RCBC Designates Next Saturday "Shabbat Shmoozer" in Teaneck

The RCBC (Rabbinical Council of Befuddled Clergy) has declared next Saturday to be "Shabbat Shmoozer" in all Teaneck synagogues.

Speaking on behalf of the group, Rabbi S. A. Rudemanski explained that scholars had pointed out a mistake the rabbis previously made in reading of halakhic texts governing synagogue conduct.

Rudemanski said the rabbis had thought that "talking in synagogue" was the cause of everything from natural disasters and political crises to scraped knees and stubbed toes.

Megillat Esther Lesson: A Woman can Save all of the Jews from extinction (but not become an Orthodox rabbi)

Purim is a happy holiday and the book of Esther is great entertainment. But this short biblical book also teaches us some profound lessons about politics, bureaucrats and life. We ought to pay close attention to all its nuances and messages.

This year we point out that according to the book of Esther a woman can save the Jewish people (but she cannot become an Orthodox rabbi - make any sense to you?).

Did Beruryah want to be a rabbi?

Beruryah was a great independent, moral, outspoken woman who lived in the time of the Talmud.

She was married to a rabbi. But I wonder now, was she also aspiring to become a rabbi?

We are told that she met with a tragic end, according to a medieval story.

The story briefly reports that Beruryah was "seduced" in a plot by rabbis and rabbinical students in a scheme to discredit her. When her act of immorality became public she could not bear the humiliation and killed herself. More on this in a moment.

But first, an example of Beruryah's legendary morality: the Talmud attributes in one source a moral superiority to Beruryah (aka Beruriah),  the wife of Rabbi Meir, as I summed it up in an short article:

... the rabbinic traditions do portray Beruryah as a sensitive yet assertive figure. The Talmud recounts anecdotes illustrating Beruryah's piety, compassion and wit. In one source she admonishes her husband Meir not to be angry at his enemies and not to pray for their death. She suggests that instead he pray that their sins cease and that they repent (b. Berakhot 10a).

The great rabbi was dressed down by his wife for letting his emotions obscure his ethics.

I wonder if that is why Rashi, the medieval commentator went ahead to discredit Beruryah with this other story that has no antecedent in rabbinic literature that says she was unfaithful to her husband by having sex with his student, and then in shame she committed suicide.

Rashi's commentary to b. 'Avodah Zarah 18b, on the phrase, "And some say because of the Beruryah incident."

One time she [Beruryah] mocked what the sages said [cf. b. Qiddushin 80b], "Women are flighty." He [Meir] said to her, "By your life! You will eventually concede [the correctness of] their words."

He instructed one of his disciples to tempt her to infidelity. He [the disciple] urged her for many days, until she consented.

When the matter became known to her, she strangled herself, while Rabbi Meir fled because of the disgrace.

But wait, wait. I have a bunch of questions about this juicy story. Did she "consent" or did the student finally just force her to submit? Was this a seduction or was it a rape? We have only the testimony of the men, not of the woman who was the target and the victim. What would Beruryah have said to the local police about this incident? We hear no voice at all from her in that brief story.

Indeed it's legitimate to ask if Rashi made up this story out of whole cloth, since it appears nowhere else in rabbinic literature. But even if Rashi had found this anecdote somewhere in an authoritative Midrash collection, I wonder, why did he choose to reproduce it? And why didn't he tell us where he found it? Rashi could have exercised a don't tell policy and left Beruryah's reputation intact. Why didn't he do that?

Rashi is known as one of the leading rabbis ever. He was primarily a commentator, and an anthologizer. But he is considered by many to have been the greatest exegete of all times.

My view is that in no way should we accept that this event was "historical" or "biographical" given the strange nature of the tradition's first appearance in the eleventh century.

The Beruryah incident text describes a cunning premeditated seduction scheme hatched by a jealous and short-tempered husband and executed through his misuse of his authority over his students. All of the blame for this perverse plot of seduction rests on Meir.

And yet, the more I think about this short tale, the more I conclude that no, this pious woman did not consent to sex, and that yes, it is likely that Beruryah was raped by her husband's student who failed after all his attempts to seduce her.

But lucky for Meir, the story is a complete fiction inserted as a bawdy tale by a French rabbi into his Talmudic commentary, perhaps to entertain, or perhaps to teach us a lesson.

If the latter, then it's quite a bizarre and negative lesson in my humble opinion. Rashi's little narrative teaches us that a great rabbinic master hatched a plot to send a student to seduce his wife because she was saying things that mocked a rabbinic teaching about the "flighty" nature and character of all women.

Yes, the storied outcome of Meir's plot was tragic for Beruryah and for him. Was Rashi trying to warn his fellow eleventh century French rabbis not to send their students to seduce their uppity wives because the results could be tragic?

So far that's the best I can come up with to justify even slightly the transmission of such an awful fable. And it begs the question: what was Rashi thinking?

Postscript for 2017:

If Beruryah were alive today, would she go to rabbinic school and seek ordination? Would the right wing rabbinic organizations condemn her for doing that?

Or perhaps if she opted to pursue such a radical path, would her husband engage a prominent New Jersey real estate magnate to hire a male prostitute to seduce her with the intent of blackmailing her.

You do know that those sorts of corrupt immoral schemes can backfire and lead to jail time, in fiction and in reality.

Texts:

You can review the whole corpus of the Talmud's traditions of the great woman, Beruryah, reproduced below in my short encyclopedia article.

Talmudic Chaos v. Halakhic Linearity in the Logic of Judaism

In 2011 I published an article, "In Search Of The Logic Of Judaism: From Talmudic Chaos To Halakhic Linearity," which you can download and read from the link here.   

I used mathematical ideas to differentiate the linear organization of the halakhah from non-linear thinking of the Talmud. Our abstract says: 

In this paper I examine some common views of scholars concerning the idea of the halakhah in Judaism. I then explain why their methods failed to account for the main philological and historical evidence regarding the term from the Talmudic texts. Then I suggest as a heuristic explanation that the logic of the Talmud defies linearity and can be discussed productively using chaos theory.

The authors in this volume cover varied topics with sophistication and erudition. The publisher's page provides details about the book, as copied below. 

Rashi - the Great French Jewish Bible Exegete

Many scholars believe that Rashi was the greatest French Jew and the greatest Bible exegete.

Read about Rashi and his work in this best seller book at Amazon: Rashi: The Greatest Exegete. It was written by Maurice Liber. I added a new Foreword. Price: an amazing $0.99. Description as follows:

The paradigmatic master of medieval rabbinic commentary was Rashi (Rabbi Solomon b. Isaac, 1040-1105) a scholar from the north of France. While he is often credited with the move to “literal commentary” in medieval times, even a cursory study of his commentaries reveals how indebted he was to the rabbinic exegesis of the earlier classical compilations. With Rashi we witness the mature development of a new paradigm of interpretation. He delicately balances his interpretations between gloss and exposition. He picks at and edits the earlier Midrash materials and weaves together with them into his commentary the results of new discoveries, such as philology and grammar. His main proposition is hardly radical within rabbinism. He accepts that there is one whole Torah of Moses consisting of the oral and written traditions and texts. In his commentaries he accomplished the nearly seamless integration of the basics of both bodies of tradition.

Rashi

Also please consider these books: 
The Book of Jewish Prayers
Dear Rabbi

Kindle Talmud in English

God's Favorite Prayers

My Dear Rabbi Zahavy Talmudic Advice Column for August 2016: Are there any Magical Jewish Cures and Curses?

Your Talmudic Advice Column

Dear Rabbi Zahavy,

My friend has started to scare me. She tells me often about her beliefs in the magical powers of religion and religious people. She claims to have witnessed faith healings right in front of her eyes. I think she’s gone off the deep end. Guide me please in what to do.

Scared in Secaucus

Dear Scared,

There are charismatic religious leaders in many religions who say that they can cure people of illnesses. In Judaism we say that we do not believe in, or practice, magical faith healing. The Torah condemns sorcerers, soothsayers, and witchcraft as abominations. But also note that the Torah tells us about Moses’ magical staff, capable of outperforming Pharaoh’s magicians. And some say the magical phrase Abracadabra comes from Aramaic words ארבדכ‭ ‬ארבא‭‬ that mean, “As I speak it, so it shall come to pass.”

Jewish Black Magic: They Cursed Ariel Sharon with the Pulsa D'Nora in 2005

I've spent years teaching numerous college courses on religion - always with the disclaimer that we will cover only the positive aspects of the subject. Religion used for evil, that is for war or other forms of harm, is a misuse and distortion of systems of faith.

Curses, I reasoned, were a misuse and distortion of religious practice.

Curses invoked before the Rabin assassination changed my mind about that. Prior to that tragic event, on the eve of Yom Kippur, a group of "Kabbalists" intoned the pulsa curse outside the Rabin residence. Once again, in the summer of 2005, another group gathered to invoke the curse against P.M. Ariel Sharon. It seemed to me that curses indeed were part of our religion - like it or not.

One blogger, Canonist, dealt briefly with the curse back in July 2005, complete with a link to the video of the curse "ceremony" and quotations from learned professors:

Praying for Ariel Sharon's Death

Yesterday's death-curse seems thus far to have gone unanswered by the Almighty, but we'll see. Generally speaking, I don't write much about Israel and the disengagement, but this latest is quite interesting. PaleoJudaica's got a great roundup, including descriptions of the pulsa de-nura ceremony, its detractors, and the threat of prosecution that've come out of it. Meantime, you can actually watch the ceremony in this video, which, with a bunch of people in sweats reading from photocopies, looks oddly like some run-of-the-mill Jewish ceremony, like burning chametz or somesuch. The video comes courtesy of Samuel Heilman, via a listserv to which he wrote, with the subject "Jewish Jihadists": "Lest any of you think that only Islamists have jihadists, see the video below in which so-called 'religious Jews' pray for Prime Minister Sharon's Death in a Pulsa De Nura." Bold words on both sides. Let's see what comes of them.

Erudite rabbis have written about the matter, explaining that magic is not a part of Judaism, as in the following:

Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah - a Star of the Seder

Passover is here once again. We will soon open our Haggadahs and find the familiar prologue stories to the Maggid section of the Seder. And soon we all will wonder, Who was Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah?

Maggid is literally the "telling" of the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the event that we celebrate in our evening of dramatic activity. My teacher Rabbi Soloveitchik always underscored that this is not a mere retelling of a story. The Maggid is an archetypal session of rabbinic Torah study. The major section that we read is a classic rabbinic midrash that expounds upon a few condensed biblical verses. This is the exodus story as told by the rabbis, not by the Torah of Moses. To make the point unmistakably clear, the rabbis go so far as to omit the mention of Moses altogether in the Haggadah.

The rabbis do mention several of their own rabbis by name and top among them is my favorite, Eleazar ben Azariah. He was a second century rabbi in Israel who also held the highest political position in his community.

Is Bernie Sanders Jewish?

Yes, Bernie Sanders is a Jew, but the Times says that, "He Doesn't Like to Talk About It."

I was disappointed in Joseph Berger of the Times for interviewing his brother and not getting Bernie to talk about this.

And trust me, there are dozens of rabbis who would be happy to slam him in the Times for not being a good enough Jew.

The Times didn't give both sides very well and it skipped lightly over the surface of this complex issue

Here is the story:

When Senator Bernie Sanders thanked supporters for his landslide victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, he wistfully reminisced about his upbringing as “the son of a Polish immigrant who came to this country speaking no English and having no money.”

While the crowd cheered, Rabbi Michael Paley of New York was among many Jews watching the speech who were taken aback. He said he was surprised that the Vermont senator had not explicitly described his father as a “Polish Jewish immigrant,” a significant distinction given Poland’s checkered history with its Jewish population.

“Nobody in Poland would have considered Bernie a Pole,” Rabbi Paley said.

My Dear Rabbi Zahavy Column in the Jewish Standard for December 2015 - Hanukkah Candles Candor and Single Sexagenerian Sex

Dear Rabbi Zahavy,

Chanukah is upon us, and for eight nights I feel I will be lying when I recite the blessing “…asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik nayr shel Chanukah” — “Who sanctified us with His commandments and has commanded us to kindle the Chanukah light.” We all know that God commanded no such ritual. The concept that Chanukah candles are a commandment was instituted by the rabbis. I’ve grown up hearing the unsatisfying explanation “Of course God didn’t command this, but it’s just as though He did since He did command us ‘And you shall do according to the word which they (the rabbis) shall tell you.’ (Deuteronomy 17:10).”

Thanksgiving Sermon of Rabbi Zev Zahavy from 1943

Here is my dad's sermon from 1943 for the holiday of Thanksgiving.

Click here for Rabbi Zev Zahavy's 1943 Thanksgiving Sermon, published by the RCA, Rabbinical Council of America.





A big hat tip to Zechariah for finding this and sending it to us.

Are Intermarried Rabbis Kosher? The President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College replies Yes to the Editor of the Forward who said No

Are Intermarried Rabbis Kosher? Previously not. Up until now it has been a given that, regardless of what the realities of the community are, rabbis must marry Jews.

Reconstructionist Jewish leaders have invalidated that assumption with a change in policy that allows their rabbinical students to be married to non-Jews.

The President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Deborah Waxman, replies Yes, they are kosher, in an op-ed responding to the Editor of the Forward who said, No, they are not kosher in her editorial this week.

This is a hot-button issue. So be sure that we will be hearing more about this controversy in the coming months. Here is Waxman's brief and confident reply to Eisner.

Why Fighting Intermarriage Is a Lost Cause - Opinion – Forward.com

In her editorial, Jane Eisner clearly states her difference of opinion with the recent decision to allow inter-partnered candidates to apply to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), where I serve as president. If I understand her point correctly, it is that intermarriage represents a lack of commitment to Judaism by Jews and that we need to hold the line in condemning intermarriage for the sake of the future of the Jewish people. We certainly understand this line of reasoning, and I think many Jews would agree with the basic assessment that we must continue the fight against intermarriage.

Here is the problem. For those of you still fighting, the battle was lost years ago. The Pew report, citing that 58% of marriages since 2005 are intermarriages, has disabused all of North American Jewry of the notion that Jews intermarrying can somehow be stopped by pressure from families, rabbis, or editorials from editors of Jewish publications.

At this point, the Jewish future in North America depends, in part, on our ability to engage intermarried Jews, unless we are willing to write off so many of us. If we continue to alienate them by saying that their partnering with a non-Jew means that they are no longer legitimate in some way as Jews, then we create a self-fulfilling prophecy and drive them away.

What to do about Joking Rabbis and Repetitious Chanters. My Jewish Standard - Times of Israel - Column for October 2015

What to do about Joking Rabbis and Repetitious Chanters. My Jewish Standard - Times of Israel - Column for October 2015

Dear Rabbi Zahavy,

My rabbi often cracks jokes in his sermons from the pulpit. I feel this is wrong, mainly because his jokes are sarcastic and sound more like biting attacks on people of whom he does not approve.

What’s your take on this?

Ha Ha in Ho-Ho-Kus

Dear Ha Ha,

I was tempted to reply to your inquiry with a variant of the old Henny Youngman joke, “Take my rabbi… please!”

But seriously, I learned long ago that using humor in a religious context can be risky, and it can backfire on the would-be comedian. I lectured once at a prestigious Catholic university, and in the midst of my talk I made a rather bland joke and then I looked up at the audience. I could see instantly from the dour expressions on the faces of the pious faculty members that in the mere act of telling any joke I had committed a faux pas.

Religion is serious business, you see. Joking around about faith is frowned upon.

Out in our complex religious worlds, though, there are clerics who try to be funny at times, and there are clerics who are constantly serious. It’s a matter of personality and speaking style. The somber clerics may fear the potentially subversive nature of humor. And so they conclude that it’s best to suppress all forms of the expression. The humorous ones walk a tight rope. They risk inadvertently insulting someone, or telling a joke that falls flat.

Some clergy tell jokes perhaps because they feel they must compete for attention in a world where entertainment and amusement can saturate our lives via the many forms of instant media -- YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, TV on demand, and the like.

Hebrew National Hot Dogs are Really Truly No-Kidding Kosher

Yes. Hebrew National Hot Dogs have been kosher since 1905. And Target sells them!

I have eaten them. But I know some more-kosher-than-thou types who won't partake. Those are the Jewish folk who answer to an even "higher authority" than Hebrew National.

Kenneth Lasson, writing in a Baltimore Jewish Times cover story in 2009, weaves together reportage about the hot dog industry, the kashrut supervision industry and baseball parks to come up with a fascinating fabric of a story, "Hebrew National and Kosher Politics - What’s kosher about answering to a higher authority?".

For years there have been some super-glatt-orthodox who whisper about whether the supervision of Hebrew National was "reliable." Lasson covers this controversy and says for instance,

...As to Triangle K, Rabbi Abadi wrote on the kashrut.org Web site, “Rabbi Ralbag is a G-d-fearing man and if he says it’s kosher, you sure can eat it. I can’t say the same for many of the other labels out there.”...more...

The Talmudic question is of course, can we trust the writing of Kenneth Lasson. Is he reliable? Is he glatt kosher? /repost from 7-9-09/

My Father, Rabbi at the Park East Synagogue

Praying and the synagogue were central to my life since my early childhood. My father, Zev Zahavy, was the rabbi of several distinguished New York City synagogues on the West side and then the East Side of Manhattan. I recall many times accompanying him to his work. His study in the synagogue was off to the side of the main sanctuary, lined with books, filled with a musty smell and having the creakiest wood floor I ever walked on.

The author (right) with his Dad (center) in 5715 in the synagogue sukkah

The synagogue in Manhattan at that time was a stately place with formal services, led by a professional Hazzan. My dad wore a robe and high hat - black during the year and white on the High Holy Days.

He was famous in the city for his sermons. He labored over them for hours. He would send "releases" to the local papers (like the NY Times' 230+ citations of his sermons -- here in online book form) to let them know about what he would be preaching on Saturday. Those were the fifties and the Times and other papers covered the Saturday and Sunday sermons. Frequently we would look around the sanctuary to see if the reporter from the Times was present. We'd know because he'd sit in the back and be writing feverishly on his reporter's pad. (Not iPad... real paper pad.)

My father was ambitious especially about increasing the attendance at the services. We had to count the number of people in shul and discuss that at the lunch table. Then he'd ask us how the sermon was and we all answered enthusiastically every week, "It was terrrrrrific!"

The Right Way to Teach the Talmud

There is a right way to teach Talmud. All Yeshivas essentially teach Talmud the same way - select the Tractate to teach -- open it and start reading. That is not the right way.

Here is a link to a short article that I wrote a while back, "Teaching Mishnah, Midrash and Talmud at the University."

I outline some of the course methods I have used in university courses and I make some generalizations, such as:

...I do not use the traditional Yeshiva approach to designing a "syllabus", i.e., start on page 2A and learn as much as time permits in the tractate. I also do not emphasize the notion of the texts as part of "the Halakhah." This concept is a relatively modern construct, composed of many strata of texts, commentaries and codes. Some would argue it is a tool of those who foster rabbinic authority rather than a purely intellectual asset of our rabbinic heritage.

Please see my article for more details. /repost from 8/5/06/

Does the Talmud say that Gay Sex Causes Earthquakes?

I'm quoted  in the Pacific Standard as an authority on the cause of earthquakes, "Gay Sex Caused the Earthquakes in Nepal."

On 8/23/2011 I wrote this post:

Does the Talmud say that Gay Sex Causes Earthquakes? In 2010 I covered this nonsensical topic after the Haiti earthquakes. (At that time Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic cited me on this subject.)

Here it is again.

Yes, the Talmud does say that gay sex causes earthquakes.

I mused, That must be some awesome gay sex.

But seriously, if one can get serious over this bizarre idea, some cockamamie rabbis were going around preaching that gay sex caused Haiti's earthquakes.

See here and here for the reports about Rabbi Yehuda Levin and the Rabbinical Alliance of America.

Now not only is this a strange teaching. I must chastise these rabbis for not doing their Talmud homework and for not paying closer attention to the text in Yerushalmi Berakhot (9:2), which several years back I translated and published through the University of Chicago Press.

According to the Talmud text, earthquakes are caused by any one of a number of acts: yes one of them is gay sex, but others are by disputes, and also by not taking heave offering and tithes from your produce, and also because God is just upset that the Temple is in ruins and there are theaters and circuses in Israel.

Rabbis ought to know better than to cherry pick among the Talmudic reasons for earthquakes.

The Surprising Essences of Halakhah

Commonly Halakhah refers now to the body of Jewish law which governs the way of life of Orthodox Jews. They speak of the halakhah as if it was a unitary source of sacred guidance for what Jews ought to do or not do.

But it's not so simple.

I did some research a while ago into the use of the term in early rabbinic literature. I found that the term halakhah is not commonly used in the Mishnah, Tosefta, or the Tannaitic Midrashim as a primary theological category or as a main descriptor of an entire realm of content.

The word halakhah or its plural form appears 31 times in Mishnah, 105 times in Tosefta and in 59 instances in the early midrashic compilations: Sifra (20), Sifre Numbers (6), Sifre Deuteronomy (18), Mekhilta (10) and Mekhilta of R. Simeon Bar Yohai (5). There is one usage in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I based this on the concordance of the Academy for the Hebrew Language, microfilm version, searches conducted in 1995. Other search methods may provide different results.

By my reckoning there are at least 17 usages of the rabbinic term and concept halakhah in the early literature.  I list them below.

Note well: Only categories V, IX and XII suggest that the rabbis referred to a body of knowledge called halakhah. The other categories of usage do not support that idea.

Briefly the categories of the term are as follows.

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Talmud Tractate Hullin, translated by Tzvee Zahavy (=me)

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To know what food is kosher, that is, fit to eat according to rabbinic Judaism, you must study the principles set forth in this volume, the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Hullin. This translation, adheres closely to the text so that the reader has a sense of the structure and balance of the original. Yet at the same time it conveys the flow of the legal arguments and debates, the dramatic unfolding of events in stories, and the sensitivities to words and language in the exegetical texts. Its aim is to facilitate a smooth conversation between readers and the text so that, without consulting the original Hebrew and Aramaic version, they can appreciate the substantive meaning and recognize some major aspects of the style of the Talmudic text.

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The Theological Cosmology of Rabbi Dr. Zev Zahavy

I published my dad's book for Kindle, "Whence and Wherefore" a major work of theological cosmology by Rabbi Dr. Zev Zahavy, of blessed memory.

Here is the final chapter of the book:

THE PLIGHT OF THE PARTICULAR

A very sagacious cocoon for emergent life was spun on Planet Earth by Mother Nature. However, her main concern seems to be the fostering of species, and ensuring their perpetuation. Nature patently ignores the trials and tribulations of the particular. Nature is clement toward her family, but obdurate toward its individual members. Small wonder, then, that an analysis of the human situation reveals wholesale anguish and anxiety as the forerunners of despair and hopelessness.

Such forlorn attitudes are quite prevalent in contemporary society. The atheist-existentialist, for example, moans about the vacuity of human existence. There is no logical explanation for the inanity of man’s being. In fact, it appears that nature played a cruel hoax on its supreme product, man. It endowed man with an intellect, with which he was enabled to perceive the utter futility of his own essence.

It is not easy to suffer the awareness of a meaningless existence. No organic specimen, other than man, has been inflicted with such a prepotent imposition. It hardly inspires a zest for life when one observes nature smiling broadly upon the species as an entity, and favoring the biologically superior product, while brusquely turning her back upon the tortured human psyche. Why was man chastised by being granted a brain that may apprehend all this?

Has man’s superior mental apparatus brought him greater security or happiness? An ego-awareness faculty, such as man possesses, becomes a hollow mockery in face of the emotional torment it causes him to endure. His intellect weighs upon him like a burdensome albatross. It would have been a far better thing for man to have been deprived of such a keen, discerning thinking-equipage, because as a simple biological creature, he would never have comprehended the sordid plight of mortal existence. If man were nothing more than a menial biped, he would have been spared the voluminous psychological stress and emotional sorrow to which he is presently subject.