Parashat Qóraḥ: לְמׇשְׁחָה | ləmoshḥah

A tension: It takes money to maintain a sacred community, but gatekeeping that community behind a financial barrier risks cutting that community off from those who need it most. No one wants to say “You can’t come to Shabbat services unless you pay us $X first”, but also if nobody ever gives any money to the shul, the shul is going to cease to exist. And even if communal leaders truly believe that all should be equally welcome regardless of financial contribution, when fraught questions of communal practice and priorities inevitably arise, it’s hard to resist the gravity of the people keeping the lights on. If you alienate the people keeping things going, eventually things are going to stop.

Another tension: Sacred communities are, at their best, deep networks of interpersonal relationships, but paying for things tends to turn them into commodities [a]. I am sure I am not alone in occasionally encountering people with the attitude “I’ve paid my annual membership dues, what else do you want from me? Just do the work I paid you for and deliver a Jewish Community™ to me”. Building durable community is, definitionally, communal work. It is the work of connecting with other people and committing to them over time. It’s not work that can be outsourced; you can’t just buy a communal network off the shelf. Writing a check doesn’t mean you can write off the rest of this work.

[a] From my completely-outside-the-pertinent-academic-field perspective, the most famous study on this is probably Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini’s “A Fine Is a Price” from the January, 2000, issue (Vol 29, No 1) of The Journal of Legal Studies. Gneezy and Rustichini looked at a number of daycare centers where parents were sometimes late in picking up their kids. In some of these daycares, they introduced fines for such tardy parents, and unexpectedly found that the rates of parent tardiness increased instead of decreasing. One of their proposed explanations was that introducing these fees changed the situation from one of social norms — “If you stay late to look after my kid after hours, that’s a thing you’re doing out of human kindness, which I shouldn’t take advantage of” — to one of market exchange — “The fee is the price you think is fair to look after my kid later in the day, so everything is good as long as I pay it”.

And also: People have limited time and energy. Community doesn’t always love you back. Pouring yourself endlessly into a shul is a good way to burn out catastrophically and never recover.

G-d sets the Temple salaries in this week’s portion [b]. We get an extended discussion of the things that G-d is granting to Aharon and his sons לְמׇשְׁחָה | ləmoshḥah | “as a dedicated portion” (Bəmidbar 18:8). This dedicated portion comes from the offerings of the Israelite community — we are, in a sense, learning how the charitable contributions of the congregation should be apportioned out into various budgetary line items like priestly salaries. It’s easy to skim over this, but I think it’s important that we get this in direct speech from G-d Voidself. Finding the balance between these tensions — relying on money without gatekeeping, stratification, and exclusion; contributing financially without collapsing community into commodity — isn’t a flyover task. It’s difficult, maybe even impossible. It takes explicit intervention from G-d to develop the system presented here, and I’ve yet to attend a synagogue where G-d was a member of the board.

[b] Definitely the main attraction in these chapters; I can’t think of anything else with dramatic narrative interest...

We are going to fumble. We are going to get it wrong. We have to keep trying to come together, buildingly, anyway.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]

Parashat Bəha’alotəkha: תַּאֲוָה | ta’avah

The Israelites want choice, agency over the intimate matter of their diet; monotonous manna is not enough. Think about how management reacts when workers ask for an improvement in the condition of their work: Who doesn’t know the clichés of that outrage? We pay them more than enough to live on; they should be grateful to have such a good job in this economy! How can they ask for more when others don’t even have this? Instead of giving them a raise or more time off, let’s just throw a pizza party in the break room.

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Parashat Bəmidbar: כְּבַלַּע | kəvala

It’s time to get a move on.

For the whole book of Vayiqra — and, indeed, for the better part of the book of Shəmot, too — the recently freed Israelites have been camped out at the base of Mt Sinai. Now, in the book of Bəmidbar, they’re going to pull up their stakes and start trudging around the wilderness in earnest.

But first, of course, they have to learn how to pack up the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary where the very Presence of G-d resides.

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Parashat Bəhar-Bəḥuqotai: חוֹמָה | ḥomah

Every fifty years, the Torah tells us, we’re supposed to go back and start again. We’re to sound the trumpet on Yom Kipur and proclaim yoveil, the Jubilee, a time of release, rest, and restoration. If you have had to sell your family property — even if you sold it decades ago — it is to be returned to you. No matter how far off track you’ve gone, you get another chance. You get to try again.

Unless you live in a walled city, of course.

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Parashat Aḥarei Mot-Qədoshim: תּוֹעֵבָה | to’eivah

There is a story I read somewhere ages ago, the origin of which I can no longer track down, about a feminist philosopher presenting a paper at some academic conference or other. When it came time for the Q&A, some smarmy asshat in the audience piped up to demand, “OK, but what does this have to do with Heidegger?”. The presenter walked to the front of the stage and sat on the lip, to get as close as possible to this guy’s face, and then, with all her force, yelled, “WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HEIDEGGER? FUCK HEIDEGGER!”. She then stood up, walked back to the lectern, and calmly explained the relationship of her work to Heidegger’s in appropriately academic terms.

I think about this story all the time, and feel it especially acutely when it comes to this verse and others like it.

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Aḥarei Mot??? More like aḥarei i've slept for five million years

Hi friends! No One-Word Torah post today. I know what I want to write, but to do it to my satisfaction, I need to make it thru this like, 500-page dense academic text first, and shockingly I did not have time to do that the week of my opera reading. Will hopefully get a post out on Monday or Tuesday and then get back to regular posting on Fridays. Thanks for your understanding!

Parashat Shəmini: דָּרַשׁ | darash

Never content with simple answers where complex ones are available (we do have four different new year’s days, after all), the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud (in Qidushin 30a) identify three different midpoints: one midpoint if you count letters, one if you count words, and one if you count verses. One guess as to which of these I care about for this, the one-word Torah project.

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Pésaḥ VII: יִנָּחֵם | yinaḥeim

NḤM is a root that may be familiar in a somewhat different guise: It is the root that rings out twice at the start of the famous passage of consolation in Yəshayáhu 40:1 — “Comfort, comfort My people!” But here it’s inflected differently, and has less to do with consolation than with regret. In the form used in Shəmot 13:17, NḤM/yinaḥeim means to feel bad, frequently because of your own actions. It also carries connotations of feeling pity or compassion for — we might even say solidarity with — others. Why should G-d be afraid of this?

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Parashat Vayiqra: וַיִּקְרָא | vayiqra

This is not the Judaism that haSheim desired. G-d wanted us all to know the workings of the cult, even if we aren’t all qualified to run it — just as we might want everyone in our society to know the workings of the government (both its abstract principles and, via FOIA and related legislation, its specific records and actions) even if we aren’t all qualified to enact new legislation. Judaism is a public affair, for the whole community; the central mechanisms for interacting with G-d aren’t the secret knowledge of a select few.

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Parashat Pəqudei: עָשׂוּ | asu

My very first year in undergrad, I took a course in philosophy, which impressed on me, among other things, the ease of critique compared with the difficulty of construction. Poking holes in others’ work is much less challenging than building something sturdy enough to resist such poking. Skepticism is safe: If you don’t commit yourself to an idea before you’re convinced it’s flawless, you’ll never have to commit to anything, because nothing will ever be that securely established; by never going anywhere, you avoid the danger of crashing along the way.

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Parashat Vayaqheil: רֽוּחַ | rú’aḥ

Roaring or whispering, it takes a constant wind to see a project of any size thru to completion. There’s a common notion that most of the work of creation involves coming up with a really good idea. Once you know what your show or book or painting or movie or whatever is about, the rest is just a sort of tedious, mechanical setting down of the work that already exists in your head. But it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.

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Parashat Ki Tisa: יָדַֽעְנוּ | yadánu

When I first encountered the idea that the evil inclination was necessary for human flourishing in shul, it was presented in less sexual terms — I more often heard the evil inclination being described as the ultimate source of the drive to make art, engage in politics, advance the limits of human knowledge — and it left me a little confused. The impulse to write a sonata seemed very far removed from the impulse to lie, and I had trouble making sense of the connection. I think I am finally coming into an understanding.

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Parashat Tətzaveh: הַשֵּׁשׁ | hasheish

I am always thinking — worrying, even — about where stuff comes from. To get plain, undyed cloth with no particular embroidered ornamentation, you need all this vast apparatus of production, all these hours and hours of labor and years of learned skill. (There are few things as humbling as trying to spin thread even and fine enough to be woven into clothing using nothing more than a drop spindle and your own two hands.) I often read visions of idyllic, utopian futures where stuff just seems to pop magically into existence, as tho generated by a Star Trek replicator. No one has to harvest the fruit; no one has to lay sewage pipes; no one has to stitch together the pillowcases. But all of these things take work, and if you put that work out of mind, it’s all too easy to put the people who do that work out of mind as well. But without people doing that work, the work does not get done, and if the work does not get done, none of these things can exist.

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Parashat Tərumah: כַּפֹּֽרֶת | kapóret

Both the lid and the curtain separate and contain. But there is a key difference: On occasion — once a year on Yom Kipur, in fact — the High Priest can pass thru the curtain; at no point is anyone ever to remove the lid from the Covenant Ark. One is slightly permeable, the other is permanently sealed.

What does this teach us about atonement?

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