Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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Lessons of the Liminal: Focusing on the Journey, not the Destination

January 1, 2019 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , •

Lessons of the Liminal: Focusing on the Journey, not the Destination By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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Liminality—though some consider this word needless jargon, I suspect it nevertheless is a favorite of many rabbis (though Rabbi Chessin prefers “bifurcation!”) This densely descriptive term is one that people who study religion love to love, because it enables them to name an important type of experience that crosses boundaries of culture, time, and place. But what does it mean, and what is it all about? Perhaps more i importantly, allow me to answer: Why should you care about noticing the liminal? 

Though he didn’t coin the term (that distinction goes to Arnold van Gennep), Victor Turner, a famous 20th-century  anthropologist, was instrumental in developing the idea behind it. He used it in studies of communal rites of passage. As he observed, there are particularly fraught times in most cultures when people transition from one part of their lives to another. These marginal moments in life define us; if we want to use the technical term for them, we call them liminal.

Even if people in a culture aren’t explicitly conscious of experiencing something liminal, they (the moments) tend to be precarious for those who navigate them. When we traverse a liminal juncture, we cross a threshold from one part of our lives into another. When boys and girls have b’nai mitzvah, they start the process as children and finish it as adults. When adults get married, they start their wedding ceremonies as unmarried individuals and finish as newly wed unions.

Focusing on liminality leads us to ask: What happens in between the beginning and the end of processes like these? What happens, for instance, if a ceremony or rite of passage somehow goes awry or isn’t completed…does the child technically not become an adult? Do the adults not become married? Liminality is about transitions, and studying it reminds us that our lives in many ways are more affected by the processes of the transformations we undergo than by any longer term status a transition is meant to enact.

If we look around us in the world, we can see the liminal everywhere, both inside and outside of the realm of religion. As we begin 2019, we may notice an extra measure of liminality around us. The new class of congress? The way they settle into their new roles—whether, for those that are returning, into a new status quo, or, for those that are newly elected, into an entirely new reality—will set the tone for many coming years of  politics. A new tax year? At this time, in this transitional moment, we make choices that are likely to affect us long into the future.

The importance of the liminal is even apparent in the general spirit of how we mark a “new year” in Western culture. As many of us set New Year’s resolutions, we simultaneously confront the progress (or the lack thereof) that we made on self-imposed vows in the past year and, likewise, ponder how  we might strive to change course in the year to come. These experiences are nothing if not liminal; by virtue of their boundary-crossing nature, they are both precarious and potent.

As you begin 2019, I encourage you to take time to think not just about what you hope to become in the coming year, but to consider how you hope to get there. Remember that the part of life that makes our stories most rich is not that which describes what we are—professional titles, family roles, ranks or social status—but the trajectory our lives take in attaining such distinctions. As the new year progresses and you make decisions for the future about what to do and who to be, be mindful of the liminal; it will help you set the tone for a good year to come!

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Hanukkah Can Help with Crisis of Faith

December 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , •

Hanukkah Can Help with Crisis of Faith By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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Like many Jews, I have a little bit of family in Israel. My Israeli relatives (cousins, aunts and uncles) moved there in the wake of the Holocaust; the rest of my family chose to come to America.

One might expect the Israeli side of my family to be, in some fashion, “more Jewish” (whatever that means!) than that which settled in the US—he or she would be mistaken. In fact, while my American relatives are active and practicing Jews, those who are in Israel, like many Israelis, tend toward secularism and struggle with anything in Judaism they consider “religious.”

On multiple occasions, my Israeli relatives and I have debated how one can believe in God in a post-Holocaust world. As far as they are concerned, any God who would allow the Holocaust to occur is no God worth believing in. Best cast scenario, they would suggest, is that no God exists at all.

Hanukkah is, at its core, a Jewish attempt to reconcile theological crises like this.

 

At the conclusion of the Maccabean Revolt, during which a Jewish family led a rebellion to gain freedom from the rule of the Hellenistic, Seleucid empire, the Jews of 2nd-century BCE were faced with their own crisis of faith: how to revitalize their people’s religiosity after the recent, wholesale destruction of Jewish culture. The question that underlied the Maccabees’ task echoes what many Jews have wondered lately: What do we do, first, when it seems like our God has abdicated the role a beneficent Sovereign ought to play? Second, what do we do when we begin to experience doubts about the meaningfulness of belief in God at all?

Thence comes the significance of Hanukkah, the holiday of rededication.

The root Ḥet, Nun, Kaf, from which Hanukkah’s name comes, is precisely about the reaffirmation of that in our world which, though originally sacred, has been sullied. According to Jewish lore, the Hanukkah miracle of 164 BCE marks the time when our ancestors decided that they would not let Syrian-Greeks—and the calamities they inflicted upon us, our holy places, and our sense of the Sacred—dictate the innermost essence of our religion or faith.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid’s Syrian-Greek leader during Maccabean Revolt, sought to make the practice of Judaism burdensome. As an imposition to the Judeans, he also attempted to turn the Second Temple into a shrine for Pagan gods like Zeus. Hanukkah—the coda to the Maccabean Revolt, the Hasmoneans’ victory lap—was an inflection point in the Jews’ response to that crisis. It marks the precise moment when the Jews, miraculously having won a war and survived yet another oppressive regime, showed the world that neither persecution nor violence would stop them from following their ancestral religion as they saw fit.

Unfortunately, Hanukkah—especially as it is often celebrated in 21st-century America, as a wintertime, Christmas look-alike—risks becoming spiritually irrelevant to American Jewry’s religious praxis. There may be nothing wrong with the inevitable cultural interchange that occurs when Jews are in societal dialogue with those of other faiths; however, it is essential that Jews maintain the core integrity of their holidays’ meaning. Hanukkah, minor festival though it may be, has the potential to hold major religious significance, especially in times when Jews experience strife.

This holiday, being born of Jews’ confrontation with an often-inhospitable world, deserves to be recognized for what it is: a statement by Jews that their history, religion, and culture cannot be destroyed. In it, we find the strident spirit of rebellion on which Jews have relied for millennia. In our world today, there are many who would all too happily gloat if Jews were to surrender their religion in response to violence, if we were to decide that our religion lacks meaning in light of the iniquities and indignities we still face.

Surprising though it may be, the 2nd-century BCE rededication of our ancient Temple should be quite relevant to 21st-century CE Jews. The debate in which I will undoubtedly continue to participate with my family (or with others who feel, given our history, that God has abandoned the Jews) is legitimate. Nevertheless, I am confident asserting that Hanukkah provides us with a model for an authentic Jewish commitment that, regardless of what happens to us, we as Jews will survive the tribulations of our times; we will come out, at the other end of our difficulties, stronger for the experience. Ultimately, I have no doubt, we will turn our weaknesses into strengths and our suffering into celebration.

Chag Hanukkah sameach, may we all rededicate ourselves and our faiths to the cause of goodness and light,

Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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Jewish Tradition Confronts Power with Truth

November 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , •

Jewish Tradition Confronts Power with Truth By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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In the wake of the national spectacle that was last month’s confirmation process of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, there have been many people around the country who have wondered if the #metoo movement should now be considered dead.

This emotionally charged question is liable to come from people on both ends of the American political spectrum. On the one hand, those who consider themselves conservative might ask whether the apparent use of an alleged sexual assault as a political weapon signals that #metoo’s demise is, if not already here, just around the corner.

On the other hand, those who consider themselves liberal may be inclined to ask, among other things, whether the Senate’s failure to rebuff a political appointee who was credibly accused of sexual violence means that any momentum #metoo once had either has fizzled out or has, at least, led to little real-world change.

 

If this is the conclusion of a movement that has so thoroughly impacted our nation’s discourse on gender, sex, violence, and women’s experiences, then it is rather anti-climactic. However, it isn’t so clear that we should see it as such. Even if we can’t divine whether or not #metoo remains relevant from the tea leaves of American current events, members of the Jewish community should still see themselves as ethically mandated standard-bearers of #metoo on the basis of our Jewish heritage.

Of course, there are aspects of our tradition which are admittedly less than admirable in how they approach women’s empowerment. For instance, the idea that women cannot initiate a divorce—an unfortunate consequence of certain interpretations of halakhah—leaves much to be desired from the standpoint of equality. Nevertheless, the broader view of Jewish history and heritage demonstrates and demands that every person should listen to (and take the concerns of) women seriously.

To that end, one major goal of the #metoo movement has been to work toward ensuring that even the most powerful men in our society face consequences if they engage in sexual violence. As Jews, we ought to take note of at least one clear precursor to this principle in the Tanakh’s strong critique of King David.

David, whom our tradition typically portrays as one of the Bible’s main heroes, is not immune from rebuke when he acts in a sexually abusive way with Bathsheba. When Nathan, the prophet, confronts him with the gravity of his sins, David poignantly acknowledges the destructive nature of what he has done and cries out: chatati l’adonai, “I have sinned against God!”

While 21st-century readers might wish that David had been punished with permanent loss of his lofty status, it’s hard to deny that the tale has some significant resonance in the era of #metoo. Certainly some would say David’s punishment was too mild since he remained on the throne.
Others, also, might point out that Bathsheba’s point of view is completely absent in the story (a result of the fact that much of the Bible is framed from a male-only perspective.) The greatest difference between David’s story and today, though, may actually be the fact that God is the stimulus that forces David to reckon with his misdeeds.

If we want truly to claim the mantle of #metoo by making claim to our Jewish tradition—and we should—then we need to remind ourselves that our path to sex- and gender-related justice will not come through divine decree. We do not live in ancient Jerusalem and we cannot expect those who harm women to be confronted with stark truth by some prophet who offers them a convenient, understandable allegory.
Instead, it is up to us to push for justice in our society, and it is our obligation to confront and grapple with the nuanced, complex circumstances necessary to fight for those in our society who have been victimized. As the biblical tradition makes clear, to be a Jewish proponent of #metoo means being ready to confront even the most powerful men in our society with the truth, in the words of the prophet Nathan, that atah ha-ish, that “[they] are the men” whose behavior makes the world less safe for women.

For women and men both, and our religion as well, it is imperative that we ensure that the essence of #metoo remain vital and potent as ever.

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Jewish Calendar Marks Many Occasions

September 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , •

Jewish Calendar Marks Many Occasions By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

Most Jews are aware of two new years we celebrate per calendar year: Rosh Hashanah in the fall and the secular new year, on January 1st, in the winter. Knowledgeable Jews may also note that there is a third new year that comes each spring—Tu BiShevat—which marks the new year for trees. How many of you, though, knew that Judaism actually suggests that we mark four new years (not including January 1st)?                                                     

This idea, fittingly recorded at the start of the Mishna’s Tractate Rosh Hashanah, teaches:

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“These are the four new years:

  1. On the first of Nisan, the new year for the kings and for the festivals;
  2. on the first of Elul, the new year for the tithing of cattle (though Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Shimon say this falls on the first of Tishrei);
  3. on the first of Tishrei, the new year for the years, for the agricultural sabbatical, and for Jubilee years, for planting and for vegetables;
  4. on the first of Shevat, the new year for trees (according to the House of Shammai)—the House of Hillel says it is on the 15th.”

In the generations after this text developed—when the Rabbis of the Talmud discussed, interpreted, and debated the meaning behind it—they suggested a wide variety of reasons why the calendar needed to have been structured in this fashion. And, as those Rabbis would surely tell you were they still around, a great need to mark each and every one of those new years for its own reasons did exist.

Nevertheless, I suspect that most of you do not mark a new year for kings, tithing of cattle, or Jubilees! On the other hand, I bet you do mark certain other yearly beginnings that this passage doesn’t include: years of age via birthdays, years of finances years via taxes and tax deadlines (oy…), years of politics via elections, and more. As it turns out, there are all manners of “new years” that each of us opt to mark in order to give structure and meaning to our experience of time.

To that end, those of you with young children or grandchildren probably are well aware that one such modern, important new year actually just occurred: the new year for the school year. (And, even if you don’t have a direct connection with kids who are starting school, you probably felt the school year begin if your Facebook page is anything like mine!)

While Makor’s first day hasn’t happened yet (it’s on September 23rd, so make sure to sign up if you haven’t yet), Temple Beth Or obviously also participates in this ritual of our contemporary annual cycle— our first day of school is a big deal to the synagogue. (I’m probably a little biased in saying so, but I think our Makor new year is one of the most important “holidays” of the year!) Just like the Rabbis of old, we at Temple Beth Or, and, more broadly, in the 21st-century US, actively make choices about which new years we are committed to celebrating, and, for us, the school year clearly makes the cut.

As the fall moves on and the first days of school, Makor, and Tishrei all are celebrated, I encourage you to take a moment to think about the times in your year that are most special to you, to make decisions about which occasions you most need to most mark in your calendar and commemorate so that you can further enrich your life.

Shanah  tova,

Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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Human Beings Are Not Bargaining Chips

July 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , •

Human Beings Are Not Bargaining Chips By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

Tuvia’s mother was wailing and tearing her hair. His father was sobbing. His sisters were terrified. “Tuvia, my dear son,” his mother cried. “My only boy, why are they tearing you away from me?”


Tuvia was taken, half-asleep, to a large house where many frightened, wide-eyed children were crying, “Mama, Mama. Take me home to my Mama!” The children cried all that sleepless night.


Larry Domnitch, The Cantonists: The Jewish
Children’s Army of the Tsar, 79-80.

 

These words might sound like they could be recently-written or a work of fiction; however, they actually come from the 19th century and record real history. They describe the experience of a Jewish family from that era—Tuvia Silverman, his parents, and his sisters—at a time when Jewish parents were being forcibly parted from their young children.

The separation of families it depicts (and these are Tuvia’s own words explaining what happened to him as a child) was the result of anti-Semitic policies enacted by Tsar Nicholas the First.

For some background on the relevant 19th-century history: Tsar Nicholas the First was a man who, in 1816, wrote in his diary the following of Jews, whom he called by the pejorative name “Zhids:” “The ruination of the peasants of [Russia] is the Zhids. They are regular leeches and suck these unfortunate governments to the point of exhaustion.”

Tsar Nicholas I

 

In 1827, two years after becoming tsar, Nicholas determined that he could break the will of the Jews by creating a compulsory quota of Jewish boys whom Russian Jewish communities would be forced to send away to the army. Boys as young as eight years old were stolen away from their families for this reason and were sent off to the army for more than two decades at a time. Nicholas the First imagined that he could, in this way, work to rid Russia of Jews.

Nicholas had some success in his sinister goal: the devastation felt by families whose children were taken was intense. He even succeeded in turning fellow Jews against one another. Jews were required to police each other to ensure that conscription quotas were met, and, thus, an infamous role—the khapper—was born.

Khappers were Jews who would kidnap Jewish boys, sometimes taking them from their beds in the middle of the night, to deliver them to the Russian government. Poor Jewish families were especially susceptible to having their children taken by khappers because they (unlike their more affluent peers) couldn’t afford to bribe those who might take their children.

Turning back to the present: Though, as an historian, I usually love to discover facets of history that are relevant to contemporary life, it is probably self-evident that this is an historical episode one would never hope to see paralleled in his or her own time. Nevertheless, I hope that the pain of this chapter of Jewish history can steer our own thoughts today. It should help to shape our consciences and to deepen our empathy for others.

The Jewish ethos, formed by our experiences throughout history, teaches unambiguously that there is no appropriate time or way to use any human being’s life as a bargaining chip for political or social ends. Regardless of the impact we might hope to have in doing things like this, Judaism does not sanction the political leveraging of children’s freedom or the separation of families.

Of course, every situation possesses its own nuances; what happens in 2018 is not identical to what happened in 1827. However, there are undeniable parallels between what was done to Jewish families in the past—as in 19th-century Russia—and what has been done to migrants recently in the United States. Nevertheless, doing justice to our Jewish history means ensuring that no person in the present ever re-experiences the indignities we as Jews once too commonly suffered; it means remembering that all human beings are created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God; and being Jewish, as well, means fully feeling the pain of the other, and acting to protect those in need. Remember: we, too, were once strangers in a foreign land.

Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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Fact vs. Narrative: Road to Peace Needs Both

June 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , •

Facts vs. Narrative: Road to Peace Needs Both By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

“When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”

As I sat heavy-hearted, reflecting on May’s bloody clashes between the IDF and Gazan protestors (many of whom were backed by Hamas), these famous words—attributed to Golda Meir—kept coming to mind. In many ways, her sentiment is fair; however, it is also quite gruesome. It is unfathomably sad to acknowledge that anyone could be “forced” to kill someone else’s child.

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Meir was not the first Jewish authority to consider a matter of this kind. The Babylonian Talmud contains words that acknowledge a similar reality. It teaches* that bystanders must kill rodfim—those who pursue innocent people, intending to kill them—rather than let those who are innocent die. Surprisingly, though, the Talmud also teaches the following lesson† in a nearby and important gloss:  If you are confronted by someone who says you must either (A) kill an innocent person or (B) let yourself be killed, you must choose option B. You are supposed to allow your own death rather than become a murderer. As the text (originally in Aramaic) elegantly wonders: “Who is to say that your blood runs the most red? Maybe that man’s blood is [actually] redder?”

How odd it feels for the Talmud to hold such seemingly‡ contradictory perspectives and to not see them as conflicting with one another! Perhaps, though, we should not be too surprised by this juxtaposition. Sometimes, narratives are more central to how we view the world than history, ideological consistency, or facts.

In fact, Yossi Klein Halevi—the famed Israeli journalist—made this idea the centerpiece of a recent article (“Israelis and Palestinians need to honor a two-story solution in the Middle East,” in the Los Angeles Times on May 13—worth reading!), opining that “each side needs to acknowledge the right of the other to define itself as a people entitled to national sovereignty.” As he explains, both Israelis and Palestinians would do well to stop trying to invalidate each other’s narratives. Instead, all would benefit from working hard to hear one another’s story.

The primacy of narratives over facts or history applies even within inner-Jewish dialogue. Recent research has suggested that the quote I mentioned above, attributed to Golda Meir, may well have never passed her lips. There is no evidence—neither audio/video recordings nor written records—that she actually said anything of the sort. However, these words still carry substantial weight in Jewish narrativizations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If Meir truly wasn’t responsible for this quote, she is not alone in having had words that are culturally significant in Jewish/Israeli discourse falsely identified with her. Joseph Trumpeldor, who died in 1920 defending a Jewish settlement in the Galilee and was one of the great Zionist heroes of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, classically is known as the man whose final words were: “tov lamut be’ad artzeinu,” “it is good to die for our land.” These words became a rallying cry for generations of Israel’s defenders. The only problem? Modern critical historians increasingly question whether Trumpeldor actually said this, even suggesting that he may have meant the opposite!

As a rabbi and historian, I value the pursuit of truth and the effort to better understand the events of our past as much as anyone. Facts do matter. However, sometimes history’s contemporary meaning is not so much about “what actually happened,” but about how we internalize our story—about how we make our history speak to our circumstances and craft our narrative. Of course, this is a dangerous truth:  It means that people can deceptively frame history in order to suit their own needs. Nevertheless, accepting it can free us to focus on hearing and appreciating the stories of those around us. While we must always protect ourselves, we should always strive to appreciate the humanity of “the other” and (as the Talmud might put it) remember the redness of every person’s blood.

* Sanhedrin 73a

† Sanhedrin 74a

‡ There are, of course, meaningful distinctions between these two texts—primarily they hinge upon whether or not the person you would kill poses a threat to someone who is innocent. Even still, the attitudes contrast strongly.

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Never Stop Learning a Very Jewish Attitude

May 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , , •

Never Stop Learning a Very Jewish Attitude By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

It is finally May, and our last day of Makor is right around the corner!

Our last day of Makor will be on May 13th; on that day our kids will do some important wrapping up of their final class projects and will get to enjoy some not-to-miss activities (including an “Israeli café” for the whole school being run by our 6th-8th grade class).

Much as I love Makor and am a little sad to see it end each year—and I really, really do and am—even I must confess that I love the freedom and rest that a summer break provides. Though I’ll be sad to say goodbye to Makor for a few months, I will greatly appreciate getting a little more sleep each Sunday morning!

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My own personal feelings about this imminent break notwithstanding, it is worth us recognizing how un-Jewish the idea of a summer break is:  as Jews, we specifically celebrate that our tradition so highly prizes the continuity of the learning process. On Simchat Torah, for instance, we very deliberately begin reading from Genesis as soon as we have finished the end of Deuteronomy in order to emphasize that our study should never cease. There is even one brilliant (and I think farcically hysterical) story told in the Babylonian Talmud* which seems to emphasize how much despair comes from being shut out of the educational process. In this tale, we read that Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Nathan—two of the most important Rabbis of the early Jewish tradition—were expelled from the rabbinic academy for bad conduct. Barred entry from the beit midrash (house of study), what did these two rabbis do? They sat outside the building and wrote their questions on slips of paper that they would throw in through the window!

Rabbis Meir and Nathan aren’t the only Rabbis of our tradition who fought for the right to go to school. The Talmud** also tells us that one of our greatest sages, Hillel—of Passover sandwich fame—had a similar problem. In his time, Rabbis could only go to the study house if they paid a fee (half a silver dinar), and one day he didn’t have enough money to get in. What did Hillel do? He climbed onto the roof of the beit midrash and listened to the Rabbis learn and debate through the building’s skylight. The story goes on to say that Hillel eventually fell asleep on that roof, and that that night it snowed and he nearly froze to death. He was only saved because the next day the Rabbis inside the beit midrash noticed that the skylight was blocked and found and resuscitated him. The Talmud teaches elsewhere that, as a result of his experience, Hillel eventually went on to abolish this entrance fee so that all who wanted could come and learn.

Now, unfortunately, we aren’t in a place where we can abolish our entrance fee for Makor (though we offer help to all those who need it—financial difficulty should never prevent a child at Temple Beth Or from learning!), but I have great admiration for how committed Hillel, Rabbi Meir, and Rabbi Nathan were to learning Torah. I have to imagine that if these sages lived in a society where a summer break existed, and where their beit midrash closed each year for months at a time, they would find other ways to quench their thirst for Torah.

As the summer begins and we at Makor relinquish the blessing of spending Sunday morning with your children, it is worth trying to emulate the model of these great students. Find ways to keep your children’s minds active and their Jewish identities thriving all through May, June, July, and August!

I would like to wish all of you a joyful summer and thank you for helping to make Makor a phenomenal success this year. I look forward to seeing everyone, parents and children alike, back this fall for another great year of Makor!

Rabbi Ari Ballaban

*Tractate Horayoth 13b   ** Tractate Yoma 35b

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Jews Obligated to Stand Against Discrimination

April 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , , •

Jews Obligated to Stand Against Discrimination By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

While out to dinner a few weeks ago, I had an unusual conversation with a stranger. During it, I glimpsed something discomfiting about the Jewish duty to stand in solidarity with those of other minority faiths.

When I meet people outside of my normal circles (who don’t know me from either Temple Beth Or or my doctoral program), it is fairly common for them to be curious and to ask me questions related to my being Jewish; this is especially true of those who have not interacted much with Jews before. That is how this encounter began. The stranger with whom I was speaking informed me that he was Christian, I told him that I was Jewish, and he happily peppered me with questions about Judaism.

Our conversation was completely pleasant…until it wasn’t. It went awry when he (proudly!) informed me, in what I experienced as an attempt to show his own solidarity with Jews, that: “I’ve seen a few synagogues before; I’m always happy to see them. What I don’t like seeing are mosques.” This comment was, obviously, a showstopper. After rebuffing his sentiment, I reluctantly continued in a polite-but-terse discussion with him, and I was only too eager to finish talking and say goodbye. I do really mean it when I say that this conversation had been quite pleasant. However, my perception of him—and the situation I was in—had greatly changed.

For days after this conversation, I wondered about this man’s motivation in sharing such a repulsive, bigoted sentiment with me—me myself being someone of a minority faith, someone whom he had just met, no less! All I could imagine was that he had internalized from the general American ether that Jews dislike Muslims, and that, as such, I would be encouraged to hear that he too harbored such intolerance.

The more I thought about this encounter, the more I reawakened to one of the realities of discrimination that makes it such an insidious issue:  In the real world, very few of those who harm others, those whom we would like to call “villains,” stand around twirling a mustache.

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So, let us be fair to this man. It is not as though it is unfathomable how a person in the United States would think such a thing. We live in a post-1948 world, 70 years after the creation of the modern State of Israel, where the conflict between Israel and her neighbors—most of whom are majority-Muslim—has been acrimonious and public. The bitter fruit of this decades-long, bloody conflict has been the deterioration of a once-healthy relationship between Muslims and Jews.

Leaving aside the political realities of Israeli peace plan politics (the minutiae of which I can’t meaningfully discuss here), we ought to recognize how sad and problematic it is that Jewish-Muslim relations (interfaith matters) have been a casualty of this longstanding political dispute. Even though we may have political disagreements (and exceptionally heated ones at that) with regard to Israel, we should work to ensure that a long history of Jewish-Muslim fellowship not be abrogated without a second thought.

In that vein, after further reflection, it might be true that my non-mustachioed interlocutor may have been less heinously villainous than my initial gut-instinct indicated. Nevertheless, we can’t, as Jews, become inured to the denigration of the “other.” It remains our ethical obligation to stand up and to control the discourse on Jewish-Muslim relationships in our time. So long as there are those who imagine that Jews would be sympathetic to any notion of discrimination, we still have work to do.

Rabbi Ari Ballaban

Photo by Juan Camilo Guarin P on Unsplash

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Jewish Holidays Remember All Milestones

March 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , •

Jewish Holidays Remember All Milestones By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

Judaism teaches that certain times and seasons carry special, sacred significance. Of course, this is a familiar idea in our daily lives: Our weekly celebration of Shabbat is meant to reenact God’s mythic, post-Creation rest. However, we also regularly engage in such temporal symbolism in a larger sense. Most of our holidays, for instance, are meant to mark the specific times in years past when important events occurred for our people. In experiencing the Jewish calendar, we are meant to reconnect with an ancient heritage and to re-experience the foundational moments of our history.

The occasions we mark in Judaism are as diverse as they are numerous. They run the full emotional gamut, from the most extreme euphoria to the deepest despair. In the latter category, for instance, is Tisha b’Av (the Ninth of Av) which commemorates essentially every calamity we as Jews have suffered. According to Jewish lore, this was the day when:

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  • both of the Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed;
  • near when the First Crusade began;
  • around the time the Jews were expelled from England in the 13th century, France in the 14th century, and Spain in the 15th century;
  • and even when Heinrich Himmler’s “Final Solution,” the German plan to exterminate the world’s Jews, was approved.

And yet, the Jewish calendar is far from being only about recalling doom and gloom. At the start of this month (beginning the night of the 28th of February, and extending into the day of March 1st), we observe a celebration that falls squarely into the euphoric holiday camp. For millennia, Purim has been held up as the most positive, inspiring example of Jewish perseverance. We learn from the Jewish tradition that just as much as we think of Tisha b’Av as the most traumatic day of the Jewish calendar, we are meant to think of the entire month of Adar as joyous and auspicious.

The teachings of the first Rabbis, recorded in the Mishnah, suggest that mi-she-nichnas av, m’ma-atin b’simchah; or: “Once Av begins, we diminish celebration.” Several centuries later, Rabbi Yerhudah (son of Rabbi Samuel bar Sheilat) coined the more famous corollary to this phrase: Mi-she-nichnas adar, marbin b’simchah; or: “Once Adar begins, we multiply celebration.”

You might be wondering: Is this teaching meant to be descriptive or prescriptive? In other words, are we urged to celebrate extra during the month of Purim, or is it just our fate to be extra happy at this special time? Judaism’s answer to this question (from the Talmud) is, perhaps unsurprisingly, both. The Talmud teaches that, during Adar, a person has greater luck than any other time of the year, but it also teaches that, during Adar—as a consequence of this cosmic reality—a person should be more open to taking chances.

I’m not usually superstitious; however, I think the idea this teaching conveys can be very productive as we reflect on the story of Purim and the past triumphs of our people. This year, for the entirety of Adar (until March 16th), I hope that we can think about the ways that we, as a nation and as individuals, have done well and succeeded in the past. But, in the dual spirit of Purim and Adar, I hope that we can also allow ourselves to take the chances necessary to create good in the future. Adar prompts us to imagine that even the seemingly-unattainable may be in our reach. It encourages us to believe something empowering: That there is no time like the present!

Joint Korean Hockey Team

Coming Together Can Be Miraculous

February 1, 2018 by • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: , , , , , , •

Coming Together Can Be Miraculous By Rabbi Ari Ballaban

With the PyeonChang Olympics approaching, a certain element of this year’s lead-up to the Games has me thinking of a major highlight from the 1980 Winter Olympics: The so-called Miracle on Ice.

In that year’s Olympics, the US men’s ice hockey team staged an impossibly-unlikely upset against the Soviet team on their way to winning a gold medal. This match was an extraordinary moment in sports history, and in 2008 the International Ice Hockey Federation even went so far as to name it the top international hockey story of the preceding century.

Joint Korean Hockey Team

2018 may be the year of a second, reconstituted miracle on ice. In an exceptionally controversial move, the president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, reached an agreement with the leadership of North Korea that will accomplish two significant things. First, this agreement will let many North Korean athletes come to South Korea to compete under their own flag at the upcoming competitions. However, perhaps more importantly, it will also establish a joint North and South Korean ice hockey team that will compete this year at the Games. If we can call this, in fact, a second “miracle on ice,” it is clear that unlike the 1980 Miracle—which was about an improbable victory and a team’s triumph over a bitter rival—the spirit of this contemporary miracle is rapprochement

By the time you read this article, the facts may have changed dramatically. Nevertheless, we should reflect on what this agreement could represent. Of course, there are those around the world (including analysts from both the United States and South Korea) who reasonably view this development negatively, and my Jewish read on the situation is not meant to rebut their legitimate concerns. Instead, it is meant to prompt us to appreciate the very real good attained simply by people coming together.

It is no accident that we often begin our services with the words of Psalm 133: הִנֵּה מַה-טּוֹב וּמַה-נָּאִים, שֶׁבֶת אַחִים גַּם-יָחַד, Behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers sit together!

Focusing more on this line, it is worth noting a significant, but often-overlooked nuance in the phrase שֶׁבֶת אַחִים (“shevet achim”). While I translate it above as “when brothers sit together” (and other translators stretch the Hebrew even further, rendering it “that brothers sit together”), the words are actually best understood as (the admittedly inelegant): “Behold how good and pleasant is the sitting-together of brothers.” The idea of this verse is not that it is lovely that brothers sit together; we know, of course, that they often choose not to! Even “when brothers sit together” is a bit of a stretch: In plenty of sibling relationships, the question about their sitting-together isn’t about a “when,” but an “if.” Perhaps this is why this psalm instructs us as it does, simply to recognize the objective beauty in an ideal of brothers being together.

The 18th century Torah commentator David Altshuler, in his commentary Metzudat David, reflected on the last words of this verse in light of historical divisions among the Jewish people. Like today’s Koreans, Jews were once been divided into rival kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Altshuler expressed his wish, prompted by the words גַּם-יָחַד, that: “ויהיו גם יחד במלכות אחת ולא יחצו לשתי ממלכות עוד,” “That they [the Israelites] should be together under a single kingship and not be divided into two kingdoms again.”

I think Altshuler’s sentiment transfers to the modern spirit quite well. As we watch the Olympic Games unfold, I think we can be fairly realistic about the immediate, larger political outcomes we can expect. However, perhaps we can set our sights a little lower: For there to be a miracle on ice again this year, the being-together of two peoples may, actually, be enough. If we agree with Psalm 133, we might see this joint team as something of beauty, something “good and pleasant,” something miraculous.

Rabbi Ari Ballaban

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