RE:VERB THIRTY-THREE / B’HALOCHTA / DESIRE - weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

DESIRE

On the morning of Shavuot, after staying up all night and watching the sun rise over Jerusalem, I ended up at Kol HaNeshama (http://www.kolhaneshama.org.il/english/index.asp), and sat in on a storytelling circle of parents and toddlers. They were reading together from a cute book that made the Ten Commandments simple for 3 year olds. The 10th commandment, ‘Do Not Covet’, was translated as ‘married people only love each other.’ Or something like that.

Please scroll to the bottom of the newsletter to read this article in full.

Keep Up Your Studies this Summer

Thank you to everyone for a wonderful school year! Our students learned a lot and we hope they will keep up their studies over the summer. We have made this handy video starring Tribeca Hebrew students for children and parents alike to brush up on the Alef Bet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD2AGCXqpr4

If you would like a DVD of this video, please email marielle@tribecahebrew.org. The DVD will also include photo slideshows of pictures from throughout the school year. They are for sale for $10.

Here are some online resources to help you keep up your studies this summer:

Click here to download Hebrew flash cards to print out and study.

Kid-friendly sites for Jewish learning, culture and fun!

• Babaganewz - http://www.babaganewz.com/
• Children’s Learning Network - http://www.akhlah.com
• Jewish Children's Museum - http://www.jcmonline.org/
• Jewish Family - http://www.jewishfamily.com/
• Shira Kline Music - http://www.shirlala.com/index.php/front/
• Welcome to Alef Land - http://www.alefnet.biz/index.html
• Your Page - http://www.yourpage.org

4th Grade Summer Hebrew Guide

4th Grade teacher Dani Saks was also kind enough to make a summer study guide for our 4th grade students. This Hebrew companion is is intended as a “crash course” in Hebrew reading. It is written to go along with the Mitkadem Curriculum Level (Ramah) 2, which should have gone home with your child. We have extra copies at the school is needed. We want to encourage all of our parents to try and read with your children at least once a week for half an hour (that has been the time frame of Hebrew at Tribeca Hebrew) over the course of the summer. If anyone has any questions about the companion or about Hebrew in general they can feel free to contact Dani by email at danisaks@hotmail.com.

You may download the Hebrew companion here.

Last Chance to Sign Up for Bagel Making at Zucker's

There is still room to sign up for our Bagel Making Elective at Zucker's for June 17/18.

Students will travel to Zucker’s, where they will make dough and bake their own bagels.

This class will meet in two-day sessions: the 1st day will be for dough-making, the 2nd for baking.

Find the sign-up sheet here.

Upcoming Events at the Museum of Jewish Heritage

WEDNESDAY | JUNE 10 | 7 P.M.
Freedom Songs

Museum favorites Joshua Nelson, Neshama Carlebach, and the Green Pastures Baptist Choir join forces for the first time for an exciting and uplifting concert of music inspired by Jewish and African-American traditions.

$20, $15 students/seniors, $10 members

Download the flyer here.

WEDNESDAY | JUNE 17 | 7 P.M.
Fourth Annual New York’s Best Emerging Jewish Artists
Hosted by comedian Johnny Lampert

Featuring indie rock bands DeLeon and Girls in Trouble, comedian Ray Ellin, storytellers Sarah Saltzberg and Boris Timanovsky, and a short film by DJLubel.

Come see a new line-up of the best local Jewish talent, followed by an after-party on the terrace overlooking New York Harbor.
$25, $20 members Ticket price includes open bar at after-party.

Dowload the flyer here.

RE:VERB THIRTY-THREE / B’HALOCHTA / DESIRE - weekly torah takeaway by Amichai Lau-Lavie

Email your thoughts and feedback to Amichai@storahtelling.org.

DESIRE

On the morning of Shavuot, after staying up all night and watching the sun rise over Jerusalem, I ended up at Kol HaNeshama (http://www.kolhaneshama.org.il/english/index.asp), and sat in on a storytelling circle of parents and toddlers. They were reading together from a cute book that made the Ten Commandments simple for 3 year olds. The 10th commandment, ‘Do Not Covet’, was translated as ‘married people only love each other.’ Or something like that.

There may be better ways of explaining to a child the meaning of ‘do not desire what does not belong to you.’ But it’s not simple. Coveting, like its siblings Desire, Lust, and Greed are with us, or so it seems, from a very early age. Don’t we always want more of what we can’t or shouldn’t have? Haven’t we always?

The tenth commandment does not refer only to the sins of lust. It lists the types of properties one must not desire – someone else’s spouse, servant or ox (or laptop). Like the other nine commandments, this one is a pretty good idea, an early form of ethical norm making. But, unlike the other nine, it is the only one that prevents one from even thinking about transgression. It’s an early version of mind control. But how well does it work?

Coveting, in all its manifestations, can easily, perhaps too easily, be identified as the possible root of so many evils – consider consumerism or adultery, and useless wars and crashing markets. Have I mentioned global warming? Throughout human history, it seemed, with an eye always on the next big thing, our healthy appetites became binges of craving, crashing delicate eco-systems of propriety, and destroying lives, homes and countries. Now it may even be the planet.

That delicate, seductive boundary between wanting and coveting gets easily blurred. Somewhere, somehow, I know they are all the right ways to keep us from blurring.

But even the people Israel, who had just seen God, been fed manna by the heavens and led home by a pillar of fire, were lost in the blur - never satisfied and craving more. One day, in the middle of the Sinai, they demanded meat and caused a riot. The whole story is told, as if written for the stage, in Chapter Eleven of the Book of The Wilderness, smack in the middle of this week’s super-packed Torah portion called B’halotcha. It’s the tale about the miracle of the quails and the fatal food poisoning that happened after. It’s a cautionary tale about excess:

“The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, 'If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to!'”

(Treat yourself to this entire chapter, honestly, it’s a great read, especially in the excellent English translation of the New JPS Bible now free online – on this excellent site, psookim.com)

I am torn between feeling sympathy for the protein protesters (I am no vegetarian) and deep contempt. The text, I know, wants me to hate them. But in their craving I hear a longing for some more profound than flesh. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. What was it they desired? Why was it so wrong?

‘Felt a gluttonous craving’ is a funny translation. The Hebrew expression used to describe the demand of the ‘riffraff’ that instigated the riots (not a bad translation, rather) is Hitavu Ta'ava – something like ‘they desired desire’. It’s as if what they wanted was simply more than what present. The rest of the people (call them ‘the mainstream’ then get swept by the momentum of discount and raised the flag over the shortage of meat. But it could have been anything. The rest of the story is intense: God gets involved and a lot of angry words are hurled back and forth, and finally the flocks of quails descend upon the Sinai, and the people hunt, and eat, and are satisfied, and many die, mysteriously, with the meat still within their teeth. They then name that place Kivrot Ha’Ta'ava – the graves of gluttony, or perhaps - the death of desire.

When desire itself is the motive of the craving, and not the specific object of desire, something goes wrong. Perhaps that is why the tenth commandment prohibits even thinking about that which is off limits, excessive to what we need, or what we get to get.

I think about the cost of craving as real riots flare outside Jerusalem today. Angry Jewish settlers were protesting the Israeli government’s dismantling of several outposts in the West Bank. They burned tires, stopped traffic and set fires to Palestinian fields. Here, in the land where land is the biggest coveting victim of all, wanting more is almost the norm. Everybody ends up losing.

“It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners… it is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness. It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day… the latest revelation – from no Mount Sinai, from no Mount of the sermon, is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what was creation.”

This fantastic quote, from the late philosopher Hans Jonas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas), is a somber reminder for why taking care of our desire habits and coveting less is no longer a luxury. It should perhaps become the commandment number one.