WHAT WOULD MOSHE DO?

This week, we begin the fourth book of the Torah known as Numbers, or in the Hebrew, B’midbar. B’midbar means desert. At the heart of this word is a three-letter root, dalet, bet, reesh or just think DBR. It is a root which means “word” and gives us the Hebrew for the Ten Commandments or more accurately, the Ten Words, Aseret HaDibrot. But the root should also trigger another verbal formulation with which you are familiar from the seder. That would be the word dever, which means pestilence, that is, a fatal epidemic disease. Is it possible that the same root which gives us the word “word,” is the same root that gives us the word, disease or pestilence? There are many linguists who think the meanings so diverse that the two words must stem from different roots. But the phonetic similarity is so strong that the two words, davar and dever, demand our attention and in the very least, some meaning, even if only mystical, that would bind the two together.

We are all in some sort of wilderness right now, beset with difficult questions. How do we move forward? Do we dare move forward? What risks are we willing to assume in opening New York too soon? What risks are we willing to carry in remaining closed too long? Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, recently pointed out that with declining GDP comes a decrease in life expectancy. So although it is clear that there is a connection between pestilence and one’s health, there is no denying the connection between the economy and one's health.

We should all feel for those whose paychecks suddenly dissipated, virtually overnight, and have been left with a host of anxieties about how to pay the mortgage, or for food, the Internet, electricity, academic tuition, and so forth. An unwelcome and dreaded party crasher has turned our lives upside down and thrown us into a wilderness and the question is will we find dever, pestilence, or davar, the words that guide us through the wilderness, this unprecedented crisis, this midbar?

Michael Schlank, president of Midway Jewish Center, and Mark Gelfand, chair of the Board of Trustees, have come up with a slogan to help us navigate life at this time. It is this: What
Would Moshe Do? Think of the acronym WWMD: What Would Moshe Do?

W          Wash your hands.

W          Wear your mask.

M          Manage the risks. We can't bring them down to zero, but the precautions we take will minimize the risks we face. And

 D          Distance yourself from others.

The way to survive the wilderness, the midbar, is to avoid the dever, the pestilence, but find the davar, the guiding word. We can do this. Just ask yourself “What Would Moshe Do?” and each of us will make it through the wilderness we now find ourselves in. Covid-19 isn’t going away so quickly. But we are going to have to continue living our lives. We will do that and we will find the way to cross this wilderness to get to the Promised Land.

Shabbat Shalom, everyone, and take care of yourselves.

GIVE THE GAIA A BREAK

The other day, realizing that I had been in my study for way too many hours, I ventured into the back yard for a few breaths of fresh air.  It was a gorgeous day. The temperature was in the mid-sixties, a few wisps of cloud drifted in the sky, and a light breeze filtered through the air. It was hard to believe that with so beautiful a day as it was, there were many people succumbing to the Corona virus throughout our nation.

But what has been a tragedy for human life on earth, has turned out to be quite a blessing for the earth itself. Satellite photography has ascertained a dramatic drop in air pollution since populations around the world have been subject to lockdown. The smog has dissipated, smoke-spewing factories have gone dark, and auto exhaust has decreased to a bare minimum. Air quality in areas as diverse as Milan, New Delhi, Jakarta, the Himalayas and elsewhere have dramatically improved. I guess this is what one refers to as the silver lining in an otherwise period of darkness.

This Shabbat, we bring the third book of the Torah, Vayikra or Leviticus, to a close. We do so by studying a double portion: B’har-B’hukotai. The portion begins with a record of God speaking to Moshe at Mount Sinai. God instructs Moshe to speak to the Children of Israel as follows:

Ki tavo’u el ha’aretz

When you finally enter the land

Asher ani notein lakhem

The land which I am giving to you

V’shavta ha’aretz shabbat lAdonai

Make sure you grant the land rest, a real Shabbat for the Lord (Leviticus 25:2).

It really is an extraordinary use of the term Shabbat, which would typically apply to human beings. Humans work six days a week and then rest on the seventh, but now, the Torah goes on to explain, the Israelites are to work the land for six years and leave it fallow in the seventh. This mitzvah is known as Shemitah, which means “release.” It releases the earth from is unending cycle of production.

To give the land a Shabbat is almost to treat it as a fellow human being. It’s a dynamic that underscores the intimacy with and respect that the Israelites were to have for their new land.  They treat it like a virtual human being that requires rest in order to be productive. And we find this intimacy between humans and non-human subjects among all those who take their profession seriously. It’s like BB King and Lucille, which is the name he gave all his guitars. It’s like the gardeners who speak lovingly to their flowers, so that they grow to their fullness. It’s like the sailor who sails a ship that is not an it, but a she. So, too, our ancestors worked an earth that they knew from the start was a living thing, and this before science told us just how alive the earth was, brimming with nutrients, microorganisms and species beyond number.

When we speak of earth as having a Shabbat, we speak in a very spiritual vein. It almost borders on an idolatry in which nature is elevated to a stature it does not deserve.  Then again, if we think not of earth as the holy dirt of Israel, but rather as the distinct planet of a solar system, knowing just how rare this planet of ours is in the whole scheme of the universe (there seems to be nothing quite like it), would that not be proof positive to treat it with a deference, if not reverence, due something as rare and precious as this little blue planet?

If there was any doubt about the pressures we place on the planet where we live, working it as we do day-and-night, it should now be very clear seeing how its atmosphere and air quality improved once we ceased our own labors. Sadly, all this became transparent by virtue of a terrible pandemic that forced us all inside. God never intended the Earth to rest like this. But maybe God is sending us a message of sorts.

Once we have emerged from this pandemic and return to a life that we are more familiar with, perhaps this experience will have taught us something about how better to interface with our home planet. The Greeks called her Gaia. It’s a word that we would borrow for words like geography. And like our Torah of old instructed us, every now and then, you gotta give a Gaia a break.

Shabbat Shalom Everybody. Have a peaceful and healthy Shabbat. And let’s remember to treat the earth as lovingly as we would our home, because after all, it is our home.

ON VIRUSES AND HOLINESS

This week’s Torah portion, parashat Emor, begins with an instruction to a special group of people, the kohanim or priests, to keep far away from any people lest they become contaminated, which ought to strike an eerily familiar note to all of us now living through the pandemic of 2020. What makes it even more uncanny is the fact that the people whom they must particularly avoid are the dead. And these days, with a prohibition against hospital visitation, even for a spouse, a sibling or a child who may dying (has v’Shalom), and with graveside funerals attended by no more than ten people, and usually fewer, and with shivahs conducted in cyberspace but not in the space of a living room, dining room, or perhaps the most important space in the home, the kitchen, we have all become the priests of old, avoiding death, in a world where this virus has already cut short the lives of 77,000 Americans, 21,000 New Yorkers alone.

For some of us, the ancient prohibition imposed on the kohanim is odd. After all, isn’t it a mitzvah to visit the dying, to sit with them in prayer, to attend to the dead? And don’t we have in our consciousness great religious figures who have done just that, like the biblical prophet Elisha of old who revived a dead child or a more contemporary example of Mother Teresa who devoted her life to care of the poor, sick and dying of Calcutta? Both are profoundly religious characters who confronted death rather than avoided it. And we honor them for their courage. So, what are we to make of the priestly prohibition against coming in contact with the dead?

For one thing, Judaism is very much a tradition of life, in stark contrast with the Egyptian religion which was focused on death and the afterlife. As a result of that emphasis, the Jewish people to this day regard life a priority, health a value, and medicine a noble art. Pikuah nefesh doheh et haShabbat—to save a life takes precedence over Shabbat. Save a single life and you have saved an entire world. Have you met my daughter, the doctor? These are all Jewish prescriptions with which we are familiar. But there is something else going on with the priests which in our highly secularized minds we may miss, and it is this.

Holiness is always something that is set apart. The Hebrew term for holiness, kedushah, actually comes from a root meaning to set apart. When something is holy, we encounter it in a way that we encounter no other thing. The Torah is never touched with our bare hands. We dare not walk around the Temple Mount, where the holy Temple once stood, in Jerusalem. To pull a blade of grass from the earth on Shabbat would be unthinkable. We cover our heads immediately upon walking into the sanctuary of a synagogue. The holy pulls the shades down on the world around us and thrusts us into the world beyond us. It awes us. It silences us. In a world where no thing is holy, and no time is holy, we are forever trapped in the here and now. But in a world where an object, a space, or a day, or a week become holy, it removes us from the here and now, and makes us think about our place in the grander scheme of things: the role we play on earth, the space we occupy in the solar system, the meaning of our life in the Milky Way, and what in God’s name are we doing at all in this thing we call the universe? That is what the holy does for us. It humbles us, it matures us, it fills us with wonder about the simple fact that we are alive.

Had I the power, I would have rid the world of this dreaded Covid-19 before anyone could have become familiar with its name. But neither I nor anyone else had the power to do so, and it has descended upon us like a noxious gas, invisible and lurking, with us doing all that is probable to avoid it. And now that the virus is here, and may be here for some time to come, and now that we, like the priests of old, are bidden to avoid death to the best of our ability, we might just start thinking about how to strengthen or enhance the holiness in our own lives.

The religiously keen know that however many steps we take to control our fate, we are never and never will be in total control. We are guests in God’s world and when we strive to avoid death, grab life, do all that is possible to promote good health for ourselves and those around us, we are in lockstep with the path God has laid out for us. The pandemic of 2020 affords us the time to rethink the place of holiness in our own lives. What Jewish tradition can we incorporate into our lives religiously, that will make us think about our own holiness? When people genuinely incorporate holiness into their lives, they never become holier than thou, which would be the exact opposite of holiness. Rather, when we incorporate holiness in our lives, it makes us realize the holiness in the thous, and the thees, and the yous, and the hims and hers. The genuine pursuit of holiness makes us see the sanctity of life around us, and that is a better way to live, and an essential tool to get us through even the most challenging of crises we may encounter.

WERE THAT GIVE ME LIBERTY OR DEATH GUY ALIVE TODAY

Back in 1775, the leaders of the great state of Virginia debated the wisdom of sending its troops to support a revolution against British rule of the colonies. One of the state’s politicians and accomplished orators, Patrick Henry, gave a rousing speech in support of the revolution and allegedly ended his speech with words that every American student knows: Give me liberty or give me death. America is a polity that cherishes its freedoms—freedom of speech, of press, of religion, and so forth. But there are times when we are stricken with a suspicion of freedom, when the idea of allowing people to do or say whatever they may is actually a bad idea, and we are living one of those moments. Under ordinary circumstances, we would never allow a single politician to tell us to close our businesses, our schools, our parks or our beaches, wear face masks, keep six feet of distance between ourselves and anyone else, and if we feel sick, stay home. These are days when we are living the very opposite of liberty, but it’s not due to the whims of a tyrant, but the vicious effects of a virus, a vaccine for which we still hope to create.

There are some people who are very upset about this. And they have good reason. When businesses and places of socializing close, people lose their jobs. Since shut-downs began, a staggering 30 million plus in the country have filed for unemployment, rates which rival those of the Great Depression. Many others have had their hours cut, their compensation sliced, or both.  There is a lot of pain in our nation right now. People have got to pay the mortgage, the electric bill, and buy food. It is no wonder that some are clamoring to get back to work.

But getting back to work before the virus has been stopped poses a risk to those getting back to work and those who would choose to patronize those facilities. How many asymptomatic people are walking about and unknowingly infecting equally unsuspecting victims? How might such a dynamic contribute to another growing curve of infected people? Will such a curve once again overwhelm hospitals?  How might opening businesses too soon contribute to another round of closing businesses once again?

I have noted with particular concern the push to reopen meatpacking plants before employees have been tested for the Coronavirus. Will these employees be subject to undue risks because of our need for meat? Will meat be packaged by people who are already suffering from the virus? Will the food chain be compromised by a rash move to get things started before things can safely get restarted? These are the kinds of questions that arise when people want to buck the precautionary measures, move too quickly, do as they please, the consequences be damned.

Our Torah portion this week is a double -header—Aharei Mot-Kedoshim—which literally means “After death/Holy Ones.” The title makes for the rather jaded observation, though containing a few kernels of truth, that after people die, we talk about how good they were. But actually, the Torah portion itself urges us to act very differently. The Torah portion, in a passage even more famous than Patrick Henry’s legendary words, urges us to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Our heritage was perhaps the first to make love the foundation upon which all other moral decisions rest. And so, in matters of life and death, it seems to me that we ought best choose life over liberty, especially where the suspension of liberty is clearly temporary. This pandemic will not last forever. The economy will come back. A dead person does not. Our liberties have been seriously curtailed for the time. It’s not a happy situation, but know that we are doing this out of love for our neighbors and for ourselves. Were Patrick Henry around today, he might just give a rousing speech in which he concludes as follows: Give me life, and not to worry, the liberties will return. It does seem as if this pandemic is going to last forever. It won’t. Let’s none of us be foolish in trying to restart too soon. Too rash a rush to return to normal, may just be the difference between liberty and death.