Parshas Ki Seitzei: How to Beat the Yetzer Hara (AKA How to Overcome Our Desires)

If there is one thing we have learned in our travels, it is that all people are fundamentally the same.  Of course, each of us is unique in our own special way, but at the core, we have more in common than we often realize.  We feel the same emotions, have the same range of character traits, and have the same strengths and weaknesses, to varying degrees.

As Jews, we are not immune to the same faults we see in others who are not Jewish.  Even Rabbis and Rebbetzins make some mistakes! (Except for us, of course! Just kidding!)  Sadly, we often see a Jew in a position of power or leadership make a mistake and, whether he is a wealthy businessman, a politician, or a rabbi, we are tempted to say, “But he is religious, he is Jewish – he should know and act better!”

Yet, how many of us are perfect?  Certainly not I!  And while we may each make different mistakes, we do all make mistakes.  Some people do not follow the commandments to keep kosher; others do not pay employees on time.  Some engage in forbidden sexual activities; others steal things.  Some speak badly of other people; others violate the Sabbath.  We really do not have room to judge because we are none of us perfect.   And yet, we can try to be.

This week’s parsha offers a compelling tip on how to overcome your forbidden desires.  A soldier who goes to war and sees a woman he wants to take for himself is told that he can take her home and… shave her head, let her nails grow jagged, and then wait 30 days.  It is funny how if the woman is forbidden, the Torah does not come out and right away tell the soldier he cannot have her.  Instead, he is told he can have her… later.

We can apply this principle to every temptation in life.  If we want to eat something not kosher, we can tell ourselves, “Yes, I will have it… later.”  If we get angry and want to yell, we can tell ourselves, “Yes, I will scream and shout… later.”  If we want to watch the footy instead of spending time with our kids, we can tell ourselves, “I’ll watch the second half of the game… later.”  Usually by the time later comes around you’ll find you don’t want it anymore… or you will have forgotten it completely.

You see, our evil inclination and our desire to do the wrong thing is challenged when we tell ourselves we can’t have something.  It’s why we crave chocolates on a diet and cheeseburgers when we try to keep kosher.  If we tell ourselves “NO!” we want it even more.  But if we tell ourselves yes, then that voice becomes quiet.  The trick is to tell ourselves yes… but later.

Hopefully this trick will help us all in our quest to become better people!

Shabbat shalom!

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Parshas Shoftim: Jewish Justice Means No Bribery

Earlier this week, a friend asked a question: “Why is it so hard for women to cover their hair once they are married?”  Cynically, another mutual friend responded to her: “Well, you can get permission from the rabbis to do anything – even uncover your hair – if you only have enough money!”

Parshas Re’eh: The Power of Choice

The ability to choose is a very powerful thing.  Our choices demonstrate to the world who we are: what do we choose to wear; how do we choose to speak to others?  To many of us, choice is the equivalent of freedom.  If we cannot choose, then we de not really feel free: prisoners have no choice as to where they can go or even what they can eat.

Yet on the other hand, too much choice can be too much of a good thing.  As humans, we crave stability and direction.  We want the ability to choose, but we also want it to be clear what the best choice is.  A few years ago, there was a trend of selling colorful kitchen appliances.  A visit to the store would reveal entire shelves of identical mixers – except that each was in a different color.  Not so anymore. Today you will find often two or three colors available – but rarely more.  Companies did studies and determined that when given up to three choices, people were very happy to pick the one they liked best.  But when given more than three choices, people were paralyzed and often ended up buying nothing at all.

This is one of the beauties of Judaism.  Some faiths restrict choices so much that their adherents are constrained.  They all look the same, act the same, do the same things at the same times, and even eat the same food (think of monks in a monastery or nuns in an abbey).  Other belief systems don’t seem to restrict anything at all.  Almost anything is permissible.  Yet, most people find such a system unfulfilling and they search for rules and guidance (restrictions, in other words) from other sources, such as the government, philosophy, or society.

Judaism is neither of these extremes.  Judaism provides a delicate balance between rules and choices.  Take for instance one of the laws included in this week’s Torah portion.  The Torah lays out the laws for determining kosher animals, but it does not say, “you must eat;” it says, “you may eat.”  True, not all animals are permitted, but neither are they all forbidden.  Some are allowed and others not.  And you have the choice of whether or not you want to eat those that are permissible.

The Torah is like this in most of its restrictions.  Sure, there are guidelines and rules we have to follow, but they are not so restrictive that we have no freedom to choose for ourselves.  That is why there is so much variety among Jews today: be they Ashkenazi or Sephardi, Chassidish or Yeshivish, or even vegetarian or meat-eating, they are all Jews.  So feel free to be yourself! The Torah has space for every individual.

Shabbat shalom!

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Parshas Va’eschanan: I Repeat, I Repeat, I Repeat Myself

Okay okay, I know I repeat myself sometimes.  There are times when I sit down to write my dvar Torah for the week and the theme I want to address seems glaringly obvious – even though I’ve spoken about it on the blog before.  I guess we all have one-track minds from time to time, and we definitely each have our own interests and themes we want to push to the forefront in our conversations and in our lives.

You see, we all repeat ourselves from time to time.  Sometimes it’s out of habit and sometimes we just forget that we’ve told that story or joke before.  But when the Torah repeats itself, there is always a deeper reason.  The Torah never, ever wastes a word (a lesson we should also learn for our own speech).

In the book of Devarim, which we are reading now, there are 199 mitzvot listed – and only 70 of them are new.  That means there are 129 mitzvot repeated!  Why?

At this point the Jews are about to enter the land of Israel and confront the 7 nations living there.  While they were living in the desert, there were many commandments they were not tempted to break.  They were living in a world where G-d was so intimately involved with their daily lives that He provided all their food and even made sure their clothes never wore out!  They certainly were not living in a world of temptation… but when they entered the land of Canaan, they would be faced with temptation on all sides.

The laws we are reviewing now are primarily focused on preparing us for life in the real world.  It’s sort of like a father preparing his sheltered son for university: there is a lot of important advice to impart.  In this week’s parsha, for instance, Moses warns about the dangers of prosperity and assimilation – concerns the Jews did not have in the desert, but which we definitely face today.

So if I repeat myself, I hope you’ll forgive me.  After all, I am a rebbetzin and it is my job to follow in the footsteps of the Torah.  And if it’s important enough for Moses to repeat some stories and some laws over and over again, well, I guess it’s important enough for me, too!

Shabbat shalom!

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Parshas Devarim: The Importance of History

A month or two ago, a friend of Rabbi Ben’s let him know about a meeting of a local genealogy society and asked if he’d like to attend.  Because the subject was old photographs and I love photography, Rabbi Ben offered for me to go instead.  The talk was interesting to me as an artist and photography enthusiast, but the best part was all the people I met there.  I was by far the youngest attendee, which to me meant the opportunity to hear interesting things from the more experienced people around me.

I did have a bit of an interesting debate with one man I met.  We were debating the importance of knowing the true history of an event.  As they say, history is written by the victors.  For example, most people I know believe the American civil war was fought over slavery – the North wanted to free the slaves while the South wanted to oppress them.  Growing up in the South, I learned a different version of the story, one that actually sounds much more believable and makes a lot more sense.  The South was the agricultural producer and the North processed the cotton, tobacco, and other products into goods that could be consumed or worn.  Of course, processed goods can be sold for a much higher price than raw materials, so the North was economically doing very well while the South was just scraping by (hence their need for slaves).  The South wanted to build their own factories but the North blocked them from doing so.  The American Civil War, which in the South is known as The War of Northern Aggression (the name alone tells you something), was started, as many wars are, for economic reasons.

But which story is the real one? Does it even matter?  The man I was discussing this with said that he thought it didn’t really matter what the true facts or history were – the victor’s history is sufficient.  I disagreed; I think it’s the true history that teaches us so we can learn for the future.  If we don’t know what really happened, how can we make it never happen again? How can we prevent something if we don’t know how it really came about? A government can learn from the lesson of the American Civil War by knowing never to allow one region (such as the agricultural sector) to become too impoverished while other regions flourish.  Either mass migration from the poor to the wealthy sector will result (as has happened in Mexico) or a rebellion will eventuate.

So, too, we Jews must learn from our history.  This week we begin the book of Devarim, the final book of the Torah.  The entire fifth book of the Torah is a summary of the Jewish history that has gone before.  But although the Jews are the main protagonists of the story, they are not cast in such a wonderful light.  Usually the victors who write the story make themselves look as good and as right as possible, but the Torah was not written by the Jews – it was written for the Jews by G-d Himself.  And G-d made sure to get the history as accurate as possible.

In fact, we reiterate this history of the Jews particularly so that was can learn from it.  And the only way we can learn from it is if we know what really happened, gory details and all.  We can learn from the story of the spies (read more about this story here, here, and here) not to doubt G-d’s plan for us, but to have faith in Him, to have emunah and bitachon.  We read about the story of the golden calf so that we should never ever repeat it.  We read and learn about what we did wrong precisely so that we learn never to do it again.

Shabbat shalom!

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Parshas Mattos-Masei: Leadership is for Others, Not the Self

As I’m traveling in North America at the moment, a lot of my friends and family are asking me if I will ever return to live here.  I cannot foresee the future, but I certainly hope not.  Canada is, in my mind, perpetually frozen (I’ve been here in May when it’s snowed, shivered my way through Sukkot in a heavy coat, this year it snowed in June, it’s now July and it’s sweater weather even for the locals, and when we came in August for Sheva Brachot it was also quite cold – it just never seems to warm up here!) and I don’t handle cold weather particularly well.

So, many people ask me, “well, why don’t you move back to Miami?”  Miami is warm enough, I’ll give it that.  But the US is not where I want to live.  And when people ask me why, I point to the politicians and the politics there.  I won’t get into my exact reasons, but I think it is easier to tolerate corruption in the government in a place where I either don’t know about it or don’t feel so strongly the effects of it.  In the US, where I went years without health care in spite of working and paying taxes, where I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education that got me a job at a barely living wage, where I worked and worked but felt myself getting very little back in return for my investment of time and health, I feel the punch of governmental corruption as it hits me personally and very hard directly in the gut.

Of course, power seems to corrupt everywhere in the world these days.  At least in the third world, I know what I’m dealing with. In the third world, I’m empowered, in a way.  I know the rules of the game.  Traveling in Romania more than a decade ago, I knew I could bribe the doctors to give me better medicine and treatment, I knew I could bribe postal workers to ensure my package would arrive on time.  In India, I know I can bribe the police.  Is it right? Maybe not, but corruption I can control seems to me to be something I can more easily swallow.  Maybe I’ve become jaded in my old age!

Now that I’m not only religious, but a leader in a community, however, I take these lessons in corruption to heart.  Corruption I cannot control (like that in the US) is terrible and even corruption I can control to an extent (like in the third world) is also terrible.  In fact, as they say, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  This is not the way we live our lives as Jews.  This is not the way any Jewish leader should behave.  Perhaps that is why Pirkei Avos (Ethics of Our Fathers) admonishes us to stay away from politics and politicians.  They will teach us their ways of leadership, which are ultimately for personal gain.  That is not the Jewish way.

The Jewish way of leadership is not for self-enhancement at all.  Perhaps this is why so many rabbis struggle to survive – they are working to help others, to help their community – they are not working for their own personal gain.  In fact, in this week’s parsha, we see that the generals and captains, upon returning from war, give all of their share of gold won in battle to the Mishkan (tabernacle) in gratitude for not a single soldier being killed.  They did not go to war with a single thought of personal glory in their minds.  Their every thought, worry, and care was for their soldiers.

This is how a Jewish leader must behave at all times.  Judges in Jewish law have to be so careful not to accept a bribe that even holding a door open for a judge is considered a bribe!  As Jews, we hold ourselves to higher standards.  We must hold in our minds at all times that as Jews in positions of leadership of any kind, we must always be working for the betterment and advancement of others, not of ourselves.

Shabbat shalom!

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