By their families and their ancestral houses

Last week, I spoke briefly at Pardes’ closing lunch, and I have adapted what I remember of the remarks here:

Two years ago, when I first arrived at Pardes, I was struck by something our dean, David Bernstein said during one of the various orientation/convocation events. He said that each of us certainly had at least one relative or ancestor, whether we knew who they were or not, for whom it was a lifelons dream to sit and learn Torah in Jerusalem, just as we were doing. Though I’d never met him, I immediately knew that for me, that ancestor was my great grandfather, Israel Marin (z”l), who brought his family to New York from Riga, and who was the last traditionally observant Jew in our family until me.

Over the last two years, as I’ve learned at Pardes and deepened my own relationship with Judais, I have occasionally thought of my great grandfather and what he would have thought of my complicated journey towards greater observance. Much more often, though, I’ve thought about other family and friends, most of whom are not religious, many of them not Jewish, for whom it isn’t a dream to come and study in Jerusalem, who don’t relate to my enthusiasm for Judaism, and who regard my newfound observance with mistrust, fearing, perhaps rightfully, that it will create a rift between us. These are the people whose image has been in my mind most often as I have sat and learned in the Beit Midrash.

Lately, as I prepare to leave Pardes and return to the United States, I’ve been thinking more about my great granfather, who left behind the Jewish community that had nourished him in Riga, and had to figure out how to build a Jewish life in America. In some ways, he succeeded very well: he raised a family, moved to a Jewish neighborhood in Far Rockaway, volunteered at his synagogue and studied a lot of Torah. In other profound ways, though, he failed. The model of Judaism that he cherished didn’t work for his children, and all four of them became secular.

Like my great grandfather, I face the challenge of building a life that is deeply grounded in the Jewish tradition, while also nurturing my relationships with secular friends and family, and the broader, non-Jewish American community. This is a balancing act, and I don’t expect it to be an easy one.

The week before last, in Parashat Bemidmar and last week in Parashat Naso, we read about censuses of the Israelites and the Levites. In both censuses, the Torah states that individuals were to raise their heads למשפחותם ולבית אנבותם, by family and by ancestral house (e.g., Num. 1:2, 4:22). I would like to bless all of us who have developed relationships to Judaism that put us at odds with our families and friends, that we all find a way to raise our heads by our families and by our ancestral houses, that we may successfully rise up as members and leaders of the Jewish people in a manner that honors our living families as well as our ancient tradition.

Starstruck

Rabbi Yitzhak Frank gave a lecture on Aramaic grammar at Pardes this week.

The casual reader of this blog could be forgiven for failing to leap out of his chair in excitement after reading the above sentence. I, however, was simply giddy when I walked into the beit midrash and saw Rabbi Frank standing there in flesh. I’ve kept my cool with personages orders of magnitude more famous than this scholar, but then again, none of them have been authors of books that I have occasion to consult with such regularity (with the possible exception of Wallace Shawn). The Frank dictionary, which explains the usage of the most common words and phrases in the Talmud, has been an almost indispensable tool in my studies for the past two years.

His lecture covered some of the basics of Aramaic grammar, which are often overlooked or misunderstood by even advanced students of the Talmud. This rather dry topic had me squirming with excitement. As someone whose ability to parse biblical passages is rooted in a strong understanding of Hebrew grammar (Thanks, Rabbi Posner!), I have found it frustrating to muddle through Aramaic texts with little sense of what form or what tense each verb is in. Though most of Rabbi Frank’s lecture was review for me, I was glad to get some ideas for how to go about learning and teaching the subject from the man who literally wrote the book on Aramaic grammar.

Shabbat in the Settlements

First of all, I love visiting the settlements. I say this as someone who, a couple of years ago, thought of settlement as a dirty word, and would have had a hard time imagining being friends with anyone who would live there. In the last couple of years, my political perspective has not shifted so drastically, but the company I keep has. I now have teachers and friends who live in places that I used to have moral qualms about even setting foot. Okay, so I still have moral qualms about setting foot there, but I choose to set them aside for the sake of these relationships.

I’ve learned living here that the majority of settlements, certainly the settlements where the majority of Jews in the West Bank live, are socioligically, culturally and geographically suburbs of Jerusalem, and not isolated outposts. People live there for the same reason Americans move to the suburbs (cleaner air, cheaper real estate, smaller family-oriented communities) as well as for a more uniquely Jewish reason – neighborhoods where there aren’t cars on the streets on shabbat. The fact is, I really love spending Shabbat in a place like that, where kids congregate in the middle of the street on Friday night to chat with their friends, where neighbors look out for each other and take care of each other, where the air on Saturday mornings smells sweet, and not like car exhaust.

Every time I’ve spent shabbat in the settlements, however, inevitably the conversation turns to politics at some point, and that’s where I get uncomfortable. Someone at the table, sometimes everyone at the table, turns out to hold views that are not only counter to my own, but outright racist, and I have to bite my tongue lest I say something that will cause offense or at least a big fight.

The current political hulabaloo here is that a group of rabbis have published a letter claiming that Jewish law forbids Jews to sell or rent apartments to non-Jews and that anyone who does so should be ostracized while other rabbis and public figures have come out against this letter. At my school the debate was, while we all acknowledge that the letter is halachically, morally and politically in the wrong, are the rabbis who signed it blinded by xenophobia, or are they motivated by other political and sociological concerns that might have some validity to them?

Among the family I spent this past Shabbat with, however, the debate was just the opposite – they all agreed about the halachic, moral and political rightness of the letter, the only question was whether it should have been phrased in a more politic manner in order to avoid offending people.

I was thankful that the argument was being carried on in Hebrew so that I could plead linguistic incompetence as the excuse for my awkward silence.

What I Learned at Pardes This Week #7: Standards of Evidence

This week in my Talmud class, as we approach the close of Chapter Four of Tractate Sanhedrin, we were looking at the talmud’s discussion of the warning given to witnesses in dinei nefashot, or capital cases. Among other injunctions, the mishnah states that witnesses are warned not to testify based on conjecture or hearsay. The first thing the Gemara does in commenting on this mishnah is to bring a baraita , that asks exactly what “conjecture” means.

On some level, it seems obvious what conjecture is. If I see Tom hit Joe really hard in the head with a hammer and then Joe drops down dead, I can testify that I know Tom killed Joe. On the other hand, if I hear hear Tom say that he has it in for Joe, and then two weeks later Joe turns up dead, it would be pure conjecture for me to say that Tom killed Joe. But there are all sorts of cases that might fall somewhere in betwen, and the Talmud is concerned with exactly those sorts of liminal cases.

According to the baraita, when we warn a witness not to testify based on conjecture, we say “Perhaps you saw the accused chase the victim down the street into an abandoned building. You ran after them and found the accused with a sword in his hand dripping with blood and the corpse of the victim dripping on the ground. If that’s all you saw, you didn’t see anything.” At first glance it seems hard to imagine a more clear-cut case. It seems obvious that the person with the sword in his hand killed the other guy. But for some reason, this isn’t strong enough evidence to convict someone, according to the rabbis.

There are two ways to look at it. It’s possible that the rabbis think that it’s obvious the person did it, but they are looking for a pretext to throw out evidence in a case where conviction would carry a mandatory death penalty. But it’s also possible that the rabbis see this as a case of very strong, but nonetheless circumstantial evidence. After all, isn’t it just conceivable that the suspect was chasing the victim without the intention of murdering him, and then the victim triped and fell on his sword, and just before the witnesses walked in, the suspect pulled the sword out of the victim’s body to try and save him?

Among the mishnaic authorities, there is disagreement about whether or not this same standard applies in dinei mamonot, or civil cases The gemara brings the parallel case of a camel, which is described as ocher, meaning either “rutting,” “biting” or perhaps “frothing a the mouth” which is found with another camel dead at it’s side. In this case, one anonymous opinion holds that, just as in a capital case, we cannot assume that the rutting camel is responsible for the death of the other camel, while another tana, Rabbi Acha, says we regard it as a known fact that the one camel killed the other (making its owner liable for damages). If we assume the cases are analogous, then Rabbi Acha, who allows conjecture in a civil case where nothing more than money and possibly the life of a camel is at stake, regards the prohibition against conjecture as stemming not from any doubt about the conjecture-based testimony, but from a simple reluctance to impose the death penalty. On the other hand the anonymous tana who states that we can’t conclude that the camel in question is the killer, would seem to support the notion that there is at least some level of real doubt about conclusions based on conjecture, which would apply equally well in a capital as in a civil case.

In the end, Jewish law doesn’t allow conjecture in either capital or civil cases. This supports the latter read that even the slightest level of inference cannot be relied upon as evidence, and anything short of actually witnessing a crime with one’s own eyes is circumstantial.

What I Learned at Pardes This Week #6: The secret meaning of Noah’s name

Earlier this week, in Judy Klitsner’s Bereshit class, we were looking at the issue of Noah’s naming. When he names him, his father Lemech explains the name, saying “this one will give us relief from our work and the toil of our ands from the land which the Lord cursed.” While the name Noah (נח) is superficially similar in sound and spelling to the word for “he will give us relief” (ינחמנו), the words are not actually related etymologically. Noah comes from the root נ-ו-ח / N-W-X, which means rest, while the word for “will give us relief” comes from the root נ-ח-ם / N-X-M, meaning comfort. So although the words sound the same, they are not etymologically related. So what do we do with the apparent contradiction between linguistics and the biblical text?

Our teacher presented us with three possible solutions to the problem, two from the medieval commentators Rashi and Ibn Ezra, and one of her own.

Ibn Ezra

The commentaries of Ibn Ezra are so rational and worldly that it is almost surprising to find them included in the cannon of classical biblical commentators. On the verse in question, he offers a variation of his oft-repeated trope that the Torah speaks in the language of human beings. The words sound the same, and they have similar meanings- that should be good enough for us as readers. After all, this is far from the only place in the bible where the explicitly stated reason for a name fails to stand up to strict linguistic scrutiny. In other words, it’s just not worth worrying about.

Rashi

Contrasted with Ibn Ezra, Rashi has a rather rigorous idea of the Torah’s perfection, and refuses to accept the idea that there is any dissonance at all between the linguistic reality and the stated meaning. According to Rashi, the verb ינחמנו doesn’t mean “He will comfort us”, but rather “He will bring rest from us”, so that the מ in the word is not part of the root, but rather part of the suffix, and in fact the root of the expression is נוח N-W-X after all, just like Noah’s name. So Rashi manages to harmonize the meanings, but in order to do so, resorts to proposing a grammatical form that fails to make idiomatic sense and doesn’t seem to have strong precedent elsewhere in the bible.

Klitsner

Our teacher, not satisfied with either Ibn Ezra’s cool dismisal of the problem or Rashi’s rather creative solution, suggests instead that the dissonance of meaning in text is a deliberate literary choice, giving the reader a dual sense of Noah’s role. On the one hand he is the means of humanity’s salvation from divine wrath, a true comfort (נחמ N-X-M) while on the other he only manages to save his own family leaving the rest of the world to perish, providing mere rest from punishment (נוח N-W-X), a respite without full relief.

In general, I like Klitsner’s underlying nmethodological assumption that difficulties and contradictions in the text of the bible serve a literary purpose, which lead her to look for a double meaning in this verse. However, I am not convinced by her conclusion in this case of what that double meaning is. “Comfort” and “Rest” are too close to one another in meaning to support the contrast in significance that she seems to be drawing between them.

My humble opinion

It was only at the next meeting of our class, when were were looking at the problematics surrounding the statement “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on earth and His heart was saddened” in Genesis 6:6 (e.g., “Does God have human emotions like regret?”, “If God is omniscient, shouldn’t he have forseen the consequences of previous actions that lead to this?” – questions beyond the scope of this post), that Lemech’s strange explanation of Noah’s name became clear to me. Noting the fact that the word meaning “and he regretted” in 5:29 (וינחם / Vayinaxem) comes from the root (נחם / N-X-M) which had given us so much trouble when it came up in the context of Noah’s name, it occured to me to look at the two verses side by side. They turn out to have striking parallels.

Compare Genesis 5:29

This one will PROVIDE US RELIEF (ינחמנו / Yenaxameinu) FROM OUR WORK (ממעשנו / mima&aseinu) AND FROM THE TOIL (ומעצבון / umei&itsevon) of our hands, from THE SOIL (האדמה / ha’adamah) which the Lord had cursed.

with Genesis 6:6

And the Lord REGRETTED (וינחם / vayinaxem) that HE HAD MADE (עשה / &asah) MAN (האדמ / ha’adam) on earth, and His heart WAS SADDENED (ויתעצב / vayit&atsev).

Each verse contains the roots נחם / N-X-M, עשה / &-S-H, אדמ / ‘-D-M, and עצב / &-Ts-B. Moreover, if we leave out the root אדם / ‘-D-M (“man” and “soil”, respectively) the roots appear in the same order, in both verses. This, together with their proximity in the biblical text (only 9 verses apart), tells me that they must be commenting on each other. Lemech cites relief (נחם) as the source of Noah’s name, a word linguistically unrelated to Noah, even though the actual root of rest (נוח) would have conveyed essentially the same meaning, because נחם / N-X-M serves as a little hyper-link to the issue of God’s regret at the creation of humanity.

This explanation solves not only the textual problem of Lemech’s etymological error, but it also solves another more conceptual problem, namely, that Lemech’s prediction for Noah’s future seems to correspond to the story that follows only vaguely and obliquely. He predicts that Noah will bring relief from our work and the toil of our hands, when in point of fact, both the the biblical text and in the reality we know, humanity still knows no relief from the work and toil of our hands.

In light of the correspondence between Genesis 5:29 and 6:6, we see that this dissonance of meaning, like the linguistic dissonance we looked at earlier, serves a literary role. Noah does provide rest/relief, as Lemech forsees, but it is not rest or relief from “our work and the toil of our hands”. Rather, it is a respite and relief from God’s regret (נחם / N-X-M) and sadness (עצב / &-Ts-B) at having made (עשה / &-S-H) man.

After fleshing this out for myself, I still need to consult with my teachers to find out if I’ve stumbled upon a hiddush (a novel insight), if I’m merely reinventing someone else’s wheel, or if there’s some glaring flaw in my reasoning that I’ve overlooked.

Negev Tiyul

The Hebrew word tiyul has no exact translation in English. A tiyul could be a long walk in a city park, a week-long guided bus tour of Israel, or a multi-week backing trip through South America.

Last week, I went on Pardes’ annual tiyul to the Negev region of Southern Israel. We spent three days hiking through various desert nahals. As our guides, Dan and Jamie told us more than once, the English word for nahal is “wadi”, which is actually Arabic (having heard this line multiple times from different guides on different tiyulim, I’m begining to wonder if it’s part of the required curriculum in the Israeli tour guide licensing course).

Between my guides, personal observation and Wikipedia, I’ve learned that a wadi is a dry riverbed, or a valley or canyon formed by intermittent water flow, the Middle-Eastern equivalent of the North American arroyo. Did I mention how much Southern Israel looks like the American Southwest?

The other fun geography fact I learned on this trip is that geologically speaking, Israel is in Africa. The Syrian-Africa rift, which divides the African plate from the Arabian plate, runs on along the Jordan river valley. Israel lies on the Western side of that valley, placing it solidly on the continent of Africa.

We stayed at Boaz Oz’s bedouin-themed hostel in the moshav of Ein Hatzevah, where the ruggedness of sleeping on on the floor of a big common room contrasts with luxury amenities like a jacuzzi, big pots of hot turkish coffee and bedouin tea, and baskets of dried dates available for guests to eat ad libidum, creating a memorable experience of desert hospitality.

Aside from the hospitality, and hikes with gorgeous views, the highlight of the trip was our visit to a family of Danish Christians living illegally in the desert in antique circus caravans without access to municipal water or electricity, while they wait for the messiah to come over the mountains of Moab (a.k.a. Jordan). In the meantime, the father of the family has written a musical about Masada, which is now performed annually at the archeological park. I couldn’t find any images of the musical on the internet (although I found plenty of images of a RIVAL Masada musical), but here’s a view of Masada itself, as seen from the ruins of a Roman fortification dating back to the famous siege, which we hiked to on the last day of the tiyul.

If the whole situation with the Danish Christians wasn’t surreal enough, their nearest neighbors, just a few yards down the road, run a crocodile farm, where hundreds of the animals are raised for skin and meat.

What I learned at Pardes this week #5: Hillel, Shammai and Uncle Vanya

This week, in my Talmud class, we looked at a couple of classic sugyot in the Gemara, one of of which, in the first chapter of Tractate Eruvin, addresses the issue of the conflicts between the rival schools of Hillel and Shammai.

Before the Montagues and the Capulets, before the Disestablishmentarians and the Antidisestablishmentarians, there were Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. As every student of Talmud knows, the Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai disagreed about almost everything. There are 316 machlokot (disputes) between the rival schools recorded in the Talmud; in all but six cases, Beit Hillel ultimately prevails.

According to Eruvin 13b, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel were disputing for three years, each claiming that the law followed their school. Finally, at the end of three years a heavenly voice proclaimed “Both these and those are the words of the living God. However, the law goes according to Beit Hillel.” The Stama, the anonymous redactor of the Gemara, immediately raises the obvious question: if both Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai represent “the words of the living God,” why did Beit Hillel become the normative opinion? The Stama answers its own question by telling us that it was because Beit Hillel were pleasant and humble, and used to teach both their own opinions and those of Beit Shammai, and not only that but they would teach the opinions of Beit Shammai before they taught their own opinions. In other words, nice guys finish first, at least in the Talmud.

However, after affirming the general principle that the law follows Beit Hillel, the Gemara provides a counter-example.

For two and a half years, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai had a debate in which Beit Shammai argued that mankind would have been better off had they never been created, while Beit Hillel argued that on balance, it was better for mankind that they had been created. In the end, after two and a half years of debate, the Sanhedrin put the issue to a vote and decided, surprisingly, in favor of Beit Shammai. They ruled that indeed mankind would have been better off had they not been created in the first place, but now that we have been created, one should “examine one’s actions”. There’s an ambiguity in the text (at least as the medieval commentator Rashi reads it) whether this means to examine the deeds of the past with the aim of achieving repentance or whether one should carefully consider all one’s present actions in order to make the best possible choices here and now.

The Sanhedrin, in upholding the opinion of Beit Shammai, while offering their caveat, seem to be saying that while it is undeniable that life is nasty, brutish and short, that human beings are on the whole disappointing creatures, morally bankrupt, making a mess of every opportunity that is handed them, nonetheless one must not sink into nihilism or despair. We must make the best of what we are given, and strive to rise above our own limitations and the inevitable disappointments that life hands us.

The resolution of this machloket reminds me of the end of Uncle Vanya. At the end of Chekhov’s play, Vanya and his niece Sonya, are left alone together, both of them disappointed in love and in life. Vanya sees no point in going on living, but throws himself into trivial, mundane work in order to distract himself from the despair he feels at the prospect of the long, empty, hopeless years ahead of him. Sonya comforts him with the thought that even if they have no hope for themselves in this life, they can work hard, make the best of the disappointing lot that has fallen to them, and console themselves with the hope of a reward in the hereafter.

What I learned at Pardes this week #4: yet another definition of p’shat and d’rash

My bible teacher, Judy Klitsner is in the states for some speaking engagements, so her husband, Rabbi Shmuel Klitsner, who teaches bible at a moderate Modern Orthodox women’s yeshiva is teaching our class on Sefer B’reshit (the Book of Genesis) in her absence.

One of the many interesting insights that Rabbi Klitsner offered on his first day in our class was a framework for defining p’shat and d’rash. These two terms are so essential to serious study of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) that avoiding them would seem as impossible as studying Chemsitry without having reference to the idea of electrons and protons. Yet essential as they are, it’s hard to find agreement on their exact definitions.

P’shat is often defined as the simple, straightforward reading of the biblical text, contrasted with d’rash, an interpretation that departs from that simple meaning. Rabbi Baruch Feldstern, with whom I studied Tanakh last year, disagreed strongly with the above definition of p’shat as simple, pointing out that some verses just don’t have a simple interpretation. There might be a simple meaning to a verse like “You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Ex. 20:13). However, a verse like “And God said to Moses, ‘I will be that I will be’, and He said further ‘thus will you say to the Israelites: “I will be sent me to you.”‘” (Ex. 3:14) is far too dense and ambiguous, and too rich with theological implications to yield a “simple” meaning.

People also often refer to p’shat as the literal meaning of the text, an equally inaccurate definition. Take a verse like “Do not lift up a false name. Do not join hands with a wicked [person] to be a witness of violence.” (Ex. 23:1). If one were to read this verse literally, it would yield biblical injunctions against carrying an inaccurate name tag and against holding hands with a bad person while witnessing a violent crime. Though amusing as an interpretation, this is not p’shat. The p’shat meaning of this verse is not literal, but idiomatic: don’t spread false rumors and don’t cooperate with a guilty party to act as a false witness.

Rabbi Feldstern used a very nice definition of p’shat in lieu of the above: the meaning of the verse as it would have been understood by its original audience.

On Thursday, Rabbi Klitsner offered another definition of p’shat, probably compatible with Rabbi Feldstern’s, which I quite like. He suggests that p’shat is an interpretation that takes into account

• Lashon (the meaning of the words themselves)
• Takhbir (syntax)
• Dikduk (grammar)
• Heksher (context)

while any interpretation that ignores one or more of the above, is d’rash. Personally, while I like this definition of p’shat, I respect d’rash as an exegetical field too much to define it simply as the departure from p’shat. I would suggest that an interpretation that ignores context or syntax, not as a deliberate exegetical choice, but out of carelessness or ignorance, would be bad p’shat rather than good d’rash.

What I learned at Pardes This Week 3: Tefilin

One of the strangest and yet most everyday of mitzvot (commandments) is that of laying tefilin. Every day Jewish men (and in some liberal communities, women too) tie little leather boxes containing pieces of parchment with biblical verses written on them around their left arms and their heads.

Nowhere in the bible does it say “thou shalt tie little leather boxes containing biblical verses to thine arms and wear them on top of thine head.” However, four times (twice in Exodus and twice in Deutoronomy) the bible says something along the lines of “and they shall be a sign upon your arm and a reminder between your eyes,” which the ancient Sages understood as a commandment to write the passages of Torah containing that phrase on pieces of parchment, put them in leather boxes and wear one on the arm and one on the head.

In my Halacha (Jewish law) class, we looked at the biblical sources for tefilin as well as some midrash halacha (Rabbinic legal exegesis) on the mitzvah of tefilin. I knew that the p’shat or plainsense contextual meaning of the verses wasn’t about leather philacteries, but I’d never paid too much attention to what these verses were actually talking about before. In Exodus, we are commanded to make a sign upon our hands and between our eyes, first of the Passover sacrifice, or possibly more generally exodus from Egypt, and then of the practice of consecrating every firstborn animal to G-d, and of redeeming every first born son. In Deutoronomy it seems it’s G-d’s word and G-d’s law more generally that we are instructed to have always on our arm and between our eyes.

At first it seems like an arbitrary departure for the Rabbis to interperet this idiom, which clearly means “pay constant attention” absurdly literally (hyperliteralism is one of my favorite Rabbinic exegetical tricks), and to take the verses out of context and treat them as if they were self-referential. In fact, I’ve heard Reform rabbis who don’t believe in putting on tefilin argue exactly that point, that the whole premise of this practice is absurd. I used to think the only available counterarguments was the Orthodox trope that the ancient Sages’ understanding of tefilin is part of an unbroken oral tradition that went all the way back to Moses, a hallowed and time-honored explanation but one that doesn’t satisfy the modern liberal practitioner.

However, my halacha teacher was able to show that the Rabbis’ understanding of these verses is not merely based on formal textual exegesis, but that the textual explanations they bring to the verses reflect a desire that the tefilin we wear should be physical tools for fulfilling the explicit biblical commandments in those verses to keep G-d’s word before one always. The issue isn’t whether or not the bible was “really” referring to a commandment to wear leather phylacteries. The real question is whether or not laying tefilin daily helps us fulfill the original intent of the biblical commandment.

What I learned at Pardes This Week (#2)

In my halakha (Jewish Law) class this past week, we looked at a piece of gemara in which one rabbi asserts that an averah (sin) which is done for the sake of heaven (lishmah) is superior to a mitzvah (a good deed) that is done not for the sake of heaven. It is then countered that if one does a mitzvah not for the sake of heaven, one will eventually end up doing it for the sake of heaven, and so the gemara concludes that an aveirah for the sake of heaven is equivalent, but not superior, to a mitzvah that is for the sake of heaven.

What is a sin that is done for the sake of heaven? The two examples that gemara deals with are (1) Tamar in the Book of Genesis, who sleeps with her father in law (really big aveirah) to prove a point and (2) Yael, who commits adultery with the enemy general during a war in order to kill him.

It’s clear that these are aveirot for the sake of heaven, but what is a mitzvah that isn’t for the sake of heaven? I think I did a mitzvah that wasn’t for the sake of heaven last night. There were a couple of girls from my program who were nervous about Yom Kippur services. For Jews who don’t go to synagogue regularly, Yom Kippur is very challenging, because the holiday has the longest and most complicated liturgy of the year, and yet it is the precisely the one holiday when Jews who don’t go to syngagogue and are not versed in the traditional litury show up at shul looking for a profound religious experience. The result is that instead of having a meaningful experience on this holiest of holy days, people find themselves lost, confused and frustrated. So I sat down with these two women and helped them go through their Yom Kippur prayerbooks in order to map out the different services and familiarize themselves with the prayerbook in advance of the holiday. But the truth was, I wasn’t really doing this because it was a mitzvah, or because it was the nice thing to do. I was doing this because these were two beautiful women asking me to help them with something. If it had been two men asking for my help instead of two women, would I have been as ready to spend two hours going over the liturgy with them? I’m not so sure.

I also learned another gemara yesterday in a different context that shed light for me on the idea of a mitzvah that isn’t for the sake of heaven. The rabbis in Israel sent a message to the rabbis in Babylonia warning them to be careful with regard to three things: personal hygiene, a study partner, and the poor. If these Torah scholars had to be warned to be careful with these things, it seems clear that there is a danger when one engages in Torah study too intensively, of neglecting these areas, namely one’s own personal needs, the needs of the people one comes into contact every day, and the needs of the broader community. Those who engage in Torah study or any meritorious activity without attending to themselves, their personal relationships and the greater good, provide a striking example of a mitzvah that is not for the sake of heaven.