Dear Rabbi,
Thank you for giving a wonderful shiur on Friday June 7th. Now that Shavuot is here, I’ve been learning about Ruth and your thoughts on the issue of choice and identity have been very helpful.
During your talk, you framed a choice to be Jewish in the context of risks faced in a foreign land. When times were easy, the choice to be Jewish did not seem compulsory. Now that a dark tide of antisemitism has washed into the world, we understand that Judaism is less the mountain to be climbed on an adventure tour and more the lone rock that provides a handhold above a dark sea.
And so we have been dog paddling in calm waters, mistaking handholds for distant mountains. In our daily lives– in our apartments and homes in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queen– we live as well as any Midionite princess. We sample food from around the world, we have a suite of doctors if we feel ill and we have hundreds of entertainers who will lift our mood at the press of a button. So we ask, what happens when disaster strikes? What happens when our newspapers speak of gatherings that, a mere 77 years ago, might have flared into a pogrom. Naomi, facing the death of her husband and sons, reached for the handhold and returned to Israel. What does it mean to reach for a handhold today?
This handhold is one sort of mountain and I want to return to it in the context of Shavuot. You mentioned a different sort of mountain in your lecture, the mountain suspended over the Jewish people at the Matan Torah. You connected this mountain to antisemitism and this fits very well with the idea of a personal (in the case of Naomi) or community disaster leading to a return to Judaism. At the same time, I want to volunteer a slightly different read on the mountain, one that connects the mountain to the theme of chesed in the book of Ruth.
Imagine for a second that we are standing under the shadow of a mountain. We are on the cusp of receiving the Torah. We feel as if we are swimming in thunder as lightning flashes through the sky overhead. Hashem's very closeness, it seems, has compromised the fixed forms of the world. The Jewish people are joining hands with Hashem to create something new.
What, we might ask, is the single most dangerous variable in this encounter? Is it lightning? No. Is it the mountain itself? No. The Torah suggests that it is instead our own capacity for creation, our sense of “self" that drives our interior stories, that grows ever more dangerous as we approach Hashem.
This is a broad statement and it requires more defense than I can offer in this poor letter. For now, it is enough to remember a few salient examples from history. Jewish history is rife with misunderstandings and mental fantasies. We can consider– for example– the state of Cain's mind, the jealous fantasy that led him to offer flax in opposition to Abel’s wool. Joseph’s brothers are gripped by the fanciful notion that Joseph is plotting against them and this is true both before the pit and after they have settled in Egypt. The struggle of the Israelites is surely as much a struggle against habits of mind as it is against the travails of the desert. In the mind of the spies, the Caananites become giants. In the mind of Korach, he is praised as the new Israelite leader. The stories that we tell ourselves puff up like leavened dough.
Our endless capacity for creative thought would be fine if our mental world remained isolated. The Torah suggests, however, that our own penchant for creation begins to impact the outside world as we grow closer to God. I mentioned Nadav and Aviehu in my prior letter. Long before they lit improper incense, Adam partnered with Hashem in the naming of the animals. Our first act in this world was an act of partnership, of co-creation and if Adam had given the Lion the name of the Lamb we might have today a world with peaceful Lions and (presumably) dangerous lambs. What were the plagues but a great disturbance in the world? These too were co-created in a partnership between God and Moses. Why is Moses prevented from entering Israel? I’d suggest that his proximity to God may have had the effect of destabilizing the new world of Israel. To strike a rock instead of speaking to it– for example– might run the risk of creating a world that responds to striking rather than speaking.
If this is true for select individuals, it is also true of the community. Manna, we are told, can take on any flavor that one can imagine but this did not prevent the Israelites from lamenting the lost taste of quail and cucumbers- items that surely tasted better in a personal fantasy world. Why does Hashem tell the Jewish people that they were not brought out of Egypt in order to charge interest? They were not brought out of Egypt– we understand– in order to develop financial structures with expected future returns. We should not leave our dough expecting it to rise and we should not lend money expecting that it will return interest. We should not tell ourselves stories of a hypothetical future self. We can create six days a week but on the seventh our endless drive for creation, for self creation, should halt. The momentum of our own imagination should rest.
If the observation is true that we should be cautious about curating a sense of self as we approach God, it is doubly true as God reaches toward us. The love of God is dangerous. It distorts the world. God loves Job, we are told, and Job’s sheep begin to kill wolves. The order of the world is distorted until the accountant arrives to rebalance the books. God loves the Jewish people and so they swim in thunder under the shadow of the mountain. A whole mountain has risen into the sky, how much has God's love for you distorted the world?
And so the threat of the mountain is not a threat of punishment any more than the threat of a sky turning to iron is punishment. These are simply statements about creation. The love of God is too powerful, too destabilizing. As we draw closer to God our own ability to create becomes more powerful as well. The giving of the Torah shows the love that God has for the Jewish people. The Jewish people have endured somewhere between 86 and 116 years of slavery, they have purified themselves with the great Mitzvot of the Passover lamb, they have walked through the desert and thrown themselves into the sea. They have waited in suspense for three days and now they stand in close proximity to God. The mountain hangs by a thread, ready to fall at any moment unless the Israelites do something.
And what should the Israelites do? It is critical that they suspend the self, that they move past the fears and fantasies of the future, that they refrain from creating little new worlds in their own minds. Instead of walking forward under their own impulses they should stand in place, trembling. How can they achieve this? They should accept the Torah. More specifically, they should accept 606 new Mitzvot because now they have drawn closer to God and now a mere 7 laws are insufficient. To follow the mitzvot is to temper our plans and expectations. To strictly observe Halacha is to dislocate ourselves in time, to interrupt our own plans, to temper our wildest thoughts and to grind our own sense of self down as the flour for an offering is ground in the mill. We will do, we say, and we will hear.
Which brings us back to Ruth, the tzaddik whose name has a gematria of 606.
How does Ruth relate to the mountain? It is this, that in times of disaster we return from our palaces to the fields and slowly, slowly take up the endless small tasks of the mitzvot. As we do this, we begin to cleave to God and our sense of self- so bound up in the world- is winnowed away. What is left after we abandon our palaces for hard fields? What is left after we have gathered the grain and moved the millstone and ground out that ephah of fine flour? We are not hollowed out, we do not disappear into gnosis. Instead we are left with the admiration of Boaz for Naomi, with the dedication of Ruth to her mother in law, with acts of yibum and chalitzah that are governed by kindness rather than stratagems and with the love for one another that defines the book of Ruth.
This is the wonderful thing about Ruth, that you can return, that you can seek God, that you can become a convert and a ba'al teshuvah. In the end, after we have done hard labor in the fields, after the storm abates and our hands remain firmly on the handhold, we are washed out and winnowed but not desiccated. The end point of Mitzvot and Halacha is not a judgemental, desiccated rectitude but love for one another. We cleave to the Torah with this sense of chesed is to stand safely under the mountain. The mountain in turn may well be antisemitism, it may be plague, it may be war or famine or crop failure. It exists because the love of God for the Jewish people has distorted this world and God in turn has good faith that the Jewish people can bind themselves together as a community defined by Chesed and Torah and can act in this way as a counterbalancing force strong enough to hold a mountain aloft in the air.
Thanks again.