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Herds, Hearts, and Hashgacha: A D'var Torah on Mattot-Masei

This is the current draft of my D'var Torah for Parashiyot Mattot-Masei, the end of the book of B'midbar (Numbers), specifically chapter 32.

The best two word opening to a story probably in the whole Bible is cattle -- lotsa! "Umikneh, rav." I would hold that up with “in the beginning” and “God tested.” The first word is cattle, probably we should say herds so you’re not only thinking cows, and the Masoretes who standardized the chanting and punctuation put a pause after "herds", umikneh and slowed down the word "lotsa", rav. These words come before we even hear who the people are in this particular story, perhaps to emphasize something about those people, who are the tribes of Gad and Reuven, joined by some or all of Menashe, which is that their self-definition has a lot to do with their herds. The Hebrew word for herds mikneh comes from the root kanah which means to acquire or own, and we might want to hypothesize that these are the extreme materialists among the Israelites.

They come before Moshe and Elazar, Moshe’s nephew the current Kohen Gadol, the high priest, and they say: This place we are right now, across the Jordan River from the land we are going into, is great for our herds, and we would like to have our tribes live here and not over there on the Israel side.

At this, Moshe seems to go kind of ballistic. He says that he cannot believe what they are asking. How could you not take part in what we’ve been waiting for, and fight with your fellow citizens. It’s the end of 40 years of wandering, and the whole reason they have been wandering for 40 years is because the people followed the words of the ten scouts who advised them that they should not be going into the land -- and now we’re almost there and you want to replay this again? How could you once again set an example that the rest of the people will want to follow? You don’t think maybe God won’t add more years of wandering?

It is tempting to say that this is a fundamental conflict of values between spiritual values and material values. Eretz Yisrael is a special place, Moshe knows, not because it’s the easiest place to herd or cultivate. And as he’ll say later, not on bread alone do people live. And here are the tribes of mikneh, of possessions and material. Of course Moshe is going to be upset.

But the Netziv of Volozhin spots a different kind of tension here. He notices that Moshe in his response to the B’nai Gad and the B’nai Reuven shifts the language from the herds to the heart, from mikneh to lev. The Netziv suggests that the people of Gad and Reuven and Menashe are expressing fearf, and it’s not a fear of war. They are afraid of “Hashgachat Hashem”, of Divine “hashgacha” in the Land of Israel.

Now you may know this word “hashgacha” from the world of kashrut -- hashgacha means supervision. You hear about a restaurant and want to know, what’s their hashgacha? A person who supervises is called mashgi’ach or mash’gicha.

But “hashgacha” has a broader meaning, which is being noticed by the Divine, individually and in all of our actions.

The materialism of the people of Gad and Reuven is a cover for a spiritual fear. They are afraid of living life as though every moment were worth noticing. As though every action, every intention, has a cosmic significance.

They are afraid that their lives don’t have that significance, that they aren’t worthy of being watched by the Divine and seen in that way. So they try to define themselves in terms of the external markers of a good life -- prosperity, which is good, and safe homes for their children. They use the language of mikneh to say we’ll be satisfied if we’re doing well in the aggregate, if we’re productive. We’ll give our tithes, just let us count what we do and calculate at the harvest, we’ll mark the year with everyone but if it’s okay just watch us from a bit of a distance, the rest of the tribes and God also.

This fear of hashgacha, that our hearts and our lives won’t stand up to being seen by the Divine -- I wonder if Moshe doesn’t see through that right away.

I wonder if Moshe didn’t make a show of accusing them of something, and getting hot and in their face. Because look what happens: Immediately they tribes come back and say: No, no! We’re not going to abandon the people. We will fight with them for the land, in fact we’re going to lead them into the land, and we will be the first to gear up, and only when we have secured this national mission will we go back and join our herds and our kids. Yes, they talk about the herds before the kids.

And I’m sure if you followed you noticed how Moshe goes over this twice, once in the positive -- are you saying you’re going to go and lead the people and.... and they repeat it. They say it in the positive and the negative -- if we go as fighters into the land, and with the rest of the people.... and if we don’t then we understand what it says about us, and the consequences of that. And Moshe brings them to Elazar the kohen, and repeats what they said, and has them say it again.

In Jewish law this has become known as the stipulation of the tribes of Gad and Re’uven, the t’nai bnai Gad uvnei Reuven -- which is when you make a pledge or an agreement in both the positive and the negative, which is a legal thing to make words airtight.

But I think what Moshe is doing is smoking them out, and causing the people of Gad and Reuven to declare that they are more than they realized. They are people of herds, yes, but also people of solidarity, and commitment, and passion, and energy, and people who can see a picture beyond their own neighborhood. Moshe gets them to say it and then he says it back to them. More than once. And in front of someone else.

Moshe is saying -- this is what hashgacha looks like. This is what it’s like to have someone look into your heart, into more of your actions than you might have chosen, into more of your intentions. It’s at first a bit of a shock to the system but I bet it feels good, to hear me say out loud what I am seeing of you that’s deeper, and to hear yourselves say it also.

This was a demonstration of what it is like, to live under Divine hashgacha, and hopefully you will embrace that.

I think Moshe was saying to them that their materialism was not superficial. These people may lead with mikneh rav, lotsa cattle, but the Divine is described in our Amidah in the same language, as koneh hakol -- everything is Divine possession, Divine material.

To the extent they are people of mikneh, it is a good thing -- through herds they will perpetuate the people and the land they graze, they will feed, they will tithe. It’s through material things that you experience not only surface joys but deeper ones, and as Michael Walzer has written there is a spirituality of milk and honey, of the seven species of grains, there is a material life that is infused with spirituality and in fact all spiritual life in Torah is through our bodies and our things. So be people of mikneh and hashgacha, don’t say it has to be that you’re either a superficial materialist or you have a spiritual life. Don’t see these as two opposed value systems when they are not.

As we finish up the book of B’midbar (Numbers), getting ready to be ever closer to the end of the Torah, so too we are getting ready to be closer to the new year. We all deserve to believe our lives are worthy of Hashgachat Hashem. That we lead lives and have hearts worth being seen in all their moments, and that it brings God joy to see all those moments. We all deserve someone like Moshe to shock us when we act more superficial than we really are. Someone to make it less scary to say what is deeper in us, our truths and our pains, and to say them back to us.

D'var Torah for Balak: Saying We Are Blessed

It's Friday and here is my current draft of a D'var Torah for Shabbat morning on Parashat Balak, Numbers 22:2-25:9:

In the parasha this week, an enemy of the Jews asks a man of powerful words to curse Israel. To say bad things about us in a way to bring us harm.

And it doesn’t work.

Balak, the king of Moav, fears that Yisrael is going to conquer his land, which is just across the Jordan River east of Eretz Yisrael -- but he has no actual justification for that fear. He doesn’t seem to know that the Divine regards his people as a kind of cousin-people to Yisrael, and even though they are presumably pagans and aren’t necessarily all that friendly, there is no reason why Yisrael and Moav can’t coexist. Which doesn’t prevent Balak from spreading this libel to others and from trying to enlist Bil’am, a sorcerer from the region who has the power of blessing and cursing, and in the Torah those are the kind of words that make things happen, sometime immediately.

It doesn’t work, and the Torah has a lot of fun with both Bil’am the sorcerer and Balak the king, making them look foolish and giving us some laughs at their expense. Bil’am has of course the talking donkey, who sees Divine messengers better than Bil’am does, and Balak looks ridiculous running Bil’am around to different places hoping if they find the right scenic overlook Bil’am will be motivated to issue the curse.

In the end not only does Bil’am not curse Yisrael, but in fact blesses us. I’m not sure we really needed Bil’am’s blessing, but Balak thinks it’s powerful and tells him basically to stop talking -- if you can’t say something bad about someone don’t say anything at all.

One of the remarkable things about this parasha is where it is in the Torah, in particular at this point in Sefer B’midbar (the book of Numbers). We have been reading about problem after problem. The past four weeks have been complaints about hunger, and thirst, and inadequate battle readiness, and unfair leadership, and plagues, and leaders at their wits’ end. A lot of people have died. This is the Torah speaking about us. This is Divine word and it’s not been terribly complimentary about us. Some years it’s fun to read those stories at arms’ length and really revel in how wise and the Torah is about group dynamics and political processes. This year not so much, it’s been very on the nose.

My point is that the Torah and Moshe himself say some pretty horrible things about our people, and they are frustrated words and include some pretty accurate criticisms, and in fact we are bogged down in the midbar (wilderness), not getting anywhere. And then the Torah switches it up. Just when you could think it would be the perfect time for outsiders to pile on and their curses would work at a time of our weakness and weariness -- the Torah says no: We are blessed. You can’t curse us. You can try. But no matter where you position yourself, you can’t curse us. You can want to, you can pay someone to, it just doesn’t work. This people is blessed.

And for a couple chapters it’s not even a struggle. Even a donkey can figure it out, can cut through the political dynamics and the money being spent and say -- don’t go that way. This people is blessed, and there is nothing you can do or say that will change that.

This year, people began trying to curse us since before the sun even set on October 7. I remember talking about this in the fall, it was Parashat Lech L’cha when the Torah first says to Avraham that he will be blessed and through his descendents all people will be blessed, and in my D’var Torah just three weeks after October 7 I was already talking about how we needed to hear those words, because so many people were saying the opposite, about Israelis and about Jews here. It felt so unrelenting already back then, and it has continued these past nine months.

So it’s important now to listen as the Torah says we are blessed, and this is not only the Divine point of view or our point of view but also an outside point of view -- if not an enemy leader, at least a powerful religious figure outside of our own.

It is Bil’am the foreign sorcerer who says: Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov mikenotecha Yisrael. How good: all the places you live, Yisrael, and the places you gather to pray, all the places where you draw in the Shechinah and where you find shalom with yourself or with family, and where you connect among yourselves.

Every time we walk in here the first thing we do is to sing the words of an outsider who blessed us. Who affirmed for us our sense of being blessed or our dream of being blessed.

Now I have to say it is not enough to be blessed from the outside, to have some relief from those trying to curse us, and it’s not enough even to hear words of Divine blessing. We need to bless ourselves and each other.

We have spent these nine-plus months reacting to the curses of others --  pushing back on them; our mood and sense of wellbeing defined by them. When we have heard a blessing we have felt better -- whether from the president of the United States, or seeing our symbol projected in light in Berlin!

We have been in a pattern dictated in this country by the attempted curses of other people, and in Israel profoundly shaped by that dynamic as well.

But being Jewish today means being able to say our own blessings about ourselves in our own words, from our own observations and convictions.

On Monday I participated in a siyyum, a completion of a one-day worldwide reading of the Tanakh, the whole Bible, which was organized by the Goldberg-Polins, the family of Hersh who is a Yerushalmi still captive in Gaza. His parents, Rachel and Jon, said that while they and other hostage families have been tirelessly speaking to the outside world, and lobbying their own Israeli leaders and powerful people around the world for the hostages’ release, they also decided it was important to spend a week flooding the world with Torah u’mitzvot.

So they organized this Torah study. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They had an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages with Leket Yisrael, and to post on one webpage acts of chesed people would be doing this week all over the world. There are at least 200 things pinned to that page, mitzvot of all kinds from taking the challah offering from bread to opening up one’s swimming pool to lots and lots of feeding to reaching out to call friends to cultivating patience to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel.

At the online siyyum, with about two hundred people, Jon and Rachel spoke about their faith, their conviction that Hersh and the others will come home and lead good lives, and they spoke those words toward him. They talked about how the Bible is showing them right now how to be resilient and hopeful. They talked about the importance of peace and safety for Jews and for all people.

This is how we are a blessing. It’s not a one-dimensional thing. It’s so much richer than the one word curses or the short phrase curses that the Balaks have been trying to get repeated over and over, from hill to mountain. And no one can say it quite like us. Bil’am says Ma tovu -- we say Hinei mah tov umah naim, shevet achim gam yachad: look how good and how more than just good, what we are all together.

And we don’t have to be perfect to bless ourselves nonetheless. The whole book of Numbers is still there, all the problems, and in fact immediately after the Bil’am-Balak story the Torah brings us back to ground level and more trouble with Israelite behavior. Rabbi David Kasher proposes that this was going on while Balak and Bil’am were watching from above. But still, says Rabbi Kasher, Bil’am proclaimed that we are blessed.

We are quite good at criticizing ourselves in real-time as Am Yisrael, and we don’t hide away the self-critical parts of the Torah either. But criticisms are not curses. As Rabbi Kasher says, they do not destroy our covenant or block Divine love for us, and they do not prevent Bil’am from noticing that we are blessed.

It would be great to have others stop trying to curse us. But mah tov, how good, if we would also bless ourselves and each other. Mah na’im, how delightful and how sweet we are, just here today on Shabbat. What are the good things you have to say about yourself as a Jew right now? What are the things you are proud of when you look out on your people, your community, your fellow Jews? Say it, and your heart becomes a mountain, and all of us will blessed.

Shabbat Shalom.

The Grape Cluster and the Two Who Carry It: A D'var Torah for Pride

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Pride Shabbat 5781/2021, for Parashat Sh'lach L'cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41).

I love this parasha about the scouts, the m’raglim, and the fact that the Torah is so brutally honest about how hard it is to go forward even to a land of milk and honey, even when the alternatives are to stay in a desert or to return to Mitzrayim (Egypt). I love the duality of feeling like giants vs. feeling like grasshoppers -- and as I’ll tell you in a bit, thanks to Pride Shabbat I love the big cluster of grapes, so large it takes two people to carry it.

When I look forward on Pride Shabbat, toward a promised land, I personally have to start by looking back, to a day I think of as “The Lunch of the Three Jonathans.”

It was right after a final exam during college, and I remember this lunch partly because we ate at one of the dining halls I almost never went to. I can’t remember if I ran into two other Jonathans by accident or if I had plans with one and the other showed up too.  These two other Jonathans were distinct and important in my life at that time.

Any one of us could have become rabbis, and we briefly talked about it that day because I thought I might and I really thought they should too, both of them. Of the three, Jonathan #1 -- I’ll call him just Jonathan -- he really was the one most suited at the time to become a rabbi. He had the widest vision; he had the widest ranging intellect of the three of us; he had integrity and fearlessness about being an activist; he had been an active youth group person in high school. I brought up the rabbi thing and Jonathan laughed, a certain look on his face that was trademark for him -- a combination of a silly grin and a knowing, “no-way” laugh. If it’s possible to be simultaneously loving and telling someone how stupid they sound for the thirtieth time, it was that kind of laugh.

Jonathan #2 at the table was me, the only one called Jon to the exclusion of Jonathan. Jonathan #3 was a star yeshiva student, sometimes called Jonathan and sometimes Jon, and he’s a whole other story.

I knew Jonathan wasn’t going to rabbinical school but it was fun to poke him about it periodically and I didn’t mind the look and the laugh. I thought I knew at the time why Jonathan wasn’t going to be a rabbi, because we were good friends and had talked about it. But it turns out, I didn’t know at all.

I didn’t know until another lunch three or four years later, in a different cafeteria, this one at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was in rabbinical school, and Jonathan was on a panel of three people brought in to talk about what it had been like to grow up Jewish and gay.

I knew Jonathan was gay, but that was the first time I heard him speak about what it was like to have been a gay Jewish teen, in a liberal Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. People in his youth group thought of Jonathan as the ultimate insider, a leader, he said -- and Jonathan told his story of being unseen, of the closet as the price he had to pay to belong. Other people, straight kids, could be draped on someone of the opposite sex in a friendly way as they hung out, but for him this kind of regular youth group behavior was a constant reminder of what he couldn’t share, and the very cameraderie that was so essential for other teens was alienating to him, and told him that there was no room for him within Judaism. We didn’t use words like “heteronormative” so much back then in the early ‘90s, not even the gay and lesbian speakers on the panel that day. But that’s what Jonathan was talking about.

Listening to Jonathan I was crushed on so many levels. Ashamed of ourselves as a Jewish community. Ashamed of the myself for the things I thought were tough for me when I was in USY. After hearing him talk that day at JTS, I couldn’t believe that Jonathan had ever set foot in Hillel.  He had so much Jewish and Israeli in him that just walking away was never an option -- that too would have denied him so much of himself. Jonathan came to the Seminary and said he appreciated that we students were listening to their stories, even though we couldn’t ever fix Judaism for him enough that it wouldn’t be painful. At least maybe we could do better for kids in the future.

I was crushed and ashamed that I had known Jonathan by then for at least five years, intense years, and considered him a good friend -- and I never knew any of this. What kind of a friend had I really been. What must have I communicated, out loud or in unspoken assumptions, that he wouldn’t think of me as someone he could share any of this with when we were in college.

I hold up these two lunches next to each other in my mind, the lunch of the three Jonathans in college and the lunch listening to Jonathan at JTS, because the second lunch was the first turning point for me when it came to think about Judaism and LGBTQ+. It was Jonathan’s gift to me and hopefully his gift through me. That was the first time I got that it wasn’t enough to be unfazed when someone came out, to treat it as no big deal, an interesting and important thing about someone just like other interesting and important things. That was the moment I realized that the Torah about LGBTQ+ lives ought not be confined to two verses in Leviticus. It’s because of Jonathan that I eventually became convinced about marriage equality -- later when his partner Peter was dying and I saw what was already one of the most beautiful love stories I had known become even more beautiful and heartbreaking. It took me quite a while even so to arrive where I got to about gay marriage right around the time I arrived here in New Hampshire.

I cannot stand here as an ally, or tell you that I use he/him/his pronouns, without acknowledging Jonathan, and the impact of his friendship and pain and integrity on me. It would not be truthful to say I always knew what the promised land looked like, that from the start I was like Kalev (Caleb) in our parasha and knew how to be a giant and not a grasshopper.

Jonathan might be horrified that I am talking about him to you only through a series of stories about Mitzrayim and the midbar, Egypt and the wilderness, and not getting on to talking about visions of the promised land. (I should say that Jonathan is someone I’ve also learned from about other things, such as affordable housing and Israel-Palestine.)  I really want to embrace the terrific formulation that the Tzedek crew created about this Shabbat, which I stole for my note yesterday. We are celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish lives and we are celebrating what queer Jews have brought to Judaism, to Torah itself.  So let’s talk about that enormous cluster of grapes, so unexpected, so big and juicy it takes two people to carry.

A cluster like maybe you’re not sure what it is, and I can say about myself that I’m only just beginning to get a view of what might be called queer Torah, just in the past two or three years. And I have to say, I’m excited and challenged. Here are a few things I’ve begun to see, on my own scouting of the land we’re heading to.

Liz brought to my attention the Queer Niggun Project -- melodies composed and traditional prayers interpreted by LGBTQ+ Jewish creators. Last night I was so taken by the “Carousel Niggun” for L’cha Dodi, one of the big Shabbat love songs -- this version mashes up very traditional, yeshivish Hebrew pronunciation with both old and new idioms for the metaphor of God and Israel as lovers, married partners.

Or take Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, which she calls a “traditionally radical yeshiva.” Her insight is that queer theory is actually the key to understanding the Talmud, because the Talmud was originally a project of marginal Jews who saw the world shaking before other Jews did, and these different-living, different-thinking sages were far more ready when the Temple was destroyed than any other Jews to pick up the pieces and make something strong and beautiful, which is the foundation of all of our Judaism today.

Rabbi Lappe says that a queer perspective is actually helpful and necessary for everyone, because the Talmudic rabbis were brilliant at tooling for a world exactly like that of the scouts in our parasha, who knew they would have to move into a new world about which so much was uncertain.  So at Svara you study in Aramaic, the rabbis’ own language, whether you’ve ever studied before or not, and sometimes their study events attract an aundience that is majority straight, because they find it’s the queer perspective that is illuminating. Once upon a time, this kind of thinking was the very definition of Conservative Judaism. I heard this same kind of perspective encoded musically in Itai Gal’s niggun from last night.

So this is my very new-for-me take on queer Torah. People like me, communities like ours, have tended to talk about LGBTQ+ Jews as people “we” quote-unquote need to “welcome”, to “include”, and to do that we have to let go of something we have had, some earlier definition or some certainty. But really, these queer teachers and creators are saying: What we have is this cluster of fruit, and we can carry it together. Yes, you could say it’s heavy, it’s unusual, I don’t know what to make of it. Or you could say it is nourishing and it’s sweet and it’s been missing. It’s been there rooted in the land the whole time, but until we went looking for it, hopefully together, you didn’t recognize it. You thought milk and honey was in the future, but the truth is the promised land is even richer.

When I think about us, this community in particular, I think about the two scouts holding that large dowel between them, carrying this new and large fruit. I can easily imagine that one of them, but only one, was Kalev, confident about the future and ready to live in it right away. The other was concerned or had questions, felt the weight of it more than the sweetness. But they carried it together. That’s a moment I treasure too in the parasha. That’s why we invited Mimi Lemay here. That moment is a hope for us, so that we don’t get stuck in the desert for 40 years. We don’t know exactly what the promised land is like when it comes to equality or what it means truly to celebrate LGBTQ+ Jewish lives all the time. What we can know, and what I do know, is like this in the Torah’s words: tova ha-aretz m’od m’od. The land of our Pride is a good land; it is very, very good.

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.

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.

D'var Torah: Dreaming Even In These Times

This is the D’var Torah I plan to share at Shabbat morning services on December 16, 2023 for Parashat Miketz. It’s related to this one I gave in late 2020, when we could begin to think about reality after Covid vaccines. 

I want to start by misquoting someone, specifically Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, on the subject of dreamers and cynics:

“Cynics are realistic in the short-term and realistic in the long-term. Dreamers are unrealistic in the short-term, but realistic in the long-term.”

Dr. Ben-Shahar is famous for being the most popular lecturer ever at Harvard College and for being a founder of what he now calls “Happiness Studies,” and yes he is Israeli, and no he didn’t say exactly what I said he What he did say is that pessimists are realistic in the short-term and realistic in the long-term, and optimists are unrealistic in the short-term but realistic in the long-term.

The reason I misquoted him is that he said this in a lecture called “Realizing Your Dreams”, and when he was talking about an optimist he was talking about a certain kind of dreamer, and that kind of dreamer is represented in the Torah by Yosef. 

Yosef is called by his brothers ba’al ha-chalomot, the “master of dreams”, and they don’t mean that in a positive way. They mean it in the way that we contrast being a dreamer with being practical. They also mean that his dreams are not good for anyone, and in particular not good for them. 

Yosef identifies himself as someone with a gift for understanding other people’s dreams, on top of having dreams of his own. And while the Torah talks about literal dreams experienced at night, it’s clear to me that the Torah is also talking about dreams in the metaphorical sense.

Yosef this ba’al hachalomot, this master of dreams in the Torah, is also a go-getter, an organizational and management genius, and a political operator. His ability to interpret other people’s dreams is a key to his achievements in the real world up to this point in the Torah. Not just getting appointed Par’oh’s right-hand man but getting to save the whole kingdom from being destroyed by famine.

But in our part of the Torah reading, Yosef struggles with his dreams, and in exactly the ways that Dr. Ben-Shahar says a person would, by being reminded that in the short-term his own dreams are not realistic and then having to figure out what to do with that.

The Torah brings up dreaming about a minute after Yosef sees his brothers in Mitzrayim for the first time, when they come looking for food. He hasn’t seen them for many years but he recognizes them immediately, and they don’t know who he. So the Torah says these things right away (Gen. 42:7-9):

Vayitnaker alayhem — he made himself strange to them

Vay’daber itam kashot — he spoke with them harshly

And then:

Vayizkor Yosef ayt hachalomot asher chalam lahem — Yosef remembered the dreams that he had dreamed for them

Vayomer alayhem m’raglim atem — he said to them, “You are spies.”

This is not a picture of a dreamer who finds his own dreams easy, or really any dreams. You have to remember that Yosef is living the implementation of his dream-response to Par’oh (Pharoah), executing the plan about Par’oh’s dreams about the years of plenty and the years of famine. It’s going absolutely according to plan, which means Yosef is in charge of a well-run operation and it’s a famine. I think in the middle of such a thing a leader might be experiencing both the satisfaction of doing something life-giving very well, and also stress  — which in Yosef’s case means knowing that for seven years he’s going be under this stress. 

And the appearance of his brothers tips him further that way, and he makes himself strange. The verb is in the reflexive, the Hebrew form called hit’pa’el, so maybe this is an inner response. Even a dreamer has a moment of being alienated from himself and his own dreams. So he speaks to them harshly.

Then they just say very matter-of-factly who they are and why they are there — and at that point the Torah says Yosef remembered the dreams that he had dreamed for them. Just then something clicks into place. He remembers his own dreams, where they were all bundles of grain and their bundles bowed down to his bundle. And there is it, it’s happening: the Torah says they are bowing down to him just like he dreamed it.

But nothing the Torah describes here seems like a “dream come true.” The commentator Ramban picks up on this and says actually this the moment Yosef has clarity about his earlier dreams. Ramban says Yosef notices the specific ways his dreams are not yet fulfilled, because his brother Binyamin isn’t there and his father isn’t there. And right then Yosef realizes that the dream isn’t about domination; it’s about bringing his family together in a reconciliation that depends on the initiative of Yosef himself.

Dr. Ben-Shahar would say that in this moment Yosef’s original dream seems very unrealistic, and in the short-term it would seem to feel better for Yosef’s own quote-unquote “happiness” not to be a dreamer at all. Just close the book on the past and the original dream. Treat these people just like all the other people in line, give them food, put them in prison, whatever. Get the job here done, realistic, rinse and repeat until the seven years are done and the crops start to grow again.

But Yosef can’t do that, because he’s not a pessimist or a cynic. In that moment of dissonance between dream and reality, he remembers that he doesn’t just interpret other people’s dreams but also his own. And I hear in his statement to his brothers that you are spies, m’raglim atem, a kind of inner truth, that they are penetrating his secret or helping him see inside. It’s uncomfortable to say the least and there isn’t a feel-good thing to do or even an immediate thing to do. So a lot of the traditional commentators explain what Yosef does for the next while, the strange and harsh treatment of his brothers and his continuing to hide who he is, as the diffcult work Yosef has to do to work toward this broader dream. Dr. Ben-Shahar in his lecture says that when our dreams hit the point where they aren’t coming true, the dreamer to do all kinds of learning about why, and about how the world works around one, and what people are like who one assumes want to embrace the same dream but don’t.

The difference between the cynic and this kind of dreamer, says Dr. Ben-Shahar, is not that one has a truer picture of the world than the other. They can achieve the goal they set in the long-run. The only difference is a choice about whether you’re willing to live with the discomfort of the time being, and work on that hard and work on it wisely, to get toward something bigger and better. The dream gets reinterpreted and refined in the process, but it’s still rooted in the original dream.

Yosef chooses that way because he is the master of dreams. One thing that motors him is pointed out by the medieval commentator Rabbi David Kimchi, who observes that the Torah says Yosef had dreamed for them, for his brothers. It was he who had the dream, but it was for them. His part again wasn’t stature over them, but what his leadership and initiative could do for his brothers and for his father and for all of them together.

This kind of dreaming Yosef is already good with. I’ve spoken in previous years about how Yosef helps Par’oh with the king’s dreams. The dreams Yosef helped him with weren’t the nightmares the Torah tells, about the skinny grain stalks eating the fat ones. Yosef helped Par’oh reclaim his good dreams, the ones his nightmares had extinguished, about himself and his empire taking care of its people. Yosef helped Par’oh do what Dr. Ben-Shahar says you have to do about dreams that aren’t fulfilled in the short-term. He helped Par’oh make new plans, add new people, and in the process enlarge his dream to encompass not just Egypt but other nations like Canaan.

As master of dreams Yosef doesn’t just do that once, for Par’oh’s two dreams. He’s got his own two dreams to figure out. That’s the process that starts with this encounter with his brothers in the parasha today.

In the long run, Yosef figures out how to make his family dreams come true. He learns about them, new people get involved, and eventually for a time there is healing and unity and prosperity, for Yosef and his brothers and his father.

And Yosef’s story teaches us that being a dreamer is not an escape from reality. It’s just one choice of how to be realistic. And I say, if the world is going to be hard, if we are going to face challenges in our lives or our families, we might as well put that same amount of work toward dreams. And be uplifted and lightened in the process.

If we do it like Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar says a realistic dreamer does it, then our lives will be transformed just like Yosef’s. It will be less about me and what I achiever and my grandeur — dream work will turn us toward learning, toward each other, toward more nuance in how we understand the workings of the world.

Today I like to call the 9th candle of Chanukkah. We could see the end of the line of lights, but I think we’re supposed to see its continuation in our mind’s eye, in the eye that’s within our heart. We’ve had all kinds of reasons the past few years and the past two months to say no to dreams or not now to dreams. All kinds of reasons to see things and speak harshly, all kinds of reasons to feel strange even to ourselves. So let’s remember from Yosef that it’s all part of the process of being ba’alot and ba’alei chalomot, masters of dreams — and that dreaming is one of the most realistic ways we can live, even in these times.

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.

Gratitude Is Our Name (Even Now)

This is my D'var Torah for Parashat Vayetze, "Shabbat Thanksgiving" 5784. I wrote it while feeling grateful for the hostages who have been returned, heartbroken for those still captive and the families not returned whole, and grateful for the naming celebration at services this Shabbat.

It is Thanksgiving Shabbat and what a better time to be celebrating namings! It’s just what we need for the time we’ve been going through. Thank you to the family for giving us something extra to gather around in gratitude.

 

Giving thanks is not just an important Jewish spiritual practice. Gratitude is the essence of both Shabbat and the Jewish people.

It’s the essence of Shabbat, which we know from a song we sing from the psalms -- mizmor shir l’yom haShabbat, tov l’hodot l’Adonai -- a song for the day of Shabbat: Good to give thanks to the Divine (Psalm 92:1). L’hodot is the same Hebrew root or shoresh as todah, the familiar way to say thank you. The midrash says that is the first song ever written, by Adam and Chava in the Garden of Eden, and it was inspired by their first Shabbat.

 

And gratitude is the essence of the Jewish people because our name Yehudim comes from a moment of thankfulness. In our parasha, Leah Imeinu (our mother) gives birth to her fourth son and the Torah says: This moment I am thanking the Divine, ha’pa’am odeh et Adonai (Genesis 29:35), and she called his name Yehudah. Yehudah also comes from the same shoresh as todah. Yehudah is Judah, and Yehudi gets transliterated from Hebrew to Greek down the line eventually to English as “Jew”.

 

So gratitude is literally the name of the Jewish people, and it’s the original song of Shabbat. We are meant to be the thankful people, and Shabbat is Thanksgiving Day every week.

 

These two origin stories for Jewish gratitude have something in common, the Garden of Eden and the birth of Yehudah, and that thing is that both of them seem at first like non-gratitude moments.

 

The midrash makes Adam and Chavah the authors of the song tov l’hodot, it’s good to give thanks, and here’s how it happened. In midrash the whole drama of the Garden of Eden happened on the first-ever Friday afternoon. The people got to the Garden, learned their way around, heard about not eating the fruit, ate the fruit. Rupture with God, decree of exile effective immediately... and then according to the midrash, Shabbat itself came to God and said basically: I exist already but just in theory, I was getting ready to make my entrance into the world, and if you don’t let humanity have even one Shabbat in the Garden of Eden, the whole universe is going to implode.

 

So God said all right. And the first two people experienced Shabbat and it was a weird Shabbat. Because they knew what was coming after, that they would have to pack their bags. So they spent Shabbat looking around the Garden, and talking, and reflecting on their first six hours of existence before Shabbat and then what they had on Shabbat. And they wrote a song, and the first word is tov, which means good.

 

You’d think they’d write, I don’t know a breakup song -- how could you do this to me. You’d think they’d be basically angry, or basically scared, or plotting to get away from this God who has such an interest in which fruit they eat, and who showed them this glorious place and then said you can’t live here anymore.

 

Instead Chava and Adam start with tov, with good. They’re in a garden so they write what they know, which is botany -- the wicked flourish like grasses, miles wide but an inch deep, growing fast but withering easily, and the righteous like a palm tree will flourish, tzaddik katamar yifrach, deep- rooted righteousness overlooking everything. Even within themselves, they’re thinking, there’s all this that tempts us to act not right, it comes fast, but it can be cut off easily if we try, and we are capable of towering things. So Chava and Adam sing their way to gratitude, to tov l’hodot, for what they have glimpsed and what they can dream of, for this Garden that exists and is worth striving to get back to.

 

And that’s every Shabbat, a garden, where we sing together songs of what could be, where we make this beatiful garden of righteousness and righteous dreams, and we make it out of us, who we are and who we have been this week and all the stories we’ve been given as a people.

 

The other origin story for Jewish gratitude, about our name Yehudi, the Thankful-People: Leah doesn’t express gratitude immediately when she has her first child. We know there’s a long story of bitterness between Leah and Yaakov, between her and her sister Rachel. Leah has all kinds of good reasons to feel resentful and angry. She called the first son Reuven because the Divine has seen my suffering, and the next two names she gives are like that. But when the fourth child is born Leah says this time I am giving thanks.

 

Leah’s gratitude is not a contentment of having things good all in all. It’s not a blessing she says at a turning point in her life from bad to good. That doesn’t happen after Yehudah is born. Leah’s gratitude is a decision -- that to quote Rabbi Shai Held you can be disappointed and thankful at the same time. At a moment when it’s not easy in her life, Leah says todah, and she gives all of us our name.

 

The world right now isn’t making it easy to feel gratitude, and I know too there are many people among us for whom the holiday weekend makes a time of loss or loneliness harder. That’s the hardest part of gratitude for me, because when I’m so thankful I am impatient for anyone who is missing a blessing that I could be doing more to help them have or help you have. I don’t want my gratitude to become selfish or complacent.

 

Leah Imeinu gives us our name, Yehudi or Jew. She teaches us gratitude in a moment and gratitude in-spite-of. The Jewish people know how to be thankful for the first moment of awareness every day, the first breath we take and turn into Modeh Ani (thankful am I), and for each chesed we experience. And when there’s not something right here to be thankful for, we’re thankful for knowing we are people who deserve blessings, and we’re grateful for our stubborn visions of what everyone deserves.

 

Adam and Chava give us Shabbat as gratitude. They teach us to stop and notice the perfect within the imperfect world, and the perfect dreams that we will use to mend the imperfect world.

 

Here we are, aligned as we sing here in the Sanctuary and learn Torah together and talk over Kiddush, sharing food that is enough for everyone, celebrating the gift of life and the next chapter in the lives of families and our people. Shabbat makes us stop to notice these things, so we don’t miss them during the week either and feel thankful -- whenever we hear voices joined together for joy or for justice, whenever there is enough food for everyone, whenever there is a Torah bringing its insights to the world. Shabbat teaches us to notice such things all week and to be profoundy grateful each day.

 

And so especially now, thank you for making Shabbat together a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, and thank you to the celebrating family for bringing us together today in joy and gratitude.

 

Shabbat Shalom!