Or ha-Hayyim: Creativity, Tradition and Mysticism in the Torah Commentary of R. Hayyim ibn Attar

By: Ariel Evan Mayse[i]

God’s Torah lay written before me; it awakened me and gave me expression. It illuminated my soul in the sweetest of lights, and my soul felt as if she had seen its secrets. She will eat and become sated of its savory delights, though many remain yet untasted; in the light of the countenance of the living King.

                                                           - R. Hayyim ibn Attar, Hakdamat ha-Rav ha-Mehaber

            A few years ago a friend of mine spent the weekend in a Hasidic enclave in upstate New York. When he entered the beit midrash early Shabbat morning, he noticed a young Hasid poring over the Or ha-Hayyim commentary on the Torah with obvious fervor and reverence. My friend walked over and asked why he had chosen to learn a Sephardic Torah commentary at this time, since many Hasidim have the custom of studying Hasidic books of mystical thought before the morning prayers. With surprise and horror, the lad looked up and immediately replied: Neyn! Vos zogstu?! Dos iz a khasidishe seyfer! [No! What do you mean?! This is a Hasidic book!]

This story is indicative of the great affection felt for R. Hayyim ben Moshe ibn Attar (1696-1743) even outside of the immediate Sephardic world.[ii] This scion of the Moroccan Jewish community penned important works in both halakha and aggada, but the commentary on the Torah entitled Or ha-Hayyim is undoubtedly his most influential book.[iii] It was originally published in 1742, alongside the traditional triad of biblical text, Rashi, and Onkelos’ translation, and within a few decades had captured a relatively large readership among among European Jewish communities. Or ha-Hayyim rose from popular to canonical status when it became the most recent commentary to be included in many standard printings of the Mikra’ot Gedolot, some of which have since replaced the works of classical Rishonim with additional supercommentaries to Or ha-Hayyim itself.

            R. Hayyim’s commentary is a demanding but extremely rewarding study. His explanations are conceptually complicated, stylistically perplexing, and often more verbose than any of the other commentaries on the page.  Yet there is a depth and profundity in his words that emerges from amidst their difficulty. As I hope to demonstrate, at the core of R. Hayyim’s commentary stands a beautiful double helix of two seamlessly integrated approaches to interpreting the Torah: the search for the verses’ plain-sense on one hand, and the quest for their deeper mystical significance on the other. R. Hayyim has outspoken affection for peshat and often explains verses according to their plain-sense, contextual and literal meaning. However, his commentary is also a tremendous repository of creative mystical thought, informed by the kabbalistic tradition but not bound to the teachings of any particular school. While for some exegetes these goals have proven mutually exclusive, R. Hayyim maintained that both a verse’s peshat and its mystical significance are equally important and true. The primary goal of this study is to bring into sharper focus several of the most important mystical themes of his commentary, and to offer a few remarks on their potential relevance to contemporary Jewish conversations.[iv]

R. Hayyim ibn Attar was born in 1696 in Salé, Morocco, into an illustrious family descended from Spanish exiles.[v] The young R. Hayyim was educated in the traditional manner by his grandfather, but his early years were peripatetic and he was often forced to move from city to city on family business or to escape persecution. After marrying into a wealthy family that was distantly related, R. Hayyim devoted himself entirely to his studies for a number of years. Yet difficult times returned with the death of his father-in-law in the early 1720s. Without patronage, the combined hardships of economic crises, plagues and famines forced R. Hayyim into a series of relocations that eventually led him to Jerusalem.

R. Hayyim moved first to Fes, followed by a brief stay in Algiers, and then settled in Leghorn, where he once again found monetary support and made his home for several years.  There R. Hayyim began to teach Torah publicly and served as a communal leader, but by 1740 he and a small number of his close friends and students had resolved to immigrate to Israel in order to establish a new yeshiva. They disembarked in Acre in 1741, where they spent a full year before the epidemics in central Eretz Yisrael abated. After moving to Jerusalem the group founded the yeshiva Kenesset Yisrael, whose  students included the renowned polymath R. Hayyim Yosef David Azulai (the Hida, 1724-1806). R. Hayyim ibn Attar died in 1743, and was subsequently interred on the Mount of Olives. The synagogue named for him in the Old City of Jerusalem is still an active place of worship, and to this day R. Hayyim’s literary legacy remains quite influential in many religious circles.

Creativity, Tradition, and the Nature of Torah

            Before embarking on our exploration of the mystical aspects of Or ha-Hayyim, briefly examining two related issues will help us clarify a more fundamental question: how R. Hayyim understood the role and limits of biblical interpretation. First, examining his attitude toward the classical commentators will demonstrate to what extent he felt himself at creative liberty to offer interpretations, both mystical and plain-sense, that contrast those adduced by earlier sages. Second, illustrating R. Hayyim’s conception of the nature of the Torah itself will reveal the underlying principles upon which his interpretive approach is based. These two questions were first analyzed in an enlightening book in Hebrew by the late Professor Elazar Touitou, yet since to my knowledge his important findings have never been made available in English, nor have they been subsequently challenged or developed, it will surely be of worth to present and expand upon them here.

R. Hayyim was a latecomer to the stage of Jewish biblical interpretation. By the early eighteenth century the “golden age” of exegesis by Western European Rishonim had long since ended. R. Hayyim is counted amongst the Sephardic Aharonim, whose literary works represent a vastly different stage of Jewish history. They wrote in a time after the major centers of learning in Spain had been destroyed and their leaders exiled to Christian Europe, North Africa, and Eretz Yisrael, forever transforming the intellectual centers of gravity of the Jewish world. Kabbalah, specifically the Zohar and later the works of R. Isaac Luria (d. 1572), had overtaken philosophy as the only other primary focus of Jewish study in the Sephardic Diaspora other than the Talmud itself, thus ending a centuries-long debate over the merits and demerits of rationalism and mysticism. The second half of the seventeenth century witnessed the dramatic rise and fall of the false messiah Shabbatai Tzevi, whose conversion to Islam left much world Jewry in shambles. Aharonim are generally thought of as far less daring than their early medieval counterparts, and this deferential shift in attitude is often attributed to the political and geographic turbulence. However, as we shall see, R. Hayyim’s commentary is bold and innovative in a manner largely uncharacteristic of this period. He was unafraid of disputing the interpretations of authorities that predated him, even those articulated by the revered Talmudic sages themselves.

            R. Hayyim notes that Hazal frequently offer homiletical (derash) interpretations of verses, which often come at the expense of the plain-sense meaning of the text. In some instances he agrees with their derashot and comments upon the verse in accord with their reading.[vi] However, in many cases R. Hayyim insists that the verse must be understood according to its peshat despite the Sages’ homiletical interpretation; though he does not deny the  legitimacy of their derashot, he presents an alternative reading that conforms to the plain-sense of the passage.[vii] R. Hayyim was fiercely committed to rabbinic legal norms, and in one case writes that he is unwilling to offer an otherwise valid interpretation that conflicted with halakha.[viii] Yet he reminds his reader that even Hazal agreed that the Torah would be interpreted in many different ways in the future,[ix] and as long as the law remains unchanged, students of biblical exegesis have nearly unlimited freedom.[x]

            R. Hayyim’s stance toward the classical medieval commentators is similarly complex. Despite having been deeply influenced by Rashi’s commentary, R. Hayyim gently disagrees with him on linguistic grounds, for misunderstanding statements of Hazal, and for giving original interpretations not in line with the peshat.[xi] In some cases R. Hayyim agrees with Abraham Ibn Ezra, while elsewhere challenging his reading of a verse; at times  R. Hayyim Ibn Ezra's opinion altogether.[xii] The same is true of his attitude toward Ramban, even though the latter's commentary includes a combination of peshat and Kabbalah not dissimilar to R. Hayyim's own style.[xiii] However, perhaps most striking of all is the relative infrequency of his engagement with the works of the Rishonim. Hoping to avoid plagiarism of any kind, he claims to have closed their books before sitting down to write his independent commentary, selectively citing earlier authorities from memory.[xiv] Only later did he compare his text to theirs, occasionally using their words to support his interpretation or contrasting earlier traditions with his own understanding of the verse.[xv]

We might thus characterize R. Hayyim ibn Attar’s attitude toward earlier interpreters as one of intermittent contradiction, or to be more precise, respectful contradistinction. While he repudiates their remarks when he deems them insufficient or not in keeping with the plain-sense of the verse, he does not deny the validity of their interpretations, nor does he attack them with any of the invectives wielded by the Rishonim against one another. R. Hayyim’s commentary itself offers a prepossessing blend of different homiletic styles, and it is immediately clear that he believes in no single correct explanation of a verse to which all readers must be obeisant. He often offers multiple interpretations of a single passage, occasionally deriving several dozen possible and correct meanings. This alone sets him apart from many of the earlier medieval commentators, with Ramban’s commentary the possible exception.

            R. Hayyim asserts that the Torah has myriad layers of meaning, and careful study of its polysemous words can yield any number of valid interpretations.[xvi] R. Hayyim  invokes the adage commonly found in mystical literature and explains that each of the four primary modes of interpreting the Torah (peshat, remez, derash, sod) corresponds to one of the kabbalistic worlds (asiya, beriya, yetzira, atzilut).[xvii] Elsewhere he writes that the Torah itself has an outer, plain-sense meaning, which surrounds and embodies its deeper mystical dimension (penimiyut).[xviii] This description does not simply proscribe how a reader should interpret the biblical text, but describes the very nature of the Torah itself. Furthermore, many intricacies of halakha were passed down as oral traditions, connected to the biblical text but found nowhere explicitly in its words, and the same is true of its kabbalistic significance. The Torah alludes to deeper mysteries that cannot be captured in writing and must be transmitted from student to teacher. Some of these are outside of the boundaries of language and are comprehensible through experience alone.[xix] In sum, while other exegetes have assumed that peshat and penimiyut are mutually exclusive ends of a spectrum, R. Hayyim’s belief that the Torah is multi-faceted and thus able to yield many coterminous explanations is the bedrock of his mystical approach to interpreting the biblical text.[xx]

Mysticism and Kabbalah

            R. Hayyim’s North African community retained much of the peshat sensibility beloved by the Andalusian Rishonim.[xxi] By the early eighteenth century this intellectual milieu was steeped in Kabbalah as well, and by R. Hayyim's time mystical approaches to interpreting the Torah coexisted alongside the quest for its plain-sense meaning. It is thus unsurprising that in addition to establishing peshat, Or ha-Hayyim's other raison d’être is to explain the mystical significance of the Torah’s words. As noted above, R. Hayyim does not see his mystical interpretations as necessarily contradicting the biblical text’s plain-sense meaning, but rather amplifying and often complementing it.[xxii] He often refers to this dimension of his exegesis as remez (allusion) or sod (secret), but from his commentary it is immediately apparent that R. Hayyim did not feel constrained to the symbols of one theosophical system alone. Instead, he synthesized different threads of earlier kabbalistic traditions and wove them together into a tapestry of mystical interpretation not beholden to any single tradition; this is a departure from the rather structured Kabbalah included in the commentaries of Ibn Ezra, Ramban, and Menahem Recanati (d. 1310). Indeed, though mystical ideas permeate nearly every page of his commentary, much of its depth is accessible to those with even an elementary background in Kabbalah.

R. Hayyim seems to have drawn the majority of his kabbalistic inspiration from the Zohar, which he assumes dates back to the early centuries CE. Sometimes he cites its passages as teachings of Hazal, others as words of the holy Tanna Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai,[xxiii] and quotes the Zohar by name in several dozens of passages.[xxiv] By contrast, R. Hayyim refers directly to the teachings of R. Isaac Luria a handful of times,[xxv] and only occasionally cites an oral or written tradition received in the great kabbalist’s name.[xxvi] While R. Hayyim refers to Lurianic ideas more subtly in other places, he never employs such specific keywords as tzimtzum or partzufim, and it is reasonably clear that his kabbalistic framework was  primarily non-Lurianic. This is rather surprising given that Luria’s was the dominant mystical voice in seventeenth and eighteenth century Jewish mystical discourse. Perhaps this trepidation reflects fears of association with the Sabbatian heresy based on a dangerous yet creative rereading of Lurianic Kabbalah. In a few allusive comments R. Hayyim expressed apprehension about revealing too much; he steadied his pen and refrained from writing down secrets that he felt could not be revealed to a popular audience.[xxvii] However, it is also possible R. Hayyim had limited primary-source exposure to the more theoretical complexities of Lurianic Kabbalah while writing the majority of his commentary.

            While the precise origins of his mystical thought require further clarification, it is indisputable that R. Hayyim's cosmology was deeply influenced by medieval Kabbalah.  In his description the spiritual plane and the physical world are not entirely distinct realms, and while there is a perceptible boundary between the human and divine spheres, a bifurcated division between “spiritual” and “corporeal” is anathema to his worldview. R. Hayyim understood the physical world as an intertwined composite of material and spiritual. All corporeal phenomena are animated by a core of divine energy; each aspect of existence is infused with an essential element of divinity, from the highest spiritual worlds to objects that which we perceive as fundamentally inanimate, .[xxviii] Mankind’s sins only have the capacity to lessen the flow of this divine energy, but they can never truly obstruct it. Without exception, all reality is sustained by God’s effluence.[xxix]

            This theme of divine immanence is developed throughout Or ha-Hayyim, but R. Hayyim treats it most fully in his comments on the creation narrative. To explain the seeming banality of the verse, “The heavens and the earth were completed in all their array” (Gen. 2:1), he writes:

We were at a loss as to what this verse is supposed to teach us, but its intention seems in accord with what the Sages taught, “God is the place of the world” (Bereshit Rabbah, 68:9). We find mentioned [in Scripture] that He also permeates the world, as it says, “the world is full of His glory” (Is. 6:3). Hence, the light of the blessed One both surrounds the world and is its inner essence.  

We must understand, why did God do things in this way? I received an oral tradition from the elder scholars of Torah that God created the world as a sphere so that it could continue to exist, since His powers are equally distributed. This should be explained as follows: Know that no yearning could be sweeter, dearer, more precious, beloved or desired amongst the created beings, especially their inner spiritual elements that recognize and know the light of God, than cleaving to the blessed One’s illumination. The vital core [of all creation] pines for Him, striving to apprehend the radiance of His light in some small way, craning to catch a glimpse of God’s pleasantness.

Know also that God imbued an element of illuminated wisdom and discernment in every aspect of creation, each according to its nature. Creatures that can speak and animals that cannot, as well as plants and minerals, all have the capacity to know their Maker in their own way….

… His sweet and yearned for light surrounds the spheres of the world uniformly, and each and every spot in the world’s rotation ignites the burning desire to draw close to the Tree of Longing equally…

… For this reason the world exists within the light of the Creator; His light fills the physical and surrounds it as well. The world continues to endure because of its great longing for God. [The word for “completion” used in] “The heavens and the earth were completed (va-yekhulu) in all their array” should be understood along the lines of “my soul longs and desires” (kaleta, Ps. 84:3). This is what truly completed and sustains creation.[xxx]

For R. Hayyim, this verse alludes to several important spiritual truths. First, God’s simultaneous immanence and transcendence may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely this tension that grants the physical world its perpetuation. The generative longing of creation for a transcendent God is made possible by their innate divine quality, the indwelling of a divine spark that sustains the world. Second, R. Hayyim believes in the capacity of all finite created beings to know God, albeit to varying degrees. The Divine remains beyond the absolute grasp of any of His creations, but the inner spiritual quality hidden within the physical means that everything has an unseverable capacity for connecting to the Divine.

            R. Hayyim demonstrates remarkable creativity and sensitivity in his ability to find mystical significance in the biblical text. In many cases these deeper messages actually represent his understanding of the plain-sense meaning of a verse, and do not come at the exclusion of the peshat he so values. For example, R. Hayyim connects the notion of a world infused with divine energy with the initial Shabbat of the creation story:

God created the soul (nefesh) of the world on the Sabbath day. This is the deeper meaning of the verse: “And on the seventh day He rested (shavat) and infused (va-yinafash)” (Ex. 31:17). From this the Sages’ taught that the additional soul mourns when the Sabbath departs (b. Beitza 16a), but theirs is only a homiletical interpretation… the plain-sense of the verse is that… “and infused” refers to God’s vital effluence pouring into all created beings, since before Shabbat everything lacked a soul.[xxxi]

R. Hayyim does not read va-yinafash as a reflexive description of God desisting from formative work, as it is often understood. Instead, his believes that its plain-sense meaning is an active verb demonstrating that God instilled a necessary current of metaphysical energy into the world through the creation of Shabbat.

            R. Hayyim adds that the deep yearning and love felt for God by His creations is entirely mutual. Identifying an interesting parallel between the words va-yekhulu in Gen. 2:1 and va-yekhal (“and God finished”) in the following verse, he comments:

Just above I translated the word va-yekhulu as referring to longing and desire, and we should translate the present [phrase] va-yekhal Elokim along the same lines, in accord with the verse, “You will long for the works of Your hands” (Job 14:15)… The Lord yearned for and desired His world, and thus through the Seventh Day the world is sustained…[xxxii]

The love between God and the physical world is thus reciprocal, cementing the bond between the created world and the Divine. However, R. Hayyim often focuses on an expression of God’s love that is more particularistic: His exceptional affection for the Jewish people. It was this love for Israel and His burning desire to wed them to the Torah that led to their redemption from Egypt. The delay of three months before reaching Mt. Sinai gave the Jews time to prepare themselves, as a bridegroom must during the period of his engagement. From God’s perspective, the ideal would have been to deliver them to the wedding canopy immediately.[xxxiii]

            Another prominent mystical theme found in Or ha-Hayyim is the mandate to redeem the “sparks of holiness” trapped within the physical world. This idea is closely related to God’s sustaining of  physical existence by the reinfusion the world with divine energy. However, the relationship between the sparks and corporeal realm differs in one important respect: the sparks also reflect the inherent brokenness of the world and its partial disunity from God. This condition began with the edenic sin and has only been exacerbated by mankind’s subsequent iniquity. The “husks” of physical reality that surround the sparks are described in distinctly negative terms:

Because of our abundant sins, many sparks of holiness are now bound within the husks, and … evil and good are all mixed together. For this reason one must separate the good from the bad, and the light from the darkness in which it has become entangled. However, it is known that the husks derive their vitality from holiness itself, and without this they would have no life force. Therefore, when God separates the light, which is the holiness, the discarded evil is left it without any place from which receive sustenance and will be nullified all on its own… this is similar to chopping down a tree and removing it from the very roots which give it life; it will become dried out and wither.[xxxiv]

Only a few decades later Hasidism would employ the vocabulary of the sparks to articulate an optimistic view of engaging with physical world, and as we have seen, in many cases R. Hayyim displays a similarly positive outlook. However, in others R. Hayyim tends more toward the dualism commonly found in the medieval kabbalistic tradition, which opposes coarse physicality with sublime spirit. Even the most impure corporeal matter is sustained by the holy sparks, but it cannot endure once we achieve the goal of returning them to their Source.[xxxv]  

            The sparks of holiness were originally scattered because of mankind’s sin, and R. Hayyim maintains that it is the task of the Jewish people to gather the sparks and remove them from the husks that surround them. He writes:

Primordial Adam was the tree upon which all holy souls were affixed, including all that had entered the world from its inception and all that ever will. When Adam sinned, [the side of] evil became much stronger and took countless [souls] captive. Since becoming a nation God’s [chosen] people have constantly striven to separate and remove them from whence they were swallowed up. They do this by means of the font of holiness that God planted in our midst: the Torah and mitzvoth.[xxxvi]

Mankind’s sin plunged the physical world into a state of fracture. The holy aspects within it, referred to alternatively as sparks, souls, and even aspects of God Himself, are now concealed behind veils of impurity.[xxxvii] However, the picture is not so bleak and all is not lost. Israel is charged with redeeming the trapped sparks and “returning them to a state of complete unity” through immersion in Torah study and performing their religious obligations with fervor and intensity.[xxxviii] This capacity is what defines Jewish people as a “nation of priests.”[xxxix] Even their most mundane actions are also reframed as spiritual activities; that we could have been created without the need for physical sustenance proves that eating and drinking must serve the higher purpose of uplifting the sparks trapped within the food.[xl] It was in order to fulfill this very responsibility that the Jewish people were dispersed across the world. Israel was thrust into exile in part because of their sins, but more importantly, they were they enjoined with task of uplifting the scattered sparks and freeing them from their corporeal prisons.[xli]

            R. Hayyim devotes very little space to the complicated and often obscure symbolism that characterized earlier Jewish mystical thought. He rarely refers to the sefirot by name, and I was able to find only one instance in which the term “sefira” itself appears in Or ha-Hayyim.[xlii] However, leaving the technical vocabulary of Lurianic Kabbalah and the Zohar does not mean that R. Hayyim shies away from a mystical conception of God. He discusses the Divine indwelling in the physical world (shekhina) at great length. For R. Hayyim, the shekhina is not the hypostatic entity conceived of in medieval Kabbalah, nor is it simply an abstract attribute of the Godhead. Instead, he describes the shekhina as a finite (if incorporeal) instantiation of God, fully united with Him but within the ken of physical beings and their limited faculties.[xliii] Israel met the shekhina on Mt. Sinai,[xliv] and it is with this the aspect of God that the angels can interact.[xlv] He notes that there are an infinite number of gradations of the indwelling of the shekhina. One particularly intense manifestation the can only be revealed to the fullest assembly of 600,000 people,[xlvi] but to a lesser degree God’s immanent presence may be found in the synagogue, the study hall, and with all who learn Torah together.[xlvii] Indeed, each Jewish individual can be transformed into a dwelling for the shekhina through performing the mitzvoth and  cultivating a sense of awe of the Divine [xlviii]

It should come as no surprise, then, that R. Hayyim sees mankind as the pinnacle and purpose of creation.[xlix] The unique qualities of the human soul connect them to the Divine in a manner that far exceeds the fundamental ability of all creations to recognize God mentioned above. Before entering the world, the human soul is a part of God that is incorporated into the supernal and sublime divine Light.[l] The soul maintains its permanent connection with the Divine even after being fused with a physical body; this bond allows the soul its lasting vitality even after the body has died.[li] The human soul also serves as a channel for divine energy into the physical realm. R. Hayyim describes it as the nexus that links upper spiritual worlds to the four elements, thus allowing corporeal matter to be infused with God’s effluence.[lii] The human soul is the ladder of Jacob’s dream, bridging between heaven and earth and uniting the two realms. The angels “ascending and descending upon it” are the mitzvoth; they are actions with the capacity to uplift the “supernal lights” (an allusion to kabbalistic theurgy) and bring down a “cascade of brilliant illumination” into the physical.[liii] Indeed, in observing the commandments  the righteous throw open the heavenly conduits through which divine energy enters the world.[liv]

R. Hayyim’s understanding of the nature of the soul is not democratic, and he clearly believes that non-Jews have a different metaphysical structure.[lv] Spiritual facility remains a spectrum even amongst the Jewish people. The soul is an innately holy spark that is given as a divine gift, but it must be continuously refined and polished in order to increase its capacity for illumination.[lvi] A soul is able to apprehend holiness and becomes a prism for refracting divine effluence into the world only to the degree that it has been consciously prepared for this task.[lvii] Prophecy is similarly a function of spiritual refinement.[lviii] The mitzvoth are beacons along this journey, since performing a mitzvah cloaks one in the light of the shekhina and banishes negative desires and cravings.[lix] It is the quest for devekut that gives the spirit within a person the strength to rule over the matter of the body, thereby willfully turning a heart full of earthly passions into an extension of the soul. This transformation is always possible, even for individuals who have become totally sunken in corporeality, since their soul is an expression of the divine light of the shekhina.[lx]

Mankind has a singular pneumatic capacity, yet one is only able to perceive God’s light while still a part of the physical realm. True divine essence remains forever beyond the threshold of human perception.[lxi] This might seem to incline one toward longing for death at the expense of valuing this world, and in some passages R. Hayyim does express a yearning for God that borders on asceticism.[lxii] When the Divine spoke directly to Israel’s souls on Mt. Sinai, they were so overwhelmed with love that they fled from their bodies in order to reunite with their Source.[lxiii] This intense longing for communion with the Divine even at the expense of one’s own life is best illustrated by R. Hayyim’s explanation of the fate of Aaron’s sons in Lev. 10:1-7:

Their death was the result of having come too close to God. With great love they approached the supernal Light, and in doing so they expired; this is the “kiss” with which the righteous die. It is the same for all righteous individuals, though while the kiss comes to some of them, others go forth and pursue it… even the feeling of their death drawing near cannot hold them back from the dearest and most pleasant devekut, beloved intimacy and sweetest affection, until their very souls expire.

The nature of this [experience] cannot be grasped. It lies beyond intellectual comprehension and cannot be expressed in words either spoken or written. It cannot even be imagined. In order understand it even to some small degree, one must remove the Evil Inclination that is holding him back. [Growing spiritual awareness] will allow one to see the signs of the accursed Inclination, and he can then nullify it and prevent it from getting in his way… as this ability increases within him, his soul will despise his flesh and will depart back to the house of its Father.[lxiv]

R. Hayyim’s warning about the dangers of intimacy with the Divine is quite powerful, but the continuation of this passage one of the most remarkable and untranslatable descriptions of mystical experience that I have ever seen. He repeats words built from the same linguistic root of s.k.l. over twenty times in quick succession, forging an assonantal matrix of expressions that simultaneously connote intellectual, spiritual and experiential illumination. This literary panzer-thrust must be meant to shatter the reader’s assumptions about the boundaries of human consciousness; mystical communion with God is indeed possible without being entirely eclipsed within His infinitude, but it cannot be described with words as they are ordinarily used. Put differently, R. Hayyim employs language in a non-rational way to refer to an ineffable but experienceable degree of mystical attunement that lies outside the frontiers of expression.[lxv]

The rapture of devekut is too powerful a siren’s call for some to resist, and they surrender themselves to death’s divine kiss. However, R. Hayyim’s overall understanding of mortality is a bit more complicated. His remarkable interpretation of the plain-sense of Deuteronomy 14:1 will help clarify this point:

“You are children of the Lord your God; do not gash yourselves nor shave the front of your head on account of the dead.” It seems to teach us that it is no great tragedy when a person dies. This may be likened to a person who sends his son to another city on business. After a time the father sends for his son, and the son loses nothing when he leaves the place to which he was sent. On the contrary, it is a boon for him to return to his Father, who is the Source of all Life. Therefore, the verse teaches us not to rend our flesh [in a display of excessive mourning].[lxvi]

The second half of the verse reiterates that death is certainly no occasion for rejoicing, but remembering that the soul is simply returning to its natural unity with God should temper the grief we experience. Elsewhere, he likens the departure of the righteous to a precious jewel being lifted from its case and affixed to the crown of the King.[lxvii]

            Given this understanding of departure from the physical world as a blessing, is there anything positive to the soul’s brief sojourn on earth? In accord with a major current of the rabbinic tradition, R. Hayyim reminds us that death must always be bittersweet, for it is only this world that we are able to perform mitzvoth:

“If the servant declares, I have loved my Master and my wife and children and do not wish to go free… he will be his servant forever” (Ex. 21:5). This verse refers to a Jewish servant who burns with fiery passion to serve his Maker. Even after his physical powers have dwindled, he still longs and yearns to serve his Master. This is the meaning of “I have loved Master and my wife and children,” which are the soul and the mitzvoth that he performs in this world. He has no wish to leave the world, becoming free of obligation like the dead. This teaches us about his desire and longing for his Master. God promises such a person that he will be called a servant of the Lord and his deepest desire will be fulfilled, but not now. At the moment he has no further connection to the world. “And he will be a servant forever” means that God will chose him from amongst the angels to be His faithful servant in the world to come.[lxviii]

There is an element of sadness that accompanies the release of death. The soul is conflicted by its desire to remain in the physical world where it can serve God through observing the commandments, to the extent that God must promise it that it will be able to do so once more, presumably referring to the time of bodily resurrection. Furthermore, the brief marriage between body and spirit is mutually fructifying. On one hand, the soul is itself refined by the time spent in a physical body. On the other, the spiritual energies with which it imbues our performance of mitzvoth enable us to leave a positive impression upon the physical world around us that extends far beyond our own death.[lxix]

In keeping with his beliefs in the cosmic centrality of man and the eternal relevance the Torah’s narrative, R. Hayyim often interprets biblical passages as sustained metaphors that shed light on the dynamics of the spiritual life and the power of the mitzvoth.[lxx] Indeed, his understanding of the relationship between the physical world, biblical text, and human consciousness dovetails with the ideal of mankind as summum bonnum of creation:

Know that all physical existence is but an analogue (dugma) for the spiritual. Just as earth needs to be worked, requiring seeding and rainfall in order to bring forth food, so must a person guard himself from anything damaging and negative that prevents him from blossoming. Today the ground of the soul, rather than the corporeal body, has taken the place of the Garden of Eden. It requires work and protection of a type befitting its spiritual nature. The rainfall [it needs] is the study of Torah… and the seeds are the mitzvoth that one performs.[lxxi]

The physical world takes on an added layer of symbolic meaning when reframed as a source of inspiration for spiritual growth. The corporeal realm has limitations, but since it is the only plane on which the mitzvoth can be performed, humans can attain a level of divine awareness beyond the reach of even such purely spiritual beings as angels.[lxxii]

R. Hayyim frequently describes the general mystical significance of the commandments, but devotes little time to outlining their specific kabbalistic undergirding.[lxxiii] As we noted above, the shekhina literally dwells upon one who is performing a mitzvah. Paraphrasing of a teaching in the Tikkunei ha-Zohar, R. Hayyim adds that the very word “mitzvah” is a permutation of the ineffable name of God; observing a commandment is thus a way of tapping into the spiritual energy held within the holiest of divine names.[lxxiv] Physical actions like bringing sacrifices return the sparks of holiness, tiny fragments of the Divine splintered by Adam’s sin and trapped in physical world.[lxxv] Following God’s will by performing the mitzvoth can even bring one to the state of devekut, or intense communion with the Divine.[lxxvi] In one of his slightly veiled allusions to the sefirot, R. Hayyim notes that “performing the mitzvoth opens up the pathways of effluence and unites the supernal midot,” drawing on the popular kabbalistic tradition that the commandments affect the upper realms as well.[lxxvii]

Though total immersion in Torah study receives special accolades,[lxxviii] R. Hayyim writes that all mitzvoth have deep mystical significance.[lxxix] This includes those mandated by logic (such as refraining from murder), or given explicit justification in the Torah (keeping the Sabbath). Hence, once cannot be selective in their observance.[lxxx] These reasons were revealed to Moses and his generation, but since then have been discerned only by rarefied individuals.[lxxxi] Ordinary people must endeavor to comprehend the secrets according to their ability, yet R. Hayyim says explicitly that the mitzvoth are spiritually efficacious even when performed with the simple intention of doing what is commanded.[lxxxii]

Concluding Remarks

R. Hayyim ibn Attar calls to mind Whitman’s famous quip, “I contain multitudes.” As an interpreter of Torah he was simultaneously bold and conservative, innovative and traditional. He was unwilling to entertain any deviation from rabbinic norms of halakha, but believed in absolute freedom of interpretation in the realm of theology and parshanut. R. Hayyim was a self-proclaimed pashtan concerned with explaining the biblical text according to its plain-sense, yet at the same time he believed that the Torah contains infinite layers of mystical significance awaiting discovery. For R. Hayyim, the banks of the biblical text hold an endless river of possible of interpretations, or in metaphor employed by the author himself, the Torah is a veritable garden of divine words ready to be sown and harvested.[lxxxiii] He saw no contradiction between these two different exegetical modalities, and felt comfortable harnessing them alongside one another under the yoke of his pen. With these interesting points in mind, let us ask how R. Hayyim’s Torah commentary may be a significant contribution to modern Jewish intellectual life and a remedy for the rote ritual observance all to common in contemporary religious communities.

First and foremost, R. Hayyim’s approach teaches us a balanced posture navigating between tradition and innovation. He was legally conservative and humble in his reticence to declare earlier commentators on the Torah incorrect, but at the same time R. Hayyim knew that the text could and should be reinterpreted in new ways. R. Hayyim’s understanding of the nature of Torah and the flexibility of its interpretation will serve as a useful model when asking our students to read and comment upon the Torah. Creativity is an indispensable asset that we should be cultivating, one that is often occluded by offering classes on pre-digested “hashkafa” instead of teaching our students to think nimbly and critically about our tradition. R. Hayyim's model  will foster pluralism of interpretation, without for a moment forgetting that interpretations of the text running counter to our established legal norms ultimately cannot be maintained.

Second, educators must balance another set of important goals when teaching  students how to interpret the Torah and other Jewish texts: we ask our students how to plumb their words for spiritual significance while remaining ever cognizant of their plain-sense meaning. Establishing the peshat of a passage is necessary for determining its literal and contextual explanation, as well as understanding its halakhic reverberations. This is an essential prerequisite for seeking a verse's deeper meaning. However, lest one object that abstract Kabbalah lies beyond the intellectual palette of our students, the next stage of looking for spiritual significance need not involve recourse to opaque theosophy. As we have seen, R. Hayyim’s creative style of mystical interpretation employs the language of our kabbalistic heritage but goes beyond its complicated symbols, and his explanations are compelling precisely because they bring spiritual meaning into the realm of human experience. Concentrating exclusively on either the peshat or mystical at the expense of the other will be far less likely to hold the intellectual and spiritual commitments of our students than a judicious combination of the two.

Studying R. Hayyim’s commentary is a particularly useful way of sparking classroom discussions of important spiritual issues that are grounded in close textual readings. When teaching  parshanut it can be tempting to gloss over Ramban's terse kabbalistic references when we happen upon the words “al derekh ha-emet;” one will still learn much from Ramban's commentary even while ignoring over his Kabbalah, though a subtle and fundamental dimension of his perush will be lost. However, exploring the spiritual and mystical dimensions of the Torah are an integral part of Or ha-Hayyim and cannot be skipped. Some of these ideas will be a freeing corrective to the skeptical and sterile hyper-rationalism found in many Modern Orthodox communities. Grappling with other mystical themes will be difficult, but ultimately rewarding. For example, the essentialist understanding of the Jewish people, our inherent division from the nations of the world, and the negative picture of gentiles offends many of our modern ethical sensibilities.[lxxxiv] It contradicts the more universalistic elements in our tradition, but is a voice that has been a part of the Jewish conversation for nearly a millennium and must be confronted. The same is true of gender imbalance found in the kabbalistic symbolism.[lxxxv] Nothing will be gained by avoiding these issues, and we have everything to lose by either sweeping them under the rug or accepting them without refusing to acknowledge their difficulties. 

Students approaching the end of their high school education, whether about to go off to college or a year of learning in Israel, should first be confronted by fundamental questions such as the following: What does it mean, both practically and theoretically, to transform yourself into a dwelling for the shekhinah? What is the Torah, and what else does it contain besides the words of its text? Given the freedom we have in interpreting the Torah, how do you know when you cross the line? What is the nature and origin of evil? Where does reincarnation fit into our tradition? What does our tradition say about life after death and the World to Come? What is the status of miracles? What is the nature of our relationship to God, and what does it mean to cleave and connect ourselves to Him? How can performing mitzvoth be an intensely spiritual and meaningful experience? As they develop, our students will be confronted by questions of this type whether or not we have prepared them to think about such issues in an intelligent manner. Therefore, exploring them should be a primary goal of our educational system from the moment our students begin to think more abstractly and maturely about their religious praxis. They need a vocabulary with which to discuss matters of existential and spiritual import, and they deserve to know that it can very easily be found in the Jewish tradition.

There are several possible options for teaching R. Hayyim’s work. Or ha-Hayyim can be included as one important voice amongst the concert of biblical interpretation on the page of the Mikra’ot Gedolot. This integrated approach has the advantage of allowing students to see R. Hayyim as part of an intergenerational dialogue focusing on Torah commentary and spiritual exploration. However, many schools assign the Torat Hayyim edition of Mikra’ot Gedolot, whose publishers focused only on the works of the Rishonim and thus excluded R. Hayyim’s commentary. The inclusion of important neglected commentaries like that of R. Saadya Gaon and the careful deployment of manuscripts make Torat Hayyim a phenomenal tool for studying humash, but educators should be aware that using it precludes Or ha-Hayyim from having a place in their curriculum.

R. Hayyim’s commentary may also be taught as a stand-alone work, perhaps as an optional habura to students interested in spending time getting to know his parshanut in greater depth. Dr. Aryeh Strikovsky assembled an excellent compendium of Hebrew language texts about and by R. Hayyim as a part of the Israeli Ministry of Education’s series on culture and Torah, but to my knowledge there is not yet a North American equivalent of this valuable resource.[lxxxvi] When focusing on Or ha-Hayyim exclusively, some recourse to the supercommentaries composed to elucidate his text will doubtless be quite helpful; R. Isaac Meir Hazenfratz’s Or Yakar has proven a particularly accessible and helpful guide in my own studies.[lxxxvii]

            Finally, as a parting word, we would do well to remember that our relationship with God is the very heart of our encounter with the Torah. This is true of the written text of the five books of Moses, and it should be equally true of our study of Torah She’Be-Al Pe. Dry sophistry and polemics should never be substituted for an honest and passionate engagement with the Torah and the search to know its Author, to the best of our ability. In R. Hayyim’s words:

I trained my heart and my mind’s eye on the Light of Life… and began with a prayer before the Source of all Wisdom… I titled this book “Light of the Life” because the Torah itself is called a light, as in the verse “the commandment is a lamp and the Torah is a light” (Prov. 6:23). Since light is associated with many things, such as a candle, the sun, the moon and the stars, I called it the “Light of the Life,” which can only refer to the Creator of the world…[lxxxviii]

Let us remind our students, and ourselves, that the goal of our conversations must be the quest to gaze upon the Or ha-Hayyim, the true Source of all Illumination and Life.

   Some Spanish Sepharadeem, refugees, made their way to Aleppo and Damascus early in the 16th century; and many more to Constantinople, Salonika and Izmir. In Damascus, where they had arrived in larger numbers than in Aleppo, they established their own synagogues, houses of study, and burial grounds, alongside colonies of Karaites, Samarians, Iraqis, and the native Jews (the Musta-Arab-een), we are told by Rabbi Moshe Basola of that period. With time, they abandoned the use of the Spanish language and before long became acculturated, an integral part of the native Jewish community. Their more worldly education saw many of them in a prosperous state and in the leadership of Jewish life, positions they maintained for centuries. Aleppo’s Spanish refugee Sepharadeem, fewer in number, had also been received with cordiality and the respect due their scholarliness. A separate section of the Great Synagogue was reserved for them. This too passed away as the ‘Spaniol became embodied in the Jewish life of the city, although they continued to be distinctive. Among them were members of the Kassin (Qaaseen) and Laniado (Langiado) families, who contributed leading rabbis to the city for hundreds of years and to the present day, in Aleppo-in Flatbush and other Syrian colonies. The Dayan family, also distinguished scholars in Aleppo for centuries, had originated in Baghdad and lay detailed claim, generation by generation, descent from King David. It was the Dayans who established the revered House of Study — and prayer — Bet Nasi, “The House of the Prince.” It functioned in Aleppo until the “days of trial” in 1947, a harrowing period which the testimony of refugees now in Flatbush will reveal to us.

   Yet another wave of European Sepharadeem came, a small one, mostly from Italy, who were to be continually distinguished and prestigious in Near East Jewish life. Perhaps among the first of them to come was a maternal forebear of this writer, Signor Isaaco Silvera from Livorno (Leghorn, Italy), earlier from Gibraltar and Spain.

   His presence in Aleppo was uncovered to me by Gershom Scholem in his biography (1973) of Shabbetai Sebbi (Sevi), the false Messiah. Scholem relates that among the foremost advocates of Shabbetai prior to 1666 the date of enunciation of Shabbetai’s ‘Messiahood’, were”. . . Signor Hakham Shelomo Laniado and Signor Isaaco Silvera.” To Hakham Laniado, Shabbetai had awarded the “Kingdom of Aram Soba” (The Hebrew term for Aleppo, Psalms 60:2), and to my ancestor Silvera, the “Kingdom of David.” No doubt Silvera had contributed importantly from his considerable wealth to the Messiah’s mission. With Silvera’s presence in Aleppo, other wealthy Italian Sepharadeem had followed, to form a small but eminent group.

   Soon after the Crusades, Aleppo had become increasingly important in commerce with Europe. Earlier, such trade had been small although continuous for many centuries. Thanks to the sharpened appetite for Oriental spices and silks and the like, brought back with them by the returning Crusaders, and with the advancing decay of the feudal system, the rise and the influence of the Towns, and the revival of a money economy in place of barter, European trade with the Orient began to grow and to become a source of great wealth.

   It was largely to Halab (Aleppo) that the early Venetians, the Dutch, and the French had arrived to establish trading colonies; “Alep”, as the French 15th and 16th century traders had labeled it; the Italians had transposed it to “Alep-po,” the name used by the English. How to negotiate this trade with Aleppo’s merchants, since the English spoke no Arabic and the Aleppoans no English? Through local Aleppoans with a knowledge of Italian, French, or Spanish, largely the Spanish Sepharadeem and the Italian Jews. In addition to the Jews, Armenians and native “Byzantines” (Greek Orthodox Catholics) also participated.

The English Levant Company

  Consul North tells us of the importance of the Aleppo Jews in their relations with the English and others. Said North: “The factoring trade is in the hands of the Jews, dominated by them.” Further, he states that, “When a European began to trade through a Jew, no other would take his ‘commission,’ for by a compact among themselves no other was permitted to accept the client.” The Jewish agents earned the esteem and confidence of their clients, they were highly spoken of and their reputation spread in England for their uprightness and trading skill.

   The privileges of their foreign patrons sometimes rubbed off on to the Jewish agents, who were thus placed in particularly high regard in their community. They became Nafs Firmanli, an Ottoman-Decree (Protected) Individual. In some few instances their patrons bestowed on them full foreign national status, including Extra Territorial Rights, endowing them with greater prestige.

   In addition to the migration into Aleppo of the refugees from Spain as was noted, there were the Italian Jewish merchants. The Italians sent younger sons to serve their needs at first hand. They came on buying ‘visits’, but instead stayed, and soon married the daughters of Spanish and Musta-Arab-een (indigenous) Jews. They become known as “Francos” (French) and “Franj,” enjoying the rights and privileges of Extra- Territoriality. They were always referred to as Signors, (“Sir, in Italian; “Signor-eem” is the Hebrew plural term for this Italian title). Through their wealth and aristocratic status they became the most distinguished of the local Jews. Their piety, scholarliness and generous support of community organizations placed them at the pinnacle of their co-religionists’ esteem. The leading family among them was that of Picciotto; who were to become De Picciotto when they received titles of knighthood from the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, whom they served as consuls. Picciotto, Belilos, Bigio, Farhi, Ancona, Silvera, A1tar and a few others constituted the Franj group in Aleppo. In Damascus it was the families of Angel — (“Shemaya), Pinto, Molcho,  Farhi, Attieh Lisbona and others, who were the elite Franj.

   Late in the .18th century Shalom Ha-Cohen of Aleppo ventured into India and with the assistance of others from Halab, members of the Shaib, Tebele, Duek, Laniado families, two Settons/Suttons, as well as several Baghdadians, served to found the Calcutta Jewish community. It flourished for almost 150 years, until the British left India in 1947.

Everyday Jewish Life

   From the many recent spoken histories of individuals who recounted to me memories of life experience in Aleppo/Halab and in Damascus, we are further able to reconstruct the everyday life of the Jews there from some years before the beginning of the 20th century. In many ways it was typical of Jewish life throughout the Near and Middle East. Arabic was the universal language (except in Turkey, and some European countries under Ottoman rule.) Arabic was the common language from Iraq (Mesopotamia) on the East, to Morocco, facing the Atlantic Ocean. Culturally, too, there was broad commonality characteristic of almost all Fertile Crescent lands.

   At the crest of Aleppo and Damascus population early in this century, each city had perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 Jews. In Aleppo, everyone Jewish lived within the confines of the old and virtually invisible city-wall lines (the inner city), until about 1900-1905, when a small movement began to the-then outskirts of the city, to the Quarter called the Djamil-iyeh (named after Djamil Pasha), with broad streets and fresh air. (In the last three or four decades almost all Jews had moved there, except the direly poor.) The community was firmly ruled by the Bet Deen, the religious Court, supported by the Comite (Fr.), the community committee, formed of leading individuals— ah-kalz-behr, “notables” which administered the Jewish institutions. It was self-ruled, as was previously observed, in accordance with Ottoman and earlier, Roman and Arab regulations, which gave due recognition and respect in most periods, to each of the religious communities. This permitted an orderly and stable life over the centuries, one in which the Aleppo and Damascus Jewish populations led a generally satisfying life — constrained only by personal economic limitations.

   The Hakham Báshi was the Chief Rabbi, an institution established in Istanbul/Constantinople some four hundred years ago, largely a political one. The local Hakham Bashi was appointed by the Chief Hakham Bashi, an influential Ottoman Empire official in the Capital — with the consent of the city’s Jewish elders. He was frequently a non-native of Aleppo or Damascus, hailing from Smyrna, Istanbul, or Salonika. Often he did not match the scholarliness of the cities’ native rabbis or their religious authority, although his Office was held in much awe by the populace. The Bet Deen, the religious court, set the rules and standards for rigid religious and civil observance for the mass of Jews. They ruled in disputes between Jews, and so universally and highly were they regarded, that a Muslim with a civil complaint against a Jew preferred to have it adjudicated by the Bet Deen. He was confident that the ruling would be unbiased and just. Leading rabbis were highly respected by the Muslim leaders and their counsel was often sought.

   Rabbis of the city were also highly esteemed by fellow Jews in Palestine, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and other parts of the Ottoman Empire; respected for their learning and devoutness, from the days of Saadia, Maimonides and earlier. Over the centuries only a few had succeeded in having their scholarly religious works published. Some with valuable texts did not possess the means and know-how to achieve publication in one of the principal Sepharadi centers, in Livorno, Istanbul, Amsterdam. Only now are some of these early works being uncovered and published.

   In Syria, relations with Islamics were amicable, but formal. A state of inward uneasiness always marked the sentiments toward those of the dominant religion. The Muslims were generally friendly, but “no one put complete trust in goyeem” (Hebrew maxim) or in their continuing peacefulness, since not all Muslims were educated, or well-mannered.

The Dhimmis: ‘Protected’ Jews and Christians

    What is the reality of conditions under which the Dhimmi, the so- called ‘Protected’ people, lived? Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians who believe in one God, had special status following the teaching of Muhammad. They were known as Ahhl il Dhimmi [ pronounced “thzimmeh”], People of Faith, Conscience. They were to be protected, allowed to lead a self-ruled life, following their religion, unmolested both in their faith and in their civil rights. However, because they would not accept Islam, they were to have measures of humiliation shown to them, they were to regard themselves as “inferiors.” A special small tax was imposed on them, a jizya (a penalty). In other ways too in some periods, they had to have their inferiority made evident — through dress, restrictions on the height of their houses of worship, the lowly animals (donkeys, etc.) they were permitted to ride, the need to give way before a Muslim, and similar means of indicating their inferiority. In everything else their rights were to be protected. The Covenant could be annulled at will by Muslims when they alleged violations on the part of a minority, to be replaced with still greater severities, sometimes demanding conversion to Islam, on pain of death.

Good Relations with Muslims

   The Muslims of Aleppo were indeed of a more peaceful character than those of Damascus. No uprisings, no massacres of Jews in Aleppo have ever been uncovered by this writer. Jews accepted their role of submissive inferiors, but with dignity. They knew their own worth, and their economic importance in the metropolis, a bustling city of traders.  Aleppo Jews seldom had to submit to more than petty abuse, and only from individual ignorant and fanatic Muslims. Such elements had created riots and massacres in Aleppo in 1659-1860, but directed against Christians, with no major disorders since that time.

   In earlier periods, prior to the advent of surging nationalist Zionism in Palestine, many commercial Jewish partnerships existed with Muslims and Christians, often in enterprises involving agricultural products; Jews were partners with herders, in large-scale operations involving sheep, etc. The Jews had confidence in the integrity of their Muslim partners, their courteous friendliness and their faithfulness to their religion. Sometimes the partners were bedu (bedouins), nomads.  Jewish Murad Faham and members of the Jemal/Djmal families owned huge herds consigned to Muslims, or were partners with them; both were important manufacturers of cheese. Faham is the hero who was later to rescue the ancient and sacred Aleppo Codex: the Codex of ben Asher, spiriting it out of the country to Israel at considerable risk to his safety.

   With educated Muslims a cordiality, somewhat formal, could exist, formed perhaps through commercial transactions. However, intimate friendships with Muslims were not common. Despite cordiality with some, there was little social interaction, Jewish and Muslim families did not exchange visits; men customarily socialized in cafes. Nevertheless, on respective holiday occasions the men would sometimes pay courtesy calls to their friends of the other religion. The Governor, too, the Pasha, would pay such a courtesy call to the Chief Rabbi. In turn, the Hakham Bashi would acknowledge an Islamic or governmental holiday by a visit to the Pasha.

Everyday Life in Twentieth Century Syria

   Everyday activity in the early years of the twentieth century in Aleppo and Damascus continued the traditional and unhurried life in the midst of the countless minarets and the many large and important souks. Earlier, Jews lived — by choice — in their separate Quarters, the Saha, il Illeh, Bah-seeta, and Harrit il Yahood, the Jewish Quarter and other nearby neighborhoods, sometimes neighbors of Muslim families, but never of Christians. They occupied residences with an inner courtyard, with chambers around it, rooms not interconnected in most instances. Outhouses provided the sanitary facilities (which were periodically — sometimes tardily — emptied by the cesspool cleaner). Wealthy families occupied a private residence; others had contained two or three families, each occupying one or two rooms to accommodate their usually large numbers.

   The rooms necessarily served as living quarters by day and as bedrooms at night. They were sparsely furnished. In the poorer homes the furniture consisted of a low table with a mansaf, a large tray, and cushions, dishaks, on which they sat, close to the floor. One or two large armoires, chests, held their clothes and household wares. A deewaan, a sofa, was found in most homes, reserved for visitors. Except for the wealthy where beds were used, bedding consisted of mattresses placed on the floor. These were aired in the morning, then piled in a corner of the room, freeing it for daytime use. For those in modest circumstances and the poor, heating the chamber was by means of braziers in which a few sticks of charcoal were burned. Illumination was provided by one or more wan-a-seh, a pan filled with oil, with lighted wicks, or by kerosene lamps. Some rooms had a small raised alcove, a m’rah-bah which added to the useable space. A small deep cellar, m’gha-ra, usual in every home, provided an area where perishable food was kept somewhat fresh.  A floor covering was a necessity. Those who could afford them had rugs on the floor, from  Ajam, (Persia), or from Turkey. Others laid down a haseereh, a large woven mat of vegetable fibers.

   Housewives whose husbands had means could employ domestic help. For the majority — the poor and the near-poor — the housewife was responsible for restoring the sleeping room into a sitting room, airing the bedclothes and storing them in a corner. She washed the clothes, cooked the meals, drew water from the cistern for the family needs, and sewed or repaired the clothing. In addition, of course, she attended her many young children. She saw to the grinding of her wheat at the local mill and prepared the dough for the bread, a large part of every meal. This was sent out usually twice a week — to a nearby baker, a soo-sahnie.

   Those in the middle and upper classes usually retained a Jewish female domestic worker, who went to her own home at the end of a demanding day. She, too, washed, cooked, kneaded dough, and looked after her other household chores. Servants were often, but not always, married women. The poor provided the wet nurses for those who could not nurse their own children.

   Since clothing factories did not exist, tailors and dressmakers often gave sewing work to be performed in the home — at niggardly prices. Some women were skilled seamstresses; others, makers of wigs and hair-pieces, etc., who spent individual days working in the homes of patrons, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. (This contradicts the popular belief that wives of Oriental Jews did not work gainfully like Jewish matrons in Eastern Europe; there, it was not uncommon for some women to be actively engaged in commerce.)

   For the poor, breakfast usually consisted of bread and white cheese; some could afford only bread and inexpensive zatar, a combination of tangy herbs. (Bread was dipped into oil and then into the zatar.) A piece of halava served as ‘dessert.’ Lunch and supper often comprised the leftovers of the food of the previous day or else of an omelet, prepared with cheese, potatoes, eggplant or other available vegetables. Laban, yoghurt, was a staple, widely consumed, in addition to cereals and beans of every description; they were cheap.  The principal meal was in the evening. Few meat dishes were available, they were too expensive for most, but were served at the Sabbath meals.

   Most Jews were either lower-middle class or (the greater number) — were poor. They were craftsmen, stall-keepers, cobblers, clerks, peddlers, porters and others without skills.The life of the middle-class Jews and the wealthy permitted comfortable homes and enabled them to live well in all respects, enjoying a wide variety of foodstuffs, meat, fish, seasonal vegetables and delectable fruits.

Marriages

   Jewish marriages in the Orient were almost always arranged by the parents, usually with the aid of a semi-professional, part- time broker, a khat-ahb. He knew most families, and thus could recommend suitable mates; it was important to find spouses of suitable lineage — those of the same social class. A marriage could sometimes be arranged with another, but only one class level above or below.  Among the poor, marriages were more expeditiously arranged, without the need of an intermediary — and negotiations.

Entertainment

   Rich and poor delighted in the Sabbath, a day of complete relaxation. Some relished the occasional Sabt, the festive mid day elaborate celebratory Sabbath breakfasts after synagogue service. These often were accompanied by the singing of traditional pizmoneem, non-ritual religious songs. Aleppoans are very fond of music, outstandingly so.

   Entertainment in earlier years — 70 or 80 years ago was quite limited. Apart from visits to cafes, family and friends, public entertainment was narrowly circumscribed. Once or twice each year there was a gala concert of Arabic music. A little music was available publicly in some cafes, mostly by means of phonograph records. The “Shahh-bandar,”, a large cafe on what was then the outskirts of the city — it has since been absorbed by the exploding city — featured vocalists and a live musical ensemble. Those who could afford it thronged this green oasis in a city denuded of trees (cut down for fuel during World War I, and never replanted). On a pleasant evening, one of the residents, usually among those in humbler circumstances, would produce an ood, a lute, to be joined by neighbors in his courtyard, and often by those of an adjoining courtyard, who would enjoy and contribute to the quiet entertainment.

Community Organizations

   The community had several social institutions in addition to the kteh-teeb, the Hebrew Schools. Mohar  u-Mattan was concerned with facilitating marriages for the poor. A few gold pounds were made available to a poor couple, to permit them to buy the minimum household needs. Without the means to buy these articles, marriages could be delayed indefinitely. Sedaqa u-Marpeh, “Charity and Healing,” looked after the needy sick. It maintained a clinic and a couple of ‘hospital’ beds, the part-time cooperation of a trained doctor, as well as a drug dispensary. Mattan ba Seter was a fund which assisted the genteel poor who would not openly accept charity. A large Fund saw to the needs of the many poor families who were regularly allotted small sums to keep them from starving. A pittance was doled out, too, to dozens of poor rabbis, to allow them adequate Sabbath meals.

   There were many orphan children, numerous offspring of impoverished, undernourished parents who died young; outbreaks of tuberculosis or cholera, plague, typhus or diphtheria, were common in some earlier years. A sizeable orphanage was maintained, whose support was made barely adequate by appeals to Syrians living in New York, Manchester, Egypt and Buenos Aires. “Joe” Duek, a successful businessman, retired early to devote his time and efforts to the needs of “his” orphans.

Jewish Commerce and the Souks

   Aleppo’s merchants, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian, are traditionally serious-minded men, in a city which lacks the heady, irresponsible effervescence of Damascus. Halab had less politics and less fanaticism. While Damascus is the town of the “Arab,” Aleppo is the city of the merchant.

   A large part of trade and commerce was dominated by the Jews of Aleppo. A small number were private bankers, called sir-eh-feen, ‘changers’, money-changers (sar-raf, sing.). In a country and city where its residents had no faith in paper money — their confidence was in dahab-at — gold pieces!. Some of their trade in silver and gold pieces was international in scope. Their activity and that of the many Jewish merchants dealing in textiles and a variety of other important commodities permitted them the acquisition of impressive fortunes, very discreetly held, and most ‘modestly’ spent.

   The merchants of Aleppo carry on their activities in the khans and souks. A khan is a caravanserai (a “palace”  for caravans). A souk is a trading street or lane, in some countries referred to as a “bazaar.” But not all souks are alike. Those who visited Jerusalem and its souk (“shouk,” in Hebrew) can little imagine the size and scope of Aleppo’s souks. The latter are roofed, and constitute a sizeable “town” extending for many miles; souks which are deemed more important than those of Damascus and Cairo. Off the principal souks are found the many khans. In several of them our Jewish merchants carried on their trade, principally in the huge Khan ii Gimrog — “the Customhouse Khan” and the vast Khan il Qassabiyeh — the “Khan of the Gold Threads.” There they maintained their offices, attached to which were their sizeable warehouses.  Each craft, in traditional fashion, is established in its own “street” and thus the visitor progresses from the leather workers to the smiths, to the merchants of silks and cotton cloths, or to the souks which sell spices, with their curious haunting fragrances. Aleppo has more than 150 hammams, ‘Turkish baths’, whose beauty and luxuriousness were highly praised.

Jewish Schools

   In Aleppo as in Damascus, in the unhurried and traditional life of old, few influences of the Age of Enlightenment had penetrated or were available to the people of the cities and to the Jewish population. Exceptions were the relatively small but important number of Jews who were able to attend the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. With the self-esteem and self-satisfaction with which they lived, Jews (and Muslims), lacked the quest and thirst for secular education, which characterized the Jews of Europe. Jewish education, except for Alliance students, was in the ktehteeb (kittab sing.) elementary Hebrew schools, for boys. When boys “graduated” at about age thirteen “they went down to the souk” to seek gainful work. Children of families with some means remained in the Alliance until they achieved ‘senior’ graduation at ages 17 to 20.

   Traditional early Jewish schooling taught the male children prayers, and the Bible — which was taught in Hebrew of course, but with some chapters memory-instilled in formal (archaic- classical) Arabic translation, very likely the translation of Saadia Ha-Goan, achieved almost one thousand years ago. The boys became familiar with AinYaacob, a simple recounting of rabbinic aggadah (parables, legends), and other similar works. Most students, with their bar mizva, went out to seek work; but children of wealthy parents, if not at the Alliance school, continued their studies, going on to instructions in the Talmud and other rabbinic works, in batteh midrash, halls of study. They attended there for a few years, before going on to the serious business of gaining money, in order to permit them to marry and to establish their own families. Newlyweds without much means lived with “his” or “her” parents, depending on their relative means, for a few years. A few wealthy men with large homes maintained several married sons and their families in a patriarchal pattern, as a truly “extended family.”

   In addition to study of religious texts in the kittab, the traditional Hebrew elementary school, an hour or so every other day was devoted to learning to read and write Arabic and write the customary cursive Hebrew Script known as nus’alam (‘half a pen’) somewhat similar to Rashi script. This is a medieval form of the written Hebrew coming down to us in the Cairo Geniza fragments of the 10th to 14th century. The men of ancient Cairo, like present-day Jews in Aleppo and Damascus, used the Hebrew script to write letters whose texts were often in Arabic. The students, particularly those whose learning years were limited by the need to work, left the kittab without much ability to write either Hebrew or Arabic — but, were of course, able to read Hebrew printed texts.

   The overwhelming majority of both Jews and Muslims — particularly the latter, had no mastery of writing, although every Jewish child submitted to some schooling with the consequent ability to read (Hebrew), and perhaps to read and write some Arabic. Limited writing lessons introduced into “senior” classes in the kitttab left the boy little time to master writing before he left school at age thirteen.

The Alliance Israelite Universelle and other Schools

   Alliance Israelite students did acquire the ability to write French, some Arabic and Hebrew. They received a Western style education which included a few hours every week of Hebrew prayers and some Biblical texts. Very religious parents provided private tutors for additional religious studies. Otherwise, most Alliance education was in French. Advanced students who deviated by speaking any Arabic in the school were made to pay a small fine for infractions.

   The Paris-based Alliance had its European-trained Sepharadi Jewish teachers. “Sophisticated” and “not very religious,” they were looked at with some suspicion by the ultra Orthodox.  They had little regard for the religious element, although they were careful in Aleppo not to flout the orthodoxy of the community.  Despite some mild disapproval on the part of some unsophisticated Aleppo rabbis, parents continued to send their children to the Alliance. Commercial advancement was impossible without the education the Alliance Israelite was able to provide — in a community of merchants.

   The brightest Alliance graduates were offered tuition-free advanced study in the Alliance schools in and near Paris. These were teacher-training schools, which required graduates to take teaching posts for a period of several years at the discretion of the Alliance in any Near/Middle East country where the Alliance had schools. Not enough can be said, or is acknowledged, of the benefactions that the Alliance Israelite Universelle schools brought to the Jews of the whole of the Near and Middle East, Turkey and Greece, (and some Balkan countries). This blessing is taken for granted, even by many who gained immeasurably by attending. The Aleppo school was established in 1869 for boys, a school for girls was instituted few years later. The lives and careers of Alliance students were affected, to benefit them for many years, in the Near East, and when many went to distant lands and new endeavors.

   In later years some Jewish families eager for more intensive education for their male children enrolled them in the superior school operated by the monks, girls at the convent schools of the the Sisters — the nuns. Jewish and (the fewer) Muslim students there were excused from attendance at Mass and from classes in Christian theology.  In Aleppo, no Jewish children were ever known to have converted to Christianity. A recently-arrived reliable informant stated that in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, 20 percent of Jewish families had given their children such Catholic school education — families which were regarded as of ‘normal’ Jewish observance.

   With the installation of French Mandatory rule in 1922, the French authorities had established the Mission Lycee, the Laique, the secular school of high caliber. The curriculum began where the Alliance ended. Graduation from the Laique school enabled students to qualify for college or university education in Beirut or in Paris, for such as wished to pursue a career in law, medicine, or other professions. A few Jewish Laique graduates did so, to become lawyers and physicians.  

A-political Jewry

   Jews in Syria and in most other Ottoman countries were entirely a-political. They could not participate in partisan politics because of the delicacy of their situation in a Muslim world. Content to lead their separate community life without molestation, they were grateful for the privilege of being left to live in peace. Thus they did not have the urge of fervent Zionism, like the oppressed Jews in Czarist countries. As I witnessed in a 1933 visit to Aleppo, the Jewish community leaders were required by the Muslim authorities to publicly “disavow any sympathy with Zionism.”  It was only in the mid-to-late 1930’s that Zionism began to grow in Aleppo — although not to flourish. Zionist-influenced sports and cultural activities on a small scale began then, manifested by the “Maccabi Football (soccer) Club” and small Zionist discussion groups. Jewish recruiters from Palestine visited Aleppo in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s; they influenced a small number of young people to move to the Holy Land. The majority, however, were satisfied to continue their accustomed pattern of life, although they became increasingly uneasy. (Some Aleppoans and Damascenes who later located in Egypt and Lebanon tell us in their oral memoirs of bustling but discreet Zionist interest and activity there.

Beginning Migrations

   With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, some Aleppoan and Damascene Jews migrated to Egypt seeking better economic opportunities. Others, merchants, had gone to Manchester, England to represent their partnerships and family enterprises which had been importing English cotton goods through commission merchants.

   Toward the end of the 19th century, a few intrepid pioneers set out from Syria, seeking the opportunity to earn enough money to provide them with a small capital, and to return to their native cities. The incentives for travel were World Fairs, the Expositions in Paris in 1859 and the Columbian Exposition in 1893. At the end of the Expositions, alas, none had made their fortune. Some returned to their native city; others stayed on waiting for the next Fair — the Pan American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, or the St. Louis World’s Exposition of 1903. Except for one individual, none had settled in the United States before 1903, when several Aleppo and Damascus Jews decided to stay and make their home in New York.

The Nucleus of Mass Migration

Dire need in many Jewish families in Syria was aggravated by the several economic crises, worldwide depressions which affected Aleppo’s commerce as well. 1903 saw such slack in trade, to be repeated in 1907. Commercial houses went bankrupt or were compelled to discharge employees — who were left destitute, with no income or the means to secure food. Having heard of the few Jews who had migrated to the Americas, pioneers who wrote back reporting their ability to work and earn in New York, Mexico, and Buenos Aires, an emigration trend, a small tide set in, inducing men with hungry homes to leave their cherished families and friends and the accustomed orderly Jewish life, to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Most of them left with little more than the clothing on their backs to go to distant and strange lands where they arrived like deaf-mutes, unable to speak the new languages, to understand and to be understood. Since an alternative to the helpless misery of their life in Aleppo and Damascus presented itself, they had seized it, those with courage enough to embark on the unknown. Still another factor encouraged emigration.

   The “Young Turks” movement of army officers had forced the abdication in 1908 of the despot Sultan Abd il-Hamid II, who had clung to the politics of an earlier and antiquated era. Turkey was humiliated by defeats in several small wars, because of the archaic and thoroughly corrupt official government structure. With the overthrow of Abd il-Hamid the Army sought greater strength — and large numbers of soldiers. This was a calamity for Jews under Ottoman rule. Under the old regime Jews and other minorities were “not desired” to mingle with the Muslim soldiers; with the payment of a f’kehk, a “release,” a small tax, non-Muslims were considered to have made a substitute contribution. The need for a new and larger army ended this exemption; every able bodied ‘young’ man was made subject to conscription. As soon as conscription appeared imminent, Jewish men quietly disappeared, to make their way to a new and strange land.  

   Encouraged by the reports from New York from the early immigrants who were sending money to their impoverished families, many more made their way to New York’s Lower East Side.  Buenos Aires, Mexico, and New York were equally known in Damascus and Aleppo as the “goal” for those compelled to emigrate. (Some who were denied entry at Ellis Island also turned to Argentina or to Mexico.) The years 1908-1913 saw the nucleus of a Syrian community in Mexico as well as in Buenos Aires and New York.  

An Evolving Sephardic Identity:  Striking a Balance in an Age of Multicultural Diversity

by Rachel Sopher

I recently travelled to Spain, planning a relaxing vacation, my first trip to Europe.  In preparation for the trip I read up on Barcelona, the city where we would be based, and asked friends about where to find kosher food and how to manage in a country where the Jewish presence was all but invisible.  Once in Spain I happily took in the sites, the architecture of Gaudi, the Picasso museum, and the rich local culture.  On the last day of our stay, a fellow traveller organized a day trip to the ancient city of Girona, birthplace of the Ramban and home to The Jewish Heritage Museum of Catalonia.  We hired a tour guide to take us through the museum and the old Jewish quarter of the city, excited by the prospect of familiarizing ourselves with the history of the Jews of Northern Spain.  But my excitement quickly turned to disappointment as I realized that the museum and our tour guide were geared towards servicing the general Spanish populace, an overwhelming percentage of whom were completely unacquainted with Jewish culture.  As we walked from room to room, and our non-Jewish guide explained the basic rituals of the Sabbath and the Mikveh to our group, my heart sank; I found myself feeling the connection to and loss of the rich Sephardic culture of Spain, all traces of which have been destroyed in the years since the Spanish Inquisition.

I was surprised by the rush of feelings sparked by the return of awareness of my Sephardic heritage and shocked by the way I had come to Spain with a total lack of concern for any historical connection. I have always taken particular interest in Sephardic culture and tradition and had studied the history of the Jews in Spain in college, spending hours reading up on its famous figures, the Rambam, Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Gabirol.  Gone was my idealization of the Golden Age of Jewish Spain; gone was the pride in my connection to this romantic past.  As our group walked the narrow streets of the old city of Girona, I pondered the obliteration of the Jewish presence in Spain and its parallel, the disappearance of my Sephardic heritage from my mind.  The trip left me identifying with the Jews who were forced to leave Spain during the Inquisition in my own analogous experience of cultural expulsion and left me wondering about my fickle relationship to my Sephardic roots.

As I pondered the questions brought up by my experiences in Girona, my thoughts led me to a consideration of the role of Sephardic tradition within a larger Jewish identity.  Sephardic Jews comprise but a small and diverse subset of the greater worldwide Jewry, constituting what some might call a minority within a minority.  Sephardic Jews in integrated communities face challenging choices when it comes to consolidating coherent religious and cultural identities. Navigating differences within a richly multifaceted group can be an intricate and formidable undertaking. How can an individual hold on to his unique background while remaining in close contact with a broader and more prominent culture?      

It is a complicated venture to negotiate individual difference while retaining membership in a distinct overarching body.  Sephardic Jews make up a heterogeneous subset of the Jewish world.  The religious commonalities among different types of Jews are significant enough to provide an umbrella identity, a link through common history, religion and values, though this broad-ranging identity is largely defined by the more dominant Ashkenazic culture.  To make assumptions about what it means to be Jewish is to accept stereotypes represented by Ashkenazic traits and to be gently folded into many broad expectations about what it means to be Jewish.  Yet Sephardim are different enough culturally to warrant a discrete though overlapping classification. For many Sephardim, self-identifying as a Jew without cultural qualification can be a gratifying and connecting experience, one in which our commonality breeds deep affiliation; but this same prospect may also carry the risk of divergence and alienation, a gulf in experience that could lead to an emphasis on isolation or estrangement in the symbolic renunciation of difference.  This conflict speaks to a question of identity; how can we celebrate our similarities and embrace differences without slipping into extreme position?

In a very personal way, this theme and variations on it have informed my relationship with religion throughout my life.  Sephardic culture and tradition permeated my early experience to such extensive proportions that for some time their influence remained vague in the way that the most basic things about us remain indeterminate, a shadowy presence as an identity taken for granted in the naive assumption that this is just the way things are.  At that time, in an uncomplicated way, the insularity and homogeneity of my family and community life contributed to a strong sense of what it means to be Jewish, and more specifically what it means to be a member of a Sephardic family and community.  These circumscribed sensibilities pervaded my day to day existence, organizing my experiences, and as such were ingested with the ease and passive receptivity of a child being fed on mother’s milk.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around my paternal grandparents, my Nona and Papoo as we called them; their house was the heart of our family, the hub around which all of our lives revolved.  Sitting on the floor as Nona entertained family and community members at her endless afternoon cave`s, I was indoctrinated into a special society, one in which vivacious connection infused earnest and sincere relationships.  The women would sit around and echar lashon, chatting animatedly with each other for hours on end.  Language peppered with Ladino sayings and punctuated by uproarious laughter filled my ears while heavy, ethnic foods reminiscent of the old countries of Rhodes and Turkey filled my stomach.  This robust umbilical tie to the old country developed in a sensorial and visceral rather than explicit way that grounded our family, providing a sense of belongingness and safety that pervaded my early cultural identity.  For us, family was everything; and being in our family was inextricably connected to what it meant to be a part of a vibrant Sephardic tradition.

This aspect of my identity gradually became more complicated as the field of my experience inevitably widened to include the more dominant traditionally Ashkenazic conventions and practice.  What had once been an implicit and unacknowledged understanding of Sephardic identity slowly became explicit as frank comparisons and contradictions brought my experiential world into the more broad-ranging Jewish arena. Mine was a naive understanding of Jewish identity, lacking direct consideration and focal attention.   When a child is raised in a particular culture, she goes through an unconscious process called enculturation; this is the means through which a person passively takes in the values and behaviors that are suitable and necessary in that culture. Developing a more extensive and complex appreciation of one’s culture means reevaluating the basic values inscribed in childhood, assessing their relevance and then making conscious choices about their personal meanings.  This process, termed acculturation, is one in which a person of any age can adapt to another culture.  People raised in diverse environments can compare cultures and consciously adopt characteristics that suit them.  It can be based on personal preference, but it is more likely the social and environmental pressures that convince a person that the behavioral norms of one of the cultures work more smoothly or achieve goals more effectively in any given circumstances. Because of the human tendency to accommodate to one’s milieu, identity can change and gradually evolve, to become an authentic reflection of an individual sense of self within a shifting multicultural context.

Of course, this process requires cognitive capacities that develop over a lifetime.  As children, we are capable only of simple psychological operations, conflicts around identity generally give rise to black and white, all-or-nothing thinking.  In this uncompromising manner of reasoning, differentiation is experienced as a danger; this threat can generally be dealt with by denying difference through merger and denial of particularities, or alternatively, by flaunting the superiority of one’s own culture, in a chauvinistic denial of the validity of the other.  These stances comprise opposite sides of the same coin, in that they involve holding on to rigid, categorical assumptions about the need for strict coherence within groups.

In every society in which diverse cultures meet, minorities face strong pressures to give up aspects of their identities to conform to the more dominant standards. Those of us who live in the United States and other Western countries have all experienced the pull of assimilation and the ways we are passively induced to forgo difference in favor of blending in with the larger group.  Aside from other influences, our history as subjugated minorities has prompted us to integrate with more powerful cultures in acts of adaptive identification.  The permeable boundaries between Jews of different backgrounds frequently leads Sephardic Jews to conform to the more prominent Ashkenazic group, though in its extreme form, this adaptation can mean giving up meaningful aspects of self.  It is often easier to fit in than to assert divergence or cultural distinction.

On the other extreme is the culture that is intolerant of others. Sephardic Jews can at times experience anxiety about the loss of their tradition, especially as more time and more generations widen the gulf between current conventions and the customs of the old countries.  Though this is a valid concern, in its extreme it can lead to defensive rejection of otherness.  In this case, difference is experienced as a threat to cultural identity and thus can lead to a xenophobic posturing, shutting others out through attitudes of self-protective fanaticism.  

These strong reactions to alterity are more common than one might think and represent the Scylla and Charbidis of diverse, multidimensional societies.  It is human nature to think in extremes and we all fall into these traps of oversimplified lines of thought at various times in our lives.  These inflexible positions allow us the comfort of avoiding conflict, both internally and externally.  Denial of difference short circuits nuanced understandings of human relationships and diminishes experiences of self-identity.  Acknowledging contrasts means facing discord and possible friction within our environments.  However, this conflict is the source of much cognitive and emotional growth.  As our experiential spheres expand into wider and more diverse concentric circles, our inner worlds become more complicated.  Enriched by new perspectives, our understanding of ourselves and of others deepens, creating opportunities for a broader range of choices and more fertile interrelatedness.

            As a child I found myself confusedly oscillating between these two extremes.  At home I heard about the importance of Sephardic culture and the need to assert a strong Sephardic identity.  This position directly contrasted with the mentality I faced in my predominately Ashkenazic school in which the Eastern European traditions were assumed as a baseline of commonality among students and teachers. It was not uncommon during my elementary school years to bring some information learned at school home only to find that it did not correspond with my family’s traditions as Sephardic Jews.  Alternatively, highlighting the differences in my background from those of my Ashkenazic peers and mentors at school often brought uncomfortable feelings of difference; teachers with heavy workloads and packed curricula do not always welcome interruptions regarding individual differences in students’ customs.  Through dealing with the tensions between these environments, I began to establish a patterned response to the contexts in which I found myself.  I learned to accommodate differences in perspective and when to assert my cultural particularities and when to remain more unobtrusive.  

As this happened, I gradually established a relationship to my identity as a Jew that incorporated some Sephardic and some Ashkenazic traits, though because of my perception of Sephardim as a marginalized community, I tended to hold on more tightly to the unique experiences of my Sephardic upbringing, asserting their validity in the face of what felt like a threat to their legitimacy.  Mine was a somewhat militant outlook, particularly in my youth when I was unable to conceptualize the feelings of conflict surrounding my identity.

            As I grew older and was better able to formulate and communicate some ideas about my experience of difference within these cultures, my viewpoint softened.  I heard from others, both from inside and outside of my community and began to integrate a more balanced understanding of the nature of one’s relationship to her individual heritage.   Through this dialogue, I realized that having access to both Sephardic and Ashkenazic cultural identities could widen my frame of reference and enhance my religious life;  I developed a more balanced bicultural Jewish identity, feeling freer to express myself  and more open to input from others.  As I learned that we can acknowledge differences and survive, I slowly gained confidence in the legitimacy of my unique background and this confidence allowed me to better hear outside perspectives without feeling threatened. 

            However, this balance was context-dependent and evolved as my sensibilities and attitudes towards myself and my surroundings fluctuated.  In more recent years, the ties to my early upbringing slowly began to fade.  My Nona and Papoo passed away and with the loss of their presence in my life, it was more difficult to sustain my connection to the experiences of my youth, inextricably tied to my experiences of myself as a Sephardic Jew.  With their deaths I began to question the need to hold on to what felt like a dying tradition.  I no longer lived in the Sephardic community I grew up in, and without the connection to that community it became more difficult to hold on to a culture with less direct reinforcement in my life.  I began to think of the Sephardic community of my youth as a fading culture and Ladino as a dead language.  I began to question the strength of my allegiance to my Sephardic background and my motives for asserting this aspect of my Jewish identity.

These changes in my experiences and perceptions of Sephardic Jewish identity, in conjunction with my desire to protect my own children from facing similar conflicts in their senses of who they are as Jews, led me to gradually give up some of my commitment to the singularity and uniqueness of my early Jewish background.  It is my belief that my discordant experiences during my trip to Girona were the culmination of this protracted and somewhat unconscious disavowal of my Sephardic heritage, the return of which faced me with a shocking crisis in identity.  

But this does not have to be the end of the story.  The flood of feelings I experienced during my trip to Spain made me aware of a part of myself, a part that I truly value and that I had been denying for some time.  It is inevitable that we fall into one extreme or another at various phases of our lives.  This is part of what it means to live within two cultures. But we can use these opportunities to develop an integrated understanding that is personally meaningful.  My experiences in Spain helped me to better clarify exactly how I feel being a Sephardic Jew at this point in my life--a feeling that, until that time, had remained much out of my awareness. As a child, I took these things for granted, as essential parts of myself, not realizing the ways we are subject to change. Though there is some loss in giving up this childish purity of understanding, what we get in return is a far richer, multifaceted, and multidimensional connection to our Jewish heritage.

My Sephardic identity still plays an important role in my life. While I am concerned about its future in the face of assimilation to Ashkenazic standards, as well as the normative values of American culture, this concern need not lead to a regressive pull towards the creation of rigid boundaries.  I believe that the meaning lies in the process, the journey towards achieving a balanced perspective that is reflective of personal significance.  What we pass on to our children are not only concrete traditions and teachings, but also the ways we relate to our religious identities.  As our children see us grapple with creating balanced religious and cultural selves, they can identify not only with our specific heritage but also with our struggle to remain true to ourselves while respecting difference in others.  Though there is a risk that the minority within the minority which constitutes Sephardic cultural identity will become watered down with such an outlook, I have faith that our children will be able to forge their own relationships to religion, striking their own balanced relationships as Jews.  Having an open point of view does not mean forsaking your roots; we don’t need to give them up, but can continue to take pride in our traditions while respecting those of others in the true spirit of loving thy neighbor.  

     I’d like to begin by quoting to you a passage from Rabbi David Hartman, from his book, The Living Covenant. He writes:

Traditional Judaism has always contained a vital dialectic between [“Ze Keli v’anvehu”] “This is my God and I will adore Him” and [“Elokei avi v’aromimehu[DEA2] ”] “The God of my father and I will exalt Him” (Exodus 15:2). Loyalty to the God about Whom our fathers told us does not exclude the discovery of new insights and experiences that lead one to say, “This is my God.” The past does not exhaust all that is possible within one’s covenantal relationship with God. When Moses asks God how he should announce God’s “name” to the community, he is told to say that he was sent by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but also the God Who is worshipped through the new possibilities that the future may uncover: “I will be what I will be” [“Eheyeh asher eheyeh”]. One loyal to Sinai does not only look backward. (Living Covenant, 8–9)

In the past year and years, members of the JOFA community and its sympathizers have made great strides taking ownership over and elevating “elokei avinu.” We have appropriated the Torah of our fathers into our own batei midrash, adding the Torah of our mothers. We’ve gotten to know the God mediated through Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaacov—and countless other men—as we shared our own voices, and those of our matriarchs, through learning and through ritual. We have faithfully inherited our tradition, struggled with it where necessary, and have—to a large degree—rendered it accessible to girls and women everywhere. While there is certainly work yet to be done, we have widened the halakhic path, so that all members of the Jewish community who want to can participate in the ongoing journey from Sinai. In so doing, we have certainly exalted God.

     Yet, with gratitude for all that we have accomplished and with a strong awareness for the battles that remain, I would like to pose a different question: Have we taken sufficient time or made sufficient space for “Ze keli”? Has all the permission and all the inclusion helped us in the project of identifying and reifying a personal God? With all our holy and rightful reverence for our past, are we any more capable of opening ourselves to the unfolding of Eheyeh, of a self and a God in the process of becoming? To what might we point and say, “This is my God”?

     Hartman’s concern accents the temporal—Can the God of our past be made present? My concern accents the spiritual—Can God, as mediated through our tradition, be made personal?

     I am charged with the task today of addressing the nexus of spirituality and Orthodox feminism. I come to you not as a guru or even as an enlightened practitioner; not as a rabbi nor as a rabbah, but simply as a woman, Jewish educator, and seeker eminently committed to expanding the possibilities for religious life in the Modern Orthodox community. I want to enlarge the sphere of our religious concern, to place at the center of our religious discourse and our religious experience the cultivation of spirit.

     To give shape to this call, I’d like to sketch for you two entry-points to spirituality—two among many, no doubt—that are captured by the phrase, “Ze keli,” “This is my God.” Recall that these words are part of shirat haYam, the song sung after the splitting of the Red Sea, in celebration of the miraculous liberation from Egypt. Rashi, quoting the Mehilta, famously writes on these words:

God revealed Godself in His glory to [the Israelites], and they pointed at God with their finger. By the sea, [even] a maidservant perceived what prophets did not perceive.

     What was available to all of Benei Yisrael—and Benot Yisrael—at the moment of great salvation was the gift of transparency: Ze keli. They could point to their immediate experience and say, “This is the hand of God.” After years of toil in the land of Egypt, after generations in which God was eclipsed from their lives, they were blessed with a moment of absolute clarity. They could perceive with certainty the urgent, unmistakable presence of a God who heard their cries and who delivered.

     I submit to you that one central impulse in the spiritual quest is the longing to be able to say “Ze,”—that is, to encounter God in ways that are immediate, powerful, palpable; to invite experiences of kedusha, or of devekut, that fill a person with awareness of transcendence. The spirituality of “ze keli” demands a relationship with the divine that is intense, real, urgent. It asserts that there is a live Other to whom one can point.

     How? In the absence of sea-splitting pyrotechnics that testify to God’s power, we might yearn in our times for more subtle moments that testify to God’s presence. “Ahat sha’alti me’et Hashem ota avakesh: Shivti beBeit Hashem kol yimei hayyay, lahazot beNoam Hashem u’livaker beHekhalo,” says the Psalmist, a seeker of God if ever there was one. “I ask one thing of God: Let me sit in Your home all the days of my life, to see your glory and to visit your inner sanctum” (Psalm 27:4). We cannot hope for supernatural miracles that will lift the veil of the world. That is not the reality in which we live. We can, however, try to sit quietly with sanctity and even to encounter deep holiness from time to time. The cry of “shivti beBeit Hashem” reminds us that spirituality—so often associated with experiences of ecstasy—can also just be found in the simplicity of everyday living, of sitting with what comes our way and dwelling with God there.  Only then might we be blessed with a visit to the hekhal, to the place of innermost depths.

     This is one way that we might reclaim “ze keli”—through the cultivation of a compelling relationship with God. Just as our ancestors could see God at the sea, so our generation is charged to figure out, where is it that we see God? As individuals and as a community, what might we do—

• what spiritual practices might we adopt?
• what intentions might we set?
• what spaces might we share?
• what texts might we learn and how might we learn them?
• what prayers might we pray?
• what goals might we privilege?

—that will allow us best to dwell in the house of God? What are the religious pathways that will speak to our souls? What will be our avenues to the hekhal?

* * *

     Beyond the explicitly spiritual agenda of getting to know a God to whom one can point, there is a second dimension to “ze keli” spirituality. Experiences like the kind at the Red Sea rarely last, of course. It is not the nature of the divine mystery to remain disclosed. The moment that Benei Yisrael exit the miraculous space—literally and figuratively—they are struck with fear, with a lack of trust in their future. They worry about whether the God who just dramatically and spectacularly saved them from their enemies can also sustain their humdrum, everyday needs. “Ma nishte?” they ask (Exodus 15:24). What will we drink in the desert? What will we eat? In other words, what will nourish us now? No amount of spiritual enlightenment could save them from the vulnerability of being human.

      A second impulse in the spiritual life can be located here, not in the ascent to the divine, but in the descent to all that is inescapably human. In those moments when life—in all of its complexity—intrudes and awakens and unsettles, those are the moments when we might open to a world beyond—beyond self, beyond what we thought, maybe beyond words. It is a strange truth that when we feel most raw and vulnerable, when our skin is thinned by the wild unpredictability of the world, we are that much more available to the touch of the other. Like a body burned by the sun, we feel more—more fear, but also more tenderness. “MiMa’amakim keratikha yah,” “From the depths, I call out to God”—not just from the place of despair, but from within the arresting grip of life laid bare.

     Joy and pain, fulfillment and disappointment, compel the deepest, hardest, most fundamental existential questions:

• In what can I trust?
• For what am I grateful?
• How can I cope with loss?
• How can I honor love?
• What is intimacy?
• For whom or what shall I sacrifice?
• Where does my integrity lay?
• How can I live in the face of fear, uncertainty, and doubt?

Like Benei Yisrael thirsting for water in the desert, we too might wonder: What will nourish me?

     I submit, it is the task of spirituality to take on these challenges too, not to answer them, but to help us live without answers; to help us cope with and embrace mystery; to live in the world as it really is. A Jewish path that accents these questions seeks to reframe the stories we tell ourselves. It seeks to help us make meaning out the mess of our colorful, wonderful, unpredictable, uneven existence. It seeks to help each and every one of us to find our way toward a God that is truly our own. Ze Keli. This is my God—a God who speaks to my personal issues, my deepest needs, the cravings and confusions of my own soul.

     For this task, the language of halakha alone won’t do. Seekers of these forms of spirituality need a wider, more varied pathway—through Aggadah, Midrash, Mussar, Hassidut; through prayer, meditation, song, and silence; through modalities of religious engagement that are neither systematic nor systematizing in their nature. To meet the cries of our explosive, expressive souls, we’re going to need to privilege those texts, those teachers, and those techniques that help reify God in the world, and in the core of our beings.

* * *

     Is this a project for Orthodox feminists? Absolutely. As a community that has valiantly fought to expand ritual access, leadership roles, learning opportunities, and social justice, it is our duty to clarify what it is that animates these struggles altogether, what mission under girds the religious life, and what makes the effort worth it. It is also our privilege—the privilege won from years on the periphery—to speak to the core and to enlarge and elevate the conversation, to expand the possibilities for a spiritually vibrant existence for all Jews.

     Let us be not just inheritors of tradition, but active shapers of it. As we honor Elokei avinu veImenu, let us commit—today and always—to cultivating lives full of a profoundly present and personally meaningful God, so that each one of us might be blessed to say, “Ze keli veAnvehu.”

I.

With the recent publication of Aharon Appelfeld’s newest novel Blooms of Darkness[1] engagingly translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green, one is initially motivated to agree with Philip Roth, the eminent American novelist, who adorned the author as fiction’s foremost chronicler of the Holocaust. Roth observed that the stories herein are “small, intimate, and quietly narrated, and yet are transformed into a soaring work of art . . . with a profound understanding of loss, pain, cruelty and grief.” Additionally, one is equally moved to add, in the words of Primo Levi, the Italian novelist and critic, that Appelfeld’s voice “has a unique, unmistakable tone which strikes the reader with awe and admiration.” And one is further tempted to agree with Honoré de Balzac, the French nineteenth-century novelist, who declared, on an entirely different occasion, that “the novel is really the private history of nations.”

Part of the pleasure in reading Appelfeld’s “history of his nation” in this novel, and others, is the brevity of its presentation. For example, many initial conversations between a mother and son, who are hounded by a Nazi killer, are uttered in half-sentences. For Holocaust-era conversations had to be brief, lest the savages discern any moves and motifs deserving liquidation. Under those circumstances, one hardly speaks in fluid sentences. Everything is secretive, for life depends more on silence than on speech: a look here, a motion there, or an eyebrow raised, often ends most conversations. To capture these sensations, Appelfeld actually tells this entire story in some 68 chapters, each one of them no more than four pages, which add up to a unique, sad, and captivating experience for the reader.

Appelfeld has dedicated his creative life to the literature and history of his own people, beginning, of course, with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and proceeding, most often, in agony—murder, extortion, banishment, vilification, and exile—throughout the ancient, medieval, and modern periods of his national history. Ultimately, of course, he devoted—attached—himself to the bitter, brutal, murderous, forlorn, and unforgettable years of the Holocaust, all replete, needless to say, with “loss, pain, cruelty, and grief.”

Julia

            But first, the story. Told almost in a whisper, it takes place in an unnamed Ukrainian city not far from the Carpathian Mountains. Among its citizens, we find Julia and Hans Mansfeld and their three children, Otto, Anna, and young Hugo. The parents were pharmacists by profession, who, during their years of dispensing pharmaceuticals and prescriptions, were heralded not only for their professionalism, but also for equally delivering those items and food, without cost, to those unable to pay. Hans, alas, was the first to be “transferred” to a secret place, near the mountains, followed sometime later by Otto and Anna; leaving Julia and 11-year-old Hugo to navigate for themselves in that chaos.

            We find mother and son, first, standing on the street, anxiously beleaguered, waiting for the arrival of one of the notorious “peasants,” who operate by snatching children “for fees,” to deposit them eventually in some “hiding places” near the mountains. Fortunately for Julia and Hugo the peasant fails to appear. Determined that at least Hugo would survive, mother and son quickly lower themselves through the half-dry public sewers of the city, until they reach its outskirts. There by the grace of good fortune, Julia chances to meet up with an old grammar school classmate, one Mariana Podgorsky, a non-Jew, and by profession a “madam,” who lives in a place called the “Residence,” together with a string of other harlots, catering exclusively to the German soldiers who visit there nightly.

            Julia shares her tale of woe with her friend of grammar school years, who graciously consents to care for the innocent youngster until the war’s end. Mercifully relieved, and filled with unending gratitude, Julia surrenders young Hugo to Mariana, while handing her son his personal knapsack, filled with “a Bible, games of chess and dominoes, plus some reading and writing material.” Shortly thereafter, Julia is herself “deported.”

            Hugo accompanies Mariana to her own room in the “Residence,” which is lavishly filled with all sorts of perfumes, bottles of brandy, which she imbibes frequently, as well as a “personal closet,” stocked with all sorts of lavish attire. Next to her “boudoir” rests another closet, bereft of any and all human necessities. She assigns that closet to Hugo, in order that he be hidden from all human contact while staying there. She immediately warns him that, should she be out at times, for whatever reason, he must never answer the door, nor leave his closet except when in her presence. As one of her first gifts, she hands him a crucifix which she then gingerly places on his neck.

            After about three months, everything in Hugo’s life changes. How much has changed, he obviously doesn’t know. “His young heart,” we learn, “began to torment him because he hasn’t kept his promises to his mother. He doesn’t read the Bible, he doesn’t write, and he doesn’t do his arithmetic problems.” Worse still is the fleeting thought that his mother may have actually “passed away.”

            In the loneliness of his “closet,” where, during the wintry nights he almost freezes to death while lying scantily dressed on his temporary couch, Hugo finds solace in an occasional dream. One night, in fact, his mother appears to him, checking on how well he is managing, and whether Mariana is treating him well. Hugo begs her not to leave him. Before going, however, she confesses to him: “You know very well that I didn’t observe our religion, but we never denied our Jewishness. The cross you’re wearing is just camouflage, not faith. If Mariana—or I don’t know whoever—tries to make you convert, don’t say anything to them. Do what they tell you to do, but in your heart, you have to know: Your mother and father, your grandfather and grandmother, were all Jews, and you’re a Jew, too. It’s not easy to be a Jew. Everybody persecutes you. But that doesn’t make us an inferior people. To be a Jew is a mark of excellence, but it’s also not shameful . . . I wanted to say all this to you, so that your spirits won’t fall . . . Read a chapter or two of the Bible every day . . . . Reading it will strengthen you . . . . I can go away in peace . . . .”

            She leaves Hugo.

Mariana

            And who, indeed, is this Mariana, the “savior”?

She started her career as a madam, we are told, at the tender age of 16, mainly because of her “disgruntled and abusive” parents. But somewhere within herself, we are led to believe, is a “soul.” When untrammeled, she finds herself believing, despite her profession, in a Christian God, to whom at times, and to the surprise even of her friends, she addresses directly. Consider, for example, this confessional: “Dear God: you understand my heart better than any person. You know that my pleasures in this world were few and bad, my humiliations were many and bitter. I don’t say I’m a righteous woman worthy to get to heaven. I bear the burden of shame, and that’s why I’ll pay a forfeit when the day comes. Even when in the depths of hell, You are my beloved.”

            Needless to say, while serving in a house of sin, she claims that young Hugo is a “symbol of a greater nation.” Citing an example of her generosity, Mariana recalls that his mother, Julia, during their youth, had been very kind to her, bringing her, despite her poverty, “clothes, fruit, and cheese.” And during those very years, she never chastised Mariana by asking, “Why don’t you do respectable work?” And that is why as Hugo begins to mature, Mariana entices him, “suggesting that he enjoy her physical delight which a woman needs, for the rest is only dessert.” Since he makes no demands on her, she continues to compliment him: “You love Mariana and make no conditions or demands on her . . . you’re beautiful.” Which leads Hugo to entertain the illusion that Mariana “really doesn’t belong to those in the Residence . . . that even in her profession one can maintain manners and respect,” that is, if one possesses “backbone.” Thus to no one’s surprise, Hugo could, and did, follow her warning that, whenever questioned, he should always answer by saying he is her “son.”

            Not only would he agree to call himself her “son,” but also because, as he matured, he actually became in pleasure, at least, her “lover.” So that whenever Mariana asks him to sleep with her, he always answers her call. For she assures him, he is “good and sweet and doesn’t want anything from her.” So that even in her drunken stupor he believes “she is really delicious.”

            One morning sometime later, Hugo, reaching for his knapsack, finds a long letter from his mother, in which she again extols Mariana as “one who will surely take care of him all the time,” adding, mournfully, that she herself may never return, and that he dare “never to despair, for despair is surrender.” And even in these dark times, “she remains optimistic . . . and that he, too, must believe in his future freedom.”

            Whatever optimism he may have felt at the time, all of it disappears when Mariana absented herself from the Residence, for a short time, in order to bury her mother. Her death, Hugo learns, was due to Mariana’s neglectful failure to purchase the medicine her mother needed. On her return home, Mariana readily admits to that failure, which draws Hugo’s strange reaction: “Circumstances are guilty.” To neither of their surprise, Mariana, relieved, “fell on her knees, hugged and kissed him,” which helped Hugo forget his short loneliness and the awful fears that surrounded him during her absence. Rather than bemoan her loss, Mariana, instead of even a brief mourning, continues to speak solely of her sad status as a madam, due, as she often repeated, to her own parents’ neglect. Always, apparently, conscious of her plight, Hugo comments further: “Behind her suffering lies a good and lovely woman.” To which Mariana adds only more kisses and pampering arms.

            Despite all of Mariana’s reliable availability, the Germans continued their unabated search for strangers, even at the Residence. Fearing the inevitability of yet another series of searches, especially since the Germans seemed less certain of winning the war, the “madam-in-charge” of the Residence orders Mariana and Hugo to leave at once. Advised hurriedly to look everywhere for any and all resting places or homes for shelter, sleep and hiding, lest they be recognized, Hugo feels self-assured because of the crucifix he wears at all times. Mariana, on the other hand, engages, as usual, in a solemn prayer to God: “I don’t say I’m a righteous woman, worthy to go to heaven . . . . I bear a burden of shame . . . . But I never stopped longing for you, God . . . . You are my beloved.”

            Because of his love for her, Hugo is enraptured with her confessional, to a point where he actually invokes his parents, saying aloud: “Papa, Mama, where are you?” No answer. They seem no longer to be with him, nor does a memory search seem to help, for they have apparently parted even from his dreams, now enshrined in Mariana.

            Hugo then opens his Bible to read the story of Joseph, whose brothers, at first, planned to kill him, only to witness his revival, in the end, and to recognize his political, and national prominence. Hugo now finds hope and inspiration in one of his ancestors’ life.

            As they proceed, rumors spread everywhere that although the Germans are actually losing the war, they will never end their violence, they still believe, until all the Jews are destroyed. The Russians, on the other hand, will surely decimate anyone who has ever cooperated, in any capacity, with the Germans. Mariana and Hugo decide to flee toward the Carpathian Mountains. Along the way, Hugo has another vision of his mother and is moved to frantic tears. As he weeps uncontrollably, Mariana suddenly criticizes him, arguing that “a person who cries announces to the world that he’s lost and needs pity,” adding that “Jews spoil their children, and they don’t prepare them properly for life.” All of which moves Hugo to wonder, “When will the tears freeze in me?”

            As they proceed further, Mariana keeps sharing her thoughts: “I’m amazed at the Jews. An intelligent people, everyone agrees, yet most of them don’t believe in God. I asked your mother, ‘How is it that you don’t believe in God? After all, you see His deeds every day, every hour.’” Answering her own questions, Mariana tells Hugo that his mother “lost her faith at the Gymnasium and since then, religion hasn’t returned to her. I’m sorry for your mother.”

            Of a far more immediate crisis, Mariana turns to Hugo, saying, because the Russians are rapidly approaching, they will kill her, as well as all those who worked in whatever capacity with and for the Germans and should save himself. “You are still young. Every time I remember that, I choke with pain . . . . And because I slept with Germans, my blood is on my head.” Now she believes God won’t stand by her. Except Hugo, who, when asked when he wants to do in the future, replies, “To be with you.” That, she adds, “would be impossible.”

            In a final farewell, she asks Hugo to take care of himself. “When the informers come, don’t go after me. They’ll take me straight to the gallows, or who knows what. You may not be religious, but since you’ve been with Mariana, you’ve changed a little

. . . . Just promise me, you’ll read a chapter or two of the Bible every day. That will strengthen you and give you power and courage to overcome evildoers.” Hugo promises.

            While Mariana and Hugo happen to be resting one day under a tree, three men suddenly appear and announce that they have strict orders “to bring Mariana in, dead or alive.” Hugo is not to be taken, because he speaks Ukrainian, not the official language of any enemy. Remaining behind, Hugo is crushed emotionally. He stands watch, at the center of the square, near a large barrel of soup provided by the Russians, where all enemy suspects stand shivering, to await their inevitable fate. When one of the guards happens to ask Hugo whom he is waiting for, he answers, “My mother.” While there, Hugo learns from another prisoner that Mariana was actually sentenced to die. Crushed by that terrifying news, Hugo recalls one of Mariana’s final and fateful pleas to him: “If they kill me, don’t forget me. You’re the only person whom I trust. I buried some of my soul in you. I don’t want to depart from the world without leaving something. I have no gold or silver. So take my love and place it in your heart, and from time to time, say to yourself: ‘Once there was a Mariana. She was a mortally wounded woman, but she never lost faith in God.’”

Desolation

            Roaming the streets of his native city in the Carpathian Mountains, Hugo reaches the square, where a woman approaches him to inquire, “What’s your name?”

            “Hugo,” he answers.

            “Ah,” she says, “so you’re Hans and Julia’s son, right?”

            “Right.”

            “They were wonderful people. There wasn’t a person in the city who they didn’t always give something of their generosity.”

            Hugo is momentarily gladdened, but simultaneously saddened, because of all the townspeople he chanced to meet, not one ever disclosed the news of the well-known bestial Nazi concentration “camp thirty-three,” where his parents were incarcerated and, apparently, finally liquidated.

            However bitter and frustrated at not having heard any formal news of his parents’ demise, Hugo still continues to walk fitfully, stopping at all those places that never seem to leave his memory, especially those homes of the Jews, who once lived above the many shops, now entirely occupied by strangers. And at the windows and balconies were women and children standing, chatting, and laughing. Hugo instinctively feels that a “different wind seems to be blowing in the air,” which he attempts to identify but fails. Worst of all is the sight of the pharmacy building, which has now become a grocery store.

            While visiting these places, Hugo suddenly recalls an incident that occurred one late Friday afternoon, while on a leisurely walk, oft taken with his father, during which they meet some bearded Jews on their way to the synagogue. Seeing those Jews, his father fell silent. While answering his young son’s question whether those Jews were “real Jews,” he offered a long reply that “would confuse things rather than clarify them.” Hugo also remembered his father’s “embarrassment at such unexpected meetings and the silence that accompanied them.”

            Even more staggering for Hugo was his heartbreaking ultimate experience during these local reminiscences. He enters his own home, and is greeted by an old man, a possible Ukrainian, who calls out to him loudly and gruffly:

“Who are you?”

“My name is Hugo Mansfeld.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to our house.”

“Get out of here. I don’t want ever to see you again,” said the old man, waving his cane.

Hugo leaves, disturbed and shaken.

II.

            This reader’s first “meeting” with Aharon Appelfeld actually occurred some ten years ago, in an extended review of his 12^th novel, The Conversion, which, incidentally, appeared in an issue of Tradition quarterly.[2] Both that work and the current Blooms of Darkness, also published by Schocken Books, reflect much that has made his fictional creativity a mark of distinction. And in this current work, there linger echoes and themes of such topics as “assimilation, disorientation, alienation and accommodation, weakening of faith, apostasy, physical and emotional dislocation, the Bible and secular studies.” All of which give his fiction a strong following on both sides of the Atlantic. He has certainly proved himself an engaging author.

            But, occasionally, one is motivated, as in this particular work, to approach this piece of fiction with an impersonal voice that does not sound like the product of some professional or academic training but rather from a very personal point of view in a voice that does not necessarily include a complete identification with the main character but, rather, with an understanding of its idiosyncratic nature.

            Since Mariana is the major, if not the only significant character in this novel, and has achieved—by saving a young, innocent child from annihilation, the incredible honor, tradition teaches, of a “share in the world to come”—why, pray tell, does Appelfeld assign this honor, however deserved, to a prostitute? There were, we know, hundreds, if not thousands, of simple or selected non-Jews during the Holocaust who saved children, and even adults, at their own risk from violent execution, all accomplished, we know, in a total silence, without rewards, including sexual, of any kind.

            And however much one admires Mariana’s constant supplications to her God, as recorded here, why has she still committed herself to satisfy her “three” or more “visitors” every night, in her perfumed salon? What changes did all those extended prayers have on her personal life, if any? Prayers hardly substitute for vagrancy, or worse.

            Furthermore, from the author’s brief references to Hugo’s parents, one is led to believe that in their lives they were lost not only for being Jewish, but also because they neglected their simple Jewishness; and, in Julia’s case, because, in her youth, she attended Gymnasium, a nomenclature for a secular education, rather than a totally Jewish one, to become a stranger to her past. As for Hans, what, pray tell, does our author imply, almost casually, to be so destructive in a secular education, when, in a multitude of cases, it is accompanied by a study and practice of classic Jewish faith and practice?

            Frankly, however much Hugo, Julia, and Mariana are encouraged, or self-inspired, to read the Bible, one still insists on inquiring, for what real purpose? How would such a reading have possibly changed their daily lives? In which way? Would it strongly influence, for example, their practice of Judaism? A mere reading? How? For himself, Appelfeld relates, it helped him fully appreciate the beauty of its language. And, he adds, importantly, a better understanding of Jewish myth. And eventually, its practice, and “its beliefs from the Bible to Agnon.”

What Appelfeld must remember, as he must surely appreciate, is that without the daily practice, and/or study, of the content of the Bible and Talmud, their linguistics, however inspiring, motivating, and enthralling, are ultimately meaningless. Language alone is a sort of serious and fascinating identification but not necessarily a religious guide to its practice, or the saving of lives, of whatever kind, in distress.

            Otherwise, doom would surpass bloom.

The empowerment of women today in Modern Orthodox society in Israel is a direct result of the number and range of education opportunities now available—and a very welcome and necessary development considering the multiple halakhic issues affecting them. The emergence of Batei Midrash for women and the courses provided at all levels—from the high school to midrasha to adult education—have bred a new generation of learned women who have become active members in the community and participants in the halakhic decision-making framework in issues pertaining to them.

When I was growing up in London in the 1960s, the Jewish education available for girls was limited. Girls could either a Jewish school that provided a mediocre secular education, or a quality public school supplemented by attendance at after-school Hebrew School classes. This spurred the trend to obtain additional Jewish education with a year at “seminary”—in Gateshead or Israel—but those girls who chose the latter option soon discovered  the vast gulf between the level of their Jewish knowledge and that of their American-educated peers.

Thus education became a major motive for our aliya in 1976, and it was our intention to secure a good Jewish education for our children. Since we were ultimately blessed with four daughters, this proved to be a wise decision. Yet no one at that time could have envisaged the power of the dynamic forces that have driven the growth and evolution of educational opportunities for girls and women over the last three decades.

People today have forgotten—and many may not be aware at all—of how narrow the range of options was when looking for a high-quality religious girls school in Jerusalem in the early 1980s. Without quite realizing it, but feeding off the obvious and painful inadequacy of the mamlakhti-dati (state religious) school system (as Esther Lapian described in her article in Conversations issue 7, p. 133) to provide both a good secular education together with a broad Jewish education, we were sucked into the elitist trend that came to dominate the education scene. “Private schools” (not in the American sense, but with a large financial input from parents to boost the quantity and quality of education) such as Horev and Noam at the primary level, and Horev, Peleh and Tsvia at the secondary level, attracted the “good kids” from the “good homes,” creating a vicious circle of decline in the mainstream state schools.

After considering the options, we chose to send our children to Horev; but over the years, we became increasingly disturbed and irritated by the emerging trend—away from the school’s original Torah im Derech Erets philosophy toward narrow, quasi-Hareidi attitudes—that came to dominate the school. This was, of course, an expression of the wider trend toward Hareidism sweeping throughout the Orthodox world. One of its primary manifestations was the sense of constraint felt by students and their reluctance to pose the most basic questions regarding personal and philosophical issues, for fear of being penalized—so detrimental in the critical teenage years. This inevitably led to frustration and conflict. In addition, the school’s attitude toward Zionist values and particularly the stance toward army service became exceedingly discouraging.

Fortunately, in tandem with (or as a counterbalance to) the trend toward greater Hareidism, other processes were at work. The massive increase in the overall student body, together with the growing diversity of views among their parents—and the greater financial resources available—led to a steady increase in both the number of educational institutions at all levels and also, and more importantly, a greater diversification of the kinds of education, the values, emphases, and so forth.

A major contribution to this educational scene, especially in the Greater Jerusalem area, was the Ohr Torah Stone network of high schools founded in 1983 by Rabbi Riskin—who personally placed great emphasis on girls’ education (and on women’s issues in general)—and which succeeded in attracting and training top-quality young educators with strong ideals and commitments. The schools’ mandate was to provide education for the Modern Orthodox woman, and the curricula provided intensive Jewish studies emphasizing the relevance of Torah to modern life together with a high level of secular studies.

At the post-high school level there has also been significant and dramatic progress. Catering to the prevailing global trend of interest in higher education, midrashot have sprung up throughout the country. Girls voluntarily choose to attend midrashot where they can now develop their Torah learning and are provided with the tools to delve into independent study. Teaching standards are high, thanks to the emergence of a cadre of charismatic and gifted educators with broad vision.

A landmark event within this field was the creation of a hesder program for girls within the midrasha. This answered the desire of religious girls who wished to serve in the army in a Torah-based framework rather than the National Service—hitherto the only option acceptable for religious girls. A leading example of these was Midreshet Ein haNatsiv, established in 1986 by Kibbutz Hadati to parallel the existing yeshiva in Kibbutz Ein Tsurim. Girls today are able to devote two years, before, during, and following full army service, to intensive and deep study of Jewish sources, and during their period of army service they receive spiritual support and regular shiurim from the staff of the midrasha who visit their girls on the respective army bases.

Midreshet Ein haNatsiv has grown in popularity and acceptance, also providing pre- and post-army courses and also attracting overseas students to its unique style of open-minded learning. Headed by top quality educators such as Rabbi Eli Kahan z"l and Mrs. Rachel Keren, Midreshet Ein haNatsiv has cultivated a cadre of learned women with a deep commitment to Judaism who take active roles contributing to the advancement of Jewish society and the State of Israel. Other hesder progams, similar to that at Ein haNatsiv, also exist at Midreshet Bruria/Lindenbaum and Be’er in Yeruham, proving the need for such a framework.

Thus, in our case, two of our four daughters chose to do sherut le’umi while the other two were able to opt for the progam at Ein haNatsiv and served in the IDF education corps—one subsequently becoming an officer.

We have therefore had the privilege to be part of this evolution, which, while developing steadily over years and decades, represents a far-reaching  revolution within the Jewish world.

Meanwhile, in the more academically focused, quasi-yeshiva style framework and beyond into adult education, things were moving at even greater speed.

Thus there are now a multitude of institutions providing higher education for women. Rav Yehuda Amital and Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, founders of Yeshivat Har Etzion, saw the need to provide yeshiva style Torah education for women at a high academic level, and in 1997 they established the Women's Bet Midrash in Migdal Oz, headed by Mrs. Estie Rosenberg (Rav Lichtenstein's daughter.) Migdal Oz provides a full-time learning curriculum together with the option of obtaining an academic qualification.

Beyond the tertiary education level, there has been a dramatic awakening in the field of adult education for women with a proliferation of Batei Midrash. Matan, founded by Rabbanit Malka Bina in 1988, is a prime example of a dynamic institution that today provides a myriad of diverse courses in Torah study. From havruta learning in Daf Yomi, through Bat Mitzvah courses for mothers and daughters, to a packed weekly schedule of classes, Matan attracts students aged 12 to 80. Its success has led to the establishment of eight branches throughout the country from Bet Shemesh to Zichron Yaakov—and has also expanded into internet courses and seminars. Thirst for learning among women seems boundless. Matan's vibrant Bet Midrash has paved the way for women to learn Torah at the highest levels, and its courses prepare them to assume leadership and educational positions. It thus provides the link between study per se, lilmod u’lelamed, and translating that knowledge into action—lishmor vela’asot.

This link is essential because the new generation of educated Jewish women see far beyond the “mere” study of texts and teaching. They are intent on becoming active participants in key areas of Jewish life—first and foremost, those issues affecting women.

A trailblazing institution in this area is Nishmat, founded in 1997 by Rabbanit Chana Henkin. Not just another midrasha providing advanced Torah study for all ages, Nishmat pioneered a course for Yo’atsot Halakha (halakhic advisors), wherein women devote two years to intensive study with rabbinic authorities of the laws of family purity as well as training in allied issues of modern medicine, such as gynecology, infertility, psychology, and sexuality.

This development is unprecedented, marking the first time in Jewish history that women have been trained to address women's halakhic issues—and have succeeded in obtaining widespread rabbinic support. Nishmat's Women's Halakhic Hotline, staffed by the Yo’atsot Halakha, receive thousands of calls from women in Israel and abroad, on issues in family purity, intimate personal and family matters, as well as fertility and women's health. This is a far cry from the traditional procedure in which women, or their husbands, were obliged to consult a male rabbi about the most intimate female and marital issues, and it must surely serve to encourage greater adherence to the mitzvoth of family purity.

Another area in which women have turned their halakhic studies to effective practical use is that of To’enot Rabbaniot (rabbinical adjudicates). This course was initiated and run by Mrs. Nurit Fried at Midreshet Lindenbaum, and provided its students with intensive training to qualify them as rabbinical advocates—whose aim is to help women required to appear before rabbinical courts. It marks another major step in the empowerment of women and testifies to the tremendous determination on the part of Orthodox women to become active partners in religious life.

A study of this eve-olution of education and allied subjects would not be complete without mention of Koleh, the first Orthodox Jewish feminist organization in Israel. Founded in 1998 and initially led by Chana Kehat, it has grown into a flourishing religious women’s forum that is active in a multitude of spheres, addressing such issues as agunot; prenuptial agreements; mobilization of religious leadership in fighting sexual harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse; and creating appropriate curricula for schools. Its national two-day conferences attract thousands of participants from throughout the Jewish world and across the full religious spectrum to learn about and discuss contemporary halakhic and social issues.

One final observation must be made—albeit not a positive one. It would seem that the advance in the education and empowerment of this generation of young women has had a detrimental effect on their ability to find marriage partners. Singlehood is indeed a global epidemic but in Orthodox religious circles this is an issue of enormous concern and a subject that demands great attention.

In summary, if we look back over the last three decades we have witnessed phenomenal growth in the provision and scope of religious education available in Israel to the Modern Orthodox woman. It can also be noted that the majority of the personalities in the forefront of this revolution have been American olim: Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Rabbanit Malka Bina, Rabbanit Chana Henkin, Rabbi David Bigman, Chana Kahat, and so forth. Such individuals have served to encourage their Israeli counterparts to eagerly jump on board to create a new cadre of Israeli educators.  

But this is not at all the end of the story, but it is very much the story so far. There can be no doubt that the process I have described—and that we have experienced and benefited from—is still in its early stages, from an historic point of view.

Rabbanit Chana Henkin, who has been in the forefront of so many of the developments noted here, envisions the process moving forward in the direction of women kollel students and ultimately, women rabbis (although they will not be called by that title—the subject of a discussion at a recent Koleh forum). But the reality will exist before the name. I expect—and hope and pray—that my granddaughters will become part of this ongoing process. They will take for granted all the achievements noted above, having been born and educated in a world where they were all well established. The front line of the campaign for women's education will be further advanced. Each of us can enunciate their own vision of how this might be achieved, but the bottom line is that women will be full, largely equal, and highly active partners in all spheres of Jewish studies and the Orthodox community.

Social gaps, between different groups and populations, are a fundamental problem that the State of Israel grapples with today. In many cases these divisions are physical as seen in many Israeli neighborhoods and communities where diverse populations live separately, refusing to integrate and live together.  These rifts are evident in many walks of Israeli life, and what is common amongst all of these social gaps is that they cause extreme isolation and social alienation between people living in the same society.

Thus we find a strong divide between religious and non-religious as well as a plethora of identities on the spectrum between ultra orthodox and secular: Nationalist-Ultra Orthodox (Hardal), National Religious, Traditionalist, Reform, those who see Judaism as a culture and a small group of those considered strictly secular.

In addition to this, other aspects of identity complicate these social divides. For instance, there are divisions based on ethnicity in Israeli society. Sadly, more than 60 years after the inception of the State of Israel, country of origin is still sociologically meaningful when trying to understand divisions within Israeli society. Two different groups can be distinguished amongst Israelis: those whose roots originate in Europe and the United States and those whose roots are found in Asia and Africa. Even for those who are second and third generations Israelis, individuals who were born in Israel or whose parents were born in Israel, ethnic origin plays a significant role. One might expect religious identity to function as a unifying force for the Jewish people, because this identity might bring Jews of different ethnic backgrounds together, despite diverse countries of origin and denominations. Ironically, the religious element in Israeli society is the cause of an extreme conservatism in this realm. We have made great progress regarding these social gaps in civil society, while in religious society, especially in ultra-orthodox circles, the situation is catastrophic; it seems that the more strict you are with regard to religious observance, the harsher the ethnic constructs are, to such an extent that there are many phenomena in this community that could be described as racist. 

These gaps are also evident and equally serious in Israel's socio-economic and class divides. Every year we are informed of the deepening gap between groups based on their economic background. If traditionally society was divided into three groups: the upper, middle and lower classes, a third of the population in each class, we now see a gradual polarization of society into two groups, the rich and the poor. The middle class is slowly shrinking to approximately one quarter of the population.

There are other areas where these gaps are apparent (for example the distribution of populations in Israel's peripheries and centers) but here we will discuss an important and currently relevant element of the Sephardic tradition throughout the generations which should be instrumental in addressing these social challenges: the ability to be inclusive and the strength of a worldview that rises above classifications and social barriers, resulting in communal unity, a force that is dwindling in modern society.    

Three Kinds of Religious Commitment

Initially, it is important to note that in Sephardic communities in the Diaspora there were never divisions between Haredi, Secular or Reform Jews; everyone was considered Jewish, some observed many of the mitzvoth and some performed fewer mitzvoth. All of these Jews should be working towards becoming better people and better Jews.  In many areas of today's Israel, we can find communities such as these, groups with a typical Sephardic character. These communities can be found in cities and settlements where there are large concentrations of Sephardic populations. 

In these communities, you can divide the population up into three groups, according to their commitment to a Jewish lifestyle: a. Those who keep what is written in the Shulchan Aruch to the best of their ability; b. those who keep some of the Mitzvoth, usually the more experiential aspects of the Jewish faith such as Shabbat services at the synagogue, Shabbat dinner with the family or Jewish holidays and lifecycle events, including those specific to the Sephardic Jews such as public celebrations in memory of a saintly rabbis, Ta'anit Dibur (abstention from speech), Yom Shekulo Torah (A day of Torah Study), Brit Yitzhak (Pre- circumcision ceremony in honor of a newborn son) and memorial services etc; and c. those who practice Judaism from afar, those who are satisfied with keeping Kosher and attending synagogue on Yom Kippur.

The common denominator between these groups is that they respectfully interact with ease during communal events and other occasions. The connection between these groups is not artificial because the people themselves do not see each other as belonging to different worlds. Instead, they see themselves as one family, while recognizing the fact that there are those who keep this or that mitzvah with more or less dedication, and they value those who keep more of the Mitzvoth. Each of these groups feels connected to God in different ways and no one excludes any community members based on observance level or religious devotion.

The second group is made up of people who feel close to Orthodoxy even though they are not considered full Sabbath observers. Nevertheless, they respect the tradition and feel a strong connection to the rabbinical world and to the figure of the Rabbi, especially those Rabbis who take part in the communal events we described above. 

It is interesting to understand how such a large population of people and their families, who do not keep the Shulchan Aruch, and who have no intention of doing so, feel so connected to those with a higher level of religious observance. It can be said that the rabbinic world is connected to these communities, and to those who feel a strong obligation towards religious observance. These rabbis also have a special wisdom that guides those who have blatant 'religious shortcomings' to make sure that no matter how a person keeps the mitzvoth, he or she still has a place within the community, a place where one can feel at home in synagogue and not like a visitor. This Masorti or Traditional Jew can even participate in the prayers by reading some of the psalms during the service. He will not hesitate to have a torah Shiur held at his house as a way of honoring a sick relative; he will not consider this hypocritical or insincere. He will never hear from the rabbinic circle to which he is obligated "Who are you kidding?", or "Stop being such a hypocrite!", or "Where are your true loyalties?" Absolutely not! In our communities we know many people such as these and we make them feel welcome as they are an integral part of our community.

How do you create this feeling of belonging? First of all, it is important to make sure that the more observant people in the communities do not dominate the synagogue and community events. One group is not better than the other and instead there should be respect for all of those who wake up early and take the time to get to synagogue for Shacharit.

For example, there was a man within our community who did not attend synagogue on a regular basis but did know how to pray. He would lay Tefillin every morning at home before going to school and we would see him at community events and sometimes on Shabbat. When this man's father's memorial (Hazkara) was coming up, he prepared for the reading of the Haftorah and the synagogue community was very supportive of this. He read the Haftorah beautifully.

The Network and the Ladder

In order to understand how a community is able to function with such diversity it is important to understand how our spiritual world is designed.  There are two ways to understand the development of community: the ladder model and the network model.

In a ladder community, it is clear to each member who is "above" him or her, with regard to spiritual efforts and ability to speak his mind within the community. Below the Rabbi, who is the highest religious leader of the community (Mara datra), are those considered more torah observant (Torani'im), those that are scrupulously devout. The person at the bottom of the ladder will have a hard time participating in communal events or expressing his opinions within the group, he will feel like a visitor in his own community as compared to his friends who are higher up on the ladder. The person on the lower levels of the ladder feels that the fact that he is accepted into this community despite his low ranking on the ladder is already a Hesed, an act of benevolence on the part of those higher up and he will always feel like a guest. He will never feel truly part of the community.

On the other hand, in the network model, everyone lives together in a close-knit community, connected together in one group. There are some areas of the network that are weaker and some that are stronger but everyone is interconnected within the network. An example of this is when a rabbi plays a central role within this network, and using his esteemed position, he is able to significantly influence community processes. On the other hand, those who are not so important and who have very little connection with those in the network do not feel out of place or lesser than anyone else within the network.  They are equal to other members of the community. As we mentioned in the previous example, these individuals are aware of the unique power they have within the community, as compared to other more prominent community members with regard to Mitzvoth. This outlook, even if it is not considered a method, is very similar to communities of the Sephardic traditions, and this perspective is advantageous because everyone fits in, and at the same time, communal leadership is preserved. Sometimes we will find a mix of these two models, with the rabbi of the community above the community as a neutral unifying force and the rest of the community an equal part of the network.

Between Man and God and Man and Man

The world of Mitzvoth is divided into two different categories, those between man and God and those between man and his fellow man. In the religious world there is a tendency to define one's level of religious observance based on the fulfillment of Mitzvoth between God and Man, such as Shabbat, Kashrut, family purity, prayer etc. The reason for this is clear: the Halachic boundaries are clearer in this realm, and it is easier to define who is 'in' and who is 'out'.

While we do not want to disregard the importance of these boundaries, there is a scenario in which we can emphasize the significance of the Mitzvoth between man and man, for example, supporting a friend in need financially, spending quality time helping those in need or performing simple acts of  Hesed (benevolence). We should encourage, public responsibility for what happens within the community, from helping a neighbor find a job to visiting a sick or elderly person. Mitzvoth related to trade such as Yosher (honesty in commerce), Amida b' Diburo (Keeping your word with regard to business transactions) etc, do just this. These are Mitzvoth that can significantly broaden the number of community members who keep Mitzvoth.

For example, there is a man in our community who gets up early to pray at dawn at home and then hurries to work, works all day, comes home to help his family get ready for dinner, does homework with his kids, and helps put them to sleep and then he stops by the synagogue for the Arvit service and participates in the evening torah lesson where he falls asleep throughout. This man is active in the community Hesed committee and helps distribute food to the poor and provides homework help for disadvantaged children in the community. This man does not know a lot of torah and he even goes to work without a Kippa.

On what rung of the ladder should we place this man? In some communities he has a good chance of being very low on the ladder because he does not keep enough of the mitzvoth between God and man. Indeed, this Jew still has a long way to go in his spiritual journey (as do we all) but it is essential to recognize the entirety of his actions within the community.  When we treat individuals such as this man with respect, it creates a feeling of belonging and can encourage an improvement in mitzvah observance.

There is an interesting example in our community in Southern Israel where teenagers do not come to prayers on a daily basis (instead, they opt to lay Tefillin at home). We see them in full attendance during Elul for Selichot. How should we react to such a thing? Someone outside of our community could say to them that they are mistaken if they think they can "blackmail" God, if they think that they can make up for a whole year of not attending services by waking up early for Selichot around the time of Yom Kippur.

We should view these young men in a different way. We should recognize that during the month of Elul these young men feel a closeness to their Creator, a feeling that is strong in their hearts; this is the feeling that encourages them to come to synagogue and to recite the Selichot. These boys do not see this as a contradiction to their behavior throughout the year.  There is no doubt that we should try to influence these young men to come to services throughout the year, but we should also value what they do now and be aware that it represents the strong connection they maintain with God.

As we review these examples, we realize that what causes these gaps between different groups in Israeli society is that we emphasize the differences between us instead of concentrating on the similarities. Using the worldview described in this essay, we can see a future for Israel that is united and not segregated. This is true in religious circles (as we said about valuing all of the Mitzvoth – those between God and man and those between man and man), this is true in the human realm (sociological definitions becoming irrelevant or inaccurate for example, Kippa wearing as a sociological indicator of faith or within those who wear Kippot, each Kippa indicating allegiance to a specific group) and this is true in the connection between life and serving God – do you achieve the desired behavior by severing ties with the professional world and withdrawing into the world of the Yeshivot and Kollels, or do you achieve this behavior through unifying a professional life with a life of learning, torah, community and family all guided by a strong belief in God. The idea of Torat Eretz Israel sees the torah as something open to physical, material life. Paradoxically, this idea was preserved in Sephardic Jewish communities outside of Israel and we are obligated here in Israel to develop the elements of a Jewish society where we serve God in Eretz Yisrael.

Rabbi Isaac Chouraqui, Director of Rabbinic Leadership Program

Rabbi Isaac Chouraqui is the Director of the Rabbinic Leadership program at Memizrach Shemesh. He also serves as the Rabbi of Yad Ramah Synagogue in Jerusalem.

Rabbi David Zenou, Coordinator of Rabbinic Leadership Program

Rabbi David Zenou is the Coordinator of the Rabbinic Leadership program at Memizrach Shemesh. He serves as a Rabbi at Moshav Shalva near Kiryat Gat.

I have drawn and painted every single verse in the first three Books of the Torah, (in three enormous murals on canvas), scenes from the lives of King David and King Solomon, all the Jewish holidays, and most of the heroines of Tanakh, and illustrated the Haggadah Shel Pessah and the whole Megillah. And I never had contact with of any of these texts until I was 45 years old! I thus conclude that Torah not only stimulates creativity, but provides a vital link to the divine, enabling miracles to occur which enable the work to be done. I'm 63 now, still praying for this process to continue. In this essay, I will describe how Torah knowledge and life have sparked and sustained my creative efforts.

            Let's begin with my first Torah art job, which brought me to a Sephardic synagogue in Los Angeles called the Pinto Torah Center, to paint outdoor murals for the preschool, an encounter that led to my becoming religiously observant and a Torah Artist. I decided to paint the Garden of Eden; in preparation I read the beginning paperback “Holy Bible” from the bookshelves of my downtown L.A. loft. When I began to paint the wall, I felt guided to anchor the garden scene with an enormous bush, laden with huge, psychedelic blossoms. Rabbi Pinto wondered what was going on! Eventually the rest of the garden appeared, and the mural, (completed in 1993), still glows on that wall. Soon after its completion, I picked up an English translation of the Zohar, which of course I had never heard of in my prior life, and was amazed to read about the giant blossoms I had painted.

            While I painted those early murals, (I also did Noah's Ark, and later added a Holiday Mural showing the cycle of holidays after I experienced them for the first time), the preschool children swirled around me during play time. Periodically, they were called in small groups to go up to the Women's Section, a balcony in those days, for their Hebrew lessons. The wonderful Hazzan, Yakov HaRoche, could be heard bribing the children: “Say it, and you get a cookie.” It occurred to me that I might be able to learn the Alef Bet if those three and four year olds were doing so, and the cookie didn't sound bad either. Later in the synagogue kitchen, as visiting Rabbi Meir boiled a giant pot of fragrant Yemenite soup, Yakov HaRoche coached me, from a traditional “Binah” text, in learning the Aleph Bet.

I found the quaintness and authenticity of these people and their lifestyle to be as inspiring to paint as the Jewish and Torah knowledge which I began slowly to acquire, and I began to make paintings of everything I learned and saw.

A huge jump in learning came when I enrolled in the Crash Course in Hebrew Reading, offered at night by Yeshiva of Los Angeles. Our teacher, Dr. Yehudah Berdugo, greeted us with this statement: “Class, learning Hebrew is like learning no other language, because Hebrew is the language of God.” I was hooked, and Dr. Berdugo's awesome skills and insights made learning a joy and an inspiration. As we moved on to Reading Improvement, he would preface each verse that we studied, by telling us: “Class, this is very beautiful,” and he was right. Learning Hebrew opens up Judaism and is of course the key to the beautiful prayer services.

            Yeshiva of Los Angeles offered a complete night program for adults just at that time, so I took advantage of those classes and learned all I could. I spent months studying each blessing of the Shemoneh Esrei with Cantor Pinchas Rabinovitz, as well as Shemirat haLashon with Rabbi Hillel Adler, the Laws of Prayer, and Humash and Rashi. The head of the program, Rabbi Harry Greenspan, became a life-long teacher, friend, and mentor. Better than being the “Head of the Fox,” which I related to having been a honcho in the downtown L.A. art scene, I was now the “Tail of the Lion”—at the tippy end of an awesome entity led by Torah greats like Rabbi Sauer. Our classes were in the Boys’ High School, but I peeked inside the Bet Midrash, where rows of men and boys sat learning Torah in timeless fashion.

I painted the “Shekhina Comes” Triptych to commemorate this era. In the center panel (of three 7-by-4-foot oil paintings), a giant woman symbolizes the “Presence of Hashem,” the Shekhina, coming into my life. Inside the figure's dress are scenes of learning at YOLA— learning the Alef Bet with Dr. Berdugo, and peeking into the Bet Midrash. Surrounding the figure is a neighborhood landscape, where people walk on Shabbat, wearing prayer shawls and finery; a new sight to me. The second panel shows another large figure, but she is being ripped open by devils; symbolizing my fall from downtown honcho-hood. Figures of each member of the Pinto Torah Center, old and young, float in the sky, while bright magen david designs emerge from the rip; showing my new life-style and community emerging and rescuing me. The third panel celebrates my arrival into a Torah life. The central figure holds a growing tree-—the growth! Decorative diamond shapes contain scenes of different Torah classes, and my own Shabbat table. In a scene of Dr. Berdugo's class, we now learn Pirkei Avot! In a scene of Mrs. Shira Smiles' class, we study a story from Kings, about Eliyahu haNavi withholding rain from the earth. A giant outer diamond shape contains my first biblical narrative: the entire story we studied with Mrs. Smiles is illustrated. I particularly related to painting the scene of the prophet breathing life back into the widow's son. It reminded me of the countless times my eldest daughter was supposed to die from her brain cancer at the age of three; she kept coming back from the edge, was still alive at that time, and lived to be 36.

            Along with my first experience of the cycle of Jewish holidays came my first experience of another momentous cycle: the cycle of Torah readings. My impulse to make a mural on canvas of the whole Book of Bereishith came from gratitude and awe. The six Hebrew letters of the word “Bereishith” correspond to the six days of creation, so I put them together in six large boxes on a 16-foot canvas. I surrounded the boxes with a border filled with symbols of Shabbat, the Seventh Day: kiddush, hallah, candles, and Torah scrolls.

             There is an element to Torah that cannot be shown, and that is the nature of spiritual experience. Non-visual, spiritual forces are symbolized in my work by using the raw bright strength of color in patterns that use constantly shifting complimentary color clashes to generate a visual punch, hinting at the cosmic content of religion. So the symbols of Shabbat in the mural are embedded in brilliant patterns of color.

            Surrounding this border is another border, divided into sections corresponding to each parasha. Each of these sections is filled with tiny paintings of everything that happens in each parasha. In the beginning I held a heavy Humash as I worked, but by vaYera, I switched to a system of making black and white drawings in the back of my “Day Book,” (visual journals kept since 1969), and then made the paintings by following the drawings. Drawing and painting the famous scenes from Bereishith gave me insights into the material. The Matriarchs are behind a lot of the action; Bereishith is practically a woman’s book! In the same parasha as Yaakov's famous ladder, 12 babies are born; to me that's a big deal. The scene of Yaakov arriving to meet Esav with specifically enumerated gifts of livestock, was fun for me to portray. And, I developed strong opinions about Joseph in the pit based on drawing and painting the events.

            When the Bereishith Mural was completed, it was exhibited in a gallery in L.A. that was never open! But at the opening reception, I met Dr. Berdugo's wife, the Hebrew scholar Dr. Vardina Berdugo, and she suggested that with my family history, I should make a painting of Dona Gracia Mendes. An 8-by-6-foot history painting was born; it shows Dona Gracia Mendes surrounded by a map of Europe tracing the flight of Sephardic Jews from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, and Dona Gracia's triumphal entry to Constantinople, where it was finally possible to be openly Jewish. I borrowed the map from my old family hard-cover edition of Cecil Roth's definitive biography of Dona Gracia. (Interestingly, the map of my family's sojourns in the biography of my great-grandfather, Henry Pereira Mendes, late Rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, is almost identical.) In the painting, the central figure is also surrounded by a banner containing all of the Torah scenes I could fit into it, to symbolize the force which kept our people Jewish despite danger, persecution, and forced conversions. On each side of the painting are vignettes showing men and women engaged in activities of Jewish Life: praying, learning, teaching children, and celebrating holidays. These vignettes are to show the terrible irony of people being chased and persecuted for the crime of a holy lifestyle!

            An artist friend sent me a tiny ad from an art magazine soliciting work for a traveling Jewish Exhibit called “Encountering the Second Commandment.” “Dona Gracia Mendes” was accepted and featured on a 30-foot banner on the side of the Pittsburgh Jewish Community Center; I was stranded there when my ticket to fly home from the opening reception was for September 11, 2001. When the exhibit arrived in Boca Raton, Florida, patrons purchased “Dona Gracia Mendes” for donation to the JCC there, and I was invited to have a solo exhibit in 2002. As I drove across country for that exhibit, I received the news that the “Bereishith Mural” had also been purchased for donation to the JCC.

            And thus I began “The Shemot Mural” upon my return to Los Angeles. This time I carefully drew every verse in pen and ink first. Then I hung up a 6-by-12-foot canvas and outlined larger boxes for the parashiot. Even so, when it came time to paint details of every verse onto canvas, it brought on tendonitis in my finger, and I lost three months of work, because I crammed so much tiny detail into each parasha. I paint everything first in one rose-and-black color, like a giant, intricate drawing. In the process of painting the “Shemot Mural,” I was blessed to paint the kelim of the mishkan about seven times for each of the seven times each is mentioned in Sefer Shemot! Each of the mishpatim, or civil laws, tells a little comic-book-like story; showing rules for eventualities in the lives of maid-servants and others, and things that can go wrong between neighbors—such as an ox falling into a hole, with penalties clearly shown. After every single verse has been rendered into a little picture crammed into the whole, I rub large areas of pale color onto the canvas, using linseed oil and rags. Then I mix my colorful palette of thin oil paint in ice trays, and go back over every area, painting in and shading each tiny figure and scene. When all that is dry, there's another journey around all the details with a very thin outline of black. I forgot to mention that the inner space containing the word “Shemot,” and an outside border, have remained blank until this time. Now is the time to use the symbolic color patterns which are meant to imply the Light of Hashem, in a circular arrangement, radiating out from the center. The whole process took two years to complete, but the day came when the mural was done.

            The Shemot Mural had its debut at the tiny “Museum of the Bible,” or Bet Tanakh, upstairs from Independence Hall, in Tel Aviv, thanks to the efforts of a fellow student from my original Hebrew class, who had moved there. When I arrived home in Los Angeles with the mural, I held a reception to open a gallery in my studio/home in the Pico Robertson area. That's when a great miracle occurred: the Shemot Mural was sold, to be mounted at the Sephardic Educational Center in the Old City of Jerusalem. When I traveled to Jerusalem to make arrangements, I looked up some old friends from the Pinto Torah Center days, now living in Tsefat. A young daughter to whom I had given art lessons when she was little, was doing her National Service in the Old City, so we arranged to meet there. Her service turned out to be in the Temple Institute; I was treated to a private tour of replicas of the kelim I had painted so many times.

            And during which parasha of our yearly cycle did I land in Jerusalem to deliver the Shemot Mural? It was the week of parashat vaYikra, (the beginning of the next Sefer after Shemot!), which I hiked the Temple Mount to hear read at the Kotel. That week, I borrowed a Humash from the SEC, and began the drawings for the “VaYikra Mural.”

            VaYikra is different from Bereishith and Shemot, in that there is far less storytelling, and lots and lots of laws. How will the viewer know for which sacrifice this round of blood is being sprinkled on the altar? The answer was to label the depictions of each of the 859 verses in Sefer VaYikra, by chapter and verse numbers. I made my painting wall bigger, and this time hung up a 6-by-16-foot blank canvas when the pen and ink drawings were finally done. Actually, during this period my beloved daughter Oma, (“Annie”), passed away after her long and amazing survival. Perhaps the rigidity of the task helped ground me in work during the worst of that ghastly grief. Thank God, my younger daughter Kerby, with her husband Jeff and my precious granddaughter, Melody, live nearby.

            The VaYikra Mural took three years to complete. After the 859 numbered verses were completely painted onto the canvas, and the Hebrew in the mural corrected by my mentors the Berdugos during their visits from Israel where they now live, there remained the blank areas of the center and the outer border. I experimented with studies of bright, circular patterns framing narrative areas within and without. On the mural, I let the colors grow crazy patterns until the edges were reached and the mural completed. Fittingly because of the content, the mural has been shown at the KOH Cultural Center of Mosaic Law Congregation in Sacramento, CA. It's currently available for exhibition and sale.

            I want to mention that aside from Torah texts, my art is inspired by friends and life in the Jewish community. My friends the Elyassi family provide me with a model of devout Jewish life, shared with love, amid struggle. I love them and often paint the holy avodah of their home-life. I celebrate happy occasions with gifts of special paintings of the mitzvah child, couple, or baby. If you have participated in a Jewish community for a number of years, you can imagine how many are out there by now!

            If I had been born a man, when I fell in love with Torah learning, I likely would have disappeared into yeshivot and the men's domain of ritual, study, and prayer. If I had been born observant, I may have been busy having a lot more kids and doing a lot more cooking. As it was, I developed into a narrative painter whose art exploded to express every new-found gem of Torah life and learning. I also developed into a terrific visitor of the sick, a mitzvah I still find fulfilling. In fact, I've become comfortable with a more womanized version of Torah living, since I live alone and don't even have to help someone else do the zillion things Orthodox men must do. But I wouldn't want to face life without Shaharit (morning prayers) in Hebrew at home, or the Tehillim, which Dr. Berdugo encouraged me to memorize, ensuring life-long instant access, or the cycle of Torah readings, holidays, and beloved friends that is synagogue life, or the awesome fun of living each yearly cycle in our Jewish community, sharing joys and losses, or the amazing bond I've been honored to forge with the beautiful land of Israel.

            Most of all I would never want to face life again without the sense of closeness to the Creator of the universe that Judaism is all about. I see the hand of Hashem in the above events, and I certainly feel aided and abetted by the Almighty in doing the work I've described. I often wonder why the nature of religion doesn't more accurately reflect the obviously half-female nature of the divine. Oh well! I try to portray it that way in my art. Rabbi Marc Angel has written of the importance of finding one's own mission in life and in Torah. Voila!

I

Neither of the Torahs, Written or Oral, seems to have anything to say about “spirituality” as such. The concept, like the Hebrew word for it, ruhaniut, is evidently much later, perhaps medieval. Yet anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, and the later rabbis, knows that many of these texts and sages (among whom we may wish to count the masters of the Kabbalah) embrace the substance of what we now often call spirituality:

that is, a personal, meditative encounter with the Transcendent or Holy, which is essentially individual and autonomous. They also include moral, ethical, and metaphysical perceptions (as distinct from halakhic mandates) that may seem to come to our mind directly from a transcendent Source, or (in the wonderful expression of the Quakers) as from an “inner voice.” We may think also of the self-generated kavanah of passionate prayer, and the spiritually elevating joy of song and dance, much beloved among Hassidic and “Carlebachian” devotees. Maimonides believed the essential part of our human, and thus of our Jewish, vocation to be something profoundly personal—our “knowledge” and “intellectual apprehension” of a Primary Reality, Matsui Rishon.

Alongside this personal experience that many of us think of as spirituality, there is the elaborate fabric of halakhically prescribed behavior, which is regarded as being divinely mandated. Something like a universal consensus of Torah sages holds, I think, that the two—the experience and the behavior—are inseparably linked, mutually animating, equally necessary, equally obligatory. Though we may distinguish them analytically, we may not dispense with either. 

Though late in coming—to speculate why would be an intriguing temptation— awareness of “spirituality” has, thus, long since arrived in Jewish life, and indeed (as the subject of this issue of Conversations amply testifies) in Orthodox Jewish life (even though in Orthodoxy the halakhot of prescribed Jewish behavior are given particular emphasis, and “observant” is the most usual epithet of approval). But as with the other touchstones of Torah and Jewish culture, including halakhic observance itself, the actuality of Orthodox spirituality never quite catches up with the ideal, and for us to contemplate our tradition’s ruhaniut may be to deplore what can often seem its elusiveness, to bridle at the challenges it encounters from time to time in our individual and communal lives. The problem is substantial and (pending messianic fulfillment) ongoing, and defies easy solution, or even easy description. What I hope to do here is to consider several aspects of the matter from contemporary perspectives, and then to invoke a few potent rabbinical ideas that, I believe, may help us address the specific “perplexities” at issue.                            

Halakha and Moral/Ethical Sensitivity

   Let us proceed, in the conversational spirit of Conversations, by recalling two articles that appeared in the Spring 2010/5770 issue.

   In “Sounds of Silence,” Pinchas Landau deplored that (as he sees it) American Orthodox Jews, and most egregiously their rabbinical leaders, generally failed to express moral indignation at the ongoing financial corruptions and distortions of principle that harmed so many people during the recent, and continuing, economic crisis. In what he perceives as this dereliction, Landau finds evidence of a larger, more sinister problem: “Many people, including—or perhaps especially—rabbis and educators actually have no clear idea what ethical and moral issues are. More precisely, they have great difficulty distinguishing between legal/halakhic and moral/ethical treatments of issues, preferring to subsume the latter in theological, or even mystical, conceptual frameworks.” His conclusion is a severe indictment: “Orthodox Judaism, as currently conceived and practiced, is morally challenged.” Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits had put the matter even more provocatively: “Orthodoxy is, in a sense, halakha in a straitjacket” (Essential Essays on Judaism, p. 101).

Halakha and Autonomous Spiritual Experience

   In the same issue of Conversations, a daring and original article by Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo addressed other dimensions of the problem (“On the Nature and

Future of Halakha in Relation to Autonomous Religiosity”). From his perspective as a

teacher of Jewish philosophy, R. Cardozo has encountered a frustrated craving for “spiritual satisfaction” among “countless young Jews who search for an authentic Jewish religious way of life, but are unable to find spiritual satisfaction in the prevalent halakhic system as practiced today in most Ultra- or Modern Orthodox communities.” These students seek “to experience the presence of God on a day-to-day basis. Beyond ‘observance,’ they look for holiness and meaning.”

   Concluding that “we need to find new paths to Jewish spirituality,” R. Cardozo

affirms provocatively a principle that, by logical necessity, one should expect to be axiomatic in Orthodoxy, but that appears to be often ignored: that “Judaism is an autonomous way of life” that expects us “to respond as an individual to the Torah’s demands.”

 Defectors from Judaism in Search of Spirituality

Contemplating Rabbi Cardozo’s Orthodox Israeli students and their failure to find “spiritual satisfaction” in the Judaism of their experience calls to mind the quite different, yet in a sense parallel, constituency of spiritually dissatisfied young American Jews of whom Professor Rodger Kamenetz had written over 15 years earlier in his notable and well-remembered The Jew in the Lotus (1994). Though few of them seem to have had an Orthodox background comparable to that which had probably nourished (but nevertheless dissatisfied) R. Cardozo’s students, they too—most significantly—used the word “spiritual” to denote what they missed in the Judaism they knew. Less committed to their formal Jewish identities by family and social bonds, they eventually sought “spiritual” satisfaction in the Asian religions of Hinduism and (especially) Buddhism.

   A few Jews are known to have embraced Buddhism more than a century ago, but it was in the 1950s and later—the period of the “beat generation” and its aftermath—that the Asian religions came to exert a strong attractive power on significant numbers of young Americans inclined to religious or cultural experiment, who happened to be, for a variety of reasons, disenchanted with their family’s Christianity or Judaism. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this became one of the conspicuous features of “hippie culture”; and the greatly disproportionate number of young Jews who adopted Buddhism (either in place of, or in addition to, their religion of birth) was widely noted.

It was also, of course, profoundly deplored in traditional Jewish circles, and the “cults,” as Buddhism and Hinduism were often derogatorily called, have been perceived by some as a major menace to the stability and continuity of Jewish life in America. The matter is complex, and has been much studied and discussed.  

    Writing in 1994, Kamenetz reveals (pp. 7–9) how important had been (and we may presume still is) the Jewish presence among recently fledged American Buddhists:

In the past twenty years, [Jewish Buddhists] have played a significant and disproportionate role in the development of this second form of American Buddhism. Various surveys show Jewish participation in such groups ranging from 6 percent to 30 percent. This is up to twelve times the Jewish proportion of the American population, which is 2 ½ percent. In these same twenty years, American Jews have founded Buddhist meditation centers and acted as administrators, publishers, translators, and interpreters. They have been particularly prominent teachers and publicizers. . . Today in American universities there is an impressive roster of Buddhist scholars with Jewish backgrounds, perhaps up to 30 percent of the total faculty in Buddhist Studies.

Kamenetz’s book provides copious examples of the Jewish experiences and perceptions that underlie these figures. He tells, for instance, of a friend of his, Marc, who described his religious position with metaphors Kamenetz found both eloquent and depressing: “I have Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.” He comments: “I knew what Marc meant by wings. Buddhism had gotten him somewhere spiritually in a way Judaism never had” (pp. 12–13). For some of the Buddhist-oriented Jews he met and talked with, their Buddhism complemented but did not wholly replace their Judaism. Others, like the poet Allen Ginsberg, seemed to have discovered, or retained, nothing of spiritual substance in their Jewish experience, which they rejected with scorn.

As a sophisticated, synagogue-bred Jew who, despite his spiritual dissatisfaction, always rejected categorically the notion of tampering with his Jewish identity and commitment, Kamenetz himself seems to embody in an accessible and understandable form the syndrome he discusses in others. Though writing from a quite different perspective with respect to education and commitment, his critical survey of Orthodoxy can be regarded as complementing those of Pinchas Landau (Orthodoxy is “morally challenged”) and Rabbi Cardozo (Orthodox students are “unable to find spiritual satisfaction in the prevalent halakhic system”):

I recall an evening in Jerusalem with a group of baalei teshuvah, Jews who had converted to Orthodoxy. To them it all boiled down to one proposition: either God had given Jews the Torah on Mt. Sinai or had not. And they asked me to choose. I felt like I was being grilled. The emotional undertone of today’s Orthodoxy, at least as I’d encountered it, seemed excessively self-righteous and self-isolating. It came down to little things, customs, such as the refusal of Orthodox men to shake a woman’s hand. I knew there were reasons for it: if she were menstruating they could not touch her, nor could they ask her point blank. But it seemed to symbolize a self-enclosure, another barrier or boundary between men and women, and also between Jews and contemporary life. I had imagined that someone obeying God’s law would feel more joy. I didn’t always feel that joy. There often seemed a neurotic quality to the obedience, a Judaism by the numbers that I couldn’t relate to. (p. 22)  

This two-level manifestation of spiritual dissatisfaction with their Jewish experience—with Orthodox experience, in the case of R. Cardozo’s students, with an experience more diverse (rarely Orthodox, often synagogue-based, sometimes secular), in the case of Professor Kamenetz and the Jewish Buddhists—strongly suggests that the problem is not exclusive to one level or another of Jewish religious life, but may be endemic. Those of us who are most particularly concerned with the challenge to Orthodoxy may be disposed to find R. Cardozo’s dissatisfied students more disturbing than Professor Kamenetz’s Jewish Buddhists. But we would be unwise to dismiss with a cynical shrug the religious frustrations of those other young Jews who, having found their own Jewish experience spiritually impoverished, have turned to Asian religion to try to acquire “wings.”

I think of a line of Chaucer’s that expresses what I should consider an enlightened Orthodox perspective on the matter: “If gold can rust, then what should iron do?” What seems evident is that both the “gold” and the “iron” are suffering today from the same “rust.” But it is precisely because of the unique role that Orthodoxy inevitably plays in the whole of Jewish religious life that the Orthodox problem that R. Cardozo has identified is by no means an exclusively Orthodox problem.

II

We like to hope that problems of this importance have solutions. I pray that this one does, and that such solutions can be speedily discovered and effected. However, I have no intention (nor authority or knowledge) to propose them. What I want to do in the remainder of this article is to touch upon a few of the relevant insights in rabbinic thought, as I understand them—chiefly those of Maimonides—which may help us toward understanding and solution.

 Maimonides and Halakha               

We have noted the broad rabbinical consensus that the Torah is as concerned with our religious experience (our understanding, feelings, perceptions, intentions) as with our behavior (our fulfillment of the mizvoth and halakhot). The discussions and citations above with respect to the perception of frustrated spirituality in contemporary Orthodoxy and in Judaism more generally have all implied that in contemporary Orthodoxy, there has come to be an imbalance (if indeed there was ever an authentic as distinct from a theoretical balance) between these two essential elements of our avodah—that the dominating focus upon behavior or halakha has tended to diminish the role of experience or spirituality (to oversimplify a complex subject).

By virtue of his range and penetration, Maimonides (better known in the Orthodox world as the Rambam) has long enjoyed a unique eminence as both rabbi and philosopher. This notwithstanding, he remains controversial as he was in his own day and after. I would like to recall some of his ideas here not to suggest that they should be regarded as sacrosanct, but rather to propose that they offer valuable points of departure for anyone who wishes to address the issue of spirituality vis-à-vis the contemporary halakhic dominance in Orthodoxy.

Maimonides, as befits an intellect of his stature, seems to embrace both “sides” of the issue—or, better, to acknowledge the danger of a simplistic commitment to either. His Mishneh Torah is, of course, our premier codification of biblical mitzvoth and rabbinical halakhot—and yet, as we shall point out presently, he has harsh words in his other masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed (Moreh Nevukhim), for halakhic devotion that is unleavened by spiritual (his term is “intellectual”) “apprehension.”

 Sacrifice, Prayer, and Meditation

            A substantial portion of the Written Torah addresses the system of korbanot, or sacrifices, which is the Torah’s most conspicuous prescription of service (avodah) to God. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides organizes and elaborates the sacrificial laws in several extensive sections. In Jerusalem today, some rabbis and other devotees are even now preparing to resume the sacrifices when the Temple will be restored.

However, when Maimonides turns to this matter in the Guide (III.32), he implies unmistakably that the sacrificial system was not in fact God’s first “wish” for Israelite avodah, but rather a concession to human weakness, specifically the human reluctance to give up familiar ways. (Maimonides’ translator, Professor Shlomo Pines, renders the author’s Arabic for this divine accommodation with the arresting expression “wily graciousness.”) After citing examples of God’s accommodating the limitations of the human body, he addresses the subject of sacrifices:

Many things in our Law are due to something similar to this very governance. . . For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he was accustomed. . . . and as at that time the way of life generally accepted and customary in the whole world and the universal service to which we were brought up consisted in offering various species of living beings in the temples in which images were set up. . . His wisdom did not require that he give us a Law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of [such a Law], considering the nature of man, which always likes that to which it is accustomed.

If this were not sufficiently jarring to conventional assumptions, Maimonides immediately follows it with an observation perhaps more startling:

At that time this would have been similar to the appearance of a prophet in these times [i.e., Maimonides’ own times] who, calling upon the people to worship God, would say, “God has given you a law forbidding you to pray to Him, to fast, to call upon Him for help in misfortune. Your worship should consist solely in meditation. . . .” Therefore He . . .  suffered the abovementioned kinds of worship to remain.

Professor Pines cites the eleventh-century Arab philosopher Avicenna as Maimonides’ probable source or influence with respect to meditation, and believes that Maimonides not only regarded prayer as superior to animal sacrifice, which seems likely enough, but that he indeed agreed with Avicenna that meditation was a superior form of worship to verbal prayer (p. cii). (Cf. Guide, III.51: “the worship peculiar to those who have apprehended the true realities” is “to set their thought to work on God alone, after they have achieved knowledge of Him.”) Maimonides’ text is subtle and is no doubt susceptible to multiple interpretations. What I suggest may be most relevant to us, if we address the matter cautiously, is this: in comparing kinds of avodah, of divine service or worship, Maimonides seems unmistakably to find least attractive—thus least “pleasing” to God— the kind of sacrifice that employs mainly human behavior, by contrast with those that invoke human understanding, intellect, mind, speech, and spirit, “that intellectual worship consisting in nearness to God and being in His presence.”

 Halakhic Observance and “Apprehending” God

We find the same principle, expanded to the scale of a human typology, at the beginning of that quartet of magisterial chapters which form the climax of the Guide. Maimonides calls this now-famous text a parable. It is a parable of man in search of God. In order to understand its relevance to our subject, we must recall all of it.

The ruler is in his palace, and all his subjects are partly within the city and partly outside the city. Of those who are within the city, some have turned their backs upon the ruler’s habitation, their faces being turned another way. Others seek to reach the ruler’s habitation, turn toward it, and desire to enter it and to stand before him, but up to now they have not yet seen the wall of the habitation. Some of those who seek to reach it have come up to the habitation and walk around it searching for its gate. Some of them have entered the gate and walk about in the antechambers. Some of them have entered the inner court of the habitation and have come to be with the king, in one and the same place with him, namely, in the ruler’s habitation. But their having come into the inner part of the habitation does not mean that they see the ruler or speak to him. For after their having come into the inner part of the habitation, it is indispensible that they should make another effort; then, they will be in the presence of the ruler, and see him from afar or nearby, or hear the ruler’s speech or speak to him. (III.51)

Part of this unforgettable parable is quite transparent. Those outside the city are barbarians “without the law,” who neither adhere to a religious tradition nor speculate for themselves. The city of God is not even a rumor to them. Lacking even a suspicion of the transcendent order, they lack authentic human identity—they are “lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of the apes.” They are, we may suppose, akin in a way to the apikorsim of rabbinic typology. By contrast, all those within the city walls acknowledge and seek God, in one way or another, though some of these are fatally corrupted with error, and cannot even approach, let alone see, his habitation.

The final three classes of seekers are the ones who embody definitively Maimonides’ conceptions of avodah. First are those who are eager to encounter God but can’t even see the walls of his habitation. These are “the multitude of the adherents of the Law, I refer to the ignoramuses who observe the commandments.”

Next are those seekers who can indeed perceive the habitation but cannot find its gate, and so are condemned to walk around it. These are the masters of tradition who know what is considered to be correct but do not think for themselves. As Maimonides puts it: They “believe true opinions on the basis of traditional authority and study the law concerning the practices of divine service, but do not engage in speculation concerning the fundamental principles of religion and make no inquiry whatever regarding the rectification of belief.”

Those who succeed in gaining access to the ruler’s habitation, though they are lodged in rooms of varying nearness to the ruler himself, are Maimonides’ ideal of the autonomous seekers, who alone can approach the ruler though with an intimacy commensurate with the acuteness of their “apprehension.” Maimonides has encapsulated their search at the beginning of this chapter, where he promises that the chapter will explain

the worship as practiced by one who has apprehended the true realities peculiar only to Him after he has obtained an apprehension of what He is; and [this chapter] also guides him toward achieving this worship, which is the end of man, and makes known to him how providence watches over him in this habitation until he is brought over to the bundle of life.

If Maimonides had earlier been relatively circumspect in depreciating sacrifice by comparison with prayer and meditation as expressions of avodah (III.32), here he is startlingly forthright with respect to “observance” without intellectual-spiritual content, and declares categorically that these “ignoramuses who observe the commandments” but will never even glimpse God’s “habitation” constitute the mass of those who adhere to the Law. And the conformists who are content to think the approved thoughts get off only little better.

 “Intellectual Apprehension” of God, and “Knowledge” of His Existence

That which both classes of earnest but defective worshippers lack—the robotic observers of the Law and the merely conforming traditionalists—is what Maimonides often, in many places in the Guide, speaks of as our necessary, unending attempt at “intellectual apprehension” of God. We must not, I think, mistake what he means by “intellectual.” Maimonides is often called a “rationalist,” at times somewhat dismissively. But there is certainly nothing merely ratiocinative about his use of this word and the concept behind it. They appear throughout the Guide, from beginning to end. Thus in the first chapter, we learn that the human capacity for “intellectual apprehension” is nothing less than that “divine image” in which man was created. It is not a faculty simply for reasoning, in a narrow sense, but for perceiving, grasping, or apprehending, in a comprehensive sense. Maimonides’ own intellectual or spiritual “apprehensions” throughout the Guide—certainly not least in these final chapters—are dense, subtle, often mystical (however one understands that term), and they unfold at a very high level of intellectual and spiritual sophistication.

His peerless final chapter (III.54), in which the idea receives its apotheosis, gives us what are perhaps his ripest reflections on “spirituality” as autonomous seeking for apprehension of the Transcendent. The chapter is a kind of peroration, and at its climax is a celebrated text from Jeremiah (9:22–23):

Thus saith the Lord: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me.

As Maimonides paraphrases this verse, even the wisdom of the moral virtues in which the wise man glories—along, of course, with lesser goods—stands below the highest and only unqualified hokhmah, which is “apprehension of Him.” But the same is true, he contends, of the mizvoth and halakhot themselves—thus ringing a significant variation on what we have found him affirming in his parable of the seekers, regarding the “multitude of the adherents of the Law”:

[A]ll the actions prescribed by the Law—I refer to the various species of worship and also the moral habits that are useful to all people in their mutual dealings—. . . all this is not to be compared with this ultimate end and does not equal it, being but preparations made for sake of this end.

 This Maimonidean bombshell is bound to dismay at least as many as it thrills. But coming from so authentic a “halakhic man” as Rambam, who was also Maimonides the philosopher, it may help to illuminate the link between spirituality and halakha. In the last sentence of his book, Maimonides (alluding to the text from Jeremiah that he has just quoted) points the direction:

It is clear that the perfection of man that may truly be gloried in is the one acquired by him who has achieved, in a measure corresponding to his capacity, apprehension of Him. . . . The way of life of such an individual, after he has achieved this apprehension [italics mine], will always have in view loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, through assimilation to His actions, may He be exalted. . . .

But according to Maimonides, I take it, we cannot “apprehend” that of whose existence we are not convinced. If the avodah of “apprehension” of God is the way to our own perfection, and in fact (as he implies elsewhere) to that intersection with the Eternal we call olam haBa, then a prior “knowledge” of the necessity of God’s existence or being is its cognitive sine qua non, the cornerstone of our understanding, the foundation of our hokhmah. (Maimonides, like Rav Abraham Isaac Kook centuries later, is reluctant even to ascribe so abstract but, in his view, mundane an attribute as existence to God.) In his articulation of the 613 mizvoth, Maimonides starts by affirming: “The first of the positive commandments is to know that there is a God.” We must know that there is a God before we can apprehend the God.

The first page of the Mishneh Torah addresses our relation to God with a philosophically austere expression of this same cognitive formula: “The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of wisdom is to know (leida’) that there is a Primary Reality (Matsui Rishon) who brought into being all existence”(Yesodei haTorah I.1).

How to try to fulfill this primary Torah mitzvah to know of God’s being, and then the corollary obligation (in Maimonides’ terms) to apprehend God, is not self-evident. We look to the Torah as God’s revealed Truth; but like our ancestors of the twelfth century, when we do this we cannot be sure of either comprehension or agreement.

 I suggest that Maimonides’ insights into these vitally important matters have not lost their usefulness.

 Maimonides on Man, God, and Torah

Three of these insights in particular seem to me immensely relevant to the challenges, both moral and spiritual, that we have seen imputed to contemporary Orthodoxy. First, there are the individual, autonomous “intellectual” ways we should, according to Maimonides, try to relate to God. The unquestioned importance of observing the formal halakhic requirements of the Law notwithstanding, fulfillment of our lives as humans and Jews requires that we personally know the existence of (not only believe in), and then apprehend (not only obey), God. Without this our devotion to halakha is fatally incomplete. No idea in the Guide of the Perplexed is more central or more pervasive. It is, I think, at the core of what we now mean by spirituality. In this context, Maimonides’ evident preference for prayer and meditation as expressions of avodah is altogether comprehensible.   

            Then, too, there is Maimonides’ very conception (or conceptions) of God. Some of his most provocative and demanding chapters are about the divine nature. For his own reasons, he himself almost invariably uses the Torah’s imagery and language of super-monarchical personification, although he explains at length that God’s nature and attributes are altogether beyond human comprehension. He reminds us many times that the Torah’s personifications of God are instances of its “speaking in the language of men,” for the benefit of those whose thinking cannot rise above this language. He himself quite decisively (and possibly a little ironically) puts aside the conventional imagery in that extraordinarily interesting opening of the Mishneh Torah, which we have already quoted, where he invokes the “Primary Reality (Matsui Rishon) that brought into being all existence.” He thus seems to distance himself at a critical moment from the familiar encrustation of personifications, images, and metaphors, numinous and venerated and usually conceived literally, which in his day, for at least a few, had evidently already become encumbrances (and have certainly, in our own day, become so for many more, as Rav Kook acknowledges in some of his most luminous pages). Perhaps it is not too much to say that Maimonides thus assists—even authorizes—our individual cognitive capability, our “intellectual apprehension,” our meditative faculty, to lead our individual sensibilities toward those personal intimations of Transcendent Reality in which he believes our fullest humanity and our most authentic Torah devotion lies.

Finally, there is Torah itself, the ordained source—more precisely, the register—of God’s mizvoth and halakhot, and thus at the core of historic Judaism, most assuredly of Orthodox Judaism. Maimonides devotes over a third of the Guide to explaining that the Torah’s innumerable ascriptions to God of “corporeality,” of a formal constitution parallel to the human, are not to be understood literally, that they are concessions, in “the language of men,” to the needs of those who cannot otherwise conceive of “Primary Reality.” Although the traditional divine personification remains for many a stumbling block and a perplexity, Maimonides and like-minded thinkers did eventually win their battle against divine corporeality.

       For contemporary seekers of spirituality, however, Torah perplexities are at least as likely to be related to crime and punishment—to the range of approved human behavior and prescribed penalties for infraction. What are we to do when the Written Torah authorizes or forbids behavior in ways that our moral apprehension—our “inner voice”—rejects? Especially when the Written Torah prescribes the punishment of death in contexts which may seem to us morally unacceptable—when, in short, halakha seems at odds with morality?

      We have already encountered Maimonides’ original, if somewhat equivocal, attitude toward animal sacrifice: that its authorization may have been from the start a divine concession to our human weakness for the familiar, and thus in itself “less pleasing” to God than prayer and meditation. But never, I believe, in either the Guide or the Mishneh Torah, does Maimonides hint that he deplores its original institution, whether for reasons of spiritual or aesthetic fitness, cruelty, or any other, nor that he would deplore its eventual restoration. Though the sacrifices may be a concession, they are also a mitzvah, a law. (Nevertheless, most contemporary Jews, including I suspect large numbers of Modern Orthodox, would be unenthusiastic for their return.) But still, Maimonides’ unmistakable preference for prayer and meditation—a preference that he in effect also ascribes to God—seems to me evidence of a critical attitude toward the Written Law, founded, one may surmise, upon his own moral and aesthetic perceptions, his personal “intellectual apprehension.”    

      If there is no unequivocally moral component in Maimonides’ apparent misgivings about korbanot, this may not be the case with respect to his rejection of the Torah’s unqualified command that when they are able, the Israelites must exterminate without exception, and irrespective of age, all the Canaanites (Deut. 7:1-2, 7:16, 20:15–18) and all the Amalekites (Deut. 25:19). Though hedged with a multitude of qualifications, his contrary conclusion is clear enough: if these arch-enemies should accept “a peaceful settlement” (however ungentle), even the Amalekites and Canaanites may live. (Cf. Hilkhot Melakhim 6:4–6.)

In thus nullifying the Written Torah’s demand for total proscription of these peoples, on account of their exceptionally destructive offenses and presumed mortal dangers, Maimonides is following in part a certain few midrashic and talmudic texts. “Sifrei and other halakhic sources reason that since the express purpose of the law is to prevent the Canaanites from influencing the Israelites. . .if they abandoned their paganism and accepted the moral standards of the Noahide laws they were to be spared” (Jeffrey Tigay, JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, 472). Like Maimonides’ apparent discomfort with animal sacrifice, the Oral Torah’s finding such a way to save Canaanite lives seems to suggest a critique (to which Maimonides adheres) of the Written text’s plain sense. “[I]t is clear. . . that Deuteronomy’s demand for proscription of the Canaanites is indeed unconditional.. The rabbis’ rejection of this view is a reflection of their own sensibilities” (Ibid., 472).

Tigay’s explanation appears to contradict the usual rabbinical principle that the Oral Torah’s role vis-à-vis the Written is to amplify and clarify. What of the Amalekites? I know of no text in the Oral Torah which extends to them the option to save their lives by accepting a “peaceful settlement,” with all that is thus entailed. Among the later rabbis, Maimonides seems unique in so extending it. I suggest that to have done so, to have once again revealed (and this time without a midrashic source) a critical attitude toward the Written Law, Maimonides has given us another reflection of his own moral sensibility.

  Dynamic Halakha and Ethical Insights

When, a number of years ago, I first encountered Rabbi Robert Gordis’ well-known article “A Dynamic Halakhah: Principles and Procedures of Jewish Law” (Judaism, Summer 1979), I was excited by what it suggested about the complex relation between Written Torah and Oral Torah. (“Dynamic” seems to me an excellent epithet.) Some years later, I found Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits equally suggestive, and for the same reason. (In particular, see his article, “The Nature and Function of Jewish Law,” reprinted in his Essential Essays on Judaism.). Other writers in these 30 years have developed the same theme, which is precisely relevant to the imputed confrontation of the Written Law with spirituality. The theme is this: Despite assertions that it is “unchanging,” rabbinical interpretation of Torah Law has always been dynamic and responsive to rabbinical moral sensibilities.

[There is] clear evidence of growth and development in the Halakha because of new ethical insights and attitudes that represent movement beyond earlier positions. In these instances the Halakha did not hesitate to establish new legal norms, not local or temporary in character, but universally and permanently binding. (Gordis, 270; italics in the original)

Rabbi Gordis writes of “the dynamic character of the ethical consciousness of the Sages and . . . their unremitting effort to interpret the Torah in the light of their ethical insights” (Idem.). Rabbis Gordis and Berkovits, as well as others, have presented evidence that the sages of the Oral Torah regularly interpreted the Written Law so as to diminish judicial execution. Everyone knows about their institution of the requirement for witnesses and warnings. The reluctance of Rabbi Akiva to countenance any executions at all is well known. Equally familiar are the halakhic stratagems that in effect nullified the biblical mizvoth to execute the “stubborn and rebellious son” and to exterminate the “city led astray to idol worship.” There was, says Rabbi Berkovits, among the rabbis of the halakha a prevailing “tension between the written law and the living conscience” (73). “Obviously,” notes Rabbi Gordis, “the Law of God could not be inferior to the conscience of men” (272).

      If we accept this reasoning, it would seem to follow, then, that when the rabbis of the Mishna find ways to void (in effect) the unqualified Scriptural proscription of the Canaanites, and when Maimonides does the same with regard to the Amalekites, they are invoking their own consciences, and implying thereby that these “inner voices” too are in their own way miSinai.

 The Semantic Model

       There may seem to be a contradiction between this concept of a progressively unfolding halakha and the axiomatic rabbinical principle, enshrined in the Torah itself, that the Torah is definitive and unchanging. We read in Maimonides’ own Principles of Faith:

The Ninth Fundamental Principle is the authenticity of the Torah, i.e., that this Torah was precisely transcribed from God and no one else. To the Torah, Oral and Written, nothing must be added nor anything taken from it, as it is said, “You must neither add nor detract” (Deut. 13:1).

What role in such a Torah is there for personal sensibilities, consciences, and inner voices? Extrapolating a little, what place is there for “spirituality” in a religion founded upon Law? Fortunately, the rabbinical concept of the Oral Law is wondrously flexible and sensitive to disagreement among qualified disputants. (Cf. Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader, 13–14.) The functions of rabbinical amplification and clarification embrace a wider range of possibilities than we might expect from Maimonides’ categorical Ninth Principle—but for which his own practice, as we have seen, might well have prepared us. And we have observed that among Maimonides’ dominating themes is his insistence that our individual understanding and apprehension of Transcendent Truth takes precedence for us over halakhic observance per se, and indeed over halakha itself, though these remain altogether essential. In this way he may have provided us with tools for helping resolve the conflicts in Modern Orthodox life between Law and spirituality.

And in the same spirit, I suggest a conceptual analogy for helping clarify how we can reconcile our “unchanging” Law with the autonomy and spontaneity of our experiences and apprehensions.

One of the basic principles of semantics is semantic contamination. According to this principle, a “message” sent by A to B is almost always vulnerable to errors of one kind or another between leaving A and arriving at B. There might, for instance, be static in a radio transmission; a paper message might be damaged by the elements; an email message might be distorted by a computer glitch; and so forth. More germane would be a situation in which the recipient failed to understand the message correctly because of intellectual or cultural limitations, and was obliged therefore to guess at some of its content. (We may also imagine a situation, less likely perhaps, where the recipient, for reasons of intellect, culture, or even perceived self-interest, willfully distorted the message.) And if the transmission of the message occurs not only in space but in time, we can easily imagine another range of potential dangers to accuracy of reception and comprehension. These matters are well-known to the historian, and especially to the philologist; such sciences as textual criticism are founded upon them.  

Without being drawn too near the quicksand of divisive theological speculation, let us think of the truths of Torah as messages, in this semantic sense—in the language of Torah itself, messages from God, through Moses, to us. An essential corollary of any such conception is, of course, as Maimonides registers in his Ninth Principle, that “messages” coming from Transcendent Reality are true and definitive. Yet by the time, so to say, that they have reached us (for the reasons I’ve sketched out, and for others that will readily come to mind) many or most of them may have been “contaminated,” or may have reached us incomplete. It may even be that no one’s “hearing,” even that of the most eminent prophets, is ever quite up to comprehending the Transcendent message. Thus the Written Torah required, and requires, to be supplemented by the Oral, and the Oral by the most eminent sages of the generations. Emphasizing one aspect of this requirement, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits addresses the matter with exceptional eloquence:

Thus, the Oral Torah as halakha redeems the Written Torah from the prison of its generality and “humanizes” it. The written law longs for this, its redemption, by the Oral Torah. That is why God rejoices when he is defeated by his children. Such defeat is his victory. (p. 97)                  

May we imagine, extending Rabbi Berkovits’ celebrated talmudic allusion, that God also rejoices whenever his children use their unique faculties of spirit and perception, of instinct and conviction, to reach beyond halakha, beyond even our only partially understood Torah, to that direct and personal “intellectual apprehension” of Matsui Rishon in which Maimonides finds our human fulfillment?