Po czerwcowych wyborach "wygrany" i "przegrany!"

In my essay on same-sex marriage and the evolving Torah, I wrote:

At the Burning Bush, confronting the narrow-minded rules of the Pharaoh  of "Mitzrayyim" (the Hebrew word for Egypt actually means "the strait and  narrow"), God took on the name "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh."  "Ehyeh" is the  future tense, "I Will Be," so it would seem reasonable to understand this Name  as "I Will Be Who I Will Be"  -- God is Becoming.  Yet it was  translated by the King James Version of the Bible in the present tense,  ""I Will Be Who I Will Be."

But of course what I meant was that the King James version translated it as "I Am That I Am."   Present tense, not future. Sorry for the glitch of mind or fingers.

The point is that what Moses needed, in order to shake Pharaoh and awaken the Israelites from slavery, was a Name of God that said Reality can change, the universe is Becoming. Future tense.

For exactly the same reason, a committee of translators appointed by a King -- especially James I -- did NOT want to affirm that the world could change.  Present tense, unchangeable God, unchangeable monarchy.

Shalom, salaam, peace -- Arthur

If this email was forwarded by a friend and you'd like to subscribe to the Shalom Center Report, please visit http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/tsc/signUp.jsp?key=442.

The Shalom Center | 6711 Lincoln Drive | Philadelphia, PA  19119
www.shalomctr.org | office@shalomctr.org | 215.844.8494

Abraham's Death:

THE TOMB & THE WELL

[First let me say: I know we've sent you a lot of Emails this week:  a couple on our "Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America" event (and you've responded wonderfully: 350 people are coming, and still counting); this comment below on the weekly Torah portion; and an emergency appeal for the hungry folk of Postville, Iowa. It will calm down from this coming week on, I promise.  -- Arthur]

This week's Torah portion is called "Chayye Sarah," "Sarah lived." But the story is about her death , her burial, and then the death of Abraham - whose two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, went beyond their estrangement to join in burying him ---  and then were able to live together at Ishmael's well.

What can we learn from these stories?

The stories ascribe power to two places, a tomb and a well:

Now these are the days and the years of Abraham, which he lived:
A hundred years and seventy years and five years, then he expired.
Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Makhpelah (Doubling) in the field that Abraham had acquired.
There were buried Abraham and Sarah his wife.
Now it was after Abraham's death, that God blessed Isaac his son.
And Isaac sat by the Well of the Living-One Who-Sees-Me.
(Gen. 25: 7-8a, 9-11)

The tomb is "acquired"; at the well, one "sits" and "is seen." Let us explore the meanings of these two places, these two life-paths.

Almost the entire story of this tomb is about its acquisition. When Sarah died, Abraham bargained with Ephron the Hittite precisely to acquire the Cave of Makhpelah, lest it come to him purely as a gift. From Genesis 23: 3 to 23: 18, we hear about the dickering; then in one verse we learn that Abraham buried Sarah there, and in two verses -- Gen. 25: 9-10 -- we learn that Isaac and Ishmael buried Abraham there.

In modern times, this acquisition has been cited as a model and prototype for Jewish ownership of the entire Land of Israel.

But on deeper reflection, this understanding is perplexing. Abraham began his bargaining by making clear that he is a ger v'toshav imakhem, a "sojourner-settler with you." He is not normally entitled to own land as a permanent holding for generations to come. He needs a special dispensation in order to acquire this property.

This is exactly the same formula with which YHWH explained in Leviticus 25: 23 that the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the Israelites are -- and are intended to be --  "gerim v'toshavim . . . imadi" - "sojourners-settlers with Me."

So Abraham was the model sojourner-settler, and his offspring were to learn that in this very land they are not to be owners but sojourners-settlers. Yet he acquired this particular piece of land, beyond reclaim. He did with this piece of land exactly what the God of Torah says must not be done -- and yet the Torah approves his acquisition.

How come? What is this "acquisition" for?

A grave. As if only the dead can "own" land; the living simply sojourn on God's land.

Owning rigidifies what had been fluid. Death rigidifies what had been fluid.

 Now let us turn to the other aspect of the story. Isaac and Ishmael survived their dangerous father. Isaac went to live at the "Well of the Living One Who Sees Me."

Where did this Well come from? -- It was the fluid, flowing well through which "God hearkened" and saved his brother Ishmael's life, turning his name into a reality.  (Yishma-el means "God hearkens.")

Hagar was the first of the Biblical figures to be connected with a well. This one, first revealed to her when she was pregnant with Ishmael and feeling badly treated, was shown to her again just as Ishmael seemed at the point of death.

She had cast her son beneath a bush ---  a tiny oasis whose roots must have gone deep to find a source of water. She hopes the bush will keep the sun from scorching him. (The "casting" is from "tashlich," the word that means not throwing trash away but, like Jonah when God cast him into the sea, means being placed where the future can be transformed.)

Hagar closed her eyes, for she was unwilling to see her son die.

She cried, and her eyes poured tears into the earth.

And then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water that she gave to Ishmael.

Surely this was once again the Well of the Living One Who Sees Me, which she had first seen years before when her own womb could give Ishmael his nourishment.

And surely it was her tears themselves, falling into the earth, that gave rise to this wellspring.

Perhaps Hagar closed her eyes not in resignation but in a direct challenge:

Refusing to see her son so as to force God to see him   -- to open the Well of Seeing that she had seen so many years before. And so God does.

Refusing to hear her son so as to force God to hear him as she had been promised long ago.

And indeed God Heard and saved their lives, watering their future as Hagar's eyes had watered earth and God's own self. "Va'yishma elohim!" "Yishma'el" becomes his name in fact as well as in truth.

It is there, at the Well of the Living One Who Sees me, that after they come together to mourn the father who had endangered both his sons, the son of Hagar ("The Stranger") can live at last with the son of Sarah ("Queen").

And what does Isaac do? "Vayeshev," he sat there. (Gen. 25: 11) He did not need to wander, he did not need to own. Like a practitioner of Zen, he sat. 
He let YHWH, the Breath of Life,  see him.

If we the living give up our attachment to the rigidity of acquiring, we can sit calmly to drink at the flowing wells of vision.

(In the book The Tent of Abraham (Beacon) and on our Website at  --
http://www.shalomctr.org/taxonomy_menu/1/127/7/56
you can find more of my and others' reinterpretations of Torah in the spirit of peace, justice, and healing.)

With blessings of shalom, salaam, PEACE - Arthur 

If this email was forwarded by a friend and you'd like to subscribe to the Shalom Center Report, please visit http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/tsc/signUp.jsp?key=442.

The Shalom Center | 6711 Lincoln Drive | Philadelphia, PA  19119
www.shalomctr.org | office@shalomctr.org | 215.844.8494

Beyond the Election:

Harvesting Our Values

With the major exception of the votes on gay marriage in California and Florida, the values held by large majorities of American Jews won the day in the general election. In a separate email, I will examine that important defeat, and what Jews and those of other progressive religious views can do about it.

After a great deal of angst and organizing effort,  78% of the Jewish vote went to the victorious  Obama-Biden ticket. It is worth celebrating the fact that despite ---  or because of! ---  extraordinary efforts by slanders against Obama to poison specifically Jewish minds, as well as the country  at large, most Jews saw through the slanders.

But the work to carry profound Jewish values into the decisions of our national government did not end on Election Day, for the task will be hard to fulfill.

(Later in this letter, I will look at the naming of Rahm Emanuel, a Jewishly committed Jew with a liberal record on almost all issues except perhaps Israel as Obama's chief of staff. The appointment has upset many progressives, including some Jewish progressives. I will also report on organizing work The Shalom Center has helped spark that will include Martin Luther King's Birthday/ Inauguration Day efforts, and a 40th anniversary New Interfaith Freedom Seder.)

The seeds that many of us have sown together over these last years are but come to their first sprouting:

•    The seeds of organizing to make peace in Iraq and the broader Middle East.

•    The seed of insisting that the abundance that comes from God and earth and human effort must be shared, lest its concentration in the hands of the super-wealthy become a blood-clot endangering our whole economic circulatory system -- as indeed has happened.

•    The seed of urging our country to address the biggest issue ever to face the human race - the climate crisis of global scorching.

Now the seeds we sowed have sprouted -- into a President and Congress who promise to respond. 

But that is not the end of the story.  For  sprouts are only the next step toward fruition. To harvest our vision will take more work. There are entrenched interests out there that are trying to kill off the new sprouts; some of them are already warning Obama against trying to fulfill his promises. They will organize; so must we.

Indeed, no President, no Congress, can harvest the fruits of peace, justice, and sustainability  unless there is a community in motion --- a grass-roots movement ---  demanding and creating crucial changes in private behavior as well as public policy.  That is work we need to do together.

So on Sunday, November 23, The Shalom Center and the Workmen's Circle will hold an action gathering in New York City: "Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America." (See --

https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/602/t/7445/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=3732 )

For too many years, some parts of the American Jewish community have held back from our true calling to seek peace and pursue it  -- for American families and soldiers, for Iraqi cities, for Israel, and for the broader Middle East.

For too many years, even the Jewish desire for social justice in America has been blunted by failing to connect that hope with the need to end the Iraq War and to work toward a broader peace. How can a trillion dollars robbed from schools and healthcare and firefighters to pay for death and destruction NOT be a domestic issue?

The gathering will restart the energies of a Jewish activism that sees "domestic" and "foreign" policy as a seamless whole.
Speakers and workshop leaders will include Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Amy Goodman of  Democracy Now, Rabbi David Saperstein of the  Religious Action Center in Washington, Rabbi Peter Knobel, president of the  Reform rabbinical association, former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, Sammie  Moshenberg of the National Council of Jewish Women, Leslie Cagan of United for  Peace and Justice, Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, Michael Ratner, Center for  Constitutional Rights, Rabbi Or Rose of Righteous Indignation, Rabbi Nina Beth  Cardin of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) --- - and many other luminaries of the newest and oldest  generations of activist Jews.

If this email was forwarded by a friend and you'd like to subscribe to the Shalom Center Report, please visit http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/tsc/signUp.jsp?key=442.