When I graduated Rambam Torah Institute, a Los Angeles Orthodox High School, in 1978 (Rambam closed in 1979, giving way to the opening of YULA and the Simon Wiesenthal Center), I was about to enter UCLA with a schizophrenic approach to my own Jewish identity. On the one hand, I had grown up in the Sephardic-Ladino community where I was about the only one to receive a formal Jewish education from middle school on. Being “shomer shabbat” was very old-country and unheard of in “Rodesli-L.A.” (the community of Jews descended from the Island of Rhodes who established the Sephardic Hebrew Center in L.A., where we were members). The only ones who admired or understood why I chose a more traditional path for myself were the senior citizens born in Rhodes, toward whom I tended to gravitate.

Being an only child to a mother who was an only child, and having lost my father when I was a baby, my “playdates” typically were in the living rooms of elderly Rodesli immigrants, who told stories and jokes in Ladino, entertained with dulce (homemade preserves) served in beautiful silver bowls with silver spoons along with coffee, biskochos (round sesame or cinnamon covered cookies), and assortments of burekas or pastelikos (savory turnovers), reshas (homemade pretzels), hard cheese, olives, and abidahu (dried, wax-covered fish roe that was a delicacy), or salado (salted, cured mackerel or tuna). There were no chicken nuggets or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at these afternoon gatherings! These visits often took place on Shabbat afternoons; most of the community lived either on the same block or within a few minutes’ walk or drive of each other. This was South Central L.A.—or Leimert Park or the Crenshaw District—where I could go trick or treating on Halloween night and ask for burekas instead of candy, and get them!

Today this neighborhood is mostly African American with not a Jew in sight for miles. The synagogues have long been sold and converted to churches, still displaying the original stained glass Stars of David in the windows. The lifestyle has also disappeared; no one lives near each other anymore in “Rodesli-L.A.,” and the community has dissipated and spread to the four corners of the Greater Los Angeles Basin. Most of those special people from my “playdates” have gone to the next world, and their children or grandchildren may have remembered a few words in Ladino, have kept a few of their mother’s or grandmother’s recipes, and have for the most part sadly strayed from what was once a tight-knit and traditional community.

In Rhodes, it was the norm to keep the laws of kashruth, observe Shabbat and holidays, and keep close to our Jewish traditions. The members of the community didn’t, however, identify as “Orthodox” Jews, nor did other Sephardic communities in the Mediterranean Basin or the Middle East identify as such. Some families were known to be more religious and knowledgeable, others much less. All, however, went to the same synagogue and followed basically the same customs and practices. This lifestyle was reproduced to an extent in America, when these immigrants established their community in Los Angeles. But the forces of assimilation and acculturation meant English first, American culture first, and work first, even on Shabbat.

The traditions of the “old country” began to fade with the next generation, especially given the choices that America offered, including meat and chicken that looked much cleaner and cheaper than the products from the kosher butcher. That’s why it was unusual for me to wind up in a Jewish Orthodox school, eventually keeping kasher and observing Shabbat. And it wasn’t because my mother was predisposed to that direction. My maternal grandfather was born in Bulgaria, and in the late 1800s emigrated to Palestine, where he was religiously educated and spoke many languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, before coming to the United States in 1920. He met my Rhodes-born grandmother in Seattle, the motherland of Ladino immigrants on the West Coast. My grandmother kept kasher, as did most of her contemporaries. When she was hospitalized, our community rabbi, Solomon Mizrahi, who was revered by all, went to visit and admonish her that she could not refrain from eating in the hospital because the food was not kasher, insisting that her health came first.

But the immigrant generation did not instill a religious lifestyle in the new generation of Americans. There was too much at stake in “making it in America” to have religion hold them back. No, the reason I landed in an Orthodox Day School in the seventh grade in 1972 was that my working single mother who had put me in private grammar school through the sixth grade could not have me to go to a public school that would dismiss the students at 3:00 P.M.—when she didn’t get home until after 5:00. And in the L.A. public schools of the 1970s, there were stories of knifings in the bathrooms and tough characters to deal with. Remember, I just grew up hanging around a group of sweet old ladies and had no training in self-defense against the ruffians roaming the halls of John Burrows Jr. High or L.A. High. “Leshos!” (Keep it far away!), as we would say. Hence, my introduction to the Orthodox Day School system was more for my protection than my religious education, and it developed into my personal road back to my religious roots.

So I did not grow up in an Orthodox family. Such a word was never even familiar to Sephardim. They could be kasher, pray regularly, adhere to all the holiday rituals, and not know what “Orthodox” meant, or if they did, it didn’t refer to them. I grew up in a “traditional” Los Angeles Sephardic family—what we considered traditional in the 1960s and 1970s, that is. (I add Los Angeles because the community was less observant than those Ladino communities in Seattle, New York, even Atlanta). The difference was that while we did have our large extended family Shabbat and holiday dinners, always with one or two “old-timers” who knew how to lead the Kiddush or the Rosh haShana “Yehi Ratsones” (in Hebrew and Ladino) or the Passover “Haggada” (in Hebrew and Ladino), I still enjoyed my pizza with pepperoni just as much as I loved my burekas. We still went to homes for a very different kind of American dinner on Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving.

That doesn’t mean we would think of missing out on celebrating Jewish holidays with all the prayers, whether Rosh haShana, Yom Kippur, or Simhat Torah with the honored “hattanim”—and our services would surely be considered “Orthodox” by any observer familiar with the various Ashkenazic Jewish movements. English translations eventually crept into the services, but the prayer books never changed, nor did the patterns of traditional Sephardic services.

When I had my first Orthodox exposure entering Hillel Hebrew Academy in seventh grade, I came home yelling and complaining that I had to wear a kippah all day and pray so often and at a speed I could not keep up with. My mother thought I wouldn’t last a week. I had to “fake” pray that first year since I couldn’t possibly make it through the entire Amida with my limited Hebrew knowledge. My prior formal Jewish education consisted of Talmud Torah afternoon school (at an Ashkenazic synagogue because our Sephardic synagogue was too far and offered little in terms of Jewish education). I made (Orthodox) friends, and soon I was tolerating this “super Jewish” environment I had been thrown into.

When I started being invited to bar mitzvas almost weekly and didn’t want my friends to know that I drove on Shabbat, I would have my mother drive me up nearby alleys, crouching under the glove compartment so that no one would see me in a car, and when the coast was clear, I’d jump out and walk the last block to the Orthodox Synagogue, Beth Jacob, in Beverly Hills where all the bar mitzvas of my classmates took place. This was a regular paranoid ritual that I practiced, for I feared what my friends or rabbis would think if they only knew! In time, I learned to appreciate the Jewish education I was receiving and the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle of my friends to the point where I soon started my own journey toward what would be considered an Orthodox lifestyle.

I started by giving up pork products around the age of 14. After controlling my taste buds in that category (though my mom thought there was definitely something emotionally wrong with me to give up something I loved so much!), I moved on to eliminate shellfish, then milk and meat, and so forth. It was a gradual process of several years until I eventually stopped driving on Shabbat and holidays and took up the Orthodox lifestyle being taught in my school. I figured that this was the way my grandparents or great-grandparents lived their Judaism, and I could reconnect that chain of tradition, which likely went back generations from what I learned about Sephardic history. I continued my communal connection to my Rodesli synagogue, the Sephardic Hebrew Center, where I became the youngest board member and was part of the small youth group established. I learned to take part in the religious services as a “junior hazzan” on Shabbat and High Holidays.

In my high school, though, I was one of maybe two or three Sephardic students (none of whom came from a Ladino-Sephardic background), and I was the only one with a strong Sephardic identity, having become active in the local Sephardic youth groups that also participated in the national American Sephardic Federation youth conventions of the 1970s. (In 1977, when I was in the twelfth grade, and my Talmud teacher, whom I really liked, made one of his typical anti-Sephardic remarks in class like “Sephardim remind me of Arabs,” that was the last straw. I stormed out of my class, slamming the door behind me, and marched to the school office with the rabbi running behind me promising he was “just joking.” I called the director of the American Sephardi Federation in New York (a “toll call” no less), whom I had met recently on an ASF youth convention and asked if he could come on his next visit to L.A. and speak to my school about Sephardic history and contribution to Judaism. He gladly agreed. I informed my principal in a stern tone that there would be an assembly for the entire school and “every rabbi and student better be there!” They indeed all attended a very interesting lecture, and I was transformed into the Sephardic poster child for the school.)

As I went through four years of Orthodox Yeshiva High School, I was developing two distinct personas, one the Orthodox student who was a member of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, a counselor at the summer and winter Bnei Akiva camps, and the founder of the first chapter of Bnei Akiva at a Sephardic grade school in L.A.; the other a “non-kippah wearing” member of the Sephardic community. By the time I graduated high school and went to UCLA, where I knew both friends from my Sephardic community as well as from my Yeshiva High School, I didn’t know whether to wear a kippah or not and was ashamed and conflicted either way. I ended up wearing a cap for my entire freshman year! I was worried about what my Orthodox friends would think of me if they saw me sans kippah and what kind of fanatic my Sephardic friends would think I’d become if they saw me with one.

This is where I started to appreciate the difference between an Orthodox approach to Judaism and a Sephardic approach to Judaism. I started to attend Magen David Congregation, the Syrian synagogue in L.A. (since I could no longer drive to the Sephardic Hebrew Center with its mixed seating and a microphone, which I now felt uncomfortable with). The walk to Magen David was 45 minutes, but I did it weekly. I started to make friends who were typical of the Syrian Sephardic communities: Shabbat- and kashruth-observant, but not kippah-wearing and not hung up on the “Orthodox look.” They blended into the non-Jewish world just fine, but still kept a very strong Jewish identity. They may have kept strictly kasher at home but felt comfortable eating in non-kasher restaurants, just keeping away from the meat and shellfish. To some, they wouldn’t be considered Orthodox at all; to others they would be considered very Orthodox, based on their regular synagogue attendance, men praying every morning with their tefillin and not driving on Shabbat. And mixed dancing?something that was taboo in those days at any Orthodox event, whether for young or old was never an issue! That was my “aha” moment; the point where I had the realization that Sephardim did not easily fit into a category of Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. We were all over the place, and everyone was fine with it.

As I became more observant, my Sephardic community embraced me as “hahamiko,” a young learned person. I wasn’t denigrated as a religious fanatic, nor was I looked down upon for not wearing a kippah all the time or not fitting the “Orthodox” compartment perfectly. My Sephardic community didn’t judge me; I think they admired me or at least that is how I felt, even though they didn’t always understand why I could no longer attend services at the synagogue I grew up in. I was able to break away from the stigma of fitting the look and practice of Orthodox Judaism, even though I admired and related to their level of observance. While I tried to parlay my activism in the Orthodox Bnei Akiva youth movement, which I still admire to this day, I realized that Sephardic kids, as different as they were in their religious backgrounds, just couldn’t be form-fitted to an Orthodox Jewish youth movement where every boy was expected to wear a kippah, every girl a skirt, act a certain way, dress a certain way, pray three times a day plus birkat haMazon (grace after meals), refrain from attending mixed dances, and basically fit the mold.

But Sephardim didn’t fit such a mold. We were all unique and different to certain extents, even though we generally felt comfortable praying under the same roof. And no one judged us; no one looked at us funny for wearing or not wearing a kippah in the street; women could be very religious and still wear pants or what the Orthodox would call “immodest” clothing; no one felt uncomfortable whether we ate strictly kasher or “pseudo” kasher; no one really minded if you got to synagogue by foot or by car, as long as you got there. And if you didn’t go to synagogue regularly, that was also fine. Shabbat dinner was still to be shared with the family, and major Jewish holidays were spent in synagogue from start to finish, if you could make it.

This Sephardic Jewish identity really created a wider tent for all of us to fit under, and it felt good to be together and not critical of others who observed more or less than we did. The summer of 1980 found me half way through my UCLA career and I decided to join my Orthodox friends from high school who made study in Israel either after high school or during college a commonplace rite of passage. I signed up too and ended up in Jerusalem at Hebrew University with a group of friends, where we immediately gravitated to the other Yeshiva high school grads from across the United States who were also on their Junior year abroad program, coordinating Shabbat dinners together and living the “Orthodox” life in Jerusalem. I wore a kippah all the time, and it felt okay. After all, I was in Israel. The summer of 1980 also happened to be the first summer of the Sephardic Educational Center (SEC) program, founded by Dr. Jose Nessim (z”l) from L.A., who had told me before I left to make sure and visit the program once I got to Jerusalem. I did, and it was life-altering—not because of the experience to be with Sephardic young adults my age from five different countries, but to see rabbis leading the program who were what we would consider “Orthodox,” yet not forcing anyone to wear a kippah or dress in a certain way, other than out of respect for holy places visited or during meals or prayers or classes.

Rabbis Moshe Shamah and Sam Kassin of the Syrian Sephardic community of Brooklyn, and Rabbi Benito Garzon of Spain, forever changed my attitude toward religious life, opened my eyes to Sephardic halakha, and the “live and let live” approach that made all feel comfortable while studying and believing in the same approach to Judaism, just at every individual’s own pace.

In the past 35 years, my Jewish identity has been shaped more by my involvement with the SEC than my Orthodox high school education, with exposure to those Sephardic rabbis and others I met subsequently who with moderation and tolerance kept alive the spirit of the Classical Sephardic approach to Judaism and opened my eyes to a non-denominational approach that echoed the lives of my ancestors who lived in places like Rhodes or Bulgaria and back to the Iberian Peninsula. Theirs was a Judaism that was a natural part of their everyday lives, with one basic approach that centered on a fervent belief in God, traditions that were celebrated by all, synagogues where the entire community worshiped without “membership ID’s” that distinguished what kind of Jew you were.

There were some weak links in the chain of tradition as Sephardic Jews relocated from the Old World to the new but there is certainly hope for a renaissance in Sephardic life as many find that this classic approach to Jewish life is far more comfortable and meaningful that what is offered by choosing an identity that just doesn’t always form fit among Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Hasidic, or Hareidi approaches to Judaism. At our annual SEC Shavuot Retreat for young families in Palm Desert, CA, last May, we held a town hall discussion as part of our Shavuot night study program, entitled “What's Wrong with Organized Religion, and How Can We Fix It?” It was led by another product of the Orthodox educational system, Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, who has also come to embrace and symbolize the Classical Sephardic approach to Judaism. The young families present attend Sephardic synagogues across the L.A. community, synagogues that would appear “Orthodox” but for the fact that not all attendees walk to synagogue, and not all keep strictly kasher, and not all wear kippot outside the synagogue—but all feel a common cause and belief in God and the Torah, along with the centrality of the State of Israel. Suggestions ranged from how to balance the old traditions with the needs of the younger generation and how to attract and hold the attention of synagogue goers. Here were the young leaders who have or will occupy the positions of leadership in our Sephardic communities, and none were shy about introducing changes and suggesting approaches within our traditional halakhic approach that would ensure the survival of these synagogues and communities.

I felt proud as a Sephardic Jew to be able to discuss these issues without fear of backlash or judgment, and proud that I am not judged nor do I feel the need to judge others on their observance. We are all in the same boat and recognize that some will always be more observant and some less and our jobs as Jews are to make all feel comfortable and welcome, maintain a common set of beliefs, and not check ID’s at the door of Judaism. That is the Sephardic approach; it is the vision and identity I gained from many years of following Dr. Nessim’s philosophy: Only God can judge us. This is why I have shied away from identifying myself with the “O” word. I just don’t fit into a denominational compartment and if you feel the same way, you might want to join a Classical Sephardic community—regardless of your bloodline!

Did I mention that my father was Ashkenazic? If you ask an Orthodox Jew, I should “halakhically” follow the tradition of my father. But I don’t, not as an insult to him but as a way of life that I was raised with and came to love and connect to. I don’t find the unity, warmth, and “big tent” feel in the Orthodox world that I do in the Sephardic world. But that’s just me, and I respect and admire you if you are Orthodox or Modern Orthodox or any other Jewish identity as long as it works to bring you closer to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. That’s just the Sephardic way.

Now a look at the next generation. I have two sons and a daughter. My oldest son (20) went through middle school and high school at a Modern Orthodox school in L.A. My middle son (17), only attended Middle School there, and then went to public high school along with my daughter for a number of reasons, not the least being the high cost. I appreciated the Modern Orthodox education and great social bonds that the school offered. I also appreciated the love for Israel that the school incorporated into its curriculum. The alternative Yeshiva high schools in our area have a more right-wing reputation, which wasn’t the direction I wanted for my family. However I did not see a passion for Judaism or the practice of mitzvoth develop in my sons or their friends that I had once experienced myself. My children’s religious connection still came from home, and the example we tried to create of a traditional Sephardic family, not from school, which surprised me.

The feeling I had when I went to high school was that we had a “religious contract” to keep Shabbat, kashruth, etc., even after we graduated. The students I observed in my sons’ classes over the past few years didn’t seem to have that commitment. University life poses challenges to keeping Shabbat and kashruth, praying every day, and taking off class for holiday observance that, for me, went without question but today seems to be a different story. While I never retreated in my religious observance, nor did most of my classmates, the graduates of today’s Modern Orthodox high school, if my own sons are an example, do not seem to feel the same religious obligation we did upon graduation, and that’s a problem. University and the “outside world” appear to have overtaken whatever commitment for practicing a level of Orthodox Judaism they were taught in high school.

Luckily for my children, they have their connections to the SEC, whether through trips to Israel or local holiday celebrations like our Shavuot Retreat to keep them excited about Judaism and Israel. Otherwise, they would be left empty-handed without any follow up from their high school rabbis, which is a shame. My wife and I wonder whether the financial investment in their Jewish education was worth it and if it will keep them committed as observant Jews. We took the approach more typical of Sephardic families of trying not to force them to practice their Judaism, though I try to continuously prod and plead that they pray, come to synagogue, remember kashruth when they are away from home. It is not easy, though. I often wonder if they would have been more passionate about their Judaism if we went down a more strictly Orthodox path than a moderate Sephardic one. Hopefully we did make the spiritually healthy decision in the long run.

But knowing what Jewish path is best for today and tomorrow is not necessarily what worked for my generation. There is no question that there needs to be a shakeup in the Modern Orthodox educational system to bring back the passion of Judaism, and there also needs to be more emphasis on Jewish commitment in the Sephardic world if that branch of Judaism is to be strengthened in the Diaspora. For the achievement of a moderate and observant next Jewish generation, there will need to be a synthesis of all the best qualities and approaches of these and other Jewish like-minded approaches, from Modern Orthodox to Sephardic and beyond, creating a Jewish lifestyle that is neither extremely stringent or oppressive nor exceedingly indifferent to religious observance. I hope our religious leaders are up to the task.

A Study of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Liturgy[1

            The core of Jewish liturgy traces back to the early rabbinic period, and is universally followed in traditional communities worldwide. Over the centuries, Sephardim and Ashkenazim developed different nuances in their prayer liturgies. It is valuable to learn about the differences that emerged, to see how rabbinic interpretations and cultures shaped the religious experiences underlying prayer. This essay will briefly survey a few aspects of Sephardic and Ashkenazic liturgy.

Connection to Tanakh

            Although many rabbinic prayers draw inspiration from Tanakh, Sephardim often prefer an even closer connection to Tanakh than do Ashkenazim.

            For example, the Pesukei de-Zimra/Zemirot offer psalms of praise to draw us into the proper religious mindset for the mandatory prayers—the Shema, the Amidah, and their associated blessings. On Shabbat morning, Sephardim read the psalms in order of their appearance in the Book of Psalms. Ashkenazim read the psalms in a different order, presumably arranged for thematic reasons. Rabbi Shalom Carmy recently wrote an article offering a conceptual explanation for the Ashkenazic arrangement.[2] To understand the reasoning behind the order of the Sephardic liturgy, just open a Tanakh.

            In a similar vein, in Minhah of Shabbat, Sephardim and Ashkenazim usually recite three verses beginning with tzidkatekha after the Amidah. Once again, Sephardim recite these verses in their order of appearance in Psalms (36:7; 71:19; 119:142). Ashkenazim reverse the order, requiring explanation. Perishah (on Tur Orah Hayyim 292:6) suggests that God’s Name does not appear in 119:142; Elokim appears twice in 71:19; and God’s Name (Y-H-V-H) appears in 36:7. Therefore, Ashkenazim read the verses in an ascending order of holiness. Others suggest that Ashkenazim arranged the verses so that God’s Name is the last word preceding the Kaddish.[3]

            The Talmud (Berakhot 11b) debates the proper opening to the second blessing prior to the Shema in Shaharit, whether it should be ahavah rabbah or ahavat olam (Sephardim and Ashkenazim both say ahavat olam in the blessing of Arvit). Ashkenazim chose ahavah rabbah, and Sephardim chose ahavat olam. Mishnah Berurah (60:2) explains that Ashkenazim selected ahavah rabbah to parallel Lamentations (3:23): “They are renewed every morning—ample is Your grace! (rabbah emunatekha).” In contrast, Rif and Rambam explain that Sephardim preferred ahavat olam since that formula is biblical: “Eternal love (ahavat olam) I conceived for you then; therefore I continue My grace to you” (Jeremiah 31:2).[4]

            Piyyut (religious poetry used as prayer) is an area where the prayer services of Sephardim and Ashkenazim diverge significantly, since these poems were composed during the medieval period. Sephardim generally incorporated the piyyutim of Sephardic poets, and Ashkenazim generally incorporated the piyyutim of Ashkenazic poets. True to his Tanakh-centered approach, Ibn Ezra on Kohelet 5:1 levels criticisms against several Ashkenazic poets, including the venerated Rabbi Eliezer HaKalir, whose piyyutim are used widely in Ashkenazic liturgy: (1) Rabbi Eliezer HaKalir speaks in riddles and allusions, whereas prayers should be comprehensible to all. (2) He uses many talmudic Aramaisms, whereas we should pray in Hebrew, our Sacred Tongue. (3) There are many grammatical errors in Rabbi Eliezer HaKalir’s poetry. (4) He uses derashot that are far from peshat, and we need to pray in peshat. Ibn Ezra concludes that it is preferable not to use faulty piyyutim at all. In contrast, he idealizes Rabbi Saadiah Gaon as the model religious poet.

Kaddish and Kedushah[5]

Sometimes, minor text variations reflect deeper concepts. For example, Rabbi Marvin Luban notes a distinction between the Kaddish and the Kedushah.[6] In the Kedushah, we sanctify God’s Name in tandem with the angels. In the Kaddish, we lament the absence of God’s overt presence in the world.

Tosafot on Sanhedrin 37b refer to an early Geonic custom where Kedushah was recited only on Shabbat. Although we do not follow this practice (we recite both Kaddish and Kedushah on weekdays and Shabbat), it makes excellent conceptual sense. Kedushah conveys a sense of serenity, setting a perfect tone for Shabbat. In contrast, Kaddish reflects distress over the exile, which is better suited for weekdays.

A relic of this practice distinguishes the Kedushah read by Sephardim and Ashkenazim for Shaharit on Shabbat. Ashkenazim incorporate the language of Kaddish into the Kedushah by inserting the following paragraph:

Reveal Yourself from Your place, O our King, and reign over us, for we are waiting for You. When will You reign in Zion? May it be soon in our days, and may You dwell there for ever and all time. May You be exalted and sanctified  (titgaddal ve-titkaddash) in the midst of Jerusalem, Your city, from generation to generation for evermore. May our eyes see Your kingdom, as is said in the songs of Your splendor, written by David your righteous and anointed one.  (Koren translation)

In contrast, Sephardim keep the Kaddish and the Kedushah separate. They insist that there is a time and a place for each type of prayer, and do not recite this paragraph.

Haftarot[7]

Although the Sages of the Talmud codified the prophetic passages to be read as Haftarot for holidays, they left the choice of regular Shabbat Haftarot to the discretion of individual communities (Rabbi Joseph Karo, Kesef Mishneh on Rambam, Laws of Prayer, 12:12). Consequently, several Haftarah reading traditions have arisen.

Vayera

Generally, when Sephardim and Ashkenazim read from same passage, Sephardim are more likely to have a shorter Haftarah. In Beshallah, for example, Sephardim read Deborah’s song in Judges chapter 5, whereas Ashkenazim read the chapter of narrative beforehand as well.

A striking example of this phenomenon is the Haftarah of Vayera. II Kings, chapter 4 relates the story of the prophet Elisha and a woman who offered him hospitality. Elisha prophesied that this woman would give birth to a son, and indeed she did. These themes directly parallel elements of the Parashah: Angelic guests visit Abraham and Sarah; Abraham and Sarah offer their guests hospitality; the angels promise them the birth of Isaac; and Isaac is born.

After these initial parallels to the Parashah, the story in the Haftarah takes a tragic turn in verses 18–23. The son dies, and the woman goes to find Elisha. As she leaves home, the woman’s husband asks why she was going out if it was not a special occasion, and she replies, “Shalom.” This is where Sephardim end the Haftarah. Ashkenazim read the continuation of the narrative in verses 24–37, in which the woman finds Elisha who rushes back to her house and God miraculously revives the child. It appears jarring that Sephardim would conclude the Haftarah at a point where the child still is lifeless rather than proceeding to the happy and miraculous ending of the story.

Rabbi Elhanan Samet explains the surprising discrepancy by noting that the entire story is inordinately long for a congregational setting (37 verses). Sephardim therefore abridged the Haftarah to 23 verses at the expense of reading to its happy ending. They conclude with the word “Shalom” to strike at least some positive note.[8] In contrast, Ashkenazim favored completing the story even though that meant reading a lengthy Haftarah.

Shemot

            Parashat Shemot is an example where Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Yemenites adopted passages from different prophetic books to highlight different themes from the Parashah.

Sephardim read the beginning of the Book of Jeremiah (1:1–2:3). In this passage, God selects Jeremiah as a prophet. Jeremiah expresses reluctance only to be rebuffed by God:

I replied: Ah, Lord God! I don’t know how to speak, for I am still a boy. And the Lord said to me: Do not say, I am still a boy, but go wherever I send you and speak whatever I command you. (Jeremiah 1:6–7)

This choice of Haftarah focuses on the parallels between Jeremiah’s initiation and ensuing reluctance, and Moses’ hesitations in accepting his prophetic mission in the Parashah.

Ashkenazim read from the Book of Isaiah, focusing primarily on the theme of national redemption:

[In days] to come Jacob shall strike root, Israel shall sprout and blossom, and the face of the world shall be covered with fruit. (Isaiah 27:6)

For when he—that is, his children—behold what My hands have wrought in his midst, they will hallow My name. Men will hallow the Holy One of Jacob and stand in awe of the God of Israel. (Isaiah 29:23)

Although there is rebuke in the middle of the Haftarah, the passage begins and ends with consolation and redemption.

Yemenites read one of Ezekiel’s harsh diatribes against Israel for their infidelity to God. The prophet compares them to an unfaithful woman who has cheated on God by turning to idolatry and the allures of pagan nations: “O mortal, proclaim Jerusalem’s abominations to her” (Ezekiel 16:2).

Ashkenazim highlight the link between the national exile and redemption. Yemenites selected Ezekiel’s caustic condemnation of the Israelites, implying that the Israelites deserved slavery as a punishment for having assimilated in Egypt. It likely was used as an exhortation to contemporary Jews to remain faithful to the Torah. Sephardim chose to highlight the development of the outstanding individual figure of the Parashah—Moses.

Music and Mood During the High Holy Days

One notable practice in many Sephardic communities is to sing several melodies during the High Holy Day season that are lively, exciting, and even joyous. One of the most dramatic examples is the refrain in the Selihot (penitential prayers), Hattanu lefanekha rahem alenu, we have sinned before You; have mercy on us! Amidst our confession of sinning, this tune is rousing and upbeat. If an Ashkenazic Jew heard some of these Sephardic tunes, he or she might intuitively feel that the happiness of the music was inappropriate for Yom Kippur. If a Sephardic Jew heard some of the solemn Ashkenazic tunes, he or she might wonder why the music lacks this happiness. Yet, both sets of tunes are consistent with different aspects of the day.

Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef discusses whether one should use joyous or awe-inspiring tunes on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur (Yehavveh Da’at II:69). Among many authorities, he quotes Rabbi Hayyim Vital, who stated that his teacher, Rabbi Isaac Luria (Ari), used to cry while praying on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. Rabbi Yosef quotes Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (Gra), who ruled that people should not cry but rather should use festive holiday melodies. Rabbi Yosef concludes that if one is overcome with emotion, one certainly may cry. However, one otherwise should try to be in a festive, happy mood.[9]

            Not only do melodic differences elicit different emotions, but the words do, as well. To take one prominent example, a central prayer of the Ashkenazic High Holy Day liturgy is the “U-Netaneh Tokef,” during which the congregation contemplates the gravity of being judged. Yet, this prayer—composed during the medieval period—is not part of the liturgy in most Sephardic communities.

            Rabbi Simhah bar Yehoshua, an Ashkenazic rabbi, traveled on a ship with Sephardim to the Land of Israel. He wrote,

On the entire voyage we prayed with the Sephardim. The Sephardim awoke prior to daybreak to say Selihot with a quorum as is their custom in the month of Elul. During the day they eat and rejoice and are happy of heart. Some of them spend their entire days in study. (in J. D. Eisenstein, Otzar ha-Masa’ot, 1969, p. 241)

When Jews of different backgrounds live together, they have the opportunity to learn from the practices of one another, thereby appreciating other aspects of our rich tradition.

The Censored Verse in Alenu

The Alenu prayer is ancient, and initially was recited only during the High Holy Days. It appears to have entered the daily prayers around the year 1300 ce. In the original text, we contrast ourselves with pagans, “For they worship vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god who cannot save, she-hem mishtahavim la-hevel va-rik, u-mitpallelim el el lo yoshia.” This line derives from two verses in the Book of Isaiah:

For the help of Egypt shall be vain and empty (hevel va-rik). (Isaiah 30:7)

No foreknowledge had they who carry their wooden images and pray to a god who cannot give success (u-mitpallelim el el lo yoshia). (Isaiah 45:20)

Around 1400, an apostate claimed that this line in Alenu was intended to slur Christianity. He observed that the numerical value (gematria) of va-rik is 316, the same as Yeshu, the Hebrew name of the Christian savior. This accusation led to the Christian censor striking this line from the Alenu in France and Germany. In 1703, the Prussian government even placed guards in synagogues to ensure that Jews would not recite that line.

In their attempts to defend the original prayer, rabbis protested that the line is anti-pagan, and cannot be anti-Christian. Among other arguments, they noted that the verses are from Isaiah (eighth century bce), who long pre-dates Christianity. Nevertheless, the censor required Ashkenazic Jews to remove that line, whereas Sephardim retained the original text.[10] Today, several Ashkenazic communities have restored that line to their prayer books.[11]

Conclusion

            Most aspects of the Sephardic and Ashkenazic liturgy are strikingly similar. The biblical passages, ancient rabbinic prayers, and the structure of the service, are largely the same with minor variations.

In those areas where there were choices left to later generations, such as ordering of the psalms, choosing between rabbinic interpretations, medieval piyyutim, Shabbat Haftarot, and music, we can appreciate the choices different communities made to shape their prayer experience.

More broadly, Jewish schools, synagogues, and adult education programs must teach the full range of Jewish thought, interpretation, history, liturgy, and many other elements from the Sephardic and Ashkenazic experience. In this manner, we become stronger and become more united as a people, even as we retain our diverse customs and traditions.[12]

The Torah provides a framework for sexual morality. Its legal prescriptions specify forbidden relationships; its narratives describe behavior and dress that reflect attitudes relating to sexuality and modesty.

The Torah’s view of sexual relationships might best be seen as fulfilling the overarching command that we be a holy people (vaYikra 19:2). Indeed, Rashi, in his commentary on this verse, identifies holiness with separation from forbidden sexual relationships.
However, the Torah does not enumerate rules relating to modesty in thought, dress, and speech. For example, it does not state how much of a person’s body needs to be covered, and gives no measurements for sleeve lengths or skirt sizes. Nor does it present specific rules relating to “hirhurim”—erotic thoughts; nor to “mehitsot” separating men and women at public gatherings; nor to the general—non-sexual—interrelationships of men and women. Rather, these rules are inferred from the mandate to be holy—to separate ourselves from sin, including sin of a sexual nature.

The Philosophy of Tseniut

The Talmud and later rabbinic literature provide additional material relating to sexual conduct in general, and tseniut (modesty) in particular. An aim of tseniut is to diminish the possibility of improper sexual temptations that could lead to sinful behavior. The human sexual drive is quite powerful, and the tseniut laws are intended to keep that drive under control.

Tseniut, though, is not simply a system of prevention from sin. Rather, it encompasses a positive philosophy relating to the nature of human beings. While acknowledging the power of human sexuality, tseniut teaches that human beings are more than mere sexual beings.

In his famous book, I and Thou, the philosopher Martin Buber pointed out that ideal human relationships involve mutual knowledge and respect, where people treat themselves and others as valuable persons—not as things. Tseniut, in fact, seeks to foster the highest form of I-Thou relationship. By insisting on modest dress and behavior, the laws of tseniut promote a framework for human relationships that transcends the physical/sexual aspects.

Non-tseniut behavior signals a person’s desire to be seen as an object of sexual attraction. People who dress in a sexually provocative way are interested in being noticed, in exciting the sexual interest of others. When people dress provocatively, what they are communicating is: notice me, I crave your attention, please don’t ignore me. Underlying this non-vocalized plea is the feeling that one will not be noticed unless he/she is prepared to become an object of attention or unless he/she conforms to the prevailing fashions, even if those fashions violate one’s sense of decency and propriety.1

It is normal and natural for people to want to appear pleasing to others. That is why they spend so much time and money on clothing and grooming. If one dresses nicely, neatly, and modestly, one may take pride and satisfaction in his/her appearance. If, though, one specifically dresses or behaves in a manner that is aimed at arousing sexual attention, then he/she has crossed into the non-tseniut mode. One has chosen to be an object a thing,rather than a Thou.

Why would people willingly dress or act in a manner as to make themselves into objects? The answer is that they want to be noticed, admired, longed for. They think that by presenting themselves as objects, they will more likely achieve these goals. They demand less of themselves and of others; no commitment or serious dialogue is invited or expected.

Human beings all have feelings of insecurity; we need to be needed, appreciated, and loved. Although these tendencies are often exacerbated in teenagers, they continue to exist throughout adult life. Exhibitionism is a short-cut to gaining the attention—and hopefully the affection—of others. Yet, underneath the veneer of showiness is a layer of essential insecurity, loneliness, and dissatisfaction with self. Exhibitionism may gain the attention of others, but it does not gain their respect and love.

Dr. Norman Lamm has written: “One who lacks the sense of inner dignity and worth will expose himself [or herself], as if to say, ‘Look at me. Am I not beautiful? Am I not smart? Do you not like me?’ The lack of inner dignity leads to exhibitionism, the opposite of modesty, whereas a sense of inner dignity will normally result in the practice of modesty.”2

Tseniut, then, should be understood as a framework for maintaining our human dignity. It teaches us to treat ourselves and others as valuable human beings, not as objects. Non-tseniut behavior and dress serve to diminish our full humanity, reducing us to the level of objects of sexuality. Tseniut is a manifestation of holiness. Exhibitionism is a manifestation of crudeness and feelings of insecurity.

The Technicalities of Tseniut

It is important for us to understand the underlying assumptions of the ancient and medieval halakhic sources. The early rabbinic opinions on the topic of tseniut emerged from a context where women—Jewish and non-Jewish—were deemed to be subservient to men. The operative principle was that the honor of a princess, i.e. a dignified woman, is for her to remain in private. Women were to stay home to the extent possible. When they appeared in public, they were to be dressed in such a way as not to attract the attention of men. Women generally were not given the same educational opportunities as men, nor were they encouraged or generally allowed to participate in public life or to have authority over men. Women’s role was to care for the household, have children, and maintain piety and modesty.

Classic rabbinic literature assumes that women are primarily a source of sexual temptation to men, and that women should therefore dress and conduct themselves so as not to arouse men’s passions. Discussions of the laws of tseniut often tend to focus on specific details of what constitutes modest and immodest dress and behavior. Rabbi Yehuda Henkin, in his book Understanding Tzniut, cites talmudic and later rabbinic sources dealing with such issues as what parts of a woman’s body constitute nakedness; how much of a woman’s body needs to be covered; the ervah (nakedness) of a woman’s leg, voice, and hair. He also discusses sociological conditions that may impact on the boundaries of modesty.3

The discussion in Berakhot 24a is reflective of the prevailing talmudic attitude:

Rabbi Yitzhak said: An [uncovered] tefah (hand’s breadth) in a woman is nakedness (ervah)….Did not Rabbi Shesheth say that anyone [i.e. any man] who gazes even at a woman’s little finger is as though he gazes at her private parts?... Rabbi Hisda said a woman’s leg (shok) is ervah… Shemuel said that a woman’s voice is ervah…. Rabbi Shesheth said a woman’s hair is ervah.4

This passage, and others of the same tenor, operate with the following tacit assumption. Because women’s body, hair, and voice are so alluring to men, women are to cover themselves up to the extent possible, and are not to use their voices in a way that might arouse men. Halakhic literature contains various opinions as to how to apply the tseniut rulings—but by and large, the general assumptions outlined above are taken for granted.

Yet, let us delve a bit more carefully into these assumptions.

1. Women today are no longer relegated to the home, but are involved in all aspects of society. Women interact regularly, and in many contexts, with men; women often hold positions of responsibility, including having authority over men. Few today would agree with the notion that the honor of a woman is to remain in the privacy of her home. Few today would agree that women are or must be subservient to men.

2. If we are concerned lest men be erotically aroused by women’s body, hair, and voice, shouldn’t we also be concerned lest women be erotically aroused by men’s body, hair, and voice? Although halakhic sources spell out in detail the various restrictions on the manner of women’s dress and behavior, there is very little relating to men’s dress and behavior. The assumption is that men are far more passionate and uncontrollable than women. Whether or not this assumption is correct, it is surely not correct to assume that women lack strong sexual feelings for men. They are subject to erotic arousal by men’s manner of dress and behavior. Thus, all discussions of tseniut should deal with both sides of the equation, not just with women’s mode of dress and behavior.

3. If the rules of tseniut are to protect men from falling into sexual sin, why are most of the restrictions placed on women? The rules could have been formulated in an entirely different way. Since men are so passionate and women are so arousing, then men should cover their eyes in the presence of women and should avoid public places where women might be seen. If men have the problem, why should women be forced to pay the price for men’s weaknesses? Let the women conduct themselves as they wish, and let men guard themselves from falling prey to temptation!

The Philosophy of Tseniut and Its Technicalities

The philosophy of tseniut teaches self-respect, respect for others, and the importance of not treating oneself or others as objects. The goal of tseniut is to maintain human dignity, and to foster respectful and meaningful human relationships.

The technicalities of tseniut should aim at fulfilling the ideals of the philosophy of tseniut. In popular discussions of the subject, though, there often is a serious disconnect between philosophy and technicalities. Here are a few items that underscore the gap between the concept of tseniut and the technical halakhic rules that are supposed to foster tseniut.

1. “Women’s hair is considered ervah, nakedness.” Normative halakha applies this statement only to married women. Single women need not cover their hair, since men are used to seeing them with uncovered hair and will not be aroused. Is this a valid argument? In olden times when girls were married off at an early age, this assumption may have held true. Seeing girls up to the age of early teens with uncovered hair may have been a normal feature of life, not generating untoward thoughts on the part of men. Yet, today most women do not get married while they are still children. If a woman in her 20s or 30s has her hair uncovered, what difference would it make to men whether she is single or married? Most men would not be able to tell whether such a woman is single or married. Yet, halakha allows the single woman to go bare-headed, while a married woman must cover her hair. If the purpose of head covering is to foster tseniut and to prevent men from looking at women’s “nakedness,” then there is no substantial reason today to differentiate between married and single women. Either all women of marriageable age should cover their hair, or none of them need cover their hair because men are accustomed to seeing women with uncovered hair.5 Indeed, Rabbi Yosef Mesas rules that married women need not cover their hair in our days, since the normal practice of women in our society is to go with hair uncovered.6 He wrote: “Since in our time all the women of the world have voided the previous practice and have returned to the simple practice of uncovering their hair, and there is nothing in this that constitutes brazenness or lack of modesty…therefore the prohibition of covering one’s hair has been lifted.”

2. “Women’s hair is considered ervah.” Yet various posekim allow women to cover their own natural hair with a wig. As long as they have fulfilled the technicality of covering their hair, they are not in violation of halakha. In some circles, it is expected that married women wear wigs; if they do not do so, they are considered to be religiously deficient. Does this make any sense? Women will spend thousands of dollars to buy wigs that often look better than their own hair. They will wear these wigs, which can be quite attractive, and be considered to be within the laws of tseniut. However, if a woman “wears” her own hair, in a modest fashion, such a woman is deemed (by many) to be in violation of halakha. If a woman’s hair is indeed nakedness, how can it possibly be permitted for them to wear wigs—also made of hair? Would anyone suggest that a woman is permitted to wear a skin-colored dress that is printed with the design of her private body parts? Of course not. Such clothing is obviously anti-tseniut. Likewise, if a woman’s hair is nakedness, covering it with a wig is anti-tseniut.

3. “A woman’s voice is ervah.” This is generally applied to her singing voice, not to her usual speaking voice. But there are strong halakhic sources that permit men to hear women singing religious songs, or lullabies to their children, or other songs that have no erotic intent or content.7 When the prohibition of “kol ishah” is applied to all instances of women singing in the presence of men, this is a distortion of the intent of the halakha. The prohibition forbids licentiousness. Moreover, it should be applied not only to men hearing lewd songs sung by women, but also to women hearing lewd songs sung by men. The concept of “kol ish” is just as valid and just as important as “kol ishah.” If men sing in a manner that is sexually provocative to women, this constitutes a breach in tseniut and a breach in holiness.

4. “An uncovered tefah of a woman is nakedness.” Surely, it will be agreed that it is proper for women to cover the parts of their bodies that are particularly arousing to men. It should be equally agreed that men be required to cover parts of their bodies that are particularly arousing to women. But the real issue is not how long skirts and sleeves must be, nor how buttoned up a man’s shirt should be. Rather, the question is: What constitutes sexually provocative dress that is forbidden by the philosophy and rules of tseniut? A person might be covered from head to toe, and yet the clothing may be too tight, too clingy, too enticing. A person’s clothing might be entirely within the rules of tseniut, yet the person may use seductive gestures, facial expressions, or body movements. In many cases, an uncovered tefah of a woman (or a man) is not sexually arousing at all; rather it may be repulsive, an example of very bad taste. Likewise when people wear clothing that is too tight or too revealing. These are violations of tseniut, not because they are sexually arousing, but because they compromise one’s dignity—even if one does not want to realize this. They reflect a person’s conscious or subconscious desire to be seen as an object, rather than as a dignified person.

Confronting Reality

A number of tseniut rules in classic halakhic literature have come into conflict with changing societal realities. These rules have been modified or dropped by large groups of Torah-observant Jews. Here are a few examples.

1. …Our sages commanded that a man must not teach his daughter Torah, since the intelligence of the majority of women is not geared to be instructed; rather, they reduce the words of Torah to matters of foolishness according to the poverty of their understanding. Our sages said: One who teaches his daughter Torah is as though he taught her foolishness. To what does this refer? To the Oral Torah; but as concerns the Written Torah, he should not teach her; but if he did teach her it is not as though he taught her foolishness. (Rambam, Hilkhot Talmud Torah 1:13)

Despite Rambam’s ruling, in many Orthodox schools today, girls/women do study Talmud. Indeed, Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University has an advanced program of Talmudic Studies for women, instituted with the blessing of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Programs for women who wish to pursue advanced study of Talmud and halakha have blossomed in the United States and Israel. Modern Orthodox institutions reject the assumption that women‘s intelligence is unfit to absorb the wisdom of Talmud. Moreover, even if Hareidi schools do not teach girls/women Talmud, they do teach the Written Torah—in spite of Rambam’s ruling not to do so.

2. It is unseemly for a woman constantly to be going abroad and in the streets, and the husband should prevent his wife from this. He should not let her leave [home] except once or twice per month, according to the need. There is no beauty for a woman except in dwelling in the corner of her home, for so it is written, “All the glory of the king’s daughter is within (Psalm 45:14)” (Rambam, Hilkhot Ishut 13:11).

Very few, if any, Orthodox communities today follow this halakha of the Rambam. Very few, if any, accept the notion that a woman should live most of her life in the confines of her own home.

3. An unmarried man may not teach children because of the mothers who bring their children [and we fear possible immoral thoughts or conduct between teacher and the children’s mothers]… A woman may not teach children because of the fathers who bring their children [and we fear possible immoral thoughts or conduct between teacher and the children’s fathers]. (Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, 245:20–21).

Few, if any, Orthodox schools follow this halakha. It is quite common for single men to teach in Day Schools and yeshivot. It is also quite prevalent for women to teach in Day Schools and yeshivot. Indeed, Hareidi girls’ schools tend to encourage students to become teachers.

4. A man must distance himself from women very very much…It is forbidden to look at her beauty and even to smell perfume that is on her…It is forbidden to look at colorful clothes of a woman with whom he is acquainted, even when she isn’t wearing [these clothes], lest this lead him to think about her. If a man comes across a woman in the marketplace, it is forbidden for him to walk behind her; rather he should run so as to divert her to his side or behind him… One who looks even at a woman’s little finger with the intention of deriving pleasure from this, it is as though he looked at her private parts. It is forbidden to hear an ervah voice or look at her hair. One who intends to do any one of these things is subject to lashes [makatmardut]…. (Shulhan Arukh, Even haEzer 21:4).

In discussing the ruling that a man must run from a woman if he meets her in the market place, Rabbi Haim David Halevy asserted that this law refers to former times when women generally stayed home and were not often found walking in public. But in our day, many women walk in the public thoroughfares and marketplaces. If a man ran away every time he found a woman in front of him, people would think he was a fool. In his seeming piety, he would actually subject religion to ridicule in the eyes of the public. Rabbi Halevy concluded that a man who found himself walking behind a woman should simply try to keep his eyes from looking at her.8

The above examples demonstrate that there is a disconnect between various technical halakhot relating to tseniut, and the reality of the societal conditions in which we live. As a result, these halakhot—and others like them—have been generally modified or discarded among Torah-observant Jews. Sometimes apologetic explanations have been given and sometimes not.

Tseniut Today

We need to return to the underlying philosophy of tseniut: the expectation that we be holy, that we live dignified lives, that we not present ourselves as sexual objects. How these aims are actually fulfilled very much depends on the societal conditions in which we live. In ancient and medieval times, when women lived highly restricted lives, the rules of tseniut were applied accordingly. In our times, when women function openly and freely in society, the rules of tseniut also must be applied with this reality in mind.
The following are some proposed applications of the rules of tseniut in our modern societies:

1. Neither men nor women should dress, speak, or act in a licentious manner that will arouse the sexual attention of others. It is a violation of tseniut to wear skimpy, overly tight, or other clothing that is designed to highlight one’s sexuality.

2. It is proper for men and women to dress nicely, neatly, and modestly. It is fine to dress fashionably, as long as those fashions do not violate the philosophy of tseniut.

3. In our society, it is normal for upstanding and proper women to wear pants/pants suits; short sleeved dresses/blouses; clothes with colorful designs. Wearing these things is not a violation of tseniut, as long as these items are not fashioned in such a way as to highlight one’s sexuality.

4. Married women need not cover their hair, as long as their hair is maintained in a modest style. The wearing of wigs does not constitute a proper hair-covering for those married women who wish to cover their hair. Rather, such women should wear hats or other head coverings that actually cover their hair.

5. Men and women may sing in the presence of those of the other gender, as long as the songs are of a religious nature, or of a general cultural nature (e.g. opera, folk songs, lullabies). People should neither sing nor listen to songs that have vulgar language or erotic content that will lead to improper thoughts or behavior.

6. If a person dresses, speaks, and acts in a proper, dignified manner, it is not his/her responsibility if others are sexually aroused by him/her. That is their problem. It is their responsibility to control their thoughts and emotions, and/or to remove themselves from situations that they find to be sexually provocative.

7. Normal interactions between men and women are a feature of our societies. Women may serve in positions of authority over men, just as men may serve in positions of authority over women.9 The key point is this: holiness and tseniut should characterize all contexts where men and women mingle and work together. Co-ed youth groups and schools are permitted, but must be maintained with high standards of tseniut.10

Conclusion

Rabbi Avraham Shammah, who teaches at the Herzog Teachers’ College in Israel, stated: “Women and men should behave in a manner that reflects great respect for one another; they should not consider one another in a crude manner such as sexual objects; they should not dress provocatively, nor should their body language be provocative….”11 This is a fine formulation of the guidelines of tseniut.

It makes little sense to pretend that our living conditions today are identical to those of antiquity and the middle ages. Women’s roles in society have changed radically. The interrelationships of men and women today are far more common and far more frequent than in former times. Fashions have changed dramatically. Definitions of brazenness and immodesty are far different today than they were in olden days. Recognizing these changes is essential to formulating a proper application of tseniut rules.

It must also be recognized, though, that modern-day fashions often reflect very non-tseniut standards. Clothing that is designed to be sexually provocative—low cut in front or back, dresses or skirts above knee-length, clothing that is too tight, men’s pants that are worn below the belt line, and so forth—are clearly in violation of the philosophy and rules of tseniut.

Our goal as thinking halakhic Jews is to be clear on our responsibility to be holy, and to treat ourselves and others as fellow human beings—not as sexual objects. When we live as tseniut human beings, we enhance our own dignity and the dignity we show to others. This is not an inconsiderable accomplishment.

Notes

1. See my book, Losing the Rat Race, Winning at Life, Urim Publications, Jerusalem, 2005, especially chapter 4.
2. Norman Lamm, “Tseniut: A Universal Concept,” in Haham Gaon Memorial Volume, ed. M.D. Angel, Sephardic House and Sepher Hermon Press, New York, 1997, p. 155.
3. Yehuda Henkin, Understanding Tzniut, Urim Publications, Jerusalem, 2008.
4. I am not going into the discussion about improperly seeing or hearing women during one’s recitation of the Shema, nor distinctions between seeing or hearing one’s wife or other women.
5. See Rabbi Henkin’s discussion of hair-covering for women, pp. 29f; and article by Michael Broyde, “Hair Covering and Jewish Law,” Tradition, Fall 2009, 42:3, pp.97-179. It is understood that married women must adhere to a higher standard of tseniut than single women, since married women are subject to the laws of adultery for illicit relations. Nonetheless, both married and unmarried women are bound by the rules of tseniut and obviously are not allowed to comport themselves in a way that will entice improper thoughts or deeds on the part of men who see them.
6. Rabbi Yosef Mesas, Mayyim Hayyim, vol. 2, no. 110.
7. For a discussion of sources relating to kol isha, see Saul Berman, “Kol Isha,” in Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Volume, ed. Leo Landman, Ktav Publishing House, New York, 1980, pp. 45–66; and the responsum of Rabbi David Bigman, “A New Analysis of Kol B’Isha Erva,” in the Responsa section of jewishideas.org. Michael Makovi collected many sources on the topic in his article “A New Hearing for Kol Ishah,” in the Articles section of jewishideas.org
8. H. D. Halevy, Mayyim Hayyim 2:45.
9. See Benzion Uziel, Piskei Uziel, Jerusalem, Mossad HaRav Kook, 5737, no. 44, where Rabbi Uziel argues that women may vote in elections, and may be elected to public office where they have authority over men.
10. See the excellent pamphlet by Rabbi Yuval Cherlow and Ron Hori, Hevra Sheleimah: Hevrah Tsenuah Me’orevet leKhathila,” published by Neemanei Torah vaAvodah and HaKibbutz HaDati, Tel Aviv, 2011.
Rabbi Shammah’s paper was originally published in Hebrew and can be found at http://www.kolech.org.il/show.asp?id=25484. It was published in English in the bulletin of JOFA.

Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster, collected and edited by Matilda Koén-Sarano. Translated from the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) by David Herman. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003, 296 pp., $30.

In a world saturated with sophisticated entertainment, it would seem we are well beyond Joha, and wouldn’t need Matilda Koén-Sarano’s 2003 collection of tales about this celebrated Middle Eastern-Sephardic wise fool. Think again.

Pronounced Joe Hah, with the accent on Hah, this underdog doesn’t really promise big laughs. The punch lines are anticlimactic, the situations silly, the scope limited. Joha, in fact, in many of the tales, has no money, no work, no food, nothing but a donkey, or an olive he keeps chasing around the plate to get on his fork. And yet Joha is Joha; when his Turkish friend gets the olive with one deft stab, he cheerfully says, “Don’t forget, if I hadn’t tired it out you would never have managed to catch it.”

Reading through this collection, we go from one tricky quandary to the next. When you write the number three hundred thirty-three, which three do you put first? Do you sleep with your beard under the covers or on top? At the end of the final Ne’ilah prayer, which word is it, echad or acher, and as soon as you’ve got the answer the two words keep going back and forth in your head, so you’ve got to chase the rabbi to ask him again, and again—and again. How do you get the rich man to serve you the big fish instead of the little one, when he charitably invites you to Shabbat dinner? And what do you do, when beneath a big ugly stone you find a bag of gold, and suddenly you are the rich man? If you are Joha, you keep a fancy little box with dung in it, and each day you open it to remind you of what it was like to have nothing.

Joha is the self before the self was invented. He is the self with no self, no borders or boundaries. He is the fool liberated from the terrible fear that plagues most people most of the time—the fear of looking foolish. Sent to buy sweets, he eats all but one before he gets home, and when asked how he could do that, he demonstrates by eating the last one. He lights all the matches to make sure they all work. He talks to his donkey and to the train. He stamps the behinds of the thieves who come to relieve themselves on his grave, then rounds them up after his faked death, and proves they are all his branded servants.

I grew up with the stories of Joha, told by my father. My father, known for his outgoing charm and warmth, didn’t know how to tell a joke but that never stopped him. He would get the wording wrong, tell the same story many times. A punchline was as uncharacteristic of him as a punch.

Two Joha stories were favorites, nonetheless, at our dinner table in a two-bedroom second-floor apartment in the 1950s. To call them stories is like calling a grain of kosher salt a diamond, but they managed to season and ornament a childhood, even provide a sense of self and a worldview—what an Ashkenazi might call a Weltanschauung, a word a Turkish Jew would not use and never heard of and would not be caught saying. Joha is sitting on a branch, sawing away, and when he is warned that he’s cutting off the branch he’s sitting on, he scoffs, and keeps sawing away. Sure enough, when he finally cuts through the branch, he falls to the ground. Instead of complaining and crying in pain, he is astounded by the person who had been warning him. “Fortuneteller! This man is a fortune-teller!” he shouts. “A genius!”

It turns out that the story continues, somewhat elaborately. However, for this one listener, if the rest of this tale was ever told, it went unheard. It probably wasn’t ever told in the hubbub of the dinner table: amidst the various hectoring complaints that are such an important part of family life; the political news; the gobbling up of juicy zucchini with tomatoes, lively salads with olives, onions, cucumbers, and generous fistfuls of parsley. The images from Joha’s world that remained over the years were of Joha cutting off the branch he is sitting on and the sage warning him he’ll fall—and the point: Joha isn’t fixated on his mistakes; without missing a beat, he cheerfully moves on.  

The second favorite is even simpler. Joha wants to count the donkeys he is bringing to market, and so he does. He carefully counts one, two, three, four, five. But he is supposed to have six. So he gets off his donkey, and counts again, slowly, deliberately, and this time there are six. When he gets back on his donkey, it is five again. Joha can’t figure it out.

Obviously here we are not speaking of jokes. We are hardly even speaking of humorous stories, although that’s what they are. Jokes and humorous stories are different. Jokes must have come in with the Enlightenment, with the scientific method. They are efficient, establish credibility, lead you along, build to a climax, then boom: “You see, it’s working already.” That’s the one about the Russian who asked the Jew how come Jews are so smart, it’s because we eat herring, would you happen to know where I could get some herring. I happen to have some here—we all know this one—how much would it cost, well, three rubles, and after he finishes it, the Russian suddenly says, I could have bought that same herring in the market for two rubles, then “You see, it’s working already.”

You don’t want to know how this “joke” is told in Koén-Sarano’s collection. The narrator of this particular tale flubs it, flunks the science of jokes. And the one about the man—in another tradition it would be Hershele Ostropoler—who threatens the innkeeper that he will do what his father did, frightens the innkeeper so badly that the innkeeper provides a great meal, and after he is finished eating, when the innkeeper timidly asks what it was the man’s father would have done if he had been denied the meal, Hershele says, “He would have gone away hungry.”

Told as a Joha story, it’s not about a meal, but a jacket. He would have “bought himself a new jacket,” especially if you know the other version, just does not cut it. You wince, you cover your eyes. Perhaps this is actually a story that modern Joha raconteurs have taken from eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, changing a Hershele into a Joha, but let’s not go there—because it’s the genius of Joha that we want, not grafts (or branches) from or to other trees.

Who is Joha? He is from before television, before Einstein, the sewing machine, Isaac Newton, the Enlightenment, Shakespeare. He is from before the Inquisition, the Crusades, before the automobile, the pressure cooker, and Dannon’s packaging of yogurt, which used to be made in a big pot swaddled in blankets left to sit for eight hours in a warm spot. Joha is from the ninth century, and from medieval Turkey. This folk hero, perhaps little talked about in Manhattan, is known in about 35 countries, by a different name in each culture, but each derived from the Turkish wise fool Nasreddin (Nas reh deen) D’Hodja. Hodja means teacher, and this legendary or historical popular figure was said to be born in thirteenth-century Turkey, and to have died in the Turkish town of Aksheir, which in our own times still celebrates an annual Nasreddin festival. His grave there is famous for having a large locked gate attached to no fence.

Sephardic Jews, forced to flee Spain in the fifteenth century were, as we know, welcomed to settle in the Ottoman Empire. Many did, while others went to Portugal, then Amsterdam and other cities of Western Europe. Spain was foolishly and brutally depopulating itself at the same time that the Ottoman Turks were seeking to populate a vast new territory, and one of the treasures of the new land for Jews who survived and went East to Turkey was the Turkish folk hero, Nasreddin. Sephardic culture was transmitted in Ladino and Hebrew, in prayers and songs, and the many languages of the new home—Turkish, Greek, Armenian—but it also found expression in the tales of Nasreddin, called by a variety of names by the Jews: the Hodja, Nas al-din, and Joha.

Adopting the Hodja was a way of mediating with Turkish culture, and of finding familiar folk values, pleasures, and realities, an overlapping that is all the more of interest in our own time, with its Muslim-Christian-Jewish tensions. The stories are simple, yet at the same time, extensive, rich, varied, energetic, a cultural feast of insubordination, stubborn survival, cheerful unmovable optimism and play. Joha is always what people have needed to survive. Joha is Jewish play with Middle-Eastern yichus (pedigree).

For a Jew growing up in New York City with bits and pieces of Joha stories, the word Joha cut two ways. If you said someone was a real Joha, it was no compliment; it meant, what a dope!! But on the other side, unspoken, never mentioned, was the daring, wit, and totally unselfconscious audacity of Joha, the liberation of Joha. Joha has deep Jewish meaning. The laugh and a cheerful approach to life represent a core Jewish religious belief. It is liberating to hear stories about someone who circumvents rationality, and effortlessly embraces the folly that is wisdom. But more specifically, Joha’s stories represent the willingness and the daring, in the best sense, of going out on a limb. Abraham left the sophisticated civilization of Ur, Sarah laughed, David took a slingshot to Goliath. Joha is the other, who laughs and calls life as he sees it. Joha flouts the arrogant assumption that rationality trumps all.

Matilda Koén-Sarano has given us a great gift with this collection in English, Folktales of Joha: Jewish Trickster. The excellent introduction by Tamar Alexander contextualizes Joha in the Turkish tradition, and provides a brief thoughtful folkloric analysis. Alexander holds the Estelle Frankfurter Chair for Sephardic Culture, and is Chair of the Folklore Program of the Hebrew Literature Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Alexander dates Joha to ninth-century Arabic, although one wonders when Jews first encountered this folk hero, if he came with the Arabic that Jews spoke beginning in the ninth century, or if he was only a post-1492 treasure.

Koén-Sarano is a writer, scholar, poet, storyteller, and broadcaster for the Israeli radio station Kol Israel. She reports the news in Ladino, and entertains listeners with Sephardic music, poetry, and tales. An eminent, prolific folklorist devoted to preserving Sephardic oral culture, she has been collecting Joha stories since 1979; her first collection, a 400-page compilation, was published in Jerusalem in Ladino and Hebrew (Kana, 1986, 1991).

One of the most satisfying aspects of her collection is her respect for the narrators, their wording, and their individuality. The description of the narrators at the end of this 2003 volume is a good read. Move over Goldberg and Greenberg. Welcome Avzaradel, Babani, Bahbout, Bardavid. Diversity has a different geography here. Koén-Sarano’s narrators come from Tripoli, Salonika, Istanbul, Milan, Oran, Russhuk, Sliven, Cairo, Beirut, Buenos Aires, Izmir, Tunis, Bursa, Marseilles, Beit Shean, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. The 82 narrators, the folk who have told the tales, were born between 1898 and 1993. Perhaps because many are women from an era before careers, the listing tells the schools and universities the male and female narrators attended, and so emphasizes institutions of cultural transmission, in itself a fascinating survival story; occasional glimpses let us know they studied many things from Italian literature to ritual slaughter to classical dance. There are, yes, a couple of lawyers, a violinist, a professor at Tufts (the only narrator from New York City), but the bios for all of them are folk bios, a couple of times with the neighborhood of birth thrown in, (“Born in Jerusalem in the Shama neighborhood at the foot of Mount Zion, 1910”), once with the number of grandchildren (12 in Koén-Sarano’s case), one Salonika man’s World War II survival of eleven concentration camps, another’s exile by the Turks from Palestine to Syria, and the somber fact that one man—Pinhas Tokatly—was killed by a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem last year.

Just folks. It’s a refreshing change from the professional bios we’re used to reading, with awards, titles, organizational affiliations, a lot of careerist huffing and puffing. “Dios nos lleva a Yerushalayim,” says the 13-verse Ladino Passover song; many of the narrators have had several migrations in their lives, for instance, from Istanbul to Marseilles to Turin, but three quarters of them by birth or eventual nationality are Israelis.

Hank Halio’s Ladino Reveries (The Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 1996) is another good source of Joha or Djoha stories, a couple of dozen of them sprinkled in Ladino and English into a chatty collection of proverbs and reminiscences.

But when we read Koén-Sarano’s collection, we don’t stop off for a meldado or the recipe for Turkish coffee. It’s straight, 300 short takes ranging from a few lines to a few pages, and presented in chapters on school, work, animals, the law, and so on. When you read about Joha, you don’t expect to laugh out loud. But you’ll be with a character who is first cousin to all the underdog wise fools from around the world. It’s an immersion, like a novel before the first novel. The narrations are refreshingly direct, and as Koén-Sarano notes of Joha in one of the best tales she herself narrates, “pure of heart.”

In a tale I recently heard, Joha was spooning yogurt into a lake. The story was told to me by a Turkish Jew who grew up in Istanbul in the 1950s, before television had arrived, and who said he and his friends used to read Hodja stories all the time. There were lots of collections of the tales, and it was great fun. They loved them. But he doesn’t tell the stories to his daughters growing up on Long Island, because, well, they wouldn’t laugh. A man asked Joha what he was doing, and then asked him why. Joha said he wanted to turn the lake into yogurt. But the man said “That isn’t possible, is it, for a little yogurt to turn a whole lake into yogurt.” “No,” said Joha, “but what if it does?”

A few spoons of inspired foolery can shape the way we view the world. In terrible times, dare we waste time on humor? Dare we not?

One more, from Koén-Sarano.

“Thieves entered Joha’s house. Joha already knew that he was poor and had nothing in the house. The Thieves were searching very slowly. Joha got out of bed and started to search behind them, slowly, slowly. When they reached the corner, he said: ‘Look, if you find something. . .fifty-fifty!’”

Postscript

In 2014, Eliezer Papo, Director of The Sephardic Studies Research Institute, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, spoke at the JCC of Manhattan about the difference between Ashkenazic and Sephardic humor. His talk resonated with me. I can be irritated and nonplussed, for instance, by a kind of Ashkenazic humor that is smart-alecky and depressed. Some Joha stories of course are over-the-top feeble, but nonetheless Joha is a gift. With a free hand, Joha cuts us loose from solemnity and pretentiousness.

Papo said Ashkenazic humor comes from the harsh climate (and pogroms) of Eastern Europe, while Sephardic humor comes from Mediterranean Ottoman lands with their relative tolerance and mild weather, plus the luscious fruit on the trees and the fish in the sea, free for the picking. Perhaps what’s considered lowbrow about Joha is its optimism, an attitude that may be antithetical to what’s widely known as “Jewish humor.” In an article about Jewish humor (by which he means Ashkenazic humor since he speaks of nothing else), Joseph Epstein says optimism is foreign to it. (“Jokes: A Genre of Thought,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2017).

Joha in fact is absurdly optimistic. Joha is cheerful, idiotically cheerful, and his good cheer, because of its patent absurdity, is balm for all of us caught in the net of what I as a child named “disaster orientation.”

The odd thing is that the instinctive habitual love of cheer, the desire to sing, the desire to tell stories and talk, the refusal to give up a chance to join in an argument, even when Joha, for instance, is happily presumed dead and is being carried home on a stretcher in a procession of the whole community, is so natural. Well, the neighbors carrying his stretcher are arguing about the shortest route to his house! Joha’s inclinations and instincts ring true. And what’s more, his responses are at home in a culture that accepts religion in a natural uncomplicated way. The luscious fruit of spiritual gratitude frees Joha.

Incidentally, perhaps the proof of the pudding for a Joha story is not a laugh out loud, but a little gleam of understanding in the eye accompanied by a compulsion to reply in kind. And so, when a Sephardic friend read my 2003 Joha article when it first came out, and loved it, of course he had to tell me about when Joha finds a glittering shard of a broken mirror on the ground. Joha picks it up with excitement and holds it up to his face to admire it. But when he sees a face in it, “That’s ugly,” he says with repugnance. “No wonder someone threw that away!”

Other notes:

Folktales of Joha: Jewish Trickster is currently available at over 1400 libraries worldwide (WorldCat database).

Matilda Koén-Sarano’s prolific output of works on Sephardic culture continues apace since 2003 with publications in Jerusalem, Istanbul, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Genoa; in Ladino, Ladino and Hebrew, Ladino and French, and Italian, including CDs and books ranging from Gizar kon Gozo and a Hebrew-Ladino Dictionary to a Ladino conversation manual expected out soon (Wikipedia, Nov. 21, 2016; CV, March 2017).

      In 2015, Tamar Alexander was appointed chairperson of the National Council for Ladino Culture, replacing Yitzhak Navon, chair until then.

The Turkish-American Jew who told the story of Joha spooning yogurt into a lake, is Selim Sadaka. His father, Haim Vitali Sadacca, is a Ladino poet published by the the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture; his daughter Janine Sadaka has remarkably transcribed a Ladino short story of mine into Solitreo.

If you wondered how Joha can date from both the ninth century and the thirteenth century, Tamar Alexander’s statement in her “Introduction” explains: “The origin of the name is unclear,” she says of Joha, “but we do know that he is first mentioned in Arabic stories dating from the ninth century. A similar character, Nasr-a-din Hodja, appears in medieval Turkish stories. According to Turkish literary tradition such a man really existed…Eventually the two characters’ names merged” (Folktales of Joha: Jewish Trickster).

The Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, active over the past century and now energetically revived by Director Rabbi Nissim Elnecavé, features a weekly Joha story in its online newsletter. Each brief tale is presented in Ladino, English, and a Ladino voice recording by Rachel Bortnick (Devin Naar, “The Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America Celebrates its Centennial,” Tablet, Sept. 22, 2016; La Boz Sefaradi: The Sephardic Voice).

Finally, for your information: Koén-Sarano herself provides 40 of the stories in her collection, Beki Bardavid 27, Eliezer Papo 19, and Gloria Ascher is the New York City-born narrator who contributes one story—in verse: this Tufts University professor has been teaching Ladino and the Sephardic Tradition at Tufts for years; she founded the Judaic Studies program there and has been its long-time Co-Director.

Just over sixty years ago, the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists was founded to resolve “the apparent points of conflict between scientific theory and Orthodox Judaism.”[1] [DEA1] The claims of paleontology, cosmology, and especially evolutionary biology exposed contradictions with traditional beliefs that were hard to overcome—so hard, indeed, that Alvin Radkowsky (an eminent nuclear physicist and leading member of the association) described the challenge as “a test of faith comparable to that faced by the biblical Abraham.”[2]

Today, evolution is no longer a hot topic amongst Modern Orthodox Jews. Few feel anxiety, let alone an impending Akeidah, at the challenge evolution poses—and even fewer would follow the advice of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and tear the offending pages out of schoolbooks. Even in the Hareidi community, rejection of evolution is no longer universal. When a ban was issued against the books of the “zoo rabbi” Nosson Slifkin for questioning the scientific judgments of the Talmud, opposition was intense—yet several prominent rabbis rallied to his defense.

Judaism’s ability to make peace with and absorb emerging scientific ideas is not new. Nine centuries ago, Maimonides declared the anthropomorphisms of the Torah to be allegorical. Dibrah torah bil’shon benei adam—the Torah speaks in human language—Maimonides tells us, stretching the talmudic saying well beyond its original intent to imply that words need not have their literal meaning. Nahmanides read the creation narrative as a spiritual lesson, and pointed out its non sequiturs if interpreted literally. And although integrating the Torah with science was of paramount importance to some, other exegetes were less enthusiastic and preferred to put the scientific issues aside. Ibn Ezra, in introducing his Torah commentary, excoriates commentators (including Saadiah Gaon) who bring lengthy astronomical explanations to bear on the text. And Rashi, quoting a midrash, famously poses a stunning question on the very first verse of Bereshith, asking why the Torah should start with a discussion of creation at all when it might instead have started with the first mitzvah. This suggests a different strategy: reconciling science and Torah not by bringing them together into a coherent whole, but by recognizing that their concerns are largely disjointed.

Science itself has increasingly moved in this direction, attenuating its conflict with religion. The medievals made no clear distinction between the sciences and humanities, or between scientific and religious knowledge. The development of scientific theories was therefore constrained by religious beliefs. Although Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by rejecting the geocentric view of the universe, he was not prepared to consider an elliptical path for planetary motion, so his theory required “epicycles” to preserve the divine perfection of the circular orbit. Isaac Newton, famously characterized by John Maynard Keynes as a “Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides” sought an integration of his religious beliefs and scientific theories, and wrote in an unpublished manuscript that “God is known from his works.”[3] Over time, however, science separated itself from religion, and scientific theories no longer relied on, or made, metaphysical claims. The great theories of modern physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, take this to an extreme: Science is no longer even about what exists, but only about what can be observed.

And thus we arrive today at the widely held view that science and religion have no inherent conflict, each in its pristine form being emptied of any claims about the other. As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, science and religion represent “non-overlapping magisteria.” Science addresses the composition of the universe and how it works; religion examines questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. As Gould puts it cleverly: “These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry. Science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how we go to heaven.” [4] Gould, who described himself as a Jewish agnostic, suspected that the soul did not exist, but hoped he was wrong and saw value in both endeavors: “The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.”[4]

Harder Questions

Although the challenges presented by the natural sciences have receded, fresh challenges have taken their place and seem to pose much harder and more far-reaching questions. The field of biblical criticism has unearthed a mass of evidence that the Torah is a composite document that reflects the prevailing ideas of other cultures contemporaneous with ancient Israel. How, in the light of such claims, can one adhere to the belief, required by Maimonides in his eighth principle of faith, that the Torah we have in our hands today is the very same Torah that was handed down by Moses, and that it is all of divine origin? Moses, according to Maimonides, acted like a scribe taking down a dictation; consequently, he insists, there is no difference in holiness or authority between verses such as, “And the sons of Ham were Cush and Mizraim, Phut and Canaan” and verses such as, “I am the Lord thy God” or “Hear, O Israel.” Nahmanides maintained that the very letters of the Torah encode secrets revealed to Moses—hence the reason that omission of even a single letter renders a Torah scroll invalid.

To be sure, not all Orthodox Jews accept these rather extreme formulations of Torah min haShamayim. Evidence of small differences between the Masoretic text and earlier manuscripts makes it hard to sustain confidence in the perfect reliability of the Torah’s transmission. When we raise the Torah in synagogue and declare veZot haTorah asher sam Mosheh—this is the Torah that Moses placed before the children of Israel—few of us feel a need to defend the assertion in its most literal sense. Moreover, the view of Moses as copyist of the entire Torah was challenged long before modern biblical criticism; Ibn Ezra’s cryptic comment about the secret of the final twelve verses of the Torah is usually assumed to be an allusion to his belief that Moses did not record the events of his own death. Many Orthodox Jews have absorbed the sensibilities of source criticism, even while rejecting its broader claims, and are skeptical of theories with origins whose historicity is dubious. They treat traditional attributions of authorship—that David wrote the psalms, or that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes—as rhetorical, no different from the Gemara’s statement that Moses himself instituted the first paragraph of Birkat haMazon.[5]

But these finer points of criticism, however important they may be for scholars, have little practical impact. Their theological impact is minor too, because few Jews build the foundations of their belief and religious commitment on such fragile assumptions. Moreover, contemporary assertions of the most extreme positions keep company with other intellectual positions of questionable rationality. Thus the advocates of “Bible codes,” for example, in which hidden messages are inferred from the exact placement of letters in the text of the Torah, seem to rely either on the dubious assertion that the Masoretic text was the version given to Moses, or on the strange belief that God should have chosen to reveal his message to the world only following the Masoretic redaction and not before. But the very notion of Bible codes is implausible, since any suitable text of comparable length will furnish “prophecies” that are just as convincing (as Michael Jackson has demonstrated, by writing a computer program that produced similar results when applied to Milton’s Paradise Lost [6]). At least the Bible code enthusiasts have heeded Mark Twain’s advice that “the art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future,” and have limited their efforts to prophecies of events that have already occurred.

The larger questions of authorship of the Torah, on the other hand, have enormous consequence. In its literal sense, the Torah conflicts with contemporary morality in many areas: in its acquiescence to slavery, its apparent advocacy of genocide (e.g., in the context of the Canaanite ban), and its prescription of the death penalty for many offences (including witchcraft, breaking Shabbat, and homosexuality). If the Torah is not divine in its entirety, rather than approaching these issues apologetically, contextualizing them, or regarding their plain meaning as superseded by more palatable rabbinic interpretations, we might instead see them as evidence of a human element –  not to be justified, but on the contrary to be deemphasized and maybe even repudiated. On the other hand, if the Torah is entirely divine, we should presumably see our own moral qualms as reflections of our inadequate understanding, and adjust them accordingly (although, as we shall see, such a conclusion is not in fact necessary).

It is the confluence of these nagging moral questions and the doubts seeded by biblical criticism that present such a formidable challenge to many Orthodox Jews today. The rise of feminism has greatly exacerbated the dilemma. As Tamar Ross puts it: “What makes the feminist analysis unique is that the ultimate question it raises does not concern any particular difficulty in the contents of the Torah (be it moral, scientific, or theological). Nor does it concern the accuracy of the historical account of its literary genesis. Highlighting an all-pervasive male bias in the Torah seems to display a more general skepticism regarding divine revelation that is much more profound.” [7]

In response to this dilemma, a reactionary will say that we have here nothing more than a clash of value systems, and that, for a believer, the Torah must prevail. The claims of biblical criticism do not meet scientific standards, its arguments are rife with qualifications and disagreements, and the evidence of multiple authorship is a figment of the critic’s imagination. But however mightily we might struggle, like former Chief Rabbi Hertz in his commentary to the Humash, to undercut the positions of the critics by exposing their mutual inconsistencies, the fact remains that in the scholarly world there is broad consensus on the basic premises of source criticism, and the ongoing accumulation of evidence over the last century has made its findings hard to reject out of hand.

From a scientific perspective, a religious position that rejects the claims of biblical criticism is not irrational because it views those claims as untrue; after all, biblical criticism is not a scientific discipline whose claims can be evaluated in repeatable experiments. Rather, rejecting the claims outright is irrational because it denies even the possibility that they might be true. To be unwilling to even consider that the Torah might be a composite document is no different in principle from holding firm to the belief that the Earth is stationary and that the sun revolves around it. In this sense, attempting to sustain a belief in traditional notions of divine authorship brings science and religion into full conflict. For Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate physicist, the very essence of the scientific mind is its capacity for doubt: “It is our responsibility as scientist, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance… to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.” From this perspective, if we ignore the dilemma or compartmentalize our religious lives, we are shirking our scientific responsibilities, attempting to preserve our religious integrity at the cost of our intellectual integrity.

The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs

Richard Feynman was not a philosopher, and despite writing with extraordinary clarity and elegance on many topics, criticizes religion in a way that will strike most religious readers as unsophisticated and unconvincing. (In one of his books, in a chapter entitled Is Electricity Fire?, he reports a conversation with some students at a university Hillel about Shabbat observance, and ridicules the notion of melakhah [9]. At least he admitted the limits of his expertise: “A scientist looking at nonscientific problems,” he said, “is just as dumb as the next guy.”[8])

Likewise, the recent spate of anti-religious books, such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion or Christopher Hitchen’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, might warm the hearts of atheists—but are unlikely to sway any believers. Their tone is angry and dismissive, and the religious views that they put down are for the most part crude strawmen. And their attitudes to Jews and Judaism are unlikely to win them much sympathy. Dawkins has called for an academic boycott of Israel, and his description of the Jewish lobby (as a model for a possible atheist lobby) was criticized for implying that all supporters of Israel are religious Jews. Hitchens described Hannuka [DJ2] in an article in Slate as “childish stuff” and cast the Hasmoneans as fundamentalist anti-Hellenists, whose success was a triumph of “bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason” that retarded “the development of the whole of humanity.”[10] (According to Shaye Cohen, Hitchens has his facts wrong: The goal of the Hasmoneans was to find a way to live with Hellenism. Many of their practices show its influence—such as the election of the high priest, and even the institution of Hanukka itself, as a festival declared by popular acclaim [11]).

A book published last year by Sol Schimmel[12], a professor of education and psychology at Hebrew College in Boston, is harder to dismiss. Schimmel is himself a traditionally observant Jew, grew up in an Orthodox household and was educated in right-wing yeshivot. He has an extensive familiarity with rabbinic literature, confesses “deep religious emotions” when singing songs such as Yedid Nefesh, and asserts that even scriptural fundamentalisms have “many positive ethical, psychological, spiritual, and social consequences.”

Nevertheless, his book, The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth is ruthless in its critique of Modern Orthodoxy. The book originated in his attempt to understand why, from a psychological perspective, Modern Orthodox Jews cling to a notion of Torah min haShamayim (TMS, as he abbreviates it) that is so at variance with overwhelming evidence and logical reasoning. His studies took him beyond Judaism to both Christianity and Islam; Jewish readers may take some solace in his descriptions of the fundamentalisms of these other religions, which seem to have had far more demonstrably negative consequences, and are tied to literal readings of the Bible and Koran that are less flexible than the rabbinic reading of the Torah. The chapter on Modern Orthodoxy, however, will make many readers squirm.

What is unusual about Schimmel’s book is that his principal argument is not philosophical. Rather, through a series of narratives and discussions of expressed opinions, he offers a psychological critique. In short, Orthodox Jews adhere to irrational beliefs because of the high emotional cost of giving them up, and they create a series of justifications and selective interpretations to bolster positions that, in their heart of hearts, they know to be false. They also employ “selective attention,” avoiding the conflict that arises from considering hard questions, even professing a lack of interest in the historical and literary analysis of a book for which in other respects they have boundless fascination. Schimmel notes that sometimes believers will even articulate the social, religious and psychological consequences of skepticism as explicit reason for maintaining belief. Concern that not believing in Torah min haShamayim might undermine observance of mitzvot is a strange justification for making empirical claims.

In some of his arguments, Schimmel brings Modern Orthodox thinkers to help argue his case. In his critique of the Artscroll Humash and its expression of a simplistic rejection of modern thought with a professed humility that “masks the arrogance of the fundamentalist who is certain of the truth… and that all who disagree with him are wrong, misguided, or heretics who have no share in the world to come,” Schimmel is joined by scholars such as Barry Levy for whom the Artscroll commentaries “misrepresent the sacred literature of normative Judaism.” Schimmel spares Modern Orthodoxy no criticism, however. Widespread capitulation of synagogues and rabbinical organizations to Artscroll signals a coalescing between Modern Orthodoxy and right-wing Orthodoxy, and many of the more independent-thinking scholars have been left on the periphery of a movement that was once more liberal, and that has largely “abandoned its original commitment to a serious and honest engagement with modernity.”

Schimmel makes no secret of his agenda: to deprogram the Modern Orthodox (among others). Indeed, his last chapter is entitled “On Defundamentalizing Fundamentalists.” His book is valuable for the hard questions that it asks, and for the light it shines on strange beliefs and their contrived justifications. For this reason alone, it deserves a wide readership in the Modern Orthodox community. But while it diagnoses the disease, it offers no cure.

Finding a Path

How can we address this challenge, and create a philosophy of Modern Orthodoxy that respects our tradition, reaffirms our commitments to Torah and deeply held moral convictions, and that at the same time preserves our rationality?

Returning to Radkowsky’s choice of the Akeidah as the metaphor for our contemporary challenge in reconciling science and Torah, we might ask: Is this challenge really a test of faith? If so, is it a test we pass only by sacrificing our intellectual honesty on the altar of religious conviction? I sometimes wonder whether some scientists might not justify to themselves, emotionally if not intellectually, the surrender of part of their critical faculty as a small sacrifice, an act of piety made all the more potent by the value they attach to it

Better then, to view this as a test of intellect rather than a test of faith: to find a way to reconcile the compelling evidence of the late, composite authorship of the Torah with a commitment to halakha[DJ3] ; to navigate a path through this rocky terrain that requires neither leaving one’s rationality behind nor disturbing the foundation of traditional Judaism so greatly that the entire edifice begins to crumble.

Many thinkers have mapped out such a path. Some take more turns away from traditional conceptions than others, and their ending points are often very different. Maybe none offers a journey that suits us personally. To some, a path will seem to veer too far from tradition; to others, a path may seem too apologetic, too ready to contrive a complex and implausible theology in defense of the indefensible. Together, however, these paths at least give us a better sense of the terrain as a whole, and make it easier for us to find out own way through.

The first modern proponents of the critical approach to reading the Bible were Protestants who used their scholarly studies in support of their view that Judaism was morally inferior to Christianity. So it was not unreasonable for Solomon Schechter to describe the Higher Criticism of Julius Wellhausen, who had likened Judaism to a dead tree, as the “Higher Anti-semitism.” But after 130 years of scholarship, the field has changed, and many of its leading exponents are Jewish. Amongst these is a cohort of traditionally observant Jews who have articulated their own theories for reconciling their private observances with their public scholarship—often as introductions or codas to their scholarly books.

Marc Brettler, closes his How to Read the Bible[13] with an afterword entitled “Reading the Bible as a Committed Jew.” The Bible, he explains, is a ‘sourcebook that I—within my community—make into a textbook… by selecting, revaluing, and interpreting the texts I call sacred.” A textbook offers a monolithic perspective and a prescriptive guide; a sourcebook, in contrast, brings together multiple, and often conflicting perspectives. In describing the Bible as a sourcebook, he makes the point often noted by its scholars (but harder for those to appreciate who have read the Bible only through rabbinic eyes), that the Bible itself does not even claim to be a monolithic book—or even a book at all. For Brettler, ‘selection” means choosing one of the Bible’s perspectives over another, in a manner no different, he argues from, for example, how Divrei haYamim chose the cooking method of the korban pesah to be boiling (according to Devarim) rather than roasting (according to Shemoth). Revaluing the text involves recognizing that, as an ancient text, the Torah has not “always aged well,” and finding new meaning that is more consonant with modern sensibilities. Brettler realizes that this is “extremely difficult to do with integrity,” but his willingness to reinterpret the text personally will place him, for many Orthodox Jews, beyond the bounds of the halakhic community.

Mordechai Breuer, like Brettler, acknowledges the problems raised by biblical criticism. He recognizes that the “power of these inferences, based on solid argument and internally consistent premises, will not be denied by intellectually honest persons.” [14] Unlike Brettler, however, Breuer wants to retain the principle of the divinity of the Torah in its entirety, and therefore draws very different conclusions. He sees divine purpose in the structuring of the Torah as a document with multiple, often conflicting strands—providing multiple meanings, and speaking to different generations in different voices. Remarkably, Breuer seems to adhere to Maimonides’ formulation, believing that this multi-stranded Torah was dictated to Moses, going further even than classical rabbinic sources that were willing to recognize contributions to the text of the Torah both later and earlier in origin than the Sinaitic revelation. The ingenuity of this approach is evident, but it will strike some as too contrived. As Schimmel notes, it is reminiscent of the view held by many (including the Lubavitcher Rebbe) that God created fossils ready-formed. Louis Jacobs noted that such a view is logical in the narrow sense, but the logical gain may be outweighed by the theological loss. In his early work, We Have Reason to Believe, Jacobs complained that such arguments lead to a conception of a God who intentionally tricks us, planting false clues to lead us astray. In his later work, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, his critique softened; he concedes that the Lubavitcher Rebbe was too sophisticated a theologian to suggest that God placed fossils there as a test of faith “to see whether men would be sufficiently steadfast in their faith in Genesis to resist the blandishments of science.” But, he notes, such positions still require us to believe that God has given us the power to reason, and the ability to uncover compelling evidence, but nevertheless expects us to resist the obvious conclusions.

If Breuer and Brettler represent ends of the spectrum, James Kugel sits somewhere between the two. Like Brettler, he is prepared to concede that the Torah was not given in any literal sense to Moses on Sinai, and that it is likely a much later document comprised of multiple sources. Like Breuer, however, Kugel sees a divine hand in this process. He confesses ignorance about how or why this process happened. But although Kugel accepts the premises and methods of biblical criticism, he wholeheartedly rejects what he views as its central agenda. From the start, biblical criticism has attempted to wind the clock back, allowing us to view the Bible not through the lens of the rabbis but through the perspective of the civilization that gave birth to it, thus revealing the “real Bible,” in contrast to the very different Bible created by rabbinic readings. Kugel maintains that no such “real Bible” ever existed, that interpretation did not follow canonization, disrupting accepted meanings, but that, on the contrary, the Bible was interpreted from the outset, before it was even complete. A “spindly sapling of texts” was able to grow into a “the great date palm of Scripture” only because of the interpretive soil in which it was planted. “The mission on which modern biblical criticism set out, then, without quite understanding it, was to uproot Scripture from that soil the better to study the whole plant and the plant alone.”[17] Paradoxically, then, Kugel’s view of interpretation is remarkably close to the traditional conception of a Torah SheBe’al Peh that was revealed contemporaneously with the written Torah.

While seeing a divine hand in the development of the Torah, however, Kugel does not see a need to defend the divinity of every word. “How,” he asks, “can you distinguish the word of God from other, ordinary human words in Scripture?”[18] Kugel is not willing to answer this question. “I suppose I have my suspicions about this verse or that one, but I really do not believe it is my business to try to second-guess the text’s divine inspiration.” In the same way, he explains, that he desists from walking on the Temple Mount—traditionally forbidden for fear that one would tread in the area of the Kodesh haKodashim—despite having his own ideas about where it once stood, respecting the sacred integrity of the area as a whole, he is likewise content to recognize the sacred integrity of the Bible. The modesty here is compelling, and it allows Kugel to maintain a traditional reverence for the Torah. Indeed, Kugel has opposed the teaching of biblical criticism in Jewish high schools, and has deep reservations about the value of his field, sometimes talking as if it is a curiosity for specialists alone.

Some, however, will see Kugel’s modesty as disingenuous. After all, to most Jews, where exactly the Bet haMikdash was situated has little contemporary significance. But the question of whether the Torah’s proscription of homosexuality, or its advocacy of the death penalty, or its acquiescence of slavery, are divine in origin is no small matter.

Louis Jacobs, like Kugel, sees divine significance in the development of rabbinic Judaism, but he is more ready to identify human elements in the Torah. As a distinguished British talmudist, Jacobs sought to demonstrate the flexibility of halakha, and the extent to which it has been influenced by external pressures. The Torah is indeed “from Heaven,” according to Jacobs, but the word “from” must be interpreted in a non-fundamentalist way[16]. A committed but non-fundamentalist Jew, for example, will refrain from smoking on Shabbat, accepting the standard halakhic formulation of observance. But he will find it hard to accept the notion that violation of this mitzvah should incur the death penalty, and is relieved that no Sanhedrin any longer exists to enforce it.

Jacobs was a student of the prominent mussar scholar Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, and served as an Orthodox rabbi in Manchester and then London for many years. In 1961, he was expected to become the principal of Jews’ College, but his appointment was blocked by the then Chief Rabbi, Israel Brodie, on account of the views Jacobs had expressed in his book We Have Reason to Believe. He was subsequently denied his pulpit, and a number of his congregants left to form a new synagogue. Later he founded the Masoreti movement in Britain, and he regarded himself as closer to (but nevertheless distinct from) the Conservative movement in the United States than to Orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, his views have been regarded as heretical within the Orthodox community, eliciting vehement opposition. After he was denied an aliya at an Orthodox synagogue prior to his granddaughter’s wedding, on his 83rd birthday, the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the Av Bet Din Chanoch Ehrentreu justified the decision on the grounds that reciting the blessing ­asher natan lanu torat emet—“who gave us the Torah of truth”—would be a false statement coming from his lips.[19]

I suspect that many Orthodox readers share Jacobs’ relief that the death penalty is no longer applied, even if they are unwilling to state such a position in public. Although they are likely to disagree with his theological views on the divinity of the Torah, they might find even more discomfiting his characterization of the halakhic imperative. For Jacobs, Shabbat observance is “mandatory,” and a Jew recites the Shema in “obedience to a divine command.” But in deciding how strictly to be bound by halakha, he may “choose which Sabbath and other observances awaken a response in him.”[16]

Tamar Ross, a philosopher at Bar Ilan University, takes a more Orthodox attitude. Unlike Jacobs, she is willing to bow to the judgment of posekim even when they seem to be motivated by a worldview at variance with hers. Like Jacobs, however, she is candid in her recognition of the incompatibility of the statements of the Torah with modern sensibilities. As a feminist, she is disturbed by what she sees as a pervasive patriarchal bias in the Torah, and she is not shy to point out the many respects in which the statements of the Torah are in conflict with her own moral convictions. To Ross, however, these concerns need not undermine the divinity of the Torah. By a divine scheme, the Torah delivered a message that was ideal for the time of its initial revelation. Even its patriarchy, she claims, must have had a purpose—for example, in strengthening the tribe or family. The changing meaning of the Torah brought about by its interpreters ensured that, as time passed, its message was attuned to each new generation. Drawing on the philosophy of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Ross sees revelation as ongoing and cumulative; feminism, itself, she contends is part of God’s message, which God chose to reveal only in our time.

This of course raises the question of how we are to distinguish between latter-day revelations that should be absorbed into our concept of Torah and those that should be rejected as alien. Here, Ross turns to the theories of textual interpretation of Hans Gadamer and Stanley Fish. Roughly speaking, they treat texts, in postmodern fashion, as lacking any fixed meaning. The interpretation of a text is subjective, arising from the reader’s beliefs and opinions. These are indeed biases, but they are biases that are borne not of anarchy and the whim of the individual, but are nurtured by the community in which the reader belongs. This is how Ross saves herself from lapsing into relativism, by situating herself and her personal interpretations in the community of the halakhically committed.

How then does change come about? It cannot, Ross contends, always be “bloodless”; it will be necessary for those committed to change to act “disruptively” in “unruly moments” that will result in a slow evolution of Jewish practice [7]. As a feminist, Ross is sympathetic to Rabbi Mendel Shapiro’s halakhic analysis [20] that minyanim such as Shirah Hadashah (and now a host of others) have relied upon to justify allowing women to read from the Torah and receive aliyot in the company of men. But at the same time she is respectful of the response of Rabbi Yehuda Henkin [21], who was able to find no fault in Shapiro’s case, but argued nevertheless that the practice was unacceptable because it lay beyond the bounds of community consensus. Ross notes with approval that Henkin leaves room for the practice in private settings, and she is willing to go ahead on this basis: not advocating a change for the entire community, but nevertheless hoping that, from a small start, the larger change will ultimately come about.

Conclusion

Perhaps one day the challenge of biblical criticism will seem as unremarkable to contemporary Jews as the historical controversy over anthropomorphism seems to us today. In the meantime, in our struggle to find a notion of Torah min haShamayim consistent with both our commitment to rationality and to our deeply held religious convictions, we might do well to bear in mind that problems of this complexity rarely have neat solutions. A pristine philosophical theory that resolves all contradictions is unlikely to be convincing; rather, we must learn to live with doubt—not merely to tolerate it, but to embrace it as an expression of our seriousness in our quest for truth.

We tend to think of our religious commitments as built on a foundation of belief, as the rooms of a house are built on a concrete foundation beneath. Every perceived crack in the foundation raises a fear that the entire edifice might collapse. Perhaps it would be better to view our religious commitments as a boat, held aloft by the surging waters of a river that are continually rising and falling, made up of currents that are fluid and complex, sometimes flowing together, and sometimes against each other, but always, in aggregate, carrying the boat forward, downstream toward the sea.

References

[1]      Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists. Mission statement. Available at: http://www.aojs.org.

[2]      Ira Robinson. “’Practically, I Am a Fundamentalist’: Twentieth-Century Orthodox Jews Contend with Evolution and Its Implications.” In: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

[3]      Stephen David Snobelen. ”Isaac Newton.” In Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, MacMillan, 2003.

[4]      Stephen Jay Gould. ”Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” Natural History 106 (March 1997): pp.16–22.

[5]      Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 48b.

[6]      Michael Jackson. ”Aish and the Torah Codes.” The Sephardi Bulletin of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation of London, 25 September 2008.

[7]      Tamar Ross. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Brandeis University Press, 2004.

[8]      Richard Feynman. ”The Value of Science.” In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman. Basic Books, 2000, pp. 141–149.

[9]      Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), Edward Hutchings (editor). Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character. W.W. Norton, 1985.

[10]    Christopher Hitchens. ”Bah, Hanukkah: The holiday celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness.” Slate, December 3, 2007.

[11]    Shaye J. D. Cohen. ”Hasmoneans, Hellenism and Us.” Forward, December 11, 2008.

[12]    Solomon Schimmel. The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth. Oxford University Press, 2008.

[13]    Marc Zvi Brettler. How to Read the Bible. Jewish Publication Society of America, 2005.

[14]    Mordechai Breuer. ‘The Study of Bible and the Primacy of the Fear of Heaven: Compatibility or Contradiction?’ In: Modern Scholarship in the Study of the Torah, p.161. (quoted in [7])

[15]    Louis Jacobs. We Have Reason to Believe. Vallentine, Mitchell; first edition 1957.

[16]    Louis Jacobs. Beyond Reasonable Doubt. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.

[17]    James Kugel. The Bible As It Was. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

[18]    James Kugel. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. Free Press, 2007.

[19]    Obituary, Rabbi Louis Jacobs. Daily Telegraph, July 7, 2006.

[20]    Mendel Shapiro. ‘Qeri’at ha-Torah by Women: A Halakhic Analysis’. Edah Journal, 1:2, Sivan 5761.

[21]    Yehuda Herzl Henkin. ‘Qeri’at ha-Torah by Women: Where We Stand Today’. Edah Journal, 1:2, Sivan 5761.

(This essay by Rabbi Marc D. Angel was published in the Jerusalem Post, December 12, 2025.)

With their military victory over the Hellenistic Syrians, the Maccabees entered the Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to the worship of God. According to Jewish tradition, they found one jar of pure oil with enough to last for one day. They lit the Menorah and the oil miraculously burnt for eight days, enough time to produce a new batch of pure oil.

When we tell this story year after year, we tend to imagine that the Maccabees found the beautiful gold Menorah of the Temple in its place, and they simply added the pure oil to it.

Yet, this would be truly remarkable. The Syrians had control of the Temple for a long stretch of time and they surely would have plundered all the valuable items within it. It would have been very unlikely for them to have left an impressive gold candelabrum in its place.

A midrash suggests that when the Maccabees entered the Temple, they indeed did not find the Menorah there. It had already been stolen by the enemies of the Jews. So the Maccabees improvised by putting together a make-shift Menorah made of spears. The midrash (Pesikta Rabbati 2:1) surmises that the spears had been left behind by the Syrian soldiers who fled in haste during their defeat.

So the Menorah of the original Hanukkah was made of the spears of our enemies!

This midrash is teaching a profound lesson. The very weapons with which our enemies sought to destroy us—those very weapons were used to spread the light of Judaism! The Maccabees were demonstrating that their victory was not merely successful in a military sense. Rather, it was also—and pre-eminently—a spiritual victory. The enemy’s spears were transformed into branches of the Menorah, bringing light into the Temple, restoring worship of the One true God.

The Haftarah that we read on Shabbat Hanukkah includes the famous words of the prophet Zechariah: “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit said the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

Not by spears, not by guns, not by missiles, not by terrorism, not by political intimidation: these weapons of our enemies will not prevail. We will transform their weapons into sources of light and peace. We will create a Menorah of righteousness that will inspire the world to a loftier and more spiritual vision.

To quote from the Passover Haggadah, “in each generation they arise to destroy us and the Almighty saves us from their hands.” The Jews seem always to have been the conscience of the nations—and many people do not like a conscience, especially a guilty conscience. They attack us because they are afraid of what we symbolize: a nation dedicated to One God, to an elevated morality, to social justice.

But the ongoing flourishing of Jews and Judaism is our unflinching testimony that the spirit of God will ultimately prevail among humanity. The spears of enmity and warfare will one day be transformed into branches of a Menorah, bringing light and hope to all human beings. May it be soon and in our days!