Access to God: 54 Ways You Can Get Closer (Without the Internet)
By Rabbi H. Rafael Goldstein, BCC Vice President/Jewish Affairs Jewish Family and Children’s Service 13851 N. Scottsdale Road, Suite 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85254
480-596-3821 (office) 602-441-4518 ( cell)
Dynamicsofhope.com
March 2005
Funding for the initial printing of this resource was provided by the Nathan Cummings Foundation as part of their support for SeRaF (Senior Resource Faculty), a joint project of the National Center for Jewish Healing (JBFCS) and its partner, The Kalsman Institute on Judaism and Health (HUC-JIR).
This project was designed to support the development of a leadership cadre for the National Jewish Healing Movement and support the development and publication of resources and materials for the field of Jewish healing.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents ...... 3 Dedication ...... 6 Introduction...... 9 Some Preliminary Thoughts about God...... 15 How to Use this Book ...... 20 1. Starting Over for the First Time: Parshat B’raysheet, Genesis 1:1 – 6:8...... 23 2. Becoming God’s Partners: Parshat Noah Genesis 6:8 – 11:27 ...... 25 3. Remembering Mel: Being a Blessing Leh Leha Genesis 12:1 - 17:27 ...... 27 4. Experiencing God/ Be more Like God: Parshat Vayera Genesis 17:27 – 22:24 ...... 30 5. Living with Loss: Parshat Ha-yay Sarah Genesis 23:1- 25:18 ...... 32 Making Thanksgiving Spiritually Meaningful...... 34 6. God, Grant me the Serenity… Parshat Toldot Genesis 25:19 – 28:9...... 36 7. Finding God in Your Life: Parshat Va-yetze Genesis 28:10 – 32:3...... 39 8. Wrestling the Blessings Out of our Fears: Parshat Vayishlah Genesis 32:4 – 36:43...... 41 Blessings ...... 43 9. Resentment Leads to Slavery Parshat Vayeshev Genesis 37:1 – 40:23 ...... 44 10. Forgiveness: Parshat Mikkets Genesis 41:1 – 44:17 ...... 47 11. Finding Comfort in the Hard Journey of Life: Parshat Va-yigash Genesis 44:18 – 47:27 ...... 50 12. Things that Trap and Enslave Us Parshat Vayehi, Genesis 47:28 – 50:26 ...... 53 13. Turning Handicaps into Blessings Parshat Shemot Exodus 1:1 – 5:1...... 55 14. What Do You Believe? Parshat Va-era Exodus 6:2 – 9:35 ...... 58 15. Stubborn, Stubborn, Stubborn: Parshat Bo Exodus 10:1 – 13:16 ...... 61 16. Terezin and Tu B’shvat: Parshat B’shelah Exodus 13:17 – 17:14 ...... 63 4 17. What’s Really Important to You? Parshat Yitro Exodus 18:1 – 20:23 ...... 66 18. Turning the Plain into the Holy: Parshat Mishpatim Exodus 21:1 - 24:18 ...... 68 19. How Rich Are You Feeling? Parshat Terumah Exodus 25:1-27:19 ...... 70 20. Elijah in our Midst: Parshat Te’zaveh Exodus 27:20 -30:10...... 72 21. God Moments: Parshat Ki Tissa Exodus 30:11 – 34:35 ...... 75 22. Rewards for Mitzvot: Parshat Vayakhel Exodus 35:1 – 38:20 ...... 78 23. Celebrate the Blessings (even when they are not permanent) Parshat Pikudei Exodus 38:21 – 40: 3880 24. Every Bite More Succulent Than the Next: Parshat Vayikra Leviticus 1:1 – 5:26...... 82 25. You Are What You Eat: Parshat Tzav Leviticus 6:1 – 8:36 Passover ...... 84 26. The Silent Scream of Grief: Parshat Shemini Leviticus 9:1- 11:47 ...... 87 27. Body Mind and Spirit: Parshat Tazria Leviticus. 12:1 – 13:59 ...... 90 28. Passover Food Considerations Metzora Leviticus 14:1- 15:32 ...... 92 29. Being a Reflection of God: Parshat Aharei Mot Leviticus 16:1- 18:30...... 94 30. Check Your Ego at the Door: Parhsat Kedoshim Leviticus 19:1- 20:27...... 97 31. Your time is limited: Parshat Emor Leviticus 21:1 - 24:23 ...... 99 32. You Can’t see the Things that Have the Most Meaning: Parashat Behar Leviticus 25:1 – 26:2 ...... 101 33. Blessings and Curses: Parshat Behukotai Leviticus 26:3 – 27:34...... 103 34. The Spiritual Wasteland: Parshat Bamidbar Numbers 1:1 – 4:20 ...... 105 35. Bless Me: Parashat Naso Numbers 4:21 – 7:89...... 108 Shavuot, The Festival of God’s Love ...... 110 36. Kvetch, Kvetch, Kvetch: Parshat B’ha’alot-ha Numbers 8:1 – 12:16...... 112 37. Catastrophic Conclusions: Parshat Shelah Leha Numbers 13:1 – 15:41 ...... 114 38. Rebellion can be Good: Parsdhat Korah Numbers 16:1 – 18:32 ...... 116 39. Life is what Happens when Your Plans Change: Parshat Hukat Numbers 19:1- 22:1 ...... 119 40. God and a Donkey: Parshat Balak Numbers 22:2 – 25:9...... 121 41. In God’s Light: Parshat Pinhas Numbers 25:10 – 30:1 ...... 124 42. Jewish Calendar 101: Parshat Matot Numbers 31:1 – 32:42 ...... 126 43. Places of Refuge: Parshat Massai Numbers 33:1 – 36:13 ...... 129 44. Personal History: Parshat Devarim Deuteronomy 1:1 – 3:22...... 132 45. Just Listen : Parshat Va'et-hanan Deuteronomy 3: 23 - 7:11 ...... 134 46. Blessings are Exercises in Humility: Parshat Ekev Deuteronomy 7:12 – 11:25...... 137 47. Seeing and Hearing: Parshat Re’eh Deuteronomy 11:26 – 16:17...... 140 48. Scary Litury: Parshat Shoftim Deuteronomy 16:18 – 21:9 ...... 143 5 49. The Language of Evil Ki Tetze Deut. 21:10 – 25:19 ...... 146 50. Bless the Moron: Parshat Ki Tavo Deuteronomy 26:1 –29:8 ...... 149 51. Time Movers: Parshat Nitzavim Deuternomy 29:9 – 30:20...... 152 52. The End of the Line Parshat Va-Yeleh Deuteronomy 31:1 – 31:30...... 155 53. Little Stuff/ Big Difference Parshat Ha’azinu Deuteronomy 32:1-52 ...... 157 Sukkot ...... 160 54. The End of the Torah, Start Again: V’zot Ha-braha, Deuteronomy 33:1-34:12 ...... 162 6 Dedication
Thank God
It seems so obvious, so simple to say. Yet we all too often look to God not when we have things to say thank you for, but when we feel that in some ways God has disappointed us. While many people are ready, willing and able to condemn God for not granting them their wishes, few people seem to be so very willing to acknowledge God for the good in their lives. It’s like we forget God when times are good, and complain bitterly when times are bad.
But both good and bad times are two sides of the very same coin. If every day were perfect, we’d get bored. I’m serious about this. I used to live in Southern California, where for most of the year you have to wonder why they have TV weather reporters. Every day is beautiful, spectacular. One can pretty well know that for weeks and weeks the weather will be great. I heard last year that it was raining in July and replied, “That’s illegal, isn’t it?” I have actually heard lots of Los Angelenos complaining about the weather, wishing for something different.
I used to live in New Jersey. (Yes, I admit it.) There, I almost never complained about the weather, because no matter what was happening it was bound to change. Unless it didn’t. Then you knew you’d suffer for beautiful weather, or that the blizzard would ultimately end in clear, crisp beauty. Sunny days always seemed to be balanced, at one time of the year or another, with weather that made you appreciate the sun and the warmth.
Life is kind of like that. We don’t have the option of no rain ever. We don’t get to live without struggles, challenges, and, at times, sadness. I know it’s a cliche. But it really is accurate. You just can’t fairly expect that everything will be perfect all the time. It’s just not reality.
I once heard a friend say, “I wish I was dead.” (Excuse the grammar.) His boss was screwing things up for him, and he couldn’t figure out a way to undo the damage that the boss was doing to other people. But isn’t that expression a rather extreme way of dealing with a pretty temporary issue? Instead of feeling powerless, he was working diligently to correct the problems, being challenged by a difficult reality. It made no sense to wish for death when what he really was praying for was the strength to continue on precisely the same course. 7
Sometimes, we say really stupid things, which we don’t generally mean. What do we mean when we say something is so good it’s “to die for”? That makes no sense. A slice of incredible chocolate cake is that good? If it’s so good, then it should be “to live for”! What good is it if you’re dead? That about sums up our current lack of appreciation for our blessings. When something is really, really good, rather than thanking God for it, we forget about credit and deny our own right to enjoy it!
That being said, where does that leave us when things are good? What we should be doing is savoring the moments when things are good, when life is going well, when we are relatively happy. And we probably should give a little credit to the Creator of Life, who made it possible for us to experience both pain and pleasure, sorrow and laughter, dancing and wailing, rain and sunshine. Both the good and the bad are parts of our lives; both make life worth living. Our challenge is to seek ways to take this odd little coin of life and stand it on its end so that there is some balance, so that the memory of that which is good will fortify us when we need it, and the knowledge that it isn’t always that way will lead us to appreciate our blessings when we have them.
A good way to start to achieve this balance is to find the good, no matter what, and appreicate it. Make a list; start with one item a day. Add to it daily, as many items as you can think of. No matter what is not good in your life, find the good, pursue it, note it and rejoice in it. Then, thank God for it. It’ll work a whole lot better than cursing God when things are not so good.
So, first, I want to thank God for helping me to find this path and providing inspiration for me to see this through. Rachel Pitt, my colleague at the Jewish Healing Center of San Diego nagged me to write Torah Reflections. She is sure that it was her idea to email Torah commentaries to everyone we could think of weekly. At the same time, Rabbi Natan Fenner of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center had the idea to send out weekly Torah Reflections. Maybe they were both divinely inspired simultaneously. Rachel kept me writing them week after week, and Natan supported whenever possible with good advice as to how they should read. The National Center for Jewish Healing invited me to participate in their Senior Resource Fellows (SeRaF) a joint project of the National Center Jewish Healing and its partner, The Kalsman Institute of Judaism and Health (HUC-JIR), which encouraged me to write this book. Susie Kessler and Alisha Goodman both contributed support and encouragement. Funding for SeRaF was provided by The Nathan Cummings Foundation. This project was designed to support the development of 8 a leadership cadre for the Jewish Healing movement and support the development and publication of resources and materials for the field of Jewish Healing.
I have received some really good feedback on some of the Reflections, mostly from clients who struggled with what I was saying, or what I missed, and from Bikkur Holim volunteers. Lee Levy, with whom I learned how to work on issues of bereavement counseling, was a source of inspiration. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said “I have learned a lot from my teachers, but from my colleagues more, and from my students, more than them all.” My clients have been my students and my teachers. I have learned a lot from each of them and wish I could name them all here, but I can’t for confidentiality reasons. I can list some of their first names, and they know who they are: Van, Barry, Ellen, Susan, Muriel, Simon, all of blessed memory, Diane, Harriet, Harris, Jane, Selwyn, Helen, Jeff, Bob, Susan, Michelle, Sam and lots and lots of others with whom I had the opportunity to learn, grow and experience joy and sorrow.
I want to thank my life partner Frank Palmer for his support and encouragement and for lending a hand whenever I needed creative design work.
Holy One of Blessing, Your Presence fills the Universe, you have kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment. 9 Introduction The Secret Religion of the Druze and the Secret Religion of the Jews
As a staff person for a Jewish Federation of North Jersey Mission to Israel, I spent a lot of time on a tour bus with American Jews who knew very little about Israel and even less about being Jewish. The purpose of the Mission was to help them connect with their Jewish roots, and in this way help them to understand how important it was to give their money in support of the United Jewish Appeal and Jewish Federation.
As we toured the northern portion of Israel, the tour guide brought us into a Druze village. He explained that among the Druze, very few people know what their religion is about - it’s a secret reserved just for the elite. Everyone else knows almost nothing about the basic beliefs of their religion. The people in my group seemed rather surprised that the Druze could follow in traditions that they knew nothing about.
When we left the village, the guide started talking about a site important in King Saul’s life. He rattled on about the political and military ramifications of the site. While he did so, one of the members of my group came to my seat at the back of the bus and asked, “Was King Saul a good guy or a bad guy?”
While answering her question, I had to note that there really didn’t seem to me to be all that much difference between the Druze outside of the bus and the American Jews on the bus when it came to knowing what their religion was about. Our American Jews knew virtually nothing about Jewish history, philosophy, religious practice or ritual. They knew they were Jewish, but not much beyond that.
Their Judaism was as much a mystery to most of the people in my group as the Druze religion was described to us. The main difference seemed to be that the Druze were much more up-front about their ignorance.
We then headed south on our tour of Israel - to Jerusalem. Once inside the walls of the Old City, we talked about what it meant to coming into a place which was denied to our people, to the place Jews had dreamed of returning to for hundreds of years. Each person spoke about what coming to Jerusalem meant to him/her. And then we arrived at the Western Wall, which many in the group referred to as the “Wailing Wall.”
I suggested that they go and touch the Wall, take their time, and use it like a phone booth, with a direct line up to God, to say whatever prayers they had in their hearts and in their minds. They asked questions 10 about all of the Hassidim around the Wall. Some said they felt they were imposing themselves into the holy space that “belonged to the Hassidim”. I told them to ignore all the other stuff happening around them, and just take some personal time with God.
They returned in about 3 minutes. It was not easy for most of them, and a meaningful spiritual experience to fewer still. The complaints were: too many beggars, too much chaos, not being comfortable being separated men from women, not knowing how to talk to God, not feeling like it was a “safe” place, not feeling like it was a place in which they were welcome. There were no prayer books they could use. Reality was, if this was a phone booth, they didn’t have a clue where to put the change, much less the phone number to call.
If there is a place in the world which has the possibility for transforming the soul, for rekindling the spirit, here we were! But for the people in my group, it was just a bunch of old stones. They knew it was touching for others. Some noted that I seemed to be touched when I stood and touched the Wall. Overall, however, it was a place at which they could only be spectators, not a place in which they could personally be touched. In fact, the tour guide planned for the group watch the Yeshiva students march to the Wall. That was his not-so-incorrect assessment of what would be of interest to the group in that particular place. Having had no contact with God for most of their lives, it should have come as no surprise that they had no frame of reference, no way to make the connection, no calling card. They could only be spectators.
Form becomes Content After returning to the United States, and after a few changes in my life, I was working with two very different kinds of people: impoverished Latin and African Americans living with HIV/AIDS, and upper- middle class Jewish High School students. On Wednesday of each week, I would go to a day treatment program in downtown Brooklyn for people living with AIDS, where I served as a chaplain/intern. I would do some counseling, lead very informal discussions, and run a “Healing Circle”. I explained to my groups that as a rabbi, I could best work from within my tradition, which I hoped could be helpful for people who come from other backgrounds as well. So we meditated, prayed Jewish prayers in English and sang niggunim (Jewish melodies without words), finding ways to bring God back into lives which had been shattered. Sometimes, they shared gospel music from their youth, stories they remembered which touched them. They seemed to really love the group, and so did I. It was sort of cool to see Jewish tradition having a healing impact in the lives of people, many of whom had no real experience with Jews or Judaism before. 11
From Brooklyn, I went directly to suburban New Jersey, to a group of Hebrew High School students. My job, in part, was to teach them prayer. They had no problem whatsoever with the “mechanics”. They could read prayerbook Hebrew, and even knew what some of the prayers were about. But when I spoke about their spirits, about the meaning of what they were doing, they were completely unable to relate to me. The kids refused to see the value in a niggun (wordless tune), or in closing their eyes and worshipping God without the Hebrew texts. In fact, there seemed to be no connection between the prayers they were reciting or with the presence of God in their lives.
The suburban kids knew the form, but had no content. The music touched the hearts of non-Jews with AIDS, yet came nowhere near to the hearts of these Jewish teenagers. The failure of their Hebrew School experience wasn’t that they never learned Hebrew - it was that they never learned why they were learning it. So much effort went into the form of prayer that the form became the content for the kids, who then also understood all too well how empty it was, without knowing why it was empty.
A Bar/ Bat Mitzvah Diatribe A few years ago, I attended a Bar Mitzvah and overheard a conversation in which a mother was saying to her friends that her 16 year old daughter absolutely refused to come into a shul anymore. She had never had a Bat Mitzvah ceremony, and didn't, therefore, see herself as fully Jewish. When the mother told her she didn't need a Bat Mitzvah to be Jewish, the daughter had responded that it was important for her brother to have a Bar Mitzvah. Clearly, if it meant he was a Jewish man, then a Bat Mitzvah would make her a Jewish woman. The fact that she did not have one meant it just wasn't important, or that she just wasn't important. So either the Judaism isn't important or she isn't. She's all too typical.
Maybe in the shtetl it was okay to deny women the pleasures and responsibilities of being a part of the Jewish ritual life (though I doubt it). But here and now, today, in this country, it's an inexcusable loss which we can ill afford. Is it any wonder when we deny children what they perceive as their official rite of passage into Jewish adulthood that they don't end up feeling like fully Jewish adults? I have heard from hundreds of Jewish women that they can't do any number of Jewish things because they were not "Bat- Mitzvahed". I can tell them until I turn purple that you become a Bat Mitzvah at the age of 12 (or 13 if you're a boy) no matter what you do, and that you don't need a ceremony/ party/major ordeal . But that's ignoring the issue. The issue is that women who were denied the opportunity to celebrate the Jewishness as teenagers often feel deprived of their right to participate fully in Judaism as adults. 12
But we also have to look at the content of that which we call Bar or Bat Mitzvah. In many congregations, including mine, despite my objections, it’s simply a process of having kids jump through hoops so that they can have a bigger and better party than the 20 others they experience in the same year. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the celebration of all of this Jewishness is bogus.
When I became a Bar Mitzvah, I was surprised when the rabbi told me what my Torah portion was about (Korah, a rebel, no surprise in some ways!). I had never bothered to read it or come to any understanding of it for my life. Unfortunately, for many kids today, the situation is unchanged. Parents have said to me they are so proud their child can (1) recite the prayers, (2) read a Torah portion and (3) chant the Haftarah. But when asked which prayers and what they are about, the answer is a unanimous shrug. While parents may be aware of every note of the cantillation, and have memorized the tape the cantor has prepared the same way as the kid has done, most haven’t got a clue as to what it’s about, what any of the words mean.
The Haftarah gets even murkier, because in a Torah portion, at least most of the time, there’s a sense of some kind of chronology, sort of. A kid could know that Abraham preceeded Moses, that the plagues happened before arrival in the land of Canaan. (Though what a kid does with the book of Leviticus is a good question.) Most kids, and their parents, haven’t got a clue who the prophets were, when they lived or what their issues were. For my Bar Mitzvah, I knew my Haftarah was from the book of Samuel. To be honest, I remember that I thought it was my father’s uncle who wrote the book, but I couldn’t figure out why half a Torah would be more important than a whole one (which it must be since it took so much more work to learn), and why Uncle Sam wrote it in Hebrew. To say “clueless” is to understate it considerably. But I read it beautifully. My parents were very proud. I’m not so proud that all these years later, kids are still coming away with that kind of “knowledge”.
When a Bar/Bat Mitzvah celebration is taking place on Shabbat with non-kosher food, with a 10 piece band, characaturist, 3 ring circus and candle-lighting ceremony, 2 hours after the kid’s Torah portion talks about the laws of kashrut and the Haftarah about not being hypocritical, there’s a problem. No one seems to be aware of what the Torah portion and Haftarah portion are about or to care about the apparent conflict of values. Most of the time, the celebration of being a Jewish adult is a reflection of everything but Jewish values. The party is ultimately much more important than anything which happens before the ark in a synagogue. The form of the event itself has completely replaced the content. Ask a normal kid 13 two years later what s/he got out of his/her Bar/Bat Mitzvah. “Lots of presents” invariably is the answer. I hope to one day meet a kid who replies: “I learned...” Anything at all filling in that blank would be nice.
There’s a horrible old joke about a rabbi who manages to rid his shul of rats, by “Bar Mitzvah-ing” them; they never come back. What makes it so horrible is that it really does seem to be a sure way to guarantee a child will not return to the synagogue. Every year thousands of Jewish children are “welcomed into Jewish adulthood” and cajoled to be active participants in their congregations. They then do precisely what the vast majority of American Jews do: they vanish, almost into thin air. Where are the people aged 14 through 30?
“Access Denied” I learned a lot from these groups - the tour in Israel, the people with AIDS and the High School kids, the Bar/Bat Mitzvah performers. The tour group of American Jews who genuinely were searching for their roots and their spiritual connections to their people, and to God, lacked some very basic information. Because they did not even know that it was lacking, they remained disconnected, spectators, observers, rather than participants. The suburban kids had the information, but lacked the way to process it, to make it useful for their spiritual journeys. The Bar/Bat Mitzvah kids showed they knew how to memorize, jump through hoops, and do anything necessary to get to the party. The people with AIDS had none of the form of Jewish worship, but certainly understood the content.
All of the groups logged onto the cosmic spiritual internet, looking for a connection to God, but the students, Bar/Bat Mitzvah kids, and the American Jews in Israel got “access denied” messages. It’s not that they actually communicated with God and were rejected. I am certain that God is staffing the website and ready to interface with anyone. They were simply missing the passwords to log onto the cosmic website.
Access to God has been denied to many people, not by God but by some of our human traditions. When we stood at the Western Wall, the people in my group really did not know how to gain access in a place where access is easiest. They didn’t know how to pray, how to connect with God, and that they had permission to do so readily. The kids in my High School program knew plenty, but their access to God was impeded by their mistaken impression that the words mattered and were in and of themselves the content. Kids who turn into adults who have been through the Bar/Bat Mitzvah mills (or who have missed 14 out on this amazingly self-delusional approach) end up as adults who wonder whether there is anything at all to their Judaism.
Does God hear only Hebrew prayers? Is the only form of prayer which is legitimate that which is set down in our prayerbooks? Does God only communicate at synagogue services? Is the synagogue the only “phone booth to God”?
The purpose of this book is to help people struggling with their Cosmic Web Browser to find their connection with the spiritual, Jewish “website”. It’s not a compendium of Jewish practice , law or interpretation. It’s simply an attempt to look at the Torah portion each week to find some meaning for today. If it inspires readers to read the Torah portion itself, or to look at other interpretations, or to think about the issues raised, it’s a start. If this book helps some people look at their approach to Judaism and see that it can grow, or begin to look at what they need to continue to learn, it will have served its purpose. I hope readers will see this as a “jumping off point” encouraging them to jump into the ocean of Jewish knowledge, thought and tradition and start on their own scuba dive through the Torah portions.
Offering just one interpretation of a single word of Torah, or a single phrase is woefully inadequate. Next year, I should be able to assemble a completely different book of interpretations of each of these Torah portions, since this volume simply surfs over the top, picking up a drop of the proverbial ocean of what we could talk about each week. My prayer is that this volume will be a starting point for everyone who reads it to join in the process of struggling with God and with the words of the Torah, coming up with their own volumes of interpretation, understanding and wisdom.
Each Torah portion is a portal to God, an access point, a way in. Once you start looking at the Torah portions, logging on to connect with God, the rest is easy. And you don’t need the internet to get there! 15 Some Preliminary Thoughts about God
We have a problem as human beings. We think we’re so high and mighty, we think we have control over just about everything. Wosre yet, that which we don’t have control over, we want to control. Where did we get such chutzpah from?
A lot of people end up really angry at God because God did not fulfill their hopes, or worse, because they feel that God has punished them for some unknown (or at times known) crime. We need to look at the theology of this kind of anger with God, and to consider whether it’s mature, rational, spiritually appropriate as an approach to understanding our ongoing relationships with God.
How can we believe in a God that doesn’t make sense, Who punishes people for reasons that are a mystery, so that the punishment has no lesson in it? How can we believe in a God Whose demands make no sense, Who expects us to be human and perfect at the same time? That’s not in what I believe to be God’s “job description”. God’s job is to provide us with strength, courage, wisdom, support, encouragement - hope. God can serve as an object to blame, but that then cuts the blamer off from feeling the support that God has to offer.
We’re supposed to be doing what God wants, not trying to make God do what we want. I sort of equate some of what we try to do with regard to God with going to the ATM. We go, put in our card, make our request, and out comes what we want, money or a transfer or whatever. But turning to God can’t be the same thing. Just because we put in our “God card”, doesn’t mean we automatically get what we want, just because we want it, or because we want it for a loved one. God is not the local ATM.
We often confuse God with magic. When we tell God what to do, it’s magic - not religion or spirituality. When we attempt to hear what God wants us to do, and do it, and invite inspiration into our lives, that is spirituality and religion. We don’t tell God to do anything. Prayer is reflexive, it is supposed to move us to achieve the goals we want God to do for us by magic.
God is not our servant. Read the Book of Job. (It’s in the Bible.) It’s a great story about a guy who has everything, loses everything, but refuses to curse God in his losses. When finally he gets to voice his complaints to God, the response he gets is precisely what we all need to hear: “Where were you when I 16 created the heavens and the earth? ...” God tells Job to back off and be humble. God does not have to answer Job’s questions. Period.
Know Who is in charge, and that it’s not you.
There never was a promise given to us, ever, that all we had to do was make three wishes and God would respond just like a genie out of a bottle and obey us. In fact, quite the opposite is made very clear: we’re supposed to do that which God wants. And there’s no negotiating allowed in the deal. If we do that which God wants, maybe our lives will be better, but there’s no guarantee. There never was one.
We don’t get to understand everything; we are supposed to be more humble than to think that we can understand God or order God around. While I understand anger at God for illness or the death of a loved one, it is often misplaced anger. God can take it, but it robs the angry person of the feeling of a right to contact God and to rely on God for those things that God can readily provide.
So why do people get sick and die? Why do accidents or terrible things happen? I believe the answer is that that’s the way the world was created. Disease happens, not as punishment, but as natural order of the world. Disasters happen. Not because we deserve them in some way, but because the world is imperfect. Our job, as humans, is to work toward the perfection of the world, to make it a better place than it was. In doing so, we are partners in the creative work of God. We are all supposed to be doing God’s work, bringing greater perfection to the world with our own hands. People die, not as punishment or warning or reward, but because our bodies wear out and things go wrong. We are not perfect.
We don’t have to like the reality of being human. But once we begin to accept our own humanity with some humility, we can hope, within the natural order of the world. Accidents happen. Disasters happen. Things go wrong. We can’t always prevent everything that threatens life. We can surely ask the “why” questions, “me?”, “now?” “him/her/them?”, but the answer will always remain elusive. We simply don’t get to know, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us.
We can struggle with it, fight it, research for cures, but there always will be disease, and people will always die for reasons that make no sense. There will always be earthquakes, tornadoes, and all kinds of nasty stuff. No matter how safe we make cars, trains and planes, there will be tragedies. It’s the natural order of the world. 17
Another piece of that answer is that despite our discomfort with the reality we see, there’s more we don’t get to see. Maybe an untimely death is a better solution to an unseen crisis if that death did not happen. We don’t get to see the whole picture of everything. We’re not omnipotent. If there is a reason, it’s beyond us. We can either trust that the reason exists, or we can just accept that we’re not going to ever know the reason.
God is available to hear our prayers and to help us find hope. God doesn’t do our bidding, but may well be there for us to cry to, to join us in the surprise and wonder of life that includes the tragedies we wish would not happen. I think God wishes they would not happen to us too. God created the world imperfect, so we would have something to do, bringing it closer to perfection. The world was created so we could be free thinkers and doers. But God is not going to do our jobs for us, or bail us out when we screw up, or step in when illnesses or tragedies develop that we weren’t expecting.
God and Torah
What does God want us to do with Torah? Learn, study grow, interpret. The rabbis tell us “to turn it and turn it because everything is in it”. They also say “Both this opinion and that opinion are the words of the living God”. As long as we’re engaged in the struggle to find meaning in Torah, God is going to back us up. Wherever we go in trying to find that meaning, and in bringing God’s will to light. There’s a wonderful story in the Talmud that I learned in my first year in rabbinical school (The first time around. I took 17 years from that first year to ordination).
Talmud, Baba Metzia 59b: The story is told of a debate among the rabbis in which they could not come to a conclusion. What they were arguing about is relatively unimportant. But Rabbi Eliezer gave all the reasons and answers in the world to the rabbis to prove his point, yet the rabbis did not accept his opinion. He said: If the law is as I say, let the carob tree outside prove it. The tree got up and moved 100 feet (and some say 400 feet). But the rabbis responded: We don’t take proof from carob trees. Rabbi Eliezer said: If the law is as I say, let the stream prove it. The stream flowed backwards. But the rabbis responded: We don’t take proofs from the waters. 18 Rabbi Eliezer said: If the law is as I say, let the walls of this house of study prove it. The walls of the house of study started to move to fall. But Rabbi Joshua said to them:When wise men are debating, what do you have to do with it? The walls did not fall in respect for Rabbi Joshua and did not stay upright in respect for Rabbi Eliezer. They leaned, and remain leaning. Rabbi Eliezer said, If the law is as I say, let a voice from Heaven prove it. There was a voice form heaven that said: What is your gripe with Rabbi Eliezer? The law is as he says in all places. Rabbi Joshua got onto his feet and replied: The Torah is not in heaven! What does that mean? Rabbi Jeremiah said: The Torah was given to us at Mount Sinai, and we don’t take proofs from heaven. Rabbi Natan met up with Elijah the prophet and asked him: What did God do when God heard that?” He relplied: God smiled and said “My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.”
This story is based on Deuteronomy 30:12, which says: Surely this instruction …is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens…neither is it beyond the sea…No, (Torah) is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart to observe it.
The Torah is not in the heavens. It’s up to us to interpret, to understand and to use. It is up to us to uphold, to work with, to find the hidden meanings within. It’s also up to us to understand that there are very few exact and “right answers”. Those things which were right in a previous generation may not be right in this day and age. But the point of the story is that we are supposed to struggle with Torah, to work with Torah, and to make it our own.
God smiles when God “My sons have defeated Me.” The smile lets us know that this is no defeat – it’s precisely what God wants from us – to rely on our own abilities; to bring it into our own hearts – to take ownership and accountability for it; to trust our own judgment when it comes to interpreting the Will of God. By being responsible in our interpretation, honoring the traditions of our people at the same time as we continue to see our Judaism as dynamic, changing, evolving. God doesn’t want us listening to voices from heaven but wants us to listen to the voices of our own hearts in direct engagement with the text, our traditions and our experiences.
19 This book is just an attempt to fulfill that Will and Vision. The Torah is not in Heaven. It’s right here. All we have to do is figure out what it means, for today, and the continue to figure it out again tomorrow.
May God give us all the strength to strive to find ways of bringing the teachings of Torah into our lives, and to constantly be engaged in Torah discussion. May we be blessed with insights and inspiration, with care and with courage, to find our convictions and to live up to them. May we, as a people we continue to grow intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally, beneath the wings of the Shehinah, the Holy Presence of God.. 20 How to Use this Book
I have a few suggestions for using this book.
Story Theology: In Chaplaincy School, we have a seminar called Story Theology. We tell a story to our colleagues. It can be any personal story of any kind. I used to like talking about my dogs at the beach. Then, everyone else gets to talk about what the story reminds them of in their own life. So the beach story is the jumping off point for other people to think about nature or loving animals, or whatever comes to their minds. The third step is to look for the theology of the story and the ways people relate to the story. How did the story remind you of God, or how do you connect the story with something more universal? What’s out there beyond our own experiences in relating to one story that is told by one person and our reactions to it?
Each of the interpretation in this book is Story Theology. I’m telling you the story. You react to it, and think about what it reminds you of in your own experience of life. Then if you can discuss it with others, great! If not, just look for and acknowledge the places where God is present in your understanding of the story, or in your reactions to it. Where do you go in your head and your heart when you think about the Torah Commentary or what it reminds you of?
If you are reading this book alone: You can read the introductions and then put this book down. Pick it up every week on Monday or Tuesday and read the section for the upcoming Torah portion. That way, you’re thinking about the Torah portion and working on your own ideas that I hope will be stimulated by my commentary. Remember, I’m just commenting on a tiny piece of the Torah portion each week, a theme, or even just a word. After you see what I’m saying, please feel free to read the entire Torah portion. The chapters and verses for each Torah portion are listed at the very beginning of every commentary. Then, engage in discussion with me via email, or better yet, discuss the commentary with your family, friends, or coworkers.
With your family: Does anyone make time for Shabbat dinner? If you do, read the Torah Commentary at dinner and do Story Theology with it. How does everyone relate to the Reflection, and where is God in the interpretation of the Reflection and your personal ways of relating to it?
21 With a Support Group: Throw away the order of the Torah portions and look at this entire books as a resource for the spiritual needs of the participants. If they are dealing with illness, look at the Reflections that deal with illness and recovery. If they are dealing with grief, look at the texts that have grief as their themes, and then do the same Story Theology process with them. I always prefer to start with where people are, and then whip out the perfect text for them In my Bereavement Groups, that meant coming with printouts for all of the possible themes that usually come up in the group, and then have those resources right there for them. How Did Abraham deal with his loss? How did Moses deal with multiple loss? What does the liturgy of the High Holiday, with who will live and who will die really say? Feel free to read through the commentaries and see what you think will apply to your support groups.
In a Bikkur Holim/Caring Community setting: If you’re visiting someone in the hospital or a nursing home, feel free to use this book as a resource for getting conversation going. You can use the Torah portion of the week or you can work with the themes. Either way, study the Torah Reflction and then do Story Theology with it – how you both relate to the Torah Commentary, and discuss the theology of the personal stories. You will never run out of stuff to say when you can get people to relate their experiences to the Torah! 22
23
1. Starting Over for the First Time: Parshat B’raysheet, Genesis 1:1 – 6:8
This week, we start again. After all the holidays, when we have examined our lives, figured out what was wrong and what was right, what worked for us, and what didn’t, now we start over. It’s sort of a spiritual “do-over” – we get to correct the errors and move on without having them drag us back down. So it’s totally fitting that we start the cycle of reading the Torah again, as though it were the first time. Because we are essentially different people from who we were last year. Sure, we’re older (and hopefully wiser), but we have been through a year of life since last time we started this reading. According to Rev. Debbie Timmons, my colleague and friend “Our experiences are the sandpaper that refines us.”
Having been refined by our experiences, when we start re-reading the Torah, we experience the stories and narrative differently from what we thought we knew. Our lenses have changed. We see the text in a new light. Therefore, we see different things in it. Perhaps we should approach the rest of our lives in the same way. Having gone through the Holidays, as we start over, maybe we should be seeing how different everything else is in our lives now that we are changed. Relationships, aspirations, expectations, perceptions – we don’t have to be who we were or how we were just 5 weeks ago.
With this in mind, we look at these first chapters of the Torah and can see them as very different from the ways in which we experienced them last year. My teacher, Prof. Ora Horn Prouser points out that the Torah begins with two very different creation stories, “the orderly, thought-out, structured creation of Genesis, 1,” when God creates each of the days and on each of the days has an agenda of orderly creation, “and the less-planned, almost trial-and-error creation of Genesis, 2”, when God creates Adam first out of the ground and creates animals in attempting to find partners for the man.
“While we would like to live our lives following the structure of Genesis chapter 1, in reality, most of us live the lives of Genesis chapter 2, where we do our best and keep struggling, facing each issue as it arises. Sometimes we get things wrong, as when God created the animals thinking they could be partners for the man. At that point, the only answer, is to try again until we get it right, as in the creation of the woman.”
I never saw the experience of the second chapter of Genesis as “trial and error” before. While I understand these creation stories as allegories, intended to teach religion and spirituality, not science or 24 history, I never thought about the theology of the second story depicting a God who learns, grows, is surprised and adapts, whereas the first story depicts a God with a plan and action that is based on the plan exclusively.
God’s Presence is different as we read these two stories, and we can see how much we reflect that Presence by our own actions and experiences. We learn by trail and error, and we make plans and act on them. Both approaches are reflections of God’s love and Presence. The Holidays were a summary of our trials and our errors, our plans and our actions. Just as God “gets it right” in the creation of woman, we can ultimately “get it right” as we experience the sandpaper of our lives.
Getting it right or getting it wrong, it’s all part of our experience, all a reflection of God. Ultimately, there is holiness in both experiences, if we are willing to see it and to start over again, fresh, willing to continue to make mistakes until we get it right. We have to learn to accept our errors as a natural and holy part of our learning process.
As we start this New(ish ) Year, as we start re-reading Torah, may we come to accept our mistakes as opportunities for growth and learning. May we fear errors less and value our experience more, and see God in all of it. 25 2. Becoming God’s Partners: Parshat Noah Genesis 6:8 – 11:27
All of us know the story of Noah, or do we? The most surprising thing for me in discussing the story is how few people have any idea of what the sin of Noah’s generation was. We all know the punishment, but what were the inhabitants of the earth doing that was so terrible? What good is a punishment, when it begs the question, “What did I do?” So without looking below, think about it: what was the sin?
Stumped? You’re not the first. According to the Torah, "The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth, God said to Noah, ‘I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth'" (Genesis 6:11-13). While we know they were bad, we don’t know exactly what the problem was.
Jewish tradition offers differing answers, which should lead us all to continue to ask the question. The medieval Jewish interpreter, Ibn Ezra, offers two possibilities: (1) the people sinned openly, in public, before God, so they had no sense of shame or boundaries; or (2) the people sinned privately, only before God - engaging in doing their evil when they thought no one was looking. But he doesn’t really say what their evil was. Some commentators indicate that the natural order of the world was not being observed: animals and people were mating with other species. Even in planting, one seed would be sewn, and another variety of plant would grow from it. People and animals were literally taking bites out of one another, eating one another alive. (B’raysheet Rabbah)
If you look at the punishment, the sin is less obscure. The removal of all living beings on earth (except fish, but don’t be so literal!) is the punishment. The crime, therefore? The complete disregard for the holiness and the value of life itself. There was no appreciation for life, or the order of the world of living things. In the first creation story, the one with the seven days of creation, God creates order out of chaos. In this story, the world had reverted to chaos. Creation was undermined by the human and animal inhabitants of the earth.
Please remember that these stories are allegories, stories that teach lessons, but not they are not science or history. The beginning of the Bible, until the story of Abraham, is about establishing the human relationship with the Presence of God, and the values that are basic to all humanity. It’s theology, not history or science. The story of Noah is really the third creation story: once again the world is created 26 from chaos, after the flood. Each of the allegories teaches lessons. The first creation story – the value and essential nature of Shabbat. The second story - (Adam and Eve) the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. This third creation story, Noah, the value of life itself. This third creation story also establishes the relationship of God and humanity in different terms than the first two stories. “So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.” All of the stories have sub-topics and other important lessons, but space here is too limited to explore them all.
The major purpose of the Noah story is to assure humanity of God’s Presence, to assure us of the natural ways of the world, and that God is a loving and caring God, despite the way it seems in the beginning of the story. God changes from angry to benevolent. The story assures us that God is involved and committed to benevolence. The Noah story ends with an affirmation of hope – God promises never to destroy the world again. God sets the rainbow to be a sign of the covenant that we can trust in God, and in the natural order of the world. The rainbow is the symbol that good can come from disaster.
God promises not to destroy the world again, but God also expects us to be partners in the Creation process, bringing order and hope to God’s creation, where the people of Noah’s generation did the opposite. It’s up to humanity to keep the natural order of the world from turning into chaos, up to us to value and appreciate life, how precious and fragile it can be.
May we continue to attempt to see the words of Torah in an ever-changing light, seeing that the truths we understand in one reading only lead us to find new truths the next time around. May we be blessed with the wisdom and understanding that the words of Torah are here to assure us that God is present in our lives, committed to benevolence. May we all create a world that reflects order and the value of life, as we are blessed beneath the rainbow of the radiant light of God’s Presence.
27 3. Remembering Mel: Being a Blessing Leh Leha Genesis 12:1 - 17:27
According to Judy Collins and/or John Lennon, There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed. Some for ever, not for better, some are gone and some remain, All these places had their meanings for lovers and friends I still can recall Some are dead and some are living, in my life, I’ve loved them all.
There are places and things I will remember all my life. This week’s Torah portion, Leh Leha, is one of those places. Because it reminds me not only of Abraham setting out on his journey toward a promise, but because it also reminds me, always, of my friend Melvin Lloyd Rosen.
Mel was my “first person with AIDS”. He knew he was the first person with whom I was close who would die of AIDS. In his last year, he was very into a song by Debbie Friedman, “Lehi Lah”. (Leh Leha means “go you”, sort of. Translating the words is not easy out of context, which is that God tells Abram to leave home. Lehi Lah is the feminine form of the same words.) The chorus says, “And you shall be a blessing.” It’s a quotation from God’s initial introduction with Abram, getting him to leave the place where he grew up to go to the place which God would show him. Mel liked the music and the chorus. I was in Rabbinical School (the Academy for Jewish Religion) and Mel liked that idea, too.
So Mel, who was enormously tall, (he was the tallest man I ever got to know) had these huge arms. He would point at me, and wave his finger, and look directly into my eyes and say: “You shall be a blessing. Make your life a blessing.” I would respond “Shut up, Mel.” Who needed him doing that to me? Who needed this wish of a dying man? I didn’t want the responsibility!
But he was right. This is something each and every one of us should want to be/do. To be a blessing for others. I’m sharing this story with you so you can see Mel pointing at you, looking directly into your eyes and saying to you, “You shall be a blessing. Make your life a blessing.” I hope Mel sees me as trying to live up to his blessing by charging you in the same way as God sent our ancestor Abram out on his journey.
Isn’t that precisely what we are all supposed to do with our lives - to be blessings for others? Judy Collins 28 had it right. This is a place in time, in my life, in Torah, that I will always remember. I will never be able to see “leh leha” from a perspective which does not in some way include Mel. Sometimes Mel’s presence fades from my life. It always comes back when I speak to his life-partner, J.B., who also is my best friend, and Mel’s presence is always with me when I hear the song, and think about being a blessing.
In this week’s Torah portion, Abraham sets out on his journey (actually, Abram sets out on the journey. Along the way, he becomes Abraham) But you have to wonder why he has to set out in the first place. If God wanted to get Abram to believe, why couldn’t he have done it right where he was? After all, God is everywhere. All lands are holy if God dwells among us everywhere. Why did Abram have to be somewhere else instead of just staying where he was?
As Jews, we often see exile as that which took place once our people left the land of Israel. But our peoplehood actually begins with the exile of Abram from his original home. Rabbi Richard Hirsh explains that “What we learn from Abraham is about the importance of being on the way, rather than arriving; of being willing to sacrifice what is known for the sake of what can be.” In each annual reading of the Torah, we go forth to a new place which God shows us. The only assurance we get is God’s promise to bless us, and help us to be blessings for others.
Abraham set out on a journey to be a blessing for others. In the process, he learned that blessings were reflexive: the more blessings he gave out, the more he collected. He was giving and receiving at the same time. Abraham became involved in the selfish and selfless act of giving and taking blessings, which invites God’s Presence to dwell among us.
Every day, Mel used to give change to the first three homeless people he saw. (I didn't know about this until his funeral.) Before Mel's funeral, I ignored the homeless on the streets of New York City. I pretended not to hear their pleas - that I knew they would spend their money on booze or drugs, and therefore I would not give them my money. I never looked at them, and certainly never talked to them. After Mel's funeral, I began giving change to the first three beggars I saw. It didn't change their lives, but it has changed mine. Try it sometime. You’ll notice that almost every beggar says "God bless you" every time you put change in the cup. The blessings of a beggar may be just what you need to remember to have some compassion for another human being, maybe even be a blessing for him/her.
The journey through life, the struggle to be a blessing for others is what counts. On that journey, we are 29 partners with God, working to make the world a better place with our own hands. We do God’s work with our own hands, being blessings, bringing blessings into the lives of others.
May it be Your will, Holy One our God and God of our ancestors, that we find the strength, the commitment and power, to understand our role in being and bringing blessings. May we all see Mel looking us straight in the eyes and telling us to make our lives a blessing, and may we respond in ways we would want to remember all of our lives.
30 4. Experiencing God/ Be more Like God: Parshat Vayera Genesis 17:27 – 22:24
This week’s Torah portion, Vayera, begins with Abraham having just circumcised himself at age 99. Talk about an incredible amount of faith! I can’t even begin to project how this experience worked for Abraham. But I’d be sure that anyone who had done such a thing to himself would be at home, in bed, trying to recuperate, at least physically. How one recovers emotionally or psychologically is difficult to determine, but one thing is clear - Abraham is not in need of any kind off spiritual healing. His self- inflicted wound, a marking Jewish men continue to carry on our bodies, is a sign of a covenant, brit, with that which can lead to healing.
Instead of lying in bed to recover Abraham is sitting at the entrance of his tent. Some of us can understand that need, to get right out of bed after we have been ill or have had surgery. Sometimes, the sooner we return to some sense of normalcy, the faster the pace of our recovery seems to be. So there is Abraham, getting back out there, ready, willing, even if not quite able, to start doing some mitzvot, bringing his life back to normal.
The text then tells us something amazing: God appears before Abraham as he’s sitting at the entrance of his tent. The rabbis point out that this means that God visits the sick. God is engaged in bikkur holim, and this is one of the bases for our practice of visiting the sick. The text just says God appeared. And then, all of a sudden, Abraham looks up and sees three men standing in front of him. Abraham ran to greet them and said, 'Please come in! I'll bring some water, and you can wash up and rest...' Abraham hurried to Sarah's tent and said, 'Quickly make three cakes.' Abraham ran to his cattle, selected a choice one, and gave it to his son who rushed to prepare it..." (Genesis 18:1-8)
Abraham treats the guests royally and serves the finest foods, he involves his family in the mitzvah, and he’s zealous in making it all happen. He seems to have completely forgotten the ordeal he has put his own body through, and he’s back in charge, giving orders, making the guests comfortable. We usually tell people to rest after surgery. Take some time to heal. But that’s not what Abraham is doing.
Something about the whole sequence of events is very strange: at the beginning of the story, God appears to Abraham, and the next thing you know, Abraham leaves to attend to three strangers. What happened to his conversation with God? Imagine you're in the middle of speaking to the President of the United States. 31 Would you ever say, "Hold on a second, there's some strangers walking by. I'll get back to you later"? So what made Abraham think putting God on hold was the right thing to do?
The answer is that there is an experience even greater than talking to God. And that is to be like God. Our primary goal, in all that we do, is to be like God. According to Rabbi Harold Schulweis, (sermon for Yom Kippur 2002) “The purpose of prayer is not the adulation of God, but the imitation of God, not the admiration of God, but the emulation of God’s ways. God is the ideal, the model to be emulated by me in my life horizontally, between me and you, and my family and friends, brother, sister, son, and daughter.”
The rabbis spelled out the moral correlation, “As God is merciful, you should be merciful. As God is compassionate, you should be compassionate. As God forgives, you should forgive. As God visits the sick, you should visit the sick.”
How do you experience God? You experience God’s love when you love. You experience God’s forgiveness when you forgive. When we act like God, do that which we want God to do, we experience God. Human beings are created in the image of God which means we are supposed to see ourselves emulating God’s work in all that we do, bringing God into the experiences we have, and the ways we touch others’ lives, to do the things God would want, and to know that people come first, no matter what.
So that was what Abraham was doing: he broke off his conversation with God in order to be more like God, to do what God would want for other people, who come first. What a radical notion! Taking care of people was even more important to Abraham than chatting with God! And God blessed him for getting his priorities straight.
Abraham set a good example for all of us: not to just talk to or with God, but to do God’s work, with our own hands. Abraham goes out of his way to demonstrate that what God desires most is for us to be more like God. When he was still recovering from surgery, Abraham managed to find healing in being God’s active partner, emulating God, representing God’s Presence.
May we all be blessed with the wisdom and courage to see clearly what is most important, like our ancestor Abraham, fulfilling the words of our prophet Micah: to do justice, love mercy and to walk humbly with God. 32 5. Living with Loss: Parshat Ha-yay Sarah Genesis 23:1- 25:18
This week’s Torah portion begins with the sadness of the death of our ancestor Sarah. Following almost immediately the story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, one has to feel for Abraham’s pain in losing his beloved wife, especially after the near-tragedy of sacrificing his son. He was so alone, and so sad. The Torah says he wept and mourned for his wife. Isaac is not around, for reasons that are not all that clear. Abraham focuses on doing what he can, burying his dead. He spends a lot of time negotiating the purchase of the first piece of land associated with the Jewish people and the land of Israel, the Cave of the Mahpelah, which is in Hebron. This is the very same place in Israel that remains in the news pretty much every day due to all kinds of fighting. No one argues that Abraham bought the land, but rather we argue about who his heirs are.
Abraham goes from mourning to the purchase of real estate, to making sure that Isaac is married to an appropriate woman from the “old country”. The text digresses from Abraham’s life to that of the arranged marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, a wedding we are not sure Abraham attended. (After the Akedah, Isaac and Abraham never had another conversation recorded in the Bible.) We know Abraham is involved in Isaac’s life, but we don’t get to see their interaction.
Abraham seems so old in this Torah portion. It even says so in Gen 24:1 “Abraham was now old, advanced in years”. When he purchased the Cave of the Mahpelah, surely he expected to be buried rather soon next to the woman whom he loved who has predeceased him, but not by much! Sarah died at 127 years of age. Abraham was 137 years old when she died. In arranging for his son’s marriage, Abraham seems to have taken care of all the essentials of his own life, getting his house in order, and seems ready to die.
Then there’s an incredible notation in the story. Abraham remarried! He had five additional children with his new wife, Keturah. Abraham lived another 38 years after Sarah’s death. Even though Isaac inherited his entire estate, the sons of Abraham’s “concubines” inherited gifts, and were sent to the east, to be away from Isaac. My question: What concubines? Keturah was a wife, not a concubine, so that means that Abraham was involved with even more women! (It’s plural!) At his age!!!
33 No one challenges the idea that Sarah was the love of Abraham’s life; that they were “b’shert” (fated) to be together. But after she died, Abraham somehow managed to go on, to rebuild his life, to prosper, to even find happiness after Sarah was no longer alive. The Torah says that when Abraham died, he died at “a good old age, old and satisfied”. And all too often we miss this important message in the Torah: even in loss, we go on, we rebuild, we continue, we grow.
All of us suffer all kinds of loss throughout our lives. Loss is inevitable. We lose people we love, jobs and homes, friends and pets, fortunes and challenges. But we can’t stay frozen in our losses. Life goes on, and we have to adjust to living without the person or people we love, without the homes we grew up in or where our children grew, without the companions with whom we shared our lives. It’s hard for all of us. Loss happens.
It was not easy for Abraham either. But it is the only thing we can do in our loss – to move forward, to remember, to keep the memory alive even as we live beyond the experiences we shared. The Torah demands that we “choose life”. That’s what Abraham does in this Torah portion – he continues to live as fully as he can, as long as he can, experiencing both the sorrows and joys of his life, dying in fullness of years and fullness of life.
We learn from our losses. These are the hardest lessons of life - not a schooling any of us welcomes. But our losses teach us that we can endure, that we really are strong, that there is meaning and even hope in learning to adjust to loss. Loss teaches us to cherish what we have all the more, as long as we have it, and as long as we can remember what we no longer can touch.
As we struggle with our own personal losses, may we also be inspired by the hope and courage affirmed by Abraham in this week’s Torah portion. May the Source of Strength, who helped Abraham through his sadness, also help us to find the better times, the good, the fullness, the blessings, in our own lives. 34
Making Thanksgiving Spiritually Meaningful
We don't often think of Thanksgiving as a Jewish holiday - it’s an American holiday which we, as Americans observe. Thanksgiving in America was started by Christian pilgrims, and infused by many Christian values. In the media, we are surrounded by images of people sitting down to their Thanks- giving dinner and “saying grace”, celebrating the Christianity of Thanksgiving. There are always special program episodes on TV of all of our favorite shows, in which, for one episode a year, the people in the show actually express some human kindness. Homeless people are visited and fed, others in need are helped, and the heroes of our shows demonstrate that they can be “good people”.
It seems that we have not developed our own specifically Jewish traditions for Thanksgiving. Yet, Thanksgiving is an interpretation of our holiday, Sukkot, the Fall festival designated to thank God for the bountiful harvest. As American Jews, we should revel in celebration of an American holiday, and not have any feelings of discomfort about it. Thanking God, after all, is a value we all share.
How can you make Thanksgiving Jewish?
1. Light candles at your table. There is no blessing for Thanksgiving candles, which means you get to make your own!!! Start out with the way we start all our blessings, baruh attah adonai, elohaynu meleh ha’olam... (Holy One of Blessing, Our God and Creative Power of the Universe, we thank You for).....and fill in the blank as you see fit. As you light your candles, invite others at your table to make their own blessings, using the same formula.
2. Have Challah and wine at your table, and say the blessings for them: Wine: Use the blessing formula above plus: Boray p’ri hagafen (who brings forth fruit of the vine) Challah: Use the blessing formula above plus: Hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz (who brings forth bread from the earth)
3. Thanksgiving is a great time to say shehechayanu (the blessing for thanking God for keeping us alive to enjoy this moment). Say it after the wine: Use the formula plus: shehechayanu, v’kiyimanu, v’higianu lazman hazeh (who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment).
35 4. Ask everyone invited to your dinner to bring something which symbolizes what they are thankful for. After the blessings, before dinner, have everyone talk about what they brought and its significance. Be sure everyone knows to bring something, and has a chance to talk, including children.
5. Make some time for remembering the people who are not with you, either because of distance, family obligations (or preferences) or death. Families change. The people sitting at your table all have other family members with whom they are not sitting (in-laws, cousins, parents and grandparents, children who are with former spouses, etc.) Talk about who else is not physically there. A moment of silence for people who have died, and are missed can be a great way of allowing people to remember. Have people talk about who they miss and special things about them from previous Thanksgivings. You can also light Yahrzeit candles for people who have died as a part of remembering.
6. Do some random mitzvot (acts of lovingkindness). Collect and deliver food, household and personal supplies to people who need them. There are plenty of food drives at this time of year. Contribute food. Make a donation in honor of the people coming to your dinner (or alternatively, in honor of your hosts) to your congregation, the Jewish Federation, Jewish Family Service, or a local shelter. Invite a single person, or people whose families are distant, to be your special guests. If you are a guest this year for the first time, donate what you would have spent hosting a dinner for others in honor of those you would have invited, or in honor of your hosts.
Most of all, have a happy, meaningful and fulfilling Thanksgiving! 36 6. God, Grant me the Serenity… Parshat Toldot Genesis 25:19 – 28:9
This week’s Torah portion starts out with the statement that this is the story of Isaac, the son of Abraham, but it goes right into the story of Rebecca. It describes the fact that she was pregnant with twins, and that the pregnancy was very difficult. The twins were fighting within her womb. Rebecca asked God, “If so, why do I exist?”, and got the response that two nations were within her womb. The older of the twins will serve the younger. In other words, despite what the rest of the Torah portion says, the proverbial “fix is in”. Somehow, the younger brother will take over, will be the leader of the people.
This prophecy is important. This is the first time we have one of the matriarchs actually communicating with God, though Hagar also did earlier. Sarah gets a laugh out of the prophecy that she would bear a son in her old age but that’s not a conversation. Here’s Rebecca, engaged in discussion with God.
We can imagine that the demands on Rebecca’s time were dramatic. She had twin sons who started fighting before they were born and proved to be even more difficult after they emerged from the womb. By the time of the climax of the story, her husband, Isaac, was frail and unable to do much. She had a staff to supervise, a business to run. (The sons were busy doing their own things; who do you think ran the business?) And yet Rebecca had the additional challenge of making a leader out of one of her sons, neither of whom seemed perfect for the job: one couldn’t care much about the business, and the other seemed manipulative and weak. But there was a prophecy to fulfill.
Rebecca had no easy job. If anyone is looking for a woman who is a hero in the Bible, here she is! She knew full well, from the very beginning, that Jacob was going to be the child who would lead the people that would ultimately be known as his children. She had to make it happen.
Isaac thinks he’s dying. He tells Esau, whom he’s supposed to bless, to go make him a festive meal so he’d be in the mood to bless him. But it’s strange: why did Isaac do this with Esau? Why didn’t he tell his wife to make the meal and get everything ready for the blessing to happen? All of a sudden the hunter of the family is supposed to be a cook? And the blessing and meal were apparently very important, sort of Last Will and Testament kind of event. Do we assume that Isaac did not intend to involve his wife, on whom he was totally dependent, in the ceremony naming one of their sons as the designated leader? Given his level of disability and his dependence on Rebecca, it seems rather odd. And was Isaac was 37 unaware of the prophecy? Why would Rebecca have kept such vital information from him, or why would he have ignored it or planned to do something contrary to it?
Rebecca hears the instructions Isaac gives Esau, puts together the meal, and tells Jacob to go trick his father, and tell him he’s Esau. Jacob puts lamb’s wool on his arms so he’ll seem hairy like his brother, and goes to Isaac his father for the blessing. Isaac asks him repeatedly if he’s really Esau; he even says, “the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau”. So Isaac blesses the “wrong” son.
But it’s not really the wrong son, remember? It was always supposed to happen that way, from the prophecy before the birth of the twins. Rebecca had to make it happen. Isaac depended on her to get it right. I’m convinced that Isaac knew full well he was blessing Jacob. That’s why he kept asking which son he was blessing - to make sure it was Jacob! Isaac counted on Rebecca to make sure it happened right. Even if the Bible describes no collusion between the two, it does so because conversation/ discussion was not necessary. Rebecca knew how to manage; Isaac knew he could count on her to make things right. They are collaborators in the illusion of a trick, which would enable the prophecy to come true.
Rebecca had to create a situation which both her sons could survive, and from which her husband would come out looking respectable. Her other options could have been much worse. In her day, these kinds of fights over who leads a people usually ended in the death of the weakest person. That would have meant Jacob would be killed. Rebecca created a situation in which everyone survives, some might even say it was a “win-win” situation, since Esau didn’t really want the responsibility anyway.
When I think of Rebecca, I wish I could ask her how she managed to do it all so well. I wonder whether she would have recited the Serenity Prayer in response, asking God to give her the serenity to accept the thing she could not change, the courage to change the things she could, and the wisdom to know the difference. As a caregiver, parent and partner in this difficult situation, she seems to embody the wisdom in finding the difference between what she had to accept and what she could make happen.
The hero of the story, who determined the fate of this family, and of the entire Jewish people was the woman, the mother, the manager! When we look for role models in the Bible, may we all see her as an example for our own lives. May we all be the dependable managers, who create opportunities for all of the important people in our lives to win, to go from strength to strength. And may we learn to appreciate 38 the people in our lives who make things happen, who take the initiative and the responsibility, to make the world and our own little corner of that world, a better place for all of us, just like our mother, Rebecca.
39 7. Finding God in Your Life: Parshat Va-yetze Genesis 28:10 – 32:3
Remember the V-8 commercials? When the guy in the ad would slap his head and say, “Wow, I cudda had a V-8.” This week’s Torah portion always reminds me of that commercial. Jacob, on his escape route, running away from a tricked father and way-too-angry brother, camps out for a night. He has a weird dream in which he sees angels going up and down a ladder. He hears a blessing from God, and when he wakes up from his dream, he slaps his head (well, I see him as doing that, the text doesn’t say so) and he says: “God was in this place and I, i didn’t know it.” (See Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s book with the same words as the title for an explanation of the double “i”. )
Lots of us have had that kind of experience. We think a place or an experience is going to be just the usual kind of thing, and then all of a sudden we realize after it is over that it was special, awesome, strange, amazing. We most often see the places where God has been. We read and talk about our desire to see God, to respond to some of the awesome nature of our existence, thinking that somehow “seeing is believing”. Many of us ask for and await “a sign” of God in our lives, some remarkable, unexplainable feat to convince of us beyond any doubt of God’s existence.
Even Moses, our most famous teacher and prophet, asks God to allow him to “behold God’s Presence”. It’s an odd request from a guy who has been sitting on a mountain for 40 days taking dictation from that very God. But God’s answer is even stranger: God will allow Moses to see God’s Presence, but not God’s face, only the back of God, whatever that might be.
Moses is shown that he cannot see God directly. He can only see God’s Presence in the past tense, where God has been. So too, with us. We also are allowed to see God in the past tense - where God’s Presence has touched us personally and has touched the world. When we are filled with awe and wonder at the world, when we find the places where God has been, we are as close as we can be to God. That’s what Jacob experiences in this week’s Torah portion.
In another Biblical “wow” moment, Elijah the prophet told of how he experienced the Presence of God: The Holy One passed by. There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rock by the power of God; but the Holy One was not in the wind. After the wind - an earthquake; but God was not 40 in the earthquake. After the earthquake, fire; but the Holy One was not in the fire. And after the fire, a thin voice of silence.”
God is not in the big deals, the high places, the “special effects”, but rather is present in the voices of silence, touching hearts, shaping souls. According to Rabbi David Wolpe, “God does not reach down to remove tumors. But God grants courage, helps us to hope, strengthens our souls, and stiffens our spine. God helps community cohere. In the stillness and isolation of illness, we can hear God’s voice of silence speak to us, and through us.”
We can see God’s Presence in our own lives most often and clearly when we look back and see acts of loving kindness, which are reflections of God. As human beings, as reflections of God’s image, we can see God in the work of our hands and the ways human beings reflect God’s Presence.
We do God’s work with our own hands. We are the vehicles through which God’s Presence is experienced on earth, even if it’s in a still small voice, even if it’s just from the back, just in hindsight, even if it’s in weird dreams that will be interpreted and reinterpreted forever.
Jacob has this amazing moment when he realizes that the place where he went to sleep was a holy place, not because of the particular rocks there, but because this was a place where he saw God, where he experienced the holy. Think back in your life. Are there places where God has been, and you didn’t know it? Are we the guy in the commercial, realizing, after the fact, that we were in the Presence of God?
May we all be blessed with awareness of God Presence in our lives, in the amazing moments, and in the small, incredible insights we have when we hear the thin voice of silence. May the works of our hands be pleasing to God, as they reflect God’s Presence.
41 8. Wrestling the Blessings Out of our Fears: Parshat Vayishlah Genesis 32:4 – 36:43
Have you ever been frightened of the repercussions of something you did? Really, really scared that something you did would lead to total disaster for you; not immediate disaster, but one at a much later time? What was it? What were the potential consequences you were so afraid of?
In this week’s Torah portion, Jacob is scared beyond belief at the prospect of returning home to his parents’ house more than 20 years after he left. He’s scared because last he heard, his father Isaac was dying, his twin Esau was ready to kill him, and just about everyone was angry at him for tricking Isaac into blessing the “wrong” son. He hasn’t written, not a phone call, no e-mail, nothing. If you went back to your mother after all that time not calling, you’d be scared, too!
But Jacob left Canaan and the family with absolutely nothing. He’s coming back in this week’s Torah portion with flocks and herds, money, and most importantly, with family: 2 wives, 2 concubines, 11 sons, Dinah and any other unmentioned daughters. The consequences of his actions all those years ago could wipe out everything that was important to him now, everyone he loved. If you faced such circumstances, you’d panic too!
So with all this fear, panic and worry on his mind, Jacob sends his family ahead of him, sends all of his possessions ahead of him, and he is left alone, just like when he started. Alone, Jacob wrestles with a man (or a messenger from God) until nearly daybreak. Jacob struggles with this stranger, until the stranger wrenches Jacob’s hip almost out of its socket, and Jacob still doesn’t let him go. He holds onto the messenger, who is causing him intense pain, and Jacob demands a blessing from him. Jacob’s name is changed to Israel, because he wrestled with a divine being. (Israel means wrestles/struggles with God.)
Who is this stranger? Is it an angel? Is it God? Is it a devil? One thing is certain: it can’t survive in the day light. All of us struggle with our own demons, many of us at night. Yet even when we are struggling with demons, many of us are like Jacob, we hold right on to the very things with which we are struggling. We hold on to the anger, the fear, the resentments that we know plague us and give us no rest. We hold on to that which we should probably let go.
Maybe the lesson is to find a way to turn the struggle we’re holding into a blessing for us, to find the blessing within the struggle. We need to know that something good will come out of the struggle, just like the blessing Jacob receives. The key to letting go of our fears, to letting go of the struggles, can be found 42 in the blessings hidden within. Jacob’s blessing is in finally coming to a personal relationship with God, finally getting know, experience and relate to his own God.
When Jacob set out on his journey, lo those many years ago, he had a dream on the road in which he saw a ladder with angels or messengers going up and down the ladder. In that dream, God spoke as “the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac.” But the text in that story didn’t mention “the God of Jacob.” When Jacob woke up from that dream he said, “God was in this place and I, I did not know it.” What does that mean? It could mean he didn’t know God was there, or it could mean he didn’t know God, not in any meaningful way.
Now, after all these years, when Jacob finally heads home, realizing he has to reconcile with his brother, Esau, Jacob has this second strange, experience while he is just as alone as he was before. After holding onto the messenger, and demanding the blessing, Jacob says “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” As a result of this encounter, he now has a relationship with his own God. Later, he meets up with and reconciles with his brother. He builds an altar and calls it “El-Elohay Yisrael,” the God of Israel. Finally, God is not just the God of grandfather and father, but also the God of Israel, Jacob. The struggle through which he has gone led him to the blessing of finding his connection to God, his personal relationship with God. He has overcome his fears, wrenched blessings from them, and in the process, he has found God, holiness, redemption, hope. Perhaps that relationship with God is what led him to be able to face the thing he feared the most.
May it be Your will, Holy One, that as we struggle with and overcome our fears and demons, we wrestle the blessings out of the struggle. May we follow in Jacob’s example, finding and receiving the blessings brought by the liberation from our own demons, and may we come to see Your Presence, right here with us, as we struggle through the journeys of our lives. 43 Blessings
We are surrounded by a world full of incredible blessings. Some of them bring us gladness, some of them may have other impacts on our lives, but blessings they are nonetheless. By blessings, I’m talking about those moments in time and in life that are noteworthy, that are meaningful, special. I’m also talking about that which may seem mundane to others, but also could hold great personal meaning at a specific time or place in one’s life.
So often we are overwhelmed by emotion or awe, sometimes we just miss the importance of something that is taking place. The rabbis teach us that we are supposed to say 100 blessings every day, at least theoretically. Because some blessings are available to us in writing, some of us think those are the only ones we can use, but that’s just not the case. We can create new blessings, new ways of recognizing the blessings in our lives, both by using the traditional formula for blessings or by creating new formulae. The choice is yours.
The official formula: baruh attah adonai elohaynu meleh ha-olam... Holy One of Blessing, Your Presence fills the Universe, You have …
Fill in the rest in any way you want. There are lots of ways to finish off the sentence. You can check out just about any prayerbook for a list of blessings, or if these don’t fit the needs of your occasion?
Think about it. What would you like to say? Create your own blessings using the formula, simply by filling in the blank with the language of your on heart. Start with the tradituional formula, in Hebrew if you can, and then end in English.
44 9. Resentment Leads to Slavery Parshat Vayeshev Genesis 37:1 – 40:23
There are three things in this week’s Torah portion that I find really amazing. I’m not sure how they fit together yet. Maybe they are just ideas for all of us to think about and discuss with our friends.
(1) Trust in God? Jacob favors his son Joseph above all of his other sons. He is open about his favoritism, and there is tremendous family resentment because of it. This is the same Jacob that went to great lengths to reconcile with his own brother, to resolve a lifetime of bad feelings with Esau. One might have expected Jacob to see in his own behavior the creation of yet another generation of resentment, anger, and ill will among brothers. Instead Jacob gives Joseph a coat of many colors, to make sure everyone knows he’s “special”. Jacob encourages him to tell his dreams, in which Joseph describes himself as superior, even to his own parents!
Jacob, well aware of the resentments, sends Joseph, the favorite one, the one whom Jacob loves, on a mission to find the brothers, and to then come back and tell him how they are doing. Why would Jacob do that? He knew the brothers hated Joseph. He knew that sending Joseph out alone to “tattle” on his brothers would not be well received. So why did he do it?
Why would this father intentionally endanger his son, his only son (the only son of Rachel) whom he loves (more than the others)? There seems to me to be an echo here of the Binding of Isaac, when Jacob’s grandfather almost sacrifices Jacob’s father, the only son of Sarah, whom he loved. Is this some kind of strange family tradition? What was Jacob expecting would happen to this beloved son?
I don’t know why Jacob would send his favorite son directly into the path of doom. But once he sent him on his way, Joseph was blessed by the kindness of strangers and cursed by the resentment of his brothers. Perhaps Jacob thought that the only way to change the family dynamic was to let it play out, even if the consequences were disastrous. Perhaps in reading about all this family dysfunction, we can see that there can be light and good that can come out of the nastiest of situations. Maybe Jacob was trusting that in the end there would be good from it all, just as his grandfather trusted when he almost sacrificed Isaac. God would somehow provide a way to make it all come out right.
45 (2) They went that way. Joseph goes on his way to find the missing brothers, and runs into some unnamed guy and asks if he saw where the brothers went. The man replied: “They went that way.” Why is this story part of the Joseph saga? Why is it in the Torah? Joseph asking for directions is not exactly earth-shattering.
Yet, as a result of getting these well-meaning directions, Joseph finds the brothers, who throw him into a pit, and then they sell Joseph into slavery. As a slave, he is sold to Potiphar, whose wife, Mrs. Potiphar (the second unnamed person in the story) has the hots for him, and due to her romantic advances he gets sent to prison. There, he interprets dreams which brings him ultimately into Pharaoh’s court, where he gains power and influence, which leads his brothers down there for relief from a famine, which ultimately transplants the entire people of Israel to Egypt, leading to their own slavery, creating the situation in which God has to rescue the people and that takes us to Mount Sinai, to receive the Torah.
In other words, some unnamed guy, who said, “they went that way” put Joseph on a path that determined the entirety of Jewish history! Such a small thing, giving directions, ends up changing the world forever.
(3) From resentment to slavery. The resentment that the brothers have for Joseph leads directly to our people’s coming into slavery in Egypt. Admittedly, Joseph is obnoxious, arrogant and insensitive to his brothers’ feelings. But their reactions are brutal, viscous and ugly. But the message is that from resentment, the feeling of being shortchanged, the feeling of being less than, deprived, the feeling of fraternal hatred, we went directly down the road to slavery. Resentment leads to slavery. The rabbis teach us in Pirkei Avot that a rich person is one who is satisfied with what s/he has. The best way to avoid resentment is to be grateful for what we have. The person who is most harmed by resentment is the one who harbors it, is enslaved by the resentments.
There is a lot to these three themes. Maybe there is hidden good even in our worst of places, even when we don’t see any good way out. Perhaps small acts of kindness, that we don’t even see as having much significance at all, somehow change everything. Maybe we can liberate ourselves from our resentments before we become enslaved by them.
May it be Your Will, Holy One of Blessing, that we find what’s hidden from us, trust that there is wisdom, encouragement and strength which comes from You. May we see that sometimes Your guidance comes through strangers along our way who just point us in the right direction. And may we be humble 46 enough to appreciate what we have, to not resent others for what they have, and to put our resentments away long enough to be able to do Your will, with our own hands. 47 10. Forgiveness: Parshat Mikkets Genesis 41:1 – 44:17
This week, Joseph becomes a famous dream interpreter, and rises to major power in Pharaoh’s court. He’s put in charge of all the land, and “All the world came to Joseph to procure rations” during the famine. And then the famine spreads into the land of Canaan and his brothers come to him for food. The very brothers who threw him into a pit, and then sold him to the Egyptians. He recognizes them immediately, but they have no idea who this Egyptian big shot is. Joseph does some machinations with his brothers, to see if they had changed. And they had. But even before he announces his emotions in the next Torah portion, we know that Joseph forgives them! The nightmare for Joseph is over, and he cries when he realizes that he need not tote around his bitterness over what happened with them any more. You can almost feel his relief even as he plays with them to better assess how they have changed.
Joseph forgives his brothers. Even after what they had done to him, and let’s face it, it was a hard journey for Joseph to get where he is now. It’s not a bad model for us, then, too. To forgive, even when the people we have to forgive did really mean stuff to us.
It’s a model we’re familiar with: God forgives us for all the terrible things we have done with our relationship with God. We’re forgiven for not praising God enough at the right times, for not thanking God enough, for not seeing God in our lives when God’s Presence is right there before our eyes. We’re forgiven for making vows in God’s name that we broke, and we’re forgiven for neglecting the world God created. We’re forgiven for not being very good partners with God in creation, and we’re forgiven for ignoring Shabbat, the rules of keeping kosher, ignoring the holy days. We’re forgiven for the lies we have told, and for the words we have said that did not enhance God’s world one iota. There is nothing that we have done for which God does not forgive us.
Why does God do this? Once a year, on Yom Kippur, we have a “default day”, we get to reset back to our pre-arranged settings. You get to clear out all of the old stuff that has been gathering for the last year, and by the end of the day - it’s over. We never have to go there again for the things we did last year. We don’t need to feel guilty, anxious or worried about any of it. It’s done, finished, and forgiven. It no longer exists between us and God, our sins have been erased. Unlike other religions, the only sins we walk around with on our dying day are those we gathered since last Yom Kippur. What’s done is done, forgiven, ended.
48 God does this because we need the forgiveness. We don’t need to keep worrying about what we did or didn’t do 30 years ago. We get to move on, and we know that God knows that we are fallible. We were created with the potential for evil. God knows that we are not perfect, that we will do things that are at best offensive. It’s normal for us, and normal for us to learn from these experiences. God does not hold us to a standard by which we will never be able to live; it’s realistic to expect that in the course of a year there will be good and bad, there will be places of failure and of success.
But there’s another, and I think even more important reason for this Yom Kippur forgiveness thing: we are supposed to follow the example God provides. We’re supposed to do the same thing and to forgive as magnanimously. If God can let go of the disappointment and anger, so can we. If God can say, “it’s all right, I forgive you, just don’t do it again,” so can we.
It’s almost easy to say you’re sorry, when you compare it with actually forgiving. The person asking for forgiveness has it easier: they are letting go of the deed they did wrong, working to be right with the other person. But the person who has to forgive, that’s the difficult task! By forgiving, we have to let go of the bitterness, the anger, the hurt. We have to move closer to the person who hurt us, who could potentially do it once again. It’s not saying “I’m sorry” that’s the hard part – it’s saying “I forgive you” that takes the hard work. That’s where Joseph is this week, working on the idea of forgiveness.
The most distressing thing for me in my work is coming across families who are divided by things that happened years ago; and they don’t even remember well who did what to whom or why. All they remember is the bitterness. I know there are legitimate hurts. But prolonging bitterness over years, allowing egos to destroy family relationships forever? What a horrible waste!
If God can forgive us for the terrible things we have done, if Joseph can forgive for what his brothers put him through, we are supposed to follow these examples, and forgive others for the terrible things they have done. We are all so desperately afraid that we will be hurt again, , that we wrap ourselves in the cloak of bitterness instead of risking another try. We are so busy being so proud that we forget that if God can do it, if Joseph can do it, we can do it.
According to Rabbi Harold Schulweis, (sermon for Yom Kippur 2002) “The purpose of prayer is not the adulation of God, but the imitation of God, not the admiration of God, but the emulation of God’s ways. 49 God is the ideal, the model to be emulated by me in my life horizontally, between me and you, and my family and friends, brother, sister, son, and daughter.”
The rabbis spelled out the moral correlation, “As God is merciful, you should be merciful. As God is compassionate, you should be compassionate. As God forgives, you should forgive.” Between God and you, there is a moral correlation.
How do you find God’s forgiveness? How do you experience God? You experience God’s love when you love, You experience God’s forgiveness when you forgive. When we act like God, do that which we want God to do, we experience God.
No one else can forgive for us. No one else can let go of the bitterness or anger for us. No one else has the power to change everything in a relationship. It’s up to you. According to Rabbi Harold Kushner, “the embarrassing secret is that many of us are reluctant to forgive. We nurture grievances because that make us feel morally superior. Withholding forgiveness gives us a sense of power, often power over someone who otherwise leaves us feeling powerless. The only power we have over them is the power to remain angry at them. At some level, we enjoy the role of being the long-suffering, aggrieved party.”1
When we’re stuck in a place of not forgiving someone, we’re the ones who are stuck with the bitterness and the anger. The person we’re so angry at is probably thrilled to not have to deal with us – they’re the last people on earth who would be upset if we don’t talk to them! Releasing the anger, forgiving, is the only option for us, or else we turn into the people we love to hate. Let go of the anger and open up the gates of forgiveness. We expect forgiveness from God. We can do no less. Joseph is the example.
May it be Your will, Holy One, that we will find a new approach to the hurts we have carried, a different take on the ways we behave, because we’re supposed to be more like You. May we find the ways to forgive those who have hurt us, and may we allow people back into our lives that we need to forgive, just like Joseph begins the process of welcoming his brothers back into his life. May there be no end to the forgiveness You have for us, or the forgiveness we have for one another.
1 Rabbi Harold Kushner: How Good do we Have to Be. New York: Little Brown and Co, 1996, p.105 50
11. Finding Comfort in the Hard Journey of Life: Parshat Va-yigash Genesis 44:18 – 47:27
As we near the end of the book of Genesis, b’raysheet, I have been looking at the promises. God promises make to Abraham into a great nation, that all other nations will see Abraham and his descendents as blessings. The rest of the Torah is about the fulfillment of this promise. I always saw this end of the Book of Genesis as sort of a stopping point. There’s a kind of break in the story. We go from having a family focus to a focus on the nation. But the family foretells the promise for the nation.
In this week’s Torah portion, Joseph and his brothers reconcile. He reveals his identity, which he had hidden from them when they came to him looking for supplies during a famine in Israel. He tried to figure out what to do with these brothers who attempted to kill him, sold him into slavery. Despite the hardships of his first years as a prisoner and as a slave, Joseph is now a major big shot in the land of Egypt. In this week’s Torah portion, he is The Man to see if you wanted to survive the famine in Egypt. Joseph sees his dreams fulfilled: his brothers all come to him and bow to him, and his father, Jacob, finally comes to the place where he is in power.
The process is interesting: Joseph’s dreams are fulfilled through major, significant struggle. His life after being sold into slavery was not easy, we can be sure. Yet he lives to see his dearest dreams fulfilled. The process, the journey leading to redemption, seems to be a major theme with his father as well. Jacob is repeatedly dreaming, hearing blessings, yet they seem to go unfulfilled for a long time. When Jacob left his parents’ home after tricking his father and brother, he met up with God in a dream (remember the ladder?). At that time, God promised, “All the families of the earth will bless themselves by you and your descendents. Remember, I am with you; I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land.”
Then after 20 years, when Jacob finally gets out of servitude to Laban with his wives and his kids, he wrestles with an angel, and is blessed again on his journey. In this blessing, Jacob’s offspring will include kings and the land of Canaan for his descendents. Now, in this week’s Torah portion, Jacob leaves the land of Canaan with a blessing from God saying, “Fear not to go down to Egypt, for I will make you there into a great nation. I Myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I Myself will bring you back.” 51
So we have this sequence of blessings in Jacob’s life, from leaving Canaan to coming back and then leaving once again, all with the promise that the descendents will inherit the land, that a great nation would come to occupy it. They are very strong blessings, the kind of blessing that leave little doubt that they will be fulfilled. God is very convincing in this series.
Yet, if we look at the process between the blessings, it seems to parallel the experience of Joseph: it doesn’t come easy. Jacob worked for 20 years to just get out of the clutches of Laban. The promise after wrestling with the angel was for the distant future. And now again, we read of a promise that foretells that there will be tremendous upheaval before its fulfillment. For some reason (and let’s face it, we all know the story) God will have to personally intervene to bring the people back from Egypt. Here the parallel with Joseph is even clearer: he goes to Egypt and becomes a slave. Jacob leads the family to Egypt, and they become slaves.
The process of fulfillment of the blessings is not an easy one. Why did Joseph have to suffer on his way to becoming a big shot? Why did Jacob have to go through all the struggles with Laban in order to come back homes with his family? Why do his descendents have to go through slavery in order for God to bring them out personally? Wouldn’t it have been better for Joseph or Jacob or our people to just get what was promised?
Even in the Bible, when God is actively intervening, there is a sense of partnership. People have to do their part, and that may involve struggle, challenge, failure, and hardship. In some ways, we become better people for it. Joseph grew up and became what seems to be a “mensch” a good guy, through his struggles, Jacob seems to have mellowed, learned to be more fair and reasonable, through his challenges, and the people of Israel, through their journey from slavery to freedom seem to learn nationhood in relationship with God.
The journey is the journey. It’s the important part; it’s where we grow and become better people. Fulfilling the blessing without our personal growth would be easy, but meaningless. Many of us would have preferred a different experience, a different journey than one filled with difficulty, pain or loss, as I’m sure both Jacob and Joseph might have. But we don’t get that. All we seem to get is awareness that God is with us, so no matter what the journey, we really have nothing to fear. We are not promised a life 52 without challenges or struggles; we are promised that we may be able to find meaning, healing and hope in our personal journeys.
Holy One of Blessing, Your Presence fills the Universe, help us to find the fulfillment of our own dreams, yet to find comfort on our difficult journeys to that fulfillment. Help us to rid our lives of resentments, hatred, enslaving habits, illness and fear that are the prisons of our own existence. May we see our lives as the fulfillment of Your promise to our ancestors. 53 12. Things that Trap and Enslave Us Parshat Vayehi, Genesis 47:28 – 50:26
This week we read the end of the Book of Genesis. The Torah portion is Vayehi, which means “he lived”. It refers to Jacob’s life, and we read of his death, the blessings he gives each of his sons, and his two grandsons, Manasshe and Ephraim. Jacob does as was done with him when his father was dying - he blesses the youngest of his grandsons, and sets him in charge of his brother. Traditions don’t break easily in this family!
We also read of the death of Joseph, who has become a big shot in the land of Egypt. This is more than just the end of the Book of Genesis; it’s also the end of the section of Torah that is about our family roots. From the time of Abraham until now, we have been watching this family, its intrigues, challenges and dysfunction, and trying to find the meaning of it. From now on it’s story of the people, not just the family.
The personal connection to the family stops here, with Jacob. Remember when he struggled with the angel, and his name was changed to Israel? That had a real meaning for all of us, children of Jacob, the person, who are also the children of Israel, the nation. The Book of Genesis is the promise. The remainder of the Torah is how God fulfills the promise made to Abraham.
But there’s a major hint at what we’re going to experience in Egypt right here, right now. Jacob is about to die. He tells his sons to bury him in the Cave of the Mahpelah, the same cave where his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, his parents, Isaac and Rebecca, and his wife Leah are all buried. After he gives this instruction, he dies. Joseph goes through all the normal mourning rituals, except he has his father embalmed, not too uncommon in Egypt. After the process was over, and the official mourning period was ended, Joseph goes to his buddy Pharaoh, and asks him to let him go to Canaan and bury his father.
Pharaoh agrees that Joseph should go bury his father, and sends him off with the senior members of the court, some dignitaries, and Joseph’s brothers. Then the Torah notes, “Only their children, their flocks and their herds were left in the region of Goshen.”
Only their children, flocks and herds were left?! Of course they were left in Egypt, they were not free to go. They were hostages! Joseph, for all his achievements, for all his success in figuring out dreams and leading the nation through the economic ruin of famine was not a free man. He was as much a slave to 54 Pharaoh as the rest of our people were to become. Sure, he had a nice house, and was treated in the highest regard, but he was not free to leave Egypt. He was now a permanent fixture in that country, probably because he had made himself so indispensable. If he wanted to leave town, it had to be with an ironclad warrantee that he’d be back. He left his children, and the children of all of his brothers, and all their wealth in Egypt!
There’s no gap in terms of the plot of the Torah here. We know from now on that the trap of our people has been set. It may not have looked live slavery from the outside, but whenever you’re not free to get out of something, whenever you’re trapped, you’re in big trouble. Joseph is in prison. Sure, it’s like a country club. But if you can’t leave, no matter how pleasant it seems from the outside, it’s prison.
The story of the struggle for an Exodus of our people from Egypt is not because a new Pharaoh arose who did not know Joseph, but rather a new Pharaoh arose who never met Joseph but knew precisely the terms of the deal that had been made by Joseph - freedom had been irrevocably surrendered.
Sometimes, we also get sucked into a vortex that traps, imprisons and enslaves us. We agree to one thing, and find ourselves making more and more deals to stay where we are, or to try to get out of it. We become imprisoned by relationships, by bad jobs, by illness, by addictions, but the quest for more money or honor, and by all kinds of things that seem inviting at the beginning, but turn into a nightmare later on. I work with people who can see themselves trapped by their illness, incurable viruses, or cancers, or “terminal” disease. The ones who find spiritual healing and inner peace are the ones who understand that they are not enslaved by the illness, that their bodies are not prisons - their spirit can and does “leave”.
Joseph didn’t know what he got us into, may not even have thought about it until he had to leave his children, flocks and wealth behind as hostages. May we become more aware of the enslaving forces in our own lives, and may we begin the process of finding ways out of these forces. It took our people 400 years to get out of the trap Pharaoh set for Joseph. It doesn’t have to take us that long to find our own liberation.
Holy One of Blessing, help us to rid our lives of resentments, hatred, enslaving habits and the prisons of our own existence. Help us to find the paths that lead to our own freedom, our own release from the slavery of our own minds and hearts. May we find peace, healing and wholeness in our journey from darkness to light. 55 13. Turning Handicaps into Blessings Parshat Shemot Exodus 1:1 – 5:1
I admit it: I sometimes listen to Howard Stern in the morning. I used to listen to him a lot more. I think he’s obnoxious, self-centered, rude, crude, and funny. He reflects, in my opinion, a lot of what we see, and won’t do anything about or even admit, in our society, and in ourselves. He’s opinionated, loud, and I think, honest. He raises some issues that are fundamental to our society, and he does it in ways that make me laugh. Even when he’s wrong, or embarrassing, or totally inappropriate, I listen and sometimes I laugh, ether at him or with him. When I listen to Howard in the morning, I know that nothing I could say that day will be as blatantly offensive, probably.
One of Howard’s more outrageous ideas was to have a guy, named Stuttering John, go out and do celebrity interviews. As you might imagine, John stuttered a lot. Sending him out to interview celebrities for a radio show was an incredible idea. I don’t like to admit it, but sometimes, when he got stuck, and everyone was laughing at him, and John was laughing at his own handicap, I too found it funny. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have been filled with guilt about it. I don't laugh at people who stutter. In some ways this shtick has made me more sensitive to them. I laugh at Stuttering John because he uses that which makes him special as a part of his comedy. I have made jokes about my hair, or lack thereof, and laughed with people about it not because my hair -line is a defect but because it is a part of me. We can be genuine, recognize one of the things that make me special, and joke about it. Those people who see me as “hair impaired” might see it as tasteless; I don’t.
So Howard’s interviews were done by a person who stuttered, and the celebrities who had to wait for his questions, which were often totally obnoxious, making him stutter more, had to confront their own impatience, their own perceptions of what is politically and personally correct, and somehow answer his questions. It’s a brilliant piece of radio theatre. Some of the celebrities picked on John; some stuttered their answers; some tried to help him with the words on which he was stuck; some moaned and took other questions; some got so outraged by the questions they missed the stutter; some never heard the questions. And all of it reflected what we in our society do, both good and bad. Most of it is pretty funny until or unless you think about it.
All this is connected with this week’s Torah portion, Shemot. When Moses gets his draft notice from God through the burning bush delivery system, he immediately says “no way”. His first response is “Who am I 56 that I should go?” Second response is “Who are You, God?” Third response “They’ll never believe either of the first two answers, neither in me or You?” The fourth response Moses gives God is “Please God, I am no man of words; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Our tradition interprets that to mean that Moses stuttered.
I understand why Howard Stern would use a speech impediment for comic effect. But why would God chose, from all people, a man who stutters to be God’s literal mouthpiece? What sense does that make? What possible reasons could God have for that choice?
I came up with a few answers: 1. The stuttering from God’s mouthpiece is a reminder that no one is perfect. 2. God’s choice of a person with an obvious defect shows everyone that Moses is human, so there would be no confusion with Moses being a God-like figure. 3. Moses was always humble even as he was in direct contact with God. 4. You have to listen more closely to someone with a speech impediment. 5. You have to be patient to understand someone with a speech impediment. 6. The people accepted Torah because of its contents, not because of Moses’ charismatic personality or speaking style. 7. Human beings are able to overcome obstacles. 8. People with disabilities cannot be ignored, or in any way considered to be less.
There are probably a lot more reasons for God’s choice of Moshe Rabaynu, Moses our teacher, that have nothing to do with his disabilities. Because Moses is not defined by what he can’t do, or how hard it is for him to speak. Moses is seen for his strengths, and his ability to overcome this substantial and frustrating obstacle. We can identify with a Moses who is “differently abled”. So maybe we should follow that example of Moses, to strive to move the focus to beyond the disability into the realm of ability.
Howard Stern uses stuttering for dramatic and comic effect, in so doing turning John’s disability into his greatest asset. He may be obnoxious, but think about it: can you turn your differences, your disability, your most embarrassing defect into your greatest asset?
May it be Your will, Holy One our God and God of our ancestors, that we learn from the example God set with Moses our teacher. May we learn to see the possibilities that others might miss; may we turn 57 handicaps into blessings, jokes into glorious examples of way in which the human soul and spirit can soar. May our differences be our greatest assets. 58 14. What Do You Believe? Parshat Va-era Exodus 6:2 – 9:35
A few months ago, we looked at the three distinct Creation stories in the Bible – the story of the seven days of creation, the story of Adam and Eve, and the Noah story. I noted then that these are allegories, stories that teach important lessons and values and are the basis for our religious beliefs and traditions, but they are not science or history. Jewish tradition has always looked at these stories with the understanding that they are theology, attempts to understand our relationships with God and the universe.
This week, we continue reading about the Exodus from Egypt – the Ten Plagues which God used to attain the liberation of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. But many people have asked recently, do we believe the story of the Ten Plagues or the Crossing of the Red Sea are historically accurate; can they be scientifically proven? Is the Exodus from Egypt an allegory, just like the creation stories? Indeed, there have been assertions recently that because there is a lack of archeological evidence proving the Exodus, it never happened.
The problem for me is one of belief. Do I really need to have proof to believe in something? Quite the contrary: it seems to me that if I have proof, I don’t need to believe. Does belief imply a foolish lack of care with regard to veracity of the belief; is belief blind? Is it naïve to believe in the miraculous experience of the Ten Plagues, and the parting of the Red Sea, and to think that miracles could happen in other ways at other times? What do I really expect the Biblical text to tell me about humanity, God, and our relationship with God if I can’t rely on it to be historically accurate or archeologically verifiable? Does it make a difference if I believe in God, but not that God could do, or did, the miracles associated with the Exodus from Egypt?
The Exodus is the # 1 most important event in our history as Jews. We relate just about everything to it. We were slaves in Egypt; we were strangers in a strange land; we know what oppression is; we know what miraculous liberation is. As a result of the Exodus from Egypt, we are unified as a people, and become the people who struggle with God and the Book we received, which we could only receive as a result of leaving Egypt. We are reminded that God brought us out of the land of Egypt to be our God, to give us the mitzvot, (acts of commandment which are to our benefit to do), to make us people who connect with God through Jewish tradition. Because God brought us out of Egypt, we are supposed to honor our parents, remember and observe the Shabbat, not murder or kidnap, and recognize the validity of 59 all of the other rules by which we are supposed to live. Everything we do as Jews is based on this unique experience of God being involved in this one-time, never repeated, event
What was the purpose of the Ten Plagues? Some people will say they were to convince Pharaoh to let our people go. But that doesn’t make sense. If God wanted to get Pharaoh to do something, anything, all God would have to do is zap Pharaoh. Pharaoh can’t possibly be the goal. Was it the Egyptians, then? Once again, that’s not likely. The purpose of the plagues was to enable the entire people of Israel to understand and see a connection to a powerful, caring and involved God. The plagues were not about Pharaoh or the Egyptians; they are about us and God, Revelation of God. Our ancestors, living in Goshen had not had any contact with God for nearly 400 years, since the time of Joseph - no phone calls, emails, letters, nothing. They didn’t know from God. The Ten Plagues were a crash course introducing God, our God, not the Egyptian Pharaoh, who thought he was god, to our people and to us. We are supposed to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt, as if we personally experienced these miracles, so that we can and will see God involved in our lives, and caring and about us. That’s really hard to do at the same time as we deny that it happened!
The burning question remains: did it happen? Or did something happen, but not what we have described in the Bible? Or, if something did happen, why is there no proof? I believe the proof is in the question – in the fact that 4,000 or so years later we’re still arguing about it. No matter how I answer this question, there will be other people with lots of other approaches to understanding what it means to consider this unique example of God’s intervention in the world. I believe it happened not because there is archeological or historical or scientific evidence of it, but because there is religious evidence: we are here and our religion is derived from this experience of leaving Egypt. This experience is how I know God, how God was revealed to me, when I left Egyptian bondage. The basis for everything else I do as a Jew is traceable to this introduction of God to our people.
There is a connection between the allegories of creation and the Ten Plagues. All are stories of miraculous involvement of God in the world. But the Exodus from Egypt goes beyond story, beyond allegory, right to the heart of what we believe we are and what we, as Jews, are supposed to do being who we are.
May it be Your Will, Holy One of Blessing, to enable us to see your involvement in our own lives and the lives of all humanity. May we be blessed with the courage to believe that which can’t be proven, and the confidence to live our lives in accordance with our beliefs. May we see ourselves as if we personally 60 struggled with slavery in Egypt, and learn from that experience to trust in Your compassion to lead us from our own personal darkness into the light. As You were there for us in our worst of times as a people, so may You also be there for each of us in our darkest hours.
61 15. Stubborn, Stubborn, Stubborn: Parshat Bo Exodus 10:1 – 13:16
I’ll admit it. I am stubborn. At times, I am very stubborn. Sometimes being stubborn is a problem. Sometimes, it’s a virtue. When we look at it as a problem, stubbornness is about being obstinate, rigid, headstrong, stiff, unyielding. When we see it as a virtue, it’s about being dedicated, sure, unwavering, certain. When a person absolutely sticks to his/her plan and achieves a goal, we call that fortitude, or stick-to-it-iveness, persistence, determination, dedication. When we disagree with that dedicated, determined person, then the determined person often is perceived as stubborn.
A judge who is determined that a law is very clear is considered to be fair and honest, except by the people trying to persuade that judge of different perspectives. A doctor who has perfected a medical procedure, and sticks to it because it works well for his/her patients is considered an expert. Until, of course, new procedures s/he doesn’t use because they are not his/her way. A teacher who knows the facts, has studied and knows answers to the questions his/her curriculum raises is considered to be a master. But when others disagree with this person’s interpretation of reality, s/he is seen as obstinate, unyielding.
In many ways, I really don’t think I’m all that much more stubborn than most other people. It’s just when other people disagree with me, and I know I’m right, I stick to my guns. My guess is most people stick to who they are, what they believe, and are rarely all that ready, willing or able to move their positions and opinions on just about anything. That’s one of the reasons why New Years resolutions often don’t work or why every year we come together on Yom Kippur and confess exactly the same sins as the previous year. We cheated, we gossiped, we were miserly, we hurt other people last year, and my guess is that it doesn’t change all that much after Yom Kippur. The optimists among us say that people can and do change; their counterparts say “nah, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
If we look at our practice of Judaism, we can also see how this intractability is reflected. Think about it. Can you define what Judaism is all about, for you? What does it mean to be Jewish? How is your Judaism reflected in your life? How have you changed and developed in your religious practice in the last years?
How many of us keep kosher? How many of us observe the Shabbat - all 25 hours to keep Shabbat holy? How many of us understand these practices in any different way from the way we understood then years ago, rethought our approach in the last year? How many of us tithe our incomes to charity - 10%? How 62 many of us struggle to do acts of loving-kindness? How many of us have studied a Jewish text this year, or read a Jewish, non-fiction book, or expanded our experience and practice of Judaism in any way in the past months?
In our congregations, sometimes we don’t explore why we do things the same way, year after year, or don’t explore how our traditions change and grow to include new traditions. We get so stubborn that there is a “tradition” that we forget the tradition is supposed to be creative, growing, flowing and moving - that the tradition can be more an act of stubbornness than an act of faith.
And in our personal lives sometimes we get stuck in places that could change if only we would let them. Illness, depression, addictions, enslaving habits can all be expressions of how we hold on to that which maybe we could be better off without. Maybe if we let go of what holds us back, we could change, grow, and experience the world, and our lives, in completely different ways. For those of you who are now wondering, yes, there is a connection with this theme and this week’s Torah portion, Bo. Remember we left off last week with two very stubborn men - Moses and Pharaoh, both locked in a battle of their own commitments. Seven plagues took place last week, and this week we read about the last three. Many of us get very concerned by the fact that in these plagues God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, God makes him refuse to let the people go. Why? Because Pharaoh has done it all along - it was his nature - to give up, realize the error of his ways and to return to his normal behavior, which was to never give up. Pharaoh had lost his ability to change; in hardening his heart God was simply keeping Pharaoh doing what was natural for him, by his very nature,
It’s natural for us, as well. Human nature determines that we are going to just be that way. The challenge, which I think is God’s message in the story, is to figure out ways to go against our very nature, to break the habits, to shed our stubbornness, to move beyond that which is usual and normal for each of us, and to be open to the ever-expanding wealth of our potential.
May it be Your will, Holy One our God, that we find ways to defrost our hearts and our minds, our souls and our spirits so that we can be less stubborn and more open to that which is different. May You lead us to find new ways of experiencing Your presence here with us, and may we continue to strive to attain our potential for change. 63 16. Terezin and Tu B’shvat: Parshat B’shelah Exodus 13:17 – 17:14
Tu B’shvat became a very difficult holiday for me the first time I visited Prague, in 1985. At that time Czechoslovakia was Communist, and Jews were still being persecuted. It was horrible to see the magnificent beauty of the perfectly preserved buildings everywhere in this city, and to see the cruelty, inhumanity and anti-Semitism of the regime. I went to Prague to see what had happened to our people during the Holocaust, to see the Museum of an Extinct Nation, the items that had been stolen from Czech and other Jewish communities. Instead, I was confronted by the reality of Jews still being persecuted. It was not a nice trip.
I won’t recount for you all of the experiences of that trip in this Torah Commentary, just the Tu B’shevat part. Outside of Prague, in the beautiful Czech countryside, there was a fortress called Terezin. The Nazis took it over, and turned it into a concentration camp. It was the “model” concentration camp, where the Red Cross was invited to see how “humanely” our people were being treated. Across the street from the fortress was a town, and it was annexed as part of the camp. Herman Wouk describes it well in The Winds of War. I recognized the village square that he described with gallows in it; there was now a huge 5- pointed red star of flowers in the square. You’d never know what it was like just 40 years before. A short walk from that square is a field, with small markers with Jewish stars on them, dominated by a huge menorah. And a crematorium.
In 1942 a sapling was smuggled into Terezin, and it was planted by the children in honor of Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish celebration of trees. At the end of the war, the tree was transplanted into the field next to the crematorium where the Nazis had dumped ashes. There now stands a beautiful maple tree, in that field, composed of the ashes of the children and their loved ones who were murdered in that place.
You can’t see and touch that tree without being permanently changed by the experience. There were a lot of life-changing experiences for me on that and my subsequent trip to Prague six years later, after the Velvet Revolution. But every year, on Tu B’shvat, I share this story, and remember this particular tree, and the bravery and hope of the children who planted it and are reflected in its beauty. Each year on Tu B’shvat, I read I Never Saw Another Butterfly, the collection of poetry and artwork by the children of Terezin.
64 Tu B’shvat reminds me of the Holocaust, and this week’s Torah portion B’shelah, tells the story of a completely different experience for our people, when we crossed the Red Sea, and the final, complete and total defeat of Pharaoh’s armies. We achieved liberation from Egyptian bondage by God’s grace, by the will of God to make us into a people that relates to God through the words of the Torah and our traditions.
We remember this story not only because of the incredible miracle that happened, but also as a reminder that each of us comes through our own awe-full experiences. We remember the miracles especially when we come through our own Red Seas, and wonder whether we will personally reach the proverbial other shore. Many of us know what it’s like – to be surrounded by enemies (either internal or external) and to be unable to see a way to avoid disaster. Many of us have faced challenges that were overwhelming, moments when we felt there was no way out. The Red Sea experience is a paradigm for our people – to see that God is a resource for us when we have nowhere else to turn.
My teacher, Rabbi Wayne Dosick writes in Soul Judaism: Dancing with God into a New Era:
O God, there are times when I come to the Red Sea in my life. Old doubts and fears pursue me; I am confronted by new and difficult challenges; the vast unknown looms before me. Sometimes I am afraid; sometimes I lose faith in my own abilities and my own strengths; sometimes I even lose faith in You. But in Your goodness, You have given me the courage to face every obstacle and the capacity not merely to endure but to prevail.
Be with me, O God, as You were with Your children at the sea. Grant me a full measure of Your all-wise care and Your loving guidance so that I can emerge on the other side of my Red Seas healthy and whole, assured that a better world awaits. In love and gratitude, like my ancestors of Old, I sing songs of praise to Your great and holy name. HalleluYah.
We can pray for God to help us through our darkest moments, through the times when we almost feel that all hope is lost. We may find courage in remembering our history. We may even find God and hope in places where we couldn’t imagine that Presence, even in fields of ashes. Confronting that tree, for me, changed my life forever (twice, when I consider my second visit there) and transformed for me (and now I hope you) the meaning of Tu B’shvat. Despite what the Nazis did to the children who planted the tree, WE are still here. We’re still able to tell their story and to remember them. We can plant trees in their 65 memory, and affirm, once again, that we are the people who were rescued at the Red Sea and who turn to God to help us through our own worst of times.
May it be Your Will, Holy One of Blessing, that we remember Your Presence in our lives each and every day. May we find You there, to help us through our darkest hours, and may we draw the courage and strength we need to be able to go on, to flourish, to grow, to learn and to praise Your name. 66 17. What’s Really Important to You? Parshat Yitro Exodus 18:1 – 20:23
Since I now work in a hospital, I have an opportunity to meet with all kinds of people, and to be touched by their stories. One of the people I work with is a nurse whose 25 year old daughter, Sarah Beth Thursby, died last summer of a rare, aggressive cancer. Sarah’s mother shared Sarah’s newspaper obituary with me. It included a remarkable list of “things we learned from Sarah”. I want to share this list with you this week.
1. Accept life as it happens. It is what it is. Banging one’s head against a wall gives you a headache. 2. Chill. Useless energy is best spent petting a dog. 3. Love all God’s creatures, especially the small furry ones. All life has inherent worth. 4. Accept yourself as you are. Even bald and yellow. 5. Laugh out loud whenever possible. 6. Recognize that there is energy in your hands. 7. Always have a positive outlook. Negative people are energy suckers. 8. Enjoy life. Dance if you can. At the very least, move your shoulders. 9. Have no enemies. 10. Be good to your friends. 11. Be patient. It is what it is and takes the time that it does. You’ll get where you’re going anyway. 12. Make Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” your theme song. 13. Inner strength can come in soft packaging. It is infinitely more durable than a steely exterior. 14. Be calm in a storm. There’s plenty of time to flip out later. 15. Trust that most people are acting with good intentions.
I never met Sarah, but this list gives me a lot of insight into who she was, what she valued and how she lived. She was incredibly wise for someone who was so young, and maybe her family can take comfort in her wisdom, which was well beyond her years. Sarah’s list is a gift to us all. Cut it out, and hang it on your bathroom mirror or your refrigerator to remind you to think about how you are living your life and how you can make the experience better, no matter the conditions with which you are living.
I am sharing this list now, because this week’s Torah portion culminates with what we know as the Ten Commandments, the original list of ways we are supposed to live our lives, by establishing and 67 maintaining a good relationship with God, our parents, and with other people. The rabbis didn’t want the Ten Commandments to be holier or more significant than all of our other mitzvot, to be the only rules people might observe. All of the Torah is holy, and all the rest of the mitzvot are important.
But these Commandments have a lot of power, spiritually and symbolically. Just ask the judges in Alabama. (Of course, their translation of the commandments changes their meaning, but that’s another Torah Commentary.) Yet, in the Torah they are not called “commandments” at all. The Hebrew description of the Big Ten is “aseret ha-d’varim” the 10 Words, or the 10 Statements, or the 10 Things. The best English description we have is “The Decalogue” which is from deka (ten) and logoi (words). Interesting, that it’s in English that we seem to have “commandment” associated with these statements. I have never heard them referred to as the Ten mitzvot, which would be a literal translation of “commandments”. How does their meaning and nature change when we describe them so differently, from Commandments to Statements?
According to Rachel Mikva (Broken Tablets:Restoring the Ten Commandments and Ourselves), “whether they are commandments, words, or suggestions, if they manage to speak in God’s voice, that which is spoken is that which must be.” However we describe them, they are clearly messages that indicate a relationship with God and what God expects of us, at least at the very minimum. The Ten Commandments/ Statements/ Words/ Things, are a starting point, not the end. We are supposed to do more, be more, using them as a basis for our values, society, and law and order.
“If they are spoken in God’s voice…” God, as we know, speaks with us in many ways. Perhaps it’s God’s voice we hear when we learn from Sarah. The message we receive through her seems to reflect additional ways in which we can do God’s work, with our own hands. When I teach the Ten Commandments (as it were) I often ask students what they would add to the list. Maybe we can see Sarah’s list as one of the ways to answer that question.
May Sarah’s memory be a blessing for all who knew her, and may we all continue to hear God’s voice in what she had to teach us. May we hear God’s voice in the words of our children, our friends, our loved ones and our colleagues.
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18. Turning the Plain into the Holy: Parshat Mishpatim Exodus 21:1 - 24:18
Last week we read the Ten Commandments. Everything in the Torah led to this incredible moment - our people standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, feeling the ground tremble beneath the Presence of the Holy One. Our people stood and freaked out as they heard the words of God not in the thunder, or in the blaring of the shofarot (rams horns) or in the pounding of their own heartbeats. They heard God’s voice telling them the Ten Commandments in a whisper, directly into each and every person’s own ears. God’s voice was the sound of almost hearing, as personal as a whisper. What an incredible moment!
This moment at Sinai was the most intimate, extreme, spiritual, and climactic moment of the Torah. How do you follow that most amazing of experiences? Although the words of the Ten Commandments are repeated, the experience was exclusive, once and only once. And it begs the question, “now what?” Where do we go from here? The rabbis didn’t want the Ten Commandments to be holier or more significant than all of our other mitzvot, to be the only rules people might observe. All of the Torah is holy, and all of the mitzvot are important.
We can find the rationale for this approach in this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, which seems to be a completely different experience. We have a compendium of about 50 laws. We have the judicial rules for how to handle and free our slaves and our enemies, manslaughter, kidnapping, insults, goring oxen, damage to livestock and to crops, arson, loans. We have rules for sorcery and for idolatry, and proper care for the needy, widowed and orphaned. This list is far from exhaustive. So, this week we go from our most holy moment at Sinai to what seems like a random list of rules.
But it’s more than just a list. It’s the details. This week we see how we can go from the most significant event in our lives to living every day – by taking care of the details. We see that there’s a message here in moving from the BIG issues to the almost mundane ideas of how we are supposed to behave towards one another. We elevate the mundane into something sacred. That’s not foreign to us at all as Jews. We’re used to taking the simplest acts - eating, drinking, seeing beautiful or ugly things, even going to the bathroom - as opportunities for praising, acknowledging or blessing God, ways to see the holy in our daily lives. We have blessings to help us see how holy the mundane can be.
69 Sometimes we forget the importance and significance of the small stuff, the simple acts that might make real differences to others. Sometimes we miss the holiness in our own lives. We get so caught up in our routines that we forget that our time is holy, our acts can be holy, our lives can be filled with the spirit of God. The minutiae of this week’s Torah portion is a reminder that after the miracle of Sinai we have to pick up our stuff in the morning and go back to our daily lives, and what we do now is even more important, after Sinai, even if it doesn’t feel that way at first.
According to Rabbi Shraga Simmons, Maimonides explains this metaphorically as follows: “Imagine you're lost at night, trudging knee-deep in mud through dark and vicious rainstorm. Suddenly a single flash of lightning appears, illuminating the road ahead. It is the only light you may see for miles. This single flash must guide you on through the night. So too, says Maimonides, one burst of inspiration may have to last for years.”
We fill our minds with Sinai, with the miraculous moment, as a light to guide us through the rest of our experiences. The peak moments are supposed to do that for us, to enable us to go on through the proverbial mud we find ourselves mired in. We can appreciate the light, the guidance, the flashes of insight we might get from the special moment, and we can turn our minds back to those moments to guide us and to bring us hope and courage when we need them most. All of us have those special moments that we cherish that have the power, in their recalling and retelling, to transform and guide us on our personal journeys.
May it be Your will, Holy One of Blessing, that we take the moments to find holiness in our day-to-day life, and to be aware of our blessings daily. May we find inspiration for today, and dreams for tomorrow, as we recall the most special moments in our lives, and may they help us get through our darkest hours. May the flash of Your light guide us on our journeys through life. 70 19. How Rich Are You Feeling? Parshat Terumah Exodus 25:1-27:19
The Baal Shem Tov once went to a very grand synagogue filled with all the elite people of a nearby community. After the service, he said, “This shul is filled with prayer!” The chests of the people who heard this compliment began to swell. “Yes, it is full. I have never been to a shul so filled with prayer.” The people could barely stand it, they were so proud of their synagogue and the rabbi’s apparent praise.
The rabbi continued, “Yes, this shul is filled with prayer. Not one prayer from this shul rises to heaven,” he continued, “they are all stuck here in this room.”
In this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, God tells the people to take gifts to God, from which they were to build a sanctuary so that God may dwell among them. So that God may dwell among the people.
Sometimes, we get so caught up in being full of ourselves; we forget that we have to make space for God. The people in this synagogue were filled with themselves, which is why their prayers were unable to rise to heaven. They had built a sanctuary but had not made it a place where God could dwell among the people. According to Rabbi Mordechai Finley, “How are we to make space for God? We must empty ourselves, turn our hearts, the core of our being, into the dwelling place for the Presence of God.”
For God to dwell among us, we have to make room for God in our own hearts. If the prayers of our lips are to rise up to heaven, they have to be carried up by that presence of God within our own hearts. It’s the heart that God wants, not the gifts, not the buildings, but the heart and soul. It’s not our fear, or sense of obligation which God wants, it’s our desire for God. The key to that heart, that desire, can be found within the name of our Torah portion, Terumah, gifts, donations.
What does God want with gifts/donations? The Hebrew is very strange; it doesn’t say bring Me gifts, but rather take Me gifts. Not give, take. According to the rabbis, this is the difference between a wise person and a fool. When giving to charity, a fool thinks it is s/he who gives; the wise person knows that even in giving s/he receives.
God doesn’t need the gifts. The gifts are God’s way of letting us connect to what is holy - giving and receiving at the same time. Giving is a way of expressing and creating the space in our hearts in which 71 God dwells. It’s that self-ish and self-less act of giving and taking which invites the Holy Presence of God to dwell among us.
There was once a rich man who was on his deathbed. He gathered his children around his bedside and he said to them, "My children, I want you to sell everything I have. I want to liquidate all of my assets and turn them into cash so I can take them with me when I go." His children were upset, but he insisted. He said "I know that they say you can't take it with you, but I don't believe it." So they sold everything he owned: house, car, computer and sound systems, all of the kitchen utensils, furniture and chachkas of the house, his desk and library, everything. And then he died.
His children buried him together with the cash. When the man got to the Next World, Olam Habah, he met the angel Gavriel, and showed all of the money he had collected and brought with him. But Gavriel said to him, "My dear friend, here, cash is not legal tender. Here the only things that counts are receipts."
In the end, the only thing that counts in this world is the number and quality of the receipts we collect. It's not how much we have, but rather what we have done with the money, how much we have helped others, how much we have shared, how much good we have done. In reality the only permanent possession we have is that which we have given away.
Wealth cannot be measured in dollars. Wealth is a function of generosity - the more you give away, the richer you feel. How rich do you feel? Have you used your money in ways that bring the Holy Presence of God to dwell among us?
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner teaches that we have to remember where the money came from. Not the person who wrote the paychecks, or even the work you did to earn it, but rather by what combination of grace, skill, luck, and blessing you happened to end up with money in your pockets. When you look at it this way, money is like land, you can possess it but it really belongs to God; we are its stewards, not owners. All of our possessions are loaned to us on trust.
May it be Your will, Holy One, our God and God of our ancestors that we make the room in our own lives necessary for Your Presence to dwell among us. May our prayers rise speedily to heaven, and may our receipts bring us closer to You.
72 20. Elijah in our Midst: Parshat Te’zaveh Exodus 27:20 -30:10
My favorite story for this week’s Torah portion is based on a story told by Peninah Schram: Elijah the Prophet goes to a wedding party dressed as a beggar. He is shooed away - who wanted a beggar at a wedding party? Elijah returned dressed as a big shot: top hat, immaculate tuxedo. Everybody thinks he’s a big maher. They seat him at the head table.
As the first course is served, everyone eats up, but Elijah takes the plate of gefilte fish and slides the food into his coat pocket. He pours the soup in his pants pockets, ever so gently. When the time for a toast comes, he pours the red wine on his formerly pristine shirt. The roast beef and potatoes with gravy go into his remaining pockets. He puts the dessert under his top hat.
Finally the father of the bride, with everyone else close behind, asks him what he’s doing. He says that when he first arrived dressed as a beggar, they showed him no regard; when he dressed in fine clothes they accorded him the highest respect. “Clearly it was the clothes which made the difference, so I am serving the food to the clothes.” They seemed to deserve the food and the honor more than the person wearing them.
Elijah clearly demonstrated that too much regard is given to the way we appear outwardly, and sometimes our outward appearance may not reflect who we truly are. But what difference does it make what you wear? I’m not just being a slave to fashion. This week’s Torah portion contains a very detailed description of what Aaron is supposed to wear as the High Priest. “Make sacral vestments for your brother Aaron for dignity and adornment. These are the vestments you are to make: a breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a fringed tunic , a headdress, a sash.” Each of the garments is described in complete detail as to color, size, jewels and gold to be used, etc.
There is tremendous emphasis on both the beauty and the dignity of these garments. Why couldn’t the High Priest wear a nice pair of jeans, a smart vest or sweater? It seems so strange for God to be concerned with the clothes the priest is supposed to wear. But coming to meet with God, to stand before the Holy One is special. For the High Priest, who represented all of the people, it had to be even more special. The High Priest couldn’t just walk off the street and enter into this holy connection with God. He had to 73 prepare and look the part, to outwardly reflect the awe, amazement, humility and pride he was undoubtedly feeling inside.
What do your clothes say about you? What parts of your personality are reflected in what you’re wearing? Look at what you’re wearing (no, I’m not quoting your mother!) and see what it says about your life, or how you feel today. If your clothes are a mess, if you don’t match or coordinate (people comment about my kippot matching my vests), what’s the message conveyed by your clothing? If other people can see that message, can you? Does what you wear effect your mood? Can changing your clothes cheer you up?
In the story, Elijah the Prophet reacts to the way some people look at others and judge them by their proverbial wrappers. Yet, it seems to me, we all get to choose what we will look like, and what impression we want to make by what we wear.
The High Priest had to prepare for his visit with God. He had to demonstrate how important his role was for the people by being dressed appropriately. People could see from the details of his clothing that this was not an experience to be taken lightly. We can learn from this Torah portion to look a little more closely at how we prepare for our own holy moments.
Shabbat can be a holy moment for all of us, and just like the High Priest, maybe there is significance to what we wear. Perhaps how we dress can lead us to find the holiness, peace, calm and joy of Shabbat. Dressing the part, like the High Priest, can help us feel how completely different Shabbat time can be.
If we are still wearing what we wore all day, one of the things we can do to make Shabbat special is to change our clothes, to make our outer appearance match the shalom which Shabbat can bring, marking the end of a weekday and the start of a day of holiness in time. I always wonder about wearing a business suit on Shabbat – the jacket, tie, etc. It seems to me that it’s not the suit that matters but that the clothes are special, comfortable, and lead me to a spiritually different place.
To be in the mood for Shabbat, or for other holy days, prepare for it. Make it special. Adorn your body as you would for a special event. Feel it and appreciate it. Sometimes what we wear on the outside is a true reflection of what we feel, or could experience, on the inside.
74 Elijah the Prophet was certainly right that other people should not judge you by your clothes. Yet, instead of feeding the clothes, we need to look at how our clothes feed us, can lead us to a different spiritual awareness. The High Priest’s clothes were a part of his process of awareness and honoring of holiness.
May it be Your will, Holy One of Blessing, that we find ways to mark a separation between the mundane and the holy in our own clothes and behaviors. May we find ways to express ourselves that lead us to feeling better and closer to You. May we all be adorned by the beauty, dignity and warmth of Aaron’s clothing as we welcome Shabbat and holy days, and may a bit of their glow remain with us throughout the rest of our week.
75 21. God Moments: Parshat Ki Tissa Exodus 30:11 – 34:35
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa, is about the concept of “awe”, wonder. There are two attempts to see God, to respond to some of the awesomeness of God. In the first, the people are in a major crisis. They left everything they knew, and their leader, Moses disappeared. They experienced incredible miracles and wonders in the desert, and really couldn’t figure the whole picture out. In the first attempt to see God, the people demanded that Aaron fashion a golden calf for them, a physical form of their perception of the appearance of God. Cows were holy in Egypt. That’s what they knew and were used to. These weren’t incredibly sophisticated people; they weren’t known for their smarts in those days. In the absence of the leader of the people for more time than they could handle, the people demanded a return to their old explanations of the world. They wanted a God they could see and an answer to their questions they could touch. They channeled their fears and their amazement at the wonder of the world into a tangible god they could relate to. They even said regarding this golden calf: “this is your god who brought you out of the land of Egypt”. Well, obviously, they knew better, since it couldn’t have been the god that brought them out of Egypt, yet they were desperate, felt abandoned, hopeless.
Many of us can identify with acting irrationally because of desperation and abandonment. These former slaves were looking for help to come to them miraculously, in the depth of their abandonment. They found their god in a fantasy, something that made them feel good for the moment, much the same way many of us might find ours – in our addictions, our cravings and our collections of stuff.
The second time we struggle with the image of God in this week’s Torah portion is when Moses asks God to allow him to “behold God’s Presence”. It’s an odd request from a guy who has been sitting on a mountain for 40 days taking dictation from that very God. How can Moses ask such a thing?
What possible motivation could he have had, after spending all that time since the burning bush in God’s Presence to ask to behold God’s Presence? Of all people, Moses?! He worked with God through all of the plagues and negotiation with Pharaoh, relied on God at the Red Sea, and has just spent 40 days with God on Mount Sinai. And it’s Moses who asks for such a thing? You have to look at this request and go “huh?” I understand completely why the former slaves made the same demand. I even understand them creating an image to fill in for their lack of image – in that Moses must have symbolized for them the Presence of God. For Moses to ask roughly the same thing in the same Torah portion is more than coincidence. 76
But God’s answer is very strange: Moses can see God’s Presence, but only the back of God, whatever that might be. God puts Moses into a hollow place on a cliff, covers Moses’ eyes with God’s hand, passes before Moses and then lifts God’s hand off Moses’ eyes, and Moses sees God’s back.
On the one hand, I’m impressed with the incredible intimacy of this experience. God in physical contact, somehow, with Moses. Moses seeing, somehow, that which none of us get to see. What does God’s back look like? How can a being with no body or corporeal image have a back? Perhaps Moses is shown that even at the amazing moment of having been in contact with the Holy One for so long, he cannot see God directly. He can only see God’s Presence in the past tense, where God has been. At that moment of seeing where God had been, he was as close as he ever could be to God.
So, too, with us. God’s Presence has touched us personally and has touched the world. When we are filled with awe and wonder, when we find the places where God has been, we are as close as we can be to God. We see God in the past tense, most of the time.
Elijah the prophet told of how he experienced the presence of God: “The Holy One passed by. There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rock by the power of God; but the Holy One was not in the wind. After the wind - an earthquake; but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, fire; but the Holy One was not in the fire. And after the fire, a thin voice of silence.”
God is not in the big deals, the high places, the “special effects”, but rather is present in the voices of silence, touching hearts, shaping souls. According to Rabbi David Wolpe, “God does not reach down to remove tumors. But God grants courage, helps us to hope, strengthens our souls, and stiffens our spine. God helps community cohere. In the stillness and isolation of illness, we can hear God’s voice of silence speak to us, and through us.”
We do God’s work with our own hands. We are the vehicles through which God’s Presence is experienced on earth, even if it’s in a still small voice, even if it’s just from the back, just in hindsight. We do that work not only as individuals, but also as a community. Not just one at a time, but together. We came out of Egypt as a community; we struggled through the desert as a community, we built a golden calf as a community, and we learn as a community to stand together to do God’s work, with our own hands. 77
God moments abound, but we’re most aware of them in the past tense. May we learn to experience the Holy One’s Presence in our own lives, to see that Presence in our personal and communal past, and right here, right now.
78 22. Rewards for Mitzvot: Parshat Vayakhel Exodus 35:1 – 38:20
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayakhel, a continuation of what we read a few weeks ago in Terumah, Moses follows up on God’s command to the people to take gifts to God, from which they were to build a sanctuary so that God may dwell among them. So that God may dwell among the people. Sometimes, we get so caught up in being full of ourselves, that we forget that we have to make space for God.
For God to dwell among us, we have to make room for God in our own hearts. If the prayers of our lips are to rise up to heaven, they have to be carried up by that Presence of God within our own hearts. It’s the heart that God wants, not the gifts, not the buildings, but the heart and soul. It’s not our fear, or sense of obligation that God wants: God wants to know our desire for God’s Presence to dwell among us.
Now that we’re not building tabernacles in the desert (been there, done that) how else are we supposed to bring God’s Presence to dwell among us? Torah and mitzvot - doing those things that God wants us to do – learning, worship and acts of lovingkindness. We translate mitzvot differently, from commandments to good deeds, depending upon whether we see the things we’re supposed to do as our choices or God’s demands. But what good are they? What is the purpose of having mitzvot in the first place?
I visited Irving in a nursing home just after a stroke. At 75, he was now completely paralyzed on his left side He told me that he had been the president of his shul for many years. He had dedicated his life to Jewish practices – kept kosher, observed Shabbat, contributed thousands of dollars annually to Federation, did all the right stuff. Why did God reward him now with this kind of terrible illness? His life was filled with mitzvot and now he gets this?
Mitzvot are not about buying or collecting “mitzvah points”, or bribing one’s way into the world to come. When we do mitzvot, they are their own reward. Irving wasn’t president of his shul, or a donor to charities because these acts would prevent him from illness or sorrow, but because they were the right things for him to do at the time. The reward is in the doing, in the moment when we actually do what we know is right.
To bring God’s Presence to dwell among us, we don’t need to build cathedrals or fill them with prayer. All we need to do is mitzvot. In visiting Irving, and hearing his sense of loss and anger, I was performing the mitzvah of bikkur holim, visiting the sick. In so doing, we invited the Holy Presence of God to dwell 79 among us, to be with us while we discussed his suffering. I know God’s Presence was right there in the room listening with me, encouraging Irving to look back and see the good he did, and to know the reward of the righteous is in having opportunities to be reflections of God’s Presence, doing God’s work, mitzvot, with our own hands. Just as he turned to God in good times to be his source of strength, now Irving could call on God’s Presence to help him find his way through the challenges and difficulties of life.
Our prayerbook tells us that God has given us Torah and mitzvot because God loves us (ahavat olam in the evening service or ahava rabbah in the morning service). When we do the things God wants us to be doing, we get to experience God’s love. God loves us no matter what; but doing mitzvot enables us to feel the love. Every time you perform a mitzvah, from saying a blessing to remembering the Shabbat, to learning a Jewish text, to giving money or time to helping other people, you are inviting God’s Presence into the room with you, and you are experiencing some of God’s love. Mitzvot = God’s love.
May it be Your will, Holy One, God of our ancestors that we make the room necessary for Your Presence to dwell among us, May we continue to be blessed with the ability to experience Your love by doing the things You want us to do, learning to be humble in the presence of Your wisdom. May we all help to bring God’s Presence into the lives of others, by involving them in opening their hearts so that all our will rise speedily to heaven. 80
23. Celebrate the Blessings (even when they are not permanent) Parshat Pikudei Exodus 38:21 – 40: 38 A lot of the Book of Exodus revolves around the construction of the mishkan, the portable tent for worshiping God in the desert. We have entire chapters dedicated to the precise materials to be used, the way it is supposed to be built, the proverbial architectural plans. Lists of every jewel, plating, utensil; every detail is described. While the story line revolves around liberation from Egyptian bondage, and the beginning of the journey in the desert, the secondary focus of Exodus is on building the tabernacle, creating the space where God can dwell among the people, where the people and God can intersect.
When we look at the process of the Book of Exodus, which concludes with this week’s Torah portion, we can clearly see some major themes: the liberation from slavery through intercession from God, rescue of the people at the Red Sea by God, the giving of the Ten Commandments, first orally and then twice in written form, a compendium of other specific laws, and the detail of how to make this place where God can dwell. It clearly is a major focus of the Book. Yet, we relate so well to the first themes, and have to wonder what the meaning for us, today, can be for having to read such an incredibly detailed list and description of something we are not going to build or use.
Many commentators see the process itself as holy: working to create space where God can dwell among us. That has to be taken seriously. So we do our very best in creating holy space, not necessarily by building cathedrals, but by focusing on the details to “get it right” to bring ourselves into a place that we can feel is holy, is filled with God’s Presence. We can see the focus on the details here as hiddur mitzvah, making the mitzvah all the more beautiful. Decorating and refining every aspect of how we do mitzvot so that we can experience them with as much beauty as possible, pouring our souls into making them as good as they can be.
But there is another theme going on this week. After all the work, all the details and assembling and inventorying, all the fitting, piecing, melting and tightening, Moses looks at all the work the Israelites had done and Moses blessed them. (Ex.29:43) Sound familiar? It reminds me of when God finished creation: The heavens and earth were finished and all their array. On the seventh day God finished the work of creation and ceased on the seventh day from all of the work that God had done. And God blessed the seventh day, and declared it holy…” (Genesis 2:1-3) Creation ends with a blessing, and the enterprise of setting up the place where God could dwell among the people ends in a blessing. In blessing the 81 experience, or the people who made it possible, Moses summarizes through blessing, as God did in the creation story. As we should do when we conclude our own projects.
Conclusions are important opportunities for reflection, for understanding the whole experience more deeply, for evaluating where we were and where we now are, for being grateful for what we have been able to do. When we end a project or an experience, it’s not just a time to “sit back and smell the roses”, it’s a time to thank God for the journey we have been on, for the opportunities and strengths we gained and enjoyed.
One of the people with whom I had an opportunity to work over the past few years, I’ll call him Dan, recently died. The cause of death was ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which slowly but surely took away his ability to move his muscles. He was very much aware of his condition, and throughout his illness, knew what the next steps would be, and prepared for whatever he could expect. While he was rapidly losing abilities and strengths, I advised him to say blessings each time he knew something was his last time, to thank God for what he had experienced, even if the experiences were no longer available to him. Celebrating what he had, and that it was good, even if it wasn’t permanent. When he found he could no longer usefully attend classes or participate in any way at his dojo, he asked me to join him there to dedicate it as a special place in his life. We hung a mezuzah there together, honoring the place, his teachers, his students and his friends by marking the end of this part of his life. Yes, there was sadness, but also gratitude for the blessings he had.
As we read about the end of construction of the mishkan, I wonder what blessing Moses said, since that detail is omitted, maybe so we can know that it’s not the formula of the blessing that matters, just that he did it. The blessing for the end of the process is ours to create, just like Moses did.
May we follow Moses’ example, setting aside some time when we finish a phase or a project in our lives to re-establish our understanding of God in light of what we have done. May we also feel free to say the blessing that we feel in our hearts. May we find holiness in the process, the journeys of our lives, and may we thank God for enabling us to reach these moments. 82 24. Every Bite More Succulent Than the Next: Parshat Vayikra Leviticus 1:1 – 5:26
Did you see the commercial for Subway? I don’t remember which sandwich they are pushing, but the announcer says: “Every bite more succulent than the next.” Let’s make sure we all understand what they are saying: with every bite you take, the sandwich tastes less succulent! The first time I heard it I just laughed. Then I began to wonder how such an error could become a national advertising campaign. Aren’t there intelligent people all over the country laughing at this? Whatever the cost of the campaign, do they really think it’s worth it for people to know they think their sandwiches taste worse with every bite? Do they assume that the words they say just don’t matter as much as the convincing tone of the announcer telling us that every bite is more succulent (also a pretty big word for the targeted audience, I suppose)?
How many people were involved in coming up with this ad? I am not familiar with huge corporate structures, but I assume a lot of people who earn a lot of money approved this text. How could they all have missed so egregious an error?
Words are important to me. I try to use them whenever I am attempting communication. Sometimes, I get hung up on a single word in listening to a client, or in thinking through an issue or in writing (I’m proud of my use of “egregious” above!). Sometimes entire conversations can revolve around the use of a single word and its implications. Maybe it’s the rabbi in me that leads me to such precision, or maybe it’s a value we share as Jews. When we read Torah, we strive to understand each and every word, to see the context, to understand the meanings that might be hidden in each word. Subway advertising isn’t Torah, and is such a clear example of the opposite of our approach to Torah. In Hebrew we call that concept, when something so clearly demonstrates its opposite, l’hav-dil. We might say that putting subway ads and Torah in the same sentence is “l’hav-dil”.
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayikra, “God called to Moses and spoke to him out of the tent of meeting, saying, ‘Speak to the Israelite people saying’.” All this speaking and calling and saying: vayikra, va- yidaber, lamor, daber, v’amar-ta. 5 out of the first 15 words of the Book of Leviticus all relate directly to the speaking, communication between God and humanity, and among humanity with regard to understanding the Divine will. So, of course, I am fixated on what all this calling and saying could mean. If each word is important, the repetition of the concept so often in so few words has to be really important.
83 God calls out to Moses and the ball starts rolling. And what God calls out about is amazing. God begins here to describe the ways in which people can come closer to God, can enter into a conversation with God, using the language of their times, animal sacrifice. Starting with where the people were, God teaches that they can establish a relationship with God using animal sacrifices as the vehicles for communication.
The nature of the sacrifices addressed very human concerns - appreciation, regret, forgiveness, making peace, the need to affiliate and be accessible, the need to mark times of the day, week, year, times of our lives. We may have changed the ways of expressing these concerns over the years, but our human nature remains the same as it was - in need of that personal contact with God. God calls out. There is dialog. God is establishing that there is at least one vehicle for communication, ritual, form for the dialog. And then there is incredible detail about the ways in which it is to be done.
What matters most here is that God called, expressed an interest in hearing from us, in engaging in dialog. But sometimes we miss some of the message. Sacrifices were good for what they were, but Isaiah points out to us that they are not the ends God intends, they are a means, and not the only means. God wants us to be better human beings and to care for and about one another according to Isaiah. Sacrifice is about getting us to be less selfish, more in touch with the communication from and with God.
The content is us, not the prayers, and not the animal sacrifices of our Torah portion. The content is what we need to say, what we need to hear from God, that we need to hear God’s call. It doesn't matter whether prayers are in Hebrew, English, Russian, or any other language. It doesn't matter whether the music comes from the first century or the twenty-first century, or whether the tunes are borrowed from American Indian rituals or Buddhist mantras. All that matters is that prayer comes from your heart and from your soul, and that both are open to hear the messages from God.
The Subway ad highlights for me that we need to keep a focus on our words, and to hold our society accountable for the things we say and hear. We have to mean what we say, and understand what the words of others mean. The Torah portion teaches me to understand, through these words, that there is a sacred, personal relationship with God, if only we hear God’s call, and respond to it. May it be Your will, Holy One of Blessing, that we find the ways to hear Your call, and may all our words reflect Your Presence.
84 25. You Are What You Eat: Parshat Tzav Leviticus 6:1 – 8:36 Passover
(Ok, so you figured it out. I’m not really commenting on the Torah portion, but on the holiday which usually happens around when we read this Torah portion.)
You find out that you are going to move to a far-away place in two weeks. Let’s say you get this incredibly great job offer, the money is too good to refuse, but you have to move. You decide you are going. Then what do you do? You put your house on the market, or notify the landlord. You make arrangements to figure out where you are going to live. You call the movers and set up a date for the move. You figure out how you’re going to get to the new place –whether you should ship your car or drive it to your new home. Then you start packing all your stuff, and if you’re like me, you make lists of everything you need to get done, and forget where you put the lists.
Let’s say it’s two days before you have to leave. What are you doing? I remember that when I left New Jersey, on the second to last day, I closed my bank accounts, went to AAA for my Trip-tik, made hotel reservations in Flagstaff, AZ, since that was the only place on the journey that seemed like a goal. And I continued packing. I went to a discount store to get supplies for the road, like soft drinks and munchies (God forbid I should go without, or have to hunt for supplies along the way!)
By the time moving day came, the bags were packed and I was ready to go, humming, like Peter, Paul and Mary - leaving on a freeway!
So all this discussion is by way of trying to understand something that makes no sense, that all of us accepted as fact, but I started wondering about. If God told Moses on the first day of Nisan that he should expect that on the 14th of the month the people and he were going to get thrown out of Egypt, and Moses told the people, which the Torah says he did, why, then, is there this whole issue of not having the time to let the dough rise for bread?!? They had two weeks notice. There was plenty of time! In fact, the feast of unleavened bread is told to Moses well before there was any discussion of a rush to leave Egypt. God tells Moses to plan a feast of unleavened bread which is to last for 7 days and is to be a commemoration of the departure from Egypt, before the people even begin planning the Passover offering. Now, for those of you who are going to doubt this, look it up yourselves in Exodus, chapter 12. The Passover offering is in fact one holiday, the Feast of Unleavened Bread another, and the issue of the rush to get out of town doesn’t appear until verse 34, while the command to have the holiday begins at verse 14.
85 We all have accepted this idea of a rush, when the rush may not have happened. My initial response was that maybe the people didn’t believe it when Moses told them they were heading out of town in two weeks, but that can’t be. If you recall, the Israelites borrowed (some might say stole) the gold and silver and riches of their Egyptian neighbors during the two weeks prior to the Exodus, so we know they knew they were leaving. You don’t go around “borrowing” all this stuff, when you don’t plan to return it, when you think you’re not going anywhere. Can it be that we would prepare to leave town and our ancestors wouldn’t? All those Jewish mothers unprepared for a trip? I can’t believe that!
Why don’t we know what’s going on? The Torah says one thing in one place, and yet our Haggadah quotes the Torah someplace else, saying that there was a rush to get out of town. Which statement from the Torah are we to believe?
There’s a symbolism to the unleavened bread, which is why we have this holiday. Matzah is the “bread of affliction” not the “bread of liberation”. Matzah has not risen, is as low as you can get. It is the perfect symbol – in food- of what slavery is: humble, unassuming, impoverished, low. There is nothing in it to lead it to “rise up”. Bread, on the other hand, is puffy. It’s full of hot air. One could say it’s full of itself. A slave can’t eat such a symbol of uprising, of grandeur, of growth.
Passover falls half a year away from the High Holidays. It’s a reminder of where we were back then, on Yom Kippur, when we confessed our sins and recognized how little worth we have. Passover and matzah remind us of the experience of slavery of our people, and the ways we enslave ourselves to all those things which make us just like bread - how we have puffed up our own souls, our own spirits, and filled ourselves with incredible amounts of hot air.
We are what we eat. If we are to know and really understand whence we come, we need to understand that we, in every generation, were slaves: we were matzah thousands of years ago, and in our tradition, just six months ago. And we have been bread – the bread of liberation from Egypt and the bread of our own puffy egos. Matzah reminds us to know who we really are, without all of the trappings and elevations, all the yeast we add to our own personalities.
There may or may not have been a rush to get out of town, but there certainly is reason for the Torah to give us two very good reasons for matzah - so that we’ll look beyond the rush to see meanings in that which we eat. May it be Your will, Holy One, our God, and God of our ancestors that we continue to 86 struggle to do Your will, to understand that there are depths to the Torah which we have yet to explore, and to constantly find the blessings hidden by You within the text. May we strive to be much more like the unleavened bread, shedding the pomposity of self-righteousness, ever reminding ourselves that we are what we eat.
87 26. The Silent Scream of Grief: Parshat Shemini Leviticus 9:1- 11:47
This week’s Torah portion, Shemini, starts out with a relatively detailed explanation of the process whereby the sanctuary was dedicated in the desert, with Moses, Aaron, and Aaron’s sons doing most of the work. One would sort of expect that given the nature of the dedication of this house of worship, there should have been a whole lot of pageantry, pomp, and ceremony. There should have been major celebrations of this special event.
But that’s not the Torah portion we read. Instead, just a week after the dedication happened, just days after they finally got the cult into action, tragedy happens instead of celebration. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu each “took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it, and they offered before God and alien fire, which God had not commanded them to do. A fire came forth from God and consumed them. Thus they died at the instance of God.” Moses then says to Aaron: “This is what God meant when God said: ’Through those near to me I will show Myself holy, and assert My authority before all of the people.’” And Aaron was silent.
It was not much of a dedication of a house of worship. I have three concerns with this passage: (1) Nadav and Avihu weren’t doing anything all that bad. They were making an offering to God, even if it was the wrong one. Was this so terrible? I would love to see kids making special offerings, of any kind, to God, worshipping, struggling to understand God’s will. (2) What’s with Moses here? His brother’s sons are consumed by fire and all he has to say to his brother is a lecture on God’s authority? Not a word of compassion, not a word of sorrow or comfort? Aaron and his sons were in fact near to God, and had the right authority. The lecture Moses gives Aaron makes no sense, especially not when you consider these were his nephews. (3) My biggest challenge is Aaron, whose response is silence. Understanding God’s will is supposed to be a precise science to Aaron and his sons. Surely none of them knew that a simple error of some kind would be fatal. They may have offered a strange fire, but it’s not clear what made it so strange or why it was deadly. How can Aaron be silent at this moment?
What could Moses say that would bring comfort to his brother? Maybe, as some commentators say, Moses is saying that God has consumed the sons in a moment when they actually come into very close contact with God, at the moment when they touched the holiness that all of us would want. Maybe that’s 88 some comfort. Moses does what so many of us try to do when we see a loved one hurt – we try to bring comfort in ways that just don’t work. All too often we talk when we shouldn’t and say things that feel like they are insensitive when we are just trying to be supportive and helpful. Maybe Moses is more like us than we would imagine.
And Aaron’s silence? Well, what more is there for him to say? His silence is the silent scream of a parent who has watched the most unnatural kind of death, the death of his children. It is the ineffable pain of recognition of dreams and hopes denied. Silence is just about the only sound he could make. He couldn’t shake his fists and rail against God; he knew better. He couldn’t curse his sons for having been stupid; they were honestly trying to do God’s will. He couldn’t appeal to Moses for fairness: they all knew there were risks in trying to physically connect with that which can’t be touched. All he could do was scream in silence. Silently accept that which he could neither change nor understand.
As Jews living after the Holocaust, we know from such screams of silence. As Jews living at a time when terrorists kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Israel, we know this silence of shock and pain. As Americans in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, we know this silence of heartbreak. We know what it means to take a moment of silence in which to scream about the loss of so many of our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, loved ones consumed by an inexplicable fire. As people who have experienced significant loss, or people who have experienced serious illness, we have learned that sometimes the only response we can have is silence, and hope that we can find comfort somewhere in the place of silence.
Like Moses, many people have tried to explain or to bring us comfort, to make sense out of the losses and sorrows of life. We know the struggle to understand that which cannot be understood, the mystery of God’s involvement in history and in our own lives. Whatever we say just doesn’t make any sense. But just as Aaron screamed in silence, he found a way to continue with his life, to work in the very place where his sons were killed. He learned to live with his sorrow, so that he could be productive and have a meaningful life, after disaster. He found hope and strength in the biggest disaster of his life, and to live in the shadow of that disaster.
As we remember our losses, as we experience the silent scream, may God give us the strength to rededicate ourselves to emerge from the silence, to be ready to meaningfully involve ourselves in the struggle for humanity and justice for all people. May we remember our losses and make their memories 89 holy by our own actions. May our silence enable us to find the strength we need to make everything else possible.
90 27. Body Mind and Spirit: Parshat Tazria Leviticus. 12:1 – 13:59
According to Rabbi Chaim Stern:
We can’t ask for lives free of problems… We can’t ask God to make us and those we love immune to disease… We can’t ask God to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will happen only to other people, and never to us…
But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. They discover that they have more strength, more courage than they ever knew themselves to have.
We cannot escape suffering, but we may find God in spite of it, and even within it…
O God, teach me to be strong enough to find a moment in the day when my heart is light enough to let me smile. Even in affliction I yearn for the grace of a loving spirit.
We read in this week’s Torah portions about people who are experiencing illness, people who are suffering from diseases for which there were no apparent cures in Biblical times. People were afflicted with strange, ugly, disfiguring and uncomfortable diseases and society attempted to figure out (1) how to bring them back to health, (2) how to keep other people from getting the disease, and (3) what behaviors might have caused the illness. Did the people do something to bring about their illness?
In the Bible, it’s the priest who has to diagnose the illness, and the priest who helps restore the health of the person who is ill, using whatever means he had at his disposal – sacrifices, quarantine, oils, bathing, etc. (Mount Sinai in those days was a mountain!) I find it interesting that while the Torah portions declare people “clean” and “unclean” based on their illness, the Torah is careful not to draw any other conclusions about the people who are afflicted. The elite of society – the priests - were assigned to deal with bringing healing to people who were ill, so they would be treated with the utmost respect. While people were isolated to prevent the spread of what they thought could be communicable diseases, there was no stigma assigned to them, no judgment that they somehow deserved what they got. People were ill; they were treated, respectfully. 91
In today’s society, we turn to doctors to treat our illnesses, and they often do really well at treating physical illness. But there is something to the idea that illness may be more than just physical. While we don’t assign blame to people for their illness, we do know that some behaviors can lead to illness. I won’t list the things that we know make us sick, but wonder about the ways in which we leave ourselves open to becoming ill by neglecting ourselves, our needs, and our spirits. I suspect many of us would benefit from a visit with the Biblical priest, who could do a “spiritual checkup” with us at the same time as we get the physical. (Maybe we should all make appointments with our rabbis for spiritual checkups regularly!)
The priest was called in for his expertise in relating to the physical issues of the illnesses, and also because he was an expert in knowing how to relate to the human soul, and how to help that soul connect to that which is holy. Good physicians in this society know that there is healing both in the pills and procedures they have to offer and in addressing the spiritual needs of people living with illness. When people are living with serious illness, an entire team needs to focus energy not just on each of their specialties, but also on the experience of the whole person whose body and soul are threatened.
Our Torah portions aren’t about magic, or pretending that all people who are good and just and kind will be well forever. Rather it’s about reality – that people who are good and just and kind will get sick, and deserve the healing touch of the community, their doctors and their religious leaders. The Torah portions make it clear that body, mind and spirit are all elements in finding healing, wholeness, shalom.
May it be Your Will, Holy One of Blessing, that we find the connections, courage, strength, and hope necessary to learn and grow through our illnesses, and that we find Your Presence with us when we bring healing to others.
92
28. Passover Food Considerations Metzora Leviticus 14:1- 15:32
Have you started getting ready for Passover? I noticed this week that the market near where I live has started to display its Passover foods. Have you ever looked at the stuff on the market’s shelves? I looked and found some incredible stuff: there were 6 different brands of matzah, all with different prices. What is the only recipe for Matzah? Flour and water. That’s it. There are no other ingredients allowed. So maybe they cook it differently? Nope. No variations are allowed. From the moment the water hits the flour, the entire process - mixing, shaping and baking - can take no more than 18 minutes. So what’s the difference? The name on the box and the price you pay.
What else is on the shelves? There are lots of gefilte fish jars and cans. Cake mixes. Mixes, actually, for just about everything you really don’t need. Matzah Ball Soup Mixes abound on the shelves. Have you ever tasted this stuff? It actually could sit on your seder table instead of the salt water. What else is on the shelves? Other incredibly useless stuff, like matzah crackers. Why pay almost twice as much for someone else to break a board of matzah? They do make the edges nice and neat. Passover candy is plentiful, and there’s every possible variety of Passover macaroons, Passover jellies like you can’t believe. (Those of us with sweet teeth and no weight problem have it made. I’m jealous.)
So what’s not there? Just about anything that’s nutritious, or, for that matter, essential for Passover (except the matzah and derivatives, like matzah meal and farfel). The items on the seder plate don't come in boxes (ever wonder why there’s no mix for haroset? ). And the stuff in the boxes and jars aren’t part of the seder. What do you make of this abundance of stuff we don't really need, and the lack of the stuff we do need?
It seems to me to be the classic conflict between form and content. The shelves are filled with the stuff that is form, with no content. Passover bagels are the best example I can think of for that. Why would someone want bagels on Passover? Can’t live without them for one week? When it’s about form, Passover bagels make sense. When you think about the content of the holiday, you know they are completely contrary to what it’s about. If there’s a holiday in which it’s supposed to be all about content, it’s Passover. We don't get to eat anything without it serving as a reminder that we were slaves, and we are supposed to see ourselves as having personally left Egypt.
93 I guess what was also missing from the grocery store shelves is the one best source of really great content: there wasn’t one Haggadah to be found. And no books on Passover. The absolutely best book, by the way, which I have ever come across for preparing for Passover is called the Passover Survival Kit, by Rabbi Shimon Apisdorf, published by Leviathan Press (1-800-Leviathan). If you’re leading a seder, going to one, or just curious, you can get it at a bookstore or order directly from the publisher.
This year, I hope we all will struggle to find the ways in which we can focus on the content, the meanings of the symbols in our homes and on our tables. I hope we will all participate in asking questions about all the aspects of the holiday, and maybe even find some of the answers. (Put on orange on your seder plate, and see where it leads.) And I hope we will all find our own meanings, even in the most mundane of issues, in the most normal of places. 94
29. Being a Reflection of God: Parshat Aharei Mot Leviticus 16:1- 18:30
This week’s Torah portion contains a challenge for most of us: to see the literal words on the page, and to figure out what they mean for our times. After all, we know that we are required to interpret every word of Torah. We have “to turn it and turn it” because we can find everything in it. Sometimes the Torah speaks in mystery, and there are plenty of laws in Torah, which we do not follow. Interpretation of Torah is at the heart of our religion. Torah is here precisely so we can struggle to understand it, and every time we look at the text we may understand it differently.
For some reason many people think this consensus applies to every line but one in the Torah, and that one passage appears in this week’s Torah portion. In Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as you would with a woman. It is an abomination.” Based on this line, many people interpret Judaism as saying that homosexuality is “an abomination”. Richard Elliott Friedman translates the word to’evah as “an offensive thing.” Most commentators see to’evah as a relative term: in Egypt, shepherds were offensive, to’evah, according to Joseph. Clearly shepherds are not so offensive elsewhere. Yet, how can we understand the passage in our own lives? Whether an abomination or offensive, is this a prohibition of homosexuality?
I see four different ways to interpret this passage on the surface. (1) If one is gay, one doesn’t lie with a woman, so the second part of the sentence cancels out the first. “As you would with a woman”, if you wouldn’t, it’s simply not talking to you. Therefore, this is not banning homosexuality. (2) Perhaps the ban, based on the “as” phrase is a ban on active bisexuality: a man having sex with another man and seeing it as not cheating on his partner. This is an indication of holiness in any relationship, and that cheating in a relationship, with a partner of either gender, is still cheating. (3) The ban here could be male cultic prostitutes. In the ancient Near East, men would go to the temples for more than sacrifices. One of the ways they “worshipped” was to utilize these prostitutes, who are described as “an abomination”, or offensive, elsewhere in the Torah. Just as you can’t use the women in these roles, you can’t use the men. (4) Another way to look at it is a ban on male-to-male rape. In the ancient Near East it was customary to rape the women when conquering their town or village. (We heard of incidents of the same thing happening in Bosnia, if I recall.) The ban here is on the rape of either gender.
95 Sure, one can have difficulty with any or all of these interpretations, but it seems pretty clear that we can’t say there is only one way to look at this passage. We interpret Torah all the time. We know that “an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth” means “the value of an eye for an eye, the value of a tooth for a tooth”. We are commanded to worship God by sacrificing animals. I haven’t made an animal sacrifice in the longest time! The Torah bans all loans from Jews to other Jews, clearly a ban we understand differently. The Jubilee Year, every 49 years, is another good example, when we have to return everything to the original owners, all loans are cancelled, paid off or not, and nothing can be planted
Torah is not in heaven, is not in a far off place, it’s not across the seas. It is very close to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, to do it. (Deuteronomy 30:11-14, and mentioned in the God section of this book.) It’s right here for us to understand, interpret and learn from. Our understanding of homosexuality has changed in the last century, and over the centuries, as our understanding of Torah has also changed, and must continue to change. The world is composed of a wide variety of people.
There’s a story in the Talmud, Masechet Derech Eretz (chapter 4), which relates that once Rabbi Shimon ben El-azar was coming from Migdal Eder, riding leisurely on his horse by the seaside. A certain man chanced to meet him, and the man was exceedingly ugly. Rabbi Shimon said to him “Raka (simpleton), how ugly are the children of Abraham our father.” The other man replied, “What can I do for you? Speak to the Craftsman Who made me.” Rabbi Simeon immediately dismounted from his horse and bowed before the man and said, “I apologize to you, forgive me.” He replied to him "I will not forgive you until you go to the Craftsman Who made me and say, “How ugly is the vessel which You have made.”
Rabbi Simeon walked behind him for three miles. When the people in town heard of the arrival of Rabbi Simeon, they came out to meet him, and greeted him with the words, “Peace be unto you rabbi”. The other man said to them, “Who are you calling rabbi?” They answered “The man who is walking behind you.” Thereupon he exclaimed, “If this man is a rabbi, may there not be any more like him in Israel!” He told the people the whole story, and they begged him to forgive the rabbi, and he agreed, only on the condition that he never act in this manner again.”
The Holy One created all kinds of people. We have to accept, welcome, and love that diversity which God created, or take those issues up with the Creator, not with the person who was created. Diversity is what makes each of us special. Inclusiveness, welcoming, and involvement of the diverse people who share this earth with us, is what makes us a holy community. Uniformity is destruction; diversity is our strength and 96 our greatest hope.
It is not up to us to judge people based on the color of their skin, or their gender, their sexual orientation or the reflection of illness and disability they might project. If you have a problem with the fact that a person is gay or lesbian, a woman, deformed, old, bent and decrepit, or of a different skin color, discuss your problem with the One who created people to be different, if you're so inclined. But remember that your problem is not with the created but with the Creator. 97
30. Check Your Ego at the Door: Parhsat Kedoshim Leviticus 19:1- 20:27
In this week’s Torah portion, God says: “You shall be holy, because I, God, am holy.” What does being holy mean to us? How do we do it? There’s a list in the Torah portion of the things we can do to be holy, but it’s not exhaustive. It includes revering your parents, keeping Shabbat, leaving corners of your fields for people to glean, not stealing or being deceitful, insulting the deaf or putting stumbling blocks in front of blind people. There are a lot more guidelines included in the Torah portion for how we can be holy.
But I think they all can be summed up with Check Your Ego at the Door. Get over yourself and your ego, because you can be sure your ego will keep you from being holy. When I was working for LA Jewish AIDS Services, one of our most important programs was Project Chicken Soup. About 70 volunteers gathered early on Sunday mornings at the Hirsh Kosher Kitchen to prepare meals for Jewish people living with AIDS and their loved ones and families. We prepared 4 meals for each person, which we delivered with a friendly visit while the food was still warm. It was a pretty touching project, helping people who felt very cut off from the community feel that there were people out there who really cared about them.
Picture it: 70 volunteers gathered to prepare about 250 meals in a few hours, all working in one small kitchen designed for a few very organized chefs and their assistants. Now add into the mix that most of the volunteers were Jewish. The potential for disaster was pretty great! At any given moment a riot could break out because of potato peelers and knives being in short supply!
I used to make a point of talking to the volunteers before they started about the meaning of the work they were about to do, and reminded them, each and every week, that they were doing God’s work with their own hands. But there was more to it. There is no way so many people can put out so many meals in such a small space with such limited equipment if we did not work together, and if we did not focus on the goals of the program. I urged the volunteers to “check their egos at the door”. What we were doing was not about us - it was about helping others, and there was no way to do it if egos were getting in the way.
This was easier said than done. But when we were focused, it was amazing what we were able to produce, and the good that came of it.
98 I reflected on this experience in a sermon a few weeks ago, talking about our teacher Moses, whom the rabbis see as an example of the ultimate in humility. Moses never let his ego get in the way. From the day he was notified of the draft into God’s service through the “burning bush delivery system” Moses remained modest, humble, focused on the well-being of his people. Moses had a speech impediment, which helped remind him, and everyone else, of just who he was - a guy like everyone else who happened to be directly chosen by God to lead the people. At no point in the Torah do we see Moses claiming special rights or privileges because of who he was, what his job was, or because he was “special”. Moses never held it over anyone’s head that he was God’s chosen messenger. Moses schlepped along just like everyone else. In his humility, he was reflecting precisely what God means when God says “You shall be holy.”
We can learn a lot from our teacher Moses’ example. We can learn to be more humble and to check our egos at the door, too, and I think our communities would be a lot better off if we did. There are three questions to ask when you’re dealing with perceived problems and insults:
1. Is this really about me? Is my ego getting in the way of me being helpful to the community? 2. Am I focusing on issues or on personalities? A focus on issues leads to growth. A focus on personalities leads nowhere, except maybe to gossip. 3. What’s best for everyone? If you’re not focusing on goals and what’s best for everyone, your ego is in the way.
One of my teachers, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, served on the Board of LA Jewish AIDS Services, and attended Project Chicken Soup whenever he could. At the time, he was the Provost of the University of Judaism, the author of countless books on Jewish law and practice, a major leader of the Jewish community of Los Angeles, and of the Conservative Movement. When Eliot came to Chicken Soup, what role did he take? He cleaned up, sweeping the floors, making sure the place remained neat and tidy. He set the tone for humility, leaving the ego at the door, recognizing that the work all of us did was pretty special.
Moses is known as Moshe Rabynu, our teacher. His was the example. May it be Your will, Holy One, our God and God of our ancestors, that we learn from the example of Moses our teacher. May we learn to be humble in our journey through life, recognizing that at times our egos swell way beyond their appropriate domains. May we turn handicaps and challenges into possibilities and blessings, and together may we create a new community in which ego mania is minimized and our souls and spirits can soar. 99 31. Your time is limited: Parshat Emor Leviticus 21:1 - 24:23
If you live to be 80 years old, how much time life would you spend sleeping? By my calculations, it comes out to about 1/3 of your life, assuming you actually get 8 hours a day of sleep. That’s almost 27 years of sleep! How much time do you spend eating? Let’s figure about 2 hours a day, give or take. That comes out to 6 years of eating. If you spend 3 hours per day watching television, if you did it all at in one sitting, you’d be on the couch for 10 years. If you spend about an hour per day in the bathroom, or stuck in traffic, it comes out to about three years of your life. Should you decide to spend two hours per day surfing the net, you will have been at it for about 6 years of your life.
Somehow, the idea of spending that much time in the bathroom, or watching TV, or even reading great words of wisdom on my computer seems like an incredible waste of my time. Sometimes, I stay up at night thinking about the enormous waste of time that my sleep entails. If I only sleep 6 hours per night, I’d be able to use the formerly wasted years of my life. Wait, if I stop eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom, I can significantly increase my usable time! Think of the possibilities! (I have to stop sleeping, maybe tonight, right after watching 3 hours of television.)
All this pondering and ciphering on the aggregate times I spend doing things is not necessarily a symptom of having an obsessive-compulsive disorder, because, despite all the calculations, I generally don’t do any of these things non-stop. I may oversleep, but not for 27 years! Our lives are composed of moments when we do incredibly mundane things, over and over and over. We eat, shower, read, go to work or school, relax on the couch, sip our coffee, just about every day we do the same stuff as we did the day before. Sometimes we just slog through it, and look forward to the breaks. Sometimes we find comfort in the routine; sometimes we hunt for ways to break up the monotony of living our daily lives.
If you live to be 80, you have eleven years of Shabbat. They don’t come at once precisely because we need those 25 hours every week to break the pattern, to remind us of why we live with the day-to-day. We get eleven years worth of time to reflect on the ways we can find God in our lives, and the ways we can transform the mundane, ordinary time we spend, into holy time.
This week’s Torah portion, Emor, includes a description of our pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot) as well as Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, and the commandment, once again, to work six 100 days each week and to rest on Shabbat. Clearly, how we mark our time, from each Shabbat to the holy days of the year, is how we manage to get through the mundane, to experience that which is holiest – time. The command to rest on these days is preceded with the command to work the rest of the time, so that we can appreciate the time off, the rest.
The celebrations revolve around the ordinary: we celebrate using foods that we would eat anyway, or denying ourselves that food. We celebrate by reading and learning, singing and praying, all activities we would have done anyway, but perhaps without the same focus we bring when it’s a holiday or Shabbat. Bread (hallah or matzah) grape juice or wine - you don’t need special equipment to change an ordinary moment into a holy time, to change ordinary food into an opportunity for coming closer to God, to change your experience of life into an experience of the Divine.
It seems to me that it’s all about the punctuation, the ways we mark our time as we experience it. Sitting for years on the couch may be one way to do it, but since we generally don’t have that “luxury” we get to enjoy the rest, the time off, the special holiness of time. There’s wisdom in the distribution of time, in the calendar, in breaking up the years into palatable sections.
As we journey in this experience of time, may we all find ways to appreciate and to experience the unique holiness of our time. It doesn’t come in blocks that we use up, but in pieces so we can savor it. Holy One of Blessing, enable us to find ways to transform the routines of the times of our lives into opportunities to experience Your Presence. May we learn to turn the ordinary into the Holy, and plain into unique.
101 32. You Can’t see the Things that Have the Most Meaning: Parashat Behar Leviticus 25:1 – 26:2
We have a phrase – “seeing is believing.” But I think it’s not true. What do we mean by this phrase? When you see something, you can believe it to be true. If you see it, it’s true. But that can’t be the case. Because we think a lot of stuff is true, even when we can’t see it. The folks in Missouri, The Show Me State, may be rightly skeptical, but not everything can be shown. For example, air, time, space, love or any emotion, can’t been seen.
In fact, the statement” seeing is believing” is sort of contrary to fact: seeing is proof of something. If you have proof, what is the need for belief? You need belief precisely for that which cannot be seen.
In this week’s double Torah portion, we have the statement: “You shall not make idols for yourselves, or set up for yourselves carved images or pillars, or place figured stones in your land to worship upon, for I, Adonai am your God. You shall keep my Shabbatot, and venerate my sanctuary, Mine, Adonai’s.” (Lev 26:1-2)
What’s the connection between the three parts of the commandment – no idols, the Shabbat and the sanctuary? They ask the ultimate question, is what we see all there is? Idols, you can see, but not God. Shabbat, a concept of time, you can experience, but not see, and the sanctuary is just a place, not the cathedrals we see other religions build, but a place to focus on that which can’t be seen. Is seeing believing? What is most real, most meaningful, is actually that which we can’t see.
I recently turned down a family that wanted a funeral with an open coffin. They wanted everyone to see Sylvia at peace, to see that she is finally completely and totally dead. But can you see what dead is, really? Where her soul is? What was essential in this person was not her body, it was her spirit, the divine force making the body work. What was most real about this person was not visible. Looking at a body, in Judaism, is forbidden to prevent people from believing that the body is all there is, and forget that the person is an image of God. The physical is temporary, passing. The image endures.
The Israelites, coming out of Egypt, a land where the dead were consistently worshipped, and death was totally denied through the cult of the dead, had troubles with believing without seeing too. Hence the 102 incident of the Golden Calf. But the Calf incident was really about Moses, not God. It was when Moses was missing, up the mountain all those days, that the people went nuts and needed something to help the visualize, to see in order to believe.
The people wanted to worship what they could see. That’s why Moses broke the tablets – they would have worshipped them instead or after the calf was destroyed. We want to see, to believe, when belief has nothing to do with seeing.
Look at a synagogue. What does it say about what we believe? Every synagogue has a Torah and an eternal light. That’s all that you need to make a sanctuary. Both stand for a symbol of God’s presence, but neither is worshipped. Our most important concept is words – the vehicles we use for worship, and the vehicles we use to understand what God wants of us. But what are they? Mere puffs of air!!! Words that can’t be touched, the vibrations of the sounds are just that, vibrations. The printed stuff is a symbol indicating the sounds we are supposed to make, but they are not the words. Letters are symbols – dots and lines on a page, arbitrary designations.
But words are incredibly powerful. God created the world just through words.
This week’s Torah portion, once again challenges the idea that seeing and believing have anything at all to do with one another. We can’t see God, we can’t see Shabbat and even the books, materials we use, and the place in which we worship can only serve as assistants in helping us to see that there is much more to belief than seeing.
May we be blessed, Holy One our God and God of our ancestors, with the ability to believe in that which we cannot see, and the wisdom to look beyond that which is temporary, passing, visible, to believe that which we cannot see.
103 33. Blessings and Curses: Parshat Behukotai Leviticus 26:3 – 27:34
This week’s Torah portion, Behukotai starts out with promises about God’s blessings if we do good, and threats if people ignore God’s laws. God promises: “I will establish my dwelling place among you, and will not spurn you. I will be ever present in your midst: I will be your God and you will be My people.” If people didn’t obey God, there was the proverbial wrath of God to deal with, and some of it is pretty specific and scary. In addition to natural disasters, there would be all kinds of defeats at the hands of enemies.
As I read this portion, though, I wonder how to interpret both the blessings and the curses. As I have written before, I believe that what many of us experience as curses sometimes are opportunities for us to see hidden blessings. Curses sometimes are the packages in which some of our blessings might be housed. The difference between the blessing and the curse is the perspective we can bring to the experience of either. But there’s something more here when God demands obedience to God’s laws. Obedience means that there will be blessings, and disobedience means that there will be curses. Yet, we read these words with a sense that if God is keeping track of all of us individually, God isn’t doing a very good job of it. Many people consider themselves to be good people, to do what’s right most of the time. We all know people who seem totally righteous, and yet they seem to suffer and experience curses instead of the blessings they so richly deserve. God as scorekeeper seems elusive, arbitrary and often unfair.
There are many ways to read these blessings and curses. Some people look at them as applying to the nation of Israel as a whole, not to individuals. If the whole nation does good, everyone is blessed. But that is so totally unrealistic – can you imagine all Jews agreeing just on the definition of what doing good is? As a nation, we speak with many voices and find legitimacy in most of them. What about good people among a bunch of evil-doers? Do they suffer along, simply because they’re in the wrong neighborhood? That can’t be the way this works. I believe in a kind, caring and compassionate God. That doesn’t really fit with this Biblical image.
Mitzvot, acts of commandment and righteousness, are self-fulfilling. We benefit from the things that we do, not at some later time, but in the moment, when we do them. Their reward is intrinsic. We do what is right, and can be satisfied and gratified by what we have done. I hope this is not a surprise to anyone, but there really is no ledger of collected mitzvah points somewhere that will determine whether or not we get rewarded at some later time/date/dimension. Our good deeds, doing what God wants us to do, are their 104 own reward. The opposite, then, is also true: if we don’t do good, we don’t benefit from the good. When we don’t benefit from the good, we suffer, we are lessened by our own behaviors and we don’t get their reward. The absence of their intrinsic reward can be seen as our punishment.
Applied to this week’s Torah portion, it seems that we have some of control over how we experience the blessings and the curses. We get to do what we know is right, and experience knowing we did what God wants. But what about the bad things that will inevitably happen, even when we have done everything we are supposed to do? Our experience of these things, in the absence of our relationship with God, in the absence of the positive experience of doing mitzvot will certainly feel like punishment, because how then can we turn to God for help, support or encouragement? We will feel cut off from God because we are not in relationship with the Divine in the first place, we have nowhere to turn in the face of disaster. Disasters feel like God has turned God’s face from us, when it’s really we who are turned away from God. We can find God, in the midst of disaster, both personal and communal, when we seek God’s Presence, and evince it by doing God’s will, mitzvot, which feel like rewards.
Mitzvot are expressions of God’s desire for us, and opportunities for us to invoke God’s Presence in our simplest of deeds. In addition to the intrinsic reward, our behavior is an expression of God’s will, doing God’s work with our own hands. I am comforted by God’s reassurance in this week’s Torah portion that God is always here for us, wanting to dwell among us, to be our God and to have us as God’s people. I am comforted by the Holy One’s expression of desire to be in relationship with us. God is waiting for us to return, to find our way back to doing that which we all know is right and good and decent, and to seeing God’s Presence in that which we do.
If we can see the holiness of the works of our own hands, and the ways our behaviors are expressions of the Divine Will, we will see the blessings, even when they are housed in a shell of what appears to be curses. May we find God’s Presence dwelling among us as expressed by the work of our own hands. May we all find the ways to reflect God’s Presence, and in so doing, bring blessings to others. As we close the book of Leviticus, may we open our hearts to the possibilities of life in relationship with the Holy One.
105 34. The Spiritual Wasteland: Parshat Bamidbar Numbers 1:1 – 4:20
Language is really important to me. I generally speak English, unless I get lucky enough to find someone with whom I can converse in the only other language I know, Hebrew. I don’t speak Spanish, French, Russian or German. I don’t know a word of Swahili, and have never understood Japanese or Chinese. I find Arabic confusing. And I do not speak Latin.
This list of my ignorance is far from all-inclusive; I’m ignorant about a lot of other things, too. I can’t design buildings, and have no idea of what makes my computer work. I would never attempt brain surgery, or auto mechanics. I have never really seen what a virus looks like, or a human DNA cell, and as for my knowledge of rocket science, I have to admit, I know nothing.
I’m not an expert in British literature of the 16th century, and, to be honest, I cannot name all of the Presidents on the Unites States in order. I don't know how to play Bridge, and I am not really clear on all of the rules of Football. I have never played the violin, drums, or tuba and wouldn’t know where to begin with a bassoon. My abilities in the fields, in planting wheat or hops or barley or corn or anything else I know what to do with once it comes home from the grocery store, is nil. Give me a tractor; I’ll give you no crops.
In sum, there is a lot about which I know very little. I readily and openly admit that I don't know everything there is to know about Judaism. I have not read every page of the Talmud (in fact, few people have, so I don’t feel that guilty) I have not read every medieval text, or studied the laws of precisely how to do animal sacrifices, and have only begun to taste how little I know about mysticism.
This list is far from exhaustive, but it is instructive. None of us knows everything, and yet so many of us walk around as though we did. So many of us pretend that we could do other people’s jobs better than they, even though I doubt I would really do much better as bank teller than the incredibly slow person whose line I was stuck in. If only the other person were blessed with all of my wisdom, s/he would easily see how to do his or her job better! And, all too often, we really believe that with neither knowledge, experience, schooling, background nor any training, we know better. We know better.
106 This week’s Torah portion, Bamidbar, the first portion from the 4th book of the Torah, literally named “in the desert”, talks about a census that God orders Moses to take, to number the people who came out of Egypt. In Bamidbar, Numbers, in the wilderness, there are the multitudes of the people, the numbers of people. And for forty years in this book, they wander and wander in the wilds, as individuals who are not yet unified into a nation. The book takes us from Mount Sinai through the wilderness until the people reach the boundaries of the land of Israel.
Bamidbar is not just a desert; it’s a social wasteland as well. There are no ties, which bind the people together. It’s not a book of unity, of one number, but a book of numbers - of disunity. There are constant rebellions against God and Moses. In this book, we read about conflict, and confrontation; unending whining and kvetching at poor old Moses.
According to Rabbi Edward Feinstein, in Bamidbar, there are no shared values, no shared dreams, most of all no shared words. The leaders speak, and no one listens. The leaders lead, but no one follows, except in all kinds of other, fractured directions. It’s a noisy book, filled with lots of yelling and screaming and arguing.
In the wilderness, all these people all knew more than everyone else, and therefore didn’t need to listen to anyone else. In the wilderness, there was lots of pride and lots of self-respect, but no humility, no respect for others. In the wilderness, the people acted like they belonged there and like chaos was the right way to behave. In the wilderness no one depended on others for support or wisdom or expertise - they all knew it all. It was a social wilderness, with no one needing, heeding or caring about others.
None of us knows everything, and none of us has the right to act like we do. None of us is without knowledge, yet none of us is finished learning more. None of us is alone in this world, and our rights, abilities, desires or hopes do not outweigh everyone else’s simply because we are louder or more powerful. The Book of Numbers, Bamidbar, is a book of wandering in the wilderness. The wandering and the kvetching and the misery of that trek in the desert is made all the more intolerable by the lack of unity and the lack of concern for other people, demonstrated by the wanderers. They are numbers in the wilderness, not a people in the wilderness. If there’s anything this book should teach us, it’s humility, knowing our place, and knowing that each of us, as an individual, is also part of something larger. As individuals within the whole, perhaps we should show some respect both for how little we know, and for the talents, wisdom and abilities of others. 107
It’s a good thing that this book, Bamidbar, is followed by Devarim, Deuteronomy, the book that brings the chaos into order, the division into vision. Devarim contains the words of the shema in it, the command to listen. It’s a book filled with the calm of consensus and unity.
May it be Your will, Holy One our God, that we all learn how little we know, and once we recognize our limitations, that we begin to walk in the wilderness of our lives in humility. May our journey in this wilderness lead us to the promised land of respect for one another, and may we draw strength from each other where we would have shown disrespect before. May we constantly work to benefit our entire people, and may we begin, to show the courtesy and respect and humility our ancestors lacked in the wilderness, Bamidbar. 108 35. Bless Me: Parashat Naso Numbers 4:21 – 7:89
A few years ago, when I was still in Rabbinical School, I visited a family sitting shiva. I sat and chatted with an exceedingly elderly man, a relative of the deceased. He had been brought to the shiva house from his nursing home by his son. He spoke in a mixture of Yiddish and Yiddish accented English and remarkably good Hebrew. We chatted for a while in all these languages, though my Yiddish is not very good. I learned a little about the “Old Country” whence he came, and his life’s experiences. After a while, I noted that it was getting late, and I had a long trip ahead of me.
As I stood to go, he looked at me and said with incredible longing, “Rabbi, bless me before you go.” I was taken aback by his request. At first, I thought I was simply unqualified to “bless” him, I was only a rabbinical student. Then I thought, “maybe I don’t know how to bless him”. I wanted to ask how he would like to be blessed. I thought of Spock, from Star Trek, and holding up my hands the way he did in the position we attribute to priests, and saying “live long and prosper”.
But this old man had done both: he lived long and appeared to have prospered. And he knew, as did everyone else in the room, that it was very likely that they would be gathering for the shiva in his memory very soon. And the pressure was on me, since now everyone was sort of watching to see what I would do.
I took his hands and said: “May God bless you and keep you! May God deal kindly and graciously with you! May God’s favor be upon you, and may you be given peace.”
He replied, “Now say it in Hebrew”. I did, now feeling all the more unqualified, and he sighed, kissed my hands, smiled and sat back in his chair.
This completely freaked me out. How could I, a lowly rabbinical student, say the official “priestly” blessing for this old man? Who was I to bless him at all? And why did it have so much meaning for my elderly friend?
This week’s Torah portion, Naso, contains this blessing. But it is followed with this line: Thus they will link My name with the people of Israel, and I will bless them.” So, it wasn’t the priests who were actually blessing the people; they were merely serving as conduits for God’s blessing. Common practice indicates 109 that all of us, not just priests or rabbis or “holy men” can serve as vehicles for God’s blessings, establishing the link between God’s name and the people.
“Live long and prosper” the Vulcan blessing from Star Trek is a good summary of the first two lines of the blessing in our Torah portion. But it misses the most important concept – peace, shalom. God blessing you, keeping you, being gracious to you may all refer to practical and physical, material things. But peace is an entirely different concept. Too bad the Vulcans missed it.
Peace, shalom can be seen on three levels, which may be a hint as to why there are three phrases in the blessing. The first is shalom with oneself. To be blessed with peace may be to find the peace necessary to live within your own skin, to live with your physical conditions, compulsions and habits, to live with the way your life is going. This is the kind of peace where you recognize that whatever you have is enough, and you find contentment in it, without hunting for more.
The second level of peace can be external to yourself, to accepting those things, people, places, possessions, experiences in your life over which you have no ultimate control and finding a way to live with these parts of your life. Shalom is completion, wholeness in our relationships with other people and the world we live in. Some people refer to this level of peace as “harmony” - sharing, blending, mixing, joining to create a peace with others and the world that you can almost hear.
The third level of peace is the shalom we might be able to find with God, with the Universe, with powers and forces which are totally beyond us. Finding this level of peace is often the hardest thing for us to do: to find the humility to walk with God at our side, without trying to get God to do our will. Ultimately this peace requires surrendering ourselves to do that which God would want us to do, including being vehicles of God’s blessings for others.
I chose the right blessing for my elderly friend, who was clearly seeking peace with himself as he recognized that his life’s experiences had to be enough, and as he found peace with the loss of another member of his family, and as he found “shalom” with God, whose kindness and grace led him now to the blessing he sought.
May we all be blessed with shalom on each of these levels, and may we all serve as the links whereby God may bless humanity. 110 Shavuot, The Festival of God’s Love
Shavuot, more than any other holiday on our calendar, is the holiday that affirms God loves us. God’s love is permanent, unshakable, unconditional. Because of God’s love, God gives us Torah, the guide for our lives and the route to meaning and hope. The gift of Torah is contingent: God expects us to struggle with Torah, to find its deepest meanings. It’s not given as an end in itself, but rather as the first step in a process that leads to our reciprocation.
We call Shavuot the Time of the Giving of our Torah, z’man matan torataynu, but that is not the same as receiving the Torah. God gave Torah once, but we receive and reciprocate in a continuous way. We also call Shavuot hag habikkurim, the festival of the first fruits, which are reserved as our gifts to God.
But God doesn’t need gifts from us. The bikkurim are God’s way of letting us connect to what is holy: giving and receiving at the same time. We receive Torah and we give back, physically with bikkurim, and spiritually through doing mitzvot. We translate mitzvot differently, from commandments to good deeds, depending upon whether we see the things we’re supposed to do as our choices or as God’s demands. The tradition of spending the entire eve of Shavuot in study is about getting started in the ongoing mitzvah of reciprocation of God’s love.
When we do mitzvot, they are their own reward. The reward is in the doing, in the moment when we actually do what we know is right. Our prayerbook tells us that God has given us Torah and mitzvot because God loves us (ahavat olam in the evening service or ahava rabbah in the morning service). When we do the things God wants us to be doing, we get to experience God’s love. God loves us no matter what; but doing mitzvot enables us to feel the love. Every time you perform a mitzvah, from saying a blessing to remembering the Shabbat, to learning a Jewish text, to giving money or time to helping other people, you are experiencing some of God’s love. Mitzvot = God’s love.
On Shavuot, we read a metaphor for this loving, dynamic relationship: the Book of Ruth. It’s the story of the love of two people, symbolizing God’s love for us. We are all Naomi in her deepest despair. Having lost all everything, Naomi can’t find anything to hope for. She sees herself as bitter, empty. Ruth accompanies her in her despair, commits herself to being a part of Naomi’s life, no matter what. Ruth says: “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you dwell, I will dwell.” Ruth is the symbol for God, standing with us, bringing us hope, strength and assurance even in our worst moments. Naomi provides 111 Ruth with an opportunity to give love and support, and Ruth provides for Naomi’s needs, showing her that hope is the only antidote for despair. Both women give, and in so doing, both women receive.
May it be Your will, Holy One, God of our ancestors that we receive and give Torah, give and take spiritual nourishment, love and hope. May we continue to be blessed with the ability to experience Your love by doing mitzvot, learning to be humble in the presence of Your wisdom. May we find healing and wholeness in words of Torah, reminding us always of Your love.
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36. Kvetch, Kvetch, Kvetch: Parshat B’ha’alot-ha Numbers 8:1 – 12:16
Things weren’t always good for Moses in leading the people out of Egypt and bringing them, 40 years later, to the edge of the Promised Land. It wasn’t just that Moses couldn’t read a map. The big problem was that he was leading a bunch of chronic kvetches. First the Egyptians were pursuing them, so they kvetched; then they came to Mount Sinai and they kvetched that God’s voice was too loud and too scary - better Moses should get Torah for them and come back with it. Then they kvetched because Moses took so long getting Torah, and they ended up forcing Aaron to create a golden calf for them to worship. The people kvetched about the lack of water a few times. They kvetched about the food, and got manna, which tasted like anything they wanted, but they still kvetched in this week’s Torah portion, B‘ha’a lot-ha, that they wanted some meat. They even went so far as to say they had things better in Egypt: at least there they could go out to dinner occasionally and get nice kosher Kentucky Fried Chicken or something!
In addition to the whole people’s kvetching, even Moses’ family starts ragging on him. Near the end of this week’s Torah portion, Miriam and Aaron kvetch about the woman Moses married, Tziporah. All in all, it wasn’t a great week for Moses.
So what did Moses do? He kvetched – to God! Here’s what Moses said: “Why, God, have You dealt so badly with me, Your servant, and why have I not enjoyed Your favor? Why have You laid the burden of this people on me?” What did I do to deserve all of this? “Did I conceive of all this people, and did I bear them, that you should say to me ‘Carry them in your bosom like a nurse carries a baby, to the land that You have promised as an oath to their ancestors?’... I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If You are going to deal thus with me, better You should kill me, I beg You, and let me see no more of this wretchedness.”
Poor Moses. He was indeed getting a raw deal. But he was also being a leader who was alone in the job. No leader, not even Moses, our most skilled and capable teacher, could work alone. In fact none of us, leader or not, can overcome every obstacle alone. Moses learns that he has to ask for help, to understand his strengths and weaknesses, and to understand those of others. He needs to build on his own strengths, and let others fill in for his weaknesses. Getting others to help is not a sign of weakness - it’s a sign of strength and understanding that we are just human beings. Even Moses was “only” human! Moses 113 knew he couldn’t do his job alone. He sought the help of God, and other people, including 70 elders to help him do his job.
Many of us are faced with challenges. Some of us feel our challenges are as intense for us as Moses’ were for him. Sometimes we feel like the only response is to kvetch like Moses: “It’s too much for me!” Maybe we can learn from this week’s Torah portion that if Moses was only human, and needed other people to help out, it’s actually okay for us to have and to express precisely that need in our own lives as we try to deal with our own challenges.
Rather than kvetching (which inevitably will happen as we take on or experience that which really is too much for us as individuals) we need to reach out, to ask for, and to receive, the help we need. If Moses could do it, so can we. We can do amazing things with the help of others, and with God’s help.
May it be Your will, Holy One, our God and God of our ancestors, that we understand that none of us can do everything. Give us the courage to face our own limits, and to seek assistance when we need it. Help us to learn that two can be better than one, and that the help we receive might be just what we needed. And help us to turn to You, even without kvetching, to find the strength, comfort and hope You offer.
Allow others to help you and you will find a path to shalom (with no need for kvetching). 114 37. Catastrophic Conclusions: Parshat Shelah Leha Numbers 13:1 – 15:41
Despite all odds, somehow the optimist can win out. This week's Torah portion is about this theme. In parshat shelah leha, Moses sends 12 spies into the land of Israel to check it out. Their mission was to see what the land was like – good soil or bad, forested or plain, and to find out what the inhabitants of the land were like – strong or weak, few or many.
After 40 days, ten of the spies come back and say that the people who inhabit the land were powerful, the cities are fortified and very large. "We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we." The ten spies then spread the word that the country they scouted out is one that devours its settlers. “All of the people are giants, and we looked like grasshoppers next to them.”
Two of the ten, Joshua and Caleb disagreed. They said, "let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it."
Joshua and Caleb saw the challenge, but they had no fear. They saw the richness of the land, the possibilities of it, and most importantly, they saw that they were working in partnership with God. With that kind of partnership, how can you go wrong? They took an optimistic point of view, looked at the glass and saw it half-full rather than half-empty. It wasn't just guess work- it was a leap of faith to believe in themselves, in their people, and their God.
It's too bad the Israelites didn't believe them. Because they rebelled once again against God and Moses, they were condemned to wander for forty years in the desert, one year for each day that the spies were checking out the land. These people were just not ready for living in freedom in their own land.
All this for not attempting to see the light, the beauty, the richness of life amidst the struggle, the pain and the heartache. There's a real lesson here for us. We have to somehow be aware of the challenges we face, understand the odds, and yet, sometimes despite the odds, go after what we know is right and true and good. Sometimes we have to make good come from difficult or bad, right from wrong, health from illness, strength from weakness, peace from uncivil unrest. If we sit back and feel our despair, all we’ll experience is the loss.
115 We all see things from different perspectives. This week’s Torah portion is a word of caution to see things from more than one side, and to have trust in the things you see as well as the things you can’t see. We come to “catastrophic conclusions” because we don't look at the other perspectives, and, I think, because we don't trust those other possibilities. Sometimes, it’s more comfortable for us to continue looking at something from the negative than turning it upside down and seeing it from another angle, in another way.
The spies all saw the same land, the same inhabitants of that land, and the difficulty of conquering the land. Joshua and Caleb both also saw, at the same time, that God was with the Israelites, and conquering the land was assured. It was just a matter of how. When we give someone or something the benefit of the doubt, when allow ourselves to get away from the negative, we are acting in a way similar to Joshua and Caleb, we are seeing God on the other side - God is in the benefit of the doubt.
What Moses expected from the spies was that they would trust in God’s promise of success and figure out ways to be partners with God in achieving God’s will - doing whatever was possible to make God’s will happen. We become partners in God’s will as well, when we avoid catastrophic conclusions and see that there are many ways to look at a lot of life’s experiences. This enables us to work with people with whom we might not agree, to understand that which was terrifying to us, and to grow as human beings.
According to Bachya ben Asher, “The light of a candle is useful when it leads you. It is useless when it trails behind you.” When you set foot in new terrain you need a lot of light. There’s a lot of darkness in the unknown, and you don't want to lose your way.
May it be Your will, Holy One of Blessing, that we keep light of Torah shining brightly in front of us to enable us to see where we are going, and to trust in it. When we allow the light of Torah to guide us in our experiences, and the conclusions we draw in them, may we see Your Holy Presence in all that we do, at times of doubt and at times of confidence. 116 38. Rebellion can be Good: Parsdhat Korah Numbers 16:1 – 18:32
Back in the days when the only way to change the channel on a black and white TV was to get up and turn a knob, in the days when telephones had dials and the only keyboards were on pianos and typewriters, in the ancient days when there were movies you could watch sitting in your car, I became a Bar Mitzvah and memorized this week’s Torah portion for recitation before everyone who was important to me and everyone who would endlessly find ways of teasing me about it if I goofed.
There was a time there, back in those days when my favorite character was Fred Flintstone, that I was not a rabbi, and was not even thinking in that direction. When I was 13, I really wasn’t all that concerned with religious stuff. I memorized my Torah portion because that’s what everyone had to do. I liked to sing in the Temple choir but hated Hebrew School with a passion.
In preparation for my Bar Mitzvah, I did exactly what I had to do. I memorized the texts, knew the blessings, and that was it. I did not read the translation of the text, and had no idea what it was about. I did have to read the Haftarah in English with the Hebrew, but the English was the stuff we had in the Hertz Humash, King James English. It was an incomprehensible to me as the Hebrew, except it had the line said by Samuel “Whose ox or ass have I taken.” I struggled with how to read that line without cracking up.
Rabbi Joachim Prinz told me that this Torah portion was about a guy named Korah who rebelled against Moses. He well knew who I was and what I had been up to all those years. The topic of a rebellion was not all that distant from who I was. Rabbi Prinz told me that Korah was not all that evil. He rebelled for what he thought was right. It was ok to rebel for what I believe in, to take risks, to stand up for my beliefs according to Rabbi Prinz. But he also noted that Korah failed in his rebellion because he did it in all the wrong ways. Korah embarrassed Moses and Aaron, bringing about unrest among the people, and ultimately achieving none of his goals. It was ok to rebel, according to Rabbi Prinz, as long as I did it better than Korah did, as long as I learned the lesson from his story, to rebel to win.
So all these years, I have returned to the Korah story to try to figure it out. It's not an easy story. What makes it difficult for us is that so much of it doesn't make sense. What is Korah after? Korah says one thing - fairness and equality among the entire people of Israel in their access to God, and Moses responds to Korah's words by saying that Korah is after special rights for the Levites. Korah says "You have gone 117 too far! For all the community is holy, and God is in their midst. Why do you, Moses and Aaron set yourselves above the people?"
Moses says Korah has gone too far (using Korah 's own words). But Korah didn't actually go far enough. He never got to say what his complaints were about! Moses makes a bet with Korah as to whose offerings will be accepted, Korah 's or Aaron's. Korah takes him up on that bet, for reasons which make no sense, since surely Korah knew the deck was stacked against him and he couldn’t win an offering contest with Aaron who had God's stamp of approval. So why Korah went along with the bet is anyone's guess. Korah lost the bet and was consumed by the fire he set.
It's dangerous when we start to believe our own lies, like Korah did. He projects his own shortcomings onto Moses. For example, he says that Moses "lifts himself up above the people". He accuses Moses, who is famous for his humility, of being arrogant. But it is Korah who is overreaching. The very things Korah says he wants for everyone else are the things he denies by his own behavior with Moses. He creates a disaster for everyone while claiming to be working on their behalf.
Rabbi Janet Marder suggests that this story teaches us not about the struggles between these two men, but two sides of the same struggle with which we all live. Each of us contains a Moses, the part of ourselves that is courageous, right, aware, full of faith and trust, ready to take on challenges. The Moses part looks toward the future with confidence and assurance. And then there's the Korah part of ourselves, the purely negative energy we have inside waiting to pounce and lead us to our own destruction. The Korah inside leads us to be indiscreet, incorrect, harmful to ourselves and others. The Korah inside helps us to sabotage every good thing we try to do. This is the Korah of rebellion without a good cause, poorly expressed rebellion, uncontrolled rejection of the status quo for the sake of just doing so. Our inner Korah saps our strength, kills our enthusiasm, robs our souls.
It's for that reason that it's important to see Korah so utterly destroyed by fire. It's only when Korah is destroyed that Moses is able to go on with the journey toward the future. And it's only when we confront our own Korah s, and overcome them, that we can get beyond that negative energy and achieve our goals. Sometimes our shortcomings, our problems, our challenges are really reflections of our own internal Korah. Like Korah, we see what's wrong in other people, but what we really see in them is ourselves. It's easier to find fault with others than to fix what's wrong inside of us. It’s easier to rebel against others than to recognize the places in our own lives where we need to turn ourselves around. 118
The rabbis teach, "Who is courageous? Those who overcome their own fears”. People who overcome their own internal Korah are courageous. We need our greatest strength for self-mastery, to do battle with the inner Korah, who saps our enthusiasm, mocks our dreams, stunts our growth, poisons our relationships. May God give us the wisdom to figure out which is which, and the courage to win those battles which are for the sake of heaven, for good purposes.
119 39. Life is what Happens when Your Plans Change: Parshat Hukat Numbers 19:1- 22:1
Last week we read about the biggest rebel in the Torah, Korah, but the tsurus (troubles) of our people doesn’t stop because just one rabble-rouser is gone. So far in the Book of Numbers, in the desert, there has been unending kvetching (complaining) from the people and a complete disregard for Moses as a human being. It has truly been a story of a wasteland, a spiritual desert. In this week's Torah portion, Hukat, we find our leader and teacher, Moses, at the lowest point in his life. First, his beloved sister Miriam dies. Miriam, who saved his life as a baby, who led the dancing after crossing the Sea of Reeds, who has been at his side all of his life. Then, instead of the community's tears for her loss, Moses confronts the assembled people of Israel, once again kvetching, this time for water. He gets no break to sit shiva, no time off to grieve.
Moses asks for God's help, and is instructed to speak to a rock, and it would give water. But instead of speaking to the rock, he speaks to the people, actually, he yells at the people, calling them rebels, and strikes the rock, which brings forth water and disaster. Instead of an outpouring of water, the outburst came from Moses, and was followed up by yet another major loss for Moses. For his outburst, he is told he will never enter the Promised Land.
Moses loses Miriam. Then he loses the dream of entering the Promised Land. You can just tell that Moses is “shell-shocked”, stunned, numbed, overwhelmed by his grief and sorrow. And then his brother, the man to whom we assume Moses was closest throughout his life, the man who was Moses’ partner in getting the people out of Egypt, and who ran the ritual cult, his last remaining sibling, Aaron, dies. Moses is now truly alone with the people, and with God, in a physical wasteland that has turned into a spiritual wasteland for him. Surrounded by alligators, he’s having trouble figuring out how to swim.
Just like Moses' tragic figure in this week's Torah portion, people living with serious illness are often also living with major, terrible, repeated loss. People living with serious illness sometimes lose everything that is important to them as they struggle to just live. First and foremost, they lose their health and their sense of personal security. But as Moses demonstrated with the terrible loss of entry into the Promised Land, loss is much more than just death. It's living with intense disappointment. People living with illness can lose their jobs, financial security, health insurance, homes, daily routines, mental capacities, appetites, drives, even hope for the future. People living with serious illness sometimes lose their family's or 120 friends’ support, because people who were once important in their lives seem to reject them for who they are now, or for fear of having to watch them die. In the process of losing their health, many people lose their sense of dignity, humanity, being an active, vital part of living on this earth.
When I look at this week's Torah portion, I see a Moses who is tragic and heroic. He has survived multiple, significant, gut-wrenching losses, and yet, somehow, he picks himself up and goes on. Not happily, maybe not with the joy he might have once experienced, without his loved ones and without his dreams, but somehow he goes on. He goes on with God. Subsequent to these multiple losses, the people of Israel and Moses go right on ahead, bickering and arguing, struggling along the same path they are used to. They fight with each other and go on to wage wars with the people around them. They continue moving from place to place, oasis to oasis.
But Moses does something with multiple loss that is very instructive to us: he seems to come to acceptance. Tempting as it might have been, he doesn’t sink into unrelenting depression, into isolation, bitterness or defeat. Moses goes on to lead the people. He knows that he can’t enter the land they are going to have to conquer, but he leads them to it anyway. As he grieves for his own personal losses, he continues to hope for his people, to bring them to the Promised Land. He literally leads them from the worst of the wastelands to the place where hope abounds.
Moses teaches us that life is what happens when your plans change. Life is messy, sometimes filled with way too much challenge, way too much loss. Yet Moses continues to live his life even after significant losses, even after many of us would find it all too discouraging. Moses demonstrates a kind of resiliency that we all could learn from. We don’t have to be happy that our futures have changed. All we can do is try to live our futures – to rewrite them, as it were, living with the changes that we would not have chosen.
Moses teaches us that significant, multiple loss, due to illness, death and that which is beyond our control, doesn’t mean that life is over. Moses’ hope changes as his life changes, and in acceptance of the changes is his life renewed. May we all be blessed with a piece of his wisdom and courage to greet life anew, even when it isn’t what we expected or wanted.
121 40. God and a Donkey: Parshat Balak Numbers 22:2 – 25:9
At the end of what was once my favorite movie -Love and Death, Woody Allen’s character, Boris, is standing in a prison cell waiting to be executed for attempting to murder Napoleon. He prays to God to show him a sign, anything, a reason to believe in God’ existence. So he sees a vision of an angel with tremendous wings, and hears a deep booming voice which tells him that he has nothing to fear, at the last minute Napoleon will pardon him for his crimes. At dawn, Boris, now confident that he has God's blessings and guarantee of reprieve, saunters off to the wall for execution by firing squad, refuses a blindfold, asks if anyone has gotten a phone call from the Emperor, and is shot.
Boris finally had the vision of God that he was searching for all of his life. We learn from the movie that God has a sense of humor, could promise one thing and do another. There's a Yiddish expression: people plan, and God laughs.
Boris’ vision is not so foreign to us, since we have a very similar experience in this week's Torah portion. Balak, the king of Moab, wanted desperately to curse the Israelites. So he called in his expert in blessings and curses, Balaam, and told him to curse the Israelites. Balaam first said “no” after asking God. Balak repeated the order and Balaam made a deal with God: he'd go, but he had to do exactly what God would tell him to do.
So, at dawn, Balaam goes off to curse the Israelites, or so Balak thinks. God, on the other hand, isn't so sure that Balaam is going to cooperate, so God places and angel with a fiery sword blocking the path for Balaam and his donkey. The donkey sees the angel. Balaam doesn't. The donkey refuses to budge. Three times Balaam beats the donkey, but it won't budge. Finally the donkey says to Balaam, "What have I done to you that you have beaten me these three times?" Balaam is really mad now, and says "You have made a mockery of me. If I had a sword I'd kill you!" The donkey says to Balaam, "Look, am I your usual donkey that you have been riding on day in and day out? Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?" Balaam says "no", and then he sees the angel. The angel and Balaam talk, reaffirming that Balaam has to do everything God says.
The important part here, for me, was that the donkey had the vision of the angel of God, and Balaam didn't, even though Balaam had the reputation as a prophet. Unlike Boris, Balaam gets a sign, and misses 122 it completely at first. He doesn't wonder about his talking donkey or the bizarre nature of his behavior? I don't know about you, but if my donkey talked, I would hope that I'd notice. Until God reveals the meaning of a talking donkey, the message eludes Balaam. Sure, we’re used to the idea, after Mr. Ed. But what did Balaam know from Mr. Ed? Instead of even reacting to the talking donkey, Balaam engages in conversation with it. Balaam says to the donkey is that he’s angry at the donkey for mocking him. This guy is worried about being mocked by a donkey?
There's a lesson here for all of us. God's Presence is here for all of us to see, if we can discern that Presence. The text says that God finally uncovered Balaam's eyes, so he could see the angel. With our eyes closed to the world around us, we see nothing. And so often we walk around, sightless, refusing to see our lives for what they are, for what they have become. When God opens your eyes, you see the world for what it is and what it can be.
There are three different kinds of visions described so far. A false vision, by Woody Allen, assuming that God likes practical jokes, a real vision seen and expressed by a donkey, and a vision which Balaam has once his eyes are uncovered, once he's able and willing to see what is so plainly obvious that it can stop a donkey.
Are we seeing the visions of God which are so plainly here, in front of our own faces? Are our eyes opened or closed to the world, to what surrounds us, to the holy and sacred which can be found in the little things, in messages we don't bother to see? If we walk around like Boris looking for the big message, we can be confused or misled by it. When the message comes from the small things, the unexpected places, even from donkeys, maybe those are the messages we ought to notice.
There is also a message here about the means God uses to communicate with us. If even a donkey can recognize and respond to the Presence of God, perhaps we should be more careful about the ways in which we dismiss other people who seemingly have less wisdom to offer than the usual donkey. The rabbis teach in Pirkei Avot, “ Who is wise? The person who learns from anyone.” We can learn from, and even gain insight from, a person whom we might perceive as an “ass ”.
Ultimately Balaam gets to the point where he's supposed to curse Israel, and he says "How can I curse people who God does not want to curse? How can I doom, when God hasn't?" So he blesses them instead. Balak goes nuts - he's paying Balaam to curse the Israelites, and Balaam blesses them! Not only that, he 123 does it on three separate occasions. Finally, Balaam says "Blessed are they who bless Israel; cursed are they who curse Israel." Balak never gets his money's worth.
May it be Your will, Holy One our God and God of our ancestors, that we open our eyes to Your divine Presence which surrounds us at all times, and see Your works in our lives, in our own experiences, in our own interactions. Open our eyes, our hearts and our minds to be aware of Your Presence and Your messages which surround us, from all kinds of human sources as well as natural sources, at all times. Let us see Your Presence and hear Your voice even in the most unexpected places, from the most unexpected sources, wherever we may travel. 124 41. In God’s Light: Parshat Pinhas Numbers 25:10 – 30:1
I was watching “Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark” for the gazillionth time. It’s a really great movie, though historically flawed. After all, the Temples were destroyed by the peoples of the East or the North (Babylonians, Greeks, Assyrians, Romans, etc.). While it may be cinematically a great idea, with the pyramids and all the terrific scenery, the Ark could not have been brought to Egypt by the invaders. It would not have been carried to Egypt by well-meaning Hebrews who wanted to hide it from invaders. They had plenty of better hiding places in Israel, like the caves at Kumran (overlooking the Dead Sea). It is beyond imagination that they would bring it there, of all places! Other than that major flaw, the depiction of the Ark is terrific. The details are good right down to what seems like an incantation said by the bad guys when they open the Ark, using an Aramaic text we say before opening the Ark in most traditional congregations.
It’s a great movie, but it got me thinking: what happened to all the rest of the stuff? The Temple was filled with all kinds of ritual objects – where are they? Surely all of them could not have been destroyed. Most of the Temple implements were for the sacrificial cult which we read a lot about in this wek’s Torah portion, Pinhas. We don’t make animal sacrifices, so what’s left? Which objects are still in use today? Torah, for sure, and the Bible, although we’re not sure how or when Torah was read in the sacrificial cult. We know Psalms were used as ritual texts for the priests, and we still have many of them. The holidays described in this week’s Torah portion we still observe, but without the sacrifices. But there isn’t much else.
Well, maybe there is. The Temples, and before them the portable Tabernacle used while we were wandering in the desert, included an Eternal Light, a flame to keep alive at all times. In every synagogue today this symbol remains in use. It’s the only symbol I can think of that is essential for every congregation, marking the place where God’s Presence is invited to dwell – the place where we go to be in that Presence.
Why the Eternal Light? According to Psalms 36:10, “By Your light do we see light.” Remember that in the first creation story in the Bible, God creates light first, and that light has nothing to do with the sun, moon and stars, since they aren’t created until the fourth day. The light created is light that comes from God. It’s that light which is symbolized by the Eternal Light. We can’t see light, but using light other 125 things become visible to us. We don’t see God’s Presence – we see God’s creations, God’s image reflected in humanity. In God’s light there might be a clearer perception of our world, and our place in it.
The Eternal Light is also a symbol of warmth – the glow of the flame warming our hearts. The flame is not the remaining object from the Temples, but the experience of the flame – its warmth, power, energy, movement continues. According to Rabbi Harold Kushner, “Fire is a process…of liberating the energy concealed in a lump of coal, a log of wood. And God is not an object, a physical being that can be located in a specific place. God is the process of liberating the potential energy, the potential compassion, the potential goodness in every one of us.” (Commentary on Parashat Tetzaveh)
The Eternal Light is a symbol of God’s Presence dwelling among us, helping us find our ways. May we all learn to find ways to see the world and ourselves utilizing the light of God and may we be constantly warmed by the glow. 126 42. Jewish Calendar 101: Parshat Matot Numbers 31:1 – 32:42
One of the most common questions we start asking around this time of year is: when are High Holy Days? Why is that a question? Why are they not the same date as every other year? Well, in actuality, they are on the same date every year, but on the Jewish, lunar, calendar. What is a lunar calendar? This week's Torah portion outlines the dates for the holidays of the Jewish year, but I suspect Jewish Calendar 101 could help a lot of people understand our calendar better.
As we all know, the solar, secular calendar has 365 1/4 days per year. That’s based on the number of days it takes for the earth to orbit the sun. But when Judaism started keeping track of dates and time, everyone knew that the world was flat, and that the sun rose and set, but mainly as a decoration in the sky. The sun’s schedule was permanent and fixed. But the moon had phases, and you could count the days in each phase, and count from one new moon to the next. It’s so much easier to count to 28 or 29 than to 365!
The big problem with the lunar cycle is that it usually takes 29 1/2 days, based on the time it takes for the moon to complete one full cycle of phases, from no moon, to crescent, quarter, half, full moon and back again. The full moon is on the 14th day of each lunar cycle, new moon always the first day of moonlight. But 12 of these cycles only adds up to 354 days. (29.5 x 12 = 354)
The lunar year is 11 days shorter than the solar year! 11 days may not seem like much, but when you miss out on 11 days for a few years, a holiday which is intended for Spring would move back through Winter into Fall. Imagine Passover one year on April 1. The next year on March 19, then on March 8 and February 25 in subsequent years. Eventually, the Spring Holiday would be in the Fall.
To correct the difference between the calendars, we add a Leap Month (of 29 or 30 days) every 2 or 3 years, depending on the year. We call that extra leap month Adar II, since it always is inserted in the calendar between Adar, when Purim happens, and Nisan, when Passover happens. An extra day is also added to the calendar – changing 29-day months to 30-day months 6 times during the 19 years it takes for all this calculating to work out. Every 19 years there are 7 leap years, a total of 6,939 days in both calendars.
Confused? I’m not great at math either, but the important part to remember is that it does work out and whoever figured this out had a lot more time on his/her hands to cipher the details than we do! And 127 though they differ on the solar calendar, Rosh Hashanah is always on the first day of Tishre, which will always come out in the late summer (around early September).
All of this discussion about Jewish months and calendars is important, not because we’re supposed to be math geniuses or to really worry about the details of each year. It’s really an issue of learning how we measure time as Jews, and how the concept of holy time is involved. According to Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps the last century's greatest Jewish philosopher, in The Sabbath, "Judaism is a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time... the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to the holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events." We don't build the cathedrals of our neighbors - our cathedrals are in time - the holy events of the year, like Shabbat. As Jews, we know that Shabbat is holiness in time, that there is special time, separate time, which is totally different from all other time.
Heschel talks about Jewish ritual as being almost like an architectural form - in time. What we do as Jews is based not on things but on time, time of the day, time of the week, month, year. We mark days for remembrance. Remember the day we left Egypt, the day we stood at Mount Sinai, the Day of Judgment, the Day at the end of Days, when the Messiah will come. Shabbat is celebration of time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space. On Shabbat we become attuned to holiness in time. Once a week. Every week.
The Jewish calendar is a way of emphasizing part of what makes us unique as Jews, and what makes our observance of time holy. We only get to live each moment once, each day once, on a calendar which connects us with our ancient past, and emphasizes that each moment we live, we get to experience both as ordinary time and holy time. May it be Your will, Holy One, our God and God of our ancestors, that we continue to struggle to find true, current meanings of our ancient traditions, and that we learn to number our days and find within them the holiness of our time.
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Months of the Jewish year: Tishre - High Holidays, Sukkot, Simhat Torah Heshvan - no holidays Kislev - Hannukah Tevet - No major holidays Shevat - Tu B'shvat: The New Year for Trees Adar (I and sometimes II) Purim Nisan - Passover, Yom Hashoah Iyar - Israel Independence Day, L'ag B'Omer Sivan - Shavuot Tammuz - no major holidays Av - Tisha B'av Elul - no major holidays 129 43. Places of Refuge: Parshat Massai Numbers 33:1 – 36:13
Can you name the Ten Commandments in order? Give it a try, then read this list.
1. I am the Holy One your God who brought you out of Egypt, the house of bondage. 2. You shall have no other gods beside Me; no idols. 3. Your will not swear falsely by God. 4. Remember (observe) the Shabbat to keep it holy. 5. Honor your parents 6. You will not murder. 7. You will not commit adultery. 8. You will not kidnap. 9. You will not bear false witness against your neighbor. 10. You will not covet anything your neighbor has.
Those of you checking your Bibles, will note that this is an interpretive translation. You might remember a bunch of “Thou shalt not”s, or that kidnap is not the literal translation of the 8th commandment. Some people might be hunting for “taking God’s name in vain”, or trying to figure out whether they covet any of their neighbor’s stuff. But I want to focus on the 6th commandment: murder. That’s actually the literal translation. The commandment never was about killing, and there’s a difference, as this week’s Torah portion points out. What’s the difference between “murder” and “killing”?
This week’s Torah portion Massai includes laws regarding homicide and manslaughter. Murder is premeditated and the other is accidental. In both situations, there is an expectation of punishment of the person who has caused the death of another. A person who is guilty of murder is to be punished by death, and the person who is guilty of causing the accidental death of another is to go to one of the six cities of refuge, where he or she must remain until the death of the High Priest.
In our society, we can well understand the need to punish a murderer, but when it's an accidental death, many people think the person who caused the death should not be punished: it was an accident. When we can prove that the death is an accident, no one is punished. But we miss the point. If you or I caused the 130 accidental death of someone, don't you think we would feel the guilt, despite the fact that it was an accident?
I was once driving in the Mount Rainier National Forest outside of Seattle. I was going maybe ten miles an hour, and there was a deer going lots faster. It ran into the street directly in front of me, from a wall of woods. I hit the brakes, but, unfortunately, I didn't stop in time. Though the deer got up and ran away, I still feel guilty. It was an accident, bad timing, bad karma, whatever. But I'm sorry it happened. I became a vegetarian soon after that incident, and remained a veggie for more than seven years thereafter. An acccidental encounter with an animal, which didn’t even kill it had a real impact on my life. How much the more so if I, or you, would have caused the death of another person – accidentally! Do you really think your life could go on as normal, that you would feel no guilt?
The cities of refuge, for people who caused accidental death, served four purposes: (1) places to punish someone who had caused the death of another person, (2) places for the person who had caused the death to atone, to adjust to living with his/her guilt, to experience the remorse he or she had better feel when the death of another person is caused even by accident, (3) opportunities for passions to cool, so the family of the person who was killed will grow to accept their loss without having to deal with the person who may have accidentally led to the death and (4) demonstrated that human life is sacred, and even without evil intent, it injured the community when someone died accidentally by another's hands. The death of the High Priest, which would then free everyone from the cities of refuge, served as a communal expiation of all sins of accidental deaths. If the High Priest had been doing his job, praying for the people of Israel, accidents wouldn't happen. It's also a death for a death, even though the High Priest's death is of natural causes.
If accidental deaths must be so carefully atoned for, all these rules are set up for accidents, clearly murder, and the process for gaining justice in the event of murder, must be even more carefully taken care of by the community.
Murder, killing, and manslaughter are not the same thing. There were six cities of refuge for people who had committed manslaughter, plus any of the 42 Levite cities to which such a person could go.
131 There are six words in the shema, and 48 words in v’ahav-ta, the paragraph following the shema. The coincidence of numbers is no real coincidence. In ancient times, when our people occupied the land of Israel, they could find refuge among the Levites.
Today, we should search for and find refuge, strength, inspiration and hope in the words of the shema. When we cause pain in others, when we feel the pain of the guilt for our own inadvertent acts, when we recognize we have done wrong, even when we didn’t mean to do it, we can and should look to God for refuge from our guilt and our grief about ourselves. The cities of refuge may be gone, but the words of refuge, the welcoming arms of the Holy Presence of God, the shehinah, these words lead us and will never be gone. Listen, Israel, the Holy One is our God, the Holy One alone, is our refuge.
May we find the protection and refuge from that which is wrong and difficult in our own lives in the shelter of our prayers and of our Shabbat and holy days. May we find that which is holy and good in our lives in the refuge of the sheltering wings of God's Divine Presence.
132 44. Personal History: Parshat Devarim Deuteronomy 1:1 – 3:22
History. Can you define it? Narrative, annals, chronicles, records, stories, relations, memories? Is history always about the big stuff? Is history national, scientific, anthropologic, sociologic? Who decides what is history and what should be forgotten? Who decides what we as humanity remember and what we forget?
Let’s add another dimension to the question – what is a hero? A person who does something extraordinary? Is the person a normal person in the first place? Can anyone become a hero or is there something about the person in question that makes it all possible?
We all have personal history and personal heroes. I met a man who was 93, no longer conscious, but the people around him wanted me to know some of his history: he was the man who invented a polymer that led to the proliferation of plastics in the world. His invention changed the world, and they wanted me to know his place in history. They could point to something special that he did that changed the world. He got an award from the government of Japan.
I met another person who is in her 80s. She has told me a few times about when the National Council for Jewish Women paid for her trip to Pittsburgh so she could deliver a report on activities in the western region of the U.S. She still has the report. This took place in the 1940s and was, apparently, one of the high points of her life.
Everybody has a story. What is your personal history? If you could summarize a personal historical story in a few minutes, what story would you tell? What parts of your history are going to be remembered by your family and friends? What parts have you written down, shared, videotaped? Adding another dimension, again, who are your heroes? Have you told the story of their heroism? What makes these people your heroes?
There is a connection to this week’s Torah portion, Devarim, the first Torah portion of the last book of the Torah. In it, Moses tells his personal history and the Israelite people’s personal history. This book of the Torah is a summary – it’s about how Moses wants to be remembered and how Moses wants us to remember the special relationship he has brokered with God.
133 As we reflect on history, own personal histories and the history of the people Israel it seems that there are two ways to understand it: (1) a series of disconnected events, leading nowhere and meaning nothing, or (2) heading in a particular direction, leading somewhere. I think history has a direction and purpose. The future builds on the past. The stories of our future are built on the experiences of our past. The present, how we interpret the stories of our past, is directly linked to our vision of the future. No matter how we defined history above, it is a clue to how we will build and write our future stories, not because we are “doomed to repeat history” but because our experience/history often is comfortable to us, or at least what we know and understand, and we can continue to interpret in similar ways into the future.
Or we can look at our experience as an opportunity to go in completely different directions, “been there, done that.” As we look at our history, we can see where we went wrong, or right, and change our future based on these observations.
I don’t know about your personal history. You don’t know mine. But I do know that I am writing my future story on a daily basis, moment by moment, seeing my future through the ever-changing lens I use to look at my past. According to Rabbi Mordechai of Izbitz “The summit is not to be found up there, but here below – with us, inside us.” Rabbi Kerry Olitzky teaches, “Don’t look for heroes, mountains, and great achievements. They will elude you. Search out the simple treasures of life: good, honest people, a place to call home, and a favorite book. That’s enough to reach the mountaintop.”
Our rabbis teach that the hero is the person who overcomes his or her fears. (Pirkei Avot) Each of us has struggled to do that at different times in our lives, and each of us can write his/her own history to reflect on those moments when we were courageous, when we overcame our fears. Tell your history, look at it, and see how your future is based in it. Rewrite your future story with you, always, as the hero, overcoming your own fears, using your own experience, and your own strengths.
May it be Your will, Holy One of Blessing, that we find and share those unique treasures of our own personal histories with the people around us whom we love and about whom we care. May we experience and share the gratitude we have for the richness of our own histories and may our own futures be infused with an understanding of how truly blessed we have been throughout our own lives. 134 45. Just Listen 2: Parshat Va'et-hanan Deuteronomy 3: 23 - 7:11
Few of us reflect on how just six words from this week's Torah portion are supposed to change us, and are supposed to be reflected in our behavior, every day. The six words are the Shema. Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Ehad. Hear, Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One.
Shema. Hear. Listen. When you listen, you're supposed to focus. You have to understand, and come to know deeply, what the sounds mean. When I drive, I listen to the radio or CD. But if you asked me what I heard, unless I focus, I may not have heard anything. Sometimes when I listen to the news, I miss entire stories; my mind is elsewhere. Perhaps the correct translation is "Pay attention".
Shema acknowledges that the hardest thing for many of us is to listen. So many of us have so much to say! Unfortunately, so often that which is so important for us to say is not necessarily worth listening to. Shema says “stop it”. Be quiet. You don't know everything. Just listen, maybe you’ll learn something new, maybe you’ll hear something new. Shema says slow down, change your pattern of behavior, listen. As Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man once told me, “Don’t just do something, sit there!” Listen, Shema.
Yisrael. This sentence is directed at the people of Israel. It involves each of us, individually. Yisrael, in this sentence means take notice - I'm talking directly to you, not to other groups of people. This sentence is configured exclusively for people who are a part of Yisrael. You, me, our hearts and our souls. Pay close attention. This means all of us. This means you.
Adonai. The name of God, written in Hebrew letters yud hay/ vav hay, which can't be pronounced, because all the letters are vowels, and in Hebrew that just doesn't work. But it is the sound of breathing. According to Rabbi Larry Kushner, the holiest sound in the world is the sound of your own breathing. The letters in the name are all parts of the Hebrew verb for "to be". A good translation for it would be: "The One who Brings into Being all that is". In other words, God's name is the Name of Being.
In Genesis, we have two descriptions of the winds of God. In the first story of creation, ruah, the wind of God is blowing over the face of the depths before God created light. In the second creation story God breathes life into the nostrils of the first human being. Breath is life. In the First Book of Kings 19:11-12,
2 Based on ideas I learned from Rabbi Wayne Dosick, in Soul Judaism: Dancing with God into a New Era, Vermont, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1997. 135 we read "The Holy One passed by. There was a great and mighty wind; splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of God. But the Holy One was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, fire; but the Holy One was not in the fire. And after the fire, the soft barely audible sound of almost breathing.” There’s a good reason we don't know how to pronounce the word spelled out by the letters yud hay/ vav hay. How do you pronounce the sound of breath?
Shema Yisrael Adonai – listen, be quiet and hear the sound of your own breathing, the breath of God inside of you. You breathe 26,000 times a day. The Hebrew word for breath is neshama, the same word as “soul”. We breathe our souls into ourselves, the breath of God, thousands of times a day, and yet we miss its importance. God is breathing your soul into your body. Listen, Yisrael, and you will hear the presence of God in your own body.
Elohaynu means our God. Not your God or my God or their God. Our God. Possessive. God is our God, and we are God's possession. We are affirming that our God is a shared God. We are all children of, and equally loved by, the same God. We all share in the blessings of God’s spirit, neshama. Just as God and you are symbiotic, one, God is the same way with each and every person in this world. The spirit is what unifies us all in God’s presence. Listen, Israel, to the sound of your individual God as that Presence is breathed into the people next to you. As you love yourself, love them, for the breath, the neshama of God is in them too.
Adonai. There's that name of God again, twice in six words. Three out of the six words are references to God, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai. Can there be any doubt, if you are listening, as to where you can find your God? Find God in every breath you take, which you cannot see and you cannot touch, you can feel only with effort, or know when it’s missing. Very few of us have doubts about our breathing: we believe we are alive and we breathe. Maybe we should learn the message in our breath. We know it’s there. Breath is a symbol for God, Who put it there. As you have no doubt that you are breathing, have no doubt about God, Whose neshama you breathe. Want to know what God looks like? Look at yourself, look at everyone else. We are all reflections of the diverse ways in which that image is turned into a person.
Adonai ehad. Listen Israel, one. But what is one? Unique. Solo. Special. Holy. That one-ness can be hard for us. The Presence of God is referred to as the shehinah, which is a feminine form. God is seen as 136 having justice, a male attribute, but also full of mercy, female. Rahamim, mercy comes from the root word rehem, which means “womb”. God is one - male and female, Creator of all beings.
If there is one God, who is our God, shared by all, what does that imply about what we have to do? What is our relationship with the One? Listen, Israel, Adonai is Our God, Adonai is reflected in each of us, Adonai is unique. There is nothing else in the human imagination like God. Maybe if we begin to see how unique God is, we’ll stop trying to be God, or to order God around, and attempt to really understand God. Maybe when we become humble enough to see the uniqueness of God we’ll stop thinking we are so smart that we can judge God’s motives, instead of the other way around. The Holy One is so unique we have to recognize that we will never understand much beyond that.
May it be Your will Holy One, our God, that we find ways to unify all humanity in our understanding of what it means to be human and to be blessed by a relationship with a unique and loving God who gives us something to listen to, if only we tune in. May we continue to search for the meanings of the messages You have given us, and may we always strive to grow to reflect Your Presence in each of us.
137 46. Blessings are Exercises in Humility: Parshat Ekev Deuteronomy 7:12 – 11:25
We’re growing tomatoes in the back yard. In San Diego, it’s not always easy. If it’s hot and dry, the plants shrivel in minutes. If it’s cold and wet, the tomatoes turn black and mushy. The odd thing for me was in the picking and tasting. I was sort of leery of the tomatoes, maybe they were filled with bugs or worms or something yucky. After all, fruit that is meant for human consumption has to come from a supermarket, no? Tomatoes come in plastic bags, no? But when I thought about it, I realized that they are completely natural – no preservatives, no chemicals – sun, water and dirt. And they taste way better than the ones you can get in stores. Amazing.
Who is responsible for the food we put on our tables? Most people will answer spiritually - God, but who else is responsible? If you consider the journey for a tomato from the seed to your table, hundreds of people are involved directly and indirectly in making it happen. There are farmers, of course, but also the bankers who lend the money for their seeds, and the teachers who provided all of their educations; there are the people who produce the trucks they are transported on and the people who pave the roads; the folks who build the dams, aqueducts and pipes to bring water. Lots and lots of people.
This week’s Torah portion, Ekev, says, “v'ahalta, v’savata, ubayrahta - when you have eaten your fill, you will bless God for the good land which God has given you." We generally say hamotzi (the blessing over bread) before we eat, since according to our tradition, you say a blessing before you do something. But why should we say a blessing after we eat? We have already said thanks to God for the meal. Why do we end up saying a blessing afterwards?
God doesn't need the blessings, but we do. God doesn't need our praise, but people need the experience of recognizing that all that we have comes from somewhere, our blessings and our challenges. Saying blessings is a humbling experience, forcing us to recognize that it all comes from God. We are all dependent on God. We are surrounded by the works of our own hands; we live in a people-made environment. Even here in Southern California, surrounded by natural beauty, the life we experience is often human-improved life. We can easily begin to think that all that we have comes from our own talents, our own strengths, our own achievements. Remember Hart to Hart? It started with a line about Jonathan Hart being a “self-made millionaire”. Nonsense. There were a lot of people who made him rich, 138 (some not by their own choice) and he was “lucky”. That he claimed to be “self-made” just meant he had no humility.
Blessings are exercises in humility. We sit down to a meal, surrounded by the human-made environment we have created for ourselves, at tables surrounded by loved ones or alone with the company of the TV, when we recite blessings, we remember in our relative affluence, in our own health and our success, how dependent on God we really are. And we express gratitude for what we have, no matter what it is.
When we sense gratitude, we gain a sense of both obligation - to deserve what we have gotten, and responsibility - to maintain and tend the blessings we have received. We have blessings for the strange and wonderful parts of life, like seeing a rainbow or a particularly unique person, but our most normal things in life is where we need to see the real blessings. It's in the usual stuff, the day-to-day, ordinary, where we say the most blessings. Reminding us that what we take for granted is no more granted than the truly unique or awesome. We may have food today. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?
The blessings of the ordinary stuff teach us to see miracles not just in the past, not just at Mount Sinai or at the Red Sea, but rather all about us. Miracles are what we live with all the time. There is nothing in this world without its wonders, without possibilities to arouse our sense of awe. Unfortunately, we sometimes notice the wonders of life when they are missing. When we're healthy, we sometimes ignore God. When we're ill, all of a sudden it's God's fault, and we forget about the blessings we experienced while we were healthy. I have repeatedly heard from people who are ill, “why is God punishing me?” Instead of hearing, “I was blessed with good years of health, even if they were too few for me”.
Saying b'rahot, blessings means we never cease to wonder, but see the wonder everywhere around us. The ritual of birkat hamozon, the blessing after a meal, is not a ritual by which we help God, but rather an opportunity for us to open the doors of our lives and allow great things to enter - to wonder at the mundane and make it holy.
So say a blessing. Use the formula in Hebrew to start out: baruh attah adonai elo-hay-nu meleh ha’olam, then say what you’re thankful for (e.g., Who made amazing and wondrous things, or Who created fruit of the trees, etc.) Rabbi Lawrence Kushner translates the formula thus: Holy One of Blessing, your Presence fills the Universe... and we can all fill in the blanks. Holy One of Blessing, Your Presence fills the 139 Universe, may You endow all of us with a sense of awe and wonder at both the mundane and the holy. May we recognize Your presence in all that we are and in all that we do.
140 47. Seeing and Hearing: Parshat Re’eh Deuteronomy 11:26 – 16:17
If you had a choice between being blind or being deaf, which would you choose, and why?
Both are essential senses, but I have no doubt of my choice. I would hate it, but I could live without seeing. But deafness? Not hearing, never hearing the sound of another person’s voice, not engaging in conversation directly, without signs, for me, would not be my choice. Hearing is the essence of communicating. Most people in our century are afraid of the dark, including the real darkness of blindness. For me the fear is more personal. To not be able to communicate, to connect with other people and beings - that to me would be the major challenge.
All this talk about hearing and seeing and blessing and curses is, of course, directly related to this week’s Torah portion, Re’eh. Here’s how it starts: re’eh, ano-hi noten lifney-hem hayom b’raha u-k’la-la. See, I place before you today blessing and curse. Blessing, if you listen to the commandments of the Holy One your God which I enjoin upon you this day. The first word, re’eh, “see”, is followed in the next sentence by the word tishm’u “listen”. See, listen.
What’s the difference? Why the different wording? Seeing is immediate. You look, you see. To get a picture, you just push the button, you get instantly what you see. All the information is right there, whether or not you absorb all the details. But listening requires involvement - it requires waiting and focus, and time. Imagine me saying this next line out loud: “You - can’t - know - what - I - am - about - to - express - until - or - unless - it – happens”. Listening is long term.
I was listening to the radio in my car and heard an interview with a composer for film scores. He said something very interesting. In movies 10 to 20 years ago, the scores were much more simple, much more evocative of emotions, suspense and beauty because the films they accompanied were less action-packed, less special-effect orient, and more “acted”. Film scores now have to wrap around sound and special effects on screen, which in the case of a Jurassic Park or Star Wars movie are the movie. The visual experience is dictating the audio experience. The visual demands an immediate response, the audio is a cumulative response over the course of the film.
141 This week’s Torah portion begins with the immediate statement, “Hey you, look!” Blessing is right here before you in front of your face. But even as it’s there, don't get lost in the special effects. Listen to what I (God) am telling you. In listening to what you see, maybe there will be a way for it to sink in.
Seeing the blessings may require us to listen to the blessings in our lives, to take them in and see more than we see with just our eyes. Seeing is not believing. Seeing is taking a picture. You don’t need belief if you can see it! Belief is in the hearing - in the depth of the experience. But we live in a society which is so completely fixated on the visual that’s it’s no surprise that we don't have time to listen.
In the three sentences which begin our Torah portion, the word hayom, today, appears three times – “today” I put before you blessing and curse; listen to these commandments “today”. “Today” appears again in the next sentence, about the curse. I find that repetition of the word hayom, “today”, to be very meaningful. Each and every day we have choices, we have opportunities, we have chances to make the blessings happen and to be there in our own lives. Each day we can start again, try anew. Each day we can change our habits, and move from a perception of curse to blessing. Each day we can move from seeing to hearing.
The other remarkable thing about the Hebrew in the first two sentences is that there is a transition between singular and plural which you miss completely in English, since the word “you” in English is for both singular and plural. But in Hebrew, there’s a singular “you’ and a plural “you”. Here are the sentences again:
The first sentence says “See, I place before you (singular you - each individual) today blessing and curse. The second sentence says “Blessing, if you (plural you, like the entire people) listen to the commandments of Adonai your God which I enjoin upon you this day”.
The text moves from you – individuals, to you - community. Choices we make, in experiencing blessings or curses, have an impact on the community at large, on our people and the people with whom we live. Each of our acts touches others, whether we see it or not, and has a ripple effect in our world. We are tied to other people, even when we are hermits, in that our absence also has meaning. Every decision, every act, every touch, every move, requires others to respond or experience in some way. When God puts before the individual blessings and curses, we as a community are connected to one another’s responses.
142 The singular “you” is connected with seeing. Seeing is personal and immediate. We can be in the same room and see the same thing and experience it in the same way. The plural “you” is connected with hearing. We all know how we hear experiences differently, process information differently, less from seeing and more from hearing. Hearing, in this case, is an outgrowth of our singular visions. We find direction in our own lives, and in so doing, communicate with others in hearing God in our lives.
May it be Your will, Holy One, Our God and God of our ancestors, that we see and hear the blessings in our lives, even those which seem to be hidden in curses, today, each day, differently from the days before, and that we, as a community, hear - support one another, and create opportunities for us all to see what we hear.
143 48. Scary Litury: Parshat Shoftim Deuteronomy 16:18 – 21:9
Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, one of the greatest men of his generation, wrote a piyyut, a liturgical poem, with which we are familiar. The circumstances which led him to write this poem were unfortunately not all that unique for Jews of his time - he had been tortured in an effort to force him to convert. According to the legend, he either wrote u’netanah tokef on his deathbed or dictated it after his death in a dream to Rabbi Kolanymous.
I’m not sure what to make of the legend, and similarly, most Jews are really not sure of what to make of the piyyut. It is included in every Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur Service in almost every synagogue. The part most of us are most familiar with says that On Rosh Hashannah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die. The piyyut then goes on to list some of the possible ways in which people might die -by fire, water, plague, starvation, etc. It’s a specific, but not exclusive, list.
When I was a kid I puzzled over whether or not it was okay for God to write on Rosh Hashannah. After all, we were told it was forbidden to write on yom tov. Certainly, on Yom Kippur, I couldn’t figure out why it was ok for God to seal anything. Once again we are forbidden to do such work on such a holy day. Beyond my own confusion, I learned much later that a lot of people find the poetry very disturbing. There’s a book out there, somewhere in which our fates are written, closed, sealed. What’s the point of having such a book, and, if it’s written down during these ten days, how does what we do the rest of the time effect that fate? Isn’t it rather cruel for there to be decisions made in September or October about the fates of people who will die next June? What if they are really good between now and then? Does God include in this book the deaths of babies who are born after the Holidays and die before next year’s holidays? What kind of God would intentionally take people in the primes of their lives, making this kind of decision in advance?
Okay, it’s all a metaphor, but, for most of us, we miss the entire point. We focus so much on the list of the ways in which people can die that we miss the words that follow the list, that make it all make more sense. Those 7 words are “u’teshuvah, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah, ma’vaerin et roah hagezerah”. Repentance, prayer, and acts of lovingkindness can shift (or remove) the bitterness of the decree. Repentance, prayer, 144 and acts of lovingkindness do not remove the decree, they remove the bitterness thereof, They can make the decree tolerable.
Repentance, prayer and acts of loving-kindness. Some of the most positive ways in which we can live our lives: recognizing what we have done wrong, correcting the mistakes, seeking forgiveness from those we have harmed; seeking God in our lives, relating to and relying upon God for the strength to improve our lives; and acts of loving-kindness, helping other people, making life better for others, not just for ourselves. So Rabbi Amnon’s paragraph focusing on death is really focusing on surrender. People die in all kinds of ways over which we have no control. Some deaths are tragic or make absolutely no sense. Some seem downright cruel. They are all out of our control. Whether we live or die in the upcoming year, according to our poet, we really don't get to control. He provides a list of some of the core issues over which we have no choice but to recognize our powerlessness.
But we do get to control the ways in which we live. If we live our lives with a focus on teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah, repentance, prayer, and acts of loving-kindness, we might come to feel very differently about the ultimate decree. It may not be so bitter after all. We may come to a place of shalom, of inner peace, through the focus not on that which we can’t control, but rather on that with which we can. We can rail against God for not consulting us in these things or we enrich our lives living with God, taking control over how we live.
In other words, Rabbi Amnon’s piyyut is reflected in the very familiar quotation based on a statement by Reinhold Niebuhr: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, The serenity prayer. We cannot change the ways we are going to die; we can change how we live in the meantime.
All of this talk about a prayer we read during the High Holidays is not just digression, but at the core of this weeks’ Torah portion, shoftim, much of which focuses on the issues of justice and judgment. This Shabbat we begin the month of Elul, the month preceding the High Holidays, a month traditionally set aside for thinking about getting ready for the High Holidays. It says in our Torah portion “tamim tehiyeh im adonai elohecha” You will be simple (wholehearted) with adonai your God.” In other words, you will trust in God, surrendering unto God that which is God’s domain. God is commanding us to take responsibility for that which we can control, to fulfill our obligations, to do that which is right and just. 145 The Torah portion then goes on to forbid sorcery, which is an effort to control those things over which we have no domain.
According to Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Judaism is a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time... the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to the holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events." (The Sabbath) Most of what we do is based not on things but on time, time of the day, time of the week, month, year. We mark days for remembrance.
Our Torah portion speaks about cities of refuge for people who have committed manslaughter, for them to go to for safe-keeping until the death of the High Priest, who, if he were doing his job right, would have prayed well enough to prevent the disasters of accidental deaths. The months of Elul is a refuge in time, for all of us, who have done terrible things, some purposefully, some unintentionally. Elul is when we look inside to see how we are using our time, which we get to control. Elul is the beginning of our process of transition between what was and what will be. We begin to get ready for the Holidays by looking at our lives over the past year, and start considering for the year to come. How do we want it to be? In what ways do we have to change in order for the desires of our hearts to happen? What needs to be done to undo the things we did that were wrong? How can we prevent them from happening next year?
The rabbis teach us that we should live each day of our lives as though it were our last day, because, we never can know. Live each day fully, one day at a time, live time fully, for each moment could be our last.
As we enter Elul, our city of refuge in time, may we all be blessed beneath the wings of shehinah, God's Holy Presence, with the strength and courage to face our failures, to own our weaknesses, and may we find the help, security, and compassion we all seek. May we recognize the things over which we have no control, and surrender them to God, have the strength and courage to work on the things that we can control, and may we find the wisdom to understand fully the difference between them. May we be blessed with that which is truly precious and therefore most holy - time. 146 49. The Language of Evil Ki Tetze Deut. 21:10 – 25:19
This week, we read in our Torah portion that “If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.” My question? Why? Why not take the mother with her young? What’s the big deal here? Perhaps the reason is tsa’ar ba’alei hayim - protection for the feelings of the animals. A mother hen should not have to watch her chicks slaughtered, same as we have with boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.
Maybe that’s really what this is about, but it seems lame to me. If you don’t take them together, which should you take? If you take the mother, the chicks will die. So they are wasted. If you take the chicks (or the eggs) what good are they? Assuming that the eggs are fertilized, which is why the hen is sitting on them, you can’t use them for food - they aren’t cookable eggs. If they are fledgling birds, they also are useless for food, there’s no meat on their bones. You couldn’t put them in an incubator and raise them. They needed their mother to survive. Either way the chicks are wasted.
If we look at the law as having a deeper meaning, what would it be? It seems to me that we should treat each other with the same care and concern. If we’re supposed to care for animals, show them mercy and concern, how much the more so are we supposed to show our concern for human beings. Just remember the end of the book of Jonah, which we read every year on Yom Kippur. God shelters Jonah from intense heat of the sun by growing a gourd. The gourd then dies. Jonah kvetches about the loss of the gourd. God chastises him saying, “you care so much about a gourd, and not about the city of Nineveh with 120,000 people in it?”
So this Torah portion is really about how we are supposed to behave as people toward other people. It’s put in terms everyone should understand, about chickens and eggs. Especially now, right before Rosh Hashanah, it’s the time for us to consider our relationships with people, and see if they fit the “chicken and egg” caring test. I want to suggest three personal activities which can be helpful in focusing on how we are doing in caring for other people; all are things which we can and should be able to make changes in the upcoming weeks.
147 a. lashon ha-ra. Bad mouthing people. It has to stop. All of us do it, and all of us need to consider ways to lessen the negative impacts of our mouths. Just as we need to worry about the emotional impact our behavior may have on an animal, we have to consider the impact gossip, bad mouthing people, can have on the people whose reputations we are harming, the people listening to our nonsense, and ultimately on ourselves. By participating in lashon ha-ra, we destroy lives as surely as we destroy the lives of the birds in the Torah portion. And in so doing, we also lower ourselves.
Ask 3 questions before you engage in any talk about another person: (1) Is it true? (2) Is it nice? (3) Is it necessary? If you can’t say yes to all questions, it’s lashon ha-ra. b. hah-nasat or-him. Making people feel welcome in our homes. I have noticed that few people invite me to dinner, ever. I’m not sure that’s because I’m so inaccessible, either. But it’s not the way I remember. I remember going to people’s houses, sitting at their tables, enjoying a meal together. Now, if I do food with someone, we go to a restaurant. When you open your home to others, though, it’s not about the food. It’s about being and sharing lives together. Reaching out to others, inviting them to a meal, dessert or something in your home is a hallmark of how we are doing in caring for others in our community. It’s not about the guests, and how they benefit at our tables, it’s about us, and how we benefit from their presence. As we look at Holidays and start our personal planning, are we sure that everyone, including older singles and new families with little kids, have welcoming homes to go to for Holiday meals? If you can, invite some guests into your home to help make the High Holy Days holy at home. c. tzedakah: plan to give. When we say yizkor, the prayer of memory for people whom we loved and who are now dead, the prayerbook includes a line about making a donation to keep their memory alive. It’s not only an act of righteousness, of doing justice for your own good, but also a way of keeping the loved- one’s name associated with doing good. As you manage not to kill off little chicks, or harm the hen’s feelings, think abut how you are also supposed to make the world a better place for all of us by giving and doing acts of justice. There are lots of organizations that would welcome your participation, and your check. At least 5 are mentioned somewhere in this reflection (subtle hint, no?). It’s not about the organizations that will benefit – it’s about your own need to do that which is right.
We need to stop talking about people behind their backs; welcome people into our homes, and consider how we can make the world a better place. The compassion we are supposed to show for a mother bird with her chicks is an example of the compassion we are supposed to show for other people and for 148 ourselves. May we all be blessed, as we focus on the upcoming year, with the ability to seek ways to improve our lives, ways to improve and respect the lives of others, and ways to bring our dreams to reality. May our New Year be filled with the same compassion that we would show to mere mother birds in our midst - compassion for our families, our community, and for ourselves. 149 50. Bless the Moron: Parshat Ki Tavo Deuteronomy 26:1 –29:8
You should grow like an onion - with your head underground! May beets grow in your belly. May he have a sweet death ... he should be run over by a sugar truck. May all your teeth fall out, except one, and may that one have a toothache. May your children grow up to be just like you. May your corns grow higher than Mount Sinai. May a child be named after you - soon. May you back into a pitchfork, and grab a hot stove for support. May your teeth get angry and chew your head off. May your husband’s father marry three times, so you should have three mothers-in-law.
When I think of some really good Yiddish curses, I have to laugh. Jews seemed to have a real knack for how to curse someone. They don't make these kinds of curses anymore. We seem to have lost the sense of what a real curse is - we use the word “curse” to describe individual words we maybe shouldn’t say. Those aren’t curses - they’re just unacceptable words.
Sometimes, when I’m in the car and some moron is going at about 35 miles per hour in the left lane, or some maniac is doing about 90 in the same lane (ever notice how it’s always the moron who’s going too slow and the maniac who’s going too fast?) I will cast aspersions as to the other person’s lineage, or his/her passions. Those words, and possible gestures aren’t curses. A really good curse is a prayer for bad things to happen to the person in question.
Blessings are the opposite of curses - instead of yucky stuff, we pray for good things to happen:
May you live to see your cherished hopes fulfilled. May all your children be just like you. May you be blessed with health and joy. May we hear only good news from you. May you have a good New Year filled with the sweetness of life. May your mouth be filled with wisdom and your pantry be filled with good food. May what should be open be open, and may what should be closed be closed. 150 May you live to a ripe old age of 121 (you shouldn’t die suddenly.) May you be blessed in your going out and your coming in. May you live long and prosper.
Just as we don't do the curses the way we used to, we don’t do blessings so well now either. The blessings may not be as funny, but the prayers are just as valid. So why do we have these blessings and curses? According to contemporary Jewish storyteller, Peninah Schram, “blessings cause us to pause, often turning mundane moments of life into sacred moments and allowing us to express gratitude” for God’s creative energy. Blessing someone binds that person to us, binds us both into a “gratitude web” with God at the center. Curses are warnings of doom and gloom, and hopes for the other person’s humility.
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, includes lists of blessings and curses, which were dependent upon the peoples’ adherence to the terms of the covenant with God. Here’s a sample: If you listen to God: Blessed will you be in the city and blessed will you be in the field. Blessed will be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed will you be in your comings and blessed will you be in your goings.
And if you don't uphold the covenant: Cursed will you be in the city and cursed will you be in the field. Cursed will be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed will you be in your comings and cursed will you be in your goings.
The blessings and curses are like the fine print on an modern legal agreement. They are intended as the penalties and consequences for abrogation of the contract with God. But they are intended not for the individual, as promises for each of us, but rather for the entire nation, in which each of us plays a part. While effective, they probably are not meant to be taken literally or personally, although our each of behaviors has implications for everyone else.
When we say a blessing, we’re enlisting and acknowledging the Presence of God in our midst. Too often we get hung up on thinking that blessings have to be in some Hebrew formula, or can’t be spontaneous. They’re just like curses - they can be personal, creative, funny, sweet, free-flowing. The rabbis tell us we’re supposed to say 100 blessings every day. That takes some effort, and creativity. Next time you 151 think about cursing something or someone, bless him/her/it instead. See if you can make it a holy experience of connecting to God.
What do I really hope for the moron going at 35 mph on the freeway? May you get home safely, and may you avoid the need to drive on the freeways - especially when I’m around. What do I hope for the maniac? May you arrive safely, harm no one on the way, and learn to slow down.
May we all find the ways to bless the good and the challenging in our lives, and may our blessings lead us all to a more peaceful and beautiful world in the Presence of God. 152 51. Time Movers: Parshat Nitzavim Deuternomy 29:9 – 30:20
"You stand this day, all of you before the Holy One your God..." Nitzavim has such a dramatic beginning, and leads so well into not just the historic narrative of the text but also into the High Holidays, when once again we all stand together before God. It is a statement of anticipation and of anxiety. We are all standing on a precipice - all looking into what we hope is the promised land of our future, trying to figure out the ways in which our pasts will lead us into our futures. The covenant which was established with Children Israel, as they stood there in the presence of God, was designed precisely so we would feel this angst when we read these words at this time of the year - we are about to stand before our God. Are we ready?
According to Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Judaism is a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time... the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to the holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events." (The Sabbath) Most of what we do as Jews is based not on things but on time, time of the day, time of the week, month, year. We mark days for remembrance. Look at the mahzor or a siddur and you'll find the word "yom" (day) more often than you might originally think. "hayom harat olam", today is the birthday of the world, and also the day when we stand before our God.
I like to tell this story a lot. Maybe you’ve heard it. I was on the subway once when I saw a man who looked totally exhausted sitting across from me. I watched him struggle to stay awake, watched him as he anxiously peered out the window at a stop to see if he had missed his. It took me a while, but I figured out why he was so tired. His shirt had the name of his company on it: "Time Movers". No wonder he was exhausted! He had spent his day moving time!
Time movers. I wonder what they do, and how they do it. Think about it: if you could move time, how would you do it? Would you move time in a way that is different from the way we currently experience it? Would you make time move faster or slower? (After all, doesn't time fly when you're having fun?) Would you move your time to a different age altogether, like the 17th century or the 25th century?
I wanted to wake the Time Mover, to ask him how he does what he does, and to seek his advice on how I could learn his technique. Unfortunately, such things just are not done in New York. With the exception of the Time Movers, the rest of us live in time which can't be moved. Life has really just two tenses: past 153 and future. We are in the constant flow between the two, every moment is either about to happen or has slipped by. We experience time each moment as it comes, each day as we live it, each week, etc.
Rosh Hashannah takes the concept of holiness in time one step further. It marks the passage of a complete Jewish year. Rosh Hashannah begs the question: If you can't move time, what have you done with the time since last Rosh Hashannah? What have you done with the hundreds of thousands of minutes, the nearly 8,500 hours, the 350 odd days, the fifty or so weeks since last Rosh Hashannah? Have you lived these times to your fullest? Rosh Hashannah asks us to begin a process of examining how we lived our time, and how will we use our own time in the future.
Rosh Hashannah is the Jewish time to reflect on how we have used our time as a nation, as a people, as human beings. Think back and list all of the things which have happened this year in human history. And what has happened this year in your own life? What really made you proud? Where did you find your nachas - your sources of joy? What were the challenges you faced? How did you do with those challenges? What remains undone, unexamined, unapproached? Who was sick, who is sick, who has recovered? What were your major life-changes of this year, and what became more comfortable for you in its ongoing reliability? Think of two moments in the last year which made your heart sing, and two moments that made your soul ache.
Rosh Hashannah is the moment of transition between what was and what will be. We begin today to look at our lives over the past year, and start considering for the year to come. How do we want it to be? In what ways do we have to change in order for the desires of our hearts to happen? What needs to be done to undo the things we have done that were wrong? How can we prevent them from happening next year? During the next days we will be in limbo between how we lived our lives in 5764, and how we will live our lives in 5765. We have ten days to think about it. We have ten days not to move time but to change how we move through time.
The rabbis teach us that we should live each day of our lives as though it were our last day, because, in reality, we never can know. Live each day fully, one day at a time, live time fully, for each moment could be our last.
This Rosh Hashannah, may we all be blessed beneath the wings of shehinah, God's Holy presence, with the strength and courage to face our failures, to own our weaknesses, and may we find the help, the 154 security, the compassion we all seek. May we look at our time, forgive ourselves and commit to the changes that we must make to move peacefully through time, rather than to move time. May we be blessed with that which is truly precious and therefore most holy - time.
155 52. The End of the Line Parshat Va-Yeleh Deuteronomy 31:1 – 31:30
According to Jewish mystical traditions, some people think that when a person dies, s/he will be shown what s/he accomplished in life - compared to what s/he could have done had s/he taken full advantage of earthly existence. In fact, it is the soul's sense of embarrassment at the realization of what could have been accomplished that is, according to some sources, the Jewish definition of "hell."
What could you have done today that didn’t happen? Who could you have loved more, who could you have helped better? What were your missed opportunities?
In a popular film some years ago, the main character dies and goes to the "next dimension" where he is asked to defend his life down here on earth. I didn’t see the movie, because I heard it wasn’t very good, but I remember the concept being at least basically interesting. According to Jewish tradition, there is no concept of actually "defending" oneself in the afterlife.
I visited a woman who had just revived from the brink of death. She was in her late 60s, had ovarian cancer and was struggling after her latest crisis to get back on her feet, literally. When we started talking she told me she was just overwhelmed by her children and husband. She “never could have anticipated that they would show her so much love.” I helped her cry for a while, tears of joy at what had turned out to be such an unexpected benefit of her illness – her family, together, there for her, showing their love for her, sleeping in her hospital room, never letting her despair. Unlike the movie, she was having the opportunity to see her life, and to justify the most important parts, how she lived and touched her family – how “the more love you give, the more you get – that love is contrary to economics, where the more you give out the more you have”.3
But we miss opportunities all the time. We miss chances to change our own lives and to change the lives of those we love. We miss accomplishments that really matter, in large part because we look for ways to accomplish those things that ultimately do not matter at all. We need to be asking ourselves again, now, what was it we set out to accomplish this year, and have we done it? If the answer is no, why not? What’s keeping us in our own way?
This week's Torah portion – Va-yeleh is near the end of the Book of Devarim which means "words." The
3 Law of the Spirit by John Marks Templeton, Riches for the Mind and Spirit 156 "words" being referred to are Moses' Divinely directed farewell speech to the Jewish People, which is about to end. Before his death, Moses presented to the Jewish people an eloquent review of the past 40 years including in his words admonishments and great moral insights. The concept of lost opportunities appears over and over again in these last words from Moses.
Because of their sins, it took the people 40 years to reach the Promised Land, a trip which should have taken eleven days. Think of the amazing lost opportunities in 40 years in the desert! Moses reminds the people that they have been a particularly difficult bunch over the last 40 years, but that God has been with them no matter how difficult they were. They are finally reaching the Promised Land, and the end of the era of Moses as their leader, and Moses finalizes his arrangements with Joshua to take over after him. So much time was wasted in the desert, in the spiritual wasteland that they experienced in those forty years of waiting to get somewhere.
By contrast we have Moses. Remember what his final argument with God was when he saw the burning bush? That he is not much of a speaker. The entire Book of D’varim, is Moses speaking! Good Old Moses, somehow has come from a place of potential into reality – he may not have realized his dreams, but he certainly has accomplished more than he could have imagined. The realization of his potential is right here with this book, if we just notice the change in him. 1/5 of the Torah was this speech by Moses that is about to end!
We do have to justify our lives, but maybe not just later, after we die. We have to justify our lives to ourselves, now. Are we sitting around missing opportunities, or are we reaching our potentials? Are we making excuses or are we living as fully as we can? What is your legacy? What do you leave behind that no one else has left? What impact have you had on the world? How has it changed because of your presence? How do you want to be remembered? When you’re gone, what part of you will remain?
May it be Your will, Holy One, our God and God of our ancestors, that we justify our lives now, and begin a process of figuring out what’s important, what we could/should/would be doing if only we got out of our own ways. May we find the strength, courage and resources that Moses drew upon to help us continue to follow in his example.
157 53. Little Stuff/ Big Difference Parshat Ha’azinu Deuteronomy 32:1-52
A couple of years ago, I finally decided I was too scared to drive on the tires which I thought seemed close to bald for a few thousand miles, so I got new tires on my car. That’s a big deal for me, because I really wanted to see how long the original tires on my car would last. It was 58,000 miles, and the car was starting to slide around on dry streets. I worried what would happen when it started raining.
So the safe side of me overcame the cheap side, and I got the tires. As long as I was at it, I figured the car needed some other work. Once the work was done, the mechanic showed me the alignment report, which indicated in cryptic numbers that there had been something to be adjusted. I just stared and marveled at this piece of paper. They moved the tires in the rear of the car by .01 of a centimeter. Other tires they moved by a little more, .10 for instance. This is an incredibly tiny amount of movement, which I said to the mechanic. He said, “Yeah it is a tiny amount of movement, but it makes a huge difference in the wear of tires and the suspension of the car.” That’s an amazing thing to me, that such a tiny change can make such a big difference. One tenth of a centimeter makes a difference when driving 58,000 miles?
This week’s Torah portion, Ha’Azinu, also helps us look at the tiny things, the little stuff which makes a big difference. Moses is making his farewell speech to the people (in this Torah portion, he ascends Mount Nebo to go to his final resting place), in the form of a song, similar to the song which he led when he and the people crossed the Red Sea. That song was about the physical well-being of the people. This song, in many ways, is about their spiritual well-being.
Moses says “Give ear, o heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I say; May my discourse come down as the rain; My speech distill as the dew; Like showers on young growth; like droplets on the grass.” It’s not just a statement to wake up and listen. Each word in this poem is carefully selected. Let the gifts of God fall upon us like the rain, nurturing us like the droplets nurture the grass.
We are constantly bombarded by the showers of gifts from God. God is constantly there trying to nurture us, but we keep looking for the gifts not in the small droplets that rain upon us, but elsewhere, where we can’t seem to find them. Maybe if we looked a little less for the big things, we could find God where God is, in the showers of blessings we tend to ignore each and every day.
158 Sometimes we focus exclusively on what we think we see, that we miss the whole picture, the entire experience. We look at the trees but don't see the forest; we look at the forest and don't see the trees.
Yom Kippur and this week’s Torah portion are about both - seeing both the big picture and the minutiae which makes that picture happen. Moses tells us to see God in the droplets of dew, the rain which falls upon us, in the small stuff. Moses concludes the poem by reminding the people to take to heart all of the words which he has spoken - to see both the droplets and to see the growth which is nourished by them. To see that in their multitude, they do make a difference, each step we take, no matter how small it may seem, can bring us closer in our relationship with God, closer to our inner spirit, closer to seeing the big signs which we miss precisely because we miss the little ones.
In the Talmud, Yoma 86b, Reish Lakish says “Great is repentance, for because of it, sins are turned into merits.” Teshuva, repentance, by redefining our attitudes, our values, our place in the universe, redefines and recreates time, undoing our sins from the past. Ki bayom hazeh yekaper letaher ethem mikol hatotayhem. For on that day God will forgive you, to cleanse you of all of your sins before God. The essential nature of Yom Kippur is to freeze time, and within the frozen time, to rearrange our lives, redefine our existence, and rewrite our past. We need to recognize God in the little stuff, and to see the impact of the little things which we do, which have the incredible power to change everything.
We all know that moments from our past influence our future - we are who we are, and do what we do, because of where we have been, what we have done in the past. But this line is like a mirror image of that idea - repentance causes a moment from our future to change our past. How else could a sin, which is in the past, change to a merit? Sin, by the way, in Hebrew, is het, which means missing the mark. And I suspect, many of us miss the mark by just enough hundredths of a centimeter to make a difference in our journey of life.
Think about something you did, which you are sorry for, which you have made amends for. Think about whether you, and whoever it was you wronged, feel better now that you have corrected the problem, worked through your error. The present and the future have the power to affect and to remake the past from sin into learning experience. Maybe Yom Kippur is when we do alignments on our personalities.
159 Centimeters make a difference in the ways that we travel on our roads through life. This holiday week, and throughout this New Year, may we all see God around each and every one of us like the droplets of dew on the grass, and may we all find healing and hope in the alignment of Yom Kippur.
Shanna tovah, and g’mar hatimah tovah. May we all be blessed and sealed for with a good and sweet New year. 160 Sukkot
In many ways, the messages of Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur are about closing one door and opening another. Starting fresh, starting new in a new year of possibilities and hope. Though it’s hard to observe all of the Jewish holidays in such a close sequence, there’s a good reason that Sukkot comes so soon after Yom Kippur. It’s to give us all an opportunity to put our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams into action. To get over the confessions of our failures and to celebrate the things which we can do to move on - to do right, to create from scratch. The sukkah is a symbol of starting fresh in our journey with God. (A Hebrew lesson: a sukkah is a booth that we build, covering the roof with branches. The Holiday, Sukkot, is when we dwell in these booths, mainly for meals. The word “sukkot” is the plural for “sukkah”).
Most of us try to live in places that are safe and secure, places where we can feel at home. We build sukkot to remind us of the fragility of our homes and our lives, the temporary nature of everything we have. Yom Kippur reminds us that we should feel guilty for all the rotten things we do with what we have; Sukkot is the opposite. It’s a holiday of appreciation of what we have, even as life is so precarious. We build walls that are not really walls, a roof open to moon and stars, knowing that our sukkah could be blown down by a stiff wind, as a reminder of the real source of shelter for us – the holy Presence of God. The sukkah is a promise of the moon and stars in our lives, the spirit of the Holy One dwelling among us.
Sukkot reminds us that we were all wanderers in the desert and that we longed for a “permanent” home. Just like our people, a sukkah is constantly threatened, constantly in jeopardy. But we, and the sukkah, are still here. We do this incredibly silly thing of making a sukkah to remind us that we’re still here as a people. Individually, we also do it to remind ourselves that we have managed to get through whatever challenges could have blown us away as well.
There has been a lot of talk about the evil which has been done to us, to our people, to our nation, to our economy, on and since September 11, 2001. We had buildings which were strong and mighty towers, but they too, like so much of what we think is permanent, have been “blown away”. These can be frightening times for us as Americans, since now we have worry about all the possibilities of other ways in which evil can be done to us. But there has always been evil in the world, and always will be.
We create a sukkah out of thin air. One minute it’s just some raw material – wood, fruit. Assembled, it’s a holy reminder place. The sukkah calls us to pay attention not just to the evil, but to the presence of God in 161 our shakiest of times and places. The sukkah reminds us that no matter what we build, no matter how strong or how tall or how well reinforced, the healing and the hope come not from the building, but from what we put into it.
We build sukkot, not bunkers. We are guaranteed insecurity, not security. We are assured by the shakiness of our sukkot that despite whatever else happens, we know we can find God and a place for God in our lives. Coming right after Yom Kippur, when we reminded ourselves of how insignificant we are, Sukkot is a reminder that we can rebuild our lives, and our dreams, in the light of God.
May it be Your will, Holy One, that we remember that nothing is more permanent or more unshakable than Your Presence with us. May we learn to seek Your Presence when we feel that the most shelter we have is a flimsy booth. May we see how our lives are filled with blessings as numerous as the stars we see when we sit in a sukkah, and may our world be illumined by a new light which comes from You. 162 54. The End of the Torah, Start Again: V’zot Ha-braha, Deuteronomy 33:1-34:12
This is the last Torah portion in the annual series. It is usually read on Simhat Torah, when we celebrate the completion of the Torah- reading cycle. In my congregation, it has been a tradition to literally roll out the entire Torah scroll, so that we see it all at once. We usually have people stand around the room and unroll the Torah one person to the next, so everyone is holding it up in the circle. And then the kids and remaining adults and I take a tour. We see the places where each of the books ends, the Song at The Red Sea, the Ten Commandments, and Shema. We find the names of our patriachs and matriarchs, and the names of Korah, Balaam, and remind ourselves of other great Torah stories.
Look at the last words of Torah: “Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses – Whom The Holy One singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that God sent him to display in the land of Egypt…and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all of Israel.” It’s a beautiful reminder that Moses was really special, if we needed one. But even our leaders deserve to be recognized for their dedication and commitment, for their very leadership.
The last word of Torah is “yisrael” Israel. Nice ending: it took us the entire Torah to be this people, one people, who struggles with God (the literal meaning of Israel). The last word is the goal, to be Israel. If you look at the last letter of the Torah, lamed, it is a vertical line, almost seeming to hold all of the letters back, keeping them in place.
On Simhat Torah, we end the process of reading the Torah and start over again. We take the lamed at the end and put it next to the bet at the beginning (b’raysheet). This juxtaposition yields a Hebrew word, lev, meaning heart. The heart of Israel is in this process, in reading Torah again and again, struggling each time to find its meanings, noting that the words may not have changed since the last time we read it, but we have. How we understand it each time will change as we do. The heart of the Jewish people, and our own hearts come together on Simhat Torah, as we celebrate the end of the Torah reading cycle, and the start of the the Torah reading cycle. In other words, it doesn’t really end at all, as we don’t stop learning, growing and experiencing each time we come back to look at it again, for the first time.
hazak hazak v’nithazek Let us be strong, strong and strengthen each other! (traditionally said when you finish studying)
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