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December 2009
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November 2009
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October 2009
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September 2009
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July/August 2009
1. Jewish tradition holds that King David is the author of most of the Psalms. No doubt this is due to his legendary ability with the harp and lyre and importance in Biblical history. Some Psalms, however, clearly must have been written well after David’s time. For example, Psalm 137 is a lament for Zion written “by the rivers of Babylon” during the Babylonian Exile, a event which occurred more than four centuries after David’s rule.
2. Many scholars feel the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the greatest event in the history of archeology. At least from the point of view of understanding Judaic and Christian history, nothing else comes close. Since the first discovery in 1946 of a cave in Judean desert containing seven ancient scrolls, over the next decade another ten local caves were found to also contain treasures. In total, the remains of about 870 separate scrolls have been found, consisting of thousands of fragments. All are devoted to religious subjects and date from the first or second century B.C.E., before the books of the Bible had been fixed or “canonized”. This cache includes the oldest known versions of every book of the Bible (except Esther), many with “editions” of books never before seen. There are previously unknown versions of psalms and prophecies, new stories of Abraham and Noah, and new writings claiming Moses as the author. There was a very torturous path in making the immense amount of Dead Sea Scroll material publicly available but this finally happened in 1991, so translations are now available to all of us.
3. It seems the ancients needed time to warm up to the idea of incorporating any part of God’s name into those of their children. In time, however, it became quite common not only among the Israelites but also among their neighbors. The Canaanites frequently used Baal (“Hannibal”) as part of a name; Egyptians Pharaohs were named after gods. And for Israelites, commoner and king alike, the Jehu (Jehosaphat) or Josh (Joshua) root was a reference to Yahweh. Elisha, Elijah, and Elihu relied on the other ancient name for God, El. But the first appearance of a prominent name incorporating a root for God does not occur until the middle of Genesis, at the time of the Patriarchs. The name is Judah or Yehudah, Leah’s fourth son, the progenitor of the tribe of Judah and ancestor of King David and his 20 successors. And Yehudah also gave rise to “Jew” and that’s very good lineage indeed.
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June 2009
1. Observing Shabbat is considered the most important mitzvah by many rabbis. According to one popular midrash, “all those who keep Shabbat are as if they fulfilled the entire Torah”. As one learned rabbi put it, this day is God’s “wedding gift” to the Jewish people and, by disregarding Shabbat, we reject the bond with God. Our wedding is off. Other rabbis also maintain that all other mitzvoth flow from this one. This centrality of Shabbat seems a very appropriate practice, especially in today’s overly busy times.
2. When a wedding party and funeral train meet at a crossroads, the wedding travelers should take precedence. The reason is that Jewish tradition always affirms life first. So in this case the life-affirming wedding celebration has priority over another significant mitvah of burying the dead. Also please remember any mitzvah can be disobeyed or ignored if doing so helps preserve or save life.
3. To make sense of this question, you needed to know that originally the husband was deaf and the wife blind. These handicaps contributed mightily to a happy and harmonious union, since the husband was incredibly ugly and the wife an incorrigible shrew. Before the physician healed them, she could never see how ugly he was nor did he ever hear her constant scoldings!
Rabbi Yaakov Krantz, or the preacher of Dubno as he was better known, often used parables, such as the one in this question, to better define moral dilemmas and anticipate possible answers. This story of the handicapped elderly couple is narrated in Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s delightful opus “Jewish Wisdom”. The consensus view is that the couple does indeed owe the money to the physician. Rabbi Krantz argues that the couple must “accept responsibility for their actions”.
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May 2009
1.Many rabbis interpret Deuteronomy 29 this way: every Jew ever to be born was at Mt. Sinai with Moses when the covenant was given. We are all included among those who are “ not here with us this day ”. Just as we are all personally liberated from slavery on Passover, so each Jew is a direct participant in the establishment of the covenant on Shavuot.
2. The Dalai Lama wanted to learn from Jewish leaders how Judaism succeeded in maintaining a faith and tradition when forcibly uprooted from its homeland. In Judaism's case, the uprooting occurred over a thousand years ago when the Jews were forced out of Israel after the Bar Kochba uprising against the Roman Empire . For the Dalai Lama, the immediate problem today is how can Buddhism succeed and flourish away from Tibet . Before the Chinese government forced him out in 1959, the current Dalai Lama (the 14 th ) and his predecessors have, since the 17 th century, headed both the Tibetan Government and his Buddhist community, from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.
The Dalai Lama is, in a sense, shaping the modern Buddhist Diaspora. In the process, he has become the world's most travelled religious leader, even stopping in Boston often. On April 30 th , he is coming again to MIT. We are grateful to him for seeking peace in the world…and to Ellen Valade for passing along the Zen Judaism gems. And we close with a final one: “Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story”.
3. Today Ohabei Shalom occupies a magnificent Byzantine building on Beacon Street in Brookline. This is Boston 's oldest congregation, founded in 1842, in what is today the Theatre District of the South End. They built Boston 's first synagogue in 1852 on Warrenton Street (then called just Warren Street ), which runs off Stuart Street between Charles and Tremont. The next home for Ohabei Shalom, from 1863-1886, situated diagonally opposite from the first synagogue, was the building that now houses the Charles Playhouse on Warrenton Street . In 1887 the congregation moved to still larger quarters further into the South End. And in 1928 they moved to their current site in Brookline . The Touro Synagogue was found by descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who had arrived in Newport as early as 1658. Boston 's was established by recently arrived German and Polish Ashkenazi Jews.
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April 2009
1. For a wine, to be certified as “kosher”, it must fulfill all the requirements noted in the original questions, except that the grapes need not be grown in Israel. How else could there be any of the excellent New York and California kosher wines? Thus to become kosher, the equipment used must be dedicated exclusively for the making of kosher wine, must only involve Sabbath-observant Jews in its preparation, and must be produced from grapes of just one variety. And if the wine is to be “Passover kosher”, in addition it must be free of yeast or leavening products.
2. Only the second of the statements is true. The first Passover does mark, in a very real sense, the creation of the Israelite people since it defined the “community” as those who took part in this observance. In fact, Exodus 12:19 states that the person who eats leavened food during this time “shall be cut off from the community of Israel ”. The commandments about the observance of Pesach (such as the obligation to eat matzah) are not the first ones in the Torah, but they do include the first COMMUNAL mitzvot, like the requirement to eat together. The very first mitzvah, found in Genesis 1:28, is simply to procreate. Chapter 12 of Exodus stipulates that the meal be held on the fifteenth of the month, at the time of the full (not the new) moon. In the Hebrew calendar, the “day” begins at dusk and the months are lunar months, so Pesach was then and is now celebrated on the evening of the first full moon in spring. We should recall that the very first Passover took place while the Israelites were still in Egypt , just before the tenth plague and the Exodus itself, so the first Passover did not take place in Canaan . This is the Pesach Mitzraim, the Passover in Egypt . However, the Exodus ended forty years later with the celebration of the second Passover at Gilgal, just outside Jericho , as recounted in Joshua 5:12.
3. All but one of the events cited in this question happened on that one momentous day back in May 14, 1948. Only the UN General Assembly vote for a partition plan for Palestine preceded the other events mentioned. The vote was taken on November 29, 1947 and, thanks in a large part to U.S. President Harry Truman's urging, it passed 33-13. Nonetheless the tension and guerilla warfare continued in the region until May 14, when a series of events unfolded quickly though not unexpectedly. And the sequence was the same as in the question. Though the British colonial mandate over Palestine was due to end by the 15 th , the Union Jack was lowered in Jerusalem early on the morning of Friday the 14 th . Hours later, Arab armies were on the attack, with soldiers from Egypt , Syria , Iraq , Lebanon , and highly trained crack Jordanian troops. The actual establishment of the new state of Israel was marked by David Ben Gurion's reading of the Scroll of Independence in the Tel Aviv Museum at 4PM that afternoon. Very soon after, President Truman recognized the new country. So as we remember the birth pangs of our country during Patriot's Day this April, we can also be reminded of Israel 's struggle as well.
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March 2009
1. The Five Books of Moses, the Torah, are at the center of the Jewish faith, so naturally the names of these Books have been a center of attention throughout the ages. The English names are familiar enough, but not - at least to most of us - the original Hebrew names. As noted in the initial question, the Hebrew name is usually taken from the first significant word in the text of that Book. Genesis begins with the word B'reishit, which is its Hebrew name meaning "in the beginning". Exodus opens with a listing of the names of Jacob's sons, and so is known as Sh'mot, Hebrew for 'the names' as in its initial passage "These are the names of the sons of Israel …". The Hebrew name of the priestly Book of Leviticus is its first word, Va-yikra, or 'he called'. In the initial verse of this book, the Lord calls to Moses giving him instructions on proper sacrifice. The Book of Numbers is a chronicle of Israel 's journey through the desert. Its Hebrew name, B'midbar, means "in the wilderness, the deserts of Judea and Sinai. In the opening passages, the Lord speaks to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, telling him to take a census (i.e. determine the 'numbers') of the whole Israelite community. The Book of Deuteronomy is one long speech by Moses just before his death. The Hebrew name D'varim, meaning "these are the words", comes directly from the first lines, "These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan …". A rose by any other name may indeed smell as sweet, but it's hard to conceive of the Torah without these names.
2. The clarinetists are especially grateful for the Klezmer revival which Hankus Netsky helped usher in. They have not had it so good since Benny Goodman's “swing” era of the 1930s. The clarinet is a standard instrument in Klezmer bands, and frequently has the lead. Incidentally, Benny Goodman started out as a Klezmer musician before switching.
3. The Yiddish (meaning "Jewish") language grew out of German. The home territory was the Rhine valley around the turn of the first millennium (1000 C.E. or A.D.) where Jewish communities adopted the German spoken around them, while borrowing many Hebrew words. Jews migrated east as trade and settlement spread throughout Poland and later to the Ukraine , and they took their vernacular language with them. All the while it was growing more expressive and grafting new words on top of its German grammar. Thanks to the exceptionally high birth rates of the Ashkenazi Jews, especially in the 1800s and early 1900s, the number of Yiddish speakers reached 11 million people, or three quarters of the world's Jewish population just before World War II. Today, because of the Holocaust and assimilation, it is spoken by perhaps 4 million at least but thanks to the efforts of Aaron Lansky, Hankus Netsky, and so many others inside and outside the National Yiddish Book Center , it is undergoing quite a revival.
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February 2009
1. The word “Torah” means “teachings or instruction”. Literally it denotes just the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which contain the mitzvot, God's commandments. But just as often it refers to the larger body of Jewish teaching.
2. In the great tradition of the prophets, Dr. Martin Luther King had a way of engaging in the everyday battles while at the same time connecting people's efforts to much larger, universal moral themes. Dr. King was in Memphis that April of 1968 to lead a march in support of striking sanitation workers of the City of Memphis . Over 1,300 garbagemen walked off their jobs in support of better working conditions and union recognition. They were paid abysmal wages, had intolerable working conditions and no benefits of any kind, and could be fired for any injury incurred on the job. The strike assumed national significance, galvanizing support on both sides. A few weeks after Dr. King's death, the city did grant union recognition, and this led to further gains for public workers all over the South and in other parts of our country. In the last weeks of Dr. King's life, he seemed to have a premonition of his own death. Some mentioned that he thought he might die in a few weeks during the planned Poor People's March to Washington . In his last major speech given the night before his death, he shared that he “had been to the mountaintop”. He had seen the promised land and knew that we as a people will get there. The “we” includes us and our new President Barack Obama.
3. The Jewish social groups of Medieval times answered the then current religious requirement that certain objects must be "owned" by those participating in a ceremony. A bride had to be married in "her own" dress and had to be given a ring the groom had "purchased". Likewise for a proper circumcision rite, rabbinic interpretation required that the mohel have his own instruments. In the poor Ashkenazi communities, most families did not have the resources to comply, so they "bought" - albeit on temporary basis - the items to fulfill these requirements. Later on the group conveniently bought them back. This system obviously worked well when items were needed neither continuously (e.g. a burial shawl) nor simultaneously by all members of the community (e.g. Passover dishes). More recently, it is worth noting that the design of Boston 's largest private umbrella social service agency, the United Way , was strongly influenced by the formation of the first independent federation of Jewish agencies, established in Boston in 1895. We should remember these charitable traditions in these difficult times.
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January 2009
1. Jewish people should be honored that the stirring words of the prophet Isaiah were chosen for the engraving on the cornerstone of the UN. The passage is from early in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 2, Verse 4. The prophet's vision of the ultimate reign of God, when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the sword will be beaten into a plowshare, has inspired many in the western world. His messages of comfort are read as the prophetical portions in the synagogue in the weeks following the fast of Tu B'Shvat in January. Interestingly, the same passage also appears in Chapter 4 Verse 3 of the Book of Micah. The prophet Micah preached about the same time as the better known Isaiah.
2. Because of his great stature as the leader - and in a doctrinal sense the very embodiment – of the world's largest religion, every deed and word of a Pope is magnified. And far more than any of his predecessors, John Pope II made entreaties to the Jewish people and to address the Church's role in the suffering of centuries. He did many things that have moved scholars and common people alike. The one that most moved James Carroll, however, was not the most publicized. It occurred when the Pope “stood in devotion before that remnant of the Temple ” and offered a simple prayer at the Western Wall, following the sacred custom of Jews for ages. The Pope thus honored Jews at home in Israel . Because of the importance he attaches to mending the historic breach and ending persecution, Carroll found the Pope's gesture the “single most momentous act of his papacy”. Carroll's own work is also an important step in building bridges between the two faiths. But there is more to do. As encouraged as he is by the Pope's efforts, Carroll believes the Pope's and Church's work is still far from completed. He closes “ Constantine 's Sword” with a call to his fellow Christians for reform in several critical areas.
3. Reverend Martin Luther King had a very special affection for Jewish people, and the feeling was mutual. In fact, during the heyday of the civil rights movement in the 50's and 60's, it is estimated that Jews contributed about half of the support funds – far out of proportion to their numbers in the general population or even the progressive community. It is worth noting that Dr. King also had a special connection with the Boston area. He received his doctorate at Boston University . His use of nonviolent civil disobedience to achieve social goals earned him a Nobel Prize as he further developed this great tradition, rooted in the writings of Concord 's Henry David Thoreau, that India 's great Mahatma Gandhi brought to the world's attention
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