Puah and Shifra Leave Egypt Without Packing

The Underground Railroad was the most wide spread act of civil of disobedience in the 19th century. For 60 years before the Civil War a diverse group of people in every state in the union helped thousands of fugitive slaves escape from slave states in the south to freedom in the north. In most cases those moving fugitives from one station (safe house) to another knew only a few other underground agents in their immediate area. Individuals acted independently and developed their own strategies to care for and then move on each fugitive. It was an organization that had no established mode of communication or hierarchy, it held no meetings, and paid no dues except in beatings or sometimes death if they were caught. In the words of Fergus M. Bodewich in his study of the Underground Railroad, “Bound for Canann”, the men and women of the Underground “defied society’s standards on a daily basis, inspired by a sense of spiritual imperative, moral conviction, and especially on the part of African American activists, a fierce visceral passion for freedom.”

The above quote could easily be used also to describe the actions of the woman Puah and Shifra, the midwives to the Hebrews, at the beginning of the Book of Exodus. They are just as key to the development of the freedom that becomes the Exodus as the Underground was to the freedom of the fugitive slave. But, although the Exodus is hinged upon their actions, the experience of the midwives is markedly different from other characters in Exodus story. By closely examining these differences we find a startling alternative telling of the experience G-d and realization of the Exodus.

Pharaoh orders the midwives to “look at the birth stool” of Hebrew women and if the child is a boy, kill him. “But” the text says simply “the midwives feared G-d” and so let the boys live. This information, that they “feared G-d”, is repeated twice. This is all the information we receive regarding Puah and Shifra’s spiritual understanding and yet it is enough for us to begin examining their story. What is important is what the text does not say. In contrast to Moses, Puah and Shifra never see a burning bush, they hear no voice, receive no instructions, and are provided no miracles. In the Moses portion of the story G-d is a clear voice, commanding, authoritative, unavoidable. G-d’s will is demonstrative, calculated, and devastating in acts of physical confrontation. One does not have to guess at His will. His orders are given again and again (“let my people go”) and cannot be misconstrued.

The midwives’ story, however, speaks of an experience and understanding of G-d framed by relationship to others, specifically, in caring for and protecting of newborns. Their “fear of God” is placed only within this context. It is from this spiritual connection intuited by the midwives that they find a moral clarity so profound that they defy Pharaoh’s orders. We see this defiance in the specificity of the text (Exodus 1:17), when it says that the midwives feared G-d and “caused the boys to live” as opposed to simply “let the boys live.” “Causing” or nourishing these newborn lives is a well thought out and deliberate resistance. Puah and Shifra are following a model of spirituality that requires a conscious act of interpreting G-d’s moral law and acting in accordance with that conviction without G-d’s direct instruction or intervention.

This Puah and Shifra spiritual model is not unique to the midwives. Although the phrase “feared G-d” is not used in the case of Pharaoh’s daughter, in her actions we clearly see a repeat of the pattern – a type of civil disobedience based on an independent act of conscience. It has been noted as well,[i] that given the quoted size of the Israelite population (600, 000 men) that it would be impossible for two midwives to care for all the women who might be pregnant at any given time. Puah and Shifra are perhaps only the head of a guild of midwives, most or all of which are defying Pharaoh’s orders. In this light Puah and Shifra cannot be dismissed as an anomaly but instead are the only names we know of a vast underground movement of women protecting baby boys.

More than different ways of experiencing G-d, the Moses model and the Puah and Shifra model are essentially different opinions of how G-d’s will is fulfilled in the history. For Moses model, G-d directly intervenes in the lives of people. He speaks to Moses, He hardens Pharaoh’s heart, He brings plagues, and He ultimately liberates the people, “bringing them out of Egypt with a mighty hand.” For the Puah and Shifra model, however, G-d’s will is brought to fruition through human agency. These women are not being ordered by G-d to save baby boys, but instead they create independently within themselves a freedom from Pharaoh and choose voluntarily to commitment to a moral obligation that they believe comes from G-d. In Moses’ confrontations with Pharaoh, most of the action is concerned with getting free from Pharaoh but Puah and Shifra have already sought and found that freedom and progressed beyond it to a freedom, not of avoidance, but of embracing internal moral commitment. [ii]

This last feature is the most striking aspect of the Puah and Shifra model because this type of freedom – to take on obligation as opposed to fleeing from outside forces– takes the Israelites 40 years in the wilderness to achieve. The Israelites in their rebellion and their complaining are still thinking in terms of “freedom from.” They are still trapped within an Egyptian dynamic about who is really responsible for their lives. They blame Moses instead of taking ownership of their needs and actions. Puah and Shifra show us the end of Exodus before it has even begun.

One fugitive slave, Jim Pennington that escaped via the Underground Railroad in the 1820s once said being a slave created a mind lost in “moral midnight.” With all deference to Mr. Pennington, it is only from the mind that we can first be freed. This freedom may happen years before or years after physical freedom. As we contemplate Puah and Shifra and their ability to act in accordance to what God demands, we might ask ourselves “how free am I?” because if we cannot find it within ourselves to be free from the demands of others, we are still very much in Egypt.










[i] Women’s Torah Commentary
[ii] Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm draws a distinction between freedom from (negative freedom) exterior forces (the will of parent, the punishment of law) and freedom to (positive freedom) commit yourself to the obligations of your choice.

Singing

As I become more confident and secure in myself as a Jew in a way I miss how hard I was pushing myself during conversion. Everyday felt purposefully and I felt like I learned a library of knowledge every week.
So I guess I have to ask myself – how do I become the Jew I want to be as the landscape of who I am changes? I will not always be that conversion student – that person is drifting away. Part of me is ready to stand more on my own, take up a different role in this identity. But part of me wishes for it never to become mundane – that I never answer automatically to any Jewish question, that I always feel, as I did before, overcome by awe that I am in a conversation about Judaism. This makes me think of what I read last night from Heschel – that the words revealed in the Torah are not descriptive but indicative. A descriptive term evokes a known idea from our mind but an indicative word is an invitation to conversation. In other words, it requires a response. Heschel writes “The word is but a clue; the real burden of understanding is upon the mind and soul of the reader.”
I don’t want to ever be silent in Judaism. I want to be like my name, Shira, “songs”. I want to always be singing in response to it.

Poem by Heschel

God Follows Me Everywhere


God follows me everywhere-
spins a net of glances around me
shines upon my sightless back like a sun.

God follows me like a forest everywhere.
My lip, always amazed, are truly numb, dumb,
like a child who blunders upon an ancient holy place.

God follows me like a shiver everyewhere.
My desire is for rest; the demand within me is: Rise up,
See how prophetic visions are scattered in the streets.
I go with my reveries as with a secret
in a long corridor thought the world-
and sometimes I glimpse high above me, the faceless face of God.

God follows me in tramways, in cafes.
Oh, it is only with the back of the pupils of one’s eyes that
one can see
how secrets ripen, how visions come to be.

Love This

Dawkins vs. Gould

I just finished reading “Dawkins vs. Gould” by Kim Sterelny. I picked it up because it had been awhile since I read anything about evolutionary biology and I thought that this book, which outlines points of contention between Charles Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould, would be a good way to get up to date on the current understanding on how evolution functions.

The subject of the book is supposed to be about disagreements on the workings of natural selection, but there is a larger underlying agenda that reveals itself toward the end of the book. Sterelny has a point to make about science and in the last few chapters he finally gets around to it. Sterelny admits to believing as Dawkins does that “the natural sciences are our one great engine for producing objective knowledge” and that science is not just a light in the darkness it is “perhaps our only light.” Sterelny goes on to say that theisms of all types are just bad ideas about how the world works and that science can prove these ideas are bad. Finally, in a crescendo worthy of Bach, he states that “an evolutionary perspective on human life might even help us escape the poisoned chalice of religion.”

Sterelny thus proves two things. Self-righteousness is hardly the exclusive province of the religious. One does not need have a belief in God in order to be bloated with arrogance about how much he thinks he understands about the nature of reality. Second, even an atheist is provoked to poetry (“poisoned chalice” indeed) when speaking about religion.

Sterelny is allying himself with a modern belief that we can explain all aspects of the natural world including all of human experience through science. So I have a question in response.
It is currently believed that human ability to see in color evolved in a primate ancestor about 55 million years ago. This is based on studies of genetic materials from a variety of extinct and living species in our ancient lineage. (For an explanation on how this conclusion was reached see “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shobin, a book that is far more interesting and useful than “Dawkins vs. Gould.”) Color sight, rare in the animal kingdom, is a parallel development to flowers, fruits, and vegetables that began to differentiate by color due to competition for pollination. As the flora around us evolved we evolved a new way to see the world.

So we know the ‘when’ and the ‘why’ of how our sight came into its current form. But does this bit of science explain what happens when our eyes see a work of art and we are overwhelmed by its beauty? Does a change in DNA explain why we feel a sense of wonder when we see the ocean for the first time? Knowing the genetics of eye construction and thinking we can understand human experience is like reading a menu and thinking we’ve eaten the meal.

Stephen J. Gould, the foil for Dawkins in this unfortunate book, believed that science is not complete. “The humanities, history, and religion” Gould contended, “offer insight into the realm of value, independent of any scientific discovery.” Dawkins and Gould were (Gould passed away in 2002) the leading scientists in the field of evolutionary biology and yet even with the “great engine for producing objective knowledge”, as Sterelny would have it, they could not agree on the boundaries of science and to what extent science can help us understand ourselves. That, in itself, should give us pause.

Awe

Why Blog?

It’s interesting this blogging. Christopher Ricks, a professor at Boston University, has written extensively on the lyrics of Bob Dylan. Dylan, who is notoriously reclusive, writes very personal and revealing lyrics. “Dylan (repeatedly makes)” says Ricks “terrific self-exposures but at the same time remaining extraordinarily unknown.”

Sometimes I think this is the blog experience. We reveal in order to, in the end, conceal. After all, blogs are anonymous. We want our voice to be known, but we don’t want anyone to know it’s our voice. We are the opposite of Samuel Beckett, who in refusing an interview, said “I have no views to inter.” We have so many opinions we cannot hold them in but I'm not sure we want to claim them either.

What makes a good drash (Hebrew meaning ‘explanation’)? I’ll give you a secular example.

I recently visited Harper’s Ferry with my best friend. We were sitting outside the building where John Brown made his last stand in 1859. He had to decide whether he would fight to the death or allow himself to be captured. (Ultimately he was captured alive). My friend commented that Brown had to make a 10-10-10 decision. Just the day before she had read a little bit of a book called ’10-10-10’ the premise of which is that decisions should be made considering how that decision will affect the next 10 minutes, next 10 months, and next 10 years of your life.
John Brown spent the 3 months of his incarceration writing letters about abolition and his popularity in the North soared along with his cause. When he was executed he handed a note to the executioner which read “I now believe that the crimes of this nation will not be washed away but with blood.”

Clearly the fact that John Brown’s words and deeds come down to us today means that he choose the right 10. He looked past his immediate death (10 minutes or 10 months) and made his decisions based on what his actions would mean in 10 years.

This is a great drash because:
- it provides a new tool to evaluate the story (10-10-10)
- using that tool allows us to see the story in a new way
- after hearing 10-10-10 being used in this way, we cannot help but think of our own decisions in this same way.In other words, the drash illuminates both the story and our own way of thinking. Now that’s a good drash.

When I toured Jewish Theological Seminary in February a met a student who shared with me a wonderful insight on a Torah portion she had learned from her friend just the night before. She said “I am so fortunate to have smart and insightful friends.” I too share that good fortune.
Thanks A-M!

3rd D'var Torah

What Do Moses and Roger Casement Have in Common?

It was called the scramble for Africa. In the 19th century the great European powers, England, Spain, and France, had established huge networks of colonies across the world that funded their vast empires. Belgium had yet to claim their piece of the undeveloped world and time was running out. The only area yet untouched was sub-Saharan Africa. So in 1884 the Belgium grabbed an enormous swath of land, 72 times larger than their own country and named it the Belgian Congo.

The purpose of establishing such colonies was to take the natural resources of the land as efficiently as possible and sell them at a much greater price in Europe. For the Congo this meant precious metals, ivory and rubber trees. “Efficiently” can be translated as slavery. The Belgians enslaved the local populations establishing monthly quotas for each village. In order to ensure the slaves were adequately motivated the quotas were initially set above what slaves could achieve. When a village failed to reach its quota, which it inevitably did, the people were beaten. If village failed again, one of the children or women was taken to the center of the village, forced to kneel in front of a tree stump and her hands hacked off with a machete. The wound was quick cauterized to prevent the victim from bleeding to death but the point was adequately made and the slaves would then work literally until they dropped. The average slave in the Belgian Congo survived less than four years.[1]
Thousands of young ambitious European men poured into this wealth making enterprise each year. A few years working in the bush under hideous conditions could lead to a substantial position with a Belgian firm in Antwerp where trading in diamonds, gold, and rubber ensured a very comfortable life style. It was into this environment that a young Irishman, Roger Casement, arrived in 1898. Not long after he landed on the shores of the Congo, he witnessed a slave being beaten to death. From that moment forward Casement kept a secret diary of the atrocities of the Congo. He took pictures of children’s amputated hands and the backs of slaves that had been so severely whipped that it was impossible to find a centimeter of skin that was not scarred. He took all of these with him when he returned to Europe and he submitted a report to the British government telling the story of the Congo. He worked with other human rights advocates like E.D. Morrell to gain access to the press. When these stories were published the outcry was so great, the Belgians were forced to stop all such practices in Congo and finally withdrew from the continent all together. It is estimated that between 5 and 8 million Congolese died from exhaustion, beatings, and starvation during the 12 years that the Belgians controlled the Congo.
Why of all the people who witness this brutality was Casement the only one to act? He had two things working in his favor. He was gay and he was Irish. That is not to say that being gay or being Irish confers some higher morality. They do not. But discrimination against both of these groups was profound. Casement was constantly reminded by the British and Belgians he worked with that the Irish were an inferior race. More than that, he knew if his homosexuality was ever discovered, he would be treated even more savagely than the Congo slaves.[2] He was an outsider that could never hope to be an insider. So when he saw that slave being beaten, he identified with the slave, not the white European delivering the beating.
The story of Casement and the story of Moses are similar. Moses also witnessed a man being beaten and rescued the man even though to do so endangered the privileges he enjoyed as an Egyptian. Like Casement, although Moses was in Pharaoh’s household, his Israelite origins prevented him from having an uncomplicated identity. He could have reacted to this, as people sometimes do, by being more Egyptian than the Egyptians but he did not. He chose to remember how he was different and let that difference be a factor in he who he was and what he did.
We often think of the commandment of “be kind to the stranger[3], for you were a stranger in Egypt” as an appeal to protect vulnerable groups within a population. The stories of Moses and Casement, however, teach us the power of the perspective of the stranger. In both cases, only these two men were shocked by the brutality of their societies. Those who “belonged”, those who were in the majority, had long ago accepted such practices as normal. Allowing strangers, therefore, to live among us and to share their perspectives can be a measure of our willingness to look at ourselves and to uncover our own worst impulses. Listening to the voice of a minority can be a gateway to safeguarding our essential humanity.

These two ways of seeing the commandment to be “kind to the stranger” are fused together. One is reflective of our morality in protecting a vulnerable group and the other is allowing the unique viewpoint of the stranger to shape our understanding of ourselves. The value of being separate in this way is particularly interesting because Judaism is a religion that also commands that we be “separate so that (we) may be holy.” These two commandments taken together make separateness, instead of being alienating, instructive of our deepest selves and a powerfully way to connect spiritually. Our religion’s story begins with the separation of light from darkness and our most important holiday is Shabbat, kept separate so that it may be holy.

It’s the experience of Shabbat that gives us the last and most important key to our understanding of Moses’ and Roger Casement’s actions. Shabbat is kept separate so that we can connect in a special way with God and with each other. Separate in order to be connected is the spiritual lesson. Casement’s, (and Moses’), perspective came from the fact that he was very much an outsider but at the moment that he saw that slave being beaten, he simply saw a man suffering and dying. He didn’t see the man’s race or social status, he just saw another human being. A man just like him. Being separate from the community of his co-workers allowed him to see the basic humanity of the stranger and this made him connected in the most important way possible – to that of the suffering of another – and to use that connection to act in a holy way - to end that suffering. Separateness has no value unless it allows us to surpass the mundane and connect with something far more significant than our individual selves. The most crucial decision we make is how we choose to be separate from people and how we chose to be connected to them.

[1] The story of the Belgian Congo is told in the book “King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hoschild.
[2] Roger Casement kept extensive diaries during his lifetime and often wrote how terrified he was of sexuality becoming known. Unfortunately his fears were well founded. In 1916 Casement was arrested by the British government for his involvement in an Irish attempt to gain independence. At the time of his arrest the British had seized all of Casement’s private papers and subsequently discovered his relationship with several men. The judges deciding his fate read these diaries during closed court proceedings. Casement was convicted of treason and sentenced to hang. A high profile group of government and church officials rallied to his causing asking the British government for clemency in light of Casement’s humanitarian work. The British government reacted by circulating selected diary entries among his supporters. Following these revelations his advocates withdrew their petition and Casement was executed on August 3, 1916.
[3] I use the word “stranger” in this essay to denote any person who is alienated from majority because of race, ethnicity, national, sexuality, or any other characteristic.

What is this aleph?

Tonight I go to my first Hebrew class. I can't help but think of Rabbi Akiba who was also a late starter with Hebrew at the age of 40. He sat in a class of little childern to learn because he cared more about learning than pride or apperances. My his memory be for a blessing.

In a letter from Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed 1855

As a country we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." Now it practically reads, "all men are created equal except Negroes." When the Know Nothings take control it will read, "all men are created equal except Negros and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this I should perfer immigrating to a country that makes no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where hypocrisy can be taken pure without the base alloy of hypocracy.

You'd never know it by this blog but I'm actually pretty quiet in person. I really make up for it in print. Given the length of these entries I'm not sure any will read this. But I will carry on.....

As seen in the Reading List at the bottom of the blog I'm currently reading "God in Search of Man" by Heschel. I realized by page 3 that I should only underline the sentances I don't want to come back and re-read because otherwise I'm underlining almost every word.

He's deadly accurate when it comes to what it is to live in the modern secular world without religion. He says "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use. To Bacon we owe the formulation "Knowledge is power." This is how people are urged to study: knowledge is success. We do not know any more how to justify in value except in terms of expediency."

More to follow. BTW, tomorrow I'm off to Diversity Advisory Council for my corporation. More about that later.

First D'var Torah - About Passover

In 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus. Within hours, local African American leaders organized and elected a 26-year old preacher to head a city wide boycott of the bus system. This preacher was named Martin Luther King, Jr. and that evening, King stepped forward to give a speech intended to convince thousands of blacks in Montgomery that a boycott was the only way to secure their rights even at the risk of violence and losing their livelihoods. “If we are successful”, King said to the crowd, “historians will say that ‘this great people…infused new meaning and new dignity into the veins of civilization.’ This is our challenge and our responsibility.”

As I read these lines recently in a book about the bus boycott I heard the echo of one word over and over: Exodus, Exodus, Exodus. When King speaks we can hear Moses’ voice telling Pharaoh not just “let my people go,” but “let my people go so that they may worship Me.”For the freedom that both King and Moses speak of is not freedom for freedom’s sake but instead a freedom framed by obligation that has the power to transform an entire community. King could have seen the struggle in Montgomery in narrow terms - that of a segment of society rebelling against a local injustice but he instinctively knew that true freedom does not restrict itself to a solitary fight. The only lasting freedom is a freedom granted to those who are black and those who are white, to those who “belong” and those who are “strangers”, to those who are poor and those who are powerful. These are Jewish ideas that traveled from Egypt thousands of years ago to find flower in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama.

When this is published, it will be March – a time half way between February (Black History month) and April (the month in which Passover takes place). Being equidistance from these two points in time, gives us an opportunity to consider the unique way in which an American Jew can fulfill the commandment to see oneself has having personally been freed from Egypt. We American Jews have an experience of slavery that is double layered – that of theology (the Exodus story) and that of our nation’s history. Although the history of slavery and civil rights in America is freighted with pain and shame, we can use those struggles to inspire us to see ourselves as a newly freed people.


- We can learn to thirst for freedom like Harriett Tubman, who when asked how she had the courage to escape slavery said, “I made up my mind that I had a right to liberty or death and I decided if I could not have the one, it was going to be the other.”
- We can learn to cry out for justice from William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the 19th century U.S. abolitionist movement, who declared, “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice…I will not retreat and I will be heard.”
- We can learn how to pray from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who said as he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma “Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying."

Star Date 5769

It feels like I'm launching into a new universe. This is my first entry....
This blog is for the posting of everything I am learning in Torah study and to invite others to add their comments, share their excitement (and/or frustrations) about Torah study, to post comments on my D'var Torah and submit your own to share.

For inspiration in Torah Study this is from the Sefet Emet:

“'If you walk in my ordinances': the meaning of this is that the human being is referred to as walking, but the ministering angels are referred to as standing. Because the angels know and understand the meaning of the mitzvoth and they have no need to labor in understanding them. Therefore their reward is not great. Not so for human beings, who labor intensely in Torah and even thought they do not arrive at a full understanding, they fulfill the mitzvoth because they have been commanded by God, and therefore their reward is greater.”