podcast # 13 Emor

Shalom everyone! Professor Shlomo Eital and Alisha Wilson discuss Parashat Emor. They talk about the themes of the Kohanim and the annual cycle. They also discuss the idea of the soul and the afterlife, as well as the importance of belief and faith. They touch on the significance of counting the Omer as a journey from freedom to morality. They also mention the connections to Judaism of Rabbi Harold Kushner and Harry Belafonte. Overall, they emphasize the power of stories and the importance of finding meaning in our lives. Shalom everyone, it's the two of us here again, Professor Shlomo Eital and myself, Alisha Wilson, from Kilat Vahavta here in Zichron Yaakov with Parashat Emor. So Shalom Shlomo, Shalom Alesha. So what have you prepared for us today? You always bring, before we even start I just want to say that I'm really inspired. I'm inspired by the way you take a theme, you take a topic and you explore it from all kinds of angles and sometimes surprising angles and then, people can't see it, I can see it, you lay it all out here and you're able to, in Hebrew we say vishlof, to kind of grab whatever you need at just the right moment. I'm just impressed. Well, Alisha, there's a saying, it takes two to tango, and your goshot are inspiring. They light the spark, it's literally like they throw off sparks, and I look things up and join the dots, connect the dots, as you often like to say, and it's a great inspiration. I look forward to this every week. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So Parashat Emor, there are two main themes. One theme is the Kohanim, who they're allowed to marry and not, and which funeral they can attend, and which is not an effective theme, is the annual cycle, the Yoch Shema, but I think we're talking about a whole other idea. We are indeed, and it's amazing to me, we're largely through Vayikra, which to me, originally when we started, I felt was like a minefield, and it turns out to be a beautiful garden. That's right, thanks to you, and you have a creative insight about Parashat Emor, and you link the titles of three parashat, Acharimot, Kedoshim, Emor, and make that into a phrase, After the Death of the Holy Speak, and you relate that to our memory of loved ones and create a beautiful message in it, which led me to think about my father, who passed away 28 years ago, and to think also about the two giants that we lost last week, Rabbi Harold Kushner from the Boston area, spent many summers teaching at MIT, and Harry Belafonte, a Jamaican mother and a Martinique father, but who had many Jewish connections, a black man with a love of Judaism and a lot of Jewish connections, and maybe I'll mention some of them a bit later. But let me ask you... Before you ask, I just want to make one comment. The connection between these three parashat, Acharimot, Kedoshim, Emor, and After someone passes, holy shall you say about them, and it's not my original connection, it's a pretty well known idiom, the three connections here. So just so people who are listening know that it's... Okay. That idea is not originally mine. So Sharon, my wife, does spiritual counseling, and I get to read some of her material. In one of her books, I found something interesting. In your dressah, you mentioned that when you were younger, you found the praise for the departed, Acharimot, Kedoshim, Emor, praise the dead, only praise the dead, there's a saying, and you found it a little bit irritating, or maybe somewhat hypocritical. But afterwards, you realize this actually has logic to it, and I want to ask you something I found in one of Sharon's books about spiritual counseling. It's a book of exercises. One of the exercises, Elisha, let's try it. It's you, as someone in their 50s, and me, I'm 80, looking back to your younger persona, when you were just finishing course at Sinim, officer's training, I'd say. What would you say, as Elisha today, to the younger Elisha, looking back? Hmm, hmm, what would I say, what kind of advice would I give him, or? What would you tell him? What would I tell him? Yes. I actually love this exercise, and I actually even do it sometimes. What would I tell him? First of all, I would actually really praise him for completing officer's training course. This is one example. It wasn't an easy path and journey for me. Really praise him for accomplishing this great accomplishment, and also mostly tell him that everything will be okay. Everything will be okay. Well, things have a miraculous way of working out, even when they don't seem to be working out. They do. I would say the following. I would say, I don't know if that's what you're after, but I would tell him, listen, life has your back. Trust life. Life has your back. That's really beautiful. I like that a lot. In the Rasha that you write, you speak about, basically about the soul, what happens to people after they die, and we're actually doing a whole course on the afterlife, which I had great doubts about, which turns out to be absolutely fascinating, and it's quite amazing when you think about it. The soul has become the centerpiece of the American presidential election, and you have President Biden, who's running for re-election in his 80s, he's going to be 86 when he finishes, if he finishes his second term, says the election is about fighting for the soul of America. And even David Brooks, who's a political commentator, a hard-nosed political commentator, a hard-nosed political commentator in the New York Times, actually writes about the soul. He says, the soul is the name we give to that part of our consciousness where moral life takes place. The soul is the place our moral sentiments flow from, the emotions that make us feel admiration at the sight of generosity and disgust at the sight of cruelty. So even hard-nosed political commentators recognize that there is a soul, and I think of the soul of my father. I left home when I was just 17, barely, went off to college, went to Princeton, married Savannah, and we made Aliyah, and after 17, I had very little time with my father, just brief visits. And yet, 28 years after his death, I think of him every day, and his soul is alive, very much, because his focus of his life was taking care of his family, his brothers and sisters, and he actually saved them by bringing them over from Europe. And I think about that all the time, that he did it very quietly and never spoke about it, but just got up in the morning and did it. And I find myself emulating that, and his soul is very much alive. That is beautiful. That's really beautiful. That's really beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, that's a beautiful question. What is a soul? And the soul of a person, you're kind of capturing, and you're right, it echoes this you're right, it's like capturing the essence of that person, and the essence is always beautiful. The essence, I don't know, I've never tried, but I don't know if there's a bad essence. Now, obviously, we could easily, you know, talk about Hitler, etc., but we didn't really know Hitler, so we better not deal with a person we didn't know personally, and thank God we didn't know him personally. But the soul of the person, that good essence about them, there's a very interesting argument between Descartes and Spinoza. While Descartes believes in separation, like most Western thinkers, since Greek philosophy spread throughout the world, the separation between body and spirit, and Spinoza is one of the few who doesn't believe in that separation. We're discussing that in our course as well. And Descartes would actually say that yes, that's the soul, what you just described now, that it emanates the body, it gives the body its qualities, and the body is just a physical matter, that if the person is virtuous, then the soul really takes precedence over the body, and not vice versa. And not the body kind of putting down the soul and overriding the soul. Spinoza has a bit of a different take, which I have to say I'm kind of drawn to, that there's no real separation between the two, kind of suggesting that the soul is like your father, what you described about your father, it's not just a part of him, a legacy that he left behind. It's not just, oh, the goodness within him. It's really your father, he himself, who he was, was doing God's work in this world through his own family, through bringing up his own family and wrestling them and bringing them from Europe to Saskatchewan. And in this sense, who we were, the essence of who we are is a unique, for Spinoza, everything has a unique essence, and no two things have the same essence. Your father's essence was absolutely unique to him, there never was and there never will be that essence ever, ever again. And in a way, if we kind of take Spinoza in a way that I may not agree with that, but your father's essence cannot possibly die, but it is indeed still present. So there was just like a few associations that came up from what you said. And you know, there's some tragedy involved as well, because when someone is taken from us prematurely, at too early an age, there's an echo effect that can be very destructive. We never really get to capture their soul. Remarkably, the outside of my wife's grandmother, Sadie, Sasha, Sadie Grieben, she passed away 1934, a long time ago, she was struck by a car on a New York street, even in those days. And she was a very young woman. And my father-in-law, Sharona's father, Mordecai, was a young boy. And he actually, I understand that he witnessed the terrible scene. He was there. I believe he was there. And he had a stepmother. In short, the echo effect lasted for a century. It was devastating for him, losing his mother. And sometimes this has negative, negative effects. The soul doesn't get a chance to really embed itself in us. And we think about what might have been, rather than what really was. That's an interesting perspective, Shlomo. It's very interesting what you're saying, that when someone dies prematurely, I'm not so sure I like that. I fully identify with that term, because I do believe that we don't know what is premature and what isn't. But you're right in the sense that it takes time. It takes a whole life for the soul to really do its work in the world and leave its imprint. And when someone dies prematurely, then that soul was in the middle of it, in the midst of its imprint, in the middle of its work here. Bialik has a beautiful song, a beautiful poem. There's a person here, and look, he's no longer here. If I remember correctly, because I'm quoting from memory, Terem Zmano Meta'isha, who died prematurely, and his tune, his life tune, has not yet been complete. So when the life tune has not yet been complete, we carry, how did you call it? The echo, what beautiful word did you use? The echo effect over the generations. The echo effect, right. So the tune, we feel like we need to complete that tune. The tune is missing some notes there. We have to, what are the notes? What are the notes? It's like it's a nagging feeling. Yes, and I mentioned that we lost these two giants, including Rabbi Kushner, and this is relevant for missing the tune. So Harold Kushner was a conservative rabbi. He died in Canton, which is close to Boston. He was a rabbi in Egypt for many years, and wrote a wonderful book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and he wrote the book, as you know, after the death of his young son, who died at 14. He had an awful disease called progenica, a genetic disease which is premature aging, and this little boy from the age of three became an old man and died when he was 14. And this raises questions. What in the world did this little boy do to deserve that fate, leading Rabbi Kushner to sit down and think about it as a rabbi? And he wrote this wonderful book, and he has a powerful answer that I can summarize briefly. Rabbi Kushner says, when bad things happen to good people, there are two possibilities. Number one, God is all-powerful, but he's really not very kind, because he lets these awful things happen. Alternative two, God is not all-powerful. He chooses not to be all-powerful. He is loving and kind, but he chooses to give us freedom to make moral choices as human beings. And this is the answer that he prefers, and it's the theme of his book. That we have choices, and sometimes we mess up, and sometimes we do well, and God is indeed loving and kind, but we have freedom. And freedom is relevant because we are counting the Omer, and we're in the middle of counting the Omer, as you know, day 25 today, right in the very middle, and I found some wonderful material about counting the Omer, which I can share a little later. Yeah, I'd love to hear it. I have to say, for me, the jury is still out on this issue of these two options that Rabbi Kushner of Yisrael Oy V'Chaar kind of brings forth. When we say God is all-loving and compassionate, we're projecting our belief in what loving and compassionate is on God. And there's a bunch of, there's some missing information here. First of all, we really don't know what happens after we die. We have speculations, some people believe this, some people believe that, but ultimately we don't know, and there's a lot of, today there's a huge amount of evidence of people who've been through near-death experiences. Today the people are resuscitated, thanks to modern medicine. These accounts are plenty, and I've been really curious about these accounts, and I've read quite a lot of material about it, and we're very scared of death. We see death as something really bad and evil, and I'm not convinced. And it's certainly tragic for the people left behind, for Mordecai, your wife Shoshana's father, when he was orphaned from his mother at a very young age, that's tragic. That's tragic. For him, the death of his mother is a horrible, bad, and evil thing. And yet, if we move away from the personal, we don't know where she went to. She may have gone to this beautiful place, she may have reincarnated, she may have reincarnated as Shoshana, who knows? Who knows? We just don't know. I don't want to make any speculations, but we just don't know. And our fear of death is something we have to always remember. That we're petrified of death because we're petrified of the unknown, because we don't know what's going to happen after. And it doesn't change the fact that Shoshana's grandmother's tune was cut somehow. But it doesn't say, I really don't believe it says anything about God, whether God is loving, benevolent, etc. So, I think you're right to leave these open questions that we grapple with every day. But this brings me to a related subject, which is Harry Belafonte, who passed away on the 27th of April. And he was 96, he had a wonderful life. Black man from a Jamaican mother. And there is a connection here with Judaism. It's a rather strange one. I'll quickly explain it. He had many connections with Judaism. I'm writing a magazine column about it. One of the strange connections was Harry Belafonte, as a movie actor, played an angel of God sent to comfort a man named Manischewitz, who was a tailor. And the movie is called The Angel Levine, and it's based on a story by a wonderful Jewish writer, Bernard Malamud. Bernard Malamud, an American Jewish writer, wrote a lot about Jewish themes. And the theme of this amazing story, made into a movie, was that God sends the angel Levine to Manischewitz, who is really struggling. His business is burned down, and his wife is ill, and he's not feeling well. And he's had it with God. And he says to God, my dear God, my soul, sweetheart, did I deserve this to happen to me? Bad things happen to good people. And God sends the angel Levine. But the angel Levine is a black man. And the black man speaks with the black patois, with the black slang in English. And that's Harry Belafonte, which Manischewitz is taken aback by. And the exercise is that he has to believe that this black man is an angel, or the angel can't help him. And the angel can't get his wings. He's sent by God to help Manischewitz, but Manischewitz has to believe. You don't believe. I can't get my wings. I can't be an angel. It's a wonderful movie and a wonderful story. But I guess one point is that belief is crucial here. And we make stories up for ourselves. And it really doesn't matter if they're true or not. And many of the stories can't be verified. But they're comforting to people. It's very comforting to believe in an afterlife, in the soul, in the perpetual soul. These are all comforting stories. And even though I've spent my whole life as a kind of scientist in a science university, I think there's wonder to stories that cannot be verified. Even though scientists say, if you say something that can't be verified, it has no meaning. But that's absolutely false. These stories have great comfort in our lives. And Manischewitz comes to believe in Harry Belafonte that he is an angel. Yeah, yes, yes. And I will watch the movie. He also sent to me and suggested that we watch it. And that's raising something very deep and interesting. This point there where only if Manischewitz is going to believe, will the angel get his wings and appear as an angel. So it requires us to believe in order to get the answers that we so badly want to receive. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that. The idea of faith. Faith opens doors. Not just opens doors to what could happen if only you believe that he is truly an angel, he will get wings and you will be redeemed because he will help you overcome your issues. But it's more than that. Having faith opens up possibilities. That when we don't have faith, these possibilities are simply out of our radar screen. And being open to all these possibilities indeed requires a tremendous amount of faith. I can just imagine the Wright brothers. They must have had faith that a material object, given enough velocity and the right structure, will fly. Even though I'm sure people thought they were crazy. But they had to have the faith that this thing could fly. And hence the airplane. So that's a beautiful story. Belief is crucial and it's even scientific. Because part of the scientific method is to make an assumption, to believe, and then to look for evidence to disprove it. But even science begins with a leap of faith, Elisha. Regarding a leap of faith, I want to talk about the Omer. Because for 80 years I paid no attention to Spirata Omer, counting the Omer, and found no meaning in it. And now this year, thanks to you, thanks to Sorona, thanks to Rabbi Sachs, I found deep meaning in counting the Omer. Which you do every day. And actually, Sorona and I also are now counting the Omer every day. And this is the 25th day. And Rabbi Sachs explains the beautiful meaning of the Omer in his own inimicable way. The Omer is a journey. We begin with Pesach, which is liberation from slavery. Freedom from. And for 49 days we engage in a journey toward a different freedom. From Hofesh, freedom from, to Herut, freedom to. Freedom to accept the Torah and become a good moral person and do good things. And Spirata Omer tells us every day this is a journey. Do not take it for granted. We are still in slavery. We are enslaved to many things, material things and so on. Remember this journey of historical time from Hofesh to Herut. And we have to do this all the time. All the time. Yeah, that's very, very beautiful. Yeah, the idea of counting as a form of noticing, A, that you're on a journey. Noticing where you're coming from and where you're heading. It's like a compass again. It's like the from and to. It's a beautiful, beautiful idea. And the word Spirata Omer to, Spirata, counting in Hebrew. The word Lispo has a lot of interesting connotations. It's also from the word Sipur. Sipur, the story we tell ourselves. So as we're counting, we're kind of creating a story. We're telling ourselves a story, which is crucial to our journey. Without a story that we tell ourselves, where are we heading? Where are we going? Why are we here? What are we doing? We're telling ourselves a story. Some of the stories are empowering. Some of the stories are not empowering. Some of the stories are wonderful. Some of them are universal. Some of them are more unique. But counting is our ability to weave the days into a story. And I think that's part of freedom as well. Freedom and liberation is when we're free to tell, retell our story. And if our story is not a good story, I think we've discussed that before. If the story that we're telling ourselves is not a good story, it's not an enhancing story, then change the story. And count differently. Exactly. And that goes to James as well. We're accountable to our story that we tell ourselves. That's a well-known form of a very powerful therapy to heal people. To have them simply reframe and retell their story in a way that is less harmful and less damaging. But I have a question, Elisha. Very religious men grow beards during Svirata Omer because terrible things happen to the Jewish people during this time. What is the message here? Why is it that during the Omer period, the march to freedom, which should be a joyful time, so many awful things happen to it? Is it about the difficulty of the journey toward becoming truly free? What is the story here? Well, first of all, there's a lot of great mystery shrouds this whole thing of Svirata Omer. Not the Svirata Omer itself, because that's written in the Torah. You have to count. Although the question is, from when do you count? It says from the Sabbath. Is it the Sabbath right after Pesach? Is it meaning the sabbatical day of Pesach? Or is it the actual Sabbath a few days after Pesach? That's a whole story and a beautiful story unto itself. But the mourning part, the part of the mourning and the grieving, that is shrouded in a lot of mystery. What exactly are we mourning? And here again, there are a lot of official answers. But in the spirit of what you raised today, I want to suggest another possible narrative. We're mourning the stories that we've been telling ourselves that have not been good. We're mourning the narratives that we have used that did not enhance life, that did not see the other person favorably, that we created narratives that did not bring a blessing. And maybe that could be something we're mourning. We're connecting these dots again. A reminder, there's a lot of unwanted narratives in our psyche, in our subconscious, in our conscious. Yallah, work on them. Start counting differently. Which can maybe help us explain why we count every year anew. Because we could say, I counted last year, I came out of Egypt, I received my freedom from, and then I counted to, towards the giving of the Torah, and I'm done. But it looks like this needs to be done year after year after year, because there's a part in us, and I certainly see it in my own psyche, there's a part in us that's drawn to negative narratives, that is almost addicted to doom and victimhood, etc. So maybe that's what the beards and that's what the grieving is all about. I get it. That's very, very helpful. So I think our time is almost up. Like, we're counting time here as well. If we don't stop here, it'll be the end of the Omer, and we'll still be talking. So thank you all for listening. If you enjoyed it, send it on to your friends. And thank you for listening. And Shlomo, thank you. Thank you for the inspiration you're bringing. And I look forward to our next week's podcast. I do too, Elisha. Thank you. Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom.