The Talmud today continues discussing blessings, bringing an argument about the proper blessing over wheat flour before it is made into bread (Tosafot states this is toasted or coarse flour, not fine flour which really isn’t edible).  Once flour is made into bread, cake, pasta or the like, it needs a different blessing.  Yesterday we also learned about wine, which gets a different blessing than grapes, the raw material of the wine, since it was improved.

God made certain items in the world that can be used as they are, or changed by man into a new item with a different use.  Wheat kernels are ground into flour and then made into dough, grapes squeezed and the liquid fermented.

All of use likewise start out a certain way, and we can change. Like these foods, often the changes are imposed on us from outside.   Unlike inanimate matter, we were given (some) free will, and can control (to some extent) how we react to outside forces, allowing us to change ourselves for the better.  Also, if we are in a state of being ground up emotionally or fermenting in anger or resentment, we can take steps to exit the situation or enforce boundaries.  Some men may think that just like fermenting improves the grapes, they should stick around in a damaging situation and take the abuse, since it will make them stronger or better in the long run, or win them points in someone else’s book.

Friends, you need to stop and take an honest assessment first. You may need to get a break from the situation to see it clearly, and obtain outside advice.  Men can change and improve, but we are not objective about ourselves.
One of the methods we use in conventional Judaism is to understand problems and situations by talking it out.  Our sages point out that God put a “speaking spirit” into human beings.  This is often understood as complex language, which distinguishes us from animals.  In fact, the entire Talmud is our sages talking, debating, and arguing about Jewish law.  It was originally memorized and repeated orally, and only written down when persecution made learning orally practically impossible.  Find a man with experience to talk to, or even find some quiet and talk it out with yourself to gain objectivity.  You can talk to God if you feel that will help, and ask Him to give you insight and clarity.  Lay it all out: what behaviors are you experiencing, how are you reacting, what have you tried so far, and what can you do next.  You need to know your goals, standards and boundaries.  Talk them out.

You are not inanimate and subject only to outside forces.  You are a man, made in the Divine image with the power of speech, the power to find objective strategies to face your subjective problems.

Today’s Talmud study wraps up the fifth chapter of Brakhot (Blessings) with the topic of making mistakes in prayer.  There are a number of amazing insights.  First, our sages teach that is it proper to decline the first time you are asked to lead public prayers, and then to be reluctant the second time, and then start when asked a third time.  This is a mark of humility.  Leading public prayers is an honor but also a serious responsibility, as we also learn that if the leader makes a mistake it is a bad omen for those who sent him.

As background, Jewish prayers have an individual aspect which is unique to each man. Every person makes his own direct personal requests to God for what he needs.  Every single human has a unique task in life and needs specific things from Heaven to fully accomplish their life’s work.  This is possible because every individual has their own direct relationship with the Creator of the Universe.

However, we also have a communal element to prayers.  Certain holy prayers can only be said with a quorum of 10 adult men, which is also required to read from a Torah scroll.  Our sages teach us that prayer is much more effective coming from a community that from an individual, as God considers the merit of the whole public, not just the one person.

Our learning today teaches us not to be too eager to take responsibility for the public.  However, this concept is balanced by another ancient teaching from Hillel: “In a place with no men, make the effort and be a man” (Pirke Avot 2:6).  There is a natural balance formed by these competing ideas.  When you are among the most qualified in your location, you step up and perform.  The practical Jewish law is that when the Rabbi or Gabai (man charge of the services) asks, you don’t refuse even once.  Same if the congregation is waiting for a prayer leader.  You don’t make other people wait so you can look humble.  When there is a need for you, you get up and take the responsibility.

This is a deep wisdom. In your life you need to balance your assertiveness and desire to improve your status (be it financial, physical, spiritual) with sensitivity to others.  There may be men more talented or experienced than you in some area.  When they are available, let them lead, and let them teach you by example.  When there is a gap to fill or a need to accomplish something, you step up without hesitation and fill it.

See also: Responsibility to brothers

Another aspect to leading prayers is that it makes us more aware of hierarchy.  Most congregations have just a few men who are very good with prayers, songs, melodies.  They know who they are and do not say no, unless they are truly unable.  Then there are some other men who are decent and can lead if called upon.  Of course there are some men who are never called up, unless it is the anniversary of the passing of their relative, and they are leading prayers as a merit for the deceased.  We get a good sense of where we stand in the pecking order.

Another amazing episode is the stories about Rabbi Hanina Ben Dosa, who was sought out to pray for people in need of recovery or salvation.  He used to say that after he prayed for sick, he knew who would live and who would not, because when his prayers were fluent and clear he knew they were accepted above.  This is an amazing level of concentration and intention in prayer.

Today’s learning discusser prayer and how Moses was prayed aggressively to God to spare the Jewish people after they were mistaken in the desert.

I can’t recommend that any of us in this generation try what Moses tried in prayer.

But it is a valid concept to be assertive and even to appear aggressive when dealing with other people to accomplish your goal.  Obviously God was the dominant power but Moses was not reluctant to challenge God’s decision about the Jewish people.  Moses was known as most humble man.  Obviously challenging God does not sound humble!  However, Moses was acting for the sake of the Jewish people, not for himself.  God actually wanted Moses to intercede and make an argument to save us, His children.

We may deal with people who have authority, but nonetheless we may need to challenge their assumptions to further a righteous goal.

Our sages discuss the practice of the ancient pious ones to prepare for an hour before prayers, pray for an hour, then spend another hour after prayers before returning to the regular world.  There is some discussion among our rabbis if this is an actual hour or some period of time even less than an hour.

Clearly there is wisdom in taking the time and effort to prepare for an important meeting.  For our ancient sages, there was no meeting more critical than coming before the Master if the universe to present their humble requests.  For us this is difficult to understand, not only is our culture unfamiliar with the concept of an all powerful God, we no longer have kings and rulers with true absolute human power either.  We don’t really have a practical model of the need to beseech a powerful entity with our very life and death at stake.

However this concept of focus and preparation is still crucial in our modern lives.  When you have something important, put in the time to get ready. Train for a competition, practice a speech or business pitch.

Now why were the ancient pious ones waiting after prayers also?  The Talmud asks when did they get their learning and work done.  Rabbi Avidgor Miller suggests that they were reviewing what they had accomplish during their prayers.  Remember, the conventional Jewish concept of prayer is not only praising God but also self evaluation and judging your personal path in life and asking for specific assistance in your goals.  Reflecting in where you are in life and where you are going can bring critical insights.  Review them and build on them.

The Talmud learns many laws of prayer from Hannah, the mother of Samuel the prophet.

We mentioned Hannah’s prayer for her son Samuel in our discussion of mothers and children Sarah and Isaac, Isaac and Rebecca

It is telling that the Bible used the prayer of a barren woman for a son as the archetype for heartfelt prayer to God.

In prior generations, most women focused on their family first, and career was a distant second (if at all) on her horizon.  God in His wisdom put into all people, into women especially, the desire for children and family.

While in modern times there is an expectation, at least in mainstream secular society, that women should go to school and start a career before a family, this was abnormal and practically unheard of for almost all of human history.  Modern life emphasizing career over family seems to be detrimental for women, as noted in “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness”

We should understand that normal, healthy women have a biological imperative to reproduce with the best specimen of man they can mate with.  Obviously men need to work to become the best they can be, and women need to bring value to their relationship beyond being an incubator and wet nurse.

Our sages point to Hannah’s pouring her heart in prayer as the example of powerful prayer to show us not just how to pray, but also how strong a woman’s feeling are in this area.  Men should take this aspect of female nature seriously, especially when popular culture has minimized it in mainstream discourse.  Understand the power of her feelings for children and family, and be especially aware if you are in a situation where she can become pregnant.

Our sages explain how certain special prayers are only said in an assembly, publicly, and that when this prayer is said by the public, each individual is exempt from saying it personally.

We understand instinctively that we have personal obligations and that the community or society has collective obligations.  For instance, if you see a fire you have a personal moral (possible legal) obligation to report it.  But you don’t have a personal requirement to put out the fire, our society is set up to provide professional or volunteer fire fighters who can do that job better than you can with less personal risk.

But if your house is heaven forbid on fire, you will feel that you should do everything you can, even when perhaps that professionals can do a better job.

One of the features of modern secular culture is that there has been a blurring of lines between private and public responsibility in some areas. In the (recent) past men would have donated to help widows and orphans, and religious groups may have tried to house the homeless.  Today men are encouraged to marry single mothers and provide for their children from other men.  Religious groups are told to provide abortions and people are told to tolerate an epidemic of homelessness and urban degredation that ruins property values for home owners.

Conventional Judaism provided clear distinction between personal and community obligations, and tells individuals how to take part in public needs.  Having clear expectations helps.  Even in modern Life you can develop your own boundaries, decide for yourself what you are willing to do for others and what you will not do.  You might get give up and your drunk friend a ride home from a bar at 3am.  You might not lend him ten knowing he will waste the money.

In an era of blurred boundaries you need to set and enforce your own clear boundaries, or you will forever be at the mercy of everyone’s unrealistic expectations and your society’s demands on you.

Our sages continue discussing prayer, explaining a cryptic statement by rabbi Eliezer that making your prayer fixed undermines the value.

What is fixed?  Our ancient sages give many interpretations, including when it seems like a burden and when you are unable to innovate something new.

For conventional Jews, prayer is a chance to recenter yourself and evaluate your daily events in a larger context.  One of the words we use for prayer also means self judgment, since prayer is a chance to tell God what is going right and wrong and what we need, we first have to evaluate and decide what is right and wrong in our life and how to improve or correct those items.  Yes, sometimes things are overwhelming and the most effective and heartfelt prayer is HELP.  But usually we can give thought to what it is we need, and think if a new means to reach it.  This is innovation in prayer.

In your own life, whether you pray or not, it’s important to step back and evaluate, try to be objective and judge where you are in life. Leave emotion out of it and use the intellectual powers God gave you.  Once you make an honest assessment, pick one new thing to work on, it could be an exercise, physically or mentally, or any self development.  Ask God for help if you believe that will help.  Remember that if you don’t believe in yourself, no amount of external inspiration will work.

Amazing true story from almost 2000 years ago.
A student asked a legal question: are the nighttime prayers obligatory or optional?

He got different answers from Rabbi Yehoshua and Raban Gamliel.  When the time came to decide the rule officially in the yeshivah (study hall), Rabbi Yehoshua stayed quiet and did not express his opinion, not wanting to publicly contradict Raban Gamliel.  [Rabbi Yehoshua was a top level sage but did not want to undermine the authority of the head of the yeshivah.  Raban Gamliel was especially sensitive to challenges to central legal authority since this event took place shortly after the destruction of the second Holy Temple, the focal point of the Jewish nation.]

When the Torah students began deliberating between Rabbi Yehoshua and Raban Gamliel, they said “wait until the shield bearers arrive” meaning the advanced scholars.  Our sages explain that they were called shield bearers since they fight the battle of Torah – of deciding which legal rulings are correct and supported by the Bible.  But why shield bearers?  Why not sword or spear bearers, or archers?

A shield is a defensive item.  The shield bearers had studied the Bible, the ancient sources, and the legal arguments, and were prepared to defend their opinions from any attack.  Defending your idea is a higher level of intellectual achievement than attacking someone else’s opinion.  Anyone can attack an idea, it takes much more skill to develop your own positions based on all the evidence and be able to defend them from attacks.  Therefore the advanced scholars were known as shield bearers and not sword wielders.

In your life you can judge someone’s intellectual and personal development by this metric.  Do they put their energies into building up their own ideas, dreams and business ventures?  Or do they go around criticizing and undermining the opinions and plans of others?

This is part of a larger concept of how you approach life.  Last week we discussed who gets to define normal for you? and proposed a test:

The more vehement and aggressive a group is in attacking anyone who questions their behavior, the more they demand exemption from criticism, then the more they know deep down that their behavior set is wrong.  Some groups and lifestyles demand zero criticism, and try to ruin the lives of people who speak out or do not accept them, they cannot tolerate any critique.  This is because their ideology has no real moral truth and their behavior is immoral.  Recall that in totalitarian societies, the first thing the regime thugs do is to violently stamp out public criticism of the regime.

The Jewish people have left Egypt proper and are in the desert (Exodus 13:17).  When the Jews do not return to Egypt, Pharaoh decides to pursue them and enslave them again.  This leads to the famous episode of the splitting of the Sea (Yam Suph Hebrew: יַם-סוּף commonly translated Red Sea).

When the Jewish nation was trapped between the sea and the Egyptian army, the people start complaining and suggesting a return to slavery (14:11-12) and Moses rebukes them and starts praying (14:15).  Our sages in the ancient Medrashim reveal the backstory (the Bible is typically written in concise language, with hints that there is more going on than the words reveal.  Our sages received on oral tradition of what actually happened from people who were there, and they passed this down through the generations.  Many of these traditions were written into the Medrashim).  Our sages tell us that at this juncture one man takes spectacular action.  A man from the tribe of Judah named Nachshon son of Aminadav.

Nachshon gets up and jumps right into the sea, and only then God begins to open it, saving him.  Then the Jewish people enter the splitting sea en masse.

This was a powerful demonstration that Nachshon was not going back into slavery.  Some of the people were arguing that it would be better to return to slavery than to drown in the sea.  Nachshon showed otherwise, showed the Jewish spirit of self sacrifice and obedience to God (God has just told Moses to order the Jews forward 14:15).  His attitude was one of we have nothing left to lose, let’s obey God, even if that means we will die.  This is the pride of a free man.

Nachshon was from the tribe of Yehuda, the leaders and future kings of the Jewish nation.  He was setting the example of how a free man acts, that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.  For Jews, it is one example of our core concept that it is better to die a Jew than live otherwise.

For modern men, become aware of what you are willing to die for.  Realize that you may never be in the actual position to die for this, so also plan how to live for what you are willing to die for. This is a powerful way for a man to explore his mission in life.

After the miraculous splitting of the sea, the Jews celebrate the Divine salvation with song and dance.  Note that the men and women celebrate separately, with Miriam, Moses’ sister, leading the women in dance and song (15:20).  To this day, conventional Jews do not allow men and women to sing and dance together.  At prayers, men and women do not sit together.  At an Orthodox wedding, the men dance with the groom on one side of a divider, while the women dance with the bride on the other side.

Naturally this sounds foreign or backwards to those influenced by modern secular culture, but there is wisdom and power in this.  By the Red Sea, the Jewish people have just seen a massive revelation of Divine power in the world which saved them from enslavement or death.  They have reason to celebrate and thank God for their freedom and lives.  They are ecstatic and their song contains words of Divine prophecy (Ex 15).

You understand, it’s simply not the time to look at girls!*  It was a time to focus on God and what He hath wrought upon the mighty Egyptian army, and celebrate freedom and a new dedication to the mission of the Jewish nation.  It simply would not have been appropriate to have the girls dancing with the men.
*Conventional Jews in ancient, less promiscuous times actually had a unique holiday featuring single girls dancing in public to facilitate matchmaking, see Talmud Ta’anit 30b–31a.

Now you may say, since these people were so holy and deserved miracles, seeing dancing women and hearing the women sing should not have caused any lust.  This is not so.  Every healthy man who sees beautiful women should feel at least a spark of desire.  That’s how God made us.  If you don’t feel something when you see an attractive woman, you need to get your T checked.

The ancient Jews were indeed on a great spiritual level that we cannot even imagine.  They still had natural desires and made love to their wives.  Both Moses and Miriam were prophets (Miriam was an older sister and had prophecy before Moses was even born), and they knew through Divine wisdom that it would have been damaging to have the men and women together even at this momentous occasion.  Likewise when we are praying, we want to focus on God and our personal relationship with the Eternal, not being tempted look at the other gender.  This is why conventional Jewish places of prayer have separate seating and some form of a divider between men and women, or the women upstairs on a balcony.

Separate allows equal

As a young child I attended a public school.  As a parent there is no way I would let my kids go to a regular public school.  There is a tremendous advantage to having your children go to a same gender school.

Boys in an all boys schools perform better, the teachers let them run around like boys should and are more understanding of male nature (because they are not comparing rowdier the boys to more docile girls).  Without girls to impress and compete over, boys make deeper friendships with one another and devote more energy to academics, sports, and personal growth.  Also, in Jewish schools the boys have a Rebbe, their Rabbi or teacher, for Jewish studies.  He is of course, a man, and can relate to the boys on that level.  In present day public school that vast majority of teachers are women and lack that empathy with our boys.

At an all girls schools, girls truly get a chance to thrive and find their own ways of self expression.  They are taught as girls.  They are not wasting time and energy (and their parents’ money) trying to attract boys, or talking about boys, dressing up to compete for boys.  When there are projects, plays, presentations, the girls take charge and develop leadership skills instead of waiting for naturally more assertive boys to take lead roles and give them orders.  The girls can truly blossom and thrive in this environment.

I have seen all of these things first hand, and no doubt you have too.  Boys and girls are different.  Science confirms their brains are different.  They play, learn, and celebrate differently.  Putting them together on the assumption they are identical is simply wrong.  This message is straight from the Bible, but is so relevant for today.

In modern mainstream society, there is an assumption that boys and girls are equal and should share the same space and be taught using the same methods.  This is called equality but it actually ruins children.  What about letting our young people have the freedom to pursue academic and personal development in the best way and without the distraction of the other gender?

Listen, they will grow up, the boys will meet girls and the girls will meet boys.  It will happen.  There will come a time when boys and girls need to invest ample time and energy into attracting the other sex and forming relationships.  Wanting children to rush into that inevitable milieu is misguided and dangerous, it undermines their development.

This is especially true when some interest groups want to “educate” children into accepting abnormal behaviors and identities.  You should be extremely suspicious of any agenda or person that wants to expose children to romantic or sexual content.  That is child abuse.

They are kids!  Let them be kids for a while.