Jewish Murderers I Have Known

Jewish Murderers I Have Known
And Other Essays for Modern Jewish Readers
Rabbi Edmond H. Weiss Ph.D.

Notice
The essays in this anthology were developed over the years as sermons,
commentaries, and essay book reviews.
In an era when it is nearly impossible to control or enforce copyright, I

offer them freely for your entertainment and education. If you cite or
distribute them, please acknowledge my authorship.
Note also that I am available as a guest lecturer or seminar leader for your
synagogue or other organization. Contact me at RavEdmond@yahoo.com.
Rabbi Edmond H. Weiss, Ph.D.
February 22, 2019

CONTENTS
Jewish Murderers I have Known 01
I Don’t Worry ‘Bout a Thing (False Wisdom) 09
She is a Tree of Life (The Woman Cochmah) 17
Loshn Koydesh: The Persistence of Hebrew 25
How Many is God? Thinking about the Sh’ma 33
Rambam’s Thirteen Revisited 39
Was Albert Einstein a Jewish Prophet? 49
The Modern Jew and the Talmud 57
Two Excommunications (Spinoza, Kaplan) 63
The Rise of the Jewish Buddhists 71
Freud on Religion in General and Judaism in Particular 81
James to Dewey to Kaplan (Jewish Pragmatism) 89
John’s Jewish Problem (Jew-hatred in the Gospel of John) 95
Epicurus Visits the Great Assembly (Rami Shapiro’s Avot) 101
Why do we Read Ecclesiastes on during Sukkot? 109
The Skeptical Child 117
Who by Fire? My Yom Kippur Problem 123

Edmond H. Weiss, Ph.D.
Jewish Murderers I Have Known:
A Sermon for Shabbat Shoftim
The subject of this essay is murder. Parashah Shoftim is mainly about law and order. It
even includes the resonant verse that some say contains the whole ethical weight of the
Torah: Justice, justice shall you pursue.
Among the mitzvoth that Maimonides counted in this portion are profound principles
of jurisprudence. For example, we are commanded that no person should be convicted
of a crime, especially a capital crime, on the testimony of a single witness. We are also
commanded to apply what has come to be called the “the law of the false witness”:
namely, that a witness who lies in a criminal case is subject to the same punishment as
the innocent defendant would have received.
Remember also that this text came into existence at a time when families and tribes
routinely exacted revenge for crimes against them, even if the defendants were found
not guilty in court. An accidental manslaughter would result in the slaying of the
exonerated defendant by the family of the deceased, just as
in some communities of the world today. So, our ancestors, in their prescience, were
commanded to create and maintain “cities of refuge,” where the exonerated would be
free from the wrath of the victim’s tribe—a kind of precursor of today’s witness
protection program.
These Jewish writings on jurisprudence lack completely the vengeful, bloodthirsty tone
that we find in the early Torah. In fact, more than one scholar has argued that the
subtext of Tractate Sanhedrin, for example, is to make the burden of proof extremely
high in capital cases, almost impossibly so. (It’s no surprise that so many Jewish
lawyers are in the ACLU, especially available for death sentence cases.)
pg. 1
The noteworthy exception, though, is Mitzvah 521 (according to the Rambam): Have no
pity for the murderer.
Deuteronomy 19:11-14
But if any man hate his neighbor, and lie in wait for him, and rise up against him and
smite him mortally, so that he die, and he flees into one of these cities, then the elders of
his city shall send and fetch him thence, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of
blood, that he may die. Thou shall not pity him, but thou shall put away the guilt of
innocent blood from Israel, that it may go well with thee.
Notice that although the text speaks specifically of those who commit murder and
hide—illegally—in one of those cities of refuge, our sages have decided that it means
we should pity no convicted murderers in any situation. We are not to be swayed by
arguments of “diminished capacity,” or extreme poverty, or anything else. And we are
certainly not enjoined to forgive murderers, as we see often on TV after tragic killings.
This mitzvah, I suppose, doesn’t interest many people. Most of us have never known or
met a murderer, and those whose lives have been devastated by a murderer certainly
have had no difficulty withholding their pity.
But my life has been a bit odd in this regard, so I’d like to tell you about my experiences
with murderers, including some famous ones; specifically, I want to tell you about some
Jewish murderers I have known.
The Unicorn Killer
I knew Ira Einhorn, the “Unicorn Killer,” before he was a murderer. (Unicorn is derived
from Einhorn.) We were both undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania in the
early sixties, and we were both early hippies living in Philadelphia’s version of
Greenwich Village, called Powelton Village. More specifically, Einhorn was the hippie
and I was a hippie manqué. He traveled with a wild and weird group of drug-using,
free-loving, folksong-playing students, while I watched from nearby, wishing I had
their nerve.
He was, however, a friend of a good friend, Howard Kenig (z”l), a student of analytical
philosophy and one of the sharpest thinkers I’ve ever known. From time to time
Howard and I would run into The Unicorn and invariably we’d end up ribbing him
about his kooky metaphysics and his penchant for bizarre conspiracy theories. Howard,
especially, could find the flaw in any argument and took delight in skewering Einhorn’s
logic. (These were the last years before the world began to believe that all people are
pg. 2
entitled to their “own truth” and that logic is a form of white, European male
oppression.) Einhorn, though, never fought back. He’d smile cryptically and walk
away deep in whatever passed for thought in his mind.
That phase of our association ended in 1964 when Einhorn, now a graduate student in
English, was assigned to read and comment on my undergraduate thesis (Melville’s
short fiction). I remember only one of his marginal comments: Pretentious! he declared
about one of my analyses.
Ten years later, 1974, I returned to the Penn campus as Associate Dean of the
Annenberg School of Communications. 1 In the interim, Ira Einhorn had metamorphized
from a well-known campus eccentric with a small circle of followers into an
international celebrity guru. Much of his fame was owed to his prominent role in
Philadelphia’s Earth Day celebration in 1970, the coming-out party for the new
environmental/ecological awareness movement. Einhorn inveigled himself into the role
of M.C. of the event and his performance was rewarded with widespread acclaim and
expert standing.
Two blocks from the Annenberg School was a nice French restaurant called La Terrasse.
There, at a large circular table, sat Einhorn the guru, holding court, for several hours a
day, regaling his followers—including some prominent businessmen—about his views
of the future. He also speculated on how the CIA was using “photronics” to program
Americans so that they would ignore the needs of the planet.
Einhorn had developed a disorder that I many years later dubbed the King David
Syndrome: namely, if enough people treat you like a god, you start believing you are
one. And this means that you consider yourself above the law. (Einhorn’s body reeked.
He felt ordinary hygiene was beneath him.)
In 1977, two years after I saw him last, Einhorn broke up with Holly Maddux, his Texas-
born Bryn Mawr-educated girlfriend. When she came back to Philadelphia one day to
retrieve the rest of her possessions, Einhorn murdered her and stuffed her body in a
trunk and then in a closet. After her disappearance, Einhorn protested his innocence
and theorized that the CIA had captured her as a way of intimidating him.
About 18 months later, neighbors noticed a horrible stench emanating from his
apartment and the police discovered the truth. After his arrest, Einhorn solicited money
and influence from a few of his powerful friends and managed to be released from jail
1 The school has since changed its name to the Annenberg School FOR Communications.
pg. 3
for a $4,000 bond. (His defense attorney was Arlen Specter!) He skipped his bail and
traveled to Europe, eluding the authorities for 23 years.
Even then, he was able to fight extradition. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had
tried him in absentia and sentenced him to death. Members of the European Union,
therefore, refused to extradite him until the US promised that he would not be
executed. Today, he lives in a prison hospital.
I should feel no pity for him, but I know that he is (or was) mad, and I’m fairly sure that
at the moment he bludgeoned Holly Maddux, he believed he was a superman, entitled
to have whatever he wanted. Most American states will not execute a murderer with a
mental disease or defect. Should that mitigate our opinion of him?
The Rabbi
One of the great ironies of my life is that I was “turned” from an indifferent secular Jew
into the person I am now through the influence of Rabbi Fred Neulander, a man
currently serving life without parole for arranging the murder of his wife 2. Neulander’s
greatest skill, the skill that both made his career and led to his downfall, was his power
of seduction. He seduced me into his Monday morning Torah class by indicating that
my brilliant skepticism would be just the thing to “shake up” his old-timers. As it
turned out, his “old-timers” were mainly retired scientists and engineers. They were
just as brilliantly skeptical as I, but also with a great deal to teach me. We became
friends and this was the first step on my road back to Torah.
The skill of the seducer is first to find out what a person wants or needs most--and then
to provide it. Neulander developed a devoted following by convincing those who
wanted to be wise that they were wise, those who wanted to be talented that they were
talented, those who wanted to be traditional that they were traditional, and those who
wanted to be hip and enlightened … you get the idea.
During most of the years I knew him he was rumored to be a womanizer. Although I
closed my ears to such Lashon Harah 3, as the Talmud recommends, it turns out to have
been true. His specialty was women who had come to him for marriage-related
counseling, usually on the verge of divorce. They would reveal their dissatisfactions to
him, and he would contrive to satisfy them. He was also good with women converts,
exploiting their need for a meaningful Judaism by inserting his rabbinical presence.
2 The two men he hired to do the job have been released from prison.
3 “Evil Speech” or gossip.
pg. 4
I sat on the Beit Din for two of his conversions and I later found he was having affairs
with both candidates: the first a married woman who was converting for the sake of her
husband and child; the second, the famous Philadelphia radio personality whose
relationship with Neulander was part of the murder scandal. (In a letter to the
congregation, Neulander referred to these affairs as “indiscretions.”)
The story of the Neulander murder is long and complicated and my family was
entangled in the melodrama. (My wife even testified for the prosecution at his second
trial.) I resisted believing in his guilt for a long time, because, quite simply, I didn’t
understand why he would do such a thing. There are far easier ways to disconnect from
one’s wife and, despite what he claimed, no Reform Rabbi is likely to suffer serious
professional consequences for getting a divorce.
Intellectual murderers—like Einhorn and Neulander—are often judged to be

conscience-less sociopaths. Although that surely applies in these cases, I’d also like to
restate my own hypothesis: that both of them suffered from a King David Syndrome.
Again, if enough people treat you like a god you begin to feel that you are one and
consider yourself above the law. Remember that King David himself arranged the
murder of two husbands so that he could add their wives to his large harem. (Abigail
and Bathsheba.)
Then should we feel pity for Neulander? Shall I grant that his capacity for decision
making was reduced by his mental disorder? Shall I ignore all the teaching and
inspiration he provided during his career, including the life-altering change he made in
my life.
At the very least, should we take pity on any human being who has to spend decades of
his life in a cage. Although I never visited Neulander after his imprisonment, I have
spent time with imprisoned murderers, and I have a bit of insight into what that means.
JCAG
In 1994, after I had been deeply engaged in Torah for about a dozen years, I received a
letter from Rabbi Richard Address, at that time a regional director for the Reform
Movement. Here’s part of it:
I am writing to you with an invitation. As you know, our region is the first to bring
into UAHC membership a congregation within a prison. We have continued to
support the Jewish Congregation at Graterford in a variety of ways…
pg. 5
I would like to invite you to consider, actually do us the honor of assuming the
position of regional para-rabbi with specific assignment to the Jewish Congregation
at Graterford. Ed, their first request is that you are able to conduct High Holydays
morning for them, the evening of Rosh Hashanah, morning of Rosh Hashanah and
Kol Nidre…
The reason why I would like you to consider this is because this is a unique opportunity
to really do some hands-on teaching and affect in a fundamental way Jewish identity.
Obviously, this field commission to the rank of “para-rabbi” exhilarated me and I

accepted. And when I told others about the project, they would always respond the
same way: There are Jews in Graterford Prison?
Yes, there were: 13 Jews out of a prison population of 3,500. (Sometimes we had trouble
making a minion when one or two men were in “the hole.”)
There were two murderers in my congregation. Gary, the President of the group, had
murdered his girlfriend while he was under the influence of a hallucinatory drug. Jon,
the Baal Tekiah 4, had murdered his ex-wife because he believed that her new boyfriend
was molesting their daughter. I met these men years after the fact, when the drugs and
alcohol were out of their systems; they were neither sociopaths nor intellectuals. They
were men who went through a patch of severe stress and disorientation, who, for a few
moments, went out of control and murdered someone they knew, with no view to any
advantage or gain. By the time I met them they were ordinary men and, God help me, I
liked them.
It was a thrill to lead my first High Holiday Service 5. I used a haunting melody for the
Adonai, Adonai that I had learned from Neulander and I even tried a guided meditation
on forgiveness that I had practiced with Rabbi Gary Mazo. We had our eyes closed
during this meditation and, when we came to the point where I asked them to imagine
the person they want forgiveness from, I heard sobbing in the room. I suppose a
penitentiary is the right place for repentance.
At one point I intoned, “I have set before you this day life and death…” and Jon
commented, “or what we have here, which is neither.”
4Master of the Shofar

5I even got to make Rabbinical rulings. Gary wanted to know if it was permissible to lift weights on Yom
Kippur; we studied the Torah and found that it urges us to abuse our bodies on Yom Kippur. Weight-
Lifting approved.
pg. 6
I know I am commanded not to pity these men. But I must say that praying with them
was an especially Jewish experience. I was standing with people who were hated by
society and living in a ghetto so oppressive that the ghetto, the gate, was all they could
see. They were utterly poor, abandoned, outcast—but nevertheless trying to sustain
whatever spiritual strength they could find. When we chanted Aveenu Malcheinu
together, in that moment I may even have loved them.
pg. 7
pg. 8
“I Don’t Worry ‘Bout a Thing ‘Cause I Know Nothin’s Gonna Be Alright”

…Mose Allison
Wisdom is different from knowledge or information. Knowledge is for the curious. If

we want to know the facts—and the causal connections among the facts—we use
science, physical or social. But science, although it can give us insights and even
surprise us by uncovering things we didn’t realize…science cannot get us wisdom.
Wisdom is something more, or at least something different. Wisdom contains the

answers to the WHY questions that science only brushes against. It especially addresses
hard questions, painful problems; it tries to explain what seems unexplainable, soothe
what hurts us most deeply, and even justify the ways of God to men who live in a
decidedly unjust world. Wisdom is sought mainly by the dissatisfied.
Although wisdom is often expressed in the form of advice or guides to living a good
life, it appears more often in stories and fables, religious or otherwise. Such bits of
literature are said to have a “moral,” a principle that makes sense of the story and
thereby comments on the injustices and pains experienced by the people in the story.
(The Chassidic stories are so fascinating and rich that in themselves they have sustained
an interest in Chassidism among those who live in diverse religious communities.)
The Book of Job is such a story, perhaps the most profound. It asks not only why there
is so much suffering in the world, but why, in a universe supposedly under the sway of
an endlessly benevolent God, there is so much suffering and death among the innocent
and God-fearing. This is, one might say, the ultimate question, the grail that every
seeker of wisdom is after.
pg. 9
But before we delve into the imponderables of Job, let me introduce you to my main
topic: false wisdom. False wisdom consists of proverbs, aphorisms, witticisms,
anecdotes, tales, legends… all of which create a kind of comforting pseudo-insight into
life’s problems.
False wisdom gives one a sense that everything will be alright, that the world is exactly
the way it should be, that God’s in his heaven, that virtue is rewarded (one way or
another), that problems will be solved, that there’s nothing to be afraid of, that justice
prevails, that dreams come true, that we’ll find what we’re looking for, that everything
comes to him who waits, that prayers are answered, that we’ll all be together again, that
someday we’ll look back on all this and laugh, that faith can move mountains, that no
one is ever alone, that everyone can find love, that most of our flaws are imaginary….
Now, it is important to understand that, as matters of fact, many of these propositions

are false and the rest are, at best, true only some of the time. Because these
propositions are typically pronounced without qualifiers, they tend to mislead.
In contrast, consider:
• Virtue is often rewarded.

• Very rarely, one can move a mountain with faith
• A very few dreams come true.
• Sometimes people find love after a long search and almost giving up.
Unfortunately, when we add the qualifiers, these pearls of wisdom lose the poetic
power to create a feeling that people interpret as wisdom, or even profundity.
Unqualified, they fill the Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies; motivational speakers
are obliged to end on one of these notes; a high proportion of sermons and Bible
commentaries embed them. (Professional public speakers are trained to end their
speeches with a “heart story.”) And the audience that receives them, the seekers after
wisdom, feel for a moment that they have found some.
The Case of Dorothy Gale
The morals of stories are expressed as sentences or short paragraphs. And sometimes
these morals are not only false (misleadingly unqualified) but even incoherent.
To illustrate, consider one of the most widely known stories-with-a-moral in all English
literature: The Wizard of Oz.
pg. 10
Frank Baum’s Wizard (the screenplay is unusually faithful to the book) is a kind of
apprenticeship novel, in which a young woman moves through the world encountering
dangers and obstacles, thereby gaining insight and becoming mature. The young
woman is Dorothy Gale. What do we know about her?
• She lives with her aunt and uncle. That is, she probably lost her parents (or at
least her mother) when she was quite young. She lives in a flat, ugly,
windswept part of Kansas that, in the 1930s, was often blighted and barren.
• At the beginning of the story, she learns that her dog, Toto, is—by legal
order-- to be put down! (Everyone who has ever loved a dog can share her
terror and desperation.) She therefore flees the law with her dog and shortly
later experiences a coma-inducing head injury during a tornado.
• While in her vivid coma dream, she kills two women, is drugged and
kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured, sent on a suicide mission by a
conniving con man, and ultimately told that she could have avoided all these
horrors if she had simply had more insight into her situation.
In the end, she must show that she has learned a lesson and that, if she gets it right, all
will be well. And what conclusion does she reach?
If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own
back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.
Everyone has heard this little speech many times, perhaps nodded knowingly. Most
accept it as the philosophical warrant for the story’s concluding pronouncement: There’s
no place like home. But what does Dorothy’s passage mean?
The problem starts with “looking,” a word with several meanings. In its most literal
sense, “looking for” something means trying to locate something that is lost or hidden,
misplaced or secreted away. But “looking for my heart’s desire” means something quite
different. It means setting goals, planning, exploring one’s options and possibilities,
studying and training to assess or discover one’s potential… One’s “heart’s desire” is
not, in any figure of speech, something that one might find buried under some leaves in
the back yard. Nor is one’s “heart’s desire” a thing that could have been lost. One does
not lose goals, dreams, aspirations, longings, ambitions… At worst, one can forget them
for a while.
Overlooking this semantic muddle, the argument is that, for Dorothy at least, her only
possible heart’s desire is at home: that everything worth pursuing is where one
happens to be living. And, of course, this claim that there is no place like home is fine if
pg. 11
your home is especially wonderful and your family loving and supportive; it’s also fine
if you live in a caste system wherein young girls should not aspire to lives different
from those of the other women in the neighborhood.
But is that wisdom? Is it even true? Given her experiences, what other insights might
she have gathered? That the world is often governed by evil and deceitful people? That
killing evil people is sometimes the only solution to injustice? That the only way to
survive in a hostile world is through the intervention of supernatural forces? That
discretion (confused with cowardice) is the better part of valor? Any of these
conclusions would have been more consistent with her apprenticeship experiences in
Oz.
And what should we make of her claim that her Kansas home is the best place of all? Is
that true? Wouldn’t she be better off if she planned to leave that bleak home for an
education and career?
The point of this extended attack on a beloved children’s story is to illustrate that all the
issues raised here are typically ignored and that the reader or audience is left instead
with a warm, comfortable, even slightly tearful, sense of profound insight. False
wisdom.
Job and the Coen Brothers
Rather than talk directly about the Book of Job, I’d rather discuss the Coen Brothers’
extended motion picture midrash on the book, called A Serious Man. I choose this film
because, in addition to raising the same philosophical issues raised in Job, it also
provides witty and insightful commentary about providing wisdom.
The hero of the Coen Brothers saga is Larry Gopnik, the serious man in question. Larry
is a non-tenured professor of physics at an unnamed university. (At one point, we see
him writing equations that explain the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As he writes
the last few symbols on the lower right portion of the blackboard, he intones: “Which
explains why we cannot know anything!” The next shot is wide, showing a 12-foot by
30-foot blackboard covered with arcane equations.)
Larry is our Job. His wife leaves him without warning; when his wife’s new love dies in
a car accident, he is expected to pay for the funeral. He is forced to live in a seedy motel
with his brother (who has Job’s boils) and who also has huge legal expenses. His tenure
is endangered by anonymous letters. He is tempted with, then accepts, a bribe to
change a student’s grade. He is lured into adultery by his sunbathing next-door
neighbor. His daughter steals from his wallet. His son, who is preparing for his bar
pg. 12
mitzvah, is smoking marijuana. And as the story ends his doctor indicates that he has a
very serious illness and, while he drives to see the doctor, a huge tornado is bearing
down on his son’s Hebrew School.
Like Job, Larry is confused and dismayed by all this and he feels that God has
abandoned him. “Why is this happening? To me!” asks the seeker of wisdom. He
consults his colleagues, his friends, his lawyer, who, suggests he consult his rabbi.
Larry’s synagogue has three rabbis: a young “associate” in his 20’s; a 50-ish senior rabbi;
and, sequestered in the lower level of the synagogue, “the Marshak,” an aged, bearded
sage whose office is filled not only with books but also odd biological specimens in jars.
We are told that the Marshak spends all his time thinking.
Now, to be honest, several reviewers find the treatment of Jews and rabbis in this movie
to be cruel and unfair. The tone of the movie is evident in the line that appears toward
the end of the credits: No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture. Those who
disapprove mainly object to the caricature portraits of the rabbis. But I disagree. I know
these rabbis and I see the point the movie is making.
At first, the senior rabbi is unavailable, so Larry is matched with the young Rabbi Scott
(his first name). Although Larry doubts that one so young can help him, he
nevertheless unburdens himself.
Larry: I feel like the carpet's been yanked out from under me. I
don't know which end is up. I'm not even sure how to
react; I’m too confused.
Rabbi Scott: … I too have had the feeling of losing track of

Hashem, which is the problem here. I too have
forgotten how to see Him in the world. And when
that happens you think, well, if l can't see Him, He
isn't there anymore, He's gone. But that's not the
case. You just need to remember how to see Him.
Am I right?
(He rises and goes to the window.)

. . . I mean, the parking lot here. Not much to see.
. . . But if you imagine yourself a visitor, somebody
who isn't familiar with these... autos and such...
somebody still with a capacity for wonder... Someone
with a fresh... perspective. That's what it is, Larry.
pg. 13
Larry: Um...
Rabbi Scott: Because with the right perspective you can see
Hashem, you know, reaching into the world. He is in
the world, not just in shul.
Rabbi Scott’s advice is mystical. His God is not a maker or solver of problems; He is,
rather, manifest in all things and all beings. If you think he has abandoned you, then
you have misapprehended His function. He does not manipulate the world; He is the
world. Is this wisdom?
Later, Larry gets to confer with senior Rabbi Nachter.
Larry: What does it all mean? What is Hashem trying to tell me?
Rabbi Nachter: How does God speak to us? It's a good question. You
know Lee Sussman?
Larry: Doctor Sussman? I think I-yeah.
Rabbi Nachter: Did he ever tell you about the goy's teeth?
Rabbi Nachter elects to use the most traditional way of answering the seeker’s question:
by relating a fable. In this case it is a quite Chassid-like story about a dentist who one
day discovers a series of Hebrew letters etched into the bottom lower teeth of his gentile
patient. The Rabbi helps him to decode the message: Help me, Save me. Troubled and
sleepless, he ponders whether this is a message of God. He even uses gematria, turning
the letters into numbers and calling the phone number they produce. The phone
belongs to a pharmacy; Sussman visits to see if there is something to be found there. But
to no avail.
Larry asks what the story means. Rabbi Nachter doesn’t know. And adds that we can’t
know everything. To which Larry responds that it sounds like you don’t know
anything. (Remember Heisenberg.)
Larry: What happened to Sussman?

Rabbi Nachter: What would happen? Not much. He went back
to work. For a while he checked every patient's
pg. 14
teeth for new messages; didn't see any; in time,

he found he'd stopped checking.
... These questions that are bothering you,
Larry--maybe they're like a toothache. We feel
them for a while, then they go away.
Larry: I don't want it to just go away! I want an

answer!
Rabbi Nachter: The answer! Sure! We all want the answer! But
Hashem doesn't owe us the answer, Larry.
Hashem doesn't owe us anything. The
obligation runs the other way.
Larry: Why does he make us feel the questions if he's

not gonna give us any answers?
Rabbi Nachter: (After a pause)

He hasn't told me.
Rabbi Nachter has mastered one of the most useful skills for a rabbi or any other
clergyman: the art of answering a suffering person who needs answers with an I don’t
Know or, better, We Don’t Know, suggesting it’s a consensus among the wise. The
successful rabbi must be able to say I (or We) Don’t Know as though a lifetime of study
has led to that conclusion.
Larry never gets to visit the Marshak, but his son, Danny, does. It is the tradition in
their synagogue that the bar mitzvah bucher, after the ceremony, visits the Marshak for
words of profound wisdom. Danny, stoned during his Torah portion, has been an
important but secondary character. Earlier, his Hebrew teacher has confiscated his
Walkman, which had $20 tucked in its cover to pay his marijuana bill. Whenever we see
him listening on his Walkman, the soundtrack fills with the Jefferson Airplane’s Do You
Want Somebody to Love. In fact, that is the music playing loudly during the opening and
closing credits.
Danny enters the Marshak’s study with trepidation. He sees his Walkman on
Marshak’s desk. The old man stares at him, hawks back some mucus, and intones with
an appropriate European accent:
When the truth is found. To be lies.
And all the hope. Within you dies.
pg. 15
. . . Then what?
. . . Grace Slick. Marty Balin. Paul Kanta. Jorma... somethin.
These are the members of the Airplane.
At this point, he pushes the Walkman toward Danny and says: “Here, be a good boy.”
(The $20 bill is still there.)
Are we or Danny meant to believe that God is present in these lyrics from a pretentious
70s Rock Group? (Is it like Rabbi Scott’s parking lot?) Or is the essence of the story
simply that one should try to be good, no matter what. And how shall we interpret that
when we know that Danny will soon be swept up in a tornado (whirlwind), probably
with less luck than Dorothy Gale?
Wisdom is a Choice
I read my first philosophy sixty years ago. It painted the world in bleak colors. For the
most part, the philosophers I have read have warned that the pursuit of wisdom is more
likely to be painful than comforting, and that, if you would be happy, don’t think too
much. Epicurus counsels us to ignore death and don’t worry about the gods. William
James said that the key to happiness is overlook many things.
If we want to believe that there is no place like home, we had best not read Freud. If we
want to believe in a benevolent world we had best not visit the concentration camps or
study the statistics on how many infants die from dirty drinking water.
The belief in an afterlife or reincarnation is not wisdom: it is comfort. (Oddly, the
Buddhist promise of no reincarnation converted many Indians who found life so
horrible that they didn’t want to go through it again.)
The 19th Century Utilitarians believed that the goal of philosophy (and government)
should be to provide us with satisfaction. (They gave us the pursuit of happiness as an
“unalienable right.”) To which Joh Stuart Mill answered: Better a Socrates dissatisfied
than a fool satisfied.
So, as the Book of Job wonders, “Where shall wisdom be found?” In the healing of
comfortable beliefs? Or in the cold reality of the “examined life”? Why does Kohelet
say it is better to be a wise man than a fool, when wisdom makes us sad and—as
Kohelet reminds us—both end up in the same place anyway?
As a lifelong student of philosophy and religion, I can assure you: We don’t know.
pg. 16
She is a Tree of Life
‫ֵ ֽﬠץ־חַ יִּ ים ִהיא לַ ַ ֽמּחֲ זִ ִיקים בָּ הּ ְ ֽות ְֹמכֶיהָ ְמאֻ ָ ֽשּׁר‬
This essay is about two of my favorite things: The Wisdom Books of the Bible
(especially the Book of Proverbs) and Grammar.
Although excerpts from Proverbs do not appear often in our services or readings, there
are some interesting exceptions. The beautiful “Woman of Valor” poem, which many
people recite to honor their wives and mothers at Shabbat dinner, is from Proverbs.
And another beautiful passage from Proverbs appears as part of the Torah service: the
Aitz Chayim chant, the Tree of Life description of the Torah.
It is a tree of life to those who take hold of it;

those who hold it fast will be blessed.
Its ways are pleasant ways,
and all its paths are peace.
Now, I must confess that this prayer, chanted in a Hebrew simple enough for me to
understand without translating, is one of my favorite moments in the Shabbat morning
service. I feel energized when I sing it, because it describes so beautifully my own
pg. 17
feeling for the Torah, a feeling that deepens every day. So, please forgive me if I raise a
few objections to how the prayer is understood.
The first is minor. In Proverbs, the two verses are reversed. The “pleasant ways” comes
first and the “tree of life” comes second—the conclusion of the idea. But this is small;
songwriters and lyricists often adjust poems to suit the music and setting, and this
modification loses nothing from the original intention.
But my second objection—and don’t say I didn’t warn you—is grammatical. Of course,
there is nothing wrong with the Hebrew grammar, but there is something amiss in the
typical English translation. The passage from Proverbs used here is not about the Torah
itself; it is about a Woman, called Cochmah, or Wisdom. The passage should be
translated: SHE is a tree of life.
Gender and Pronouns
When children begin their study of Hebrew, they are amused by some of its famous
oddities. In Hebrew, the word for “fish” is “dog.” The word for “body” is “goof.” And
the word for “she” is “he.”
The curiosity of Hebrew pronouns has made possible a very funny internet video in
which an older man teaches a young English-speaking girl the rules for Hebrew
pronouns. He begins, “In Hebrew…
• Who is He.
• He is She.
• Me is Who.
The remainder of the routine—with its straightforward questions and imponderable

answers-- is an homage to the famous Abbot and Costello sketch: Who’s on first?
It is quite important to know “he” from “she” (or “hoo” from “hee”) in Hebrew,
because in Hebrew EVERY noun is masculine or feminine. In Hebrew, the word for
“boy” is masculine—but so is the word for “day.” In Hebrew, the word for “wife” is
feminine—but so is the word for “book.” That means, in effect, that every Hebrew noun
is either a he or a she, even though in English we translate most of the instances as “it.”
Learning the gender of nouns is one of the harder tasks for an English speaker learning
Hebrew. The gender of the noun not only defines the pronoun, it also affects the way
plurals are formed and adjectives are expressed. A good day is “yom (masculine) tov”;
a good year is a “shanna (fem) tova.”
pg. 18
Those of you who have studied a language other than English already know this
problem. Every language I have tried to learn has gender for every noun, and in some
languages, like German and Latin, there are THREE genders (neuter added) not just
about a dozen German words for THE.
In contrast, English is so free of these gender, case, and number markers that most
Americans are never sure when to say “whom” and half the people I know mix up “I”
and “me.” Moreover, what little gender attaches itself to English nouns is in the process
of being stripped away by those who wish to free our language from gender biases. Our
prayer books and even some translations of the Torah are replacing words like Lord
and King with gender-neutral alternatives. And I cannot remember the last time I heard
God referred to among my associates as HE.
(Moreover, to avoid the use of “he” and “she” in current English, teachers and editors
are now approving the use of “they” to refer to singular nouns—a practice that would
have flunked you when I went to school.)
So, we have the paradox in which nearly every English translation of Proverbs (I
checked a dozen of them) says she is a tree of life, while our prayer books, those that
have English translations, all say it is a tree of life. The one exceptional translation of
Proverbs is the Kravitz/Olitzky (UAHC Press, 2002), which provides this grammatically
confusing version:
Long life is in Wisdom’s right hand,

Wealth and honor in its left hand.
Her ways are pleasant, and all her paths are peace.
It is a tree of life ….
Be that as it may, I still wish to argue that, even though the word Torah is feminine in
Hebrew, and even though “hee” is most often translated as “it,” nevertheless we should
say: She is a tree of life…and all her paths are peace.
Who is Wisdom?
Cochmah, Wisdom, is a woman who appears several times in the Tanach Wisdom
literature as well as making extended appearances in the pseudepigraphal books The
Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus).
pg. 19
Her official debut is in Book 8 of Proverbs where she issues this breath-taking
introduction to herself:
Proverbs 8:22
The Lord created me at the outset of His way, the very first of His
works of old.
In remote eons I was shaped, at the start of the first things of earth.
When there were no deeps I was spawned, when there were no
wellsprings, water sources.
Before mountains were anchored down, before hills I was spawned.
He had yet not made earth and open land, and the world's first clods of
soil.
When He founded the heavens, I was there, when He traced a circle on
the face of the deep,
when He propped up the skies above, when He powered the springs of
the deep,
when He set to the sea its limit, that the waters not flout His command,
when He strengthened the earth's foundations.
And I was by Him, an intimate,
I was His delight day after day, playing before Him at all times,
playing in the world, His earth, and my delight with humankind.
Wisdom was there at the Beginning. Or before the Beginning. Some metaphysicians
have said she was there before time existed, so that there were not yet beginnings and
ends. She was the first of the creations, but, again, in the absence of ordinary time her
existence may have been instantaneous.
Interestingly, several Bible scholars have commented on the similarity in tone and
substance of this passage and the mighty poetry of the KJV Gospel of John: In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…
For an even closer parallel with John, consider how Wisdom characterizes herself in the
non-canonical book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus):
I am the word spoken by the Most High.

I covered the earth like a mist.
I made my home in highest heaven,
my throne on a pillar of cloud.
pg. 20
Alone I walked around the circle of the sky

and walked through the ocean beneath the earth.
I ruled over all the earth and the ocean waves,
over every nation, over every people…
He created me in eternity, before time began,
and I will exist for all eternity to come.
But what is problematical is that, while a Christian has no objection to an incarnation of

God, the Jew has insisted throughout history that no being can be an incarnation of
God—even though these passages suggest that Wisdom is a companion God, even a
consort to God.
Nor would it be correct to suggest that Wisdom is somehow a female aspect of God.
That job goes to the Shekinah, who is often characterized with very female
characteristics and charms. She is the Sabbath Bride we call when we turn to the door
and chant Boi, Kala. The Zohar tells us:
One must prepare a comfortable seat with several cushions and embroidered
covers, from all that is found in the house, like one who prepares a canopy for a
bride. For the Shekinah is a queen and a bride. This is why the masters of
the Mishna used to go out on the eve of Sabbath to receive her on the road, and
used to say: 'Come, O bride, come, O bride!'
Or consider this translated excerpt from Bialik’s poem, Alone, in which a man describes
his regular rendezvous with the Shekinah:
Driven from every ridge –

one desolate corner left –
in the House of Study she hides in shadow,
and I alone share her pain.
Imprisoned beneath her wing
my heart longed for the light.
She buried her face on my shoulder
and a tear fell on my page
Wisdom as Torah
The sages tend to treat Wisdom less as a woman and more as a plan. The Saadia Gaon
tells us:
pg. 21
If we consider, as logic dictates and the verses clarify, that the Creator made
everything with wisdom and considering that [creation is] complete and perfect,
we can accept as true the prophet’s declaration that she [wisdom], must have
preceded all creation… Although wisdom itself does not really exist
independently, it is however a necessary component of every creation that God
created.
Or consider this remark from Midrash Rabah:
…Everything was created thanks to wisdom and she was there at the first instant
of time when it came into existence, for time itself was created through wisdom.
This kind of reasoning leads directly to the traditional view that Wisdom is realized in
the Torah, changing the pronoun from she to it. Again, a quote from Sirach:
Wisdom is the Law, the Law which Moses commanded us to keep, the covenant
of God Most High, the inheritance of the synagogues of Israel… The Law
overflows with Wisdom like the Pishon River, like the Tigris at fruit-picking
time.
Most traditional commentaries find support for this idea in the line that follows the
tree-of-life verse:
The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding He established the

heavens.
This is also a source of the widespread image of God looking into the Torah (the
distillation of all wisdom) and using it as a blueprint for creation.
Wisdom vs. Other Kinds of Woman
Despite these rabbinical attempts to defeminize Wisdom, to turn her into another name
for Torah, it is still fascinating to note how Proverbs extolls wisdom by contrasting her
with another kind of woman: Folly Woman. Wisdom is chaste, undefiled, observant,
modest, loving, generous, motherly and loyal.
Here she addresses her “sons”:
1:20 Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:
1:21 She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of
pg. 22
the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying, 1:22 How long,
ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in
their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? 1:23 Turn you at my
reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known
my words unto you.
1:24 Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my

hand, and no man regarded; 1:25 But ye have set at nought all my
counsel, and would none of my reproof: 1:26 I also will laugh at your
calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; 1:27 When your fear
cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when
distress and anguish cometh upon you.
2:10 When wisdom entereth into thine heart, and knowledge is pleasant
unto thy soul; 2:11 Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding
shall keep thee.
And like any virtuous woman, she knows that men will be drawn to the woman of folly
and easy virtue. Wisdom will:
Deliver thee from the way of the evil man, from the man that speaketh froward things;
2:13 Who leave the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness; 2:14 Who
rejoice to do evil, and delight in the frowardness of the wicked; 2:15 Whose ways are
crooked, and they froward in their paths:
2:16 To deliver thee from the strange woman, even from the stranger which flattereth
with her words; 2:17 Which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the
covenant of her God.
2:18 For her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead.
2:19 None that go unto her return again, neither take they hold of the
paths of life. 2:20 That thou mayest walk in the way of good men, and keep the paths of
the righteous.
Thus, if you absorb the lessons of Wisdom, you will marry the right kind of woman:
The Woman of Valor, also described in Proverbs.
Rabbi Rami’s Divine Feminine
I have heard Rabbi Rami Shapiro speak on what he calls “the second Axial Age.”
According to Karl Jaspers, an Axial Age is "an interregnum between two ages of
pg. 23
great empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness."
The first Axial Age was from about 900 BCE to 300BCE, a period of intellectual and
religious ferment, that led to a 2,500-year era of—as Shapiro sees it-- male-dominated
religions and institutions.
For about the last 100 years or so, however, Shapiro believes humankind has entered a
second Axial Age, a period in which there will be many eruptions signaling the end of
violent, male-dominated religions and societies, and out of which will emerge a new era
of the Divine Feminine. Shapiro’s prophecy is built less on historical analysis than on
intuitions and insights mainly drawn from Jewish wisdom literature, including the
Song of Songs.
While Jews allegorize the lovers in the Song of Songs as God and Israel, and Christians
as Jesus and the Church, Shapiro allegorizes it as the love of humankind for Woman
Wisdom! Quoting the Tree of Life passage, Shapiro says that we must “take hold of her
(not it)” and to “know her” in the Biblical sense. Indeed, one of his recent books is called
Embracing the Divine Feminine.
These views are, of course, at considerable variance with the Jewish tradition. In fact,
when I sit down from time to time to join in conversation with the sages of the Talmud,
I get the sense that they are extremely uncomfortable with sexuality and with women in
general. If they thought of the Torah as a woman, they’d be reluctant to hold it for the
hakafa.
Not I, though. I may not be as ecstatic as Rabbi Rami, but when I experience the
pleasant paths of Wisdom, it often feels like a leisurely walk with a beautiful woman at
my side. She is a tree of life.
pg. 24
LOSHN KOYDESH: The Persistence of Hebrew
• Chomsky, Willam Hebrew: The Eternal Language Jewish Publication

Society, 1957
• Glinert, Lewis. The Story of Hebrew Princeton University Press, 2017
I call these books to your attention because, in many ways, Glinert’s book continues the
work that Chomsky completed in the 50s. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reviewer,
Benjamin Balint, calls Glinert’s work "the most ambitious attempt since William
Chomsky’s groundbreaking 1957 study, Hebrew: The Eternal Language” at a biography of
the Hebrew language. Balint tells us this work helps us “to appreciate Hebrew as the
grammar of a dynamic dialogue between the claims of the ever-changing present and
the imperatives of the past."
Chomsky and Glinert agree that this perpetual struggle to balance the past and present
is, in effect, not only the story of Hebrew (which is, at once, one of the oldest and
newest languages spoken in today’s world) but also the story of Judaism.
I met William Chomsky (Noam’s father) very briefly in 1968. I was working at the
Franklin Institute Research Labs in Philadelphia and Professor Chomsky—a titan in the
Philadelphia’s vibrant Jewish scholarly world-- had been engaged by our Systems
Science Department to work on a top-secret project: Machine Translation of Hebrew.
Why, you might ask, would the U.S. Armed Forces want to secretly translate
documents without the help of Hebrew speakers? Because in 1967, the Israeli Airforce
had sunk the U.S.S. Liberty in the Mediterranean Sea, killing 34 persons in the process.
pg. 25
Although the official report concluded that the attack had been an accident, many
believe that the Israelis did it deliberately, to make sure the Liberty would not intervene
in Israel’s plan to acquire the Suez Canal.
There has always been a tension between the U.S. Navy and Israel since then 6 and an
associated distrust not only of Israeli translators but also of American Jews who are
often suspected of divided loyalty. The solution then was to find a way of translating
Israeli documents without using any Jews!
The project failed. The 1968 state-of-the-art in machine translation, and limits on
computing power, doomed the work. Moreover, the general strategy of machine
translation for all languages in those days (surface analysis) was shown to be
grammatically insufficient—in ways made clear, ironically, in the linguistic theory of
Noam Chomsky!
Biblical Hebrew
Even if one believes that the Torah was hand-written by Moses (b’yad Moshe), it could
not possibly have been written by Moses in what today we think of as Biblical Hebrew.
Forgetting for the moment that Moses, raised as an Egyptian prince, would have been
illiterate and would have no reason to have ever heard Hebrew, forgetting that the
Israelites who left Egypt with him could not have brought Hebrew with them from
Canaan in the 15th or 14th Century BCE… forgetting these and several other factors, we
still must face the fact that even the most rudimentary samples of written Hebrew are
dated more than two centuries after the latest estimate for the Exodus.
Recognizably Hebrew writing does not appear until the First Temple period, and it is
an amalgam of several Canaanite and other languages (much Phoenician influence)
with unstable pronunciation (especially vowels), helter-skelter grammar, and
inconsistent orthography. And its alphabet looked like this:
6Caspar Weinberg was Secretary of the Navy at that time; later, when he was Secretary of Defense, he got
what many people regard as revenge in the absurd life sentence for Jonathan Pollard.
pg. 26
Biblical Hebrew as a Spoken Language
Between the ascendancy of David and the Babylonian exile, a Hebrew that we now
recognize developed as both the written and oral language of the people in Judea and
Israel. But the alphabet was still in the Phoenician style above.
The separation and loss of the North caused Northern speakers to gradually begin to
speak Aramaic, as they fell under the influence of other countries--although they
continued to use Hebrew for their religious activities.
But the remnant of Jews that returned from Babylon had accomplished two important
things in their absence: they had compiled the Hebrew literature (oral and written) of
the 8th Century BCE into what we now recognize as the Books of Moses, along with
several other portions of the Tanach. 7 And they replaced the Paleo-Hebraic alphabet
with the curved letters we all know today.
7I recently attended a class in which the instructor, a native Israeli, apologized to us for feeling superior
to those who are forced to read the Torah in translation. What he had come to realize was that the earliest
drafts of the Torah already contained Hebrew translations from other languages and dialects.
pg. 27
The best evidence suggests that Hebrew was spoken by those in Judea through the
Second Temple (but not by those in the North) and that the last group of people who
used it as their everyday language, about a million, were killed, enslaved, or just driven
away during the last gasp Bar Kochba rebellion.
After the destruction of the Temple, the Rabbis of the Mishna and Gemara eras still
consulted the Tanach in its Biblical Hebrew form, using the new alphabet, in a text that
had neither capitalization, punctuation, nor vowels. (The pronunciation of the words
was communicated orally because it could not be inferred from the text.) The last book
canonized was the Book of Daniel, which is mainly in Aramaic. 8
The Tanach contains fewer than 10,000 unique words, the Torah about 8,000. This is,
frankly, too modest a vocabulary for sophisticated discourse. So, the rabbis developed a
“diglossic” mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic to render their nuanced arguments and
parables. 9 This enlarging of the Jewish vocabulary enabled 20th Century activists to
develop a larger and more robust Hebrew language.
It is a very serious error, moreover, in praising the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, to

claim that Hebrew disappeared in the diaspora or was spoken by no one in their non-
religious lives. Chomsky tells us “it may be safely assumed that there were always
somewhere in the world, especially in Eretz Yisrael, individuals or even groups, who
could and did employ the Hebrew language effectively in oral usage.” He continues:
According to Ben Asher (Tenth Century Masorete 10), the Hebrew language was
alive during his days “in the mouths of men, women and children.” Solomon ibn
Parhon, a Spanish philologist of the twelfth century, pleads with his readers in
the introduction to his lexicon not to judge him harshly in case they find any
errors or obscurities in his Hebrew style. The people living in Arabic-speaking
countries, he apologizes, all use one language, that is, Arabic, and all travelers
understand it. Hence, they find no need for employing Hebrew and becoming
adept in its use. It is different, however, Parhon continues, in the case of the
8 This fact was called to my attention by a Jesuit professor between classes one day at Fordham University
when I was a professor there. He, in effect, scolded me for using the term “Hebrew Bible.” This professor
was later the Aramaic consultant on Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ film.
9 Aramic and Hebrew are related but different enough to require that BOTH languages be studied
independently. For example, the verse “the earth had become corrupt before God” in Hebrew is:
vatishachaet haaretz lifnae elohim. In Aramaic: va-itchabala ar’ya kadam YHVH.
10 The Masoretes were a group who took it upon themselves to add punctuation, vowels, and section
breaks, turning the received Torah into the Chumash we use today. Surprisingly, the master for today’s
Hebrew Bibles is from a 12th Century CE Codex.
pg. 28
German and Italian Jews. “The Christian countries employ a diversity of

tongues… That is why the native Jews are forced to converse in the Holy
Tongue, which explains their superior proficiency therein…
Thus, since it was almost impossible to practice the Jewish religion without acquiring
several hundred words of Hebrew, the language became a lingua franca for Jews living
in non-Arabic countries.
But even beyond its practical use in religion and commerce, Hebrew was also a
language of song and poetry throughout Europe—in Italy, Amsterdam, and especially
in Spain before the expulsion. The outpouring of humanistic literature in the
Renaissance also had its share of Hebrew speaking poets.
For the most part, though, the 18th and 19th Centuries saw a retreat from non-religious
uses of Hebrew. Although the language never came close to dying out, it became ever
more arcane, so that, as early as the beginning of the 19th Century, Jewish reformers
proposed eliminating it as the language of prayer, to be replaced with the vernacular.
They would have been astonished at what came next.
The Great Revival
The most amazing chapter of the Hebrew narrative is the adoption of a language based
on Biblical Hebrew as the vernacular of the new state of Israel. What may be less well
known, though, is that this decision was made at the end of the 19th Century and
beginning of the 20th, long before the Balfour Declaration.
The father of this “miracle” is the storied Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a refugee from the
Central European pogroms who decided, almost simultaneously, that Jews must flee
Europe for their own homeland and, then, that Hebrew must be its language.
In the Yishuv, well before 1910, day schools were being organized and teachers being
trained to teach vernacular Hebrew, a project that required Eliezer and others to extract
from the entire library of extant Hebrew documents—including contracts,
correspondence, legal opinions, poetry…--a vocabulary of 50-60,000 Hebrew words,
with guides for creating new ones as needed.
pg. 29
The program was moving well until a crisis in 1913, when it was decided to create a
new university in the Yishuv and an argument broke out over the language of
instruction. Chomsky tells the story:
The projected Technicum, since renamed Technion, in Haifa was nearing

completion. The greater portion of the sums raised toward this project was
contributed by Russian and American Jews. The establishment of the school
attracted a great deal of attention. It was just the kind of institute the country
needed. There was a serious shortage of technological workers in the entire
Turkish empire, especially in the Middle East. An Institute of Technology would
open up a vast field in professions and industry for Jewish young men in Eretz
Yisrael and in the Diaspora, and it would accelerate the development and
industrialization of the country.
As a practical matter, there were simply no science textbooks available in the Hebrew
language. To teach in Hebrew would require not only the writing/translation of such
books, but the invention of thousands of new words to express the sciences. Not
surprisingly, then, the planners settled on German as the language of instruction. That
such a thing did not happen, we owe to none other than the Hebrew Teachers’ Union.
Again, Chomsky tells the story:
This, the Teachers’ Organization in the Yishuv decided, should never come to
pass. The Technicum would either be Hebraic or it would not be at all. The
whole Yishuv concurred in this decision. Furthermore, it was felt that this was
the crucial moment to strike the death-blow at the linguistic multiplicity and
confusion in Eretz Yisrael.
The union may have had selfish interests in striking for the enlargement of their
job market, but the effect was epochal, so that, Glinert tells us, on the day the
new state was created, half the 650,000 residents were fluent in modern
Hebrew.
There is, however, a dark side to this story. Until recently, with the 1980s influx
of Russians, Israel forced (or bribed) people to abandon the European languages
they had brought with them, thereby killing the continued growth of Yiddish
(Judeo-German). School children were immersed from Day One in Hebrew
instruction until it became comfortable. Recent data shows, though, that the
Russians, who were permitted to keep Russian while they acclimated
themselves to Israel, learned Hebrew just as quickly and well. Glinert
pg. 30
concludes, therefore, that the suppression of Yiddish was a cruel and

unfortunate strategy.
Is It Hebrew or “Israeli”?
According to Glinert:
In the first, epic decade of statehood, an entire younger generation of

immigrants emerged from Israel’s schools, its youth movements, and the IDF
with a fully functional Hebrew, equipped to conduct their daily lives in it and to
read biblical prose and the daily newspaper.
This point must be stressed: modern Hebrew is quite different from Biblical Hebrew,
but it is close enough so that contemporary speakers can process the ancient texts—
although with problems similar to modern English speakers assaying Hamlet or the
KJV Bible.
Various attempts have been made to regulate it—to limit the incursions of Russian and
English words, for example—but these have been uneven. The language accumulates
concepts and vocabulary continuously, so much so that some have recommended that
the new version be called “Israeli.”

To illustrate, my wife and I were dining al fresco at the Port of Tel Aviv. Our dinner
companions were a young Israeli woman, a social worker whom my wife met at
BrynMawr, and her husband, a young daati, who supported himself as a “sofer,” a man
trained in the sacred calligraphy of Torah. Over their heads, I could see a building with
an immense neon sign on top (above); as always in Israel, I struggled to decode the
word, and, since I was sitting with a “sofer,” it occurred to me that the first four letters
might be sefer or sofer, although I was fairly sure that “vav” didn’t belong. Perhaps this
was a library, or a book depository, or a school for training scribes… The last four
letters were a puzzle: yagia, perhaps, which I thought might mean “you will tell”; again,
I wasn’t sure that “vav” belonged. After spending much too long, I finally asked my
pg. 31
dinner partners to translate. SUPERYOGA, was the result, Hebrew letters used to
render an Americanism.
Hebrew letters can be used to render almost anything. Israel has added new letters to
produce the W sound and the sound that begins the words George and John. Nor
should we forget that most Yiddish was written with Hebrew letters and that
Maimonides himself wrote in Arabic with a Hebrew alphabet.
My feeling is that there is no need to call the language Israeli. If Shakespeare and
Twitter are both English, then the Torah and HaAretz are both Hebrew.
Hebrew and the Modern Jew
I understand the thinking of Geiger and Mendelsohn when they proposed to reduce
Hebrew in Jewish worship. Praying in a language you don’t understand is tantamount
to signing a ketubah you can’t read.
But I also believe that Hebrew language and Hebrew texts are the blood supply of the
Jewish people. Hebrew is not just our language; it is in many ways our international
identity, our memory and conscience. Glinert says it eloquently:
The Hebrew language and its literature have been critical elements in this
national identity, often as a counterforce to rival cultures and languages—Greek
in the ancient world, Arabic in the Middle Ages, European vernaculars in the
modern era, and now global English. Pride in the force and grace of the
language underpinned the secular Hebrew literature of the medieval Diaspora
and the modern revival as much as religious commitment has underpinned
Hebrew’s sacred literature.
I have read that today’s bar/bat mitzvah experience is often referred to as “ordeal by
language.” When I was twelve, however, and Hebrew was becoming easier for me, my
teachers would often urge me to read faster. I suppose they meant to prepare me for the
day when I would be galloping through my daily services as quickly as possible. But I
continued to read slowly, enjoying the exotic consonants and rhythms. When I was a
boy, Hebrew tasted rich in my mouth. And it still does.
pg. 32
How Many is God?: Thinking about the Sh’ma
The Torah portion V’Etchanan, contains the most famous prayer in our siddur: the
Sh’ma, along with the V’Ahavta. Actually, let me correct that. The Sh’ma is not really a
prayer at all. Jewish prayers are almost always directed to God, and usually begin with
a robust statement of praise for Adonai and the Mitzvoth. In contrast, the Sh’ma is an
exhortation that Moses, on his deathbed, directs at the Israelites who are about to enter
the Promised Land.
In many Hebrew schools, the Sh’ma is the first sentence that students learn. It was the
very first lesson of my own Jewish/Hebrew education…and it almost derailed me. Our
teacher asked if anyone could recite the Sh’ma. I couldn’t; I had never heard a word of
Hebrew in my home and I had never attended a service.
The boy sitting next to me—an undistinguished colleague from my elementary school—
raised his hand, spoke the Sh’ma sentence, and then proceeded to rattle off from
memory the V’Ahavta and following passages. The teacher was impressed but I was
mortified. I had always been the teacher’s favorite in every school I attended and it was
clear to me that Hebrew school was going to be an ordeal. I can still recall the feeling.
But back to the present. The Sh’ma is not only the first prayer-book Hebrew we learn; it
is one of the few Hebrew sentences from the Torah that most people can translate into
English. In the old days, we learned: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God--the Lord is
One. Nowadays, our gender awareness usually changes the translation to: Hear, O
Israel, Adonai is our God--Adonai is One.
These translations satisfy most people. Only students of Torah textual criticism are
concerned that God has two names in the Sh’ma: YHVH and El. And most people are
satisfied with the “Adonai is One” apposition; they take it to mean that Jews are
monotheists and always have been. The truth of the latter claim depends on what you
mean by “monotheist.” In the beginning, Israelites were “monolatrists,” that is, they
worshipped only one of the many available gods; then they were “henotheists,” that is,
they believed their single god was the best and most powerful of the gods; and, finally,
probably around the time of the Babylonian exile, they decided their god was the one
pg. 33
and only true God, which made them authentic monotheists. (Rabbi Richard Elliot
Friedman disputes this claim, arguing that there were true monotheists among the
earliest Israelites,)
Actually, it’s quite difficult to understand what Moses means here. And the intent is
made even more obscure by the fact that Hebrew has no verb “to be” in the present
tense. The sentence merely says “YHVH One.” This has led more imaginative
translators to try other versions: Adonai alone; only Adonai; Adonai is Oneness, and so
forth. In some texts, I have seen that One is another of God’s many names.
After more than six decades of reciting the Sh’ma, after a lifetime of study and
reflection, I’ve come to believe that the most import word in that sentence is “one.”
(Thus, the Sh’ma would reflect the Strunk and White principle of putting the main
word in a sentence at the end.) One is not only a number; it is the mother of all
numbers; it is a concept and construct and can be used to characterize anything from a
grape to a universe. And, of course, it’s indispensable in forming a monotheistic
religion.
One
Let us hope that your inquisitive children or grandchildren never ask you to define or
explain what one means. The dictionary is useless; it provides synonyms (unity, unit,
singleness, single unit, identity…) all of which merely shift the problem to the other
words.
One of the few major intellectual lightning bolts I’ve experienced in my life happened
during my freshmen year when I realized that one is not observable and, therefore, not
empirical. You can look around for hours and never see a one; you believe you can
point at “one of something,” but actually your finger is pointing at an indefinite number
of objects on a vector. You can hold up what you call “one apple,” but it’s still not clear
which of the things in your hand is the “one apple.” (Is it the skin, the stem, the flesh,
the seeds. If you say it is all those things, then by removing some of the skin or seeds
will it cease to be “one apple”?) And it’s not even clear whether your hand is part of the
apple.
Maria Montessori notwithstanding, a child cannot pick up “one rod” unless he or she
knows what one is. For all the child knows, the whole pile of rods is “one rod”—until
that child has already acquired the construct of one.
pg. 34
Every object in the world (except perhaps the boson) is divisible. Whenever we see
“one thing” or think about “one thing” it’s because we have learned to group a
collection of items into a one-frame.
To make matters more complicated, the separate items we put into the frame are not
always required for the unit to persist. We can pull the stem from the apple and it’s still
an apple. And this, in turn leads to what Bertrand Russell dubbed the Category Error.
So, for example, Harvard is one university. But as you’re walking on the campus one
day, some stranger approaches you and asks where he can find Harvard. You wave
your hand, pointing at the buildings. “Excuse me,” says the stranger, “I see the library
and the dormitories and the athletic field…but where is Harvard University?”
The unit of Harvard University is a way of framing all the parts, but we can eliminate
half the buildings and there’s still one Harvard University.
Gilbert Ryle, the British philosopher, proposed that this is the same sort of mistake we
make when we act as though the soul or personality is one of our parts, inside a person
(“behind the eyes” typically); Ryle says that the persona or soul is like the university, a
way of framing the body as a unit. Identity is an aspect of one. Identity entails the one-
ness of something over time—even when the something changes its parts. Humans
replace all their tissue over time, yet their identities remain.
One, unity, identity, sameness are all facets of the same abstraction. To illustrate, this
abstraction enabled a carpenter friend of mine to say he had been using the same
hammer for twenty years: seven handles, four heads.
Obviously, then, there is no oneness or unity unless there is an intelligence to

apprehend it, to put a one-frame around the parts. No unit exists without a brain to
abstract it as such. And without this ability, human beings would live in a world as
chaotic as the one infants see when they first open their eyes: unintelligible images,
sounds, and sensations…a chaos caused by the inability to know where one thing
(sound, sight…) ends and the next begins.
But this infant, barring some unfortunate impairment, will eventually learn to distill
sense data and ideas into one-frames. Eventually, he or she may even be able to put a
one-frame around everything that exists: what most call the universe 11 and the kabbalist
calls the “yaish.”
11 For those who believe there are many universes, all of them together equal what we’re talking about.
pg. 35
In Questioning the Millennium, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould writes of
people who are “religiously talented,” that is, people who are capable of sustaining the
idea that the whole universe is one thing, a unity, of which they are a part. (Those who
believe that the universe is a dream or illusion are saying that the universe is part of
them. That they are the one.)
Of course, unless you’re a theoretical physicist, there’s not much practical need to
contemplate the one-ness of the universe. For most of us, it is an idea/feeling that
insinuates itself into our imagination at some point in life. It often fills us when we
contemplate the night sky, or a range of mountains, or the image of a cell in an electron
microscope. Or sometimes it comes to us while we are studying philosophy or Torah, or
when we are meditating. It’s a feeling that is enabled by music: anything from the
overpowering Agnus Dei in Bach’s B-minor Mass to the trance-inducing power of
banging on a tisch or in a drum circle.
There is also a sense in which the universe is composed of indivisible ones: atoms,
monads… The Roman poet Lucretius (The Nature of Things, the Bible of Epicureanism)
and the philosopher Leibniz proposed such a structure. Spinoza believed that there was
only one substance (substantia) in the universe, made of these unitary bits, and that this
substance was God—knowable through the laws of Nature.
In all its forms, this sense of oneness 12 with the universe is what the theologian calls
gnosis and what the Chassid calls devekus, a sense of the presence or closeness of God.
That experience, I think, comes closest to defining the one in the Sh’ma.
Nothing(ness)
In my cynical younger days, I would joke that if one god is better than many gods, then,
logically, no god is better than one god. It turns out, this may not be a joke at all.
From the time of Maimonides and the medieval mystics, Jews have believed that God
has no comprehensible attributes, that is, none within the scope of human
understanding. Clearly, our earliest ancestors believed nothing of the kind. They were
not speaking allegorically or metaphorically when they talked about God’s voice, or his
face (which cannot be looked at), or his nose (which enjoys the smell of burnt offerings),
12 The old joke: How does a mystic order a hot dog? Make me one with everything.
pg. 36
or his back (which he showed to Moses). It’s more than a thousand years after the fall of
the Temple when the Rambam tells us that the anthropomorphic God is the belief of
“ignoramuses.” You cannot, according to him, say anything accurate about God’s looks,
powers, attitudes, virtues… You may, however, say what he isn’t, and whatever you
say He isn’t is true. Why? Because He isn’t anything we can grasp. (Of course, this
central proposition does not stop the Rambam from discoursing about God at length.)
At the same time, the mystics develop the notion that the universe (the Yaish) is one
thing and that God is the formless, endless something-or-other that is somehow beneath
or behind the Yaish: the Ayin or Ein Sof. (Logically, of course, a thing that is without
ending cannot be near something else; the words make no sense.)
Once we have become comfortable with the notion that the universe is one, we may, if
we are inquisitive, begin to wonder about concepts that won’t fit into the universe:
eternity, endlessness, infinity, infinitesimals, forever… Nothing in the universe is
infinite, or infinitesimal, endless, borderless, or eternal. And because these notions
cannot exist in the universe, then they must exist in the not-universe: Nothing. (By the
way, Nothing cannot exist either.)
This is not a new idea of course; again, one of the names the Kabbalists give to God is
Ayin—Nothing. But what is important is that we not make the mistake of thinking that
Nothing is the same as Zero. The relationship between One and Zero is mechanical; the
relationship between One and Nothing defies explication.
As a boy I was fortunate to read George Gamow’s One,Two,Three…Infinity. One

purpose of the book was to show clearly that Infinity was in a different category from
numbers, that no matter how large a number becomes, it gets no closer to infinity,
that numbers and infinities were incommensurable. One chapter describes a “universal
printing press,” a gadget like an odometer with fifty wheels and fifty English characters
of each wheel. The device begins with a row of 50 a’s and prints that line; then the last
wheel moves and the it prints 49 a’s followed by a b… and so on. Eventually, this
gadget, which has no intelligence or computer, will print every 50-character sentence
that has ever been printed or thought; every 50-character sentence that will ever be
written in the future; and every possible alternative and misspelling of the previous
sentences. No, this is not the story of the infinite number of monkeys with an infinite
number of typewriters… this universal printer will actually finish the job, in a fixed,
predetermined—but quite long--length of time. Infinity has nothing to do with it.
pg. 37
Moreover, there is no such thing as an infinite number of monkeys; infinity is NOT a

number.
Infinity is not a quantity, and neither is eternity. There is no such thing as half an
eternity, for example. Another book I read as a boy was James Joyce’s Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. I remember very little from the book except for a speech by a
priest-teacher who is trying to scare his students with the threat of eternal damnation.
Imagine a mountain of sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest
heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in
thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied
as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers
on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine
that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried
away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries
would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how
many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that
immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.
At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun…
Rabbi Rami Shapiro tells us that the main lesson of Ecclesiastes is that everything that
exists (the universe, the Yaish) is impermanent. Following the Zen formula, God =
Reality. If you would experience permanence and eternity, however, if you would
come to grips with death, you need to contemplate Nothing.
The choice then is to imagine God either as coterminous with the one-frame of the
universe, or external to the universe, in the Nothing, somehow tweaking the universe
and us into the best of all possible universes, through mechanisms and manifestations
that defy logical explanation.
My limited experience indicates that contemplating Nothing is possible, if one creates

the proper meditative setting and one practices for a long time. (At first, it makes you
anxious.) My experience is also that brief encounters with the Nothing are refreshing
and return us to the real world with appetite and gratitude. At the same time, I expect
that there’s something dangerously seductive about meditating on Nothing (death,
eternity, infinity…) and that it might lure one away from the Yaish altogether.
I like Nicole Krauss’ approach. In the current N.Y.Times Book Review (Sept 10, 2017),
the Israeli/American novelist is asked what she looks for in choosing a book to read: “I
pg. 38
want something of that other world that comes through and limns ours with meaning.
I want, if possible, a little bit of infinity, which I don’t think is too much to ask.”
Not too much at all.
pg. 39
pg. 40
Rambam’s Thirteen Revisited
Judaism is not a creedal religion. There is not now, and probably never has been, a
straightforward answer to the question: What do Jews believe? But in the Middle Ages,
with the maturing, creedal theologies of Catholocism and Islam spreading across
Europe and the Levant, there was an apparent need for Jews to have an answer,
especially an answer that would differentiate their beliefs from other major religions.
Towards the end of the 12th Century (CE), Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known
as Maimonides or "The Rambam" inserted into his commentary on Tractate Sanhedrin
(as well as other writings and correspondence) a list of thirteen articles of faith that, he
argued, were an essential, immutable core of Judaism. The thirteen beliefs are:
1. The Creator, blessed be His name, is the creator and guide of everything that has
been created, and that He alone has made, does make, and will make all things.
2. The Creator, blessed be His name, is a Unity (is One), and that there is no unity in
any manner like His, and that He alone is our God, Who was, is, and will be.
3. The Creator, blessed be His name, is not a body, and that He is free from all the
accidents (properties) of matter, and that he has not any form whatsoever.
4. The Creator, blessed be His name, is the first and the last.
5. To the Creator, blessed be His name, and to Him alone, it is right to pray, and that it
is not right to pray to any being besides him.
6. All the words of the prophets are true.
7. The prophecy of Moses our teacher was true, and he was the chief of the prophets,
both of those that preceded and of those that followed him.
8. The whole Torah, now in our possession, is the same that was given to Moses our
teacher, peace be unto him.
9. This Torah will not be changed, and that there will never be any other Torah from
the Creator, blessed be his name.
10. The Creator, blessed be His name, knows every deed of the children of men, and all
their thoughts, as it is said. It is He that fashions the hearts of them all, Who gives
heed to all their deeds.
11. The Creator, blessed be His name, rewards those who keep his commandments and
punishes those that transgress them.
pg. 41
12. In the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.
13. There will be a resurrection of the dead at a time when it shall please the Creator,
blessed be His name, and exalted be the remembrance of Him for ever and ever.
Understand, Maimonides himself probably didn’t consider this list to be exhaustive or
definitive. One gets the sense in reading his work and his biographies that he regarded
this list as sort of a “Disney Version” of Judaism for those who could not do much
intellectual heavy lifting. One also suspects that his willingness to publish the list was
motivated by a desire to be free from the recurring questions about creed.
Nor was this list universally applauded by the great rabbis of the time, who found it
superficial and even inconsistent with other things he had written. In fact, the list
gained almost no currency in the Jewish world until some creative editors introduced it
in two poetic forms in our prayer books: Ani ma’amim (I believe with perfect faith…)
and the exhilarating Yigdal (Magnify…)
But how do we feel about the list today? Has history or scholarship or science made any
of the items dubious or wrong? Are we brave enough to challenge the great Rambam?
The Creator, blessed be His name, is the creator and guide of everything that has been
created, and that He alone has made, does make, and will make all things.
This statement may be the easiest for a contemporary reader to accept but the hardest to
understand. The Rambam’s first obligation is to assert that the world was created so
that, later, he can assign the “job” of God to that Creator. Why is this so?
Rambam was caught up in a heated philosophical dispute with some of his

contemporaries over the legitimacy of non-Jewish philosophy in general, and Aristotle’s
philosophy in particular. Maimonides, like the Christian Thomas Aquinas, believed that
scientific and philosophical inquiry lead one to a deeper appreciation of God. As
Maimonides wrote:
Only those who cultivate both religious practices and mathematics, logic, natural
science, and metaphysics are privileged to enter the inner courtyard of God. Only after
thus comprehending Him and His works—according to the degree of man’s intellect—
can man devote himself to God and strive to come near Him and strengthen the bond
that links man to him—namely, human intellect. (Guide for the Perplexed III)
In contrast, many of his righteous contemporaries believed that “goyishe” science and
philosophy were the very sort of alien thinking Jews are cautioned against in Torah and
that such knowledge had the power to corrupt even a great scholar. Maimonides’
assertion that the world was brought into existence by a Creator is mainly a way of
distancing himself from Aristotle, who believed that the world had always existed.
pg. 42
Thus, there is nothing difficult for a person of any religion to accept in this first article.
It merely asserts that the universe came into being ex nihilo, out of nothing, and that it
is a lawful universe. Even most atheists believe that.
The Creator, blessed be His name, is a Unity (is One), and that there is no unity in any manner
like His, and that He alone is our God, Who was, is, and will be.
At first, this may be regarded as Rambam’s underscoring of the difference between

Christian and Jewish theology: a rejection of Western Christianity’s core belief in the
trinity of God. The “He alone . . .” is aimed at Christians (but not, presumably, at
Moslems).
One key problem in understanding this sentence is Hebrew grammar, which has no
indefinite article. We cannot know whether the sentence means that the Creator is a
unity or simply unity itself.
From a practical point of view, we may infer that Maimonides believed that God has no
parts, is monolithic and indivisible. Of course, Maimonides did not believe that one
could ascribe positive attributes to God, only negative attributes. We cannot, in his
view, say that God is unified, rather that God is not made of parts. Further, he asserted
that when we try to ascribe an attribute to God we end by identifying God with that
attribute. Thus, instead of saying that God is compassionate, we say that God IS
compassion. Instead of saying God is unified, we say God IS unity.
The Creator, blessed be His name, is not a body, and that He is free from all the accidents
(properties) of matter, and that he has not any form whatsoever.
If God has no body and no form, then the events described in the Torah must be
understood figuratively, not literally. Indeed, to most enlightened modern Jews, all
sentences with the word God in them should be understood figuratively! This is
especially true when God is characterized as a man, a king, a father, or bridegroom.
Any assertion of God’s preferences is dramatic invention; any story about God’s actions
is an allegory. And any claim to know precisely and unambiguously what God wants
from humankind is hyperbole.
The Creator, blessed be His name, is the first and the last.
The concept of unity logically precedes all matter and succeeds all matter. In the end,
the universe, impelled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, will once again be
unified. Eventually, every cubic centimeter of the universe will be exactly like every
pg. 43
other cubic centimeter: no planets, stars, organisms, or even recognizable substances. It

will be One again. But, since that condition can only be sustained for an instant,
something else will happen, either a reversal of the process or something else we cannot
imagine.
Real systems begin with a concept and end with a concept. When we impute a
personality and will to the concept that created our universe, we call that personality
God.
To the Creator, blessed be His name, and to Him alone, it is right to pray, and that it is not
right to pray to any being besides him.
Again, this article is meant mainly to differentiate Jews from Christians, who, to Jewish
eyes, appear to be worshipping someone other than the formless, matterless, unified
God. To even the most liberal Jew, the notion of worshipping the man Jesus, or his
mother, is alien and impossible. To Jewish eyes, moreover, the adoration of statues and
icons, commonplace in Christianity but also forbidden in Islam, is expressly the conduct
forbidden by the second or third of the Ten Commandments (depending on how one
counts them).
In a current view, however, one does not necessarily pray to or even for something. It is
very hard to believe that prayers are heard or acted on by an unseen mechanic who will
alter the course of the universe in our favor. We pray for our own sakes, so that we can
feel whole and healthy, simultaneously powerful and humble, so that we are better able
to love others and so that we are inclined to act in the most human ways. What we
receive in this prayerful state—insight, courage, comfort, a sense of belonging, energy
to do good—we may call figuratively gifts from God.
All the words of the prophets are true.
If by this the Rambam means that the Prophets section of the Tanach contains sentences
that are literally, factually accurate, then an educated Jew will have trouble accepting
this article. Even the naming of the books of the Prophets is problematical. Except for
the most Orthodox, for example, nearly every Bible scholar believes that there are two
(if not three) Isaiahs, that the first 39 chapters were written nearly two centuries before
the remainder. To be good Jews, must we, in accordance with Article 6, believe that
there was one Isaiah who composed the entire book.
The Prophets portion of the Bible is laced with historical errors. It is also filled with
fanciful and bizarre episodes that could not possibly have occurred. Are we to believe,
pg. 44
for example, that King Saul visited a witch, that the witch conjured up the form of the
dead prophet Samuel, and that Samuel complained about being disturbed..
If there is a “truth” in the prophets it is that there is a certain kind of wholeness and
emotional/intellectual robustness (shalom) in “walking with God” and observing the
commandments. But the belief that observing the mitzvoth—even if one could get
every Jew on earth to observe them—would protect us from our enemies is nothing
more than childish optimism, unsupported by history or even common sense. It is a
confusion of the “mighty king” metaphor with reality. Our God is not a desert chieftain
who can defeat our enemies at will; our God is a potent figure of speech and our
enemies’ weapons are literal and real.
The prophecy of Moses our teacher, peace be unto him, was true, and that he was the chief
of the prophets, both of those that preceded and of those that followed him.
On the surface, there is nothing controversial or problematical in this simple assertion

of the respect that all Jews feel for Moshe Rabbeynu. Taken historically, it may be seen
as a warning to view with suspicion any self-styled prophet or messiah who claims to
supersede the teachings of Moses.
The claim that the prophecy of Moses is true, however, is subject to some of the same
problems discussed under the general issue of prophetic reliability. Repeatedly in
Deuteronomy Moses makes all-or-nothing, unfulfilled promises in God’s name.
What enlightened Jews—including sophisticated Rabbis—have realized is that the

Pentateuch we now read was not written in one piece and stored in an ark. It was
accumulated over hundreds of years and most of it was compiled and edited during the
Babylonian exile. (This is called the “documentary” or “critical” view.) Moreover,
substantial portions were probably motivated by the political and economic pressures
on its exiled authors. To produce harmony in the exiled remnants of the northern and
southern kingdom, it includes competing versions of the same legends (such as the two
contradictory accounts of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis); to maintain
sharp separation between Israel and its occupiers, it introduces rules of clothing and
food which, among other things, make congress between the peoples difficult.
The only somewhat persuasive argument one sees in support of the divine/Mosaic
authorship of the Torah is that it is so filled with errors and contradictions that a
modestly good human editor would have cleaned them up.
pg. 45
The whole Law (Torah), now in our possession, is the same that was given to Moses our
teacher, peace be unto him.
Rambam asserts the absolute authority and perfection of the body of documents called
the Torah. (One immediate problem, of course, is that different groups of Jews have
disagreed on what belongs in that body.)
But, despite these disagreements, if it can be said that there is one core idea that unites
traditional Jews it is this article of faith, expressed succinctly in the Stone Edition of the
Chumash: “The Talmud states emphatically that if one questions the Divine origin of
even a single letter or traditionally accepted interpretation of the Torah, it is tantamount
to denial of the entire Torah. . . for if a critic can take it upon himself to deny the
provenance of one verse or letter of the Torah, what is to stop him from discarding any
part that displeases him.”
(In rhetorical theory, this is called the “slippery slope” fallacy: If we let people change
one thing, then they’ll want to change anything that they feel like changing. There is, of
course, almost no basis for this argument.)
In the concept of Torah, traditional Jews also include much of the Talmud, what they
call the “Oral Torah” and its commentaries in this divine, perfect package. Again, from
the Stone edition: “[It] is clear beyond a doubt: there is a companion to the Written
Torah, an Oral Law without which the Written Torah can be twisted and misinterpreted
beyond recognition, as indeed it has been by the ignorant down through the
centuries…” Those who “raised their heads against the sanctity of the Oral Torah” are,
in his word, “blasphemers.”
The Bible, Talmud, and Midrash are bursting with the overpowering wisdom of the
Jewish people. A serious Jew will spend a part of almost every day, and most of the
Sabbath, studying these materials and absorbing the wisdom of our sages. Every visit to
the Jewish texts, especially in the company of a wise teacher, yields insights and ideas
that are worth having. But to say that any part of them is perfect, unassailable, from the
mouth of God, is, once again, mere hyperbole, a figure of speech.
This Law (Torah) will not be changed, and that there will never be any other Torah from the
Creator, blessed be his name.
On the surface, this is a denunciation of the Christian and Muslim scriptures as having
something other than divine provenance. More particularly, it is a defense against
pg. 46
supercessionism, the idea that one scripture/religion can absorb and supersede a
predecessor, rendering it obsolete.
But the Torah is, in fact, in a perpetual state of change. Every discussion, interpretation,
and “responsum” adds to the Torah. (In much the way that every trial adds to the law.)
As Jews, we have chosen to devote ourselves to our scriptures, to the exclusion of all
others. But this is merely a choice: not a proof of our unique claim on the truth.
The Creator, blessed be His name, knows every deed of the children of men, and all their
thoughts, as it is said. It is He that fashions the hearts of them all, Who gives heed to all their
deeds.
The Rambam teaches us that when we say that God “knows” or “sees” or “hears” we
are speaking metaphorically. If we claim that God knows all our deed and thoughts,
what have we actually said? Moreover, what are we to infer from any statement in
which the heart is held to be the seat of beliefs or feelings, a primitive idea from ancient
and medieval medicine?
Taken literally, the claim is empty. Taken figuratively, it may be the key to a good life.
It is an axiom of Judaism that everything we say or do matters. Not just what we do in
our worship services, but everything. It refers twice to deeds, which is consistent with
the Jewish tradition of elevating deeds above belief as the measure of our lives.
The Creator, blessed be His name, rewards those who keep his commandments and punishes
those that transgress them.
The most childish conception of religion, what Einstein called “the religion of the naive”
and Freud called “infantilism,” is God as father/judge, dispensing rewards to the
faithful and painful punishments to the wicked. It establishes fear as the basis of
religion—fear of punishment in this life or “the life to come.”
In the two millennia since the emergence of this idea of an afterlife with just deserts,
there have been millions of words written about the “problem of evil”—why the
righteous suffer and die, why there is so much misery in a world created by a perfect
Creator. Of course, there is only a problem of evil if one adopts this innocent view of
God as a dispenser of rewards and punishments. (And one cannot help but point out
that much of this evil, in olden times and today, is carried out in God’s name with the
endorsement of the officers of his churches and other institutions.)
Let us resolve the problem of evil once and for all: The widespread suffering of the
innocent, throughout the centuries and on every continent, proves that God does not
pg. 47
intervene in human affairs. As the philosopher Michael Scriven has pointed out, an
ordinary man or woman—limited in power, knowledge and goodness—would do more
than God does in the face of the endless brutalization of the innocent.
In the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.
The Messiah envisioned by Maimonides was not a demigod or even an angel. He was,
rather, a man with the power to effectuate peace between Israel and her neighbors. “Do
not think,” he wrote, “that in the days of the Messiah any of the laws of nature will
cease to exist or that new creations will come into being.”
The Rambam’s conception of the Messiah is nothing like the Christian conception. “All
of the fantastic visions of the Prophets concerning the messianic era are metaphorical,”
he wrote.
In short, Maimonides’ conception of the messianic era is neither magical nor

supernatural. It will simply be a period of peace for all nations, both “lions and lambs.”
The belief in the coming of the Messiah is nothing more complex than optimism about
Israel’s future, even in the face of her endless problems and suffering. One might add,
though, with a somewhat existentialist twist, that it is in the nature of Messiahs to tarry,
just as it is the nature of Jews to wait, every day.
There will be a resurrection of the dead at a time when it shall please the Creator, blessed be
His name, and exalted be the remembrance of Him for ever and ever.
As a physician and scientist, Maimonides had much to say about the resurrection of the
body. Since he believed that God would never suspend the laws of the universe, there
would then have to be a perpetual replacement of physical bodies as the old ones wore
out. (The later sage, Nachmanides, offered that the new bodies would be made of a
nondecaying material, something between flesh and spirit.)
The belief in resurrection of the flesh is alien to most educated people of all religions.
Most Reform prayer books have replaced the three references to resurrection in the
Amidah (m’chayae ha-matim) with other, vaguer language.
Our funeral services are oblique on this question. The departed have been “returned to
God,” or “found eternal peace,” but no one thinks that the peace of the grave is
anything like the peace that comes from a good sabbath meal. There are even important
parts of the Hebrew Bible, namely Ecclesiastes and Job, that indicate quite strongly that
there is nothing at all after death.
pg. 48
Can we agree with the Rambam? Of course. The Creator will resurrect the dead “at a
time when it shall please him.” Maybe now, maybe later; maybe never. This is a subtle
way of saying that it has nothing to do with us.
Our “mourner’s” prayer is praise for life, not reflection on death. The Talmud says that
a funeral cortege must stop and yield the right of way to a wedding procession; life
takes precedence over death. The obligation of Jews is to study, pray, act righteously,
and find joy in our festivals. To live.
pg. 49
pg. 50
Was Albert Einstein a Jewish Prophet?

A Sermon for Einstein’s Birthday (March 14)
Let’s pause to celebrate one of the best known and most admired Jewish thinkers of the
20th Century: Albert Einstein. And in this spirit, let us perform his favorite kind of
investigation: a thought experiment.
Would our Talmudic sages have considered Einstein—had they the power to
comprehend his writings—a prophet? Would they have admitted him to that exclusive
club of 55 Israelite men and women (plus one Gentile, Balaam), said to have received
enlightenment through a visionary communication from God?
Would our ancestors have accepted a theoretical physicist as a spokesperson for the
Eternal? Probably. Moses Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, tells us “Only those
who cultivate not only religious practices but also mathematics, logic, natural science,
and metaphysics are privileged to enter the inner courtyard of God. Only after thus
comprehending Him and His works—according to the degree of man’s intellect—can
man devote himself to God and strive to come near Him and strengthen the bond that
links man to Him—namely, human intellect.”
To the Rambam, remember, God is pure intellect and the greater a person’s intellect, the
closer to God. He even asserted that Moses must have been considerably more
intelligent than everyone else to be so favored by God. He explains:
Among men are found certain individuals so gifted and perfected that they can receive
pure intellectual form. Their human intellect clings to the Active Intellect, whither it is
gloriously raised. These men are the prophets; this is what prophecy is.
(That, he says, is why only Moses understands the rationale for all the mitzvot.)
pg. 51
Baruch Spinoza also associates the prophet with profound intellect. In his Tractatus, he
defines a prophet as someone who “interprets things revealed by God to those who
cannot themselves achieve certain knowledge of them and can therefore only grasp by
simple faith what has been revealed.” (Remember that Spinoza regarded God as being
another name for the laws of physics.)
However, to be fair, Maimonides’ and Spinoza’s notions of God as pure intellect has
never been widely shared by our sages and scholars. Most expect more (or less) from a
prophet than a stratospheric IQ. The Talmud asserts that there were 100s of thousands
of prophets in the Wilderness, but their prophesies were not retained in scripture
because they spoke ideas relevant only to their own times and generations—unlike the
55 who spoke to us for all time. My old friend, Rabbi Louis Eron, distinguishes between
a sage—who unearths God’s intentions in everything that has happened until now—
and the prophet, who sees the path through the future that will fulfill the Divine Plan.
And the longest and most fascinating requirements list for prophets can be found in
Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets. Here are just a few of his criteria for judging
the true prophet:
• Justice and righteousness are the preeminent values, far more important than wealth
or power, or even wisdom.
• The Powerful are regarded as evil, the cause of jealousy, greed, and ultimately war
itself. The powerful are to be challenged, reproached, and disobeyed.
• Intolerance of evil is more important than forgiveness and accommodation for the sake
of peace and harmony.
• Compassion and caring for the whole world is essential, while showing no particular
interest or affection for the present moment.
• Fanaticism is necessary to battle the unending threats to the will of God.
• Isolation and Loneliness are the destiny of the prophet. The message of doom makes
everyone hostile to the prophets; their visions of disaster overwhelm them; they forfeit
any hope of satisfaction or joy.
Einstein’s Visions
Theoretical physicists—although they are the most “spiritual” of scientists— are not
given to talking about miracles. To most scientists, the word miracle means “something
that violates the laws of nature and, therefore, cannot happen.” But Rabbi J. B.
Soloveitchik tells us that “The word ‘miracle’ in Hebrew [nes] does not possess the
pg. 52
connotation of the supernatural. Miracle describes only an outstanding event which

causes amazement.”
Even so, physicists often refer to the year 1905 as the miracle year in physics: the year in
which Albert Einstein—26 years old—published his first four scientific papers, all of
which dramatically affected science and engineering, and one of which led to the most
profound change in worldviews since Isaac Newton’s papers on motion and gravity.
But in 1905, the young Einstein, after years of battling with his professors, frustrating
his parents, and posing questions that sowed doubt about the best established scientific
ideas … after all that he experienced a visionary lightning storm of earth-shattering
cosmic insight. The papers were:
First, On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of

Light. In this, Einstein showed that, by assuming light actually consisted of
discrete packets (rather than waves), he could explain the mysterious
photoelectric effect first observed separately by James Maxwell and Max Planck.
Planck later called these packets “quanta,” which gave rise to the term quantum
physics. Einstein called them “photons,” which gave rise, of course, to the term
“photon torpedo.”
Next, the expansion of his doctoral dissertation, On the Motion—Required by the

Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat—of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid.
Among other things, this paper demonstrated that atoms are real things—not
just fictions or constructs useful in chemistry discussions. Although poets like
Lucretius and philosophers like Leibniz had argued that the universe is made up
of atomic particles, until as late as 1905 there were important scientists who
doubted the existence of atoms!
The third paper was originally called On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies and
was later renamed to reflect its better-known content: The Special Theory of
Relativity. This paper, which I’ll discuss in a moment, substantially revised
humankind’s understanding of light, time, mass, and motion. That’s all.
Then, to round out the year he tossed off a little three-page addendum to his
Special Theory of Relativity Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy
Content? All this little study did was posit the mathematical relationship between
matter and energy and provide the foundation for atomic energy with what has
been called the single most well-known equation in the whole world: e=mc2.
pg. 53
Now as to Relativity… By the end of the 19th century, a problem had developed for
classical, Newtonian physics: namely, certain anomalies in the behavior of light.
According to Newton’s predictions, a wave of light should be slowed down when it
passes through something or near something. Moreover, light traveling with the wind
at its back should move faster than light traveling into a headwind.
But, according to the historic experiments of Michelson & Morley (1874), nothing you
did to light—even bending it—changed its velocity, which appeared to be a constant
186,350 miles/second. (or 300,000,000 meters/sec)
A lesser-known problem for Newton was the work of George Fitzgerald who, in 1894
observed a foreshortening of moving bodies, in the direction of their movement. (The
measurement of this phenomenon was worked out by Hendrik Lorentz in 1903.)
Einstein, starting with the Michelson-Morley experiments, throwing in the Lorentz

transformations (along with other extant theoretical physics) and leavening it all with
his visions, created the Special Theory of Relativity. And to understand it you must try
that thought experiment he proposed.
Imagine that you are racing with a beam of light. You run as fast as you can, but no
matter how you accelerate, you do not seem to be gaining on the beam of light. How is
that possible: that you are running ever faster, but not gaining on that beam?
But things get odder still… When you finally quit your futile race and describe your
experience to a friend who was watching the whole thing, he says that you are
mistaken, that you WERE in fact gaining on the light beam the whole time.
There is nothing in Newton that can explain any of this. Instead, we need a new theory
that asserts the following:
• The laws of physics are the same at all speeds and in all circumstances: invariant.
This proposition was the metaphysical foundation of Einstein’s science AND
religion. More later.
• The speed of light is a constant; moreover, it is the highest velocity that can be
observed in our universe.
• As a moving body approaches the speed of light, time slows down for that body;
moreover, the mass of that body foreshortens and increases. (In effect, if an object
were to reach the speed of light, its mass would become infinite and, for it, time
would stop: a singularity.)
pg. 54
Interestingly, it wasn’t until 1971 that someone actually did an experiment with two
very fast aircraft, each equipped with an atomic clock, and demonstrated that time, in
fact, moved slower in the faster vehicle.
In other words, Einstein perceived a phenomenon that no human being had ever
observed and predicted a precise relationship that no measurement instrument
available in his day could have calculated. The Special Theory of Relativity, although it
benefited from the work of other physicists, was largely the product of a kind of holy
seizure of imagination. Indeed, it is reported that, after he finished the paper, he was so
mentally depleted that he slept for two weeks!
Einstein and God
Over time, as his reputation grew, his mane of unkempt hair became like a nimbus.
People considered him the smartest man in the world and began to treat him like a seer.
That explains why Einstein, a scientist, was continuously questioned about such non-
scientific matters as the nature of God, or the geopolitical appropriateness of developing
an atomic bomb, or the proper governance of the State of Israel (Einstein was invited to
be the President of Israel after Ben Gurion), or any other subject? (He was not invited to
help with the building of the atomic bomb, by the way, because J Edgar Hoover—that
famous judge of character—decided he was a Communist.)
Sure, science geniuses are smarter than most people, and sometimes (not always) they
are even well-educated in matters unrelated to science. But sometimes they turn out to
be quite mad. For example, Kurt Gödel, the premier 20th Century mathematical
logician, starved himself to death because he was convinced that people were trying to
poison him. Even Isaac Newton was said to be quite psychotic during most of the last
40 years of his life.
We respect Einstein’s opinions because he happens to have been well educated in

philosophy and history and even a bit in Jewish theology. (When he was 11 years old,
he began a 2-year intensive study of Torah and Talmud with a religious family member.
He abandoned it at twelve when, according to him, his reading of “popular science
magazines” convinced him that the Bible could not be true.)
He also happens to have been a good aphoristic writer, pretty good historian, and
better-than-average philosopher. (He was a follower not only of Spinoza but also of the
German Schopenhauer, who did not believe in Free Will. Einstein was fond of quoting
pg. 55
Schopenhauer: You can do what you will, but you can’t will what you will. Einstein believed,
for example, that the Nazis, given their history, couldn’t help themselves!)
Especially interesting is that Einstein—who called himself a “deeply religious non-

believer”— was the most eloquent (along with Freud) of those German-speaking Jewish
intellectuals of the early twentieth century who regarded nearly all the ritual practices
of traditional Judaism as superstitious and childish, while, at the same time, embracing
an elusive concept of intellectual Jewishness (Einstein called it “living Jewish
intelligence”) with its own, peculiar philosophical and spiritual robustness.
So, on the one hand, Einstein wrote: “For myself the unadulterated Jewish religion is
like all other religion an incarnation of primitive superstition, and the Jewish people to
whom I gladly belong, and whose mentality I deeply share, has for me no different
dignity than all other peoples…”
Or: “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will
of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive
his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such
notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.”
When he once famously expressed his skepticism toward some of the probabilistic
aspects of quantum theory by saying that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,”
people around the world felt obliged to include him as an expert witness on the
existence of God. Eventually, he felt obliged to issue a denial. “It is, of course, a lie what
you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I
do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it
clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is unbounded
admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”
But he also wrote: “Spinoza’s worldview is penetrated by the thought and way of
feeling which is so characteristic of the living Jewish intelligence. I feel that I could not
be so close to Spinoza were I not myself a Jew, and if I had not developed within a
Jewish environment…. I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly
harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of
human beings.”
So, on the one hand, he discounts the entire Yom Kippur liturgy with: “...the religion of
the naive man [holds that] God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and
whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a fear similar to that of a child for its
father…” And then counters with: “The religious geniuses of all ages have been
pg. 56
distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God
conceived in man’s image; so there can be no Church whose central teachings are based
on it.”
The key to Einstein’s Jewishly-inflected, non-believing religion can be found, I think, in

examining his objections to the other great branch of 20th Century physics (quantum
mechanics) and his own, life-long pursuit of a “unified field theory,” a “theory of
everything.”
Einstein objected to two aspects of quantum theory. First, he was uncomfortable with
the idea that the laws of physics at the subatomic level were different from those at the
molecular level. He believed—he didn’t know, he believed—that the laws of nature
shouldn’t be asymmetrical in this way, and was passionately certain that somewhere
there must be a unifying theory whose equations would predict both kinds of
phenomena without paradoxes.
Second, he objected to the probabilistic and stochastic (chance) aspects of quantum

theory. He believed—again, he believed, he didn’t know—that the universe should be
deterministic and rule-abiding, that someone who knew all the laws of nature and
knew the position of all the atoms could, like God, see everything that was going to
happen forever.
Although he was comfortable with many exotic notions—black holes, antimatter, 5-

dimensional spacetime (the precursor of what was later called ‘string theory’), all of
which he originally conceptualized—he couldn’t accept the notion of a particle that
“sort of” existed and did not exist at the same time, but that came into existence when it
was observed because its “quantum wave” had collapsed.
Like Spinoza, Einstein believed that the universe ought to be regarded as the work of a
perfect engineer or programmer and, therefore, that the program should be elegant and
coherent. For most of his life, especially the last 30 years (when lesser physicists were
winning Nobel Prizes by testing predictions in Einstein’s footnotes), he was in search of
single, unified field theory that would explain, with a single set of equations, gravity,
electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force—the four
dynamics that must be in perfect balance to keep the universe in existence.
pg. 57
This solution, which he called figuratively “the mind of God,” would reveal Nature
itself—which Spinoza always called God or Nature. But keep in mind that Einstein had
no way of knowing that such a solution existed
But it is also possible that Einstein was wrong. That believing God to be a perfect
engineer is simply another form of human naiveté, just slightly more sophisticated than
thinking of God as an old man with a beard. Perhaps—contrary to our sense of order—
the universe is actually chaotic, random, in a word: messy.
Einstein spoke the famous words “God does not play dice with the universe” during a
public debate with Niels Bohr, the quantum physicist. What we rarely read is that Bohr
shouted back: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”
The hardest idea for most people to deal with—even geniuses like Einstein—is that
there might be no elegant or intelligible plan to the universe. Imagine how horrified
Einstein would have been if he had lived to see the dawn of that branch of physics
known as Evolutionary Cosmology, which holds that black holes (which Einstein first
conceived) spew out universes endlessly, and the universe we live in may be the
trillionth, or 10 trillionth that has popped out. That the reason the four forces are so
“perfectly” balanced in our universe has nothing to do with design but, rather, is that,
given a long enough time, sooner or later one of the universes will work—has to work,
by chance alone.
But Einstein, like the other great thinkers of the 19th and early 20th century surely would
have been even more stunned by the return and rise of superstition and Biblical
literalism in the early 21st century, especially by the use of bits of medieval literature to
warrant mass murders in God’s name.
In contrast, he once wrote: The Jewish God is simply a negation of superstition, an imaginary
result of its elimination. In other words, Einstein regarded God as a thought experiment!
So, shall we dub Einstein a prophet? Should this Time Magazine Person of the Century
be considered more than an ordinary man: because his intellect was powerful enough to
see what no other human being could see and understand so much about the invisible
laws of our universe. If his visions did not come directly from Spinoza’s God, then from
where else? After all, could any of you imagine yourself in a race with a beam of light?
pg. 58
The Modern Jew and the Talmud
On a 90° day in August, 2012, over 80,000 Jews, most of them wearing the heavy
clothing we associate with the religious communities of New York and New Jersey,
gathered in the MetLife stadium in Rutherford, NJ to celebrate the completion of the
latest, seven-and-half year cycle of Talmud reading: the Daf Yomi, or page a day
program. That’s over 2,700 pages, two-sides a page, one page per day.
This program is a bit of a stunt, of course. Any serious student will tell you that a page
of Talmud can take an entire day or more to analyze and discuss and that many of them
are so cryptic and elliptical that you’re still in the dark a day later. Reading them all this
way is more like a marathon race than a course of study.
Even so, hundreds of thousands around the world participate in the program, holding
daily study sessions, forming online groups … in general immersing themselves in the
world and culture of the Babylonian Talmud. It is a moving demonstration of the
worldwide unity of the Jewish people, the virtual nation that exists alongside the State
of Israel.
Now, of course, among those throngs of Talmud readers you can be sure that there are
very few non-Orthodox Jews. What the modern Jews know is that the Talmud is arcane
and difficult. If they’ve read a bit they know that it’s full of tiresome minutiae—like
how much sealing wax you can carry on the Sabbath. They sense that it’s largely
irrelevant to what the modern Jew cares about: social justice, tikkun olam, spirituality.
And, for the most part they would be correct. I was once at a meeting where the great
Talmudist Adin Steinsaltz was the speaker. When someone asked him about the
pg. 59
growing interest in spirituality, he replied: “Spirtuality, shmirituality. The Jewish

religion is about things that are real!”
Idolizing the Torah
Liberal Jews put their allegiance not in the Talmud but in the Torah, even though they
do not officially believe that the Five Books of Moses come directly from God. The
Reform Movement’s Columbus Platform of 1937 describes it as the “products of historical
processes.” But modern worshippers often act otherwise.
In even the most liberal synagogue, the Torah Scroll is still treated with a reverence that
borders on idolatry. It has to be a kosher scroll, purchased from a Jerusalem scribe who
probably regards non-orthodox Jews with contempt. The congregants can't wait to
touch it or kiss it—although, God forbid, not directly with their skin.
This sort of drama would make sense if we were in the presence of the transcribed
words of God. But it makes far less sense if we are in the presence of a multi-source
document, containing not only history and wisdom but also error, contradiction,
polemics, and superstition. It also encourages people to believe—incorrectly--that
everything sacred to the Jewish people, including tikun olam, is captured in this one
scroll.
For example, most modern Jews are surprised to learn that Abraham's breaking of his
father's idols is not in the Torah. (It's a midrash.) Nor is the story of Joshua in Jericho or
of David and Bathsheba. (They're in the Prophets.) And the whole story of the
Maccabees and Chanukah doesn't appear in the Hebrew Scriptures at all. (It was
banned from the canon, judged apocryphal.) Similarly, the rules for what one may not
do on Shabbat and not eat during Passover are not there either. (Babylonian Talmud:
Tractates Shabbat and Pesach) And the most treasured notion among modern Jews, tikun
olam, is actually from Kabballah.
In short, the idolization of the Torah Scroll, I fear, distracts many of us from the rest of
the Jewish Bible and the larger library of Jewish texts. Therefore, to help my Jewish
friends better experience the full pleasure and fascination of the Jewish mind, I suggest
that modern Jews should learn to love Torah a little less and Talmud a good bit more.
Does this mean that they should curtail their already too meager Torah study? Hardly.
But it does mean that they should find time for that greatest of all Jewish monuments—
pg. 60
grander than the pyramids and more awesome than the cathedral at Chartres—the
Babylonian Talmud.
What Is the Talmud: A One-Minute Official History
According to Jewish tradition, the heart of the Talmud, the Mishna, was communicated
to Moses along with the written Torah. The process is described succinctly, in the
Talmud itself, in the first words of Pirkei Avot:
Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua
to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to
the men of the Sanhedrin . . .
Actually, the Talmud emanated from the work of the Scribes and Pharisees of ancient
Jerusalem, whose central job was interpreting Jewish scriptures as the basis for making
civil and criminal legal decisions. Until the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in
Jerusalem (70 CE), these scholar judges were secondary in influence to the priests of the
Temple. After the destruction, however, the Pharisees became the leadership of
Diaspora Judaism, the Rabbis.
In their judgments, they were guided by many unwritten texts not captured in the
scrolls of the Hebrew Bible. Much of this material became known as the "Oral Law,"
retained in the memories of the scholars and taught by repetition--mishna means
"repetition"--to their disciples. For various reasons, the leaders of this epoch, led by
Yehuda HaNassi, decided to compile and edit this “oral” material into what became the
Mishna.
As with all law, these new writings generated questions; they spawned a second oral
tradition of commentary upon the Mishna, which led to a second round of compilations
and commentaries, many in the form of intense debates, called the Gemara. Strictly
speaking, these two texts, compiled between 148 and 475 CE, comprise the Babylonian
Talmud.
In addition, the books nowadays called the Talmud contain much more: elaborate
commentaries by the Rabbi called Rashi (12th century) and several generations of his
followers, the Tosafot; later editions added references and links to other compilations
based on the Talmud. The first printed-book realizations of the Talmud were in the
Gutenberg era--the Mishna in 1492, the Mishna and Gemara in 1523 (both published in
Italy).
pg. 61
What the Talmud Is . . . Really.
Any traditional Jew will allow the Talmud to be characterized as a clarification, or

interpretation, or even a completion of the Written Torah. The additional truth is that
the Talmud is in many ways a library of amendments and occasionally negations of the
Written Torah. The Mishna and associated commentaries were the first large scale
attempt to adapt the Written Torah to “modern” times. The claim that the Oral Law was
also received by Moses was a legal fiction made necessary when the Pharisees so often
contradicted or superseded the impractical and outdated laws of Moses. (Remember,
the Priests themselves had composed more than half the Written Torah and also
claimed it was from Moses.)
The Five Books of Moses are elliptical (leaving out much exposition and explanation),
frequently contradictory, sprinkled with inconsistencies of spelling and grammar,
ambiguous in Hebrew or English, and incomplete. And if one were to apply the Written
Law to all criminal and civil cases, one would be forced to deal with imprecise
categories, as well as draconian punishment schemes.
This last issue may have been one impetus behind the second law. The Torah is, by
current standards, excessive to the point of barbarism in applying grisly capital
punishment for such moderate crimes as adultery and disobedience to one's parents.
Even the lesser penalties, like whiplashes, offend the liberal sensibility. But what
today’s Jew should realize is that they also offended the ancient sensibility as well. The Oral
Law, before it became the written Mishna, rose to prominence in the last century BCE,
at which time the compilation of the Books of Moses was already over five hundred
years old! That is, even before the fall of the Second Temple, even before the Jews were
scattered into the diaspora for two thousand years . . . even then the original Torah was
already inadequate and out of date for the "modern" Jews of the era.
The compilers of the Talmud were, in effect, Jewish reformers. They effectively
eliminated much capital punishment through elaborate rules of evidence and
jurisprudence. But, not surprisingly, these Pharisees, with their bizarre, heretical new
doctrines of the afterlife and the messiah, were regarded as dangerous, inauthentic Jews
by the orthodoxy of Priests and the wealthy Saducees that supported them. Just like
today’s reformers.
pg. 62
The Talmud Is Torah
Throughout Jewish history there have been major and minor factions—including the
Temple priests in Jerusalem, probably the Essene authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and
many others—who looked askance at the claim that the oral tradition of the Pharisees
(later the Rabbis) was of the same divine authority as the Books of Moses.
But this should not be an issue for modern Jews, who have never believed that the
Written Torah was from heaven (except in a figurative sense) and who therefore
should have no problem treating the Talmud as equal to, or in some ways greater
than, the Written Torah.
The Reform Movement, although it has always allowed--albeit in vague language--for

God's participation in the writing of the Torah, has never asserted the divine perfection
of any sentence in the document. In a wonderfully radical and brave pronouncement,
the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 declares:
The Bible reflect[s] the primitive ideas of its own age and at times clothing its
conception of divine providence and justice dealing with man in miraculous
narratives.
To the liberal Jew, the claim that every letter of the Torah Scroll is divine is, depending
on one's mood, a charming eccentricity, an impressive show of irrational faith, or an
embarrassing superstition. And an enlightened Jew judges the stunt of finding hidden
prophecies encoded in the Torah to be nothing more than an amusing parlor trick.
So, if one believes that none of our "sacred" books is divine (al pi Adonai), then—
paradoxically--all of our "sacred" books are equally deserving of respect, study, and
even reverence. In a sense, it is a fundamental error, an un-Jewish way of looking at the
world, to study the Torah, or even the Tanach (Bible), without considering it part of a
larger library whose texts are essential to a Jewish understanding of each other. All of
the Tanach, and Midrash, and Talmud are equally divine—because none is, except in a
figurative sense, divine at all. Therefore, there is no basis for singling out or preferring
the words of Devarim (Deuteronomy) over those of Tractate Ketubot (Talmud) or even
Kohelet Rabbah (Midrash).
The Rewards of Talmud Study
pg. 63
But why should people with already too much to do find a few hours a week for the
Talmud, especially those who do not feel bound by its laws and pronouncements?
There are several potential rewards:
First, even a few months of Talmud study will overcome the modern Jew's religious
inferiority complex. Although it takes a lifetime to master the Talmud, it takes only a
few weeks of reading and studying with a good teacher to learn its imposing structure
and style, and then to begin to absorb it, part by part. (And there are several CD and
online versions of the Talmud that permit you to search in English for key words and
phrases, enabling you to perform research feats that were, until recently, the province of
only the greatest scholars.)
Second, after only a few months of serious Talmud study, you need no longer feel
intimidated in your discussions with Orthodox and traditional Jews. Talmud learned
by a liberal Jew as an adult, especially an adult with a good education in law or science
or the humanities, especially one who is not indoctrinated with its divinity, especially
someone who knows what the Talmud really is and why it needed to be written . . .
such Talmud learning may be far superior to that learned in older traditional ways,
such as passive memorization.
Third, Talmud study demonstrates that the modern branches of Judaism, with their
constant re-evaluation and rethinking of tradition and regulation, are far closer to the
spirit of the early Rabbis than is Orthodox Judaism. Indeed, the orthodox Priests of
ancient Jerusalem denounced and abused the upstart Pharisees in much the way that
today’s Orthodox (descendants of the Pharisees) abuse the non-orthodox Jew.
Fourth, Talmud study is thrilling, entertaining, and bracing. To join this conversation
with our ancestors teaches us that every Jew is born with an inheritance far more
valuable than bagels and dreidels. We each have a family tree filled with wise, funny,
and eccentric ancestors, who were kind enough to leave us documentation of their
mental lives.
So, like the Orthodox, I also say that every text that has been handed down to us by our
sages is part of Torah. There may not be a single divine syllable in the lot, and there is
more than a little nonsense and superstition. But every sentence in our traditional
library is inherently interesting and potentially enlightening. And for those who
complain about the lack of transcendental emotion in modern Judaism (“spirituality,”
they call it), I can promise that to be utterly absorbed by a bit of our texts, to feel one’s
self a part of the conversation with our ancestors, is, perhaps, the most authentic and
intense Jewish feeling of all.
pg. 64
Two Excommunications
“Do we excommunicate?” asked my friend. By “we” she meant the Jewish people.
What occasioned the question was a discussion of Spinoza in a class we were attending.
For reasons I cannot fathom, this friend frequently turns to me for rulings on what Jews
do and don’t do; this ruling was easy.
Jews have always excommunicated people whose ideas they found abhorrent: not
often, but for centuries. Sometimes the excommunication—cherem—was short-term and
conditional; if the offending party repented publicly and forswore the offending words
or conduct, his cherem was suspended. But, in other cases, the acts were judged so
egregious that the person was shunned for life, denied association with all Jews and cut
off officially from God’s blessing.
The topic of this discussion is a pair of Jewish excommunications that happened about
300 years apart: Baruch Spinoza (1656) and Mordechai Kaplan (1945). These events are
not only interesting, but also help us think about a problem for all of us: How much can
Judaism change or grow without losing its essence?
We know that, historically, there has never been only one kind of Judaism. We know
that each branch and facet of Judaism changes its beliefs and practices (the orthodox
calling it “reinterpretation” rather than change); but we’re not sure about the limit, the
point of no return.
Spinoza
The Jewish community of 17th Century Amsterdam found in its midst—in the
Hebrew school, no less—one of the greatest minds in the history of Western
Civilization. They responded to this good fortune by harassing him, by attacking his
person, by undercutting his livelihood (and then later by offering him a lifetime
stipend as bribe to shut up), and, finally, by excommunicating him, denouncing him
pg. 65
to the civil authorities, and driving him from Amsterdam and the Jewish community
entirely.
Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza was part of a group of Sephardic Jews, expelled by
Catholics from Portugal in the years after their ancestors had been driven from Spain.
His synagogue was under the direction of three revered rabbis, as well as a board of
“parnassim” drawn from the wealthiest men in the community.
As a boy, Baruch was a brilliant student of Torah and Talmud, but, of course, one of
those inquisitive souls who could drive a teacher mad with tough questions. For
example, he once asked the question that almost all of us ask at some time in our
studies: Is there a good reason for each of the 613 mitzvoth? But, unlike most of us,
he followed that question with the observation that, “if there were well-thought-out
reasons for each of the mitzvoth, then any rational person would observe them
without the need for divine command.”
At the age of 18, Spinoza did what most traditional Jews cautioned against; he
extended his studies to include the sciences, Latin, and philosophy. Somewhere
around 1650 or 51 he was struck by the lightning bolt of Descartes. (In some ways,
Spinoza’s Ethics is a recasting of Descartes in a kind of Euclidian format.)
Gradually his remarks caused him to be called a “materialist,” someone who

denounced the transcendental nature of God and Torah. He doubted the existence of
an afterlife and mocked the notion of chosen-ness. He once remarked, sarcastically,
that if triangles were capable of speech and reason, they would assert that God is
quite triangular.
After sending spies to his home to ask him provocative questions, the leaders of the
community noted his answers, which, along with other testimony, led to his
excommunication (cherem).
“The Lords of the Ma'amad having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de
Spinoza, they have endeavored by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways.
But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving
more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and
taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses
who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they
became convinced of the truth of this matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the
presence of the honorable hakhamim, they have decided, with their consent, that the said
Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel...
pg. 66
"By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel,
curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the
consent of the entire holy congregation, and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts
which are written therein; cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned
Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations which are
written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he
when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and
cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord
and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book
shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall
separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant
that are written in this book of the law. But you that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive
every one of you this day.
"That no one should communicate with him neither in writing nor accord him any favor nor
stay with him under the same roof nor within four cubits in his vicinity; nor shall he read any
treatise composed or written by him."
All this happened when Spinoza was in his early twenties—well before he had
published any of his renowned books on religion and the Bible. The reaction against
him seems disproportionate to his acts (he never taught or proselytized his views).
And if you would learn the subtle religious and political reasons that led to the
expulsion of the first Jew to undertake writing a grammar of Biblical Hebrew… then
you’re in for a lot of good reading.
My own theory is based on the research of Rabbi Barry Schwartz, currently president
of the Jewish Publication Society. His rabbinical thesis explored Menasse ben Israel’s
mission to London to urge Cromwell to liberalize laws that banned Jews from
England. (This was during the 1642-1660 period when England was a
Commonwealth instead of a monarchy.) In short, Menasse was out of town when the
community decided to move against Spinoza. Until he left on the mission, he had
been the protector and nurturer of the young mind—and the buffer between him and
those who could not abide his “heresies.” Brilliant, outspoken people who don’t
know when to keep quiet typically rely on some powerful person to get them out of
trouble. His absence left Baruch unprotected.
And what effect did this cherem have? Spinoza was not upset, saying it did not change
any of his plans. But it has always inflamed the Jewish intelligentsia who still, from
time to time, meet and declare his excommunication void.
The great irony of Spinoza’s excommunication is that he accepted it, concluding that
the philosophy he wanted to work on had nothing to do with—and was in no need
pg. 67
of—Judaism. But, ironically, many modern Jews see him as a kind of patriarch for
modern Judaism, one who sees Nature and God as two names for the same thing,
who respects all texts without considering them transcendental, who insists on
political and religious freedom. (David Biale calls him the Moses for secular Judaism.)
Some consider him the first Reform Jew—although he would have been repulsed by
the suggestion. I also revere him for having separated ethical philosophy (which
works through reason and science) from theological commandments (which work
through reward and punishment).
Here is Spinoza’s God:
By the help of God, I mean the fixed and unchangeable order of nature or the chain of
natural events: for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of
nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name
for the eternal decrees of God, which always involve eternal truth and necessity.
To me, this conception is not very different from the Rambam’s God (who has no
attributes but creates everything) or the Kabbalist’s God (who is the endless
nothingness from which all reality is continuously created.) And Einstein’s appraisal
of Spinoza has always rung true for me:
The gulf between Jewish theology and Spinoza cannot be bridged. However, it seems
to me no less true to say that Spinoza’s worldview is penetrated by the thought and
way of feeling which is so characteristic of the living Jewish intelligence. I feel that I
could not be so close to Spinoza were I not myself a Jew, and if I had not developed
within a Jewish environment.
The question, finally, is whether Spinoza’s Ethics can be considered, despite his
excommunication, a contribution to the Jewish religion.
Mordechai Kaplan
“We” not only excommunicate, but “we” also burn books on occasion. Maimonides
had more than one of his publications burned when it was reported that he was a
supporter of Aristotle, whose belief in a universe without beginning or end was
considered heretical.
In the case of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, only one copy of his controversial siddur was
burned, but it was during his own excommunication by the Orthodox Union in 1945,
only a few weeks after Germany surrendered to the Allies.
pg. 68
Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, was at that time a senior faculty member
of the Jewish Theological Seminary. His theology was so radical (he was known to
shuckle while reading a book by John Dewey), that most of his colleagues shunned
him. Just as Menasse ben Israel had shielded Spinoza, it was Louis Finkelstein, head
of the JTS, who shielded Kaplan, who, by the way, didn’t even distribute his siddur to
his colleagues knowing that they would be angered. (There had already been an
uproar against him when he published his New Haggadah.)
The heresies of the book were not provocative. He merely excised certain doctrines
that he judged to be inimical to the progress of American Judaism, such as chosen-
ness, God’s vengeance on the enemies of the Jews, and other materials that suggested
that the Jews had a unique and special relationship with God (“that which we call
God”) unavailable to others.
Kaplan’s motivating vision can be found in the Introduction to the Prayer Book:
People expect a Jewish prayer book to express what a Jew should believe about God,
Israel and the Torah, and about the meaning of human life and the destiny of
mankind. We must not disappoint them in that expectation. But, unless we eliminate
from the traditional text statements of belief that are untenable and of desires
which we do not or should not cherish, we mislead the simple and alienate the
sophisticated.
Kaplan believed, quite simply, that in an age of science, no “sophisticated” person
would find tenable the wide range of miracles and mysteries that were part of the
Jewish tradition. Moreover, he felt we should reject (not cherish) those beliefs that were
no longer suitable for an enlightened people--like the slaughter of innocents for the sake
of Torah. He believed passionately that given a choice between total belief and nothing,
most intelligent people would prefer nothing—and therefore he set upon the task of
creating the in-between that most American Jews favor.
Here is the text of his cherem:

The leaders of the people, rabbis of the greater New York area, the heads of yeshivot, Hasidic
leaders, and scholars from the great yeshivot, on Tuesday of the week of the parashah of Korah,
separate from this congregation (Numbers 16:21), the second day of Rosh Hodesh Tammuz,
5705 – at the call of the leadership of Agudas haRabbonim of the U.S. and Canada and of the
Vaad HaRabonim of greater New York, because of the terrible scandal and insolent public
rebellion of Dr. Mordecai Kaplan, who published a new monstrosity which he calls Siddur Tefillot.
In it he demonstrates his heresy and rejection of the God of Israel and core principles of the
Torah of Israel. Who knows what will result from this kind of heresy?! Therefore, it has been
unanimously decided to banish and to excommunicate him and to separate him from the
community of Israel until he repents and returns completely to our law and custom.
pg. 69
By this document, we publish and announce the excommunication of the King of the Universe
with the full strength of our holy Torah and all the severity of the law a complete and total
prohibition and cherem on this siddur, which should neither be seen nor found in any Jewish
area, with the penalty of [excommunication] on anyone who holds this siddur or looks at it,
whether in private or in public. One who obeys all that has been said in this decree will be
blessed.
Kaplan found this statement and the associated ritual absurd. Its principal effect on his
life was to make him more famous in the New York Jewish community. His
indifference was in some part due to his knowledge of the real force behind the action.
Although directed at Kaplan, the JTS’ most infamous rabbi, it was really a shot over the
bow of JTS and the Conservative Movement, which, with the arrival of post-war
suburban living, was growing quite rapidly.
We should also keep in mind that the term “orthodox” had only recently become the
label for a branch or denomination of Jewry. It was the rise of the liberal denominations
that occasioned the change from orthodox Judaism to Orthodox Judaism. It was a
political decision, as was the decision to tamp down the severe break between
“modern” orthodoxy and the Chassidic communities, whom most centrist or modern
Orthodox Jews considered superstitious or backward. The unification of these two quite
different models of Judaism was necessary to combat the rise in numbers of the liberal
alternative.
But why attack Kaplan and the JTS when the Reform Movement’s prayer books were so
much more strikingly separated from the tradition? Because the Orthodox considered
the “Reformers” a joke, arguing that a real Jew would be more comfortable in a Catholic
Church than a Reform Temple. Even today, Orthodox Day Schools prefer to hire
Gentiles rather than “non-observant” Jews.
Kaplan’s aim, influenced by John Dewey, was to educate and sustain the Jewish people.
He said that the main job of a rabbi was to teach Judaism. And that synagogues should
be supplanted by “Jewish Community Centers” that would support the religious, social,
physical, and economic needs of the Jewish people. In his famous “Thirteen Wants
(1926)” he wrote:
We want our religious traditions to be interpreted in terms of understandable

experience and to be made relevant to our present-day needs.
Flexigidity
pg. 70
Both Spinoza and Kaplan are considered by many to be atheists—even though both
wrote about God incessantly and the former insisted that the contemplation of God was
the highest form of human pleasure. Consider, though, this observation by Karen
Armstrong in her The History of God:
Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all
called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a
revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence.
Albert Einstein also opined that, “it is precisely among the heretics of every age that
we find men who are filled with this highest kind of religious feeling.”
Spinoza’s great break from tradition was to assert that God and the Cosmos were two
names for the same thing, that is, that God was not outside or around the Cosmos
making things happen but, rather, conterminous with the Universe itself. Spinoza
said God is nature; Kaplan said that God is the imputed personality of the Cosmos;
Einstein said that God is the imaginary result of eliminating superstition from the
universe; Rami Shapiro offers the Zen insight that God is Reality.
These men are not called atheists because they don’t believe in God. They are called
atheists because they don’t believe in a person-like God who composed the Torah and
still intervenes in human affairs. And not even this is radical when we recall that
several times in the Talmud the rabbis reach their opinions while ignoring heavenly
voices and miracles. (At one point, God laughs and proclaims, “My children have
defeated me!”)
These two excommunications were crisis points in the ongoing struggle between God
and Israel—a name that means one who struggles with God. Neither man threatened
the growth or survival of Judaism. Indeed, both men made it possible for educated
and sophisticated men and women to be assertively Jewish without accepting notions
that conflict with science and reason.
It’s been said that Judaism is more a process than a religion. It is the Talmud process
of challenging the meaning and interpretation of everything. It is the process in which
our ancestors debated everything from how much we are allowed to eat without
saying the Birchat haMazon, to how many days an infant need live for it to merit a
funeral service, to whether God is inside or outside the universe.
pg. 71
This eternal struggle begins in our texts and persists through today. It has uniquely
endowed the Jewish people with a trait Gidi Grinstein calls Flexigidity, Israel’s
special way of dealing with:
… Judaism’s inherent, structural, and unbridgeable tensions between the old and the
new, tradition and innovation, rigidity and flexibility…how the conservative and
progressive factions of Judaism are interconnected and interdependent.
This combination, interplay, of flexibility and rigidity is the ineffable secret of Jewish
adaptability and survival. And it is manifest, according to Grinstein, in six “pillars” of
thought and practice: Mission (alternative narratives for the Jewish plan); Structure
(alternative networks of institutions and power); Law (Talmud and its descendants);
Membership (patterns of lineage and conversion); Place (Zion and the diaspora);
Language (Hebrew and other languages.)
Recall that Judaism survived the destruction of the Temple by rethinking itself. Such
a religion is probably endlessly adaptable and will continue to bend without breaking
indefinitely. Change and growth do not threaten the essence of Judaism. They are its
essence.
pg. 72
The Rise of the Jewish Buddhists
Once a monk made a request of Joshu.

“I have just entered the monastery,” he said. “Please give me instructions, Master.”
Joshu said, “Have you had your breakfast?”
“Yes, I have,” replied the monk.
“Then,” said Joshu, “wash your bowls.”
The monk had an insight.
JuBus and Juddhists
In the 1980s I began to encounter Jewish men who were also practicing Buddhists.
Then, in the 1990s, I noted several books about the interaction of Jews with Buddhism, a
process made possible by the fact that Buddhism allowed one to retain one’s Jewish
identity and religion. (In some accounts, Buddhism is not considered a religion.)
But why the interest? What did Buddhism offer that was so attractive to Jews searching
for more satisfying religious experiences? (The estimate is that about a third of Western
Buddhists have a Jewish background.) 13 And, moreover, is it a significant development
in the history of the Jewish or Buddhist religion? 14
In The Jew in the Lotus, 15 Rodger Kamenetz famously chronicled an excursion by Jews
and Jewish Buddhists to visit with the Dalai Lama in India. What drew him to
Buddhism?
The house of Judaism in North America has not been satisfactorily built -- it does not
have a spiritual dimension for many Jews. Too many Jews are like me: our Jewishness
13 There is a joke about an elderly Jewish lady who is given permission to speak to Tibet’s most revered
Buddhist master, provided she limits her remarks to just 8 words She says: Sheldon, enough is enough. Time
to come home!
14 Several observers claim that the high participation of rate of Jews has also altered the practice of
Buddhism.
15 Harper Collins, 1994
pg. 73
has been an inchoate mixture of nostalgia, family feeling, group identification, a

smattering of Hebrew, concern for Israel, and so forth.
One of the most persistent topics of discussion in recent times is the spirituality in
American Judaism, more particularly, its lack of spirituality. But then, there was a
similar discussion in the 18th Century as well, when large numbers of Central European
Jews decided that Judaism, in the Maimonides tradition, had become too scholarly and
intellectual to satisfy the needs of the Jewish heart; this, of course, led to a religious
reimagining of Judaism by the Baal Shem Tov and the emergence of Chassidism.
Historically, one sees often that the formalistic, legalistic impulses of the Jewish religion
tend to become so arcane and require so much study that they alienate those who lack
the skills to do the work and do not perceive the psychic reward that would cause them
to persist. Indeed, Paul Johnson, in his excellent History of Christianity, implies that
excessive legalism may have been the matrix that spawned spiritual (mitzvah-free)
Christianity, the first large-scale attempt at reform of the Jewish religion:
The Jewish scriptures, formidable in bulk and often of impenetrable obscurity, gave
employment in Palestine to a vast cottage industry of scribes and lawyers, both amateur
and professional, filling whole libraries with their commentaries, enmeshing the Jewish
world in a web of canon law, luxuriant with its internal conflicts and its mutual
conclusions, too complex for any one mind to comprehend, bread and butter for a
proliferating clergy and an infinite series of traps for the righteous. The ultimate success
of a Gentile mission would depend on the scale and hardihood of the demolition work
carried out on this labyrinth of Mosaic jurisprudence.
Talmudic or Rabbinic Judaism, then, the “official” form of the Jewish religion since the
fall of the Temple, has been the exoteric, public face of Judaism for millennia, but it has
frequently failed to provide the esoteric, private and spiritual dimension sought by so
many Jews. For example, there are many deeply religious Jews who are put off by
participating with a group of men who gallop through the obligatory prayers as quickly
as possible, the standard service.
As most people use the word, spirituality emanates from the esoteric, which is also
known in some theologies as gnosis, the awareness of an inexpressible presence
interpreted as the closeness of God. The Chassid calls this deveykus, a cleaving to God.
The Buddhist interprets this experience as wakefulness, or awareness, or
enlightenment, or Buddha mind.
pg. 74
Alan Kazlev provides this useful schema:
Topic "Exoteric" "Esoteric"
Preferred state of
Normal waking consciousness Expanded; meditative or spiritual states
consciousness
Transformation of Yes (transpersonal)

No (ego-centered)
personality Self-transcendence
Means of Higher Inspiration

Reason (secular), Belief (religious)
knowledge and Intuition ("Gnosis")
Authority External (Bible, Church, Science, etc) Internal (Inner feelings and intuition)
Narrow; only one authority (Bible, Scientific Broad; universal, is able to draw from
Philosophy or
method, etc.), everything outside that is many different teachings,
teachings
considered false both exoteric and esoteric
Sophisticated (complex cosmology,

Metaphysical
Simplistic (Materialism, Dualism, or Holism) psychology, ontology,etc)
Position
- Emanationism, Dramaturgism
External
God (Dualism): i.e. God is mainly considered
Universal Consciousness
Concept of as a separate, external being
(Monism)The Divine is within as well as
Absolute Reality or Space-Time-Energy (Materialism) - the
without
"unified field theory" or Theory of Everything
or some such holy grail of physics
(Note the undisguised and naïve treatment of science and physics, as though they were
in the same class as religious orthodoxy.)
And the quest for the missing esoteric experience has been even greater among those
who follow what is called “Classic Reform” Judaism. Historically, Reform Judaism was
an attempt not only to free Judaism from laws and practices that made no sense in the
modern world but, more important, to constrict Judaism into a well-defined religion,
rather than a tribal or essential model for living. The founders of the movement felt that
by remaking Judaism in the image of German Lutheranism, limiting Jewish practices to
pg. 75
an hour or two of formal services a week, they could more easily blend Jews into
German society.
The German-style version of Reform Judaism that was implemented so successfully in

America has been ridiculed as an “hour of power” approach to Hebrew-free worship.
(Indeed, its liberal wing broke off and formed a God-optional version of Judaism called
Ethical Culture.) The result, at least until dissatisfaction began to grow in the 1970s, was
a decaffeinated form of Judaism that regarded halakha, mysticism, and Chassidic
interpretation as embarrassments.
Several religious leaders arose in the 70s and 80s, however, with a goal of restoring
what had been lost from Reform and liberal Judaism. Notably, a central player in
Kamenetz’s report is Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi (z”l), the spiritual father of Jewish
Renewal and founder of the Aleph Seminary. Reb Zalman saw as clearly as anyone the
need for a revitalization of the esoteric component of Judaism, especially through
meditation and an emphasis on the experience of God, especially as manifest in a
feeling of connectedness with all people AND all things.
The small body of anecdotal research on this subject suggests that when persons of
limited Jewish background encounter the richness and intensity of the Buddhist
scriptures and practices, they are drawn to Buddhism. On the other hand, those with a
good grounding in Judaism are drawn back to Judaism with added insight. So, after
studying with a Buddhist master, a Jew has a deeper insight into the PaRDeS levels of
Torah study and a fuller grasp of what the Zohar means when it says that each new
interpretation of a text creates a “new universe.” Kamenetz teaches us that there are
parallel constructs in Buddhism.
Judaism and classical Buddhism share many ethical perspectives and, in some ways,
can be made compatible. But among the many ways they are incompatible is in their
very different ontologies, that is, their models for what exists and what doesn’t exist.
The Buddhist path to enlightenment consists in seeing things as they are, free of the
attachments and judgmental language that distorts our understanding. At the risk of
oversimplification, one might say that a Jew can read volumes in an apparently
misspelled word in the Torah, while the Buddhist sees only an unfamiliar spelling. For
the Buddhist, as I understand the teaching, a cigar is always just a cigar.
Zen Judaism
pg. 76
A best-seller during my high-school years was a $.95 edition of Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism.
My teen-aged salon of literary friends all bought it, along with Jack Kerouac’s Dharma
Bums, and, as I recall, we tended to conflate satori with “hipness”—an enlightened state
brought on by dope, alcohol and jazz.
We couldn’t really understand Zen, because, let’s face it, Zen intuition is a notion that
disparages understanding. Those of us who love words resent somewhat the notion
that most of the functions of language block the path to enlightenment. And those of us
who study philosophy are put off by the notion that Spinoza or Maimonides were
thinking with a “monkey brain.” And, to be sure, the most attractive aspect of Zen for
us literary types was not zazen meditation, but, rather, the ingenious Koan parables
that, while ridiculing some aspects of logical thinking, are still very amusing stories.
The huge gap between Western preconceptions and Zen logic is embodied, for me, in a
short passage from my favorite Zen book, Blowing Zen: Finding an Authentic Life. It’s a
memoir by Ray Brooks, an Englishman who found himself knocking about Tokyo,
where he decided to learn to play the Shakuhachi flute, a long bamboo instrument with
a uniquely haunting sound. Apparently, the best teachers of Shakuhachi are Zen
masters, and, for weeks before one ever plays the flute, the student must learn Zen; in
Brooks’s case, this involved not only zazen but also running up mountains in a cold
rain, for days in a row. The passage from Blowing Zen that is most meaningful to me is a
moment when the master tells Brooks: When you practice your instrument, do not try
to improve.
This sentence is my Zen trigger. When I find myself oppressed by my own ego, dizzied
by my attachments, I speak that sentence aloud and then repeat it to myself silently as I
sit still and breathe mindfully.
Zen Buddhism, which developed mainly in Japan, about 1000 years after the life of
Siddharta, was a reaction among some Buddhists to the institutionalization of certain
Buddhist concepts. The reaction to these perceived excesses parallels the process Paul
Johnson explained above in his description of the Christian response to Pharisaic
legalism.
The Zen Buddhist distrusts theologies, official interpretations, taxonomies of religious

experience. Indeed, the Zen Buddhist distrusts language itself 16 because of its tendency to
16I have a friend who studies at the Aleph Seminary. He often complains about the way I “language”
things. When I tell him that language is not a transitive verb, he replies: You see what I mean!
pg. 77
model experience and insert these models between us and our intuitive insights. Tom
Hickey explains it extremely well:
…As a teacher asserts something spiritual, it soon takes on the character of a

metaphysical model whose interpretation by the majority of the powerful becomes
privileged (orthodox). The alternatives are either to disguise one's assertion
poetically (Kabbalah, Mystical Christianity and Sufism) or else to abjure all modeling as
misleading, which is the Zen alternative. Because the more fundamentalist orthodoxy is
so politically powerful in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the sages of Kabbalah, Mystical
Christianity and Sufism have relied on poetic metaphors to disguise an underlying model
which the orthodox would likely deem heretical and react against. Zen, on the other
hand, abjures model construction almost entirely because it sees models as establishing
boundaries, whereas the aim of the teaching (dharma) is the Boundless.
Zen is, in effect, an austere mysticism. Its central argument, as I see it, is that by ridding
one’s mind and body of everything evil or unnecessary, everything pre-conceived, one
can attain or acquire, or sense, or experience infinity. Consider these four vows that are
part of every Zen service:
• However innumerable things are, I vow to save them.

• However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them. 17
• However immeasurable the Dharmas (teachings) are, I vow to master them.
• However incomparable the Buddha-mind is, I vow to attain it.
Typically, this Zen language violates basic standards of meaning. An inexhaustible

force cannot be extinguished; one cannot master all the elements of an endless list. And,
if the Zen Koans are to be taken seriously, one would expect that pointing out these
inherent contradictions to a Zen master would lead him to put his sandals on his head
and walk out of the room.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro famously calls himself a Zen Rabbi, by which he mainly means that
he thinks of God and Reality as the same thing. The problem with this view, of course,
is that it is universalist, not especially Jewish. Shapiro’s position is that all religions
share the same quest, called by different names, and that the individual religions of the
world are merely alternative dialects or languages for worship. I suppose he is saying
17 Spinoza also believed that passion inhibits progress toward enlightenment.

pg. 78
that one’s religion is an accident of birth or circumstance and that no religion is

“exceptional.” 18
The Two Modes
Soon after I began the serious study of Torah, I also became interested in the dynamics
of Jewish worship, the ebb and flow of the religious service. It was quickly apparent
that the elements of the service split into two categories: instructive/intellectual and
emotional/meditative. These correspond roughly to the exoteric and esoteric aspects of
religious experience. Because people are far more likely to be bored by an exoteric
program than an esoteric experience, another way to characterize the quest for
spirituality is as a quest for services that are less boring.
The esoteric component is the emotional part—even if it officially is the Zen attempt to
master the passions. Although meditation is usually associated with silence or simple
chanting, my own life experience is that esoteric experiences sought by Jewish
searchers-after-meaning are most easily found in the presence of music, secular or
sacred. The effects can be amplified by the environment (darkness during the Havdalah
chant), by drugs or intoxicants (note: Reb Zalman’s time with Timothy Leary), and by
intimate contact with other people. (Sometimes I think the search for spirituality is
partly a search for the remembered joy and sensual pleasures of summer camp services
at the campfire.)
Possibly the most intense and sustained moments of awakening occur when we are
actually playing and/or singing music; at those times, according Daniel Levitas 19, so
many of our brain functions are needed to make the music that we are forced to
conscript the parts of our brain ordinarily used to keep track of time and space and
location. The result is to escape from time, another figurative way of describing the
meditative pursuit of the infinite.
Among improvising musicians, this is called being “in the pocket.” It only happens
after years of study and discipline. The Jewish saxophonist Stan Getz, sounding like a
Zen master, taught his students: First you master your instrument; then you master the
music; then you master yourself. Ironically, the net effect of all this hard work and
discipline is that you are able to feel utterly free and spontaneous when you perform.
18 This may damage my ego, but it seems an appropriate attitude for a Modern Rabbi.
19 This is Your Brain on Music
pg. 79
In the West at least, a high proportion of intense esoteric experiences—in and outside of
a religious context--are associated with music. In my own life, I will never forget the
time when I was 17 and sawing away in the second violin section of an orchestra/chorus
performing the Bach Christmas Oratorio. During the thundering opening chorale, I felt
my bones melt inside of me and it was as though all of us were floating around inside
one of those snow globes. At the end of the chorale, no one could move or speak.
Now, the text of that chorale was about the joyfulness of Christ’s birth, and my high
school German was good enough to get most of it. But I felt neither the spirit of the
Christ nor the closeness of God nor any other recognizably religious idea. What I felt,
what I succumbed to, was…music.
My clumsy metaphors above—melting bones, giant snow globe—are the problem. In

my view, meditation, esoteric intuition has no real substantive content. Meditative
states can produce an absolute restfulness, including a quieting of our non-Sabbath
thoughts, or, with music or drumming or dancing they can release our tensions and
untether our imaginations. If the notions or intuitions that come to us through
meditation make us better people, give the universe and our lives a sense of meaning,
alleviate our fear of death and other anxieties…fine and good. But we would do well to
remember that these are gifts of our own imagination—probably not communications
with the unknowable.
Consider this meditative experience reported by Sylvia Boorstein: 20
My sense that I had stumbled into the same energy space as the mystics who wrote
Genesis started suddenly with a powerful burst in the center of my forehead. I felt
filled with light, in fact saw bright light, all with my eyes closed. I was ecstatic.
I am put off by this description. First, I don’t know where she learned that Genesis was
written by mystics; second, I don’t know what “energy space” means; third, I believe
that people who see flashes of light, especially with their eyes closed, should consult a
physician.
20 That’s Funny. You Don’t Look Buddhist.

pg. 80
Again, metaphorically or poetically described experiences are generally harmless and

frequently helpful to the one who has them. But, while they may be therapeutic, they
should not, in my opinion, be regarded as sources of knowledge.
And, finally, I must protest—in the strongest terms--the widespread mystical prejudice
against the exoteric. A psychotherapist friend, who is a Jewish Buddhist, once told me
he’d like to open my head and rip out all my theories and constructs!
No thanks. Perhaps I am odd, but I have always found that study, philosophy, research,
and analysis are vital, exciting, and, on good days, scalp-tingling. There is a strong
feeling of community in Torah study (just as in science), and an intoxicating reward for
the recognition of a meaning or connection for the first time.
And incense is optional.
pg. 81
pg. 82
Sigmund Freud on: Religion in General and Judaism in Particular
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis--the explorer who discovered that the
source of most mental illness is the nursery rather than the outside world--was one of
several brilliant, “non-believing Jews” who shaped the 20th Century. Three of his many
books, written in the 1920’s and 30’s, are devoted mostly or entirely to religion:
• Totem and Taboo

• The Future of an Illusion
• Moses and Monotheism
The religious commentary in Totem and Taboo is absorbed and expanded in the later
books, so that, for purposes of this report, I’ll consider The Future of an Illusion (hereafter
FoI) to be his most complete statement on the nature and function of religious belief and
practice. Moses and Monotheism (hereafter MaM), long withheld from print for fear that
it would aggrieve the Jewish people and give comfort to the legions of anti-Semites in
Europe, is Freud’s highly imaginative interpretation of the early history of the Jewish
religion, with a particular emphasis on the identity and fate of the man Moses.
Together, these two works are a kind of major and minor premise in an argument that
concludes with this sentiment from FoI:
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more the defection
from religious belief will spread, at first only from its obsolete, offensive vestments, but
then from its fundamental presuppositions as well….When a man is freed of religion, he
has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
pg. 83
Religion as a Way of Managing Repression
Freud’s understanding of religion begins with the notion that the formation of societies,
as every political philosopher has observed, requires the individual to sacrifice some
independence of action to the community at large. Put simply, even the least advanced
civilizations oblige their members to refrain from performing certain acts, because,
without this stricture, society becomes unstable and unsustainable. (Plato believed that
even lying fit into this category.) The most chafing of these restrictions are the rules
limiting sexual activity, an “unnatural” encumbrance that begins when even primate
societies agree that males should keep their hands off the other males’ females.
So, in Freud’s view, civilized people (especially males) live in a state of nearly constant
frustration and repression, which therefore provides the need for coping mechanisms,
to manage the consequent stress. And Freud suggests in FoI that the coping
mechanisms developed over the ages are three:
• Alcohol, drugs, and other mood altering substances, which either dull the pain or
distract the sufferer
• Art, into which one may sublimate sexual impulses and convert them to
architecture, painting, music…
• Religion and religious ritual
So, in addition to the well-known functions of religion—to alleviate fears and

ameliorate grief—Freud observes in FoI:
The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must
reconcile men to the cruelty of fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must
compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has
imposed on them.
But how does religion offer this compensation? (Forgetting for the moment those
religious practices that involve drugs and art-making, the other two categories of
coping.) Freud says it is by providing a grand, all-encompassing illusion:
We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the
world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe
and an afterlife; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to
wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant, and
downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the
universe.
pg. 84
An illusion is a confusion between what is real and what we wish to be real. Illusions are
NOT delusions; they involve no hallucination or brain lesions. Rather, illusions are the
result of a basic neurotic mechanism: believing that a person can alter the world by
wishing it to be different. (Several of Freud’s patients, for example, after wishing for a
bad thing that coincidentally came true, are paralyzed with the fear that whatever they
wish might also happen.)
Religion as Infantilism
The tendency of Judaism and other religions to make their chief god father-like, and to
invest in this father supernatural powers, leads Freud to conclude that “religion is
comparable to a childhood neurosis." After all, is not the story of the confrontation
between Moses and Pharaoh a spectacular battle to show whose dad (god) is tougher?
Isn’t it a truism of Biblical exegesis to point out that most of the plagues are directed
toward various Egyptian deities, beginning with the poisoning of the Nile? From this
perspective, Freud observes:
Religion would then be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the
obsessional neurosis of children...If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning
away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth.
That is, religions are to societies as certain childhood obsessions are to individuals and,
therefore, just as healthy mental development requires the child to outgrow these
obsessions, similarly the healthy development of a community requires that community
to outgrow its religion, even though it may have been useful and helpful when the
community was young and primitive.
In a word, Freud tells us that the belief in all-powerful fathers and mothers, the
acceptance of miracles and the efficacy of petitionary prayer… these and other attitudes
are a form of infantilism, which, if allowed to persist into maturity, diminishes the
society’s potential for growth and advancement.
Magic and miracles are a central part of this assessment. A modernist—a person who
believes that the history of ideas is a progression toward ever-higher levels of
understanding and intellectual power—sees dependence on magic and miracles in the
same way as Freud, something a free people should grow out of. And, similarly, sees a
surge in religiosity as a regression or retreat, often characterized as an inability to adapt
to modernity.
pg. 85
A famous example is America’s foremost modernist, Thomas Jefferson, who predicted

in a letter to a friend that by the end of the 19th Century all Americans would be
Unitarians. That is, he felt sure that a people freed from the oppression of state churches
would educate itself to see that miracles are fiction, and that a “true” religion would be
one with good ethical principles and no outrageous claims about the ancient past. He
even, famously, created what is usually called the Jefferson Bible, a cut-and-paste version
of the New Testament with the ethics kept in and the miracles left on the cutting room
floor.
Freud’s modernistic analysis has proved fairly accurate for Europe, which, after the
horrors of World War II, outgrew its subservience to religious—especially Catholic—
authority, so that, for example, it is easier to acquire a legal abortion in Europe’s
Catholic countries than in the U.S.A. In contrast, Jefferson would have been appalled to
see how America has regressed or devolved into a deeply religious country, where the
main prevailing forms of religion are the most infantile.
Moses the Egyptian Priest of Aten
Held back from publication for decades by the author, Moses and Monotheism is among
the first “popular” discussions of a theory that developed among Egyptologists in the
late 19th Century. More than 3,000 years after the fact, archeologists discovered
information about a suppressed era in Egyptian history, the so-called Armana period,
when, for about 30 years, Egypt was ruled by a Pharaoh who abjured the traditional
Egyptian religions for the sake of the god Aten, a single god for all the world, source of
all life, having no shape or form but often considered to be behind the sun, or the force
behind the sun. Speculation arose that the events described in Exodus are a re-telling of
the expulsion of that pharaoh (Amenhotep IV or Akhenaten) from Egypt, along with his
followers and many others. Freud, working from several versions of this analysis,
proposes the following chronology for the Jewish people:
• Moses was an Egyptian priest in the Aten sect.

• He brought this religion to a group of “Hebrews” (Ibaru) living in Egypt.
• This was a radical, monotheistic counter-religion.
• The Moses version was even purer and more inflexible than the earlier Egyptian
version, placing heavy demands on its followers.
• This religion was so overbearing and intractable that Moses was murdered by his
followers (and possibly eaten by them).
• Moses 1 was replaced with Moses 2 (Jethro?), a worshipper of the volcanic
demon called Yahve (a Midianite god).
pg. 86
• Thereafter, the religion—and the Biblical texts—contain numerous contradictory

accommodations to an increasingly diverse collection of immigrants, hangers-on,
and conquered tribes.
• The duality of the Moses figures accounted for the dualism—universalism versus
tribalism— in the Jewish tradition.
• Eventually, though, the true religion of Moses 1 (universalism) bubbled up and
gained predominance.
While many of the earliest speculations about the Armana period have been corrected
by modern research, nothing has dispelled the notion that there is a link between
Akhenaten and Moses, between Aten and Adon. Aten—faceless, bodiless, not
susceptible to description, attribution or characterization—strongly resembles the
version of God in Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed. The Aten cult, because it was
monotheistic, not just monolatrous, posed a threat to the immense Egyptian religion
industry and its priests, making confrontation inevitable. Jan Assman, in Moses the
Egyptian (Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), describes the clash:
The monotheistic movement that is especially associated with the name of Moses…
presents itself in the Book of Exodus as an anti-Egyptian revolution… In striking contrast
to the Armana religion, this monotheism derives its crucial semantic elements from a
construction of the rejected other … Mosaic monotheism is an explicit counter-religion
which depends on the preservation of what it opposes for its own definition. For this
reason, the Bible has preserved an image of Egypt as its own counter-image.
NOTE: Observant Jews still thank God three times a day for rescuing them from Egypt.
And Tractate Pesach even claims that Passover wine is healthy, unlike Egyptian beer,
which is poisonous.
It would have been controversial enough had Freud merely substituted this Armana
narrative for the story of the babe rescued from the river. But Freud goes much further,
suggesting that the Moses who left Egypt with these followers was subsequently
overthrown by them and replaced.
Moses 1 and Moses 2
Aten never appeared to humans, never spoke words that humans could hear, never
engaged in magical demonstrations of power. This was the God (according to MaM)
that Moses extracted from Armana, a natural, universal god for all people, without
favorite tribes and special arrangements or promises for his (its) followers. But Freud
proposes that the original emigres from Egypt grew weary of this faceless, absent god
pg. 87
(remember the Golden Calf episode) and chose instead the Midianite volcano god,
Jahve (JHVH), who appears with a spectacular entrance in Exodus 19:
16And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and
lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding
loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. 17And Moses brought forth the
people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount.
18And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in
fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount
quaked greatly. 19And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder
and louder…
It is also relevant that this volcanic confrontation between God and Israel occurs in the
sedra called Yitro, named for the Midianite priest who was father-in-law to Moses. Yitro
(Jethro) is Freud’s favorite candidate for Moses 2, the new leader of the Israelites who
are now instructed to think of themselves as holy, separate, chosen, in continuous
danger of return to pagan ways (the flesh pots of Egypt). Freud tells us (MAM) that,
“the god Jahve attained undeserved honor when, from Qades onward, Moses' deed of
liberation was put down to his account.”
(Freud speculates that his followers murdered Moses 1 and may have eaten him. This
grotesque guess derives from his idea that the several references to blood-drinking in
the Torah may be a shadow memory of cannibalism.)
And, in his most interesting proposal of all, Freud argues that the memory of Aten was
never lost (remember that Freud was a Lysenkoist 21) and re-emerged, enabling the Jews
to survive for millennia.
In the long run, it did not matter that the people, probably after a very short time,
renounced the teaching of Moses and removed the man himself. The tradition itself
remained and its influence reached, though only slowly, in the course of centuries, the
aim that was denied to Moses himself... The shadow of the god [Aten] became stronger
than [Moses]; at the end of the historical development there arose beyond his being
that of the forgotten Mosaic god. None can doubt that it was only the idea of this other
god that enabled the people of Israel to surmount all their hardships and to survive until
our time.
21Lysenkoism is the discredited belief that a community’s experiences could somehow be retained in its
gene tissue and passed along to later generations.
pg. 88
Implications for the Modern Jew
When the brilliantly compiled Chumash, Aitz Chaim, was published, it contained some
scholarly musings about the lack of archeological evidence supporting the Exodus
narrative; it even hinted that it might be possible that Israel never was in Egypt at all.
This remark sparked outrage from traditional and orthodox Jews; one review said that
such an idea would be more harmful to the Jewish people than even the Holocaust.
Indeed, one of my friends argued that denying the historical accuracy of the Exodus
account was a form of anti-Semitism!
Presumably, modern Jews—perhaps the best educated and most cosmopolitan cohort in
American society—cannot be forced to take-it-or-leave-it when it comes to Biblical
narratives. Remember that Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan (z”l) mused that if you gave the
American Jew a choice between all or nothing, he will probably choose nothing.
Not believing in the historical accuracy of the Bible—suspecting that there may be only
a handful of true sentences in the Tanach—does not in any way inhibit the sincere and
gratifying study and practice of Judaism. Maimonides himself believed that the much of
the Torah was literary/allegorical stuff for the benefit of the 90% who could not handle
philosophy or abstraction. Kabbalists often speak of the Torah as a poem, not the
history of Israel. And some mystics have even suggested that the Torah is an immense
anagram, waiting to be deciphered.
Rather, I propose that one take the position of my late Talmud teacher, Rabbi
Scharfman (as traditional a Rabbi as you can find), that the gift of Torah is primarily a
gift of creativity and imagination—not a set of words. The meaning of Torah, the import
of its stories, is in our minds. Judaism is an imagined universe; Albert Einstein once
remarked that the Jewish God is the “imaginary result of eliminating superstition from
the world.”
Which gets us back to Freud’s original observation: religion is a like a childhood

neurosis that needs to be outgrown. First, we must agree—given the state of the world
today—that he is mainly right. We live in a time when religious belief has escalated
from neurosis to murderous psychosis, not only in Radical Islam but also among
extremist Christians. When a synagogue is defaced we have to investigate to find
whether it was a Muslim or Christian perpetrator. And there is little doubt that the
current political scene in the USA has exacerbated the problem.
Second, though, we must disagree with Freud and point out that it is unwise to
characterize all forms of imagination-based Jewish activity as a protracted infancy. The
pg. 89
hallmark of Jewish life, a principle obligation of the modern Jew, is lifelong Jewish
education, which enables the childlike, peshat Bible stories to evolve into what Jews call,
simply, text. And to teach by example that every word in our traditional texts is
(historical inaccuracy notwithstanding) inherently interesting and potentially
enlightening.
pg. 90
James to Dewey to Kaplan: The Pragmatic Foundation of

Reconstructionism
We carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to

serve our human purposes.
William James
The title of this essay— “James to Dewey to Kaplan”—is supposed to sound like a
double-play combination. Imagine the ball being whipped around the diamond, by
three, old bearded in-fielders, with bang-bang outs at second and first.
My purpose is to show how each pitched an idea to the next, so that, over the space of
about fifty years, a book challenging the materialistic critique of religion became the
core idea in a vibrant new kind of Judaism.
William James and the The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James is one of a handful of scholar/scientists regarded as seminal thinkers in

both psychology and philosophy. (His Columbia University colleague, John Dewey, is
another.) First-year psych students still study the James-Lange theory of emotion
(“You’re not running because you’re afraid; you’re afraid because you’re running.”)
and no comprehensive reading list for a Humanities course can omit The Varieties of
Religious Experience.
VORL was a series of lectures published in 1902 when the dominant approach to
philosophy was positivism, which, oversimply, was an attempt to apply science and
logic to all philosophical claims and arguments. Positivism, rationalism taken to its
extreme, also insisted that metaphysical and mystical language be reworked into
scientific form (measurable, testable) or discarded from intellectual discourse.
pg. 91
Positivism, like similar approaches, was materialistic, which in philosophical terms

means that it did not admit the existence of non-material objects and events, often called
transcendental experiences. Rather, the positivist insists that transcendental claims are
either nonsense or the product some physical—typically neurological—aberration.
The example that most interested James, apparently, was the popular notion that
Saul/Paul, riding to Damascus, experienced not a message from God but, rather, the
recognizable symptoms of an epileptic seizure! He dubbed this way of thinking medical
materialism:
… a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are
considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road
to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs
out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.
George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it
treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts
for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you
come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most
probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet
discover. … And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such
personages is successfully undermined.
James’ argument, the foundation of Pragmatism, is that attacking and demeaning the
source of an idea—suggesting that it emanates from a physical disorder, for example--
is used to attack only metaphysical arguments. In other disciplines, no one would think
to assess an idea by casting aspersions on its origin. Does it matter to an assessment of
Nietzsche that he lived a life of constant pain? Shall we dismiss Spinoza’s ideas about
the passions on the basis that he was rejected by the only woman he ever loved?
In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute
opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are
invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's
neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value can
only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments
based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can
ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we
hold as true.
The source or root of the idea, even if it is pathological, does not set the criteria for
evaluating such opinions; rather we should look for:
pg. 92
• Luminousness
• Reasonableness
• Moral utility
These criteria need no operational definition, he believes, since they are understood by
all thoughtful people. The origin of the idea neither damns nor saves it from
philosophical assessment.
Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not
now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to
be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will
make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have
been when she was with us here below.
In more contemporary philosophy, James’s critique is fighting against a form of the ad

hominem attack called the “genetic fallacy”—dismissing someone’s remarks by
characterizing the person who made them. A perfect example occurs in Wilde’s
Importance of Being Earnest, when Algernon upbraids his butler, saying: “Never speak
contemptuously of society. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
Fearing this fallacy, Freud, we are told, wanted his successor NOT to be Jewish (he
chose Jung), so that the world could not dismiss psychoanalysis as a “Jewish science.”
And Albert Einstein famously observed:
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and

France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will
say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
In short, James’ view of religion is that, so long as it provides real benefits, it doesn’t
matter that its scriptures are factually false, its prophets epileptic, or its preachers mad.
What matters is that the ideas are beneficial, that you can “ride them” for a very long
time, feeling healthier along the way, not encountering intellectual or emotional crisis.
James even applauded the range of “mind-cures” emerging in the religion of his time.
Although he found Mary Baker Eddy’s group to be a sect, he could not help but
observe, as a psychologist, that a great many religions with the goal of improving health
in general, and mental health in particular, seemed to work rather well. “After all, it is
the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which
may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the Diatetik der Seele into the
pg. 93
shade.” He sometimes characterized such religions as extreme forms of effective

optimism and its practitioners as able to use optimism to overcome evil.
Thus, James staked an early claim in the debate about the ethics of using placebos to
treat mental and emotional disorders. Effectiveness is the main criterion. Whatever the
ritual or prayer did to heal the mind of the worshipper was worth doing. Today, no
doubt, he would raise a similar objection to those who look to dispel the non-material
world by looking with a PET scan for religious experiences in the brain. He would
probably say it doesn’t matter that the notion of God is an area of the brain evolved to
serve some survival purpose; it’s still God.
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is the most American of philosophies. The earliest philosopher to use the
term was Charles Pierce (who was William James’s undergraduate classmate at
Harvard) and put its core idea in this way:
Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception
of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.
James and others elaborated on this core concept. James’ very interesting approach to
pragmatic epistemology was to argue that truth is in a perpetual state of becoming—not
fixed and waiting to be unearthed. As we shared ideas, including religious ideas, we
not only shaped the ideas but all the persons in the conversation and even the context
and setting of the conversation. And this change was neither delusion nor deception but
the actual meaning of our words and ideas, always changing and evolving as we think
and speak. And whatever the practical effects of the idea—utility, effectiveness,
wellbeing—IS the idea itself.
Put another way, pragmatism is the belief that ideas are real and, no matter where they
come from, the test of their value and “truth” is their benefit.
John Dewey
John Dewey, James’s colleague at Columbia, was quite sensitive to and influenced by
his work. His approach (which he sometimes called instrumentalism) held that the
effects and practical consequences of a concept were not the whole concept, however. That
is, there were objects and meanings in the world having nothing to do with our beliefs
pg. 94
and discourse. As philosophers put it, there is an entire universe that is “logically
prior” to our understanding of it. In Dewey’s version, our concepts bounce off these
logically prior objects, sometimes changing them, but more often bouncing back in a
“reverberation” or a series of bounces and reverberations over time. The validity or
truth of an idea, in Dewey’s view, was equivalent to its practical effects.
John Dewey communicated his version most effectively in writing about Education.
More than anyone, Dewey was responsible for shifting the emphasis of education from
the acquisition of received wisdom to the process of socialization, bouncing concepts off
the world and learning, thereby, to become an individual comfortable and effective in
modern times. This pragmatic model of education is, therefore, lifelong in its reach—
another idea that was new at the time.
In Democracy and Education he wrote:
Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of
correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a
revolution in teaching would be worked.
In Dewey’s addresses, he frequently describes education as socialization; occasionally,

though, he shifts emphasis and says education is civilization. This alternate term caught
the ear of one of his more famous graduate students: Mordechai Kaplan.
Mordechai Kaplan
Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, the reluctant founder of Reconstructionism, the fourth

denomination of Judaism, defined Judaism as the “evolving religious civilization of the
Jewish people.” In this model, after Dewey, Judaism socializes (civilizes) Jews; Jewish
tradition and history may be logically prior to the current practice of Judaism, but the
modern Jew is obliged to form new ideas and bounce them off the external materials. In
a famous aphorism, Kaplan remarked that “the past has a vote, but not a veto.”
Pragmatic Judaism was Kaplan’s response to the need to keep Judaism alive. He
predicted early in the 20th Century that the modern Jew, if forced to choose between all
(the yoke of halakha) and nothing, would choose nothing. Although there is no way to
know whether he was right, it seems appropriate to mention that this is still pretty
much the case in Israel.
pg. 95
Kaplan did not regard this as a radical idea, though. He points out, correctly, that Jews
have been updating and modifying their practices from the beginning. During the
Babylonian exile, dispossessed priests and other political factions placed their own
editorial mark on the extant versions of the Torah and Tanakh, well before they were
canonized by Ezra and Nehemiah. Later, the Pharisees/Rabbis, struggling to keep the
Torah relevant and useful in a world without a Temple, created a library of interpretive
midrash and, ultimately, imagined another entire “oral” Torah. And this process
continued through centuries of commentary and legal responsa.
Kaplan’s position was not that he was replacing Judaism; he was amending and
strengthening it. The only difference he perceived between himself and the Rabbis of
old is that they called the process interpretation.
Kaplan, who was not a mystic, would have been quite surprised by the growing interest
of contemporary non-orthodox Jews in Kabbalah and other mystical practices. (He also
had a positivist streak that led him to believe that increasing scientific knowledge
would make mystical traditions seem fairly absurd to well-educated American Jews.
Thomas Jefferson thought the same thing about Christianity a century earlier,
predicting that by 1900 all Americans would be Unitarians.) But Kaplan would have
been quick to revise that estimate by applying the two overarching principles that
energized his followers.
The two essential pragmatic principles of Reconstructionist Judaism, the ones most
relevant to the modern Jew, are these:
• Torah should be understood as any text or message that contributes to the ethical
education of the Jewish people.
• Whenever a precept of Judaism is not of practical benefit to the Jewish people, it
should not be the people who change but the precept itself.
pg. 96
John’s Jewish Problem
The Gospel of John, according to most scholars, was composed around the year 100 CE,
in the Turkish city of Ephesus. I once went on a Jewish-themed tour of Turkey and, as
our tour bus approached Ephesus, the guide pointed to a small house on the horizon
and indicated that it was the House of John, where Mary, mother of Jesus, stayed for
safety after the Crucifixion. (The priests who maintain the Church of the Dormition in
Jerusalem would be surprised to learn this account.)
I asked the guide: Which John? And he advised me that the Eastern Church had
decided that John the Baptist, John the Apostle, John the author of the gospel, and John
the author of Revelation were all, in fact, same person!
Indeed, the authorship of this fourth gospel is unclear and it may have been an
aggregation of three or four Christian midrashim from several new Christian
communities. The important thing to remember is that it is very probably the last gospel
and, importantly, reflects the emerging reality in which Christianity changes from a
growing sect within Judaism to a new religion at odds with its parent religion.
John v. the Synoptics
There are four gospels in the Christian canon (many more outside); they are typically
referred to as the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and John, in a
class of its own, John. The Synoptics are so called because they cover much of the same
narrative events in the life of Jesus, often using the same language with different
emphases. They also frequently contradict each other in specific matters of fact (such as
the lineage of Jesus), which is exactly what a Jewish bible student would expect of
midrashim from different communities. These discrepancies are sufficiently notable,
however, that they have generated a cottage industry of fundamentalist ministers
pg. 97
explaining to those who consider the Bible literally true that these obvious, marked,
serious, and undeniable contradictions can be harmonized away.
John is quite different in its scope and objectives. There is no birth narrative, no sermons
or parables demonstrating the doctrine of love and forgiveness. There are no maxims or
proverbs or new insights—except those relating to the metaphysical status of Jesus
himself. Raymond Brown 22 summarizes:
A comparison of the Fourth Gospel to the first three Gospels shows obvious
differences. Peculiarities of the Fourth Gospel include: setting of much of the
public ministry in Jerusalem rather than in Galilee; the significant absence of the
kingdom of God motif (only in 3:3, 5); long discourses and dialogues rather than
parables; only some seven miracles, including the unique Cana changing of water
to wine, healing a man born blind, and the raising of Lazarus.
In John’s gospel, there is almost none of the characteristically Christian idealism

regarding the poor and the humble, nor such provocative ideas as loving one’s enemies
and turning the other cheek. In this gospel, Jesus’ main concern is first, to explain that
he is the redeemer of all who would be redeemed, all who would choose Light over
Darkness, and also that he is the single, sole, path to God. Jesus is not just a portal to
eternal life but also the only portal to eternal life. 23That is, in the view of this gospel
author, adherence to Mosaic Law cannot transport one’s soul into heaven; being a
descendant of Abraham offers no advantage; and Torah learning avails the student
nothing. Thus, we see in this confrontation the earliest theological foundation for the
Deeds versus Belief dispute that sparked the Protestant Reformation.
22 Brown, Raymond E., An Introduction to the New Testament (The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library), Yale
University Press, 1997; Brown, Raymond E., The Gospel of John: A Concise Summary Liturgical Press, 1988
23This gospel also spends considerable time explaining that John the Baptist is not the Messiah. We may
infer that he also had a following. Indeed, the Gospel of Luke makes him the near equal of Jesus in many
ways.
pg. 98
John and “the Jews”
On the surface, the most problematic aspect of John, of course, especially for Jewish
readers, is the recurring use of “the Jews” and “Pharisees” in the unkindest terms. The
Jews are descendants of the devil, murderous, hypocritical venal. Sentences lifted out of
context sound like pure anti-Semitic venom. 24
Understood in context, though, the text seems far less Judeopathic. As Brown explains,
the expression “the Jews” is short for “those Jews who took public issue with Jesus’s
teachings” and the Pharisees are “those Pharisees who disputed with him about the
Mosaic Law.” The difficulty of interpreting John arises from the fact that it is one
side of a debate…and we do not hear the other side. That is, at the end of the First
Century, the Jewish academy at Yavneh had refined a model for living a life coherent
with God’s wishes and thereby winning God’s favor, even though the Temple was
gone; in contrast, Jesus argued that only by following him, only by eating and drinking
his incarnate manifestation of God, could anyone find enlightenment. Brown
characterizes these two perspectives as “utterly incompatible.” 25
The confrontations described in John could not have occurred during the fourth decade
of the First Century, when Jesus preached and was executed. Notably, the setting for
this debate is the hostile confrontation with synagogues and Pharisees. During the
time of Jesus’ ministry, however, the Pharisees were an outspoken but not especially
powerful group within the religious landscape of Jerusalem. The priests (with support
from wealthy Sadducee families) controlled the religious and political life of the city,
even under Roman occupation. And the high priest was appointed by the Roman
Governor himself. During Jesus’ adult lifetime, therefore, he would have spent little
time in synagogues (which later replaced the Temple) and his adversaries would more
likely been priests and Levites, rather than scholars of Jewish law.
The Pharisees, of course, became the Rabbis, the front guard of Judaism, AFTER the
destruction of the Temple in 70CE; the last vestiges of priestly power disappeared about
130CE in the wake of Bar Kochba. Thus, the confrontations with “the Jews” and the
Pharisees represent later stages of Christian Jewish relations, at the end of the First
Century, when these two branches of Judaism began to split into hostile alternatives.
24The expression “the Jews” appears 71 times in John; in the three Synoptics combined, only 16 times.
25To illustrate, contrast this Jesus with the Jesus in Matthew who insists that the Law and the Prophets
(Tanach) will never lose their authority.
pg. 99
It is also impossible to overlook the fact that the ideas and methods of Jesus, in all four
gospels, are decidedly Pharisaic themselves. (I’ve even seen a speculation that Jesus and
Hillel knew each other.) It was the Pharisees, for example, who believed that wishing to
do evil (sinning in the heart) is as reprehensible as doing the evil—an important idea
espoused by Jesus in another Gospel. But, most important, it was the Pharisees who
created the Jewish afterlife, the olam haba, mostly as a way of promising reward to
those faithful Jews who felt that the destruction of Judea represented an inability of God
to fulfill his promises in the world of the living.
Jesus, of course, spends much of his time in John discoursing on eternal life, even
arguing (but not in other Gospels) that he is the sole and unique path to this eternal life.
He is the Light and the Life; other beliefs are Darkness and Death.
But Jesus’ most pharisaic moment in John is when he argues with Nicodemus, in a
purely Talmudic style, that if it is acceptable to break the sabbath to circumcise a child,
then it must surely be acceptable to heal the sick on the sabbath. This is a classic
illustration of the a fortiori version of the kol v’chomer argument used so often in the
Gemara.
The paradox, then, is that Jesus seems especially Jewish in this gospel, while the text
itself is the most Judeopathic. This, for example is the only gospel in which the Jews
demand as a group the execution of Jesus, in which the Romans play almost no part at
all. This is also the gospel in which Jesus asserts that “the Jews” are descended not from
Abraham, but from the devil. (The later Christian midrash is that Eve copulated with
the serpent and spawned the Jewish people.)
I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word
finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you
have heard from your father. They answered him, "Abraham is our father." Jesus said to
them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did. ... You are of
your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer
from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in
him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of
lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.
Again, in context, this may be understood as the rhetoric of religious leaders eager to
separate completely from the traditional Jewish religion, with overstatement and
invective as part of the message. But, alas, most people do not read the Bible closely and
even fewer understand the historical matrix from which it grew. Raymond Brown also
pg. 100
speculates that the intensity of the invective may have been a bruised reaction to the
expulsion of Jesus’ followers from many Jewish communities.
The Deadly Legacy
Modern Christians, especially those who understand the sources and composition of
the scriptures, do all they can to blunt the sharp sting of John’s Judeopathic
pronouncements. The scholarly Jesus Seminar thinks that the word “Jews” in this
gospel should be translated as Judeans and the text should be understood as a local
dispute between the residents of Judea and Galilee. (Note that Jesus urges his
surrogates to stay out of Judea.)
But, to repeat, most of the people who read the Bible do so without regard to history,
context, or composition. There may be more than 100 million Americans who think the
propositions in the Bible are literally true, even those in the hallucinogenic forecasts of
Revelation (which they claim to understand perfectly). But a few minutes of
conversation with them shows that there are vast sections of the Bible they have never
read at all, concentrating instead on a small set of verses recommended by their church
leaders. Moreover, most of the preachers and pastors in the 1000s of American
Protestant denominations suffer from similar ignorance about the material.
It’s not a surprise, then, that the Gospel of John gets the credit/blame for the collective
demonization of the Jewish people. (Remember: John even minimizes the role of the
Romans in the crucifixion.) Every Nazi and neo-Nazi, every Christian Militia, every
fascist radio host, and every Klan dragon can substantiate his hatred with proof texts
from this Gospel. (Aided by medieval paintings that show Jews with horns and tails.)
But there is nothing to be gained by complaining about phrases “taken out of context.”
It is a practice favored by nearly all the religious leaders of the major faiths; it is the
principle technique of eisegesis, that is, forcing the text to support what you already
believe. There are very few debates in the Gemara in which someone does not lift a
passage from the Tanach, manipulating its meaning to suit the argument, or even using
gematria (numerical substitution) when the words are not enough. 26
No, there is nearly nothing to be gained by caviling about misinterpretation and

context. The Christian scriptures—with a special contribution from John—has
26I am always amused when ecologically-minded rabbis cite the Torah verse that says: When you lay
siege to a city you should “not destroy the trees.” They neglect the next passage which makes it clear that
you save the trees so you’ll have fruit to eat while you’re starving your enemies.
pg. 101
generated hatred of Jews for many centuries. It provided the theological context for
every pogrom and for the Shoah itself.
The Impediment to Interfaith Dialogue
As a modern Jew, I am intensely concerned with interfaith communication and feel a

responsibility to create Shalom among all people. Like Rabbi Rami Shapiro, I regard
religions as different languages and I hope to be an interpreter when the situation
requires.
I am certain that to be a Christian does NOT oblige one to despise all other religious
ideas or demonize the followers of any one faith. I know this in part because Pope
Francis has said so:
Many think differently, feel differently, seeking God or meeting God in different ways.
In this crowd, in this range of religions, there is only one certainty that we have for all:
we are all children of God … [and I hope you] will spread my prayer request this month:
that sincere dialogue among men and women of different faiths may produce fruits of
peace and justice.
The trouble, of course, is that most American Christians do not seem to agree with
Francis. We live in a time when the numbers or radical, fundamentalist, and evangelical
Christians are increasing, when religious enthusiasts hold up signs saying JOHN 14:16
at televised sports events, and also when the power and influence of Christian-fueled
hate groups have increased and become more welcome in the body of the Republican
Party. Our president finds some “honorable” people in the fringe-right and our vice
president believes America would be a better country if everyone were a Protestant.
There’s the problem: To maintain comity and civility with people of all religions while
being ever mindful of the threat posed by the Christian right to America in general and
to Jews in particular. Interestingly, the central question is the one posed by Jesus in his
first speech in John; to paraphrase: “What kind of country are we looking for?”
pg. 102
Epicurus Visits the Great Assembly: Rami Shapiro’s Two

Versions of Pirke Avot
Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s first translation of Avot (Wisdom of the Sages: A Modern Reading of
Avot, 1993) should, under no circumstances, be a student’s initial exposure to this
tractate. In fact, this early edition of Avot does not purport to be a translation at all but,
rather, “an interpretive reading ... to make plain the meaning of Avot as I understand
it.” This earlier version, originally self-published in the 1980s (when the newly-minted
rabbi was in his 30s) was formally published by Bell Tower Press in the 90s, and,
apparently, Rabbi Shapiro relented of his approach later and approached the work
anew in 2006 (Ethics of the Sages: Pirke Avot Annotated and Explained). The Introduction of
the latter version refers to the former as “my Zen-like interpretive version,” which was
finally replaced with an more-accurate translation accompanied by interpretive
commentary.
To illustrate, consider 1:11.
First Version
Be careful with words.

C-O-W gives no milk.
M-A-N-U-R-E has no stench.
L-O-V-E knows no passion.
Mistake words for Truth
pg. 103
and you exile yourself from Reality.

Others may follow and
Drink the poison of your confusion.
They will die, and Truth will be defiled.
Second Version
Do not mistake words for truth

lest you become exiled in cleverness
where every well is poison,
and all who drink from them will die,
and thus diminish the Name of Heaven.
Interestingly, Shapiro uses “heaven” in the second translation, a word that does not
appear in the earlier version. This second time he supplies this note: “Shem Shemayim
refers to God’s purpose…to manifest a world capable of knowing itself as God.”
In his first translation, Shapiro frequently uses the word Reality, often as a substitute for
the traditional Truth or God. He retreats from this practice in the second translation,
but, it should be stressed, this substitution is an important part of several of Rabbi
Shapiro’s other translations, most notably of Ecclesiastes, where God becomes Reality
once again.
First Version, 2:9
If people think you are wise,

Do not think you are special.
Wisdom comes from knowing Reality
And knowing Reality is the purpose
For which you were created.
Second Version
Take no credit for your wisdom.

Being wise is the reason you were born.
(Shapiro sometimes capitalizes Wisdom when it appears in his work. His best books are
about “wisdom literature,” and when he speaks of wisdom he has in mind the woman
Cochmah.)
pg. 104
The recurring theme of Avot is that the pursuit of Torah learning should take
precedence over all other human concerns. It says more than once that the Torah
scholar is greater than a king and that Torah study is as important as all the mitzvoth
combined. This is, in some ways, a very different outlook from that expressed in the
Torah, with its emphasis on conquering and holding the Holy Land. What accounts for
this dramatic change in perspective?
Avot: The Context
According to Adam Kirsch (The People and the Books, 2016), Avot is the work of a
“powerless and dispossessed people,” and when it refers to government, it means the
occupying government of Rome. The process of humiliation that began with the
destruction of the second temple was completed with the bloody massacre of the Bar
Kochba rebellion, a war that claimed the life of the beloved Akiba.
Although modern Jews may applaud the transition from a priestly religion centered on
animal sacrifices to a religion devoted to study and reflection, the displaced Pharisees,
scribes, and rabbis of the Tannaic period probably mourned the past in the same way
the Babylonian exiles did.
I do not mean to be unkind, but the sages of Avot and most of the Talmud seem, above
all else, impotent—in several senses of the word. The domain of their interest is Torah
exclusively, and, in Avot especially, they disparage in the strongest language those men
who aspire to power or wealth, those who seek congress with the outside world, those
who would amass property and wives. Women, even one’s wife, are a distraction and
always a potential source of sin.
(Even the God who appears in the Talmud seems softer and more accommodating than
the vengeful God who appears in Genesis and Exodus; in the Talmud, He regrets the
drowning of the Egyptian charioteers. And, elsewhere, when he is overruled by a group
of sages, he laughs that his children “have defeated” Him.)
It is not an exaggeration to say that Avot proclaims that any study, conversation, or
interaction NOT concerned with Torah is, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, an
abomination. And a case could be made that the main virtue that ties together this batch
of assorted maxims is Humility.
Another key message of Avot is to establish the authenticity of the new Torah, the oral
law. The preamble, from Sanhedrin, explains the provenance of the new Torah by
pg. 105
describing its transmission from Moses to the Sages of the Great Assembly. (Shapiro
calls this the foundation of the Jewish religion.) And, most important of all, it introduces
the afterlife—the olam haba—into the discussion of Jewish conduct. After the God of
Israel had failed to fulfill his half of the Brith in this world, the rabbis invented a new
place, a new world, in which God would reward the faithful. (Of course, according to
Avot, following the commandments just for the sake of the reward does not constitute
righteousness. But it is certainly better than NOT following the law out of ignorance or
rebellion.)
In Avot, and elsewhere in the Talmud, we learn that “Every Jew has a portion in the
World to Come.” There are only a handful of infractions that can deprive a Jew of that
portion; some are major (like denying that the Torah is from heaven) while some are
interestingly minor, like calling someone by a derisive nickname (Bava Metzia).
Rabbi Rami, the Epicurean
Rabbi Shapiro’s avowed purpose in his youth was to be a “Zen Rabbi.” (Zen was a
“hip” perspective for those of us who came of age in the Kerouac/Ginsberg period.)
Given that Shapiro has written elsewhere that he considers each religion a “language,”
he believed that a rabbi could be effective and bilingual.
Although there are a few similarities between the ideals of Zen Buddhism and mystical
Judaism (such as the intuiting of the inexpressible), Zen is far from the teaching of the
sages in Avot. (Some Zen masters say there is nothing to teach.) The most evident
influence of Zen on Shapiro, in his earlier publication, is the substitution of the word
“Reality” for the word “God” and the substitution of the word “Truth” for “Torah.”
There are also references to the central Buddhist notion of mindfulness. Consider 3:4
(first version):
But three who eat together mindfully,

Attending to talk and taste
And sharing words of Torah and Truth—
It is as if they had dined with God,
For God is Reality and Reality is ever-present.
All we need do is attend.
Contrast this with the traditional Soncino translation.
pg. 106
If three have eaten at one table, and have spoken thereat words of Torah, [it is] as
if they had eaten at the table of the All-present, blessed be he, as it is said, this is
the table before the Lord.
My own study suggests that Rabbi Shapiro is more Epicurean than Zen devotee.
Epicureanism is largely misunderstood by most people, who confuse it with
Hedonism—the pursuit of excess. Epicureanism, in contrast, which holds that one
should try to make sure that there is as much pleasure in one’s life as possible, believes
that excesses of sex, food, and drink lead invariably to unhappiness, not pleasure. In
fact, Shapiro has written extensively about 12-step recovery, as a result of his own
battles with food.
Epicurus’s prescription for happiness—the Tetrapharmakos--contains the following

elements:
• Don't fear god,

• Don't worry about death; (“Death has nothing to do with us.”)
• What is good is easy to get, and
• What is terrible is easy to endure.
The first two precepts put Epicureanism are quite at odds with the Sages of Avot, who
argue that the fear of God is the foundation of all ethical life and that the punishment
for denying the origin of the law is loss of the afterlife.
On the other hand, Epicurus expresses a very powerful version of the virtue of study:
Both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over
him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter
in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of
the things which are to come. So, we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring
happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our
actions are directed towards attaining it.
In Tannaic times, Jewish apostates and heretics were called Apikorsim, a term derived
from this most persuasive of Hellenistic philosophies. The first page of Sanhedrin (that
is, page 2) tells us: “The following have no share in the world to come: He who says that
there is no allusion in the Torah concerning resurrection, and he who says that the
Torah was not given by Heaven, and a follower of Epicurus.”
pg. 107
Nowadays, Apikoros (the singular) is used casually to describe anyone who disrespects
any aspect of Torah or Judaism; I’ve even read it used humorously to characterize
people who put chocolate in their hametaschen.
But this is a disservice to one of the most powerful philosophical anti-religions ever
conceived. (Buddhism may also be considered an ant-religion.) Consider this almost
Buddhist-like description of pantheism by Marcus Aurelius, the best exponent of
Epicureanism:
Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul;
and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one
living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the
cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the
thread and the contexture of the web.
Note also how Aurelius, an emperor of Rome who wished Rome were a republic,
regarded political power with the same suspicion as the sages of Avot:
Take heed not to be transformed into a Caesar, not to be dipped in the purple dye, for it
does happen. Keep yourself therefore, simple, good, pure, grave, unaffected, the friend
of justice, religious, kind, affectionate, strong for your proper work. Wrestle to be the
man philosophy wished to make you.
Although Shapiro talks about God (while Buddhists do not), his version of God is at
least as Epicurean as Jewish or Buddhist. In one of his blogs he wrote that, after a Zen
meditation in 1968, he concluded that “all things were a manifestation of the One Thing,
which I choose to call God. From that moment on, God, for me, was Reality, that which
is happening: YHVH, from the Hebrew verb ‘to be.’”
On the subject of the Olam Haba, he offers this explanation:
Just as a wave is nothing but the ocean in extension, so I am nothing but God in
extension. Just as a wave doesn’t have a “true wave” hidden within it, so I don’t have a
“true self” or “soul” hidden within me. Just as a wave returns to the ocean which itself
continues waving, so I will return to God as God continues I’ing. There is no “afterlife”
because life itself never ends.
This ocean image, which also appears in Kabbala, is also consistent with Epicurean
thought, which holds that the particles of the universe sometimes “swerve” together for
a while, and then, at the moment we call death, swerve apart.
pg. 108
Shapiro on God and Virtue
Again, a good way to understand Shapiro’s view of the universe is to compare his
original, “interpretive” translation with a more traditional one.
On God:
Shapiro 1 Soncino
Those who are born are destined to die. He used to say: the born [are destined] to die, the
Those who die are destined to return. dead to be brought to life, and the living to be
Those who live are destined to be judged. judged; [it is, therefore, for them to know and to
make known, so that it become known, that He is
With Reality there is no wrong, God, He the fashioner, He the creator, He the
no forgetting, no bias no bribe. discerner, He the judge, He the witness, He the
All is as it must be; there is no escape. complainant, and that He is of a certainty to
judge, blessed be He, before whom there is no
Despite your wishes, you were conceived. unrighteousness, nor forgetting, nor respect of
Despite your wishes, you were born. persons, nor taking of bribes, for all is His.
Despite your wishes, you live.
Despite your wishes, you die. And know that all is according to the reckoning.
Despite your wishes, you are destined And let not thy [evil] inclination assure thee that
to deal with the consequences of your actions. the grave is a place of refuge for thee; for
So get on with it. without thy will wast thou fashioned, without thy
will wast thou born, without thy will livest thou,
without thy will wilt thou die, and without thy
will art thou of a certainty to give an account and
reckoning before the king of the kings of kings,
blessed be He.
On women and sex:
Shapiro 1 Soncino
[Hillel] used to say: [Hillel]used to say: the more flesh, the more
More flesh, more worms. worms; the more property, the more anxiety; the
More things, more anxiety more wives, the more witchcraft; the more
More lovers, more illusion. bondwomen the more lewdness
More maids, more exploitation.
Akabiah b. Mahalaleel said: Akabiah b. Mahalaleel said: Apply thy mind to

Reflect on three things, three things and thou wilt not come into the
and you will not mistake yourself power of sin:
for someone special.
Whence you come,
pg. 109
where you are going, and Know whence thou camest, and whither thou art
to whom you must give account. going, and before whom thou art destined to give
an account and reckoning.
Whence do you come?
From an accidental mixing of sperm and egg. Whence camest thou? — from a fetid drop.
Where are you going? Whither art thou going? — to a place of dust, of
To a place of dust, worms, and maggots. worm and of maggot.
To whom must you give account? Before whom art thou destined to give an
To Reality, the undeceivable One. account and reckoning? — before the king of the
kings of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.
In these and other examples, Shapiro interprets God as Reality and Torah as Truth or
Wisdom. He rescues women from exploitation, eliminates Divine punishments, and
generally speaks, to my mind, the way a modern Jew should speak.
Rabbi Shapiro as Rabbi
My first encounter with the work of Rabbi Rami Shapiro was when my psychiatrist
recommended his edition of Ecclesiastes. I was in treatment for profound grief and
depression after the death of my son in 2010, and my doctor judged, correctly, that
reading this book would help.
The idea that God is another name for Reality (like Spinoza’s ”God or Nature”)
resonated in me, and his belief that the best way to understand hevel is not “vanity” but
rather as “impermanence.” And when Kohelet says it is better to be wise, he means it is
better to understand that everything is impermanent. I learned from this that, despite
our best efforts, life is frequently horrible and that more suffering comes from love than
from anything else. But I also learned that wisdom consists in making peace with this
notion.
When Rabbi Shapiro was the Scholar in Residence at our synagogue, my assignment
was to chauffer him from our shul to his hotel. I used the opportunity to thank him for
the service he provided me. He seemed embarrassed at the praise.
Of all the rabbis I have known, Rami Shapiro best embodies the qualities of a current
rabbi: well-educated in many fields and faiths, articulate and witty, conversant with all
the best-known Jewish texts (as well as the pseudepigrapha), always ready to teach and
pg. 110
learn, an excellent writer and engaging speaker, capable of healing spiritual pain, and—
through it all--humble.
pg. 111
pg. 112
Why Do We Read Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) During Sukkoth?
Everything about Yom Kippur is spirit; everything about Sukkot physical.

…Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
On the Sabbath that occurs during the week of Sukkoth, it is traditional to read from the
Book of Ecclesiastes, or Kohelet. Kohelet is one of those rich, beautiful, and profound
“wisdom books” found in the Ketuvim (Writings) section of the Hebrew Bible. And
though many prefer Job, I find Kohelet the wisest of them all.
Were it not for this Sukkoth tradition, most of us would never experience this work in
Hebrew. Interestingly, though, many of us know parts of it from the King James
English translation. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” “There is nothing new under the
sun.” And some parts have been made it into well-known songs: “For everything there
is a season—a time to live and time to die…”
One of Hemingway’s best novels is named The Sun Also Rises, and the opening of
Shakespeare’s 59th Sonnet is nearly a paraphrase: If there be nothing new, but that which
is/ Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd…
As you can tell from just these few excerpts, Ecclesiastes, though poetically beautiful, is
also rather gloomy and fatalistic. In fact, if you substitute “futility” for “vanity”—a
better translation—it sounds positively depressing. (Other translations that can be
derived from the biblical context in which they appear are impermanence,
incomprehensibility, absurdity, nothingness, and wind.) On this problem of translation, R.
Cover of the Dallas Theological Seminary has this to say:
Kohelet deliberately chose a word (hevel) with a calculated ambiguity; he skillfully

employed it in a variety of contexts so that several associated meanings could be
communicated without the use of synonyms. . . It must be emphasized that Kohelet
nowhere uses hevel pejoratively or with morally negative connotations. For Kohelet
hevel is a neutral term expressing brilliantly in its figurative nuances, the limitations of
human activity and human wisdom.
pg. 113
In the King James Translation, Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, is some of the best, and the darkest,
poetry in English. Consider its introduction:
1:12 I Kohelet was king over Israel in Jerusalem.13. And I gave my heart to seek and
search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven; it is a hard task
that God has given to the sons of man to be exercised with. 14. I have seen all the works
that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
More than a few scholars have wondered why this book is in the Bible, since it appears,
on the surface at least, to contradict many of the core beliefs espoused in the Torah.
So… Why is it in the Bible? Why do we read it aloud in synagogue? And why during
Sukkoth?
About Ecclesiastes
There is a straightforward answer to the question of why Ecclesiastes, a mitzvah-free

rumination on the impermanence and futility of life is in the Bible: No one is sure.
Although it enters the canon during the Hellenistic period 27, scholars think it is much
older and may have had a large constituency among groups that compiled the text.
Rabbi Dov Lipman wrote, “Kohelet isn't really a book with Jewish content; however,
because it states that it was written by King Solomon, the sages included it in the
Ketuvim, the Writings, division of the Tanach.”
Its message, in effect, is to enjoy life while you can. Understand that “stuff” happens;
the good are not always rewarded and the bad are not always punished. There is
nothing a person can do to escape death (and there is no mention of afterlife); the rich
and poor are headed to the same end. Everything of beauty and value perishes. And
there is no greater pleasure in life than the ephemeral happiness of a good meal with
the woman you love:
Ecclesiastes 9:4
For to him who is joined to all the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a
dead lion. 5. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know nothing, nor do
they have a reward anymore; for the memory of them is forgotten.
27Fighting vainly against destiny and ultimately succumbing to death is about as Greek a theme as you
can find. It is the basis of classical tragedy.
pg. 114
But Ecclesiastes is not a purely nihilistic essay. Several times The Preacher speaks in
praise of Wisdom over folly: for example
Ecclesiastes 9:17
The words of the wise heard in quietness are better than the shouting of a ruler among
fools.
Even though he said earlier
Ecclesiastes 2:13
Then I saw that wisdom excels folly, as far as light excels darkness. 14. The wise man’s
eyes are in his head; but the fool walks in darkness; and I myself perceived also that one
event happens to them all. 15. Then said I in my heart, As it happens to the fool, so it
happens even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this
also is vanity.
But the question remains. Why is wisdom better than folly? How is one to endure a life
of perpetual loss and inevitable futility? And what does Judaism have to do with any of
this?
The priests and redactors who defined the contents of the Bible were also worried that
the text might obviate many of the teachings of Torah. So, most scholars agree, they
added one or two epilogues to the original text.
First, here’s how the author ended his sermon:
12:7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit
shall return unto God who gave it.12:8 Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is
vanity.
The first epilogue switches from the first to the third person:
12:9 And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge;
yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs.
12:10 The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was
upright, even words of truth. 12:11 The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails
fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd.
pg. 115
The second epilogue switches back to the first person, but it’s not clear whether Kohelet
is being impersonated, or whether the redactor is speaking for himself:
12:12 And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many

books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh 28.
12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and
keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.
12:14 For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret
thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.
Although “Fear God and keep his commandments” is a jarring and irrelevant summary
to this book, it nevertheless provides the warrant for later Rabbis to extract homilies
that contrast the vanity or futility of life with the unswerving rule of God.
Interpretation 1: Temporary versus permanent
Rabbis tend to link the unpredictability of life in Kohelet with the flimsiness of the
Sukkah. Professor Paula Hyman, who taught Jewish History at Yale, explains, “The
book of Ecclesiastes that we read on the Shabbat of Sukkot reinforces this message of
the transiency of our existence with its cry that all is futile." And what used to be called
the UAHC, in its guide to the holiday, tells us, “The most common explanation of
Ecclesiastes' message, that worldly possessions are vain and transitory, corresponds to
the central message of Sukkot. Like the sukkah, which is a temporary and vulnerable
structure, life itself can be fragile and dangerous.”
Other rabbis point out that, during the time of the fall harvest, especially if it is
bountiful, perhaps people need to be reminded that one never knows that a good
harvest is coming. The open roof of the Sukkah, our vulnerability to the elements, is
meant to humble us, to disabuse us of the idea that safety and survival are man’s lot.
And so, to undermine that false sense of power and security, Kohelet reminds us that
bad things can happen any time, a harvest can be destroyed by aberrant weather, and
that it makes no difference if we are good and honorable people.
And, thanks to the redactors’ epilogue, Kohelet also offers us hope. Orthodox Jewish
journalist Amy Kramer, who believes that Solomon wrote Kohelet and that the epilogue
was his own work, concludes that:
28 Obviously, written before the era of the Rabbis.

pg. 116
In contrast to the more sensual Song of Songs, which was written at an earlier point in
King Solomon's life, the book of Kohelet was written after the king experienced of life's
pleasures. Solomon concludes with the message, ''The end of the matter, all having
been heard, fear God and keep His commandments; for this applies to all mankind.''
And Rabbi Dovid Soloveitchik, (Rosh Yeshiva in Gush Shemonim) goes even further,
insisting that pleasure of Sukkoth, the happiness and abundance of the harvest, has
nothing to do with physical pleasure at all:
The joy experienced during Sukkot was a spiritual experience that was based on
mitzvoth—not superficial, physical factors. In order for a person to feel this unique,
spiritually based joy, one must first step back from the pleasures and desires of this
world. This is what the megillah of Ecclesiastes is all about and is why it is specifically
read on Sukkot. Once we take to heart its lesson that this world is temporary and
unfulfilling, we can then learn to experience a new level of joy, through the
performance of Hashem’s mitzvot.
Again, these interpretations depend mightily on the epilogue, that awkward appendage
that glosses over the profound content of the book. Which of the commandments, for
example, protects us from the wisdom that every one of life’s pursuits is merely
“chasing after wind”?
Interpretation 2: Inhibition
The second theory is that Kohelet is read mainly to depress people who are feeling too
lustily happy.
When one religion conquers another, a straightforward way to win over the forced
converts is to integrate some of their old religious festivals and rituals into the new
ones, repurposing them enough to dispel the memory of the old ways. For most
students of history, the best-known example of this occurred when the northward-
expanding Roman Catholic empire convinced the pagans of the north that their Norse
Saturnalia was actually Christmas! (Both holidays, of course, and probably Hanukkah
as well, were repurposed celebrations of the winter equinox, honored by earlier
pagans.) 29
29 Many believe that Thanksgiving is a repurposed Sukkoth (or Festival of Tabernacles).

pg. 117
Passover, for example, is sometimes referred to as Chag Matzot, which appears to be a

pre-Israelite festival. 30 If we think of this holiday as a modified fast, meant to facilitate
the arrival of the vernal equinox, then we can see easily that Passover, Lent, and
Ramadan 31 are the later derivatives of this pagan superstition.
Sukkoth, it appears, a harvest festival, absorbed some of the extant fertility

rites practiced by the conquered Canaanites. According to Karen Armstrong (in
The History of God), “The ancient Canaanite religions were still flourishing in
Israel... the Israelites were still taking part in fertility rites and sacred sex there, as
we see in the oracles of the prophet Hosea…”
Just as, today, many Jewish communities celebrate the end of Sukkoth—Simchat
Torah—with festive dancing and music-making, similarly in the Second Temple era the
holiday concluded with an even more raucous celebration called Simcha Beit HaShoeva,
the water-drawing festival. The Bavli tells us “He that never has seen the simchat beit
hashoevah (the joy of the Water-Drawing) has never in his life seen joy.”
While on the surface, there isn’t anything especially sensual or joyous about pouring
water from one vessel to another, the mood and setting were frantic with excitement.
Consider this exotic detail from tractate Sukkah:
There were golden candlesticks there with four golden bowls on the top of them. The
candlesticks were fifty cubits high. Four ladders led up to each candlestick, and four
youths from the priestly stock went up holding in their hands jars of oil, of twenty-four
logs' capacity, which they poured into the bowls.
They made wicks out of worn-out drawers and girdles of the priests, and with them they
set the candlesticks alight, and there was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that did not
reflect the light of the beit hashoevah.
Apparently, most of the cavorting featured a bird-like display of male-prowess, in

which the young priests succumbed to the joy of the occasion with feats of strength and
skill for the benefit of a largely female audience. This all-night party has also been
characterized as a festival of “sacred juggling.” We read that R. Simeon ben Gamaliel
was so adept that, with eight torches going, not one of them touched the ground when
30 The explanation for the eating of matzah on Passover is possibly the least credible part of the answers
to the four questions.
31 Ramadan moves through the year because the Muslim calendar is lunar. It no doubt began in spring.
pg. 118
he prostrated himself, touched his fingers to the pavement, bent down, kissed it, and at
once sprang up (Sukkah 53a).
Rabbi Harry Freedman, who did much of the Soncino translation of the Talmud, tell us
that the offering of water on the altar was a recognition of the blessing bestowed by
rain. The celebration, centered on light and joy underlined the life-enhancing power of
the rains. 32
Contemporaneous accounts indicate that thousands of people participated in the

ceremony, and that most who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem during Sukkoth did so
mainly to enjoy the spectacle—which, despite the best attempts of the rabbis to prove
otherwise, has no basis in Torah and was, in fact, conducted over the strenuous
objections of the senior priests and wealthy Sadducees who found the whole business
undignified and embarrassing.
For us today, it is easy to imagine. A quiet, reverential neighborhood suddenly turns

into Woodstock once a year. A Catholic publication, the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the
Bible, has this to say:
Today, this music and dance festival is understood as the one remnant of the old
Canaanite fertility rituals… This was perhaps the only occasion where popular music-
making was allowed to mix with the otherwise sternly guarded prerogative of Levitical
music…Consequently, secular, superstitious, even popular licentious elements were
here introduced in the performance of the temple's liturgical music.
From this point of view, Kohelet is a necessary tranquilizer. “Consider your fate,” the
revelers are warned, and that was supposed to take some of the zeal from their
celebrating.
I doubt that the theory behind this second interpretation would work, though. I don’t
know about you, but when I read Kohelet my inclination is to ask for more wine and
louder music!
32 The insertion of “masheev haruach…” into the Amida is a reference to rain as a fertility symbol.
pg. 119
pg. 120
The Skeptical Child: A Passover Sermon
Passover is probably the most widely celebrated and genuinely loved holiday in the
Jewish year. And the Passover Seder is an always-valued chance for our far flung
American families to sit together at one table, to remember when were young, and
reflect on all the missing people we loved so much--who used to sit in that chair, or tell
that story, or make that awful joke about the egg on the Seder plate.
The Seder part of the Seder—the presentation and discussion of the Haggadah—varies
tremendously. I’ve heard that some families whip each other with scallions to reenact
slavery. Others recite the Four Questions in every language known to the people in the
room. In some homes, the Seder part is just five or ten minutes. While in the house of
one of my teachers, there were so many rabbis and Torah students at the table, and so
much agitated discussion, that dinner wasn’t served until after midnight!
About a third of the way through the Haggadah, there is a passage that I always used to
recite without much thought: the lesson of the Four Sons or (nowadays) the Four
Children:
• The wise son asks "What are the statutes, the testimonies, and the laws that
God has commanded you to do?"
• The wicked son, who asks, "What is this service to you?"
• The simple son, who asks, "What is this?"
• And the one who does not know to ask is told, "It is because of what the
Almighty did for me when I left Egypt."
Usually, the child who provokes the most discussion (if there is any) is the so-called
wicked child. In Hebrew, he is Rashah, and as you know, ra is Hebrew for Evil. Evil!
And what does he do to deserve this harsh label? He uses the wrong pronoun, asking
what this Seder means to YOU instead of to ME. In this tiny act, he is said to be
separating himself from the community, implying that the Passover narrative is for
pg. 121
someone else’s benefit. In illustrated Haggadot, he is often depicted carrying a weapon

or wearing an alien costume. In playwright David Mamet’s monograph on anti-
Semitism, which is called The Wicked Son, he is the self-hating Jew.
But I would like to suggest another view. Just as the Evil Impulse (yetzer hara) is not all
bad, perhaps the Wicked Son (rashah) is not all bad. Ordinarily, when we think of the
evil impulse, we think of immorality and excess: lust, avarice, greed, gluttony. Also, we
know how strongly our ancestors felt about disobedient children, for whom the Torah
recommends the death penalty.
But it is also clear that these so-called evils or sins are what propel our lives and nourish
our curiosity. We must agree that at least a little disobedience is part of growing up, just
as lust and avarice, in moderation, often lead us to salutary ends. In fact, our sages teach
us that without this evil impulse, no man would ever marry, build a house, or start a
business.
As I began preparing these words, my first idea was to propose a fifth child. Now,
though, I suspect that the wicked child can carry my point if I rename him or her the
skeptical child. And that child’s question is much more provocative: How do you know
that any of this is true? Aside from your say-so, what reason do I have to believe any of it?
Skeptical children are not cynics. Cynics presume that everyone is lying, that all claims
of fact and history are self-serving misrepresentations, and that just about everything
attractive to us is a delusion or trap. The skeptics are not like that at all. They insist that
claims about matters of fact need some evidence to support them and that extraordinary
claims about highly improbable or miraculous events—events that strain belief—need
extraordinarily good evidence and proof. Skeptics do not assert that every unproven
claim is false. Hardly. But they do insist that, in the absence of evidence, a reasonable
person cannot be faulted for not believing the disputed item.
My goal here is not just to rehabilitate the reputation of the wicked child. Rather, my
goal is to tell you what I’ve learned after a long life and a pretty good education:
namely, that skepticism is essential to intellectual development and that, moreover, it is the key
to the survival of a people whose existence in unending peril.
Now, at this point, many readers want to remind me of the importance of faith, and its
power to heal us, restore us, give us a sense of community and continuity. But I answer
that skepticism versus faith is not an either/or question. Skepticism and faith are two
other names for the evil and good impulse, forces that compete and interact within us.
pg. 122
The great Israeli writer, A.B.Yehoshua, for example, a socialist intellectual who is also
religiously orthodox, simply divides his thinking into two domains: beliefs that require
science and reason versus revelations that don’t.
The point is that without a strong, skeptical bent, it is hard to be a Jew at all.
To explain, let me relate a story from my childhood. When I was a boy, I lived in a
Jewish neighborhood and had no communication or interaction with people who were
not Jewish. My only contact with Christianity came through a new communications
technology called television, which often showed movies about the birth and death of a
certain Jesus. One especially popular TV movie, I still remember, was the silent version
of King of Kings in which the actor who played the Good Samaritan was the same actor
who played Hop-along Cassidy in the TV series.
I had begun to put together the pieces of this unfamiliar religion by watching the
shows, but there was much I didn’t understand. I asked my mother to explain the
concept to me and she began with the following words: Jesus, if there was such a person…
If there was such a person! My mother--who may or may not have finished high school,
who had never read a book on the history of religions or theology—calmly suggested to
me that the most dearly held belief of the billion or so Christians in the world might be
false.
I don’t remember how that sentence ended and certainly not the rest of the explanation.
But I do remember a kind of mild shock (if that makes sense) when I contemplated, for
the first time, that a widely-held belief need not be true, embedded in which
understanding was the logical principle that historical truth could not be determined by
votes or surveys (unless the respondents were skilled historians or archeologists.) At
that moment, then, I was armed with the most useful weapon against the persecution of
minority beliefs: namely, the awareness that being in a minority does not disqualify
one’s opinions.
Much later in my education I learned the word hagiography. Hagiography originally

referred to the craft of writing biographies of the saints, but it has widened its meaning
to include all biography and history written to glorify certain individuals or groups.
And there tends to be at least an element of it in every work of history, requiring all
readers to read carefully and be somewhat skeptical of what they see. This applies
especially to all history and biography written by people with strong political or
religious ideologies. Certainly, to all “scriptures.”
pg. 123
Still later I read David Hume’s brilliant little essay On Miracles. Hume’s advice to us,
when someone has reported a miraculous event, is to consider these possibilities:
• The person is mistaken.
• The person is lying.
• The person is mentally ill.
• The person is telling the truth.
Hume was sure that the last option is the least likely—no matter how much we wish it
were the correct one.
And there is the heart of the problem. The wonderful events and miracles that happen
in all the scriptures of the world—including the Tanach—are stories we wish were true.
We want to believe them, even though we know how generations of retold stories get
changed and improved with each telling, altered with each translation, and edited by
authorities with vested interests before they are committed to print.
Jews, especially, must be skeptical, because they are so often lied about and lied to. Not
only do the Koran and Christian Bible accuse the Jews of grievous crimes, even
nauseating little pieces of outright anti-Semitic propaganda (like the Protocols) are
available in inexpensive editions in the book shops of every Muslim city.
Being the skeptical child isn’t easy. There’s much more to it than just gainsaying or
demanding proof. The skeptic must also be able to evaluate the proofs offered. This
requires being familiar with the strictures of science, the rules that prevent us from
collecting biased data and making broader generalizations than the data can warrant. It
also requires an understanding of logic and especially fallacy: counterfeit arguments
that, until unexamined closely, seem to prove the point.
An example of a claim that exhibits both kinds of problems can be found in the
wonderful Chumash prepared by Rabbi Joseph Hertz: the first Chumash to divide the
Torah into separate parashot. In one of his commentaries he remarks that those nations
who treated their Jewish residents best had been, historically, those countries that were
most prosperous and long-lived, suggesting that they found favor with God.
What’s wrong with this lovely claim? There is no data; the variables are undefined; the
nations are not named; there is no timeframe for the claim; we don’t know the size of
the sample or universe; there is no control for the presence of other causes or
explanations. And even if it were generally true that nations with a kinder policy
pg. 124
toward Jews did last longer, we still have the oldest and most insidious fallacy of all:
the confusion of correlation with causation.
These flaws of science and logic do not mean the claim is false. Rather, it means that a
serious student of Jewish history needs much more than this respected man’s testimony
to consider it true.
Put another way, the good child wants to learn; the skeptical child wants to study and
research. And, frankly, our ancestors seem to have preferred that children “learn” (that
is, commit to memory) as much of the received wisdom of Judaism as possible, as soon
as possible. Above all else, they didn’t want their children to be exposed to the foreign
ideas of the non-Jewish world, or even to the teachings of those Jews who doubted the
provenance of the oral law, such as the Karaites. As it says in Avot:
A child’s learning is like ink on fresh paper.

An elder’s learning is like ink on smudged paper.
Our ancestors were intent on indoctrinating the young, before they could be corrupted
by alien knowledge. They saw no virtue in being empty-headed for long. In Jews and
Words (Yale University Press, 2012), Amos and Fania Oz discuss the Christian tradition
in which, as they see it, the purest souls are those of innocent children who know
nothing. But they say, with a few Chassidic tales as exceptions, Jews do not venerate the
tam child, the one we call the “simple” son in the Haggadah. In contrast, the Talmud
applauds child scholars, tinokot she beit Rabban, school-babies.
So, how should we encourage and reward the early stirrings of intelligence in our
young? I once asked my Rabbi at what point he believed that children should be told
that their favorite Bible stories, like Noah, are stories--not historical facts. Shall we treat
our children, as the RAMBAM likes to say, as “ignoramuses” incapable of
understanding the difference between inspiring literature and substantiated fact? Shall
we fill their heads (as mine was when I was in Hebrew school) with the image of God as
a mighty desert chieftain, wreaking havoc on his enemies? Shall we tell them that the
epic literature of the Tanach is, in fact, a history of the Jewish people, after 70 years of
earnest biblical archeology in Israel has uncovered almost no evidence that such is true?
His answer was that it is best to the tell children the truth, as we understand it, from the
beginning.
pg. 125
Because those of us who do not live in closed Jewish communities cannot insulate our
children from the non-Jewish world, it is dangerous to suppress the skeptical child. My
grandsons, for example, have in their pockets a gadget that gives them access to every
great Jewish text, all the scriptures of all religions, all the great literature written or
translated in English, all the vile anti-Semitic poison in world, and other materials too
disgusting to think about. Shall we raise such children to be trusting and eager to learn
whatever people want them to believe? Shall we excommunicate our skeptical children
as we did to perhaps our greatest thinker, Baruch Spinoza?
I propose, during this week of Passover that we encourage and reason with the
skeptical child, telling him that the greatest Jewish sages were full of argument, eager to
learn the truth of things—but not cynics. Teach him or her that there is much valuable
insight to be gained from a Rabbi who, when asked to tell the story of the Jewish
people, begins by saying: Moses, if there was a such a person…
pg. 126
Who by Fire: My Yom Kippur Problem
During the Days of Awe when we think about mortality, specifically about living
another year. According to tradition, our fate for next year has already been decided,
but, if it’s a decision against us, we have ten days to humble ourselves and promise that
we will be deserving of a second chance.
Can an ordinary man or woman increase the chance of living another year? Of course.
We all know that if we eat right, drink moderately, and keep active we have a better
chance in the life expectancy lottery. A fellow at the gym once told me that every
minute I’d spend on a treadmill would add a minute to my life. (That bet sounds like a
push to me.)
But these longevity measures are not what the High Holidays are about. Given that life
is a reward for correct Jewish behavior—and that’s what it says in the machzor—what
can we do to merit another year? The easy answer is that we should obey all the
commandments, the mitzvot, that apply to us. Although that number is traditionally
reckoned at 613, when you remove those that apply just to the Temple and the
Priesthood, or that can only be practiced in Israel, you are down to fewer than 300.
But if you study all the mitzvot in the Torah, you will rarely find a claim that obedience
leads to long life. The contract or brit is in exchange for Israel, the promised homeland.
Our end of the deal, our obligation, is the mitzvot, and God’s end is Israel. If you
studied all the commandments, laws, rules, and codes in the Torah, you’ll find almost
no mention of mitzva-for-longevity. Except for three cases:
pg. 127
• Mitzva 33 (according to the Rambam’s count) appears in Exodus 20:12. Honor thy father
and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God
giveth thee.
• Mitzvot 544 and 55 Come from Deuteronomy 22:6-7. If you come across a bird’s nest
beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young
or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be
sure to let the mother go, so that it will go well with you and you may have a long life.
• Mitzva 602 is from Deuteronomy 25:13-16. Do not have two differing weights in your
bag – one heavy, one light. Do not have two differing measures in your house – one
large, one small. You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you
may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. For the Lord detests anyone
who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.
Why should these particular commandments be honored with this special reward?
Apparently, respect for one’s parents and honesty in business (the first and third
passage) are especially important, a matter of life and death. But what of the birds?
Why would mishandling some chicks or eggs result in such a severe penalty?
The commentators have no problem with this paradox; they tell us that the profound
emphasis on kindness to the smallest of creatures makes even more potent the
importance of kindness to other people. (kal v’chomer)
In fact, it may be more significant than that. The bird law figures in the life of one of the
legendary Rabbis of the Talmud: Elisha the Apostate, also known as “the Other.” And
Elisha’s story relates directly to the question in this sermon: Does God reward with life
and punish with death?
Of course, to many of us, the question is absurd on its face. The notion that God
shortens the life of the non-believer is almost a joke. In fact, George Carlin (of blessed
memory) made that very joke, saying, “There’s no God and if I’m wrong may he strike
the audience dead.” But to most Jews—and followers of other religions as well—it is the
core fear, the awe that signals their humility and submission. I’ll wager than many Jews
who attend shul only on Yom Kippur, even the sophisticated ones, are afraid that
something bad will happen to them if they do not. Modern Jews buy tens of thousands
of copies of When Bad Things Happen to Good People as though that were a real riddle, as
though bad things should come only to those whose misdeeds deserve it. For me,
whenever I am asked that question, I answer: Why shouldn’t bad things happen to
good people?
pg. 128
Elisha the Other
Elisha the Apostate did many things to annoy his Rabbi colleagues. He insisted that the
mind was improved by reading non-Jewish books and that communication with Greeks
could be civilizing rather than automatically corrupting. But the thing that drove him
from his people was the belief that life and death were NOT rewards and punishments
from God.
There are several versions of Elisha’s confrontation with this issue; he is written about
in both Talmuds and many miscellaneous midrashim. The version we’ll share tonight is
found in the Talmud of Jerusalem (Yerushalmi) and is the basis of Milton Steinberg’s
novel about Elisha, As a Driven Leaf.
One day Elisha is strolling and discussing Torah with his disciple Rabbi Meir when he
notices a man and young boy walking with a ladder toward a large tree. The man leans
the ladder against the tree and the boy scurries up to fetch the eggs in a nest. Knowing
the Torah, the boy shoos away the mother bird before he collects the nest full of eggs.
This event impresses and pleases Elisha and Meir. Elisha observes that the boy is
performing two mitzvot—honoring his father and shooing away the mother bird—both
of which promise long life. But at that same moment the boy falls from the ladder, hits
his head on the ground, and dies.
This event transforms Elisha. He sees in it that the promises of the Torah are false. Not
only one divine promise broken, but two! And at this point he pronounces that “there
is no justice and there is no judge,” renounces and rejects the Torah and, for the most
part, abandons the Jewish people.
Almost everyone in the Talmud is aghast at Elisha’s analysis and behavior. A typical
observation from Tractate Hagigah (15a-b):
What happened, he wondered, to this lad’s good life? What happened to his long life?
Unfortunately, Elisha was not aware of the interpretation Rabbi Jacob had already given
the passage: Thus you will have a good life -- in the next world, which is entirely good.
And a long one -- in the future life, where everything lasts long.
But this observation is just casuistry. We are told repeatedly in the Talmud that EVERY
Jew has a portion in the world to come—except for those who violate a few
proscriptions. And since the world to come is eternal, everyone lives just as long there.
pg. 129
And, to be particularly blunt, the plain meaning of the Torah says nothing about reward
in the afterlife. It speaks of long life, on this side of the next world. Just as do the prayers
in the Yom Kippur service.
My Yom Kippur Problem
Inherent in traditional Jewish metaphysics is the proposition that the length of our lives,
the day of our death, is a judgment—a righteous judgment—made by God. (Mourners
praise the dayan emeth at funerals.) Put more starkly, our ancestors believed that the
only way to receive our full allotment of years (120 or 70 years, depending where you
read) is to satisfy the judge.
Another example: The Torah, just before the Noah narrative, has indicated that God
wants humans to live only to 120 years. But in Chaye Sarah, Abraham and Sarah exceed
that limit. What is fascinating is that the Rabbis feel a need to explain why Sarah did not
live as long as Abraham. Genesis Rabah speculates that Sarah should have reached
Abraham’s age of 175 years, but 48 years were taken away because of her readiness to
dispute with Abraham over Hagar. It seems that her years were reduced when she said,
“Let Adonai judge between you and me.” R. Tanchuma says, “Whoever plunges early
into litigation does not escape from it unscathed.”
I am deeply concerned about this central theme of the Yom Kippur liturgy: namely, that
living another year is a dispensation from God, influenced (though not determined) by an
appraisal of our repentance, prayer, and good deeds. The notion that God, who--like the
Lord High Executioner in the Mikado-- has a list of people to be dispatched (in a
manner fitting their misdeeds) is hard to accept and, I think, almost certainly false. It is,
in short, a superstition, a belief in a causal connection between two things that have no
causal connection. And it is made even more bizarre by the notion that, if one is
especially well-behaved during the Days of Awe (especially if one makes a generous
donation) the death verdict can be “unsealed.” The Yom Kippur prayers, especially
Una Tanen Tokef , legitimize the single most wrong- headed notion in our religion:
namely, that people suffer and die as divine punishment.
This idea that one earns one’s longevity is the central motif (nowadays “meme”) in the
High Holidays liturgy. While most adults remember little from their Hebrew School
studies, they all remember the first time they heard about THE BOOK OF LIFE. This
image makes sense to children who have been raised on a diet of fairy tales and magic
epics. An aged God (looking just like the man in the Sistine Chapel painting) watches
pg. 130
humankind march past Him, deciding who gets “written” to live another year. And,
since none of us knows who has been marked for death, we’re all obliged to pray like
crazy, heap scorn on ourselves, grovel, supplicate… anything to get a death sentence
changed before it is sealed.
For a child, this is a deliberate harrowing, an indoctrination into what may be the most
psychologically crippling idea ever formed: That our imperfections are the explanation
for our deaths—especially for those that die young. “What did I do to deserve this?”
wonders the dying teenager. (My late son, dying from cancer a few weeks before his
43rd birthday, decided it was punishment for sins against his wife.)
What is worse is that this idea resonates with young children. Indeed, in psychiatric
terms, this belief is a form of infantilism: the kind of idea that very young children have
about the omniscience and omnipotence of their parents--which they should outgrow.
Children, like a good many adults, do not apprehend the Book of Life as metaphor. In
my own youth, for example, the Rabbis at Hebrew School used the Yom Kippur threat
as a way of scaring us into observance.
(I also remember vividly the story about the high priest entering the Holy of Holies on
Yom Kippur, with a rope tied around his waist, where he would pronounce the true,
full name of God. The rope was to pull him out, in case he mispronounced the name
and was struck dead.)
And, by simple extrapolation, our children grow up to think that not only death but
also lesser “punishments”—pain, disease, loneliness, childlessness, poverty, mental
illness—are all the consequences of failing to observe the commandments. The Sh’ma
promises rain its season (prosperity) to those who obey and, by inference, drought,
flood, and poverty to those who don’t. And in Moses’ great deathbed oration he warns
the Israelites that, if they fail to keep the commandments, they will be sold into slavery
and, moreover, NO ONE WILL BID ON THEM.
The core of the Yom Kippur liturgy is not Kol Nidre (a weird text with a saddening
melody, used to set the mood) but the Una Tanen Tokef a beautiful poem that imagines
the Book of Life (along with other books):
Let us now relate the power of this day’s holiness, for it is awesome and frightening. On
it Your Kingship will be exalted; Your throne will be firmed with kindness and You will
pg. 131
sit upon it in truth. It is true that You alone are the One Who judges, proves, knows, and
bears witness; Who writes and seals, Who counts and Who calculates…
This poem tells us that God not only decides who dies but how: who by water, who by
fire…. That God not only punishes our sins but suits the punishment to fit the crime.
To a sophisticated person, Yom Kippur is religious theater: a mixture of dark music,

hunger, and fatigue meant to enable a sense of humility, a resolution to improve
oneself, a reminder of how much pleasure there is in a single piece of bread. But to
children it is a horror show, a brainwashing that may cloud their thinking through the
rest of their lives.
Of course, not much can be done about my Yom Kippur problem. Everything about
Yom Kippur is exceedingly dear to Jews of all denominations. When early Reform Jews
(as well as Mordechai Kaplan) tried to excise the embarrassing text of Kol Nidre from the
liturgy, the reaction was overwhelmingly harsh. And I doubt I could convince any
mainstream synagogue to lift out the Una Tanen Tokef . Instead, my advice would be
that those who, like me, find this core idea repugnant should form independent havurot
to spend Yom Kippur together in prayer, meditation, and study. In particular, they
should reflect on the routine and widespread suffering and death of innocent people
and its implication for theism in general and Judaism in particular. And they should be
unafraid of where this thought process will lead them. As a mystical friend of mine
once put it, God does not require us to believe anything that is false.
Those of us who have exceeded our Biblical allotment of years also might do well to tell
our grandchildren and great grandchildren that, while there are many things we can do
to make ourselves healthier and protect ourselves from danger, there is no reason to
believe that failing to act righteously will shorten your life. Instead, let us teach
honorable behavior through reason and by our example and not by threats of divine
punishment.
Perhaps we should teach our children Einstein’s conception of God instead:
Judaism is not a creed: the Jewish God is simply a negation of superstition, an

imaginary result of its elimination. It is also an attempt to base the moral law on fear, a
regrettable and discreditable attempt…I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in
the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and
actions of human beings.
pg. 132

Jewish Murderers I Have Known

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Jewish Murderers I Have Known

And Other Essays for Modern Jewish Readers

Rabbi Edmond H. Weiss Ph.D.

In an era when it is nearly impossible to control or enforce copyright, I

Rabbi Edmond H. Weiss, Ph.D.

February 22, 2019

Jewish Murderers I have Known 01

I Don’t Worry ‘Bout a Thing (False Wisdom) 09

She is a Tree of Life (The Woman Cochmah) 17

Loshn Koydesh: The Persistence of Hebrew 25

How Many is God? Thinking about the Sh’ma 33

Rambam’s Thirteen Revisited 39

Was Albert Einstein a Jewish Prophet? 49

The Modern Jew and the Talmud 57

Two Excommunications (Spinoza, Kaplan) 63

The Rise of the Jewish Buddhists 71

Freud on Religion in General and Judaism in Particular 81

James to Dewey to Kaplan (Jewish Pragmatism) 89

John’s Jewish Problem (Jew-hatred in the Gospel of John) 95

Epicurus Visits the Great Assembly (Rami Shapiro’s Avot) 101

Why do we Read Ecclesiastes on during Sukkot? 109

The Skeptical Child 117

Who by Fire? My Yom Kippur Problem 123

Jewish Murderers I Have Known:

A Sermon for Shabbat Shoftim

The Unicorn Killer

Intellectual murderers—like Einhorn and Neulander—are often judged to be

Obviously, this field commission to the rank of “para-rabbi” exhilarated me and I

4Master of the Shofar

“I Don’t Worry ‘Bout a Thing ‘Cause I Know Nothin’s Gonna Be Alright”

Wisdom is different from knowledge or information. Knowledge is for the curious. If

Wisdom is something more, or at least something different. Wisdom contains the

Now, it is important to understand that, as matters of fact, many of these propositions

• Virtue is often rewarded.

The Case of Dorothy Gale

Job and the Coen Brothers

Rabbi Scott: … I too have had the feeling of losing track of

(He rises and goes to the window.)

Later, Larry gets to confer with senior Rabbi Nachter.

Larry: Doctor Sussman? I think I-yeah.

Larry: What happened to Sussman?

teeth for new messages; didn't see any; in time,

Larry: I don't want it to just go away! I want an

Larry: Why does he make us feel the questions if he's

Rabbi Nachter: (After a pause)

She is a Tree of Life

‫ֵ ֽﬠץ־חַ יִּ ים ִהיא לַ ַ ֽמּחֲ זִ ִיקים בָּ הּ ְ ֽות ְֹמכֶיהָ ְמאֻ ָ ֽשּׁר‬

It is a tree of life to those who take hold of it;

Gender and Pronouns

The remainder of the routine—with its straightforward questions and imponderable

Long life is in Wisdom’s right hand,

I am the word spoken by the Most High.

Alone I walked around the circle of the sky

But what is problematical is that, while a Christian has no objection to an incarnation of

Driven from every ridge –

Or consider this remark from Midrash Rabah:

The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding He established the

Wisdom vs. Other Kinds of Woman

Here she addresses her “sons”:

1:24 Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my

Rabbi Rami’s Divine Feminine

LOSHN KOYDESH: The Persistence of Hebrew

• Chomsky, Willam Hebrew: The Eternal Language Jewish Publication

Biblical Hebrew as a Spoken Language

It is a very serious error, moreover, in praising the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, to

German and Italian Jews. “The Christian countries employ a diversity of