When Worlds Collide[1]: Why Observant Student Teachers Refuse to Teach in the Mamlachti Dati School System?

     During the past several years as an educator in the fields of Tanakh and Jewish studies, I have come across a prevalent and disturbing phenomenon: most of the religiously observant student teachers whom I have met  are not at all  interested in teaching in the mamlakhti-dati school system (the religious public school system in Israel). When the time comes for them to decide on a professional placement, they apply to secular schools, or to the new model of specialized dati-hiloni schools (religious/secular schools), or to pluralistic religious schools. Several years ago, as the head of the Tanakh department of such an experimental dati-hiloni high school, I found that more than half of the Jewish studies faculty was comprised of incredibly dedicated and talented religious young people. When I asked them to describe the thought process that brought them to an experimental framework, (in our case, a particularly demanding one), the majority of them admitted to never having even considered Mamad (religious public school system) as a professional option, for reasons that will be discussed in this paper. Some had tried to teach in the Mamad system and had given up.

     Why is this true?  Why are these bright, highly motivated, religiously observant young people, who are extremely knowledgeable in both Jewish and general studies, opting out of the mamlakhti-dati school system?  And if they are opting out, then who is teaching our children?

     In this article I would like to address these questions by relating several stories that reflect the changes that are taking place in the Mamad schools and in the teachers colleges. I want to examine how and why these changes, which are occurring in both the formal and informal frameworks of the Mamad, are alienating many young, committed and engaged religious student teachers out of its educational system. In addition, I would like to suggest conceptual and practical changes to improve an ever worsening situation.

Observations from the Field: Primary School

A Story about Matisse

     When our daughter was in fifth grade at the local Mamad (religious public school), she decided to do her personal project on Matisse. We went to do research at the Israel Museum art library and spent several hours reading his biography and examining books of Matisse’s paintings.  Some weeks later I bumped into the teacher in the school hall, and couldn’t resist asking her what she thought of my daughter’s project. Well, she said hesitating, it was a bit skimpy. Skimpy?!  I cried in disbelief. She’s in fifth grade. She could have chosen “Water” or “Color” or “Why is the Sky Blue?” Instead she picked a difficult topic and handed in work she did herself. What do you mean by skimpy? Well, she said quietly, the truth is… I have never heard of Matisse.

     After recovering from the sad implications of this story, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions: Why is a person with so little intellectual curiosity, or basic professional self-respect, hired to teach school children? Once hired, why are such teachers maintained?

     The status of teacher knowledge in the secular primary schools is, unfortunately, not much better than that of the teachers in the Mamad system. It is unlikely, however, for a teacher in a secular school never to have heard of Matisse, implausible that she would not refer to an encyclopedia while grading her student’s work, and inconceivable that she would look the student’s parent directly in the eye and say: “I have never heard of Matisse."

     Why are so many Mamad teachers like this, particularly--but not exclusively--in the younger grades?  And why does a teacher in the Mamad system feel safe in doing this?  The answers are not pleasant. One: Matisse was not Jewish.  [In the eyes of the narrowly Orthodox] non-Jews don’t count.  Two: Matisse was an artist. Art is irrelevant.  If the fifth grader’s paper had been a biography of a great rabbinic sage, the teacher would certainly have done her homework.  Three: Matisse painted nudes. Nudity is immodest and immodesty is the cardinal sin, greater than ignorance and intolerance (more on this later). In fact, the teacher had asked my daughter to remove one of Matisse’s abstract line drawings of a nude from the paper. The principal insisted that it stay in. Poor Matisse, he never had a chance.                                 

     So why is this person permitted to teach our children?

     The answer lies in the ever changing face of the Mamad teacher. Whereas once the Mamad teacher and principal were observant Jews who prided themselves on their abilty to combine love of Torah with love of all knowledge, today more and more Mamad teachers pride themselves on their insularity, and yes, their ignorance of all things not Jewish.

     I would like to underscore this point with 3 stories from my recent experience in Mamad teachers colleges.

Observations from the Field of Teacher Training

     Recently, I taught at a well-respected college for primary school educators, considered for years a pillar of dati leumi (religious Zionist) Judaism. For administrative reasons, the college hosts students from an influential hareidi –leumi midrasha (hareidi Zionist school) who pursue their B. ED at the college. They are excellent students, and their influence on the school is great—as are their demands.

Feminist Research

     Early on in the semester, in a course on pedagogy, I referred to a research study by feminist scholars on a gender related educational issue. After class, some of the students approached to further discuss my conclusions, but questioned my reference to feminist scholarship. 

     That night, I received a call from a faculty representative from the midrasha.  His official job was liaison between the midrasha and the seminar; his unofficial job was to be a watchdog for religiosity. He asked that I meet him the next day in his office allotted to him by the college.

      I was told the following: academic research is not important to us. Please avoid referring to it. Feminist research is anathema to us. If you happen to teach Tanakh, do not teach comparative parshanut a la Nechama Leibowitz. We don’t evaluate the great parshanim (classic rabbinic Bible commentators) - they are all equally great. We don’t compare and contrast. Who are we, after all?

A Trip to London

     Wanting to prevent further such confrontations, I avoided all areas of controversy--not my natural inclination. During a class exercise demonstrating varying approaches to planning, I asked my students to plan a trip to London. I noticed one pair sitting and not working. I approached to ask if they needed help. The following conversation ensued.

We have never been to London.

OK, I said, make believe.

We don’t want to go to London.

Ok. I said, (thinking perhaps that they were Anglophobic). How about Paris?

We don’t want to go to Paris either.

OK. Where do you want to go?

They thought for a moment and said, To the Golan.

Literary Analysis

     Soon after, I began teaching at another dati leumi College intended for junior high and high school educators, also a prominent institution in dati leumi education.  The school was eager to develop into an Israeli model of Yeshiva University, a degree granting religious university. In this vein, the school held a half day conference on the topic of literary approaches to teaching Tanakh. All the presenters were religiously observant. I delivered a paper on the topic of thematic reading. When I returned to class, I found my normally compliant students up in arms. How could I apply literary tools to the reading of Tanakh? Tanakh is a sacred book, not literature.  It is forbidden to apply literary text analysis to the Torah.

     This was compartmentalization at its best. Literary analysis, a gentler cousin of Biblical criticism, has a way of unnerving some religious people.  The students’ instincts were right; this material is sensitive and troubling. But what struck me most was the fear, a near panic, at what they had heard, and a refusal to have a discussion.  In a house of learning, the response to ideas that challenge our assumptions cannot be flight or fear. That is the hareidi way; it is not meant to be the approach of classical dati leumi education. In addition, these were students preparing for high school teaching. Certainly the day would come when one of their students would question them on this topic. What will their response be?  

     The colleges and students alluded to are not marginal or atypical. They serve as major feeders of teachers to the Mamad school system.  Those students are the teachers of our children today.  

     What the above stories have in common is that they all reflect the growing influence of the hareidi ideologies on Mamad education via hareidi-leumi teachers and attitudes: lack of curiosity bordering on disdain  for all things not Jewish; distrust of academia--even while earning an academic degree; distaste for feminism- even while benefiting from the contribution of feminist activism to the equality of women in the workplace; fear of critical thinking; refusal to recognize and grapple with issues of modernity and post-modernist humanist thought; extensive use of  the advances of modern research in areas of medicine and technology, along with an unwillingness to admit or to acknowledge the central role of the university in bringing about these advances.   

     The hareidi-leumi worldview, while clearly one I do not share, has the right to its input into the religious and political discourse of the State of Israel. But the legitimate place for the dissemination of its values is within its own schools and communities. The dati leumi school system, once the pride and joy of the dati leumi world, is emptying at a frightening rate, because the liberal dati leumi establishment refuses to acknowledge that, despite a shared commitment to the observance of (certain) mitzvoth and to the state of Israel, what divides us is greater than what unites us.

     On Sukkot 2005, Ne’emanei Torah V’Avodah hosted a joint conference with Edah,[2] an American organization associated with religious Zionism and modern Orthodoxy.[3] In a keynote address, Rabbi Saul Berman delineated the major ideological issues on which the hareidi world and the modern Orthodox world differ: pluralism/tolerance, the religious meaning of Medinat Israel, Jew and Gentile, da’at Torah, Torah u’maddah, humrah, women in halakha, outreach, and activism. On the majority of the issues listed, the hareidi- leumi attitude is closer to the hareidi attitude than to the dati leumi attitude. [4] Aside from the approach towards the State, we differ on the central, most significant issues of modern Jewish life.

     These ideological differences weigh heavily upon the young students with whom I have contact. Humanistic in their orientation and pluralist in their outlook, they do not want to teach in the Mamad schools, because they do not want to instill values that are not theirs. They all (women and men) have academic degrees, some in Bible and in Talmud, as well as in literature, history, music, and art. They embrace the world because it is awesome, and they are curious. They cannot teach honestly without alluding to all that they know, nor do they want to.

     These dati students have been to China and India, some even to London! They believe Jews are special, but they don’t believe that everyone else is devoid of values. They go to concerts, they know who Matisse is, and they know a thing or two about wine. The men know how to cook… and most of the women wear slacks.

     They are rigorous in their thinking, but not rigid in their outlook. They struggle to find the interface--often through reexamination of religious sources--between the yeshiva/midrasha and the university, between Levinas and dati leumi, shiurim and shira, Carlbach and Kleinstein. Their challenge is to make these worlds overlap, not to compartmentalize them.

They represent the oft alluded line between dati and leumi, between modern and Orthodox. These are the students who should be teaching our children. Most of them will not.

The Dress Code

     A disturbing corollary of hareidi- leumi influence that threatens the caliber of teachers in the dati leumi schools system is the growing obsession with the dress code relating to women. Part of the reason why the teacher in the Matisse story continues to teach in our schools is because she looks the part.  She and hundreds like her are teaching in our schools, despite the fact that they may be inferior teachers, because her elbows are covered, her skirts are long, and in the case of married women, her head is covered.   

     Over the past 10-15 years, the dati-leumi establishment has become obsessed with the dress code of women. Prominent rabbis write outrageous articles measuring centimeters on the neck and on the arms. While the suitability of male teachers is measured in how much they know and the quality of their prayer, in the case of women, the skill of pious dressing can override the skills of good teaching.

     Modesty is a significant tenet of Jewish life, but we have begun to lose all sense of proportion. When appearance is secondary to talent in a school system, the big losers are the children. 

     A case in point: Several years ago a new Dati Leumi academic school opened in our neighborhood to address the needs of our predominantly liberal dati-leumi population. Most of the parents, working people, professionals and academics, were eager for a superior local school for their children that could compete with excellent schools outside the neighborhood. The girls’ school, however, was headed in a different direction. From its inception, it insisted that homeroom teachers wear head coverings at all times, that is, outside of school as well as in. All non- homeroom teachers, that is, art, history, math, were requested to wear a head covering in school,  even if they didn’t do so in their personal lives. Thus, with one swift religious stringency, the eagerly awaited alternative dati-leumi school committed to excellence, disqualified all outstanding religious teachers who didn’t "look the look.”[5]  While the boys' school, instituted at the same time, searched for the "best and the brightest," the girls’ school front line concern was attire.  Not only did the students have a dress code, so did the teachers.

     It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss the halakhic ins and outs of these dress demands.  The point of emphasis here is that this stringent dress code does not reflect the norms or the values of the religiously observant parent body.  The vast majority of the mothers in this school do not cover their hair and many wear slacks. At the opening ceremony of the school the number of mothers counted with head coverings was 10 out of 150! Thus the unstated message conveyed to girls is that their mothers are not qualified to be their religious role models. [6] 

     The ever increasing insistence on a dress code for teachers is another reasons my religious students avoid teaching in the Mamad system. It is important to note that some of my married dati students do in fact wear head coverings, but some do not. Some wear head coverings and slacks and want to continue to do so, not because they are rebellious, but because slacks are comfortable and efficient. These young women are halakhically committed, and halakhically informed, many are well versed in Talmudic texts. They know that the ban on slacks is a sociological issue, not a halakhic one[7], and that head covering has become the sociological equivalent of a kippah only recently.  Graduates of midrashot and yeshivot, they spend countless hours examining the sources. Thoughtful and honest, they are looking for ways to be true to halakha and true to themselves.

     Thus these young dati-leumi teachers opt for schools that will let them wear what feels comfortable, while retaining their personal sense of modesty;  schools that will focus on their thinking abilities, their pedagogic skills,  and their ability to touch the hearts and minds of their students. They are not going to the Mamad system.

     Yet, aren’t these the very teachers we want teaching in our schools? 

Conclusion

     The Mamad school system has lost its sense of identity; it is no longer responsive to the needs of its community.  The vacuum created is being filled by ideologies that do not reflect the vision and the values of the majority of the pupils’ homes and communities. By allowing vast hareidi leumi influence on our schools, we abrogate our responsibility to our own community. Not only are young teachers leaving the system, so are the children. 

     Talented teachers with a more embracing attitude to the modern world as well as to its challenges will find work elsewhere, in the secular public school system and in other frameworks mentioned in the opening of this paper. But who will teach the thousands of children from liberal dati leumi homes? For now, the majority of dati leumi parents are not looking for alternative frameworks, although with each passing year, more and more are doing so. They are still eager for a neighborhood school that reflects their combined commitment to Torah and general wisdom, in the broadest sense of the word. 

     In the final analysis, it is the teachers who make a school. In order for children to return to the Mamad system, we need to make spiritual room for the many talented young religious teachers who are grappling with the same issues as the families,  teachers whose intricate approach to the world is similar to that of their students.

A Practical Suggestion for Change 

     The past few years has seen the development of several excellent academic programs throughout Israel which support promising young students financially in exchange for a commitment to teach Jewish studies in the religious public school system for a stipulated number of years.  I would like to see the creation of similar programs that would prepare bright and motivated religious university students for teaching in the Mamad system. In exchange for tuition and financial support, perhaps by the religious branch of the Ministry of Education, as well as private donors committed to liberal religious values, they would be asked to commit to several years of teaching in the Mamad.

      In addition to the regular courses in disciplinary knowledge and in pedagogy, there would be classes and workshops devoted to issues such as: the implications of the past 100 years’ of Biblical research; recent Talmud research; issues related to women; national service; conflicts arising between Synagogue and State; democracy and Judaism; attitude toward non-religious Jews, and so much more. As of now, most of these issues are discussed only in informal youth programs like Gesher. Their place is in the schools.

     In order to accomplish this, we need teachers who are not afraid.

     There are many options for such a program of study, worthy of a separate paper. But in order for such a program to be effective, there needs to be more than specialized education for students. Just as the general public school system is reevaluating its attitude toward Jewish studies and therefore training teachers to spearhead that movement, so does the dati leumi school system need to do some serious self- reflection. Only then will they be able to bring back young dati teachers who think out of the box, who are committed to halakha and to academic research, who are rethinking old approaches--not rejecting them--who love children, love knowledge, and embrace the world.  

On the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah in 2009, an audience of 225 individuals attended a Jewish community-wide Healing Service in Baltimore, Maryland. The Healing Service was convened as a gathering for survivors of domestic, sexual, physical, verbal, and all forms of abuse; family members and friends of survivors; mental health and physical health professionals; clergy; educators; and all who wanted to learn how to “break the silence” that surrounds and permeates abuse and trauma in a community. The Healing Service was designed and sponsored by the Shofar Coalition, a program of CHANA and the ASSOCIATED Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore.

Representatives from Shofar, CHANA, the Baltimore Board of Rabbis, and the Baltimore Jewish Times joined with eight courageous survivors who agreed to share their experiences of trauma endured as children, adolescents, or adults. Together, they delivered a message—in words, in chants, in prayer. In doing so, they challenged the audience to cultivate a Healing Community, one that actively listens to the truths spoken by those among us who have been victimized; one that believes and accepts that these traumatic experiences affect not only the victims but all of us; and a community that responds with compassion and action rather than with silence and denial.

Why a Healing Service?

Allow me to quote from a statement publically issued several weeks before the event by Rabbi Amy Scheinerman, President of the Baltimore Board of Rabbis:

As Jews, we understand viscerally from our historical experience what it is to be victims of persecution. Time and again, we have demanded that the voices of victims be heard, that their pain be acknowledged, and that justice prevail. Yet in our own midst, many have suffered silently for far too long, as victims of abuse and trauma whose pain and suffering have gone unacknowledged, whose stories have not been believed, and whose perpetrators have been shielded from suffering the appropriate consequences their behavior warrants. Silence and inaction have re-victimized those traumatized by abuse by inflicting fear, shame, and guilt. As a community, we have participated in a conspiracy of silence: denial of the truth of abuse in our midst, the silencing of victims, and our own individual choice of silence when fear or disbelief take precedence over informed response. The silence must end.

The ethical issues and the moral imperatives raised in Rabbi Scheinerman’s statement apply to communities of all faiths, not just Jewish, and in societies across the country and the world. There is no place for denial, silence, or inaction in any community—certainly not in any Jewish community.  In a Healing Community, of any faith, all of its members share a responsibility to acknowledge the pain and to help ease the suffering of victims. Pursuing justice by holding those responsible for abuse accountable, and thus preventing other innocent individuals from being victimized, is also an integral obligation for a faith community. There is no place in a Healing Community for bystanders.

In any discussion of the ethical issues related to abuse, it is important to understand certain facts. The majority of perpetrators are not strangers to the victims. It is difficult to secure an accurate number of abuse victims in general due to the consequences of the shame, fear, and silence that typically paralyze victims and communities. If an individual feels guilt and shame over the abuse, as is often the case, he or she will not admit that the abuse occurred. If a community denies that abuse happens—and worse, blames the victim or anyone who speaks about abuse and accused abusers—then the resulting fear often gives rise to victims being forced into silence. Where there is fear and silence, suspected abuse of children or adults remains unreported to the authorities, thus allowing perpetrators to continue to victimize others, sometimes for many years. Failure to report suspected abuse means a failure to bring the perpetrators of abuse to justice.

I know of a woman in her mid-30s who was molested when she was a teenager by a well-known and greatly revered congregational rabbi in Baltimore. Shortly after the abuse occurred, her mother and two other rabbis whom she turned to for guidance told her to keep quiet so as not to destroy this much-loved rabbi’s reputation. Besides, she was told, no one would believe her anyway. All these years later, this woman continues receiving professional therapy to help her deal with intense guilt over the number of women who were molested by this same rabbi long after she was. She believed that her imposed silence had resulted in the suffering of other women. Similarly, hundreds of men who had been sexually abused when they were young boys by the same rabbi over a period of more than 20 years finally came forward to speak of their suffering only after several of this particular rabbi’s victims broke their silence, thus giving voice to so many who were re-traumatized by remaining silent for so long.

Knowing that the actual number of incidences of abuse is higher than reported, it is shocking to note that studies indicate that one in four women report that they have been victimized by domestic violence as an adult. Likewise, one in four women and one in six men report that they have been sexually abused in their lifetime. In the United States, 4 million children are reported to have been abused every year. There is no indication that these numbers are any different among Jewish individuals, nor is there any known difference in numbers among the various denominations within Judaism. A groundbreaking study published in November, 2007 entitled “History of Past Sexual Abuse in Married Observant Jewish Women” states that “Twenty-six percent of respondents in a study about the sexual lives and attitudes of married Orthodox Jewish women— 55% identifying as Modern Orthodox and about 45% as right-wing Orthodox—indicated that they had at some point suffered sexual abuse.” (American Journal of Psychiatry 164: 1700–06).

The Ethical Imperative in Judaism to Help Trauma Survivors

Rabbi Mark Dratch, Founder and President of JSafe: The Jewish Institute Supporting an Abuse-Free Environment, wrote in a 2007 article entitled “Few Are Guilty, but All Are Responsible: The Obligations to Help Survivors of Abuse”:

The Torah expresses the obligation to help those under assault or subject to abuse through both positive and negative precepts: ‘Thou shalt not stand by the blood of thy neighbor’ (Lev. 19:16) and ‘And you shall restore him to himself’ (Deut. 22:2). The Talmud (Sanhedrin 73a) teaches that while the latter verse teaches that one must intervene personally, the former expands that responsibility; a person may not just stand around idly while someone is being hurt.

All too often, the obligation to help victims of trauma and abuse is trumped by a fear of speaking out and getting involved—and a denial that the abuse even occurred. The resulting silence takes the place of bringing relief to the suffering of the victims and securing the safety of the community by bringing the perpetrators to justice. Both abuse victims and observers of the abuse are scared that no one will believe them if they speak up. They are afraid that exposing the abuse and the abuser will destroy their families or the families of the perpetrators.

By exploring the ways that victims are harmed by silence and inaction, whether self-imposed or imposed by others, we can best understand the importance of the Torah-based obligation stated above. The silence often sentences a victim to years upon years of isolation and feeling alone. Many of the people who come to the Shofar Coalition for help do so after years of telling no one what happened to them. Some come forward for the first time when they are in their 40s, 50s, or even 60s. An individual who attended our Healing Service last September submitted a note that stated: “I have been suffering from mental, emotional, and physical abuse for so many years. Can someone help me? I don’t feel safe.”

The prevailing silence contributes to feelings of intense shame, guilt, and low self-worth on the part of victims of trauma. People may wonder why the victim would feel guilty or ashamed about something that was done to them, not by them. As one survivor of incest explained to me, until the abuser is named, the victim carries and owns the shame and guilt. Once others know about the abuser, the shame is shifted from the victim to the abuser where it belongs. Excerpts from the testimonies of three of the eight survivors who spoke at the Shofar Healing Service gives us a window into the feelings of shame, fear, and isolation born out of silence.

A 45-year-old woman: I was a college graduate. I was a nice, Jewish girl from Pikesville [Baltimore] who married her best friend’s brother, also from Pikesville. So how in the world could I be lying in the hospital emergency room with a broken arm, caused by my own husband? This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to people like me. I was scared and embarrassed, humiliated, and so ashamed. I felt so alone, I just wanted to disappear. The physical pain didn’t even hold a candle to the mental pain I was holding inside. It was easier to keep that secret.

A 32-year-old man: I was first molested at the mikva when I was 4 years old….I was afraid to tell my father, so he never knew about it. It was like I had a Scarlet Letter on my forehead that said “easy target, molest me!” As a child, I was also molested by a female neighbor, my bar-mitzvah teacher, and while I was in yeshiva. Most of the molestations took place in a religious environment. [I was brought up to believe] that you should always have respect for your elders, that the Rabbi/teacher/parent/adult is always right. This led me to believe that I was the problem—It was my fault; I was bad.

A 65- year-old man: I didn't think that I was affected at all by these encounters with the rabbi and his friend, however 52 years later I realize that shame, embarrassment, and fear kept me from revealing the revered rabbi's insidious behavior. In fact, I could not speak out loud the name of the rabbi who molested me until I was 60 years old.

So many trauma survivors have expressed to me that perhaps even more painful than the original abuse that they have endured is the feeling that they were betrayed by the reaction of trusted individuals (parents, friends, rabbis, teachers) who were sought out for comfort, compassion, validation, support and guidance. The denial, silence and inaction on the part of trusted individuals give rise to profound feelings of being “re-victimized.” The emotional scars left by such re-victimization are often long lasting and more difficult to heal. A woman who was molested by her uncle over the course of two years beginning when she was ten, and who came to Shofar for services when she was in her mid 40s says:

For many years, I only told my closest friends about what had happened to me. The first time I told someone in a position of authority in confidence was to my rabbi when I was in my late 20s and already a mother. I went to my rabbi, whom I very much respected as a man of terrific judgment and integrity, and asked for help. He did not ask about me or my mental health, he didn’t pursue a line of questioning that might have led to accountability for my uncle, he didn’t even want me to upset my father by telling him the truth if there were some way that it could be avoided. I went back into the closet of my shame and closed the door.

Rabbi Dratch, in a 2006 article entitled “The Shame of It All: The Real Shonda in Revealing Abuse,” points out yet another way that victims and the entire Jewish community are harmed by silence, inaction, and feelings of betrayal by family and respected members of the community. He states:

Many [Jewish] victims of abuse are exploited first by their Jewish perpetrators and then are betrayed by the reaction of the family and community they thought would help them, nurture them, and find them justice. In many cases, these victims lose faith in themselves, in the community, and in God. Those who do not reject their Judaism find strength in their faith, despite all that has been done to them. But in many cases victims are disillusioned by the institutions and leaders they thought they could trust. Too many of them abandon mitzvah observance and their connections to the Jewish community are weakened. This is a real hilul hashem!

Perceived Barriers, Unique to Jewish Communities, to Revealing Abuse and Acting to Help Abuse Survivors

Concerns of Hilul Hashem

Rabbi Dratch addresses these concerns in “The Shame of It All” when he states: “this concern about protecting the reputation of God and the Jewish people by repressing public discussion of behaviors and actions that may be deemed a ‘shonda,’ scandalous and disreputable, may in fact itself be a hilul hashem. It is the abuser and not the abused that has committed hilul hashem, and it is those who cover up and silence victims, not those who seek justice and the protection of innocent victims that desecrate God’s Name.”

The Shonda Factor

 Individuals are often afraid to discuss abuse or to expose an accused abuser because of the potential harm to the perpetrator’s reputation. They fear that they and their families will be shunned or ostracized by the community. Sadly, this is often the case. Victims, and their advocates who do speak out, have become the target of verbal, written, and physical attacks. They are viewed as having brought shame to the entire community. The shonda factor is further intensified in some Jewish communities by the fear that speaking out about abuse may damage the possibilities of young people in a given family finding suitable marriage partners. All in all, these fears not only give rise to the silencing of victims but to the organized cover-up of dangerous situations and enabling of potentially harmful abusers.

Lashon haRa (Libel or Slander) and Mesirah (Informing Civil Authorities)

Some Jewish people attribute their silence and inaction in the face of abuse to their adherence to and understanding of Jewish laws prohibiting lashon haRa and mesirah. In his “Few Are Guilty” article, Rabbi Mark Dratch states that: “These principles, and others, are valid, essential principles of Jewish life and law and should be carefully observed by committed Jews. But all too often misplaced priorities and misconceived interpretations of Jewish law have trumped equally valid halakhic concerns for the safety and security of Jewish bodies and souls.”

In the same article, Rabbi Dratch eloquently expresses the ethical responsibilities of the Jewish people when those among us are suffering from the horrors of abuse. In expounding on a quotation by Abraham Joshua Heschel having to do with a Jewish response to evil (“Few are guilty, but all are responsible”), Rabbi Dratch states: “So, while a small minority of the Jewish community is actually guilty of perpetrating abuse and violence, the entire community is responsible to come to the aid of victims, to pursue justice, to demand accountability, and to protect the innocents of our community and the integrity of our faith.”

Many years ago, on a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I saw the following line: “Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never be a bystander.”  The Museum’s website attributes the quotation to Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I do not in any way mean to equate the evils and horrors of the Holocaust with the evils of child abuse and domestic violence.  I do, however, mean to say that we as Jews cannot and must not stand idly by while some of our fellow Jews are suffering due to no fault of their own, but rather due to the fault of abusive people and silent bystanders. Historically we as Jewish people know all too well the consequences of silence in the face of human suffering. And abuse thrives in silence.

I challenge all Jewish communities to rebuild themselves as Healing Communities. Healing Communities say to those who are hurting among us that they need not suffer in silence alone any longer. We need to replace fear, denial, and silence with compassion and truth, and inaction will be replaced with action. We as Jewish communities will attend to the healing of all those who wish to recover from the long-term effects of abuse. We will commit to bringing the perpetrators of abuse to justice and to preventing them from hurting others. We can do this! We must do this!

For information about Healing Services and other Shofar or CHANA sponsored activities, contact Elaine Witman at [email protected] or 410-843-7582.

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?

     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.

I first started going to daily minyan for one selfish reason. I simply wanted to be with my husband. Three days after getting married, we were in our new home, and my husband awoke early for minyan. He was getting up, so I got up too. I certainly wasn’t ready to be apart from him, so I accompanied him to the synagogue. It was my first early morning weekday minyan. Prior to our marriage, it never occurred to me to attend daily minyan in a synagogue. Why on earth would I schlep to a synagogue for morning services when I could say Shaharit at home amidst the whirlwind of bathing, blow-drying, breakfast, and then the mad dash to work?

That was 11 months ago. Surprisingly, I quickly became hooked. I continued to attend daily minyan, going morning and evening almost every single day. The biggest surprise of all, however, was witnessing the quiet beauty that exists when men pray together on a regular basis. This beauty continues to unfold before me and perpetually takes my breath away: I was totally unprepared. Unfortunately, words are hopelessly inadequate tools for capturing the intricacies and undulations of the beauty of daily minyan. The ability to appreciate the wonderment comes only from experiencing the subtleties of daily minyan, from glimpsing the deep relationships that exist with God. Given the limitations of language, I will still do my best to relate what daily minyan feels like at Shearith Israel. Keep in mind, my perspective is from the other side of the mehitsa, where I have the wonderful freedom to inhale all of it.

I am blessed to belong to Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of New York. Founded in 1654, we are the first and oldest Jewish Congregation in North America. I am infinitely blessed to be married to the rabbi of the community. I am also a member of the community, something that brings me immeasurable pride and delight. My understanding of daily minyan is limited my experiences at Shearith Israel. I hope, however, that every member of every daily minyan team feels so passionately about their home synagogue and the people with whom they pray.

My husband refers to the daily minyan team as the “spiritual backbone of Shearith Israel.” Not only are they the backbone; they are the heart, the soul, the spirit, and the sense of humor too. These men believe in regular communal prayer, and their commitment to it is inspiring. These are the men who brave snow, rain, heat, and power outages to make minyan. These men will give up the Superbowl or take a cab straight from the early arrival gate at the airport to make sure they pray in a minyan. These are the men who believe it is important for every person saying kaddish to be able to do so in a minyan, whether it is a member of Shearith Israel or someone who walks in only once to honor the memory of a loved one. These men will stay on a Sunday morning to ensure that a couple from another country can fulfill their dream of getting married according to Jewish Law. These men will become worried if a “regular” misses just once, because everyone notices and everyone matters. These are the first people who knew I was pregnant because I stopped attending morning minyan, and they got concerned. They all figured out what was up, and smiled without saying a word, because that is just how they are.

Many people talk about spirituality as if it is the latest fashion or diet craze. Like true style and good nutrition, spirituality is not something that just comes and goes. It is a constant pursuit. It is lived every single day. It is in every breath, in every blink. Often times it is so subtle that many easily miss it or mistake it for something else. Just as it is easy to walk into a fancy store and spend a lot of money on something the salesperson says is the hot new item of the season, so too it is easy to find a “spiritual” workshop or retreat and have a powerful experience. The expensive outfit will be the wrong color next season and, if not internalized and integrated into daily life, the intense spiritual experience remains a distant memory, a snapshot posted on a wall next to a concert ticket.

We recently returned from a visit to Israel. We went to the Kotel a couple of times for Minha. I am always amazed at the scene at the Kotel. Here is a religious treasure, a jewel in the crown of the Jewish people and an important religious site for people of many other religions too. People are having mind-blowing spiritual experiences left and right. Women are crying, pleading, kissing the wall, posing for pictures, stuffing notes into every nook and cranny, taking photos of others praying. It is indeed beautiful, but I wonder how lasting this experience will be for many. Will it leave these visitors changed? Will it foster a new relationship with God? Will it lead to a commitment to prayer? A commitment to community? What happens when everyone goes home?

As one woman at the Kotel backed into me and then another ran over my foot with her stroller without acknowledging my presence, I was discouraged. How can each individual have such a “spiritual” experience while totally disregarding those around them? I longed for daily minyan, I ached for community.

One of the many things I love so much about Judaism is that religion does not happen in a vacuum. From the revelation at Sinai to the daily prayer services, it is about community. We have the siddur to formalize the prayer services and to allow for everyone to pray together. Certainly we can talk with God whenever we want, but when it comes to weekday Shaharit, Minha, and Arvit, we recite what is written and that links all of us. During Shabbat and the Haggim, we are connected by the words we all say, words written long ago by brilliant rabbis who understood the importance of bringing people together to thank God for our infinite blessings. We recite the same words our ancestors recited. Not only do we link to those in the room with us, but we are bound to those that stood before us and to those who will one day stand after we are long gone. Daily minyan exemplifies community.

Spirituality is a daily pursuit. It is not found in one visit to a holy site. It is not an amulet you buy in some far-off town. It is not practiced alone on a mountain top. It is a relationship based on commitment and trust and vulnerability. It is letting others see you during prayer, whether you are crying, or trying not to space out, or lost in the siddur, or in the  deepest recesses of standing before the Almighty, thanking God for countless blessing and praying that your children will be healthy or that God will protect the loved one you just lost. Spirituality is waking up early in the morning or rushing to minyan after a long and tiring day to pray as a community because people depend on you and because you are part of something bigger than yourself. Daily minyan exemplifies spirituality.

Now that my husband and I know we are expecting twins, I realize that my days of regular attendance at daily minyan are numbered. I am grateful beyond words to have such reasons to keep me from being able to attend minyan, but I will miss praying daily with my community. I will miss being part of the daily minyan team. My debt of gratitude to them will never be paid. They provide to the Shearith Israel community the most important thing of all: the ability for people to pray in a minyan. Yes, we have many wonderful programs. We have amazing classes and lovely celebrations. Yes, the beauty of our historic building is without parallel. Yet, none of this matters if someone can’t come and pray in a minyan. The daily minyan team is the axis on which the whole community of Shearith Israel spins. It is the foundation on which all else rests. I wish more people would be part of this special team, because there is plenty of space for everyone. The more people praying together, devoted to the tefillot, the stronger the backbone and the stronger the community. All anyone has to do is show up.

I am so happy I followed my husband to Shaharit after we got married. It is one of the best gifts he has given me.

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!