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Part of our series,Israel at a Crossroads—Expanding the Conversation

With Rabbi Matt Berkowitz, President-elect, The Schechter Institutes, Inc.

On January 29, 1902, Boris Schatz wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl about establishing an art school in Palestine; in 1903, the two met in Vienna and Schatz pleaded the case for a revolution of visual art that would accompany the nascent Zionist Movement.  He received Herzl’s blessing, and that meeting led to the founding of the Bezalel School in 1906.  Art became a powerful language for the national aspirations of the Jewish people. 

In this session, we explored classical works of pre-State and Israeli art that reflect the ethos of the Zionist vision.  Visual art and the artists behind these creations were in animated conversation with classical and modern Zionist voices.  We reflected on the extent to which the material artistic culture of Israel reflects and engages compelling spiritual and national visions of Zionism and a State for the Jews, in light of current events and the ways artists and cultural institutions are responding to this moment. 

Rabbi Matt Berkowitz is the incoming president of Schechter Institutes, Inc., Jerusalem, and is an artist and founding partner of Kol HaOt, a studio project that weaves art and Jewish learning together in compelling and cutting-edge ways.  He was ordained by and worked for 91�첥 of America for 24 years. 

About the Series

This series builds on the discussions from 91�첥’s Israel at the Crossroads convening, bringing 91�첥 alumni into conversation about the evolving challenges of Israeli identity, culture, and collective resilience. Through explorations of art, spirituality, and national memory, we will consider how Israeli society navigates questions of belonging, pluralism, and meaning in this complex moment. By engaging voices from across disciplines, Expanding the Conversation seeks to illuminate the ways individuals and communities are shaping Israel’s cultural and spiritual landscape today. 

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In Commemoration of Yom Hazikkaron (Israel’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror)

With Dr. Alan Cooper, Elaine Ravich Professor of Jewish Studies, 91�첥

This session was generously sponsored by Yale Asbell, 91�첥 Trustee.

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Timely Torah, Timeless Insights

Join 91�첥’s renowned faculty to learn about their current work and greatest passions. Drawing on their expertise, scholars will offer inspiring learning and expose us to new ideas and insights that help us connect the Jewish past with the Jewish future. 

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And then the pandemic changed our lives, and transformed our relationship to these previously enigmatic Torah readings. What captured my attention as I turned to Parashat Metzora this year was the idea of the affliction of home. The idea of home, which many of us consider to be a place of refuge and sanctity, is turned on its head as Torah presents us with a case of domestic disease.

Leviticus 14:34–35 teaches, “When you enter the land of Canaan that I give you as a possession, and I inflict an eruptive plague upon a house in the land you possess, the owner of the house will come and tell the priest . . .” This triggers a series of directives in which the priest examines the plague; if the plague is determined to be serious, the house is quarantined for seven days; another examination takes place; and then a process of remediation occurs. What are we to make of this curious phenomenon and ritual?

Basing his commentary on Leviticus Rabbah 17:6, Rashi, the prolific medieval commentator, writes, “This was because the Amorites concealed treasures of gold in the walls of their homes during the whole forty years that the Israelites were wandering in the desert; and in consequence, the plague was sent so the Israelites would pull down their walls and discover the hidden treasure.” Far from being a punishment then, this domestic leprosy is, at its heart, a blessing. It strikes homes with the aim of helping their inhabitants discover treasure that the Canaanites tried to conceal.

The Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, has a visceral reaction to Rashi’s commentary. He responds,

Now really! Did the Creator of the universe need to resort to such contortions? Why would God have given the Canaanites the idea of hiding [things in the walls] so that Israel would have to knock down these houses!

The real meaning of these afflictions of houses is in fact quite wondrous; a demonstration that Israel’s holiness is so great that they can also draw sanctity and purity into their dwelling places. Scripture tells us, “A stone will cry out from the wall and a wooden beam will answer it” (Hab. 2:11), regarding a person’s sin, to which the walls of the house bear witness (Arthur Green, The Language of Truth, 173–174).

According to the commentary of the Sefat Emet, our moral and ethical behavior affects our surroundings, and, more intimately, shapes the physical structure of our home. The walls of our sacred dwelling places potentially absorb the consequences of unethical and immoral behavior.

The Sefat Emet teases out a beautiful message: Torah demonstrates a higher level of holiness that is accessible to the Israelite people upon entering the Land of Israel. I would call it the “sensitivity of sanctity.” We are called to live up to our greatest morals and principles. It is through this virtue that we acquire and maintain possession of the Land of Israel. As inhabitants of Israel we must be attentive, vigilant, and caring.

And apropos Yom HaShoah, Arthur Green goes even further, writing,

. . . [A] Jew living after 1945 cannot hear this RaSHI comment quoted without recalling the tales of Jews in Poland and elsewhere being asked by their gentile neighbors, as they were led out to the slaughter: “Where did you hide the gold?” In the face of this horrible memory, the aggadic tradition underlying RaSHI here serves to protect us from any moral superiority that our status as victims might give us. Under different circumstances, we are reminded, we might have been the ones to go searching for other people’s treasures (ibid.).

Indeed, it is a poetic commentary on the idea of home. In Judaism, we consider home to be a mikdash me’at, a sanctuary in miniature. And if so, it should be a place where we try harder—where we have aspirational visions of being the best we can be. Home is not just built of construction materials such as wood, stones, and steel; a home is also built with compassion, love, and an ethical compass. Without soulful work, our home will indeed be plagued with argument, corruption, and isolation. This holds true for both our personal, private home as well as our national home.

As we celebrate Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day, and Israel engages in the hard work of putting together a stable government in the coming weeks and months, may the moral, aspirational vision of Torah guide our blueprint.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

At the emotional heart of contemporary Jewish life lies a connection to the State of Israel. This week, the entire Jewish world celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the modern miracle called Israel. The annual celebration of Israel’s independence, the coupling of Yom Hazikkaron (State of Israel Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’atzma’ut (State of Israel Independence Day) is the great modern addition to the Jewish calendar. Celebrating Israel each year focuses our attention on the roles of very real and very imperfect human beings in the making of Jewish history and Jewish destiny. Unlike the other sacred occasions on Emor’s list, which describe divine acts and their impact on humanity, Yom Ha’atzma’ut salutes the acts of people and raises the question of the impact of those acts on God.

That may sound like a radical piece of theology, but in fact Jewish thought has long imagined a divine-human partnership in which the actions of either partner have a real impact on the other partner. From the early Rabbis to the Kabbalists to the Hasidim to the Musar Movement, classical Jewish thinkers have always allowed for a human role in bringing about events of cosmic significance. To my mind, and to the minds of many others, the birth of an independent Jewish state in the land of Israel is the central example of this partnership at work in our time. How fortunate we are to live in this extraordinary moment!

While deeply encouraging of the concept that ordinary people can, at key moments, do extraordinary things, our tradition’s theology of divine-human partnership carries significant risks. The efforts of people, however well-intentioned, can certainly distort any reasonable understanding of God’s wishes. Human exuberance can, and too often does, yield results that dramatically dishonor God’s name. We’re all familiar with the litany of examples in which religiously motivated human excess has resulted in sheer horror and self-evident profanation of God’s honor. That’s the dangerous side of Emor’s implied partnership. We the people too often get carried away.

The Torah itself offers a corrective in the form of a well-known verse that immediately precedes the sacred calendar I’ve just described. Leviticus 22:32 reads: “Do not profane My holy name, rather sanctify Me among the people of Israel; I the Lord who make you holy.” The Talmudic tradition emphasized the public nature of this call for holiness, deriving many of the rules regarding minyan from this verse. In the glow of our celebration of Israel’s sixtieth, the Torah’s focus on honoring God’s name through visible, outward, and public behavior takes on a new light. The evolving miracle of modern Israel serves as a most extraordinary arena for the struggle to conquer profanity by honoring God’s name visibly and publicly. In classical Jewish terms, the possibility of hillul hashem  (the profaning of God’s name) is meant to be outdone by acts of kiddush hashem (the sanctification of God’s name).

The State of Israel, for all of its challenges and, yes, missteps and mistakes, scores extremely well on the kiddush hashem scale. Israel’s commitment to democracy and human dignity, scientific and cultural achievements, and determined defense of the Jewish people around the world, all bring honor to our tradition, our people, and God. This week and this Shabbat we celebrate the great Jewish miracle of our time. Perhaps because of this miracle’s strong human component, we celebrate a work in progress, an ongoing effort to sanctify God’s holy name in a deeply unredeemed world. Our task as lovers and supporters of Israel is to stand on guard against the ever-present temptation of hillul hashem, and to keep the focus on Emor’s demand that we as Jews engage endlessly and eternally in actions that bring honor to God’s name. That shared commitment makes this a truly sacred occasion. Hag Sameah to us all!

Scholars argue over why this law is included in the Torah, and though some argue that the primary concern is for the animal’s feelings, the medieval commentator B’khor Shor argues: “It is not because God pities the animal but in order that the people of Israel should not practice cruel habits.” Human beings should learn kindness and compassion from this law and it should become a part of them.

Alas – history shows that Jews have not always embodied this value, and that our persecutors have often made a mockery of the Torah’s sense of compassion. A midrash on the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem has Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses pleading before God not to keep the Jews in exile. Toward the end of the midrash, Moses cries out:

“‘O captors, as you live, if you kill, do not kill with a cruel death; do not bring on them total extermination; do not kill a son in the presence of his father, or a daughter in the presence of her mother. For the time will come when the Holy One will requite you.’ But the wicked Chaldeans [Babylonians] did even worse things: they put a child in its mother’s bosom and said to the father, ‘Up and kill it.’ As the mother wept, her tears fell on the child, while the father raised the child’s head [to cut his throat].

Moses went on defying the Holy One: ‘Master of the Universe, in Your Torah You wrote: “Whether it be a cow or ewe, you shall not kill it and its young both in one day.” (Lev. 22:28) But have not mothers and sons been killed again and again? Yet you remain silent!'” (Lamentations Rabbah, proem 24)

The midrash finally has our matriarch Rachel begging God, based on her own sufferings, not to banish the Israelites – her children – because of idolatry. And God responds: “For your sake, O Rachel, I will restore Israel to their place.” The midrash then quotes Jeremiah (31:16):

“Restrain your voice form weeping,
Your eyes from shedding tears; 
For there is a reward for your labor… 
There is hope for your future… 
Your children shall return to their country.”

We celebrate this week not only Shabbat, but Yom Ha–atz–maut – Israel’s Independence Day. And while nothing can make up for the slaughter of millions of our people throughout history, we have hope today that most of our ancestors never lived to see: a reborn Israel – by no means perfect – but a place to which Rachel’s children have returned and in which they are living full lives as Jews. As those of us who have visited or lived in Israel know, it breathes according to the Jewish festivals enumerated in our parashah, and it speaks in the language of the Torah. And in its 55 years as a state, and before that as a growing settlement, it has tried, in numerous ways, to live according to the compassionate and ethical ways of the Torah. It is not easy to live that way when you are surrounded by enemies, and Israel has not always been able to reach the high standards set by the Torah and our tradition. But Israel has tried, and continues to try mightily to live as a country which is just and compassionate, and which honors the dignity of its people. We can only pray that changes in the Middle East will make it easier for Israel to live up to its full potential to be a “light unto the nations.”

The publication and distribution of Rabbi Melissa Crespy’s commentary on Parashat Emor are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (z”l) Hassenfeld.

On the fifth of Iyyar, Jews and Israelis will once again join to celebrate the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, without a doubt, one of the most conspicuous miracles in all of Jewish history. The unprecedented devastation of the Holocaust did not end the millennial saga of the Jewish people. A new center of gravity for a traumatized world Jewry arose in the very same land where once two Jewish commonwealths had flourished in succession. Bound as well by language and religion to its predecessors, the third Jewish commonwealth was quintessentially modern and western in its embrace of democracy, the rule of law and the importance of higher education. Religious and secular Jews agreed that Israel augured the dawn of national redemption. Some fifty-six years later, the grandeur of that achievement and the power of that hope remain undiminished, no matter how problematic the compromises a harsh environment has exacted.

But it is of the inconspicuous miracles which surround us that I care to speak. How few of us are animated by the spirit of William Blake!

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower; 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, 
And Eternity in an hour. 

For the religious temperament, the expanses of space and time manifest themselves in miniature. Our parashah opens with a brief discourse on birthing, not a state or nation, to be sure, but a child. Ritual gives voice to reality. Giving birth renders the mother impure; in the case of a boy for thirty-three days, in the case of a girl for sixty-six. The loss of bodily fluids, especially blood, accounts for the mother’s impurity. Every delivery skirts the borders of death. The ultimate value of the Torah is life, making its polar opposite, a human corpse, the ultimate source of impurity. The emission of certain fluids like menstrual blood and semen constitute lesser degrees of impurity because their loss is regarded as a temporary diminution of life. Hence, the mother of a newborn child was excluded from the precincts of the Tabernacle or Temple.

Impurity, then, is a measure of danger. The extended state of impurity of the postpartum mother expressed a deep awareness of the risks of childbirth. Before the advent of modern medicine, all too many women shared the fate of Rachel who died while giving birth to her second son, Benjamin. Every successful delivery, from which mother and child emerged healthy, was deemed an act of God. That is why the birthing mother at the end of her ordeal brought a burnt offering to the Tabernacle as well as a sin offering (12:6-7). Whereas the latter signified the end of her impure state, the former embodied a joyful gesture of thanksgiving to the Almighty for an instance of unmerited grace. Despite a planet overrun by humans, I still find the birth of every child a mystery wrapped in holiness, which is why I have held onto the words of the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, written more than a quarter century ago:

Four billion people on this earth, 
But my imagination is the way its 
always been: bad with numbers. 
It is still moved by particularity. 

The birth of an infant prompted the rabbinic imagination to envision God as an artist without peer. Appropriately, it selected a verse from Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving after God had ended her state of barrenness. As she returned Samuel, her young son to the Tabernacle at Shiloh for a lifetime of service to God, she broke forth in exultation:

My heart exults in the Lord; 
I have triumphed through the Lord. 
I gloat over my enemies; 
I rejoice in Your deliverance. 

There is no holy one like the Lord, 
Truly, there is none beside You; 
There is no rock like our God. (I Samuel 2:1-2) 

The midrash seized upon the common biblical word “tzur,” rock, in the final clause for its move, a word familiar to us from the medieval Hanukkah hymn Maoz Tzur,” The Redoubtable Rock of My Salvation.” It is also the only appellation for God to appear in Israel’s declaration of independence: “With confidence in the Rock of Israel [Isaiah 30:29], we affix our signature in testimony to this declaration..”. In Hebrew the words for rock and artist, tzur and tzayar, are closely related, though tzayar is a formation that is post-biblical. The verbal resemblance allows the midrash to reread Hannah’s praise of God to say, “There is no artist like our God.” And with that shift, the midrash spins a web of comparisons that highlights God’s uniqueness. The creation of a child is an incomparable work of art. Thus, a mortal artist paints on a hard wall, while the more challenging material used by God is the liquid in the mother’s womb. Unlike God, mortal artists cannot imbue their portraits or statues with life. Nor do they offer praise to their creators. Rather, it is the artists who lavish their handiwork with encomiums. In contrast, the products of God’s creativity fill the world with hymns of praise to God. Finally, the fetus emerges from a single drop, whereas mortal artists need an abundance of paints and colors to produce their human likeness. In short, the birth of a single healthy child dwarfs the artifice of the greatest of human artists (Tanhuma, Tazri·a 2).

The celebration of God’s artistic prowess, moreover, invests the flesh with sanctity. The body is no less holy than the soul. To make it the object of our attention does not reduce us to crass materialists, but merely enlarges the canvas of God’s presence in our lives. The litany of berakhot (praises for God’s beneficence) with which we start each day, sustains our wonderment at the sundry miracles that reactivate our dormant bodies. We take nothing for granted. A disposition of gratitude shrinks our sense of self-importance, enabling us to appreciate the promise of every single moment.

The publication and distribution of Dr. Schorsch’s commentary on Parashat Tazri’a – M’tzora are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (z”l) Hassenfeld.