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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

Parshat B’chukotai opens with the familiar theme of reward and punishment for our observance or non-observance of God’s commandments.  This basic framework of “if you keep my commandments there’ll be peace and prosperity and if you don’t…” is presented numerous times in the Torah, and we see it daily in the second paragraph of the Shma. This dynamic is the dominant theme of the book of Deuteronomy in which Moshe addresses the generation which will enter The Land without him.  Reward and punishment however seems strangely out of place at the end of Vayikra, still encamped at the foot of Mt Sinai.  What are these blessings and curses doing here, and what do they teach us which is different from the Shma?

The book of Vayikra is about Holiness.  Holy offerings, Holy people, Holy space, Holy times, Holy land. The opening line of (Lev. 1:1) “And He called to Moshe and Hashem spoke to him from the Tent of meeting saying” serves as the archetype for the entire book.  Just as Rashi explains the “calling” to Moshe as an articulation of God’s affection and an expression of closeness to God, so too, all the laws of Holiness in this book are about how to live a life of closeness with Hashem.  While there are mitzvot in the book of Vayikra which are contingent on being in the Land of Israel, their inclusion in Vayikra tells us that these mitzvot are instructions for living in God’s presence.  Possessing the land is the main focus of the book of Devarim, but here, it’s about relationship.That being said, the presence of reward and punishment is coming not just to warn us to be careful to keep the laws of Holiness, but is articulating a specific aspect of what living in Holiness means.  

The parsha opens with the big IF.  (Lev. 26:3) “IF you walk in My laws and faithfully guard My commandments and do them..”  So what exactly is it that we’ll be rewarded for?  Keeping God’s laws, right?  Not so fast.  Rashi points out that the last word is “doing them”, so then what is “walking in His laws”? Rashi and his super-commentaries tell us it breaks down into seven parts.  1) Putting effort into learning Torah in order that we  2)understand it, 3) know how to do it, 4) teach it, so that 5) our children will understand it, 6)and so our children will learn to do the mitzvot, and so 7) that we will take upon ourselves to actually do the mitzvot.  That means the conditions for reward here are more about our attitude than about our behavior.  

We can see God’s intention reflected in the final passage summarizing the rewards.  (26:12) “And I will walk amongst you, and I will be your God and you will be my people”. This is in stark contrast to Adam and Eve who (Gen 3:8) “heard the sound of Hashem walking in the Garden… and Adam and his wife hid from Hashem”.  All the blessings of fertility, peace and tranquility promised if we have the right attitude are all about returning to the Garden of Eden and living in God’s presence. Our sages have said (Avoda Zara 22b) that when we received the Torah, the ‘snake venom’ which had tainted Adam and Eve left us. That means that when our attitude towards Torah is one of making space for God’s affection, Torah is the antidote to the existential dread of facing God. It allows us to walk with God without being afraid.   

And speaking of being afraid… “If you don’t keep my commandments…” 

Just like the positive attitude towards Torah which is to be rewarded was divided into seven, so too, the attributes which will draw suffering upon us are also seven.  The verse says: (26:14)  “But if you will not listen to me and refuse to do all my commandments.  If you scorn my decrees and abhor my laws and reject all my instructions, and so violate my covenant.”  

Rashi again breaks these verses into seven specific vices: 1)Not learning Torah; 2) Not wanting to do what the Torah says; 3) Being put off by those who DO learn and keep the Torah; 4) Hating the Sages; 5) Actively preventing others from learning Torah and doing Mitzvot; 6) denying that God commanded us at all; And finally 7) Denying that God even exists.

Certainly, one who carries these attitudes is going to have a very hard time feeling God’s love.

In the same way that our positive attitude towards fulfilling God’s commandments and our openness to God’s love brings about prosperity and peace in the world, so too God tells us here, that the opposite is also true.  

When Adam and Eve heard God walking about in the Garden they were afraid.  Why?  Because they felt guilty, and thought God was out to get them. To punish them.  And so they hid from God. Their fear of punishment created the reality in which they were punished.

So too, when we do these seven things, we are also hiding from God, and invite greater suffering upon ourselves.  Just like our ill-fated ancestors, we too are sent out to face a world which will not easily yield its bounty.  We toil and struggle, but to no avail.  All sorts of maladies may come. Sickness, poverty, oppression and afflictions of body and soul.  

In such circumstances, it’s not hard to feel that God has it in for us.  Here in our Parsha, H’ calls this attitude “walking with me in Keri בקרי.”  This word “Keri” connotes both coldness קר and coincidence מקרה.  Giving God the cold-shoulder. Refusal to see our suffering as Hashem nudging us back towards his path of righteous delight.  It’s all just a coincidence.  These things happen.  Like Pharaoh, we harden our heart against God because of our suffering… 

At every step in the process, God says to us, (26:23) “If you continue to walk with me in Keri, I will walk with you in Keri and I will strike you seven times because of your sins.”

So it goes further… We suffer more.  Seven times.  We get colder and colder. For some, it can progress all the way to Pharaoh’s iconic “I know not your God”, dissociating ourselves from God, from Torah, from the land of Israel and even from the Jewish people.  We are conquered, swallowed up and assimilated in foreign lands.  Out of desperation, we turn back to Hashem and we (26:40) “confess our sins and the sins of our ancestors”.  But it doesn’t work!  More guilt doesn’t break the cycle.   So what does?  (26:41) “Then they will surrender their uncircumcised hearts…and then their sin will be absolved”  God wants our hearts. Our Love.

Adam and Eve’s mistake was expecting wrath and punishment from God, so that’s exactly what they got. However, when we remember that God’s purpose in giving us the Torah is to show us affection, everything turns around.  The cycle of punishment is only broken when we turn back to God in love, knowing He loves us and teaching our children to feel that love through Torah. 

We’re stuck with God.  Will we walk coldly and suffer, or will we walk joyously with love?

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shlomo Schachter