When you lie down and when you rise up

This is just a nodule of a thought really, not quite a post. But it is interesting to me that the command to recite the Shema "when you lie down and when you rise up" is presumed to refer to evening and morning recitations.

How odd it must be, for a night watchman or a third-shifter to help out with a morning minion and recite "who removes sleep from the eyes, slumber from the eyelids" before going to bed, or to recite Hashkiveinu at the start of his day.

The Shema itself, does not contain language linking it to the time of day it is recited, but the attendant blessings are.

Taboos and Text Preservation

Had an interesting thought driving home from Shul today - to what degree has the taboo on destroying documents containing the tetragrammaton helped to preserve our tradition, and help our historical sense. Imagine - if that taboo did not exist, if the stuff could be burned, no Cairo Geniza, perhaps no Dead Sea Scrolls. With rulings that digital representations of the Name don't count, what will become of documents we produce today.

A Response to the latest "Eilu V'Eilu"

Which can be found at The URJ's Eilu v'Eilu Volume 20 page.

RavMoffic is happy to wring his hands over the decline in synagogue affiliation, but he fails to address the most crucial of issues: Why be Jewish? During the span in which he notes the decline, the Reform movement did all the things he seems to prescribe - welcoming intermarrieds, davenning in English, being accessible - so that's clearly not working.

What IS bringing people in are lively services, and a return to practice that allows us to reify what it is that makes being Jewish so special - the sense that God chose us for a special purpose. Lose that element of our theology and the rituals that reify it and one is hard pressed to see why one would choose it over, say, Presbyterianism.

Judaism has always been a very sensory religion - the clean light of Shabbos candles, the smoke of the havdallah candle, the fragrance of the etrog and the myrtle, the rustle of the willow and the pine, the flavors and textures of the Passover Seder, that cozy, sheltered feeling that comes with wrapping the tallit over your head as you say the Shema.

Early Reform, with its nearly Spock-like valorization of Reason uber-alles, erred in rejecting these rituals and the very human needs they meet. The zeitgeist was one of pragmatism, of privileging the intellect over emotion or physicality, and the move my have seemed appropriate for the time, but I think it has proved demonstrably unsustainable.

Ritual fills the need to have a physical relationship to God, to acknowledge that as physical, emotional beings we need modes of physically reifying our relationship to God. It prevents us from either worshipping idols or rejecting God altogether by creating a way to encounter God from the place we are.

Hebrew

Hebrew has been making a comeback in the Reform Movement, which, for a few centuries, prided itself on the use of the vernacular languages in worship. In many ways this is unsurprising. Perhaps part of the shift is that with the establishment of the state of Israel, Hebrew is no longer a “dead language,” although I would contend that it never was a dead language. I study Biblical Hebrew because as languages ranging from Ancient Egyptian to Aramaic to Latin and Middle High German and English have passed into and out of the mouths of Am Yisrael, Hebrew has remained the language of Torah and liturgy, of commentary and philosophy. Had Rashi written in Old French rather than Hebrew his work would be far less accessible to the contemporary Jew than it is. I cannot help but note with some irony that in the Metsuda Chumash with Rashi, it is Rashi’s rendering of Hebrew terms into Old French, the vernacular of his audience, that now needs glossing. Hebrew has also made collaboration possible across both space and time. Would the Yiddish-speaking Moses Isserles have been able to gloss the Shulchan Aruch as he did had Karo written it in the Ladino of his own vernacular rather than in Hebrew? And do we not, today, have more difficulty understanding the Aramaic Gemara than the Hebrew Mishnah upon which it comments? More than anything, it is the fact that Hebrew has served Judaism as a reliable lingua franca for millenia, while vernaculars have proven but transient lodgers in our mouths that gives it the distinction of being lashon kodesh, the holy tongue. I celebrate the Reform Movement’s renewed interest in the language, because like Shabbat, Hebrew too has kept the Jews.