A House of Cards: A No Yeast Blog

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Dear readers, we are close enough for me to admit that I suffer from opsomania. Don’t worry, I won’t have you scrambling for your dictionaries--maybe just scramble some eggs.  Opsomania is the abnormal love for one kind of food. In my case it’s, bagels. But as Passover arrives it’s not an option. I cannot deny that every year, as I sip away at my morning latte, I lament the loss of my favorite carb and my spirit sadly flattens like a whole wheat matzah.

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But Passover is not just about slicing off bread from the menu or getting rid of the last possible crumbs from our fridge. It is also a divinely sanctified time for us to take an introspective look at ourselves, to clean up our spiritual crumbs, and to commit ourselves to doing things differently and better today than we did yesterday. It’s about scrutinizing our habits, cravings and entire life with questioning and honest eyes. A thorough and honest search often reveals that we are much crumbier than we realize or care to admit. On Passover we are reminded that Chametz (leavened dough) is equivalent to arrogance – it is the exact opposite of the Torah ideal.

The yeast that makes bread rise is compared to a man’s swollen pride and self-puffery. Yet matzahs are hardly attention seekers. Everything about them bespeaks humility. And indeed, they are a needed reminder to a people who often bloated by their own success, forget that at any moment history can take the air right out of them. The destiny of a Jew can pivot in a second. G-d’s chosen people historically has had to go to sleep at night with their running shoes on. 

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Repeatedly in Jewish history we have seen that Jews can be up one day and under the heel of its enemies the next. One day Joseph was the viceroy and savior of Egypt until his people were rendered slaves of Egypt. German Jews were also respected citizens of their beloved Vaterland, Deutschland until they were cremated and gassed to death. Jews living in the Diaspora are welcome guests in their host countries until they are not and then they must flee for their lives. One moment Jews are simply living life and the next second, even in their own homeland, are gunned down, stabbed and run over by terrorists. 

A thinking man must ask, “Why?” Passover is the perfect time for such introspection. It is a holiday called by a few names: One is, Chag HaHerut, i.e., the holiday of freedom. What are we doing with our freedom? When G-d smashed Egypt along with its idols and freed His nation, He told the Israelites:  

 

“You saw what I did in Egypt, carrying you on eagles' wings and bringing you to Me. Now if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you will be My special treasure among all nations, because all the world is Mine.

 

You will be for Me a Kingdom of Priests and a holy people.”  (Exodus 19:5-6) 

Do we resemble that beautiful vision G-d had of us at all? Are we behaving like a holy people or liked a puffed-up holey bagel, all inflated around an empty core? 

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The Passover Haggadah reminds us that each generation must consider that it was they themselves who came out of Egypt and not their ancestors. We are free and safe at anytime only by G-d’s will. We must earn our redemption daily. Israel has to pray every day for rain while its neighbor Egypt is irrigated by the Nile. G-d demands a constant unique relationship with us and in all our interactions. He wanted us to be a “special treasure,” to become polished gems through His Torah. But, instead we throw away His commandments like unwanted crumbs and fashion our lives like oil-rich bread loaves molded in the shape and service of foreign gods. 

There’s a price to pay for walking away from Hashem.  “You shall fear the L-rd, your G-d, worship Him, and swear by His name. Or What? “Lest the wrath of the L-rd, your G-d, be kindled against you, and destroy you off the face of the earth.” It is the Eleventh principle of Jewish faith to believe that G-d rewards those who keep His commandments and punishes those who don’t. Our enemies are just the sticks that G-d uses to hit us, albeit enthusiastic sticks. The irrational quality of Jew hatred should make us realize that something “irrational,” something exceptional, something beyond the physical reality we cling to, is at play. Rabbi Avraham Tanis says: “Man believes in himself and questions the Almighty, when really, we should believe in the Almighty and question ourselves.” 

My friends, Jewish destiny is as brittle as a matzah. And even as we succeed, let's not forget who is puffing the air into our well being. So let’s try to make every effort to remember we are Jews and show it in ways that are important to G-d, i.e., by observing His Torah.  

Yes, these days are different than all other days. For one, I will miss my bagels. Secondly, it's an apt time to acknowledge that at the center of that sesame-seeded symbol of pride is a big fat zero--an accurate evaluation of what we are without G-d as the core. And so, as we munch on our matzahs, it’s the perfect time for us to reflect upon our more savory days and take note of Who really is buttering our bread or making us choke with each bite. 

Happy Passover!

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Does Your Tongue Need Boot Camp?

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Does your tongue need boot camp? There's a day for that; It's called Yom Kippur. We spend the whole day praying instead of tongue wagging and abstain from eating instead of pacifying our thousands of demanding taste buds. Twenty-five hours of repurposing and disciplining an eight-muscled tongue is no small effort when 364 days of the year it is granted free reign. And so, with parched tongues, as people exit the synagogue at the end of the holiday, I’ve noticed that most whom I’ve encountered, family and friends, will stop themselves mid-sentence, when they are about to comment negatively on something or someone they saw that day. The sentence will start with, “Did you see how So and So looked? And will be self-interrupted with, “Ah, I just finished praying, it’s a New Year. I don’t want to talk bad.”  

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Indeed, showing great promise, at the end of the very intense Day of Atonement, our tongues seem to know better. But as the awe of the day loses its grip on us and the savory break fast meal moistens our mouths, we quickly forget our prayers of repentance and all the hours we spent begging to be sealed in the Book of Life. Our tongues resume old habits and give life to the language of death, the language of the snake who talked bad about G-d to entice Eve to sin and successfully brought death to the world--a true and tragic fall from Paradise. For the Torah says that when G-d blew life into Adam, he became a "speaking being." And thus a person's speech is an expression of the very soul that G-d breathes into him,   making gossiping, slandering, spreading rumors--true or false--all sins. Deadly ones!

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With His love He breathed life into our mouths and with that very same vessel we spew hate, mischief, curses and falsehoods. As delectable as fresh gossip may be, know that our tongues can effectively lick our names write out of the Book of Life and write an entirely new biography, one with a scary ending. The Talmud states that every word which issues from our mouths, whether good, evil, by mistake, or on purpose, is written in a book: “Then those who feared the L-rd spoke with one another; the L-rd has hearkened and listened, and a book of remembrance has been written before Him […].”  So please tell me, with the stakes so high, from all the role models in the Torah, from Moses to Queen Esther, why would you want to emulate the snake?

In this week’s Torah reading we learn how talking bad about people and slander can you make you ugly. The punishment for it is a skin disease called tzarat (miscalled leprosy). Moses’ own sister, Miriam, is punished with an ephemeral bout of tzarat for talking bad about him.  And even Moses himself was affected by it momentarily. G-d turned his hand white with tzarat, and then back to normal again, after the world’s most humble man was hesitant about G-d’s assignment and said that the elders of Israel wouldn’t believe him. The Talmud says that even when the Messiah comes and all people and animals will be healed of disease and the impure will be made pure, the snake whose scaly skin  actually is leprosy, will not be healed because of his evil words. In this Parasha we also read that it is the duty of the Kohanim, the priestly spiritual leaders, to evaluate the skin diseases of the people, not doctors. Why you ask? Because its cause is spiritual, not medical. There is no suffering, our rabbis teach, without sin. “Plagues only affect a person on account of the evil speech which comes out of his mouth.” (Talmud) With so many variants of Covid, it should make us wonder if we learned our lesson yet. 

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The power of speech is so mighty that G-d created the world not with His hands but with ten utterances. Using the power of speech negatively effectively destroys what He so lovingly created. G-d created the world in seven days and thus we read this week that the slanderer who is diagnosed with tzarat is separated from the community for seven days. “The punishment is measure-for-measure: If you promote divisiveness amongst others, then you will also suffer the divisiveness of separation from the community.”[i]

So here I repeat, the world was created by words, it is sustained by words and it can be destroyed by words. Words never die! We are taught in a Midrash that when Moses smashed the first set of tablets indeed the tablets were destroyed but the words and letters that were upon them, they lived, and they all flew back up to heaven. (Jerusalem Talmud, Taanit 4:5).

Eleanor Roosevelt is attributed as saying: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” So my dear friends, what are you talking about? I know personally when someone calls me and asks me, “So have you heard the latest?” I know we are not off to a healthy start. If all your friendships revolve around gossiping about others perhaps it’s time to question who your friends are. If today they yap about others be sure that tomorrow they will talk about you. When’s the last time you walked away from a conversation smarter than when you started, more inspired and motivated? Do your friends make you better people or vile and base?  It’s time to question your life’s purpose. Are you a creator or a destroyer? Are you behaving as if you were created in G-d’s image or slithering in the shadows like a sneaky snake.  Click to watch Aliza's Torah  videos on YouTube 

  

I know it’s not easy to stop and  that being a yenta is as contagious as the plagues it causes. But we are better than that. How can we not be? G-d made us! Remember the simple advice we’ve all been told in our life, “Think before you speak.” If we’d be in court in front of a judge we’d measure every word we say. Well we are in front of a Judge, an eternal Judge who is always watching and can’t be fooled. Know before whom you stand!  Watch your mouth and remember most things are better left unsaid.

                                                                                         SHABBAT SHALOM!