The preface to Micah Goodman’s book “Maimonides and the Book that Changed Judaism” begins with this delightful story:
I first encountered The Guide for the Perplexed when I was nine years old. It was at Yehuda HaLevy Synagogue in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood where my parents prayed. After the services one Shabbat morning, while waiting for the bustling committee members to bring out kiddush – whisky and pickled herring for the grownups, potato chips and ice-pops for the children – I wandered over to the expansive pine-wood bookcases at the back of the sanctuary and stopped at a shelf marked “Jewish Philosophy.” I did not know then what Philosophy was, but I had a vague notion that it was something important and that I would learn more about it someday.
The book’s cover was plain, with dark blue letters on the spine: The Guide for the Perplexed. I took it down and began to turn the pages. My eyes lighting up here and there on words and phrases that I couldn’t understand: “physics…metaphysics…homonyms…” My interest was piqued, and I turned, meaning to sit down with the book in one of the back pews, but found myself instead facing a rabbi in the synagogue, who was towering over me.
The rabbi looked at the book and then at me, a mixture of pride and concern in his kind gray eyes. He gently removed the book from my hands, replaced it on the shelf, and murmured, “Not yet, Micah,” and then guided me by the arm to the Kiddush tables, by now laden with goodies. As I tore the wrapper of an ice pop I wondered, what could be in this book that would make the rabbi take it away from me.”
There are several reasons why I’m sharing this story this morning:
First. Micah Goodman is in Lakeview this Shabbat, a scholar in residence at Anshe Emet, and early this afternoon, I will be walking over to Anshe Emet to take part in a panel discussion with Micah Goodman and the Lakeview rabbis. I’ll be leaving ASBI following kiddush and you are all welcome to walk with me.
Second. Micah Goodman’s book is a recent English translation of a book that was a national best seller in Israel. That simple fact, that an accessible and engaging book about Maimonides was a bestseller in Israel where it catalyzed a public conversation about philosophy and Judaism, is the very core of what Zionism is about. In Israel our history, our cultural heroes, our concerns can occupy the public sphere. That’s more exciting to me than any archeological site.
Finally, I love the way this story situates the author’s relationship with a series of ideas within his personal relationship with a book. His own personal relationship with this book is the preface – it’s literally the preface – to his book-length exploration of the ideas themselves. And, not only is the author’s personal history with the book part of his treatment of the book’s ideas, but the meaning of the book in Jewish history is also part of that story. The rabbi took the book from Micah Goodman’s hands because of what the Guide for the Perplexed had come to symbolize and represent in Jewish history.
When we open a book, a work of Jewish philosophy like The Guide, or some other piece of Torah scholarship, we are not encountering the ideas without mediation. We read them through the filter created by our memories of encountering those books before and the teachers who taught them to us. And we are encountering those ideas as part of a great chain of Jews who have been studying Torah since Sinai, each of us adding our own voices to an eternal conversation that began generations ago.
The same is true in our Jewish calendar. The Judaic conception of time is linear – marching forward, inexorably towards Ge’ulah and Redemption. Yet the Judaic conception of time is also circular, we return each year to the same yamim tovim which teach us the same messages from our history and the same perspectives with which to understand our place in the world.
We don’t approach Shavuot, or Pesach, or Sukkot in a vacuum. We bring to each yom tov the memories of celebrating that day in our own earlier lives, and we bring along with us the experiences of every Jew and every Jewish community that marked these days.
אֵ֚לֶה מועֲד֣י ה‘ מִקראֵ֖י ק֑דש אֲשֶר־תִקרא֥ו אֹתָ֖ם בְמועֲדֽם׃
“These are the festivals of the Lord, holy occasions when you proclaim them in their proper time.”
The Shabbatot and the yamim tovim are the “festivals of the Lord” – but they depend on us proclaiming them. This is true on a simple, factual, halakhic level because it is our control over the calendar which grants sanctity to the holidays. This is true of no holiday more than Shavuot which has no fixed date in the Torah and indeed can occur on different days of the calendar. Shavuot is the 50th day after Pesach, as determined by our conscious act of counting.
But the sanctity of the holidays also is built on our collective celebration of the holidays on n a vertical plane. When we celebrate sacred Jewish occasions, we are connected to our own celebrations of these days in our own past – we bring our childhood memories with us into the Sukkah and to the Shabbos table. We are also connected to Jews stretching back generations before us, going back centuries and millennia, who have endowed these days with their joys and hopes, their spiritual yearning, and have given special resonance to the sanctity of the day. When we endow the day with our own holy energy, there is a “sacred reverberation” from those who came before us.
Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro, The Piasecner Rebbe, was one of the last rabbis to continue to teach and write in the Warsaw Ghetto and is most famous today for his book Esh Kodesh, which was buried in milk cans in the Warsaw Ghetto and excavated and published after the war. But, he was an accomplished teacher and author before the war and he left behind a small library of significant books on Jewish education and spiritual development.
Among his writings is a theory of niggun, the wordless songs that occupy an important place in Hassidic spirituality. He writes:
There are concentric spheres of sacred reverberation—beginning with one’s own body, the walls of one’s house, one’s city, one’s country, the land of Israel—these are arenas of expansiveness and reverberation, platforms for unfolding, such as what a Torah scroll needs to be unrolled.
So even though the verbal and cognitive content of Torah can indeed be grasped while walking on the road, yet the ta’am of the Torah – it’s taste or its melody – that is beyond speech and intellect can only be manifested in a place where the Torah is allowed to reverberate—where the place itself is holy, where the walls are steeped in holiness (nirtavim bi-kedushah). It takes a holy place to reveal the ta’am—because the ta’am transcends the body.
In this passage the Piasecner Rebbe is reminding us that just as we come to the Jewish bookshelf, informed by all those who have studied these Torahs sources before us, and just as we come to celebrate the Jewish holidays and take advantage of the added meaning and sanctity that generations before us have endowed to those times, so too when it comes to our life of prayer.
In the words of Professor Nehemia Polen, a contemporary scholar of Hassidut, in a paper presented at Yeshiva University’s Orthodox Forum earlier this spring:
The walls of the beit knesset and beit midrash reverberate with the sounds of previous sessions of prayer and learning. And just as Torah study is always a dialogue with previous generations and generations yet to come, so does niggun lift up and pluck old strings, earlier instantiations of the great melody of the Jewish yearning for God.
The power of … niggunim is not based solely on musical talent and virtuosity. Rather, [great niggunim] all emerge from communities of sustained spiritual aspiration. They are embedded in and support a collective quest for the sacred, continued without interruption over many generations, in the face of successive challenges of poverty, chaos, destruction, and (most recently) prosperity. The walls of their batei midrash are alive with resonance.
We too can tap into that power when we pray in this community and in this building, but that requires focus and it requires attention, and it requires a willingness to have our own spiritual ambitions be subsumed within those of past generations.
I would like to revive the Anshe Sholom tradition of dedicating one Friday night each month, Shabbat mevorchim, in this month – this coming Friday night, for a longer Kabbalat Shabbat service with more singing and greater energy. I’ve struggled with how to describe this form of worship in a succinct way to list on the shul calendar and in the shul bulletin. It used to be called “Hassidic Kabbalat Shabbat” which always struck me as being somewhat inaccurate and not maximally clarifying. I thought of calling it a “Musical Kabbalat Shabbat” but didn’t want anyone to think that we would use instruments. If we call it a “melodious Kabbalat Shabbat” those who can’t sing well may think they aren’t invited. So, we’re going to call it a “Festive Kabbalat Shabbat” (until one of you comes up with a better name).
‘Festive Kabbalat Shabbat’ alludes to the spiritual dynamic that applies to all of our sacred and festive days – we draw upon the spiritual capital created by earlier generations even as we make our own investments of spiritual energy. And I also have in mind the dynamic that Professor Polen described. We can’t just sing a song or two and expect any religious transformation of ourselves or of our community. But we can tune in to the spiritual reverberations that exist in this sacred space and then allow the power of the words and the melodies of our prayers to move us.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 