NO SHAME WHEN GOD’S FACE IS WITH YOU.
Dvar Torah For Shavuot, Day 1, 5770.
As enigmatic and mysterious as the story of the Sinai revelation is, the content of that revelation –what we call the Ten Commandments- is equally puzzling and mysterious. Consider just a few examples of its enigmatic nature. The first “commandment” is not a commandment at all, but a kind of preamble to the other commandments. In it, God self-identifies as the Redeemer Who took the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. The last “commandment” does not prohibit behavior, but feelings: you are forbidden from covetously desiring what others have. Finally, these commandments are not even identified as such, but as devarim or dibrot, words or utterances of God, even though functionally they are clearly mitzvot: binding commandments and obligations.
This first morning of Shavuot, I want to focus with you on one of these ten divine utterances that I find most interesting. Let’s look for a moment at the second commandment, specifically the first part of it. Please open Humash Etz Hayyim to page 443, at verse 3:
לא יהיה לך אלהים אחרים על פני:
You shall have no other gods beside Me.
In his classic listing of all 613 commandments, Sefer HaMitzvot, Maimonides lists this one as the very first negative commandment, and as the one that is the anchor for all the others: “By this prohibition, we are forbidden to believe in, or ascribe deity to, any but God, exalted be He. It is contained in His words…’You shall have no other gods beside me.’” What I find troubling about this second of the ten commandments, at least as it is stated by Maimonides, is that –like the prohibition against coveting- it seems to be about what a person thinks or believes, not about what a person does. It does not necessarily possess any behavioral content. Maimonides himself acknowledges this when he teaches elsewhere (MT Hilchot Teshuva ch. 3) that a person who believes in the existence of many gods or deities is branded a min, a heretic who is denied access to the world to come. Implicit in his teaching is the recognition that a traditional court of Jewish law could not punish such a person, mi shum she lo asah maaseh: he or she has not actually done anything prohibited, only thought or believed something that is presumably unacceptable.
The sages of the early rabbinic period, who preceded Maimonides by many centuries, offer a more concrete, behavioral interpretation of this prohibition. They translate “other gods” to mean literally, “the gods of other people”, or “the gods who become like others to their worshippers by being proven worthless,” or even “the gods who transform their worshippers into the other—someone who becomes less than human through enslavement to idolatry.” In other words, God is not prohibiting a personal belief, feeling or thought as much as prohibiting active physical and emotional servitude to false deities. What counts for the sages is the behaviors of false servitude that lead to the spiritually enslaved mentality of false servitude.
Another refreshing way of understanding this second of the Ten Commandments is that it is not a commandment at all, but a promise or a reassurance concerning the results of faith. The popular Hasidic Torah commentary, Noam Megadim explains our verse by first referring us to the very last commandment: do not covet. The author of Noam Megadim asks, how is it that God could require us not to covet? We may not want to feel covetous feelings, but they will sweep over us anyway, against our will. His answer? Do not covet is not a prohibition but a promise: if we follow the first nine commandments and align ourselves with a life of holiness in God’s presence, we will be able to master (not extirpate) that covetous impulse that often results from our belief that we are the center of the world and that we have coming to us everything that we want. So too, “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” Read in a creatively literal way, the Hebrew of our verse can be understood as God saying to us : “You will not have any other gods.. as long as you are in the presence of PANAI, My face.” That is, as long as we discipline ourselves to keep God’s face – God’s immanent presence- right before us, the other false gods won’t become our gods. What gods in particular is the Torah speaking about here? Other human beings who try to coerce a person of faith into embarrassed conformity to their views of the world and perspectives on life: they assume a kind of god-like mastery over many a person who is seeking a life in God’s presence but who is made to feel stupid, backward, or humiliated because he or she dares to embrace a life of religious values and consciousness.
I am no fan of extremes, whether they be of the religious or the secular variety, and I certainly have no use for the way that extremists of either camp carry truth with a capital T in their pockets, attempting to denigrate others who do not share their worldviews. Like you, I am terrified by the way a small but virulent group of young Muslims are using Islam as the match that lights weapons of terror and mass destruction against innocent human beings. Admittedly in a different way, though with growing concern, I fear how growing number of secular thinkers are reacting to religious extremism. Rather than focus critically on what has become corrupted and dangerous in organized religion, they are throwing out the spiritual baby with the political bath water by condemning all religious faith, all religious community and values, and all mention of God, as backward and toxic. With an almost puritanical fervor borne of understandable fear, they are developing a rhtetoric of anti-religion that is just one more false god seeking to cow adherents of religious tradition into silence by branding all of us adherents of dangerous fundamentalism. They do no justice to the wisdom and insights of millennia of religious teaching and quest; they also do no justice to the billions of truly decent human beings whose decency derives in great part from religious living.
The teachings of the Noam Megadim are especially applicable in responding to both forms of extremism. To religious extremists we need to say: “Your fervor for God needs to be balanced with respect for God’s laws that require you to treat all of God’s creations with respect.” To secular extremists we need to say: “Your fervor for law and freedom needs to be balanced with a humble recognition that these great traditions of law and liberty have their sources in the even greater traditions of religion.” To ourselves, as religious modernists seeking to contribute spiritually and morally to promoting peace and human rights, we need to say: place the God of peace and justice before you every day; make God –however you understand God- the basis of your decision to live in the world and better it; and recognize that, all the false gods of human arrogance and contempt notwithstanding, you have nothing for which to be ashamed, when God is facing you.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Passover Sermons 5770
IN EVERY GENERATION, PART 3: HALLELUYAH!
Dvar Torah For Day Eight Pesach/Yiskor 5770.
Everyone, say Halleluyah! Don’t be shy, all it means is, “Praise God!” What… you don’t believe in God, or you’re not sure you do? You don’t like overt, maybe over the top, expressions of piety? You think that shouting Halleluyah is sanctimonious, posturing, self promoting, religiously preening, hypocritical? You think that you dare not shout Halleluyah when you’re a nothing, a humble nobody? Huh, look who thinks he or she is a nobody! Come on, get out of your comfort zone, stop rationalizing, live a little. Your life may not be perfect, you may even be quite unhappy right now, you may be a confirmed atheist, you may not be feeling well, you may think that this little exercise is leading us right down the path to being a…Baptist church…but so what? Stretch your vocal chords and your spirit, move your body and shout Halleluyah! Let me hear you! Halleluyah!
How ironic that a word like Halleluyah, an authentically Jewish word that comes from, and is found all over, our Bible, should be so uncomfortable for Jews to say with passion and gusto. Some of this is the result of our overall discomfort with emotion laden spiritual expression. Yet, I think that we are also uncomfortable with shouting Halleluyah because we have bought the myth that it is something that Christians do, not us. How untrue this is. Please look with me at a famous passage from the Mishnah, Judaism’s oral tradition, Tractate Pesahim, 10:5; this is a passage we have been studying together since the Shabbat preceding Pesach.
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’”
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God Halleluyah (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
As we have been learning throughout Pesach, this teaching of Rabban Gamliel is found in its entirely in the Passover Haggadah. In the first two parts of the passage, he reminds us to talk about the ancient Passover sacrifice with its accompanying matzah and bitter herbs, so that we relive that great feast at the seder, even if we can no longer perform it ourselves. Further, our teacher asks us to place ourselves at the scene of that very first seder when, as slaves about to become free, we offered that very first paschal sacrifice in grateful preparation for liberation. Then, notice that Rabban Gamliel concludes with one more instruction. Because we owe God a huge debt of gratitude and praise for transforming us into free people, we should chant before God the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel prayer, also known as the Egyptian Hallel because it thanks God for redeeming us from there. (In fact, Hallel is sung in two segments as part of the seder service according to the traditional Haggadah.)
I imagine Rabban Gamliel as a Baptist preacher shouting “Halleluyah, praise the Lord!” to his congregants in the pews. He jumps up and down, with sweat streaming from his beet red face as the faithful get riled up, catch the spirit, fall down, start writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues. For all we know, the context of his teaching was something akin to this: he wanted his fellow Jews not only to practice the rituals of the seder as if they were in that exact moment of liberation from Egypt. He also wanted them to feel the exhiliaration of that moment, to scream and shout Halleluyah as they charged Egypt’s gates en masse and walked out into freedom. However, it is just as likely that Rabban Gamliel exhorted us to sing the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel because he was copying what our ancient ancestors did during the Passover sacrifice in the Holy Temple. An earlier passage of the Mishnah, Pesahim 5:7, teaches us that the Jewish pilgrims would eat the Passover in three shifts, all of which would sing the Hallel prayer as the Temple priests distributed pieces of the sacrificial meat to them. The Talmud, Tractate Pesahim 117a explains that the Egyptian Hallel goes back in time as far as the crossing of the Red Sea itself. As the Israelites embarked on their dangerous journey to freedom, the prophets among them taught them to sing Hallel as a way of asking God to protect them from trouble. After they were finally saved from Pharaoh, those prophets taught them to sing Hallel again in thanks to God for redeeming them. Thus, Rabban Gamliel’s spontaneous exhortation to his fellow Jews was actually a well thought out pedagogic strategy for –once again- helping us to relive the Passover Temple service, and by extension, that terrifying moment at the Red Sea when we were caught in that transitional space between shedding our skin of slavery and dressing ourselves in the robes of freedom.
I am drawn to the Talmud’s twofold understanding of Hallel: we chant it as we walk through breath holding, heart stopping danger; we chant it after we live through that danger. It accompanies us on both parts of our life journeys because –as the Talmud points out- its most important word-Halleuyah- compounds a command to praise (Hallelu) with a straightforward reference to God –known here by God’s Hebrew name, Yah. We are not asked or encouraged, we are commanded, to carry an attitude of praise with us wherever we are and through whatever we experience. A view of life that is suffused with praise does not usually come naturally: we have to inculcate it within ourselves through the hard work of waking each day –no matter how we feel, no matter what a day brings us- and recognizing that day as one more precious opportunity to breathe, to live, to be in this mixture of madness and magnificence that is our world, the world created by God, the never ending source of all life in all of its complexity, mystery, and imperfection. A Halleluyah perspective on the world sees God’s creative power and compassionate presence in everything: danger and redemption, sadness and joy, life and death. A Halleluyah perspective praises God for life as it is, because it is holy and worthwhile simply by virtue of being life!
In a moment, when we chant Yizkor, we will actually be reciting an extended Halleluyah. Yes, we will be remembering our loved ones who have died, some naturally in their time, and others tragically and before their time. But we will also be remembering their precious legacies, feeling their palpable, endless presence, and praising God for the people they were and the people they have helped us to become. For the love that they gave us and allowed us to give them, we say Halleluyah! For the complex, imperfect but loving relationships that we had with them, we say, Halleluyah! For our ability to remember them without the varnish of false piety, we say Halleluyah! For their having lived in our world, in God’s world, we say Halleluyah!
Dvar Torah For Day Eight Pesach/Yiskor 5770.
Everyone, say Halleluyah! Don’t be shy, all it means is, “Praise God!” What… you don’t believe in God, or you’re not sure you do? You don’t like overt, maybe over the top, expressions of piety? You think that shouting Halleluyah is sanctimonious, posturing, self promoting, religiously preening, hypocritical? You think that you dare not shout Halleluyah when you’re a nothing, a humble nobody? Huh, look who thinks he or she is a nobody! Come on, get out of your comfort zone, stop rationalizing, live a little. Your life may not be perfect, you may even be quite unhappy right now, you may be a confirmed atheist, you may not be feeling well, you may think that this little exercise is leading us right down the path to being a…Baptist church…but so what? Stretch your vocal chords and your spirit, move your body and shout Halleluyah! Let me hear you! Halleluyah!
How ironic that a word like Halleluyah, an authentically Jewish word that comes from, and is found all over, our Bible, should be so uncomfortable for Jews to say with passion and gusto. Some of this is the result of our overall discomfort with emotion laden spiritual expression. Yet, I think that we are also uncomfortable with shouting Halleluyah because we have bought the myth that it is something that Christians do, not us. How untrue this is. Please look with me at a famous passage from the Mishnah, Judaism’s oral tradition, Tractate Pesahim, 10:5; this is a passage we have been studying together since the Shabbat preceding Pesach.
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’”
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God Halleluyah (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
As we have been learning throughout Pesach, this teaching of Rabban Gamliel is found in its entirely in the Passover Haggadah. In the first two parts of the passage, he reminds us to talk about the ancient Passover sacrifice with its accompanying matzah and bitter herbs, so that we relive that great feast at the seder, even if we can no longer perform it ourselves. Further, our teacher asks us to place ourselves at the scene of that very first seder when, as slaves about to become free, we offered that very first paschal sacrifice in grateful preparation for liberation. Then, notice that Rabban Gamliel concludes with one more instruction. Because we owe God a huge debt of gratitude and praise for transforming us into free people, we should chant before God the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel prayer, also known as the Egyptian Hallel because it thanks God for redeeming us from there. (In fact, Hallel is sung in two segments as part of the seder service according to the traditional Haggadah.)
I imagine Rabban Gamliel as a Baptist preacher shouting “Halleluyah, praise the Lord!” to his congregants in the pews. He jumps up and down, with sweat streaming from his beet red face as the faithful get riled up, catch the spirit, fall down, start writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues. For all we know, the context of his teaching was something akin to this: he wanted his fellow Jews not only to practice the rituals of the seder as if they were in that exact moment of liberation from Egypt. He also wanted them to feel the exhiliaration of that moment, to scream and shout Halleluyah as they charged Egypt’s gates en masse and walked out into freedom. However, it is just as likely that Rabban Gamliel exhorted us to sing the Halleluyah psalms of the Hallel because he was copying what our ancient ancestors did during the Passover sacrifice in the Holy Temple. An earlier passage of the Mishnah, Pesahim 5:7, teaches us that the Jewish pilgrims would eat the Passover in three shifts, all of which would sing the Hallel prayer as the Temple priests distributed pieces of the sacrificial meat to them. The Talmud, Tractate Pesahim 117a explains that the Egyptian Hallel goes back in time as far as the crossing of the Red Sea itself. As the Israelites embarked on their dangerous journey to freedom, the prophets among them taught them to sing Hallel as a way of asking God to protect them from trouble. After they were finally saved from Pharaoh, those prophets taught them to sing Hallel again in thanks to God for redeeming them. Thus, Rabban Gamliel’s spontaneous exhortation to his fellow Jews was actually a well thought out pedagogic strategy for –once again- helping us to relive the Passover Temple service, and by extension, that terrifying moment at the Red Sea when we were caught in that transitional space between shedding our skin of slavery and dressing ourselves in the robes of freedom.
I am drawn to the Talmud’s twofold understanding of Hallel: we chant it as we walk through breath holding, heart stopping danger; we chant it after we live through that danger. It accompanies us on both parts of our life journeys because –as the Talmud points out- its most important word-Halleuyah- compounds a command to praise (Hallelu) with a straightforward reference to God –known here by God’s Hebrew name, Yah. We are not asked or encouraged, we are commanded, to carry an attitude of praise with us wherever we are and through whatever we experience. A view of life that is suffused with praise does not usually come naturally: we have to inculcate it within ourselves through the hard work of waking each day –no matter how we feel, no matter what a day brings us- and recognizing that day as one more precious opportunity to breathe, to live, to be in this mixture of madness and magnificence that is our world, the world created by God, the never ending source of all life in all of its complexity, mystery, and imperfection. A Halleluyah perspective on the world sees God’s creative power and compassionate presence in everything: danger and redemption, sadness and joy, life and death. A Halleluyah perspective praises God for life as it is, because it is holy and worthwhile simply by virtue of being life!
In a moment, when we chant Yizkor, we will actually be reciting an extended Halleluyah. Yes, we will be remembering our loved ones who have died, some naturally in their time, and others tragically and before their time. But we will also be remembering their precious legacies, feeling their palpable, endless presence, and praising God for the people they were and the people they have helped us to become. For the love that they gave us and allowed us to give them, we say Halleluyah! For the complex, imperfect but loving relationships that we had with them, we say, Halleluyah! For our ability to remember them without the varnish of false piety, we say Halleluyah! For their having lived in our world, in God’s world, we say Halleluyah!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Passover Sermons 5770
IN EVERY GENERATION, PART 2: A DOSE OF SPIRITUAL MEDICINE
Second Dvar Torah for Pesach (Day 1), 5770.
My wife likes to joke that I treat food as if it were medicine. I guess that early on in my parents’ home, I internalized the idea that you don’t consume foods like green tea, blueberries, and tofu because they taste good, a debatable point at best for some, or even because they’re healthier for you than very tasty cheese fries, a point that is irrelevant for others. You eat them because they’re loaded with, well you name it: phytochemicals, antioxidants, micronutrients, essential fatty acids such as Omega 3 and Omega 6, high density lipoproteins, and polyunsaturated fats. Certainly, there is more than ample evidence that much of our chemically treated, commercially prepared food supply is potentially quite toxic; we have more than ample information that a balanced diet of high fiber, low fat foods consisting mostly of fruits and vegetables is quite good for you, and can also be quite tasty. However, I think that I have taken this basic, scientifically grounded wisdom a bit far. Imagine the scene. As a regular green tea drinker, I look at green tea as the magical preventative and powerful cure all for whatever may or does ail me: a sure shot antoxidant weapon in my internal arsenal against oxidized chemicals in the body that scientists have labeled, significantly enough, free radicals! Now, from time to time I engage in the quintessential American ritual: I eat a ton of junk, most of which I really like. If I wind up feeling sick to my stomach, do I resolve not to eat like that again? No, of course not, I’m an American, and that kind of resolution is, frankly, un-American, the kind of behavior you would expect of, well, a free radical! I simply boil a pot of water, pour it over my favorite green tea, and poof!, all is well with Rabbi Dan-i-el! I might as well become a marketer for the green tea industry. My ad line? “GREEN TEA—THE WONDER DRINK BURSTING WITH ANTIOXIDANT GOODNESS!"
We all know that no food is a wonder drug with magical medicinal powers, even though we may allow ourselves to be duped by the natural foods industry into wanting to believe this. However, as we move from seder to seder –a culinary experience filled with rich spiritual symbolism- we certainly can understand the power of food as spiritual medicine that deepens our sense of personal meaning and our connection to God and values. Consider the teaching that you will find in the synagogue announcements in front of you. We began learning this teaching this past Shabbat. It comes from the Mishnah, and it is quoted in full in the Haggadah:
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’"
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God Halleluyah (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
Note the three foods that one is supposed to talk about during the obligatory telling of the Exodus story at the seder: the Passover offering, the matzah, and the bitter herbs. As I mentioned on Shabbat, Exodus 12:8 mentions God’s commandment to the Israelites and their descendants to eat these three foods together as part of the feast commemorating the Exodus. Our teacher, Rabban Gamliel, transforms this commandment –which by his time was obsolete, given the prior destruction of the Temple- into a commandment fulfilled through words, based upon Exodus 12:27: we are to tell our curious children that the Pesach offering recalls how God pasach, passed over our houses during the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn. Of course, we know that, even without the Passover offering, we still do more than talk about this three food concoction: we continue to eat matzah and bitter herbs at the seder, even though we no longer eat roasted lamb. Therefore, for the Mishnah and Haggadah, seder food is about memory.
But is it about more than memory of things past, and perhaps also a kind of culinary medicine directed at our spiritual health? One Talmudic commentator seems to think so. Rabbi Shmuel Eidels, also known by his acronym, the MaHarSHa, was a sixteenth century teacher who lived in Poland. He was one of the rare Talmudists who wrote as extensively about the aggadah, the non-legal narratives and moral teachings of the Talmud, as about the Talmud’s legal arguments, the Halakhah. Eidels wrote the following intriguing explanation –recast in a contemporary idiom by me- for why we talk about these three foods, and eat at least two of them, at the seder.
Eidels asks why it is that, of all the Torah’s commandments, these three are singled out with the explicit requirement to publicly ask why we do them, then to explain the reasons? Normally, when I perform a commandment, I say the blessing thanking God for commanding it, but that’s all I do. Here, I have to actually have to experience the meaning of these three commandments. He then explains that consuming the Pesach offering, the matzah and the bitter herbs was a kind of spiritual antidote for our ancestors as they made the hard climb out of physical slavery into physical freedom. As the Haggadah even explains to us, our ancestors’ slavery was not only physical but spiritual as well. They lived with a slave mentality that subjected them to the idolatrous, morally bankrupt consciousness of their masters, the Egyptians. Eating the Passover lamb, an animal revered by the Egyptians, freed them from feeling subject to their gods; eating matzah, the bread of escape that reminded them of their redemption, was a further step in their feeling liberated from the spiritual afflictions placed upon them by their oppressors; eating the bitter herbs helped them recall that slavery is bitter not only to the body, it also embitters and distorts the soul by sullying us with the dangerous impurity of inner passivity and dependence. Thus, the generation of the exodus had to consume these three foods as palpable reminders to digest –literally and symbolically- the spiritual message of freedom and redemption. In our day, the MaHaRSHa teaches, we are doing the same thing when we sit at our seders, speaking about and sampling matzah, bitter herbs, and by extension, the Passover offering.
Rabbi Eidels’ interpretation of Passover, matzah and bitter herbs offers great spiritual insight to us as we transition from seder to seder. We American Jews –and Americans in general- possess unparalleled physical, economic, and political freedom: we are truly blessed. Pharaoh does not hold us back physically. Yet, it is obvious that we too at times find ourselves slaves to the idolatries of the contemporary spiritual Egypt: those negative after images of freedom’s blessings that, if not mastered, will master us and hurt us as we travel in the wide open spaces and market places of our very free and aggressively consumerist culture. One need only walk through an American mall –the richest symbol of American liberty and privilege- with critical lenses fitted to one’s eyes to witness how easily an individual’s prioritization of values can be blunted. Money, material glut, and the confusion of want with need are spiritual stealth bombers that ever so subtly distract us, dull our consciousness and rob us of intellectual independence. In a society like ours that is dependent upon independent thought, courageous moral action, and commitment to community, entanglement in servitude to the world of things will only bring us existential heartache. Worse yet, that kind of narcissistic spiritual enslavement which masks itself as the liberty of luxury can only be used as a very dark tool in the hands of political elites: how they would love to foist a new Egypt, with themselves in the role of Pharoah, upon a public too drunk with the preoccupations with our stuff to ever notice what hit us.
Now we are slaves, next year we will be free. Tonight we will look again, taste and speak of those ingredients in the paschal sacrifice: hopefully that taste of outer and inner freedom will linger in our mouths and stay with us for the rest of the year.
Second Dvar Torah for Pesach (Day 1), 5770.
My wife likes to joke that I treat food as if it were medicine. I guess that early on in my parents’ home, I internalized the idea that you don’t consume foods like green tea, blueberries, and tofu because they taste good, a debatable point at best for some, or even because they’re healthier for you than very tasty cheese fries, a point that is irrelevant for others. You eat them because they’re loaded with, well you name it: phytochemicals, antioxidants, micronutrients, essential fatty acids such as Omega 3 and Omega 6, high density lipoproteins, and polyunsaturated fats. Certainly, there is more than ample evidence that much of our chemically treated, commercially prepared food supply is potentially quite toxic; we have more than ample information that a balanced diet of high fiber, low fat foods consisting mostly of fruits and vegetables is quite good for you, and can also be quite tasty. However, I think that I have taken this basic, scientifically grounded wisdom a bit far. Imagine the scene. As a regular green tea drinker, I look at green tea as the magical preventative and powerful cure all for whatever may or does ail me: a sure shot antoxidant weapon in my internal arsenal against oxidized chemicals in the body that scientists have labeled, significantly enough, free radicals! Now, from time to time I engage in the quintessential American ritual: I eat a ton of junk, most of which I really like. If I wind up feeling sick to my stomach, do I resolve not to eat like that again? No, of course not, I’m an American, and that kind of resolution is, frankly, un-American, the kind of behavior you would expect of, well, a free radical! I simply boil a pot of water, pour it over my favorite green tea, and poof!, all is well with Rabbi Dan-i-el! I might as well become a marketer for the green tea industry. My ad line? “GREEN TEA—THE WONDER DRINK BURSTING WITH ANTIOXIDANT GOODNESS!"
We all know that no food is a wonder drug with magical medicinal powers, even though we may allow ourselves to be duped by the natural foods industry into wanting to believe this. However, as we move from seder to seder –a culinary experience filled with rich spiritual symbolism- we certainly can understand the power of food as spiritual medicine that deepens our sense of personal meaning and our connection to God and values. Consider the teaching that you will find in the synagogue announcements in front of you. We began learning this teaching this past Shabbat. It comes from the Mishnah, and it is quoted in full in the Haggadah:
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’"
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God Halleluyah (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
Note the three foods that one is supposed to talk about during the obligatory telling of the Exodus story at the seder: the Passover offering, the matzah, and the bitter herbs. As I mentioned on Shabbat, Exodus 12:8 mentions God’s commandment to the Israelites and their descendants to eat these three foods together as part of the feast commemorating the Exodus. Our teacher, Rabban Gamliel, transforms this commandment –which by his time was obsolete, given the prior destruction of the Temple- into a commandment fulfilled through words, based upon Exodus 12:27: we are to tell our curious children that the Pesach offering recalls how God pasach, passed over our houses during the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn. Of course, we know that, even without the Passover offering, we still do more than talk about this three food concoction: we continue to eat matzah and bitter herbs at the seder, even though we no longer eat roasted lamb. Therefore, for the Mishnah and Haggadah, seder food is about memory.
But is it about more than memory of things past, and perhaps also a kind of culinary medicine directed at our spiritual health? One Talmudic commentator seems to think so. Rabbi Shmuel Eidels, also known by his acronym, the MaHarSHa, was a sixteenth century teacher who lived in Poland. He was one of the rare Talmudists who wrote as extensively about the aggadah, the non-legal narratives and moral teachings of the Talmud, as about the Talmud’s legal arguments, the Halakhah. Eidels wrote the following intriguing explanation –recast in a contemporary idiom by me- for why we talk about these three foods, and eat at least two of them, at the seder.
Eidels asks why it is that, of all the Torah’s commandments, these three are singled out with the explicit requirement to publicly ask why we do them, then to explain the reasons? Normally, when I perform a commandment, I say the blessing thanking God for commanding it, but that’s all I do. Here, I have to actually have to experience the meaning of these three commandments. He then explains that consuming the Pesach offering, the matzah and the bitter herbs was a kind of spiritual antidote for our ancestors as they made the hard climb out of physical slavery into physical freedom. As the Haggadah even explains to us, our ancestors’ slavery was not only physical but spiritual as well. They lived with a slave mentality that subjected them to the idolatrous, morally bankrupt consciousness of their masters, the Egyptians. Eating the Passover lamb, an animal revered by the Egyptians, freed them from feeling subject to their gods; eating matzah, the bread of escape that reminded them of their redemption, was a further step in their feeling liberated from the spiritual afflictions placed upon them by their oppressors; eating the bitter herbs helped them recall that slavery is bitter not only to the body, it also embitters and distorts the soul by sullying us with the dangerous impurity of inner passivity and dependence. Thus, the generation of the exodus had to consume these three foods as palpable reminders to digest –literally and symbolically- the spiritual message of freedom and redemption. In our day, the MaHaRSHa teaches, we are doing the same thing when we sit at our seders, speaking about and sampling matzah, bitter herbs, and by extension, the Passover offering.
Rabbi Eidels’ interpretation of Passover, matzah and bitter herbs offers great spiritual insight to us as we transition from seder to seder. We American Jews –and Americans in general- possess unparalleled physical, economic, and political freedom: we are truly blessed. Pharaoh does not hold us back physically. Yet, it is obvious that we too at times find ourselves slaves to the idolatries of the contemporary spiritual Egypt: those negative after images of freedom’s blessings that, if not mastered, will master us and hurt us as we travel in the wide open spaces and market places of our very free and aggressively consumerist culture. One need only walk through an American mall –the richest symbol of American liberty and privilege- with critical lenses fitted to one’s eyes to witness how easily an individual’s prioritization of values can be blunted. Money, material glut, and the confusion of want with need are spiritual stealth bombers that ever so subtly distract us, dull our consciousness and rob us of intellectual independence. In a society like ours that is dependent upon independent thought, courageous moral action, and commitment to community, entanglement in servitude to the world of things will only bring us existential heartache. Worse yet, that kind of narcissistic spiritual enslavement which masks itself as the liberty of luxury can only be used as a very dark tool in the hands of political elites: how they would love to foist a new Egypt, with themselves in the role of Pharoah, upon a public too drunk with the preoccupations with our stuff to ever notice what hit us.
Now we are slaves, next year we will be free. Tonight we will look again, taste and speak of those ingredients in the paschal sacrifice: hopefully that taste of outer and inner freedom will linger in our mouths and stay with us for the rest of the year.
Passover Sermons 5770
IN EVERY GENERATION, PART ONE: STANDING IN THE SHOES OF SLAVES.
First Dvar Torah For Pesach (Shabbat HaGadol) 5770.
Between this morning and Yizkor, on the eighth day of Pesach, we are going to look at one famous passage of the Mishnah, the tradition of Jewish oral law. This Mishnah, which is quoted in full in the Haggadah, is one of the liturgical and spiritual centers of the Haggadah and the Pesach seder. I want to learn it with you from three different perspectives as we celebrate the holiday together. Please look with me at the text of the Mishnah, Tractate Pesahim 10:5:
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’”
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God, Halleluyah! (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
Some background information will help us understand this passage more completely. Our teacher, Rabban Gamliel, lived in the land of Israel and was the patriarch of the Jewish community there in the decades immediately following the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans. He hailed from the family of the great Hillel, and was the preeminent religious leader of his time. Rabban Gamliel derived his ruling about the obligation to talk about Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs during the telling of the Exodus story at the Seder from the famous verse in Exodus, 12:8: “They shall eat the flesh of the Passover offering that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire, with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs.” Exodus 12 contains God’s instructions to our ancestors concerning the first Passover meal prior to their leaving Egypt. Whatever the Torah’s original reason for the Passover offering and for eating these three foods together, our teacher offered three unique explanations for them that are not found explicitly in the Bible, all of which emphasize the dual experience of slavery and redemption from slavery. Note that his entire teaching then transforms the Torah’s commandment into a three-fold obligation of continuity, remembrance and gratitude.
The first obligation—continuity: In the wake of the trauma of the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem and the holy Temple, Rabban Gamliel directed the Jewish community to continue offering the Passover sacrifice –in their time a rapidly fading memory- through words: the words of the retelling of the Passover story and the words recalling the Passover sacrificial ritual through which our ancient ancestors prepared for freedom. For Rabban Gamliel, Temple or no Temple, Roman occupation or no Roman occupation, freedom or no freedom, all Jews then, now, and always were, are, and will be preparing joyously for the Exodus through the Passover sacrifice.
The second obligation—memory: Rabban Gamliel then took one step further. Not only are you and I obligated to continue offering the Passover, howbeit in a different way. We are also obligated to see ourselves as having personally been slaves who were liberated from Egypt by God and Moses. This is an intriguing psychological dimension that our teacher adds to the celebration of Passover. My telling of the Passover story is not a mere retelling of someone’s else’s history: it is my history, a traumatic experience of transition from slavery to freedom that happened to me. In its original context, the proof verse used by Rabban Gamliel to make his point was originally addressed to the Israelites who actually left Egypt and were on their way to the land of Canaan. He turned it into a verse applying to all of us for all time. For him, regardless of time and place, all Jews, then, now and always, are tasting the bitterness of slavery and the sweetness of freedom.
The third obligation—gratitude: Rabban Gamliel understood that constantly reliving the experience of redemption from slavery should naturally lead to spontaneous, and uncontained, expressions of thankfulness to God for transforming us and our situation. After all, if we are always at the crossroads of slavery and freedom with our ancestors, then the trauma and catharsis of that experience is always ours, and our gratitude should be a spiritual and moral no brainer! However, he also understood human nature well enough to comprehend that, left to our own devices and at an increasing distance from the original experience of freedom and redemption, we will not feel or express gratitude for the most part. Such is the narcissism and lethargy of human experience, especially when a person or people take freedom for granted. Conversely, the actual experience of suffering oppression distracts us from genuine gratitude because who can feel thankful for freedom when one is immersed in slavery? I suspect that when Rabban Gamliel and his fellow Jews were surrounded by the living evidence of their own oppression at Roman hands, their natural motivation to thank God for freedom was likely pretty weak.
Yet these reasons are precisely why his teaching is set up as a series of three obligations, not pious suggestions or requests. Under the best conditions of freedom, a person will not make great efforts remember the oppressions of the past, and would certainly not try to imagine that experience as a living, personal one. Under the worst conditions of oppression, a person would not feel overly thankful for deliverances of the past, and would certainly not be so inclined to see God or any force in his or her life as a redemptive presence. Rabban Gamliel’s teaching worked so well in the past, and it works so well now, because it is a powerful personal and communal discipline that applies universally. Using ritual, psychology, and spirituality, it directs us to do what we find hardest to do under the best and worst circumstances: feel and live like slaves crossing over to freedom, who can internalize that experience and apply it to the seder and to our everyday lives. In words, deeds, and feelings, Rabban Gamliel, the seder ritual, and Judaism call us to choose the actions, the words, the feelings, and lives of free people. That is not only what gives us purpose as Jews, it is what gives us dignity as human beings.
Shabbat shalom.
First Dvar Torah For Pesach (Shabbat HaGadol) 5770.
Between this morning and Yizkor, on the eighth day of Pesach, we are going to look at one famous passage of the Mishnah, the tradition of Jewish oral law. This Mishnah, which is quoted in full in the Haggadah, is one of the liturgical and spiritual centers of the Haggadah and the Pesach seder. I want to learn it with you from three different perspectives as we celebrate the holiday together. Please look with me at the text of the Mishnah, Tractate Pesahim 10:5:
Rabban Gamliel said: “Whoever has not referred to these three matters connected to the Passover has not fulfilled his obligation (to tell the Passover story), and these are they: Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
Passover: because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.
Unleavened bread: because our ancestors were redeemed in Egypt.
Bitter herbs: because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt.
In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt, since it is said (in the Torah), “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8)’”
Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, honor, exalt, extol, and bless the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles. God brought us forth from:
Slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festival, darkness to great light, subjugation to redemption.
So, we should say before God, Halleluyah! (that is, the psalms of Hallel, Ps. 113-118.)”
Some background information will help us understand this passage more completely. Our teacher, Rabban Gamliel, lived in the land of Israel and was the patriarch of the Jewish community there in the decades immediately following the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans. He hailed from the family of the great Hillel, and was the preeminent religious leader of his time. Rabban Gamliel derived his ruling about the obligation to talk about Passover, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs during the telling of the Exodus story at the Seder from the famous verse in Exodus, 12:8: “They shall eat the flesh of the Passover offering that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire, with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs.” Exodus 12 contains God’s instructions to our ancestors concerning the first Passover meal prior to their leaving Egypt. Whatever the Torah’s original reason for the Passover offering and for eating these three foods together, our teacher offered three unique explanations for them that are not found explicitly in the Bible, all of which emphasize the dual experience of slavery and redemption from slavery. Note that his entire teaching then transforms the Torah’s commandment into a three-fold obligation of continuity, remembrance and gratitude.
The first obligation—continuity: In the wake of the trauma of the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem and the holy Temple, Rabban Gamliel directed the Jewish community to continue offering the Passover sacrifice –in their time a rapidly fading memory- through words: the words of the retelling of the Passover story and the words recalling the Passover sacrificial ritual through which our ancient ancestors prepared for freedom. For Rabban Gamliel, Temple or no Temple, Roman occupation or no Roman occupation, freedom or no freedom, all Jews then, now, and always were, are, and will be preparing joyously for the Exodus through the Passover sacrifice.
The second obligation—memory: Rabban Gamliel then took one step further. Not only are you and I obligated to continue offering the Passover, howbeit in a different way. We are also obligated to see ourselves as having personally been slaves who were liberated from Egypt by God and Moses. This is an intriguing psychological dimension that our teacher adds to the celebration of Passover. My telling of the Passover story is not a mere retelling of someone’s else’s history: it is my history, a traumatic experience of transition from slavery to freedom that happened to me. In its original context, the proof verse used by Rabban Gamliel to make his point was originally addressed to the Israelites who actually left Egypt and were on their way to the land of Canaan. He turned it into a verse applying to all of us for all time. For him, regardless of time and place, all Jews, then, now and always, are tasting the bitterness of slavery and the sweetness of freedom.
The third obligation—gratitude: Rabban Gamliel understood that constantly reliving the experience of redemption from slavery should naturally lead to spontaneous, and uncontained, expressions of thankfulness to God for transforming us and our situation. After all, if we are always at the crossroads of slavery and freedom with our ancestors, then the trauma and catharsis of that experience is always ours, and our gratitude should be a spiritual and moral no brainer! However, he also understood human nature well enough to comprehend that, left to our own devices and at an increasing distance from the original experience of freedom and redemption, we will not feel or express gratitude for the most part. Such is the narcissism and lethargy of human experience, especially when a person or people take freedom for granted. Conversely, the actual experience of suffering oppression distracts us from genuine gratitude because who can feel thankful for freedom when one is immersed in slavery? I suspect that when Rabban Gamliel and his fellow Jews were surrounded by the living evidence of their own oppression at Roman hands, their natural motivation to thank God for freedom was likely pretty weak.
Yet these reasons are precisely why his teaching is set up as a series of three obligations, not pious suggestions or requests. Under the best conditions of freedom, a person will not make great efforts remember the oppressions of the past, and would certainly not try to imagine that experience as a living, personal one. Under the worst conditions of oppression, a person would not feel overly thankful for deliverances of the past, and would certainly not be so inclined to see God or any force in his or her life as a redemptive presence. Rabban Gamliel’s teaching worked so well in the past, and it works so well now, because it is a powerful personal and communal discipline that applies universally. Using ritual, psychology, and spirituality, it directs us to do what we find hardest to do under the best and worst circumstances: feel and live like slaves crossing over to freedom, who can internalize that experience and apply it to the seder and to our everyday lives. In words, deeds, and feelings, Rabban Gamliel, the seder ritual, and Judaism call us to choose the actions, the words, the feelings, and lives of free people. That is not only what gives us purpose as Jews, it is what gives us dignity as human beings.
Shabbat shalom.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
A Poem I Wrote While In Israel 2010/5770
I wrote this poem while in Tzfat, one of Israel's four cities that are holy to Judaism. The mikveh -ritual bath- of Rabbi Isaac Luria is a pool inside a cave at the lower end of the old city of Tzfat, that I presume is fed by en underground spring. I go there to immerse myself every time I am in the city.
Isaac Luria (Egypt and Israel, 16th century) was one of the most important figures in the history of Jewish mysticism, whose greatest contribution to religion is a creation myth that explains the existence of evil and imperfection in a radical way.
Put in very simple terms, Rabbi Luria’s teaching seeks to understand the hidden reality behind the story of creation that is found in the book of Genesis and cherished by Western religions. In his view, God, who is endless in time and space, (Ein Sof--"without end") “pulled back” to open a “space without God” in which some “thing” other than God could be created. God then sent God’s light (or creative energy) into that space by placing that light into vessels --kayleem-- in Hebrew- which could contain and organize it. The original divine plan of creation was for the light in those vessels to bring about a perfectly created world modeled upon God, who is infinite and perfect. But a terrible thing happened. Because God’s light is so powerful and overwhelming, the vessels were unable to hold it and they shattered. After this cosmic accident, God reorganized the creative process and brought the universe into existence. However, the universe as God finally ordered it was a mixture of sparks of creative light and shards of the broken vessels blocking and trapping those sparks: a tangle of light and dark, life and death, ugliness and beauty, good and evil. This is the world that we have inherited in nature as well as human affairs: broken and beautiful. Luria believed that human beings have the power to release those original sparks that are still trapped, to repair those original vessels for God’s light, and to return the sparks to their source in God. For instance, when a Jewish person performs one of the mitzvot –the ritual and ethical commandments of Judaism- that action releases some of those sparks and brings us closer to perfection and redemption from evil. Thus, human beings are important actors in the great cosmic struggle for healing and wholeness that began before there was reality as we know it and that will only end when we and God heal and perfect that reality.
My poem draws upon Luria's ideas as well as the simple beauty and mystery of the mikveh where he would purify himself.
IN TZFAT (At The Mikveh Of Isaac Luria)
The bulb, dim and naked,
-A weak, dying emanation of Ein Sof-
Hung over the frigid, murky water
Of the damp stone pool.
Standing naked and cold,
I briefly considered my options:
Let the light fan its pallid rays
Over the still,
Perfectly dull liquid surface?
Or create a wet commotion with my body
That dispersed the light and the dark water
In endless jagged directions
Until they came to rest, trapped,
In the enveloping blackness
Of the shell-like cave?
I was freezing;
I had places to go.
I reasoned: anything is better
Than stagnating in static serenity.
Banking on a moment of purity
Before the long trek back
To inevitable dirt,
I plunged in.
© 2010 By Rabbi Dan Ornstein
Isaac Luria (Egypt and Israel, 16th century) was one of the most important figures in the history of Jewish mysticism, whose greatest contribution to religion is a creation myth that explains the existence of evil and imperfection in a radical way.
Put in very simple terms, Rabbi Luria’s teaching seeks to understand the hidden reality behind the story of creation that is found in the book of Genesis and cherished by Western religions. In his view, God, who is endless in time and space, (Ein Sof--"without end") “pulled back” to open a “space without God” in which some “thing” other than God could be created. God then sent God’s light (or creative energy) into that space by placing that light into vessels --kayleem-- in Hebrew- which could contain and organize it. The original divine plan of creation was for the light in those vessels to bring about a perfectly created world modeled upon God, who is infinite and perfect. But a terrible thing happened. Because God’s light is so powerful and overwhelming, the vessels were unable to hold it and they shattered. After this cosmic accident, God reorganized the creative process and brought the universe into existence. However, the universe as God finally ordered it was a mixture of sparks of creative light and shards of the broken vessels blocking and trapping those sparks: a tangle of light and dark, life and death, ugliness and beauty, good and evil. This is the world that we have inherited in nature as well as human affairs: broken and beautiful. Luria believed that human beings have the power to release those original sparks that are still trapped, to repair those original vessels for God’s light, and to return the sparks to their source in God. For instance, when a Jewish person performs one of the mitzvot –the ritual and ethical commandments of Judaism- that action releases some of those sparks and brings us closer to perfection and redemption from evil. Thus, human beings are important actors in the great cosmic struggle for healing and wholeness that began before there was reality as we know it and that will only end when we and God heal and perfect that reality.
My poem draws upon Luria's ideas as well as the simple beauty and mystery of the mikveh where he would purify himself.
IN TZFAT (At The Mikveh Of Isaac Luria)
The bulb, dim and naked,
-A weak, dying emanation of Ein Sof-
Hung over the frigid, murky water
Of the damp stone pool.
Standing naked and cold,
I briefly considered my options:
Let the light fan its pallid rays
Over the still,
Perfectly dull liquid surface?
Or create a wet commotion with my body
That dispersed the light and the dark water
In endless jagged directions
Until they came to rest, trapped,
In the enveloping blackness
Of the shell-like cave?
I was freezing;
I had places to go.
I reasoned: anything is better
Than stagnating in static serenity.
Banking on a moment of purity
Before the long trek back
To inevitable dirt,
I plunged in.
© 2010 By Rabbi Dan Ornstein
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Purim In Jerusalem
PURIM IN JERUSALEM.
The end of our congregational mission to Israel was close at hand. After our tour bus came to a halt in the midst of the post-Shabbat pandemonium at Ben Gurion Airport, I bid farewell to all of our participants as they rushed to grab their bags and begin the long trek back to America. We had all ridden the euphoric wave of an intense Israel mission that deepened us as people, Jews and Zionists, and now it was time to return to the realities of life at home. However, for the first time since I began taking congregants to Israel in 1999, I was not going back with the group. Because my son, Joe, is participating in Nativ, USY’s Israel gap year program, I was staying in Israel for an extra week of study and travel that would include spending time with the Nativ community.
Nothing compares to reconnecting with your college age child after he or she has been away for a while. From the first to the last embrace during our visits, I marveled at how much Joe had matured even more into a young man with thoughtful opinions and a life that began with our family, but was now truly his. A number of times during the year, he had thanked my wife and me for giving him the opportunity to be part of Nativ, and live in Israel at the tender age of eighteen. During the last Shabbat of our synagogue trip, he joined us in Tel Aviv, and spent the weekend telling me wonderful stories about his travels, studies, and friends. I looked forward to meeting them all and watching Nativ in action. First, I would spend a long awaited week alone, walking the streets of Jerusalem, searching for new wisdom and new words to write.
Jerusalem is home to myriad hotels and hostels for the pilgrims and tourists who come from all over the world to be part of its mystique. As a Conservative Jewish traveler, I found a simple, but excellent home and spiritual respite at our movement’s Fuchsberg Center in the heart of the city. The center houses a well maintained hostel along with the Conservative movement’s main Israel offices, Kehillat Moreshet Yisrael –a thriving Masorti (Conservative) shul-, ongoing educational programs, and our movement’s Conservative Yeshiva. The Yeshiva attracts Conservative (and a number of formerly Orthodox) Jews from all over the world to Jerusalem, where they can have a fully observant, egalitarian Jewish life and learn Torah. I regret not having enough time to really get to know the students of the Yeshiva and to learn with them. My time in Jerusalem was far too short and filled with too many commitments. Still, the spiritual energy and genuine warmth of the Yeshiva community was immediately apparent to me, as was their level of seriousness about learning Torah and applying it to their lives. Praying each day from the balcony of my room at the Center, I would look out over Jerusalem, and be able to glimpse the very top of the beautiful golden Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. While the Dome, the Al Aksa mosque, and the entire Temple Mount have become holy to the worldwide Muslim community, we Jews continue to venerate this site and its powerful symbolism. It is part of what the prophet Isaiah was referring to when he declared: “For Torah shall go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Cradled in the arms of our holiest city, and knowing that just a couple of hundred feet below me our Torah students were making God’s word come to life, I was pleased that our Conservative movement in Israel was making its small but precious contribution to fulfilling Isaiah’s words.
Having the time to be alone is a blessing, but being alone can also be disconcerting. While I was with our synagogue mission, I was so focused on our group that I had little time to miss everyone back in Albany, New York too much. The people with me were my congregational family on-the-go. Yet, as I walked (actually, hiked with a heavy backpack) the streets and neighborhoods of Jerusalem during my extra week’s stay, no matter how busy I was, I felt alone, even lonely, at times. Though every Jew belongs to the Jewish people and is always walking with God, my closest friends, family, and congregation were in America, not at the corner of King George and Agron Streets. I felt this most explicitly that week, because it was the week before Purim. Purim is an all encompassing communal holiday: it celebrates our people’s redemption from evil. This celebration is given concrete expression through four mitzvot that are all about community, friendship, and common fate. We read Megillah in public, we give gifts to our friends, we help the poor, and we eat a huge meal together with the people we love. All around me, the friends and families of different communities –even the most secular Jews- were joyously preparing for the holiday. I felt a part of it all…and apart from it all. As busy as I would be back home preparing for Purim at shul as one of its rabbis, at least I would be an integral part of a community I knew. Not so in Jerusalem. I worried a bit. Even though Purim in Israel is far more rich and intense than anywhere else in the Jewish world (a strange paradox, given that Purim is the ultimate diaspora holiday!) would the Purim I was about to spend with Nativ wind up being an uncomfortable encounter with strangers absorbed in their own tight, somewhat insular community of late adolescents, my son among them?
My concerns were put to rest from the very beginning of my stay. My son had grown so much in the five months since I had seen him, not only because he was ripe for growth (and because, I am proud to say, my wife and I raised him to be a mensch). He had grown because Nativ strongly emphasizes the best Jewish values of kehillah (community), hesed (kindness), and ahavat Yisrael/Habriot (loving one’s fellow Jew and one’s fellow human being). From the moment our spirited and very musical Kabbalat Shabbat began, until the last hug and warm goodbye that I gave to Joe and his friends on that Sunday, Purim afternoon, the Nativ community embraced each other, and found room for this middle aged rabbi in that embrace. Praying, learning, singing and joking around with this very special group of young, committed Conservative Jews, I got a very potent taste of what Jewish community is and what Conservative Jewish community can be at all times. I feel truly blessed to have been with them and their madrichim (group leaders) during the celebration of the holiday.
Conservative Jewish community as it can be is a great concern for at least some of the “Nativers” with whom I spoke. Like their older counterparts in the Conservative Yeshiva, these young people like being Conservative Jews. They respect and appreciate the appeal of Orthodoxy for religiously serious Jews, but it is not for them. However, at least a couple of the Nativ participants mused sadly about needing to find religious community outside of the Conservative framework if they returned to the United States and were given no support for spiritually progressive and halakhically serious Jewish life in our synagogues. Our movement is painfully aware of this phenomenon. We debate almost incessantly (and we even joke about) the ongoing exodus of young, committed Conservative Jews to Orthodox synagogues. These are the young people who learned to take traditional Judaism seriously when they were in USY and the Schechter schools, at Camp Ramah, on Pilgrimage, Wheels, Nativ, and in the Yeshiva. They often return to their campus Conservative communities and their local Conservative shuls and they truly feel alone spiritually. The students I met were not threatening me with talk of defections. They were merely telling the truth about what they would need to do for themselves and their future families to find spiritual homes where they belong.
Admitedly, I am one more rabbi bemoaning one of our greatest challenges as a movement. I have no brilliant solutions, nor would I say that my congregation (as wonderful as it is) always gets this aspect of our Jewish life right all the time. We all have work to do in this regard as we chart the course of Conservative Judaism in the 21 st century. However, let me conclude with one simple insight that I had as I spent time with Nativ and our Yeshiva. Apart from creating even more elaborate outreach efforts and expending much money on alternative programming, what if we simply got the names of any Yeshiva or Nativ graduates living near us, invited them to our shuls, gave them a free membership for the duration of their college or grad school stints, and put them on a committee or on our boards? What if we asked them (given whatever time they had) to teach one course to a group of people who wanted to learn more about Judaism, Hebrew, Shabbat songs, or Israel? Would this simple act of inviting these core members to our community and giving them the power to shape us from the ground up make a difference? I believe that it would, it could cost little, and it could require even less in terms of personal investments of time and energy. If a religiously active and Jewishly knowledgeable laity matters to us and we recognize it as the basis for Conservative Jewish renewal, then these graduates of our best denominational programs will need us to provide them with a welcoming spiritual home. What they will give back to our communities will transform us for the better, if my interaction with these young Nativ students is any indication.
No one wants to be alone, and everyone needs a sense of supportive Jewish religious community to live a full, meaningful Jewish life. The students of the Yeshiva and of Nativ taught me this quite powerfully and quite naturally. We have resources as a movement that can be replicated again and again, here and in Israel. My time with my son, my people, and my Conservative movement in Eretz Yisrael showed me how wonderful community can be, and how it can truly build the world, one traveler on this earth at a time.
(c) 2010 by Rabbi Dan Ornstein
The end of our congregational mission to Israel was close at hand. After our tour bus came to a halt in the midst of the post-Shabbat pandemonium at Ben Gurion Airport, I bid farewell to all of our participants as they rushed to grab their bags and begin the long trek back to America. We had all ridden the euphoric wave of an intense Israel mission that deepened us as people, Jews and Zionists, and now it was time to return to the realities of life at home. However, for the first time since I began taking congregants to Israel in 1999, I was not going back with the group. Because my son, Joe, is participating in Nativ, USY’s Israel gap year program, I was staying in Israel for an extra week of study and travel that would include spending time with the Nativ community.
Nothing compares to reconnecting with your college age child after he or she has been away for a while. From the first to the last embrace during our visits, I marveled at how much Joe had matured even more into a young man with thoughtful opinions and a life that began with our family, but was now truly his. A number of times during the year, he had thanked my wife and me for giving him the opportunity to be part of Nativ, and live in Israel at the tender age of eighteen. During the last Shabbat of our synagogue trip, he joined us in Tel Aviv, and spent the weekend telling me wonderful stories about his travels, studies, and friends. I looked forward to meeting them all and watching Nativ in action. First, I would spend a long awaited week alone, walking the streets of Jerusalem, searching for new wisdom and new words to write.
Jerusalem is home to myriad hotels and hostels for the pilgrims and tourists who come from all over the world to be part of its mystique. As a Conservative Jewish traveler, I found a simple, but excellent home and spiritual respite at our movement’s Fuchsberg Center in the heart of the city. The center houses a well maintained hostel along with the Conservative movement’s main Israel offices, Kehillat Moreshet Yisrael –a thriving Masorti (Conservative) shul-, ongoing educational programs, and our movement’s Conservative Yeshiva. The Yeshiva attracts Conservative (and a number of formerly Orthodox) Jews from all over the world to Jerusalem, where they can have a fully observant, egalitarian Jewish life and learn Torah. I regret not having enough time to really get to know the students of the Yeshiva and to learn with them. My time in Jerusalem was far too short and filled with too many commitments. Still, the spiritual energy and genuine warmth of the Yeshiva community was immediately apparent to me, as was their level of seriousness about learning Torah and applying it to their lives. Praying each day from the balcony of my room at the Center, I would look out over Jerusalem, and be able to glimpse the very top of the beautiful golden Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. While the Dome, the Al Aksa mosque, and the entire Temple Mount have become holy to the worldwide Muslim community, we Jews continue to venerate this site and its powerful symbolism. It is part of what the prophet Isaiah was referring to when he declared: “For Torah shall go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Cradled in the arms of our holiest city, and knowing that just a couple of hundred feet below me our Torah students were making God’s word come to life, I was pleased that our Conservative movement in Israel was making its small but precious contribution to fulfilling Isaiah’s words.
Having the time to be alone is a blessing, but being alone can also be disconcerting. While I was with our synagogue mission, I was so focused on our group that I had little time to miss everyone back in Albany, New York too much. The people with me were my congregational family on-the-go. Yet, as I walked (actually, hiked with a heavy backpack) the streets and neighborhoods of Jerusalem during my extra week’s stay, no matter how busy I was, I felt alone, even lonely, at times. Though every Jew belongs to the Jewish people and is always walking with God, my closest friends, family, and congregation were in America, not at the corner of King George and Agron Streets. I felt this most explicitly that week, because it was the week before Purim. Purim is an all encompassing communal holiday: it celebrates our people’s redemption from evil. This celebration is given concrete expression through four mitzvot that are all about community, friendship, and common fate. We read Megillah in public, we give gifts to our friends, we help the poor, and we eat a huge meal together with the people we love. All around me, the friends and families of different communities –even the most secular Jews- were joyously preparing for the holiday. I felt a part of it all…and apart from it all. As busy as I would be back home preparing for Purim at shul as one of its rabbis, at least I would be an integral part of a community I knew. Not so in Jerusalem. I worried a bit. Even though Purim in Israel is far more rich and intense than anywhere else in the Jewish world (a strange paradox, given that Purim is the ultimate diaspora holiday!) would the Purim I was about to spend with Nativ wind up being an uncomfortable encounter with strangers absorbed in their own tight, somewhat insular community of late adolescents, my son among them?
My concerns were put to rest from the very beginning of my stay. My son had grown so much in the five months since I had seen him, not only because he was ripe for growth (and because, I am proud to say, my wife and I raised him to be a mensch). He had grown because Nativ strongly emphasizes the best Jewish values of kehillah (community), hesed (kindness), and ahavat Yisrael/Habriot (loving one’s fellow Jew and one’s fellow human being). From the moment our spirited and very musical Kabbalat Shabbat began, until the last hug and warm goodbye that I gave to Joe and his friends on that Sunday, Purim afternoon, the Nativ community embraced each other, and found room for this middle aged rabbi in that embrace. Praying, learning, singing and joking around with this very special group of young, committed Conservative Jews, I got a very potent taste of what Jewish community is and what Conservative Jewish community can be at all times. I feel truly blessed to have been with them and their madrichim (group leaders) during the celebration of the holiday.
Conservative Jewish community as it can be is a great concern for at least some of the “Nativers” with whom I spoke. Like their older counterparts in the Conservative Yeshiva, these young people like being Conservative Jews. They respect and appreciate the appeal of Orthodoxy for religiously serious Jews, but it is not for them. However, at least a couple of the Nativ participants mused sadly about needing to find religious community outside of the Conservative framework if they returned to the United States and were given no support for spiritually progressive and halakhically serious Jewish life in our synagogues. Our movement is painfully aware of this phenomenon. We debate almost incessantly (and we even joke about) the ongoing exodus of young, committed Conservative Jews to Orthodox synagogues. These are the young people who learned to take traditional Judaism seriously when they were in USY and the Schechter schools, at Camp Ramah, on Pilgrimage, Wheels, Nativ, and in the Yeshiva. They often return to their campus Conservative communities and their local Conservative shuls and they truly feel alone spiritually. The students I met were not threatening me with talk of defections. They were merely telling the truth about what they would need to do for themselves and their future families to find spiritual homes where they belong.
Admitedly, I am one more rabbi bemoaning one of our greatest challenges as a movement. I have no brilliant solutions, nor would I say that my congregation (as wonderful as it is) always gets this aspect of our Jewish life right all the time. We all have work to do in this regard as we chart the course of Conservative Judaism in the 21 st century. However, let me conclude with one simple insight that I had as I spent time with Nativ and our Yeshiva. Apart from creating even more elaborate outreach efforts and expending much money on alternative programming, what if we simply got the names of any Yeshiva or Nativ graduates living near us, invited them to our shuls, gave them a free membership for the duration of their college or grad school stints, and put them on a committee or on our boards? What if we asked them (given whatever time they had) to teach one course to a group of people who wanted to learn more about Judaism, Hebrew, Shabbat songs, or Israel? Would this simple act of inviting these core members to our community and giving them the power to shape us from the ground up make a difference? I believe that it would, it could cost little, and it could require even less in terms of personal investments of time and energy. If a religiously active and Jewishly knowledgeable laity matters to us and we recognize it as the basis for Conservative Jewish renewal, then these graduates of our best denominational programs will need us to provide them with a welcoming spiritual home. What they will give back to our communities will transform us for the better, if my interaction with these young Nativ students is any indication.
No one wants to be alone, and everyone needs a sense of supportive Jewish religious community to live a full, meaningful Jewish life. The students of the Yeshiva and of Nativ taught me this quite powerfully and quite naturally. We have resources as a movement that can be replicated again and again, here and in Israel. My time with my son, my people, and my Conservative movement in Eretz Yisrael showed me how wonderful community can be, and how it can truly build the world, one traveler on this earth at a time.
(c) 2010 by Rabbi Dan Ornstein
So, Who Really Did Take Us Out Of Egypt?
SO, WHO REALLY DID LEAD US OUT OF EGYPT?
Dvar Torah For Parshat Ki Tissa/Shabbat Parah 5770.
At times in the Torah, we encounter lead words and phrases whose repetition is so explicit and unsubtle that, in the words of our sages, they appear to be screaming: “interpret me!” Ki Tissa contains one such phrase that is used in three different contexts. I believe it is a critical key to understanding the meaning of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, their relationship with God, and the importance of their journey to the promised land.
Ki Tissa opens with five sets of directions and commands that are part of God’s instructions to Moses concerning the mishkan, the desert sanctuary: the half shekel poll tax to be given by every male twenty years and older, the copper laver for the priests to wash in before performing sacred service, the anointing oil for the sanctuary items and the priestly vestments, the incense for burning before the holy ark, and the commissioning of Betzalel and Oholiav, the master craftsmen of the building project. God then reminds Moses and the Israelites that Shabbat, the sanctification of time, takes precedence over the building of the mishkan, the sanctification of space. This portion of Ki Tissa closes God’s instructions to the Israelites with a tone of cosmic order and peace. God finishes speaking to Moses and gives him the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments. All is right with the world, above and below.
Then, all hell breaks loose. What follows, of course, in Exodus, ch. 32 is the infamous story of the building of the golden calf by the Israelites who, in their frenzied longing for Moses’ delayed return from his encounter with God, force his brother Aaron to build them “a god who shall go before us.” Aaron does this with the people’s gold that was supposed to have been used for the holy purposes of building the mishkan. They tell Aaron to do this because, “That man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.” Note, of course, the total absence of God in the people’s statement. Having forgotten so quickly that it was God, and not Moses or some other power, Who performed miracles for them at the Sea of Reeds and who gave them the Ten Commandments, the people look at the golden calf and exclaim: “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” How ironic and terrible that the Israelites would so quickly forget what the true God of Israel had done for them just months before, and that they would replace their allegiance to God with exclusive allegiance to Moses or to a piece of molten gold. Even more ironic is the way in which they turn God’s introductory words to the Ten Commandments –“I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt”- on their heads. A more emphatic misidentification of their true divine savior there could not have been.
What follows is the whole messy story of God, in God’s fury, seeking to destroy the entire people, Moses staying God’s hand, Moses burning the idol, forcing the Israelites to drink water mixed with its ashes, the slaying of 3,000 Israelites, and God’s begrudging reconciliation with the people. What I want to look at is the way in which this phrase “bringing the people out of the land of Egypt” continues to be used in the story, and the possible message that its use has to teach us. The first two uses of the phrase we noted above. However, now turn to Exodus 32:7, p. 531 in the Humash. While the people are engaged in their debauched and idolatrous revelry, God tells Moses: “Hurry down, for your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, have acted basely.” Once again, note the bitterly ironic appropriation by God of the Israelites’ own incendiary language to describe Moses as the sole redeemer of the people from Egypt that we saw above. We almost imagine God saying to God’s self, “Well, you folks want to rewrite history, with My redemptive efforts struck from the record and Moses as the center of this drama? Fine…Moses, you deal with your people whom you delivered from Egypt. I have nothing to do with them anymore.” But Moses will have none of this. After God threatens to let God’s anger blaze forth and destroy the people altogether, Moses engages in a kind of deferential conceit to stay God’s hand. Notice Moses’ words in Exodus 32:11, p. 532 in the Humash: “Let not Your anger, O Lord, blaze forth against Your people whom You delivered from Egypt with great power and a mighty hand.” Moses not too subtly shifts responsibility for the people’s redemption from Egypt back onto God’s shoulders, as it were. But this bit of political and spiritual ping pong is not yet over. After the great massacre of the people that Moses and his fellow Levites execute, God tells him, in Exodus 33:1, p. 536 in the Humash—“Set out from here, you and the people that you have brought up from the land of Egypt, to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘To your offspring will I give it…’” In a state of extended rage against the sinful Israelites, and in an apparent attempt to disown them and all responsibility for them, God continues to turn this language back onto Moses. However, note the transition that has taken place in the verse we just read. Despite the rage and almost willful disownership, God is still willing to look to the future that is the Israelites’ raison d’etre, and the reason for their leaving Egypt in the first place: to enter and settle the land promised to our ancestors, Canaan, or what we call the land of Israel. Only after God calls up this ancient promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, can Moses move God –as it were- to reclaim shared responsibility with Moses for moving the people forward to the promised land. God then promises Moses to help him lead the people, and reveals to Moses God’s 13 attributes of mercy and compassion.
So, who was responsible for bringing the people up out of Egypt, and into the promised land? Certainly not the mute, inanimate golden calf that symbolizes the most infantile, slavish impulses of an immature people. I suggest that what emerged from this extended dialogue between Moses and God was the recognition that both of them –the human leader and the divine Leader- were responsible. It is not that God and Moses were equals, but that neither of them alone –as it were- could fulfill the necessary criteria for redemption from slavery and possession of the promised land. Without God at the helm, the mission would have no spiritual energy. Without Moses at the helm, that spiritual energy would lack a channeled, human focus, and would hemorrhage uselessly.
Having just spent three weeks in Israel –our modern promised land- I am once again amazed at just how true this insight of the Torah is. From the beginning of our Israel pilgrimage until its end, our Ohav mission group experienced almost non-stop the vital energy flowing through our Jewish homeland and the awe inspiring, world class Jewish society that our people has created there. The great quantities of great food that we sampled daily were paralleled by the rich expressions of the Jewish past, present and future and the rich varieties of diverse Jewish backgrounds and experiences that we encountered as well. Even those of us who knew no Hebrew or Bible quickly immersed ourselves in a highly compressed and emotionally intense embrace of Jewish knowledge and experience: as it were, we became the Israelites entering the promised land, we entered into dialogue with God near the Holy of Holies, we lived through the horrors and heroism of the Holocaust, the terror and the triumph of the War of Independence, the prosaic banality of ancient Jews living their daily lives in the Holy Land, and the poetic bliss of Jews achieving our greatest dream: to be a free people in the land of Zion and Jerusalem after two thousand years of homelessness and hope in the face of despair. Here is what we learned there, and what I learn there time after time that I visit: the Jewish people, the great Zionist enterprise to assert our right to freedom, dignity and sovereignty, and the creation and continuation of the State of Israel continue to flourish because of a powerful partnership between us and God. This partnership brought us out of Egypt and into the promised land; it brought us out of Auschwitz and into the founding of the Jewish state; it brings all of us out of the diaspora and into an utterly transformative encounter with our destiny each time we visit Israel, each time we support Israel, each time one of us makes aliyah. Almost all Israelis, from the most idealistic to the most cynical, from the most religious to the most secular, from the most right wing to the most left wing, are bound together by the simple Hebrew phrase, yihiyeh tov, it will be alright, everything will turn out ok, I have hope. That is more than just a phrase: it is a whole way of life, a massive leap of faith forged in the crucible of time, vision and spiritual energy, and given distinctive shape by a lively people who express it in myriad ways, great and small, every day. It binds together and lifts up the people of Israeli society who are often deeply divided and plagued by difficult internal and external problems, yet who refuse to give into despair.
Walk down the streets of Jerusalem before Shabbat as our group did, or walk those same streets in the week before Purim, as I was privileged to do by myself, and you feel it. Talk, as I did, to the students and faculty of the amazing Hand In Hand School For Jewish-Arab Education who are trying to create a civic space for dialogue and peace, and you feel it. Plant a tree in the Kennedy Memorial Forest, listen to the words of David Ben Gurion proclaiming Israel a state in the actual place where he made that proclamation, or sing Hatikvah –the Jewish National Anthem- on the beach in Tel Aviv at sunset, and you feel it: you feel God, however you feel God, very much alive and present in this place called Israel, but especially among this people called Israel.
Who brought us up out of the land of Egypt and into the promised land? God did and Moses did. Who does this today, time and time again, when we are open to it happening? God does and the people and State of Israel- do. It is great to be home, but already I miss our imperfect, pock marked, crazy, beautiful Jewish home, our promised land, our Israel: partnership of God and Man, old/new miracle, sign of God’s eternal covenant with us and with the world.
(c)2010 by Rabbi Dan Ornstein
Dvar Torah For Parshat Ki Tissa/Shabbat Parah 5770.
At times in the Torah, we encounter lead words and phrases whose repetition is so explicit and unsubtle that, in the words of our sages, they appear to be screaming: “interpret me!” Ki Tissa contains one such phrase that is used in three different contexts. I believe it is a critical key to understanding the meaning of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, their relationship with God, and the importance of their journey to the promised land.
Ki Tissa opens with five sets of directions and commands that are part of God’s instructions to Moses concerning the mishkan, the desert sanctuary: the half shekel poll tax to be given by every male twenty years and older, the copper laver for the priests to wash in before performing sacred service, the anointing oil for the sanctuary items and the priestly vestments, the incense for burning before the holy ark, and the commissioning of Betzalel and Oholiav, the master craftsmen of the building project. God then reminds Moses and the Israelites that Shabbat, the sanctification of time, takes precedence over the building of the mishkan, the sanctification of space. This portion of Ki Tissa closes God’s instructions to the Israelites with a tone of cosmic order and peace. God finishes speaking to Moses and gives him the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments. All is right with the world, above and below.
Then, all hell breaks loose. What follows, of course, in Exodus, ch. 32 is the infamous story of the building of the golden calf by the Israelites who, in their frenzied longing for Moses’ delayed return from his encounter with God, force his brother Aaron to build them “a god who shall go before us.” Aaron does this with the people’s gold that was supposed to have been used for the holy purposes of building the mishkan. They tell Aaron to do this because, “That man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.” Note, of course, the total absence of God in the people’s statement. Having forgotten so quickly that it was God, and not Moses or some other power, Who performed miracles for them at the Sea of Reeds and who gave them the Ten Commandments, the people look at the golden calf and exclaim: “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” How ironic and terrible that the Israelites would so quickly forget what the true God of Israel had done for them just months before, and that they would replace their allegiance to God with exclusive allegiance to Moses or to a piece of molten gold. Even more ironic is the way in which they turn God’s introductory words to the Ten Commandments –“I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt”- on their heads. A more emphatic misidentification of their true divine savior there could not have been.
What follows is the whole messy story of God, in God’s fury, seeking to destroy the entire people, Moses staying God’s hand, Moses burning the idol, forcing the Israelites to drink water mixed with its ashes, the slaying of 3,000 Israelites, and God’s begrudging reconciliation with the people. What I want to look at is the way in which this phrase “bringing the people out of the land of Egypt” continues to be used in the story, and the possible message that its use has to teach us. The first two uses of the phrase we noted above. However, now turn to Exodus 32:7, p. 531 in the Humash. While the people are engaged in their debauched and idolatrous revelry, God tells Moses: “Hurry down, for your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, have acted basely.” Once again, note the bitterly ironic appropriation by God of the Israelites’ own incendiary language to describe Moses as the sole redeemer of the people from Egypt that we saw above. We almost imagine God saying to God’s self, “Well, you folks want to rewrite history, with My redemptive efforts struck from the record and Moses as the center of this drama? Fine…Moses, you deal with your people whom you delivered from Egypt. I have nothing to do with them anymore.” But Moses will have none of this. After God threatens to let God’s anger blaze forth and destroy the people altogether, Moses engages in a kind of deferential conceit to stay God’s hand. Notice Moses’ words in Exodus 32:11, p. 532 in the Humash: “Let not Your anger, O Lord, blaze forth against Your people whom You delivered from Egypt with great power and a mighty hand.” Moses not too subtly shifts responsibility for the people’s redemption from Egypt back onto God’s shoulders, as it were. But this bit of political and spiritual ping pong is not yet over. After the great massacre of the people that Moses and his fellow Levites execute, God tells him, in Exodus 33:1, p. 536 in the Humash—“Set out from here, you and the people that you have brought up from the land of Egypt, to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘To your offspring will I give it…’” In a state of extended rage against the sinful Israelites, and in an apparent attempt to disown them and all responsibility for them, God continues to turn this language back onto Moses. However, note the transition that has taken place in the verse we just read. Despite the rage and almost willful disownership, God is still willing to look to the future that is the Israelites’ raison d’etre, and the reason for their leaving Egypt in the first place: to enter and settle the land promised to our ancestors, Canaan, or what we call the land of Israel. Only after God calls up this ancient promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, can Moses move God –as it were- to reclaim shared responsibility with Moses for moving the people forward to the promised land. God then promises Moses to help him lead the people, and reveals to Moses God’s 13 attributes of mercy and compassion.
So, who was responsible for bringing the people up out of Egypt, and into the promised land? Certainly not the mute, inanimate golden calf that symbolizes the most infantile, slavish impulses of an immature people. I suggest that what emerged from this extended dialogue between Moses and God was the recognition that both of them –the human leader and the divine Leader- were responsible. It is not that God and Moses were equals, but that neither of them alone –as it were- could fulfill the necessary criteria for redemption from slavery and possession of the promised land. Without God at the helm, the mission would have no spiritual energy. Without Moses at the helm, that spiritual energy would lack a channeled, human focus, and would hemorrhage uselessly.
Having just spent three weeks in Israel –our modern promised land- I am once again amazed at just how true this insight of the Torah is. From the beginning of our Israel pilgrimage until its end, our Ohav mission group experienced almost non-stop the vital energy flowing through our Jewish homeland and the awe inspiring, world class Jewish society that our people has created there. The great quantities of great food that we sampled daily were paralleled by the rich expressions of the Jewish past, present and future and the rich varieties of diverse Jewish backgrounds and experiences that we encountered as well. Even those of us who knew no Hebrew or Bible quickly immersed ourselves in a highly compressed and emotionally intense embrace of Jewish knowledge and experience: as it were, we became the Israelites entering the promised land, we entered into dialogue with God near the Holy of Holies, we lived through the horrors and heroism of the Holocaust, the terror and the triumph of the War of Independence, the prosaic banality of ancient Jews living their daily lives in the Holy Land, and the poetic bliss of Jews achieving our greatest dream: to be a free people in the land of Zion and Jerusalem after two thousand years of homelessness and hope in the face of despair. Here is what we learned there, and what I learn there time after time that I visit: the Jewish people, the great Zionist enterprise to assert our right to freedom, dignity and sovereignty, and the creation and continuation of the State of Israel continue to flourish because of a powerful partnership between us and God. This partnership brought us out of Egypt and into the promised land; it brought us out of Auschwitz and into the founding of the Jewish state; it brings all of us out of the diaspora and into an utterly transformative encounter with our destiny each time we visit Israel, each time we support Israel, each time one of us makes aliyah. Almost all Israelis, from the most idealistic to the most cynical, from the most religious to the most secular, from the most right wing to the most left wing, are bound together by the simple Hebrew phrase, yihiyeh tov, it will be alright, everything will turn out ok, I have hope. That is more than just a phrase: it is a whole way of life, a massive leap of faith forged in the crucible of time, vision and spiritual energy, and given distinctive shape by a lively people who express it in myriad ways, great and small, every day. It binds together and lifts up the people of Israeli society who are often deeply divided and plagued by difficult internal and external problems, yet who refuse to give into despair.
Walk down the streets of Jerusalem before Shabbat as our group did, or walk those same streets in the week before Purim, as I was privileged to do by myself, and you feel it. Talk, as I did, to the students and faculty of the amazing Hand In Hand School For Jewish-Arab Education who are trying to create a civic space for dialogue and peace, and you feel it. Plant a tree in the Kennedy Memorial Forest, listen to the words of David Ben Gurion proclaiming Israel a state in the actual place where he made that proclamation, or sing Hatikvah –the Jewish National Anthem- on the beach in Tel Aviv at sunset, and you feel it: you feel God, however you feel God, very much alive and present in this place called Israel, but especially among this people called Israel.
Who brought us up out of the land of Egypt and into the promised land? God did and Moses did. Who does this today, time and time again, when we are open to it happening? God does and the people and State of Israel- do. It is great to be home, but already I miss our imperfect, pock marked, crazy, beautiful Jewish home, our promised land, our Israel: partnership of God and Man, old/new miracle, sign of God’s eternal covenant with us and with the world.
(c)2010 by Rabbi Dan Ornstein
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