Closing One Book & Opening the Next: 3 Years of Daf Yomi

“An ignorant person cannot be pious / לֹא עַם הָאָרֶץ חָסִיד,” said the 1st century BCE sage Hillel (Pirkei Avot 2:6). No other religious faith of which I know would quite make such an astounding claim.

Like all polemical statements, it’s unfair and exaggerated, and it probably would be considered irredeemably elitist if not for two mitigating factors:

1.     We’re all ignorant, at least in the vast sea of wisdom known as Torah and knowledge of G-d. That’s why every volume of Talmud begins on page 2: to teach spiritual modesty. In the words of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, “However much a person may have learned, we should always remember that we have not even gotten to the first page!”

2.     The Torah is an open book; Judaism does not secret away wisdom. It’s available to anyone who seeks it out with an open heart, and in our generation there are more classic texts available at our fingertips than at any other time in human history—and in translation! It’s all there for the taking, waiting for each of us.

So there’s more to Hillel’s statement than meets the eye. It means that learning—acquiring the knowledge that potentially leads to wisdom—is a Mitzvah; that is, a primary religious activity.

A week or two ago, I (and many others) reached a personal milestone: the 3-year anniversary of the cycle of Daf Yomi, the daily study of a page of Talmud. It takes 7½ years to go through the entire Talmud, which is the size of a set of encyclopedias—so we’re not even halfway through the cycle.

Daf Yomi is a phenomenon. The idea was proposed in 1920 by Rabbi Moshe Menachem Mendel Spivak (b.1880), a Polish rabbi and renowned figure in the Torah world of Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. The idea was carried forward by Rabbi Meir Shapiro (b.1887), the head of a great Polish yeshiva in Lublin and a leader of European Orthodox Judaism.

These two visionaries promulgated the astonishing proposal that, all over the world, Torah students would study the same page of text on the same day. With Rabbi Shapiro’s spearheading, the daily regimen of Daf Yomi began on Rosh Hashanah in 1923. It’s now in its 14th cycle and approaching its centennial year, with tens of thousands of adherents—Orthodox and liberal Jews, women and men alike.

There are no days off: we read our daily page on Shabbat and even Yom Kippur; it accompanies me on family vacations, and so on. For some, it is a social endeavor: they learn with a partner or a group (known as studying in chevruta) and listen to online lectures or podcasts about the Daf Yomi. For me, it’s a more private experience, as I’ll explain.

Even though I’ve had a passion for Talmud throughout my adult life, I’d always kept Daf Yomi at arm’s length. And for good reasons.

First, there’s a whole world of Torah study out there besides the Talmud, and I have a short attention span and a wandering mind. So by committing to daily Talmud study, I feared I was missing out. What about Hasidut? And Midrash? And Zohar? And all the other pearls of Jewish spiritual literature?

Second, I’ve been involved in a one-on-one Talmud chevruta for over 20 years. My partner Ben and I used to scoff at the very idea of Daf Yomi. After all, he and I move so slowly when we read Talmud together, and try to go deeply into the meaning of the text, so our pace is unhurried. We might spend our lesson on just a few lines; a whole page could take us months to complete. And a whole volume of the Talmud can take us years! A page a day? Ha! How superficial the speediness of Daf Yomi must be, just to get through it all!

I must admit, some of that thinking remains—and Ben and I still proceed at the same glacial pace as ever. But I approach my Daf Yomi regime differently than my learning with Ben. I treat it as a spiritual discipline. I typically have 45-60 minutes to devote in the morning, and I do what I can. I read the Hebrew/Aramaic text, but when I get stuck, I have no problem looking to an English translation as a crutch.

And if the discourse on the page gets too bogged down in pilpul—the logic gymnastics that assume every contradiction must be resolved and every debate of the early Sages must be smoothed over—well, I move on. My goal here is breadth, not depth.

While I might have scoffed at “breadth, not depth” in the past, I see now that there’s an excitement about mapping the Talmud from the 10,000 foot view. I’m excited to know that, at some point 3¾ years from now, I’ll have visited and made notations on every page of my massive Talmud set that casts its shadow over my workspace.

There are days when it can be daunting. Last year, the Daf Yomi community around the world worked its way through 122 days/pages of Tractate Yevamot: over four months devoted to the arcana of the Torah’s laws of levirate marriage, the ancient law that if a man should die childless, his brother must marry his widow in order to produce an heir. It can get, shall we say, a bit esoteric.

On Tuesday, we’re completing another volume: Nedarim, 91 days/pages devoted to the biblical laws concerning the declaration of vows. It can be pretty obscure stuff, and it demands a certain amount of discipline to persist.

Yet the Talmud is famously ADD, and there are pearls to discover along the way. For instance, in one of many asides in Nedarim, we find this wonderful passage:

Rav Yosef said: A sick person will forget his learning.
Then Rav Yosef himself fell ill, and he forgot all of his learning. Abbaye restored it [by learning] with him. This is why we say [throughout the Talmud] that Rav Yosef would say, “I never heard this law,” and Abbaye would reply to him, “You taught this to us directly, and it was from this baraita [earlier teaching] that you said it.” (Nedarim 41a)

My comment: Like the Torah, the language of the Talmud can be concise and blunt. But embellishing this story in my head, it becomes very emotional! I picture Rav Yosef, the wizened teacher, whose capacities have diminished because of the ravages of age or illness (maybe a stroke?). Perhaps his other students have left him behind, leaving a disabled old man to his caretakers. Yet here is his student Abbaye—one of the giants in 3rd-4th century Babylonia—gently talking Torah with his teacher and reminding Rav Yosef of the divine wisdom that is inside him.  

And:

Rabbi Yochanan said: Initially Moses would study the Torah and forget it all, until it was given to him as a gift, as it is written (Exodus 31:18): When G-d finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, G-d gave Moses the two tablets of the Pact. (Nedarim 38a)

My comment: I can relate, Moses. I wish I had a fantastic memory and could retain all the wondrous things I’ve read in the past few years. But what a treasure books are: repositories of wisdom to go back and revisit…!

If all this sounds very rigorous, one of the first things I discovered was: I find that I wake up in the morning anticipating getting to my desk and to the Talmud, to resume the conversation with Rav Yosef and Abbaye, Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer, Hillel and Shammai, and all the others.

So, onward… to, um, tractate Nazir: (only!) 66 pages devoted (ostensibly) to the laws of those who take the Nazirite vow in an ascetic desire to be more spiritual. No matter how arcane the material, I know that the discipline Daf Yomi accords me is good, and I know that there will be jewels embedded in the road along the way.

Image: the opening side of the first page of the first volume of the Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 2a

Happy 80th Birthday in the Next World, Jerry Garcia: Three Jewish Things I Learned from the Grateful Dead

August 1 marks Jerry Garcia’s 80th birthday, and that milestone is provoking a whole lot of recognition across the cultural map: on musical fronts where it most certainly belongs, and a few other places where it probably doesn’t (like Garcia Bobblehead Day at Fenway).

Garcia made a big impact on my life, so even though he died in 1995, this occasion prompts some reflection.

First and foremost: It needs to be said upfront that when the Grateful Dead came to town, it was the best party around. On a good night—and not every night was a good night, G-d knows—the Dead were the greatest rock and roll band in the world, I’d stake my ears on it.

It’s important to make that point before jumping off the deep end, because for decades people have sought to overinflate the Dead’s significance in ways that are, often as not, kind of embarrassing. This essay is, no doubt, part of that trend. Sanctimony has always been the Achilles heel of this band and its fans, and all those liberal arts courses on “Philosophy and the Dead” and “The Sociology of the Dead” don’t help.

I do think popular culture, including rock, is worth studying, and I do think the Dead were an extraordinary cultural phenomenon. But let’s remember that Garcia often had the glimmer in his eye of a holy fool, implying: “Look, don’t take this too seriously, I’m in it for the laughs as much as anyone.” In other words: Don’t forget, it was primarily about fun.

Yet there were a whole lot of reasons why people latched on to the Dead and puffed up their importance. In part it was holding on to a countercultural vision that kicked back at the corporatization of things that once had been fun.

For a while, a very realistic middle class suburban alternative to the norm was to get in a car and follow the Dead around for a few weeks. It was a great way to visit other parts of the country, make new friends, semi-randomly run into old friends, and feel like you were part of something against that ran against the grain of the conformist American cultural product, even as the scene expanded to gigantic proportions. And—again, on the good nights—you got to hear fun, musically sophisticated, and occasionally risky performances.

Still, a lot of the Grateful Dead nostalgia among boomers and Gen-Xers is as much about themselves as it is about Jerry and the Dead. I remember where I was on August 9, 1995, when Garcia died: somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I had spent the summer in Israel and was traveling back to the States for my cousin Stacy’s wedding. And my brother Andy met me at the airport with the words, “Garcia died.” Like lots of people, I cried that day. Now, I’m not one to weep for dead celebrities, but in retrospect I realize that the tears were for something much more than a guitar player whom I never met: His death sealed a chapter of my youth that was inevitably coming to an end anyhow. (And, it should be said, some of those tears were also for an artist who touched me more than just about any other.)

While I do want to write about the music, it’s worth pointing out that the Grateful Dead were a significant cultural zeitgeist during their thirty years of existence. The band morphed out of a California scene around Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters, who, just as the psychedelic ‘60s really got going, had a great time traveling around the country on their Day-Glo bus scaring the children and shaking up Middle America. Kesey’s bona fides rested on his great novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Cassady was intimate with Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the 1950s. Therefore, from their inception the Dead were operating in a literary-cultural milieu as much they were creating cutting-edge electric music. They and their fellow travelers were the inheritors of the Beats and other cultural nonconformists in postwar America, which, it turns out, actually is a big deal.

Musically, the Dead pioneered high improvisation in rock music (along with a few others, like their East Coast nemesis the Velvet Underground and Cream in London), and committed to it a lot longer than anyone of their generation. There are moments in the Dead’s ’73-’74 incarnation that make me think of what John Coltrane’s group would have sounded like if they played electric guitars instead of traditional jazz instruments. Those are the moments I love most—along with the outright avant garde cacophony that they also were able to conjure.

They also brought on Robert Hunter as their non-performing lyricist, which shows a certain commitment to making the words as significant as the music. It worked; they created some songwriting masterpieces (like this one) that deserve recognition beyond the Cult of the Dead.

Hunter wasn’t Jewish and his writing, masterly as it is, doesn’t have the touchstones of the Bible or semitic spirituality the way, say, Dylan’s does. Finding Jewish meaning in the lyrics depends on the interpretative skills of the listener. But I want to emphasize that I learned some Jewish lessons from the Grateful Dead experience—as opposed to exegesis of, say, “Eyes of the World” or “New Speedway Boogie.”

Here are three of those lessons:

(1) The value of spiritual transcendence.  Mickey Hart—the Jewish member of the Dead—has a great quote describing his band:  “We’re in the transportation business.” He was right: there was an invigorating energy at Dead shows for people who used music and dance as a meditative tool to leave their body behind. (Dead crowds also drew their share of religious nonconformists and outright cults.)

Where does that sense of transcendence exist in the Jewish world today? Let’s be honest: it is extremely rare in the world of mainstream synagogues, whether they’re Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or whatever. Most of those places are far too staid for worshippers to really shed their bodies for spiritual points unknown. And—let’s be real—the formal structures of Jewish prayer aren’t super-conducive to that kind of transcendence anyhow. (In a typical prayer service, there’s too much to do—voluminous prayers to recite, Torah to read, etc.—for real meditative flights of fancy to happen).  

Hasidim are better at ecstasy. But if you’re like me, their conservatism and exclusion of women from the ritual mean their shuls can’t be my permanent spiritual home, even though I enjoy visiting. So there aren’t a lot of options.

But we need that transcendence, and the failure of many western-mode shuls to cultivate it is a big part of the reason so many of those shuls are empty, especially for young people. For many young Jews, Dead shows provided a crucial spiritual option in a time and place (late 20th Century America) where opportunities were few.

It occurs to me that the absence of ecstasy is one of the primary problems of 21st century liberal synagogues and churches.

(2) Joy is the essence of life—but you gotta earn it. Dead fans did exhilaration pretty well—spinning, leaping, smiling and sharing with one another. But it always seemed to me that there was something lurking behind or beyond the image of a stoned hippie girl spinning in a circle. There was a phantom in the shadows, something dark and vaguely dangerous—after all, why do you think they called themselves the Dead??

Maybe it was all the loss that the band themselves suffered. There was some special sort of conviction—a knowing—when Garcia would step up and sing a ballad like “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” or “Black Peter” (“All of my friends come to see me last night / I was laying in my bed and dying”). Sometimes “Dark Star” would extend dissonantly out to some pretty dark and ominous seashores of the unconscious for 20 or 30 minutes… before the tide would roll back in and resolve itself with the country bounce of “Sugar Magnolia” (“Heads all empty and I don’t care”). Sugar Magnolia was pretty joyful, but often you had to earn your dancing by having made it through to the other side.

I think this is a spiritual truth that Judaism embraces, too. The Baal Shem Tov famously said, מצווה גדולה להיות בשמחה תמיד / “It is a great Mitzvah to be perpetually in a state of simcha,” but it is banal to think that simcha means “put on a happy face.” Long ago, Danny Siegel taught me that simcha can’t just mean “happy”—after all, it is a simcha to be involved in the Mitzvah of comforting mourners or burying the dead. So where is the simcha in that?

He proposed translating שמחה/simcha as “life force”; the essence of existence and being and why we were created. Therefore, anytime we are involved in a Mitzvah/primary Jewish action, we potentially connect to the Source of Being—and that is joyful, if not exactly happy.

Jewish history is filled with too much heartbreak and suffering to say, “just be happy.” But having come through the dark, bitterness, and hurt—the joy of being connected to Life is that much sweeter and more profound. You need a Dark to stick a Light into it. Death don’t have no mercy, indeed.

(3) Jewish living primarily takes place in community. אַל תִּפְרֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר said the great sage Hillel; “Do not separate yourself from the community” (Pirkei Avot 2:4). Sure, there are times when a spiritual being needs to be alone. Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav emphasized that each of his disciples needed to spend time every day in the practice of התבודדות, solitude and reflection.

But much of Judaism takes place only in a collective. Most famously, a minimum quorum of 10 adults is needed for the practice of many rituals and prayers. It’s as if to say that the fullest glorification of G-d can only take place in a spiritual partnership with one another.

The GD experience was hugely social as well. Sure, anyone can put on a pair of headphones and bliss out. But the touring and concert-going experience was almost always a group effort. I shared some of those sojourns with some of the best friends I’ll ever have, even if today they are far-flung across the country. But I’ll never forget Spring Breaks, piled into my pal Maurice’s ridiculous Country Squire station wagon, heading off for Atlanta, or Albany, or Ontario. Few Deadheads traveled to see shows by themselves.

So thanks for all this, Jerry. Even though we never met, you made a difference in my life (and so many others’). Happy birthday in the Olam Ha-ba.

Light in Darkness

This short piece was written for the newsletter of Babson College’s Office of Religious &
Spiritual Life, who requested a post on the subject “creating light at dark times.”

I was invited to write a short piece about “Light in the Darkness.” Well, there is a sequence of ideas sprinkled throughout the Torah that leads us, I think, to a provocative and timely conclusion.

Hang on tight and follow my logic:

(1)  The Torah opens with darkness. The second verse of Genesis reads: “…darkness over the surface of the deep, and wind from God sweeping over the water…” before any act of creation came into being.

(2)  And then, the first act of creation: “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’” (Gen. 1:3). Divine creativity commences by pushing away darkness with light.

So far, so good. Except for one dilemma. A seventh-grader reading Genesis for the first time can spot the obvious quandary: the sun, moon, and stars do not come into being for a few more paragraphs, not until the 4th day of Creation! So what kind of light was this on Day One?

The Zohar, the preeminent book of Kabbalah, suggests that the divine light of the 1st day of Creation—this primordial Light, by which one could see from one end of the universe to another—was withdrawn for a variety of reasons. Its replacement, the light of the celestial bodies, is something qualitatively different.

But that’s not the end of the story, for there continue to be periodic glimpses of the divine Light.

(3)  Noah, says Jewish lore, had a radiant jewel in the midst of the ark that radiated the Light, so that the remnants of life could survive the flood.

(4)  Similarly, when the infant Moses was born into the slave-house of his parents, the Rabbis said that the house was flooded with Light.

(5)  Presumably, this is the sort of Light with which the burning bush glowed, not to be consumed.

 And so on.

But after a while, the Torah doesn’t take up the idea of the Light again, not for a long time. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Torah forgot all about the subject, for the sake of other things: creating families, freeing slaves, giving laws, etc.

(6)   Then, a couple of dozen books later, a thousand pages ahead (1,633 pages in the Hebrew-English Bible I’m looking at), there it is, the great secret:  “The human spirit is the lamp of God” (Proverbs 20:27).  That concealed light from Day One was hidden away - in each human soul, including your own. Human beings have the potential to illuminate the world with the divine Light of Creation. People bring light to the darkness. This is what it means to be God’s partner in completing Creation, an important Jewish theological idea.

If you followed the trail this far, you can draw the logical conclusion:  If the world seems dark, due to ignorance or cruelty or barbarism or selfishness… then you’ve gotta be the light.

Miles Davis and the Art of Living

Miles Davis (1926-1991) was one of the most important American musicians of all time—completely reinventing musical categories three or four times over during his turbulent career. Here’s the opening track of his 1971 album A Tribute to Jack Johnson, called “Right Off”:

Miles was a great trumpeter, but he was even more important as a bandleader, putting together some of the greatest groups in history. And he was known for giving cryptic instructions to his players, like a Zen master. He’d say, “Don’t just play what’s there, play what’s not there.” And: “Sometimes you have to play for a long time in order to play like yourself.” And: “There are no mistakes.”

There’s a moment in “Right Off” that illustrates Miles’s attitude of “no mistakes.” And in this instrumental drama, there’s a spiritual lesson.  You can hear the moment—Miles’s entrance after a dramatic introduction of drums, bass, and electric guitar—between 2:00 and 2:20 in the audio clip.

Here’s how jazz critic Paul Tingen describes what we’re hearing:

At 1:38 the guitarist takes down the volume, and at 2:11 he modulates to B-flat to heighten the dramatic effect of Miles’s entry. However, the bass player misses the modulation, and carries on playing in E.

In other words, the two principle players are now accidentally playing in different keys. It’s a train wreck. Surely they should stop and start the take over?

But that’s where Miles’s genius – his flexibility and his careful listening to his fellow musicians – comes in. Tingen continues:

In the middle of this clash of tonalities, Miles decides to make his entrance.

He starts by playing a D-flat, the minor third in the key of B-flat and the major sixth in the key of E. It is an ingenious choice – because the note is effective in either key. Miles than plays twelve staccato B-flat notes, phrasing them on the beat to drive the band on, and also as if to nudge [Michael] Henderson [the bass player] towards B-flat tonality. Henderson gets the message, comes into line by modulating to B-flat, and Miles carries on, giving one of the most commanding solo performances of his career.

 Tingen explains what’s so stunning about this:

Most musicians would have regarded the point when the 2 musicians were clashing in such incompatible keys as E and B-flat as an embarrassing mistake and would have stopped the band… Very few would have considered, or have had the courage, to come in at such a moment. And even fewer would have been able to make it into a resounding success.

Miles could have stopped the music, corrected the musicians, and started over. Instead, he picks the perfect note that takes the so-called mistake and makes it art.

Abraham Joshua Heschel told us that our task is to construct our lives as works of art, and what Miles does is illustrative of this.  On these days before Yom Kippur, we are tasked with having the courage to look honestly inward, reflecting on our choices and our deeds and their consequences. 

One important lesson of the Season of Teshuvah is that we don’t get to go back and erase our actions. They are done, with a ripple effect that has gone out into the world.  Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur are not spiritual erasers, blotting our sins from the Book of Life.

But the Days of Awe are something else:  They are opportunities to transform those deeds and shape them. Every living soul is a work-in-progress. It’s been said: No one can make a brand-new start, but anyone can make a brand-new ending.

That’s what’s so empowering about Yom Kippur. It’s only for people who make mistakes. Perfect people are not invited:

 Rabbi Abbahu says: In the place where a baal teshuvah [one who has turned back to a good and decent path] stands, even a completely righteous person cannot stand. [Talmud, Berachot 34b]

Think about it this way: Teshuvah is one of 613 Mitzvot. That means if a person is perfect and has not sinned – then she can only do 612 of them! The rest of us get the upper hand!

To take what we’ve damaged and mangled and turn it into art: that’s the trick. Miles knew it; so did the Talmud. Maybe this year Yom Kippur can spur more of us in that direction. 

Quotes are from Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 1991), p.106.

The Secret of the Seventh Light

Tonight is the seventh light of Chanukah, which is also Rosh Chodesh: the new moon in tonight’s sky heralds the start of the new month of Tevet.

(To be technical about it, this month has a two-day Rosh Chodesh, which happens occasionally; the new moon is on the second night, Monday night. Here’s more.) 

I think this night holds one of the secrets of the Chanukah.

Chanukah, ritually speaking, is very simple. For eight nights, starting on the 25th of Kislev, we light menorahs and place them so they can be seen by passers-by. We begin with one light and we increase incrementally until the final night, when the menorah is fully lit with eight flames.

This is the key symbol of Chanukah. Chanukah always falls during these eight days around the new moon that is most closely situated to the winter solstice—that is, days with the least amount of daylight (in the northern hemisphere) and most darkness: the sun is at its most distant point from earth’s axis and the moon is at its most obscured.

During that darkest time of the year—that’s precisely when we have our festival of lighting lights. And light, of course, is a pregnant symbol. It can mean justice, love, faith, peace, hope, wisdom (“enlightenment”), hidden mystical Truth. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyady (1745-1812) taught that while other festivals are celebrated with symbols that are inherently physical (matzah, sukkah, shofar, etc.), only Chanukah is celebrated with a symbol that is inherently spiritual: light.  

And Beit Hillel in the Talmud famously taught that in matters of holiness, our task is to always increase light, and never to decrease it (Shabbat 21b). 

Yet here’s the thing: during the first six nights of Chanukah, we stubbornly light the menorah—even while the world gets darker and darker. We add flames while the light of the moon keeps diminishing.

But tonight there’s a change. Tonight the moon starts to emerge and wax larger. It’s as if to say that our efforts have started to pay off:  The world is starting to follow our persistent lead, inclining towards light rather than darkness. 

Look, the world these days can seem pretty dark—no matter what darkness connotes for you. Things seem hopeless? Nations seem to be careening towards corruption and war instead of integrity and peace? People who said they care about you seem heartless? Feels like greed and materialism are winning out? I know the feeling—I’ve been there.

But the aspiration of Chanukah is that hope wins out in the long term. Keep using a spark to light more lights—and the world slowly, inevitably, will start to incline towards the light.

Writing Roundup: A Few Recent Books with Writings of Mine

November was a prolific month. I have articles in three recent books which you may be interested in:

First, THE FRAGILE DIALOGUE: NEW VOICES OF LIBERAL ZIONISM, edited by Stanley Davids and Larry Englander, is a collection of essays about Reform Zionism in America, Israel, and elsewhere. I contributed a transatlantic dialogue with Rabbi Charley Baginsky comparing the history and nature of Zionism in the liberal Jewish movements of America and the U.K.

A LIFE OF MEANING, edited by Dana Evan Kaplan, discusses Jewish spiritual practices. I wrote an essay on “Creating a Life of Meaning by Caring for Others,” which includes some reflections on the inspiration of my teacher, the Rabbanit Kapach.

Finally, NAVIGATING THE JOURNEY: THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE JEWISH LIFE CYCLE, edited by Peter Knobel, includes an article of mine about integrating Tzedakah into the practice of daily living.

Check ‘em out!

How to—and How Not to—Prepare for Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur is a time of deep introspection and reflection. The most solemn day of the year, it is also potentially a day of great liberation: forgiveness and turning can have that effect. (There’s a reason that the Talmud, startlingly, calls Yom Kippur the “most joyful day of the year.”)

Judaism recognized long ago that for Yom Kippur to accomplish all it sets out do demands a certain amount of preparation. Thus, the Ten Days of Teshuvah that commence with Rosh HaShanah are designed to spark a careful sifting through our relationships and all the parts of life that we want to redirect in the year ahead.

Our tradition developed a handful of interesting customs to aid in this preparation. (A custom, or minhag, is to be differentiated from Jewish law, or halakha. They reflect the diverse local color of Jewish life as it has proliferated throughout the millennia across the globe.)  Some of these customs have—mercifully!—disappeared except in certain obscure corners of the Jewish world.

Here are a few interesting ones:

Makkot:  That is to say—lashes. Following the literal letter of Leviticus when it says, “You are to afflict yourselves” (16:31 and 23:27), some Jews historically went beyond fasting. Here’s Scott-Martin Kosofsky, from his Book of Customs (2004):

From this grew the customs of fasting and makkot, the act of flagellation, as a personal confession of sin… Those who do the flogging alternate with those who are flogged. Thirty-nine lashes are given, as the words of V’hu Rahum, the prayer for mercy, are recited three times very slowly by the person administering the lashes. The person who is flogged bows and recites the confession saying one word at each lashing. If specific sins come to mind, these should be mentioned quietly, below the breath.

Kapparot: The most notorious Yom Kippur custom involves taking a live fowl (a rooster for a man and a hen for a woman) and swinging it over one’s head while reciting, “This is my atonement, this is my ransom, this is my substitute.” Afterwards, the chicken is slaughtered and either it or its monetary value is donated as Tzedakah. The tradition of kapparot (better, the Yiddish kappores, since it is an Ashkenazi custom) functions similarly to the Tashlich ceremony: symbolically casting one’s sins onto a third party and sending it away.

Kappores arose in Europe and has been controversial throughout its history. The Sephardic sage Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the 16th Century law code the Shulchan Aruch, insisted “it is a practice that should be prevented” (Orach Chayim 605:1). The Maharil, a 14th-15th century German sage, was more sympathetic, but offered an interesting caveat:

There are places where the kappores themselves are given to the poor But the custom in the Rhine district, where the price of the kappora is given to the poor, is a better one, for the poor man is not ashamed to accept the money. But when the poor man is given the fowl itself, he says to himself: First this person put his sins onto this fowl, and now he humiliates me by giving it to me!

The custom of kappores can still be found in some Chasidic communities. Chabad seems especially big on retaining and promoting it. In 2016, an activist group called United Poultry Concerns, trying to stem the practice, filed a lawsuit in California against Chabad of Irvine. The case was dismissed; it did not rise to California’s compelling state interest to infringe on religious liberty in this instance. Still, one can see why those concerned about animal rights are disturbed by the persistence of this custom.

Mikveh:  Immersion by men in a mikveh—a ritual bath for spiritual purification—is unusual but not unheard of. (Mikveh is a Mitzvah for women after their menstrual cycles, but is not commanded of men.) Immersion as a spiritual custom has had a popular reemergence in liberal communities in recent years, thanks in no small part to places like Mayyim Hayyim in Newton, MA.

Daniel Sperber, the preeminent scholar of regional Jewish customs around the world, has noted some interesting aspects of the practice of immersing before Yom Kippur. In his opus Minhagei Yisrael (available abridged in English as Why Jews Do What They Do, 1999), he explains that the custom arose in medieval Germany to immerse three times before Yom Kippur. This was based on numerology: in one explanation, the phrase mikveh yisrael appears in the Bible three times; in another, the Bible refers three times (Ezekiel 36:25, Leviticus 16:19 and 16:30) to God’s purification of Israel. An alternative explanation connects the three immersions to the three appearances of the word “purify” in Leviticus 16:19 and 30.

Seudat Mafseket:  A ritual meal that precedes the fast. The Talmud itself emphasizes the importance of having a good meal in preparation for fasting. Rashi, commenting on the discussion in Yoma 81b, writes:

The feasting on the ninth of Tishrei [the day before Yom Kippur] helps to emphasize the solemnity and the self-affliction due the next day. The more feasting on the eve of Yom Kippur, the more pronounced the affliction on the day itself.

It’s more than academic to look at the traditions that arose around preparing for Yom Kippur. Some of those customs are dead-ends for us (I won’t be joining you for lashing with makkot this week, and my own experiences with kappores largely have been nauseating, not redemptive).  Some—like rediscovering the mikveh and making the meal before the fast special—readily complement our spiritual condition. 

The point is that Yom Kippur, in order to “work,” demands preparation. The essential thing is not the custom per se, but the internal, spiritual result.  They are intended to catalyze the process by which we ask face deep questions:

What relationships are most precious to me, and how will I tend to them better in the year ahead?

Whom have I hurt? Who is waiting to hear my apology?

To what degree am I living up to my responsibilities—to myself, my family, my people, my world?

What makes me so angry about the world that I want to scream—and what can I, in fact, do about it?

How am I going to stop screwing up?

If we can be honest about the questions, and start to approach the answers, then all the preparations for Yom Kippur have done their jobs.

Gleanings in the Fields of Israel

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the corners of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. – Leviticus 19:9

 We came to the land to build and to be built [livnot u’l’hibanot] – Early Zionist Song & Slogan

The Torah created a remarkable framework for caring for the most desperate and hurting people in the ancient world.  At a time when wealth was your land, animals, and crops, the Torah stipulated that a certain part of your fields didn’t in fact belong to you at all, but belonged to people who were poor, needy, and homeless. These are called:

Pe’ah – the edge of the field;

Leket – the gleanings that were dropped by those harvesting the field the first time around, or were neglected to be harvested;

Shichecha – parts of the field that had inadvertently been forgotten to be harvested.

Each of these belonged to poor people, who had the right to come and take what belonged to them. The most well-known illustration of this from the Tanach is found in the second chapter of the Book of Ruth, as Ruth herself gathered grain for herself and her widowed mother-in-law Naomi.  This is what social justice meant in the days of the Bible. As later generations of Jews (and Christians) became urban and less agriculturally-based, they took these ideals and transformed them to systems based on money (i.e., the laws of Tzedakah). But it all starts with food.

Leket (“gleanings”) is alive and well today. I spent the morning with other volunteers in fields operated by Leket Israel, harvesting daloriyot (butternut squash).  Leket Israel relies on a handful of employees and hundreds of volunteers to glean vegetables in their fields and then distribute it to hundreds of organizations around the country that get food to people in need. 

Standing in the hot Middle Eastern summer sun this morning, I was thinking of Ruth the Moabite and I was singing.  I was reminded that harvesting these squash was a deeply spiritual exercise, one that the early pioneers of this land understood well when they harvested their fields and sang “Livnot u’L’hibanot: We’ll build and simultaneously build authentic selves, new identities.”

One stereotype of meditation is that it entails sitting crosslegged in silence. But many meditative practices involve mindful movement. For instance: dance, exercise, flyfishing, hiking – any of these can become focused spiritual disciplines (but they aren’t automatically so. They have to be performed mindfully.) As I look to the ground to identify a ripe squash, break it from its stem, put it in my basket, and walk on to the next one, I begin to develop a rhythm.  Identify, break off, basket, walk on.  Again. Again. The repetition lifts me. The sun is hot; the field goes on forever. And my basket gets more and more full, until it has to get emptied. This continues for two hours, with water breaks.  I get very into it, losing myself to the rhythms of the gleaning.

The two hours fly by quickly. I look to the bin that I’ve filled with squash and the volunteer coordinator (she was a Temple Executive Director in Arizona where she went by the slave name “Nancy”, before she made Aliyah, came to Leket, and became “Nechama”) looks at my accomplishments.  “You’ve gleaned 400 kilos of squash,” she tells me, “Enough to feed 100 people.”

But the fields are so big, and she explains that most summers she has hundreds of volunteers gleaning it all.  The war this summer has scared many of them away; this morning there are just a few of us.  She says that much of this field will never get gleaned this summer, and the vegetables will probably rot on the vines.  There’s just too many vegetables and not enough hands to harvest them. We’ll do the best we can – but hungry people will be another set of victims of the war.