Online siddur resource

Here. Online siddur. The only problem (thus far) is that it doesn't properly copy and paste into Word. At least not on a Mac. If anyone has a solution, please do share! (It pastes into TextEdit just fine, but all the words are in the wrong order in Word.)

Text Two: Torah's Relationship to Me

The second text that I shared in fulfillment of this assignment was much shorter. It was this:

יט הַעִדֹתִי בָכֶם הַיּוֹם, אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ--הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי לְפָנֶיךָ, הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה; וּבָחַרְתָּ, בַּחַיִּים--לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה, אַתָּה וְזַרְעֶךָ.

19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed;

This is Deuteronomy 30:19. I was sitting and learning Tanakh on my own one day, when I was a senior in high school. It would be a severe understatement to say that I was going through a rough patch. Everything was hard. Nothing was going right. Life really sucked and throwing in the towel seemed kind of like a good idea.

And then I read this verse, and it was like God was speaking to me through the text. I saw, for the first time in my life, full acknowledgement from a source that I considered authoritative that there was both life and death in this world; both good and bad; both blessings and curses. God put both before us, and gave us death, bad, curses, etc. In my life at the time, it seemed that acknowledgement of the bad parts of life was forbidden. One should focus on the positive, be grateful for all that one has, etc. It's like people were afraid to acknowledge that sometimes life just totally sucked.

So to me, in 1996, this verse recognized that there was bad, death, and curses in the world, and that they were put before us by God just like the good stuff was. But the verse also recognized that God gave us the power to choose something else over death, bad, curses, etc. He gave us the power to choose life. God was telling me that I had a choice--that I had agency. This was the first time I understood, really understood, bechira chofshit. I felt like this idea--that I had choices in life and that God trusted me to make those choices--was new and exciting and phenomenal and comforting, all at once. Wasn't I seventeen? Wasn't my every move still controlled by an idiosyncratic set of rules contrived and enforced by adults?

No, this text said, no. You are a human being and you always have a choice. And this verse, with one word--"choose"/"וּבָחַרְתָּ"--both tells us that (a) we have a choice and (b) urges us to make the choice in one particular way--towards life. So I did. I chose life then and I chose life over and over again, every time I saw the choice between life and death, good and bad, blessings and curses, laid out before me.

I frame this not as my relationship to Torah, but the Torah's relationship to me. Time and time again (not frequently enough that I can expect or count on them, but not so infrequently that I lose hope that I will never have another moment like this), something--a verse, a mishna, an aggadata--reaches out from the page, picks me up, grabs me, and shakes me, and my life is changed forever for the better.

I chose to think of this as God speaking to me through text. I don't know where these texts come from, but I feel, from personal experience, that their holiness lies in large part in the messages that they transmit directly to our hearts. Forget all of the sturm und drang of my intellectual love affair with Torah, muddled as it constantly is by my concerns as a free-thinking, critical, post-Modern, feminist, Western, single, childless woman. Fuggedaboutit! These are texts that transcend those concerns and that, in a way, is what makes them most Godly. These are texts that I read in a particular time and place that flip a switch in my heart, in the deepest understandingest part of me, and make me love life.

I know, for a fact, that non-Torah texts have the power to do this to me, also. But there is something about these texts being mine, by dint of birth and 29 years of all-encompassing Jewish living, that makes them more valuable to me than non-Torah texts that flip similar switches in my heart.

This is much shorter than my Text One piece, but I think that's because it's really almost not about words at all, or at least not as much as Text One was. It's about words that quickly transmogrify into strong emotions. It's almost as if the less said about it, the better. I am sure that this is one of those things in life that would only get worse with more analysis, with more words, with more footnotes. Analysis is for Text One: My Relationship to Torah.

Text Two: Torah's Relationship to Me, defies words.

Text One: My Relationship to Torah

One of the more interesting assignments I've had here at the yeshiva was to present two moments, two snapshots from time, from my life, and to talk about how they relate to the story I tell about my Jewish identity. I presented three weeks ago (or is it four weeks ago, now? I'm losing track of time). The two moments that I chose are really two texts,¹ and I will discuss the first here.

If you will indulge my claim that my life itself is my primary text itself, then its most important secondary texts are the journals that I have kept since I was nine years old.² When I was little, I mostly wrote about what happened in my life and how I felt about it. When I was fifteen, I stopped writing in my little girl locking diaries and started writing in a notebook, and what I wrote about changed dramatically.

I started writing about the issues that I was encountering in Judaism, how I felt about those issues, and the steps I was taking to resolve those issues. I recorded correspondence and conversations that I had with my teachers. I made lists of books that I was reading.³ (I was so methodical!) At first, I kept these thoughts in a notebook separate from my locked diary, but over the course of a year or so, the conversations converged into one notebook.

What precipitated this change? To protect the innocent (or perhaps myself), I've changed the names of the institutions in question in the excerpt below. The important thing to know is that I went to a hareidi yeshiva [HY] from the age of three through seven (through 2nd grade), and in third grade, started attending the Modern Orthodox school [MOS] that I attended through 12th grade. Without further ado, a lengthy explanation of how I ended up here, sitting in a beit midrash, writing this on my laptop:

A few weeks ago, I entered HY for the first time in four years. Unfortunately, the reason was a sad one--it was the end of shloshim for DB, my beloved kindergarden [sic] teacher. However, the occassion [sic] got me thinking--about how I felt about HY while I was there, how I felt about my switch from HY to MOS, how I feel about MOS after being there for seven years, and if my perspective on HY had been changed by MOS.

In the course of thinking about these issues, I have also been thinking about other, related, religious issues which have been bothering me lately: how one's family influences one's thoughts on religion, how much one should do/change to "fit in" with the religious community and to present the "right" appearance, even if one thinks that these outward changes aren't otherwise necessary [I was writing here of my struggles over whether I should continue to wear shorts or not], how much one should push his/her religious views on others, and how to make decisions about who you want to be religiously. I realize that these are not light issues, and hope to be able to examine and resolve them without becoming too frustrated. I think about these things often, not every day, but often enough that it seems worthwhile to try to write down my feelings about them....⁴

Just being in that room made me think of Morah B. [aka the "DB" mentioned above and below], and her constant cheer and goodwill. Anyway, the room was split into two sides: one for men and one for women....As many others later eloquently stated, D.B. made friends all over the community. She is one of the few people who didn't chose [sic] one group to be friendly with. It is sad that it takes the death of one wonderful woman to bring people from all over the Jewish community into one room together. People who sent their kids to all three of the day schools were present. Rabbi M., leader of [the most hareidi shul in town] was there. People who davened at [list of four very different shuls followed] were there.... I never before realized that this was one of the things that was special about Morah B [aka, DB]. Many people later touched on this point.

Everyone spoke very well, but there was one comment that made me cringe. Two groups of people in the community had undertaken the task of learning mishnayot, to be completed that evening. Rabbi M. remarked that even after her death, Morah B. [DB] was still bringing people together in Torah learning, etc. He said that the learning shouldn't stop now, at shloshim.

"Every person in this room," he said, looking towards the men, "who has the ability to learn, should start learning mishnayot every day in memory of DB. Even just a little bit of learning every day will hasten the coming of Moshiach. The women," he said, turning towards us, "have an important task also. They are the ones who support and inspire their husbands to learn."

As soon as I heard that, I became very angry. What right had he to say that? And how could other women hear those words and not become inscensed [sic]? I'm not one to advocate jumping up and starting a riot, but how could any well-learned guy say something like that? Does he really think that women's learning doesn't also hasten the coming of Moshiach? Why didn't he also encourage women who were able to learn, to learn in memory of D.B., a great talmida in her own right (she was a ba'al [sic] teshuva)?

At the very moment that he was saying that Morah B. [DB] brought us all together, he had said hateful words that could only serve to drive people apart. That was very sad. The comment about women was 100% unnecessary. What was wrong with stopping after "Whoever can learn should learn"? I do not understand this at all. With all of the English translations out there nowadays, there are very few people, men or women, who couldn't learn if they really wanted to. If he was adding the comment about women in, to make women who didn't have the education to be able to learn, to feel that they, too, had a role, maybe I could understand. However, unfortunately, I don't think that that's the reason.

I have several thoughts about this text, thirteen years after its composition. Mostly, I feel a deep tenderness towards and love of this fifteen-year-old who couldn't imagine that any "well-learned guy" would ever want to deny women encouragement to learn Torah, never mind deny them access to certain Jewish texts, period. I love that naive girl, and the Orthodox, non-egalitarian community that was able to produce her. I have had many ta'anot over the years against the MOS that I attended from third through twelfth grade, but I will always be grateful that I grew up in an environment where it was completely normative for a teenage girl to excel at Gemara. I felt that there was some sex-bias in math (i.e., girls weren't as encouraged to excel at it as boys were), but never for any limudei kodesh.

I still remember the shock of hearing that statement--"the ones who support and inspire their husbands to learn" following on the heels of "Every person in this room who has the ability to learn, should start learning mishnayot every day." The first half of his statement felt so inclusive of me, of me who had never even thought or considered learning any Torah outside the classroom. I, of course, having the ability to learn after many years of a rigorous Jewish day school education, had the obligation to learn. It was as simple as that. When he said that women support and inspire their husbands to learn, it just sounded to exclusive, so rejecting of any potential contributions that I might make as a well-educated Jewish woman. This was the first I had ever heard that anyone implicitly or explicitly discouraged me from learning, but, unfortunately, it was far from the last.

This text, this journal excerpt, represents, to me, the impetus behind my intellectual love affair with the Torah. It goaded me towards a new and different kind of engagement in Jewish text study. I took the fire in my belly from this incident and turned it into a letter to a teacher, who, in turn, told me about a drop-in women's beit midrash that was being set up that summer in my neighborhood. This blatant rejection of the value of my Torah study propelled me into the beit midrash, where I sat and learned mishnayot from Masechet Kilayim, one evening a week, all summer long, just because he had articulated that--the learning of mishna--as a desirable activity and one that would suitably honor my kindergarten teacher's memory. The first night I went, I was the only person there. After that, a chavruta/pair of friends of mine showed up and they did their thing and I did mine. All of us were 18 or younger and all of us pursued Torah studies on advanced levels.

I fell in love, that summer, with limmud Torah in a way that I never could or would have in the classroom. It was a purely intellectual love. Learning Kilayim on my own with a dictionary by my side was possibly one of the most difficult intellectual exercises I'd ever undertaken, with the possible exception of some math class or other. (Who knew there were so many kinds of squash?!) And both the obscurity of the text I was studying and the challenge I heard issued in a rabbi's offhand remark made me into someone I might not have been otherwise. If I had started, say, with the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, would I have been as smitten? Probably not.

This aspect of my relationship to Torah has not been easy peasy since that fateful day in 1995. It became fraught when my love of Torah clashed with my commitment to intellectual honesty. It became fraught when I began to question the legitimacy of the authority of the texts I was reading. It wasn't all a head game--it was also a love of the heart--but when I started thinking more deeply and more constantly about Torah and my other intellectual commitments, to authenticity, feminism, to close and careful readings of texts, I began to have trouble with Torah, with the Torah that I had been so devoted to from the ages of 15 to 18 or so.

For those of you who fear for my relationship to Torah due to all of these problems, I will reassure you that struggling with a really meaty Gemara or Tosafot still makes my heart sing. I am finally learning in a place where having all of those problems need not delegitimize my intellectual love affair with Torah. There are so many other uses to which my brain could be put, but it is almost never as happy as when it is put to the task of untangling complicated sugyot in the Gemara.

Still, it's a very good thing I had another model for a relationship with Torah up my sleeve, since this kind of intellectual wrangling can only get you so far in aspiring to connect to the Divine. That other model is exemplified by Text Two.

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1. In one way or another, my whole life and certainly all of my intellectual passion has been directed towards texts. My undergraduate junior paper, which focused on the discourse surrounding corsets and health towards the end of the nineteenth century, used corset advertisements from women's magazines as its primary text. My undergraduate senior thesis, which focused on women college students during World War I, used school newspapers and yearbooks as its primary texts. The Jewish texts that I love include mishna, gemara [Talmud], and rishonim, the book of Esther, the book of Psalms, the siddur [prayerbook], and others. Finally, I love synthesizing old texts to create new texts. My happiest moments at the computer have certainly been when someone, reading one of my new texts, e-mails me or leaves a comment on my blog to say that my new text has touched or positively affected them in some way.
2. I've mentioned some of these early texts already. (I actually have some diary-like entries from when I was seven, but I didn't write regularly until I was nine.)
3. One such list reads:
This is My God, by Herman Wouk [a book that I remember made me feel really, really good about being Jewish]
To Life!, by Harold Kushner
The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin
On Women and Judaism, by Blu Greenberg [my very first organized exposure to feminism vis-a-vis Orthodox Judaism]
Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, ed. Jonathan Sacks
One People?, by Jonathan Sacks
Jewish Wisdom, by Joseph Telushkin
To Be A Jew, by Hayim Halevy Donin
To Pray As A Jew, by Hayim Halevy Donin
The Lonely Man of Faith, but HaRav Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Jewish Woman in Jewish Law, by Moshe Meiselman [a book that disturbed me at the time and I'm sure would only disturb me more today]
Of these books, I think the only one I never got around to at all was Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, edited by Jonathan Sacks. I read most of the rest of these when I was 15 and 16.
4. I cut this paragraph out because the excerpt was getting too long and it isn't directly related to the matter at hand, but it is still a fascinating peek into my 15-year-old mind:

Rabbi C. made an announcement that ma'ariv was about to begin in another room, and Daddy went off to join the men. A fleeting thought entered my mind--what would they say if I wanted to daven ma'ariv? Halachically, there was no real reason why I couldn't set up a little mechitzah made of chairs and daven in the back, unobtrusively. I never daven ma'ariv at home, but if I'm in shul, I don't purposely skip it. At [shul], after the Purim seudah, the guys went to daven ma'ariv and so I davened behind the folding curtain, which goes completely up to the ceiling and can't be seen through. I was the only woman davening there. I felt good doing that at [shul]--I was, thank G-d, given enough educational opportunities to know how to daven, and I had lots to thank Hashem for, so why not daven ma'ariv? I didn't feel that it was inappropriate at all, in that situation. This, however, was different. I realized, that davening ma'ariv here, where, clearly, women didn't do that, would be for the wrong reasons. It would be just to get a reaction, to see if they would stop me. Just b/c I'm not obligated to daven ma'ariv, that doesn't mean that I can't/shouldn't, but...I never would have done it then, there. However, that is one huge difference b/t HY and MOS. At MOS, women, and teenage girls especially, are encouraged to daven ma'ariv, I like to think. Except, after the high schoo play, there was a minyan, and I don't remember seeing any girls [davening]. On the other hand, they could daven at home, w/o a minyan. This fleeting thought left my head as quickly as it had entered....

Still here

Just really busy with yeshiva.

I'd like to write about all kinds of interesting things like: group dynamics, the way that Ivy League culture carries over into the beit midrash (at least this beit midrash), the differences I've noticed in learning in all-women's vs. co-ed batei midrash, introversion vs. extroversion, Torah min hashamayim, what being observant is or isn't all about, having or not having a sense of commandedness, how fun Gemara is and Rishonim are, how little I care about philosophy of any kind even though I feel like I should, how different learning seriously with a group of people from such vastly different backgrounds is from learning either not-seriously with a similar group or seriously with a more homogeneous group of, let's say, Modern Orthodox people, and how this is, in so many ways, like a second adolescence for me, but without all (some of?) the angst. Also, how much better, in general, it is to be 28 (almost 29) than to be 20 or 22.

Also, I just have to say that so many of the people here are so warm and interesting and, best yet, open to and desirous of learning from others. The openness is so refreshing!

Whatcha' gonna' do with all that learnin'?

As of June 1, I have started my break from the rat-race in order to study Talmud and halacha (and maybe midrash and parshanut and whatever else catches my attention) for about a year. This is why I have not posted since May 27, which is a very long break for me.

When I share these plans with people, and include the information that these studies are not towards a degree or even a certificate, they usually ask me what I plan to "do" with my studies (much as some, but far fewer, asked me what I planned to "do" with a B.A. in History and Women's Studies). Some (the non-Orthodox) assume that I am going to become a rabbi; others (the Orthodox), a teacher.¹ Nobody, I note, asked me what I going to "do" with my hard-earned high school diploma. In any case, I think I may refer people who ask such questions to the following corpus of text, which caught my attention as I was busily planning my future as a grateful kollel student.

I was already familiar with this text from Pirkei Avot [Ethics of the Fathers], chapter 4:

ז רבי צדוק אומר, לא תעשם עטרה להתגדל בהם, ולא קורדום לחפור בהם: כך היה הלל אומר, ודישתמש בתגא חלף; הא, כל הנהנה מדברי תורה, נטל חייו מן העולם.

7. R. Zadok said, "...make not of the Torah a crown with which to aggrandize thyself, nor a spade with which to dig." So also used Hillel to say, "He who makes a worldly use of the crown [of the Torah] shall waste away." Hence one may infer that whoever derives a profit from the words of the Torah is helping in his own destruction.

It's not clear what "derives a profit from the words of Torah" means here. Presumably, due to its place in the mishna, it means to aggrandize yourself with it, dig with it, or make worldly use of it, but that, too, is rather unclear. Still, the basic take-away message seems to be, "Do not use the Torah as a utilitarian tool."²

ח [ו] רבי יוסי אומר, כל המכבד את התורה, גופו מכובד על הברייות; וכל המחלל את התורה, גופו מחולל על הברייות

8. R. Yosi said, "Whoever honors the Torah will, himself, be honored by mankind, but whoever dishonors the Torah will, himself, be dishonored by mankind."

[Translation based on this nifty source and then modified slightly by me. I used to use Project Guttenberg a lot in college, but I somehow forgot about it after that.]

This mishna is clearer: "If you honor the Torah, you will be honored in the end." The converse, as well, is true.

In February or March, when I began (!) writing this post, I heard someone refer to a tiny piece of this text from Nedarim 62a. When I looked it up to read the whole sugya, I immediately knew that I had the only good answer for all of those who question the practicality or lack of directionality of my plans to learn in yeshiva.³

תניא: "לאהבה את ה' אלהיך לשמוע בקולו ולדבקה בו" (דברים ל), שלא יאמר אדם אקרא שיקראוני חכם, אשנה שיקראוני רבי, אשנן שאהיה זקן ואשב בישיבה--אלא למד מאהבה וסוף הכבוד לבא, שנאמר "קשרם על אצבעותיך כתבם על לוח לבך" (משלי ז), ואומר "דרכיה דרכי נועם" (משלי ג), ואומר "עץ חיים היא למחזיקים בה ותומכיה מאושר" (משלי ג

It was taught: "That you may love the Lord your God and that you may obey his voice, and that you may cleave unto him" [Deut. 30:20]: [This means] that one should not say, "I will read Scripture that I may be called a Sage. I will study, that I may be called Rabbi, I will study, to be an Elder, and sit in the assembly [of elders];" but learn out of love, and honour will come in the end, as it is written, "Bind them upon your fingers, write them upon the table of your heart," [Prov. 7:3] and it is also said, "Her ways are ways of pleasantness [Prov. 3:17]"; also, "She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is everyone that retaineth her [Prov. 3:18]."⁴

This is why I am spending this year learning: Because I love it. And, to borrow another oft-cited phrase from Ethics of the Fathers [1:14], "If not now, when?" I don't even care about the end of that sentence--"honour will come," unless one translates "honour" into "a means to support oneself," or "a viable career," in which case, yes, please! But I do not seek honor at the moment. The love is more than sufficient.

I came to this realization, or series of realizations, about eighteen months ago: One should do what one loves, providing that what one loves is safe and legal. One should not stay at a job where one is not growing and learning new things (i.e., bored) just for the sake of having a job and appearing respectable. After twenty-seven years of thinking only about what I was the most good at, what I was best at, or what I was most successful at, I finally realized that I had been asking the wrong question. The right question is: What do I love? What makes me feel most alive and most connected to myself and the world around me? The answer is studying Torah and writing.⁵ I spent the next fifteen months or so figuring out how I was going to make that work, financially.

I started writing this post in the winter, in the midst of trying to reorganize my life so that it would resemble that of a woman who has the leisure to learn Torah and to write. I started writing it in joyful anticipation of the beginning of an intense, loving relationship with Torah study.

I was afraid, throughout, that it--the joyful existence that I anticipated--might exist only in my brain. I prepared myself, or tried to prepare myself, for the possibility that I might come to yeshiva and be...disappointed. Even worse, I might find myself...bored. One can idealize something so much in one's mind, especially if one plans for about eighteen months to quit one's job to pursue it, and when one actually begins the activity for which one quit one's job, it can let one down.

And, indeed, I felt that way last week. I won't lie to you--last week, the first week, was rough. The yeshiva I am at runs from 7:30 am to 9 pm three days a week, from 8:15 to 5 pm one day a week, from 7:30 am to 12:30 pm one day a week, and from 5-7:30 pm one day a week. That's--you got it--six days a week. It takes me 45 minutes to get to and from the yeshiva, so to shower and be ready for my day, I need to get up at 6 am most days. Thus far, I have not succeeded over much, but I am working on that. I am a night owl and prefer to nod off around 1 am, and I was pretty successful at that end of things, so that first week was exhausting.

In some ways, this was the intensity that I craved and did not have during my year in Israel before college, ten years ago. In other ways, struggling to learn Gemara and halacha on four or five hours of sleep, I wanted to shoot myself, or at least go back to my job. My first week was also complicated by the fact that on Wednesday night, after we got out at 5 pm, I took a 30 minutes subway ride to return to my old job to begin to train my replacement, and on Thursday night, I left yeshiva early (at 6 pm, after a 7:30 am start) to go back to the job-that-I-had-quit to preside over commencement exercises for a program that I had administrated. I felt like I was being pulled in all directions and towards no particular goal. Also, they are generously providing breakfast and lunch each day, but there was a lot of dairy tempting to me, so I was either feeling grouchy from having to avoid delicious dairy foods or very sick for capitulating to it. (I love dairy but am supposed to, according to the gastroenterologist, restrict myself to 100% lactose-free foods, like Lactaid milk.) I had an excruciating time trying to get up in the morning and staying awake in classes once I got there, and it was hard for introverted me to suddenly be thrown together with some thirty-odd strangers most of whom I had never met previously, and to spend so many, many hours with them. Last week, I actually sort of wanted to quit.

But I did not, because I remembered that I had quit my job to do what I loved, and if I trusted myself enough to go ahead with my plans, I owed myself more than five days to try to adjust to my new life as a kollel woman. I caught up on sleep over Shabbat and Shavuot, which was--yes, you guessed it--also spent with the yeshiva, and this week, so far, has been much, much better. Patience is not my strong suit, but I am learning to be patient with myself.

I had an experience while preparing for a gemara shiur yesterday that brought this text from Nedarim--and the love of Torah study--back to the forefront of my mind. The gemara brought up an apparent contradiction between two Amoraic sources, but something about the apparent contradiction bothered me like an itch you can't quite scratch. They seemed to be talking about slightly different cases, but I was at a loss to articulate that and thus resolve the contradiction. (To complicate matters somewhat, the gemara itself appeared to leave the matter unresolved.) Then my chavruta and I looked at a Rif and I had one of those "aha!" moments in which everything suddenly becomes crystal clear and disparate facts and opinions fly into a neat little chart in my mind, or at least they look poised to. Like this big mess could turn into a beautiful chart. (I happen to find charts beautiful much of the time.)

It was instantaneous and euphoric and not unlike falling in love, but far less enduring. It was like I could feel my brain flooding with serotonin or some other feel-good hormone or two. It's hard for me to describe these moments, but they happen sometimes when I read something that shifts my thinking in a permanent and useful way (as life-altering books do), or find a way to put a squirmy, slippery, complicated thought into words on paper or screen, or sometimes when I learn Torah. It's akin to the feeling I had when I first learned how to ride a bike. I wish I had better words for it. It's shivery and astounding and floaty and it's gone in a minute or two, but while it's there, I...I don't know what. I feel like I am doing what I am meant to be doing.

I don't think that one "aha!" moment is the end of this story--I am sure that things will get difficult again and that I will be frustrated again--but it wasn't just that one moment that made me haul out Nedarim 62a for further investigation. I felt precursors to that "aha!" moment and aftershocks from it, and I know that I was right to choose this path for myself. And that is why I decided to return to this drafted post from February, engage with it anew, and post it for you all tonight.

Happy learning!


P.S. The next part of the gemara from Nedarim 62a, cited above, reads:

רבי אליעזר בר ר' צדוק אומר: עשה דברים לשם פעלם ודבר בהם לשמם, אל תעשם עטרה להתגדל בהם ואל תעשם קורדום להיות עודר בו. וקל וחומר ומה בלשצר שלא נשתמש אלא בכלי קדש שנעשו כלי חול נעקר מן העולם, המשתמש בכתרה של תורה על אחת כמה וכמה

R. Eliezer son of R. Zadok said: Do [good] deeds for the sake of their Maker, and speak of them for their own sake. Make not of them a crown wherewith to magnify thyself, nor a spade to dig with. And this follows a fortiori. If Belshazzar, who merely used the holy vessels which had been profaned, was driven from the world; how much more so one who makes use of the crown of the Torah!

Now you can see why I immediately connected it to the text from Avot. It is a quote from R. Eliezer, the son of R. Zadok mentioned in the Avot 4:7. There is more of great interest before and after these bits. Now, go and learn for real!

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1. I have never, in my life, had so many people suggest to me that I may want to become a rabbi! (Is this what happens, I wonder, when a woman jumps the fence between the Orthodox and the liberal Jewish worlds? Fascinating!)
2. One can possibly infer from this that one should not get paid for Torah study, but let's not take this in that direction, shall we?
3. This text is far more interesting and exciting to me than the Avot text. Perhaps just because it's new? I'm not sure. I just really like it. Part of me would like to slap it on t-shirt or some bumper stickers.
4. Translation based on the Soncino, which I found online for the first time, and quite usefully, here. The host site seems a bit bizarre, but I may only think that because of the Java applet they have playing on their home page, and the reference to George W. Bush. But maybe those are reason enough. Does this mean that they are fundamentalist Christians?
5. A third thing is observing nature, and I sometimes think that if I had been born to the right family and probably in the other gender in the 19th century, I might have become a naturalist.

Tainted Meat

I'm sure that, by now, you've all heard about the AgriProcessors/Rubashkin's meat packing plant scandals. Here is a letter from Uri L'Tzedek. You can sign on to the petition and agree not to patronize any establishments that use Rubashkin's meat by sending an e-mail to uri.ltzedek@gmail.com. Emphasis in the letter below is mine.

Lag b’Omer 5768
May 23, 2008

Mr. Sholom Rubashkin
220 N West St
Postville, IA 52162

Dear Mr. Rubashkin,

We write to you out of a deep sense of ahavat Torah and ahavat Yisrael, with both great respect and great concern.

Your company produces 60 percent of the beef and 40 percent of the chicken provided to the kosher marketplace in America. You employ 968 factory employees and serve as a pillar of the food economy. Your generous philanthropy supports moral and significant causes and is a great source of pride for Israel and Jewish institutions around the world. You are an important and respected leader of the Jewish community.

Therefore it is with great frustration and sadness that we write this letter. We are the kosher meat consumers of America. We are mothers and fathers raising our children in a kosher home. We are rabbis, teachers, and Jewish professionals who use your products in our work. Since you control much of the kosher meat market in America, we rely on you to uphold the halakhic requirements, both ritual and ethical, of the food we eat. We believe you have failed, and we are deeply troubled.

• We are deeply troubled that you have demonstrated a pattern of knowingly exploiting undocumented workers, to paying them less than market wages and treating them poorly.[1]
• We are deeply troubled that according to many experts, the wages you pay your workers are the lowest of any slaughterhouse in the nation.
• We are deeply troubled that, despite years of public inquiry and concern over worker conditions at your plant, AgriProcessors was cited for 39 new health and safety violations in March 2008. It pains us to hear that examinations of Agriprocessor's OSHA logs reveal amputations, broken bones, eye injuries and hearing loss that occurred at your plant.[2]
• We are deeply troubled that animals have been abused against the laws of tzaar baalei chaim, causing needless pain to animals.[3]
• We are deeply troubled that among the hundreds of workers who were arrested by federal officials on May 12, eighteen were children between ages 13 and 17.[4]
• We are deeply troubled to read reports of various criminal operations taking place at the Postville plant, the account of a Jewish floor supervisor who severely abused a Guatemalan worker in the most reprehensible conditions, and allegations of sexual assault and verbal abuse.[5]

On your website, you state as your values that “as a producer of kosher meat products, we approach our business in the context of a deep religious tradition.” Undoubtedly you agree that our shared deep religious does not approve of these practices, and we therefore write this letter in the spirit of the mitzvah of hocheiach tochiach et amitecha, to give rebuke where it is needed so that a fellow Jew can make right what is wrong.

We ask the following:

1. Pay all of your workers at least the federal minimum wage.

2. Recommit your company to abide by all federal, state and local laws including those pertaining worker safety, sexual harassment, physical abuse, and the rights of your employees to collective bargaining.

3. Treat those who work for you according to the standards that Torah and halakha places on protecting workers--standards which include the spirit of lifnim meshurat hadin, going beyond the bare minimum requirements of the law.

In order to ensure that you meet these modest requests, we ask that you establish a department and staff with external transparency to a reputable, objective third party to deal exclusively with these three concerns. We ask that you maintain this office on an ongoing basis to ensure the basic ethical standards demanded by Torah, the U.S. government, and the American Jewish community.

Until these changes are made, we feel compelled to refrain from purchasing or consuming meat produced by your company, and will pressure every establishment with which we do business to cease purchase of your meat. Effective June 15, 2008 we will stop patronizing any restaurant that sells your meat.

Mr. Rubashkin, you have been a leader in the kosher meat industry, and we look forward to seeing you lead the way for all American meat processors, not only in the kashrut of your products, but in the kashrut of every aspect of your business.

אודך בישר לבב בלמדי משפטי צדקך

I will give thanks to You with upright heart, when I study Your ordinances that are righteous.

תהלים קי"ט:ז Psalms 119:7

Sincerely,

Uri L’Tzedek uri.ltzedek@gmail.com

1In Iowa Meat Plant, Kosher 'Jungle' Breeds Fear, Injury, Short Pay, The Forward. May 26, 2006

2Agriprocessor's Safety Problems, Des Moines Register, May 14, 2008

3AgriProcessors In. Inhumane Slaughter, Conflict of Interest, Bribery. United States Department of Agriculture, 2005

4Detainees moved from NCC grounds, Waterloo Courier, Thursday, May 15, 2008

5Application and affidavit for search warrant, Case Number: 08-MJ-110, Court of the Northern District of Iowa

In addition to all of this, there was apparently a meth lab on the premises!?

My reactions:

1. To those who don't understand why hiring illegal workers is problematic because, like me, you think that immigration to this country should be liberalized: I don't think it's unethical to hire illegal immigrants. However, it is unethical to underpay them because they're illegal and can't complain, and to fail to protect their safety ("examinations of AgriProcessor's OSHA logs reveal amputations, broken bones, eye injuries and hearing loss that occurred at your plant") because they're illegal and can't do anything about it. It is also unethical to hire children to do the work of adults.
   
2. I am 100% comfortable refraining from purchasing any meat that comes from Rubashkin's, whether at the local supermarket or at a restaurant. I don't eat red meat that often, and it's easy enough to get chicken from Empire (which I am told uses unionized labor) or Vineland at least here, so that's not difficult.
3. I am not sure I am willing to refrain from eating anything at any restaurant that uses Rubashkin's. Instead, I think I might ask where the meat comes from before ordering, and if they say either Rubashkin's or that they don't know/won't tell me (I've heard of many places saying this recently), then, instead, ordering fish or pasta or some other meat-less dish. The reason I have a problem with not eating anything at any restaurant that uses Rubashkin's is that (1) it unfairly punishes the struggling kosher restaurants and (2) I am currently avoiding dairy and soy in deference to my digestive system's preferences, so meat restaurants are sort of the only "safe" place for me right now. If (2) weren't true, I would just go exclusively to dairy restaurants which is pretty much how I used to operate.

What do you think?

A pain no man will ever know

Two words: "discontinued bra."

Fellow women, I accept your empathy. I know you've been there.