This is a version of the D'var Torah on Parashat Yitro that I gave in 2021/5781. I've lightly updated it to reflect the changes in the pandemic and the presidential administration since then. It centers a midrash I've linked, and my own take on that midrash.
The midrash called Shir Ha-Shirim Rabba takes the opening of the Song of Songs and applies it to the revelation of the Ten Commandments. The verse says, and I don’t know if my blushing will come through on camera -- Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. יִשָּׁקֵנִי מִנְּשִׁיקוֹת פִּיהוּ כִּי־טוֹבִים דֹּדֶיךָ מִיָּיִן. Like The Weavers: “kisses sweeter than wine.”
The midrash is one of my all-time favorites and as I tell it now hopefully by now some of you will be remembering from when I’ve told it before.
Rabbi Yochanan said that for each of the Ten Commandments, the Divine sent a personal messenger, a מַלְאָךְ mal’ach, to bring that particular mitzvah to each Israelite, to tell it to them, and then to have a discussion about it, for as long as necessary until the particular Israelite would say: I agree.
So imagine the mal’ach coming to you and saying: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or spouse or servant or donkey or anyting else that belongs to them. And you say: I’ve already agreed not to steal anything -- does God really care if I’m feeling jealous from time to time?
And the mal’ach says well it depends, maybe your envy will cause you unconsciously to pressure your neighbor to give you something you don’t really need and that’s not really going to make you better off. After all, this is your neighbor who would do anything for you and wants you not to be distressed, or maybe just wants to get you out of their hair. So how about instead of thinking about what they have that you don’t, you try to figure out what’s eating you?
And the Israelite says: Ah, that’s why you (meaning: God) included their spouse and their house and the people who labor for them and their animals. You mean sometimes we get focused on the easy life we think someone else is having right now, we think why can’t mine be like that, and then maybe we think they don’t deserve it, I do -- and that drives us apart?
And the messenger says: You’ve got it. Of course we use others to judge our situation, but that’s a first step, not a shortcut.
Envy is a clue to think about what’s out of whack. Maybe it’s something in your power, or maybe it’s out there in society, in the distribution of houses and donkeys and fields. Use that itch to think about those things, and maybe your neighbor even agrees with you about that and you can bond. Okay, says the Israelite, this coveting thing -- you’re not trying to control my mind, it’s trying to make sure we don’t get so caught up in our minds that we drive ourselves apart from our neighbors.
And the mal’ach says: So it’s a law, agreed, no coveting? And the Israelite says: Yes! And then the midrash says the mal’ach gives them a kiss -- “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” -- and the Israelite feels great, and really connected. And the mal’ach goes back to the mothership for the next mitzvah.
Rabbi Yochanan imagines each Israelite during the revelation of the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten Commandments) in their own spiritual bubble, with a personal angelic tutor who is very patient and a personal time warp. Rabbi Yochanan is solving a problem of grammar in the Ten Commandments, which is actually a bigger problem. The commands are delivered in the Hebrew singular even though all the Israelites are together. And even though every thing in the Ten Commandments only makes sense in the context of the collective. Honoring parents, and not murdering; letting your household rest on Shabbat, and not coveting -- those are all social. Even the issue of idols is about taking some power or image recognized by everyone and projecting that as a godly power.
It’s all social, but Rabbi Yochanan says there’s a paradox -- first each person has to go into a kind of isolation, and then “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” The individual is wooed into the collective in a very deliberate way. Crossing the sea in a big crowd and singing together wasn’t enough. Each person has to feel loved with some love that is as big as everything, that is love from the Divine and the whole people, and also gets connected through a specific other. Only an individual who has been spoken to and kissed this way by a divine representative will say: What we have together is better than wine, better than the high that I experience from my own pleasure or the buzz I get from having my own ideas all on my own.
Up until now, the people had only negative experiences of the collective. Being miserable together, as slaves, who sometimes turned on each other. Watching Egyptian togetherness -- conformity, complicity in evil, mass psychology, the mob. Even when they got out, the Israelites knew themselves frequently as a group of complainers.
How could they trust themselves to be a group that could heal from slavery and get to the promised land? They needed shared ideas, and not shared idols. They needed a picture of fulfillment more motivating than coveting what some small group of them had.
Rabbi Yochanan in the midrash says that if each Israelite will feel loved enough to say “yes” for a moment, ten times, then we get to the verse right after the Ten Commandments: “and all the people together perceived the voices and saw the bright lights” וְכָל־הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹת וְאֶת־הַלַּפִּידִם v’chol ha’am ro’im et hakolot v’et halapidim.
A path to solidarity is what we need right now. We need it to stay alive, we need it to be more than just alive. It’s tempting to think of groups, especially political groups, only in terms of mobs and groupthink. It’s easy to perceive comformity, or to see insider groups that do sloppy work together. Those are real dangers of groups.
So Rabbi Yochanan says solidarity has to be built a person at a time, out of two elements: it’s built out of discussion, and out of loving affirmation. It has to originate on top of the mountain; there has to be somewhere for everyone to look up. But the real work is up close, person by person.
We can’t just assert solidarity or unity. It doesn’t come via the media or speeches. We have to make it by wooing people with our ideas and with our love. On the political level, when I first wrote this D’var Torah, I wanted President Biden and Vice President Harris when they were in office to go out and identify individual communities, let’s say the counties in this country where they got the lowest percentage of the vote, and have a midrash kind of conversation -- here are some principles and ideas, let’s talk about them, talk back and I’ll answer. And even if we don’t find a yes ,we’ll go back to the mothership in DC and come back shortly for the next conversation.
Same for Republican leaders in Congress -- do that. Find whatever community organizng group or congregation will do that with you in those counties. Set up a health clinic for the community there, and have the conversations.
On an individual level, in our own synagogue and our local community, we have to be the personal ambassadors for solidary rooted in reasoned conversation and love, for anyone who opens their ears or their arms.
We are going to need more of this kind of solidarity, to comfront the challenges of Am Yisrael and the United States, and to build our own community as a place that is welcoming and helps each of us reflect and be challenged, grow and flourish. It can’t be done if all we do is criticize when groups fail, which they often do. We need to build the collectives where we trust, and ask what it would take to give ourselves over in solidarity, to say yes to what the divine messengers are offering us.
It’s so hard to imagine getting to that kind of solidarity these days, to believing it’s possible. And it’s hard to imagine that we require it -- but I think there is no alternative. Some critical mass of solidarity is a matter of life and death. It doesn’t have to be everyone but it has to be more than it’s been in a long time. At Mt Sinai time could stand still to get that kind of solidarity, and even then it only held for a short time even for B’nai Yisrael. We can’t stop time like that. But we each need to be receptive to messengers who come and offer us rational conversation and love, and we need to find opportunities to be those messengers.
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” That kind of intimacy, that kind of solidarity -- it can be scary; we know it was in the Torah. Resisting solidarity will always have its rewards for people -- the wine, the yayin, is a symbol for a real intense feeling that you don’t share but have just on your own. It’s not lasting, but it’s powerful. I myself (Jon) do covet -- and what I covet are pockets of solidarity in this world that are somewhere else. But then I know the question is how not be jealous, but to learn how to do solidarity better right here. So let’s think about how we can open ourselves when the mal’achim come and try to connect us more deeply, and how to be those divine messengers ourselves, patiently trying to build the solidarity we need for life and healing, to overcome isolation, for justice and for peace.
Shabbat Shalom.