podcast #47 Parashat Vayechi

The speaker discusses various topics, including finishing a book, the meaning of Aliyah L'Torah, working with Bar Mitzvah kids, the rising quality of teenagers, the theme of blindness in the Torah, the importance of inner vision, and the limitations of perception. They also touch on the idea of projecting our own thoughts and emotions onto others and the complexity of reality. The speaker shares examples from a famous optical illusion and cosmology to illustrate these points. They end by reflecting on the troubling events of the war and the shared humanity of all people. Shalom Shlomo, Shalom Elisha, Bokir Tov, We're finishing a book, we're finishing a book. With sadness Elisha, it's been an amazing journey through Rashi, and I feel as if I've been reading it for the first time. So many interesting new insights. That's great, may we all say that after each Parashah and after each book, as if we read it for the very first time. We just talked to our Bar Mitzvah kids this week, what is the meaning of Aliyah L'Torah, why is it called Aliyah L'Torah, and they all responded, they all gave really creative answers. I love those creative answers. And then we talked about how, actually one of the kids actually put his finger on it and said like, well it's something to do with Mount Sinai, it must have something to do with Mount Sinai. And yes, indeed, when you have an Aliyah L'Torah, it's as if you yourself are climbing up the mountain, Aliyah, ascending up the mountain, for the very first time to receive the Torah anew, fresh. And from that we can explain to them why it's such a powerful idea, Aliyah L'Torah is like no other Jewish custom, it's a great privilege to climb Mount Sinai, hear God's words, freshly. Wow. So Alisha, I think you're very fortunate, you get to work with these amazing young people, and that must be a real source of comfort and strength. It is, it is absolutely, and if you're already saying that, I want to also add that we're noticing, Aviv and I are noticing, that the quality of these teenagers is rising continuously. We keep on talking about how the young generation, what do they know, and they are all like stuck with their phones, and they may be stuck with their phones, they are, in fact, but they are bright, they're brilliant, they are sensitive, which is really interesting. Something really good is happening to our teenagers. So I wonder, Alisha, I'm sure you're accurate in what you say, but also part of it may be that you yourself are changing as you work with them. Interesting. Thank you for that compliment, and I'll take it, I'll take the compliment. So your drashah that we've chosen this week is for Parshat Vayechi, the last of the Parshat in Genesis, in Breitscheidt, and the title of your drashah is Human Blindness, About Us Not Seeing, and you have several themes. One theme is deception, telling lies. A second theme is sibling rivalry, powerful sibling rivalry, all through the book, right from the beginning, from Adam and Gain, and blindness, of course, the fact that we don't see, and these three things are all connected. So we're going to discuss how deception, blindness, and sibling rivalry are all kind of wrapped together. And you quote Breitscheidt, Parshat Vayechi, Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see, and you note that he was blind in more ways than one. So we're talking about Yaakov or Yitzchak, Isaac or Jacob, both were blind. So Yaakov hears, okay, Isaac, and both end up being pretty blind. Yeah, we're talking about the blessings that Yaakov gives, and you mentioned that Yaakov was sort of blind in more ways than one, and this reminds me. So I'm myopic, Elisha, I've been wearing glasses since I was a kid, and I have a wonderful optometrist, I also have double vision, and he manages to correct my myopia, and he corrects the double vision with these amazing glasses, and it's a great blessing, and so I see physically well, but vision is not only about seeing physically, it's about perceiving what we really see, and it's not just about what we look at, it's also about seeing who we are and looking inward as a person. And I was thinking how strange the world is, Elisha, abroad, when young Jewish kids don't go to the army, they go off to college when they're 17 or 18. We just met with a wonderful young man who's going off to college to study aeronautical engineering in Boulder, Colorado, and at 18, you have to make a big decision, okay, what am I going to be? What am I going to do? And we don't know anything about ourselves, we haven't discovered ourselves. I discovered myself when I came to Israel, and I got my call-up notice for reserves before I got my little blue book, Giving Citizenship, and out there in the field with a bunch of people, I discovered who I am in the army. Patty Chayefsky, a Jewish playwright, once said, nobody should go to college before they're 35, because we don't make the right decisions. And I was thinking about these wonderful glasses that I have, what if every one of us could go to a spiritual optometrist, Elisha, and get these glasses and really be able to see other people, and then to see ourselves, who we are. I think the world would be very different, as you note in your drashah. Yes, yes, and as you said that, I was wondering to myself, what would that look like, what would that session look like, if you went to a spiritual counselor to work on your inner vision, what would that conversation really look like? And I'm kind of, you know, the one thing I can just imagine is leaving the session, ending the session, just with the knowledge that we're not really truly seeing straight, that we're seeing what we want to see, that we're seeing everything very subjectively. And it's like, kind of, tell me what you're seeing, and I'll tell you what your consciousness is like, other than tell me what you're seeing, and I'll tell you what's out there in the world. We don't really know what's out there in the world. So, if we could only just not take our vision too seriously, I saw it with my own two eyes, so what? So you saw it, and now you're actually telling me what's burning inside of you. Exactly. So Alisha, let's do a little experiment here. Even though this is audio rather than video, I have a little picture here, and I want to show it to you and ask you, Arav, Alisha, tell me what you see. Right, yes, I'm familiar with this amazing picture, and right now what I'm seeing is I'm seeing this beautiful young woman with this thing coming out of her hair. I'm seeing a beautiful young woman. Okay. Do you see anything else? Only because I know the picture, because I've seen the picture before, I really have to remind myself, wait, wait, wait, Alisha, you know that there is something else hiding here. Do this trick with your eyes, and boom, I can suddenly see it. I can suddenly see it. But I'll tell you something interesting, maybe because I've gotten older, this older woman in the picture, I can see her beauty now, too. I don't think I could see it when I saw this picture when I was a younger man. I'm not so sure I could see that she, too, is a very beautiful woman. Yes, good for you, good for you, Alisha, yes. So this is a famous diagram. Maybe we'll include this with our announcement for the podcast so our listeners can see it as well. It is at the same time a beautiful woman and an older woman, and our brain chooses what it sees, and this is reality because our brain selects for us things that we choose to see, and sometimes the brain purposely neglects things that are important. So reality is complex, and we don't always see other things clearly, let alone ourselves. Maybe we should give the listeners the context for this conversation that Yaakov is blessing his children before he dies, and he's kind of telling them, let me tell you what the future holds for you, and according to the sages, God withdraws his visionary powers, and he just basically blurts out what he can see in his own heart, and there's a lot of accounting going on here, but what his sons have done has very little to do with the future, and he's really projecting, he's projecting his own anger, disappointments, love on his children. Exactly, and I think in looking at this picture, I think we project our own thinking as well. Most people see the beautiful woman, and it takes some effort to explain that there's another visual figure, an older woman, and it's exactly the same drawing. I have an example, Alicia, from cosmology, of all places, about vision, and about how we need to be very modest about what we're seeing, because we really are not seeing everything. So Alicia, on a starry night, go outside and look at the stars, and it looks like a scattering of stars everywhere. We see the beautiful stars in the heaven, and it looks like the heaven is covered with these stars, especially if we're in the desert. I did reserve duty in the desert, and the evenings were just amazing, because there were no lights around. You could see the stars, and astronomers believe that the stars are evenly distributed, and they should be, because the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang. When there's an explosion, everything is scattered, but they're scattered equally. So the stars should be everywhere, and it's not the case, Alicia. So with telescopes and surveys, we found that there are huge, huge gaps in the cosmos. It's like Swiss cheese. There are 400 million light years where there's nothing, no stars, nothing. Why is that? How come? We don't know. We're seeing things differently today than we once saw as we learn more, and also as we learn about ourselves. Let me bring us back to earth into our own situation a bit, Alicia, and ask you a really hard question, and this is troubling me a lot. So this is the 80th day of our war. The Drashan that I quoted you wrote in 2020, so it was in the first few months of COVID, which were very challenging for you as a rabbi and for our congregation. And then October 7th, 80 days ago, and we had a terrible massacre. And let me quote a song, just a few bars from a song by Shalom Hanoch. Shalom Hanoch is a leftist singer, pop singer, rock singer, and here is what he wrote in his song. A man is strange. Our enemy is just like us. Suddenly he wants to be just like us. Suddenly he gets up and we stand facing our enemies, and he too wants to live. You know that he's a person like us, exactly like us. Doesn't rush to commit suicide like us. It's not amazing that he's fighting because he's afraid too. He's just like us. The title is, Our Enemies Are Just Like Us. And Alicia, I kind of had this humanistic streak in me, and so do many people in Israel. We're Jews. And I don't think we can believe that anymore. And it's very, very difficult. What about you, Alicia, personally? Are our enemies like us? You have no idea how pertinent this conversation is right now. I just had this WhatsApp exchange with a colleague, a Reform female rabbi that we've known one another for many, many years. We're friends. We're colleagues. We've worked together. And since October 7th, we've had this ongoing dialogue. And basically what Shalom Hanukh writes here, and I love Shalom Hanukh dearly, it's basically essentially what she says too. I wrote out to a group of rabbis a question, I was preparing a class on evil, on human evil. And people send me all kinds of things, and that's what we do with one another. We send great texts to one another, which is great. And she wrote back and said, just remember that the same kind of evil is inside of all of us. And I think this was on probably the 10th or 11th of October, this remark, and I was not prepared for that remark at all. We had just begun to read about the atrocities. Since then we've learned a lot more how awful it truly was. Then it just seemed awful. Now we know it was even worse. And I wrote back to her privately, I said, you know, that is the worst response you could have sent me. So what am I supposed to do with that notion right now? Okay, so there's evil in me as well. Okay, great. So now what? Now I'm supposed to say, oh, okay, the 7th of October, well, you know, we all have evil in us. C'est la vie. What am I supposed to do with that? We went back and forth, and then we decided it's better if we stopped our communication for a while. And a few, about a week ago, she sent me an article from Haaretz, I forwarded it to you. She sent me an article from Haaretz talking about how every human being, part of being human is having an evil, having a shadow, having an evil side to every single human being. And I agree with that. I agree. But then the article also went on to say that the difference between civilizations is that there's a thin cultural layer that allows us to take this shadow of ours and project it on others and do evil to others, or if our cultural norms are such that we know that we simply are not allowed to let this evil out, or we process it, or we do whatever we want to do with it. So we're back to where I said, bingo, I said, I absolutely agree. We all have a shadow. We all have evil inside of us. But yes, there are cultures where evil is allowed to reign, and there are cultures where evil is shunned. And we have a case here where we're fighting a civilization where part of the culture is that terrorism is legitimate, that raping is legitimate, that beheading children is legitimate, and even part of a holy war. So yes, indeed, I absolutely agree. So we all have evil inside of us, but if our culture doesn't help us deal with our own shadow and evil, then what are we supposed to do? So a few days passed, and she sent me another response. It was actually this morning, saying the son of a peace activist, she was murdered, a very famous peace activist in Israel. She was murdered on the 7th of October. She lived down south. And her son, I think probably in the unveiling, the unveiling in Israel was on the 30th day, a few months later, also said, he said, you know, we all have within us two, he quoted an Indian proverb, suggesting we all have evil inside of us. We all have these two wolves inside of us. We know this parable. We know this metaphor. And the question is, which wolf do we choose to feed and nourish? I said to her, I love this proverb, this saying, and I agree 100%. So let's add up the two things that you just sent to me, a culture that feeds the evil and allows you to feel the evil wolf inside of them is a culture that's very, very, very dangerous. And she wrote back and said, you are a bigot. How can you, you know, it's like this is all in Hebrew, so I'm translating this in my mind. This is cultural supremacy, supremacy, that you're better than they are. And I got very, very angry, very angry. And I just had a conversation a few hours ago this morning with someone and reminded that person that when you're really angry, it's not a good time to send a response. And I started writing a response. And the whole time I said to myself, I'm going to write it, but I'm not going to send it to her. So it gave me the liberty to write what I wanted to write. And then I simply erased it in order not to send it. But as I was reading the Rasha that you brought in this morning, I was still thinking about that. Am I blind here to something? Is she blind? Am I blind? Are we all blind? Because what I can feel right now, what I'm aware of right now is that this is a just war. And it's a tragic war. She said, listen, 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza and a third are innocent people. So first of all, I thought it was more. I was relieved to hear it's a third and not more than that, given the heavy bombardment. And what I wrote back to her and didn't send it was that, yes, indeed, this was not a war that we started. This was not, we did not want these casualties. We were not the ones who kidnapped children and elderly. We were not the ones who raped women and beheaded children. We still have our beloved civilians kidnapped in Gaza, in the deep, deep tunnels of Gaza. So what exactly were we supposed to do? We were not the ones who were using human shields, civilian populations, human shields, putting them in danger of Israeli bombardment. So I have to say, I'm at a loss here. I really am at a loss here. And the one thing I can say spiritually is that I give myself a permission to feel at loss, to feel, what do we do? We do not like killing people. Our culture doesn't believe in killing innocent people. And yet we find ourselves having to go out to a war. And war has casualties. So am I a bigot? Am I a cultural supremacist? Is that truly who I am? So I'm very busy right now in my own mind, kind of thinking about blindness, seeing clearly. What I do know is when I'm very kind of angry and as I am right now, emotionally, not, you know, then I'm clearly not seeing clearly. I'm not seeing clearly and my emotions are in turmoil and therefore I know not to trust my own thinking and my own vision. Yes. So the technique that you used in sort of self-censoring your email, it's one of the best things I've learned in life and it took me too long, is not to say things that you think immediately. Listen to what you're going to say in your head and then think to yourself if you really want to say that. And I got into such trouble by shooting my mouth off, Alicia, you can't imagine. You're right. I can't imagine. I don't know that part of you at all. But I do want to say, I would recommend to people, don't even think about it too much because your thinking right now is not straight. So you're still thinking with your enraged thinking. Therefore let it go. You don't have to erase it. Just put it away for a day or two. And if two days later it's still relevant, maybe send it. We Israelis, Alicia, we are 9 million and Jews all over the world. We are 16 million Jews. We are going through this process of really rethinking and re-rethinking about our core values in the light of this terrible tragedy. And it's going to take some time. And I think some people may be evading it. We have to face it. What does all this mean to us as Jewish people? And it's not traumatic. There's something called traumatic growth. We've discussed this. And rethinking these values is part of, not post-trauma, but part of traumatic growth in becoming better people. Going back to the parashah and to the drashah, there's a wonderful sermon by Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, When Can We Lie? That's the title. When Can We Lie? What? We are allowed to lie? Alicia, the parashah, the whole book of Genesis is full of deceit, is full of lying. Yehudah lies to Yosef when he meets him. Our father told us to come to you and et cetera, et cetera. He never did. He didn't say that. God asks Cain, where's your brother? He lies. I don't know. He's not my brother's keeper. Full of lies and deception. And we live in an age of lies because people write anything they feel like on internet and in social media, and it's passed on, it's shared instantly to many, many, many people. So when God, in fact, Rabbi Sachs points out, even God does a little deception here in terms of talking about Sarah and Avraham and they can't have kids. And God attributes it in part to Avraham being old as well. But later that isn't mentioned in order not to embarrass him. There's a huge amount of deception going on in the Parshah and in the Torah. And the question is, is there such a thing as a white lie? And are we ever allowed not to tell the truth? And it's part of what we see because we partially deceive ourselves, not just other people, in what we choose to see, what our brain chooses to see. So when is it okay to lie? Yes. When is it okay to lie? Now I obviously don't have the answer. I certainly don't, but, not even a but, I'm just thinking about it out loud as you're asking that question. We've decided, you and I, without actually making that decision consciously, that we are following the example of Avraham. Avraham, he was commanded to be a blessing. So I would suggest that maybe we should use that litmus test here too. If saying the truth is going to bring a blessing, then wonderful. If saying the truth is going to bring just more pain, then better be silent. If saying a white lie is going to actually bring a blessing to everyone involved, then maybe it is wise to consider it. But I want to try and tackle it from another perspective too. Thinking that we know what the truth is, is also problematic. Do we necessarily know what the truth is? We think we know what the truth is. We think we know the path that we need to follow. And as I said earlier about vision, it's what we are able to see right now. And I think it's a really important point to stress. Every human being acts according to what they are able to see in the moment. A minute later, we may see it differently. A year earlier, we may have seen it differently, etc. So recognizing that we see the world according to what we are able to see right now, that's our relative truth. So if that's the case, in a way, nothing is quite the truth. So going back to the other answer, therefore, all that's left is, what's going to bring a blessing? But not just a blessing to myself, a blessing to myself and to the others involved. And sometimes the best thing is not to say anything, just to shut up. And sometimes the worst thing is not to say anything and shut up. And sometimes we just can't get it right. That's for sure. He who has been married for 50 years knows that very well. So our sages, Elisha, they knew this and they taught it. There's this principle in Chazal, in our sages, in four words. These are four words that capture it, I think, well. Mutar l'shanot mipnei ha'shalom. You're allowed to alter what you say in order to keep peace. And that is in line with what you say about a blessing. And the example I give, I guess, is, what do you say to a bride? And she's kind of not good looking, right? And do you say that she's beautiful? And the answer is absolutely, of course. You say to all brides, they are beautiful. And Elisha, there's a contradictory opinion. But before you go to contradictory, I just want to, for the sake of the listeners, it's a very important point that you just made now, just to give the context. It's a very famous argument between the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel about lying. And the question is, there's a mitzvah that when you go to a wedding, you need to make the bride happy and tell her how beautiful she looks. But what if she doesn't? What if she doesn't look beautiful? So the house of Shammai says, you have to say the truth if she's not beautiful. I mean, you may not say anything if you want, but if she asks you, what do I look like? You don't have to say, oh, you're so ugly. No, you don't. But yeah, whatever, find a way to respond to that, but which doesn't tell her that she's beautiful. Hillel says, always say that she's beautiful. And there's a resolution to that, in my opinion. I think Hillel is not saying you need to lie. Hillel is suggesting if you are unable to see her beauty, you have a problem. And she, a bride is beautiful, period. Now, the fact that you can't see it, that's where we have the problem. Excellent. In other words, sharpen your vision, put on your special glasses. So Alicia, on the other side of the fence, we have a member of our community, Dr. Kim Trager-Barham. She's just written a wonderful book. I've been reading it on Kindle. It's called The Ethics of Truth. And she begins by saying, truth is in trouble. Truth is in trouble, Alicia, because people make stuff up and it can spread. It used to be that you could tell gossip to someone, but it would go to two to three people. You can reach a million people today on the internet, so truth is in trouble. And she even notes that it's not that new. The Oxford English Dictionary chooses the word of the year every year. And seven years ago, in 2016, the word of the year was post-truth. We live in the age of post-truth. There is no truth anymore. Anything goes. You can say anything. And Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, said that truth is to say of what is, that it is. And what is not, that it is not. That's truth. There is objective reality. And she goes on to note this, and I want to ask you about this. Jewish tradition carves a central place for stories in the moral tradition. Stories are powerful. All the wonderful stories of Breschit. Storytelling is the great vehicle of moral education. That's how we learn. That's how we teach. It's fundamental to the ethics of such a society. True. Yet, I hold, this is Dr. Trager, that personal narratives are not to be labeled truth, apart from the elements of them which are based on fact. Fact is fact, and stories are story. What about this, Elisha, the philosophical point of view that there is objective truth and it's very, very important, and it's part of our ethics to value highly truth and to preserve it? Okay. Okay. So, I think, you know, a great Jewish answer is, on the one hand, and on the other hand. So, on the one hand, I think we need to live our lives based on what Kim, for us she's Kim, what Kim is saying, is writing in her book, that we need to, you know, respect facts and then be able to decipher between facts and opinions, for example. On the other hand, philosophically, there's a big, big question. Is there an objective reality outside of ourselves? We don't even know that. That hasn't even been proven. As far as we know, there is. Back to this Bar Mitzvah group, there's one kid who's colorblind, and since the way we teach the trope is every set of tropes have a different color, it's a great, great system. Now, he's colorblind, and I asked him, how do you know you're colorblind? What you see as red, we may see as green, but you call it red, and we call it green. But nevertheless, when we're looking at the same thing, you heard your mom say, oh, take your red bag, so you took your green bag, because you call it red. You saw red. Now, it's a bit more complicated than that, I know, but essentially, we got in this little mini-conversation with the Bar Mitzvah group as to what do we see out there? What is the objective truth? And there are indeed schools of thought in which we claim that there's no objective truth out there whatsoever. There's no others that I personally follow, is that we don't really know what's out there. We make assumptions about what's out there. As far as I can tell, I'm looking at you, and as far as I'm going to, that's going back to the on the one hand. So on the one hand, I'm going to live my life as if it's really you, Shlomo. I'm not making you up. You're truly sitting there. On the other hand, there's a part of me that recognizes that it's one of the biggest mysteries in the world, and we're all about this parasha, and the parasha is all about vision and deception. But I think we do need to, A, strive for the truth. Perhaps the truth can be more of a compass than an actual fact, and we're striving to figure out the truth. One of the ways that I love to use body sensation to gauge the truth, not feelings, not feelings, not certainly not thoughts. I don't trust my thoughts at all, and I don't trust my feelings either. I do trust my body sensations. Something about the body being very physical, my biggest breakthroughs in the world is when I'm able to kind of sink down from the thoughts, further down from the feelings to the actual body sensations. They really have a sense of what's going on out there, what's going on out in the world. And sometimes, I think we all know that we can hear something, we can hear someone talking, and they're making a lot of sense. And yes, that's right, that sounds like truth, but our body is screaming, no, no, no, no, no, this is really uncomfortable what this person is saying. So I would like to argue that truth remains a mystery. I agree, Dalisha. And just to add one thing, I think the area where we most encounter deception is how we perceive ourselves. And the very important part of truth is truthfulness about who we are, because we are we, and we have direct insight into who we are. And we should be able to see ourselves as we are, and often we really don't. I find that so important, looking inward, and we learn that a lot from reading the Torah. Yes, absolutely, that's a really good point. And so we do have to end, I just think we need to leave our listeners with some kind of an anchor with all of this, so that nothing is true, nothing, even though our listeners are now waiting for us for their anchors in life, I realize that. But nevertheless, I would suggest that perhaps just knowing, having this knowledge in the back of our mind that what we're seeing is not necessarily the ultimate truth, just having that knowledge there brings about a lot of humility, and humility is a great place to live our lives from. Respect the truth, but always allow that little shadow of doubt, because so many things that we believed in science once proved to be untrue. Believe and respect the probability that you may not actually know it. Yes, yes, beautiful, so Shlomo, thank you very much, and we're going to meet up again in the book of Exodus in Shemot, so chazak, chazak, v'nitchazek. Chazak, chazak, v'nitchazek, thanks Elisha. Bye everyone. Bye.