Hitzonim | Outsiders

It’s D’Var Thursday, and the Parsha is Yitro. Let’s freaking go, fam! This is long, and I curse some. It’s irreverent. It’s me, your whatever I am. Thanks for reading. For real. xx. -amh

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I went to lunch with a dear friend this week. We share different perspectives on similar situations, and our friendship is edifying for each of us.

We do this monthly or so. Servers stop by at least twice before we order; our first course is conversation. Like all good conversations over a meal, the food plays in the supporting cast, and my food decisions are often made in haste, both because I’m hungry when it’s time to order, and I couldn’t stomach sending a server away for a third time. Hasty decisions are rarely the optimal decisions.

I ordered the cheeseburger. It was on the lunch specials. It was lunch. It’s a cheeseburger. A good choice made in haste. And it was good. No complaints. I’m often hesitant to cut the burger. On the one hand, they wouldn’t serve it with a steak knife if cutting were not advised. On the other hand, depending on the meat to bun to condiment ratio, a cut could further diminish structural integrity, resulting in a fork and knife situation, which is not as conducive to lunch. I’m not sure whether I’d defend that evaluation in court, but fork and knife burgers don’t feel like lunch. Lunch is handheld. This is all to say, an uncut burger, when it’s a loaded one, does not so disturb the structure. Paradoxically, a loaded burger is best left uncut.

For planning purposes: How the menu item is listed is your first clue to plan your approach long before the plate hits the laminate. “House sauce,” “Burger Sauce,” “____ [insert name of restaurant] ____ sauce” “Western” or “Brunch” are your dead giveaways that you’ll have a loaded burger on your hands. Be weary. Do not order this item unless you are with a trusted lunch mate.

Now, we can’t proceed without also mentioning that some burger joints will not require cutting; indeed, may even prohibit it. I wouldn’t cut a burger at Working Man’s Friend solely on principle.

A smash burger often does not require cutting. Unless we’re talking smash burgers at a spot that describes itself with words like, “Gastro” or “Bistro” or a single, overly reductive name, say, “Cream” for a dairy bar; “Fried” for a chicken sandwich joint; “Leaf” for a salad spot–or marijuana dispensary. In ‘n Out doesn’t say burger in its name, amiright? The now antiquated “New American” description made loaded burgers en vogue. No shade, I bought in. These are burgers north of $19, and something on the burger is aged, pickled, or jellied. The more bistro it gets, the less smashed it shall be. Bistro is fork and knives, so no bistros for lunch, certainly no bistro burgers from a place not named bistro.

We’re talking one patty smash, a single, maybe a double, (see: Working Man’s Friend), with few options beyond American cheese and the ingredients it takes to order it “LTOP”–these spots require no cutting. If you’ve managed to customize a burger that requires cutting at a restaurant like that just described, then this mistake rests fully on your shoulders. You may knife and fork without judgment this time, but what makes life worth living is the openness to learning lessons. Growth mindset, bro.

Yitro, Moshe’s father in law. Notice we didn’t say, “Zipporah’s father, Yitro,” and call the parsha Zipporah. No, no, it’s Moshe’s father in law, and the thing is called Yitro. Well, I wish a little later Moshe didn’t tell the wilderness team, “Don’t go near a woman,” which, of course, makes sexual encounters wholly residing with the man’s power. An ancient ethic. The man possess. The man penetrates. We can’t read Torah without facing it, and figuring out what to do with it. My suggestion: Leave that bullshit at the bottom of the Sea of Reeds. This is why the parsha is called Yitro, and it is not called Zipporah. There’s no reason we can’t call it Zipporah, though. See how easy it is to leave it at the bottom of the Sea of Reeds?

In this week’s Torah portion, Zipporah, we meet Zipporah’s father, Yitro, a Midianite priest who counsels Moshe on leadership. Specifically, Yitro instructs Moshe to establish a court system over which Moshe magistrates, and capable men free from corruption serve at smaller and smaller divisions of the grumpy lot of us. This portion is mostly an E source that scholars have dated as early as the 9th century BCE. For G-d’s sake, we’ve been calling on capable civic leaders without corruption for 3,000 years. Any day now, i’m sure.

Team Manna encamps at the foot of G-d’s mountain, Horeb, by the E source. G-d speaks to Moses. G-d envelops the mountain in thick smoke. G-d speaks in thunder and makes the people tremble.

Get it, G-d! Damn! Good G-d Damn!

G-d tells Moses to tell the people this that and the other. Ten total this’s and that’s. G-d tells Moshe the decalogue, also called the Covenant Code, better known as what the men in charge these days (capable and without corruption?) think should hang in every classroom in America. It’s the Ten Commandments, baby! Put that shit in the front yard.

Don’t tell the men in charge that there are three different “Ten Commandments.” Wait. Is that 30 Commandments?!

These are Exodus 20.2-17, Deuteronomy 5.6-21, and Exodus 34.10-26. There is a partial list at Leviticus 19. This is important stuff, friends. So important that many late-Bronze Age communities in Ancient Southwest Asia had legislative codes that may or may not bear striking resemblance to those legislative codes we read in the Torah. *thinking face emoji* It’s never a bad time to recognize that many Semitic peoples share common ancestry with the Canaanites, and maybe all had some shared ideas, cultural and cultic exchange, yada yada. Like in this week’s portion we recognize G-d as the best out of “all gods,” so, like, about that monotheism thing. It get a little tricky.

But bout these commandments, comic relief time: I like how Aaron Higashi discusses the Commandments in about a minute. I hope you watched that. I commented on that post to say I was linking to it in a blog post I was working on. This is that post! Whoa, breaking the fourth wall!

Back to our Torah portion, Zipporah. Here we find my favorite midrash, a form of Jewish interpretive tradition that fills in gaps in stories in the Torah and often adds to the meaning. We definitely are not a literal reading people. It’s negotiation, chevarim. Have you seen the Talmuds?! We literally wrote down hundreds of years of debates. That is so awesome!

In my favorite midrash, the people resist accepting the law. This tradition stems from Moshe’s challenges leading this (us?) troublesome people. They (we?) nearly stoned him in last week’s portion! The people refuse the law, so G-d picks up G-d’s mountain, suspends it over the Israelites, and says it’s either the law or I’m droppin’ this heavy sum’bitch, and it’ll be your grave! (G-d, don’t curse. Fourth wall break number two, I love that I spell it G-d or Gd out of respect for the name, while also saying G-d Damn!)

Anyway, we’re the people of the law, so that’s how that story went. The law is a difficult thing to make sense of. It’s really shaped us. That probably ought not be in the past tense.

The burger was good. It’s not often that a chain place makes the medium, well, medium, not medium well, I mean they did a good job cooking the burger to medium. I did opt for the cut, and it was manageable. Simple condiments, so this checks out. Cheese + LT only, but there was a light sauce, so I deliberated the cut for a moment. A lunch burger is charmingly simple, and this one delivered.

I regretted every bite.

Cheese + Meat. Not good. Of course, that’s nowhere near the 3 X 10 Commandments, but it’s kashrut, and it’s Levitical (and Deuteronomical), and it’s sort of the thing we’re known for, right? Especially the no bacon stuff. And people love to cherry pick this to prove that even “literalists” aren’t literalists, and etc. “Jews don’t even mix their fabrics, so blah blah blah spew spew spew let’s use a people’s entire three thousand year tradition in a reductive argument about who reads the Bible best in asinine debates between evangelicals.”

Ah, that felt good to get off my chest. No offense. I mean, OK, some offense, but also, ilke, you think Jesus came to show the proper interpretation of scripture to the people who wrote it so like, instead of acknowledging, oh, Jesus was in this tradition not against it.

I guess this is how I’m religious. I was mindful of what I was eating. I was being religious by violating our religion. Like, a lot of us don’t even think of our mitzvot in a day. I say the modeh ani (almost) every the morning, I light candles on Friday, we did all eight nights for Hanukkah this year, and I, seriously, and I mean this with sincerity, try not to be a total poser when I say that I try to eat 80/20 vegetarian to meat, mostly because I am mindful of kashrut. I’d love to be all the way vegetarian, but I got a house of five, y’all, and ain’t nobody be psyched about a Beyond Burger but me, know what I mean?

So Zipporah’s dad seems like a solid dude and set up a judiciary, G-d is all about talking to Moshe and handing down some laws, so the Torah portion is bookended by our people’s most important commitments: justice and G-d’s law. There it is. Read it again. Justice and G-d’s law. It’s right here in Zipporah.

Pretty cool that thousands of years later I’m sitting in a BJ’s Brewhouse feeling tremendous guilt about my cheeseburger lunch special. How fucking Jewish is that. That’s the way that I’m religious. And, I’m telling you, G-d’s law is on my mind like every day. Impure and profane by that law, I identify myself in its long history. It was a good week to have a mountaintop experience. I like being on top of the mountain rather than beneath it.