February 2018

Terumah – it is a parsha about gifts. It is a parsha named “gifts.” Terumah is a collective noun: this parsha is about the collective.

Speak to the Israelite people, YHVH tells Moses. Offer everyone whose heart is moved to generosity, to thankfulness the sweet opportunity to bring something of themselves to the Holy One. And the people respond, with gifts of gold and silver and copper, with gifts of blue, purple, and crimson yards, with tanned ram skins and acacia wood, with oil for lighting, spices for anointing and burning incense, with lapus lazuli for the ephod and the breast piece, with the means to build a sanctuary.

It is a parsha filled with magical objects, with golden cheruvim who will spread out their wings and shield the ark in their care. With a lampstand adorned with metal petals curling about its seven branches and cups fashioned in the form of almond blossoms. The tabernacle itself will be made of fine twisted linen, of deep shades of purple and blue and wine-red, held together with gold clasps.

It is a parsha of abundance, a parsha, Chassidic tradition tells us, which contains the heart and substance of the Torah in its second verse. These are tzedakah and good deeds. The point of all our texts is reduced to this commandment: Give of yourself. Do good things. Gold and silver, as Torat Moshe tells us, may belong to God, but the pure willingness of heart is ours to give.

Just a few verses later, God says, “Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” The preposition at work here is bet. While that can certainly be translated to “among,” bet also means “with” or “in.” The Holy One, it appears, is suggesting that humanity build a sanctuary so God can live in them. Not in an edifice. Not in a structure, however beautiful, but in human hearts: “Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell in them.”

If only.

It has been another week in the maelstrom of rage. We are living in such an age. It is infecting every aspect of our lives. It begins with a self-righteousness that is permeating every single social and news media platform. It ends with dismissing every compromise, with murdering others by word and deed.

The Dreamers have been crushed – again. Children have been slaughtered in their schools – again. Blame has been cast, again.

So many of us are feeling overwhelmed – even bullied – by the ceaseless, unending vitriol. We read Terumah and long for human hearts to be sanctuaries of peace. Our hearts are bruised and battered. We are exhausted. For every day, in every way, we are bombarded by the rage that so many Americans seem to hold dear – as if it were their most precious possession. Can this be our country, our world?

How can we make a sanctuary for God when we choose to fill our hearts with resentment and anger? How can rage be the bedrock for anything holy? No sanctuary can be built on such a foundation.

We know that rage is generated by fear. The essential question is this: What are we afraid of?

Note: This parsha was read the week my daughter-in-law, Serafina Ha, was born. This blog post was inspired by her efforts to understand and speak with those who have harmed and hurt her and the people she tries to protect. It is dedicated to her.

The Baal Shem Tov… we think. It appears that it is actually a different guy: Rabbi Falk, the Baal Shem of London.

True/False

Hasidism emphasizes the negation of the material world.
Hasidism was a messianic movement.
Hassidism was antimessianic.
Hasidism regarded prayer as “higher” than study.
Hasidism considered prayer and study as equally holy.
Christians considered the tombs of tzaddikim as sites of veneration and visited them.
The Shivhei ha-Besht (In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov) recycles stories from the Shivhei ha’Ari.

Multiple Choice:

The Besht (Baal Shem Tov)….
a. was an unschooled radical who opposed the social structure of his time.
b. was a paid functionary with a plum residential post.
c. intended to found a movement.
d. became popular because he offered comfort to a traumatized people.

The Besht (Baal Shem Tov)….
a. paid no taxes; he was granted a domicile and supported by the local religious b. establishment.
c. was a rebel against the religious perspectives that surrounded him.
d. was a true “man of the people”.

Hasidism became a movement….
a. because the Besht and his followers worked consciously to create one, spreading out across Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, etc..
b. composed of poor and unlettered Jews.
c. in part as a result of the opposition of Jewish Enlightenment thinkers.

Answers
True/False questions: Every one is true. Hasidism has a lot of bandwith; ideas we might think as polar opposites show up in varied sources. Multiple Choice: b, a, c

This semester, my ALEPH seminary students are answering these kinds of questions in our course on the history of Hasidism. We are busy dissolving a good bit of mythology, working instead with the messy reconstructions of history.

No, the Baal Shem Tov had no idea and no intention of founding a movement. He worked as a local practical kabbalist and hung out with other scholarly and semi-scholarly men who were interested in Kabbalah. The men he fraternized with were, in large part, exploring mystical ideas we can trace to mystics of 16^th century Safed and the early pietistic elite who succeeded them.

No, the Besht was hardly revolutionary or engaged in a battle with “establishment religion.” His sources of learning were also theirs. Many scholarly Jews studied Kabbalah – including the Vilna Gaon who so opposed the Hasidim. Rabbinic leaders across Eastern Europe were sympathetic with Hasidic pietists who preceded the Besht, men whose ideas and practices he often borrowed.

The Besht was a faith healer, hired as such by the religious establishment in Meshbizh. He was given a house (#93) to live in and, as a paid functionary, he didn’t have to pay taxes. It is likely that his work included the writing of amulets (a longstanding part of Jewish practice that dates back to Second Temple times), incantations (also an established practice), and conducting exorcisms (ditto).

In some respects, finding the Besht is a little like looking for the historical Jesus. The Besht did not leave treatises or books for us to ponder. His letters have been redacted and “produced” by later followers. Te stories we read in the Shivhei ha-Besht are part of a well-known genre of hagiography, one particularly popular in Christian circles and adopted in Jewish ones.

Hagiographies originated as accounts of saints or ecclesiastic leaders, accounts that were, by the nature of the writing, packed with holy deeds and miracles. Jews adopted the genre and populated their pages with figures like the Ari and, later, the Baal Shem Tov. Christianity had its saints; Judaism had its tzadikim.

Hagiography is history. The former is about building legends. The latter is about dissolving them.

Are we, then, to discard such legends and myths? Should the “real” history, such as we know it, lead us to dismiss the hagiographies we are heir to? The beauty of the stories we read is that their beauty never fails to move us, after all. That’s why they were written; that’s why we read them.

But we learn history for good reason, too. It is important to place the Besht in his own time – as far as we are able. History is a messy, complicated thing. Discovering how those opposed to Hasidism actually played helped (re)create it as a “movement” helps us understand where, how, and why Hasidism spread in the first place. Knowing how rooted in tradition Beshtian Hasidism was can illuminate a great deal about Hasidic community in our own time.

And this, too, is important. If the Besht is not who his followers made him out to be, what is it that they needed him to be, and why? That is, in a real sense, a spiritual question as well as a historical one.

Just as importantly: Who do we need the Besht to be, and why?

Month: February 2018

Terumah and the Age of Rage

Waddya Know ? A Questionnaire for the History of Hasidism