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Z-Zero

David PorushLeave a comment

The “Used-to-be-Jews”

I play poker with the same group of guys every week, mostly Jews. One is a fellow on whom life has smiled. He’s even lucky at cards. I’ll call him Paul (not his real name). A few months ago we were talking about the wars in Israel, and he said, “I used to be a Jew.” It’s a phrase I never heard back East, but I’ve heard it several times out here in California. It’s a thing.

The other day, the talk at poker returned to Israel. I think I said something about how tough it still was on my kids being Zionists in Northern California. Paul seemed startled. He asked sincerely, “You’re Zionists? What do you mean?”

I said, “I’m Jewish. So I’m a Zionist. God promised the specific land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob thousands of years ago. That’s the origin of Judaism. It’s in the Bible.

“Huh! I never heard that!” Paul said.

“What did you hear?”

“I thought it was an extremist view by a few crazy Jews.”

Failure on the Seventh Front

Hamas brutally attacked Israel October 7th, 2023, raping, torturing and slaughtering. It was followed literally the next day by a global surge of raw hatred of Israel. It seemed spontaneous, but it was fueled by a long-prepared strategic propaganda campaign by a perfect storm of forces conspiring against us, including Islamic states, Western academia, the UN, communist countries, many European countries, progressive politics, media bias, the long-suppressed violence implicit in the hyphen Judeo-Christian …. The assault is global, stark in its persistence, and personal. It’s depressingly resistant to fact or reason. It’s frightening in its emergence from spaces we thought safe, even in our strongest Jewish havens outside Israel, like NYC. Every day brings new propaganda atrocities so absurd they would be funny if they weren’t so malign and effective.

Judging by Paul, it’s working. It sure seems like the world is trying its hardest to finally extinguish Israel, The Jewish State, and with it all the Jews who, our enemies tell us, are Zionists by default. Maybe our enemies know us better than we know ourselves.

Many Jews were forced to declare they were not the kind of Jew who supports Israel. They agreed with the enemy to be a good Jew means you were not a Zionist. Some even became prominent “as-a-Jews” (as Bari Weiss, Bret Stephens and others call them). They performed the charade: “I am Jewish. I denounce Israel because (yes, it’s committing genocide, starving Gazans, racist, colonialist, imperialist, fascist, Nazi…)”.  Younger generations of Jews are turning away from Israel, let alone Judaism.

Israel as the Jewish State doesn’t intend to go away. It has won many victories in its ongoing war against six enemies simultaneously: Hamas, terrorism on the West Bank, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, Iran, and Syria. Astonishing tactics and surprises have given it victories, like the pager maneuver against Hezbollah and the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear weapons. But it’s pretty clear that in the long run to survive, it must also win the war in the “airwaves”—on the “seventh front” of global political discourse.

Jews who remain Zionists responded with a mixture of grief, fear, solidarity, activism and counterpropaganda. Israel reinvested in telling its story (hasbara). In and out of the Diaspora we had great arguments: Jews were there first. We are fighting on the front lines of civilization against barbarism and terror. Israel is just like other nations fighting for our survival, why are you focused on us? Biased media, influencers and nations: you are purposely lying about Israel. It’s not fair.

Of course we need to continue these efforts to shield Israel and hold off the world. But without a deeper foundation, our arguments devolve into fortresses built on desert sands. Our cry for “fairness” or claims “we were here first” or that “we’re defending Western culture” or “truth” are doomed to fail against overwhelming odds – eight billion against fifteen million – much fewer if we count the Jews who even want to fight on our side. We need a firmer, permanent, global basis for how Jews defend Israel’s existence.

Z0

“Show me a place to stand and I can leverage the whole world,” Archimedes said.

Let’s find the place Jews must stand. Let’s boil it down to the bone, the most fundamental axiom, one that will survive the worst sandstorm of Jew hatred and violence in the 21st century:

To be Jewish is to be Zionist.

This is not a proclamation, it is a definition, a simple statement of fact. Jews are heirs to an eternal covenant between a single family and God.

THE COVENANT THAT DEFINES JEWS: As long as this family, its descendants, and converts – adopted into the family – keep their side of the deal, God will give Israel to them and guide their destiny. They will thrive and become a model to the whole broken world until it’s perfected.  

The deal was first announced to Abraham in the 20th c BCE. It was reiterated to his specific descendants Isaac, Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons who became the Twelve Tribes – the Children of Israel. In the 14th century BCE at Sinai, God then made the deal with them all – Hebrew slaves newly liberated from Egypt, along with plenty of details that He gave to Moses in writing and orally, The Torah. It gives plenty of specifics of what the party of the first part (Jews) has to do to fulfill their end of the bargain and what the Party of the Second Part (God) will do if they don’t. Since then there has been a continuous, documented transmission and elaboration of the deal to us today (the rest of the canon, Talmud, and all that follows) by our tradition.

This covenant is more profound than a contract, more enduring and intimate than a quid pro quo. It’s an understanding that goes all the way down to the deepest sense of self. As Rabbi Sacks said, “A Contract is about interests; a Covenant is about identity.”[2]  Its outlines are simple, though the terms are complex. It’s more like a marriage where there are implicit as well as explicit understandings, things that go unsaid, ineffable intimacies, in this case with a transcendent Partner

When God announced the Covenant to the entire family of Israel and gave it to them in writing it changed the world. It created an entire empire of morals with its source in an absolute authority. The Torah lays out the laws of a utopian, holy nation – Israel – founded on them. It’s the world’s foundational document of liberation, where in Israel everyone is family and slaves all go free.

To put it another way, Jews have a divine right to Zion. God is on our side. All our other defenses stem from this fundamental axiom. Jews and the Jewish State can’t define themselves coherently without it.

I call this Z0 – Zionism 0.0, inspired by my friends, Zack Bodner and Rabbi Amitai Fraiman of Palo Alto who created a growing and powerful movement called Z3. In Bodner and Fraiman’s construction:

Zionism 1.0 is the dream of Herzl in the 1880s that led to the founding of the state in 1948.

Zionism 2.0 assumed Israel would be the sole focus of Jewish life and the diaspora would fade away, a national ideal that sustained Israel from 1948 to early 2000s.

Zionism 3.0 – Z3 – recognizes the mutual strength and interdependence of both Israel and the diaspora, equal partners in ensuring the life and endurance of Jews. Z3’s goal is to map the way forward.

Z0 solidifies Z3 by specifying the immortal bond between Jews everywhere and Israel. Jews in the Diaspora and Israel share a common, cosmic identity, belief and purpose. Z0 declares what they believe, to others and themselves.

The Sturdy Few: A Formula for Survival: She’erit and Pletah

Yet, Z0 is the single fundamental declaration that the some Jews in the Diaspora are unable to make. Even those who passionately support Israel or identify as Jews with one of the brands of Jewish religion (Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative…), or are culturally but not religiously Jewish or already assimilated can’t bring themselves to declare that God gave Israel to the Jews to be a light to other nations. Even many Orthodox Jews, who believe Z0 in their kishkes as an article of faith, keep it to themselves. Over thousands of years of exile, Jews have developed a completely understandable allergy to claiming that they are The Chosen People. As a guest in other nations at very best it’s impertinent, at worst suicidal.

Z0 is the declaration most Jews can’t say even though our religiously-motivated enemies all over the world attack us with a similar weapon: They claim Hamas (Hezbollah, Iran, the Islamic world…) has the right to extinguish the Jewish State because their version of God told them so. A few others – on the Left, the Right, in Europe and Islamic or communist countries – don’t share their belief in a Jew-hating God, but sympathize with their cause to extinguish Jews anyway.

Maybe that’s the Jewish problem. The fierce declaration we need to make sounds like the thing deplorable, benighted and barbaric nations say to justify bloody campaigns. We Jews are too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, too ethical and compassionate, too civilized, too empathic.

Z0 is exactly the firmness we need to defend ourselves. We need to believe – or at least act like we believe – that we’re marching on a mission from God. We aren’t a race, ethnicity, people, or even just a nation. We are a family who’ve made a Divine Deal. This is the bedrock of emotional and spiritual strength for Jews in the Diaspora and Israel as we face overwhelming forces gathered to annihilate us together.

Z0 counters and resists the malevolence of “as-a-Jews” and the ignorance of many others who have separated Jews from Zion. It sends us into battle on the Seventh Front with a powerful weapon: the conviction that Israel’s destiny transcends our current crises and will survive the frothing of a noisy anti-Zionist world that threatens us.

Z0 is an invitation to everyone who calls themselves a Jew, by definition.

Yet we know some Jews will define themselves out of the Z0 definition. Awe may lose more Jews. Many, including Israeli Jews who’ve bled and suffered in waging these wars since 2023, won’t and don’t accept it. It sounds like it demands becoming religious.

Z0 means declaring that God gave Israel to the Jews, but it doesn’t require religion. It doesn’t require wearing a black coat or even observing the Shabbat or keeping kosher. It doesn’t mean following the strictures of Judaism. It only means knowing and acting like Israel’s right to exist as Jewish State and being Jewish are completely identical. Jews and Zion are born inseparably at the same instant in history when Abraham and God shake on it.

Nevertheless, we know Z0 will lose many Jews. They won’t be able to make this leap of faith anyway.And while we need as many Jew-Zionists as we can get and it seems unnecessarily zealous to draw this line in the sand, it’s not a numbers game.  Our history clearly demonstrates that after every cycle like the one we’ve now begun, only a fragment of Jews remain to carry on. And our Torah prophesies it.

A single remarkable verse in the book of Genesis encapsulates the prophesy. Joseph has become the viceroy of Egypt through his obvious talent and a miraculous-seeming series of coincidences. The famine that Joseph prophesied drives his brothers from Canaan to Egypt to seek refuge. They come before the imposing Viceroy of Egypt. They don’t recognize him, having assumed Joseph is dead. Joseph stays in disguise and plays the role to the hilt. He exacts some revenge and gets them to fetch his little brother Benjamin and aging father Jacob to Egypt. Only then does he reveal himself. After a tearful reunion, they are remorseful for their original crime and seek his forgiveness. Joseph comforts them with this remarkable phrase:

   וַיִּשְׁלָחֵנִי אֱלֹקים לִפְנֵיכֶם לָשׂוּם לָכֶם שְׁאֵרִית בָּאָרֶץ וּלְהַחֲיוֹת לָכֶם לִפְלֵיטָה גְּדֹל

V’yishlachani Elokim liphnaichem l’soom l’chem she’erit ba’aretz olhachayot l’chem l’pleitah gadol

And God sent me before you to place you as a remnant(she’erit) in the earth and to keep you alive as a mighty survivor (or “as a great rescue”) (pleitah). Gen 45:7 

She’erit means “the remnant.” Pletah means the “act of deliverance” or “the survivor.” The plain sense is this: God orchestrated a painful fate so that Joseph would be the remnant, the solitary Jew, who ploughs the field of destiny for the survival of his family. As viceroy, he restructures the whole nation of Egypt and secures Goshen for his family, paving the way for the survival of all the Children of Israel.

This verse encapsulates a prophecy of the entire Jewish story and models a strategy for eternal survival:

The small but faithful remnant of Israel survives catastrophe to be the seed of a mighty renewal.

Against all odds, millenia of Jewish history fulfills this prophecy over and over again, confounding historians:

  • Moses only took a fraction of the Hebrew population out of slavery in Egypt. A stunning 80% stayed behind. They died because they preferred the material guarantee of survival over belief in the abstract God of Moses. In other words, they assimilated.
  • When the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, they slaughtered, enslaved, or dispersed ten of the tribes. They were lost. Judah (the Southern Kingdom) remained, but barely.
  • Babylon captured Israel in 586 BCE, laid waste Jerusalem and the First Temple, exiling several hundred thousand Jews to Babylon. Fifty years later Cyrus of Persia set Jews free and urged them to return and rebuild the Temple. But only a small minority did. Ezra gives a marvelously specific census: “42,360 Jews, 7337 servants and 200 singers came back under Zerubbabel.” Only a fraction returned – maybe 5-10% – because Jews thrived and became materially comfortable in Babylon.[iii]  Our tradition tells us that Judea after the return was “poor and thin” in population.[iv] Only the “righteous remnant” returned,[v] “to rebuild.”[vi]  Modern historians confirm this picture.[vii]
  • When the Seleucids (Greeks) reigned over Israel in the second century BCE, many Jews adopted Hellenism. It was modern, enlightened, liberal, sophisticated. It had an alluring, rational, scientific picture of the cosmos. In 164 BCE, Mattathias and Judah Maccabee led a faithful core of a few thousand to an impossible victory against overwhelming odds. They purified the Temple and initiated the Jewish revival we now celebrate at Chanukah.
  • The Great Revolt of 66–70 CE ended with large-scale destruction and depopulation of Israel. The Romans destroyed the Temple and renamed the devastated country Palestine after the Jews’ perennial enemies, the Philistines. Josephus reports over a million Jews were slaughtered and a hundred thousand enslaved. Although his numbers are likely inflated, archaeological and demographic studies confirm Judea’s population shrank to a few hundred thousand.[xii] Shimon bar Yochai survived (he wrote the Kabbalah while hiding in a cave for thirteen years). He emerged to lead a small remnant of Jews to regroup at Yavneh, reestablish a court and maintain the traditions.
  • A Roman historian reports that in the failed Bar Kochba revolt (132–135 CE), 580,000 Jews were killed, a figure modern historians treat cautiously but accept as indicating massive losses.[xiv] Again, a remnant survived. They relocated to Galilee, where the sages eventually produced the Mishnah around 200 CE.[xv] Josephus reports that only about 6,000 Pharisees preserved halakhic Judaism.[xi]
  • In the centuries following Hadrian, Judea remained sparsely populated by Jews, while Babylonia held a large and thriving community of hundreds of thousands.The remnant there, thriving from the original Babylonian Diaspora, developed the Babylonian Talmud, 1500 years later still the central text of traditional Judaism.
  • In the millenia that follows Rome, the cycle comes every four generations or so virtually everywhere Jews have tried to make a home. The countries that formally expelled and/or systematically killed Jews is a dark trace of history itself: Byzantine Empire, Almohad Caliphate, Mamluk Sultanate, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, Soviet Union, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Croatia, Slovakia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco…

We Must All Be Maccabees

The same formula traces a dark fall line with mechanical regularity through the chaos of history, as if a divine force is stirring the pot of Jewish destiny.  Jews disappear because they are slaughtered or assimilate. They have forgotten or given up hope or simply abandoned the covenant, and with it, the promise of the Promised Land of Zion that defines what it is to be a Jew.

After Oct 7  we are willy nilly facing the same choice. We have to reconcile to the facts and embrace Z0 as our definition, our strategy, our destiny. We don’t need to be religious zealots. We need only claim that to be a Jew is to be a Zionist. It is our impregnable rock against the enemy’s attempt to split every Jew from his or her essence. Only Jews who are firmly convinced that they must fulfill God’s deal will ensure Israel’s survival. Now, we must all be Joseph, or Judah Maccabee, or Shimon bar Yochai.

This remnant-survival cycle may be depressing, as we see our Jewish family splinter and get lost, but it also strengthens us collectively and psychically as individuals. It explains our history and why we are so few. It gives us the courage to fight and the promise that we will. Against all odds, after horrible catastrophe, we’re still here: refined to a core of what Paul, my “used-to-be-a-Jew” friend, thinks are the crazy, zealous exceptions.

Anyway, it sure seems like God is on our side. How else should we explain that we’re still fulfilling an ancient prophecy, the remnant sent ahead to keep us alive until the perfection of the world?

How the Bible solved Darwin’s “Mystery of Mysteries” and the new scientific paradigm it implies

David Porush

New genetic research confirms the Bible was right: species don’t mix!

The mule is a problem for Darwin and the Bible

A deep mystery haunts both Charles Darwin and the Torah—a riddle embodied in one humble creature: the mule. It’s a hybrid, born of the mating of a horse and a donkey, but unable to have offspring of its own. It’s sterile. For Darwin, this was not just a barnyard curiosity. It was the “mystery of mysteries,” that rocked the foundation of his otherwise beautiful evolutionary theory.

If new species arise by gradual change and interbreeding and evolution is a continuum, why are hybrids like the mule sterile? Why do the boundaries between species seem so stubborn, so absolute? If hybrids are sterile, how can new species ever arise?

The mule's inability to have offspring poses a deep mystery for Darwin and the Bible.
Why are mules sterile? Biology and the Bible have the same answer.

This wasn’t just a technical glitch in his theory; it was a fundamental paradox. Darwin wrestled with it in On the Origin of Species (1859), devoting an entire chapter to hybrids and their sterility. For decades, scientists shrugged off these limits as quirks of genetics or chance. This “mule paradox” remained a central problem in evolutionary biology until just a decade ago.

For the Torah, the mule is also a problem. The Torah’s strictly prohibits the crossbreeding of species, the mixing of seeds, and even the weaving of wool and linen together, the laws of kilayim[1]. The Talmud singles out Anah, the first breeder of mules.[2] Anah was himself the bastard offspring of incest between his father and grandmother.[3] For Torah, the mule is a living symbol of disorder—a breach in the divinely ordered tapestry of life. If God created each species “according to its kind,” what does it mean when humans force a breach in those kinds?

Jewish tradition says there are mystical reasons to reinforce the boundaries between species. Mixing them is called “kilayim” and the Torah strictly forbids it and the Jewish tradition elaborates all sorts of examples of this abomination.

Science says, “God Don’t Make No Junk!”

Astonishingly, in the last two decades has genetics shown that the Bible was right. Science discovered vast stretches of DNA that didn’t code for anything, it thought. It labelled this useless DNA “junk.” However, new research has discovered that among many other functions, this junk actually is crucial in enforcing reproductive boundaries between species. The ENCODE project (2003–2012)[4] and subsequent research pinpointed the chromosomes and genes that act as barriers to successful hybridization in several species.[4][5] In other words, Darwin was right to fret about mules. There are no hybrids because deeply embedded genetic mechanisms prevent it.[5] Non-coding DNA is not junk at all, but a sophisticated regulatory network. As the t-shirt says, “God don’t make no junk!”

The “Hard Stop”: What the Numbers Show

Based on the latest studies of our own part of the evolutionary tree, the number of times primates from different species hybridize to produce living offspring is very, very tiny. This is true whether hybrid attempts occur in nature or if a modern day Anah in a lab tried to force interbreeding. Even using sophisticated genetic manipulation, hybridizing has never led to viable multicellular organisms. In other words, the genetic “hard stop” of species interbreeding is the rule. Any interspeciation is a short-lived freak of nature. Even in the event such mating does produce offspring, the number of times those offspring themselves are fertile to produce other offspring – so there can be progress or novelty in evolution – is also tiny.  The chances of a new, stable, fertile lineage is infinitesimally small. Fewer than 1 in 100,000,000. Functionally zero.

The Hebrew when translated properly reveals the secret

Then, as if the Biblical text is signaling that it knows a deeper truth, there’s the puzzle of the Hebrew word itself – kilayim. One English translation is “…Do not cross-breed your cattle with different species (“kilayim”) “[Lev. 19:19] But the Hebrew “kilayim” is more mysterious. Scholars believe it alludes to “restraints” or “holding back.” When the Bible revisits the prohibition, it tells us the consequence of breaking the rule of mixing two species. The best Hebrew translation is “the fullness of the produce will be rejected.” Taken together, the Hebrew now appears as prophetic. Individuals from different species may want to breed together, or humans may want to experiment and force them together, but their efforts will be fruitless. Something’s holding them back, a mysterious force whose mechanism we would find out three thousand years later is in the DNA of virtually every animal. And their offspring will be fruitless.

Kabbalah, Kilayim, and the Deep Structure of Speciation

For Darwin, the mule was a mystery that threatened the very logic of his theory of evolution. For the Torah, the mule is a violation of cosmic order. Today, genetics reveals that of the two, Torah was right.  Nature is structured by boundaries between species.

The Torah’s paradigm—each kind according to its kind—is not just a religious belief or superstition. It is a radical insight into the architecture of life, one that modern science is only now beginning to appreciate. But Torah’s insight, unless it was a lucky coincidence, comes with other implications about nature that science cannot ignore.

Kabbalah says kilayim is part of the spiritual architecture of creation itself. Each species, each “kind,” is seen as a vessel for a unique divine energy or “power.” To mix species is, in the kabbalistic view, to uproot these powers from their proper place, disrupting the harmony and order of creation. So the nature “holds it back,” restrains it from the disorder it would create. Ramban said cross-breeding species was arrogant. It was as if Anah was saying the Almighty did a poor job, and he wanted to finish the task. Cross breeding undermines Creation itself.[6]  Maybe that’s why the Talmud considers the idea that God created Anah’s mule on the last evening of Creation. On the one hand, it was a true miraculous innovation, like fire which was created that evening, but on the other hand it was too transgressive. [7] The prohibition of kilayim is a cosmic principle: the world’s diversity is not arbitrary, but a manifestation of distinct channels. When we respect these boundaries, we align ourselves with the inner order of the universe. When we violate them—whether by breeding mules or mixing wool and linen—we risk spiritual and ecological disorder.

But although the Bible beat science to the punch by three thousand years, its bigger view of nature is still dismissed by science. Science will not accept its assumption that the universe and everything in it was created by an intentional deity for a purpose. This is a profound axiom that separates the ways science and Torah think about how the cosmos works.As the t-shirt says, “God don’t make no junk!” Even though science was massively wrong about junk DNA, and wrong about species being kept separate, it is unlikely to change.

Science’s Maginot Line

Before it had the DNA evidence, evolutionary science was committed to an article of faith even when there was almost zero evidence for their belief: hybridization must occur. Now it has legitimate rationales for new beliefs: genetics enforces boundaries between species because it has evolutionary advantages. Of course hybridizing leads to sterility. It is too expensive. A donkey and a horse consume energy, grow, mate, carry a fetus to birth, etc.. and it is futile. The “hard stop” on hybridization is not a failure of evolution’s model, but a feature—a mechanical safeguard in DNA that maintains the resilience of a species. Evolutionary biology calls it “reinforcement of species boundaries.”

To me this sounds like a bit of circular reasoning (the fancy word is “tautology”):

Species don’t successfully hybridize because when they do they are unsuccessful.  

Either way, the hard stop reframes Darwin’s and our entire scientific conception of how evolution works. Think of the 150 years science would have saved itself if it began with the assumption that species did have a self-conserving mechanism!

It invites us to imagine an alternate history of science.  What if science had not split from religion in its two-century march from Francis Bacon to Darwin? What if it preserved as an alternate starting place Torah’s view of nature? The architecture of the universe has intricate integrity, unity, and a purpose. The whole structure depends on boundaries like kilayim. These boundaries have metaphysical origins but we may find they also have mechanical explanations, as with the DNA that enforces a species’ integrity. The two are not exclusive: We can explain the “hard stop”mechanically, but it also logically implies a purposeful vector –  a teleology – in evolution. As Nobel Prize winners Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russel, Erwin Schrodinger, Ilya Prigogine and Roger Penrose have suggested,

There is no logically necessary contradiction between the fundamental beliefs of science – its a prioris – and the idea that the universe has a teleology, a purpose.[8]

This is not a call to abandon the methods of science. Knowledge still must be grounded in sensory or measurable data. Claims must be testable. We should still explain phenomena only by what chain of causes we know produced them, not why God wants it a certain way. Most modern scientists have the habit of deliberately excluding teleology. Not because it’s logically incoherent, but because it’s methodologically extraneous. Distracting.

This a deep historical and methodological tradition in science that for some is an article of faith. But it’s expensive and may be wrong. It’s like the Maginot Line which France built after WWI to prevent another German invasion. It cost billions of francs and dozens of years. It was largely useless once war came.

A New Paradigm for Science

We can imagine a new paradigm for science that completely overturns our approach to the universe by “turning the sock inside out.” What if science began with the goal of defining a vector – a purpose – for all things, instead of just trying to define its mechanics, a result of stuff, energy and coincidences? This view of nature sees it as dynamic and bounded. A boulder bounces wildly down a mountain. It looks like a chaos of tumbling but it really is following a glide path. There are places that it can go and places it cannot go and it has a certain destination.

Genes we once thought were junk have a “hard stop” that shows every individual of a species is in a feedback loop with the whole species to preserve its integrity. The baboon can’t mate successfully with a chimp because it costs the troop. Its DNA includes a mechanism to preserve the integrity of the whole species. Life is not just an endless blur of things bumping into each other, hoping that luck will produce a good outcome. The universe isn’t a Las Vegas casino. It’s a cruise ship heading somewhere. Boundaries and directions define a phenomenon as much its blind mechanics.

Let’s extend this model to see how it would work with two other of science’s enduring mysteries: life itself and consciousness.

Science offers no satisfactory explanation for how life began or how consciousness arises. What if we begin by assuming that both are “hard stops”? Instead of trying to punch through the barrier, we assume that the barrier is there for a reason. So what if it’s metaphysical? So is the assumption that everything is coincidental. Instead, science would look for the mechanisms of and reasons for the barrier. Nature just won’t let us build life from scratch or grow consciousness from the ground of brute supercomputation. We can specify the purpose of those boundaries once we discover the mechanistic explanations, just like with the hybrid problem, but we’d get there quicker. And if it confirms an old religious conviction – like kilayim – we might have to consider that there is a mystical unity and purpose in the natural world and everything in it.

In this new paradigm, scientists still don’t have to accept that these are boundaries created by a transcendent entity for a reason, but they may eventually come to the conclusion that that’s the most logical and efficient explanation.

David Porush

Endnotes


[1] “You shall observe My statutes: You shall not let your cattle [“kilayim“] mate with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff.” Leviticus 19:19, Deuteronomy 22:9–11

[2] Genesis 36:24

[3] Bereshit Rabbah 82:15

[4] The ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Project was launched by the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in September 2003 as a follow-up to the Human Genome Project, with the aim of identifying all functional elements in the human genome. The ENCODE’s results, published in Nature and other journals in 2012, revealed that the vast majority of the human genome is absolutely not “junk” but has at least one specific purpose. This included specifying genes that enforce genetic boundaries. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3439153/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENCODE ; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3438920/

[5] In house mice (Mus musculus) hybrid sterility is triggered by incompatibilities involving as few as two or three small chromosomes. These incompatibilities activate a genetic checkpoint during meiosis, preventing proper chromosome pairing and resulting in sterility, especially in hybrid males, enforcing the “hard stop”  barrier. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11518865/   In fruit flies (Drosophila), decades of research have revealed that hybrid males often suffer sterility due to X-autosome incompatibilities. These findings have been extended to other animals, where chromosomal rearrangements and specific gene incompatibilities act as robust “hard stops” to gene flow between diverging species. https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article%3Fid=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004088  

[6] Ramban on Leviticus 19:19

[7] Pesachim 54a

[8] See also Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), Alfred North Whitehead Principia Mathematica (with Bertrand Russel, 1910-13), Thomas Nagel Mind and Cosmos (2012), Roger Penrose The Emperor’s New Mind (1989).

The Angel of Death Visits the 21st Century

David Porush1 Comment

After Oct 7, Passover reminds us to outwardly perform being Jewish

  “For here the day comes burning as a furnace” – Malachi 3:19

This Passover, many Jews will celebrate another seder with special intensity. Oct 7 sharpened the knowledge that we are in history. The Angel of Death still hovers on the threshold of the Hebrew home.

The slaughter on Oct 7 was atrocious enough. But Jew hatred erupted all over the world, stunning Jews and making many cower. On campuses, in the workplace, on the streets, Jews hid their kippahs, Stars of David and even mezuzahs. Maybe this was forgivable self-preservation. But there were other Jews who joined with those who outed themselves as Jew-haters, their old political allies who want the West and Israel to disappear. Their betrayal is hard to forgive.

The Bible tells us where they went wrong and gives us clear advice for how to survive our post-Oct 7 crisis when it tells us how to celebrate Passover.

The original command

As the Hebrews await the tenth plague of the Angel of Death, the Book of Exodus instructs them how to keep the Angel of Death away. Here’s a fairly literal translation:

Then take a bunch of hyssop and dip [it] in the blood collected in the basin,
and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with some of the blood which is in the basin, and don’t go out, any man from the entrance to his house, until daybreak. God will strike Egypt and see the blood on the lintels and on the two posts and God will pass over the entrance and will not allow The Destroyer to enter your homes and strike you.  (Ex 12:23)[1]

It concludes by telling them this is not just for Egypt but for all time:

And you are to keep this thing as a statute for you and for your children, forever! (Ex 12:24)

What’s “this thing” we’re supposed to keep forever?[2] It should be obvious but the Sages see a problem: no one has smeared blood on their doorposts since Egypt. That cannot be the ritual which we observe for all time. Normally “this thing” simply refers to what just immediately preceded it. “This thing” must instead refer to something else. But what? The majority conclude it’s not marking the doorway to avert the Angel of Death, a one-time event, but to sacrificing the Paschal lamb, the enduring centerpiece of the seder. The trouble is, that was mentioned way back twenty-one verses earlier in the Bible, a really lost antecedent![3]

A solution

However, let’s take the Torah at its word and read “this thing” in its plain sense of referring to what came before. Then we see smearing the blood on the door is only the culmination of a continuous set of instructions about how to observe Passover. The Hebrews are told to identify the sacrificial lamb, to sacrifice it, to share it among households, and to eat it. They must also save the lamb’s blood in a basin and use it to mark their doorways.[4] In other words, it is all one piece, connected by the lamb and its blood.

So for all time, rather than choose between the eating of the paschal lamb, as the Sages would have it, or smearing of blood as a marker for God, as grammar and logic suggest, it should be both/and. But are we literally supposed to smear the blood on our doorway?

Message for today: Don’t bait the Angel of Death

A tradition they don’t tell you in Hebrew school is that 80% of the Hebrews died in Egypt. They preferred their miserable but tangible reality as slaves in Egypt to the intangible promise of an uncertain redemption promised by an abstract God. They were chained to a secular, materialistic vision of the world, unable to make a leap of faith despite the awesome display of plagues God performed for them. These Hebrews, like so many generations after them did, disappeared with the empires they assimilated to.

After Oct 7, some Jews have donned the keffiyah, literally or figuratively. Perhaps they think that placating the Hamasniks will preserve them, though weakness, denial and submission only incite the bloodthirsty to attack. Maybe they are genuinely reacting to Israel’s response in Gaza out of misplaced colonial guilt, or simply following the crowd on social media, or naively following the lead of tv news, or joining the rallies on campus to be cool and skip classes. Maybe they are too committed to a progressive ideology to change their minds, or too lazy or ignorant to look at the evil of the terrorists and the horror of their acts. But these Jews are like those Hebrews lost for all time back in Egypt. They’re baiting the Angel of Death. They forfeit God’s protection. They’re abandoning their own and their descendants’ immortal identity.

Being a Jew Means Performing It

The Talmud says the seder is a performance for children, a night of elaborate stagecraft to get their attention so they will transmit it to their children.[5] Oct 7 teaches us that the transmission includes performing the outward sign of being Jewish, repeat the ritual of the lamb not just in the seder but always, openly, visibly, especially when it’s most scary out there.

Billboard in California on Hwy 101.

It’s hard to believe that even in the 21st century, we should publicly display our Jewish identities for the Angel of Death to pass over us. The Nazis made Jews wear yellow stars to make them easier targets for round up, which contradicts this advice to go public. Jew haters attacked identifiable Jews in New York, Amsterdam and many other places after Oct 7, and Rabbi Meir Kogon was killed in the UAE. But the Passover command in Ex 12:23 suggests the need to be courageous anyway, make public signs of our faith (unless, of course, there is imminent danger to one’s life).

Three other Hebrew words suggest this in the our verse.

וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה לְחׇק־לְךָ וּלְבָנֶיךָ עַד־עוֹלָם׃

And you are to keep this thing as a statute for you and for your children, forever! (Ex 12:24)

Chok [חׇק], “statute,” refers to a special kind of commandment, one with an impenetrable rationale that transcends normal understanding, like the commandment of the Red Heifer.

The second is et [אֶת], a preposition that points to what comes next very particularly, in this case “this thing” we must observe. Rabbi Akiva tells us that this almost insignificant and often overlooked particle actually contains deep secrets, hidden intentions of God, and requires extra interpretation. We are on supernal ground here and should tread carefully before drawing conclusions about what God intended for all time.

The third is d-b-r [דבר], the “thing,” the “matter” we are to observe. But the Hebrew as it is written in the Torah scroll – without vowels – could also mean “plague” if we pronounce it dever instead of davar. So we could read the verse as

“Guard – give heed to, be on the outlook for – this plague for all your children forever. [שְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־הַדָּבָר].”

The world burns. The tenth plague returns. Jews again have to choose between Egypt and redemption. Now is the time for a courageous, affirmative public sign, We Here Are Jews! After all, what more powerful act could we to perform for our children this Passover?

ENDNOTES

Thanks to Marcos Frid for fixing a big error I made in the original draft. I’ll sure there’s more to find if he looks.

    [1] My attempt at a literal translation.

    [2] Called in grammar “the antecedent.”

    [3] The Sages untangle the contradiction by noting other occasions in the Bible when a commandment and its reference were separated.

    [4]  In fact, the command in Ex 12:23 is first mentioned in Ex. 12:7 in the middle of these instructions. The repetition indicates the continuity of the Passover instructions.

    [5] Pessachim 108-109. Thanks to R. Feldman for teaching me this.

    Sinwar, Simchat Torah, Sukkot and Peace

    David Porush

    “.. to take refuge from the fiery stream and rain, when You rain coals upon the wicked”

    “May it be Your Will”- Prayer said in the succah

    Israeli soldier prays in sukkah in Gaza. Courtesy of Israel Live News 70 on WhatsApp Oct 20, 2024.

    Yahya Sinwar orchestrated the October 7 massacre by Hamas to inflict maximum pain on Israel and Jews.

    Whether he timed it for Simchat Torah, the most joyous religious holiday on the Jewish calendar, may never be known, but our enemies always know us better than we do ourselves, and Sinwar was an assiduous, if evil, student of Jews and Israel. 

    Almost certainly he also knew about the Nova Festival of Peace, a wonderfully soft target on the Gaza border that week. The festival organizers did schedule Nova deliberately for the last days of Sukkot because it is an Israeli national holiday. Maybe they and all the festival goers consciously intended it as an alternative Simchat Torah, a secular celebration of the religion of music, peace, sensuality, drugs, sex, and indulgence. In any case, the targets were ripe. Israel was caught off-guard. Hamas went on a rampage. They raped, murdered, beheaded, burnt, and tortured unspeakably any Israeli they could get their hands on. They took almost 250 hostages to the hell tunnels of Gaza.

    On the first day of Sukkot the next year, 2024, Israeli troops assassinated Sinwar in Rafah, where they long suspected he hid.

    I’m writing this sitting in my succah, sunlight streaming through the straw roof. It’s the one time of the Jewish year when the mitzvah surrounds us, envelops us, shelters us: we are in the mitzvah as opposed to the mitzvah being in us.  And so it’s hard in this placid moment staring at the calendar not to reflect on the coincidence of dates: Sinwar’s terror the day after Sukkot; his assassination a year later on the first day the next year.  It opens a space on the calendar, a temporary parenthesis that alters consciousness, a week that happens to be Sukkot, when we live as if we just fled Egypt and dwelled in temporary wilderness huts 3200 years ago. In the succah we dwell in the temporary, the temporal. History accordions in on itself. What does it mean?

    Of course, if you see the world filled with miracles, there are no coincidences.  God is talking to us through His time, His calendar. In His time, infinite opposing currents can be true, tumbling into and flowing over each other in dense layers of meaning. Past and future collapse into one unifying vision of truth.  Looked at this way, the signs are explosive, hard to ignore, like reports of gunfire around the corner. Maybe we can read His mind about the week:

     Enter My space, the canopy of peace. My soldier’s rifle is nearby. Bullet holes riddle the wall outside the window. Light halos him. This is a temporary if holy peace. The succah roof is makeshift, gerryrigged over destruction, yet My light streams in. My soldier summons seven heroes from the Jewish past. They faced horror and survived disasters and are now his guests. He has carved out a bittersweet moment of peace on the battlefield. It is fleeting. That’s the nature of human time, but it looks forward to a future of permanent and perfect peace.

    A Wagon of Poetry Brings the Hebrews through the Portal of History

    David Porush

    רַב עוֹד־יוֹסֵף בְּנִי חָי  (Gen 45:28)

    The story of Joseph and his brothers is one of the most novelistic passages in the Bible, filled with hidden motives, deep emotion, staged revelations, ambiguous plots and an apparently happy ending. Joseph finally reunites with the eleven brothers in Egypt. He puts them through an elaborately staged torture in Pharaoh’s court, but finally Joseph reveals his true identity and can’t wait to see his father, so he sends his brothers back to fetch him.

    The Bible lavishes ten verses on Pharaoh’s and Joseph’s eagerness to get all of the Hebrews to Egypt. They load donkeys and wagons with clothing and goods and gold to bring back the families and entice Joseph’s father, Jacob, now 130 years old, to come too.

    Nonetheless, when the brothers return to Canaan and tell Jacob the good news, his “heart goes numb.” The brothers give him CPR with reassurances, Joseph’s fabulous story, and showing him the wealth Joseph sent. When Jacob sees all the stuff and hears their story, his first reaction is, “רַב עוֹד־יוֹסֵף בְּנִי חָי.”

    The Hebrew has so much feeling and hidden meaning it should be a song, maybe a Jewish anthem, and I want to pay it tribute. While the usual translation captures the sense –  “Enough! My son Joseph still lives!” – the poetry and depth is lost. The Hebrew eye might immediately notice the repetition of three words for abundance in a row:

    COLORFUL+WAGON+(1)
    • rav רַב – is translated as an exclamation “enough,” but it really means much, many, great
    • ohd, עוֹד – an adverb that seems to modify “live” as in “Joseph still lives” but beyond continuance (still) also implies besides, again, more and directly modifies Joseph as in “more (still, yet) Joseph …”
    • Yosef – יוֹסֵף – Joseph’s name is prophetic. It means He will add.

    Together the three words express “much more greater enlargement.” Jacob’s sudden burst of emotion expresses deep currents.

    “Much more greater enlargement!”

    Jacob knows the wagons are symbolic of Joseph’s essence and exclaims it with a burst of emotion. His favorite son’s very presence, even as a young boy, seems to make life bigger and more extravagant. Joseph’s lavish coat is just outward expression of his unrestrained charisma. Even his dreams are tinged with megalomania, but he brings his fantastic dreams and those of others to life. Through him, dreams become true. Joseph’s whole life is the story of bursting the bounds of one adversity after another: snake-filled pits, slavery, jail, marooned in a strange country. Everywhere he goes, he expands the borders of life itself. He brings fabulous fantasies into reality. He is the source of survival and abundance for his adopted nation, Egypt, and his own tribe, the Hebrews. The wagonloads of goodies symbolize his lavish success.

    Jacob evokes this enlargement of reality that Joseph brings to the world here: “My son adds so much more life.” The father sees the son’s spiritual potential, not the material illusion of the coat that arouses his brothers. Jacob isn’t swayed by the lavish riches in front of him. He’s not toting up the wealth presented to his earthly senses, but what it evokes in his heart. He is rich in material things, but the loss of his beloved son has dug a pit of loss in his soul. And now, by this wagon, he sees instantly Joseph has been miraculously reincarnated.

    And then, in case we thought we were just kanoodling around with wordplay, there’s a clincher. When Jacob revives, he is called by his birthname: “the spirit of Jacob revived.” But in the next verse he is “Israel,” the prophetic name he got after winning a wrestling match with an angel. Israel is Jacob’s spirit name, the name of the father of nation that is redeemed – resuscitated – from slavery in Egypt and who also get a lavish gift beckoning them to their destiny. In short, the verse is altogether prophetic, concentrating the whole history of the Hebrews in a few words. Jacob suffers a mini-death and is resurrected as Israel by his son Joseph’s spiritual largesse. He knows the prophecy of exile that awaits his family and their descendants, yet immediately embarks on the fateful journey almost joyfully.

    Now if we read Jacob’s cry sideways, the whole verse says,

    And he said, ‘Israel to have much more life must go down to my son before I (Israel) die’.

    They will go to Egypt to survive the famine as a re-united family, endure a spiritual famine, and emerge as Israel. As Hebrews they all must march through the portal Joseph has opened in history to be resurrected as liberated slaves with the Torah as their fusion engine.

    Rashi reads the poetry

    Then Rashi tells us there’s yet another secret message encoded in the wagons. The word for wagons – ahgalot – contains a pun for eglot – calves. They may even be etymologically related at a deep level to the primitive root for turning, circling, wheeling.  Just as calves cavort by running in circles, wagons run on wheels that turn round and round. In that pun, Jacob sees the last law in the Torah father and son studied before Joseph disappeared: the eglah arufah. If a corpse is found in the wilderness between two cities, how do we assign responsibility for burial and pursuing justice? You can’t just let the corpse lie there. The priests of the closest town must go into the wilderness, sacrifice a calf by breaking its neck, throw it over a cliff, and thus cancel the bill for an unsolved injustice and guilt that would come due to innocent townsfolk. (Deut 21:1-9)

    On the surface, Rashi’s neat detective work forms a nice sermon (never mind the anachronism of father and son reading the Torah before Moses brings it down from Sinai. The sages assume that the patriarchs had the Torah).  We now see that all the prior stagecraft about loading the eleven wagons with stuff from Egypt fior the brothers to bring back to Jacob in Canaan carried a double message from the prodigal son to grieving father that only the two of them would understand.

    Poetry of the Torah and dreams connect the material and spiritual world

    The Lubavitcher Rebbe expands our understanding of this ritual. Though he doesn’t refer to this scene with the wagon explicitly, he deepens our understanding of it even more by parsing the meaning of the wagon-calf secret message Joseph sent to Jacob. The elaborate ritual involves sacrificing the calf by severing its neck. Why? The Rebbe calls the neck “the precarious joint.” In the Torah, he notes,

    “the neck is a common metaphor for the Holy Temple.” It links “heaven and earth, points of contact between the Creator and His creation. … G-d, who transcends the finite …  chose to designate a physical site and structure as the seat of His manifest presence in the world …. The Sanctuary, then, is the ‘neck’ of the world … the juncture that connects its body to its head and channels the flow of consciousness and vitality from the one to the other.”

    “The Neck,” Chabad.org)

    The unclaimed corpse leaves unattached guilt lying around in a no-man’s land unaccounted for. It is intolerable. The guilt must be expiated. If we cannot determine which city owns it, we sever the calf’s neck to show that the integrity of the Holy Land has been broken and restore it symbolically.

    Joseph’s wagon is an invitation to walk through the portal in history. Time collapses as the whole vista of Hebrew destiny appears to Jacob upon seeing the wagon laden with gifts. That walk leads down to Egypt and then up to Sinai and the Torah and eventually the landscape of the Promised Land, an Israel with towns and a system of justice and order and holy calculus so sensitive that an unaccounted for corpse has to be brought back into balance. The Torah is itself the gateway to a whole other consciousness about the world for an entire nation, connecting the material world to the spiritual world.  Joseph here is the avatar of this new understanding, introducing dreamspace into reality, enlarging the world through the flow of consciousness and vitality between the different channels in our senses. Reading the Torah as poetry enables us to rehearse, to recapitulate this connection over and over. We are always standing before the wagons, laden with treasures, symbol of resuscitation and reading secret messages, interpretation.

    Layers of meanings and cross-references within the text and outside it deepen rather than interfere with one another. The means to deciphering the scene before us is not only through our senses but by short-circuiting our rational, empirical senses. They see only the goodies. We need to open up to the mysteries inside the poetry, the associative, artistic, aesthetic resonance of the images and words acting together. We need to have the Joseph super-power, to see the reality in the dream. Like him, and like Jacob on seeing the wagon, we must create a channel, a precarious joint, from the spiritual realm to the material one. This way of reading life and the Torah and the world before us enlarges everything. The original Hebrew, without vowels or punctuation is Moses’ transcription of God’s one long transcendent utterance atop Sinai and virtually demands that we approach it with openness.

    I’m no prophet, but I imagine this is how it must work and why the prophets are such great poets: they are seized by a sudden flooding expansion of their senses, a wheeling, prophetic perception of past and future unfolding in the fateful moment. We can get some small taste of this if we read the poetry in the Hebrew: Israel, summoned by a secret sign from his son, sings a song of extravagant overflowing joy and in that moment can’t wait to go down to Egypt.

    TRUE LOVE: The Torah’s Afikomen

    David Porush

    Matot-Masei 5782

    Is the Torah a Comedy?

    The story of the Israelites’ journeys really ends at the finale of the fourth of the Five Books of Moses, Numbers.

    The official fifth book of the Torah is the next one, Deuteronomy, but only one thing happens in the entire book. Moses gives a five week long motivational speech to all the Israelites on the Plains of Moab. Then he exits. It’s an Aristotelian tragedy. It has unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action.

    Five-tier wedding cake

    It’s not like the fifth book doesn’t have plenty of drama. After all, the Israelites are poised to enter Israel. Everything up to this point has been for this moment, to seize the promise God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob more than four centuries ago. The suspense alone is magnificent: the Israelites seem to hold their breath as Moses expends his. Everyone, including Moses himself, knows he is about to die before he enters Israel, because God told him so. In a monumental effort, he gives one of the most inspiring – and certainly the longest – series of motivational speeches in history. For five weeks, he recaps, deepens and enhances the entire teaching from the prior four books. He adds plenty of clarifications, new laws and cosmic views. He achieves soaring heights of inspired poetry and fiery rhetoric that capture the transcendent pathos of the moment. He exhorts, inspires, cajoles, admonishes, rebukes, and threatens. He even breaks into a transcendent song filled with a keening sense that his own lifecis about to end even as Israel is about to be born in full. The official tradition grants that Moses delivered all of the book as a speech that is later transcribed and added to the four prior books.

    The Greek name for the book captures this flavor: Deuteronomy – the Second (deutero-) Telling (-nomy). The Recap. Or as we say in the literature game, the denouement, the unknotting.

    So the end of the epic of Hebrews for all intents and purposes is the end of the Book of Numbers. The Israelites are encamped at the other side of the Jordan River on the plains of Moab. They know they’re going to war once they swoop down on the Canaanite tribes that live there. But that book lands on what seems a very curious, sputtering choice for a climax. After the story of Creation, the Flood, the romance of the patriarchs and matriarchs, the descent into Egypt, the plagues, the redemption and exodus out of Egypt, the many failures and dramas in the wilderness, Numbers’ final concern seems to be to clear up a technicality left dangling from several chapters ago: the rights of women to inherit land if they marry whomever they choose.

    What makes the daughters of Zelophechad and the legal back and forth about their rights worthy of such a premier position in the Torah?

    If we dig into the language, we find a joyous, celebratory climax is right there before our eyes. Like the afikomen at the Passover seder, it’s hidden in the beginning but it comes out at the end, a dessert with rewards to the children who discover it. In fact, the word ‘afikomen’ is the perfect analogy: it also comes from Greek (transported into the seder through Aramaic, the language of the Talmud sages). It means ‘dessert’, specifically the dessert at the end of a wedding feast: afi (from epi – ‘on top of’) and komon (from comus – the name of the fertility rite and the pagan god who presides over it). The same name gives us the word ‘comedy’.

    Let us unwrap the afikomen from where we discovered it – just where my Pop placed it every year, under the tablecloth – and taste the dessert. I believe it will reveal that the Torah, if we end at the Book of Numbers, is a comedy. Though it may not be apparent at first glance – it’s been a long and rocky road for the Israelites to get to the Promised Land and figure out how to fulfill their deal with God – the final verses make it clear that the Torah has been a love story all along that is now being consummated. It even has a happy ending. In fact, we could call the end of Numbers a comedy – a komus – in the classic tradition. It ends with a merry festival of love.[1]

    The Daughters of Zelophechad Inspire Two Revolutions

    The people of Israel haven’t even begun to conquer the land of Israel, but they have already divvied it up among the tribes proportionate to their size and then by individual clans by lottery. A good deal of the last portion of Numbers detail the borders of the tribal states and specify the land given to the clans within them. It’s a divinely inspired strategy designed to forestall any territorial squabbles. At the same time, it shows amazing self-confidence: these former slaves have been forged into God’s warriors. They are completely certain of victory in conquering the Canaanites.

    But wait. There’s a fly in the ointment. A few chapters ago, the parents of five daughters have died, leaving them with no brothers. They want to keep their father’s inheritance in the family, but women are not allowed to inherit the land. Shouldn’t they have the right to continue their father’s legacy like any other heirs?  So they screw up their courage to appeal directly to Moses. Their gumption – and love of the prospective land – is compelling, but Moses is stumped. This is beyond his pay grade. Nothing like this has ever happened, or at least ever before in recorded human history. Prior teachings of the Torah don’t cover it. Moses appeals to God. In a stunning innovation not only of the rules for the Israelites but for all human civilization, God makes an incredible new decree on the spot in the daughters’ favor. These brotherless women, the daughters of Zelophechad, shall inherit their father’s land.

    Yet this creates another problem, a loose end which the finale of Numbers dramatizes in its last short chapter. The heads of the daughtes’ tribe, Menashe, now protest to Moses. What happens if these girls marry a guy from another tribe? We’ll lose our lands to them! Not to mention the gerrymandering – the broken patchwork of territorial rights – this will cause. There could be a hostile clan’s reservation right in the middle of our state!

    You’ve got a point, Moses agrees. So here’s the solution according to God. He then offers another neat reconciliation:

    This is what G-d has commanded concerning the daughters of Zelophehad: They may become the wives of anyone they wish, provided they become wives within a clan of their father’s tribe. (Num 36:7)[2]

    But is this really deserving of the closing shot? It all seems like such an anticlimactic technicality, a Talmudic dispute you might hear a couple of millenia later, but not the finale of the Hebrew epic in the 13thc BCE.

    The future feminine plural of active creation

    This is the second part of the text I quoted above in Hebrew:

     תִּהְיֶינָה לְנָשִׁים אַךְ לְמִשְׁפַּחַת מַטֵּה אֲבִיהֶם תִּהְיֶינָה לְנָשִׁים׃

    ….they become wives within a clan of their father’s tribeNumber 36:7

    The Bible seems eager for us to look at those two words (in bold) that it repeats. The Hebrew is “tihyeynah l’nashim” (תִּהְיֶינָה לְנָשִׁים). It’s hard to translate perfectly into English. It’s the future feminine plural of the verb ‘to be’. We first encounter the basic verb in the Genesis 1:3 as God declares “’Let there be light’ and there was light!” (יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר׃ ).

    Hold that thought, because it reveals a critical shortcoming in most standard translations.

    Most translations of our repeated phrase fold it into the passive or at least ambiguous sense of “becoming wives” like this comon mis-translation of the Hebrew above: “They may become the wives of anyone they wish, provided they become wives within a clan of their father’s tribe.”

    But the verb is the future feminine plural of active creation. The daughters don’t just become wives, they now get to choose to make themselves wives, to wed by their own volition.

     The next verse of Torah gives God’s reasoning. Most translations separate it out as a standalone declaration:

    וְלֹא־תִסֹּב נַחֲלָה לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל מִמַּטֶּה אֶל־מַטֶּה

    The inheritance of the Children of Israel is not to go ‘round from tribe to tribe…
    (Num 36:7)

    But this is also a mis-translation. This rationale sounds like a command. Don’t make a mishmash of tribal boundaries through intermarriage. Wait. In one breath the daughters are told they can choose to wed anyone they wish, and in the next that it has to be a man from their own tribe?

    But there’s a sneaky “and” (vav) at the beginning of that line, conjoining its logic to the prior verse. It is still ambiguous whether this makes it an imperative – And marry in your tribe! – or a conditional. Make yourselves wives of anyone you love; wed in your tribe and you inherit the land.  

    The repetition of the words tihyeynah l’nashim suggests there are two separate possibilities, a choice the consequences of which this next line spells out. Choose anyone you wish from any tribe, but only if you marry intra-tribally (the technical term is endogamy) do you keep your inheritance.

    This more liberating reading is confirmed in our celebration called Tu B’Av (the 15th of the month of Av) when we are commanded to be joyous, perhaps as a tonic to the deepest day of mourning six days prior, Tisha B’Av (the 9th). The sages tells us that the reason for joy is that it’s the exact date of this ruling (15th of Av, 1273 bce), “when tribes were permitted to intermarry.”[3]

    So a better reading of the two verses, putting it all together, would be this:

    Women should wed anyone who pleases them, but if they want inherit the land, they should choose a husband from their own tribe so land doesn’t circulate from tribe to tribe

    Yes, God told them in a revolutionary moment, women deserve their father’s inheritance. And now, perhaps even more monumentally, God reveals to them and the world that women can wed whomever they please, from any tribe. But to balance it all, in exchange for your newfound freedom, He says, I gotta restrict the other revolutionary liberty I gave you (to inherit the land) so that you get it only if you choose to wed someone from your own tribe. Otherwise, the inheritance of the children of Israel will circle from tribe to tribe, mash up the neat map we just drew, and our peaceful utopia will be doomed before we even get there.

    The deepest love

    If this is a perfectly logical rationale, the next line is soul music. In the next breath, the same verse, God then explains – or mandates – the deeper spiritual force behind His compromise between love and inheritance:

    כִּי אִישׁ בְּנַחֲלַת מַטֵּה אֲבֹתָיו יִדְבְּקוּ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל׃

     “…because each Israelite must cling to the land of the tribe of his father.” [4] (Num 36:7)

    The text’s word for ‘cling’, or the more antic ‘cleave’[5] – d-b-k, devek –  is the same word Torah uses for other transcendent attachments, good and bad. It’s the same word for the God-given mystical connection between a man and his wife in Genesis. It describes Shechem’s deep, illicit lust for Dinah and also how persistent the plagues against the Israelites were, clinging to them. Later it applies to the deepest embrace between the Israelites and God. “You must cling to Him, for He is your life.” In later Jewish tradition it inspires the deep mysticism of devekus. But here it’s the engine of a love triangle: the Israelites love of Israel equals the love between man and woman equals the love between us and God.

    And as if winking at us the Torah confirm this reading a few lines later. There are those same words bracketing this end of this story – tihyeynah … l’nashim:

    תִּהְיֶינָה מַחְלָה תִרְצָה והגְלָה וּמִלְכָּה וְנֹעָה בְּנוֹת צְלפְחָד לִבְנֵי דֹדֵיהֶן לְנָשִׁים׃ (Num 36:11)

    The verse says, “They chose (Tihyeynah )- Mahla, Tirtza, Hogla, Milka and Noa the daughters of Zelohechad”– the Torah names them here again to honor their importance – “to their cousins to be wives (lenashim).” The sages say Moses wasn’t telling them what to choose, but offering good advice from God. They heeded Him.

    Having motivated two earthshattering revolutions through their chutzpah, they now show their modest wisdom. They choose to wed their cousins “so that their inheritance went along with the tribe of the clan of their father” (Num 36:12). It’s a great call. They get to have their wedding cake and eat it too.

    With such a satisfactory wrap up, Numbers is quick to close the curtain with a swift last line: “These are the commandments and the laws that God commanded by the hand of Moses to the Children of Israel, in the Plains of Moab, by Jordan-Jericho.” (Num 36:13) Good show. Cue the soaring happy score.

    Torah’s afikomon

    We usually read the final weekly reading of Numbers, Masei, along with the one before, Matot. Together they create the longest reading of the year. The significance of the climax to Numbers may slide by us in the rush to get through the reading and as we get tangled in the technicalities of the revolution in marriage laws. The commentary is silent mostly about the startling fact that we’ve just heard the announcement of an unprecedentedly massive wedding, a five-fold celebration of women choosing their own mates. This even beats Shakespeare’s record in his comedy As You Like It, which famously ends with four simultaneous weddings.

    Once we join the party, the message for the sweep of the epic narrative of the Hebrews starts getting deeper and clearer. It is really a celebration of the entire joyous covenant of the Torah, its climax. So let’s swiftly recap that epic in the light cast back by this happy moment.

    Israel preserved its identity since the promise to Abraham through slavery in Egypt. They hear God pronounce His pact with them, newly-liberated slaves, on Sinai. They then get it in writing from Moses. It includes a detailed constitution, a set of laws for establishing a prospective heaven on Earth in the union of the people and land of Israel. They should have been eager to rush across the Red Sea and Sinai to seize their destiny, but they are not up to it. They fail every which way imaginable: through idolatry, cowardice, doubt, backsliding, violence, rebellion, complaining, lawlessness, debauchery, ambition, treason. Others have peeled away to return to Egypt. Some disappeared through assimilation with pagans. Some withered by wandering off in the desert. By far, God’s many plagues, afflictions, earthquakes, fire and snakes have eliminated the bulk of the spiritually weak, the rebels, the sinners and the merely conflicted. Their failures doom them to wander 40 years in the wilderness until the entire generation of former slaves die out. Even at the last moment, Moses faces two breakaway tribes, Reuben and Gad. They want to take the fat, fertile Moabite territory on the other side of Jordan, outside the borders of Israel proper. Moses first loses his temper when he hears their request. He compares them to the spies whose cowardly refusal to take Israel when they had the chance was the immediate cause of their wandering. But then Moses relents. Maybe he thought it would be better to let them pursue their corrosive greed outside of the utopia now rather than risk them rotting the future Israel from the inside, spiritually. Even so, to make sure they’re not just dodging the draft for the impending war against the Canaanites, he cuts a deal with them. He demands that they fight with their brethren before they take up residence across the border, build their cities and graze their cattle. Reuven and Gad readily agree. In fact, they’ll serve as shock troops, the most daring of the warriors. They’ll win the war and only then return to occupy their fat Transjordan lands. Are they loyalists who can’t resist their materialism or are they mercenaries? No matter. Moses has made the final selection of the spiritually fittest.

    The only Israelites left are a new generation of fearsome, enspirited warriors. They’ve defeated the Sihon and Og, the Bashan, the Ammonites. They’ve just overcome the Moabite’s evil prophecy with superior God prophecy. They then completely decimate the even stronger Midianites for trying to seduce their whole nation.[6] They leave almost nothing alive, taking only the cattle, gold and remaining virgins as booty. Then they carve up the land of Israel as if the outcome is assured, though they haven’t yet stepped foot in it.

    In short, these vital Israelites are about to take, in the very Biblical sense, Israel. Israel the people are about to consummate their long-forestalled, pent-up ecstatic promised union with Israel the land. It’s a magnificent climax.

    Jewish mystical tradition and literature overflow with the metaphor of groom and bride in this union between the people and the land.[7] They interpenetrate and fertilize each other. They are meant to cleave to each other, just as bride and groom in the three-way union of man and wife with God as the not-so-silent partner. History proves the mysticism is real. When Jews occupy the land, it is fertile. Josephus in 75 CE testified to Israel’s abundance before the Romans destroy the Temple and scatter the Jews.[8] To humiliate them, the Romans call it Palestine after the Jews’ bitter enemies the Philistines. The land never recovers for almost two thousand years. Empire after empire, Rome, Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, Ottomans, England – all try and fail to make it anything less than desolate. Ramban (1194-1270), flees Spain for the Land of Israel. In Acco, he couldn’t even find nine other Jews to pray with. He wrote to his son, “Many are Israel’s forsaken places, and great is the desecration. The more sacred the place, the greater the devastation it has suffered. Jerusalem is the most desolate place of all.” He prophesied that Israel will remain desolate until the Jewish reoccupy the land.

    Riding on horseback through what is now is the fertile Jezreel Valley in 1867, Mark Twain observed, [9]“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for 30 miles in either direction.” He calls it “the curse of a Deity… that has ruined its fields and fettered its energies. …Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince.”

    Travel to Israel today and you can see immediately the instantiation of the metaphysical inter-fertilization of people and land both named Israel. When I last visited with my brother and sister, we traveled up and along the middle and northern borders – along the territory known as the West Bank, up north along Lebanon and Syria. Driving around and up the hairpin steepness of two lush mountains in Golan, a sudden gap opened in front of us.  It was a vista of a forsaken, arid landscape in the distance, framed by green

     “What’s that?” my sister asked, startled by the contrast.

    “It’s Syria.”

    “It looks dead.”

    When the Jews are absent from Israel, the land suffers. Where they go, the land blossoms. Yes, there are exceptions. The territories Reuven and Gad bargained for, now Jordan, are still mostly lush, though I doubt anyone there still calls themselves a child of Israel. They still make wonderful wine in the Bekaa valley (mentioned in the Talmud) of southern Lebanon. Yes, there are mundane explanations for Israel’s fertility: Wealth, education, pent-up historical yearning, Western science and technology, sheer energy. But the mundane meets the miraculous halfway and the former disguises the latter from our dim mortal sight.

    The Jews of Israel today are a testament to this mystically fertile union, especially after many of their great grandfathers shriveled (physically) in the shtetls of Europe before being incinerated. Brown, robust, social. Almost every man and woman serves in the military when they are 18. Their voices have music in them. In the last worldwide survey, Israel is one of the top countries for self-reported happiness despite the fact they’re surrounded by enemies, neighbors regularly pledge to eliminate them (the Palestinians and Iranians), and they’re despised by many nations of the world who should know better.

    So why end with these women who have been given the new right to marry for love? Because their wedding is neither by force nor convenience. They’ve been given the Divine right to choose to marry whomever they wish, whoever they love – men who “find grace in their eyes” as the Hebrew literally says. They have expanded the domain of human joy and freedom by actively choosing their own paths. The daily ubiquitous miracles we mistake for the coincidences of material reality require us to meet divine will at least halfway on the road to fulfilling it.We’re not in Egypt anymore. we’re free to choose and act. You can’t just lay about and huddle in your hovel and wait for the hand of the Almighty to intervene. After all, He sent you a raft, a rowboat and a helicopter. You have to choose to take the ride. Israel the nation is now, finally, stepping into the boat. Tihyeynah.

    What is a more fitting, complete ending to our epic adventure of the Hebrews than a five-fold wedding that we commemorate for all time? We celebrate it like that other, best of all liberation meals, the Passover seder. We end with the special dessert that, in its very name, celebrates the fertile conjugation of wife, husband and God through their separate deliberate acts of choosing, creation. It was set aside from the beginning only to be fulfilled now. It’s the Torah’s afikomon.

    Tihyeynah. The future feminine plural. The Torah doesn’t have to tell us how the comedy ends. The daughters lived happily ever after. After all, this is true love.

    – David Porush

    Simchateo 5782

    Aug 1, 2022

    ENDNOTES

    I am indebted to my study mates in our Friday Noon Parsha Shmooze for delving this reading of Matot-Masei with me: Nicolas Cruz, Ron Kardos, Bobby Lent, and Brad Diller. I am also indebted to Rabbi Yossi Marcus for his Shabbos drash on the significance of Aaron’s yahrzeit being mentioned here out of place (it’s the 15th of Av; Aaron dies on the 1st). Aaron earns the only yahrzeit date explicitly mentioned in Torah. It comes to teach us the fundamental aspect of love for our fellow humans suffused in the Torah through Aaron. Finally, I am indebted to Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman for confirming the meaning of the key word here – t’hiyeynah – as the future feminine plural of “to be,” and even more so for responding positively to this particular reading of the end of Numbers as a comedy.

    [1] As Lord Byron quipped, “All tragedies are finished by a death. All comedies are ended by a marriage .” Most Shakespearean comedies end with a wedding: The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well That Ends Well, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, many others. As You Like It ends with four weddings.

    Going further back, we see the modern wedding comedy as a civilized version of its primitve pagan roots. The genre of comedy originated in ancient Greece as Dionysian fertility revelries. Komus was the Greek god of merrymaking who brought wine to his father, Dionysus, for his infamous parties. The annual spring rituals of komus weren’t so much weddings as festive orgies of appetite.

    [2] The Contemporary Torah, Jewish Publication Society, 2006.

    [3] Rabban Simon b. Gamaliel said: “Never was there any more joyous festival than the fifteenth of Ab and on the Day of Atonement, etc.” It is readily understood why the Day of Atonement should be a day of rejoicing, because that is a day of forgiveness, and on that day the second tables of the Law were given to Moses; but why should the fifteenth of Ab be a day of rejoicing? “Because,” said R. Judah in the name of Samuel, “on that day the members of the different tribes were permitted to intermarry.” What passage did they interpret to prove this? (Num. 36, 6) [Ein Yaakov (Glick Edition), Taanit 4:11]

    [4] In fact, Ramban berates Rambam for not listing the imperative for Jews to “cling to the land” as one of Rambam’s 613.

    [5] The word is a contranym; it means two opposite things at the same time. Cleave could imply “to bind or unite”, or it could mean “to sever completely, (as with a cleaver).” The implication is that two entities have a deeper wholeness or unity.

    [6] There’s another whole drash to be written about the connecting theme in Matot-Masei of willful, feminine choice, encoded in the verb of “to be.”  This one is the contrast between the daughters of Zelophechad and the evil choice of the Midianite women to seduce the men of Israel: The consequence of their debased choice is that all the women are slaughtered and the virgin daughters become booty בָּזָז׃. “The Israelites seized the women of the Midianites and their children and all their beasts, all their herds, and all their wealth as booty. [Num 31:9]… “Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. Moses yells at them: “You have spared every female! Yet they are the very ones who made it happen  הָיוּ to seduce the sons of Israel to the bidding of Balaam, to trespass against HaShem in the matter of Peor, so that G-d’s community was struck by the plague.

    [7] From the Kabbalistic tradition: “Behold the holy Torah and Eretz Yisrael have a unique relationship. So too the Jewish people have a unique deep spiritual relationship to the land of Israel. This can be seen from the prophet Ezekiel (chapter 48) dividing up the land between the twelve tribes, granting each tribe the parcel of land best suited for its needs. This was accomplished by each tribe bordering the place from where the soul of his tribe emanates from. Thus each mitzvah performed in Eretz Yisrael ascends and adorns each of the borders in relationship to the soul of each tribe. In this way, the completeness of the soul is dependent upon which portion of land it dwells in. And the fulfillment of the land is dependent upon the souls that dwell there in accordance with its existence. The essence of this is that Zion is the point of the original creation (Gemara Yoma 54b) For, from that point the rest of the world unfolded. That point of course is associated with the Shechina.” Chabad https://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/380682/jewish/A-Land-for-Every-Nation-21.htm

    Also Kabbalah: “The land of Israel and its cities also represent a sexual aspect. The first sin caused a split be­tween the masculine principle of the divine powers (symbolized by the sefirah of Glory or Foundation) and the feminine principle (symbolized by Kingship). The coupling of the two principles is already symbolized in early Kabbalah by the unification of “Zion” (Glory or Foundation) and “Jerusalem” (Kingship). Since the righteous person simi­larly is symbolized by the sefirah of Foun­dation, the sexual aspect is also reflected in the fact that only perfectly righteous people can possess the land.”  https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mystical-israel/

    [8] “These two Galilees, of so great largeness, and encompassed with so many nations of foreigners, have been always able to make a strong resistance on all occasions of war; for the Galileans are inured to war from their infancy, and have been always very numerous; nor hath the country been ever destitute of men of courage, or wanted a numerous set of them: for their soil is universally rich and fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees of all sorts, insomuch that it invites the most slothful to take pains in its cultivation, by its fruitfulness; accordingly it is all cultivated by its inhabitants, and no part of it lies idle. Moreover, the cities lie here very thick, and the very many villages there are here are every where so full of people, by the richness of their soil, that the very least of them contain above fifteen thousand inhabitants.” Note how Josephus connects the robustness of the warriors and their dauntless spirit with the fertility of their land. Josephus, The Book of Wars transl. by William Whiston, (London: 1737) 3, 3:2

    [9] Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)

    Torah as Hologram

    David Porush

    “Calculus… ironically the word means ‘pebble’” – Herman Wouk, The Language God Talks (2010)

    You come on a small, still pond in a clearing in the woods. Someone just tossed a pebble into it seconds ago, but now they’re gone. You can tell because waves ripple out from where it plopped in. You watch as the rings radiate out to reach every point in the pond.

    From Physics Stack Exchange

    Imagine now that you arrived just after two pebbles dropped into the pond. You can tell where they went in by tracing the two concentric patterns back to their two centers. Then you notice that the two patterns collide. Looking closely, some waves add their energy to each other to make bigger waves with higher troughs and crests. Some waves cancel each other, making smaller waves or even points of calm water. As the waves radiate out, the whole pond now shows that two pebbles dropped in.

    If you were clever, it might be possible to look at any smaller section of the pond, even without looking at the whole, and reconstruct the fact that two pebbles dropped in. You might even be able to deduce more information, like how heavy the pebbles were, how far away from each other they dropped or even how soon the second pebble hit after the first.

    Now imagine thousands of pebbles dropped in the pond. Every part of the pond would register every dropped pebble in an extremely complex array of waves. Maybe it would take a super-computer to tell how many pebbles, where and when they were dropped, etc., but the surface of every part of the pond, however far away from the original pebbles, registers all the information about them. You could read any part of the surface of the pond and it would tell a story about the original events, even though you weren’t there to see the pebbles enter the water.

    Holograms

    Without getting too deep into the technicalities (laser beams are split and recorded after they bounce off an image) making a hologram uses the same phenomenon as the pebbles in the pond: a wave interference pattern (see this at “Explain That Stuff”). The “holo” in hologram refers to the whole image it projects.

    It is a curiosity of a hologram that if you cut out a tiny piece of the original hologram and shine a laser through it, it would display the whole image, if in lower resolution and smaller. So a hologram is also holistic because every part, however small, registers and represents the whole, just like you could (theoretically) look at a small section of the pond at its edge and reconstruct where, how many, and when the pebbles dropped.

    Like the surface of the pond, every point of a hologram contains a trace of the whole. Every point resonates echoes the original events (the object on which the laser shone; pebbles dropping) that created the text (waves forming an interference pattern on the medium of a holographic plate or the pond’s surface). Every point also resonates with every other. It is a whole – (“holo”) – writing or record (“gram”). We can read the text of the pond to tell what happened before we got there.

    Holistic thinking

    The hologram is a great metaphor not only for reading a literary text but for reading the cosmos as a hologram. A holistic approach means you cannot fully understand any part of something without seeing the whole and vice versa. Holistic thinking is a compelling approach to the world. Dissect a frog as much as you want, but it won’t explain why it jumps at a fly. You might even kill the essence of the thing you’re after.

    We know instinctively, especially when we think of living beings that somehow the whole has an identity and integrity that no part in itself can describe on its own. Holistic healing treats the whole person because it assumes that every organ, every cell, is intimately connected to every other. Further, it knows the body and the mind, maybe even the personality and spirit are all connected. Your dynamic habits and experiences affect the physical part of your body. Your fingernails and hair say something about your diet. An examination of your eye could tell the opthamologist that something is wrong with the liver or heart. And it is a cliche that your attitude towards life affects your health. In turn, the health of every individual organ can affect and be affected by every other. Holism gives us a more powerful and intuitively appealing way of looking at a very complex phenomenon or system than by just picking it apart and analyzing its components

    One scientific theory applies this concept to the whole cosmos. David Bohm, an associate of Einstein’s at Princeton in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was one of the most significant physicists of the twentieth century. Based on his work on quantum waves, he proposed a view of the entire universe as an interconnected whole. In his view, the universe has an explicit order we can see and intuit, and a deeper level of reality, a hidden implicit order that underlies it and ties it all together, what he called “the Holographic Universe.”

    An associate of Bohm’s, neuroscientist Karl Pribram, speculated that the brain also worked like a hologram. As he put it, the brain was “holonomic.” When you see something new or feel a great emotion, it stimulates waves of neural impulses. Even the firing of a single neuron propagates waves of neuro-electrical impulses across the whole brain, just as waves from pebbles dropped in a pond.

    If you look at videos of lightning storms in the upper atmosphere as seen from space, they seem to dance across vast regions as if they were in tune to some secret music. The entire atmosphere is an interconnected ecosystem. Standing on the ground and watching a single bolt of lightning gives you no clue to this implicate order in the sky.

    Reading the Bible as a hologram

    The Hebrew Bible records an experience just like this. An entire nation of Hebrews, six hundred thousand men and their wives, children and parents, flee slavery in Egypt to the desert. Moses leads them to Mount Sinai. They huddle around its base as he warns them of an awesome event about to happen. Then lightning flashes, thunder rumbles. A prolonged incomprehensible sound blasts out, growing louder. God is talking. The Hebrews are overwhelmed. They can’t comprehend what they hear and they’re afraid the unprecedented show will kill them.

    They ask Moses to intercede. He goes up the mountain and returns forty days later with a transcript of what God wanted them to hear, written in the brand-new medium of the phonetic alphabet. Later, according to some interpretations, Moses writes more extensively about what God told and continues to tell him. The result is the Bible, the Five Books of Moses, the Torah.

    God’s performance atop the mountain is transient and long gone. Jews have a national memory of the event. They are the only people who claim a deity spoke to them en masse and they survived. They have a collective national memory of a story that would be impossible to falsify. Did millions of people conspire to make it up and then agree that this thing really happened? Would Moses say this happened to them, and they just don’t remember? Would he say it DID happen and their folks just forgot to tell you about it or covered up the source of your national identity and purpose? So the only way to fully understand the Torah is to see it as an accurate record – an autobiography – of its birth, but how? If we take its testimony seriously, the Bible obliges us to understand what God meant us to hear. However, the text is only the trace, the transcript, of this incomprehensible event: the prolonged blast of a divine voice.

    So this singularity – the fancy word is theophany – requires a singular approach to reading. For this I recruit the hologram. A holographic approach to reading assumes that the Torah is the dictation of a single divine Author. The hologram models how to read a text that traces an event that happened before we got there but where every part of the text is implicated with every other and with the original event like pebbles in a pond. The minutest part, a single word, letter, the embellishments on a letter – even the silent spaces between the words – represent and register and resonate with the whole (as I show in various parshas such as Chukat, Vayigash, Vayikra, Noah, Emor and elsewhere). Every jot sings the theme of a larger song, however softly and faintly. The text is an interference – or better yet an interconnection – pattern, intensely dynamic, complex hyper-inter-textual.

    If the waves on the surface of the pond comprise the text, the pebbles are the writing instrument or channel used by an “author” or actor to transmit his or her intentions. But as we come on the rippling pond in the glade in the woods, we come after the original event is long over, and different readers will have different interpretations. Some deny there was ever a girl in the glade dropping pebbles in a pond. A naive explorer might come on the pond, look at the complex interference pattern the pebbles caused, and say, “Whoah, windy day.” He sees only a chaos of waves and has no idea that someone dropped a bunch of pebbles into the water before he got there. A skeptic might say, “You’ve been staring at the pond too long. You’re imagining things.” The cynic has a completely alternative explanation. He sees the complexity of the waves but says, “It’s just a natural coincidence.”

    If we believe we know someone plopped pebbles into the water before we arrived, that leaves us with the challenge of reconstructing the hologram, reading the dynamic traces of the original act and reconstructing what happened. After all, pebbles and waves are two completely different media, one the cause, the other the effect. No number of waves in water will ever form themselves back into the original pebbles that caused them. But the clues are there. There’s enough information to of it. The waves present a mystery. Who was the original pebble-dropper? Why’d she do it in the first place? Was she just passing the time idly amusing herself? Was she trying to achieve something?

    Reading in the hologram and Jewish tradition

    This approach to reading the Torah as a trace or transcript has a long provenance. The great medieval sage Rambam (1138–1204) expressed it as one of his “Thirteen Principles of Faith”:

    We believe that the entire Torah in our possession was given [to us] by the Almighty through Moshe Our Teacher by means of the medium we metaphorically call “speech.” No one knows the real nature of this communication except Moshe, to whom it was transmitted. He was like a scribe receiving dictation. He wrote the history, the stories, and the commandments. Therefore he is called “[the] inscriber.” There is no difference between the [the apparently trivial and most profound verses]. For it is all from God; it is all God’s perfect Torah, pure, holy and true.

    Rambam is very clear. The Torah is the transcript of a dictation. It is always already a translated version of an original utterance and intention. As A.J. Heschel put it, the Torah from Moses is already a “midrash,” literally “from the word,” a commentary.  Traditional Jewish interpretations call themselves mishnehs – “repetitions”.

    So during their chat atop Sinai, when Moses took God’s dictation, was he fast enough to write every word? Was the new medium of the phonetic alphabet agile enough to capture everything? Did it capture more than we could parse by the fact it had no vowels and so any string of consonants could be parsed multiple ways? Did God want everything He said written, or were there elaborations, digressions, and occult and secret revelations? The Jewish tradition is built on this inevitable fact. Midrash encompasses the entire Jewish interpretive tradition since Sinai, including the Mishnah (brought down from Oral Law into written form in the second century CE), Gemara (which with Mishna forms the Talmud), and the almost two millenia of ongoing commentary, debate, legends, exemplars, parables, and case law conducted across time, space and cultures since then.

    Hologram and spirituality

    The approach to Torah as a hologram also has a deeper spiritual dimension. An essential Jewish belief is the oneness of God and the unity of the cosmos He created. God did not perform His blast, nor create the universe, and then disappear or stand idly by to admire it work. His involvement in Creation is intimate and continues and compels at least acknowledgement, if not gratitude. The holistic approach to reading mirrors these beliefs.

    The final more mystical concept is the congruence of the physical universe and the Torah. In Kabbalah, Torah is the cosmic cookbook. God wrote it before He brought the world into being. He consulted its recipe to recite the words that “He spoke” (Vayomer Elohim) to create light, sky, earth, and life. A kabbalistic tradition suggests that the written letters formed God’s script and were (it’s too tempting to say literally) the instruments of Creation. It demands an approach that transcends our usual ideas of reading and interpreting to hint, however faintly, at a divine creativity implicit in every word, letter, flourish and even silence.

    – David Porush, (Haifa 1994 and San Mateo 2022)

    The Adultery-Jealousy Complex and its Cure: The case of the *shtuss* twins

    David Porush2 Comments
    “O comfort-killing night, image of hell, dim register and notary of shame, black stage for tragedies and murders fell, vast sin-concealing chaos, nurse of blame!” – Shakespeare, “Macbeth”

    Most of us have experienced bouts of jealousy at some point in our lives. It’s not fun. Jealousy torments you and makes you torment the person you suspect, especially if it is your mate. On the way to doing real damage, you are likely to make yourself look ridiculous to your loved ones and even your community. Jealousy is the devourer, a “green-eyed monster.”

    Screen Shot 2020-06-02 at 11.44.05 AM
    Image of the cuckold in Moliere’s 1660 opera, “Sganarelle”

    The Bible discusses jealousy in the context of a broken marriage. A husband is so suspicious of his wife, whether justified or not, that he brings her to trial in the ritual of bitter waters (sotah) that establishes whether she has been faithful. Jews often read this portion, Naso (Num 4:21-8:89)  around Shavuot holiday, when they also read The Book of Ruth, the story of the faithful woman. The contrast between the two is too good to pass up because Ruth also offers a cure for broken marriages that are as contemporary as they were three thousand years ago.

    The sotah trial – really a ritual – is a spectacle. The priests take sacred water, mix it with dirt from the floor of the Tabernacle, and after plenty of elaborate stagecraft, ink curses and oaths on parchment, grind them up, and mix them into the water. The poor woman has to drink it, a kind of spiritual litmus test. If she’s guilty, the potion promises to “distend her belly and sag her thigh,” make her into a curse to her people, and kill her.

    But I want to focus on the other half of the drama. The ritual of bitter waters is also called the “Ordeal of Jealousy.” The two terms adultery and jealousy are entwined throughout this passage. Most popular descriptions of the trial emphasize the victimization of the woman. But the jealous husband’s fate also hangs in the balance and it is obvious that the Bible thinks he is also worthy of condemnation. What if she’s innocent and he’s the one who deserves humiliation (and payment) to atone for his mistake? The bitter sotah water will tell. That’s why when she is being tried, the wife holds in her hand “the meal offering of jealousy” that the husband has brought.

    I’m not suggesting the husband is a victim like his wife might be.  Just the opposite. The only thing he is a victim of is his own rampant emotion. The English translation often renders his state of mind something like this. He brings his wife to trial because

    “a fit of jealousy comes over him and he is wrought up about the wife who has defiled herself; or if a fit of jealousy comes over him and he is wrought up about his wife although she has not defiled herself.” (Num 5:14)

    His rage is the stage for the scene whether she is guilty or not.

    The original Hebrew in the Bible for this dramatic seizure of jealousy reveals this more forcefully: it literally says something like:

    “…and [the husband] is carried away high [by a] spirit or wind of jealousy doubled “

    וְעָבַר עָלָיו רוּחַ־קִנְאָה וְקִנֵּא

    I know that’s awkward to read, but you get the idea. The verb ohvar (עָבַר) has the sense of transgression, loss of self-possession. Alahv (עָלָיו) doesn’t mean spiritual heights but loss of groundedness, rootedness. The doubling of the adjective for jealousy (kinah v’kinei) is a common rhetorical device in Biblical Hebrew to indicate an extremity of a quality, and this ruach kinah v’kineh – blast of super-jealousy – occurs nowhere else in the Torah outside this drama. (It is repeated in the next verse and in the recap at the end of the section). [1]

    Marriage counselors take note: the Hebrew word for jealousy (kanaw – קַנָּא) puns on the word for possession (kawnaw – קָנָה), as when you buy something. But you already knew that. Jealousy and possessiveness go together, and the husband’s suspicions may live in a realm where the facts are irrelevant, overcome by a need for ownership and control of his spouse. The wife either defiled herself OR has not, but the husband is definitely transgressive, lost, alienated, out of his head or too deep into it, and crossed a boundary into a jealous rage.

    Shtuss

    So obviously yes, on the one hand, adultery is one of the gravest matters, disruptive to home, life, family and community, not to mention violating one of the Ten Commandments and therefore a capital crime.

    But on the other hand, so is jealousy. When the Talmud discusses it, it slides between the waywardness of the wife and the anger of the husband, implicitly equating them:

    Reish Lakish says: A man commits a transgression only if a spirit of folly [shetut] enters him, as it is stated: “If any man’s wife goes aside [tisteh]” (Numbers 5:12). The word tisteh is written with the Hebrew letter shin, affording an alternative reading of tishteh, which is related to the term for folly, the word shetut. [2]

    The pun, however opens a window onto how our tradition views this transcendentally irrational jealousy-adultery complex and, in fact, the moral structure of the Torah itself. 

    Shtuss. It was one of my bubby’s favorite words and I always assumed it was pure Yiddish because the way she said it was always with that unique mix of laughing dismissal and deep contempt.  Little did I know she was invoking a profound Jewish concept embedded in the ancient Hebrew. And like that unique Yiddish flavor of contempt and irony in the word, there’s comedy implicit in the staging of the sotah trial, despite its gravity, that comes from the public outing of the husband’s jealousy.

    Adultery and jealousy are twin foolishnesses. They both can unleash an orgy (maybe that’s the wrong word) of foolishness, gossip and disruption in the community if not rectified. The Bible is clear that it was just as likely that the husband was in the grips of crazed suspicion as the wife was guilty. No wonder sotah is the title and subject of an entire tractate of the Talmud that ends with an extended apocalyptic vision of the descent of the generations (Yeridas HaDoros) into transgression and loss.

    But the wife’s alleged adultery is at this point only a suspected act. There’s so much histrionics already in the Biblical ritual that if the accused is guilty, she is just as likely to die of psychosomatic fright than the magic bitter waters which promise to “distend her belly and sag her thigh” and kill her. For some, that former fate might seem the worse threat.

    Let’s keep our focus on the husband, though. Imagine being so deep in the grips of jealousy’s derangement that you are willing to air your dirty laundry in public. You’re going to expose yourself either as a cuckold, or insanely suspicious. Imagine subjecting your wife and family and self to this ordeal. The jealous husband is a common, ridiculous figure in comedies throughout time, from the ancient Greeks to Chaucer and Shakespeare to Hollywood. The entertainment industry would be out of business without jealousy. You probably know someone who fits the type. The jealous husband – if he’s not tragic like Othello – is usually met with ridicule, which one of my professors called “a kind of wild, communal justice.” But by setting tongues wagging with vigilante gossip, it only makes things worse. Only the priestly ritual can rectify the cosmic, communal imbalance that a domestic drama creates once it flies out of the home, fueled by the husband’s suspicions.

    By the way, marital Counselors Note #2: the husband’s jealousy often pushes his wife into the behavior he fears.  Such is the paradox of paranoia. But you knew that, too.

    The Maharal [Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, 16th century] expands on the Talmud’s pun. He says that this sin of adultery comes to teach us that every sin has a bit of foolish adultery in it:

    No one does any sin if they weigh the full implications of his actions … a sin is illogical, and so we say a ru’ach shtuss (a deep spirit of foolishness) has entered him (or her).

    In other words, though it is aberrant and has aspects of both high tragedy and low comedy, the adultery-jealousy complex captures an intrinsic integrity of the Torah’s entire moral system. While most secular and modern views of the Bible suggest it presents a system of faith that is the opposite of reason and logic. But the foundation of its traditional moral order is rational. The behaviors it warns us against, its laws, mark the sharp boundaries between animal impulses like lust and lizard-brain rage and civil, orderly behavior. Violating its laws makes no sense. Behaving yourself creates order and civic harmony, which are also holy. Plato and Aristotle knew this. Shakespeare did too, for all the fun he has with human frailty and misbehavior. It’s just a lesson we’ve seem to forgotten in a secular age.

    Foolishness, fidelity and choice

    The sotah contrasts with that paradigm of psychic strength and self-possession, Ruth. Naomi, her husband and two sons leave Israel to find their fortunes in Moab. The sons take Moabite wives, sisters Orpah and Ruth. But the father and two sons all die. Broken by loss and poverty, Naomi decides to go back to Israel. Orpah a stays, which makes sense. But Ruth accompanies Naomi in one of the great pledges of selfless love and fidelity: “Where you go, I will follow. Your G-d will be my G-d.” Back in Israel, they barely survive as paupers on the pickings of barley crop left in the field after harvest. Here, Ruth is only a Moabite woman, statusless, an alien, taunted and molested by the crop pickers. But her modesty and grace catch the eye of the rich landowner himself, Boaz. He protects her and ultimately redeems her in marriage. It’s one of the great happy endings in the Jewish canon.

    Juxtapose the two stories and we see that the cure for sotah’s shtuss is Ruth’s strength. The remedy for foolishness is faithfulness, in every sense of the word. Counselors Note #3: Commitment to a higher code, outside our self-absorption in our own troubles, grants us an amazing calm and grace even in the face of humiliation. How does that work, exactly? There’s a feedback loop between devotion to something that is not-self and orderly in ourselves and order in the world we create around ourselves, between inner psychic conviction and trust in a higher order, in a supernal destiny. This confidence in comportment, in restraining our passions in the face of all challenges, manifests itself in things like trust in our spouses and behaving ourselves in marriage and beyond to treatment of our family and our society. Ruth knows – and acts as if – they are all connected. Perhaps that is why the line of King David and the Messiah springs from her, a woman who begins as a widowed, beggared Moabite stranger in Israel, attached to her embittered mother-in-law.

    As a convert, Ruth reminds us that we choose our behaviors. She chooses to follow Naomi. She chooses her public and private demeanor. She chooses to be a Jew, reminding us that fidelity to being Jewish requires a constant conscious choice. It is harder and more meaningful to make a deliberate, conscious choice to be a Jew than it is to rest on our Laurels (and Hardys) and assume we’re covered just because we were born that way and happen to like bagels and lox.

    Husbands and wives choose how to behave themselves in matters of marriage and procreation. Any mortal marriage is equivalent to Ruth’s marriage to Judaism. A husband and wife commit to each other and to a third principle that arises from their tie to each other but exists outside and above them. We sometimes call that third entity “the institution of marriage,” but that sounds deadening. “Holy matrimony” is a politically incorrect cliche, but it comes closer by invoking the source of healing of the jealousy-adultery complex. Marriage is a dynamic, active ever-unfolding creation. It requires that the spouses consciously and continuously choose it, not just to forestall the shtuss twins of lust and jealousy, but to keep the marriage vital and even, possibly joyful. I like to think that’s where true love comes from, bringing heaven onto earth.

    Dedicated to my wife, Sally

    San Mateo, 5790/2020

    ENDNOTES

    This perambulation was inspired by one of the many seemingly off-handed spontaneous remarks during class by my teacher, Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman, that had profound learning and depth of insight behind it. He said, “sotah is connected to shtuss.’

    [1] The Talmud debates the meaning of this phrase as possibly meaning we shouldn’t get witnesses and warnings involved because it will arouse the anger in the domestic dispute, but it concludes by confirming the shared responsibility: “And the husband is he who will come to act in anger with her, as they will have mutual antagonism toward each other.” (Sotah 2b)

    [2] Reish Lakish in (Sotah 3a) is playing on the fact that one sign signifies two sounds – ‘sin’ and ‘shin” ( שְׂ ) – note the dot on top moves from right to left).

    The pun has many layers of linguistic complexity relating to this discussion of Sotah. First, there’s a pun between s’teh spelled with a ‘sin’ (wayward) and sotah, the name for the ritual, spelled with a ‘samech’ ( ס ). The letter ‘sin’ was interchanged with the letter ‘samech’ in early Hebrew but is more or less fixed by the time of the Mishnah. Second, the word “sot” and “shot” are virtually equivalent, both meaning “to turn aside from the path” (see the entry for שׁוטKlein Dictionary,  Carta Jerusalem; 1st edition, 1987). 

    In other words, the ritual is named after or at least sounds the same as the label for the wayward woman, which unfortunately fixes the focus on the woman’s culpability, not the man’s, and thus fuels the feminist indictment of it.

    What does “virus” really mean? A pandemic etymology

    David Porush4 Comments

    The etymology of virus has gone viral

    According to the Internet god of all things virtually true, the word virus comes from the Latin root meaning “snake’s venom.”

    snake-venom
    From “The Fig Tree”

    This viral etymology is repeated in one form or another on all the major sites about words –  wiktionary, dictionary, wordorigins, merriam-webster, etymonline, oxfordlearnersdictionaries. 

    They’re all cribbing from the mother of all English dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary.

    “Virus: [L(atin) ‘slimy liquid, poison…] 1. venom such as emitted by a poisonous animal.”

    It makes perfect sense as far as it goes. Viruses are sorta poison-spewing evil little animalcules, right? But all these free online sources are, like most thieves, lazy and simply repeat each other’s smash and grab larceny of the OED. No one owns words, but discovering their origins and sources is hard work. See “The Professor and the Madman” (2019). It’s free on Netflix. Thieves like free, right?

    If we dig a little deeper – perform a more serious archeology on virus using the OED as our guide – we uncover in its sinuous history a message for our current coronavirus pandemic.

    Virus and virtue

    The second definition of virus in the OED is “path,” also deriving from the Latin. What’s the connection? It’s probably not the toxicity of snakes but a deeper shared origin having to do with their shape. A snake is shaped like a curvy path.

    Sure enough,  if we wend our way next door to virus‘s neighbor word virtue, we see another clue: the original root of ‘virtue’ is vir, a Latin root for ‘man’. In ancient Rome, virtus meant courage on the field of battle. Virtue was inherently virile, masculine. Julius Caesar in Book I of The Gallic Wars, his macho historical narrative, advises that we should

    Rely more on virtue than on artifice and stratagem.

    But if you’re a logomaniac like me, you’re not content with a mere 2000-year-old source. You want to dig deeper beneath the Roman ruins to find the oldest possible origin. Where did that word come from? Why do those three letters come to mean something as elemental as ‘maleness’? [1]

    So strip away yet another layer and you discover vir comes from an even earlier root, probably Hindo-Sanskrit or early Greek, for stick, twig, or rod. That’s the fundamental root connection: rod is a phallus or vice versa, and thus manly virtues like virility carry genital freight. The Latin word virga preserve this root: it also means rod. I will leave it to your imagination how it penetrated to the concept of virginity.

    At the very root of language?

    What etymologists fantasize about is traveling back in time to eavesdrop on the first burbling articulation by the first genius hominid who first invented the word they’re studying. Maybe – and this is a real fantasy – vir was the very first word, there at the aboriginal creation of language, of wording itself, where sounds came to represent and signify external things instead of only verbalizing hominid reactions to transitory events or warnings or coded warblings or states of existence.

    So imagine with me a linguistic Adam and Eve alone in their grove. Fueled by the urgency of desire, a sound erupts from one or the other of them and she (or he) points at what they both want,

    “Vir!” he (or she) said, nodding at it, and they look down and they smile in a flash of telepathy, for it was obvious that they agree this was a capital way to indicate that thing.

    “Vir,” the other repeats, and “vir,” they would coo to each other from now henceforth, forever after referring to it in the kind of fond secret vocabulary that couples everywhere invent, pillow talk.

    But somehow the secret gets out and catches on. Someone eavesdropped, the snake perhaps, and it spread, this viral app of pointing with sound, especially this happy signifying meme. Folks apply the sound pointer nimbly to other things like stick and rod, and eventually, surely by the time of the Latins, to snake. We’ve made the same slangy sling of meaning. Shlong comes from the German word for “snake,” to take only one of hundreds of examples.

    The essence of virus 

    Language isn’t a computer code but a stew. Dictionaries shouldn’t be lists of algorithms any more than cookbooks are chemistry manuals. As the pot of culture simmers, convenience, contingency, inspiration, necessity and even humor throw in new ingredients and flavors. A good chef would never follow a recipe slavishly.

    Dictionaries, however, are by definition definitive, making pronouncements on fluid meanings as if they’re fixed. We can see how the conflation between venom and virus creeps in. It’s not really an error, but a cluster of images and metaphors that crowd and seep – I might say infect – each other. A snake emits venom like the penis spews semen. A vir is the source of fluid essence, it is seminal. This is how we get to virus.

    Snake down the path to yet another neighboring word in the Oxford English Dictionary, virtue, and the hidden route to virus appears.

    OED’s very first definition of “virtue” is

    the power or operative influence inherent in a supernatural god or being

    Virtual means “to be possessed of the power to influence, to have the potential to affect.” Caesar’s exemplary man influences us to manliness by his valor. Divinity influences us to virtue metaphysically.

    From here it is now one more small step to that other kind of invisible influenza, organic virus and virulence. The very word flu is a contraction of influenza. We now know that a microscopic pocket of weaponized genetic material causes flu pandemic. It sits astride the limbo between living and not, helping all-too-many souls to cross it, ubiquitous but invisible like G-d Himself. Through most of history, to most humans, it must have seemed metaphysical.

    Pandemic as transcendental flu

    Millions of words have already been written about the terrible virtues of this virus, how nature or the divine is exerting its superior influence over human affairs through the invisible Covid-19 flu pandemic, correcting our hubris, changing civilization in the blink of an eye, forcing us to inspect and re-evaluate assumptions about work, play, family, love, even self. Even if you cannot be persuaded that this – or anything else – has metaphysical origins, you have to admit the coronavirus pandemic is doing a good imitation of what a metaphysical being would do: making us consider the meaning of virtue as if we had indeed lost our path.

    NOTE:  This is an extension of the etymology of virtual  that I wrote a few years ago: Almost Really Real: How the word “virtual” deconstructed itself and what its curious etymology tells us about the future of virtual reality and truthiness

     

    Too Many Aarons

    David Porush1 Comment

    Now Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it, and they offered before the LORD alien fire, which He had not commanded them. And fire came forth from G-D and consumed them, so they died in front of G-D. (Lev 10:1-2)

    Rosh Chodesh Nissan, 1312 BCE: It’s one of the most mystical days in our calendar. Kabbalah tells us it’s the anniversary of G-d’s very conception of Creation. The trans-dimensional portal that enables Him to visit us, the mishkan, is complete. Moshe, Aaron and his sons have tested it for a week. Everything works. It’s show time.

    In an excess of wine-induced ecstasy or zeal or chutzpah, these two princes enter the most transcendent and dangerous place in the cosmos to offer that most esoteric of sacrifices, incense. Rather than accepting the incense as it did two verses before, G-d’s fire instead eats their souls, leaving their bodies still in their tunics. Moses tells Aaron, with what feels like incredible sangfroid, “G-d warned us this is how His glory works to bring us near,” and commands Aaron not to mourn his sons openly.

    Was it a Divine kiss or punishment? Did they transcend or transgress? At this miraculous interface between the supernal and mundane, all is beyond comprehension, suprarational.

    I began writing this on Nadav and Abihu’s yahrzeit 2020. In these days of plague that will include Pesach, our mystical calendar is talking to us across the millenia. Too many have become Aarons, enduring the unimaginable pain of burying loved ones without proper mourning.

    Yet, perhaps there’s solace for us. The function of the mishkan was to sublime the physical into transcendent holiness. Today, while we wait to rebuild it, its invitation to elevate matter into spirit through sacrifice is everywhere, if we look for it.