Mitzvah of the Week - Intro Post #2

Today, my MOTW project officially begins! 

Having given this some thought since posting last week about this, there are a few other things I should probably say here by way of procedure before jumping in.

• As I mentioned in that post, my main guide will be Rambam's Sefer Hamitzvot (with the Jewfaq.org list as an online backup/companion guide).  Rambam's list of the mitzvot divides the 613 into 248 "positive" commandments ("corresponding to the organs of the human body") and 365 "negative" commandments ("corresponding to the days of the solar year").  You can find that list here.  Obviously any list has advantages and disadvantages.  In this case, it means doing all the positive commandments before the negative ones.  It can't be helped.  I hope I don't run out of steam!
  
• Where needed, I will show Tanakh references using the excellent Mechon Mamre site.  (While I don't love it's English translation, it does give the Hebrew.  I will also be consulting the most recent JPS translation to make sure I'm getting the right meanings.)  Talmud references, unfortunately, are a bit trickier.  The weakness of my Aramaic is only superceded by my lack of Talmud knowledge.  I could provide online references to specific pages, but (a) this doesn't help me too much and (b) it isn't likely to be of help to the kinds of people who might ever read this.  So instead I'll provide references to the relevant Babylonian Talmud English-language translation at the Internet Sacred Text Archive. 
  
• Organization of the posts is going to be a little tricky, because there's going to be "before," "during," and "after" components of each mitzvah:  "before" is my reading up of what the mitzvah actually requires, existence of alternative readings/interpretations, if any, and what my own thoughts are before juming in; "during" would be my thoughts and comments while the week is going on; and "after," of course, would be the post-game round-up.  I think the only way to do this properly, without causing confusion for all 2 people who will ever read this, is to put each mitzvah (or group of mitzvot) into one post, containing the before, during and after analysis.  Otherwise there would be too many posts, and too much jumping around.  So, check back here in one week's time for the post on positive mitzvah #1, to believe in God.

Stay tuned!

Mitzvah of the Week

Ah yes, mitzvot.

One of my plans for this blog -- something I have had in the back (and front) of my mind to do for quite some time -- is to take a long,  hard look at the "taryag mitzvot":  the 613 commandments that constitute the corpus of a Jew's obligation to God. 

(Having recently read some of BZ's posts on this subject over at Mah Rabu -- such as this one -- I'm aware that there are potential "framing" issues attendant to my formulation of the subject, in particular, the notion that there is some agreed-upon, bounded set of mitzvot and that their meaning, modes of implementation, etc. are unchanging and uncontested.  At least for right now, my intention is to keep these things in mind as I proceed with my own explorations.  I plan to take up BZ's framing arguments more generally in a later post.)

Why?

As a Reform Jew, my relationship to mitzvot has always been problematic. 

In the first place, RJs just don't study them.  This makes a certain amount of sense:  We have enough on our plate keeping up with the mitzvot that are perceived as relevant and worthy of observing, much less those that on their face have little or no relevance to the kinds of lives we lead.  So the emphasis on education is to "focus on the positives" -- those things RJs as a whole either do or might possibly do -- rather than "to know the laws."  I kind of blame my Jewish educators for this one.

Of course, blaming one's teachers is a pretty sorry reason for not knowing the laws (forget following them or not).  Until relatively recently, actually, within the last year, I had never even read a list of the 613.  There were some real surprises for me there...but I get ahead of myself.

The problematic aspect of the mitzvot for me has been that "mitzvas" are not "good deeds" -- they're not meant to me things that make one feel good, or things that any decent person should do.  They're ostensibly commandments or obligations -- expressions of God's will.  Kind of heavy, and no wonder RJs tend not to dwell on them.  To understand and appreciate that mitzvot are not just "principles to live by" but actually commandments from God...well, that makes them a different animal entirely.  Ah, but then one starts to see what's involved in the observance of mitzvot, and things get murky.  Some of them I think are plain wrong.  Others may not be "right" or "wrong," but their observance doesn't speak to me in any meaningful way.  Yet others make sense, but are so alien to the way I have lived my life, that I can't imagine observing them in any consistent way.  And then there are the mitzvot that, when you start to look at them closely, make no sense at all.  Well, they make sense, but when I go back to their textual bases -- where does a particular mitzvah "come from" -- they don't seem to be supported by the underlying words.

But, in the end, none of these are reasons not to know.

It's particularly troubling to me that the Reform movement's stand on mitzvot is so at odds with what seems to be the practice of RJs.  "A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism" adopted by the CCAR in Pittsburgh in 1999 reads, in part

We are committed to the ongoing study of the whole array of [mitzvot] and to the fulfillment of those that address us as individuals and as a community. Some of these [mitzvot], sacred obligations, have long been observed by Reform Jews; others, both ancient and modern, demand renewed attention as the result of the unique context of our own times.

Now to be fair, I was "born and bred" as a Reform Jew prior to 1999, but I have to wonder out loud to what extent the commitment referred to here has actually been manifested, in study and action, in the collective behavior of Reform Jews.  If it has, I've certainly seen little evidence of it.

So...

I'm going to undertake a project I've long delayed, with the understanding that I have no idea where it will lead, what I will discover, or what it all means anyway:  I'm going to examine and, where applicable, observe all of the 613 mitzvot...one by one.  I'll read up as much as I can, including reading Rambam's Sefer Hamitzvot as a kind of companion guide (yes, I know he's not the first and last word on mitzvot, but I'll be reading other sources too).  I'll blog about my experiences here, warts and all.  To be sure, I'll probably end up grouping some of them together -- I can't imagine devoting weeks and weeks to the incest probibitions, for example.  And for obvious reasons I'll have to skip around here and there, particularly with the holiday-related ones.  Others may need more than one week -- Shabbat-related mitzvot are kind of big ones and should probably get more time, both in terms of studying them and observing them.  You get the idea.  Overall, by trying to stick to one a week, it will give me the opportunity to do my best to really observe it -- to focus on a single thing (or set of things) without being distracted.

I fear that I don't know enough to do this right.  I fear that if I don't do this, I never will.  I hope that I will be challenged, enlightened and wizened by doing it.  And, perhaps most of all, I hope that if anyone out there ever bothers to read any of this, that I will hear other people's thoughts, suggestions, etc.  If I could find a good RJ chevrusa to do this, I would, but most would find this a little crazy.

Wow.  It's out there now.  Let's see what happens...

What is going to happen here...

Okay, vague and cryptic first post, right?

So here's what I'm planning to do here:  On a regular basis, daily if possible, but certainly several times a week, I plan to take up different Jewish and Jewish-related topics, questions, problems, and stories.  There is no stone here I'm not willing to turn over. 

Some of these issues will be intensely personal, others will be global in scope.  I imagine some will be brief thoughts, while others will be longer, more in-depth explorations of the topic at hand.  I hope to be as autobiographical as possible, but only to personalize the discussions.  I am well aware that there are many Jews more knowledgable than I on these issues.  But this blog -- the entire point of all of this -- is meant on the one hand as a vehicle for me personally to work through the meanings and implications of the laws, rituals, language, culture, history, politics for my life but also, on the other hand, to offer up my own struggle as a real-time history of what it's like for a committed Jew (well, at least someone who likes to consider himself as one) to work though the contradictions between his faith and modernity, and between his religion, which is fundamentally conservative, and his ideology, which is fundamentally liberal. 

I'm terrified and excited beyond words to see where it goes.

Why another Jewish blog?

Why am I writing this blog?  Why should anyone bother to read it?

This blog, this post, is the culmination really of years of not knowing what to do with the unsatisfactory answers to a million different questions about who I am, where I come from, and who I want to be.  Without realizing it, I've been looking for this blog for most of my life; yes, even before there was such a thing as a blog, before I knew what a blog was, before I came to appreciate the nature of the blogosphere's collective wisdom.  I was desperately looking for a blog by a Reform Jew grappling with the kinds of questions that I have confronted and continue to confront.  Only in the past few months did I finally, belatedly, begin to sift through the many terrific Jewish-related blogs out there -- many of them are linked here -- but none of them focused on the specific issues that I grapple with.  I salute them because they have given me the inspiration to do this, not knowing where it will take me or what I will find when I get there.

I'll have a lot more to say about these things over time.

But it still begs the question, why this blog, and why now?

• because I've been on the road to this moment for a very long time, and I've run out of excuses
• because there are ideas that I believe need to be expressed and that need to be explored
• because the words of Rabbi Bag Bag have always spoken to me:  "Turn it, and turn it again, for everything is in it; And contemplate it, and grow old and gray over it, and stir not from it, for you have no better principle than it"
• because I have fallen short in my life as a Reform Jew -- I have not studied and questioned and known the laws before knowing where I stand
• because over the past few years, questions I never thought I'd have to ask have been put on my table
• because this is the only subject I've ever really wanted to write about

As I said, I don't know where this journey will go.  I don't know how much insight or wisdom I will have to offer.  Actually, I have no idea if anyone, ever, will even see or bother to read any of this.  But I promise that on this blog, I will struggle always to tell as much of my truth as I can, in the hopes that putting it out there will somehow make a difference.  I am not obligated to complete the task, but neither am I free to abstain from it.