The Poet and the Gatekeeper (Arachin 11b)

Today’s daf continues the Talmud’s discussion of the music of the Levites, a combination of vocal and instrumental music that was considered an essential component of sacrificial worship in the Temple. Not all the priests were responsible for Temple music; there seem to have been two categories of Levites. One group, known as the משוררים (poets), was responsible for Temple music. The other group, known as משוערים(gatekeepers), was responsible for locking the doors of the Temple. These categories date back at least to the time of Ezra (2:7), who enumerates the families of poets and gatekeepers in a list that is repeated (with some variations) in Divrei Hayamim (I chapter 9). These two categories had to be kept distinct; a poet could not perform the duties of the gatekeeper, nor vice versa, as cautioned by the following tale from today’s daf:

A story is told of Rabbi Yehoshua bar Hanania who went to help Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada with the closing of the gates. Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada said to him: My son, turn back! For you are one of the poets and not one of the gatekeepers!

Both of the sages who figure in this story were Levites. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania was a poet, though he is more familiar to us as the student of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai who helped smuggle his teacher out of Jerusalem on the eve of the Temple’s destruction. He then became the leader of the Yavneh beit midrash, known for its intellectual creativity. It was he who famously asserted, “There can be no beit midrash without novel teaching!” Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada was a gatekeeper, though we also know him as the poor student who was appointed along with Rabbi Elazar Hasma to supervise the students in Rabban Gamliel’s beit midrash. Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada were friends; according to one story, Rabbi Yehoshua pleaded with the wealthy patriarch Rabban Gamliel to find a job for Rabbi Yohanan, who was so brilliant that he “could count all the drops in the sea,” yet he was utterly destitute (Horayot 10a). In our story from daf yomi, too, Rabbi Yehoshua rushes to the aid of Rabbi Yohanan, this time offering to help his friend lock the doors of the Temple. But Rabbi Yohanan rebukes him, insisting that he must keep to his own job of poet and not rush to the aid of the gatekeepers.

This story inspires a rather stern Talmudic injunction about the division of labor in the Temple, warning about משורר ששיער ומשוער ששורר
This brilliant conjoining of sound and sense—itself a poetic injunction about gatekeeping (or policing) who may do what-- refers to a poet who guards, and a gatekeeper who composes, both of whom are liable for quite a severe punishment:

A poet who engages in his friend’s gatekeeping duties is put to death, as it is written, “Those who were to camp before the Tabernacle in front…were Moses and Aaron and his sons, attending to the duties of the sanctuary. Any stranger who encroached was to be put to death” (Numbers 3:38). What is a stranger? If you mean a non-Levite, well, we have already been told that once already! Rather, it must mean someone who is estranged from that labor [that he is meant to perform].

Anyone who engages in someone else’s designated task is described as being “estranged” from his true labor to the extent that he is considered a זר, a stranger. This is an appropriate message for Masechet Arachin, which deals with the value of every human being. It is also a sentiment I identify with quite strongly on a personal level. For over seven years I have been working as a gatekeeper. As a foreign rights agent, my job is to secure permission for Israeli publishers to translate into Hebrew books originally written in foreign languages. Each day I receive dozens of manuscripts, which I submit to the appropriate Israeli editors. When multiple editors compete for the rights to translate a single work, I decide who gets the right to publish that book. I am, in short, a gatekeeper for literature.

At night, when I lock the gates of my office and return home, I often dream of becoming one of the poets. I make up rhyming songs that I sing to my baby and compose silly limericks about the Talmud, but rarely do I write anything more serious or sustained. I am so estranged from myself that I am convinced I am a gatekeeper, and well I might be. But that does not explain why my spine tingles at the poetic resonance of the Talmud’s tongue-twisting plays of language, nor why I search every day for that novel insight that keeps the beit midrash alive, nor why I am haunted by Rabbi Yohanan’s rebuke. חזור לאחוריך! Turn back! For you are one of the poets and not one of the gatekeepers!

Parshat Vayishlach: Learning to be Shalem

Here in Jerusalem I live between two languages, yet I try to speak only one at a time. I cringe when I hear other Americans in Jerusalem peppering their English with select words of Hebrew: “We’re doing a total shiputz with an amazing kablan!” I aspire to access the full range of expression in whatever language I am speaking, without smuggling in words from another tongue. And yet sometimes I find myself guilty of the same shoddy linguistic border patrol, like last week, when I kept borrowing a key word from the parsha: “I’m just not shalem with this decision” or “I wish I could agree with shlemut” or “she’s just such a put-together, shalem person.”

In last week’s parshat Vayishlach it is Yaakov who is described as being shalem: “And Yaakov came shalem to Shechem” (33:18). This verse appears after the parsha’s mounting anticipation about the confrontation with Esav and the surprising anticlimax that follows. Yaakov, terrified of the impending confrontation with his estranged twin, attempts to appease Esav by sending messages of peace and bountiful gifs of he-goats, she-goats, ewes, rams, camels, colts, cowls, and bulls: “If I propitiate him with presents in advance and then face him, perhaps he will show me favor” (32:21). Quaking in his boots, Yaakov prays to God to save him from the dreaded clash with his brother: “Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; else, I fear, he may come and strike me down, mothers and children alike” (32:13). Worried for the welfare of his wives and children, Yaakov resorts to the desperate measure of dividing his family into two camps in the hope that if Esav were to attack, he would lose only half his numbers.

Although Yaakov is fully prepared—militarily and psychologically—to fight off his brother, Esav surprises him by coming in peace. As David Flatow points out in a d’var Torah on the Drisha Institute website, instead of the expected confrontation with Esav, Yaakov finds himself instead wrestling with a mysterious man who approaches him in the darkness when he waits alone on the far side of the river. Somehow Yaakov succeeds in fighting off this anonymous aggressor, perhaps because he was already prepared for battle (with Esav) at the moment when he met him. Flatow points out that Yaakov is the kind of person who prepares thoroughly for everything that he expects in life, and as a result, when he is confronted by the unexpected, he has the wherewithal and the reserve strength to deal with those challenges as well. According to Flatow, this is the source of the shlemut that we are told about in the first verse after the anticlimactic meeting with Esav: “And Yaakov came shalem to Shechem.” Yaakov, in a state of constant preparedness, had an inner peace and wholeness that enabled him to successfully navigate even those challenges that he least expected.

I aspire to the shlemut of Yaakov even as I recognize how sorely I lack it. I wish to be able to reach that level of ease and inner peace that enables me to confront everyone I meet with a smile and a willingness to take on whatever the situation might require of me. And yet instead I find myself answering the telephone with a sense of dread creeping into my voice: “Who is calling me now, and why are they interrupting me, and what am I going to have to do for them,” instead of “oh how lovely, an opportunity for human encounter!” Yaakov takes the time to put his life in order, and as a result, he is able to deal with anything that comes his way. He accepts that life is not always what you expect, and that sometimes it is the willingness to embrace the unexpected that enables us to glimpse Peniel, the face of God. Moreover, he engages in regular dialogue with God, which instills in him the wholeness and the sense of self-awareness that enables him to be receptive to other human beings. I can learn from this as well; all too often I find myself so caught up in my own turmoil and “issues” that I must unload them on the first person I meet, instead of greeting others with a receptiveness to their needs and concerns. Perhaps if I spent more time emptying myself out to God in prayer, I’d have more room for the needs of the other people in my life.

I still do not have a suitable English translation for shlemut, perhaps because, as David Bellos writes in Is That a Fish in Your Ear, his recently-published book on translation, “It’s an indisputable fact about languages that the sets of words that each possesses divide up the features of the world in slightly and sometimes radically different ways.” Shlemut is a combination of several English phrases: it is the sense of wholeness that allows for the inner peace and that enables us to confront the challenges at hand without being torn apart by whatever we are dreading or anticipating at any given moment. It is also a kind of maturity and a willingness to make room for others, even if we meet them unexpectedly, and even if they surprise us by being pacific rather than aggressive – or vice versa. I am blessed with many models of shlemut in my life: from my husband who never loses his cool regardless of what goes wrong; to my sister-in-law who is so comfortable in her own skin that she is able to devote her entire existence to being there for others; to my baby son who has been lying on our bed content to play with his feet and delay his breakfast for the past twenty minutes so I could type up these thoughts. Perhaps one day I will learn how to put his needs first, but that, I fear, involves a sense of shlemut that I am still working to master.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masekhet Hullin (Perek 1)

הכל שוחטין
(Perek Aleph)

(2a)
All are permitted to shecht
(So long as they’re part of the sect)
Unless they’re the kind
Who are deaf-mute or blind
Or so short that they can’t reach the neck.

(5a)
Elijah was fed by the crows
Or so the Tanakh’s story goes
But were those crows birds?
What to make of that word?
They were two men named “crow,” we suppose.

(5b)
There are people who act more like beasts
Do we let them bring sacrifice feasts?
Even people who choose
Sin cannot be refused
By the Temple’s officiates, priests.

(6a)
Rabban Gamliel said: Don’t condone
Those Samaritans. Don’t eat their bones.
All they shecht is forbidden
For though it’s kept hidden,
They worship a dove carved in stone.

(6b)
Jewish women should not grind their wheat
With impure commonfolk who might cheat.
Lest the commoner say,
Yum, so tasty today—
You should sample my flour – come eat!

(7a)
If your mother in law can’t be trusted
Then your quantities must be adjusted:
That is, tithes you must take
From whatever she bakes.
She is sly, and won’t ever get busted.

(7a)
Pinchas ben Yair, one fine day,
To redeem captives set on his way.
He said: Stream, you must split!
But the stream had a fit.
Til he threatened, and made it obey.

(7b)
Pinchnas then came to an inn
With his donkey, a beast loath to sin.
They fed oats to the ass
Who refused the repast
“Were your oats tithed?” asked Pinchas, chagrined.

(7b)
Rabi kept most unorthodox pets:
He had white mules (as bad as it gets)
Pinchas knew they kicked hard
Hence he wanted them barred
When invited, he sent his regrets.

(7b)
A woman crawled under the seat
Of Hanina to sweep by his feet
To get dust for dark arts
Said Hanina: Too smart
Is our God. All your charms He’ll defeat.

(9a)
A scholar of Torah must learn
These three subjects, each one in its turn:
How to slaughter, and write,
And to circumcise; quite
A whole lot for a sage to discern.

(12a)
If you chance on a beast that’s been shechted,
Though it looks kosher once you’ve inspected,
You did not watch the slaughter
When blood flowed like water
So don’t eat -- the butcher’s suspected.

(12a)
If you throw a sharp knife towards a wall
And it chances to shecht while mid-fall.
Although not intended
A beast’s life is ended
But not by correct protocol.

(12a)
Does a little kid act with intention
Can he act with full grown-up attention
If he carves out a fruit
To make storage for dirt
Do we render “Tamey” his invention?

(13b)
Goyim abroad don’t know much—
Though idolatrous objects they clutch
It’s more just a fad
For the son acts like dad
Avodah Zara? Well, just a touch.

(13b)
You can shecht in the night or if blind
(Though the right spot might be hard to find.)
You can shecht on a ship,
On a roof (but don’t trip)
Just make sure you have presence of mind.

(16a)
Abraham took up the knife
(Unbeknownst to poor Sarah, his wife)
Must the knife be detached
When the deed is dispatched
Zealous Abe almost took Yitzchak’s life!

(17a)
In the desert the Jews had no rules
They could slaughter whatever they’d choose
When they entered the Land
Matters got out of hand
God said: Do shechita right please, you fools!

(18a)
Bar Hinana said: I can’t trust
This young butcher. I’ll make him go bust.
But the guy must be able
To put food on his table
Please say what I did was unjust!

(19a)
Mugremet is not a good cut
If you shecht that way, you’re in a rut.
Know the right place to slice
For you can’t do it twice
Aim for windpipe, and not for the gut.

(24a)
In five years’ time you learn your trade
After five years you work without aid
If you didn’t quite master
Don’t try working faster
It’s time to give up, I’m afraid.

(24b)
At age 80, Hanina could stand
On one foot, put on shoes with his hand
He was spry for his age
‘Cause his mom at one stage
Used to bathe him in oil. How grand!

(26b)
If yom tov’s on Friday, you asked,
Is havdala said once chag has passed.
To teach: “Now it’s Shabbat
Can you cook? You cannot”--
No havdala. Instead, shofar blast!

Fumbling for the Thumb: Parshat Noach

In this week’s parsha we read about Noach, though we first learn of his birth at the end of Parshat Breishit. There we are told that his father Lemech calls him Noach because “this one will relieve us (yeNACHamenu) from our work and from the toil (itzavon) of our hands” (5:29). Lemech creates a midrash to explain his son’s name: Noach, whose name means comfort, will provide relief to a humanity that has just been cursed by God with the burden of working the soil with toil (itzavon) all the days of their lives. (Yeats: “It's certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.”) The midrash relates that Noach provided this comfort because he was the first human being to be created with opposable thumbs, which made it much easier to till the earth or do almost anything with one’s hands.

I thought about this midrash when Matan began sucking his thumb for the first time this week. He has been trying to master this skill for quite some time now: First he noticed the thumb and stared at it for a few days; then he realized that he could put it in his mouth; and then he would chomp on it and gag himself, only to stick the thumb back in and gag again. Yet now he sucks away gleefully. As a result, his parents can sleep better at night – in the past, each time Matan would stir, one of us would have to reach over the side of our bed, feel around for the pacifier strewn somewhere across his crib, and poke our hands around in the dark (like a blind person groping around in broad daylight, to invoke an image from the Tohekha) until we found (oops, that was the wrong side of his head; nope, an eyelid; yeah, there it is!) his mouth and could stick the pacifier back in and then roll over back to sleep. But now Matan knows how to pacify himself: He wakes up, finds his thumb, and sticks it in his mouth with gusto. This one will comfort us indeed! Matan can rest (Nach) more deeply, and this solution finds favor (Chen) in his parents’ eyes much as Noach (in another anagrammatic midrash – chen is Noach backwards) found favor in the eyes of God.

Inevitably, in our lives as parents, I’m sure Matan will be the source of some Itzavon, which Rashi interprets as צער גידול בנים, the pain of raising children. It is not just pregnancy and childbirth that are part of God’s curse to Eve, but also the gap between expectation and reality: Parents invest everything in their children, only to find that thorns and thistles spring up from the soil in which they have planted their hopes and dreams. Itzavon, like Teshuka (desire), is the difference between what we have and what we want. Eve is saddled with Teshuka for her husband and Itzavon for her children, leaving her with little room for satisfaction. And yet until this point, Matan has been only a source of Naches, which of course comes from the Hebrew word Nachat, itself a variant on Noach/comfort. When I peer into the Teyva (ark) of his crib at night and watch him fumble for his thumb, I find myself paraphrasing the most poetic line from this week’s parsha: So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night; my love for you, Matan, shall never cease.

Note: Like everything I write, this dvar Torah owes much to the insights of Avivah Zornberg. For more on Noach and Itzavon, see “Despondent Intoxication” in The Murmuring Deep.

First Fruit

This week I returned from my maternity leave from leyning. Since Matan’s birth, I have leyned only rarely. I was reluctant to commit to reading Torah because I worried that Matan might need to eat at that very moment when I was at the Amud, or that I’d be so exhausted from yet another sleepless night that I would not wake up in time for shul. Perhaps I was still traumatized by the memory of last Yom Kippur, when I nearly fainted while leading shacharit – this was also on account of Matan, though at the time I did not even know I was pregnant. But now with Matan more or less sleeping through half the night and blessed with patience and equanimity far beyond his four months, I felt it was time to return, at last, to reading an aliyah or two each week.

This week’s parsha is Ki Tavo, a reference to Benei Yisrael’s entry into the land of Israel and a reminder to me that I am re-entering the Torah reading cycle, this time as a mother. Like the farmer bringing his first fruit to the priest in the opening verses, I will come to shul with my own first fruit so that Matan might hear me recite from the Torah before the Lord my God. Unfortunately, it is not the Bikurim passage that I am leyning but rather the Tohekha, the long list of curses that will befall the people of Israel if they fail to observe God’s commandments. Poor Matan has been listening to me practice all week, and trembles at the breast each time I come to the verse about mothers eating their children. (He ought to realize that in his case it is the child who is eating from the mother and not vice versa.) In an attempt to reassure my hungry boy, I shift him from Har Eyval to Har Gerizim, and he latches right back on.

And perhaps I am correct in doing so. After all, when I look down lovingly at Matan (whose nicknames include everything from Matanushi to Nuni-nu), I find myself thinking about the words of the blessings shouted from one hilltop rather than the curses shouted from the other. I truly feel that God has opened for us the bounteous stores of the heavens to bless all our undertakings. Each night I watch Matan sleep with his arms above his head like Moshe fighting Amalek, confident and trusting that the world is a safe place. In the morning (“Would that it were evening,” I sometimes mutter groggily) I wake to the sound of our son gurgling to himself and staring mesmerized at his own two hands, which he turns slowly in each direction as if he is conjuring the dead. (I hope he is not doing that, because then, as the Torah threatens, the curses will catch up with him!) Lately he has also started turning around in his crib, so that I put him down with his head on one side and find him a few hours later with his feet and head reversed. (He who was once at the tail will soon be at the head.) He seizes every opportunity to stand up on his two feet, and perhaps it won’t be long until he is walking in His ways….

Matan and I do quite a bit of walking together, hopefully in God’s ways. Tonight, for instance, we walked back from the shuk in the early hours of the evening, his stroller laden with an overflowing basket of the last of the summer nectarines and the first of the green winter clementines. I sang the blessings and curses to Matan from memory, using the same nursery rhyme lilt for both so as not to scare him. He stayed awake for the entire 45 minutes of our walk, looking at me with his wide blue eyes and occasionally smiling and then looking away bashfully, as he is wont. Each time we came to a red light I leaned in close, planting small kisses on his cheeks and his forehead that will grow, someday, into mountains of blessings.

Moses and Motherhood: Of Manna, Melons, and Matan

I was walking home yesterday, carrying Matan in a sling that hung over one shoulder, when I passed a watermelon kiosk. Since watermelons are so heavy, no one wants to carry them home from the market. And so throughout the month of June, when watermelons are at peak season, kiosks that sell nothing but watermelons spring up all around the city so that people can buy this heavy fruit close to home. As a nursing mother in need of constant hydration, I’ve been eating nearly half a watermelon a day since Matan was born. And so I stopped at the kiosk to buy another. The watermelons were four shekel a kilo; my purchase came to sixteen shekel. As the vendor put my melon in a plastic bag, I realized that it was exactly the same weight as Matan. I lugged baby and watermelon home – Matan in the sling, and the melon in the plastic bag – and deposited them in the bassinet and the refrigerator, respectively.

When I got home, I quickly prepared some lunch. I have learned to eat quickly, since Matan may stir at any moment, and then I’ll have to drop everything to feed him. Like most days, I ate my husband’s homemade gazpacho for lunch (made with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, peppers, and leeks), followed by watermelon slices. I realized that I was eating almost all of the foods mentioned by Bnei Yisrael in their bitter complaints about their desert diet: “We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, watermelons, leeks, onions, and garlic” (Numbers 11:5). Had Moses turned the Nile into a blood-red river of gazpacho, with the fish swimming among the vegetables? Before I could pursue this absurd speculation, I heard the first whimpers from Matan’s bassinet. I knew it was a matter of moments before his whimpering would turn to full-throated wailing for food.

I confess that whenever Matan stirs (and he is stirring at this very moment, as I type!), my first reaction is often a sigh of exasperation. Like Coleridge with his person from Porlock, I do not handle interruptions well; and I struggle with how to manage my time given that I never know when Matan will want to be fed. In this sense he resembles Bnei Yisrael in the desert: “Rabbi Acha bar Yaakov said: In the beginning the children of Israel were like hens that peck continuously at scraps, until Moses came along and established fixed meal times” (Yoma 95b). Bnei Yisrael, a people still in their infancy after recently leaving the narrow birth canal of Mitzrayim, had not yet learned how to eat fixed meals. Perhaps, like Matan, their stomachs were still too small to sustain them for more than three hours. And so God rained down manna for them to gather. The manna tasted like shad ha-shamen, rich cream, a phrase that might more literally be translated as “the fat breast.” Like breastmilk, which will taste like whatever the mother ate the day before, the manna had a variety of different flavors. The Talmud makes this analogy explicit: “Rabbi Abahu said: Just as with the breast, a baby can taste a variety of flavors, so too when Bnei Yisrael ate the manna, they could taste a variety of flavors. And some say: It was like an actual breast. Just as a breast can have various shapes and colors, the manna too had various flavors” (Yoma 95a). In any case, Matan seems far more content with his breastmilk than Bnei Yisrael with their manna; the people of Israel began clamoring for solids to be introduced to their diet only months after their delivery from Egypt.

[An excursus] The episode about the people’s clamoring and complaining takes place just after they have “marched from the mountain of the Lord” (Numbers 10:33), which was also the site of the burning bush: “Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Yitro, priest of Midyan, drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horev, the mountain of the Lord” (Exodus 3:1). Both episodes involve the complaints of the people: In Exodus God tells Moses that he has “heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters” (3:7), and in Numbers the people “took to complaining bitterly against the Lord” (11:1). Both episodes also involve fire: “An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush” (3:2), and “a fire of the Lord broke out against the people” (11:1). Moses questions his role in both scenes: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites form Egypt” (3:11), and “Why have I not enjoyed your favor, that you have laid the burden of all this people upon me?” (11:11). At the bush, God tells Moses to put his hand into his bosom as a proof that the people will listen to him (4:6); and when the people complain, Moses asks how God could say to him, “Carry them in your bosom” (11:12). In both episodes, God’s response to Moses involves gathering the elders of Israel: “Go and assemble the elders of Israel” (3:16), and “Gather for me seventy of Israel’s elders” (11:16). The passages parallel each other with uncanny linguistic precision as Moses balks at the burdensome role with which God had previously saddled him. [End of excursus]

Moses has had it with the querulous people, who cry out to him like little babies – the text uses the word bocheh, which is the same word used when little baby Moses cried out in his ark (Exodus 2:6). And indeed Moses relates to the people as babies when he in turn cries out to God: “Why have you dealt ill with your servant, and why have I not enjoyed your favor, that you have laid the burden of all this people upon me? Did I conceive this people, did I bear them, that you should say to me, carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant?” (Numbers 11:11-12). Moses insists that he is sick and tired of nursing the people and responding to their every whimper and wail. Why can’t they leave him alone? Is he their mother? Did he give birth to them? Avivah Zornberg points out that Moses himself did not have a normal nursing experience. He went through a period in the ark when he was deprived of breastmilk altogether, and when he was returned to his mother’s bosom, his mother acted as a hired wet nurse in the employ of Pharaoh’s daughter. We might say (with apologies to Freud, as per the title of this post) that Moses was traumatized at the breast, and has not recovered. No wonder he wants the heavy burden of the people –who weighed surely much more than a watermelon—taken out of his sling.

Like Moses, I sometimes find motherhood frustrating – especially now, as I sit nursing Matan while typing the end of this post, pecking at the computer with one hand like a hen pecking at scraps. But as I look down at Matan’s big fishy eyes staring up at me from my bosom, I’m struck once again by how adorable he is. I did in fact conceive Matan, and bear him; and so unlike Bnei Yisrael and unlike Moses, I really cannot complain.

Speech for Pidyon HaBen of Matan Aharon 10.6.11

Two days ago, on Shavuot morning, Daniel and I sat in this park with Matan trying to lull him to sleep. Matan had conducted his own Tikun Leyl the night before, waking each hour to eat milk and spit up cheese in accordance with the custom to eat dairy on this chag. After a night of no sleep, I did not make it to shul that morning, so I davened in the park with Matan, sharing with him the highlights of Shacharit. Chief among them was Akdamut, the piyut recited before beginning the Torah reading, a long liturgical poem composed in the eleventh century by Rabbi Meir Yitzchak of Worms. This mystical poem moves from a description of the creation of the world to the splendors of the World to Come, and as I chanted aloud to Matan each of the ninety Aramaic stanzas, I realized how much of the piyut’s imagery was appropriate to the place where we were sitting that morning and where we are all now gathered today – beneath a trellis covered by a canopy of trees in a quiet corner of this beautiful park. The poem describes a messianic future in which all of the Tzadikim will gather in Yerushalayim, beneath a divine bridal canopy inside the Garden of Eden. There God will prepare a banquet for the righteous, and they will sit around tables of precious gems and drink their fill from overflowing goblets in a redeemed world. As we stand here today overflowing with joy, preparing to redeem our precious son and enjoy a Seudat Mitzvah on this beautiful Jerusalem morning, I cannot help but think that after joining with God in the creation of Matan, we have truly been granted a taste of the World to Come.

It seems fitting that we are celebrating Matan’s Pidyon HaBen not just two days after reciting Akdamut but also one day before reading parashat Baha’alotcha, the parsha that provides the textual underpinning for this ceremony.

כִּי לִי כָל-בְּכוֹר בִּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בָּאָדָם וּבַבְּהֵמָה בְּיוֹם הַכֹּתִי כָל-בְּכוֹר בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם הִקְדַּשְׁתִּי אֹתָם לִי. יח וָאֶקַּח אֶת-הַלְוִיִּם תַּחַת כָּל-בְּכוֹר בִּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. יט וָאֶתְּנָה אֶת-הַלְוִיִּם נְתֻנִים לְאַהֲרֹן וּלְבָנָיו מִתּוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לַעֲבֹד אֶת-עֲבֹדַת בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד
“Every firstborn among the Israelites, man as well as beast, is Mine; I consecrated them to Myself at the time that I smote the firstborn in the land of Egypt. Now I take the Levites instead of every firstborn of the Israelites, and from among the Israelites I formally assign the Levites and Aharon and his sons, to perform the ritual service for the Israelites in Ohel Moed.” (Numbers 8:17-19).

Another connection to this week’s parsha appears in a recent daf yomi, Menachot 86b. In speaking of the lights that were kindled in the Mishkan—which is also the subject of the opening of the parsha, B’haalotcha et HaNerot-- we are told:
צו את בני ישראל ויקחו אליך שמן זית זך כתית למאור להעלות נר תמיד

“Command the Israelite people to bring you clear oil of beaten olives for lighting, for kindling the eternal lamp.” (Leviticus 24:2). The Talmud teaches:
אמר רבי שמואל בר נחמני אליך ולא לי לא לאורה אני צריך
Shmuel bar Nachmani questions why the Torah adds the extra word Elecha, for you. The Talmud’s response is that God specifies that the oil for this light is “for you” because the Ner Tamid is lit for the sake of human beings who need to be reminded of God’s eternal presence, and not for God, who needs no such reminder. It is we human beings whose faith in God’s presence may flicker and grow dim, and it is therefore we who need the eternal lamp, which burns not for God’s sake, but for ours.

We might extend this concept to say that God does not need the Bekhorot consecrated to him, and when we redeem them back, we are not just exempting them from priestly service. Just as God does not need the light of the eternal lamp, so too does God not need Matan Aharon to engage in Temple service. It is human beings of imperfect faith who need the reminder the lamp provides, just as it is human beings in an imperfect world who look to the potential of new life to perform some act of Tikun in the world, thereby inspiring us with hope for the future. And so Daniel and I would like to think that today we are not just buying back our son from the Kohanim; we are also dedicating him to doing God’s work in a world sorely in need of repair and renewal. We offer our Matan as a gift to partner in some aspect of God’s work, and to heal some part of God’s creation.

It is in this spirit of partnering in creation that we will shortly be planting a tree in honor of Matan’s birth and in honor of the birth of Hallel Libson, daughter of our friends Ayelet and Adi. The Talmud teaches in Masechet Gittin, in the midst of the aggadot about the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem, that there was a custom whereby whenever a baby boy was born, a cedar tree would be planted in his honor; and when a girl was born, a cypress. And when they would get married, the two trees would be cut down and used to make the poles for their chuppah. Now, we don’t want to make any assumptions about Hallel and Matan’s future romantic predilections –we cannot know whether Matan will date older women, or whether Hallel will consent to marry the boy next door—but Daniel and I do like the idea of putting down roots in the soil of Eretz Yisrael just a few years after we each made aliyah, as per the words of Shirat HaYam:
תְּבִאֵמוֹ וְתִטָּעֵמוֹ בְּהַר נַחֲלָתְךָ מָכוֹן לְשִׁבְתְּךָ פָּעַלְתָּ יְהוָה מִקְּדָשׁ אֲדֹנָי כּוֹנְנוּ יָדֶיךָ.
You, God, will bring them and plant them in Your own mountain, the place You made to dwell in, O Lord, the sanctuary O Lord. (Exodus 15:17)

The Mikdash is the province of Aharon HaKohen, Matan’s Biblical namesake, to whom many of the commandments of this week’s parsha are addressed. It is Aharon who is supposed to mount the lamps of the Menorah, and it is Aharon who supervises the Levites and prepares them to serve in Ohel Moed, the place of God’s dwelling during the Israelites’ journey to the promised land where they ultimately put down roots. More generally, Aharon is responsible for the ritual aspects of Jewish worship, whereas his brother Moshe gives them the Torah, the book of laws and teachings that we are meant to occupy ourselves with day and night, as we are reminded in Akdamut:
צבי וחמיד ורגיג דילאון בלעותא
God desires and longs and covets that Israel should toil in Torah study.

In naming our son Matan Aharon, we hope that he will embody both of these aspects of Jewish tradition – the lifelong commitment to Talmud Torah, as well as the rituals involved in divine service. We hope that our son, like his namesake, will be Ohev et HaBriot, and that his love for human beings will find expression in the teaching of Torah, so that he might be m’karvan la Torah – bringing other people closer to Torah. The root of m’karvan is also the root of korban, sacrifice. As we redeem our Matan Aharon today from the priestly responsibility for the korbanot, it is our fervent wish that he will dedicate himself to being one who is m’karvan laTorah, one who brings the light of Torah into people’s lives so that it may burn steadily and unwaveringly for all eternity.

Love in the Time of Omer, Again

This Lag Ba’Omer I found myself thinking of Shimon bar Yochai and his son, who studied Torah together in a cave for twelve years. The Talmud (Shabbat 33b) relates that they shed their clothes and sat covered in sand up to their necks and broke from study only to dress and daven. It dawns on me that this is not so different from how Matan and I have been spending our mornings -- albeit without the sand.

Matan generally wakes up around 6am (to the extent that one can generalize about the daily habits of a two-week old). He doesn’t cry, but when I peer into his bassinet in the early morning light, I notice that his eyes (which are no longer brown, but bluish) are wide open. He blinks furiously when he catches my gaze, and I lift him up out and begin singing “Rise and Shine.” By the time Noah is getting his children into the “arky arky,” I’ve changed his diaper and carried him over to the rocking chair where I sit and nurse him. I marvel at the fact that my body can satisfy all his nutritional needs, like the carob tree and spring of water miraculously created for Bar Yochai and his son to sustain them in the cave. During this first nursing of the morning, I sing him Modeh Ani followed by “greatest hits” from Psukei D’Zimra and Shacharit, including most of the Hallelujahs. (My repertoire also includes El Adon, even on weekdays, because I love the melody so much.) Often he’ll wait to detach from the breast until I finish a particular Tefillah, though I’m not sure whether this is out of Koved Rosh or a keen sense of melody.

When Matan finishes nursing, we move on to Daf Yomi, which I don’t really learn but rather sing aloud. In the interest of time, I merely read through Steinstaltz’s commentary, making my best attempt to understand the discussion at hand. (As a friend recently quipped, instead of Baby Einstein, we are educating Matan through Baby Steinsaltz.) Yesterday we learned a sugya about the number of times oil must be added to a Minchah sacrifice that is offered in a vessel. The term used for each addition of oil is “Matan Shemen,” as I was excited to point out to our Matan. And now that we are on the Korban Todah, the thanksgiving offering (and the bread that came with it), I have the opportunity to share with Matan all the many reasons I have to be thankful after nine months of anticipating what it would be like to hold our child in my arms.

Matan usually falls asleep at some point in the middle of Daf Yomi (lately he’s been holding out until Amud Bet, so maybe there’s hope). I put him down in his bassinet and take advantage of the break to brush my teeth (at last!), jump in the shower, throw on some clothes, and eat breakfast. Then we head out for a morning walk. I gently place Matan in a sling without rousing him, strap the diaper bag (which has replaced my L.L. Bean backpack) over my shoulder, and invent a destination. Everywhere we go, we see the rest of the world busy at work, and I am reminded of how my life is so different now that I am on maternity leave. I think about Bar Yochai and his son, who emerged from the cave and saw everyone around them plowing and sowing and engaging in other forms of labor. They had just spent twelve years learning Torah, and so they could not identify with the working life. I know how they must have felt. Our apartment often feels like a cave, with my whole existence confined to the seat where I nurse and the table where I change Matan. It is hard to imagine that just two weeks ago, I was at my desk at work at 8:30 every morning, selling books to publishers across the country and communicating with clients around the world.

By the time Matan and I return from our walk, he is usually just waking up again, so I change him and nurse him while reading to him aloud from my novel. I want Matan to be exposed only to wholesome literature – thus far he’s been read Alexander McCall Smith’s The Lost Art of Gratitude and the first half of Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’ s Last Stand. I enjoy reading him novels with dialogue because I can act out the various voices. Nonfiction doesn’t work as well; inevitably I give up and start reading to myself, because it doesn’t seem worth the effort of vocalizing in a monotone.

Matan falls asleep as I read to him, so I wheel his bassinet into the kitchen and place him down in it. While he sleeps I eat my lunch and try to answer a few emails. As soon as he wakes up, we turn on Skype and speak with either Matan’s Savta or my grandmother, depending on who is available. Everyone wants to see Matan on the video, but he’s too short to reach the camera, so I construct a booster seat atop the kitchen table consisting of my Norton Anthology of Poetry and Heschel’s Man is Not Alone. Matan’s feet dangle over the edge of the books, about an inch off the table, and he swings them while we Skype. Often he falls asleep mid-conversation, generally when my grandmother starts complaining about the weather in Princeton. I quickly lift him over my shoulder so his back is to the camera and he doesn’t seem rude.

Although he is a big sleeper, Matan always wakes up when I start playing our CD of Bialik nursery rhymes. We dance around the house to Yossi BaKinor and Rutz Ben Susi, two songs that I learned for the first time only this past week. (I now know them both by heart.) As the light begins to fade, I place Matan in his mechanical swing and play NadNed, and once again he dozes off. His head slumps forward and his blue hat creeps down over his eyes, so he looks like a smurf, or like one of the seven dwarves.

By the time Matan next stirs, his Abba is home to entertain him, make dinner, and relieve me for a while. One night last week the three of us tried to go to an evening shiur. We brought Matan in a carseat and D sat in between the two of us. After about ten minutes, Matan had woken up and I’d fallen fast asleep. D looked to his left and then to his right, trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture….

When Matan falls asleep for the night (errr, for the first Ashmura of the night) we sing him the Shema followed by a few soothing songs, mostly Seudah Shlishit melodies. He will wake up every two hours throughout the night. Each time I hear him whimper, I find myself muttering God’s words to Bar Yochai: “Have you come to destroy my world?” But then I peer into his bassinet at his tiny clenched fists which he holds over his head, and at his fingernails the size of sesame seeds. As I lift him out to feed him yet again, I remember that I have created his world, and that he has essentially recreated mine. His eyes peek out from under his hat like Bar Yochai’s head beneath the sand, and I kiss him and hold him close.

Speeches for Brit of Matan Aharon, 18.5.11

INK:

From the moment we found out I was pregnant, D and I began counting. A pregnancy is measured in nine months or forty weeks, each of which we counted in excited anticipation. By the time we came to Pesach and sang about Tisha Yarchei Leida, we were no longer counting months or weeks, but days to my due date. And then that date passed, and we moved to counting the days past my due date. By Yom HaZikaron the baby was three days late, so we walked the entire way back from Har Herzl to our apartment in the German Colony to try to stimulate the onset of labor. Then on Yom Haatzmaut, when I was four days overdue, we went to the Jerusalem Theatre for Hidon HaTanakh, a program I watch every year on the internet, hoping that if we watched it live, then the suspense that accompanied each Biblical trivia question would intensify the contractions that had already begun. We also wanted to give our baby a chance to review all the Torah he had learned in the womb, before he came out and forgot it all. (We are confident that if only his voice could have been heard from inside my uterus, he would have been the winner this year!) The Hidon seemed to have done the trick, because by the time we got home that afternoon, we were already counting the minutes between contractions.

That night, in between contractions I remembered to count the Omer – I guess that my head was already so used to counting by that point, which is perhaps the reason that this is one of the only years that I have made it so far in the Sefira. When we count the Omer, we are of course counting up the days to Shavuot, Zman Matan Torateinu, for which our son is named. He was born during the week of Shabbat Parashat Behar Sinai, which reviews the laws given at Sinai, including the countdown to שנת השמיטה. And he was also born during the sixth perek of Masekhet Menahot in the Daf Yomi cycle, the chapter that deals with Minchat HaOmer, the barley sacrifice brought to the Temple on the sixteenth day of Nisan, the second night of Pesach. The Talmud explains that this is also the night that we begin counting the Omer, and this chapter elaborates on the details of how we count, when we count, and what happens if we miss a day in the countdown to Matan Torah.

Our own Matan, having internalized the lesson of Yom Haatzmaut, held out until he could have his own independent birthday, and so he was not born until 7am the next morning. He was given to us after an unforgettable Tikun Leyl, a long night which I spent at home with my mother and D and our wonderful doula. As the night drew on and my labor intensified, it truly felt like the heavens were opening for our child to pass through into this world. When we finally drove to the hospital at 5:30am, the sun rising in a magnificent האיר מזרח over the hills of Ein Karem, it felt a little like the delirium of early Shavuot morning davening after a night of no sleep. Like Bnei Yisrael at Har Sinai, it was with loud cries and trembling that I received from heaven the gift of our son, our Matan.

Matan means gift, and it is used to refer to the gift of Torah, which Matan learned in the womb and which D and I have been teaching him since the moment he was born – today he is eight dapim old. The first letter of his name, Mem, is a remez to the first name of my mother’s father, Rabbi Mordecai Rubin, a beloved teacher of Torah with whom I had the privilege to study before he died just a year after my Bat Mitzvah. Matan’s name also contains the two letters Taf and Nun, which are the root of the Aramaic word for “teach” or “learn,” used in the Talmud to introduce an earlier teaching: Tanya, Tani, Tanu Rabbanan. Torah is passed down from generation to generation by teaching and learning, and it is our fervent wish to transmit to our son the love of Talmud Torah which is such an integral part of the lives of both of our families, and of our love for one another. D, I feel so fortunate that my son has such a special father, and so blessed that you are my husband. Watching you fall in love in love with our son has made me fall in love with you all over again. I pray that God will grant us the merit to raise our son to Torah, as well as to Chuppah and Maasim Tovim, and that the gift of our Matan will teach us the lessons of gratitude and awe, so that we may forever remember to count our blessings.

D:

Matan’s middle name is Aharon in memory of his great-grandfather, Aharon Yizhak Levenstein, whose twenty-fourth yahrzeit was yesterday. My zaidie was an extraordinary man: a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, a noted baal tzedaka, Holocaust survivor, businessman, and ardent Zionist. But first and foremost, he was a builder in every sense of the word: he sought, after the Shoah, to lay the foundations for future generations. Like Aharon HaKohen, he suffered the devastating loss of his first children but never lost his optimism and faith in a more vibrant future. After he survived the Shoah thanks to Oskar Schindler, he reconnected with his wife, who had survived separately, and at age 42 and 40, in an Austrian DP camp, they miraculously gave birth to my mother, an only child who in turn raised five children of her own and is now grandmother to ten, ken yirbu. We hope my zaidie is watching today with joy at the enormous success of his efforts to build the family and Jewish future which our Matan inherits.

We hope our son will combine the legacy he inherits with his own unique gifts, fulfilling a bracha in this week’s parsha:
וַאֲכַלְתֶּם יָשָׁן, נוֹשָׁן; וְיָשָׁן, מִפְּנֵי חָדָשׁ תּוֹצִיאוּ.
As a sign of Hashem’s blessing, harvests will be so abundant that older crops will overlap with the newer ones that, during the times of the Beit HaMikdash, were permitted only after the Omer offering had been brought. In naming our son after both of maternal grandfathers, we hope to mingle the old with the new. We pray that our son will embody the values of the older generation, while also coming into his own as a first-generation Israeli, which would have made all of our grandparents very proud.

As we stand here today with Matan Aharon on this seam between the Old City of Yerushalayim and the new, surrounded by all four of Matan’s grandparents and five of his many aunts and uncles, we feel the plenitude of Hashem’s bracha.

The prior generations played an active role in bringing Matan into this world. We are grateful to my parents, Baba and Saba, for remaining in Israel since Pesach and for organizing this simcha. We will also forever remember the devoted role played by Matan’s Savta Alisa, who has been living in our second bedroom for the past two weeks and can now add to her Jewish continuity professional portfolio the title of midwife par excellence. Thank you Savta, and thank you Saba Neil for making the trip at the last minute to join us at Matan’s brit. We know you also bring love and greetings from Matan’s great grandparents in Princeton, שיבדלו לחיים ארוכים. May we merit to celebrate all his milestones in good health together.

We also want to recognize our siblings Michael, Mindy, and Eytan who likewise made the trip to be here today. And a special thanks to Estie and Elizur, who prepared us with every conceivable baby provision except the baby himself. If our child is better dressed than we are, Estie deserves the credit. To all of you and Matan’s many uncles, aunts, and cousins, we love you much and are grateful for your support.

Finally, INK focused on the significance of Matan’s birth during Sefirat HaOmer, but I want to add that this transitional time has additional meaning for the two of us, as it was the period during which we fell in love. It is through the sacrifice of the Omer that the new generation, the latest offspring is celebrated and enjoyed on a festive morning when the eastern sky is illuminated. And it is during the Omer that we find the equilibrium of our love, as we move from the passionate ardor of Shir Hashirim to the more mature commitment of Rut and Boaz. So it is appropriate that it was on an unforgettable night and morning of the Omer that I found my love for you, INK, renewed. As I told our son immediately after he was born, he is blessed with a very special mother, which you have shown yourself to be in the first week of his life. Few mothers would begin reading to their children fifteen minutes after birth, and you are perhaps the only mother who has sung Daf Yomi to your baby each morning throughout his first week. You gave birth to Matan with a sensitivity, vulnerability, and profound strength that is authentically and wholly your own, and I am supremely privileged to share my life with you. Matan’s birth, which we celebrate today on Pesach Sheni, will forever be a midway point for us between Shir Hashirim and Megillat Rut, between passionate Ahava Raba and enduring Ahavat Olam. May we merit to shower our son with every form of affection, as we raise him in the image of our parents and grandparents to love Torah, Am Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael, and to always seek out the tzelem elokim that is inscribed on his adorable, perfect face.

Making Seder: Towards an Idea of Order

For the past few weeks, my husband has been urging me to clear off my desk so that we can replace it with a baby crib. The crib, which arrived just a few days ago from my sister-in-law along with an array of car seats, strollers, and bright orange garbage bags filled with baby clothes, will not fit in our apartment until I get rid of my desk. But I have not been able to let it go. And so my great wooden desk--stacked with folders marked “ideas for the Pesach seder,” “Bronfman seduction,” “Babylonian menstruation,” as well as a pile of books including the JPS tanakh, Masechet Menachot, the current issue of Lilith, and Benne Lau’s book on Hazal--is an island in a sea of baby supplies. When sitting down before it, I cannot get up unless I push back one of the strollers, climb over a garbage bag, and straddle a big wicker box labeled “toys.” You might say that the baby supplies form a wall, to my right and to my left, and I am harboring a murderous urge to hurl rocking horse and rider into the sea.

Of course, I am extremely grateful to have received a full supply of baby goods from my sister-in-law, which saves us many hours and shekels in the weeks ahead. But the sheer physical reality of this paraphernalia crowding what was once my office has left me quite overwhelmed. In an attempt to reclaim some idea of order, I packed my bag for the hospital tonight, as instructed by the stack of eleven baby books behind my bed (all courtesy of the literary agency where I work): It is never too early to pack for the hospital – you must be prepared! In stuffing my hand cream, underwear, hot water bottle, and Alexander McCall Smith novels (I chose my hospital reading three months ago) into a tote bag, I felt a bit like the Israelites packing to leave Egypt. I too was gathering all the possessions I would need to take with me into the uncharted wilderness of motherhood, a land of flowing with milk, which I am told is characterized by many a Leyl Shimurim-- long nights of no sleep without even a pillar of fire to keep vigil beside me.

On the other hand, once the baby is born, it will no longer be inside of me, which I suppose offers some degree of relief. I find it amusing that watermelons came into season in Israel the very week I entered my eighth month, just when I began to feel like I was carrying one around. Perhaps in a few weeks, when beset by the wailing cries of a baby that wishes it were back in my narrow womb, I, too, will pine for the watermelon to be curled up mutely inside me again. We remember the watermelons we ate in Egypt....

That watermelon-sized baby inside me is really all I need at this stage. If I had to, I could flee to the hospital b’chipazon, without my hospital bag and with only my girded loins and my sandals on my feet. If my contractions drive me out of my home so that I cannot delay, I could leave even without preparing any provisions for myself. After all, Pesach is not a holiday of preparedness. No one is ever fully ready for Pesach when the sun sets on the fourteenth of Nisan. There is always more to cook, more to clean, more to study, more to prepare. Perhaps that’s why the matzah is such a powerful symbol. Matzah is unfinished bread. It is dough that has not been given sufficient time to rise. Eating matzah is a reminder that we don’t always have time to plan in advance, and that sometimes we must just pick up and run, placing our trust in God as we hurl ourselves forwards towards our divinely ordained destiny. I hope the baby that is cooking inside me does not emerge half-baked--and certainly I feel quite puffed up and leavened--but I don’t think I’ll ever feel completely ready for labor and childbirth, let alone motherhood. I do know, though, that this year I have a very different understanding of what it means to see myself as if I have left Egypt. I will be as prepared as I can be, and, in spirit of Dayenu, it will have to be enough.

Zaphod's Phylacteries (Menahot 37a)

Today’s Daf (Menahot 37) ought to have been off limits for pregnant women. I already have nightmares about birth and babies – last night I dreamt that I left my baby on the stove for too long, and it started to cry because it was overheated. (I was grateful when my husband explained that this dream was obviously inspired by leaving artichokes on the stove for too long, which is a mistake I often make.) I know that birth is a natural process, but it also seems like a miracle from on high. If I am blessed with a healthy baby, I will be overcome with gratitude to God – to the extent that I find myself saying “Godwilling,” a word I never really invoked before, in every other sentence. It seems presumptuous to discuss baby names or to order a stroller or to talk about who will care for the baby while I teach this summer – how can I know that this baby will come out alive and well? I feel, more than ever before, how much is entrusted to God, and how little is in our human hands.

And so I was somewhat disturbed to find, amidst a discussion of Tefillin in the third chapter of Menahot, a reference to babies and birth defects. The Talmud is discussing the proper place for laying the head Tefillin. First the rabbis establish that the Biblical phrase “between the eyes” refers to the skull, specifically “the place where a baby’s head is soft.” As I’ve learned from my bumblebee-colored bedside companion “Pregnancy for Dummies,” the bones on the skull of a newborn are not yet fused, because the head must be able to squeeze through the narrow birth canal. For this reason it is so dangerous to touch the soft spot on a baby’s head. But it is that very soft spot (albeit not on a baby, of course) where the Tefillin are supposed to be placed. This discussion of the head Tefillin inspires a question from Pleymo, who asks Rabbi: “If a person has two heads, on which one should he lay Tefillin?” Rabbi, convinced that Pleymo is pulling his leg (one of his legs, at least), responds angrily: “Either get out of here, or be excommunicated!”

At that very moment, in the felicitous synchronicity that is often a feature of Talmudic narratives, a man happens to walk into Rabbi’s beit midrash: “In the meantime, a man walked in and asked: My baby was born with two heads. How much money do I need to give to the Kohen?” The new father is not asking about Tefillin, but about Pidyon HaBen. As we learn in the Torah, every firstborn has to be redeemed for the price of “five shekels per head” (Numbers 3:47). But what if the baby has two heads? That is, what if the baby resembles Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed former president of the galaxy in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker trilogy? The Talmud answers that baby Zaphod would need to be redeemed for ten shekels, five per head. And so Pleymo, who had just been rebuked by Rabbi for his silly question, is vindicated (or should I say redeemed?) by the inquiring new father.

The question about Zaphod’s Tefillin shel rosh remains unanswered, and the Talmud does not even consider what the three-armed former president of the galaxy is supposed to do about his shel yad. (OK, we understand that Tefillin go on the left hand – but what if you have two left hands? Which is different, of course, from two left feet….) Nor do we ever re-encounter the hapless father of the hydra-headed twins, who had to pay double for his Pidyon HaBen. And certainly we do not know anything about the expression on his wife’s face when she first laid eyes upon her Siamese progeny. I can imagine her look of horror, and can only hope, as I crawl into bed, that she does not haunt my nightmares tonight.

The Book of Names

I spent much of my childhood dreaming up names for my future children. On Shabbat afternoons I would sit on the floor perusing our heavy World Book Dictionary in search of beautiful words. Afflicted with an overly poetic sensibility, I didn’t care much for the meanings of these words – I privileged sound over sense, which is how I came up with names like “Parsimonious Avarice the Evanescent.” I loved the seductive mellifluousness of the soft s’s, and didn’t mind that the name I had chosen for my firstborn in fact meant “Stingy Greed the Fleeting.” Her siblings would be known as Chevrolet Charlotta, Chaperon Cliché, and Azalea Rendezvous, names that were surely influenced by my reading of Anne of Green Gables. If Anne could rename herself Cordelia and refer to Barry’s Pond as “The Lake of Shining Waters,” then surely I, too, could martial the English lexicon in service of my own phonetic aesthetic.

Now, twenty years later, I am perplexed to find myself at a loss for a name for the child currently kicking around in my belly. Instead of reading the World Book, I sit in shul and pause at every other word in the siddur, wondering if it could be my child’s name. “L’hodot l’hallel l’shabeach l’faer” – Hodaya? Hallel? Shevach? Pe’er? Occasionally I also look in the parsha, though not this week, lest my child be afflicted with a name like Se’et or Sapachat or Baheret. I think about the names of my friends’ children, and the grandparents we might want to name after, and the names of the literary characters I love. But thus far, I have not had any brainstorms.

Perhaps this focus on names is an attempt to intellectualize my pregnancy, which has been the most intense experience of embodiment I could possibly imagine. If I concentrate on the name of the baby, I can take a break from thinking about the extra thirty pounds weighing me down and preventing me from leaping out of bed in the morning. I might actually delude myself into thinking that I can go for a morning jog, forgetting the intense pressure on my pelvis and the soreness in my upper thighs each time I try to take a long stride. I might even succeed in distracting myself from the terrifying awareness that the head of my baby needs to be able to fit through my own body and make its way into the world, a prospect that makes me tremble in fear of the pain that lies ahead.

The contrast between potential baby names and the pain of physical embodiment brings me to the beginning of Sefer Shmot, the book whose narrative we will recount next week at the Pesach seder. These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob. The book opens with the names of Jacob’s sons, who in turn had many more sons, in a process that surely involved great pain, since the midrash tells us that the Israelite women had six babies in their bellies at a time. The Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased and reproduced and grew mightier very very much, and the land became filled with them. The language of the text, with its rapid succession of synonyms and its doubled “very very,” reproduces itself, replicating the embodied experience on the semantic plane. Suffering under their Egyptian taskmasters, the Israelites cry out (vayizaku), and shriek (va’yeanchu), and their moans (shavatam) and groans (naakatam) reach God’s ears in all their synonymous multiplicity.

Of course, while the Israelite men are laboring to build Pitom and Ramsees, their wives are laboring to bring forth their multiple births, who emerge so quickly from the womb that the midwives Shifra and Puah do not even have time to look at the birthstool and evaluate the sex(tuplets). Their moans and groans of childbirth blend with the moans and groans of their husbands in the fields, until God can ignore them no longer. I have taken note of you, says God to Moses, invoking the same language (פקד) used to describe the impregnation of Sarah: And God took note of Sarah… And Sarah conceived and bore a son. God takes note of the Israelites, causing them to reproduce en masse; but at the same time, God hears their cries and delivers the people from the narrow birth canal of Egypt. Perhaps this is the rationale behind the very first commandment given after the exodus:

That very day the Lord freed the Israelites from the land of Egypt, troop by troop. The Lord spoke further to Moses, saying, “Consecrate to Me every first-born, man and beast, the first issue of every womb among the Israelites is mine. And Moses said to the people: Remember this day, on which you went out from Egypt, from the house of bondage, how the Lord freed you from it with a mighty hand.

God delivered His firstborn son Israel from the womb, and immediately afterwards, we are commanded to consecrate our firstborns to God. When we experience the convulsions of childbirth, which I’m told are as cataclysmic as the splitting of the sea, we must recognize the divine hand that guides each firstborn through the narrow womb never before stretched by a child. We must trust that our moans and groans and cries and shrieks are reaching up to the throne of the One who is responsible for the creation of all new life, the One who takes note and delivers, and the One whose name is the ultimate mystery: I will be what I will be. And so this is what I have decided to tell myself as I puzzle over lists of names in an attempt to stave off my panic about childbirth: I will trust in God, and, with God’s help, it will be what it will be.

Reading while Walking while Pregnant

Yesterday I went for a morning jog and tripped on the cobblestones of Derekh Hevron. This is not the first time I have had a bad fall while running—the sidewalks of Jerusalem are notoriously ill-kept, even though, as we learn in Masekhet Ketubot (112a), Rabbi Hanina repaired the roads of Israel when he arrived from Babylonia. (He started in Akko. Perhaps he didn’t make it this far south). I have fallen many times before, but never while pregnant. It was for this reason that when a few concerned pedestrians rushed to my aid, I found myself scared to get up. “I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine,” I assured them, remaining hunched over lest they catch sight of my gravid belly. I have learned, over the past few months, that pregnancy is not a personal affair in this city. Everyone—both men and women, those who have had children and those who have not—feels at liberty to offer hectoring advice. The last thing I wanted was to be rebuked: “How can you run when you’re pregnant? You are endangering your unborn child!” And so I waited until everyone had dispersed before lifting myself up, brushing off my bloody knees, and continuing on my way.

I ran the full length of Derekh Hevron, and then came home to clean off. The soap stung on my open wounds, so I took advantage of the opportunity to practice the pain-management techniques we’ve learned in our childbirth class. I exhaled strongly through my mouth, shaping my lips in alternate configurations: “Hee hoo, hee hoo, hee hoo.” Our teacher told us to come up with a mantra to repeat when the pain gets very intense. Though I’m not pregnant with twins, the words that always come to mind are Rivka’s cry to God: "אם כן, למה זה אנוכי?" And if so, why do I exist? Rivka feels the struggle of unknown forces inside her and questions her very existence. Avivah Zornberg points out that Rivka’s name is an anagram of “Kirbah,” the interior space in which the babies struggle in Genesis 25:22: “The children struggled within her (b’kirbah).” Her womb becomes a scrambled version of her name, confounding her sense of identity.

I relate to Rivka’s confusion about the boundaries of her own identity when I feel the baby moving inside me. Suddenly I am more than just myself. This raises a host of ethical questions. Am I responsible for eating and sleeping healthily because my habits directly impact another creature? Are there new limits to my autonomy because of the alien being I am hosting inside? Take today, for instance, when I walked the 50 minutes from Baka to Meah Shearim while reading a novel. It is true that reading while walking entails certain risks: I might trip, or bump into someone, or fail to take note of a red light. These are risks that I’ve always been willing to take; it seems worth it, for the sake of all the pages I manage to read while in transit. But now that have a baby b’Kirbi, I am not so sure. I think about the opening of Masekhet Bava Kama (4a), where we are told, “אדם – שמירת גופו עליו הוא.” A person is responsible for guarding his own body from harming others. In the past, I have always interpreted this statement to mean that given my clumsiness and obliviousness, I should never carry an umbrella, or ride a bicycle, or drive a car – all of these activities extend the radius of the space for which I am responsible, with the risk that I might poke out someone’s eyes, or run over a hapless pedestrian. I always imagined that any potential damage would be outward, projected into the world with which I come into contact. Now, bestirred by a profound sense of my own inhabited interiority, I realize that this damage might also be inward. If I walk into a pole while reading and walking, it is not simply a matter between me and the pole, but between me and my unborn child.

If I am honest with myself, I recognize that part of the reason I am compelled to jog regularly and to read while walking is because I am uncomfortable with the notion of sitting still. I have a hard time doing nothing – the day is short, and the work great. If I ever find myself standing in line at the post office without a book to read, I go crazy; how can I just wait there, watching the minutes tick away? To some extent, pregnancy has enabled me to overcome some of this compulsiveness about using time to the fullest. When I feel the baby moving, I remember that even when I am doing nothing productive or creative, something is being produced and created within. This was a profound realization, as well as a spiritual one. When the Israelites were wandering in the desert, they questioned God: “Is God in our midst (b’kirbeinu – in our Kirbah), or not?” Of course, God longs for nothing more than to dwell inside the people: “They shall build Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell inside them.” It is paradoxically in those moments when I am most still that the baby inside me becomes most active, asserting its presence with powerful kicks and thrusts. In those rare moments of rest, when I stop relentlessly achieving and pursuing, I feel a sense of divine indwelling. I realize that it is not I alone—and not I and my husband alone—who are responsible for the creation of this child, who we pray will emerge into the world and render the image of God yet more manifest.

בניית המשכן כעבודה יצירתית: פרשת ויקהל

האם בניית המשכן היתה עבודה יצירתית?
אנו מוצאים בתורה שכל פרטי בניית המשכן נמצאים פעמיים, בפרשות תרומה-תצוה כצויי מהאל למשה ("ועשית"), ובפרשת ויקהל פקודי כדווח על מה עשו ("ויעש"). כמעט כל הפרטים—המזבח, הכיור, המנורה, הכלים—זהים בין הצויי לבין הביצוע. ה' מצוה למשה איך לבנות את המשכן עם כל פרטיה, ואז בצלאל—האומן הראשי בונה לפי ההוראות. אבל – האם אכן כך היה המעשה?

אני רוצה להסתכל איתכם על כמה מדרשים שמראים שעבודת המשכן לא היתה רק מלאכה, אלא גם אמנות יצירתית. המדרש מביא תמונה אחר של בניית המשכן, תמונה שמראה שהחזון—הנושא של השבתון שלנו—היה חלק עיקרי בבניית המשכן. נקרא את המדרשים ביחד וננסה להבין –האם בצלאל היה אומן, או פשוט בעל מקצוע? האם יש לנו מה ללמוד מבניית המשכן, לגבי חזון ויצירתיות?

במדבר רבה י"ב:י
רבי יהושע דסכנין, בשם רבי לוי אמר: בשעה שאמר הקדוש ברוך הוא למשה: עשו לי משכן היה לו להעמיד ארבע קונטיסים ולמתוח את המשכן עליהם, אלא מלמד שהראה הקב"ה למשה למעלן, אש אדומה, אש ירוקה, אש שחורה, אש לבנה.
אמר לו: כתבניתם אשר אתה מראה בהר.
רבי ברכיה בשם ר' בצלה: למלך שהיה לו לבוש משובח עשוי במרגליטון.
אמר לבן ביתו: עשה לי כזה.
אמר לו: אדוני המלך, יכול אני לעשות כמותו?!
אמר לו: אני בכבודי ואתה בסממנך.
כך, אמר משה לפני הקדוש ברוך הוא: אלהי יכול אני לעשות כאלה?!
אמר לו: כתבנית אשר אני וגו' בתכלת, ובארגמן, ובתולעת שני, ובשש.
אמר הקב"ה למשה: אם את עושה, מה שלמעלה למטה, אני מניח סנקליטון שלי של מעלה, וארד ואצמצם שכינתי ביניהם למטה.
למעלה, שרפים עומדים, אף למטה, עצי שטים עומדים.
העמד אין כתיב כא, ן אלא עומדים, כנתון באסטרטיא של מעלה. הה"ד (שם ו): שרפים עומדים ממעל לו מה למעלה כוכבים, אף למטה כוכבים.

מה מפריע לדרשן? כתוב בתורה, ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם, וגם "וראה ועשה בתבניתם אשר אני מראה בהר." מה בדיוק הראה ה' למשה בהר? לא תבנית של המקדש שהוא היה צריך לזכור ולהעתיק, אלא חזון של אש בארבעה צבעים—דבר שבכלל לא קים בעולם שלנו! זה רק מגדיל את הבעיה – אם החומרים לא נמצאים בעולם, איך אפשר לבנות משכן מהם?

עבודת המשכן, אני רוצה לטעון, היתה עבודה של תרגום. משה היה צריך לתרגם את החזון שראה בהר סיני לעבודה של ממש בעולם שבו אנו חיים. משה לא אמור פשוט להעתיק דגם, אלא לתרגם את הדגם השמימי לורזיה ארצי. במקום שרפים עומדים, יהיה עצי שטים עומדים. אנו רואים את הקשר בין החזון לבין המימוש במדרש הבא:

תנחומא ויקרא י"א:ח'
וזה מעשה המנורה ( במד' ח ד).
מלמד, שהראה לו הקדוש ברוך הוא באצבע את המנורה, ואף על פי כן נתקשה בה הרבה משה לעשותו.
מה עשה הקדוש ברוך הוא?
חקקה על כף ידו של משה.
אמר לו: וראה ועשה בתבניתם (שמו' כה מ), כשם שחקקתיה על כף ידך.
ואף על פי כן נתקשה בה משה ואמר: מקשה תיעשה המנורה (שם שם לא). כלומר, מה קשה לעשות.
אמר לו הקדוש ברוך הוא: השלך את הזהב לאש והמנורה תיעשה מאליה, שנאמר: מקשה תיעשה המנורה.
כתיב תיעשה, מעצמה תיעשה.
מלמד, שנתקשה לו המנורה, והראה לו הקדוש ברוך הוא באצבע, שנאמר: [ו]זה.

המדרש הזה משחק בקשר בין העין לבין האצבע. ה' מראה למשה את המשכן, אבל "מקשה תעשה את המנורה" – מה קשה היה המנורה למשה, עם כל נביעה, כפתוריה, פרחיה,וששה הקנים. לכן ה' חקק את המנורה על ידו של משה. זה לא רק שהלוחות היו כתובים באצבע אלוהים, אלא גם התבנית של בית אלוקים, היינו המשכן. ובכך משה יכול להביא את המשכן חקוק על ידו משמים—מקום החזון—אל הארץ—מקום המימוש.

אבל עבודת המשכן היה לא רק עבודה של משה. עיקר העבודה נעשית על ידי העם, אנשים שנקראים "חכמת לב." מי היו?

רמב"ן שמות ל"ה: כ"א
(כא): ויבאו כל איש אשר נשאו לבו -
על החכמים העושים במלאכה יאמר כן, כי לא מצינו על המתנדבים נשיאות לב, אבל יזכיר בהם נדיבות.
וטעם אשר נשאו לבו -
לקרבה אל המלאכה, כי לא היה בהם שלמד את המלאכות האלה ממלמד, או מי שאימן בהן ידיו כלל, אבל מצא בטבעו שידע לעשות כן, ויגבה לבו בדרכי ה' לבא לפני משה לאמר לו אני אעשה כל אשר אדני דובר. וכבר הזכרתי זה בסדר האחר (לעיל לא ב). והנה אמר שבאו לפני משה כל אשר נשאו לבו לקרבה אל המלאכה, וכל אשר נדבה רוחו אותו הביאו התרומה. והנה משה אמר לכולם כי קרא ה' בשם בצלאל ואהליאב (פסוק ל), ואחרי כן קרא להם משה ואל כל חכם לב (להלן לו ב): שיבואו לפניו ונתן להם הנדבה:

מה מפריע לרמב"ן? למה כתוב גם "נשאו לבו" וגם "נדבה רוחו"? מה ההבדל? כנראה אלו שנדבה רוחם היו אלו שתרמו למשכן. אבל אלו שנשאו לבו היו אלו שמצאו בלבם ובטבעם שידעו איך לבנות בית לה'. הם קבלו סוג של השראה ומצאו שהם יודעים איך לבנות משכן, למרות שלא היה בהן שלמד את המלאכות האלו.

ובראשם היה בצלאל. מי היה בצלאל ומאיפה הוא קיבל את הידע שלו?

רמב"ן שמות ל"א: ב'
(ב): ראה קראתי בשם בצלאל בן אורי בן חור -
אמר השם למשה ראה קראתי בשם, ומשה אמר לישראל ראו קרא ה' בשם (להלן לה ל). והטעם, כי ישראל במצרים פרוכים בעבודת חומר ולבנים, לא למדו מלאכת כסף וזהב וחרושת אבנים טובות ולא ראו אותם כלל. והנה הוא פלא שימצא בהם אדם חכם גדול בכסף ובזהב ובחרושת אבן ועץ וחושב ורוקם ואורג, כי אף בלומדים לפני חכמים לא ימצא בקי בכל האומניות כלם, והיודעים ורגילים בהם בבא ידיהם תמיד בטיט ורפש לא יוכלו לעשות בהן אומנות דקה ויפה.
ועוד, שהוא חכם גדול בחכמה בתבונה ובדעת להבין סוד המשכן וכל כליו למה צוו ואל מה ירמוזו. ולכן אמר השם למשה שיראה הפלא הזה, וידע כי הוא מלא אותו רוח אלוהים לדעת כל אלה בעבור שיעשה המשכן, כי היה רצון מלפניו לעשות המשכן במדבר, ולכבודו בראו, כי הוא קורא הדורות מראש (ישעיה מא ד), כדרך בטרם אצרך בבטן ידעתיך ובטרם תצא מרחם הקדשתיך (ירמיה א ה). ובלשון הזה (לעיל טז כט): ראו כי ה' נתן לכם השבת על כן הוא נותן לכם ביום השישי לחם יומיים:
ולרבותינו בזה מדרש (שמו"ר מ ב):
הראה אותו ספרו של אדם הראשון ואמר לו כל אחד התקנתיו מאותה שעה, ואף בצלאל מאותה שעה התקנתי אותו, שנאמר ראה קראתי בשם בצלאל.
והוא כענין שפירשתי.
ועוד אמרו (ברכות נה א):
יודע היה בצלאל לצרף אותיות שנבראו בהן שמים וארץ.
והעניין, כי המשכן ירמוז באלו והוא היודע ומבין סודו:

מי היה בצלאל? המדרש מזכיר לנו שבני ישראל היו עבדים במצרים – הם עבדו בפרך, בחומר ובלבינים. עבודה לשם פרעה היה ההפך של עבודת המשכן – היא היתה עבודה גסה, בלי מנוחה, בלי מטרה—כי אם היתה מטרה, למה פרעה היה לוקח מהם את חומרי הבנייה כדי שצטרכו לעבוד יותר?(לא תוסיפון לתת תבן לעם ללבון הלבנים כתמול שלשלום מם ילכו וקששו להם תבן – שמות ה: ז) אבל עבודת המקדש היא עבודה מעודנת עם חומרים עשירים ודקים כמו זהב וכסף. מאיפה יש לעבדי פרעה לכשעבר מסורות של עבודה בחומרים אלו?

בצלאל כנראה קבל את הכשרונות שלו מה'. ה' מלא אותו רוח אלוהים, כמו שהוא מלא את אדם הראשון ברוח ה': ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים. חלקו השני של מדרש זה מקשר אותנו לבריאת העולם – בצלאל ידע לצרף אותיות שנבראו בהן שמים וארץ. מאמר זה מופיע בתלמוד מסכת שבת נ"ה, בפרק ט, מיד לפני הסוגיה הארוכה על חלומות ופתרונם. למה מופיע דווקא פה? אולי בצלאל מופיע כהקדמה לדיונם של חז"ל על חלומות ופתרונם כי בצלאל היה מין פותר חלומות. הוא ראה חזון—היינו החלום—והבין איך לפרש אותו, היינו איך לממש אותו. הוא ידע לצרף אותיות שנבראו בהם שמים וארץ, ולכן הוא היה סוג של בורא עולם: הוא ברא את עולמו של המשכן. כמובן, היה לו תבנית, אבל גם לה' היה תבנית כשהוא ברא את העולם: המדרש בבראשית רבה מתארת לנו שה' הסתכל בתורה ובכך ידע איך לבנות את העולם. אי אפשר להתחיל פרויקט אומנותי בלי שום דגם או מודל. הדרשה שלי היום באה מדגם של שיעור ששמעתי באנגלית לפני שנים ממורי אביבה זורנברג, שאני מתרגמת בשבילכם וכמובן, תוך כדי, מוסיפה את היצירתיות שלי. ככה זה לדרוש בתורה, ככה זה לכתוב, וככה זה להיות יצירתי. אפילו הקב"ה היה צריך להיעזר בדגם כדי לברוא את העולם:

בראשית רבה א:א:
אמון - אומן. התורה אומרת אני הייתי כלי אומנתו של הקב"ה.
בנוהג שבעולם, מלך בשר ודם בונה פלטין אינו בונה אותה מדעת עצמו, אלא מדעת אומן. והאומן אינו בונה אותה מדעת עצמו, אלא דיפתראות ופינקסאות יש לו, לדעת היאך הוא עושה חדרים, היאך הוא עושה פשפשין.
כך היה הקדוש ברוך הוא, מביט בתורה ובורא את העולם.
והתורה אמרה: בראשית ברא אלהים ואין ראשית אלא תורה.
היאך מה דאת אמר (משלי ח) ה' קנני ראשית דרכו:

אין בריאה ללא חזון שקודם לו. קודם כל צריכים לדמיין – אפילו אם באש שחורה ואדומה וירוקה ולבנה --את הפרוייקט, ורק אז אפשר להתחיל לממש אותו. כל סופר ומשורר צריך לעלות להר סיני בדמיון שלו ולראות את הדגם עשוי מאש לפני שהוא חוזר לשולחן כתיבה שלו ומתחיל לעבוד. ברור שהספר שהוא כותב לא יהיה גם עשוי מאש – הוא יהיה התרגום של החזון באש. אבל אם הסופר מצליח, עבודה הסופית תהיה משהו שיוכל להתיז ניצוצות בתוך הקורא, ולגרום אם לא ללהבי אש אז להתלהבות.

לפני שאני מסיימת אני רוצה לחזור לענין של השבת, שמוזכר במדרש האחרון שהבאתי, שמקשר בין "ראה קראתי בשם בצלאל" ל"ראו כי ה' נתן לכם השבת." מה הקשר בין בצלאל ועבודתו לבין השבת? פרשתנו מתחילה עם הצווי לשמור את השבת, ורק אז אנו עוברים לתיאור של בניית המשכן מה ענין שבת אצל משכן? בשבת אסור לבער אש. חז"ל למדו את כל ל"ט המלאכות שאסורות בשבת מעבודת המשכן – כל המלאכות שהיו חלק מבניית המשכן הם אסורות בשבת. אפשר להגיד שהשבת הוא ההפך של המשכן – בשבת אנו לא עוסקים במלאכה, ובניית המשכן כלל בו את כל המלאכות. אבל לדעתי זו תמונה יותר מדי פשוטה, כי גם החזון—גם העלייה להר—הוא חלק מהיצירה. למה פרשת ויקהל מתחילה עם מצוות שבת? כי התורה מבינה שהשבת היא לא רק המנוחה שמגיע לנו אחרי ששת ימי מלאכה, אלא גם המנוחה וההשראה שמאפשרת לנו להיות אומנים בשאר הימים. שבת היא אות בינינו לבין ה' – לכן לא לובשים תפילין בשבת, כי שבת היא אות בפני עצמה. בשבת ה' חוקק על ידינו—מקום לבוש תפילון--את הפרוייקטים שנעסוק בהם בשבוע הבא. שבת היא מעין עולם הבא – טעם של עולם אחר, כמו האש בארבע צבעי שאין לו קיום בעולם הארצי. בשבת יש לנו נשמה יתירה – כמו שה' מלא את בצלאל ברוח אלוהים, ה' גם ממלא אותנו ברוח ומראה לנו את החזון שהוא סוד אומנותינו. לכלנו יש נדבה ייחודי לתרום לעולם זה, ולכולנו יש את היכולת להיות מי שנשאו לבו לתרום לתיקון עולמינו. תפילתי היא שבשבתות כמו היום, נזכה לראות את החזון, ובימות השבוע, נשב כולנו ליד שולחן הכתיבה או מקום עבודה כל שהו, ונתחיל את מלאכת הקודש של מימוש החזון. שבת שלום.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Zevachim, chapters 1-2

Perek Aleph: כל הזבחים שנזבחו שלא לשמן

(2a)
An off’ring must be sacrificed
For that off’ring. You must be precise.
You can’t bring a cow
And think about how
It’s a Pesach lamb. That won’t suffice.

(2b)
Stan, you happen to be walking by
In a market, and hear someone cry
“It’s a Get for Joanne
And for her husband Stan.”
Though the name’s right, it doesn't apply.

(3a)
An oven for food that you bake
Is infested! Inside there’s a snake!
If the oven is split
Can you salvage the bit
In the non-snake part? Redo the cake.

(6b)
Israel sins often, we owe
Sacrifices each moment. Oh no!
Fear not – we are spared
By a Torah that cared
That we not give up all our cash flow.

(12a)
Time for minchah! Then you realize
You forgot to do Musaf. Devise
A solution. Well, first
You do mincha. Reverse
Them you don’t. Musaf always applies.

(12b)
If you set aside your Korban beast
Then go crazy ere you see the priest.
Sanity then comes back
Do we cut you some slack
And let you bring that set-aside feast?

(13a)
Said Tarfon: By my sons I swear
There is something these two acts don’t share:
Sprinkling and collecting
I’m not recollecting.
Akiva got it. Tarfon fell off his chair.

(14a)
It’s the priest who puts blood on his fingers
(Can’t be done by Levitical singers)
The priest does it himself
He can’t count on an elf
Or a monkey. (Or ape-priest dead ringer.)

(15a)
A priest was once sprinkling blood
When his finger came off with a thud.
Is such mulilation
A clear desecration?
Oh yes! And this Kohen's a dud.

Perek Bet: כל הבחים שקבלו דמן

(16b)
Sacrificial blood can’t be received
By a non-priest. He can’t be relieved
By one impure, or sitting,
Without clothes – unfitting
Are these. So is one who’s bereaved.

(17b)
“The clothes make the man,” that’s the vest
And the breastplate, and all of the rest
Of the priestly attire
All needed to fire
A sacrifice. Don’t underdress!

(18a)
On festivals, Rav always stunk
Of alcohol. He got quite drunk
And so he refrained
From all preaching, til drained
Of the wine, and til out of that funk.

(18b)
There are those who say blindness impinges
On whether a man must wear fringes
Tzitzit must be seen
But a blind man has been
Seen by others, on whom this one hinges.

(19a)
Huna bar Natan professed
He was once with the Persian king, dressed
In his vestments. He felt
As the king fixed his belt.
“Kingdom of priests,” the Persian king blessed.

(19a)
Can a priest wear a band-aid or gauze
On his finger? This question gives pause.
Some say we suppose
He can’t wear extra clothes.
Others say: There are no band-aid laws!

(21b)
In the morning, one priest would clear ash
All the other priests woke to the clash
Of the wheels that went clink
As he lowered the sink
To the well, where it made a big splash.

(24b)
A priest who’s a lefty was screwed
Temple work with left hand was eschewed.
No matter how deft-
Ly you sprinkle with left
It is sinister blood, we conclude.

(25b)
If you’ve wounded the ear of a cow
(Do not worry, it’s dead – can’t say ow.)
Ere its blood is collected
The act is affected,
For mixing of blood’s not allowed.

(27b)
When you slaughter a sheep, you can’t say
“I will eat his meat some other day.”
Or “I’ll eat this outside”
If you do so, we chide
You: That’s Pigul, go throw it away.

(29b)
If you vow sacrifices, then wait
To bring them til some later date.
Your wife will not die
As she would if you cry,
“I can’t pay you!” Then you’ll lose your mate.

Nine Months, or Three Hundred Dapim

For the first time today I felt the baby inside me kicking. It happened of course while I was learning Daf Yomi, which deals with the period of time in which a woman is considered impure after giving birth to a girl (Zevachim 38). Is it two weeks (Sh’vuaim), as per the pronounced form of the word in the Torah? Or is it seventy days (Shivim), as the spelling of the Biblical word seems to indicate? The baby continued kicking until the makhloket was resolved, and I was finally able to rest assured that the creature inside me enjoys learning Gemara as much as I do. If all goes well, this pregnancy will last me through Zevachim and Menachot, and the child will be born with full knowledge of both animal and vegetable sacrifices. Of course, I know that the baby will inevitably forget all its Torah when the angel strikes it on the mouth as soon as it takes its first breath (Niddah 30b). But still, I like to think that the clouds of glory it trails from the womb will be the pages of Gemara I’ve learned these past few weeks while lying in bed, because I’ve been too exhausted to wake up in time for my daf yomi shiur.

This week the pregnancy books tell me that the baby is the size of a banana, but I find these weekly produce updates difficult to follow. How can it already be a banana when last week it was an heirloom tomato? And what is an heirloom tomato anyway? Instead, I prefer to use the Gemara’s measurements, which are more familiar to me. When I first found out I was pregnant, the baby was a k’zayit. A month later it was k’beitzah, which is odd, since ostensibly it started out as an egg in the first place. By the third month, it was a kotevet ha-gasa, a date so large that were I to eat it, I’d be breaking my fast on Yom Kippur. (Thankfully I have no intention of eating my own child, like the threats of the Tochecha or the woeful women in besieged Jerusalem described so vividly in Eicha.) I have tried to make all the measurements match up, but I am told that the time of labor is significantly longer than k’dei achilat pras, the time it takes to eat three egg-sized pieces of bread with relish. I can only hope that like the Israelite women of this week’s parsha, I deliver quickly.

It is hard to imagine the delivery, which is still far off in the distant future, about a month after Pesach. Godwilling at the seder I will be singing “Asarah yarchei leydah,” since as anyone who has been pregnant can tell you, a pregnancy lasts 40 weeks, which is not nine months but ten. I hope that as I sing, the baby will join in a chorus of Shirat HaYam, imagining itself as if it, too, has gone forth from Egypt. As we start reading Sefer Shmot this week and setting off on the journey that will take us through Pesach, I begin thinking about the exodus from Mitzrayim, that narrow place that is likened to the birth canal from which the children of Israel were born. By that point perhaps I will already feel the birth pangs of redemption.

Still, if there is anything I have learned thus far about pregnancy, it is an appreciation for how many miracles are involved in the creation of new life. Every stage of this process fills me with awe and gratitude, and I have much to pray for in the coming months. The Talmud (Taanit 2a) teaches that there are three keys that are in the hands of God, which God does not entrust to any messenger. These are the key to rain, the key to childbirth, and the key to the revival of the dead. We pray for the first two keys during the second blessing of the Amidah, where we ask God to cause the rain to fall and to revive the dead. And so I have begun praying for the health and welfare of the unborn child inside me each time I come to this blessing.

When I don’t have time for formal prayer, I simply place my hand on my stomach and recite a version of the prayer that Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother used to recite for him. We read in Pirkei Avot that Rabbi Yehoshua’s teacher praised him by saying, “Blessed it the one who gave birth to him.” Rashi explains that Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother used to pass by the batei midrash of her town and ask the sages, “Please pray for this unborn child in me that he should become a Torah scholar.” I vary her prayer only slightly: “Please pray for this unborn child in me that he or she should become a Torah scholar, and be healthy, and be kind.” Perhaps that is a lot to ask for, especially given how many blessings I have received already. Each morning I wake up, look down at my growing stomach, and bless God who, in His goodness, renews creation every day. I imagine that the flutter I feel inside me is tiny egg-sized head nodding in assent.

Radical Judaism

Tonight I went to a lecture by Rabbi Arthur Green, professor and rector of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College and author of Radical Judaism. As soon as I got home, I typed up everything I could remember. I post it here:


During the twentieth century, traditional religion fought and lost two great battles against modernity. These were the battles against Darwinism and against Biblical criticism. These battles are over, and what we are left with is a level of consciousness that has to confront the radical awareness that God is not there. But if this is Emet, there is also Emet L’Amito, and that is the even deeper level of consciousness that says that nonetheless, God is there. How do we live with and make sense of that double consciousness, in light of the strides made by both evolution and Biblical criticism?

Evolution takes us to the subject of creation, which was the focus of medieval theology and the theology of the Zohar. But throughout the past hundred years, Jews have been primarily concerned with providence (is God there?) and authority (why listen to Him?). We moderns must realize that creation is every bit as essential to our theology, if not more. We speak often of Nachshon ben Aminadav, the first Israelite to jump into the Red Sea -- but what about the first organism to come out of the sea, and try to make its life on land? Evolution is the greatest sacred drama of all time. The question we must ask ourselves is what do religious people have to offer to this drama? As religious people, we understand that creation is the ongoing inbuilt desire in God to reveal itself to its many forms. Creation is the push towards greater diversity and greater complexity. Greater diversity means greater beauty, and greater complexity means greater consciousness. This greater consciousness pushes towards beings who are ever more aware of God. This notion of God is both immanent and transcendent, but its transcendence is a part of its immanence. We access the transcendent God when we realize that God is present in every moment in such a profound way that we will never be able to grasp it. Transcendence is thus the elusiveness of immanence.

We must strive to access a God that is both immanent and transcendent so that we can be partners in creation. Heschel spoke of being partners in creation, but when we say this today we speak with much more urgency. To be partners in creation is to take responsibility for the future of the planet. We live in an age of great environmental responsibility. We will need to change human behavior in massive ways, making drastic transitions in our lifestyle if we want to ensure the future of humanity. We would like to think that in another 100,000 years, the human beings of the future will be as ashamed at the terribly misguided decisions that we have made as we are ashamed of our chimpanzee ancestors.

In terms of Biblical criticism, we must recognize that yes, the Torah is human; but yes, the Torah is divine. The first question that God asks man in the Bible is Ayeka, where are you. This is the same divine voice that continues to call out to us. But it calls out in a language beyond words; it is we who create the words. The Torah that preceded creation contained nothing other than the name of God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, which is just vowels, just aspirated breath from a time before language existed. It is we who add the consonants. God spoke the first two commandments, Ehyeh and Lo Yihyeh (both plays on the divine name), and then Moshe translated the rest. This process of translating the divine call into words is a sacred process, which is why Torah is sacred. At the same time, though, we must remember Heschel’s answer to the question: Is the prophet an active partner in prophecy, or is he an empty vessel for the divine voice? Heschel answered the former. But if so, then the prophet is fallible, and is shaped by the constraints and conventions of his age. Prophecy (i.e. Torah) is a partly human creation, with all the limitations of any human creation. Sometimes we have to object to it, because it is antithetical to the values of our own age, which are ever-evolving. We must remember that it is we human beings who brought God into language, but that in bringing God into language, we ourselves were transformed. This is the Sfat Emet’s midrash on
את ה' האמרת היום...וה' האמירך היום
At Sinai human beings spoke God into words. And so yes, I believe in the covenant at Sinai, even though I believe that it was our idea. Sinai is essential language for me; it is a key element of my spiritual life, and of our spiritual language as Jews, regardless of whether or not it happened historically. We must not forget that when Moses took blood and dashed it on the people in Exodus 24, he was not doing so because God had told him to. This blood covenant was Moses’ invention for the sake of binding the people to God. And so the human impulse to create ritual is encoded in our divinely inspired human text.

The subject of ritual brings me to the subject of Mitzvah. A Mitzvah is a man-made opportunity for encountering the divine. Davening with tefillin is a reminder to stop for a moment in our fast-paced cyber-wired lives to listen to the call of Ayeka. Tefillin, like Shabbat, is a sign and reminder to heed the divine call. Unfortunately, we sometimes get so involved in doing the reminders that we forget what it is that we are supposed to remember. The rabbis thought that if they told us to say one hundred brachot every day, they would ensure that we live each day with a consciousness of God. But Jews are smart. They found a way of forgetting God even with one hundred blessings. They became so obsessed with counting the blessings that they forgot Who it is they are meant to be blessing.

Of course, Judaism is not the only response to the divine. All religions are human creations in response to the divine call. Is Judaism better than all the others? I wouldn’t say that. But I consider it a privilege to be born into a small religion that has such a great tradition, and I want to be part of developing and updating that tradition. I believe that Jews have some specific things to say that no other tradition says as well. Shabbat is one of the great gifts of Judaism to humanity. I’d love to be able to give it to the world, if I could first give it to the Jews again. And then there is the notion of being created in the image of God, one of the most important ideas that Judaism has to offer. Who would have thought that having a Jewish state would call this fundamental religious notion so much into question? We Jews have not done a good job of spreading the notion of Tzelem Elokim in the last 65years. This is not a political lecture, but given our track record, it will be very hard to convince the world that Tzelem Elokim is a fundamental idea of our tradition.

You ask me how to know which mitzvot to follow, and how to find a Jewish practice that works for you. To this I say: Learn a lot, try a lot of experiments, and take responsibility for your own Neshama. Theology is an art, not a science. We religious people have nothing we can prove, but proving and disproving is not a chessboard I am interested in playing on. I believe that religion takes place in the realm of the imagination, that realm which allows us to open our minds to music and poetry and to deeper levels of reality. Our job is to bring evolution and science to that realm of poetry. To do so we must silence ourselves to hear the Ayeka, and seek out ever richer and more vibrant language in which to translate the divine call into the language of human beings.

Running Commentary

On my 28th birthday my parents gave me an Ipod. At the time I was a student living in Jerusalem, and I used to spend every morning jogging the streets of my city. In Jerusalem the street names are organized thematically, so that each neighborhood depicts a particular period in Jewish history, set of characters, or field of scholarship. The streets in leafy Rehavia are named for medieval parshanim—Rashi, Radak, Ibn Ezra; the narrow streets of Baka are named for the twelve tribes; and in the German Colony, where I live now, the streets are named for nineteenth century European rabbis. Jogging in Jerusalem is not just a form of exercise; it is a lesson in Jewish history.

And so I was already used to learning while jogging when I received the gift of an Ipod. At the time I was jogging about 45 minutes each day, which offered me a fair amount of listening time. This was just about a year after the internationally televised Siyum in Madison Square Garden, where Jews from around the world gathered to celebrate their completion of Daf Yomi – a program involving the study of a page of Talmud a day, completing the entire corpus in seven and a half years. And so I decided – that’s what I’ll do with my IPod! I decided to download daf yomi classes, and listen to a lecture each morning on that day’s page of Talmud. I didn’t know it then, but my life would never be the same again.

I started with Masechet Yoma, because that is what the international daf yomi community was up to when I began. One of the first passages I learned was about two priests who race one another up a ramp to the Temple altar because whoever gets there first will get to do Trumat HaDeshen, that is, to clear off the ashes from the previous day's sacrifices. Just as one priest begins to gain on his fellow, he stabs him with the knife used for slaughtering animals, and the lagging priest falls to his death. I thought this was an appropriate passage to learn while jogging, even if I’ve never been quite that competitive.

For the past four and a half years I have learned a page of Talmud every day. I don’t always learn while jogging, because usually I want to have the book open before me. Often I go to a class held at a local synagogue at 6:15am, in which a rabbi teaches the daf to a group of about a dozen middle-aged men, and myself. Other days I learn over dinner, careful not to drip tomato sauce over discussions about the sprinkling of blood on the altar. And sometimes I learn just before bed, falling asleep with the rabbis still arguing in my head about just how late a person can recite the bedtime Shema.

I have never missed a day of daf yomi, including the day of my wedding – and incidentally, I married a man from my daf yomi shiur, and now we learn together. Learning Torah has been a constant in my life, giving structure and meaning to my days. During particularly tough periods, on days when I found it hard to remember why I bother to get up in the morning, I found that my daily Talmud study was an anchor, if not a liferaft. I love the notion that with every day that passes, you are not merely one day older – you are one day wiser. What a healthier relationship to time, viewing time not as a mark of age but as an opportunity to grow in wisdom. This is in fact the Jewish view of time: The rabbis teach in Pirkei Avot that five is the age for studying Torah; ten is the age of studying Mishnah; fifteen is the age for studying Talmud, and the list goes on.

I often feel that my life unfolds against the backdrop of the Daf I am learning. My learning is a source of inspiration -- I write poetry based on the Talmud I learn, and have a blog devoted to poetic reactions to the daily daf. It has changed the way I see the world, and what my interests are: I’ve become fascinated by Jewish life in the early centuries of the common era, when the Talmud was compiled – a time when Jewish life was struggling to regain its foothold after the calamitous destruction of the Temple. The key players in this period have become as familiar to me as dear friends: Ben Azzai, who loved learning Torah so much that he couldn’t be bothered to get married and sacrifice precious learning time to raise a family; Rabbi Eliezer, who left his family’s huge farming estate to go learn Torah in Jerusalem, against his father’s will; Rabbi Joshua, who developed his love of Torah in the womb, because his mother used to pass by the Beit Midrash when she was pregnant with him; Rabbi Akiva’s son, who spent his entire wedding night studying Torah with his bride, and then lied to his father about what they had not done. In my eagerness to get to know these individuals better, I began translating a series of biographies of the sages of the Talmud, which should be available in English in within the next two years. Every time I sit down to translate, I marvel at my good fortune that in translating these books, I am essentially being paid to study Torah – it’s better than Kollel!

I am fascinated, too, by the possibilities that are open to me as a woman studying a text that for 1500 years has been analyzed primarily by men. What does it mean for me as a Jewish woman to read Talmud, a text whose heroes are primarily men – not to mention men who considered themselves experts in women’s psychology and anatomy? I am exhilarated by the notion of reading these texts through a woman’s eyes, especially as someone who regards herself as an independent self-sufficient adult, a role the Talmud could not imagine for women. I am intrigued by how the rabbis struggle to balance leaning Torah with making a living, which was the authentic form of being Jewish during the Talmudic era, very unlike the Haredi lifestyle of today. I am interested in the rabbis’ interactions with non-Jews, with aristocratic Roman matrons, with heretics and non-believers. And as an editor, I am fascinated by the organization of the Talmud, which is probably one of the most intensely edited books in all of world literature, its stories reworked again and again into tight literary units in which no detail is extraneous, and little is transparent. Any page of Talmud assumes that you know every other page – there is no clear beginning – so the only way to begin is already to know everything, which is why it’s difficult to begin, but once you have, it’s impossible to stop.

When finishing learning a tractate of Talmud, which I did just this past week, it is traditional recite a prayer known as the Hadran: Hadran alach v’hadrach alan. In classic Talmudic wordplay, the word Hadran, from Hadar, can have two meanings. And so the phrase can mean “may we return to you, and may you return to us:” may we have the opportunity to study this tractate again (because inevitably we’ll forget some of what we learn), and may it come back to us (because we hope that some of what we learn with stay with us). This speaks to me in terms of the power of learning to make the world endlessly interesting – there is always more to learn, which means that there is always a reason to keep living. But Hadar also means “beauty and glory” as well as “return.” So the prayer can also mean: “Our beauty is from you, and your beauty is from us,” which conveys the notion that we, with our own individual life experiences and our own unique perspectives, can enrich the study of Talmud; and that Talmud can enrich us.

The Hadran prayer goes on to contrast those who study Torah with those who are drawn to idle pursuits: “We are running and they are running. We are running to the World to Come, and they are running to the den of iniquity.” Whether jogging or learning, I don’t always know where I am heading; but I know that with every passing day, I am further along.