VaYeshev, the Creation of Freaks and
the Light of Hannukah
All are obligated to come to the
Temple with a korban re’iah (offering to see God and be seen by God)
except a deaf mute, an imbecile and a minor, a person of unknown sex, a
hermaphrodite, women, unfreed slaves, the lame, the blind, the sick, the aged,
and one who is unable to go up [to the Temple] on foot. Who is [in this respect
deemed] a minor? Whoever is unable to ride on his father’s shoulders and ascend
from Jerusalem to the Temple Mount. [This is] the view of Beit Shamai.
But Beit say: Whoever is unable to
hold his father’s hand and go up from Jerusalem to the Temple Mount by foot,
for it is said, ‘three regalim’ (regalim means both ‘pilgrimage’ and ‘legs’).
Beit
Shammai say: The Re’iah/Pilgrimage offering
must be worth [at least] two pieces of silver, and the Hagigah/Festal offering one piece of silver. But Beit
Hillel say: The Re’iah offering must be
worth [at least] one piece of silver and the Hagigah offering
two pieces of silver.
(Hagigah,
first Mishnah)
One of my students – a specialist in
anti-discrimination law – vehemently objected to this Mishnah, labelling it,
and other stereotypes of Torah, discriminatory.
I had to wrestle with this objection for some
time.
The question “why does Hashem create freaks?”
is one that arose frequently when I tried to lead discussions about
homosexuality within the orthodox community.
This is not an easy question, but the
dialectic tension between the normal and the abnormal is absolutely central to
existence.
The Mishnah in Hagigah presents us with a
‘hard-sell’ list. The normal reaction to this list of ‘freaks’ is extremely
negative. The basic thesis of most liberal minded people (witness ‘Brown vs.
the Board of Education’) is that separate cannot be equal, because separate is
discriminatory by nature.
As the anti-discrimination lawyer in my class
pointed out, in American law we must be very careful to enumerate the instances
where we can discriminate. If we
don’t do this, a system based on utter equality becomes absurdly impossible. As
we have come to recognize, in the dialectic reality, you can’t simply go one
way or the other.
And so, the Tractate Hagigah starts out by
enumerating all these disabilities because, as the Mei Hashiloach emphasizes,
everyone has a disability. We are all born with our own hisaron/deficit, and, in the final analysis, this deficit
becomes even more important than our talents in our quest to discover purpose
and meaning in our lives.
Each person’s disability is an automatic kvetch to God. From this week’s Parsha, we can see that
when Joseph disappeared, Jacob became depressed, the lights went out and the Ruach Hakodesh departed from the family.
Here in the opening Mishnah of Hagigah we are
trying to explain the Pilgrimage – the ‘going up
on foot to see Hashem’ – and from this week’s Parsha we learn that if you have
a kvetch it is not possible
to see God. Hashem can only be seen b’simcha/in joy. The Hagigah
offering is a simcha-festive offering,
and so even those who are exempt from the Re’iah offering
can still come to the Temple with the Hagigah offering.
Through studying these disabilities that stop
us from going up to the Beit Hamikdash we can arrive at the later section of
Hagigah concerning the four rabbis who went into the Pardes. The Gemara goes on to examine each disability in
some detail. According to the teachings of the Mei Hashiloach, study of the
dark, negative space is a critical way of asserting the positive. This is
derived from the general Torah rule of tzur m’rah, v’asey tov – create
the negative space, and then you can do well.
It takes quite a lot of work to convince
people that this perspective on abnormalities and deficits isn’t just a way of
patronizing or rationalizing and inherently flawed system.
Jews have a tremendous stake in the whole
process of persecution; we have always been at the forefront of civil rights
movements and campaigns. Perhaps the whole idea of anti-Semitism and of being
Jewish may be for us to teach people about the concepts of mob psychology,
scape-goating and projection. These are things that create very destructive
group dynamics, and because we Jews experience them first-hand, we are able to
alert the rest of the world to their dangers. The whole Messianic concept is
based on liberating the group from the mob.
‘Group-think’ destroys the world. The
question is, do Jews engage in ‘group-think’ and the mob mentality? This week’s
Parsha, in its account of the sale of Joseph by his brothers, also teaches us
that ten men are a mob. The basis of the Minyan is the mob.
The Baal Shem Tov wrote only one major
teaching. (All the rest of his teaching was given orally, and recorded later by
his disciples). This one written document is a letter from the Baal Shem Tov to
his brother-in-law, Rabbi Gershon Kitover, in which he notes that the Torah –
like the Mishnah in Hagigah – is full of distinctions. Some people are included
in obligations, others are excluded. The entire Torah, says the Baal Shem Tov,
is about making distinctions, and if you make the distinctions with humility,
you create constructive helpful opposition that leads to hamtaka/sweetening and unity. This is an instance of Gevurah-discipline (the process of making
distinctions) creating a fruitful womb.
If, however, these distinctions are made with arrogance and pride, then
everything grinds to a halt, and all is destroyed.
This is a basic rule, and it is intimately
connected to the insistence of the Gemara that we must never, under any
circumstances, humiliate anyone.
Law tries to create norms, and so the law may
say, for instance, that homosexuality is an abomination, and yet, according to
the teaching of the Ishbitzer, God’s awesome imprint on the world is that
absolutely everything is unequal. Law and our God-given lumpy reality are in a
natural dialectic with each other. This tension is evident in the
anti-discrimination laws in the United States. These laws are very broad and
therefore susceptible to all sorts of binds – for instance law suits brought by
obese people against airlines that can’t accommodate them in seating designed
for people of average weight.
Nonetheless, the Torah insists that we need
laws of this kind, because unless we impose them on our ‘lumpy reality’, people
will eat each other alive. Nature is cruel, and so, the name of God that
corresponds to judgement – Elokim – has the same
numeric value as Hateva – nature. Without
these laws, we are left with a Darwinian world in which no one is protected in
their inequality.
One of the reasons given by the Midrash for
the rape of Dinah is that the rape was the consequence of Jacob putting Dinah
in a trunk before meeting Esau, because he wanted to prevent Esau from seeing
her and marrying her. According to this Midrash, Jacob was guilty of a lack of
confidence, in assuming that Esau would corrupt Dinah if he married her. He was
not open to the possibility of Dinah transforming Esau.
My teacher, Rabbi Twerski, used this Midrash
to criticize yeshivot and the orthodox world in general, when it becomes
disconnected from the outside world. His teaching was that the tendency of frum people is to exclude and protect. Dinah here
represents the Torah, and due to an inferiority complex and a lack of
confidence they lock the Torah in a box instead of allowing it to be a winning
proposition and a winning philosophy out in the world. The assumption is always
that if the Torah and the world face off, Torah will lose and the world will
win. This is a very unhealthy inferiority complex suffered by Torah Jews. We
need to have the confidence that we can meet the world head-on. We don’t need
this trunk to hide in.
In my life, there is a definitive line of
Rabbis who have taught me inclusion and inclusiveness. These rabbis taught me
the Torah as a challenge, as opposed to other Rabbis I have learned with, who
treat the Torah defensively, as a kind of hide-out, in which case it becomes
very exclusive. The yeshivot that I know of are very intolerant of aberrant
behaviour and influences. Even if I could prove to them that a student was extraordinarily
capable and has enormous Torah potential, they would not take him in if he was,
for instance, a cross-dresser. And yet I know that my rebbe, or Rabbi
Carlebach, or the Ishbitzer would not hesitate to study with a cross-dresser.
In the Eighteenth Century, the Seer of Lubin
was vehemently attacked for bringing all sorts of ‘passionate evil doers’ into
his Hassidic court. The Seer’s response
was; “I’d rather have a passionate evil doer than a luke-warm Hassid.” He
understood that a passionate person who is making a mistake is much easier to
transform and bring to tshuva/repentance than
someone who is not passionate, and not excited in any direction.
This is a very integrative Torah, for here we
can tie the concept of the mistake-hero, who learns his life’s purpose from his
biggest, most repetitive error with the image of the dancing circle at the end
of the Tractate Ta’anith. In this
circle, everyone is unequal, and everyone is equidistant from Hashem. We are
all unequal, and the whole challenge is in how you react to your inequality. Do
you look at what someone else has and say, “I want that”, or do you investigate
your own dark place?
Finding light in the darkest place is the
definition of Channukah.
The upshot of the Ishbitzer’s Torah is really
the rationale for Torah as inclusion rather than exclusion. The other way can
lead to a dichotomized situation, where the opening Mishnah of Hagigah is read
as a series of exclusions. Rabbis who read the Torah this way really actively
exclude people – they don’t want to have hermaphrodites or homosexuals around.
The Baal Shem Tov’s critique Torah Judaism is
that whenever the havdalot/distinctions are
applied with arrogance, this is a destructive situation. The havdalot of Torah are there to help people refine their
ability to make distinctions in the world. This is the fundamental process of
Torah.
The solution is not to obliterate
distinctions and make everyone the same, for doing this involves tremendous
human control.
God creates freaks so that man won’t feel
that he can control the whole world through normative laws. The aberrations are Hashem’s presence in the world.
In terms of American culture, the melting pot
is ubiquitous, and so differences are seldom celebrated.
In this perspective, being a Jew in a
non-Jewish world is excellent practice in autonomy – in being able to be
aberrant. From here we gain the
perspective needed to be ohr l’goyim/light of
nations and to teach about the essence of the human condition.
I call this Ishbitzer teaching “inner kvetch work”. According to the Ishbitzer,
every one of us has some reason to complain to Hashem that life is unfair. In order to have a relationship with God,
you must investigate this dark inner place. Each person has an aberration, to
which they may respond with an ‘inner kvetch’, and this is what must be
investigated in order to access Hashem. The basic Pilgrimage we are working
towards is the inner pilgrimage, just as in the Tractate Hagigah, these opening
pages dealing with differentiation and discrimination lead towards the four
Rabbis who go into the Pardes. Three of the rabbis see only themselves, instead
of Hashem, and only Rabbi Akiva can enter in peace and leave in peace (see
Hagigah 14b).
In this week’s Parsha, a number of things come to a head. Jacob, in his
response to seeing Joseph’s bloodied coat, teaches us that depression prevents
the inner pilgrimage and blocks access to Hashem. It is because of this that we
place the Channukia at a height lower than forty-one inches – because the Shechina/Divine
Presence can’t descend lower than forty-one inches above the ground. We place
the Channukia below where the Shechina can reach, because in order to
make the pilgrimage, we must bring light into the darkest of all places – those
depressed places inside ourselves where even Hashem can’t reach.
This is why the Gemara in Hagigah dissects and examines each of the
disabilities described in the Mishnah. We need to understand each one
individually in order to understand which aspect of the darkness we are
addressing.
In the United States, we don’t want to do this. This is why the
disabled, the mentally unstable, and the aged are hidden away in America. We
get them off the street and shut them away in special homes, because people
don’t want to see them – they don’t want to peer into that part of the mirror.
In this week’s Parsha, the family of Jacob becomes embroiled in a lie.
This is the darkest moment in the life of Jews in the Torah – darker even than
slavery. Everyone is unconscious. The Midrash says that after their collusion,
none of the brothers can look at each other, or at their father, because they
didn’t want to see his pain. Immediately after the sale of Joseph, the Torah
says “Judah went down” (Genesis 38:1). There is great entropy in this place in
the Torah – a descent into darkness where everyone moves away from each other.
The symptom of this is Judah’s marriage to a Canaanite woman – an act that up
to this point has been strictly forbidden within the family.
The darkness is propounded in a corollary act of Judah’s. He is
attracted to Tamar, but instead of expressing his attraction, he arranges for
her to be his daughter-in-law. The Gemara in Sanhedrin calls a father who keeps
his daughter unmarried so she can continue serving him a “nakedly wicked man”.
Judah’s action is comparable to this, in that he takes Tamar as a wife for his
son, his heir. Like his sons, Judah can’t see the greatness of Tamar’s neshama/soul, and they just want her to be the ‘trophy wife’. This is a
dichotomized world in which there is a ‘trophy wife’ who is good for sex and
good to show off to your friends, as opposed to the wife who is good for having
babies and good to talk to. In Judah’s behaviour we find the Torah’s symptom of
non-salvation. Salvation is in the tikun/repair of the
relationship of Adam and Hava, in which men see and appreciate women for their
souls. Conversely, the main symptom of tzimtzum/constriction and
darkness is when men divide women into those for conversation and family, and
those for sex and showing off to their friends.
Here we turn the scales on the Mishna in Hagigah, to say that often the
talent and the duty become the real disability, while the disabilities
themselves become the bridge to your purpose. The tragedy of the favoured,
talented, beautiful person is that this person becomes addicted to all the
positive attention, and, if it is not forthcoming, falls apart. This is the
image of Joseph going down into the pit.
There is a parallel structure between Joseph going down into the pit and
the pilgrim going up to the mountain. These are parallel journeys. Joseph’s going down into the pit (and again
later into Pharaoh’s dungeon) is his realization that he is the cause of most
of his pain. He realizes that through his relationship to his own talent and
beauty, he has brought pain upon himself. This is Joseph’s pilgrimage down.
Joseph can’t go up to the mountain, because this wouldn’t work for him. For him
to see God, he has to go into the pit/dungeon.
Joseph’s mother, Rachel, also brings about her own demise. She says,
“Give me a child or I will die” (Genesis 30:1), and she dies in childbirth. For
Rachel, children are the currency with which she can compete with her sister.
The unequal world, the lumpy reality, is the activator of choice. According
to the Ishbitzer, the fundamental choice is between jealousy - in which you give away all your power to
someone else because they have what you want – or the expansiveness through
which you feel a breath and a relief in your hisaron/disability. Everything
else emanates like a spring from this fundamental choice.
Tamar is the answer to Joseph and Rachel. She is very beautiful, but she
is willing to let go of her beauty. She could use her beauty to control the men
in her life and get what she wants, but she chooses not to. Instead, she does a
most extraordinary thing. She becomes a kedesha/holy prostitute.
Part of religious service in the Canaanite religion was to have sex with
holy prostitutes at the harvest festival. The sex was believed to generate a sympathetic
magic that produced a better harvest.
In a similar vein, Dan Brown’s historical novel The DaVinci Code
contends that an entire cult grew up around the idea that Jesus was secretly
married to Mary Magdalene, and through the children of this union there was a
continuation of the sex/fertility religiosity that was the opposite of celibacy
as a way of connecting to God.
Tamar takes off her mourning clothes and becomes a holy prostitute. For
Judah, after losing his family, his two sons, and his wife, the ultimate act
was to go to a pagan ceremony and have sex with a holy prostitute. This is as
far away from God as you can get in the Torah.
The first Hannukah light was lit by Tamar.
How did she do it?
First, by introducing the idea of eravon/‘collateral’ (Genesis
38:17), she demonstrated that the world is not all entropy – that we are in
fact connected to each other. We can trust each other and back each other up.
Second was the brilliance of her using the phrase haker na/
‘please recognize this’, (Ibid 25) when revealing to Judah that he is the
father of her unborn children. This is the exact phrase used by the brothers
when they asked Jacob to identify Joseph’s bloodied coat (Genesis 37:31). When
Judah heard the same words from Tamar he was stunned. He knew that when he had
first uttered those words, the lights had gone out. They are just two simple
words, but the genius behind Tamar’s use of them is incredible.
Everything in Torah has been going down and down to this point, which is
literally the darkest place. Every year this darkest moment lines up with
Channukah – the Festival of Lights.
The Beit Din called by Judah convicted Tamar and sentenced her to death,
so when Tamar says Haker na/ ‘recognize this’, Judah has the option of
burning the evidence and plunging the world into more denial and more
unconsciousness. When instead, Judah responds, “she is more righteous than I”
(38:26), the lights go on, and in that moment the Jewish people and Mashiach
are born. Family awareness – the return to ruach hakodesh - is
born, and everything starts to come together and go back up.
All the core ideas of tshuva come together in Parshat VaYeshev,
and through them we can understand the Mishnah in Hagigah.
Prostitution is considered aberrant by Torah, and yet from the Torah’s
two prostitutes – Tamar and Rahav – comes all the awareness of Moshiach. Rahav
teaches the spies not to be afraid of the inhabitants of Jericho (Joshua 2) –
she shows them that the great walls of Jericho are really walls of fear.
In the cases of both Tamar and Rahav, we have Canaanite prostitutes
teaching the princes of the Jewish people how to have confidence and find God.
A story found in the Gemara (Menachot 44a) connects this concept of the
power of insight of the prostitute in Parshat YaYeshev with the Mishnah from
Hagigah cited above. In this story, a man is prevented from having sex with a
prostitute by his tzitzith, which fly up and slap him on the face when
he tries to climb the seven beds upon which she is waiting. The seven beds parallel
the seven heavens through which a person must travel in order to reach God.
When the prostitute sees what has happened, she descends to the floor,
and asks the man if he found a flaw in her beauty. He replies, “No, it is these
four witnesses (the tzitzith) that prevented me”. She takes his name,
and the names of his teacher and his yeshiva, then divides her fortune into
three parts, one third for the government, one third for the poor, and one
third for herself, travels with only her bedclothes to the yeshiva, and
converts to Judaism. She then marries the man, and the story ends by saying
“Those very bedclothes which she had spread for an illicit purpose she now
spread out for him lawfully.”
The Gemara in Hagigah (3a), in its discussion of those who are exempt
from ascending to the Temple, includes “one that is lame in one foot”, because
the word Regalim (meaning “feet” as well as “pilgrimage”) refers to two
feet, not one. The Gemara goes on to quote Shir Hashirim (7:2) ‘How lovely are
your feet in sandals, O daughter of the noble!’ ‘Noble’, says the Gemara,
refers to the Patriarch Abraham. The commentary here notes that ‘the word Nadiv/noble
means literally “one who offers himself voluntarily”. Abraham was the first
whose heart volunteered him to recognize his Creator. All subsequent
noble-hearted ones of the nation followed Abraham’s lead in converting to
Judaism. When the people of Israel make their pilgrimage to the Temple Mount
for the Festivals, they in turn are praised as the ‘daughter of the noble-hearted
one’. That is, they demonstrate a semblance of the dedication of the spirit
that Abraham exhibited when he ascended the very same mountain in order to
sacrifice his son. The pilgrims agreed to leave their homes and affairs behind
them in order to do God’s will, just as Abraham did.’
With this, the pilgrimage becomes the model of the Akeida. The spirit
with which we ascend the Temple Mount is the spirit of Abraham at the Akeida.
Abraham was grappling with his darkness as he ascended. His darkness was abuse
he suffered from his own father, and this is one of the greatest disabilities
of all, and one from which it is very difficult to emerge. If Abraham simply
tries to be nice because his own father was mean, Hashem would say, this is not
true Chessed. He must literally go up to the Temple Mount, because the
whole idea of the sacrifice is to sacrifice a part of yourself. You sacrifice
your own illusion, your investment in your own disability. The word regel
fits well here, because the term oley regel/go up on foot, can also mean
“raising our habits”.
The Pilgrimage Festival is not a holiday like the Fourth of July. It is
an investigation of the darkest place. Unless we do this, we can’t achieve the simcha/joy
necessary to see and be seen by God.
And so the Gemara goes on to refer to the parable of the favourite child
going into the pit: ‘R. Kahana said: R. Nathan b. Minyomi said in the name of
R. Tanhum: ‘What is the meaning of the verse; and the pit was empty, there
was no water in it? (Genesis 37:14)
We pray from the darkest places, and so Joseph’s pit – which was empty,
and there was no water in it, is the pit of prayer. Mayim/water
represents Torah and insight. The Gemara says that instead of water, there were
snakes and scorpions in the pit. In that moment we were faced with the threat
of going all the way back to Cain and Abel, and if this was the case, there
would be no change in the whole Book of Genesis.
The Ishbitzer teaches that while he was in the pit, Joseph had to
absolutely still himself from all the hatred and grudges he harboured against
his brothers. In order to survive the pit, he had to remain totally still.
This is the pit of prayer. Our needs can destroy us, and so, when we
come to pray the Shemonah Esrei, we need to be in that pit, and call out to
God from the depths.