidra on the Shabbat before Yom Ha'atzma'ut. His mission is to heal a generation gap which seems to only be getting worse.
V'heshiv lev avot al banim v'lev banim al avotam. The older generation will be reconciled to their children's building the geula seemingly divorced from Torah, while the young will be reconciled to the ancient traditions of our people. Otherwise G-d forbid the next pasuk will materialize. But we shall overcome.