Tonight and tomorrow, millions of Jews around the world will celebrate a momentous occasion in world history, approximately 3,000 years ago – the giving of the basis of the Torah, including the ’10 Commandments’, which became the basis not only of Judaism but also of Christianity and Islam, thereby shaping human consciousness and civilization all over the world for thousands of years.

According to our sages, the giving of the Torah is a marriage with the Divine, a betrothal to Existence itself, so it is fitting that we mark this festival (Shavuot) by reading the Book of Ruth (found in the latter part of the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible).

‘Ruth’ is a very short, achingly beautiful, and apparently simple love story about people giving up their ego-centric, island identities, learning to go outside of their comfort zones and thereby share in creating something new, unpredictable and world-changing.

The sages tell us that we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot (Pentecost) to learn about Chesed (lovingkindness/giving/the unity of all exsistence).

Beneath the childish simplicity is are many profound lessons which ‘Ruth’ teaches us about the journey from the 1st impulse of Creation – unadulterated kindness/generosity (Chesed shebeChesed) to the culmination of all existence (Malchut shebeMalchut) – and funnily enough, it’s all about being kind to strangers…the above rap/poem is inspired by the Book of Ruth, and being in Bet Lechem (Bethlethem), where that story is set, on a peace/dialogue trip to meet Palestinian people (students, housewives, shop-owners, journalists, farmers, political activists, politicians) in their own communities with Encounter…near the tomb of Rachel (our mother, wife of Yaakov/Jacob, who is buried there).

Chag Sameach – Happy Revelations!
Love
Daniel

Thanks to Einstein, we understand well that time is not an absolute, but a relative phenomenon. When we are enjoying ourselves, ‘time flies’. When we feel relaxed, ‘we have all the time in the world’. When we feel less relaxed, we never have enough time, we feel like we are ‘chasing time’, ‘battling time’, and so on.

Towards the dramatic climax of the blockbuster story of the Exodus, between the 9th and 10th Plagues, the action pauses, and the 1st mitzvah (connection) is given to the Jewish People. It’s an even funnier thing, but rather than being a moral law (e.g. Don’t Murder), the 1st mitzvah is an instruction to begin a new calendar, based on the waxing and waning of the moon.

These people must overcome centuries of servitude, torment and self-loathing. I imagine that as slaves, they didn’t have much control over how they spent their time, so the transition into being co-creators of a new civilization is vast! This is why the generation who leave Egypt never make it into the Promised Land – only their children can make that next step of giving root to a new way of life. But the generation who leave Egypt must at least begin the work of leaving behind the thoughts, words and actions of slaves, hence they need a new calendar before the Exodus.

Once the people have absorbed this mitzvah, they are ready to take the substantial step of kid-napping a lamb (an animal worshipped by their host society), slaughtering it (a capital offence), and feasting on it. This feast is the 1st Seder Night, which begins a ritual that Jews all around the world still participate in to this day. I say ‘participate’ because the 1st Seder was not the only ‘real’ one, but rather an opening in the flow of time, which we travel through every year, as we re-live the Exodus as if we ourselves were slaves, on our way to freedom.

To what end?

To remind ourselves that we too were once, and indeed still are, slaves, and that the work of liberation is not yet done.

Now, the question arises, who is ‘we’?

Are we only concerned with the liberation of ourselves?

Our family?

Our community?

Our tribe, people, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, postcode, country…?

According to the beautiful ‘Fourfold Song’ of Rav Kook, the highest aspiration of Judaism is to SIMULTANEOUSLY sing the songs of

1) oneself
2) one’s people
3) humanity
4) Everything/the Universe

We learn here and in many of our other sources of wisdom that the path to attaining such a state is to start from deep within oneself, and to work gradually, patiently outwards. (For example, the Torah says “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, and we know that we can only truly love others to the extent that we love ourselves.)

So, what is this ‘fourfold song’ that is at once “simple, doubled, tripled, quadrupled”? (Meaning that it exists in each one of these states alone, that each of these states interplay with each other, and that all also exist together.)

According to Rav Kook, this song is the Song of Songs, aka the Song of Solomon, which is traditionally read in homes and synagogues on Pesach.

The Song of Songs is a sensual love song, or really a string of songs. It is at once

1) a personal song, between a woman and her lover
2) a song of the relationship between a people and their god
3) a song between the human soul and its Creator
4) the song of all Creation.

These 4 songs flow into each other and nourish each other, like the spiraling cycles of fertility, water, oxygen, nitrogen, Carbon, sun, moon and earth around us, thus creating the dance of life.

Like the Song of Songs, the Song of the Universe has no perceptible beginning or end and consists of both movement and stillness, giving and receiving, ebbing and flowing.
According to the ‘Sfat Emet’, we sing the Song of Songs on Pesach because its subject is a “necessary love”. On Pesach, when we re-live the Exodus, we are privileged to a glimpse of profound freedom, not merely the absence of slavery, but true freedom – a state where everything is in tune with this love.

And so, we sing the Song of Songs, to re-learn how to hear this song, to attune ourselves to the necessary love underlying all life.

If we listen, we might hear the song of our own potential, or of those around us, or of all humanity, or of all Being.

We might, as the Sfat Emet puts it, “wake up to the song in all creations”.

Love

Daniel

BACK IN the UK I was a Zionist. Now I’m an Israeli, it seems I can’t define myself that way anymore without being thought of as either hopelessly anachronistic, or avowedly right-wing.

Sections of the Israeli right have made Zionism synonymous with support for the settlement movement, while sections of the left have acquiesced in this fiction by abdicating ownership of the term. (It is worth noting that Zionism was originally a progressive liberation movement with its roots in the enlightenment. Even Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of what became the Israeli right, was an avowed liberal who insisted on democratic rights for all the citizens of the putative Jewish state and who spoke resolutely against expelling Arabs from their homes.)

Early secular Zionists forecast that their proud, secular nationalism would replace Jewish religion as the core identity of the Jewish people. Meanwhile the religious Zionists who followed Rav Kook saw Zionism as a messianic force that would unify the Jewish world.

Both have been proven wrong. Zionism didn’t replace religion as the secularists predicted; neither can it be used to promote religion to the Jewish masses if it obsessively prioritises the mitzvah of settling the West Bank, hardly a unifying issue in Israel – or indeed if only a one-size-fits-all Orthodoxy is sanctioned by the state authorities.

So what can Zionism mean for Israel in the 21st century?

I got a hint of an answer just after Rosh Hashana, on the Fast of Gedalia. Gedalia was the Jewish Governor of Judea after the destruction of the First Temple. He was assassinated by another Jew – a betrayal of the Jewish people regarded as so heinous by the Rabbis that a fast day was instituted.

I was surprised to see a close friend of mine, avowedly Zionist but not religious, observing the fast.
“I’ve kept this fast since the Rabin assassination,” she explained.

Now she was no supporter of the former prime minister. A fierce opponent of the Oslo Accords, she had been desperate to see him removed from office. The way in which this eventually happened however, shocked her to her Zionist core, and the Jewish tradition provided a precedent of how to respond to the murder of a Jewish leader by another Jew.

I was struck by her decision. She is not religious, but neither is she part of a secular community that has divorced itself from the Jewish world. She is a Zionist, proud of being an Israeli, devoted to the country and deeply connected to Jewish tradition. Her Judaism informs and strengthens her Zionism.

There are some excellent programs in Israel today, promoting a new Zionist agenda which embraces Jewish tradition in a spirit of pluralism; but Israel needs more of them, as well as government support and an entirely different relationship between the state and the Orthodox religious authorities, whose uncompromising monopoly on religious life has been one of the contributing factors to the alienation of most Israelis from religion.

Judaism need not be antithetical to the basic liberal democratic values of tolerance and freedom. In the words of Michael Melchior, an Orthodox Rabbi and former Israeli government minister:

“Only a reconnection to the hyphenation that links Jewish and democratic values, Zionism and religion, the teachings of Judaism and the teachings of ethics, will offer a chance for the continued existence of the State of Israel as a state that fulfils the dreams imbued in it when it came into being.”

I REJECT the notion that Zionism is either dead or only meaningful to the settler movement and its supporters. It has long been a cornerstone of contemporary Jewish identity outside Israel; within Israel it can be something that transcends politics and religious observance while connecting Jews to both their state and their heritage.

This Full Moon Festival of Purim, we read the story of Esther/Ishtar/Venus, a book of dramatic inversions that turns the tables on conventional views of women and sexuality.

The story of the Garden of Eden ends with G!d telling Eve/Woman that because of her ‘sin’, man will rule over her (Gen. 3:16).

And so begins the brokenness of our current reality, where relationships are almost universally viewed in terms of power relations and hence as a means to an end. Theists and atheists alike, the ascetic priests of the twin idolatries of organised religion and science, try to tell us that love and pleasure and such other hogwash are merely secondary to the procreation of the species/natural selection. Isn’t it funny how much fundamentalist theists and atheists have in common?! According to both, woman is only a servant of the male, and her life-giving ability is a commodity to be acquired and jealously guarded, rather than trusted or celebrated.

The book of Esther/Venus/Ishtar, a remarkably sophisticated late biblical composition, comes to debunk this view, and to (re)assert that femininity, love and relationship have immense value of their own. Viewing women, relationship and sexuality as a means to an end is exemplified by the deeply insecure, and hence power-obsessed, King Achashverosh, who is proven to be inadequate and self-destructive, and in alliance with the forces of destructive chaos, aka Haman/Amalek.

Achashverosh’s view of women and sexuality is clear from the beginning of the story, where he plays geopolitical power games with his wife’s naked body, and is soon humiliated by Vashti’s refusal to subordinate herself, and her Babylonian ancestry, to his new Persian dynasty, empire and capitol city. When Vashti refuses to dance before his drunken ‘friends’, wearing only her crown, he exiles her and sends a letter to every province of his vast empire, declaring, somewhat ridiculously, that every man should rule authoritatively over the women in his house – his pathetic attempt to reassert the status quo as articulated by G!d in Eden.

Achashverosh is so traumatized by this episode that even some years later he can only contemplate relationship with any woman in the form of rape, and so his aides set to work, kidnapping likely candidates for the dubious honour of being the next queen. Our heroine, Esther is chosen as the king’s favourite companion because she seems to be the most pliable woman ever created – that is, the easiest to rule over, to subdue, to rape not only with the physical act of penetration, but existentially to make her entirely subservient to his whims. The Talmud tells us that she was capable of being both an experienced lover, and a naïve virgin, depending on her partner’s desire. The midrash explains that this is no coincidence – she is so pliable because she was orphaned at birth and has been brought up by her uncle Mordechai who has made her his wife. Given her absolute dependency on him, we cannot help but view their relationship as abusive, meaning that when Esther is made queen, she essentially goes from one relationship of existential rape to another.

As I mention at the end of my video, Esther’s victory of Haman/Amalek is not, on the surface at least, the ideal one of love defeating manipulation – she seems to be just as manipulative as Haman, if not more so! However, whereas the text makes explicit that Haman’s manipulation of the king was driven by hate and greed, hers is quite the opposite, driven by a desire to fulfill her own personal potential by grasping the unique opportunity that has dropped into her lap, to save her family and her people from annihilation.

Esther is therefore an inspiring paradigm for a woman in a broken world of rape, who overcomes enormous abuse to find her own identity, and in doing so learns to use every tool at her disposal to a positive end. She takes her reality and turns it (one of the many dramatic inversions of the story) on its head – whereas she was selected for the king because she seemed to be the most pliant woman imaginable, she in fact turns out to be capable of manipulating him to a tee!

Still, manipulation is not love, and she never achieves this herself. Rather she teaches us that such a relationship must be worked for, even across generations, and her bravery and desire to give of herself for the sake of life and love are in many respects the building blocks for the flourishing of authentic love in the future.

How so?

The Talmud suggests that one reason why we do not say ‘Hallel’ (extra psalms of praise) on Purim is that at the close of the story of Esther, the Jews are still in exile, still subject to the whims of Achashverosh, and of course Esther herself is still trapped as his wife. Whereas the story of Purim closes ambivalently, it is followed, always exactly one month later, by Pesach, which provides us with the very paradigm of complete redemption, and for saying ‘Hallel’ – the Song at the Sea. If Purim is a flash of light in the darkness of oppression and exile, Pesach is being led entirely from darkness into the realm of light. (See R Tsadok HaKohen, Divrei Soferim 32)

From one Full Moon to the next, from Adar to Nisan, we transition from partial redemption to complete redemption. The Pesach story has become the paradigm of liberation not only for Jews but for countless other oppressed peoples worldwide, but, fascinatingly, the ‘megillah’ traditionally read on Pesach is not a politically oriented book, but a shining stream of perhaps the intoxicatingly beautiful love poetry ever written – the Song of Songs (aka the Song of Solomon).

It seems that before we can re-live and bring into our lives the absolute liberation from Egypt, we must first experience something more partial and more ambivalent. And before we can truly relate to the intense love poetry of Solomon, we must acknowledge that to create real love requires patiently working to find one’s own identity and giving selflessly of oneself, like Esther. And for those of you still waiting for the happy ending, it comes, with the festival that Pesach climaxes with – Shavuot (Pentecost/Weeks), when we read the story of Ruth, and discover that healthy, redemptive love is not only possible, but what we were created for. Phew! More on that nearer the time…there are zillions of multi-layered connections between Purim, Pesach and Shavuot I’ll flesh out over the next few weeks to complement what’s above.

Happy Purim, and happy transition into most deep liberation!

Love Daniel

PS If you would like to experience some of the boundless waves of Simchah (profound joy) that Purim offers, simply indulge in any or all of the 4 key mitzvot (connections) of the festival – the more, the merrier!
1. Hear or read the story of Esther.

2. Give gifts to the Poor.

3. Send Gifts (especially food!) to friends.

4. Eat, drink and be merry – The Talmud and Codes of Law instruct us to drink until we can no longer differentiate between “Blessed is Mordechai” and “Cursed is Haman”!

PPS – 1 more afterthought – this is from Rabbi Wikipedia – Esther and Mordechai might well correspond to Ishtar and Marduk, in which case another crucial dimension to the festival which ties in very closely with everything above is that Esther/Ishtar is defeating the forces of winter and bringing the much-needed Spring liberation!

“From the late nineteenth century onwards, several scholars explored the theory that the Book of Esther actually was a myth related to the spring festival of Purim which may have had a mixed West-Semitic/Akkadian/Canaanite origin. According to this interpretation the tale celebrates the triumph of the Babylonian deities Marduk and Ishtar (which seem phonetically similar to the names of the heroes in this book – Esther for Ishtar and Marduk for Mordechai) over the deities of Elam or more likely the renewal of life in the spring and the casting out of the scapegoat of the old year. This interpretation is explored in depth in the works of Theodor Gaster.”

For every Judah the Maccabee who fought against all odds and successfully freed his people from an occupying empire (Greece), there is a Bar-Kokhba whose revolt against an occupying empire (Rome) ended in defeat and mass slaughter and expulsion.

And apart from the result, is there genuinely any qualitative difference between these two stories?

Read more…

Is modern day Hellenism reflected in those who call for an Israeli withdrawal to the armistice lines, as our current foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman quipped?

In his laws on Hanukkah, Rambam describes the importance attached to publicising the miracle of a military victory of the few against the many; “the commandment to light is an exceedingly precious one…even if one has no food to eat except what he receives from charity he should beg, or sell clothes to buy oil and lamps” Yet despite this, someone who only has enough money to either buy a Shabbat candle or a Hanukkah one should choose Shabbat because of what Maimonides terms ‘Shalom Bayit’ between husband and wife.

As the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes “The implication is simple. Even the smallest peace (between husband and wife) takes priority over the greatest victory in war.”

read more

Falling as it does on the 4th Thursday of November, Thanksgiving weekend always comes around the same time as the anniversary of the UN Partition Plan that promised a sovereign part of Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people for the first time in two millenia.

And like the declaration of independence, the words ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands’ or Hatikva sung in a full football stadium, hearing the British accent announcing how those votes were cast in the UN General Assembly is one of those things that send shivers down my spine

the Partition Plan wasn’t ideal by any means – it didn’t even include Jerusalem as part of the proposed State.

The Partition Plan wasnt ideal in many ways. But I think its acceptance by the Yishuv is what Zionism is about – being satisfied with something less than our dreams – and making reasoned decisions of what is achievable at any particular time given the circumstances.

Read full post here

If, as Victor Frankl argues, life revolves around man’s search for meaning, then sitting in traffic on a Sunday morning while Israel’s bikers made their point about insurance prices could easily represent a potentially existential challenge.

Not that I didn’t try to make the 2 hour journey as meaningful as possible.

I shaved.

I did a sit-down Shacharit.

I even read some of my book. (A State Beyond the Pale – Europe’s Problem with Israel)

And when I finally reached the office and tried to ascertain who exactly I should be sympathizing with, I came across this video about the demonstration in which the bikers explain their point.

But what really caught my attention was the reasoning that “normally Israelis don’t even acknowledge protests unless they turn really wild, but we are trying to be different” [I guess ‘really wild’ in this context would have been completely blocking the Ayalon rather than leaving one lane free, but that’s simply conjecture]

Read more…

They encircle me with words of hate;
they attack me without cause.
They answer my love with accusation
but I am all prayer.
they repay me with evil for good,
with hatred for my love.

109

This Monday night, we start to celebrate Rosh Chodesh, the new moon, and Tuesday night is the beginning of the new moon/month, called Kislev.

Kislev leads us into the very darkest point of the year, at which point we light the candles of the Chanukah candles/menorah, which shine all the more brightly for being surrounded by such palpable darkness.

Jill Hammer’s amazing ‘Jewish Book of Days’ reminds us that during this season, although it might appear that nature is simply dead, She is in fact preparing, deep underground, and deep inside every living being, for the coming re-birth and re-flowering in spring.

This is the season of ‘the root’ for all of us – for trees, it is the season to focus their energies on their foundations and sources of nutrition, and for us, the darkness brings introspection and opportunities to connect with our own roots, physical and spiritual.

As the nights are growing towards being their longest, and many of us feel the urge to hibernate, to curl up under our duvets, both physically and emotionally, it is fitting that Kislev is also the month of dreams.

This month we read about the famous dream of Jacob – the ladder between heaven and earth. The ladder is a challenge to Jacob, and to all of us – are we fulfilling our potential to connect with and heal both the immanent/physical world and the transcendent worlds? By ‘transcendent worlds’ I do not mean ‘ghosts and goblins’, but rather those parts of ourselves that we don’t allow into our everyday existence, because they would get in the way of all those things we have to do. Are we making time that is un-cluttered with our everyday hassles, to focus on the more subtle, but no less important, aspects of life?

In a later story, Jacob is re-named Yisrael, by an angel who says “you have struggled with man and with the Divine and you have won”. Yisrael fulfilled his potential, and became an archetype, a name for all Jews, and all beings who struggle with both the immanent and the transcendent for the sake of perfecting the world.

Jacob’s favourite son, Joseph, was also a dreamer, and Breishit (Genesis) relates his dreams in great detail. As his roller-coaster journey of riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches progresses, Joseph overcomes his vanity and his ego-centrism, and learns to project his gift for dreams in the direction of helping other people, which eventually brings redemption to both him and his entire family. The story of Joseph and his brothers holds many essential teachings for anyone struggling with the immanent and transcendent. I’ll try and squeeze a few in here…

In Kabbalah, Joseph is identified with the sephira/quality of Yesod. Yesod means foundation, and it relates to our emotional and physical foundation, i.e. our drive to procreate. If Malchut (Nobility/Synergy) is the ruling aspect of the sephirot, the Number One into which all the others integrate, then Yesod is Number Two that leads to it – the gateway.

Yesod represents a most essential pre-condition for true Malchut – a desire to relate and share for the joy and love and creativity of relationship (as opposed to wanting to control or own something or someone, which is what lands Joseph in the pit). Yesod means letting go of trying to manipulate, learning to appreciate what is, as opposed to what we might think we want, and trust in the journey, as Joseph eventually learns to do.

Through his ups and downs, Joseph is prepared to face the super-challenging test of the sexiest woman in the known world – Potiphar’s wife! Joseph was Potiphar’s trusted Number Two, running his household without any supervision or constraint. The text stresses Joseph’s commitment and loyalty to his relationship with Potiphar. Joseph’s teenage dreams were of being Number One, the Alpha Male, but he had learnt enough about himself and Life by this point to know that NOT everything we are offered is necessarily really ours to take, and sometimes fulfilling our potential means being Number Two.

Through this success, and maintaining his faith through the darkness and confinement that followed this episode, Joseph succeeds in healing himself to the point where is ready to embody Yesod to its highest possible level – as the Number Two of the most powerful man in the world – the Pharaoh (now that is Yesod of Malchut!). In this role, Joseph is given an incredible opportunity to sustain a huge number of people through years of famine, and thus to re-find and to re-complete his own family in the process. As above with the dreams, only by being willing to help others for no selfish motive, does Joseph eventually merit the reward of his own, and his family’s salvation.

At this point, the Torah teaches us that Joseph’s sex appeal was utilised to help save the people from the famine – he literally had the girls climbing up the walls to catch a glimpse of him! Joseph’s dedication to mastering of his own Yesod enabled him to help millions of people, and become a paradigm of true, non-exploitative relationship for all Yisrael.

Joseph is the perfect role-model in this month of Chanukah. Joseph is associated in our tradition with the quality of Chein (grace/kindness/charm) which is related to the word Chanukah, which means Dedication. To be truly dedicated means to utilise all of our gifts, talents, attributes in the service of Life, even our mojo, as Joseph discovered throughout his exotic adventures…

Happy Dreaming!

Love

Daniel