Ki Tisa: Learning to Break and Tolerate the Broken

A few weeks ago, I attended a really fascinating lecture on the Talmud. Now, I was a Talmud major in college, and I studied quite a bit more of it in rabbinical school.

And yet, I had never heard it described anywhere NEAR the way I did last month. A teacher from a Yeshiva called "S'vara" spoke about their school's approach to Talmud. S'vara describes itself as "A traditionally radical yeshiva." It is an inclusive, modern institution that teaches Talmud through a queer lens, which - let's be honest - you NEVER hear anyone else doing. In fact, it doesn't even sound plausible. What kind of queer, LGBTQ lens could EVER be used to understand rabbinic (male, straight, cis, old-fashioned) discussions from 2,000 years ago? Enter S'vara's introductory talk, that each new student hears when they first attend the Yeshiva, and which not only has given me an entirely new outlook on some old methods... but has really shifted how I read this week's Torah portion. They call it "The CRASH talk."

What I heard was, essentially, The CRASH Talk. It was amazing. I'm not going to do it justice, because I need to boil it down to four paragraphs here, but hopefully you'll get a sense of what it's all about... and maybe it'll provoke you a little.
At its core, The CRASH Talk makes two essential points: 1) In life, we are always part of a story. We have origin stories from our childhood, community stories about where we belong, value stories about what we believe. Constant stories! We all create narratives that help us walk through life and make sense of the world around us. And 2) All stories crash. It's not about whether they "should" crash, or do we enjoy when they shatter, or if it's helpful for them to break. No, it's just the reality of being flawed, imperfect human beings, who live in a chaotic world where no story or narrative can stand up to ALL scrutiny. The question we should be asking is *not* whether crashes happen or not, it's what do we do when they inevitably occur?

Insert the brilliant lens of S'vara. The Talmud isn't actually about stuffy, old men, writing laws for an ancient society; it is a blueprint for HOW to deal with the inescapable crashes that happen in life. Destroyed temples, oppression, persecution, in-fighting, calamities - the Talmud, and indeed the entire rabbinic enterprise, is about how to handle these crises, process them, and keep living.

Amazing!! Again, I'm not doing this justice, because it's actually a much longer, well-developed approach that I just hijacked. So you've probably got lots of questions and disagreements. Don't worry; I intend to keep sharing my own personal processing of this radical concept right here on the blog. We can do it together!! :-) For now, let's briefly look at one powerful example of this: The Golden Calf incident. This week, we read the infamous story of the Israelites rebelling against God while Moses is on Mount Sinai. When Moses returns to find them worshiping a bovine idol, he smashes to the ground the Tablets containing the Ten Commandments. That's right, this is a literal CRASH story!

It's also a disaster, right? An absolute worst-case scenario. Rebellion, rejection, destruction of the Divine Word, anger, punishment, death. So why then do we find multiple rabbinic stories, midrashim, that see the broken tablets as a *good* thing?

The ancient scholar, Reish Lakish (himself an ex-gladiator... and possibly queer, but we don't have to go into all that now...), goes so far as to state that even God declared, "Yasher Koach (well done!) that you broke them!!" How can this be?? Maybe the rabbis understood that the most powerful learning doesn't come when a teacher imparts all the knowledge and the students just sit silently and memorize. Maybe the rabbis of old - and the traditionally radical rabbis of S'vara - realize(d) that some things need to be smashed to smithereens to allow new learning to emerge from the rubble. Because if EVERYTHING crashes, then perhaps our task on this earth isn't to tiptoe around and avoid bumping into anything. What if, instead, our job is to build up tolerance for mistakes, failures, disappointments, difficult emotions, pain, sadness, and all the other "crashes" that simply come with being alive? It sure does put a new spin on the shattered Ten Commandments, doesn't it? That story just isn't the same for me any more; the old narrative is broken. And maybe that's precisely where new learning begins.


Images in this blog post:
1. Image of S'vara's Hebrew letters decoder sheet
2. CC image courtesy of LillyCantabile on Pixabay
3. CC image courtesy of Big Dave Diode on Flickr
4. CC image courtesy of freestocks.org