Shabbat: Parsha Emor

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah Portion for this week is Parsha Emor, Leviticus 21:1-24:23.

This parsha is what I like to refer to as a "little things" parsha. Instead of having one major theme throughout, it issues several smaller, mostly unrelated items. Emor reiterates some old laws, reminds the people to observe certain holidays and it even has a fun linguistic lesson in the middle.

The first thing that springs to mind when reading Emor is the focus early in the parsha on unblemished things. God forbids priests who have some blemish or deformity from performing public rituals, though they are still permitted to carry out the private rites of the priesthood. Similarly, God emphasizes the importance of using only unblemished animals for sacrifice. Though these two laws are on a similar topic, it's not likely that they stem from the same line of reasoning.

The easier of the two to parse is the use of unblemished sacrificial animals. In addition to forbidding the use of blemished animals, God also makes note of sick or injured creatures. The implication here is simple. Sacrificial animals came from one's personal livestock or by purchase from someone else. The point of sacrifice is to feel a loss, to give up something of value. Sick, injured and blemished animals are worth significantly less than strong, healthy, unblemished animals. This law is meant to require people to take their religion seriously. Sacrificing a cheap creature is hardly a sacrifice at all.

As for the limits placed on blemished priests, this is not meant to put an inherent value on a human life, but more as a means to maintain a public image. The priests were revered leaders in their communities. Just like President Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to stand through the pain of his polio-effected legs so that he might project an image of strength and dignity, the priests of Israel had to project an image of purity and health to the people they served. Our clergy today certainly deal with similar circumstances. There are many behaviors that are simply unacceptable for our rabbis because of their responsibilities to the communities they serve.

After all the blemish-related laws, God reiterates the importance of properly observing two specific holidays. First is Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the second we would recognize as Sukkot, the harvest festival during which it is a mitzvah to sleep in the Sukah, or booth. The concept on which God focuses this time around is the prohibition of working during these observances. Just like we are not supposed to work on Shabbat, neither are we supposed to work during other holy days. The interesting linguistic tidbit here is that the Torah has to add a modifier to the word for "work" in order to distinguish it from prayer. The Hebrew word Avodah on its own is used to mean both "work" in the traditional sense but also "worship". To indicate the former, the Torah adds a term that basically means "servile" or "daily, mundane, non-holy" work.

We are approaching the final parshiot for Leviticus and soon we will be moving into some of the more obscure laws of the Torah. The focus shifts away from sacrifice for the most part, so we can say that sacrifice is the general theme of Leviticus. With major rituals out of the way, the Torah turns its attention to daily life. Before that, we still have a few lessons left. I hope you'll join us for further study each week. Shabbat Shalom.

 

Person of the Week: Marc Chagall

Politicians, religious leaders and scientific pioneers are truly important people, but a culture is nothing without its artists. In the study of many civilizations of antiquity, art is all we have left. How much would we know about ancient Egypt without the statues and the paintings preserved inside of the tombs of kings? How deep would our understanding be of the daily lives of the Sumerian people without the fragments of personal votives found in the ruins of a home? Artists document the soul of a people. Without them, our collective histories are nothing but a series of facts, like bones with neither flesh nor blood.

One of the greatest artists of the Jewish culture is Marc Chagall. His colorful, lively paintings depict the joyous spirit of our people using the strange geometry of Modernism that was otherwise so often dark and troubled. Chagall studied under many talented painters, sculptors and theatre professionals in his youth. He faced anti-semitism his whole life but never lost his passion and hope.

Marc Chagall (or Shagal) was born in the region that would one day be Belarus in the year 1887. He was the son of a herring merchant and the eldest of nine children. Chagall often reflected positively on his childhood in his work, depicting the impoverished shtetls of Eastern Europe as being the homes of loving, tight-knit people. Where literal drabness existed on the surface, Chagall painted wild colors and exuberant poses. What's more, he never hid his Jewish heritage in either his life or his work. If the painting was of a rabbi, the title would say so.

At the age of 20, Marc Chagall went to join an artists collective in St. Petersburg, Russia. Whether under the Czar or the Soviets, Russia was a difficult place for Jews. The cities required Jews to have special passes just to enter them and anti-semetic violence was common. Though he was already an esteemed artist and even the founder of the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art, Chagall faced dismissal and scrutiny from the new Communist regime for his Jewish heritage and for his approach to art.

At the time, Soviet Socialism had very strong opinions about what kind of art should be pursued in the new order. The Party favored Socialist Realism, a stern and inherently political variety of art that depicted the struggle of the people and the triumph of collectivism. The work of Marc Chagall tended more toward the passionate Modernism of the West and was thus deemed decadent and anti-Soviet.

Seeking a safer, more nurturing environment for his family and his art, Marc Chagall relocated with his wife Bella and their daughter Ida to Paris, France and eventually to America during the horrors of World War II. After the war, Marc moved around frequently, though he spent much of his time in France where he was a fixture in the art scene.

Like many Jews of his time, Marc Chagall had a troubled relationship with his heritage. Though Jewish themes remained throughout his work and he was even involved in the creation of the new culture of the State of Israel, Chagall was not a practicing Jew. It is said in many of his biographies that upon his death in 1985, Chagall's funeral would have been entirely secular had a stranger not decided to say the Mourner's Kaddish over his coffin.

Regardless of his personal beliefs, Marc Chagall remains one of the most prominent artists to ever come from a Jewish background. He achieved worldwide acclaim for his prolific contribution to Modernism and his work currently adorns museums and private collections across the globe. Perhaps we can take a lesson from Marc Chagall concerning what makes a Jewish artist. He was a fighter, a traveler, a man of family, of principles and of passion.

Shabbat: Parsha Acharei-Kedoshim

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Acharei-Kedoshim, Leviticus 16:1-20:27.

This parsha is famous, or rather infamous, for containing the first proscription against homosexuality. Perhaps no passage in the entire Torah has been more politicized than the single line prohibiting men from laying with other men as they would lay with women.

Concerning this, there are two points I would like to make. First of all, it's not just the anti-gay activist groups who twist the context of this ruling. I have heard ill-informed arguments for the meaning of this passage on both sides of the debate. Anti-gay groups use it as a justification for anti-gay laws in our ideally secular society (itself something of a non-sequitur) while gay rights groups pick apart the exact language of the law. The passage itself refers to the contended act as "an abomination", a term that is applied to varying degrees of crimes according to the Torah, some of them as seemingly minor as planting one's crops incorrectly.

As always, Bible study driven by a political agenda really misses the point entirely. The culprit for this misunderstanding, like just about every other skewed attempt at exegesis, is lack of context. First there is the context of the passage within its given portion. The second half of Acharei-Kedoshim is all about sexual propriety. There is a long list of people we as Jews are not supposed to be around while naked, all of them being members of our families or our neighbors' spouses. In short, people with whom we shouldn't be having sex. The parsha also clearly prohibits sexual acts with animals. Like so many other thematically cohesive codes of law in the Torah, this parsha is aiming for order and simplicity. Remember that the Israelites at this point are people who have never governed themselves before. Their laws need to be clear and easy to follow. Giving them nuanced rules with room for interpretation would be akin to asking a class of 4th graders to interpret modern tort law.

The other and more vital context of this or of any passage in the Torah is time. These are not laws floating in the ether, they are guidelines for a new and fragile people. In the ancient world, a nation rose and fell by its population. Without enough workers, soldiers or farmers the society would quickly fall to outside control. The Israelites at this point are comparatively few in number and constantly facing the threat of foreign conquest. Laws like the sexual directives in Leviticus aren't designed to oppress people, they're designed to ensure a steady growth of population.

As I have written many times before, it is extremely important to ask why the Torah says what it says. This text must be approached with reason if it is to be a positive force in the modern world. This document is supposed to be the foundation of monotheistic morality. It grew out of a disenfranchised people's desire to escape the arbitrary cruelty of an endless procession of kings. To reduce Torah to dogma, to hold it so high that no one can actually read the words inside, is to invite new arbitrary cruelty, although one that is centered in common people instead of those who would govern them. This makes for a society that is permanently self-oppressed.

Shabbat: Tazria-Metzora

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Tazria-Metzora, Leviticus 12:1-15:33. Sometimes it's just as important to look at the arrangement of the Torah as it is to read the words themselves. Far too often those words are taken out of context merely to be used to justify a point of view. Such is the danger of faith. Taken piecemeal it can and will contradict the spirit in which it was first devised. Reading today's portion, it's difficult to see what exactly that spirit is without also seeing some intellectual speed bumps. A modern reader would likely hone in on the dual weights of ancient sexism and now-irrelevant rules, but that's not what we as 21st century students of Torah ought to take away from these passages. Tazria-Metzora is concerned with two topics. Most of it is devoted to how the presence of leprosy ought to be handled. It describes, at length, the procedure for identifying the disease, diagnosing its severity and ultimately what to do with an individual stricken by it. Aside from the obvious extrapolations we can take away about the importance of health and the worth of educated medical professionals, there's little need today for the specifics. Leprosy has been all but rendered non-existent in the modern world. Even in the rare cases of the disease today it is easily curable and an estimated 95% of all human beings are immune to it anyway. In short, you probably don't need to worry about going to your rabbi every time you get a pimple. The more interesting element of today's parsha is at the beginning when God describes the process of returning to purity when a woman has a child. The Torah is unambiguous about how it views childbirth and menstruation. It considers the former a necessary act of uncleanness and the latter it refers to as sickness. In essence, the perspective of the Torah runs counter to some of the core values of our modern culture. The difference, of course, is that we today have a firm understanding of these events, while ancient people did not. Once again, this is an opportunity to approach the Torah as a flexible document. People perceived menstruation to be an illness in the ancient world because they didn't have the means to understand it for what it is. That in mind, this idea among so many others in this ancient document must be viewed through the filter of new, relevant information. In that sense, the Torah is not sexist, it is merely uninformed. I am reminded of the most famous work of the great Christian theologian Augustin, The Literal Interpretation of Genesis. In so many words, he stated that science and reason have their place and that place is in the understanding of the natural world. The Bible, by contrast, is not meant to be a scientific document, but a moral one. If study and reason has revealed a fact in the natural world that runs counter to the views of the Bible, it is important to accept the fact as fact and to admit that the Bible, while factually inaccurate, made the assertion that it made out of a moral concern only, not to inform. So, what is the moral purpose of treating menstruation like an illness even though we today know for a fact that it is quite the opposite? At best we can see a large social concern for health and hygiene. Misplaced though that concern may be, the spirit of the law is to keep the women of the community of sound body. The modern lesson, then, should be that different individuals have different needs in their pursuit of wellness. Even modern doctors would agree that there are some medical issues that concern women but not men, and vice versa. No, we shouldn't treat perfectly healthy women as if they are ritually unclean. We should, however, take care of ourselves and others with due diligence. *A small note on a similar topic in this parsha. Upon childbirth the Torah states that a woman is ritually unclean for only a week after having a boy but two weeks after having a girl. This is often mistaken for sexism. The only reason a woman would be considered ritually unclean for a mere week upon having a boy is because the boy must be circumcised eight days after birth. If the mother was considered unclean for two weeks, she wouldn't be allowed to attend her own son's brit milah. Shabbat Shalom and have a nice weekend.

Shabbat: Parsha Shemini

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is parsha Shemini, Leviticus 9:1-11:47. For many non-Jews one of the most difficult things to understand about Judaism are its dietary restrictions. Known as kashrut or "Kosher Laws" these limitations almost all come out of Leviticus, many of them from this parsha. Without prompting or framing of any sort, God dictates a list to Moses of the animals people are allowed to eat and the things they are not, all based a series of seemingly arbitrary standards like the number of legs, the shape of a hoof and the eating habits of the creature in question. Because there is no explanation other than that "they are unclean" it is difficult for many to understand why these creatures were off-limits. Unlike the dietary laws of some other faiths which prohibit people from eating animals considered sacred, Judaism does not recognize any sacred animals. Rather, the restrictions have to do with health concerns. We can extrapolate this from the short list of animals used as examples in the parsha. Creatures such as pigs, rabbits, vultures and raptors are called unclean, as are all sea creatures that have no scales. When the Torah calls these animals "unclean" it may be in a very literal sense. Let's consider for a moment the methods of animal care and food storage in any age prior to the modern day. There was no such thing as refrigeration and certainly no such thing as pasteurization. Taking an animal like a pig that lives in filth and making it safe to consume is a tremendous task for any pre-industrial society. There were no sterile tools or machine-quality processing systems. Everything was done by hand. As for creatures like carrion-eating birds and various kinds of rodent, these animals are quite prone to picking up diseases and parasites. While rabbits are occasionally consumed in the modern day, mostly farm-raised varieties, most cultures still don't eat buzzards and crows. There are even restrictions in this parsha against eating most kinds of insect. Aside from locusts and grasshoppers, God forbids the people to eat anything else that we today would consider a bug. If one considers the kinds of bugs that can be found in the desert it only makes sense. Many of them bear powerful toxins for biting and stinging. While there are a few animals on Earth that have a tolerance for these poisons, humans most certainly aren't one of them. In the end, the dietary restrictions of kosher law have everything to do with control. Cattle, sheep and goats are easy to control and, at least when compared to pigs, they are relatively easy to slaughter and clean. The same goes for a fish with scales. Part of the preparation process for a food fish is a thorough removal of all scales, a process that necessitates cleaning regardless. If the people control what they eat and how clean their food is, they are more likely to be healthy and strong. This interest in dietary control pops up in other places in the Torah. There are instances where Jews are instructed to eat no meat when visiting a strange place, as they have no idea what animal they may be eating or how it was procured and prepared. As it stands today, many Jews do not follow the laws of kashrut. In many ways, a lot of them just aren't necessary anymore. Given post-industrial standards for cleanliness and quality control, most of us don't have to worry about the same issues as ancient people. It should be noted, however, that the Talmudic sages agreed that kosher laws only apply in normal circumstances. If it's a choice between starving and breaking the rules, then by all means break the rules. The spirit of the law is health and safety. Were new kosher laws to be created today, they would likely leave lobsters and pigs alone, aiming for trans fat and bad cholesterol instead.

Person of the Week: Issac Mayer Wise

The history of Judaism in America is a fascinating one filled with great innovations and more than a few colorful characters. The United States is the birthplace of the Reform movement, a mindset that has driven progressive thinking in the Western hemisphere for nearly 200 years. Without a doubt one of the most important people behind the Reform movement is Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise.

Wise was born in 1819 in Bohemia, a region in the Austrian Empire that would later come to be known as Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. His father was Rav Leo Wise who, like all rabbis prior to the 20th century, balanced his responsibilities as a religious leader with his separate professional duties. He was a school teacher, so it only stands to reason that Isaac would grow up to be an educator himself. Isaac studied both Jewish and secular topics in his home town of Steingrub then later pursued higher academics in Prague. For a brief two years, the certified Rabbi Isaac Meyar Wise took a pulpit in the town of Radnitz, not far from the famous beer-making region of Pilsner.

Like many European Jews of his time, especially those with a Judaic education, his services were of high value in America. He emigrated to Albany, New York in 1846 to be the rabbi at the synagogue there. Wise was a reformer at heart and a passionate one at that. The early Reform movement had a habit of adopting structural elements from Christian neighbors. Among those that have persisted into the modern day is the practice of giving sermons or d'varim during shabbat services. One that has waned in popularity in recent years is the use of family pews instead of separated chairs. Rabbi Wise's temple was the first to use pews in America. This and many other drives toward change and modernization put Rabbi Wise at odds with many of his peers. He was particularly progressive in terms of gender for his time. He was one of the first to permit a co-ed choir in his services and also took the radical step of including women in the minyan, the mandatory ten adults required to conduct a proper service.

Before leaving Albany (under some pressure from disagreeing parties within the synagogue leadership), Isaac Mayer Wise helped plant the seeds of a national union of Jewish organizations in America. This union wouldn't come to fruition for several years, long after Wise moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. After one failed attempt at creating a young men's Judaic seminary, Wise managed to establish Hebrew Union College, which is still today the premiere Jewish seminary in America and one of the most highly regarded in the world. Such is Isaac Mayer Wise's balanced philosophy toward modern Judaism. He fought for decades to convince the Jewish organizations of America to form a definitive union to foster communication and create universal standards. On the other end of this balance was his perceived need for a centralized seminary where the nation's religious leaders could all receive an equal education and the pervading philosophies of the time could be debated in as efficient a way as possible.

Rabbi Wise was also a tireless fighter for civil rights. His letters to President Lincoln during the American Civil War directly led to the repeal of General Grant's infamous Order No. 11 which required the Union military to expel all Jews from occupied territories under unfounded suspicions of collaboration with the Confederacy.

The hope and freedom brought to all immigrants by the promises of a new life in the United States created countless innovators and leaders. This drive for modernization and equality made it possible for passionate agitators like Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise to change not only the way Judaism is practiced, but the way this entire country operates.

Shabbat: Parsha Tzav

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Tzav, Leviticus 6-8. Much of the book of Leviticus is concerned with the proper procedures of sacrifice and other major rituals of the priestly caste. This parsha concerns itself with a reiteration of the laws of atonement sacrifices, guilt offerings, and others previously mentioned in abstract instructions. As always, by depicting the prominent individuals of this period in the Torah, namely Moses and Aaron, doing everything to the letter of God's instructions, it is meant to be proof of the righteous foundations of the first generation of Jews. In short, if it was good enough for Moses, it most certainly should be good enough for the rest of us. But that's just the sticking point. Though I've written it many times before, I can't help but wonder about the cessation of ritual sacrifice in the Jewish faith. There is absolutely nothing in the Torah that states sacrifices must be carried out at the one and only Temple of Jerusalem. In fact, the Israelites hadn't even reached the Holy Land when the first sacrifices took place. Conceivably, one could build an altar anywhere. That's probably the original intention to begin with. Because the instructions in the Torah are so specific, even including a method of building a very portable tabernacle, it's more than a little dissonant to say that the act of ritual sacrifice and indeed most of the priestly rituals ended because the Temple was destroyed. So, why are so many instructions from the Torah deemed irrelevant today? Why do we go so far as to cherry-pick the dietary laws, swearing off pork but choosing to consume fat without ritual regard? Why do we still have the mikvah, the ritual bath of purification, but not the soil-bath rituals prescribed for women accused of infidelity? It is my belief, and I'll make it clear that I am editorializing here and likely often will in the future, that the Rabbinic Age in which we are living and have been living for more than 2000 years has actively sought to revise the laws of the Torah itself. Frankly, I don't think of this as a bad thing. The rabbis embraced the idea of the Torah being "The Tree of Life", an ever-changing, growing document meant to be a basis for a righteous life, not a static, unquestionable text handing down dogma to each increasingly unknowable generation. The rabbis, upon the destruction of the Second Temple, took the opportunity to enact a political shift in the ritual lives of Jews everywhere. As for why they chose to end ritual sacrifice, it seems most likely that it was out of a combination of poverty and emergent philosophy. For a people in diaspora it is absurd to spend vital resources like grain and cattle on a ritual that is, to be perfectly honest, little more than a left-over from the ambient polytheism of the ancient Near and Middle East. Removing sacrifice in any and all forms was a statement saying, "Is our concept of God so primitive and materialistic that we believe God requires earthly sustenance?" In many of my d'varim, both written and presented live, I have encouraged people to challenge the instructions of the Torah, to not take these words at face-value or believe that such mortal concepts as words and laws are forever infallible. If the ritual or law seems unnecessary, study it, scrutinize it. This may just be my upbringing in the Reform philosophy taking hold, but I firmly believe that a lack of defiance toward dogma is the best way to eliminate the otherwise vibrant life of Judaic discourse.

Person of the Week: Chana Senesh

The Jewish faith has a long history of well-regarded poets. From Ibn Ezra, a devotional symbolist from the Islam-dominated territories of the Middle Ages, to American modernist Ezra Pound, Jews have always been a people fascinated with the word's potential for beauty. But of all the poets in the history of Jewish culture, few ever get the honor of having their work elevated into the liturgy of the faith. One such poet was a Zionist and soldier named Hannah Szenes, or Chana Senesh as it is often transliterated. Chana was born in Hungary in 1921. Her family was ethnically Jewish but they did not practice any religious rituals of the faith. She would have been known as an "assimilated" Jew. Assimilated Jews in early 20th century Europe didn't get to enjoy the same benefits as secular-leaning individuals of Christian backgrounds. They were still branded as ethnic outsiders whether they practiced or not. They were still barred from certain professions and some varieties of land ownership, and they also incurred extra fees for things like private education. At the end of the 1930's many Europeans countries began embracing anti-semetic laws, encouraged by the social fallout after the First World War in the West and Soviet anti-semetism in the East. These injustices pushed Chana Senesh into religious devotion and soon into political Zionism. She joined Maccabea, one of the Zionist youth organizations of Hungary. Upon her graduation from high school, she emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine where there were opportunities for Zionists to join various labor movements. Chana chose the Girls' Agricultural School in Nahalal, then took part in a kibbutz two years later. Before long, Senesh reacted to the violence against Jews in the Second World War as many Zionists in Palestine did. She joined Haganah, a Zionist military organization that would one day become the Israeli Defense Forces. At the height of the war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill formed the Special Operations Executive, a small branch of the military set to carry out delicate and dangerous missions behind enemy lines, much like the American ISS. Chana Senesh, being a citizen of a British territory, was able to enlist in the army and soon trained to be a paratrooper for the SOE. She took part in a mission to support a Hungarian anti-fascist partisan group and was eventually captured at the border between Hungary and Yugoslavia. She underwent torture and imprisonment, though she never gave any information to her captors. The details of Chana Senesh's trial are murky at best. There were several judges removed from her case and replaced, as well as several postponements of the final verdict. She was executed before even receiving a sentence, and was posthumously cleared of all charges in 1993. During her time in prison, Senesh kept a diary that doubled as a book of poems. Just prior to her death at the age of 23, she penned a poem that Jews all over the world recite in temple to this very day:
Eli, Eli She'lo yigamer l'olam Hakhol v'hayam rish-rush shel hamayim berak hashamayim t'filat ha'adam
This translates as: "My God, my God/ Do not let all of this end/ The shore and the sea/ The waves on the water/ The thunder of Heaven/ The faith of mankind" Today, Chana Senesh rests at the Mt. Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem. She is regarded as a heroine and as another of too many tragic losses in the horrors of World War II. Hers is a story of defiance, a microcosmic rendition of the stories that played out all over Europe to end that most brutal conflict.

Shabbat: Parsha Vayikrah

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Vayikrah, Leviticus 1-5. At this point in the Tanakh, the tone and the format changes significantly. Much, but not all, of what follows from Leviticus through Deuteronomy is a recitation of specific laws. In essence, the epic poem of the Jewish people's origin has concluded. Only a few closing scenes remain and they will be scattered throughout these next three books. From this point on, the Torah is a document of everyday spiritual practices and civil laws. In Vayikrah, God is explaining to Moses some more details concerning the act of sacrifice. The instructions list what animals or other materials are to be used, what counts as a suitable sacrifice and some of what the priests are supposed to do upon an offering. As always, modern Jews tend to skim these parts of the book because we no longer perform ritual sacrifices. That doesn't mean there aren't still relevant lessons here, just that we have to stretch some of these concepts to place them in a modern context. The most striking idea here is that sacrifice is supposed to work on a sliding scale. The Torah recognizes that many people won't have the means to sacrifice a large head of cattle every time they commit a sin or wish to pray for peace. There are provisions here for people of many different economic standings. Those who can't afford cattle can sacrifice sheep, goats, doves, or even pigeons. People can give meal offerings, essentially sacrifices of grain. The message here is fairly overt. No one will be excluded from the full services of the faith just because they're poor. The class-consciousness of these passages continue with a comparison between the sacrifices of rulers and the sacrifices of common people. There is no appreciable difference between the two. Rulers are not exempt from any of the duties of repentance and common people are not excused for their relative powerlessness. As far as faith is concerned, one's social station doesn't matter. There is a seemingly out-of-place passage among all of these laws of sacrifice that addresses what people are to do in civil disputes. Basically, when people sin against other people they are obligated to make recompense to the person they wronged. There are certainly guilt sacrifices involved, but a person doesn't just have to get right with God if the crime has a human victim. This is one of the central morals of Judaism. Being sorry isn't enough to repair the damage done to the living world, one must take an active role in setting things right in proportion to one's crimes. Because some of the parshiot in these remaining books contain similar laws and related lessons, I'm going to be adding an occasional feature to these Shabbat entries. When I think it's appropriate, we'll take a look at a selection from one of the texts outside the Tanakh in addition to the weekly Torah portion. It may be a poem out of Psalms or a particularly interesting story from Prophets, or some other item that doesn't normally come up in Shabbat Torah study. If any of you readers would like this blog to take a deeper look into a specific item, feel free to mention it in the comments section and I'll be sure to get to it. Until next week, Shabbat Shalom and thanks for reading.

The Star of David

A reader recently emailed me asking about the origins of the Star of David, the most recognizable symbol of the Jewish people. While the Star has a long and nebulous history, its origins don't stretch back as far as its name implies.
The six-pointed star associated with Jewish culture and Israeli independence doesn't actually have much to do with King David.

Its Hebrew name doesn't even mean "star". Magen David means "Shield of David", a term that isn't directly related to the star symbol. Magen David comes from a prayer said on Shabbat and it references God, who protected David from the wrath of various enemies throughout his story. Even then, the term itself doesn't come from the bible or any of its contemporary texts. It is a poetic phrase developed in the early rabbinic age, probably in the first few centuries of the Common Era.

The earliest known representation of a star in association with Jews is a relief depicting a Babylonian king meeting the recently-defeated king of Judah. The star in the relief isn't exactly the Magen David, though. Popular use of the Star didn't really begin until the Middle Ages, around 1100 CE. At that time Kabbalistic mysticism was popular among European Jews, so they created and embraced a number of symbols to which they attributed many layers of meaning.

The Kabbalistic understanding of the Magen David revolves around the significance of the number 6. It is a six-pointed star with a prominent, open center. This is often thought to represent the six days of earthly work being supported by the holy seventh day of rest. That's why 7 is a number closely associated with God. It's the sabbath, the seventh day when all focus turns toward divinity. In the Magen David the six points emanate from the solid center, likely a metaphor for the lives of people emanating from the unseen divine.

There may be a political reason for the exact shape of the Star. Many Kabbalists adopted an older, more universal star: the Pentagram. Though it is only five-pointed, the Pentagram has been a very pervasive symbol of spirituality, its origins going back as far as the first cities on Earth. In its earliest days, the city of Jerusalem even used the Pentagram as its official seal. With the rise of Christianity in the West, old spiritual symbols were deemed unholy by the church and subsequently demonized. The church began to claim that the Pentagram was the symbol of Satan and the occult in general. The Magen David possibly grew out of a desire to distance Jews from a suddenly incriminating symbol.

As for why the Star came to be associated with King David (who was never referenced as bearing any star-symbol whatsoever), it likely has to do with the transformation of the Jewish identity in the Middle Ages. Living in diaspora required Jews to contemplate the nature of their culture. Are we just a religion or are we still a nation? If we are a nation, just how unified are we? The Magen David became a symbol of Jewish identity and, wanting to associate it with strength and divine protection, it was soon linked to David. This is certainly why it is the symbol of the Zionist movement.

Such is the nature of ancient symbolism, especially for a people who have shifted between so many different host cultures over the centuries. It is impossible to say where exactly these images and figures originate, but it is also highly unlikely that symbols like the Magen David have a single source to begin with.

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