First some music, then the DvarTorah on Parashat Emor.
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<big><big><big>DvarTorah: Parashat Emor - "Speak" ... and about the signal-to-noise ratio...</big></big></big> revised from 19 May 2016.
When it comes to Tanakh, depending on whom we ask, and how we ask —e.g., if we demand polar, yes/no answers— orthodox thinkers may say it’s all signal; and anti-religion or anti-Judaism or other anti viewpoints that it’s all noise. And likewise for commentary — Talmud, responsa, secondary texts of Beta Israel, etc., etc. And many won’t answer at all.
But ask in terms of SNR, and the answers more likely make a spectrum —►
(Is it blueish? It looks blueish...)
...with every gradation of reply, from skeptical ratios —such as 1:1000 (one part good and clear signal in a thousand parts noise) or 7:613— to more tolerant ones like 9:10, and enthusiastic ones like 20:16. Graphing those responses, we’d probably get some kind of bell-curve, with most answers clustering around the middle.
What keeps me inching toward the cheering section of the curve, is not that I know all that much of the material … despite the talmudic atheist sociopolitical father and the teachers-union-founder orthodox mother I’ve mentioned, they didn’t teach me this material (possibly due to unconscious sexism) but I saw them acting upon the principles, with their colleagues and fellow activists from the Old Left from my stroller-age onward.
Still —or perhaps consequently— when I read(reed) a Dvar in this group, or the material a Dvar explicates, there keep being words / phrases / ideas leaping out and speaking to me with astonishing resonance and constant surprise about how much good signal there is that I hadn’t before imagined. It can take me a few days and re-reads (I have a lot of iatrogenically-acquired cognitive deficits), and then I start to get remarkable , clear signal. Often, what I thought at first was noise turns out to be signal as well.
And here I am with the Torah portion for this week —Emor-“Speak”. As I’m reading down wikipedia’s article on it, and using the links to the text translated side by side with the Hebrew, I can see that it picks up from the parasha for last week that A DC Wonk wrote about so well, and he’s a pretty serious scholar, as most of our other writers are, so I’m getting a little worried for what is there for a person like me to speak about? Am I missing the signal?
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Then I reach the "Classical Rabbinic Interpretation" section of the Emor article, and in the part about Leviticus Chapter 21, the third paragraph down begins:
The Gemara noted the apparently superfluous "say to them" in Leviticus 21:1 and reported an interpretation that the language meant that adult Kohanim must warn their children away from becoming contaminated by contact with a corpse. But then the Gemara stated that the correct interpretation was that the language meant to warn adults to avoid contaminating the children through their own contact.[79]
{emphasis added}
As always in the kind of study that goes on in this dk series, even a three-word phrase from Torah and two sentences from Gemara can and do deal both with overt concerns in the time written and subtler ones.
Am I talking about the corpse and kohanim stuff? Nope. In the moment that I’m writing this, those concerns are a vehicle designed to carry to me, across a thousand-plus years, another idea from there that resonates in the here and now: I’m seeing this pair of sentences talking about something very crucial in our noise-polluted era, about how learning happens.
It’s below the surface, but it just may be a larger issue than the overt one, because it’s universal:
Kohanim or not, Jewish or not, parents are usually the first teachers/first leaders a youngster has, whether parents realize it or not. And at one time or another, nearly all humans will be actual or surrogate parents or teachers or leaders to other people, be it for a moment or for the long haul. Maybe to kids of our own, maybe for other youngsters, maybe for someone not even younger than us. But look at any gang of schoolyard bullies or questionable politician, look at anyone standing up for someone else who’s in need of defense, or in need of family or of anything desperately important in survival and life, even in need of learning to be able to speak up … and we see there’s teaching and learning going on all around us. Some of it’s responsible, with great SNR, some of it corrupt, contaminated, exploitive, and false as hell.
And a whole spectrum of variety ranging in between.
Those two sentences and three words ask: where’s the locus of responsibility for learning? The signal seems clear that the main responsibility is with adults. But it goes beyond that simple and probably obvious idea. See how the first sentence uses “a” (singular form), specifying a single hazard source, suggesting that telling/teaching a kid (or any learner) a single time the thing to be learned is sufficient for the kid/learner to fully grasp it and always act accordingly. Pretty demanding on the learner! (Go ahead, go back and read to see if it seems like that to you too. I’ll wait right here.) But the second sentence, in explaining the truer interpretation, doesn’t mention the specific hazard, as if to avoid distraction from the key point, that signal-to-noise responsibility is not only with parents/teachers/leaders in order for learning to happen, but once is not fully meeting the responsibility, that learning is a process that has to keep happening in order to be of good use, not a one-piece-of-information-one-time event. Realistically, it takes repetition, practice, self-restraint/patience … on the part of leaders/teachers/parents and on the part of learners/students/kids — fair credit to both.
Regardless of age, every one of us is someone’s child.
And as the story of the four different kinds of children in the Haggadah just taught us at the Passover Seder (and teaches us year after year, not just one time), we are responsible to send the signal not just in one single way, but in every way it can be received. After all, if in the Haggadah there are four kinds of learners exemplified, in real life there might be five, or six, or elebenty-nine. Signal has to get sent in all the ways that makes worthwhile learning able to happen for kids’ lives and everyone around them, and the next generation of kids of today’s kids, and the next and next.
I’ll go a step further and say it’s what we all need, depending on what kind of “kid” we each are no matter how great our age. Everyone has to go on learning. If nothing else, science has found that it’s good for the brain, and a good brain offers a lot of advantages in life. Isn’t everyone human who’s in a tough spot entitled to that? There’s hardly a spot left that doesn’t need repairing in this world, to make it a good place to live, on top of everything else we need to learn and do just to live at all.
But all around us there’s always more and more intentional noise, more intentional interference and corrupted signal, because there are always entities and individuals who profit or just viciously enjoy themselves when we can’t get clear messages helping us learn what’s for the good of our selves instead of only them at our terrible cost. Adults and kids alike, we’re all pretty easily contaminated with noise pollution. Even cleaning it up, we have to wade through it!
From time to time, with pollution dripping off our wading-boots, we reach someplace where we can learn and practice to learn a little more. Mostly by learning to teach! I’ve known many teachers in my lifetime (and worked in that field) — virtually all will tell you that by the actions of teaching, we ourselves learn the most.
In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher of Torah. This title derives from the Hebrew word רַבִּי rabi [ˈʁäbi], meaning "My Master" ... which is the way a student would address a master of Torah.
A rabbi is always still studying, even the most scholarly of them —as the Haggadah says, “even though we are all learned, even though we are all wise”— and somewhere years ago, I read that each of us must be prepared to be a rabbi at a moment in life when someone else needs one and there’s no one there but us.. For our own sake, then, as well as for someone who may be in need, and for the sake of our communities and planet, we all need to be lifelong students in the whole range of all that it means to be responsibly human, in this place ("the pale blue dot") and time. Aware or not, we’re instinctively striving for mastery in the wisdom of this strange thing that is conscious existence, that keeps changing in the blink of an eye and, if we decide ourselves to be lifelong students, leading us to discover new lessons that help us learn to meet what’s changed and share what we learn.
And always to one side of each of us is someone teaching, whether they know it or not, whether we know it or not, and to the other side of each of us is someone learning, Can we really say for certain which (or both) we ourselves are all doing in any unaware moments? It does get noisy sometimes…
May we always call upon ourselves to speak with good signal-to-noise ratio, and to listen for signal in even the noisiest places. We’re all in this life together, teaching and learning it, trying to decipher signal from noise. If we humans set ourselves to keep learning, the noise of the world changing. and of people changing, may be signal we only may not have learned how to decipher yet. As we continue learning, so it becomes clear.
Shabbat shalom.
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