"To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.  I am not a teacher, only a fellow student."  (Soren Kierkegaard)

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A FEW PRE-SHABBAT WORDS FROM RABBI AARON

The Tower and the Curse of Marching in Lock-Step
Below, you'll find a painting of the the Tower of Babel juxtaposed with the lyrics to Peter Gabriel's We Do What We're Told. Gabriel added the phrase "Milgrom's 37" to the song lyric. If you wish to dig a bit further (it's worth while), Google “Milgrom experiment.” Wikipedia does a fine job outlining this famous and troubling experiment in social psychology. Check it out if you get the chance.

Flood
1 Nursery Torah
"Rise and Shine and give God your glory glory...The Lord said to Noah, ‘there's gonna be a floodie floodie...get those children out of the muddy muddy, Children of the Lord.’" And the animals come aboard by twosies, twosies... Such is the nature of calibrating the ancient story into a language that can be internalized by the little guys. And when we are ready to grapple with a more complex - and tragic - world, more layers of  text await. Even if the story feels simple and straightforward, we will find that the drama is anything but simple.

2 The Burden
Noah versus Abraham - in the past I've referenced a famous citation of Rashi in which he shares a midrash comparing the righteousness of each character. Who was more mature in their faith? Who cared more about their fellow human beings? While that midrash is insightful, left unspoken, unexamined, are impossible challenges of being Noah, about the overwhelming guilt and rage of the survivors emerging from the bomb-shelter, taking in the scarred and battered world. Also neglected by the traditional dialogue are the moral hazards posed by a God who recruits heros, by a God whose purging rage unleashes the unspeakable. Year after year, to take shelter in the shadow of that neglect is an act of cowardice.

The mythical vision of a great and terrible flood left its tell-tale marks in so many ancient cultures, in so many songs of sadness and terror.  This week I share with you a brilliant piece written just over 15 years ago by an inspiring teacher of mine, Dr. Peter Pitzele. Pitzele, a psychotherapist, who is one of the great pioneers and practitioners of Biblio-drama. His unsparing prose midrash takes us to into the darkness of desperation; not even God emerges unscathed. Like any great midrash, it stays with you for a while...

I Am Noah written by Dr.Peter Pitzele, printed within Learn Torah With [1995]
I am Noah. It is not important how I found out the secret of the grape, its strange intoxicating power. All you need to know is that this alchemy became my chief preoccupation after the flood had passed, and my other "undertakings" had been concluded. These researches did not keep me sane; no, I would never say that. I lost my sanity in the course of forty days.

No, rather my vineyards and my studies of the grape were the methods of my mania, the ceaseless experiments in which I sought for something that could anesthetize my soul. Is there a greater force in man than the desire to escape? Is there a more potent genius? I think not. In making wine I made a god, and in the almost endless twilight of my life - my blood became the servant of this god, for the God who had made me build an ark never spoke to me again.

A list perhaps. A list will be enough. Small things first, almost comical, like the ridicule of friends who saw me building a boat in the middle of dry land. Painful domestic moments, the insolence of sons, their sullen cooperation. More painful things, the mother and father who thought I was mad. And at first, of course, my own doubts growing as the project grew, the monumental idiocy of this enterprise, the gnawing fear that the voice I heard was the voice of God and that a man like me was to be the savior of the world. No one can keep balance among those dizzying perspectives. Yet hard work is an antidote. I cut lumber; I built like a demon on that ark.

Then the rains began. Gentle at first, a relief to the dry land. But after two days all dust was mud. He slung the dark rain down like pitch. As if guided by a fear, the animals arrived, mud-mired, fur-drenched, wing-weary. It gave me some joy to give them shelter. Overnight it seemed, by the third day, it was already too late. The houses were islands. The roads were streams, the streams were rivers, and the water had covered every field. Some few of the friends of my sons, strong young men paddled makeshift rafts to us and pounded on the ark's sides, asking for entry. But we had already begun to rise on the lake that was our field. From the deck I could see my father's house. Already the way between us was an impassable current, uprooted trees, the bodies of the cattle floating bloated on the stream. Once, just before we battened down, in the screaming wind I thought I heard my mother's scream.

And then the world was swallowed up in night as we closed the shutters down. Never mind the reeking pitching timeless passage, the howls and bellows of the animals. The desolate empty calm. The silence worse than noise. All through the nights and days I only heard that scream, and it seemed in my mother's scream, in the banshee's scream, in the scream of birds I heard the whole world scream, the cries of mothers, infants, lovers and beloved. That scream was fire. It roasted my brains. It made my soul a cinder.

And then when we came out upon the land, there was a world to bury. That task I took as mine. While my sons sowed and reaped and built and fathered, I went about digging holes. The world was a corpse, and I was its undertaker. I found the seeds. I planted them. Grapes grew. I tasted, and in the taste I dreamed of an escape. Patiently, season after season, I tried, until gradually I perfected wine. And then I drank. Pity the men that old God chooses. I found another god. Naked, I feel no shame.

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