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Tentative Torah For the Week's Parasha and Week of Protests

Some meandering and very rough notes about the opening of this week’s Torah reading, Leviticus 16, somehow sort of in light of week’s events at Columbia University and other places.

 

The chapter appears to be just the description by the Divine to Moshe and Aharon (Moses and Aaron) of an elaborate ritual for Yom Kippur, the annual Jewish high holy day of “atonement” – cleansing, resetting. This year, I’m thinking that it’s hinting at a conversation between the Divine and Moshe about his brother Aharon, who is not there at the moment. The conversation is about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing.

 

Some scholars view this conversation as the center of the Torah itself. It references the Holy of Holies, which is in the very center of the traveling community of Israel in the wilderness.

 

“The Divine said to Moshe – after the death of two of Aharon’s sons, in their coming near in the presence of the Divine, and they died. The Divine said to Moshe: Speak to Aharon your brother, that he not come just anytime the Holy Place inside the curtain, facing the Cleansing-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover that is on the ark, and die – for in a cloud I am seen over the Cleanings-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover. This is how Aharon should come to the Holy Place…. And atone/cleanse/reset for himself and for his household…”

 

And then more, about atonement/cleansing/resetting/ransoming for the entire people, through offerings and a scapegoat and an encounter in a cloud in the Holy of Holies.

 

1. Nadav and Avihu

 

In the first verse, the Torah is already wrestling with itself. The two sons had names, so why are they hidden here? Nadav and Avihu were their names. They died in a fire that came out from the Divine presence, when the two of them brought some kind of unauthorized fire offering. So that’s a reason to hide them. But then the verse shifts, softens -- unauthorized, “strange” fire is reported here as “coming close to the Divine.” And the Torah just mentions that they died, as a thing that happened without pronouncing judgment. It happened and it seems to be how Aharon is marking time right now, or how Moshe is, or how the Divine is.

 

If you want to say Nadav and Avihu were punished, you could say they wouldn’t tolerate holiness by any kind of methodical system. They had waited through seven days of an elaborate ritual of dressing up and waiting inside, to become priests. As soon as that was over, they just came the way they decided was right. You could say they wanted a short cut to absolutes, to truth. They didn’t trust authority, not their father’s or the Divine’s. They were protesters against the system. They were individualists masquerading as brave rebels. They broke from their tribe and family, from a long collective process of inquiry into truth and value and holiness, and fell into groundthink, an echo chamber of two.

 

Or you could Nadav and Avihu were right, but the Torah has no room for them, or the system can’t figure out how to assimiliate them. They were on a different plane, one which just couldn’t coexist with the world of method and system. The Torah doesn’t say in the chapter where they died that they sinned. The “strange fire” of many translations is probably too harsh and wrong for the Hebrew “zarah”; “unauthorized” is more precise. So maybe their story isn’t about punishment at all? Nadav and Avihu were just completely absorbed, in every sense, figuratively and literally. And still we can’t build a bridge from the Torah to them, on this way of seeing it. And to those they left behind, the matter was never resolved, and no one understood who they were or what they had done.

 

2. Aharon and his two sons

 

I never noticed this before this week: the Divine is worried that Aharon will go back to the place where his sons died, and if so he would also die. He might go at the wrong time, or he might go not prepared in the authorized way.

 

None of them had been priests for long. But Aharon was the quintessential system guy. He had to be, after he had improvised in the Golden Calf situation and look at the chaos and carnage and death that ensued. Aharon was at the top of the careful pursuit of holiness, the absolute, and truth – with his carefully designed garments, and the step-by-step processes of shepherding people through their offerings whenever they felt whole, or guilty, or joyful. Aharon would be the one to make judgments, first by oracle and eventually by the book of Torah.

 

But even so Aharon couldn’t suppress the improvisational, says the midrash. Doing his compulsory figure-eights, Aharon had the cultivated calm and metronomic pace to listen to people. And when they hurt he wanted to help them find peace within, or reconciliation between.

 

From time to time, could it be that Aharon was jealous of his two sons? Wished he could dispense with the time-consuming processes and inquiries, and go straight to the absolute? Is that the ground he wanted to go back to, at the Holy Place – to experience himself as they did for a once and only time? Did he need go there to reassure himself that this was him, and that was them, so he could reground himself? Or did he ever doubt his own way? If he did, who else could the Divine possibly find, to model the best of the priestly way and not just the prophetic?

 

Or maybe Aharon would go to the Holy Place simply to weep at the site of his loss, which was or wasn't connected to anything Nadav and Avihu did or represented in relation to him or anything. And the Divine was worried the people might never get him back from there, or never get him back intact.

 

3. The Divine and Aharon

 

How to talk to Aharon about this? How to protect him from searing pain, from being retraumatized by the Holy Place itself? How to shield him from a complexity he might never emerge from?

 

But also, how could even the Divine know when Aharon was healed enough, clear enough, to play his essential role? Which was to help the nation take responsibility, be accountable in a global way, for all it had done over a year’s time. It was Aharon the priest, not Moshe the teacher, whom the Divine designated to shepherd them through. It was Aharon the Divine wanted to train for this, even after Aharon had made the Golden Calf.

 

I have sometimes thought that Aharon’s priestly life was the Divine’s way of guarding him from ever making another public pronouncement in front of an idol that *This* is your god, O Israel. Literally from now on his every word and move would be scripted. But for some reason, that’s not the Aharon I’m seeing this year in this text. The Divine wants the father of Nadav and Avihu to be the one who comes to their meeting together in the Holy of Holies, to be the one person who will speak out loud the Divine name.

 

4. The Divine and Moshe

 

So the Divine went to Moshe with this dilemma.

 

Usually when the Divine has a charge that involves Aharon, the Divine speaks to them together. Not always, but mostly. Here, it stays for the time being between the Divine and Moshe.

 

Let me tell you what I have in mind, which the people need soon, and we need Aharon to guide them through. Maybe if I tell you, Moshe, you can tell him? Or you’ll know when he will be able to take this on?

 

Could we possibly say that the Divine “felt better” unburdening from this load, even if it would be a charge, a command whose execution we don’t hear much about?

 

Usually the Torah records that Moshe passed along what was spoken to him by the Divine, and then the Torah reports who followed through on the matter. In this chapter, it’s only sort of. We hear at the very end that someone did what the Divine had charged Moshe, but you almost miss it. We don’t know if “he did what the Divine had charged” means that Moshe talked to Aharon, or that Aharon performed the ritual.

 

Usually we don’t think of the Divine and Moshe as having conversations of consoling, of reflection. Moshe is the insistent one, the resistant one, the impatient one, the one who has an answer back or pushes the Divine to do something or do the opposite of what was just announced. Who just demands that the imperatives of absolute truths and methodical systems be reconciled – and you, Divine, make that so now! Usually the Divine relies on Aharon to slow things down and soften the edges, or make the dilemmas less painful.

 

On very rare occasions, it has to be Moshe. In this chapter, Moshe just listens to the Divine, listens absolutely, like no other time. And I have to think Moshe sobs in worry for his brother, for the Divine, for the people who need both the Divine and Aharon. Sobs for himself, for being Moshe and not Aharon. For not being able to meet these needs of the people himself.

 

And the Divine will not forget this, and will one day teach Moshe how to be like Aharon. But not yet.

 

5. Aharon and the people

 

It’s not like there haven’t been “sin offerings” until this point. Somehow it hasn’t been enough.

 

They need from time to time a broader accountability, for their year as a nation. Not just when they realize or find out they’ve done wrong – that’s what the “sin offerings” were for. They need to be made, forced, to ask themselves on an annual basis what have we done wrong, and give real answers and not just formulaic ones.

 

Even if they are in pain and in mourning, they need this periodic accountability. Nadav and Avihu were their loss too. Their trauma. It happened in their Holy Place.

 

Aharon will have to be the one to lead them through this new Yom Kippur, this day of cleansing/resetting/ransoming themselves back. Partly because Moshe is too harsh. The teacher is always grading. Partly because Aharon is the master of both systematic method and peaceful reconciliation.

And because when Aharon shows the people how to do this, from within his own pains and questions and anger and uncertainties, they will say: If he can, if he must, then we must, and we can.

 

Aharon will show them that you start with yourself, and your family. Before he can engage the people in confession, he must reflect on himself, on Nadav and Avihu, on everyone who is left. He will confess what he can, and what he doesn’t know is a sin or not he will at least offer up out loud as a report, to say that he knows.

 

Then he will speak on behalf of the people. Atonement is a word muddying the matter. There is a dimension of confession and acknowledgement, and then there is the Kippur, the cleaning/resetting and possibly ransoming back of one’s own soul and the national soul.

 

Interlude – Two Goats

 

The Mishnah says the two goats have to be identical in every way. The one that will carry off all the people’s wrongs to a far-away, sealed-off place no one can get to – and the one whose blood Aharon will take with him into the Most Holy Place.

 

Our worst acts and our ideals, sometimes they flow from place that are twinned within us. A quantum entanglement. (Or maybe just a cliché.)

 

6. Aharon and the Divine, or: Two Cherubs, or: Us Now

 

In the Most Holy Place it is crowded and it is lonely.

 

I have often thought of this part of Yom Kippur, where Aharon disappears into a cloud and meets the Shechinah, right by the ark with the deposit of the Divine words, as a calm retreat. A place he can see the most things, and hear spoken the special sounds of the Divine name, a word reserved and protected from the ways the world barnacles onto even our best most powerful words. How peaceful, how whole in this place.

 

This year I wonder about the lonely part. How will the Divine and Aharon be together? Will the two cherubs, which in the midrash embrace when the people as a whole are reconciled – will they be a comforting metaphor, especially to Aharon, or a cruel reminder of the separations he feels? Or of Nadav and Avihu who came toward this place and are no more – tragically, or because of their choices?

 

From Tali Adler this year, I think for the first time that Aharon and the Divine speak to each other. It’s not just Aharon, speaking the Name. About the Golden Calf, and what happened; about Nadav and Avihu, and who they were and what they did and what happened to them, and how everyone was affected. Aharon and the Divine have the best and most difficult conversation, about the year past and the losses and the wrongs and the world. Just like our midrash says that revelation at Mt. Sinai took as long as each person needed – a spiritual case of special relativity – so too Aharon and the Divine speak. From their perspective it takes as long as they need, maybe infinitely long, even if to the outside it seems to be over in a few minutes.

 

They have the conversations we all need – about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing. I wish the Torah would have told us more how to do that.

 

I believe Aharon emerges more cleansed, and restored, and healed. Through his acknowledgements, of his own faults and those of the people. And then all of the people through him are cleansed and restored and healed. They feel better and they are better, in every sense of the word. I believe this because I believe Moshe doesn’t tell Aharon to do all of this until Aharon is ready. (I wish the Torah had told us more about when Aharon was ready.) I believe this because I believe it’s possible to be ready.

 

Not just back then, but for us too.

Adar Conversation -- Getting to Mi Yode'a (Who Knows): Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World

Here is a session I did picking up on another of the themes I laid out in my talk a couple weeks ago. Grateful to Valley Beit Midrash for hosting it. You can watch or listen.

 

 

Follow the texts I refer to here on this source sheet at Sefaria.

Purim: The Buddy Film

This was my D'var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 16, 2024, Parashat Pekudei. which fell this year about a week before Purim.

It’s already after the Oscars, but I have a pitch for a new movie -- it could even be a franchise!

It’s about a pair of young friends who travel the world together. Every two years they pick a different spot. There has to be something grand about it -- imperial castles, or gaudy restaurants, or flamboyant festivals. They’re great friends who met in eighth grade and have always been just friends, nothing else going on there -- but each place they go, if anyone asks, they pass themselves off as cousins.

Before each of their travels, they do Wikipedia-level cultural research, giving themselves no more than two days to learn enough to choose new names to go by for the trip. Names that will help them blend in but are also a bit too on the nose. It’s kind of an inside joke between them. In Rome, for instance, they would be Sophia and Cesar, philosophy and empire.

You’re thinking: Entitled, alienated, bored millenials? Far from it. In fact the places they pick all have certain things in common.

They are prosperous places, but complacent. The ruling class is checked out, mildly corrupt, but mainly buffoons. There are latent tensions in society, whispers of racism and nativism, worries that it’s more. But the people who used to want to do something about it are stuck and have drifted away from each other. Nothing awful has happened there for a long time, but you never know. In each place there’s always someone who runs a boutique or a yoga studio or a food truck but used to be a young activist.

And here is the actual caper: The two friends choose these places in order to shake things up, to force the issue and help the people save themselves.

On the way, on the train, they talk through the whole night about all the big things. It’s like Before Sunrise or My Dinner With Andre. An hour before they arrive, they split up on the train so one will see they came together.

Once they arrive they head in different directions. She befriends the regional governor, who is (of course) recently single again. She takes language classes and always ends up starting an English-language book group for the other college students; they teach her colorful idioms and she brings them Shakespeare. He hangs out in the local taverns, figures out who the movers and shakers are, always buys the editor of the newspaper a drink.

For a few months, our gal and our guy don’t see much of each other. They pass in the streets and drop a note in each other’s pocket: Miss you, can’t wait to hang out. Did you catch that play, I think I’m learning enough of the language to get it. I heard the funniest joke, can’t wait to tell you. Dinner when we get back. Occasionally, someone notices these little connections between them and asks: Do you know each other or something? And they say: No -- well kinda. It’s my cousin; I can’t believe he’s here too.

After a few months, they know enough about the texture of the place to provoke the necessary crisis. You can probably fill this part in yourself: Local jerk who’s actually worse; owns a bunch of businesses; was the governor’s best friend back in the day. The jerk keeps selling the governor on changes to laws that one by one aren’t much, but together amount to a massive anti-immigrant crackdown. She gets her book group to raise their consciousness and take to the streets, and the owner of the boutique or yoga studio or food truck calls up her old friends and they group up too and show up together for the kids.

Right before the local jerk can make his final move, she invites him and the governor out to dinner at the gaudy restaurant down the path from the old imperial castle. She calls him out. The guy is run out of town.

Our guy and our gal, Sophia and Cesar or whatever they’re called this time around -- the people of the area finally put two and two together. They did know the other was here! The citizens honor them at a huge festival celebrating what they all achieved together. Speech, speech, the people demand, and you can write it: You people have welcomed us, you stood up for each other more than you ever realized you would because you’ve always loved each other, you just forgot for a time. Don’t forget anymore, tell this story, keep being good to each other. The two of us had to lose each other for most of a year -- don’t you all lose each other.

The people beg them to stay, but they have to move on. You know us as Sophia and Cesar, but that’s not who we really are. (In the film we learn her real name but never his.) Their year is done, and they’ve missed each other. They also need the friendship they saw all these people around them share, in the book group and the tavern and the streets. It’s time to find each other again. To tend to their own friendship for a year... and plan their next caper.

Do you recognize this movie?

If you think you don’t, think again, because the story I’ve told is the Megillah. Megillat Esther as: a buddy film.

I’ve taken a few liberties, of course; it’s my own fan fiction, my own midrash. But did I really? Couldn’t this be the story?  To give credit where credit is due, first of all I have to give a shout out to Paul Franks, who some of you know or remember from our community. One year around Purim at our Thursday Torah class, he said something like: The story of Esther and Mordechai is actual a heist; it’s Ocean’s Eleven. Something like that.

I’ve reimagined it instead as a buddy film, and I got the idea via Rabbi Josh Feigelson, who I quote here a lot, currently the leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. More on Rabbi Feigelson’s idea in a minute.

If the Megillah were a buddy film, wouldn’t it be great? In my pitch, Esther and Mordechai are old friends in every way. Their friendship is their company, the plays and the jokes they share, and how they want to change the world.

I’ve said before that within the Torah is absolutely one of the oldest buddy films of our culture. Moshe, Miryam, and Aharon -- they are for sure Luke, Leia, and Han Solo; they are Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. Each one in the group has a special power; it takes all of them to defeat the Empire or Voldemort; and they goof around and poke fun at each other, and grow and gather other friends too around them for all of it. Yes, I know in each case there is some kind of family dimension that’s hidden or created -- but really all of these are about friendship first.

Rabbi Feigelson says our parasha, Pekudei, has a buddy thing going too. The construction leaders for the Mishkan (the desert sanctuary) are Betzalel and Oholiav. This is me and not Rabbi Josh but it seems like this could be a classic Odd Couple dramatic situation. Betzalel means “in the shade of the Divine” -- he’s the spiritual free spirit. Oholiav has “my tent” in it -- he’s the quieter homebody. Rabbi Josh wrote this week: “It makes sense to me that the Torah would choose to highlight two friends at the center of the creation of the Mishkan, as the word for friend, chaver, is related to a word the Torah itself uses to describe putting together the Mishkan, l'chaber.”

Am I just messing around here, or does this have something to do with Purim and Shabbat?

I would love for the Megillah to be a buddy story between two people who come to Shushan calling themselves Esther and Mordechai. But regardless, Purim is a friendship chag. There is a specific mitzvah that I don’t think has a parallel anywhere else in Torah, the mitzvah of mishloach manot ish l’rei-eihu, of friends sending portions to each other. I can’t think of any other  affirmative mitzvah that is about friendship.

In the story of the defeat of Haman and the rescue of a whole people, part of the story is friends. A pair of friends, small groups of friends, even devious friends. In the aftermath of this violent self-defense, there is a charge to do something sweet for your friends. Something about friendship itself is a tikkun at this time of year, a repairing thing.  A tikkun for the large-scale brokenness of the Purim story.

As I was reimagining the Megillah as a buddy film, I was thinking about the interplay between our purposes and our friends, and all the forms that takes. I was thinking how the small joys of friendship and the big things we contemplate in life interweave, and how some friendships come out of meeting people around a collective purpose. Or sometimes it’s with our existing friends that we just find ourselves talking about the big world things on our minds and our place in their tikkun, as we drift into and out of those conversations even in the midst of a casual dinner or a gathering for fun.

In buddy movies there are all kinds of these friendships with all kinds of rhythms. From the intensity of Thelma and Louise or Butch and Sundance, to the quieter friendships, the once in a year or once in a reunion cycle reconnections. The friendships of extroverts and introverts. Maybe that’s why I imagine Esther and Mordechai as two people who pal around a lot, and also as two people who don’t see each other for a long time.

As we don’t live on bread alone, we also don’t live our dreams on ideas alone, or accomplish big things on meetings alone, or enjoy our lives on family alone.

The Purim practice of mishloach manot ish l’rei’eihu is a way to acknowlege that, to lift up the sweetness of the people we are friends with on any and all of those levels. Our tradition says a hearty treat is what we exchange, and it can be hearty food or even a hearty book!

And on Shabbat, we call the same kind of thing Shabbat dinner, or Shabbat lunch, or Kiddush at the synagogue. A day of friendship, with food made by friends and served by friends. We don’t go out on adventures, like in the buddy pics, but bring the stories of those adventures here, and as they project in the background we reconnect and talk.

There isn’t any aspect of our lives, any meaningful caper, that isn’t better as a buddy film. So on this Shabbat half an hour before Kiddush, and a week before Purim: May we send each other the blessings of Betzalel and Oholiav, of Moshe and Miryam and Aharon, of Esther and Mordechai.

D'var Torah: Questioning and Certainty

This is my D'var Torah for Shabbat, Parashat Va-era, January 13, 2024. It also reminds me of a Rosh Hashanah sermon I gave in 2022/5783, "Right-ology: How To Be Right Better in the New Year"

In August we went down to New York for the simchat bat celebration for our newest grandniece, and when we were hanging out with the family afterward at the synagogue, my daughter Lela was playing with R. and P., and she offered to give them piggyback rides. I think it was R. who got the first ride, so P. began to scream that it was unfair, so Lela said how about I give you two rides. And then of course R. began to scream -- that’s unfair! -- and this went back and forth for a minute when I though I might help.

I tried a trick I learned from Laurie which she learned from her mom, Iris z”l, which is to distract a kid with some other words. And I thought the way I would do this was to bring my moral-educator skills to bear. So I said to one of them, R. I think, “What’s fair?”

And there was a pause for about a second, and can you guess what she said to my question?

R. said: “It’s not fair!”

At which point I left Lela to her own devices.

So R. was right about one particular thing, which I’ll tell her when she’s old enough to get it but I’ll tell you now. In Judaism, we say that we value questioning. We value it a lot, and sometimes we even say that questioning is the essence of Judaism. Questioning what everyone takes for granted, questioning authority, even questioning God. It’s why Jews are often b’gadol, in the big scheme, revolutionaries and social critics, and scientific innovators, and litigators.

What R. was responding to is something else which we also say is the essence of Torah, which is knowing right and wrong. We look to Torah for absolute moral principles, which b’gadol is also why Jews have been among the leading activists for civil rights and human rights, in any country we are in and around the globe.

Questioning and having absolute moral conviction are not the same thing.

R. was saying now is the time for moral conviction, not for questioning.

Sometimes questioning is the opposite of what the Torah wants. When Par’oh says “Who is the Divine, mi Adonai, that I should listen and release the people”, that is not: Ah, Moshe, you’ve brought me an interesting theological perspective I’ve never encountered. I have some questions, perhaps we could discuss divinity and its implications for social ethics.

No, this is Par’oh questioning something we don’t think should be questioned. People shouldn’t enslave other people, period-full-stop.

And even if Par’oh had said: Let’s talk about this God of yours and the implications for our current labor situation -- this was not a situation for questions like that. This was a situation for moral certainty.

It’s not just that certain things should be beyond question. It’s that if what you mostly know how to do is question, it’s hard to build up the commitment you need to follow through, or to stand up for someone. Sometimes questioning can prevent us from believing that we know right from wrong. We think: if you can formulate a question about this conviction, then maybe it’s not a conviction. But you need to be certain about something in order to fight for it, especially when the people who are convinced of the immoral opposite are certain and fight from that certainty.

Let me give you one example from the week, and I want to say something about it from this lens and then come back to from another angle. Israel is right now before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, responding to an accusation that the war in Gaza constitutes genocide.

To me this particular charge is in the category of when questioning is not spiritual strengthening but leads you astray. When you are in a just war, against an enemy that is real and continues to be dangerous on a day-to-day basis, when you make efforts even though they are imperfect to distinguish combatants from noncombatants by helping them escape the fighting so they won’t be killed and giving warning and even a map and schedule of the fighting -- raising the question of genocide is profoundly confused. And Israeli actions to take account of the human rights and humanitarian needs of Gazans aren't a ruse to cover up genocide or genocidal intent. Gaza isn’t some kind of Theresinstadt, that if no one was looking the whole area and all its people would be bombed to the ground.

On this issue there is moral certainty that self-defense is right and a enemy itself genocidal deserves to be fought.

Considering genocide on the part of Israel as though this were a real question, worthy of the international court, doesn’t further any moral certainty at all -- no matter what the court rules, and may they have the wisdom to rule justly. No result of this case, or of parallel actions on university campuses, will strengthen a moral principle in the world or in anyone’s mind.

The parasha and the Exodus story more broadly do teach us about the questions you should ask even in a situation where much is morally clear and absolute. I have this question of my own -- why does God insist so often that the purpose of the plagues is so that Par’oh and the Egyptians will know the Divine? Why doesn’t God say: It’s so they will know that slavery is immoral. Surely that’s a moral certainty that ought to come before anything else.

In fact, while the Torah is teaching us about moral certainty in Egypt, the Torah is also teaching about questioning at the same time.

The parasha begins with this interesting revelation by the Divine to Moshe. God says: I appeared to your ancestors in Genesis as El Shaddai, but by my name, Y-H-V-H, I was not known to them. (Exodus 6:3)

The commentators interpret this to mean that there was something about the One that Avraham and Yitzchak and Yaakov knew with certainty, and that there was something they didn’t know. Rav Ovadia Seforno says that they never stretched what they knew for certain beyond their own experience, and therefore couldn’t really pass on to their children what their moral convictions would mean for their lifetimes.

And Sara Wolkenfeld teaches a midrash from Shmot Rabbah which says the same thing this way: that before Moshe no one who really knew God ever asked questions at all, particularly when what they knew for certain from the Divine was contradicted by what was happening before their eyes.

They never asked why if the land was being promised to them they were continually fighting the people there, or finding it hard to dig a well, or I suppose why sacrificing my son was a coherent thing to do. They never even asked how their enslavement was supposed to be part of the big picture.

But Moshe asked the Divine at the burning bush: Who are You? What’s your name? I know that slavery in Egypt is wrong, and I tried to do something way back but I couldn’t, so what’s going on that you think I can help change this?

This is a questioning which is grounded in moral certainty. Which asks -- if I know this is right and I know this is wrong, how should I apply it? What do I need to do? What don’t I understand yet? What detail about the big principle might I be getting wrong -- or might you be getting wrong? (Even the angels by the way in one grueseome midrash ask God: If this oppression is so wrong, why do You allow babies to be baked into the bricks that Your people are still being forced to make?)

So Moshe reaches a level where he can ground himself in certainty and challenge Par’oh and also continue to ask questions of the Divine, about what flows further from his moral certainty and what he is charged with teaching the people.

And the Divine continues to say in our parasha and next week’s too and beyond that that it’s not enough to say slavery here and today is wrong, but knowing Me means knowing that the Exodus means something forever, in other places and times, and you will have to keep asking each other about that.

So we can and must ask questions about Israel and Palestine, and the war and its conduct and what comes after. We ask them out of our certainties about a Zionism of moral excellence and out of the certainly that all human beings are created B’tzelem Elohim (in the Divine image). Indeed these questions will strengthen and deeper our deepest moral convictions about right and wrong.

We can and must ask about how the Exodus certainties stretch out to civil rights and equality in the United States. What now, and what toward the future, and what have we been missing in this story, all of these we should ask as we mark this important weekend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.

Some of these wise questions might be very challenging ones, ones that feel every bit as uncomfortable as the genocide quote-unquote “question.” But the point isn’t the doubt; the point is to question in service of conviction. This is the questioning of the chacham in the Pesach Seder, the wise child. Who is convinced that there are important testimonies and laws, and wants to dive further. As opposed to the one she-eino yode’a lish’ol, who doesn’t know to ask questions in the right spirit. I know that my grandnieces R. and P. will understand that one day, because of their parents and the great teachers they want for them.

The Torah calls of this throughout the Exodus narrative “knowing the Divine”, Yediat Hashem. To remind us that it’s impossible to know everything we need to about our certainties but that they are highest thing to strive for. Yediat Hashem is where certainty and questioning meet and then stretch higher. That’s the questioning that is indeed at the heart of Judaism, and as one of our most famous questions asks: If not now, when?

Who Were the Baby-Savers of Exodus and Who Are We?

Saving babies, according to the Torah, was the first crack in the oppression of the Israelites by Pharaoh.

In the first two chapters of Exodus, the start of this week’s Torah reading in the synagogue and Jewish study cycle, two sets of people save baby boy Israelites from the death decreed by Pharaoh. First it’s two midwives, then it’s Pharaoh’s own daughter with the help perhaps of her retinue and for sure of Moses’ sister and mother.

What do we know about each of them? Their motivations? Exodus 1-2 are both very schematic and very nuanced, worth a very careful read or re-read for the way stories that might be very familiar were first written out.

The midwives are introduced in 1:15 by name as Shifra and Puah, and they are the first characters given names in the text, other than the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt generations before and had long since died. Pharaoh and all the other actors so far in the present story are described by title and role but not named.  And of course it’s very unusual for women who aren’t ongoing figures in a biblical story to be named, or for women at all in the Bible.

Not only did Shifra and Puah defy Pharaoh in their actions; they also defied him verbally to his face! (Clever talk in 1:19; they say the baby boys lived because the Hebrew women are “chayot”, which Pharaoh would have heard as “wild beasts” but also means “alive/full of life.”)

The first interpretive bump in the text is a brilliant gift made out of the fact that Hebrew is an alphabet primarily of consonants, and in biblical Hebrew most vowels are implied and not written. Generally if you know the rules of Hebrew grammar you know the patterns of vowels. But every so often there are two grammatical possibilities, and Exodus 1:15 is such a case. Pharaoh spoke either “to the midwives of the Hebrews” or “to the Hebrew midwives.” One vowel in one word affects whether they might be Egyptian or whether they are clearly Israelite. The names Shifra and Puah aren’t conclusive -- they sound like they could be Hebrew names, or non-Hebrew names made to sound like Hebrew. (Today Shifra has become a good Jewish name, but that’s no proof about ancient Hebrew.)

And then the Hebrew word for Hebrew itself adds to the ambiguity. “Ivri” means the one-from-across, one-from-over-there, one-from-across-the-river. As a rule of thumb, Israelites are described in the Torah as Ivri/Hebrew either by non-Israelites, or by Israelites in the presence of non-Israelites.

And as if that weren’t enough, the Torah says that Shifra and Puah kept the boys alive because “the midwives revered God” (1:17). You could use that to argue that they were Israelites, worshippers of the One. Or you could say the language calls attention to their unexpected reverence for this particular divinity, a stretch beyond their prior identities.

In terms of what this motivation is in substance, “revered God” sounds like deep spirituality. On the other hand, in the Torah “fearing/revering God” often refers to the most minimal standard of moral decency, and the absence of “fearing God” often means the absence of any moral standard at all. Was this standing up beyond any expectation, powered a strength from deep within the heart, or what any decent person should do?

So, were Shifra and Puah Hebrew midwives, or Egyptian midwives serving Hebrews? Or as some early post-biblical legends have it, Egyptian midwives who because of this experience went over to the Israelites or at least to their God?

Whoever they were, they saved baby boys whose death was an edict of the regime. The act is the same either way, but who they were matters. Did they act because this was their own people? (Later Jewish midrash identifies them usually but not always with Yocheved and Miryam, Moshe’s mother and sister.) Was it because of their guild, their duty to all mothers and babies? Because of their spiritual depth and attunement, or a simple and profound humanity? All of the above? Exodus 1 is a different story depending on the answer.

In the next chapter (2:6), Pharaoh’s daughter is bathing by the Nile when she sees a box floating there: “And she opened it, and she saw him, the boy, and look -- it was a little one, crying – and she took pity on him, and she said, ‘One of the Hebrew children this is.’”

Unlike the midwives, she does not have a name in the Torah. She is Daughter-of-Pharaoh. (Later Jewish tradition calls her Batyah, “daughter of Yah/the Divine.”) At least part of her motivation is clear: it’s a baby! And he’s floating for his very life. “She saw him, the little one” – the Hebrew adds an extra syllable. She saw extra.

What did she mean, “one of the Hebrew children”? It’s not just a surface descriptor, one of the babies who belongs to “them”; it’s a baby her own father has decreed must be killed. Anyone who found him was required to drown him in this very same Nile. No longer only midwives were under this command. Identifying a Hebrew baby boy meant seeing immediately a baby condemned to death.

One view: “She saw him, the little one” – Pharaoh’s daughter immediately saw this about him, a boy not just vulnerable but a specific target of her father. She went to great lengths after saving the baby to see to its care and presumably to hide him and his identity. She broke the law right under her father’s nose. She established a relationship with the baby’s mother across a boundary both geographical (Goshen) and national.

Another possibility: Tali Adler this week wrote something interrogating the meaning of pity, the root “ch-m-l” in Hebrew. Sometimes it’s a problematic term, a selective pity or even a self-serving one. (Tali herself I think concludes that in the case of a baby, one never doubts that “chemlah” is pure compassion.)

But in her general vein -- Why did Pharaoh’s daughter save this particular baby boy? Was this just the only one Pharaoh’s daughter happened upon? Was one enough for her, or would she have saved others? Did her retinue mobilize to hold her back from putting all of them at further risk if they were found out? In any case, Pharaoh’s daughter did this one act and didn’t disturb her father’s system any further.

Or did she? At some point, she gave the boy his name, Moshe/Moses, which works in both Hebrew and Egyptian. She says it’s about her “drawing him out of water.” We know for sure that in the Egyptian language his name locates him in the family of Pharoah. But in Hebrew the name is a charge or a prophecy that this boy will become a drawer-out-of-waters. He will, in a long time.

In the next set of episodes, the text toys with us around Moses’ awareness of his own connection. The narrator and we know he is Israelite, yet we don’t know if he himself does. Read the verses in the last half of chapter 2 very carefully! Moshe is identified later by Midianites as an Egyptian (2:19), and he calls himself a “stranger in a strange land” (2:22), which could mean every place he has ever dwelled.

Was the Daughter-of-Pharaoh the one who gently set up her adopted son to “get it” on his own? Did she play a long game? Did she know how painful it would be for him to discover the oppression around him, that he would have to flee from the situation for decades and then from his own role in the revolution, until he couldn’t say no to the Divine voice any more?

“Hebrew or humanitarian” and the other interpretive questions aren’t just about nailing down the motives of these specific characters. The opening chapters of Exodus are parallel to the opening of Genesis. Genesis has 10+ chapters of creation and the origins of humanity before we get to Abraham and Sarah, the founders of Israel (and others) with their special relationship to the Divine. Exodus 1-2 are a kind of second creation saga. Idioms from Genesis 1 are sprinkled throughout. Humanity as an ethical principle prior to Israel and Israel’s Torah is in play, at least as a possibility.

Encountering this part of the Torah, we Jews are being asked whether this Exodus story is about our liberation alone, or about the nature of liberation in the scheme of the universe generally. It's about whose babies we have to see.

Can the story be ours, and also ours-toward-others, and ours-and-others’? Do we read our liberation story as something that has to finish before we can relate it to other people, or can our stories run ongoing in parallel, or are they actually interwoven?

And what if in one telling we are in a process of liberation, and in a simultaneous telling we play a role in oppression? Michael Walzer argues for this at an early stage in our history. He says  that the biblical prophets saw the Israelite ruling class during the era of the kings as both beset by empires and acting like Pharaohs to their own poor.

For me, all the answers are yes. Exodus liberation is past and present, ours and others’-near-us. The first law the Israelites receive after the Ten Commandments is to liberate their own “Hebrew slaves” (21:2). I would argue this means – the slaves which are Hebrew-to-you, the way you were Hebrew-to-others.

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Now for the harder part, spiritually and morally. I hope you’ll read this part graciously toward me, particularly if you’re a committed Jew or a committed Christian. I hope it might spark some one-to-one or small groups conversations; it’s certainly not my definitive word.

The story of oppression and liberation of the Jews is not over yet for us. The century or less of tremendous Jewish freedom doesn’t mean the process is complete or the book is closed.

About a dozen years ago I first articulated to myself and to the congregation I serve that Palestinian liberation should and will be a Jewish story, a part of our own midrash on Exodus. When Palestinians are free it should be not begrudgingly or in spite of us, but because of us and because of our own liberation.

For a Jew, this focuses the challenge of the babies in Exodus 1-2 and the account of those who first saw them and acted -- what biblical scholar Jon Levenson has called “the universal horizon of biblical particularism.” In the past month, compassion for babies has been at the center of reactions to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The horrors inflicted on babies by Hamas on October 7. The babies in hospitals and homes in Gaza killed and wounded and put at risk in Israel’s military response.

This week how can we Jews not see our own people’s babies and the babies of Gaza at the same time, as we read of Pharaoh’s decree and the midwives and Pharaoh’s daughter? Which of those characters are we supposed to be?

For many Christians recently, there has been another powerful biblical anchor. So many people shared in December an image of or based on a baby doll amidst Gazan rubble set up outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as this year’s nativity scene. How could people not perceive a link between then and now, especially Palestinian Christians and those who have bonds to them?

Yet if Jews face the challenge of “the universalist horizon of biblical particularism”, Christians face the other side of that coin. Call it “the particularlist horizon of biblical universalism.” How might my friends in Christian faith see particularity, multiple particularities, in the universalism of the Christian story?

When I first saw the image from Bethlehem, I was both upset and afraid. I was upset at exclusion. Does this mean you can’t see my babies during your holy season, only yours, only theirs? And also afraid of what happens when Christians map the war this way. If Jesus represents (only?) the Palestinian babies today, then we Jews today are also the ones who are King Herod in the Gospel of Matthew, ordering the massacre of babies, Herod who is described exactly as Pharaoh from Exodus 1-2.

What would happen if this was the takeaway from Advent and Christmas this year, absorbed on social media and in churches in the United States? How would people emerge from that and look at me and my people? That’s an immediate fear. In the wider picture, what would that do to the possibility of a story where Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian liberation are intertwined?

Seeing the Bethlehem image many times, I tried not to let it disturb my own compassion for Gaza, not to let me off from my own Torah imperative to keep Gazans in my view and in my prayers, even as I was fearful and upset for myself and my own. I felt better actually after seeing a Christmas Day post from one of my religious Jewish-Israeli friends visiting the U.S.: “Where I live, we could use hope and miracles. So if you pray today, keep us all in mind.” I had thought of asking that out loud too, and wish that I had.

I know many of my Christian friends in faith did just that. I prayed that the prayers of my friends during Advent and on Christmas would be capacious enough to see the babies of Gaza these past few months and the babies in Israel who were murdered on October 7 or who were present when their parents were killed; the babies and toddlers held underground as hostages, including baby Kfir Bibas, not even a year old, who is possibly still alive in captivity. All of these babies, and older children, who lost their lives or who will have to grow up and live with the trauma of this from their youth. Not to mention the babies of Ukraine during Putin’s bombings, and other places I forget even to think about too much of the time, who need to be in our stories too.

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I have a strong memory of Mrs. Nussbaum’s Sunday School class at Shaare Shalom Congregation, when I must have been in first or second grade. We were making our own cut-and-paste versions of the Haggadah, the text of the Pesach (Passover) Seder. I remember myself doing a page with babies being thrown into the Nile. I picture it in the traditional old-style Hebrew School notebook, with the picture of Rabbi Moses Maimonides on the front, though that’s probably wrong. Cutting, pasting, maybe even coloring.

We were taught about the babies and assimiliated it very matter-of-factly as Jewish kids. I don’t remember being scared about it at the time. I, who became the father who wanted to shield my own small children from violence of any kind in TV and books as long as possible, who fast-forwarded past the Nazi parts of “The Sound of Music” with my kids.

Today, it’s the story on the shore with Pharaoh’s daughter and on land with the midwives than I’m eager to cut, paste, and color in. These women will help me see the liberation stories in which I as a Jew am involved – our own story, Palestinians’ and our story with them, African-Americans’ and other American’s and our story with them. It’s not only about babies, or even just children.

I can’t say that in any of the liberation stories of our time I have been active like Shifrah, Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter. I haven't saved any babies. I am perhaps most like Pharaoh’s daughter at the shore at the first moment, trying to see extra and able to say, “One of the Hebrew babies this is.” That’s the moment I guess I have to study so I can know what’s next.

Who were Shifra, Puah, Batyah. What’s the best version of them, the best place to put the vowels and the best way to interpret their words -- and how can I become like them.

Jews and Power

This is my current draft of my D'var Torah for Shabbat, December 2, 2023, Parashat Vayishlach and the Shabbat before Chanukkah 5784.

Yocheved Lifshitz is an 85-year-old Israeli who was one of the first hostages released by Hamas in late October. She and her husband Oded have been coexistence activists from Kibbutz Nir Oz just a couple miles from the Gaza Strip. They used to pick up people from Gaza at the Erez crossing who needed medical treatment to bring them to hospitals in Israel. Yocheved made the news this week with the story that shortly after she was captured Hamas chief Sinwar came, and she says: “I asked him how he wasn’t ashamed of himself, to do such a thing to people who for years supported peace. He didn’t answer. He was quiet.” When Yocheved was finally released, she took the hand of one of her masked Hamas captors and said, “Salaam”, peace.

This kind of chutzpah in the face of terror is astonishing, and in Israel since October 7 there’s been a whole genre of bubbe-chutzpah stories like this, starting with Rachel Edri from Ofakim who held off the terrorists in her home on that day for hours with cookies, while giving signals through the window to the forces outside.

It’s tempting to say that this is the whole Jewish superpower in a nutshell, chutzpah and wit for survival with spirit. It’s tempting just to say as we’ll hear from the prophet Zechariah in a week on Shabbat Chanukkah -- Not by might and not by power but by My spirit, lo v’chayil v’lo v’choach ki im b’ruchi (Zechariah 4:6).

But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest eventually an edit for the prophet’s words, and that brings us to our parasha this week, which in its own nutshell is completely about power. This week we tell of Yaakov’s reunion with his twin brother Esav -- two strong camps of people meeting each other after twenty years of separation. We tell of Yaakov’s wrestling match with a being, a man or a Divine messsenger. We tell of the rape of Dina and her brothers’ response and Yaakov’s own response or lack of response.

And in the middle of it we get our people’s name Yisrael, which contains in it many possible statements about Jews and power.

Twenty years prior, Yaakov was a single man with nothing, on the run for his life from his brother who wanted to kill him. Now Yaakov is a wealthy herdsman with a big family and a whole community with him, and he is ready to come home. With both a signal from the Divine and because he is himself ready. As he approaches the border Yaakov sends messengers ahead to Esav, and they return and tell him Esav is coming toward him with four hundred men. What their intentions are, the messengers can’t say.

The Torah says vayira Yaakov m’od vayeitzer lo Yaakov was very terrified and he was troubled (Genesis 32:8). There are two verbs that describe the same feeling or a combination of reactions. The first verb vayira has connotations of terror and fear and awe, being overwhelmed. The second verb vayeitzer relates to narrowness, being narrowed or boxed in or clenched.

The midrash in Bereshit Rabbah sorts it out like this: Vayira means Yaakov was afraid that Esav would kill him, and vayeitzer means Yaakov was afraid that he would kill Esav. “If he overpowers me he will kill me, and if I overpower him I will kill him.”

I want to pause over that. Yaakov was afraid of being overpowered and of being overpowering. I’m also once again astonished that our Rabbis living in Israel under the rule of the Byzantine Empire could imagine a Jew worrying about being so powerful that they might have to kill someone in war, worrying about the ethics of power.

The midrash goes on and imagines Yaakov thinking: All this time Esav has been living in the Land of Israel and I haven’t, and perhaps he comes to our battle with the strength, the koach, of the mitzvah of living in the land. All this time Esav has been living with our parents and supporting them, and perhaps he comes to our battle with the koach of fulfilling the commandment of “honor your father and your mother.” And just because the Divine has made me promises of protection if I would live according to our covenant, which I have, maybe those don’t really apply to worldly matters.

Yaakov seems to understand that he has power and Esav has power, and both of them have physical power and both of them have some moral and spiritual power. This realization itself overwhelms him. Yir’ah is awe and trembling in an existential sense. Yaakov’s consciousness is broad enough to see Esav somewhere in this picture, not just Esav’s might but the mitzvot that Esav might have, which are the same mitzvot related to the land and to legacy and to compassion that Yaakov himself has or wants to have.

At the same time, Yaakov is tzar, he is concerned about seeing himself too narrowly and of seeing Esav only in the narrowest possibility as a mortal enemy. My chavruta Rabbi Dan Ross says Yaakov is concerned about his yetzer, about acting only out of his selfishness, of justifying violence by shutting out the humanity of Esav and assuming they are in a zero-sum game.

Yaakov is suspended there for the rest of a day. He prays, and he begins to strategize and develop a negotiating strategy toward Esav. None of this gives him confidence.

Then that night comes the fight with the being. They wrestle, and if you read the description in the Hebrew or a good translation, you won’t quite know at first who blesses whom, who wounds whom. In the center of the episode Yaakov receives a new name, Yisrael, “for you have sar-ed with the Divine and with people and you were able, or you were victorious” (Genesis 32:29).

The letters sin-resh make up the root sar or sarar. One of the essential meanings of sar is a person of power or authority. In modern Hebrew a sar is a government minister.

I said that this name Yisrael contains a number of possible statements about Jews and power. It’s been suggested by scholars that Yisrael means “God is the powerful”, meaning God and not us, that Yisrael are the people who have no human king, only God. That’s what we show and stand for in the world in contrast to all the other nations.

A second interpretation is that Yisrael the people are ourselves sar-el,  the human manifestation of power in a godly way, the executive official of the Divine. A third and related take holds the image of the story of the name, that we are destined to wrestle with power, our own power and the power of others.

The first interpretation says that human power is always evil or tragic, and that no human can wield power as the Divine does. All human power in the hands of a group turns destructive or exploitative or oppressive. A version of this says that there is no way Israel can exert power as Israel in relation to Palestinians, except oppressively.

The other interpretations acknowledge that power is necessary for us and possible. Power can be godly or not. Power is necessary to survive, to live with Esav, to acknowlege his mitzvot or to defeat him if necessary. But it’s always a struggle to use power well, and the grappling never stops.

I have been saying lately a lot that Jews are experiencing power in the world in a way we never have since maybe King Solomon. And it’s not since 1948 even; it’s probably since the late 1960s or the 1970s, my lifetime, fifty or not even sixty years.

We have sought power out of necessity, to protect ourselves as a minority in this country and of course to protect ourselves in the Middle East. Being powerless as an immigrant community, being powerless after the Shoah, these were not an option. Leaving our fate to the hands of God or the powers of the world were not and are not an option.

We have developed power in the obvious senses -- military, political, economic. But we have also developed power through our values and our friendships and our alliances. In the U.S., our situation was transformed through World War II for instance because Jews fought side-by-side with every other American group, and then came home to the G.I. Bill and went to school and gained education and built wealth, often alongside other groups.

We used our power to establish for ourselves hospitals and nursing homes and universities when others wouldn’t have us, and then we opened those to others, and look what power for good a name like Beth Israel holds in our world.

In the U.S. Jews became enmeshed with others working to gain the power we all needed and deserved, in unions and in the women’s movement and the civil rights movement and beyond. In Israel, when it wasn’t possible to reach out to neighboring countries, Jews brought life-changing technologies of agriculture and health to the developing world, sources of power in the long run for the people of those countries.

We have struggled with power and how to continue to hold it as sar-el, as power infused with divinity -- as the power and status of Jews in this country began to diverge from our African-American allies and friends in the 1970s, for instance; of course with the Palestinians as well, even in times of relative quiet.

And this is what we have to do, to struggle with power, to wrestle with it ourselves as Jews today. The answer is not that Jewish power is evil inherently. The answer is also not the opposite represented by Otzmah Yehudit, the Israeli political party whose name means “Jewish power.” That is a movement that glorifies power itself and whose ideology makes no bones about putting Jewish lives above Arab lives in every way, and is behind the terrorizing of Palestinians in the West Bank right now. The name is opposite of Yisrael, and it is our responsibility to  repudiate it and wrestle power away from it.

Our power is necessary, not just for survival but for being Yisrael is the widest senses. Like Yaakov we have to understand our power to save lives and our power to take them, and how power can limit our vision or enlarge it. We will use our power as Jews ethically and not, in the current war and at other times, and all we can do is to keep trying honestly to use it well and say when we have not.

So this is my revision to the prophet Zechariah: Not only by might, not only by power, but also by My spirit. Lo rak b’chayil v’lo rak b’choach ki gam b’ruchi. So we might say in a time when we contemplate the power of Yocheved Lifshitz and the power of Tzah”al (the IDF). So we might say during this time, as we arrive at Chanukkah this week and retell that ancient story of corrupt power, redeeming power, and the struggle to establish power well.

Shabbat Shalom and may I be the first to wish you a Happy Chanukkah.

41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
    
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
    
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

Two Kinds of Darkness, Two Kinds of Light, Two Kinds of Torah

This is (I think) the D'var Torah I have for services this Shabbat tomorrow. The Torah reading begins with the very beginning of the Torah. It's one week since the Hamas atrocities began. Thank you to Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal and Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for helping me unlock this, though if anything is off it's on me and not them.

*****

Last week on Simchat Torah, as we tried our hardest to celebrate especially for our youngest kids, knowing what we already knew, there was a verse I was chanting in the Torah that just gutted me even more. It’s the very last line attributed to Moshe in the Torah, his last words. The final line of Moshe’s blessing to the people said:

 

Happy are you, fortunate are you, people Israel, who is like you,

a nation saved by the Divine

your helping shield, whose sword is your pride.

Your enemies shall recant themselves to you

and you on their high places will tread.

 

Ashrecha Yisrael, mi chamocha, am nosha b’Adonai

magen ezrecha, asher cherev ga’avatecha

v’yika-chashu oyvecha lach,

v’atah al bamoteimo tidroch

 

And I thought in that moment, is it possible that not a single word or phrase of that Torah is true?

 

Not happy, not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. No Mi chamoacha, no callback to the moment of escape from Egypt, from danger into freedom, An enemy far from recanting, from going back on its essence -- and who is treading on whom today.

 

Was even our own Torah going to be turned on us, to mock us, and on our holy day no less and in the presence of our sweet little ones. Or was this some kind of invitation toward even more faith, a faith that Torah can be as powerful as the weapons and mutated imaginations that define our reality right now.

 

And with those wonderings ringing in my soul we turned on Simchat Torah to the very first verses of the Torah, the first words of our parasha today, and they too seemed unreal: the creation of light in a reality hitherto dark and formless all the way down.

 

This is the week we are starting the Torah again. Against the backdrop of murder and kidnapping and mobilizing and bomb shelters, mourning and fearing for our loved ones and our people, this is the week we start again fresh. Each year when we get to Parashat Bereshit we’re supposed to have become better prepared by the chagim (fall holy days) for a new year of Torah, to be more receptive to it than ever before. Yet we know ahead of us is for certain a week of more death, and certainly weeks and who knows how much of 5784. What kind of strength will Torah have, this week and beyond, and what kind of strength and wisdom can it give us?

 

Parashat Bereshit begins with perfection, everything in its orderly place, and humans created in the Divine image, b’tzelem Elohim, and the first humans, placed in a perfect garden -- with closeness to the Divine, the end of loneliness, and a charge simply to work and to protect their beautiful place.

 

Everything about the opening chapter was a revolution in human consciousness in its time, and I usually say in our time as well. But so quickly it all falls apart, and the parasha descends into exile, violence between brothers, and then violence enveloping the world. Until the parasha ends with only a single glimpse of hope, the birth of Noach: -- zeh v’nachameinu, this one will comfort us, will turn us around, mi-ma-aseinu ume-itzvon yadeinu, from our actions and the sadness our hands have wrought, min ha-adadmah asher erera Adonai, what we’ve made out of this earth that the Divine has cursed.

 

This is not an easy parasha to begin with, a parasha about new beginnings and immediate troubles. I thought about going to other Torah this Shabbat for the comforting we all need. But maybe it is the parasha we need nonetheless.

 

On the first day, darkness hovers over the face of the deep seas and chasms, and God says let there be light, y’hi or -- and there is. Vayehi or, light was, all of a sudden. And God saw the light, that it was good, ki tov, and immediately God separated the light from the darkness.

 

God wants light. And then God makes a decision to name the darkness. In the ancient world prior to the Torah, even in parts of the Bible composed earlier than the first chapter of Genesis, the creations stories would tell of realms beyond the reach of the gods, symbolized by deep and vanquishing waters and by endless darkness. But in our Torah God stakes a claim even to darkness. Gives it a name: laila.

 

Why would God want in on that? Especially if the light of the first verses is considered not physical light but Torah. Why would God want there to be something that is so profoundly opposite to Torah, as one of the first things in creation?

 

I can only think that there are two kinds of darkness. There is a darkness that says there is nothing in the world but violence, and even seeming goodness is just self-interest, or huddling together for safety and nothing more. Darkness is believing that is all there is, not just from time to time as we all do, but fundamentally all the time.

 

The Torah claims, I think, that darkness is something else. Some of it and maybe all of the moral darkness is made out of imagination and language and even out of connection, out of the capacity for organization and sustained effort -- twisted for sure, and encased in the hardest and thickest klippot, cases of iron and hatred.

This kind of darkness is made of the same things as its opposite -- as goodness, as light, as Torah. So God has no choice but to claim this darkness. And our hearts, connected as they are to all hearts with their roots in the Divine Heart, have no choice but to acknowledge it too.

 

And God is ambitious, and ambitious for the power of Torah against this darkness. Even knowing that it’s only through us, Divine image that we are but earthy nonetheless, that Torah will show its energy in the world.

 

So we have been taugh each day to say this blessing precisely when it’s actually light outside: Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech Ha-Olam, Yotzer Or u’Voray Choshech, Oseh Shalom u’Voray et Hakol. We thank God for fashioning light and creating darkness, making peace and creating everything.

 

On the fourth day, God comes back to work more on light, and God creates the sun and the moon. According to the midrash -- and thank you to my friend and colleague Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal for pointing me to this Torah this week -- the sun and the moon were originally made the same brightness, and both were charged to shine all the time. The moon approached God and said: Is it possible for two kings to serve with only one crown? And God said: Then go and make yourself smaller. The moon said: I raised a valid point, so why should I shrink myself? And God said: Go and share the day with the sun, and also rule the night by yourself. The moon said: What good am I that way, as a candle during the day that no one sees? And God said: Then go and let Israel count its days and years by you. And let people see that sometimes you are small, and sometimes you disappear, and sometimes there is no other light but yours.

 

As there are two kinds of darkness, there are two kinds of light. A bright and certain light, so obviously guiding and warming the world, at times of peaceful unity and justice -- yes that is the light of the sun. But there is also moonlight, and Rabbi Rosenthal quotes a teaching from Rabbi Sharon Brous: That we Jews are moon people. “[T]he moon, like our spirits, is an object in motion. It will always come back around. For moon people, that is the essence of our spiritual mobility. ... the moon teaches us that even when no light is visible at all, even in the deepest darkness, our hearts trust and remember that the light will shine once again. Maybe even tomorrow. And—though it seems impossible to imagine today—it will even eventually reemerge in its fullness. Orienting our calendar around the moon means that hope is a muscle we practice month after month, year after year, generation after generation. It is a muscle that gets stronger as we use it.” We Jews have had long experience exercising that muscle, and now we need to build it even more.

 

Sometimes Torah is a light powerful like the sun. Twelve years ago, the week of this parasha, Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it had held captive for more than five years. It was among other things a testimony to the idea from our parasha that what Tzelem Elohim means is that we are accountable for the life of even a single individual, and the State of Israel did not break that faith with Gilad Shalit. That’s actually the Torah I taught for Parashat Bereshit right here on Shabbat twelve years ago.

 

Today, the light of Torah we need is more like the light of the moon. To continue to believe that the sanctity of human life is a powerful and guiding Torah, even during the weeks we are seeing more and more pictures of those who are captive and those being buried and more bombs. There is no Torah we can learn and go out and fix this with right now, even if we brought it to every minister and general and world leader. There is no Torah as that absolute a light. Still there is a Torah like the crescent moon that will help us locate ourselves, as I am trying to do right now with this Torah I am teaching, and Torah that will help us take a few steps in the right direction, even in the dark time we’re in.

 

In a few minutes we will bench Rosh Chodesh. We will anticipate the day this week when the moon disappears entirely and a new month commences, and we will beg God to give us a new month of blessing for us and for all the people Israel. How hard that prayer will be.

 

The name of the new month is Marcheshvan, which means “the eighth moon.” Eight is a special number. Marcheshvan is the only month of the Jewish year with no holy day at all beyong the new moon itself and Shabbat-- no celebrations, major or minor, not even a minor fast. Tradition says this particular new moon coming this week, the sky left only with stars, will some year launch the month when the Mashiach comes, when the messianic era begins. The month is beyond saved for the biggest festival that could ever be, the light that doesn’t ever end.

 

It won’t be this month. I pray that with as much darkness as already grips our souls, with as much fear as we have, that we will help each other perceive the light of the moon, even as a sliver, and not lose all hope even as we acknowledge the power of the darkness, the darkness still claimed by God. I pray that we will find a Torah of moonlight to guide us, and remain committed to finding it. May our loved ones be safe, may our mitzvot be powerful in the days ahead, for ourselves and for them.

 

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov

 

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons From Last Week

Here are my sermons from Rosh Hashanah 5783:

First day:
Help Me Talk About What I've Been Through and Who I Am

Second day:
Right-ology: How to Be Right Better in the New Year

Wishing everyone a Shana Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet new year!