chayei sarah: strangeness for the sake of heaven
Hello friends,
It's cold, it's rainy, it's autumn. I hope you all have a delightful Spookot (the Jewish holiday celebrated by leaving the Sukkah up until the day after Halloween to celebrate our spookiest witchy foremothers.)
As always, so much happens in this Torah portion. Let's start near the beginning. In Verse 4, after Sarah's death, Avraham says to the Hittites:
ger-v'soshav anochi imachem
i am a stranger and a dweller with you
The Artscroll Stone edition chumash comments (quoting Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik) that Avraham here is representative of every Jew's role: to be both a dweller/תושב within the broader community (Soloveitchik says country) and work for its welfare but also to always be ready to be a stranger/גר, since a Jew's ultimate allegiance is to G-d and Torah.
I find myself in lots of conversations about assimilation lately (in part because I'm taking an excellent class on the halachas of Chanukah). There's a strong push in my queer and Jewish communities to oppose assimilation. In both cases, the push is to be more distinct from the surround culture both visually (yarmulkes! queer haircuts! rejection of "passing"!) and culturally (learning ancestral languages! rejecting cisheteronormative social norms/roles!) None of this is bad, to be clear, and some of these activities are ones I value deeply (oy the hours I have spent learning Yiddish, the years I have spent covering my head). But I also find myself annoyed at arguments based in the desire to create these distinctions for their own sake. Arguments like (for example) saying that a Chanukah-centered Jewish life is less authentic because Chanukah is only important due to assimilating to Christian culture. Or that Spookot isn't a real Jewish holiday because it is clearly made up to connect with Halloween. Or arguments that queer relationships (or, g-d forbid, queer people) that appear more normative (bisexuals in hetero relationships, for example) are somehow less authentically queer.
Before going further, I do want to be clear that it's totally fine to be weird just for the fun of being weird (but don't make it weird.)
image description: jughead from riverdale saying "In case you haven't noticed, I'm weird. I'm a weirdo. I don't fit in. And I don't want to fit in. Have you ever seen me without this stupid hat on? That's weird!"
I think I would like to spend less time debating where we should lie on the assimilation-nonassimilation spectrum, and more time thinking about when (and how) to be a תושב or a גר (or a mixture of both). No more anti-assimilation for anti-assimilation's sake, or assimilation for assimilation's sake. I want to be in my communities, working for their welfare, while also understanding that sometimes I will need to hold myself apart. Not for the sake of holding myself apart, but because I have a higher allegiance.
There's a connection here to a Rabbinic idea about the comparative status of disagreements. In particular, the Rabbis make a distinction between disagreements that are for the sake of Heaven, and disagreements that are not for the sake of Heaven. I think this distinction is at play here. There's holding oneself apart as a גר for the sake of Heaven, for the sake of some higher truth or higher calling, and then there's holding oneself apart simply to hold oneself apart (which is not necessarily bad!)
You might argue that there's no difference here, but I think there is. There's the old saying by the Kotzker Rebbe popularized in Avraham Fried's song (yiddish version, english version):
if i am i because you are you,
and you are you because i am i,
then i am not i, and you are not you
but if i am i because i am i,
and you are you because you are you
then i am i and you are you
Pushing for assimilation and pushing for anti-assimilation are both the same activity. They both define me in terms of you and you in terms of me. Understanding myself as both גר and תושב, on the other hand, means that sometimes I will behave like those around me, and sometimes I won't, but the questions I'm asking myself to decide what to do are not based in simply a desire to be the same or different.
We can go a little deeper, though. Avraham uses the word אנכי here for "I" and not the more common אני. These two words for "I" differ by the letter כ, which has gematria of 20. This is the same gematria as that of the root היה, which means being/existence and is the root of the four-letter name of haShem. You might say that אנכי is therefore אני + היה: I-in-the-world, I-together-with-existence, or even I-together-with-haShem. I would perhaps argue that אנכי is, Buberliciously, the I we can only use along with a Thou. (I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this gematria, if you know a source please share!)
Rav Hirsch arrives at a similar conclusion based on an etymological argument, namely that אני connotes the speaker as separate from their audience but אנכי connotes the speaker in intimate (and benevolent) connection with their audience (I-in-community, I-with-haShem, I-and-Thou.)
Avraham is not a dweller among or a stranger to, therefore, but both a dweller with and stranger with the Hittites. Avraham's dwellingness and strangeness are both projects undertaken with the Hittites, because the intimacy and connection of אנכי applies to both גר and תושב. When we set ourselves apart, as Jews or queers or whatever we are, it is not to set ourselves apart from but set ourselves apart with. Perhaps, when we are in the role of גר we are actually still present in the broader community and still working for its welfare, even as we keep to our I-am-because-I-am.
This is strangeness l'shem shamayim, strangeness for the sake of heaven.
I don't know if this perspective is helpful to you, but it has been helpful to me. Let me know your thoughts, and feel free to forward this to anyone you think might be interested.
gut shabes,
ada
Correspondence Corner
I got some questions after last week's gematria marathon (paraphrased):
Why do you use gematria?
Why do you think so few people in liberal/queer/progressive Jewish spaces do?
How can someone start using gematria?
There are three purposes, as I see it, to do gematria:
to enjoy playing the game,
to make connections you wouldn't have otherwise thought about, and
to organize your thoughts
For the first, I'm a professional mathematician, and so I enjoy number-patterns. I also enjoy the Rabbinic game of word-association, where you chain together ideas to get to unexpected places. It's just fun. There's no energy like the energy in a beis midrash where everyone is playing this game of finding the next idea, the next connection.
For the second, I think that gematria allows us to force ourselves to think about things differently than we are used to. Gematria connects laughter and Torah. Okay, so what does this teach us about Torah? What does this teach us about laughter? You might reach that connection some other way, but the (frankly, somewhat random) connections gematria produces force reflection that might not otherwise happen. I think this is useful even if we jettison the idea of gematria having any kind of mystical authority.
Lastly, I think gematria is a convenient way to remember and organize your thoughts (if you like number-patterns.) There's a spot in my brain that stores the laughter-torah gematria connection, and I can use that as short-hand for the broader connection between the different types of Torah and types of laughter. After writing last week's newsletter, I now have a spot in my brain that stores the two sides of ת and the לך-לך-עבד gematria as shorthand for thinking about transition and liberation.
As to why gematria isn't more common in liberal/queer/progressive spaces....I think this is a combination of a few things. First, you need to be familiar with the Hebrew alefbet and into number-patterns, which I think rules a lot of people out. But even with both of those, I think a lot of people assume gematria can only be useful if you do think it is uncovering some hidden mystical truth. I disagree, of course, but I'm not surprised (given gematria's reputation) that this turns some people off.
If you want to start exploring gematria, my suggestion is to simply pick the standard system and ignore all the variants. Start picking one word you are interested in thinking about, and try to find at least one other Hebrew word with the same gematria. Don't worry if the connection seems profound or mundane. Just find another word or phrase with the same gematria, and then meditate on it. Do this once a week, and before long you'll be noticing the numeric value of words as you read!