Rabbi Anderson's Divrei Torah

Shabbat shalom! This morning’s Torah reading included a detailed account of war with Midian followed by a sudden new halakhah about what to do with the dishes. It seems that the Israelites’ war spoils included metal vessels, ranging from gold to lead, and midway through Numbers 31 it is Aaron’s son Elazar – this is actually his only solo law in the Torah – Elazar who tells the returning soldiers that anything they bring home which can withstand fire should be passed through fire to clean it, and anything that cannot withstand fire should be passed through water instead.

If anything in that sentence gave you Pesach vibes, or otherwise reminded you of turning a kitchen kosher, there’s a good reason: these are the verses from which Jewish tradition derives most of its laws about kashering metal pots, pans, silverware, oven racks, and so forth. If you can safely fire it up, do that; if you can’t, dunk it in boiling water. While Temple Israel’s parsonage is getting a fresh coat of paint and some accumulated maintenance, I’ve been living in a TowneSuite by Marriott: to make its kitchenette as kosher as possible, I turned both its burners up to high for a few minutes and then poured boiling water all over the metal sink. I also brought my own pots, pans, silverware, and knives. I might have done that even if I didn’t keep kosher, because I have much nicer kitchen equipment, but I would probably live with less fear that the cleaning crew would sneak in and put everything in the dishwasher while I wasn’t looking. I admit that I feel a little silly doing this, because the burners and sink were already clean. Actually, the dishwasher I’m not using is clean too. But it’s not such a big deal to have an extra cleaning step.

Where it gets weird is also in Elazar’s advice about metal vessels: he tells the Israelites that the vessels they pass through fire should also be cleansed – ritually, not hygienically – with mei niddah, the water in which the red heifer’s ashes were mixed. In the context of the Midianite war, this makes perfect sense: mei niddah removes contamination from human corpses, and the metal vessels have just come from a battlefield. But the rabbis decided to take mei niddah extremely out of context and argue that it means a kosher mikveh[1], in which all metal vessels – or perhaps all non-porous vessels or eating implements – should be dunked if they were possibly made or owned by idol worshippers.

This is where we get an area of halakhah called tevilat keilim, the immersion of vessels. If you head over to the mikvah at the Albany JCC, you’ll find a door with its lock combination written in Hebrew on a sign. That’s enough security for the kelim mikvah, a tiny room with a very deep pool, a couple of plastic mesh bags for submerging small items, a long pole with a hook in case you drop something in the pool, and a laminated copy of the blessing ending al tevilat kelim. It’s a nice spot; being there, pan in hand, made me feel like part of my new Jewish community. The problem is that I’m not sure how I feel about the underlying idea that somehow non-Jews could have contaminated my new Calphalon nonstick skillet.[2]

The Conservative movement does offer a partial solution: in a 2007 teshuvah approved unanimously by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards,[3] Rabbis Mayer Rabinowitz and Abraham Reisner concluded that tevilat kelim is unnecessary for mass-produced items purchased from stores, which is the vast majority of what’s in our kitchens. After all, most of the people Jews live alongside are not, theologically or halakhically, idol worshippers, and corporations like Calphalon – or like Amazon, where I ordered my skillet – are not people. So they ruled that tevilat kelim with a blessing is only required in cases where you actually bought an item from an individual artisan or a previous owner who you know (or reasonably suspect) worships idols. A restaurant owner who immerses all their pots and pans anyway because they want to appeal to Jewish diners across the spectrum is welcome to do so, but should not recite the blessing, since the act is not actually “commanded.”

But halakhic change is not the only way to address – let’s say challenging – Jewish traditions. There are actually plenty of modern commentators who find new meanings in a very old set of practices, often while continuing to practice them. More than two hundred years ago, the Hasidic Rebbe Nachman of Breslov was already writing that the verse in Numbers about being purified through fire referred to the human heart, purifying itself with the fire of love for God, in order to dispel evil spirits of impurity and pray genuinely and originally each time.[4] In another passage, he suggests that purification through fire refers to making a confession of wrongdoing before a Torah sage.[5]

Of course, Rebbe Nachman’s radical theology made a lot of people uncomfortable. One of his followers, Rebbe Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, wrote a Breslover halakhic treatise in which he clarified that Jews should still immerse their vessels, but should do so knowing that immersion represented the vessel’s transition from the natural and secular world of non-Jews to the providential and holy world of Judaism.[6] Oy.

In the twenty-first century, creative Jewish thinkers have written about tevilat kelim in other ways. Perhaps it represents a “mitzvah of ethical consumption,” with the significant time investment in unwrapping, unlabeling, cleaning, and then immersing and re-cleaning each new purchase reminding us not to order too many things on Prime Day.[7] Perhaps it represents the mastery of the intellectual, symbolized by metal, over the sensual, symbolized by food, and is “intended to revive and strengthen the consciousness of moral freedom.”[8]

I especially like the take by Rabbi Joshua Heller, who suggests that we use the idea of tevilat kelim as a reminder to view whatever media we consume through a kind of Jewish lens.[9] If we want to set Dror Yikra to the latest popular music in 4/4 time, or wear the latest fashions to shul, or apply new ideologies to Jewish thought, Heller suggests that we need to pause long enough to consider whether or not they really fit with Jewish values. Maybe they’re fine! Maybe they’re not. And maybe you need to take a little time and, before you know it, your popular music is everyone’s “traditional” Dror Yikra tune. It’s not that Judaism shouldn’t take in new ideas; it should just make them Jewish first!

These are all basically allegorical or symbolic readings of tevilat kelim – that is, the rabbinic practice of immersing non-Jewish vessels in a ritual bath symbolizes something other than what it really is. But what I love about this topic is that it’s self-referential: tevilat kelim is also a great allegory for the practice of taking a difficult or seemingly outdated or just plain contaminated piece of Jewish practice and giving it a new, satisfying, sparkling clean interpretation. We don’t have to get rid of the practice, especially if we find it meaningful. But it’s important to know that we can also give the practice a quick dunk in the living waters of Jewish thought and come up with something that we’re even more comfortable doing.