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E-Maggid: Aharon's Words

Who is Aharon, the brother of Moshe?  It must have been hard to have his life taken over at some point by an unusual and extreme mission:  just to be a better mouth for Moshe.  As they go together to Pharaoh, Aharon is fully there, but the words are not his own. 

But in this role, Aharon embodies an insight about our relationship to the words of others.

 

How many of the things we say in the course of a day are in fact our own words?  There are scripts we follow for casual conversation at the checkout counter, or getting things done at work.  We have standard ways of catching up with the others at home at the end of the day.  And times when we realize that without thinking we sound exactly like our mother or father!

 

And even when we really need to say something important, we don't come up with all the words on our own.  To express love, to help someone learn, to motivate and mobilize for a cause…. we don't invent these words from scratch.  We rely on the great words we have heard, or even read.  We have learned our most important words from parents and books, from inspiring public leaders or dramatic art.  From teachers and Torah.

 

Since none of us is the inventor of love, or teaching, or motivating, we're fortunate that we can use, quote, and even parrot others' words.  Usually we go further -- we adapt them, we tweak.  But whenever there is something important to say, we start even when we don't realize it with someone else's words, and that's what propels us into our own words.

 

Our tradition teaches that when we use someone else's great words, we actually bring that person to our side, just like Aharon and Moshe stood together.  Rabbi Yochanan said in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai:  A departed sage, whenever his words are quoted as a tradition in this world, his lips move gently in his grave.  Aharon reminds us that whether we are demanding freedom, showing love, or offering consolation, we don't have to come up with our own words from scratch.  And when we rely on words we have learned from others, we are not alone.

E-Maggid: What Is Freedom?

"Tell old Pharaoh: Let My people go." Everyone knows the words of the old spiritual. But in the Torah, the words are a bit different. Say to him: Adonai, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to you to say: Let My people go so they may serve Me in the wilderness (Exodus 7:16).

In American history, freedom has always seemed to be freedom from something. From the British crown, from the masters of Southern slavery. In our classic American literature, freedom means liberation from unreasonable social norms, or even from adulthood itself (think Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye).

But in the Torah, freedom is always freedom toward something. Moshe reminds Pharaoh and the people that they seek freedom to go to Mount Sinai -- where they will be free to hear God and to take on new responsibilities.

In Judaism, freedom leads necessarily to obligation. What responsibilities do you choose? Who do you choose to be bound to, not just today but for the long term? On a simple level, commitments make you less free. But on a higher level, commitment to Torah adds to freedom. Without some higher purpose to strive for, we can be awash in so many choices every day that we could hardly move. Moving freely toward Torah, we move away from the unreasonable masters that can control our lives.

Then, we can face the choices of the truly free. How do I make time today for the people in my life and for my important work? Of the many unheard voices in the world, whose will I try to respond to? What will I do to nourish and protect my soul, so that I do not wear out or fall into cynicism? This is the freedom we are working toward, even after we are freed of the Pharaoh of Egypt.

E-Maggid: Esther

Purim is the holiday of masks and costumes.  The Megillah is a story of hidden identities.  Only at the end is everyone understood completely for who they are, for better or for worse.

At the core is Esther.  The Megillah introduces her as "Hadassah, she is Esther."  The Megillah does not tell us when or why she received either of her names.  In the Talmud there is the following discussion:

• Rabbi Yehudah says:  Hadassah was her name, and she was called Esther because she hid her important matters (masteret in Hebrew means "hide").
• Rabbi Nechemiah says:  Hadassah was her name, and she was called Esther because the gentiles called her after Ishtar, the goddess of beauty.
• Ben Azzai says:  Esther was not tall and she was not short, but of medium stature, just like a myrtle (hadas in Hebrew means "myrtle").
• …Rabbi Eliezer said:  Every individual nation imagined that she came from there.

 

At the start of the Megillah, the rabbis say, Esther was a person who projected no individuality.  She had an identity, but she hid it (at Mordechai's insistence).  Ben Azzai and Rabbi Eliezer suggest that when others saw Esther, they saw whatever confirmed their own reality.  She disturbed or challenged no one.  Ironically, says Rabbi Nechemiah, Esther was regarded like a goddess -- but not one who teaches or commands anything.

 

Esther is remarkable because of the way she learns to reveal herself.  At first, when Mordechai asks her to intercede against Haman, Esther says she only knows how to be what others see.  Things change when she realizes that she can fulfill her purpose even while she is everything the world says she is.  She has to find a way to integrate what is hidden and what is seen.  Both are real.  Both are who Esther is.

 

Esther fasts for three days.  Perhaps to find herself, perhaps to speak from deep inside the strange Persian harem to the unique God of her people.  When she emerges and approaches the king, he sees her as more beautiful than ever.  Eventually, Esther brings all "her important matters" out into the open.  She challenges Haman, and the king.  She not only saves her people, but brings all of them out into the open.  She does all this not merely by being Esther, but as "Esther the Queen."  Esther and Queen.

 

Our roles and labels may not be the most real things about us.  They may even trap us.  But as with Esther, they give an easy opening for others to see us.  Our challenge, sometimes, is not to throw off our labels, but to become them and more.

E-Maggid: Vayikra

This week we start reading the third book of the Torah on Shabbat morning.  It begins with a word written in a strange way.  The word is Vayikra, which means "and he called".  God calls to Moshe at the start of the book of Leviticus.  But in the Torah, the last letter of Vayikra, the aleph, is written as a small superscript.  If you read the word without the aleph, it would be Vayiker, which means "and it happened by coincidence."  It's as if the word is teetering between two meaning, wondering whether the aleph will enlarge or fade away. 

Responding to a call from God, or bouncing from happenstance to happenstance.  These are two completely opposite perspectives on life.  We can look back and ask:  Did I hear a call and follow it, or did things just happen to bounce me a certain way?

 

Vayikra or Vayiker are two possible views on ourselves, two possible ways of interpreting how we got to this point.  In the Haggadah, as we tell the Exodus story we quote the Torah:  "Yaakov went down to Egypt."  If there hadn't been a famine; if Yosef had not become the coordinator of food for all the land….. But the Haggadah explains:  "Yaakov was compelled by the divine word."

 

We can always look back and find the coincidences, the random events that affected the turn we took.  But one way we develop our capacity for freedom is to find the coherence hiding in the static.  Underneath geographical moves, relationships that endure or have ended, professional transitions, is there a basic truth that is unfolding through me?  Or was there one Vayikra moment when my path changed profoundly?  Or is something calling me only just now?

 

Changing Vayiker into Vayikra means committing to a view of life beyond chance and coincidence.  It means committing to enlarging the letter aleph.  That first letter of the Hebrew alphabet stands for Anochi -- "I."  "I' is myself, and also the Anochi of "I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt."  The more we see our lives, looking back and ahead, as a response to the call of the divine Anokhi, the more we become "I", the authors of a life that is more than chance and happenstance.

E-Maggid: Pharaoh, Amram, and Miryam

The Talmud teaches that as soon as Pharaoh declared, "Any son who is born -- you shall throw him into the Nile," a notable of the tribe of Levi named Amram divorced his wife.  All the other men followed suit.  Miryam, his daughter, immediately confronted him:  "Father, your decree (g'zayrah) is harsher than Pharaoh's.  Pharaoh decreed against the boys, but you have decreed against both boys and the girls!  Pharaoh's decree may or may not be fulfilled, but your decree shall certainly be fulfilled."  Amram listened, took back his wife, and she soon gave birth to a son, who turned out to be Moshe, the redeemer.

 

Miryam compares two "decrees" that affect Amram himself and the Israelites as a whole.  One is from the outside, from Pharaoh.  The other is from the inside, from Amram himself.  No one would argue that Pharaoh's decree is not real.  No one would dispute that Pharaoh's decree is in fact the source, the reason the Israelites' future hangs in the balance.

 

And yet, Miryam suggests that her father does not distinguish clearly between what is inside him and what is outside.  He experiences only a reality of g'zayrah -- decree, a situation that will be only one way, that has only one possible end.  Miryam calls that into question.  She challenges Amram to see that the outside does not have the only word or the final word.  Miryam does not promise that things will be better.  She does not blame the victim -- she does not claim that Pharaoh is nothing, that Amram is everything.  She only says that Amram need not be defined 100% by the outside.

 

One of the most consistent findings of modern psychology is that we tend to blame others for their actions, but to attribute our own actions to the pressure of outside circumstances.  Our circumstances do shape our lives and choices, and influence our lifelong patterns.  But no matter what, there is always an inside.  It is important to know the difference between what Pharaoh decrees and what Amram decrees.  No matter how powerful Pharaoh's g'zayrah might be, there is still Amram.  In each of us, Amram still decrees, even when Pharaoh decrees.  And when that is hard to realize, we need to hear Miryam.  She might be a person outside, who has been trying to persuade us.  Or a voice inside, worth taking the chance to trust.

E-Maggid: Everyone Is In Egypt

During the period between now and Pesach, our focus will be on the inner, spiritual dimension of the Exodus.

The Haggadah says that "in every single generation, a person is obligated to to see himself as though he had personally come out of Egypt."  Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger amplifies this and explains that every single day, each and every person is undergoing an Exodus from Egypt.

 

Pesach is the Torah's original new year festival.  The Exodus can be seen as a vivid mindscape of the process of teshuvah, of self-repair and personal change.  What is your "slavery", the bricks you are compelled to keep assembling?  Who or what is the Pharaoh that keeps you in place?  What is the sea that seems impassible, toward what promised land on the other side?  Who or what might be your midwife, your Moshe, your Miryam -- the voice of hope and possibility even when you, or things around you, seem unchangeable?

 

Pharaoh may well be outside of you:  in financial pressure, a terrible boss, an unhealthy relationship.  But Pharaoh may be inside as well.  Exodus 1:  "A new king arose over Egypt, who was not aware….he said to his people:  Let us apply our smarts about it…"  Reb Nachman of Bratslav explains that Pharaoh is the force that opposes wider awareness in a particular way.  It is the voice or the habit that keeps us hard at work only on the problems in life we can attack right now, with our cleverness.  We solve them because they are easy to see and define.  They are what Stephen Covey calls "urgent, but unimportant."  They keep coming, and by solving them we are certainly doing something.  But this Pharaoh can take up all of our time.  If we notice this, we can begin to make room for another awareness.  It was Pharaoh's own daughter, after all, who walked down to the river, and first became aware of the hidden basket that contained Moshe, and heard the infant voice of hope and possibility.

 

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