Call Me Pelotit (The Real Sins of Sodom and Gemorrah)

Who was Pelotit?

In our biblical stories there are many individuals (many of them women) who are not named in the Torah, but are given names in the midrashic stories of the rabbis. One of them is Pelotit, a daughter of Lot.

In this week’s Torah portion we read of the infamous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and how Abraham pleads with God to spare the cities if only enough righteous people live there. Now our fair state, Oklahoma, likes to think of itself as a righteous place. After all, our public leaders take firm stands against all forms of immorality that were practiced in those biblical cesspools of iniquity.

Or so we’d like to think. In reality, our Rabbis of old taught that the real sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were not sexual depravity, but lack of charity toward the strangers and less fortunate. In many different places, our sages stress that not only did the residents of Sodom not believe in charity towards strangers, but they sought to prohibit others from generosity. One Midrash from Pirkei D’Rabi Eliezer says it well:

R. Yehudah said: They announced in Sodom that anyone who gave bread to the poor, the sojourner or the destitute would be burned. Now, Pelotit was Lot’s daughter and she was married to one of the leaders of Sodom. She saw a poor man afflicted in the public square and she was grieved on his account. What did she do? Every day, when she went to draw water, she would take some food from her house and hide it in her pitcher, and so would feed the poor man. The people of Sodom wondered: how could this man stay alive? When they found out, they took Pelotit out to be burned.

On November 1, Oklahoma House Bill 1804 goes into effect. This bill makes it a crime employ, transport, offer housing to or otherwise help undocumented workers or their families. This law has the stench of sulfur to me. It is mean-spirited, racist, prejudiced and short-sighted. It is immoral. That our legislature passed this bill makes Oklahoma more like Sodom and Gemorrah than we would like to believe.

Now, I think we do need to address the question of legal and illegal immigration in our country in a meaningful way. It is equally immoral for us to continue with the situation we have had for a number of years, in which undocumented workers are officially prohibited but unofficially tolerated, forming an underclass with no minimum wage, no workplace safety, no security, and none of the rights we take for granted as Americans in a free and democratic society. Hopefully in some future age, when humanity has become morally more advanced, we will have no more need for nation-states, armies, passports, and borders. In the meantime, our country should exercise its right to control how non-citizens may stay within our borders. There is nothing intrinsically immoral about turning back people who wish to cross our border illegally. There should be nothing wrong with returning non-citizens who are here illegally and who have been here a short time to their home countries.

I actually think that President Bush’s proposal in the national debate on immigration made sense (Yes, I actually praised our president for something and lightning didn’t strike). His proposal was that undocumented workers who had been here longer than a certain period be given a path toward naturalization, those here an intermediate length of time would have to return to their home country and apply for a visa, and those here only a short while would have to leave. Needless to say, this did not become federal law.

Let’s not kid ourselves: This law is racist and promotes racist behavior. When I spoke about this last Shabbat, a man of Mexican heritage related how behavior toward him has changed in recent weeks, how prejudice has come to the surface. Two elders born in Germany reminded us how such laws deprive all of us of our humanity and make us partners in the dehumanization of people labeled ‘other’. The worst effects of the first Nuremberg laws were not what the government did, but how they gave license to average Germans to commit violence against German Jews without fear of retaliation. Need I say that the anniversary of Kristallnacht is only a week away?

Our silence constitutes consent. Our Jewish values compel us to take whatever action we can. Other religious communities have openly pledged to help those affected in any way, because it is the right thing to do. In our synagogue, and our larger Jewish community, I feel we can do no less. If you have an idea, or want to be involved, please email me.

In the meantime, you can just call me Pelotit.

B’Shalom,

Rabbi Russell Fox

(This essay was based on my sermon last Shabbat morning, October 27)

Matai Atah Khozeir? (When are you coming back?)

Matai Atah Chozeir?

Some say that everything that happens in Jerusalem is so important that if you encounter a twig lying in the street, it matters whether it is lying lengthwise or crosswise.

It happened seventeen years ago. I was living in Jerusalem and studying at the Pardes Institute. I had a rented room a couple blocks from the Machaneh Yehudah market, One Friday evening in December, I was walking home from Shabbat dinner through the cobblestone streets and alleyways when a baritone voice boomed out from the shadows: “Matai atah chozeir?” (When are you coming back?) I was a bit startled by this baritone voice out of the shadows and looked around. Who was saying these words? A dignified middle-aged Hasid stepped out of the shadows.

“You used to come to our place for Shabbat. We haven’t seen you for three weeks. When are you coming back?” I had a fleeting moment of panic and guilt. Had there been some holy table I once had graced but now had even forgotten existed? Not possible. I remembered distinctly exactly what houses I had been to over the last weeks, and his wasn’t one of them. Nervous for some indescribable reason, I protested that the Hasid must have mistaken me for someone else, and that I had not been to his house for Shabbat. He gave me a long searching look and nodded. “Sorry, sir, Good Shabbos”. I walked on, feeling unsettled.

We have many lenses with which to read Torah. There is the P’shat, the plain meaning, and D’rash, the metaphorical meaning. The plain meaning of “Matai Atah Chozeir” were a greeting from someone asking when a guest would return for another visit. A simple case of mistaken identity. But this was Jerusalem. In the Holy City, nothing is a mistake or coincidence; all is an echo of realms beyond realms. The prophet Hosea gave us God’s words: “Shuvah Yisrael ad Adonai Elohecha” –Return, O Israel, unto Adonai your God. They reverberate off the hills and resonate in the night air.

Applied to life, the lens of D’rash sees no mistaken identity. The Hasid may have had the wrong person, but God had not. Matai Atah Chozeir? I was being asked when I would return to the Holy One. The question hung in the cold night air.

This is how I think it really went: In the great Shabbat before life, our souls sat at the holy table of the Eternal. As we took our leave to go out into the world of separations, we promised we would not forget, that we would keep our beings pure, and that we would find our way back. The world distracted us, we sullied the garments of mind heart, and body, and came to believe we were no longer welcome. Eventually we even forgot there was anywhere to go back to in the first place.

The Hebrew word Teshuvah is often translated as ‘repentance’, but has more the connotation of ‘turning’ or ‘returning’ rather than the English penitence. In modern parlance the term chozeir bitshuvah refers to one who has ‘returned’ to an observant Orthodox Jewish life.

To me, finding my way ‘back’ is a bigger game than that. I could no more count the observances I had taken on and calculate whether I had ‘done teshuvah’ than I could paint my ceiling light blue and call it the sky. The road back leads beyond a collective memory of Jewish life as it was lived before railroads and Ellis Island, before Napoleon and before Hitler. It leads to that realm where we all stood in amazement before Eternity and accepted our assignment to live fully human in this world where destiny hangs from our actions.

The Hebrew month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashanah is a time of inner preparation and teshuvah. Tradition calls it the time of ‘the king in the field’, when God is closer and more accessible to us. Elul is a bit like being in Jerusalem– everything is more significant. Every day, voices call out from the shadows, asking when we will return. The question hangs in the hot air of early September. Yom Kippur will come– how far afield will we find ourselves?

I am always on my way back. No matter what I do, I will never get there completely. It is a journey of a lifetime.

Dog With a Quiet About Him

The Quiet Dog

Everyone had seen the red and white dog limping around the neighborhood. It almost seemed to patrol a certain block, accompanying everyone who passed by, dog-walker or not.

He was waiting on ‘his’ block as my children and I walked our dog Idabel around the neighborhood. As we came the dog quietly fell in with us, staying close. His open wounds could have come from a fight. His ribs were showing. He had no collar, and looked quite lost.

We rounded the corner, and he stayed with us. “Do you think he’s lost, Daddy?” “Yes,” I sighed, wondering what we were getting into, “He looks lost.” It seemed the most natural thing in the world to open our gate. The dog looked up at us once, as if asking permission, and trotted into our yard.

In Deuteronomy 11:15 we read, “I will provide grass in your field for your cattle and you will eat and be satisfied.” Our tradition has read this to mean that we feed our animals before eating ourselves. In accordance with Torah, we provided dog food in a flower pot before we went in to dinner. The lost dog ate, was satisfied, and disappeared into our outbuilding.

“Daddy, we should help the dog find its home, shouldn’t we?” Hashavat aveidah, returning lost property, is another mitzvah, so we went around the neighborhood, asking if anyone knew where the lost dog had come from. Everyone had seen the dog, no one knew who owned it. We tacked up signs on telephone poles.

After dinner we took a closer look. Our stray was an impressive specimen, quite muscular in spite of being underfed. Even with a limp, he moved with a sense of restrained power. There was a quiet about him. It was not just that he didn’t bark or whine, but something about him made other dogs go quiet, and people too. “It’s a very nice dog, Daddy, if no one wants it, can we keep it? Then we would have two dogs.” Umm… Well… I don’t know about the other members of my family, but I was of two minds about the dog.

One the one hand, we clearly were in the presence of a creature with great kavod, dignity. He was extremely polite and naturally attentive in a way I had seldom seen in a canine. I watched him read our body language to figure out what we wanted him to do. A digression: Can anything without a soul have that sort of presence? According to Judaism do animals have souls? Judaism’s inner teaching says that all things created, have some spark of divinity within them, even a piece of granite. In other words the world itself is en-souled. Human beings are uniquely endowed with a neshamah, an independent flame of God-ness that gives us free will, the ability to say the word “I”, and a moral sense of right and wrong. Somewhere between granite and person, a steady presence shone forth from the dog’s amber eyes as he looked at us through the back door.

The dog also made me nervous: He looked at least part pit bull terrier. He had a head and jaws that looked capable of crushing bricks. Idabel, for whom other canines are all doggy friends, only huddled against the door to be let in when we tried to put her in the yard. Besides, who knew how he had been trained? Who knew what killer instincts lurked inside that brick-crushing head? “We’re sorry, kids,” we hedged, “Our house and yard are only big enough to have one dog. Besides, you complain about taking care of the animals we have now. No second dog.”

The animal shelter? The nice lady on the phone explained that few owners reclaim their dogs from the shelter, animals are euthanized after three days, and pit bulls with open wounds are rather low on the cuteness factor adoptable dogs need.

What to do now? The Jewish value tzar ba’alei chayyim (not causing suffering to animals) gave us a challenge. We did not fit our own image of pit bull owners. Naomi made us promise not to send him to the shelter. We decided to call him Walter for the time being.

Pit bull terriers unsettle lots of people. Following a number of cases here in Oklahoma of savage attacks by pit bulls, one state legislator has proposed legislation that would ban the breed entirely. What’s Jewish about this question? As with any Jewish question, there is not one simple answer but a number of perspectives to weigh. The basic principle of Jewish law is that an owner is responsible for preventing their property from causing damage, including animals. The question comes down to how dangerous an individual or species of animal is by nature. The Talmud teaches: “Do not breed a kelev ra (savage dog), nor permit a loose stairway,” because either of these “will place blood on your home.” Elsewhere the commonsense law appears that all dogs must be kept chained to protect the public. Some voices from our tradition say that, well, there are dogs, and there are dogs: the kelev ra (literally ‘bad dog’) and the kofri kind of dog which is useful and safe as a pet.

“Well, ‘Walter,’” we mused among ourselves, (while he looked in from outside with those hopeful amber eyes) “Are you a ‘bad dog’ by virtue of your breeding? Does the Talmud along with State Rep. Wesselhöft command us to ship you off without pity to the shelter? Or do you have a good nefesh (animal soul) in you, quiet and full of dignity?”

A few days later, a tenant of a congregant came by to look at Walter. He said he would take him to his vet to have him checked out. If the dog was healthy, he would take him. The family all came out to say goodbye to Walter the pitbull. The man called a little later: “Well, I’ve got bad news for you. He’s a great dog, and you’re not getting him back.” I told him we just wanted to see the dog in a good home. I have to say we all felt a little mixed, except Idabel, who was happy to be top dog again.

My 73rd Bat Mitzvah

My 73rd Bat Mitzvah.

If I have counted correctly, over the years since I first started as a student rabbi, I have officiated at approximately 73 Bar or Bat Mitzvahs. Each one has been unique, but the one I was at last Shabbat was different from all of them.

It was my eldest daughter’s.

Where did the time go?

Could it really have been twelve and a half years since I first held that tiny baby in my arms? It somehow doesn’t add up. Emotionally, I am not caught up with Naomi’s having matured into a young lady, that she has essentially been raised into the person she is and largely is going to be. When I was younger, I swore I would live more consciously, that these “Sunrise, Sunset” moments would never happen to me, that I would never ask where the years went. Now, I have to wonder if it may not just be human nature, that we are simply not equipped to notice time as it passes, except in the shortest intervals. Only the greatest masters of consciousness can observe a whole hour as it goes by, so how could any of us follow even one year, let alone twelve? Mind you, I’m not complaining: Our daughter is a class act. Faith and I tell each other that we must have done something right. It’s just that enormous sense of Life Having Happened that I’m wrestling with right now.

Gatherings.

Naomi once said, wistful about having had to move away from a beloved place and set of friends, that she “wished she could roll up all the best people from everywhere she had ever been and have them with her wherever she was.” For one Shabbat, we tried. People came from many corners of our lives. Some came at great trouble and expense. Aunts and uncles and grandparents and friends communicated something powerful with their presence: “You are in our hearts. You are part of our lives. At a moment this important, we want to be there with you.” This is not to say that being with each other is always comfortable. Unlike your circle of friends, family is not a choice. You can’t divorce each other, and they will accept you with your quirks and peccadilloes just as you will accept them because, well, family is family. You share ancestors, you may have grown up together, all other commonalties are an added bonus. Naomi’s particular extended family covers a wide range of people, who live in the world in very different ways. We were honored to have all of them present.

Reacquaintances.

It was great to see so many relatives we had not seen in a while. There’s always that moment of recognition, that special smile as we link the snapshot in our memory to the person standing in front of us, who may have grown taller, fatter thinner, or greyer. There is a Jewish tradition which says that if you have not seen someone for over a year, you say the blessing baruch mekhayyeh hameitim– blessed is God who has enlivened the dead. Even in the age of email and videoconferencing, how do we stay ‘alive’ in relationship to those we seldom see? The way our minds work, we also tie in to who we were at the point in time where we have placed our memory. We often watch ourselves regress to an old way of being in the presence of people from our past. It’s not easy at an event like this, where there are many greetings and little chance to really get caught up. It’s too bad. I think the failure to really accept each other’s changing and grow with each other is the main reason families tend to grow apart. It no longer fits us to be who we once were with them, and we concluded long ago that we already know who they always will be.

Holy Moments.

Naomi is gifted with poise, public presence, a gift with language, and a keen mind, gifts which enabled her to ‘pull it off’ excellently. None of those make her a mensch, a good person. What becoming Bat Mitzvah really represents is not a set of skills, but goodness from within. What matters more is her gentleness, her caring for others, her ability to relate with everyone. What was the holiest moment in the whole event? It was not when Faith put the homemade tallit on Naomi’s shoulders. It was not when the Torah scroll was taken out from the ark. It was not when Naomi stepped forward to read from the Torah, nor when she gave her speech, her D’var Torah. For me, it took place after the service, when Naomi gathered in her younger brother and sister and bent over them, holding the microphone so the guests could hear them say the Motzi, the blessing over the bread. The patience, caring, and concern that radiated from her to her siblings was the greatest blessing of all.

The Burning Castle

I have always liked science fiction. Stories about advanced alien species and galactic empires have always captivated me. They speak to some of our deepest human yearnings. In using terms like 58th Century and Sixth Galactic Era, there is a acceptance that there is a future. Looking at the state of the world, I often have fantasies of a race of elder brothers and sisters descending to our planet in spaceships, and with wisdom, grace, and better technology guiding us to end warfare, violence, poverty and environmental destruction. Perhaps that is what really motivates those who scan the skies with radio telescopes in search of signals from far-off cosmic civilizations.

Life in the Fifty-Eighth Century.

In the Western calendar (or, to be honest, the Christian calendar) we entered this 21st century seven years ago. In the Jewish calendar, it is the year 5767, and we entered the 58th century sixty-seven years ago, in 1945. I think that the beginning of this Hebrew century marked a more significant breaking point than the year 2000. (Remember Y2K?)

Al Gore may or may not have invented the internet, but I will take credit for introducing the phrase “58th century” into Jewish discourse. How did I do it? Back when I was in rabbinical school, I collaborated with the president of our seminary, Rabbi Shohama Wiener, on the editing of a festschrift in honor of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, which was published by Jason Aaronson. I suggested the title, and it stuck. From there the phrase has, according to Google, turned up in many places.

The world was not the same after 5700/1945. At the outset of the 58th century, humanity brought about and witnessed Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Our idea of how God guides/guards/gods the world cannot be what is was until then.

In the Midrash (Bereshit Rabbah, Lech L’cha) we read: There was a story of a person who went from place to place, and saw a bira doleket, a castle in flames. He said, “Can this castle be without an owner?” The owner of the castle looked out and said, “I am the owner of this castle.” So to did Abraham wonder, “Could this world be without an owner?” The Holy One of Blessing looked out and said, “I am the Master of the World.”

A burning castle. The Hebrew word bira can also mean citadel, or capitol city. This rabbinic midrash makes sense against the backdrop of the destruction of the citadel of Jerusalem and the Second Temple by the Romans, which we remember during the nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av.

The story is puzzling: God looks out from the castle, speaks forth from amid the flames, unmoved, unburned. And yet the castle keeps burning. The Midrash never says what becomes of the citadel. Is our world like a burning castle? Why does the castle keep burning? Why does God neither ask for help nor put out the fire? Abraham saw his world in flames— why does God not extinguish the fire, save creation?

Burning castles, worlds in flames. After the Shoah, I cannot believe in a God who will intervene to save the world directly. In the ashes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, some philosophers declared that God is dead. They are partly right. What died in that time was a world in which we could believe that some force beyond ourselves would intervene directly to save us from the worst that humanity could inflict each other. If we are at all awake we are keenly aware that we have the technological power and moral depravity to destroy the world and that the only force that could prevent this is in human hands.

Not all of us are awake. Some of us have found that reality so terrifying that we have chosen to go back to sleep. I think this is in part what is behind the rise of “fundamentalism” in the world: a deep psychological need to withdraw into a worldview in which we are absolved from responsibility for our collective and individual actions, and place that burden on a “god” who like a good cosmic parent will break up our fights with our siblings and clean up our messes.

It would be so easy to conclude that there is no God in a world full of pain. Abraham’s faith was awakened by the anguish of living in a burning world, not by sweetness and bliss. The real challenge of faith is to believe in God’s presence even when we do not feel it.

This graffiti was found on the wall of a cellar in Cologne Germany, where Jews had hidden during the Shoah: “I believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining._
I believe in love even when I am alone._
I believe in God even when he is silent.”

I cannot believe in God the silent horrified onlooker of history. In the year 5767, the Midrash of the burning castle tells me not that God is powerless to save the world from our mistakes, but that God chooses not to do so. God chooses not to intervene because humanity can only fulfill our potential if we come to the right decisions ourselves. God’s purpose in creating humanity has been to give us the chance to use our collective free will to mature beyond our present destructive natures into the wise and gentle race of ‘elder brothers and sisters’ we now dream of in futuristic fantasy.

We can either save the world or destroy it.

Shalom

I am a little new to blogging. I hope to keep improving my blog as time goes on. In the meantime, enjoy the content.

Rabbi Russell Fox

Peaches

We have a peach tree in front of our house. Our peaches ripened last week. At least, they ripened enough for us to eat. As far as the birds were concerned, they began to ripen two weeks ago.

Since the peach tree comes with our house, it is easy to think of it as “our” tree, and its peaches as “our” peaches. The birds, however, recognize no such ownership. The other day I was sitting on our porch, looking out at the peach tree and the birds busily flying to and from the tree. One of the birds (and I confess that I do not know what species) was singing a beautiful and complex song as it flitted from branch to branch, pecking a peach here and a peach there. It repeated the same melody precisely, over and over. I imagined that this was the bird’s peach-song to its neighbors, that it communicated something like ‘Delicious peaches here! Delicious peaches here! Enough for everybody!’

I felt conflicted. Part of me wanted to shoo the birds, with their pecking beaks and their peach-songs, away from ‘our’ peaches. I had momentary fantasies of going out to buy some netting to put over the tree, to keep the birds out, or chaining a large ferocious dog to the trunk. But other thoughts (besides inertia and the knowledge that they would return as soon as I went inside) held me back from chasing the birds away. From where did the idea come that these peaches were any more mine than the birds’? What, in the grand scheme of the universe, gave me inherent right to this fruit? Did I pay for it? Did I manufacture it? Was I promised it by anyone? No! I did not own the peaches. They are just a small expression of the earth’s abundance, which happen to offer themselves in my vicinity. The Hebrew language expresses this outlook. You see, there is no verb in Hebrew corresponding to the English ‘to have.’ Possession is indicated by the expression yesh li, yesh lah, yesh lo, etc., which translates literally, to ‘there is to me/her/him…’ In the Hebrew mind, we do not own, things are with us.

With all the laboratories and factories in the world, I could not duplicate the experience of picking a fresh, ripe peach from the tree, still warm from the sun, and biting into its sweet, juicy flesh. (It is hard to get a decent peach-experience commercially. Most grocers do not seem to know that refrigeration ruins peaches.)

We can’t make a peach. It’s a humbling thought. We need ways to affirm that sense of having-been-given, of not-being-entitled-to. The Jewish tradition offers us a way to cultivate that quality. It is called a brachah, or blessing. Between when we pick the fruit from the tree and when we bite into it, there is a blessing. The specific blessing for peaches (held in your hand, orange and glowing from the sun on a warm July afternoon) is: Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, borey p’ri ha’etz. The blessing translates (more or less, as Hebrew translates about as well peaches refrigerate) to: ‘You are blessed, our Eternal God, who rules the universe, who created the fruit of the tree.’ A looser interpretation might be: ‘I acknowledge my debt and gratitude to forces infinitely larger than myself and far beyond my control for the gift of this fruit.’ A blessing is a way of reminding ourselves that what we eat, what we consume, what we have is not ‘ours’.

Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, calls one of the basic qualities by which God forms the world khesed, or which means kindness, grace, mercy, benevolence. It represents the quality of being infinitely giving, of endless generosity and abundance. Our peach tree was sort of like that this year. It was a good crop. Standing under the tree, I was amazed to see every branch fully laden and bent under the weight. As the peaches ripen, they attract the interest of passersby. Some will simply stop and help themselves to a peach or two. Some will knock on the door and ask if they may have some. One man even offered to buy our peaches. I told him they weren’t for sale but he could have a few. I have an easier time sharing them with people than with birds, I guess. Especially in a good year.

At our house the Picking of the Peaches is as much a part of the summer rhythm as Shavuot, the end of school, and the Paseo Arts Festival. The kids helped, Molly and Gershon enthusiastically climbing up and handing down peaches, setting aside the bad ones. When we were done, our kitchen counters were full of bowls and buckets of fruit. What to do with it all this abundance? No matter how delicious, one could only eat so many at a sitting. I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I get tired of peaches after a few days. Some years, we bring bags of peaches to our neighbors out of— well neighborly generosity. It just seems to me that is what people do. We didn’t do that this year, as this year the peaches were soft and watery and would spoil quickly, and most of our neighbors were off for the fourth of July.

The counterpart to the Kabbalistic quality of khesed is gevurah, which means strength or rigor. This represents structure, limits, order, restriction or law. The child in us doesn’t like these qualities. But bounty needs containers. It is a basic law of the universe. Good containers in which to keep peaches are freezer bags and canning jars. We got to work peeling and cutting and putting up the peaches for some week in the future. When summer and sun is just a memory, we can open the jar and taste and remember the experience of picking, eating, and saving peaches from our very own tree.

But what am I saying? Our tree? Our peaches?? No. Yesh lanu– The fruit is with us. This is not just about peaches: If we take a deep look at our lives, at all that we own and possess and call ours, we ultimately have nothing. We are only given gifts for a while to use and share and enjoy and pass on. If we can empty our minds of the weight of entitlement, then the canning jar of life is never half full, but always overflowing with blessing.