Eikev: Covered Heart, Stiff Neck

Some common Biblical Hebrew metaphors seem straightforward to English-speakers, some need only a little explanation, and others seem bizarre. The name of this week’s Torah portion, Eikev, is an easy metaphor. The word means “on the heels of”, and this makes sense to English-speakers in a fairly literal translation of the first sentence of the portion:

It will happen, eikev your listening to these laws, that if you keep and perform them, then God, your god, will keep for you the covenant and the kindness that He swore to your forefathers. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 7:12)

eikev (עֵקֶב) = on the heels of, as a consequence of.

Later in this Torah portion, we get the following sentence:

You must circumcise the foreskin of your leivav, and you must not stiffen your oref again. Because God, He is your god, the god of gods ... (Deuteronomy 10:16-17)

leivav (לֵבָב) = heart, thoughts and feelings, seat of consciousness, mind.

oref (עֺרֶף) = nape, neck, back of the neck

Most English speakers think that stiff-necked means stubborn, and that is certainly part of its meaning in Biblical Hebrew. But in the Torah kasheh-oref (“stiff of neck”) and related phrases have a more specific meaning.

The first time the Torah refers to a stiff neck is right after God has given Moses the two tablets of commandments on Mount Sinai. God tells Moses that the people below have made and bowed down to a golden calf, and calls them stiff-necked— meaning that they are stubbornly reverting to the old-time religion of Egypt.

Necks are called stiff or hard 19 times in the Torah, and 18 of those references either accuse or warn descendants of the children of Israel regarding their attitude toward God. Being stiff-necked is associated with deliberately disobeying God— by worshiping other Gods, or by refusing to listen to God, or by refusing to follow God’s laws.

The Torah also has nine references to turning one’s neck to someone. Since the word oref really means the back of the neck, it is not surprising that this Hebrew metaphor covers two English metaphors: turning your back on someone, and turning tail to flee. Perhaps stiff-necked people are those who stubbornly turn their backs on God.

The only time the Torah uses the concept of a stiff neck a different way is in Proverbs 29:1: Reprimands make a man stiff-necked; suddenly he cracks, and there is no healing. (If only Moses had known that, it might have been easier for him to lead the Israelites across the wilderness.)

In this week’s Torah portion, when Moses tells the people not to stiffen their necks again, he means that they must not deliberately turn away from their own religion again. But what does he mean when he says “You must circumcise the foreskin of your heart“?

The Hebrew word levav does mean the organ that pumps blood, but this literal meaning leaves us with a horrific image of open-heart surgery. In the Torah and Talmud, the heart is also the seat of our stream of consciousness, all our thoughts and feelings. In many Torah passages, a more accurate translation of levav would be “mind”. I usually prefer to keep the original metaphors in my translations from the Torah, but if I retranslate Deuteronomy 10:16 with the words levav (heart) and oref (back of the neck) changed into their implied meanings, here is what we get:

You must circumcise the foreskin of your mind, and you must not stubbornly reject [God] again.

Then what does it mean to circumcise the foreskin of your mind? The 15th-century rabbi Ovadiah Sforno wrote that the Torah is asking us to remove the covering over our intelligence, by examining our thinking for errors that lead to false beliefs. Eliminating these errors of thought will remove the barrier between our minds and God.

The 19th-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch proposed a harsher interpretation: our thoughts and desires are unruly, so we must gain mastery over them. Once we subordinate our hearts/minds to our real selves, we become able to subordinate ourselves to God.

Circumcision is certainly removing a covering (though what remains is rarely associated with intelligence, today). When Moses describes himself at the burning bush as someone with uncircumcised lips, he implies that an insensitive covering, literal or metaphorical, prevents him from speaking well.

I suppose circumcision can also be seen as a form of discipline; the ancient Israelites did view uncircumcised Greeks and Romans as licentious. But in the Torah, literal circumcision is primarily a sign of the covenant between the Israelites and God, the covenant first ratified by Abraham. Thus circumcisizing your heart is also a metaphor for making a covenant with God–not just with your actions, but with your inner mind.

It is hard enough to obey the rules laid down by your religion (particularly if you are an orthodox Jew facing a list of 613 commandments). But is it even possible to cut away anything unholy from your innermost thoughts and feelings?

All too often, when we examine our own minds and judge the contents, we reprimand ourselves harshly. Then we react to our own harshness either by rebelling against our superegos and stiffening our necks (perhaps like the man in the verse from Proverbs above); or by wrapping ourselves in suffocating layers of blame and depression, and sometimes covering that over with denial. It is as if, having peeled back the foreskin over our minds and peeked inside, we then add layer upon layer of extra skin, so we will not see our true inner minds again.

How can we uncover our hidden feelings and beliefs, and leave our minds open and able to grow? I think we need to relax our necks first. We need to be flexible, willing to turn around, to reconsider. Then, if we approach our inner selves either dispassionately or with kindness, instead of with reprimand and blame, we can choose to turn toward the good and the holy. Once we are turning toward God, instead of stubbornly turning our backs on God, then the coverings that have kept us out of a covenant with the divine might not even need to be cut. The barriers might softly fall away.

Or maybe that’s a woman’s point of view, and men need to tame their testosterone drive with a metaphorical circumcision of their hearts! What do you think?

Va-etchanan: Extreme Love

Ve-ahavta God, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your uttermost. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 6:5)

ve-ahavta (וְאָהַוְתָּ) = And you shall love.

The verse commanding us to love God, which appears in this week’s Torah portion, Va-etchanan (“And I implored”), is also a key moment in every evening and morning Jewish prayer. For Jews serious about prayer, it can be a daunting commandment.

What does it mean to love God? And how can we do it?

Loyalty

When the book of Deuteronomy was written down, perhaps in the 7th century B.C.E., the word ahavah, “love”, often meant loyalty. When treaties called for vassals to love their overlords with all their heart, they meant that the vassals must be totally loyal.

This definition of love answers the question “How can love be commanded?” Our emotions may not be under our own control, but we can freely choose, over and over again, to act with loyalty. Similarly, we can choose to be committed to someone, even when our desires pull us in another direction.

The concept of love as commitment and loyalty continued in the Talmud, which tells the story of Rabbi Akiva’s execution by the Roman government, after his conviction for teaching Torah. Akiva interpreted nafshekha as “your life”, and said at his execution that he was fulfilling the commandment to love God with all his life.

Today it is still possible to be loyal and committed to your religion, and in one sense this counts as loving God.

Obsession

Ideas about the meaning of the word ahavah, “love”, changed over the centuries, and Torah commentary on this verse changed accordingly. Medieval thinkers saw love as an overwhelming state of mind. In the 11th century, Bachya ibn Pakuda wrote in Duties of the Heart:

“What does the love of God consist of? The soul’s complete surrender of its own accord to the Creator in order to cleave to His supernal light…”

In this state of mind, there would be

“no place for any other thought, sending forth not even one of the limbs of its body on any other service but that drawn to be His will; loosening the tongue but to make mention of Him and praise Him out of love of Him and longing for Him.”

This kind of obsessive passion sometimes happens to a lover who is falling in love, or to a mother who is enraptured by her baby. The condition is temporary, and does not require any deliberate choice. Can obsessive passion for God be commanded? Can we choose to enter into that state?

In the 12th century, Moshe ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or Rambam, wrote that passion for God can be prompted by deliberately paying attention to the wonders of God’s creation:

“When man contemplates His works and His wonderful, great creatures and fathoms through them His inestimable and boundless wisdom, he will immediately love, and praise, and exalt, and will be seized by a keen longing passion to know Him …” (Yesodei ha-Torah).

Judging by another of his books, Maimonides thought contemplation would lead to passionate obsession:

“What is suitable love? To love God with an exceedingly great and very intense love until one’s soul is knit with the love of God and one is constantly obsessed by it. As in a state of love-sickness, in which the mind cannot be diverted from the beloved, the love is constantly obsessed by his love, lying down or rising up, eating or drinking.” (Teshuva).

Longing

The Chassidic movement among eastern European Jews in the 18th century also placed a high value on passionate attachment to God, but its rabbis emphasized the feeling of longing for union with God. The holy Chassids are described as desiring God with an intensity like the sexual desire of a young adult who has fallen in love–hard. Yet the yearning for God seems to be enough, even if the lover of God occasionally gets distracted, and even if the lover never feels as if the union with God is consummated.

Building on the Chassidic tradition, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger wrote in his 1808 work Sfaat Emet (as translated by Arthur Green):

“This means one should want nothing but God. ‘With all your soul’—‘with every single soul-breath that God has created in you.’ And the meaning of ‘be-khol levavekha’ is not ‘with all your heart,’ as most people interpret it. But rather, we need to become aware that each feeling we have is only the life force that comes from God. … Even if it is hard for us to imagine fulfilling ‘with all your heart,’ we should still have that willful longing to reach it at all times. For it is through this longing that gates open in the human heart.”

Unselfishness

Later in the 19th century, the rationalist Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explained the verse this way:

“All your thoughts and emotions, all your wishes and aspirations, and all your possessions shall be regarded by you only as means for attaining closeness to God, for bringing God near to you; this shall be their sole value to you.”

Selfish desires, he continued, should be sacrificed for the sake of the relationship with God.

Although self-sacrifice acquired a bad reputation in the 1960’s, today many people believe that marriages are successful when both partners are willing to sacrifice selfish desires for the sake of the marriage. Can this view of love as being unselfish and giving the other person priority be applied to God?

When I say or read the commandment to love God with all my heart/mind and all my desire/life and all my uttermost means, my immediate thought is always that it’s too hard. I just don’t have the inner means to do it–whether I define love as loyalty and commitment, as passionate obsession, as extreme longing, or as self-sacrifice.

Yet I have loved a few human beings in all of those ways. Perhaps if I believed in an anthropomorphic god, I would be able to follow the commandment to love God. Since I do not, I am hoping that partial love of God is better than none at all. So instead of loving God as I love a human being, I am committed to Torah and a moral life. I have established a habit of remembering to contemplate the wonders of the universe, as Maimonides recommends, and a habit of moving my feeling-soul by singing prayers.

I keep longing and seeking to go farther on this journey. I am taking better care of my real needs, but I am prepared to sacrifice any apparent needs to serve a greater good. That is my all my uttermost, all I can do to love God.

Devarim: What are these words?

Moses dedicates the last days of his life to a long speech: the book of Deuteronomy/ Devarim (“Words”). He tells the Israelites their history since they left Mount Sinai, and he repeats the laws and decrees God gave them during their 40 years in the wilderness.

During this oration the Israelites are camped on the east bank of the Jordan River, right across from Jericho in the “promised land” of Canaan. The book of Deuteronomy begins:

These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan, in the wilderness, on the desert plain opposite Suf, between Paran and Tofel, and Lavan and Chatzerot and Di-Zahav. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 1:1)

Suf = reeds, water weeds; coming to an end

Paran = place of tree-branches, of beautifying with boughs

Tofel = probably an alternate spelling of tafeil = whitewash, whitewashing

Lavan = white; the name of Rebecca’s brother and Jacob’s uncle and father-in-law in the book of Genesis/Bereishit

Chatzerot = courtyards

Di-Zahav = enough gold

At first glance, the opening sentence seems to be giving coordinates for an actual geographic location. Yet the place-names are all either invented, or located far away from the east bank of the Jordan. Why are they mentioned here?

Commentary as early as Targum Onkelos, from the first century C.E., found an alternate meaning in the list of supposed place-names. According to Onkelos, the list is a reminder of the times the Israelites made God angry during their wanderings in the wilderness. A few centuries later, the Talmud agreed, and it became the traditional interpretation of the verse.

Which offenses do the six place-names refer to? In other parts of the Torah, the word Suf is a place-name only in the combination Yam Suf, the Sea of Reeds (known in the English tradition as the Red Sea). This is the sea the Israelites crossed to escape from the Egyptian army; it lay between Egypt and the Sinai peninsula, far away from the Jordan. When the Israelites came to the Red Sea, they asked Moses why God had brought them there to die; weren’t there enough graves in Egypt?

Paran was an unpopulated area just south of the Negev desert, south of the border of Canaan at the time. The Israelites were camped there when Moses sent twelve men to scout out the “promised land” to the north, and ten of the twelve who reported back said that the Israelites could never win a battle against the residents of the land. The people rebelled against entering Canaan. According to classic commentary, Moses mentions Paran at the start of his speech in Deuteronomy to remind the surviving children of Israel that their fathers’ lack of trust in God doomed the people to wander in the wilderness for another 38 years. Now that they have another chance to cross into Canaan, albeit from a different border, they had better not repeat the earlier generation’s mistake!

No location named Tofel is mentioned anywhere in the Jewish bible, except in this single sentence. With a shift in vowels, the word is tafeil, whitewashing or plastering over. First-century commentaries consider tafeil a metaphor for slander, and explain that the Israelites slandered the manna–which is described as white, lavan, in Exodus/Shemot 31.

Chatzerot (Courtyards) was the name of the place the Israelites went right after Kivrot Hata-avah, the camp where they complained that they wanted meat instead of manna, and God sent quail–along with a plague (Numbers 11:35). In Chatzerot, Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses on account of his wife, and God punished Miriam.

The last place in the list is Di-Zahav, a variant of dai zahav, which means “enough gold”. Classic commentary pointed out that the Israelites brought so much gold out of Egypt, they could use it to make the golden calf at Mount Sinai. (Fortunately, they still had enough gold left over to make the furnishings for God’s sanctuary.)

Maybe the place-names in the first verse of Deuteronomy are indeed reminders of how the earlier generation of Israelites irritated God. Moses might begin his long speech with these reminders in the hope that the new generation would not repeat their parents’ mistakes. He knows he will die on the east side of the Jordan, so he will not be able to shepherd them.

On the other hand, in the original Hebrew there were no capital letters, no consistent way to indicate a word was a proper name. The letter nun, pronounce like our letter N, was only occasionally added to an ordinary word to make it a place-name. So the first sentence of Deuteronomy could be legitimately translated with all of the so-called place-names as common nouns or verbs:

These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan, in the wilderness, on the desert plain opposite coming to an end between beautifying and whitewashing, and then whiteness and courtyards and enough gold. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 1:1)

As Deuteronomy opens, Moses’ journey with the Israelites is coming to an end. Their end is on the opposite bank of the Jordan; his end is on the eastern side, where he will die. Should he give his people a glowing picture of Canaan, formerly described as the land of milk and honey, in order to increase their desire to cross over? Or would beautifying what lies ahead of them really be whitewashing it, covering up the hard reality that they will have to fight battles for the land? Should he describe the land as full of white milk, and courtyards, and gold?

No, Moses decides; it is better if the Israelites do not expect to walk into a life of luxury. Canaan is good land, but the people should not conquer it merely for the sake of its beauty, its food supply, its cities, its riches. They should conquer Canaan because God told them to.

And so after Moses hints at the beauty of the land across the Jordan, he begins his lengthy account of how the people angered God on their journey, and how God helped them to seize the land on the east bank of the Jordan anyway, and how they must nevertheless go on.

Ruth: What’s in a name?

This Saturday evening the Jewish holy day of Shavuot (“Weeks”) begins. Shavuot comes at the end of seven weeks of counting of the omer, a measure of harvested barley, every day. Originally, Shavuot was a summer pilgrimage festival, when farmers brought the “first fruits” of their harvests to the temple. After the fall of the second temple in the year 70, Shavuot became the annual celebration of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

So why do we read the Book of Ruth, the story of a Moabite convert, on Shavuot?

It was in the days of the judging of the judges, and there was a famine in the land, and a man went from Bethlehem of Judah to be an expatriate in the fields of Moab–he, and his wife, and his two sons. The name of the man was Elimelekh, and the name of his wife was Naomi … (Ruth 1:1-2)

Naomi (נָעֳמִי) = My sweetness. She must have lived up to her name, at least in Moab, or her daughters-in-law would not have cried at the idea of parting from her.

Elimelekh died in Moab, and their two sons married Moabite women. After about ten years with no offspring, the two sons died. Then only the three widows remained: Naomi and her daughters-in-law Orpah and Ruth. Naomi heard that the famine in Bethlehem was over, and she headed back to her old home. Her daughters-in-law followed her, but Naomi insisted they should return to their own mothers’ homes instead, where they would be more likely to remarry.

They raised their voice and they wept again. And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law [goodbye], but Ruth clung to her. (Ruth 1:14)

Orpah (עָרפָּה) = from oref = nape, back of the neck; dripping. The Talmud claimed that Orpah dripped tears, while Ruth Rabbah (rabbinic commentary compiled around the 6th century) noted that “she turned her back on her mother-in-law”.

Then Ruth said her famous words:

Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back from following you; because where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay; your people will be my people, and your god will be my god. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried … for [only] death will separate me from you. (Ruth 1:16-17)

When they came to Bethlehem, Naomi told the women of the city: Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the bitterness of God to me is extreme. I was full when I went, and God has brought me back empty. (Ruth 1:20-21)

If only Mara were spelled the same way as mar = bitterness, Naomi’s remark would be straightforward. However, the Hebrew text spells Mara with the letter alef at the end, and that changes the word to “apparition” or “mirror”. Perhaps Naomi had become so empty, so despairing, that she was only a shadow or reflection of her former sweet self. Perhaps she was like a ghost, the walking dead. She did not even introduce Ruth, the young stranger beside her.

Ruth (pronounced “Root” in Hebrew) probably comes from the same root as riutah = she drenched, she provided abundant drink. The Talmud said Ruth’s name foretold that her great-grandson David would drench God with songs and hymns.

Ruth Rabbah traced her name to a similar word with the letter alef in the middle, ra-atah = she saw, she perceived. According to Ruth Rabbah, Ruth was perceptive, considering carefully the words of Naomi.

More recent scholars speculate that Ruth comes from a similar word with the letter ayin in the middle, reut = female neighbor or friend; striving, aspiration. Ruth was a faithful friend to Naomi even when Naomi gave up hope; and she never stopped striving to improve their lot, always working hard and thinking fast.

Naomi and Ruth arrived in Bethlehem destitute. Ruth supported them by gleaning barley and wheat, and she chose to glean in the fields of Boaz, one of Elimelech’s relatives. When the harvest ended, Ruth, following Naomi’s instructions, came to Boaz in the night and suggested that he marry her. As a childless widow, Ruth was entitled under Israelite law to get a son through her dead husband’s closest male relative. This “levirate marriage” would “redeem” her dead husband’s inheritance.

Boaz was not the closest relative, but he was the most willing, and by the end of the book, he had married Ruth and given her a son. In an all-around happy ending, Naomi’s life was redeemed through her grandson. This boy, Oveid, became the grandfather of King David.

So why do we study Ruth on the holiday of Shavuot?

Like Shavuot, the book is about first fruits: Ruth gleans barley, the grain that is counted before Shavuot, and wheat, the grain the Israelites brought to the Temple on Shavuot in the form of loaves of bread.

The book of Ruth also addresses the other theme of Shavuot, the giving of Torah at Mount Sinai. Ruth is Judaism’s supreme example of a convert, and not just because of her famous words of commitment to Naomi and her religion. Traditional Judaism sees Ruth as the convert who merited being the great-grandmother of King David. What does conversion have to do with Sinai? The Vilna Gaon, an 18th-century rabbinic authority, declared that everyone at Mount Sinai was a convert, because there was no Jewish religion until God gave the Torah to the people there–to the Israelites and to those who came with them out of Egypt.

I believe the names of the women in the Book of Ruth also comment on conversion and attachment to a religion. Naomi represents the native Jew, in both her sweetness–the blessing of giving so many blessings –and her bitterness, the mirror of her past suffering. Orpah, who turns her back on her mother-in-law’s religion and stays in Moab, reminds me of someone who converts to Judaism when she marries a Jew, but does not take the religion seriously. Ruth is the passionate convert, always striving. Even if other Jews ignore her, she keeps pouring her soul into the cup of kindness and offering it again and again. She is also perceptive, seeing when to act, when to speak, and when to hold her peace. May we all be granted Ruth’s passion, her willingness to give, and her insight.

***

Last week we finished the book of Leviticus/Vayikra. This week we begin the book of Numbers/Bemidbar, as the Israelites get their marching orders. (At least, the tribes are counted and appointed their camping positions on the journey ahead, and the Levites are given their duties for disassembling and transporting the mishkan, God’s dwelling place. It takes a lot of organization to move all those people and all those holy items from one camp to the next.)

I will be on a personal retreat during the month of June, organizing my own life, so I won’t be posting any new “Torah sparks” for the next month. If you are looking for a spark of inspiration on any Torah portion in the first half of the book of Numbers, you can go to my website, http://www.mtorah.com, and click on the tab “Blogs by Torah Portion”. You’ll find my postings for the last two years on Numbers/Bemidbar. I’ll be back with new sparks in July!

Emor: The God of Life

The Jewish tradition of focusing on this life, in this world, began with the Torah itself. Its first two books, Genesis/Bereishit and Exodus/Shemot, treat death as merely the end of life. People grieve when their loved ones die, but the text shows little interest in what happens to the dead. The next book, Leviticus/Vayikra warns the children of Israel not to succumb to idolatry of the dead. In this week’s Torah portion, Emor (Say), the priests are given additional rules which make it clear that the God of Israel is opposed to worshiping death or those who have died.

While priests in other ancient Middle Eastern religions conducted elaborate funeral rites, the priests of Israel had to minimize their contact with the dead. While ordinary people in other religions followed extreme mourning practices, including gashing themselves and yanking out their hair, the Torah forbids Israelites from making cuts in their skin or bald spots on their heads. These permanent marks would mean that the living survivor has less honor (according to 16th-century rabbi Obadiah Sforno) or less value (according to 19th-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch) than the dead.

Furthermore, the Torah says anyone who touches a dead human body, or enters a room containing a corpse, becomes tamei, a state of ritual impurity that prevents one from entering God’s sanctuary until one has completed seven days of purification. Worship of the God of Israel must remain completely separate from the experience of death.

Since proximity to a human corpse makes a person tamei, the priests of the Israelites can only do their jobs if they avoid the dead. (Ironically, the priests’ service inside the sanctuary required slaughtering and butchering animals; but the Torah views the body of a kosher animal differently from the body of a human being.)

The Torah makes two exceptions to this ban against proximity to dead human bodies. If a priest finds an unidentified corpse on the road, he has the same obligation as anyone to take the body away for proper burial. Additionally, this weeks’s portion says that all priests except for the high priest are allowed to become tamei when their closest blood relatives die: mother, father, brother, unwed sister, son, and daughter. (Rabbis through the centuries have assumed that the priest’s wife also counts as a sufficiently close relative, and have devised explanations for her omission from the list.)

Like other Israelites, regular priests are forbidden to mourn by shaving their beards, making bald patches on their heads, or cutting incisions in their skin. But they are allowed to dishevel their hair and rip their clothing as they grieve. The high priest, however, must follow stricter rules.

The high priest over his brothers, who has had the oil of the anointing poured over his head and his hand filled, so as to wear the garments– he shall not dishevel his head, and he shall not rip his garments. And he shall not enter (a room) with any dead body; not even for his father or for his mother shall he become tamei. And he shall not leave the holy place, and he shall not profane the holy place of his God; because the crown of the anointing oil of his God is upon him. (Leviticus/Vayikra 21:10-12)

kohein gadol = great priest, high priest (a lifetime office after anointment, with unique duties)

mikdash = holy place, holiness; that which is set apart as exclusively for God

neizer = crown, headband, head of hair; mark of distinction, ordination, setting apart

On a practical level, if one regular priest becomes tamei because of the death in the family, another priest can substitute for him in his sacred work. But there is only one high priest, who has no substitute. (In this respect, the high priest is like the president of the United States, who is always on call, and can use the vice president as a substitute only if he is seriously incapacitated.)

On another level, the Torah requires all of the priests to serve as public symbols of holiness, and the high priest is the ultimate symbol. He even wears a unique gold medallion on his forehead engraved with the words “Holy to God”. (See my post on “Tetzavveh: Holy Flower”.) All priests, but especially the high priest, represent God’s characteristics to the public. That is why, when they are on duty, they dress in beautiful costumes colored with expensive dyes, dazzling people with their majesty. And that is why, unlike priests in other religions, they avoid corpses. Traditional Jewish commentary agrees that if the priests of the God of Israel engaged in rituals for the dead, God would be viewed as another god of death. Above all, the God of Israel is a god of life.

In fact, one of the names of God in the Hebrew Bible is “God of Life”, a phrase that first appears in the book of Deuteronomy, and occurs in many of the books of the prophets:

For who, of all flesh, heard the voice of Elohim Chayyim speaking from the midst of the fire, as we did, and lived? (Deuteronomy/Devarim 5:23)

Elohim Chayyim = God of Life, Living God (Both translations are valid.)

Because the high priest is distinguished from all other priests by his method of ordination–which includes anointment on the head–and by the additional items he wears with his official garments, he must avoid any appearance of mourning on his head or his garments. As a human being, he will grieve in his heart. But as a symbol of God, he must always stand for life, life in the body in this world. This life is God’s great gift to us, the one that lets us praise and bless God in return.

The dead do not praise God, nor any who go down to silence. But we ourselves will bless God, from now until eternity. (Psalm 155:1718)

Of course, life and death must co-exist in this world; you can’t have one without the other. But we can choose which aspect of reality to focus on and appreciate. When I meet people whose personal religion revolves around an afterlife, I wonder if they are fully appreciating this life, in this world. I find that the more attention I pay to everything that is alive, right now, the more I appreciate life, the more I rejoice in creation, the more I am able to praise God. A god of death would give me a grim outlook.

There is a time for mourning, and I am glad I will never be a high priest! But I am grateful I could choose to become a Jew, and bless the God of Life.

Shemini: Aaron’s Four Sons

Four sons. We have completed the week of Passover/Pesach, with its ritual commemorating the exodus from Egypt. For at least 1,500 years this ritual has included a description of the “four sons”—four kinds of children the parent must teach about the exodus.

Now I am preparing to go to Ashland, Oregon, for a weekend learning from Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, and I will be telling a new Torah monologue inspired by the Torah portion of the week, Shemini (“Eighth”). In this portion, Aaron and his four sons emerge from seven days of seclusion after Moses anointed them as priests, and engage in the final ritual inauguration of the mishkan, the dwelling-place for God. Only two of Aaron’s four sons survive the day.

The four sons in the Passover reading are based on four places in the Torah where a father tells his son the reason for performing the Passover ritual. Three of these answers are preceded by a question by a hypothetical son (Deuteronomy 6:20, Exodus 12:26, and Exodus 13:14). The fourth place, Exodus 13:8, merely implies it is the answer to a child’s question. The rabbis of the first several centuries C.E. took these lines out of context in order to describe four kinds of children:

—the “wise son” who wants to know all the rules;

—the “wicked son” who thinks Passsover has nothing to do with him;

—the “simple son” who merely asks “What is this?”;

—and the son who does not even know how to ask.

In the Torah, all four answers are variations on “Because God freed us from slavery in Egypt”. The answers in the Torah are clearly addressed to the descendants of the Israelites in general, while the elaborations in the Passover ritual refer to four general types of children. I have never seen a haggadah (a book telling the Passover ritual from start to finish) that connects the “four sons” with Aaron’s four sons. But next year, I hope to write one.

Two years ago I analyzed what happened to Aaron’s two older sons, Nadav and Avihu, in my blog “Shemini: Strange Fire”. As I wrote my new Torah monologue the past week, I became interested in the psychology of the two younger sons, the survivors who were not consumed by the fire from God: Elazar and Itamar.

In birth order, the sons of the high priest Aaron and his wife, Elisheva, are:

Nadav = Willing Donor

Avihu = He Is My Father

Elazar = God Helps

Itamar = Island of Date Palms

Although the Torah gives reasons for the names of many of the people in its stories, it is silent about these four. Here is what I imagine:

Elisheva had a dream when each of her four sons was born in Egypt. She saw her firstborn walking toward God’s throne, bringing God a glorious gift. So she named him Nadav, “Willing Donor”. And Nadav lived up to his name. Whenever he learned another way to worship the Holy One, he threw his whole soul into it. When the men asked his father, Aaron, to make an idol for them to worship, Nadav said, “No, don’t do it! Our god only appears in fire, or in a pillar of cloud. You can’t drag that holiness down into mere metal!” Later, when holy fire poured forth from God and consumed the animals on the new altar before the mishkan (the new, authorized dwelling-place for God), Nadav picked up his fire-pan in an ecstasy of desire to give his soul to the true god, the god of fire. And his soul was consumed.

When her second son was born, Elisheva dreamed he was toddling after Aaron, mimicking his father’s walk. So she named him Avihu, “He is My Father”. And Avihu lived up to his name. From his first step, he was always imitating Daddy. When the men asked Aaron for an idol, Avihu said, “Yes, do it! Our god is so great, He can appear anywhere, even in an idol.” And when Aaron made the Golden Calf, Avihu built the fire to melt the gold. Later, Avihu watched his father pick up an incense-pan and follow Moses into the inner sanctuary of the new mishkan. Both men came out and blessed the people, and then a river of holy fire poured over the altar. Avihu took his own pan and walked toward the Holy of Holies. And the fire from God consumed his soul.

When her third son was born, Elisheva saw a shepherd’s staff moving all by itself, pointing out hazards along the road. And she saw her baby following the staff carefully, and walking in safety. So she named him Elazar, “God Helps”. And Elazar lived up to his name. He took his job as a Levite, and then as a priest, very seriously, and he never acted without checking to get the details right. When the men asked Aaron for an idol, Elazar said, “No, don’t do anything without Moses’ approval. And if we have to spend the rest of our lives waiting for Moses to come back down the mountain, so be it.” Later, when holy fire poured over the new altar, Elazar reached for his fire-pan, wanting to give something, anything, to the all-powerful God. But he drew his hand back, because Moses had not commanded it. And he lived to become the high priest after Aaron died.

When her fourth son was born, Elisheva was exhausted. She didn’t dream about anybody. She just had a vision of an island covered with palm trees, date palms. So she named the baby Itamar, “Island of Dates”. And little Itamar turned out to be a sweet and loving boy. When the men asked Aaron for an idol, Itamar said nothing, because he did not understand enough about God—and because he was so much younger, he was not used to being listened to. Later, when holy fire poured over the new altar, Itamar could not even remember where he had left his fire-pan, and he felt no impulse to bring incense to God. He just wanted to survive the awesome spectacle, and learn his new priestly duties, and make his own life in whatever free time was left to him.

The Torah monologue I’ll tell in Ashland is from the viewpoint of Itamar. But maybe next year I will write another Torah monologue, from the viewpoint of Elisheva.

And next year, God willing, I will write a haggadah for Passover in which the four sons of Aaron and Elisheva are the four sons of Passover. But I won’t list them by birth order. Elazar will be the “wise son”, the one who wants to learn all the rules, so he will make no mistakes in his service to God.

Nadav. as I imagine him, is like the “wicked son”, the one who thinks the religion of his fathers has nothing to do with him. He not really wicked, since he willingly gives himself to God. But he does not listen to his father Aaron or his uncle Moses; he brings his own “strange fire” to God.

Avihu, in my book, is the “simple son”, awed by all the ceremony. All gods are exciting to him, and he is just as willing to worship the Golden Calf as his father was to make it. When Aaron repents and commits to the god of Moses, so does Avihu. But without real understanding, he flings himself into the impulse of the moment.

Itamar, Aaron’s youngest son, is like the son who does not know how to ask. He does not understand the new family business of priesthood, but he is willing to learn it. He does not understand the impulse to give everything to God, but he understands the desire to give to other human beings.

I have to admit I am more like Nadav than Elazar, making up my own mind regardless of what my my predecessors taught. So I had better be careful when I play with fire. At least I am not impulsive, the way I see Avihu. Most of all, I can identify with Itamar, the novice who does not even know what to ask, and who tries to serve both God and his own life and loved ones.

Which son do you resemble?

Tzav: Who Gets the Skin?

When I read all the gory details of the animal sacrifices in the book of Leviticus/Vayikra, I have to work hard to imagine how all that slaughtering, butchering, and throwing blood around could bring anyone closer to God. I believe that when we kill our fellow mammals we should mourn, not celebrate; and I view the slaughter as something we need to atone for, not as a means of atonement. Thank God we switched to worship through prayer about 2,000 years ago!

It would be easy for me to dismiss the earlier technology as an artifact of an ancient culture. I could simply address the issues of the present day, and campaign for treating all mammals more humanely, killing them only out of practical necessity, and reforming our diets. But I have dedicated myself to Torah study, and that means I must search for deeper meaning in the text, even the descriptions of animal offerings.

When I reread this week’s Torah portion, Tzav (Command), I noticed that the three basic motivations for offering an animal at the altar correspond to three instructions for what to do with the animal’s skin.

Although the book of Leviticus/Vayikra classifies offerings with five different names, covering at least a dozen different situations, they boil down to three reasons for bringing an animal to the altar: to express individual gratitude or devotion to God; to atone for individual guilt; and to atone for the whole community and/or its religious leaders.

When a man brought an animal offering to express gratitude or devotion (in the Torah only men bring animals to the altar), after the butchery, burning, and feasting, he got to keep the animal’s skin, which had value because it could be tanned to make leather.

We learn in the Torah portion Tzav that when an individual brought an animal offering to be relieved of guilt over a lapse, a wicked thought, a sin of omission, or an unintentional wrong against God, the priest who performed the atonement got to keep the hide.

As for the priest who brings near a man’s rising-offering, the or of the rising-offering that the man brought to the priest will become his. (Leviticus/Vayikra 7:8)

or (עוֹר) = skin (either human or animal)

When a priest brought an animal offering to make atonement for himself or for the entire community, the skin was burned on the ash-heap outside the camp where the ashes from the altar were taken. Moses does this in this week’s Torah portion during the ordination of Aaron and his four sons as the first priests of the Israelites, so they can begin their new offices with a clean slate.

And the bull and its or and its flesh and its intestinal contents he burned in the ash-heap outside the camp, as God had commanded Moses. (Leviticus 8:17)

The three ways of disposing of the slaughtered animal’s skin make sense on a practical level. Someone who wanted to draw closer to God out of a devotional impulse, or gratitude for good fortune, should be allowed to keep any part of the animal not used in the ritual. Why should he suffer any extra economic loss?

However, someone who was guilty of missing the mark in his relationship with God needed to experience a loss, to give up something in exchange for being freed of his guilt. The priest got the skin because his service enabled the guilty man’s atonement. (Priests were not paid salaries, or given land to farm, so they received compensation in the form of meat, skins, and bread from various offerings.)

If a priest erred in his holy service, or if the whole community missed the mark (because the priests did not guide them properly), then it makes practical sense that the priest should get no economic benefit from the sacrificial animal’s skin. Burning the hide adds dramatic impact to this most serious kind of ritual offering.

I can also see symbolic meaning in the three ways of handling the skins. In the book of Genesis/Bereishit, God clothes Adam and Eve in skins before sending them out into the world. Skin is like a garment. It separates and protects an individual from the rest of the world. And skin, like a garment, also signals the individual’s public identity and role in the world.

Perhaps the skin of an animal offering represents the skin of the man who brings it. The Torah mandates that the man who brings an animal to the altar must lean his hands on its head before it is slaughtered. This gesture apparently connects the human with the animal, so the offering counts as his.

When someone brought an offering of gratitude or devotion, he was already in a good standing with God; the offering expressed his feelings and brought him even closer to the divine. His public identity did not need to change. Therefore he could keep the animal skin.

When someone brought an offering out of guilt, he had stumbled in his service to God. In order to atone and return to good standing, he needed to recognize, in his heart, that his position in the community and his connection with God must not be taken for granted. I think he gave the animal skin to the officiating priest as an act of humility.

Why was the skin burned when a priest brought an offering to atone for his own guilt, or for the guilt of the whole community? The Torah requires burning the skin outside the camp when a priest is ordained, when a priest discovers that he or the whole community has committed a lapse in service to God, and once a year on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement for everyone.

The priests of the Israelites, like all religious leaders today, and everyone else who guides people on the level of their souls, have to be meticulous in their service. If they violate someone’s trust; if they treat other humans without respect; if they preach one thing and do another; if they become so enamored of their role, so dazzled by their own garments, that they fail to examine their inner selves; then their guilt is so great they must burn their animal skins. That means they must leave their sanctuary and leave the community where they did wrong, going “outside the camp”, and give up their public roles, their animal skins.

What if the animal offering atones for the whole community, like the goat offered to God on Yom Kippur? Modern Jews do not cast lots on goats on Yom Kippur, but we do spend the day praying. Our prayers for atonement are in the plural: we have become guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have slandered, and so on. No one is isolated; we are all responsible for one another. We share the good and the bad. We are our brothers’ keepers. And our membership in the human community is intrinsic to our connection with the divine.

Therefore, when we want to come closer to God, we must all abandon the garments of our public roles. Burn those animal skins, and let the smoke rise up to the heavens!

Vaykheil-Pekudei: Witnessing the Divine

The book of Exodus/Shemot ends this week with a double portion, Vayakheil (And he assembled) and Pekudei (Inventories). The Israelites eagerly donate materials for the mishkan (the portable dwelling-place for God), and for ritual garments for the new priests. They make all the parts of the mishkan, and Moses assembles them. At the end of the book, God’s glory enters the Dwelling.

High Priest, Bible
card by Providence
Lithograph Co., 1907

The portion Vayakheil begins: And Moses assembled the whole community (everyone who would witness) among the children of Israel. (Exodus/Shemot 35:1)

The portion Pekudei begins: These are the inventories for the Dwelling, the Dwelling of the Testimony of God. (Exodus 38:21)

kol adat = all the witnesses of, the whole community of

eidut = report of a witness, testimony (from the same root as adat)

ha-eidut = The testimony (This form is used for the testimony of God.)

In Vayakheil, the community of witnesses is also the community that donates and makes the mishkan. Women as well as men are specifically included in this group. In Pekudei, when Moses assembles all the parts of the mishkan, he puts God’s testimony, ha-eidut, into the ark, then inserts the carrying-poles into the rings at its corners, and puts the golden cover on as a lid. The Torah does not specify what the testimony inside the ark actually is. Classic commentary is divided on whether it consists of a parchment scroll on which Moses wrote down the first part of the Torah, or the stone tablets inscribed by the finger of God with the commandments (both the intact pair of tablets and the shards of the broken pair), or both the scroll and the tablets.

Either way, The Testimony is something the Israelites already have. And Moses has already told the people that God is with them. But seeing is believing. The Israelites need to witness Moses putting God’s “testimony” into the ark, and then they need to witness God’s visible presence. On their journey from Egypt to Mount Sinai, they followed a manifestation of God as a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. But the pillar disappeared when they arrived at the mountain, and clouds of smoke and fire appeared only at the mountain’s peak. This was not enough for the Israelites; when Moses was gone too long, they made a golden calf. And soon they will have to leave Mount Sinai and journey on to the Promised Land. How can they know God is really with them, and God’s testimony is really secure?

Their memories of God’s miracles in Egypt and manifestations after that are not sufficient. The Israelites are like witnesses with poor recall. In order to remain fully aware of God’s presence and God’s investment in them, they have to build a visible, tangible place for God to dwell, and then they have to witness something that indicates God’s presence in that dwelling-place. Only then can they fend off their fear of abandonment.

This plan works. The book of Exodus ends:

…and Moses completed the work. The cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of God filled the Dwelling … For the cloud of God was upon the Dwelling by day, and fire was in it by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel on all their journeys. (Exodus 40:33-38)

Today, our world has many sanctuaries designed to make people feel the presence of God, including many synagogues, cathedrals, and mosques. (We also have a plethora of buildings intended for religious worship whose architecture is no more inspiring than a high school gymnasium—but that’s another story.) Many religions also have fixed prayers or mantras, with words to be recited or sung at specific times, words designed to help people feel the presence of God.

Nevertheless, God’s presence is not concrete enough for most humans today to attest to it as witnesses (and those who do have no corroboration). And the written “testimony” we have, however accurately copied, was written down by fallible human beings, which means that, at best, something was lost in translation. We have no ark, we have no mishkan. We know that if we discovered the ark, buried away somewhere, and attempted to duplicate the mishkan described in the Torah, God would not manifest in it the same way. We live in another time, millennia away from the ancient peoples who built the Dwelling for God on their journey across the wilderness.

Yet so many people, including myself, yearn for something ineffable, something so hard to name that we call it “God”. Some find an anthropomorphic idea of God helpful. Some find the idea of a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent helpful. I am one of those who use the words “God” and “soul” when we want shorthand ways to talk about the mysterious feeling that there is some huge extra meaning in the universe and in ourselves.

No matter what phenomena I observe, I can always generate counter-explanations that prevent me from being a witness for “God”, whatever that word means. Nevertheless, I have discovered that I can help my sense of a divine presence to grow. I can build an imaginary mishkan inside my mind, and witness some spirit of the divine, in the form of mystery and exaltation, obscurity and light … cloud and fire.

May we all discover some of the divinity that dwells inside us.

Ki Tissa: Observing Shabbat

It’s Friday, I’ve had an exhausting week, and besides finally writing this blog and catching up on my work, I’m determined to clean the bathroom before sunset.

Any Jewish readers observe or try to observe Shabbat, Shabbes, the Sabbath, are smiling now. It sounds wonderful to make one day a week a holy day of rest. And the importance of keeping Shabbat comes up over and over again in the Torah, in the Talmud, and in the writings and talks of sages and rabbis for thousands of years, to this day. Yet observing Shabbat can be so hard … and not just because it takes some preparation every Friday. Even Jews committed to strict observance have to figure out how to carry out the letter of the law recorded in the Torah, which was written at a time when our lives today were unimaginable. Jews who want to carry out the spirit of the law of Shabbat observance, in addition or instead of the letter of the law, also have a lot of figuring out to do.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa (When you lift up), begins with God’s final instructions to Moses before God hands over the first pair of stone tablets popularly known as the Ten Commandments. After God finishes telling Moses how to make the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that will make God’s presence manifest, and all the sacred objects in it, God says:

And you, you speak to the children of Israel, saying: Nevertheless, guard my shabbatot, because that is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, in order to know that I, God, am making you holy. (Exodus/Shemot 31:13)

shabbatot (שַׁבָּתֹת) = sabbaths, stopping-days

In other words, Shabbat is even more important than creating the sanctuary. Every seventh day, the Israelites must stop doing the holy work God commanded, and do something different. And after the sanctuary is built, the descendants of the Israelites, every generation, including Jews in the 21st century, must stop and do something different on Shabbat. The Torah continues:

And you shall guard the shabbat because it is holy for you; whoever desecrates it will certainly die, for anyone who does melakhah on it, that soul shall be cut off from among its people. (Exodus 31:14)

melakhah (מְלָאכָה) = tasks, job, crafts; creative work, productive work; project, enterprise.

What counts as melakhah? The Hebrew bible gives six concrete examples of activities forbidden on Shabbat: cooking manna (Exodus 16:23), lighting a fire (Exodus 35:3), gathering wood (Numbers 15:32), carrying burdens into Jerusalem or out of your house (Jeremiah 17:21-22), treading grapes for wine (Nehemiah 13:15), or buying and selling (Nehemiah 10:32).

From these examples, as well as from the multiple meanings of the word melakhah, and from lists of tasks necessary to build the sanctuary, Jewish commentary from the Talmud to today extrapolates so many different arguments about what you shouldn’t do on Shabbat that my head spins.

But desisting from certain kinds of work is not all it takes to observe Shabbat. This week’s Torah portion says that Shabbat is a sign that God is making us holy. When we stop and rest on the seventh day, what do we do to realize that holiness?

I found two good clues in the Torah. One comes from the book of Isaiah:

… turn back from stepping on Shabbat/ Doing whatever you want on My holy day/And instead call the Shabbat a delight/ The holy (day) of God an honor … (Isaiah 58:13)

Instead of stepping all over Shabbat by doing whatever you want, including melakhah, we should make Shabbat a delight and an honor to observe.

Another clue comes at the end of the warning about Shabbat in this week’s Torah portion:

Between Me and the children of Israel it is a sign forever, that for six days God made the heavens and the earth, but on the seventh day It stopped and was refreshed (shavat vayinafash). (Exodus 31:17)

shavat (שָׁבַת) = he/it stopped, ceased, desisted. (From the same root as Shabbat)

vayinafash (וַיִּנָּפַשׁ) = and refreshed his/its soul, and recovered himself/itself, and re-animated himself/itself.

Here, God is refreshed by a day of rest. Earlier in the book of Exodus (Mishpatim, 23:12), Israelites are required to desist from work on Shabbat so that all of their dependents (by example, the son of a maidservant) and the strangers living among them could be refreshed.

So how can I observe Shabbat in a way that will result in my being refreshed, re-animated, re-ensouled? I confess that I am still trying to figure this out. (For example, singing prayers with my congregation re-animates my soul, but driving an hour to where we meet—and back—wears me out.)

I do know that my spirit is brighter when I don’t have to look at a dirty bathroom. So please excuse me now; Shabbat begins at sunset this evening, and Friday afternoon is all too short.

Tetzaveh: Divining

What should I do?

Usually human beings carry on with their habitual behavior, but sometimes we have to make a deliberate decision. And we do not know whether a particular choice will lead to good or evil, or to happiness or disaster. If only we knew ahead of time!

The longing for foreknowledge has been with us for millennia. Most cultures have had their own methods of divination, of gaining knowledge that is normally outside the human realm.

In the Hebrew Bible, leaders and kings ask the high priest to consult the urim and tumim tucked into his breast-pouch. These mysterious items are introduced in this week’s Torah portion, Tetzaveh (“You shall command”), but we do not learn their purpose until the book of Numbers/Bemidbar, when God tells Moses what Joshua must do after Moses has died. Since Joshua, unlike Moses, cannot hear God directly, he must ask the high priest for divination when he needs to decide whether to go out to battle:

He shall stand before Eleazar the priest, and ask him for the ruling of the urim before God. (Numbers 27:21)

urim (אוּרִים) = firelight? illumination?

But the book of Joshua never refers to the urim. The only time the Torah says someone actually consults them is in the first book of Samuel:

And Saul inquired of God, but God did not answer him, either with dreams or with urim or with prophets. (1 Samuel 28:6)

Several other times in that book both Saul and David “inquire of God” in the presence of a priest, and when David receive yes/no answers, we can assume the answers are indicated by the urim. But no description is given.

This week’s Torah portion describes everything else the high priest wears, from his headband to his underpants. Over his sky-blue robe, the priest must wear an eifod, a kind of tabard with shoulder-straps and sewn-in ties at the waist. A chosen, a square pouch, will hang from the shoulder-straps of the eifod, secured on the high priest’s breast. This breast-pouch will be folded at the bottom, and twelve gems will be set into the front. Each gem will be engraved with the name of one of the tribes of Israel.

And into the breast-pouch of the law you will place the urim and the tumim; and they will be over the heart of Aaron when he comes before God, and Aaron will carry the law of the children of Israel over his heart before God constantly. (Exodus/Shemot 28:30)

tumim (תֻּמִּים) = ? (a noun probably based on the adjective tamim, תָּמִים = whole, flawless, blameless.)

Obviously a high priest could not carry firelight and wholeness in a pouch on his chest; the names of the actual items are symbolic. But what do they mean? In Ezekiel, ur is a destroying fire. Throughout the book of Isaiah, urim means “fires” or “firelight”, not an object worn by a high priest. Everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, the word urim refers to the item worn by the high priest.

Traditional commentary says the word urim means light, illumination, clarity, because it has the same root letters as the word or = light. Some modern language scholars speculate that urim is derived from nei-arim (נֵאָרִים) = cursed, inflicted with a curse. In that case, urim and tumim would mean “cursed” and “blameless”. In other words, one object indicates a bad outcome and the other indicates a good one.

Rashi (11th-century rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki) suggested that the two words urim and tumim were written on a single piece of parchment, and the high priest would look down through the open top of his breast-pouch to see which word was facing up.

In the Talmud tractate Yoma 73b, the rabbis seem to use the phrase “urim and tumim” interchangeably with the phrase “breast-pouch of the law”. Some speculated that the names of the twelve tribes were inscribed on the urim and tumim, and the letters lit up or moved around to create an oracular message. Others said that the urim and tumim caused the stones on the front of the breast-pouch to light up, and the message could be deciphered from the pattern of flashing lights. The important thing was that both the person with the question and the high priest had to direct their minds toward God.

Some passages in the Torah appear to forbid using any kind of divination, along with any other kind of magic. For example:

No one must be found among you who sacrifices his son or his daughter in the fire, or who reads omens, a cloud-conjurer or a diviner, or a sorcerer; or a charm-binder, or a medium who consults ghosts or a medium who possesses a familiar spirit, or who questions the dead. For anyone who does these is an abomination of God, and on account of these abominations, God, your god, is dispossessing them before you. You shall be whole with God, your god. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 18:10-13)

Here Moses is banning all the divination practices of the people surrounding the Israelites. In other places, the Torah approves of a few practices for getting a bit of divine knowledge.

The two most common ways that God shares foreknowledge with humans is through dreams, and through communication with prophets. In the absence of dreams or prophetic utterances, a person can take the initiative by casting lots, or by consulting the high priest’s urim and tumim.

When this week’s Torah portion introduces the urim and tumim, it says “they will be over the heart of Aaron when he comes before God”—like the gems representing twelve tribes of Israel. Maybe the primary purpose of the urim and tumim is not to enable divination, but to keep light and wholeness in the high priest’s awareness whenever he approaches God.

Even today, people who want to make the right decision resort to dubious divination methods. Instead of reading omens in entrails or conjuring clouds, they flip a coin, or buy something from a New Age shop, or consult a medium who channels the spirit of a dead person. It is hard to accept that we cannot have foreknowledge, only good guesses.

Yet we can answer the question “What should I do?” without knowing the outcome of our choice. And when our intuitions are not clear, we can use approaches similar to the kind of “divination” the Torah approves of. Dreams still help by connecting us with hidden parts of ourselves that are connected with the divine. And we can improve our conscious thought by keeping certain ideas in our awareness, carrying them upon our hearts like high priests. We can consciously stay in touch with urim, the light shed by the fire of our passions; tumim, the continual effort to complete ourselves and become whole; and on the outside, the gemstones of our own tribes, our own families, friends, and communities.