Tag Archives: Yitz Greenberg

Adam Mintz [1:29 – 1:30]: Let’s get going.

Geoffrey Stern [1:32 – 2:19]: So Shirat HaYam is the Song of the Sea that I made reference to. And in Exodus 15:1, it says Az Yashir Moshe U’bnei Yisrael then sang Moshe and the children of Israel, this song to God uttered this utterance I will sing to God, for he has triumphed, yes, triumphed, the horse and its charioteer he flung into the sea! My fierce-might and strength is YAH, he has become deliverance for me! This is my God. I laud him, Ze Eli V’anveyhu the God of my Father, and I exalt him. Rabbi, how many times a week do we sing this wonderful song?

Adam Mintz [2:19 – 2:22]: Seven times a week. Every single morning.

Geoffrey Stern [2:22 – 4:49]: Every single morning. And I would suggest not only because it’s iconic, but it’s also rather old. I think that’s something that everybody agrees upon. Biblical critics, traditional rabbinic scholars. It’s a very old piece of liturgy of song and it’s, I think, would say, seminal, right up there with Mount Sinai as an experience in our history, our shared history. So I could almost say it’s so iconic that you could say this is the aha moment. This is when Paul discovers has the epiphany. This is when Muhammad discovers God. And so, I’m gonna start with a midrash that charts a path that we’re not gonna follow, but it is within the traditions that I just told you. According to Sir Hashiram Rabba, it the words Oz Yoshir Moshe U’bnei Yisrael. The story that it has is Rabbi Yehudah Hanassi is sitting in the Beis medrash in the study hall and the audience is dozing. So, talk about disruptive Torah. He sought to arouse them. And so, he said, a certain woman in Egypt bore 600,000 in a single womb. There was one student there, Rabbi Ismael Ben Rabbi Yossi, who must have been woken up by this startling comment. And he said to Rabbi, for whom was it so? Rabbi said to him, this is Yocheved who bore Moses, who is the equivalent of 600,000 of Israel. And then it goes on to say that it is written. Then Moses said to the children of Israel. Since it says that Moses sang with the children of Israel, everything is focused on Moses. So, it would have been natural. And I think we touched upon this when Moses had that birthing moment, that it clearly there are texts within our tradition that we could have made this personal. But the truth is that the consensus has always been that this is about the children of Israel. These newly formed children of Israel. And Rashi quotes a piece of midrash that I think, whether famous or not, I’d like to know from you how well known this is. Makes this very clear.

Adam Mintz [4:50 – 4:52]: You read it and I’ll tell you how famous it is.

Geoffrey Stern [4:52 – 5:34]: So he says, this is my God Ze Eli in his glory did he reveal himself to them. And they pointed to him, as it were, with the finger, exclaiming, this is my God from Shir Hasiram Rabba. Here is the famous Mechilta that we’re gonna be spending a little bit of time on. A maidservant beheld at the Red Sea, what even the prophets never saw. Rabbi, this is a 360 degree turn from what we saw before. But a second ago we were talking about Moshe Rabbeinu. Moshe Rabbeinu, Lo Kam B’ Yisrael k’Moshe Rabbeinu. And now we’re talking about a simple maidservant saw at the Red Sea what none of the prophets saw.

Adam Mintz [5:35 – 6:50]: Yeah, well, there are two things here. First of all, just the image of Moshe and the people singing or reciting the poem, however you want to say it. That’s a remarkable image. Can you imagine 2 million people reciting a song of praise? You know, you sometimes go to. I don’t know if you went to this, but every seven years they have the Siyum HaShas and the last two Siyum HaShas is when they complete the cycle of the study of the Talmud. So they have the celebration in the Meadowlands, 90,000 people. And, you know, they. They say the Hallel at one point, and you can hear everybody, 90,000 people saying, Tehillim. Can you imagine what it would be like for 2 million people to say as Yashir? So, you kind of understand ra’ata shifcha al HaYam ma shelo ra’ah neviyim, that the shifcha al Hayyam is not Moshe. And the people singing the song, the shifcha al hayyam is the audience, is the person looking on the outsider. And that shifcha al hayyam saw something that, you know, you can’t imagine. It’s like them davening ma’ariv in Meadowlands. Who could imagine such a crazy thing? And this is the most famous statement. I would rank it as one of the top five most famous rabbinic statements in rabbinic literature.

Geoffrey Stern [6:51 – 7:14]: Wow. Okay. I love that. I love the fact. I think. Am I wrong? That it’s a novel interpretation that you’re giving, that when you talk about the shifcha, when you said it, it almost sounded like an outside bystander. You almost put it into the category of all of the other midrashim that talk about what the world did when the Torah was given, what the world did. You put it in that category.

Adam Mintz [7:14 – 7:27]: So you know why I did that? Why shifcha al ha? Why isn’t it just ish al hayyam, isha al hayyam? Shifcha al hayya means the maidservant, the person who’s not really part of it, the outsider.

Geoffrey Stern [7:27 – 12:48]: Okay. I love it. I think that we need to put that into one of the commentaries that we’re gonna have. I think the other term, the other way to look at it, would be the most lowly of all of the Israelites. But I’m not taking away from you, as I love what you just said. So that is kind of remarkable. When you were talking about the Siyum hashas, I had another vision. I was thinking during COVID when they had these zoom songs where they would have hundreds and maybe thousands of people singing the same song together. But I do get the power of the image that you’re conveying. And this was a powerful moment, as I said before, right up there with the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The Mechilta that Rashi quotes has a little bit more in it. And so, if you look at the original source, it says, this is my Lord, and I shall exalt him, and you can see this in our Sefaria Source Sheet Rabb. Eliezer says, from where do we know that a maidservant saw at the sea more than even Isaiah and Ezekiel ever saw it, as it says, and spoke parables through the prophets. So, Hosea did not point a finger and say, this is God, and the heavens opened and I saw visions of God, says Ezekiel. Visions of God is not the same as Ze Eli V’anvehu. This is my God. So, it’s that pointing, getting back to our episode on fingers and hands, it’s the fact that they pointed and say, this is my God made their, in the rabbi’s mind, their experience so unique. And it goes on to say, it’s like if a great ruler came and conquered your country and he came with a whole battalion. And then they lined up and they were all big guys and dressed up. You’re going to say, who’s the king here? They didn’t have that hesitation. I started by saying, we’re going to be looking a little bit at Emile Fackenheim and what he inferred from this. But before we go there, let’s look at a few other interpretations that were given of this. This is my God Ze Eli V’anveyhu. And he actually brings this. He compares it very much to what happened at Mount Sinai. And this goes in line with what you were saying before. You were saying before that the shifcha was not part of the group. What Fackenheim is arguing by bringing this midrash to is that it wasn’t only the people standing, it was future generations who were also there. So, he quotes the midrash that talks about at Mount Sinai. That standing here with us today refers to those who were already born and with him that is not here alludes to those who were to be born in the future. So, both of these, I guess, seminal moments, you can clearly made a case that the rabbis are trying to make them much bigger, much longer, much more, less temporal and less place oriented than they were. They were impactful, powerful moments. Another midrash that we have in the Sifrei Devarim says, this is my God and I will extol him when I acknowledge him, he is Naveh, he is beautiful, and when I do not acknowledge him, he is also beautiful. But look at the next thing that it says. It quotes Isaiah and it says, and you are my witness, says the Lord, and I am God. Says the midrash, when you are my witness, I am God. And if you are not my witness, I am not God. And it brings our Eli V’anvehu, along with three other examples where the adverse is not true. So I don’t know, Rabbi, whether this is a case of a textual edit. Many times, in the Torah, as you know, when they say something is very extreme, they say the exact opposite. I don’t know what if that this is one of those cases, but certainly what it is saying is ze Eli V’anveyhu This is my God, as I extol him, as he is beautiful. If I don’t extol him. Maybe he’s not my God, maybe he is not God. What Fackenheim, in a second, we’re going to look at his words himself is trying to say here is that this moment became so powerful not only by the participants, not only by the future participants, not only by the highest and the lowliest. It became powerful not so much because of what happened, but because of the impression that it had upon those who participated both at the time and into the future. And that, in a nutshell, is what his argument is going to be based on these multiple midrashim.

Adam Mintz [12:48 – 13:18]: Yeah, I mean, but before we get to Fackenheim, which is of course fascinating, your idea that when you say something extreme, that they struggle with it. And you know, the key word here, the key word is kivi ya chol. Kivi ya chol is when you talk about God, but you don’t want to actually say it. You say kivi yachol, as if God, you know, got angry. As if God could get angry. So that word is always a giveaway when they’re struggling with defining God.

Geoffrey Stern [13:18 – 16:07]: Absolutely. So, let’s get to Fackenheim a little bit. Fackenheim is a Holocaust survivor. Fackenheim is deep in the philosophy of the day in Germany. Hegel and Kant and all of this fancy stuff. Sometimes it’s even difficult to read him because he has so much of the nomenclature of philosophical thought. And then he starts thinking differently. And he meets people like Elie Wiesel. He meets people like. Itz Greenberg and even Martin Buber. And what he starts to understand is that these midrashim are talking about something that transcends philosophy. In other words, the questions that had been asked before the Holocaust of how can our God permit evil? How can people have choice if God knows everything? All of these traditional philosophical questions kind of fall to the side. And we come down to a moment where the shifcha, the handmaiden who participates in the splitting of the Red Sea, the survivor who participates in the liberation of Auschwitz, halutz who create a new country, the Parents, survivors who decide to live up to the 614th Commandment and have children after the Holocaust, all of a sudden, they have more wisdom than the great philosophers. And that’s why he focuses a little bit on Ezekiel. If you had to pick a prophet who had the most sublime, transcendent notion of God, it would be what we call Ma’ase Merkava, a vision that Ezekiel had when he sees these flames. And even till today, we can’t really f the inevitable, so to speak, to explain what he is he’s seeing. And he did not understand what the shifcha, the lowly maidservant, did. He says the midrashic author is not, not unaware of the possibility of a religious flight from history. On the contrary, he refers to Ezekiel’s vision, the biblical chapter which, more than any other, has encouraged otherworldly mysticism within Judaism, and then exalts the maidservant. So Fackenheim is making even a more important point. He is saying that after the Holocaust, we can no longer run away from those inconvenient truths of good and evil, those inconvenient truths of what happened to God’s chosen people. We cannot go into the world of philosophy and Kabbalah. He really is doubling down on this shifcha, and I think it’s kind of amazing.

Adam Mintz [16:08 – 16:23]: It is most definitely amazing. I mean, I’m happy that I noticed that there was something odd about the Shifcha. He takes it to a whole different level. But clearly the fact that the example used by the medrash is Shifcha is something that needs an explanation.

Geoffrey Stern [16:23 – 19:23]: So, what he goes on to do, and this is why I call the episode “Root Experience”, is Fackenheim tries to understand what it is that was so special about this experience, but also about Jewish history, because for him, God and the Jewish people and what makes us special is our unique kind of understanding of Jewish history. And what he is saying is this means on the one hand that Rabb Eliezer himself does not see, and on the other hand that he knows that the maidservant saw and he does not. So now he makes like a dialectic move, Rabb Eliezer, who made this comment and said that the shifcha knew more than Ezekiel. On the one hand, he’s admitting that he didn’t see what the maidservant saw, but on the other hand, he knows that he doesn’t know what the maidservant saw. And that makes him a part of what Fackenheim is going to call a “Root Experience”. In other words, he understands that the experience of that, I guess that unmodulated, unmediated experience of the shifcha is so much a part of him that he understands how important it is and he understands that it must have occurred. And he is as close to understanding as the shifcha, but he knows he’s not the shifcha. It’s experiential Judaism, if you will. Ezekiel’s vision is not a root experience in Judaism. It is the experience of an isolated individual and may legislate to isolated individuals after him, those few to who the heavens are accessible. So, a second what he does is he’s starting to give principles of what a “Root Experience” is. And he says the first thing that has to be amongst the multitude. And this is what I focused on in the beginning a little bit that said, this is not about Moses. This is about the whole community of people who experience something together. Those of you who know Yehudah Halevi and the Kuzari, he makes a similar argument. But this is certainly something that was unique about the Jewish tradition, that we experienced it as a many and not as an individual. And that puts us at a different place than a Jesus experience, a Buddha experience, a Muhammad experience, that is unique. The second thing that he saw is that at the Red Sea the whole people saw, the lowly maidservants included, and what occurred before their eyes was not an opening of a heaven, but a transformation of earth, a historic event affecting decisively all future generations. So, the emphasis now becomes Rabbi. And he saw this in Buber too. It’s more important what happened to the participants than what happened.

Adam Mintz [19:23 – 19:26]: Yeah, but that’s right, go on. Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [19:26 – 19:35]: And it’s the reflection and the reverberations of what happened to the individuals that makes this so powerful.

Adam Mintz [19:35 – 20:11]: Right. The idea of the multitudes of the group. That is obviously, that’s the theme here. And that’s the theme next. You say that this right in the giving of the Torah, you say it’s not a Jesus moment. It’s very interesting that, you know, Jesus had had his moment by himself. But Jesus didn’t create the religion, the religion was created afterwards. Right. The disciples of Jesus created the religion. In Judaism, it’s different. This is the moment of creating the religion. And therefore, it has to be everybody together.

Geoffrey Stern [20:12 – 22:36]: Yeah. So, it’s a multitude. It’s what the multitude experienced, meaning how they reacted to the events that they all, that all affected them. That’s the second point. And the third is that those in later generations who focus back to this memory, this memory turns into something more than just a memory. And the example that he gives is the Passover Seder. When we actually relive or try to relive the experience of Yetziat Mitzrayim, this is not reading about history, not documenting history, not proving history, but again, trying to relive the experience of that generation that saw it. Which again, picks up on what he said before. And also, a little bit of what you said is that you become part of this root experience if you experience it. It’s a little bit of a totality, but it’s amazing. And then the final thing that he adds is that he says that it has to move into action at the same time. The divine presence requires the self and its freedom at the very moment of its presence. There is no abiding astonishment unless men exist. Who can be astonished more? The divine presence, saving as well as commanding, remains incomplete unless human astonishment terminates in action. And when he talks about action, as I said a little bit earlier, that action might be just having children. That action might be just having lived through a concentration camp experience, still having the hope to move forward and to prove facts, not to be facts and experiences, to be more powerful and more energizing and forward leaning. I think I love what he’s done with these few midrashim and turn them into a way of looking at Jewish history and what it means to be a Jew that kind of moves on. And we saw this also with Itz Greenberg. It moves into a new way of looking at all of our traditional, honoring it, but looking at it in a different fashion.

Adam Mintz [22:36 – 22:59]: So Fackenheim, it’s interesting you say that because Fackenheim and Yitz Greenberg are very similar in the fact that they look at Judaism post Holocaust as being a new era in Judaism. And they look for the traditions to see how we understand the modern world. So this is fascinating how he takes this Midrash again and he. He develops really a philosophy of Jew of Judaism and Jewish history around it. So, this is great.

Geoffrey Stern [23:00 – 27:04]: And he starts. And what I was surprised this year in my rereading of Fackenheim is the sense of this new form of Judaism. And if you believe that Judaism has made an amazing contribution to the world thought as well, this new way of looking at life is full of contradictions. So he says, such are the contradictions in the root experience of Judaism insofar as they concern our present purpose. Philosophical reflection on becoming aware of these contradictions is tempted to remove them and do so by means of retroactive destruction of the root experience themselves. What he is going to argue, is that baked into the midrash and the Rabbinic Judaism that we follow are retaining those contradictions and not eliminating them. And he brings another midrash that talks about when the Torah was given at Sinai, that God starts talking, and it’s so scary and so fearful. The people say they all die, and they send back not Moshe, but they send back the words of the Torah itself back to God, kind of a return to sender moment. And they said, you say your Torah is full of life, but you’re killing everybody. So, then God comes back and he gives it in a sweeter way. The midrash affirms that at Sinai, says Fackenheim, as at the Red Sea, the whole people saw what Ezekiel and the other prophets never saw. Yet because the divine Presence is here, a commanding presence, the astonishment has a different structure. A commandment effected by a distant divine cause could be divined only by virtue of its external sanction and inspire no abiding astonishment. What he’s saying is that you have to have both the freedom and the destruction. You have to have these contradictions and be able to live with them. And what he does, and we’re going to kind of end with this, is he talks about a midrashic framework. And I had never realized that what Fackenheim is arguing, in a sense, is re, I guess, inventing, rediscovering how all of the midrashim that you and I look at a weekly basis that many times contain conflicting ideas are reliving the experience of what happened at these pivotal moments, because in them you have all the emotions. You’re saying this, and this is true. And what he says is midrashic thinking reflects the root experiences of Judaism and is not confined to the immediate use. You don’t use a midrash to prove a point. You don’t use a midrash to get to a halacha. You use these midrashim to understand the different variables. He says midrashic, like philosophical reflections, become aware of the contradictions in the root experiences. It remains inside even as it steps out of them. So, we can have a midrash that talks about how great Moshe is and that he is within him all 600,000 people. And we can also have a midrash that says that a shifcha at a maidservant at the splitting of the Red Sea understood more than Ezekiel, but I would say more than Moses, too, because he also was a prophet. He goes on to say that midrashic thinking cannot resolve the contradictions in the root experience of Judaism, but actually expresses them. Midrashic thought, therefore, is both fragmentary and whole. I mean, a perfect tool to look at the fragmented world that we live in when everybody is looking, and we kind of ended last week in this way too. Everybody is looking for a perfect solution. And the midrashic thinking is saying that’s a dead end. There are no perfect solutions.

Adam Mintz [27:04 – 27:24]: I’ll just say that that’s what disruptive Torah is. Because you said that last sentence as if that’s obvious, but that’s not really obvious to everybody. The idea that you know that, that, that you have to live with contradiction is something that, you know, that these people, you know, try to develop from these midrashim. That’s not the way we were taught Yeshiva.

Geoffrey Stern [27:24 – 30:31]: It wasn’t. And I am going to finish by quoting Fackenheim, because I think as much as anything else, it describes what we do at Madlik disruptive Torah and why an Orthodox Jew and a not so Orthodox Jew can meet once a week to discuss these midrashim and how important it is what we’re doing. So Fackenheim writes, no Jewish thinker can take lightly the stance of Rabbinic Judaism or dissent from it without facing unforeseen, perhaps unforeseeable consequences. Yet simply to embrace it as up to a point Fackenheim says, I once had would be to prejudge rather than face what we have called the central question of post Holocaust thought. To make Judaism absolutely immune to all future events except Messianic ones is a priori to dismiss the challenges of contemporary events. What he’s saying is if you go to the Kabbalah, if you think about the only way to look at world events is Messianism, is how do we get to the end game and you stop looking at the minutia of life as we live it with all its complexities, you are not following Rabbinic Judaism, you are basically bailing out. He says also it would be a relapse into fideistic one sidedness which for my part I was already in the process of project. So, he goes on, secular Jews may reject a miracle at the Red Sea and a revelation at Sinai, but if committed to a Jewish future, cannot reject the experience of their people. Moreover, a root experience, as I then defined it differs in quality from an epoch-making event, but at the same time is not absolutely immune to its impact. So, Rabbi, what he’s saying is that what makes the Jewish people, what guarantees its future, what gives us hope and faith, is that we can still look at the Red Sea event and look at it from the perspective of 2,000 years of Jews who have reacted to it, 2,000 years of Jews who can talk about it without even talking about the historical event. Because that’s the least important thing about the most important thing is almost like a Rorschach test. We’ve been reacting to it, to each other, and dare we walk away from that tradition? And I think that is a wonderful mandate for what Madlik does, what you and I do once a week. And I do think it’s so timely for both the conversation going on here in the United States, and I’m talking now more than just amongst Jews, but amongst us all, that we have to be able to look back at our past traditions and re react to and react to them together with shared texts. But certainly, what’s happening in the State of Israel with secular and religious Jews, with Jews who were there in 48 and Jews who never experienced that. It’s a wonderful mandate.

Adam Mintz [30:32 – 30:49]: This is a fantastic. Emil Fackenheim is always great and this is great for this week’s Parasha. So, this week we’re going to think about the Shifcha Al Hayyam, the maidservant. Whatever interpretation we’re going to give, it’s going to be an interesting one. Thank you so much. Regards from San Francisco Airport. And I look forward to being back in New York next time to continue our learning. Be well.