I Will Be Who I Will Be

Excerpt from “Exodus: Cargo of Hidden Stories,” Being,  April 14, 2011:

Krista Tippett: Let's talk about also the very mysterious name of God when Moses encounters God in the burning bush. He says, "Who should I tell them I saw?" And the name that comes back now, or the way it's often translated in English is, "I am who I am." I've also heard it translated, "I am becoming who I am becoming." How do you read what is said? And say it for me in Hebrew as well, if you would?

Avivah Zornberg: Yes. It's Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, and literally it just means, I will be who I will be. And I think there's just no getting around it. Some of these translations are just mistranslations.

Ms. Tippett: Right, yes. And they don't help, do they?

Dr. Zornberg: They really don't because, actually, God is being evasive. God is saying, “I'm not giving you a handle.” You want a handle of some kind to hold on to, to say, "Now I've got him." That's a name. And instead he answers, "I am the very principle of becoming, of allowing the possible to happen."

Listen to the unedited conversation…

The Torah and the Golden Rule

From The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong:

…the most progressive Jews in Palestine were the Pharisees, who developed some of the most inclusive and advanced spiritualities of the Jewish Axial Age. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation of priests and that God could be experienced in the humblest home as well as in the temple. He was present in the smallest details of daily life, and Jews could approach him without elaborate ritual. They could atone for their sins by acts of loving-kindness rather than animal sacrifice. Charity was the most important commandment of the law. Perhaps the greatest of the Pharisees was Rabbi Hillel (c. 80 BCE-30 CE), who migrated to Palestine from Babylonia. In his view, the essence of the Torah was not the letter of the law but it’s spirit, which he summed up in the Golden Rule. In a famous Talmudic story, it was said that one day a pagan approached Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could teach him the entire Torah while he stood on one leg. Hillel replied simply: “What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go learn it.”

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From “Modern Lessons From Hillel,” All Things Considered, September 7, 2010 :

“Not much is known about the life of the rabbi and Talmudic scholar Hillel, who lived 2,000 years ago, but his teachings have shaped Judaism. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin's forthcoming book Hillel: If Not Now, When? argues that Hillel has as much to teach the 21 Century as he did his own.”

Something More than Mere Survival

Judith Shulevitz, from “Making Room For The Sabbath,” a conversation with Terry Gross about her book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time:

I was fascinated by rules. I sensed that one of the things about my life that I didn't like is that I was a kind of knee-jerk libertarian. Nobody could tell me what to do. But that's not how life works in a society. Societies have rules and we keep them. We don't object to the ones we all keep because we all keep them together. We object to the new ones that don't seem familiar to us. And I wanted to get familiar with these rules because it seemed to me that rules are how society passes on from one generation to the next moral behavior and moral activity and its idea of how life should be shaped and life should be led. And I wanted to get to know what these rules had to say to me...

The basic principle uniting all these rules is that you as a human being should not be exerting mastery over the world. For one day a week, let the world be as it is and you be in it and you're not trying to dominate it. That's the basic principle. Now the form that the rules took when they were first thought up was agricultural because they were conceived of in an agricultural society. And there's something to me very beautiful about this because not only were they conceived in an agricultural society, they were conceived of in a mainly subsistence farming society. So people were being asked not to bring in the crops. They were being asked not to do basic labors which would have helped them survive and they had to transfer that work of surviving to six days a week. And it had to have been very, very hard because we know how hard it is to survive when you're living off the land. And that to me gives me a sense of the seriousness with which it was taken and the beauty of the idea. Imagine telling people who are struggling to barely survive that one day a week they must give themselves over to something more than mere survival -- and they have the right to even if circumstances dictate otherwise. Those two things are very beautiful to me...

The thing that was most intriguing to me when I was working on the book and remains most intriguing to me, is as a fundamental political idea. And it's an idea that we've really lost in America today, though I think we've had it in the history and, indeed, I try to make the case that we were really one of the most Sabbatarian nations when we were founded by the Puritans. (Sabbatarian meaning keeping the Sabbath.) But this is an idea that we have really moved radically away from. And the idea is this: that as a society we have the right to collectively regulate our time and that everyone has the right not to work at least one day a week. You have to imagine a world in which this idea was conceived of and codified. This had never been said before.

[Thanks Tammy!]

The Highest Form of Intimacy

Excerpts from “A Monotheistic Model of Love,” by Gilla Nissan, Parabola (Spring 2010):

In B’re-sheet, Genesis, during the process of the creation of the world, it is said that God separated the water into two: sha-ma-yim, the water of above, and ma-yim, the water below. The Zohar: The Book of Splendor, a collection of works ascribed to Simon Bar Yochai of the second century CE, goes on to say that the lower waters missed and longed for the higher waters and so cried out to unite back with them. The Hebrew words reflect this deep relationship: mayim, meaning water, and shamayim, meaning sky.

God tried several times to create the world. He used equal measures of compassion, che-sed, and judgment, din. More than once the world collapsed until He incorporated an extra measure of ra-cha-mim, another word for compassion. Without love the world cannot exist, yet we humans were given freedom to love or not to love. God so wants to be known and be loved out of free will; forced love is no love at all.

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The Hebrew language has gender; we refer to God in the  masculine; although, in His true nature He is without gender. In the Tetragrammaton, Yud Hey Vav Heh, the unutterable name of God, the letters vav and heh represent the male and female forces of providence. The male force is that which acts upon the world, while the female force is that which allows the world to be receptive to God’s power. We refer to God as Him because we want Him to act upon the world through the male force of providence. The Hebrew word for Divine Presence, on the other hand, is She-chi-nah, a feminine noun.

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According to the Zohar, love begins with a physical attraction, then communication and speech. A kiss is the merging of one breath with another. As closeness occurs, the lovers stop speaking and are merely aware of each other’s breath. Finally, they come even closer, to the point of physical contact, and their communication becomes a kiss. Here they are aware of each other’s life force. Kissing, explains the modern mystic Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, is a natural consequence of increased intimacy in speech. Two mouths come closer and closer, and progress from speech to breath to the kiss. The kiss, then, is the highest form of intimacy.

The Zohar describes four levels in the intimacy of love: physical attraction, speech, breath, and the kiss. These same four levels exist in the relationship of a person with the Divine. These levels are to this day reflected in the structure of the daily services in the synagogue and private prayer, moving the worshipper from one level of intimacy to another. The impact is deeply profound when one’s ka-va-nah, intention, is aligned with the words.

To Rediscover the Questions

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with a voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.

Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in. The primary task of philosophy of religion is to rediscover the questions to which religion is an answer.”

~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, from God in Search of Man : A Philosophy of Judaism