The Torah should be better.
The Torah already IS better, as you’ve noticed in your years spent, passionately and perhaps even desperately probing and digging for the sweeter and righter parts of the package we all grow up with or wind up around, to whatever degree. The Torah contains better, and means better, than seems to be easy to give over popularly, and is infinitely bound in its own language and context.
Bridges keep building to make text and perspectives available, and old paths endure in the traversed forests of masoretic-tradition; we live in them and their conclusions always. All the more reason to NEED to understand better how to respect, relate and transcend with those paths, all the more reason to know that land so deeply that we would even know the delicacy vs. urgency of digging, deeper and deeper, as the need for wisdom-treasures, i.e. sensible solutions for social and personal issues, became ever more compelling.
Perhaps you’ve spent time in these fields-turned-mines. Maybe reached points of disappointment in the limits of what some stage or particular voice was saying and able to say, but then had the skills and basic awareness of How Big This Is to notice that other perspectives and values were long acknowledged and given space in Judaism. Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe you’ve resigned yourself to Judaism being A Certain Thing, and struggled with that resignation, because you loved and treasured something else in All This.
Know! Not a one of the good traditions really prefer to be inaccessible, it’s just that the subtlest of processes and treasures are so precious that only love + time can make them clear at all. That’s why its all the more important that the few skilled and yet invested enough in the good G-d and the best of gospel have spaces to share and facilitate clarities and their circulation. Can we please maybe put such a thing together?
To this end:
I like Ishbitz. I like Breslov. I like Maharal. I like Gemara. I like Bahir. I like Rams, bam and ban. I like foundations and I like extentions. I like bridging imaginable gaps with perfect metaphor and I like how easy it is to give something over when you’ve chapped it yourself. What sepharim, and better, what particular Torahs inside them is most important or exciting for you to give over?
I appreciate yoga. I appreciate fermentations, pickles, krauts, sours and ciders. Fresh and wholemeal patissieries. I appreciate wild grasses in their seasons, also then kept and dried. I appreciate concentrates and preparations and deep breaths of the freshest air amidst old rocky trails in newly grown forests. I appreciate shlepping important things back and forth, somehow communicating my commitment and love through the carrying of weights that themselves benefit carrying and are appreciated where arrived. Whats a precious skill, sensitivity or virtue you have that you would appreciate the chance to teach the circulation of? What is something real and physical that you would most rather enjoy living from, and make it possible for others to live from, with and through?
I strongly resent racism. I strongly resent competition. I strongly resent disingenuous manipulation. Hypocrisy. Thievery. Abuse (of power). Nationalism, militarism, uninformed fundamentalism. Distraction. Rabbeinu Yonah. Use of truth to obscure accountability. Noise, except music. Ich veist! I also know how much I appreciate and live from all these terrible things. Are there better ways to fulfill the problematic, dishonest, and abusive that civilization has depended on? How much to accept the nature and way of things? What crimes are inherent in our reality, do all our blessings depend on? What kind of Torah do you resent the most, and why? What can we do, what should we adress, as far as our own participation in what troubles ourselves about others, and the whole world, or just the hated identifiable enemy and problem?
We are responsible for the Torah we’d like to see in the world. To that end: a school is the only way. To test, ground, and sharpen our conceits and conclusions, and draw insight out of people. Where most Yeshivas aspire only to reinforce certain conclusions or models, “בארי עדיף,” Clearer Is Better, and the more we can empower individuals to understand their own actual relationship to the wider range of mystery and revelation called “The Torah,” the better the popular Torah becomes.
Most of us, interested or invested in Judaism and the wisdom ported within and through it, find ourselves utterly at the mercy of surrender to alien assumptions, definitions, and traditions of what the Torah says or demands properly and best. To the degree that we don’t understand what’s important to us in the context of what offends us, we cannot be free with what we know or feel. This is one of the unique blessings of The Torah of Israel, as opposed to other myriad religions and doctrines: accessibility and Pharisaic flexiblity, relationship to prophetic word and cannon text that invites if not demands personal engagement and re-clarification of old and problematic imperatives, until they make sense as authentic wisdom in context, and not just bad advice or old soup recipe because of alienation from context.
Many of us just love “The Torah”, or hate it, without a sense of how it works to process whatever is important to us, as individuals, as communities, or as nations. This is because we think of it, like Law, as a monolithic and defined set of dogmas and practices. But looking simply at the history of the Torah and it’s adapted imperatives testifies how true that is not: context, modernity, failure and possibility have always informed the Torah’s conclusions and counsels, and responsible use of the Torah, like Law and Literacy, demand accessibility and engagement from investment.
The plan is such:
3-5 months of Clarifying Work.
Starting with the questions in Bold above, 3-5 months of working with scholars and teachers on the personal answers to these questions and sources relating to them in the corpus of the Torah traditions. Students will develop their priorities, source them and then debate them, in one-on-one debate, classroom discussion, and analytical essay, until the context, limit and purpose of some things important to us becomes clearer.
And then
3-5 months of Skills Training.
How to give over your Torah effectively, gracefully, irresistibly and appreciatively. Almost no one likes a preacher except in context, so we’re going to spend 3-5 month on context skills. Songwriting, Organizing, Storytelling, Conscious Communication, Dance Therapy, Social Activism, Personal Health, Service and other skills to put whatever values we individually and communally clarify into circulation and embodiment. Advanced study after this year long process is an option, continuing on as a teaching assistant-trainee.
This is imagined as a post-educational enrichment program, with it’s own ultimate certifications. Lets start with the best people we can find, the most troubled, concerned, witty and hopeful, the ones who would come to this troubled Canaan land because they knew there had to be better priorities, better clarities, and better functional traditions with the integration of the thing we really need Torah to be. Because we, as children or as adults, glimpsed and felt degrees to which it always was what it promised to be, and notice maybe exactly what inhibits its ability to be any kind of good at all. Maybe that’s worth resolving for and with the kids: what can we do with this after all? Not to profit, but not to be starved. Not to exploit, but not to fail. Model your solutions to the good life problem and model Her strengths that we might all become the most loveable kind of strong.
There’s something precious in this language; a way to deal with everything that our lives depend on, in some sense, and to negotiate the standard for our peoples, the kids. Can you think of any young people who would appreciate the chance to learn in a school that asked and answered all these questions in the company of the most attentive and deeply invested of friends?
Know what you appreciate. Notice what it is and find out what it’s sourced in, mythically as well as socially as well as culturally. Know what you abhor. Find the context for it so you can be free with it. Know how to share your clarity, with grace and aplomb as well as coherence and sensitivity. Master your Torah, and share it everywhere, even with words when necessary, so we could all have that better Torah. Local religion doesn’t have to be stupider than feels right to you; you can be a part of living, engaging and co-creating in the better world we already know is not just possible, but necessary. Your clarity could be our clarity, all you need to do is share and notice, in a space with others sharing and noticing, and through each other, truer clarity will be facilitated. Please help us do this better.
