Looking to Betzalel for Inspiration

Last week's Torah portion, Ki Tissa, recounted what is quite possibly the Torah's low point in the relationship between God and the people of Israel. As Moses ascended Mt. Sinai to receive the commandments, a devastating breach was simultaneously transpiring down below, as the Israelites turned to idolatry with the building of the Golden Calf. As Moses began his descent from the mountain and learned of this betrayal, he threw the first set of tablets to the ground. The physical shattering of the tablets echoes the brokenness of the relationship, and feels so profound that we the reader might wonder: is there even a possibility of returning from this abyss, this seemingly bottomless chasm of brokenness?

This week, however, the Torah moves boldly into a new chapter. The Israelites begin a second collective building project -- this one not idolatrous in nature, but rather commanded by God and with the purpose of creating a place on earth for sanctity, community and togetherness.

One key ingredient in this powerful pivot from brokenness towards hope is a person, a talented artisan by the name of Betzalel. As Parashat Vayakhel recounts (Exodus 35:30-36:2): 

And Moses said to the Israelites: See, Adonai has singled out by name Betzalel, son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, endowing him with a divine spirit of skill, ability, and knowledge in every kind of craft, and inspiring him to make designs for work in gold, silver, and copper, to cut stones for setting and to carve wood—to work in every kind of designer’s craft... Betzalel [together with Oholiab and other skilled individuals] will undertake the task and carry it out.

Of course, the rabbis of our tradition have long wondered what made Betzalel so special that God singles him out by name? A number of aggadic midrashim (interpretive stories) offer answers to this question. This week, I've found myself particularly drawn to one -- a midrash about Betzalel from Bamidbar Rabbah 15:10 -- and I invite you to join me in reading and parsing it:

When the Holy One said to Moses (in Exod. 25:31), ‘And you shall make a menorah of pure gold,’ Moses said to God, ‘How shall we make [it]?’ God said to him, ‘Of hammered work shall the menorah be made.’ Nevertheless Moses had difficulty; for when he descended, he had forgotten its construction. 

He went up and said, ‘Master of the world, I have forgotten [it].’ God showed Moses, but it was still difficult for him. God said to him (in Exod. 25:40), ‘Observe and make [it].’ Thus God took a pattern of fire and showed him its construction, but it was still difficult for Moses. 

The Holy One then said to him, ‘Go to Bezalel and he will make it.’ [So] Moses spoke to Bezalel, [and] he made it immediately. Moses began to wonder and say, ‘In my case, how many times did the Holy One, blessed be He, show it to me; yet I had difficulty in making it. Now without seeing it, you have made it from your own knowledge. Bezalel (btsl'l), were you perhaps standing in (b') the shadow (tzl) of God (el) when the Holy One, blessed be He, showed it to me?’

This is a beautiful midrash. On the surface, the text of it cleverly plays with Betzalel's name -- as the punchline explains -- imagining a situation in which Betzalel could have absorbed what he needed to know by standing "in" (b') "the shadow" (tzel) "of God" (el). 

But on a deeper level, this midrash is saying something far more profound. Moses - the leader who last week wanted to see God face to face, who participated with God in creation of the second set of tablets - has hit a wall; it turns out there's something quite important he can't do. For all of his great qualities, Moses lacks imagination; he is unable to conjure a vision of what doesn't already exist and bring that vision to life. Even when the image of the menorah is showed to him visually in a pattern of fire (I imagine this hologram style... or today we might say, even when shown the youtube tutorial!), he simply doesn't have the ability to conceive of what is not yet.

Fortunately, someone else can. Betzalel's great gift, according to this midrash, isn't his incredible craftsmanship alone -- the dexterity of his hands, his ability to work multiple materials, or his flair for color and texture -- but rather is his ability to imagine what has never before existed. At a time of tremendous brokenness -- where the tablets have been shattered and so too the relationship between God and the people of Israel -- it is Betzalel's creative imagination that has the potential to lift the Israelites out of the abyss and towards a hopeful future.

As we head into this Shabbat, it's easy for me to relate to the Torah's sense of brokenness in thinking about the world. Hatred and fear abound, and the global move towards autocracy feeds off of them. I lament the tragedy of Israel facing war on multiple fronts and struggling under the weight of its own morally corrupt leadership. And last but certainly not least, looking at Gaza -- with tens of thousands dead, mass displacement and famine-like conditions -- is particularly excruciating and feels so profoundly broken (an unfathomable abyss!). With low points this low and brokenness this shattered, how can it be that we/they/the world will ever find the ability to move forward in building towards a more hopeful future?!

This week, I look to Betzalel for inspiration. Even in the most broken and stuck of moments, he has the capacity to envision different possibilities than the ones that have been, or that exist before him. He can see, in his mind's eye, the menorah of wholeness and light that yet might shine on the world. With his artist's sensibility, he has the super-power of being able to conjure a vision of something new, that has never existed before. He enables a future that is different and brighter (literally).

The good news is that there are Betzalels all around us. These are artists and visionaries, leaders with start-up sensibilities, and -- especially at this moment -- peace-makers who are defying all odds and generating creative solutions. One such example I've been reading up on is the shared movement of Israelis and Palestinians thinking expansively about what it might look like to create two independent states that share a single homeland (A Land for All)... I'm not yet sure how it could work in practice, but it's a beautiful example of a Betzalel-like vision for something that has never existed before emerging at a time of immense brokenness.

On this Shabbat, I hope that each of us will have the opportunity to pause and consider who and what gives us hope in this moment. Who are the inspirational visionaries of our day who promise that the future could look radically different than the past or the present? What visions and holograms can we see in our minds eye? Parashat Vayakhel teaches us that the future can and will contain hope that transcends the broken present. Let's channel Betzalel this week, seeking out spots of our own "in the shade of God" (b'tzel'el), and renewing our hope in the future through the power of creative imagination.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Responsibility, Dee Caplan

I must admit that when Rabbi Jay asked me to contribute to this project I was daunted and felt insecure because I am not a Jewish scholar by any stretch of the imagination. This past year I have participated in Kavana’s teachings of Mussar, the study of soul traits that make us better human beings if we live with intention, reflection and purpose to elevate these traits within ourselves

During our most recent series of classes  we explored moral issues and ethical dilemmas when  a question was raised that resonated with me and led me to reflect on Alan Morinis’s  chapter on Responsibility in Everyday Holiness. Backing up though, the question that came up is “What do we owe each other?” It feels like a really important question given the times in which we live and I felt immediately connected to Morinis’s chapter on Responsibility. 

I want to share a story about myself. Growing up in Connecticut my family was not wealthy when my sister and I were young. One day my parents said they had a treat for us, we were going to see the play Oliver on Broadway in NYC and have a meal at Lindy’s, a now defunct but in the day, an incredible deli. I was so excited. We took the train from New Haven to Grand Central, a trip I had taken several times before. But this day I noticed Harlem for the first time.  In 1959 Harlem was a very poor, run down neighborhood in NYC, not the upscale, cool neighborhood it is today. I was shocked to see the slums, asphalt playgrounds with basketball hoops missing nets, kids with far too little warm clothing for that winter day. It had a huge impact, so much so that I was not able to enjoy the play or the special dinner and my parents wondered if I was sick. I remember telling them my 10 year old self’s variation of not knowing how to enjoy that day knowing what I had seen in Harlem. 

In the chapter on Responsibility, Morinis writes that the Hebrew word for Responsibility is achrayut and one root of that word, acher, means “other.” “Bearing the burden of the Other” partially begins to answer the haunting question of what do we owe each other.

To take responsibility for our actions seems self-evident but in today’s world there are so many examples where this is not the case. I like to imagine a world where we take responsibility for our actions for our own sense of well being as well as out of concern for each other. My actions have consequences. As Hillel says, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  But if I am only for myself, what am I?”

I believe that one thing that we owe each other is to bear witness to one another, to be present and open, to be compassionate and to do our best to relieve suffering. I believe that we need to every day ask that question of ourselves, “What do we owe each other” and to find a way, big or small of living into an answer.

Responsibility, Jennifer Nemhauser and Matt Offenbacher

“Mussar…takes you by the shoulders and turns you around so that you face squarely all the (real or potential) messes, breakage, or offenses you might have had a role in causing. Take responsibility, it says. If you made that mess, clean it up. Better still, foresee the mess and take responsibility before it happens, so there won’t even be a mess for you to have to clean up afterward.”

Using this definition of responsibility (achrayut), Alan Morinis captures both the practice of preventing harm and the practice of repairing harm already done. Indeed, he argues that the core of Mussar is that “our personal spiritual advancement takes place not separate from but rather right in the midst of our relations with other people”. Over the last year of learning about and trying to enact the practice of Mussar, we have felt the satisfying soreness of building muscles—finding new ways to center soul traits in everyday interactions with friends, families and colleagues.

In doing this work, we have also wrestled with the question of where individual soul transformation connects to communal transformation. Can Mussar help us perform ‘heshbon hanefesh’ (a spiritual accounting) on the systems that form the contexts in which we do and repair harm: the laws, customs, codes, institutions that structure our individual relationships? Sometimes as we are urging ourselves individually to “bear the burden of the other”, our organizations, groups and governments are left unchallenged as they pursue their own interests. With something like climate change or reparations to Black Americans, it’s pretty clear that our individual choices and actions – while meaningful in the context of our own lives – are insufficient to clean up the mess.

Maybe the traits we work on balancing in Mussar could be viewed as worthwhile only insofar as they let us, as individuals, be more effective and resilient in changing the systems we are part of, to finding the intention to work for the structural changes that will cause less harm in the future and acknowledge harms in the past. This placement of the individual within the community reminds us of something Rabbi Rachel wrote in the newsletter titled “It’s Time to Dismantle the House”. In that powerful drash, she drew a connection from a Leviticus text on how the community should respond to the discovery of a house with a plague upon it to “the seemingly impossible trick of dismantling and rebuilding the house while also continuing to live in it!” We cannot wait to be perfect before we act. Instead, we have to move forward, painfully aware of our individual accounting still underway, to take collective responsibility, imperfectly.

Silence, Julie Kohl

In Mussar, the soul trait of silence is called sh’mirat ha’lashon, which is literally translated as “guarding the tongue.” The Jewish tradition recognizes the power of speech, to be both creative and destructive.The world was created by divine speech. On the other hand, speech has the ability to spread harm. Gossip, or Lashon ha’rah, (literally evil speech) is prohibited, even if the information being conveyed is true. The classic Jewish folktale about the impossibility of recollecting all the feathers scattered from a pillow is a metaphor for the spread of gossip.

Another aspect of this soul trait is the value of contemplative silence. I experienced the power of  silence through attendance at a number of Jewish silent retreats. This may seem like an oxymoron because Jews love to talk. Actually, removing  the distractions of interacting with others gave me space to spend time with myself and my own mind. Eating in silence is an amazing opportunity to slow down and pay attention to food, using sight, smell, and taste, to really feel the sensations in my mouth and my body.

I now have an (almost) daily meditation practice, sitting in silence. It is an opportunity to observe and get curious about the working of mind. While preparing for the High Holidays, I spent the month of Elul meditating on Psalm 27. I wrote this interpretation of the Psalm, about the struggles and fruits of my meditation practice. 

Love is my beacon and my intention

So why do I feel afraid?

I am held in a divine embrace

Yet I feel terrified.

So many doubts, and struggles.

Both internal and external,

I stumble and fall, 

Forgetting again and again.

That regardless of my difficulties,

There are other options besides fear.

Even though I struggle, 

I can trust in truth and compassion.

If I had only one desire,

It would be to dwell in a state of awareness.

To be awake to the truth

That I am ok in the present moment.

I always have a place of refuge,

Solid as a rock,

Sitting in meditation,

Open to the truth of the present moment.

From a vantage point of awareness,

I can see many alternatives.

I am so grateful,

I am full of praise.

Soon, I am in that familiar place of constriction again,

Grasping at the pleasant,

And trying to avoid the unpleasant

I seek awareness,

Face to face,

A relationship.

Yet, I dwell in delusion,

Feeling abandoned, alone

Straining to maintain connection with others,

Unaware of the unity of all.

Show me the way,

To avoid being trapped by the stories of my discursive mind.

My adversaries,

The inner critic, self doubt, comparing mind, 

Torment me

I yearn to find the place of refuge,

the divine spark in myself,

and connect the divinity in others.

I wait, 

Praying for a strong heart and good amount of courage,

To remain hopeful,

While I wait.

Silence, Rachel Doyle

This week’s middah is Sh’tikah (Silence), something I’ve found myself surrounded by as of late. This may surprise people who know me since I have twin seven-month olds. But it turns out that when you spend 80 hours a week nursing in a silent and darkened room so each baby doesn’t get distracted, you spend a lot of time alone with your thoughts. 

It turns out my semi-monastic life-style puts me in good company. As Alan Morinis outlines in this week’s chapter, our rabbis held silence in great esteem, seeing it as the precursor of wisdom. Rabbi Perr said “Because when you are quiet a lot of things that will come into your mind will come not from your mind but min ha’shamayim. You grow from that.  You become a different person from that.” 

I’ve found that most of my thoughts seem to stem more from my yetzer hara (evil inclination). I’ll spend hours mentally arguing with people over parenting decisions I feel insecure about or focus in on my ever-growing list of complaints. Already tired and worn out, it’s easy to let my yetzer hara win out and stay in these fantasies and let it influence my mood and actions as well. 

Instead, I’ve been trying to use principles I’ve learned from various meditation and psychotherapy practices to curate my thoughts.  Imagined arguments are areas for me to see where I feel insecure and dig into it. Complaints show me which areas of my life need tending and self-compassion. I try to practice “Opposite Action”. If I’m feeling resentful towards someone in my life, I begin to list the ways I’m grateful for them or how they are going through a hard time as well. It takes a lot of self-control, and I’m not always successful, but I’m working towards making my thoughts (and thus my feelings and later actions) better match the middot I want to embody. 

I haven’t gotten my mind still enough in the silence to hear G-d’s voice. But silence has allowed me to make my own inner-voice more G-d-like. And that is enough for me at this moment.

Order, Bruce Kochis

Humans are creative beings and their creativity can produce non-finite variety.  Hence, art of all kinds can constantly amaze us with the new, some of it meaningfully new.  This centrifugal force, however, can spin artifacts out of the orbit of understanding or recognition and we end up lost.  Noam Chomsky’s famous example “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” represents a thought syntactically meaningful (the string of words is grammatically appropriate) but makes no sense.  What we need is the centripetal force of order that keeps creativity inside or near the boundary of understanding (the boundary will be different for different individuals).

Jazz improvisation, for instance, also needs some recognizability.  Saxophonist John Coltrane”s version of “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things” exemplifies the creativity in his improvisation and the order in the underlying melody of a well-known song from The Sound of Music.  In jazz too much order produces blah predictability and too little sounds like chaos (apologies to lovers of free jazz).  

Mussar’s sense of order applied to art is about working the edge between the predictable and the unintelligible new and the relationship between them can be complex yet inspiring.  So Morinis’s claim that “If you are not careful about the cleanliness of your house, you are also likely to be lax about the purity of your spirit” might be a little too neat.

Order, Lon Walton

The beauty of Mussar practice is this: regardless of where one begins, which middot one chooses to consider, daily practice seamlessly connects each middah to the whole picture; weaving and reweaving an endless rubric that inches us closer to balance. There is no ending, only beginning, no stasis, but a continual fluid movement towards recalibration. 

In his chapter on Order, Morinis emphasizes the need for a well-ordered life to facilitate effective awareness. This takes multiple forms, from ordered physical surroundings to scheduling. In the end though, what I’m struck with is his caution against rigidity, equally effective in preventing spiritual awareness, and I think, Aha! It seems I’m guilty of both extremes, back to the drawing board for a deeper understanding: Order vs. control, my needs vs. those of others. This nudges me to the middot of Humility and Moderation. Each adds awareness and adjustments in behavior.  With each comes a smidgen of greater clarity, a strengthened ability to step back from reactivity and judgment (‘the condiments of emotion’). Every small insight alters my road map and pushes me on to another middot before circling back for more changes. Studying in community with others we are privileged with their thoughts, further informing our perspective, tweaking our understanding, encouraging us to continue.

Quoting Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Morinis tells us; we are ”all placed between wholeness and deficiency with the power to earn wholeness.” I’m human, it's unlikely I’ll get there but I have a map.

Compassion, Ellen Ehrenkranz

Compassion is defined as sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. However, the Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, has a deeper meaning. It literally means "to suffer together." This suggests that compassion is not just about feeling sorry for someone who is suffering, but about actually entering into their experience and feeling their pain with them.

When do I show compassion and what do I do to help? Identitying with the other as the basis for compassion is precisely what the Torah invokes when it hands down the commandment to be loving to the stranger in your midst.

Alan Morinis, in his book, reflects on the relationship between compassion and judgment. He writes that true compassion, according to Jewish thought, is like a parent for a child. Parents need to be both strict in teaching right and wrong, as well as compassionate. They need to be able to see their child's pain, but they also need to be able to set limits and expectations.

The first step to being compassionate is to lower the barriers that separate us from others: the soul trait of compassion may be more accurately defined as the inner experience of touching another being so closely, that I no longer feel the other one as separate from myself. I will leap to care for the other as I care for myself because the other is no longer the other.

I need to feel the person’s pain. I need to be able to join with the other and share their feelings. To do this means giving up my sense of separateness and lowering the barriers that ordinarily wall me off and isolate my sense of self. 

It is so easy to judge based upon my own standards and based upon my framing of the situation. To understand the other is to listen to them and see the issue through their lens.

Judgment comes from a habitual ego-bound perspective that gives rise to the well-ingrained tendency to look at others with eyes of judgment. However, when I truly enter into their experience and feel their pain, it becomes much harder to judge them. 

Through close identification, I open up to that person and get close enough to understand their pain. It will teach me to act kindly, softly, and gently. It will also allow me with respect to “offer compassion in the form of judgment.” I will be able to feel within myself the truth of that other person’s experience and see with the eyes of compassion. I will also see more deeply to perceive the untainted soul that is the kernel of their being.

Compassion, Tamara Erickson

The Hebrew word for compassion is rachamim, which shares its linguistic root with the Hebrew word for womb, rechem. Consequently, compassion is often understood as the manifestation of the bond between a mother and the life growing inside her. 

Rachamim can be interpreted as the inner experience of touching another being so closely that the lines between “you” and “me” are blurred, an understanding that we are not really separate from one another. The interconnectedness of mother and child that occurs within the womb can be likened to the spiritual interconnectedness of all beings in the universe, or within God’s womb. Compassion is the inner quality that grows within us when we realize and appreciate our oneness.

Compassion has an important emotional component, the feeling of empathy. My oneness with you implies that I am able to feel your emotional experience as if it were my own - your suffering is my suffering, and your joy is my joy. However, rachamim does not come into being just by feeling empathy. Alan Morini explains, it is the “Jewish insistence that inner qualities only reach a state of sh’lemut, “wholeness”, when they are brought out into the world of action”. It is the action that turns empathy into compassion. To be truly compassionate, it is not enough to just feel what another being feels, but we must also act as if their feelings were our own. The capacity for compassion is innate within us but in our culture, we are more likely to perceive ourselves as distinctly separate from other beings. It is simpler for us to slip into judgment than it is for us to rise to compassion, and it is often easy for us to “other” another human being. We are more likely to be compassionate to those we care about and can relate to easily. It is much more difficult to be compassionate to a person who has committed a crime or whose actions contradict our values, or to be compassionate to a person whose life and appearance is so drastically different than our own, or to be compassionate to a group of people whose existence complicates the ability for our people to have our own homeland with a Jewish majority.

However, compassion is a skill that can be cultivated. Every time we transcend the boundaries of self and feel within us the truth of another’s experience, we are cultivating compassion. We can foster a limitless affection for humanity by seeing the image of God in every person. We can remind ourselves that everyone is doing the best they can given their resources and life experiences. What if we saw that person in prison as someone who is struggling? According to the CDC, 98% of the prison population has experienced at least one adverse childhood experience and 78% have experienced 4 or more. Without intervention, people who have experienced even just one adverse childhood experience are 2X more likely to have serious financial problems, and those with 6 or more are 4,600% more likely to face opiate addiction and are 50% more likely to have a shortened lifespan by 20 years. What if more Americans could see the person crossing our southern border illegally and answer the question, “what would I do if I were in that person’s shoes?” from a sense of shared identity and an understanding that “us” and “them”, in the words of Morinis, are “mingled in a oneness that transcends our perceptions of separate identities”. 

Compassion is not limited to the human experience. Even plants seem to show compassion for each other. Studies conducted by Suzanne Simard have shown that trees have an intricate system of communication through their roots in the ground that can extend for miles within a forest. This system of communication, referred to as the Wood Wide Web, consists of a mutually beneficial relationship between plants via the fungi that colonize their roots. The underground network between roots and fungi allows plants to transfer nutrients and share information about hazards, such as pests.  The trees that are most closely interconnected with all the other trees in a forest are known as Mother Trees.

Humility, Anonymous

Just having read the section on humility in Everyday Holiness, I’m struck by the genius of finding one’s place and being comfortable in it as a working definition of humility and the idea that so much else in our ethical and spiritual lives is dependent on a personal comfort with this sense of place. 

I think much of my dissatisfaction with life as a younger person stemmed from a feeling of not having a place, the stress of finding my way, which skewed my personal compass in multiple dimensions of my life. It’s being comfortable enough in my own skin to observe and feel my environment and respond to others that in a way enables them to make the space even better for all of us. 

I resist (sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully) my ego’s need for ever more recognition and praise, and try to remember to offer more to those around me. This is not trivial in today’s “attention economy” of social media, but what do the sages say, “It’s the little things that make the difference”? Find a place and be there for those around you. Can it be that simple? 

Humility, Bruce Kochis

Humility faces tough challenges in an anti-humility culture.  As Susan Cain has pointed out in her book Quiet, that culture got its foothold in the late nineteenth century as industrialization pushed workers into the anonymous cities, and villagers hitherto known as part of a community had to “sell” themselves to employers, co-workers, prospective mates, and neighbors. The villagers’ knownness became unknown and the culture of “personality” arrived.

The culture of personality has only swelled via a host of practices--college admissions essays, resumes, applications, grant writing, Linkedin, online dating profiles, and a barrage of self-evaluations and performance assessments.  The talk show hosts burnish the egos of celebrities, college athletes now promote their personal “brand,” every child chess player gets a medal or trophy. One ought to cultivate a personality that is unique and recognized as such.

Alan Morinis suggests that “being humble doesn’t mean being a nobody, it just means being no more of a somebody than you ought to be” (47).  But that becomes more and more difficult when the culture is ever pushing us to be a Somebody for fear of being a nobody.  We end up promoting ourselves to stand out, to be noticed, to be recognized.  Our humility recedes.

And the waning of religion in everyday life means that the temptation beckons to think of oneself as a center, or as the center, of the universe and of life.  This began with Humanism of course; for example it was in the Renaissance that artists began signing their work—the individual artist superseded the guild.  At shul we are reminded of role models—Sarah, Moses, Ruth—who see themselves in a much bigger picture of the universe and of life.