This makes sense—great skill requires great effort. In , we read that “לפום צערא אגרא”(according to anguish is reward). Or, as Jane Fonda summarized it, “No pain, no gain.” Only by practicing and practicing some more can we develop proficiency in a skill. Repetition is boring—I imagine that most athletes become bored with their sport at some point—yet the pursuit of excellence motivates continued effort.

Why, if this is so obvious, do most people expect that another proficiency will come quickly and without effort? I refer here to faith. Many people think that religious faith is something that one either has or doesn’t have, and that it is acquired in an instant. You should just feel God’s presence the minute you open a prayer book or light the candles. We are impatient with faith and don’t invest the effort needed to develop it. Popular stories of sudden conversions foster the expectation that faith is a gift requiring no effort.

That expectation, however, is neither realistic nor productive. Faith is, in fact, a skill that requires effort and develops in stages. These stages are evident in a gem of a verse in chapter 13 of Deuteronomy. Verse 5 reads (my paraphrase),

1. Walk after the Lord your God
2. revere God
3. guard God’s commands
4. listen for God’s voice
5. serve God
6. cling to God

There is a history to interpreting each phrase of this sentence so that it refers to another activity. In the midrash known as Sifrei, the clauses mean the following:

1. Perform the positive commands
2. show reverence
3. avoid the negative commands
4. listen to the Prophets
5. worship in the Temple
6. separate from idols and stick to God

When I read this sentence, however, I see each phrase as a stage in religious development. The first stage in cultivating faith is to make a decision to act differently—to walk after God. This means relinquishing some of our autonomy and seeking to satisfy a higher will. The second stage is to cultivate reverence. While this might seem primary, it takes time to develop the psychological awareness of God’s commanding presence. This prepares us for a third stage: to observe the commandments. Sure, many people keep some commandments without even knowing what they are. But this verse speaks of “guarding” the commandments. Only with proper intention can one become a guardian, a shomer mitzvot.

As the mitzvot become integrated into our daily life, we become ready for a spiritual breakthrough. At this point can we begin to listen for the Voice. Mitzvah consciousness seeps into our daily routines, affecting our habits, our relationships, our homes and offices. God’s voice becomes audible through the mitzvot. Only now can our worship be described truly as ‘avodah (service). Until we reach this stage, Jewish practice can be self-serving. But once the mitzvot have started to make us aware of the Voice, it becomes possible for our religious practice to become service.

The final stage in this progression is hardest to achieve, much less sustain. It says that we are to cling to God. Clinging to God implies releasing some of our grasp on the world. I don’t know if a normal life can be lived while clinging to God. People with highly developed faith may have moments of clinging to God. But this stage of faith may elude us until death, when the soul returns to its source.

Just as a world-class athlete requires years of practice to master his or her sport, so too does a person of faith require practice to walk after God, feel reverence, guard the mitzvot, hear the Voice, serve God, and cling to the divine.

True, even an amateur athlete can sometimes serve an ace, and anyone can have a suddenly intense awareness of the Almighty. In the Talmud (), Rabbi Judah exclaims at the end of a famous martyrdom tale, “Some acquire the world to come in a moment, and some in many years!” But this story and the entirety of the Torah point to a deeper truth: that it takes will and effort and devotion and inspiration to learn how to cling to God.

This Shabbat, we bless the new moon of Elul. For the following four weeks, we will blow the shofar each morning and prepare to stand before God in teshuvah—as those who have returned. The Rabbis teach that Elul is an acronym (in Hebrew) for the words in the verse, “Ani ledodi vedodi li” (I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine; ). By walking in God’s ways and attending to our faith, we can feel God’s love and cling to our Creator.

You and I may never be world champions in any sport or other celebrated skill. But we each have a soul that was designed for challenges and that is waiting for attention. Let’s use this month to practice—to walk after God, to feel reverence, to guard the mitzvot, to listen for the Voice, to serve, and to cling. With God’s help, our practice will lead to great joy and love.

This commentary was originally published in 2014.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (��”l) Hassenfeld.

Yet our Sages add another dimension to the story. In the Gemara(), we hear that Hannah actually threatened to undergo thesotahritual, a humiliating and traumatizing ordeal meant for spouses suspected of adultery,in the hope that its promise of fertility for the fortunate few who passed would open her womb. Hannah sought, from this point of view, to stimulate the divine system from below—to engineer cosmic blessing through threats, coercion, and the intimidating effect of recklessness.

Turns out, this is an established approach to the Divine in our faith, and one that is well-suited to our current calendrical moment.

Our Sages saw Hannah as trying to trap God into offering blessing, and they interpreted the same from another unlikely context, one that also occurs during this month’s Torah readings. We read about the apparently bizarre mitzvah of shilu’ah haken, the sending away of the mother bird.  is the sole description of this shockingly precise mitzvah: “If you happen upon a bird’s nest while on the road, whether in a tree or on the ground, whether with chicks in it or still-unhatched eggs, and the mother bird is sitting on the eggs or chicks, you shall not take the mother with the young. Instead, chase away the mother bird and take the young—in order that you be well and your days long.”

What’s the purpose of this mysterious mitzvah? Despite its often being cited as the case par excellence of a hok, or irrational commandment, many explanations have been offered. In some sense, the explanation is right in front of us: that we should be well and live long. Yet the standard reasoning, drawing on the Midrash, is that performing the mitzvah reminds us that God’s compassion is upon all creatures, and that performing the mitzvah cultivates the same compassion within ourselves (Devarim Rabbah,Ki Tetzei 6:1; ). The exact nature of this compassion is not clear, however. Are we exercising compassion for the mother, in preventing her from watching us take her babies? Are we exercising compassion for the species, in not eliminating the possibility of procreation?

Standing at the threshold of the month of Elul, in which we pray for compassion for ourselves, we owe it to ourselves to dig a bit deeper into this mitzvah’s meaning. We’ll find that learning to exercise compassion is not a complete explanation for it.

The deeper level is the one that Hannah acted out in the rabbinic imagination. She didn’t only plead for divine compassion, she took action—manipulating the spiritual system to ensure compassion.

Similarly, for the significance of shilu’ah haken, the Zohar offers a deeper take. The Zohar tells us there is an angel appointed over the birds, and when we perform the mitzvah and chase away the mother, that angel appears before God angrily, asking, “God, how could it be a commandment to show such cruelty to birds?” Immediately, the Zohar tells us, God turns to the other angels and says, “Look, this one is concerned about his birds—but not a single one of you could plead on behalf of the Shekhinah and her children exiled on Earth?!” Eventually, out of frustration, God states, “Then I will act for my own sake,” arousing compassion for the Shekhinah and Israel here on Earth (Tikkunei Hazohar 23a).

Thus, our performance of the mitzvah does eventually stimulate divine compassion—but only through our exercise of cruelty. Shilu’ah haken, for the Zohar, operates the same way the Sages saw Hannah maneuver in her moment of desperation—a way to engineer the cosmos through our own action, a way to “work the system” and manipulate God into acting for our sake and for the sake of compassion. In this view, we don’t simply plead for compassion; instead we blackmail, threaten, and coerce compassion from God.

As we stand at the beginning of the journey toward Rosh Hashanah and enter the period when selihot (penitential prayers) are recited in the weekday liturgy, it is worth considering what exactly we are doing with our spiritual efforts. Are we, like the midrash about shilu’ah haken says, exercising compassion upon ourselves and pleading that God grant it to us? Or are we, like Hannah and the Zohar, using what resources we have to make God be compassionate upon us? Does this mean that we should do teshuvah differently? Maybe not; maybe all that is required is to see teshuvah differently. Perhaps we should embrace Hannah’s method and find a way to make God see us. Perhaps we should understand the practices of these Yamim Nora’im, these Days of Awe, not as petition, but as protest.

What if the fast of Yom Kippur was not about depriving ourselves, but instead was about getting God’s attention? What if the hunger we experience is not that of an ascetic practice, but that of a hunger strike? What we do, when we recite selihot every morning, when we rise early to plead before God, when we starve our bodies to feed our souls, is protest. Not petition, but protest. We don’t do shilu’ah haken in order to be compassionate; we act cruelly in order to get compassion.

Similarly, we should not spend the next 40 days asking for forgiveness, we should ensure it. We should act in a way that requires God to forgive us. We should work the system, and appeal to God’s sense of justice as much as God’s sense of love. The mitzvot purify us, but they also can be our form of protest. Our earnest engagement with repentance can be a way of saying, perhaps above all else, “Look at what a mess it is down here! I’m going to rub it in your face until you do something about it.” Perhaps if we embrace the practice of protest, we’ll find our petitions better received and our souls more ready to begin another year in a renewed world.

This commentary was originally published in 2017.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (��”l) Hassenfeld.

Many questions arise from this reference to the site of the Temple. Where was the Temple supposed to be built? How were the Israelites to know that God had chosen a specific location? Does the phrase refer to one centralized site of worship as opposed to many sites of worship? Is the number of cultic worship sites not at issue, but the selection by God of those sites? Can it be understood as suggesting that only a single site of worship must exist in any given time, but the location of that single site may change in different generations? Most importantly, however, we must ask: Why is the site of the Temple never identified explicitly?

It cannot be argued that vague place descriptions are characteristic of the book of Deuteronomy, for many locations in Deuteronomy are explained in great detail. For example, our parashah begins with the commandment to “give the blessing and the curse” upon entering the Land on two mountains. The locations of the mountains are then described in 11:30: “Both are on the other side of the Jordan, beyond the west road in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah, near Gilgal, by the terebinths of Moreh.” For a book that can obviously describe locations in painstaking detail, it is striking that the location of the Temple, a most important location, be left ambiguous.

The Rambam in his Guide for the Perplexed (3:45) suggests that Moshe did not identify the site distinctly so that other nations would not occupy it or fight for it, and also so that the 12 tribes would not fight over who received the inheritance of land that would house the Temple, as this would lead to divisions and discord among the nation. Sadly, the events of recent years highlight the profundity of these suggestions. So much fighting takes place surrounding the Temple Mount, both within the Jewish religion and across the religious divide. The unfortunate result is that a holy site is besmirched by hatred and violence. People will always find things to fight about, but to drag a holy site into the mire taints its holiness.

This week’s haftarah is the third in the set of seven haftarot in between Tishah Be’av and Rosh Hashanah, known as the shivata denehemta, the “Seven of Consolation.” These haftarot were not chosen due to their relationship to the weekly parashah; rather, for their relationship to the time period. After we remember the destruction of the two Temples on Tishah Be’av, these seven prophecies of consolation bring us comfort that God has promised to redeem us from exile. According to the Talmud (JT ; ), the Second Temple was destroyed due to sinat hinam. This phrase is generally translated as “baseless hatred,” but I prefer to translate it as “free-flowing hatred,” since who among us ever believes our hatred to be unjustified? Rather, “free-flowing hatred” expresses the inclination of people to put down or hate others with ease and no remorse.

I don’t propose that all Jews should unite themselves into one homogenous group. I don’t propose unity across Jewish factions. The Jews as a people were never truly united; our history encompasses many sects who opposed each other: Pharisees vs. Sadducees, Karaites vs. Rabbinites, Hassidim vs. Mitnagdim, and the plethora of denominations that exist today. Unity has never been our strong suit. However, I do believe that we should strive for a respectful disunity. Let us embrace each other’s differences but not fight against one another nor try to restrict each other’s religious expression based upon our own religious convictions. How much fighting could we reduce if we just let people be different from ourselves? If the Temples were destroyed due to sinat hinam, it stands to reason that future redemption can result from ahavat hinam, the inclination to respect and accept—and maybe even love—each other.

Perhaps the Rambam was correct that Deuteronomy chose to hide the future location of the Temple in order to extend a peace for a little while. In Tom Petty’s 1981 song “The Waiting,” the chorus begins and ends with the observation, “The waiting is the hardest part.” I’ve always respectfully disagreed with Mr. Petty on this point. I’ve always felt that not knowing is harder than waiting. Waiting for something that is guaranteed to happen is easier than waiting for an unknown outcome. In general, I always think it’s better to know information than to not know it, for with knowledge comes the opportunity for preparation. However, in thinking about the Temple and its hidden location as hamakom asher yivhar Hashem, I find myself reevaluating my position. Perhaps there is something to not knowing. Perhaps not knowing the specific site of the Temple allowed for a level of holiness that was no longer possible once the site’s location was revealed.

Withholding the location of the Temple site might have allowed for focusing on what the Temple truly represented to Deuteronomy, namely a rejection of pagan practices and a commitment to serving a transcendent God, without fighting over the physical location.

May we all strive for peace and merit to see holiness in the place that God will choose.

This commentary was originally published in 2017.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

According to Deuteronomy 14:22, Israelite farmers must tithe the produce of their field שָׁנָה שָׁנָה, shanah shanah, which at first glance means “year, year.” Later in the parashah, Deuteronomy 15:20, we are told that firstborn animals shall be eaten at God’s chosen place שָׁנָה בְשָׁנָה, shanah veshanah, which apparently means “a year in a year.” What does the repetition mean in these two verses?

In Biblical Hebrew, repetition conveys a sense of plurality often translated as “every,” “each,” or “any.” Joseph resisted the sexual advances of Potiphar’s wife יוֹם יוֹם, yom yom, “every day” (Genesis 39:10). Samson awoke from his sleep thinking he would again break free from Delilah as he had done כְּפַעַם בְּפַעַם, kefa’am befa’am, “each time” (Judges 16:20). We are told that אִישׁ אִישׁ, ‘ish ‘ish, “any man” who curses his parents shall be put to death (Leviticus 20:19).

Returning to our parashah, what do the phrases שָׁנָה שָׁנָה, shanah shanah, and שָׁנָה בְשָׁנָה, shanah veshanah convey? They mean the Israelites were supposed to visit God’s place “every year.” This phrase has a similar meaning to לְדֹר דֹּר, ledor dor, in Exodus 3:15, in which God reveals his name to Moses “for every generation.” As the years and generations pass, God is still waiting to be served.

If we look closely, sometimes we find syllables repeating themselves within a single word. This has a slightly different nuance. Instead of meaning “every,” “each,” or “any,” this type of repetition occurs when a great plurality is to be imagined. The תַּלְ-תַּלִּ-ים, taltallim, “locks of hair” in Song of Songs 5:11 convey a full head of hair with bountiful locks; עֲ-קַלְ-קַלּ-וֹת, ‘a�첹���첹�����dz�, “twisted” in Judges 5:6 suggests a road with frequent turns; עַפְ-עַפַּ-י, ‘a��‘a��貹��, “my eyelids” in Psalm 132:4 connotes blinking repeatedly; the name דַרְ-דַּר, dardar, “thistle” of Genesis 3:18 warns of its many thorns; and the גַלְ-גִּלָּ-יו, galgillav, chariot “wheels” in Isaiah 5:28 implies spinning round and round.

With this knowledge we can better understand a noun in the second half of the parashah:

‏ אֶת־זֶה תֹּאכְלוּ מִכֹּל אֲשֶׁר בַּמָּיִם כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ סְנַפִּיר וְקַשְׂקֶשֶׂת תֹּאכֵלוּ��

This you all shall eat from everything in the water: everything that has fins and scales you all shall eat.

(Deut. 14:9)

Whereas the plurality of שָׁנָה שָׁנָה, shanah shanah, means “every year,” the repetition of קשׂ-קשׂ in קַשְׂקֶשֶׂת, kaskeset, conveys the hundreds, if not thousands of individual scales on each fish. The repetitive form suggests abundance.

Looking beyond the parashah, repetition can be found in some of the most well-known verses in the Tanakh. For example, the angels surrounding God are described in Isaiah  as follows:

‏ וְקָרָא זֶה אֶל־זֶה וְאָמַר קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת מְלֹא כָל־הָאָרֶץ כְּבוֹדוֹ׃

And each one called to another “kadosh kadosh kadosh” is the Lord of Hosts, his honor fills the entire world!

(Isa. 6:3)

What does kadosh kadosh kadosh mean? Most translations have something like “holy, holy, holy!” but our approach adds new meaning to the repetition, rendering it “holy in every way” or “infinitely holy.” This happens to be the understanding of the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, which adds that God is “holy” in the heavens, “holy” on the earth, and “holy” for all eternity. God is holy in every conceivable way.

In next week’s parashah we will read that judges must be fair and righteous:

‏צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה‏ וְיָרַשְׁתָּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ׃

Pursue tzedek tzedek so that you may live and possess the land which the Lord your God is giving you

(Deut. 16:20)

What does tzedek tzedek mean? Some translations have “justice, justice,” but our approach suggests “every type of justice.” Justice for the rich and the poor. Justice for your friend and your foe. As it turns out, this is the approach of the King James Bible, which translates tzedek tzedek as “that which is altogether just.” The way to say “altogether” in Biblical Hebrew is to repeat.

Repetition is so uncommon in the English language it is underlined in red in Microsoft Word. This is not the case in Biblical Hebrew. As we have seen, some of the most familiar and influential verses contain repetition, and our approach can be applied to each and every one. All you have to do is repeat, repeat.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

You are God’s children. Do not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead, for you are a people holy to God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, God has chosen you to be God’s treasured people.()

This prohibition, here extended from the priests to include all male Israelites, refers to a ritualized type of self-harm that is different from the hurt that some people afflict on themselves as a way to release painful emotions. To this day, self-laceration remains an expression of mourning in some cultures. In a few weeks, when Shiite Muslims celebrate Ashura and the martyrdom of Imam Husain at Karbala, some will flog themselves until blood flows, even as others reject these practices as extreme.  

But why does the Torah tell us not to mourn too much? What is wrong with feeling our losses intensely? We read here that it is because we are “God’s children . . .  chosen to be God’s treasured possession.” Excessive mourning is rejected because it is not seen as behavior fit for a holy people. One view is that the prohibition stems from gashing being associated with idol worship, as in the case of the Baal prophets who confronted Elijah ().

The rabbis of the Talmud offer another interpretation. “Weep not for the dead, do not lament for them,” we read in . The Talmud explains that the second half of this verse refers to going beyond the traditionally prescribed periods of mourning, while the opening sentence alludes to extreme mourning (BTMoed Katan 27b). This interpretation follows a harrowing story about Rav Huna and a bereaved mother who refuses to be consoled. “One who grieves excessively will in the end weep for another person,” the Talmud warns the reader. But the mother does not listen to Rav Huna’s admonition to stop mourning. She continues to cry and eventually loses her remaining sons, and her own life. This kind of mourning, the Talmud implies, is a criticism, an indictment of the Divine. Bereavement, too, comes from God, and extreme mourning is seen as a refusal to accept God’s will.

The example of the twelfth-century polymath Moses Maimonides reveals the tension between interpreting mourning and living it. On the one hand, Maimonides saw mourning as a pedagogical tool. When we encounter death, he writes, we are called to “prepare ourselves and repent and awake from sleep” to face our lives, and our mortality (Hilkhot Avel 13:12). But in an intimate letter, he also describes how he spent an entire year bedridden and in great despair when his beloved brother David was lost at sea, a loss he called the greatest misfortune of his life. Maimonides was well familiar with the long tentacles of grief: the pain of this experience, he writes in the same letter, was reawakened when he as much as glanced at his brother’s handwriting.

Limiting deep mourning is difficult but, our parashah insists, necessary to regulate the pain of existential loss. Plunged into the alien world of the bereaved, Jews have access to finely tuned practices reaching from Aninut (usually the time between death and burial) to shivah (the seven days of mourning), and distinct periods of mourning, a year for parents and sheloshim (thirty days) for others. Experiencing a death can shatter our sense of self, and mourning customs offer orientation: Aninut exempts the bereaved from the everyday demands of spiritual life. You are now, Aninut says, free to mourn as deeply as you wish. Shivah, and to a lesser extent sheloshim and the year of mourning, are periods of declining intensity that ritualize ways in which we can express emotions, and gently guide the mourner back into life after death.

The prohibition against excessive mourning grew out of the lived experience that loss, and mourning loss, is an existential challenge. What does this prohibition mean in the face of a pandemic that robbed us of so much, including the comfort of ritualized mourning? Many funerals were solitary affairs, with loved ones following along on Zoom or, if they were lucky, from their cars. When my father died in Germany last year, ten days passed between his death and his funeral, and I had to re-evaluate what Aninut meant for me (we were fortunate, others had to wait three weeks). How many people sat shivah at home, comforted virtually by loving friends and family, and yet alone. Some of the changes brought by the pandemic will surely stay: virtual shivah visits have opened up the mitzvah of nihum avelim (comforting the mourner), gathering mourners and those who love them, wherever they may live. Virtual minyanim are bringing welcome accessibility to mourners who for a myriad of reasons—physical ability, dearth of community, convenience—might not have been able to say kaddish otherwise. For others, the disappearance of what we now call “in-person services” and the solace that can come from saying kaddish in shared space has been devastating.

As we (hopefully) emerge from this current pandemic, I am not sure that I am ready to heed the advice to limit mourning quite yet. I do not mean that we should get mourning haircuts or scar our bodies. But before we can celebrate the lessons learned during the pandemic, it may be good to acknowledge the hard parts: people we lost, months spent indoors, time not spent with friends and families, the times when we missed out on watching babies morph into toddlers or sitting with the elderly or the ill. 

With Elul approaching, and the High Holidays not far behind, we are invited to tune into the rhythm of the Jewish year. We close out one year and turn to the next. We complete one cycle of the Torah and open it again to begin afresh, with our grief, our mourning, and all the hopes that make up our human experience.  We are also called to reach out to those who lost someone over the last year. For although no gashes or shorn hair remind us of their losses, they may still be in pain.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

But what can this verse mean to us today, in the twenty-first century, when we are no longer standing on the border of the Promised Land following a forty-year trek in the desert? If the Bible speaks to people in all times and places, how can we discern the verse’s relevance to our own lives?

I understand the word הַיּוֹם/ “today” in the same way that the Midrash understands the words הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה / “this day” in Exodus 19:1 and Deuteronomy 27:9.

בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁלִישִׁי לְצֵאת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם בַּיּוֹם הַזֶּה בָּאוּ מִדְבַּר סִינָי׃

“In the third month since the children of Israel’s leaving the Land of Egypt, on this day, they arrived at the wilderness of Sinai.” (Exod. 19:1)

הַסְכֵּת וּשְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה נִהְיֵיתָ לְעָם לַה’ אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ

“Be silent and hear, O Israel; this day you have become a people of Hashem your God.” (Deut. 27:9)

Why does the Torah use the words “this day” in each of these verses? Exodus 19:1 would read better with the words “on that day,” and Deuteronomy 27:9 doesn’t actually take place on the day the nation entered a covenant with Hashem! In his commentary on each of these verses, Rashi, the preeminent medieval Jewish biblical exegete, references midrashim (cited in Yalkut Shimoni 273 and BT Berakhot 63a, respectively) which present the idea that on any given day that these words are read or heard—meaning on every single day—it should feel as though the event in question (receiving the Torah or entering into a covenant with God) is occurring “today.” Similarly, in our verse in Parashat Re’eh, on any given day that we read these words, we are being told that God is giving us blessings and curses.

In the biblical narrative, בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה (previously translated as “blessings and curses”) refers to a choice between receiving blessings or curses, depending on our behavior. Yet this phrase does not have to be read as a choice. Rather, it can be understood to encompass both: God giving us both blessings and curses at the same time. Life is full of both positives and negatives simultaneously. We all have blessings for which we’re grateful and experience hardships that feel like curses; they co-exist in our lives, and we don’t get to choose only the good or only the bad. 

In this verse, the Torah is directing us toward the realization that both the good and bad in our lives come from God, as is written: אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם / “I am giving you.” Indeed, Jewish practice acknowledges that both the positive and negative in our lives come from God. The Shulhan Arukh, OH 222:1–2, teaches us that upon hearing good news or experiencing something extremely positive, we recite either the blessing Hatov vehametiv / “Who is good and causes good,” or Sheheheyanu / “Who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season.” We also recite a blessing upon hearing bad news or experiencing something extremely negative, that of Dayan ha’emet / “Who is the True Judge.” It is not our place to accept the good that God gives us and reject the bad; we don’t get to pick and choose God’s lot for us. Additionally, we are not to blame God for the negative things we suffer while taking credit for the positive things in our lives; Deuteronomy 8 already warned us against that.

“Beware lest you forget your God . . . and you say in your heart: ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ But you shall remember your God, for it is He that gives you power to get wealth . . .” (Deut. 8:11, Deut. 8:17–18)

The first word in our parashah, Re’eh / “See,” charges us to recognize that all of the above are true. The 12^th century Spanish biblical exegete Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra notes that the command “r��’e��” is written in the singular despite Moshe’s speaking to all the Israelites, because Moshe addressed each individual who was present. We can learn from this that it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to internalize the verse’s message. 

Each of us must recognize that we receive both blessings and curses from God every day. Sometimes it is easy—and during these challenging days of pandemic, perhaps almost unavoidable—to get caught up in the travails of the day and lose sight of the blessings in our lives. It is also easy to take certain privileges for granted and stop being consciously grateful for them. But the opening verse of this week’s parashah enjoins us to recognize and appreciate every good thing with which God blesses us, even at a time when we may be contending with challenges and losses that would have seemed unimaginable a year ago. We are literally instructed to “see” God’s gifts.

May we all strive not to lose sight of our blessings, and in recognizing them every day, merit increased peace and joy in our lives.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

“And once I saw her menstrual blood . . . saw it shining darkly up at me from the worn linoleum in front of the kitchen sink . . . Also in this icon is an endless dripping of blood down through a drainboard into a dishpan. It is the blood she is draining from the meat so as to make it kosher and fit for consumption. Probably I am confusing things . . . but I see her standing at the sink salting the meat so as to rid it of its blood, when the attack of woman’s troubles sends her, with a most alarming moan, rushing off to her bedroom. I was no more than four or five, and yet those two drops of blood that I beheld on the floor of her kitchen are visible to me still.” (Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 42–43)

These days most observant Jewish women in North America do not soak and salt their own meat. What was once a common and familiar marker of Jewish kitchens, and a deeply gendered rite of passage for young Jewish women, has been professionalized and sequestered away from the eyes of most of those who cook and eat kosher meat. In the United States, the act itself is often performed by mostly non-Jewish workers under the supervision of Orthodox rabbis—a largely male caste. The sounds, sights, and smells of this “kashering” process as performed today would seem strange, unfamiliar, and perhaps even repulsive to most Jewish North American women. The remaining women whose mothers taught them this little ritual of water, blood, and salt, with its ramped wooden drainboard, are now mostly in their late sixties and early seventies. Within the next twenty or thirty years, for all practical purposes, its existence as a rite commonly performed by women in Jewish kitchens may pass from living memory.

This shift in location from home to commercial setting has happened in my own lifetime. As recently as the 1970s, Rabbi Isaac Klein, the Conservative Movement’s widely-accepted posek (adjudicator of Jewish law), wrote this piece of practical advice:

We would suggest that housewives who put meat into a deep freeze should, as a rule, kasher them first and then freeze them. In cases of emergency, however, and where the meat was accidentally not kashered, we permit the kashering of the meat after it was taken out of the deep freeze. (A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice, 353)

What is relevant for us is that the tradition of kashering meat at home was still robust enough at the time he was writing that a sufficiently abundant number of Jewish women would have been interested in whether they should kasher their meat before or after freezing. I think it unlikely that a contemporary rabbi would write such a passage for a popular Jewish audience. The question is simply not relevant to the lived day-to-day practice of observant Jews in the English-speaking world.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother beside the kitchen sink with raw meat laying before her on a slanted board, a small blue box of kosher salt on the counter. The memory is vague and foggy and yet strikingly immediate, tinged with the metallic scent of blood. There was a time when these miniature scenes of decontamination were common to the point that Jewish men and boys’ imaginations of their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters were suffused with a ferrous crimson. Philip Roth was only able to use the iconography of salt, blood, kitchen, and mother so powerfully because of its familiarity to him and other Jewish men of his generation. In times and places other than our own, Jewish women wielded a curious power in the control they held over blood. Blood was threatening and dangerous, possessing a hazard. Women held the antidote in the form of two water-based rituals—kashering and mikveh. This decontamination had to occur before Jews could eat meat or make love.

91���� professor emerita Rabbi Judith Hauptman has argued compellingly that already in the time of the Mishnah women took power over the ritual complex of niddah (menstrual impurity) by invoking stringencies or leniencies in matters of seeing menstrual blood. As she writes, “The rabbis seem to have sensed that in the area of niddah women had taken matters into their own hands” (Rereading the Rabbis, Ch. 7). These ancient rabbinic women controlled the reactivity of desire, either drowning it in blood, or rousing it with water.

Meat was also long linked with desire in rabbinic representation. Deuteronomy 12:20 reads:

When the Lord your God enlarges your territory, as He has promised you, and you say, “I am going to eat some meat,” because you wish to eat meat, you may eat meat whenever you have the desire.

Sifrei Deuteronomy, an early work of Midrash, already contextualizes the dispensation for the eating of non-sacral meat in the quenching of desire.

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah says: Scripture comes only to teach you proper behavior. For a person should not eat meat unless they desire it. (pis. 75)

Most notably, Roth’s association of kashering with the blood of menstruation is not coincidental. For a non-trivial amount of time, soaking and salting was an oral tradition among women, as with niddah, passed from mother to daughter. It also arose from a culture of blood taboo and purity—it was a practice that seemed normal, mundane, and unremarkable. It is only now when kashering has become a strange, alien, and unfamiliar thing that we have the possibility of seeing its full range of associations with clarity.

The term “ostranenie” (often translated as “defamiliarization” or “estrangement”) was first coined in 1925 by the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Device.” Shklovsky claimed that presenting audiences with common things in an unfamiliar or strange way (as art does) allows recovery and restoration—a fresh and renewed experience of quotidian events, circumstances, and entities. When a thing is common and familiar we tend to take it as a given and it escapes our attentiveness. Even matters possessing storied pasts and profound symbolic potency become hum-drum and disregarded. Framing them in new perceptual contexts grants us a new clarity of vision and rejuvenates our capacity to attend to them.

This is the gift that Roth gave in the above passage from Portnoy’s Complaint. We are able to see the tensions and fault lines of depuration, disgust, desire, femininity, food, and fear that all join together in this workaday observance. These blood taboos serve to compromise between the two negative possible extremes: giving in to the chaos that desire contains in potentia, on the one hand; and the repressive stifling of the drives that make life vital on the other. The desires for meat and sex are dangerous; either desire can spill over into violence and rip a community apart. Yet, without some indulgence life is meagre and grey. Throughout the novel, Portnoy finds himself trapped in exactly this conflict between chaos and suppression, the Torah’s solution of moderating life with blood and water denied to him (and even unconsidered) because of the modern casting off of religious ritual life.

In our distance from this blood-purging food ritual’s commonplace recurrence, now that it is hidden from our eyes and made strange to us, we are doubly blessed. On the one hand, this act of purity and decontamination still resides in living memory. We can see it just barely out of grasp, perhaps ready for us to reclaim it. On the other hand, it has all but disappeared from the observed life of the contemporary Jew. And through its strangeness we see its roots in an older, broader domain—Scripture’s apprehension of blood rooted in its association with unrestrained desire. Today we can witness it oozing life as it disappears from the hearths of the Jewish people in favor of the system of commercial and industrial kashrut. Let us pray that we are observant enough to mark its passing and decide how we should respond.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

This third haftarah of consolation and comfort contains a beautiful promise of a society established on righteousness, and consequently free of oppression and fear and safe from ruin. Most strikingly, it critiques the worldview that sees the accumulation of wealth and material possessions as the highest value, offering an alternative vision, in which that which truly satisfies is available “without money.” The prophet suggests that it is actually the people’s obsession with materiality and money that leaves them empty and puts them at risk, while the alternative value system in which righteousness and justice are paramount is the foundation of true safety and security.

Food for thought:

• Beyond the need for basics, to what extent does your relationship with money and material things offer comfort and security, and to what extent does it contribute to anxiety and fear?
• How do our values lead to societal stability or instability, righteousness or oppression, a culture of security or a culture of fear?
• What suffering results of lack of righteousness in our foundations?
• How would addressing our failings lead to comfort?

Listen to the haftarah brought to life as it is declaimed in English by renowned actor Ronald Guttman by .

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