​Dear friends,
​
When you study Western history, you may notice after you passed your last exam that you were really studying the history of warfare. When you study Jewish history, you find something else. It is the history of moral triumph (and at times defeat), and the accompanying history of scholarship. One of the major exceptions is in this week’s Parshah. You have the Jews being told to wage war against the Midianites, and it is part of our sacred history-part of the Torah. The question is why?

It's not because we ever saw war as a test of nationhood. War is by nature brutal and often tragic. It is, however a test of what you are willing to fight for, and possibly to sacrifice for. Most of the wars you read about when you learn history were fought for expansion and a subtle but toxic something called national pride. (Think of the Napoleonic wars, the endless battles for a “place in the sun” that led to the colonial wars in Africa, the underlying issues in the war in Viet Nam and more). The wars the Jewish nation fought were by Hashem’s command to claim our land (after offering peace terms to the non-Jewish inhabitants allowing them to continue living in Israel as law abiding citizens who keep the Noachide laws). 

The war against Midian was different. It was not for survival (such as the war with the Amalekites who attacked us in the desert right after the sea split). It was not because we were under physical threat in Eretz Yisrael. It was because we were under threat for our very existence - an existence which is defined by who we are as Jews. 

They tried to destroy us morally by instructing their daughters to attract and later seduce young Jewish men. How did they do this? They set up a bazaar, and when a young man would come in to look at the goods, the middle-aged saleswoman would suddenly “need a break” and send in an attractive young woman to “substitute”. She had a script. Looking him straight in the eye, she would begin a dialogue that sounded something like this:
He “How much is the rug?”
She, “40 dinar. May I just ask you one thing before you go? I’ve always been fascinated by the Jews”
He: (with tolerant smile, always happy to help…) “sure”
She, taking out a box of tissues or whatever they used in the desert 4000 years ago. “WHY Do you hate us?”
He “I don’t hate you! Why do you think I hate you?”
She, “You won’t celebrate with us. You always find excuses to avoid being with us. There’s a major festival tonight. I know your type. You won’t be there. You think you’re above us”. This is said between little sobs and shaking shoulders.
He. “You have it all wrong. I’ll be there”

And he was, and he found himself in a world he always avoided, with women he would never see again. 
What did they believe? We don't know much about their systems any more.  Whatever it was, it robbed the ordinary Joe's and Janes of the idea of having a real relationship with the Creator. They thought that they were too small, to low, and that any belief in human morality or potential was an enemy from whom they had to escape. You find this today, when people who live with sins, that are described as ‘abominations’ in the Torah, cover it up with a platina of pride. 

The name of their idol was Baal Pe’or.  The Master of the Gap. The gap in question is the anal cavity. They would defecate before their god. What were the adherents of this bizarre mode of worship thinking? The Chassam Sofer explains that they were making a statement. “G-d in heaven doesn’t want (or can’t have) anything to do with us. We are base and gross. Unworthy and unable to relate to G-d’s transcendence and compassion. They were as the French philosopher Camus (who would have felt right at home with the Midianites) would say, “We are like whales stretched out on a beach” almost dead, but in the sun. Certainly, closer to an animal than to a person.  Do what you want. The animals do! Would sum up their theology.
A rabbi was on a plane, and his seat mate took note of the kosher food that he had ordered. The other man had also made a special request and his vegan food came shortly after the kosher tray was passed over his head. “I don’t eat other animals” he said, making note of the tepid chicken served on the overcooked rice on the rabbi’s tray. “Why not? The “other animals” eat each other animals”, the rabbi replied. “Most are not vegan”.… 

We are not animals. Our ancestors had to fight against those who would redefine them as such. It was a hard fight. It is a battle that some of us have to fight fairly often.

Outsmarting an enemy is the best way to do battle against him.  Get in touch with your nature, and use it to serve Hashem. You are not an animal who eats because the food is there, and it looks good. If you take the laws of kashrut seriously it gives you the means of being truly human, not another animal. You can learn to feel the good “Gaavah d’kedushah” pride in being holy.  Communicate with Hashem. He loves your words and even if the words of the siddur don’t flow from your heart, He loves the person who opened the siddur in an effort to speak to Him on His terms. Every mitzvah you do is eternal. Every time you learn something new, you are validating the entire purpose of the world’s creation.

You are important
Human
Possessed of a soul
That lasts forever.

Love,
Tziporah             

Dear friends,
Today begins the period on the calendar called the three weeks. It’s a time of diminished joy, a time in which you try to deal with the realities of our lives as individuals who are no longer part of a nation that has claimed an indigenous culture, land or language. You are part of the Great World, but not consistently really at home.

Those of you who live in the States are aware of the rise of a new brand of Black anti-Semitism. I saw a clip in which one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement stood in a large public area near a Jewish neighborhood. Pointing at the homes, he asked his adoring audience, “. Who owns these homes?” and the answer was “The Jews” “How did they get them?” “White Privilege”. The fact that the Jewish refugees struggling to keep alive, keep their kids in school, and maybe belong to a synagogue were not a privileged bunch by anyone’s definition when they hit the shores of the US is not relevant when you are selling hatred. Just don’t bother him with facts. Also, if he tells you that as a Jew you don’t belong, you are just a leech trying to suck his blood, don’t ask him where you do belong.  The answer won’t be Israel. From his perspective, Israel deserves vindictive financial and physical consequences for being racists who are addicted to committing daily genocide against our Partners for Peace.

How would you like it to be if you had your “druthers”?

Do you dream of peace (which means acceptance and validation, not just non hostility)? I have really terrible news, and some marvelous news as well.

The bad news is that it’s not going to change until we change. The same way the galus was predicted, the redemption is predicted. The good news is that it will definitely change, and so will we. The kind of rave I saw is typical for galus; the 2000-year exile we are so accustomed to. In fact, it feels unpleasant, but normal. The good news is that it is the same Torah that told us that we can open our hearts, redefine ourselves as a G-dly people and affect the entire world. 

These 21 days are days of re-evaluation of who we are, much as the 21 days between Rosh Hashanah Hashanah Rabbah. You have to first figure out who you aren’t and who you don’t want to be before you can go onto becoming something more.

What don’t we want?

The bloodbath that spelled out the destruction of the Temple. The subsequent expulsions in countries where we lived lives in which we felt we were completely accepted until it became clear that we were never genuinely accepted. We don’t like being forced to move on from country to country until you can find Jews in every country on the planet. We don’t like learning hard lessons, such as the fact that as long as you define yourself as a citizen of the world rather than as yourself, the world will not accept you, nor has it ever done so for very long. 

There has never been world peace (without even considering the way Jews are dealt with) and there is a reason for this. Peace can only occur when there is recognition that each and every piece of the puzzle has a place to be. When you try to homogenize the nations you reap the raw hostility that erupts every year or so because no one wants to be destroyed or repressed or to be left with no identity. 
The function of the Jews as a people is to exemplify what the puzzle can look like through the example we set. In the Maharal’s vocabulary this kind of example is called “tzurah” or structure. The tzurah presented in the Torah is big enough for each nation to be itself (which is why in classical Judaism converting other people is not quite the thing to do; If a person was born a non-Jew, he has a piece of the puzzle that is real and important. Why trade it in for another one with a Jewish star on it? If he/she says, I never really belonged. I need the structure the Torah provides, then he or she is now an official member of the clan (after circumcision for men and immersion in the mikveh for both men and women). 
The Torah is the structure that Hashem gave us to know how to put the pieces together.  “structure”.

​You have 21 days to be less distracted and more focused on one thing.
Are the way things being now the way you want them to be?
Do you like hatred?
How’s about violence?
What about change?

During the 820 years the Bais HaMikdash existed, we had structure. Something of the Bais HaMikdash still remains. Get yourself to the the Kotel (okay, go to Aish and see the Kotel through their 24-hour camera). Let it speak to you. Let it inform you that you are part of something bigger than yourself, and that the structure you want to govern your life is the one that was created by the One who simultaneously re-creates the world over and over giving you chance after chance to bring meaning to your life and to enjoy His world. Just get the rules right.
 
Use the time well!
Love,
Tziporah

Dear friends,

Rosh Chodesh Tammuz is so different than other Roshei Chodashim.  I doubt that you know what Tammuz actually means. Of course it is possible that you have no particular desire to assimilate this particular bit of information, but then again, who am I to say?  I will tell you what it means at the end of the letter. That should keep you reading!

A hint, and some reflections on the nature of language.

The word Tammuz is actually not Hebrew. It is Aramaic, the language that was spoken in Babylon. We never really made a complete linguistic recovery from that period when we headed back to Israel (and the majority stayed put; after 70 years Babylon which had been conquered by Persia). It was a place where we found a niche, far from the horrors of the Roman occupation of Israel, and in a relatively tolerant environment. The language that we had learned to speak on foreign soil was our language. It didn’t take long for this to occur. It was only 70 years earlier that the exile had begun. 
Although Hebrew (or Lashon Kodesh, the Holy Tongue) was never forgotten, it also was never really alive again as the language that you woke up to in the morning and went to sleep with at night. It was the language of prayer, of holy books that were always part of our lives as a much beloved family member. There were always people who chose to speak Lashon Kodesh, but for the majority Aramaic was their native tongue. 

Maharal points out the reason this happened.  Lashon Kodesh no longer expressed us.
Although the language is holy, and the holiness of the Jewish People is real, the bond between what could have been the language that gives expression to this kind of holiness, and the lives we actually live is not always that steady. Lashon Kodesh is the language with which Hashem created the world, it is also unique in this that it has no word that isolates physical intimacy from its spiritual and emotional component. This is both its virtue and its liability.  If a language isn’t a “good fit” for you, you will find yourself adjusting the language to fit, or end up speaking another language. Modern Hebrew is the perfect example of this phenomena. Ben Yehuda, often referred to as the father of modern Hebrew, and he author of its most popular lexicon was a purist. He tried to find Heberw words that fit into contemporary experience. What happened was that even when he though of words that work, modern Israeli’s are comfortable using phrases like Veeken (week end), breksim (brakes) and totalreck. The words take you to the West, a place that many young secular Israeli’s feels at home in even more than in Yerushalaim.

One of the big questions that you may find yourself asking when you think about your Jewish identity, is why we have one.  It’s not land (at present the majority of Jews still don’t live in Israel), nor is it language (hmmmm. There must be a reason that I am writing this letter in English.  You speak it, and in honesty, for the most part, it is also the language of my self-talk. It isn’t culture. The culture of say a Jew living in LA is different enough from the culture of a Jew living in Addis Ababa force you recognize that history and culture aren’t the bond that made us a people. It also isn’t religion. In case you live in a cave and aren’t quite aware of what goes on outside cool doom, many Jews in both LA and Addis are not religious. We are still a single people, and the Jew in LA or Addis is no less Jewish than the one in Yerushalaim. No one knew the answer to what actually makes us a people than Bilaam and Balak, this week’s parsha’s anti-heroes.
What did they know, and why did they care, and what does any of this have to do with you?   

When Balak the king of Moav hired Bilaam to curse the Jews there was more going on there than a HR deal in which someone is hired for a job and collects a small fortune in compensation. Bilaam was a profound mystic, who had a deep grasp of the underlying unity of Hashem’s creative power. For him, this kind of knowledge was egocentric. I was more a search for ego fulfillment than it was a channel for devotion. Hashem opened doors for him that He had never opened for a non-Jew. 

Bilaam’s grasp of reality was so great that he could use his tongue the way an archer uses arrows. He could verbally make accusations that were not unfounded, and demand that justice be done. He was threatened by us. Our existence forced him into a secondary role in the world’s stage. Jew’s   Each of the blessings he was forced to give (as you can see in the Parshah, parshat Balak which is in BaMidbar) was an alternative glance at a piece of reality that could be easy seen as negative but true.

What’s Wrong With Us?

The first Bilaam did was to focus on only one part of the Jewish Nation’s encampment. He didn’t want to see the whole. The picture of Klal Yisrael, the Jews as a united group is so awesomely great that there is no weak spot to attack. Wherever you look for the rise of moral values, sensitivity towards others, add acts of kindness, we are there. When you look for seeing Hashem’s unity so that you recognize that each person comes from one original source, as does every microbe and every galaxy, you will find Jewish people there ceaselessly looking for meaning (sometimes more successfully sometimes less so).  When you look at us as we sometimes are; hopelessly fragmented, embattled against ourselves, unable to find the magic ingredient that unites us, you see us as Bilam did.

He began his blessing by saying, “Who can count Yaakov’s earth”. We do mitzvos without abandoning the physical world. The comparison with the earth also has a deeper side. Maharal’s Earth is the “mother” of everything that grows. So are we. Every meaningful spiritual road starts at Sinai. It is the source of all of the great world religions. They base their principles and teachings on the revelation that Hashem gave to us, giving us the empowerment that we have to touch every seeker. If you were to ask everyone who lives in Yerushalaim, for instance, “Is your life touched by the Jews and the Torah”? The answer would be be that if they are Muslim, Christian or Jewish the answer is yes. Spiritual ambition is engraved on the soul of even the least observant Jew.

The earth also consumes. It reduces even the strongest metals to rust and nothingness. We have faced the greatest civilizations, watch their decline, and outlive the challenges that they presented.
What’s right with us, and what does this have to do with today’s reality?

One of the problems that we face, is that we don’t  know ourselves well enough. We have lost our language as a result of assimilating the way the people who surround us express their version of the search for meaning.  You may not know yourself well enough to find the moral stamina to face the current reality of watching the disintegration of society. We have been down this road before.
It’s time to see yourself through Bilam’s eyes. Recognize that you have the potential to live a life that nurtures and that at the same time confronts everything that is false in the world surrounding you.

WHAT DOES TAMMUZ MEAN?
AHA! I didn’t lie!

Tammuz is the name of the ancient Babylonian sun god. It tells you that you have lived in this kind of distorted culture and survived. You come from people who lived with every sort of depravity and stayed “awake” enough to have Torah flourish the way it does today in Jewish enclaves that are surrounded by today’s version of depravity. The words of Kaddish, probably one of the prayers that have survived exile the best, are in Aramaic!

I don’t know what kind of challenges you face. Ironically, from the parshah, I do know one solution.
Be yourself
Your deepest holiest
Self.
​
Love, 
Tziporah Gottlieb (yes I know that you know who I am, but I love my new name)