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Dear Chaverim,

We begin with Rabbi Rosenblatt’s Torah reflection on interruptions in the life of the Jewish people. This sets the context for Dr. Neiman’s eulogy for his brother, Scott Neiman z”l, concluding with a vision of the world to come.

Prelude: bearing the casket…

The Torah’s chapter Parshat Beha’alotecha is a story of interruptions. Its most noted interruption is an inverted pair of the letter nun in the Hebrew print. It is the only punctuation mark in the Torah. The nuns bracket the verse that is sung when the Ark is opened and the congregation is mobilized to hear the Torah.

This break in the calligraphy calls our attention to an interruption in the storyline of Moshe and the Jewish people. Here, just before Moshe fashions the trumpets that will mobilize the Children of Israel to perform the service in the Tabernacle, the action is interrupted by a group of individuals who are unable to bring the Passover offering because they became ritually disqualified when they came in contact with human remains. 

The rabbis differ on whose remains these individuals attended to. Rabbi Yossi Haglili said these were the men charged with bearing Joseph’s remains from Egypt through the desert. Rabbi Akiva said they were Mishael and Elzafan – the senior members of the Levites – who Moshe instructed to remove the bodies of Nadav and Avihu – who had passed away on the opening day of the Temple service. 

The dead cannot care for themselves. Passover is definitional to being Jewish. A second option must therefore be found for those who were to be excluded from the Passover service because they had attended to the dead. The Torah therefore gives those who were invalidated special permission to have a second Passover. This reinforces that we must not exclude those who serve the needs of the deceased.

This draws into focus a central tension of the process of mourning – i.e., the state of being separate and together at the same time. Before a funeral, the onen – one who is charged with caring for the body before burial – is separated from the rest of the community. Social engagement is minimized or eliminated. The onen’s life is limited to burial and mourning.  

During this separation, a greater community connection occurs. Carrying Joseph’s casket connected his bearers to the oldest roots of their people and to the broader history and mission of the Children of Israel. They were involved in the ultimate act of connection because the mitzvah of burial is the mitzvah most directly related to respecting that each person was created in the image of Gd. We bury quickly because we don’t want the human reflection of the Divine image to be tarnished in the slightest. 

In this respect there is hardly any other activity that binds an individual as much as this one to family, to Israel, or to G-d. In the case of Nadav and Avihu the verse says, 

וַאֲחֵיכֶם כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל יִבְכּוּ אֶת הַשְּׂרֵפָה

Your brothers, the house of Israel, will weep over the loss. 

The storyline and the placement of the nuns teaches us that each of these losses has its own trajectory, its own interruption of everyday life. When the narrative picks up after the interruption, the Children of Israel travel, moving together. To facilitate this, Moshe is commanded to fashion trumpets with which to mobilize the camp. While the Passover ritual may have taken place long after the deaths of those being shepherded to their final resting places, the trumpets brought their shepherds simultaneously back in time and to the present with the rest of the camp. 

Eulogy: …three circles…

My brother Scott died in California just hours before the start of Shavuot. We spoke by phone the night before. He was being prepped for emergency heart surgery. He originally expected to be laid up with something less serious. He told me that he had given various people instructions on how to take care of his business interests and personal effects while he was recovering. However, in the preceding day he had come to understand that he was more likely to die than to survive the operation.

Scott was not successful in business by any monetary measure. His summary of the business arrangements, though detailed, was brief. It included the instructions, names, and contact information of six people. Over the next week I would come to speak with them – some for the first time ever.

Most of my final conversation with Scott was about his wish to get a proper burial. He sounded desperate. He had no formal Jewish education, but he knew that cremation, crypts, open caskets, autopsies, and embalming were out. He wanted me to see to this because I am the one knowledgeable of such things among his associates, friends, and family. I agreed, and he immediately had me designated as his next-of-kin.

Scott spent his last full day – his birthday – in surgery. He never regained consciousness. The following morning – Thursday – his surgeon called and told me that Scott had just been pronounced dead. I replied with the traditional, “Baruch Dayan ha-Emet.” The surgeon at first did not understand. However, as I started to explain, he remembered it because he was Jewish.

I then became an onen – one whose immediate relative has died and not yet been buried. I spent the rest of the day arranging my brother’s funeral and preparing for Shavuot. Aninut, the status of being an onen, is like sitting shiva, but with even more restrictions. For example, one is not allowed to bathe, make a bracha, or to say daily prayers. All efforts must focus on arranging burial as soon as possible. After burial, seven days of shiva begin. Shavuot, being a festival, added two days to the process.

After Shavuot – Sunday – I flew to Los Angeles and spent the next four days cloistered in a hotel room making funeral arrangements. It was not easy. Monday was Memorial Day in the US. Many offices were closed for the long weekend. To accommodate the annual flood of people visiting the graves of dead veterans, non-Jewish cemeteries postpone funerals until the following week. This, in turn, creates a backlog of applications to register deaths and get permits for burials. The net effect was that Scott’s death certificate did not get signed and registered until Wednesday morning. We buried him that afternoon.

On Thursday I came home to Vancouver and started sitting shiva. There is logic and a tragic beauty to shiva. By design, it has some inconvenience for each mourner. I can easily sit on a low stool, not trim my nails, stay at home, and cover the mirrors for a week. However, I find not being able to listen to or play music to be a personal hardship. This restriction applies to aninut, shiva, and shloshim – the month following the death of an immediate relative.

On the Shabbat of my shiva I was ten days into the period of restrictions, facing four more weeks of it. A musician friend from shul and I reflected on how it seemed unfair that the rabbis made music off limits. After all, some music is evocative perfectly in keeping with the spirit of mourning.

My friend gave as an example of such music the Adagietto movement from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony #5. The symphony is in the key of C-sharp Minor – which has been described as a key ‘most melancholy’, ‘a sigh’, ‘a lamentation’. It is a popular selection for music compilations for the most devoted and most casual of classical music listeners alike. It comes as no surprise that before my friend cited that piece, it was the first thing that came to my mind, too.

I grew up buying and listening to classical music records, based on things I heard on the radio – i.e., what was popular. However, I became existentially connected to it when I was 18 and heard someone in my fraternity playing the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D-major on a good stereo system. It was one of the first days of spring in Boston – when the season was right for open windows.

Hearing the second movement opened a window for me to something that had always been there, but that I had not experienced so vividly before. It was universal, transcendent, so I stopped what I was doing to take it in. Then, the third movement turned out to be even more soulful. It is a funeral procession, with folk melodies, borrowing heavily from the sounds of the shtetl. This movement has been described as Mahler’s most characteristically Jewish composition. It has notes of klezmer, and Hassidic and Yiddish nigunim. Hearing it felt like coming home.

Gustav Mahler was a complicated man. Born Jewish, but assimilated and ‘unaffiliated’. He converted to Catholicism to advance his career after completing his first three symphonies. His music explored universal themes of life and death, borrowing motifs from folk songs and poems – i.e., what was popular in 19^th century European culture. However, the soul of his work was grounded in his Jewish roots. He channeled spirits that he likely did not even know were part of him. His latent Jewishness became a gift to Western culture.

Scott Neiman was a complicated man. He lived his life in three separate, barely overlapping circles: immediate family; a dozen acquaintances from a flea market where he had a concession that sold things of interest to survivalists; and a handful of other friends. While there was some commonality in things they told me, Scott’s friends, his business associates, and his family had radically different takes on his life. These circles were completely independent. At great effort, Scott kept them that way until the end.

So it was that these three circles first converged at his funeral in the foothills of the San Fernando Mountains, at Sholom Memorial Park. In comparing stories about how he lived his life, what stood out was how he maintained Jewish values in business and personal relationships. Though he did not study halacha, he lived by such imperatives as treating workers with dignity and respect, helping the stranger, and “when you sell anything to your neighbor or buy anything from your neighbor, you shall not deceive one another.” In the end, he insisted on a proper Jewish burial. In doing so, he gave everyone he left behind an opportunity to do the ultimate mitzvah. His latent Jewishness became a gift to our larger circle of family, friends, associates, and medical staff.

 Coda: …sehr behaglich

Following the conversation with my friend in shul, and putting these thoughts together, I know what I am going to listen to first when shloshim ends. It will be the final movement of Mahler’s Symphony #4 in G-major. It is adapted from the tone poem “Das Himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”). In it, a soft, transcendent voice sings “sehr behaglich” – “very comfortable.” It is the voice of the angel who welcomes one’s soul to their home in heaven.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. Terry Neiman with Rabbi Rosenblatt

One of today’s biggest meta-issues is inclusivity.  People hate being “not allowed” in places or contexts where they wish to be included.  While today most people readily agree that Jim-Crow laws and “no blacks allowed” restaurants were abhorrent, there are definitely those today who feel that biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports. There are now girls in the boyscouts, white students at HBCUs, boys at Girl’s High (a historic girl’s only highschool in Philadelphia), men at Sarah Lawrence College, girls in fraternities and the list goes on and on. Exclusion is no longer tolerated.  I’m not coming here to take a side, but only to demonstrate that at the heart of today’s controversies lies the issue of inclusivity or exclusivity.

On Shavuot we delved deeply into how identity is formed, and along what lines do we separate “us” from “them”.  Nowadays, any labeling of a group as “other” on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or disability is labeled as hateful, and institutions which treat different people differently get labeled as apartheid, racist, homophobic etc. There is now an absolute intolerance for intolerance, and exclusion has become the cardinal sin of our era.

Now, we Jews know all too well the feeling of being excluded, shunned, labeled as “other” and therefore subjected to all manner of evil.  Consequently Jews have been at the forefront of many struggles for equality, including communism, the civil rights movement, and feminism. There are many Jewish liberals among today’s “woke”. Even Zionism can be seen as the liberation movement of the Jews, and insisting upon our right to equality as our own sovereign nation. 

Clearly there’s a “Holy Spark” hidden within these movements. An essential Torah truth to which Jews are drawn, perhaps subconsciously, even though they may not know it’s Torah. On the contrary many Jews throughout the years have rejected Torah observance in favor of pursuing these struggles for equality and freedom. There is something so important, so foundational a principle that pursuing it overshadows their commitment to the details of Torah.

Meanwhile, you cannot look at the Torah and not see a heavy dose of exclusivity.  There are countless cases in which a Jew is treated differently than a non-Jew.  From counting in a minyan to lending without interest, we are commanded to treat our fellow Jews in a particular manner which is not extended beyond our covenant.  Even within the Jewish people there are numerous distinctions amongst people and laws about how they are to be treated differently.  Kohanim, Leviim and Yisraelim are different.  Men and women have different halachic responsibilities and therefore are not treated the same in shul.  Women do not count towards the requisite quorum of a minyan.  They don’t lead the prayers or read from the Torah.  But ask any orthodox rabbi if women are somehow ‘lesser than’ or ‘inferior to’ men and not a single one will say yes.  It’s not about a hierarchy of value of people. It’s about specialization of design.  The heart is not better than the kidneys nor vice versa, they simply have different functions.  This is the key categorical difference between the halachic distinctions in the Torah and segregation based on race, sexuality or anything else. 

Let’s look for an example in Parshat Nasso.  Numbers chapter 5 opens with the expulsion from the camp of anyone carrying certain categories of tuma.

“Hashem spoke to Moses, saying:  Instruct the Israelites to remove from the camp anyone with a skin eruption or a genital discharge and anyone defiled by a corpse. Remove both male and female alike; put them outside the camp so that they do not defile the camp of those in whose midst I dwell.

The Israelites did so, putting them outside the camp; as Hashem had spoken to Moses, so the Israelites did.”

Can you imagine what would happen if the city of Vancouver declared that anyone who had a genital discharge or a skin discoloration had to leave the city?  After the pandemic, it’s not so hard to believe that given the right media spin, many people would be compliant, but certainly not everyone.  In Texas, it would look very different, but even here, I would expect there would be some serious opposition and it would be seen as discriminatory. I doubt that kind of edict would even be legal in today’s free societies. It would certainly be found unconstitutional in the US.  Such a law would alienate certain people, dubbing them as “other” and removing them from our midst.  This itself is the cardinal sin of differential exclusivity.  And yet it’s right there in the Torah.  We don’t want those people around because they defile our Holy camp.  But, is that really so different from Nazis not wanting Jews corrupting their pure German culture?

Yes, my friends, it is.  It is incredibly different, and looking at this difference identifies what I believe is that Holy Spark chased by Marx, Herzl, Heschel and even contemporary Jewish social justice warriors like Dr. Rachel Levine (US deputy health secretary – an openly trans-Jewish woman who is an outspoken advocate for ‘trans rights’) as well as countless young Jews who participate in anti-zionist groups like BDS.

Most often, discriminatory policies and hatred of the “other” come from objective value judgment.  The Nazis believed themselves to be essentially superior to us.  They are good, we are bad.  Homophobia often carries with it a value judgment of homosexuals being somehow unnatural or morally inferior.  “We don’t want to mix with them because they are bad” has been the mantra of hateful folks for as long as they’ve been around.  Unfortunately, sometimes that attitude surfaces even among Jews, and even among Torah observant Jews.  This is terribly sad, and in my opinion, (and I believe Rebbe Nachman’s and Rav Y.D. Soloveichick’s as well) is a terrible corruption of Torah thinking.  The Torah is not bigoted!  Distinctions and halachic categories are the exact opposite of good/bad value judgment.

Being Tamei doesn’t mean you’re bad.  It doesn’t mean we don’t want you around.  Quite the contrary.  It means God and we see you and accept you exactly as you are. With what you’re going through, the Torah prescribes some time of solitude for you to work on yourself inwardly and then gives us instructions for a specific ritual to facilitate your reintegration into the community.  Halacha does not judge a person or an object.  It doesn’t really even describe it, and makes absolutely no attempt to be objective.  Halacha is always subjective and always prescriptive.  Something being un-kosher doesn’t mean it’s bad.  It means that we must relate to it in a certain way.  It’s about us, not about the food.  The same goes with people. It’s not that Kohanim have access to parts of the Temple that Israelites do not because they ‘better’. They have different responsibilities. There is no value judgment, only instruction.  

Rebbe Nachman in Likutey Moharan and Rav Soloveichik in Halachic Man both teach that halacha is the remedy for the essential poison of the Human condition – “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”. Remember that tree we weren’t supposed to eat from?  It would be more helpful to translate it as “thinking in terms of good and bad”.  This kind of value judgment thinking is toxic to the core. It attempts to describe everything in objective terms, and when applied to a person, turns them into an object. It dehumanizes them in the poisoned mind.  Instead of thinking “this is good and that is bad”, Halacha teaches us how to relate to people and things.  To accept everyone and everything exactly as it is and move towards a harmonious relationship with them based on the Torah’s instruction.

Herein lies that elusive Holy Spark.  Jews instinctively know that value judgment thinking, particularly around people, is precisely that poison God instructed us not to eat.  Wheresoever this “we’re better than them” attitude shows itself, Jews will rise to combat it.  This essential truth is what drives us to combat hatred and discrimination in the name of “Tikkun Olam”, even (or especially) when it’s us doing it. 

The true remedy for this ancient ailment of humanity is the Torah, The Tree of Living.  Looking at the world in every situation with eyes of “How can I help implement God’s vision?”  “What does the Torah instruct me to do here?”  This is the great gift given to us mt. Sinai, the antidote to that poisonous fruit we are all still struggling to purge from our collective psyche.

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Shlomo Schachter

Educational authorities in the United States and Canada have sounded the alarm about innumeracy in today’s student population and workforce. Innumeracy is the inability to properly conceptualize and use mathematics in the evaluation of information. For example, consider the statement, “the murder rate has doubled every year since 1995.” To someone who is innumerate, that statement might sound credible. However, one who is familiar with exponents – i.e., one who is numerate – knows that such a statement can be represented as 2 to the 27th power, which equals 134,217,728. That is nearly one in three people in the United States or more than the entire population of Canada. Numerate people know that such a claim is ridiculous. Innumerate individuals nod and say, “it is a shame.” One problem with this is that it influences people to elect policymakers who push simple, fear-based solutions for complex problems. This is the kind of thinking that supports extreme policies on either end of the political spectrum – e.g., “the war on drugs” on the right and “defund the police” on the left. Numeracy is crucial.

On the other hand, numeracy is not the whole story. Research on how people make decisions under pressure has shown that people with advanced degrees in STEM fields fail to apply basic numeracy in their everyday lives. This has been noted in the psychology and economics research of Daniel Kahneman, in the mathematical phenomenon of the Monte Carlo fallacy also known as the gambler’s fallacy, and in the paradox of the so-called Monte Hall problem from the game show Let’s Make a Deal. In each of these cases, people who know better fare no better than those who know next to nothing about math. So, what gives?

Part of the explanation is that numeracy is half the equation of something called framing. Framing is how we think and communicate to organize our thoughts and arrive at some sense of reality. Here, numeracy crunches the numbers, and literacy guides how one defines or understands the problem to be solved. For example, “the murder rate has doubled” implies more than a trend. If a process or phenomenon really repeats like that – 27 times in a row from 1995 through 2022 – then it is felt to be akin to a law of nature. Making such a claim is what science writer Charles Seife has termed ‘proofiness’ – a play on Stephen Colbert’s term ‘truthiness’ – i.e., “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” Proofiness involves using technical or scientific wording to mislead people.

Proofiness is the logic and language of scientific illiteracy. It goes hand-in-hand with innumeracy. In all the examples above these two factors combine to replace critical thinking with false thinking. The glue that holds together illiteracy and innumeracy in proofiness is the persuasive power of the ones who make ‘proofy’ statements. People choose to believe and spread false information because doing so validates what they already believe. Ultimately, this distorts how an individual conceives of the world around them in relation to their own experience. We see what we want to see.

The question of numeracy and literacy also operates in the opposite direction, i.e., how we self-conceive and contextualize ourselves with numbers. For example, millionaire once referred to people who were exceptionally wealthy. When Little Orphan Annie debuted in 1924, 0.01 percent of the US had a net worth exceeding one million dollars. Today 9 percent of Americans, and about 4 percent of Canadians have a net worth over a million dollars. Nonetheless, we have cultural and social touchstones that embrace the notion of millionaire. Who wants to be a millionaire? Well, Millionaire Lottery players do in 2023, just as game show contestants did until 2021 and fans of Daddy Warbucks did in 1924. In our minds millionaire means Daddy Warbucks, but in reality, a millionaire is anyone with a pension fund that pays 40 thousand dollars a year.

Millionaire is a trivial case in point. Self-conception has wider ramifications. We live in a time when influential people frame identity-based differences as the root causes of existential threats to humanity. For example, racialization is now akin to a law of nature. By extension, identity-framed conflict has become a battleground over the science of how to solve social problems. The failure of numeracy and literacy is at the root of why so many people have accepted uncritically competing approaches to these issues. Very few people can articulate the actual logical and mathematical differences between equality and equity. In the absence of the needed literacy and numeracy, proponents of each end up accusing the other side of being racists. Because this problem is so deeply rooted in identity, it is one of today’s greatest failures of self-conception.

Pushing deeper into the nuance of numeracy and self-conception, we must ask, “what is the fundamental unit of my identity?” The answer is not to be found in any particular aspect of family unit, workplace, vocation, social group, or even synagogue. It is only to be found in the intersection of all those things.

In Western life, and in North America in particular, the individual is the basic unit of identity. Science/numeracy and culture/literacy here invented the selfie and the notion of self-care. We drive to work in vehicles weighing thousands of pounds to transport a single person. However, this is a relatively recent development. There are many cultures that still hold the family, clan, or even a broader societal unit as the frame of identity. 

Parshat Bamidbar has a numerical logic to support this approach to identity. It describes the first census and organization of the Jewish nation as a framework for a collective identity. The Jews are at the foot of Sinai in their second year since the Exodus. A census is taken, organized primarily by tribes. The results are multiples of 100, except for the tribe of Gad – which is a multiple of 50. This result is a curious numeric outcome. What are the odds that all the numbers end in zero like this?

One could ask, why did they not have more precise numbers? Professor Eli Merzbach of the Bar Ilan University Department of Mathematics points out that the census numbers were not the result of rounding to the nearest hundred.

It should be noted that the simple notion which we understand of rounding numbers to the nearest hundred was totally foreign to science until the end of the Middle Ages. Otto Neugebauer, in “The Astronomy of Maimonides and its source,” HUCA 22 [1949], p. 340, notes that also ancient astronomers who were expert in complicated computations and who regularly used rounding did not generally round to the nearest whole number. Rounding was generally done downwards, unless the number was very close to the larger number (e.g., greater than 0.75). Neugebauer stresses that Maimonides in his astronomic computations to determine when the new moon occurs rounded to the closest integer and that this was a major innovation in comparison with his predecessors such as Ptolemy or even Al-Battani.

Merzbach also cites the great 19th-century Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk who explained that the Children of Israel were counted in equal-sized groups. He ties this accounting practice specifically to the way tribes were organized under leaders of groups of 10. By extension, that fundamental population increment would be at play as groups are combined to add up to multiples of 100 or 50.

This organization was built into how the people moved through the wilderness as a unit. History professor William McNeill offers a description of what that must have felt like in recounting his own experience of being trained to march with his army unit before World War II as follows.

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved, a sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall, more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement, a sort of swelling out bigger than life thanks to participation in collective ritual. (William H. McNeill. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Harvard University Press, 1995)

The census provided a framework for organizing the march and organizing the people in relation to one another. We learn from this that one need not frame identity on the individual or family scale. There is a bigger scale. It is the community which defines the basic unit of our numeric conception of self.

This is where the Jewish notions of conception-of-the-world and self-conception converged as a framework for our identity. One’s sense of personal identity was reinforced by collective movement. One moved with their tribe, with their hundred, and in some contexts with their ten. There is something cohesive about such movement. It is a system that is both numerate and literate. This has proven to be the case since Sinai.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rosenblatt and Dr. Terry Neiman