Sunday, June 30, 2013

Bein HaMitzarim: Tefillin, Korbanot, Yahadut, and Yisrael

This is a post I am only sensing as I write - unlike other posts, which are more thought out and fully conceived, this is more along the lines of me feeling my way through the thoughts, concepts, and their meanings to me as I go along. Its connection to our aliyah is perhaps tedious and tangential, but then again, so is much of the grandeur in this life.

This time of year lends itself to melancholy, to feelings of being adrift perhaps misunderstood by most as the "lazy days of summer". Our calendar, and the pulse of time as we experience it through our Moadim with the Divine, encapsulates this feeling of breached boundaries (on personal, national, historical, and existential levels, among others) so neatly ensconced in the Halachot of accepting the trappings of mourning on ourselves. No shaving, haircuts, music, new clothing...and while we entertain ourselves with meaningless debates about what the Beit HaMikdash means, and if perhaps with the establishment of the State of Israel the Moadim of Shiva Asar B'Tammuz and Tisha B'Av themselves are no longer necessary, and what it is we are missing in our lives without a Temple, and so on.

I subscribe to the (self-invented) doctrine of "be where you are" - your boundaries of Self, however flimsy and prone to being smashed by external (or perhaps internal) events and stimuli, is your current answer to "Ayekah", and where your interaction with the Universe lies. There is no use trying to artificially move them to something else. Therefore, whatever mitzvot or ideas are in your realm of consciousness, that is where you are - arbitrarily deciding to "concentrate" on another mitzva or idea only succeeds in turning you into an ideologue, a robot performing empty actions, and a hollow self.
(This is not to say I condone not keeping mitzvot you do not "feel", etc. One keeps Halacha as he finds his way along the Path it is meant to be. I am simply saying that where you are is where the magical nexus of Self, G-d, idea, action, meaning and Existence meet, and it is those actions and thoughts that are meaningful within the relationship of Self and G-d/Existence.)

However, entropy is a law in this universe, and all of us know too well the feelings of lethargy and hopelessness for change that this time of year brings, as well as anyone with Existential dreams must face any time they take inventory of their lives. It is hard to leave the path you're on, harder to Know the Path you are trying to walk, and perhaps hardest of all to Walk before Him and Be Whole (Hit'halech lifanai v'heyei Tamim). As Jerry and the Dead once sang,
"There is a road
no simple highway
between the dawn 
and the dark of night
and if you go
no one may follow
that path is for
your steps alone"
And it is that Existential loneliness we feel most of all, strongest of all, when trying to find our Way, trying to find ourselves. (It is not an exaggeration to say I have written extensively about this before.)



Switch gears for a moment. The hallmark of the Avoda in the Beit HaMikdash was Korbanot. Today they are seen as antiquated, barbaric, needless slaughter; we live in a world of PETA and animal rights, a world very much formed by a people that used the term "bloody" as a pejorative, a world so determined to surf the surface of things that any reminder of the redness of Life coursing through veins of any living creature, be it human or marsupial, bovine or aquatic, that it immediately attempts to rectify it with "humane" concerns such as painless slaughter for meat production (and EU bans on shechita) or chemical substitutions for animal byproducts or organically raised livestock or whatever the humanist flavor du jour is.

And us, Yisrael, we are told B'Damayich Chayi, we are told Ki haDam hu HaNefesh, we are told of the glory that was the Beit HaMikdash awash in the blood of the Korban Pesach ankle deep. We are commanded not to eat blood, but to cover it - a practice demanding respect for, and awareness of, both blood itself and the soil that we see as its source. We recount the Plague of Blood, the Plague of the firstborn delivered in blood, the blood of the prototypical paschal lamb in Egypt smeared on the doorposts saving us from that plague. On Yom Kippur we read/recount/relive the Avoda of the Kohen Gadol as he catches blood, mixes blood, smears blood...and then throw a lamb off a cliff to meet a bloody end. The Western notions of never spilling blood of any kind for any reason (though look at Western history for how well that has turned out) are NOT Torah in origin, no matter how much apologists and the misinformed call it a "Judeo-Christian value".

What is it about blood that is so central to our practices, to our tradition and understanding of the nexus of human and Divine?

I found my own understanding/answer watching a video out of Syria. Now, I am not a squeamish sort, and perhaps possess the right amount of Cluster B Personality Disorder to be relatively stoic in the face of gore. I have watched many, many videos of torture, beheading, executions, and other gifts to the world by our deluded and subhuman "cousins" (not an inclusive term, simply referring to those of them that are). Yet there was something about this particular video, and my own inner emotional state while watching it, that...enlightened me.
Beheadings, especially those done to inflict maximum pain before death, are of a category of their own when it comes to digesting violence. A small knife hacking away at a person's neck while they are held there, helpless, reduced from free human being to waiting for the release of death while feeling every cut and thrust...it fills one watching with rage on behalf of the victim, and fear that life is so short, so brutal, so fickle, so...final, when it ends.

It was this moment, this realization of carpe diem, mixed with the acknowledgement and awareness of your truly puny mortal self, tinged with a clarion call to ignore the petty and worthless and demand, insist, CHASE realness and reality with every fiber of your being - this was the experiential awareness of one who confessed his fallacies and shortcomings, his being lost in the sands of time, digging for a way out when he should have been walking along the Path, on the head of a living animal and watched it be slaughtered and burned. What a consciousness altering, Self-creating (or re-creating, to be precise) experience! What an existential boundary breaker, a way out of the entropy and into the Path, the Way, the Walking Whole.

That moment of Self-realization (literally - realizing your Self, your Being, your existential essence removed from its cement shoes it had fashioned for itself) is what is meant to be adorned as tefillin each day. The pesukim inside the boxes, themselves made of animal hide and halachically required to be of something edible (which now we can understand somewhat!), revolve around the self-realizing moment when G-d Chose us, individual and nation, removed us from Egypt and slavery and insists Be "where the falling star meets the rising ape"; YOU are Man, Be Mine. Know who you are, and Be One. Tefillin are placed on heart and mind, in the dichotomous nature of emotion and intellect, literally binding those ideas and ideals to the spheres that lose track of it.

And it is this that we are meant to Be, meant to Become, meant to provide the world; this Oneness, this binding (for after all, the Jewish people is G-d's Tefillin) of reality to the day to day, the realization of self and existence, the nexus of man and Divine in the redness and richness of Life, and being aware of it.

Our country, our peoplehood is predicated on this - it is who we are, whether we want to be that or not. The Jew has succeeded in bringing science, reason, balance to the world - the ad hoc explanations of sun gods and divine moods are largely gone from the public mind. Yet the care, the responsibility, and yes, the guilt that is instinctive in a people who know that every action counts, every theory matters, every life an expression of a multiverse of Oneness, and all minutiae needing to be weighed against the Path of progress, of evolution, of Self-realizing Man - that remains to be taught. In some ways, we have begun - an army that aborts objectives for innocents caught in crossfire, an almost pathological need to see every human given a chance to Become themselves, even at our expense(!), a nation that takes its dead so seriously it is prepared to shoot itself in the foot (perhaps literally) to return their blood to the Earth it came from...but there is a long, long way to go, and while it is not politically correct in today's world to speak of this, and it is not fashionable to have a desire for sacrificial rites, the Path ends at a Temple of Prayer for all Mankind, where all can have the opportunity and blessing of breaking the barriers that hold us in our finite, limited, day to day selves instead of Becoming that which we are ALL meant to Be.

May this period of Bein Hamitzarim, between the walls, inside the narrow confines and constrictions of the petty and the meaningless, be the last, and may we reach the plane of Existence where all can see, and want, a Temple that grants us our Selves by teaching us of Life.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

"Your Brothers Go To War, and You Sit Here?"


One of the hot button issues in Israel these days is the national universal draft, being spoken about in the guise of "shivyon b'netel" (equality of burden). Having never been in the army, nor having a clue as to the real ideas fueling both sides (who knows what is in the hearts of men?), I havent said anything about this until now.

Then the Satmar movement staged a rally in Manhattan, and I found myself being quite mad.
(For those of you who follow me on twitter [@tzvizucker], you are well aware of my basic disagreements with the "Torah True Jews" and my attempts to combat their propaganda spreading. But, to me, it was a "milchamto shel torah", a difference in views within the guise of determining the Halacha [literally, the Way or the Path] we are to take. I never doubted their sincerity, nor their bona fides as Bnei Yisrael Saba. Until now...)

Ostensibly, the protest was a way to voice disagreement with the current draft policy of the Israeli government. In reality, Satmar decided to go all in and make the issue the existence of Israel. Their speakers compared Zionists to Amalek, asserting the existence of Israel is itself a rebellion against HaShem. The closing speaker, Rabbi Yaakov Weiss (principal of Satmar yeshiva in Kiryas Yoel) warned: “Hear, O’ Israel. We are close today in a war against the enemies of religion. Today’s protest is not ending tonight. Today’s protest is only the start of an outright war against our enemies, the haters of religion.” (-YWN)

His is a telling statement - the enemy, to this group, are those opposed to religion; not to Jews, but to Judaism. And that is a perversion of the highest order. There are shiv'im panim laTorah, but I am willing to go to battle on the assertion that this is NOT one of them. And I will explain why.

The basic question of "Who is a Jew" is perhaps the most dynamic, well-discussed debate across world history. That we are "the People of The Book" is taken for granted, that we are the seed of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov not as widely held in its literal sense, that we are the Chosen Nation by G-d a matter of raging debate (and indeed rage). This is a question we have not entirely satisfactorily answered for ourselves - are we a people, a nation, a religion, a movement, an "ethnoreligious" tribe? All? None? There is one universal understanding, however, and that is that the identity of a Jew is one that supersedes his ritual observance - whether this assertion in made by Hitler, YS'V, or by Journeys ("...and the pintele Yid will never disappear"), or anyone in between. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew - there are none whose Jewishness is held to be defective, or lacking, or considered inferior.

Until recent times. There has been a growing push within the Orthodox/Haredi circles to begin judging Jews by their observance of Halacha (and usually the Halacha of the poskim of the movement doing the judging). There has been a new intellectual insanity that has been taught to a generation of us now, the one of "True Judaism". 
Even within this development/phenomenon, there are levels of tolerance and respect for "dissident" viewpoints. Some communities are more open to accepting that there may be other views, other opinions, other possibilities, than others.

And the least among them all is Satmar. 
Carried into the United States by Rav Yoyl Teitelbaum, Satmar Chassidus is one of extremes. An eyewitness, holocaust survivor once told me how they were practically Amish - they refused to use electricity or modern technology, claiming the right way to live life was that of their ancestors. (In this sense, Rav Yoyl was a moderate, encouraging them to live as modern humans do, and to this end he started newspapers and encouraged people to go work.) There is no compromise, no room for ambiguity, no ability to tolerate ambivalence in their worldview or attitudes. This is a movement so far off its rails that it no longer has a direction. There are two mirror Rebbes, themselves the children of a Rebbe that most of the community did not accept. Their followers fight each other in the streets over which Rebbe is the "real one" ( http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=19871 ), insisting that was is "right" matters more than anything else; they are willing destroy families, and children, on the altar of "proper Mitzva observance" ( http://www.unpious.com/2013/05/ex-hasidic-mother-loses-custody-of-children/ ) and worse (see all the links regarding Nechamia Weberman further down).

And their singlehanded crusade to end the State of Israel is an example of this attitude in action.

Anyone who has had the painful experience of talking to one of the charlatan "Torah True Jews" quickly learns their intellectual semantic argument that "Zionism is not Judaism". Never mind the obvious stupidity and logical fallacy to such an assertion, as the entire Torah and a good portion of the Siddur talks about our longing to return to Eretz Yisrael, or that our peoplehood is predicated on HaShem's Giving that Land to our forefathers. And forget the insanity of denying the open miracle of the State's creation on the ashes of Churban Europe. This argument is the best ammunition one can give to those trying to kill Jews - it removes the antisemitic label from their actions. "I dont hate Jews, I only hate political Zionism!" I have seen many use this artificial and arbitrary distinction as their excuse for their advocacy that Israel be dismantled, attacked, or destroyed. That they can point to "authentic looking Jews" who claim the Torah is the source of this argument only makes it so much stronger.

That they think the Torah promotes (literal) sin'at chinam, and that actions which promote division and discord within Klal Yisrael are, to them, optimal and desirable, speaks volumes to their warped views of Torah. That they believe they have the right to decide who is considered a "True Jew" and who is not, and flatly ignore and denigrate all those who disagree with their opinions and dogma is a clear indication that is they who have been Poresh Min HaKlal. 
(I am particularly referring to their treatment of Rav Shteinman, shlitah, of whom they have referred to as "Shteinman, the editor of the Yated newspaper" - here are a few links: 




This worldview that they promote as "Torah" is one that can despise and seek to destroy a victim of abuse, while supporting (financially and emotionally/reputationally) an abuser of such horrific proportions that his victims carry literal and figurative scars years later. 
(I refer to the now infamous Weberman case. Here are a few varied links:






This worldview is one that believes the ends justify the means, so much so that they shamelessly propagandize the "true torah view" on the internet, and Twitter, while simultaneously declaring that the Internet is assur (and ignoring their own Rabbonim who continue to insist they not use it), they have an organized intimidation squad to enforce their (draconian) understanding of tzni'ut ( http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york-news/weberman-abuse-case-exposes-role-shadowy-modesty-committees ) and they create forged letters from Litvish Gedolim in an effort to convince their followers to attend their anti-Israel rallies and lend the legitimacy of numbers and presence to their agenda. 

And it is this worldview that cannot be accepted, cannot be given legitimacy by the Jewish world at large, cannot be shrugged off as a "political disagreement" or some other halfhearted refusal to see things for what they are. A war has been declared, one dedicated to eradicating the Shem Yisrael of all those who have it save themselves; it is a war being waged by de-legitimizing the safety and security of millions of Acheinu Bnei Yisrael in the name of one Sefer of a Daas Yachid's understanding of an agadeta Gemara being the only Truth that should be accepted by all.



I am reminded of the recounting in Sefer Melachim (perek chaf) of Achav's fatal battle, that he goes to war against hopeless odds because Ben Hadad asked for the Sefer Torah he wrote. This is Achav, he who told Eliyahu haNavi he didnt keep ANYTHING in the Torah - and he had already accepted Ben Hadad's demands for his wives, children, and treasury. But when it came to the honor of the Torah, that he NEVER KEPT, he was willing to battle and die. Today's Israel is probably more comparable to Achav's Israel than, lets say, Yoshiyahu's Yehuda. But, like Achav, it does stand for Torah, identifies itself with Torah, and BY the Torah. And is very much part of the Klal of Yisrael.

And when there is a war, waged by those who pretend to be "brothers", trying to destroy the flimsy and nascent Klal we have and have been rebuilding for 70 years, how can you sit there and not join the battle?

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Home is Where the Heart Is

This is not some mushy post about Libi BaMizrach, though it could be.  This is the "we found an apartment for us!" post.

S we found an apartment in Baka/Talpiyot (right in between them, in fact). Great deal, furnished apartment, and an amazing property manager who was patient, informative, and willing to work with us. 

We have our home at Home, starting August 15. And we couldn't be more excited to move in. 

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Complications, of Complications, of Complications

So we figured out a plan that would help us solve our current problems with aliyah, and it got blown up five minutes later. 

We are stuck in limbo until the darling wife's paperwork comes through. We also had our temporary housing plan derailed by an illness in the family. To kill both birds with one stone, we thought of taking an extended pilot trip (for two to three months), finding a furnished rental, set up cell phones and bank  accounts, and networking for jobs/business opportunities. Then we would return to the States, settle our affairs, and make aliyah from there back to our set up home in Israel. Simple, neat solution.

Then my brother decided to get married (shhhh, its not official yet). Due to interesting and complicated circumstances, his wedding will probably be atthe end of August, and precludes us from going for a long period of time this summer. It also brings our aliyah into direct conflict with the Chagim, something we were trying to avoid. 

So now we're back to the drawing board - still need a place to live, and now our anticipated date is ambiguous at best. 

This is really, really, really hard.