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Jewish Journal

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August 12, 2022

Moonlight – Sunlight – The First of the Seven Weeks – Shabbat Nachamu

Seeking the Good /

 

Moonlight – Sunlight – The First of the Seven Weeks
Thoughts Coinciding with Torah Portion Va-etchanan

This week is the first of seven weeks that take us to Rosh HaShanah. This week’s Torah portion is an excellent first step. We have here the 10 Commandments as well as the Shema, two foundations of the Jewish religion.

In thinking about the High Holy Days, though, I find myself drawn to another part of our Torah portion – the first few verses. “Va-etchanan” means, “I pleaded.”  Moses pleaded with God to allow him to see the Promised Land. God refused. There are competing theories as to why God said no, but the most important thing was the “no.” Moses was not going to get what he wanted, what he dreamed of, what his life’s purpose was. At least what he thought his life’s purpose was.

According to the book of Deuteronomy, Moses did not collapse. He did not quit. He doesn’t even seem to have been depressed. He carried on. Promised land, but apparently not promised to him.

Perhaps Moses says to himself, “All right. I did not see that coming. Now what?”

People say that when one door closes, another opens. Perhaps, however, when one door closes, you look around at where you are, and you realize you are where you are supposed to be.

Perhaps the God Who is called “I am Who I Am” was saying, “Be here now.”

When Moses was denied entry to the land, did he suddenly understand that it was never ultimately about his going to the land in the first place?  Canaan was to be the place where the people of Israel could create a spiritual and moral path to God in sovereign boundaries, but perhaps that was not to be the work of Moses – that work was to be bequeathed to others.

Moses had been traversing a path to God since the day he left Pharaoh’s palace as a fugitive, on a journey into the unknown. When Moses encountered the angel of God in the heart of the burning bush, he was told by the angel, “Take your shoes off your feet, for the place that you stand upon is holy ground.” That ground was his holy land, a holy place he never left. He was on holy ground wherever he went.

As we begin our walk to the Days of Awe, we must remind ourselves: the work we are doing, at its core, is not about the High Holy Days. Our deepest path is not about religion, not even about God. The Days of Awe are about encountering the God beyond God, an encounter with pure Being. The soul encountering its source. Right here, right now.

This encounter can be profoundly unsettling. Beyond the text, beyond the prayers, beyond theological knots – a place where you just know a Presence that cannot be named – yet, it somehow knows your name. Silence is the greatest prayer, as we experience the unbearable lightness of our being.

Menachem Mendel of Vorki was asked, “What constitutes a true Jew?” He said, “Three things are fitting for us. Upright kneeling, silent screaming and motionless dance.”  (Buber, Tales of the Hasidic Masters)

This encounter is unbearable if it lasts too long. If you stay there, you can’t come home. If you have been there, you can’t come home anyway, not the way you used to be.

This experience never leaves the heart, and in some ways creates a hole in the heart that yearns to be filled. Some of us are born with that tear (a “kera” in Hebrew) in the heart; for others, life rips it open. It can only be filled with the overflow of pure being (the “shefa,” as the Kabbalists call it). The overflowing, the “shefa,” has many vessels into which it pours itself. Religion-this-side-of-God can certainly be one of them. For many, however, religion out of a can is not a satisfying vessel. Much of religion-this-side-of-God refuses to admit it is a finger pointing at the moon. It is not the moon.

And the light of the moon is not its own light. Moonlight reflects sunlight.

Suturing that tear, that wound, takes us into the world of spirit, to the garments of God: Love, Justice, Truth and Beauty. The Good. The Holy.

When experiencing the incoming Overflow, you face the existential burden of knowing that you are choosing a life in the presence of the Knowing One. With this knowledge, a calm resilience, a strength and courage, settles in as well.

When God says to Moses, “You can’t cross over to the land,” perhaps Moses thinks, “I’ve been on this land the whole time, anyway.”

Of course, the problem is we can forget all this. Just go back to sleep. We have to be disciplined and methodical about staying awake to the beauty, to the light, to the love. We have to find a way not to fall back asleep. Hence religion.

So here is a start on the path to the High Holy Days: Remember to love the Divine and all the garments of the Divine, when you lie down in the moonlight and when you arise in the sunlight. From love will come duty, from duty we find truth.

 

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Salman Rushdie Stabbed Multiple Times During NY Event

News, United States /

Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed 10-15 times during an event in New York and his condition is currently unknown.

Rushdie, 75, was being introduced at a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in southwest New York when the assailant charged the stage and attacked the novelist.

“A man jumped up on the stage from I don’t know where and started what looked like beating him on the chest, repeated fist strokes into his chest and neck,” an audience member told Reuters. “People were screaming and crying out and gasping.”

The moderator, Henry Reese, also reportedly suffered a minor head injury. The suspected attacker has been arrested and is currently in custody; he has reportedly been identified as Hadi Matar, 24, from New Jersey.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said that Rushdie is still alive; the author is currently in the hospital.

Suzanne Nossel, who heads PEN America, said in a statement, “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil. We hope and believe fervently that his essential voice cannot and will not be silenced.”

Though the assailant’s motive is unknown, the Iranian government has a fatwa (legal ruling based on Islamic law) against Rushdie calling for his killing after the author wrote “The Satanic Verses” in 1988. The book has been viewed as blasphemous by members of the Islamic community and it is banned in several Islamic countries. Rushdie was raised in a Muslim household in Mumbai, India.

Jewish groups noted that the Rushdie stabbing reflects the danger of the Iranian regime.

“Tehran celebrating the stabbing of @SalmanRushdie highlights the urgent need to acknowledge the threat of #Iran,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted. “Rushdie has received death threats from the Iranian regime for decades. This is further evidence of Iran’s malign influence in the US and abroad.”

“If the attack on Salman Rushdie is connected to the Iranian ‘fatwa’ calling for his execution, it is one more link in the chain of murder and attempted murder that originates in Tehran under the mullahs,” the American Jewish Committee said in a statement to the Journal. “For decades, we’ve seen hard evidence of Iran’s sponsorship of terror, from the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut to the Israeli Embassy and AMIA bombings in Buenos Aires, the Mykonos restaurant killings in Berlin, and just in recent days the thwarted attack against Iranian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, and the assassination plot against former National Security Adviser John Bolton. Now, Salman Rushdie has fallen victim to the violence and intolerance Iran inspires and encourages. We must all condemn egregious attacks like this, as we wish him a swift recovery.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center tweeted that they are “outraged but not shocked that renowned author and free speech icon #SalmanRushdie has been violently attacked. Pray for him. Iranian regime offered $3 million to kill him. @POTUS must end talks with Tehran as it tries to assassinate Americans.”

“The Twitter accounts of Iran’s Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] have been used to threaten people like Salman Rushdie and spread antisemitism,” journalist Yashar Ali tweeted. “Iran bans Twitter for its citizens and yet Iranian officials have Twitter accounts. Twitter must permanently ban the Supreme Leader’s accounts.”

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How to Stay Married

Columnists /

If you stay married long enough, say 42 years, certain truths will be revealed. Like maybe your mate prefers staying at home to freezing on an Antarctic adventure cruise. Or perhaps he has such a severe obsession with sports on TV that he not only watches anything with a moving ball, but he also feels compelled to deliver a running commentary to no one in particular in an inappropriate voice. Finally, just as you start accepting your husband’s quirks, even finding them cute, don’t be surprised if he hits you with a new one. Like my husband, who recently announced that he will no longer eat my food.

I was shaken to my core at first. Isn’t he the one for whom I rushed home from work to cook gourmet meals over the course of about 30 years? Back when our sons were young he seemed very happy chomping away on osso buco, Provencal fish stew, or Aunt Ruthie’s brisket, basically anything I put in front of him. Then he hit 70 and everything changed. He decided to take control over what went into his mouth. He became a vegetarian!

Even though he explained that he had been feeling bad about eating animals for a long time and his doctor agreed that a vegetarian diet might be better for his heart, in my heart I felt a pain. He was about to win the biggest competition of them all. He was going to outlive me!

Of all the values I inherited from my mother, the obligation of a wife to provide family meals stuck. Even though it clashed with my feminism, I couldn’t resist wowing the gang with homemade pizzas, cloud-like Chinese dumplings, perfect roast garlic chicken and lemon tarts. I enjoyed the creativity of working with my hands, and I loved the power of following my own appetites as I decided what to cook each night. In retrospect, gathering the family around the table each night was a pleasure.

As much as I yearned for a break from all that food production, once I got over the freedom when the kids left home, I cut back to cooking a few dinners a week. I couldn’t quite shake the habit. Perhaps it was due to the Steins. The first couple of my parents’ generation to split up, family legend has it that chopped liver was to blame. After 35 years of serving the same menu every evening, Mrs. Stein wasn’t in the mood to make her legendary liver one night. When her husband walked in the house and didn’t see his favorite dish on the table, he turned around and promptly walked out. “She stopped making the chopped liver,” he explained in the divorce proceedings.

My husband Ted is a bit more modern. A journalist with no gourmet aspirations, he adored whatever I put in front of him for 40 years. As soon as the food would come to the table, he would fill his plate, beam at me lovingly, and exclaim “Yum! This is delicious!” Then he would gobble it up. As he mopped up the sauces with the last bit of fresh baguette, his gaze told me I was a goddess. Though I suspected sometimes that he couldn’t really discern what he was eating, it didn’t matter. I could never have flourished as a cookbook author with a picky eater giving me corrections. It took me a long time to admit that all he ever really wanted was to refuel—a fact that explains his need to eat quickly, pay the tab, and go home when dining out.

As he mopped up the sauces with the last bit of fresh baguette, his gaze told me I was a goddess.

Now that he’s cooking exactly what he wants when he wants it, his diet leans toward the functional. He’s hoarding for the vegetarian apocalypse. The pantry is overflowing with ancient grains, every kind of lentil, chickpea, bean, nut, rice and seed that the modern food industry can market. He hunts for his own special vinegars, hummus of every variety, and enough avocados to cause a shortage. As for the spicy Siracha sauce that he slathers all over his creations, there’s always another bottle in the pantry waiting on standby.

I understand that other wives may adjust their cooking to accommodate crotchety men in retirement, but I just can’t. I love my repertoire too much; plus, for me salad will always be a profoundly unsatisfying meal.

In the new system, we try to time our dinners to eat together, which takes coordination since he tends to spread out, use every bowl, and blast bad music. Nonetheless, dinner remains sacrosanct—the time we sit together, catch-up and occasionally share a vegetable side.

 

Los Angeles food writer Helene Siegel is the author of 40 cookbooks, including the “Totally Cookbook” series and “Pure Chocolate.” She runs the Pastry Session blog.

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