LECH LECHA 5783

Kanye, Jews are a Blessing

Do you believe in curses? Yiddish speaking Jews were renowned for their curses. I found a few colorful ones translated into English. Let me share some of them with you: 

         May you never be alone in bed: you should always have bedbugs, lice and fleas with you.

         May you win the lottery, and spend it all on doctors.

         I love this one: May you never have to visit such a filthy place as a bathroom.

         You should be like a chandelier—you should hang and burn.

         May they name a baby after you! Which really means, “You should drop dead!” because, in the Yiddish speaking world, babies are named after dead relatives.

         Your head should be full of lice, but your arms should be too short for you to scratch.

         May you lose all your teeth, except for one—and that one should hurt!

         May you live in a house with 100 rooms, and may each room have its own bed, and may you wander every night from room to room, and from bed to bed, unable to sleep.

         And finally, my favorite: May you grow so rich that your widow’s 2^nd husband never has to worry about making a living.

In the beginning of our Torah reading, the blessing Gd gives to Abraham at the start of his career contains an interesting reference to curses (Gen. 12:3): Va-avarcha m’varchecha, umkalelcha aor, “I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you will I curse.” Rabbi Harold Kushner in commenting upon this verse asks: “Why would anyone curse Abraham? After all, he’s such a fine person, a tzadik, in fact!”

But evidently, not everyone appreciated being taught about morality and Gd. It implied that the gods they were worshipping were fakes. And some people resent the demands that Abraham’s Gd makes, like: Don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, show compassion for others.

Kushner quotes Oscar Wilde who said: “One of the hardest things in life is to forgive someone who did you a favor.” Listen carefully to Kushner’s comment: In this verse Gd counseled Abraham: “Some people will resent your help. It will call their attention to their ignorance, or their powerlessness, so they will curse you. But when they curse you, don’t curse them back. Umkalelcha aor, I will curse those that curse you—leave them to Me. Your role is: V’heyey b’racha, “Be a blessing.” Do what’s good because it is good, not for the applause or for the thanks. After all, those things may or may not come.

My favorite pundit, may he rest in peace, Charles Krauthammer, once published an opinion essay in Time Magazine, called, “To the Rescue of Ingrates.” He wrote: A foreign policy carried out in our country’s own national interest will justify itself…America fled Somalia after 18 Army Rangers died, because the cost of the operation became apparent. But there was a more visceral reaction propelling our retreat: a sense of betrayal. Here we are, doing this for the Somalis, for no benefit to ourselves, and this is how they repay us!

I remember more than 30 years ago, there was growing hostility towards Jews by radical segments of the African American community—emerging as full-blown anti-Semitism in the Nation of Islam and the Reverend Louis Farrakhan. I heard some Jews say: “After all those years of our support for the civil rights movement, the Jewish students who died in voter registration activity in Mississippi, and the Jewish financial support for black organizations—is this how they repay us?”

        Well, those Jews were just wrong! The vast majority of African Americans were not followers of the Reverend Farrakhan and his views. And those Jews who felt that way would have been wise to remember Rabbi Kushner’s reading of Abraham: “Don’t do what’s right for the gratitude or the applause. If the recipients of your goodness curse you, Umkalelcha aor, leave that to Gd.” And by in large, this is what Jews did. To prove it, over 70% of Jews voted for Barak Obama—America’s 1^st African American president!

So, what should we do about Kanye West? Recently his antisemitic remarks were so outrageous that Adidas severed ties with him along with a growing list of other companies like Foot Locker, Gap, TJ Maxx, and JPMorgan Chase bank. Kanye recently echoed Farrakhan in a podcast saying: “Jewish people have owned the black voice…being signed to a [Jewish-owned] record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.” Well, not only is Disney NOT a Jewish platform, but it has also been accused over the years of antisemitic practices. West also claims that Planned Parenthood was founded by Jews to control the black population—to give them as many abortions as possible. There’s more, but you get the point.

So, what should we do about Kanye West? Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this type of rhetoric is grossly misinformed. And, at the same time, stand up and challenge it with the truth. In so many circles today, people are proclaiming antisemitic tropes openly without challenge—and this type of behavior is growing! But this is not pre-WWII Germany or the former Soviet Union. We can raise our voices. So, let’s challenge them and then, Umkalelcha aor, leave it to Gd.”

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi tells the story about when he was a young rabbi in a small congregation. A young man once came to the morning minyan to say Kaddish for his father. Reb Zalman asked if he wanted to put on tefilin. The young man refused, saying, “I don’t believe in it.” Thinking the young man might have said this because he didn’t know how, he called the young man and offered to teach him privately. The offer was accepted, and Reb Zalman went on to teach him how to daven and all about Jewish life and study Torah with him. He was elected to the Board and eventually became President of the shul. His 1^st act as president, was to fire Reb Zalman!

        Reb Zalman was deeply hurt by that betrayal. Psychologists might speculate that the man felt embarrassed at the presence of the Rabbi who knew him when he was ignorant of Judaism. Devastated, Reb Zalman stayed away from synagogue life and went back to school, got a PhD, became a professor, helped found the Jewish Spiritual Renewal movement—teaching a mystical approach that attracted many non-observant Jews. He wrote: “I owe it all to that man. If it weren’t for him, I’d still be Rabbi of that small shul!” He didn’t curse him. He left that to Gd. He just went on to become a blessing.

Growing up, one of my favorite tv shows was “The Lone Ranger.” How many of you remember it? How did every episode end? Someone asks after the Lone Ranger saves the day, “Who was that masked man? He didn’t wait around for us to thank him.” That’s right. He didn’t wait around, expecting thanks. He just rode off into the sunset to help someone else—to be a blessing.

At the very beginning of the Jewish People, Gd gave us, through Abraham, wise advice (Gen. 12:2): V’heyey b’racha—your role is to be a blessing.” Do what’s right because it’s right. If people are grateful and bless you, great. But if they mistreat you, Umkalelcha aor, stand up, speak the truth, then leave them to Gd. And it could be that you might later even need to thank them for your life of blessing that came about as a result.

So, Kanye West, or “Ye” as you now like to be called, if you truly search for the truth, you will find that no people on earth has been more of a blessing to humanity than the Jewish people. It’s not even close. Amen!

NOACH 5783

How Old is Mankind? The Answer Might Surprise You

Last year I taught a course titled, “How Old is the World?” According to the Torah, our world is 5783 years old since a soul was put into Adam. However, anyone who studies science cannot accept the notion that people are only 6,000 years old—especially with all the fossil evidence. Anthropology textbooks and the museums show humanoids like us go back 90,000 years.

50,000 years ago, people were making clever tools. 10,000 years ago, we learn from pollen studies in Israel and Syria that people were farming. It takes a lot of intelligence and foresight to farm, because why would you put grains in the ground unless you had the foresight that later in the year it could give you hundreds of grains? So how can the Torah tell us that humans are only 6,000 years old?

Today’s Torah portion describes how human beings began to spread out after the great flood of Noah and repopulate the world. I thought it would be a good time to speak about the question of how long have human beings been on the earth?

The answer depends on how we define a human being. Anthropology textbooks and museums define a human being as a person that looks like you and I and has your brains and my brains—i.e. Homo sapiens sapiens. The Torah, however, adds a nuance in the definition of a human being. A human being—according to the Torah—is a humanoid that looks like you and me, has our brains, but also has a neshama—an eternal soul! As we learned last week (Gen. 2:7): “Hashem Gd formed man of dust from the ground, vaipach b’apav nishmat Chayim, and He blew into his nostrils a neshama, the soul of life (an eternal soul).” All animals have a nefesh—an animalistic soul. But only a human being has a neshama!

Let me tell you how the advent of the neshama changed the world! I’m going to amaze you now with facts that have amazed me. If you study ancient history, you will see a sociological change in the world about 6,000 years ago that is so dramatic, so extraordinary that the British Museum in London—which has the most important exhibits on Mesopotamia—has an entire exhibit demonstrating this.

The exhibit is called, “The Earliest Cities.” It lists the changes that took place, and what’s so amazing is the exhibit gives a date for when these changes came about for the earliest of cities. The date that they give for the change in society that was so extreme that they devoted an entire wing to it is approximately 5,500 years ago! Sound familiar?

Of course! This is right after the Torah says the neshama was placed into a human being. And this we can count from the dating in the Torah, as being 5,783 years ago! Human beings with a neshama then spread out and bingo, you’ve got major cities within a couple of hundred years.

Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, in a lecture, tells us that he spoke with the curator of the museum. The museum lists the changes that appeared 5,500 years ago. Writing was invented, trading was invented. Large cities appear for the 1^st time. Schroeder didn’t mention Torah or the Bible to him. He didn’t mention the concept of neshama. He didn’t mention Adam and the dating of a human being according to the Torah. He just asked him, “What was the change that caused this? What made all this happen?”

A plaque on the wall noted that writing responded to the need to record economic transactions. Before the advent of the neshama, you couldn’t have large cities. People with just a nefesh animalistic soul could only cooperate so much. They literally had each other for dinner. It was a dog-eat-dog world! There were no humans there. There were people, but they weren’t yet human.

Now, because you have a neshama in people—for the 1^st time in the history of Homo-sapiens sapiens—beings that were exactly like you, smelled like you and talked like you could live together. That’s how you now can have a large city. This was not a physical change, but a social change with the invention of writing and trading and the 1^st large cities. The domino effect of all this is that once you have large cities, you have a division of labor. So, farmers outside the city can trade for items made in the city. In the city some people would be builders, and some produce clothes or baskets or tools or whatever.

The British Museum tells us that writing was invented because bartering, trading was invented. Trading was invented because of division of labor. Division of labor was invented because of the appearance of the 1^st large cities with some in the cities and some on the farm. This is all so magnificent! But what the museum does NOT tell us is why the 1^st large cities appear? Schroeder says he asked the curator what was the change that brought about the 1^st large cities? The curator shrugged his shoulders and said, “We have no idea!”

But we know why these changes in the world came about. It was the advent of the neshama into human beings! It wasn’t a population explosion. That goes back 10,000 years with the creation of farming. Once there was farming, you could have big families. Before farming—when hunting and gathering was the main support—with following the heard, there was a limit to how many babies you could carry. Once you had farming, you’re sedentary, and large families are helpful in growing and harvesting the farm.

So again, why did people suddenly come together—from China to Mesopotamia to Europe, and everywhere in the world—to form large cities 5,500 years ago? The curator had no idea, but we know. It was the neshama! The Torah makes clear that 5,783 years ago a spiritual force came into the world that changed beings into humans—not physiologically, but spiritually!

Maimonides (1190CE), in his Guide to the Perplexed (1:7), describes beings at the time of Adam that had the same shape and intelligence as humans: As regards the words [in the Torah], “the form of Adam, and his likeness,” we have already stated their meaning. Those sons of Adam who were born before that time were not human in the true sense of the word, they had not “the form of man.” So, with reference to Seth who had been instructed, enlightened and brought to human perfection, it could rightly be said, “he (Adam) begat a son in his likeness, in his form.” It is acknowledged that a man who does not possess this “form” is not human, but a mere animal in human shape and form. 

So, the notion that there were humanoids—Cro Magnon man, Australopithecus, Homo erectus. Etc.—tens of thousands, even millions of years before Adam is not so far-fetched in the Jewish world. Even Maimonides teaches this. Jews count the years of mankind from the moment Gd placed a neshama (an eternal soul) into man 5783 years ago—remarkably similar to what science tells us.  

And what about how old is the universe? The Sages of Kabbalah maintain (and this is a talk for another time) that the universe is about 15 billion years old—also remarkably similar to what science tells us.

My friends, we don’t really need to know that science confirms what the Torah teaches us. But isn’t it nice to know? Amen!