Evening-Fall

There is evening, and there is morning. One day turns into another.

And yet, sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I’m still standing before an open rectangle cut into the ground. I see the clods of earth, there, where I shoveled them over my father’s coffin. I hear that sound. The thud of earth falling … And part of me falls with it.

What does it feel like to lose someone?

To lose someone… feels like falling.

At least, for me it does. And I wonder, will I be able to rise at the end of this year—the traditional Jewish year of mourning for a parent? I wonder, will I again be able to get mixed-up in the lives of those around me? Will I always feel removed, as I do so often now—suspended, wandering aimlessly?

What does it feel like to lose someone?

For me, it’s like being Isaac. Isaac who walks, alone, at twilight.

When Sarah dies, Abraham turns his grief outward. He comes לספד לשרה ולבכתה, lispod l’Sarah v’livkotah, “to eulogize Sarah and bewail her” (Genesis 23:2). And then he is able to move on: ויקם אברהם מעל פני מתו וידבר..., va’yakom Avraham mei’al p’nei meito vay’daber, “And Abraham rose from beside his dead, and he spoke…” (3). Abraham gets up and gets going: he negotiates for the Cave of Machpelah as a burial-place; he fills his time with concrete tasks; he even looks toward the future, planning a marriage for Isaac.

In stark contrast, his son, who disappears from the Torah’s narrative after Mount Moriah. Isaac is conspicuously absent at his mother’s burial. Three years after his mother’s death, Isaac still mourns.¹ Not active, not vocal, not like his father, Isaac is passive and pensive. ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out לשוח lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

Alone, in a field, as the darkness descends, what does Isaac do? How should we translate that rare verb, לשוח lasuach?

Traditional commentators offer several interpretations: a שיח siach is a bush or a shrub, so Isaac went out to walk in nature, or to work in the fields. ² A שיח siach is a conversation, so Isaac went out into the field to meet up with friends. ³

Perhaps the most pervasive traditional interpretation is that Isaac went into the field to pray. The Midrash identifies Psalms as a source for our tradition of prayer three times a day: ערב בבקר בצהרים אשיחה, Erev va’voker va’tzohorayim asichah, “Evening, morning, and noon, I plead” (Psalms 55:18). According to this midrash, we pray in the afternoon to imitate Isaac, who walked out into the field at twilight—that strange mix of day and night—lasuach, to pray mincha, the afternoon service. ⁴

I guess he began with Ashrei, the opening prayer? “Happy are they who dwell in your house, O God”? …. But, no. He couldn’t have.

As a mourner, I can only imagine Isaac’s שיחה, sichah, out there in the field as night began to fall.

It’s three years since she died... Why can’t he shake off this darkness? Why can’t he eulogize and cry, and then “rise up,” like his father Abraham? Isaac lingers in his grief. He can’t return to routines. He pours out words, but they’re not like Abraham’s neat and purposeful sentences. Not rational. Not a linear presentation of thoughts and wishes. Rather, a lament—as Rachel Adler describes: “contradictory rather than emotionally consistent.” ⁵

Whatever Isaac voices out there, in the field, at twilight, it is not a siach—not a conversation where Isaac says “X” and God replies “Y,” but rather lament’s “tumultuous and disordered language.” ⁶ At least, that’s how I imagine it. Unruly.

Because the world just doesn’t make sense anymore. Language fails… “How are you holding up?” Am I holding up!? What do I have to hold up? What’s holding me up?

It’s dark. And I’m falling.

ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ער, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

Isaac went out to pray in the field at twilight… Perhaps. We might read לשוח lasuach as לשתחוות lishtachavot, which means “to bow”—in prostration and deference. Va’anachnu korim u’mishtachavim u’modim, we bend and bow and give thanks before God. ⁷

(But) How difficult it is to bow to God when I am already bent in grief.

What if Isaac bends not in prayer, in thanks, in acknowledgement of God? What if it is Isaac’s emotion that bends him? He sinks down to the earth in unremitting sorrow. So, don’t read לשוח lasuach but rather: ויצא יצחק לשוחה בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak la’shuchah basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to a pit⁸ in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62). In the depths of despair, Isaac wanders to a shuchah, a gaping hole in the earth, a reminder of his mother’s burial in the deep dark ground, a landscape that reflects his own low feelings. How could he carry on with life when his mother has been lowered into the dust?

Isaac walks into the field at evening-fall to bow… not in prayer, but in despair. Shachoach: to lower, to incline downward, to be bent, to be oppressed. ⁹ To lower his body toward the ground—because his soul is already lowered. From Psalms: כְּרֵעַ כְּאָח-לִי הִתְהַלָּכְתִּי כַּאֲבֶל-אֵם קֹדֵר שַׁחוֹתִי, K’reah, k’ach li hithalachti, ka’avel eim koder shachoti, “I behaved as though he had been my friend, my brother; like one who mourns for his mother, I darkened with grief and bowed low” (Psalms 35:14).

Isaac can’t get up and get going like his father Abraham. Instead, he walks into a field, alone, at evening’s-fall, and he drops to the ground in despair and in grief.

What does it feel like to lose someone? What does it feel like to mourn?

Philosopher Judith Butler describes mourning in her recent book, a post-9/11 reflection called Precarious Life. She writes, “[O]ne is hit by waves. […One] starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen” (Butler 21).

You fall. Darkness descends.

What is the significance of Isaac’s wandering precisely as evening falls? He is crossing into a time that is neither here nor there.

ערב, erev, evening, is a time for עירוב, eiruv, for mixing.

Isaac walks in the field לעת עירוב, l’eit eiruv, at the time when boundaries blur. Neither day nor night, but something in-between. Neither day nor night, but a mixing of the two.

When we think of the Shabbat עירוב, eiruv,¹⁰ we might think of a boundary. A line that marks the farthest one can travel. A marker of the limits of the public realm, the outside. But an עירוב eiruv is also a way to extend the inside. What is an עירוב eiruv if not a plea that I might carry a little farther, that I might blur the boundary between the safety of my home and the risk of the wide, wide world? ¹¹ Perhaps, for Isaac, the ערב erev represents an עירוב eiruv for his grief: he wants to linger there, to carry on a little further. To wander out into the field and fall sobbing to the ground as darkness falls around him.

Love and loss topple us from our careful plans and our automatic routines. Some of us recover quickly, like Abraham. We weep and we mourn and we rise up. And some of us run from the messy work of mourning—we run because we don’t want to fall. If we keep moving, maybe we won’t notice how off-balance we are. And some of us are like Isaac, and we can do little but go out lasuach.

We can ask, as Judith Butler asks, “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability […]? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for […] one another?” (Butler 30).

Because, when we wander into evening, we are turning not only to the despair of ending. We are wandering into the time for mixing. It’s a tricky time, an in-between time, a liminal time.

And so with Isaac. Walking out into the field, bent low in his grief, Isaac enters the realm of the liminal.

Anthropologist Victor Turner notes that, in the liminal, one is “betwixt and between” ¹²—not this and not that. Isaac, too, is betwixt and between: A boy who has lost his mother. A man not-yet a husband. A person walking alone in a tribal society. Like an initiate in a rite of passage, Isaac walks in the wilderness, בשדה, basadeh, in darkness, לפנות ערב, lifnot arev.¹³

And in the darkness, boundaries blur. When we walk into the liminal, we risk the breaking of some ties, and the building of others. As critic Richard Schechner writes, the point of liminal space is “to reduce those undergoing the ritual to a state of vulnerability so that they are open to change.” ¹⁴

Liminality represents potential. In a liminal state, we might become anything. Truly anything. That kind of transformation is frightening and risky. No particular result is guaranteed. And yet, we walk out into the field, lowered. We walk at twilight, vulnerable.

ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

But not just evening… ערב erev. Jewish-time. Evening not as ending, but as beginning. First, there is evening. And then, there is morning.

There’s a line in Freud’s famous essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he makes a peculiar observation about mourning—a phenomenon he can’t explain through psychoanalysis. It’s what he calls “the regular amelioration” of grief that happens “toward evening” (Freud 589). How remarkable. Mourning eases at twilight. As if our bodies know that dawn will come.

ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to despair in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

But the story continues: וישא עיניו וירא והנה גמלים באים, va’yisa einav va’yar, v’hinei! G’malim baim! “And he lifted up his eyes, and behold! Camels are approaching!” (Ibid.). Isaac wanders, hunched over in the field, and only then can he lift up his eyes – נשא nasa – an action that leads to נשואין nisuin, a marriage, a love, a turn from the past and from death to the future and to relationship.

Because it is Rebecca approaching there, in that caravan. It is Rebecca, and, like Isaac, her transformation begins as darkness falls.

When does Eliezer the servant first meet Rebecca? לעת ערב לעת צאת השאבות, l’eit erev, l’eit tzeit hasho’avot, “At evening-time, the time when women come out to draw water” (Genesis 24:11).

And now, in the caravan, approaching the field, ותשא רבקה את עיניה ותרא את יצחק, va’tisa Rivka et einehah va’teireh et Yitzchak, “Rebecca lifted up her eyes and she saw Isaac” (Genesis 24:64). Saw him there, sunken in grief. Saw him there, betwixt and between. Saw him there, as he lifted up his eyes to new possibilities. ותפל מעל הגמל, va’tipol mei’al hagamal, “And she fell from her camel” (Genesis 24:64).

Like the sudden miracle of love, she falls into Isaac’s life.

So Isaac meets Rebecca at twilight, the liminal time. And, out of this ערב erev, out of this עירוב eiruv, emerges love and comfort and hopefulness:ויבאה יצחק האהלה שרה אמו ויקח את רבקה ותהי לו לאשה ויאהבה וינחם יצחק אחרי אמו, va’y’vi’e’hah Yitzchak ha’ohalah Sarah imo va’yikach et Rivka va’t’hi lo l’ishah, va’ye’eh’ha’ve’hah, va’yinachem acharei imo, “And Isaac brought her toward the tent [of] Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after his mother” (Genesis 24:67).

How do we know we’ve found our comfort? Though I have turned, eagerly, to traditional Jewish mourning customs, I don’t expect my comfort to come all at once at the close of eleven months. In his classic work on Jewish mourning, Rabbi Maurice Lamm writes, “Twlight is neither day nor night, or perhaps it is both day and night. The law, however, must be clear.” ¹⁵ The laws of mourning are neat and clear and measured. They can give shape to the overwhelming messiness of grief. But what if we can’t help but linger, like Isaac? The practices of shiva and sheloshim and yarzheit offer a way for the mourner to move, as Rabbi Lamm puts it, from darkness to light. ¹⁶

But some of us find ourselves in the twilight. What can we do? We can take the risk to truly experience that in-between. If we can be willing lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, perhaps we too can look up from our dark place and be transformed.

Because, like Isaac, we are never the same. Love and loss change us. Love and loss hurl us down into the pit. We walk out into the evening, fallen.

You see, the bad news is that our relationships leave us vulnerable.

But the good news is that we might, through falling, manage to lift up our eyes and see the caravan approaching. היני! Hinei! Behold! We know something is about to happen to us—but we don’t know what. We lift up our eyes and we see an Other walking toward us in the field. וניפול מעל הגמל Va’nipol me’al hagamal, and we fall from the camel. We know our lives are different—but we don’t know how we will be forever changed.

What does mourning feel like? It feels like falling. But, then again, so does love.






¹ Radak on Genesis 24:62.

² Ibn Ezra on Genesis 24:63; Rashbam on Genesis 24:62.

³ Ramban on Genesis 24:62.

⁴ Bereshit Rabbah 68:9, cf. Rashi on Genesis 24:62.

⁵ Rachel Adler, “For These I Weep: A Theology of Lament,” Dr. Samuel Atlas Memorial Lecture, The Chronicle, Issue 68 (2008): 10-15, p 11.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Evan-Shoshan’s Biblical Concordance.

⁸ Evan-Shoshan. See Jeremiah 2:6; 18:20, 22; Proverbs 22:14; 23:27.

⁹ Evan-Shoshan.

¹⁰ Under traditional Jewish law, carrying an object from the private sphere into the public sphere is prohibited on Shabbat. An eiruv, usually a string suspended on poles, even telephone poles or street signs in modern neighborhoods, links neighboring houses in a community into one big “private realm.” This symbolically enlarges the private realm, allowing people to carry objects during Shabbat in their own neighborhood.

¹¹ Wendy Zierler, “Feminist Voices,” My People’s Passover Haggadah, Volume 1: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing): 2008, pp 104-105; and Zierler’s conversations with this writer in preparation for writing and delivering the sermon.


¹² Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine Transaction): 1969, p 95.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge): 2003, pp 57-8.

¹⁵ Lamm, Maurice. The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, Inc): 2000, p 82.

¹⁶ Jewish mourning customs are extensive, and offer stages for the mourner to move from the shock and isolation of hearing the news of the death of a loved one to the embrace of the community and a return to normal routines. During shiva, the first seven days, mourners remain at home, sitting on the floor or on low stools; it is the most intense period of grieving. The first thirty days, sheloshim, represent a mix between sadness and return to routine. A yarzheit is the anniversary of a death; Jews end the strict mourning practices for a parent (like not attending public celebrations or not cutting one’s hair) one year after a person’s death (sometimes measured as eleven months). We also mark the anniversary of a death each year.

K’sharim, Ahava (Relationships, Love)

So, I wrote this whole other sermon for this morning. It was something about Facebook and Twitter and how we speak to and about one another in public forums and via social media. Perhaps someday I’ll give a version of that sermon. But, this morning, I’m giving a different sermon. I’m giving a different sermon because I decided I couldn’t ignore two crucial facts: (one) the mounting tension between Israel and Palestine over the new “roadmap to peace”… and (two) you.

One: Israel and Palestine. Let me assure you that I’m completely uninterested in telling you what to think about the recent Palestinian bid for statehood in the UN, the merits of the proposed Quartet peace plan, Netanyahu’s position on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, or any other aspect of what is known in the Middle East as “the conflict.” I’m not going to stand here and talk to you—many of you politics majors who know more about international relations than I do!—about the details of the peace plan itself. I want to talk about something related… but different. I want to talk about what our Jewish tradition teaches us about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to fact two: you. When I was here at Bates during Rosh Hashana, I learned a little bit about how some of you navigate expressing and exploring your Jewish identities on a campus with a relatively small Jewish presence. The choices you each make about your Jewishness, your faith, and your identity are not exactly parallel with the choices Israeli and Palestinian leaders face in figuring out how to express both their national identities. But Jewish Bates College students do make myriad decisions about how to relate to non-Jews and about how to relate to an institution that runs counter to the Jewish calendar. On the first day of the Jewish New Year, many of you faced the difficult choice of whether to attend services or go to class. Some of you had tests and assignments. Many of you wondered, what’s the point in going to services if I’m not even religious? Some of you may have felt disappointed that the services weren’t more “traditional” or familiar. Some of us, together, were chastised for performing the tashlich ritual in the Pond—something we might want to reimagine for next year! And then suddenly it was parents’ weekend—a raucous, joyful, and maybe even stressful time, smack in the middle of what was supposed to be, for Jews, a period of intense introspection and soul-searching.

What could I do with these two facts—the tenuous peace process in the Middle East and the decisions you make as Jewish students of Bates College?

I remember standing here on Erev Rosh Hashana, ready to pray the Aleinu at the end of the service, and panicking for a moment. Did I really want to say the line “she’lo asanu k’goyei ha’aratzot”—“that you have not made us like the other nations of the earth”? I was acutely aware of the fact that my hosts here at Bates include the Multifaith Chaplaincy Office and the Dean of Intercultural Education. I was acutely aware of the fact that, here at Bates, Jews and non-Jews explore one another’s culture and worship. And yet we pray in thanks to God for making “us” different from “them.”

What does Jewish tradition say about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews? To say the least… it’s complicated.

It’s really a shame we’re not going to hear the traditional Yom Kippur afternoon Torah reading. In it, we are charged to pursue justice and to eschew revenge, to share the fruits of our harvest and to deal kindly with the disadvantaged. How do we become holy? By providing food for the hungry. How do we become holy? By conducting our business honestly. How do we become holy? By judging the privileged and the poor equally. How do we become holy? By refusing to hold a grudge. How do we become holy? By letting go of hatred.

Sure, some of these guidelines to holiness refer only to how Jews must treat other Jews. But many of them are universal. We learn how to be holy in our interactions with others: K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Not only are we enjoined to treat the stranger as a citizen, but we are commanded to love the stranger as we love ourselves.

Is this really from the same Torah that also instructs, Rak me’arei ha’amim ha’eileh asher Adonai elohecha noten l’cha nachala, lo t’chyeh kol neshma, “But of the cities of these nations which the Eternal your God is giving to you as an inheritance, do not allow any soul to live” (Deuteronomy 20:16)?!

So, which is it? Are Jews the holy people who are supposed to love the stranger, welcome the disadvantaged, live peacefully with other nations? Or are Jews the people who are commanded by God to kill entire peoples—down to every last man, woman, and child?

The thing is, we can look to the Torah and to the broader field of sacred and rabbinic literature and argue either way. There are verses that support war and destruction and verses that urge justice and mercy. There are interpretations that restrict how we read inspiring passages like “Love your neighbor as yourself” to one meaning: Love your fellow (and I kinda do mean “fellow”) Jew as yourself. Whatever your personal political position on the conflict between Arabs and Jews in that tiny strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, you can probably cite a Bible verse or a passage from the Talmud in your favor.

So I’m not turning, this morning, to any of those passages about “us” and “them.” I’m not going to offer a comprehensive—if that were even possible!—overview of what “Jewish tradition”—as if there were such a monolith!—says about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews. I’m turning to something much smaller in scale. I’m turning to something much more intimate. I’m turning to a relationship. I’m turning to the relationship between Abraham and Hagar.

On Rosh Hashana, didn’t read the traditional First Day Torah reading, the story many refer to as “the birth of Isaac”—a story chosen for the holiday because of its association with birth (Rosh Hashana as the birthday of the world) and with God’s remembering us (God remembers Sarah and gives her a son in her old age). But the Torah portion of Isaac’s birth is also the story of another boy, another son of Abraham. It is the story of Ishmael. And the tale of how God remembers Sarah is also the story of another woman, another beloved of Abraham. It is the story of Hagar.

Isaac and Ishmael have come to stand iconically for Judaism and Islam, for Jew and Arab. In the Biblical story, Ishmael is born first. He is the son of Abraham’s concubine and slave, Hagar. Ishmael is born because Abraham’s wife Sarah is barren and fears she will never be able to give Abraham children. And somehow, Abraham is to be the father of many nations. On the first day of Rosh Hashana, we read that, finally, Isaac is born to Sarah, in fulfillment of the promise of the two angels who visited Abraham and Sarah in their tent. In the span of one verse, Isaac grows up and is weaned, and Abraham throws a huge celebration. Suddenly, we read that Sarah “saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian whom she had borne to Abraham playing” (Genesis 21:9). We’re not precisely sure what the Torah means by “playing,” but Sarah certainly doesn’t think it’s a good thing. We read next, “And she said to Abraham, ‘Banish that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave-woman will not inherit with my son, with Isaac’” (21:10). The Torah says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes, because of the matter of his son”—that is, because Ishmael is his son and Abraham does not want to banish him (21:11). Despite that emotion, despite the bond between Abraham and Ishmael, God orders Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert. At the story’s end, Ishmael languishes in the desert, nearly dying of thirst. Hagar weeps some distance away so that she does not have to witness her son die, when suddenly “God heard the voice of the lad” and saved them by showing them a nearby well (21:17-19).

This complex story of a blended family gives just one tiny indication of how Abraham might have felt at the prospect of sending a woman with whom he had fathered a child, along with his first-born son, into the desert—never to see them again. The Torah only says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes” (21:11) because of Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son, his flesh and blood. But did Abraham weep over Hagar? Did he hesitate to send her into the desert? At the moment of banishment, the Torah tells us nothing whatsoever about the relationship between Abraham, father of the Jewish people, and “Hagar the Egyptian.”

For more than a thousand years, Jewish commentators have seen troubling gaps in this text. They have been troubled by the relationship between Abraham and Hagar, and troubled by Abraham’s apparent lack of concern for this woman with whom he shared a bed. Did Abraham really care so little for Hagar? Did the father of Judaism really treat as expendable the woman who would later become a beloved mother in Islam? Surely not! Despite the banishment, despite the fact that Abraham’s blessing is handed down only through the line of Isaac, despite Sarah’s suspicions about Ishmael—despite so many indications that Hagar was “only” a concubine, a slave-woman—Jewish tradition asserts that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar was marked by love.

In the Midrash, we find imaginative retellings of Biblical stories. In one expanded version of the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar saga, the author hints that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar exceeded the commercial bounds of an owner-slave arrangement. In this version of the story, when Sarah urges Abraham to exile Hagar, she says, “Write a get and send that slave-woman and her son away!” (Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer 30). What is a get? It is a bill of Jewish divorce—a document one gives not to a slave but to a wife.

Even further, this midrash imagines a lasting connection between Abraham and Hagar, even after the banishment to the desert. In the Torah story, Abraham places something on Hagar’s shoulders before sending her off as Sarah had ordered. What was it? It was a large barrel, says the Midrash, or a long, trailing piece of clothing. What is the significance of this? Abraham sent Hagar off into the desert dragging behind her an object that would leave a trail. A trail he could follow. A trail that would allow him to see his beloved Hagar and Ishmael again.

In the Torah, at several crucial points in Abraham’s life, Hagar and Ishmael are absent. Perhaps they don’t matter very much to Abraham. The Midrash disagrees. Hagar and Ishamel are never far from Abraham’s heart. At the moment when God asks Abraham to make the ultimate sacrifice—to kill his son—the Torah reports God’s words thus: “Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and offer him up as a sacrifice” (Genesis 22:2). Your only son!? The Midrash imagines instead a conversation between God and Abraham: “‘Take, please your son.’ But he replied, ‘I have two sons.’ So [God] said, ‘Your only one.’ But he replied, ‘This one is the only child of his mother, and the other one is the only child of his mother.’ So [God] said, ‘The one whom you love.’ But he replied, ‘I love both of them.’ And God said, ‘Isaac’” (Bereshit Rabbah 45:7).

In the Midrash, the relationship between Abraham and Hagar does not end in the desert. After the story of the binding of Isaac, when Sarah has died, Abraham busies himself with the burial and with trying to find a proper wife for Isaac. But Isaac himself wanders out in the field, pouring out his fears and his grief in prayer. And where has Isaac been all this time, after his ordeal on the mountain? We read in the Torah that Isaac was returning from a place called “Be’er Le’hai Ro’ee” (Genesis 24:62)—the very same place where Hagar and Ishmael heard the voice of an angel of God, rescuing them from their thirst in the desert. And why did Isaac travel there? To find Hagar and bring her to his father Abraham so that they could be married (Bereshit Rabbah 60:14).

And indeed, just a few verses later in the Torah, we read that Abraham did remarry: “And Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah” (Genesis 25:1). The rabbis link the name “Keturah” to precious incense, katoret. And they link the name “Keturah” to the verb katar, to tie up. Keturah, says the Midrash, is none other than Hagar (Bereshit Rabbah 61:5). Hagar is “Keturah” because, like incense, she is pleasing. Hagar is “Keturah” because she “tied herself” only to Abraham—keeping chaste all those years between her banishment and her reunion with her beloved.

In Hebrew, the word for “relationship” is kesher—linked to a verb that also means to tie or to bind. Abraham tied a burden to Hagar’s shoulders so that she would leave him a trail to follow. Hagar tied her faithfulness to Abraham, despite the fact that he sent her and her son into the desert alone. To tie oneself to another demonstrates devotion and, indeed, love.

As we think about the relationship between Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and non-Jews, it can be all too easy to look only at the level of institutions and nations and generalizations. And yet, when the rabbis of our Jewish tradition looked at the iconic rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael—between Sarah and Hagar—they saw more than the struggle between one nation and another. Admittedly, our tradition includes some pretty disturbing instructions on how to maintain the division between “us” and “them.” But Judaism also includes the Midrash: stories that reconcile the divide between Isaac and Ishmael, Sarah and Hagar, by looking for those relationships where there had to have been love.

We do not relate to one another solely as representatives of big categories. When Abraham banished Hagar into the desert, he might have been acting as “Father of the Jews” toward “a Mother of Islam.” But he was also a man who loved a woman. Imagine his anguish, standing at the opening of his tent, watching them enter the desert with just a loaf of bread and a canteen of water.

And, though we don’t necessarily face life-and-death consequences, it’s like that for us, too. Our daily lives are not, when it comes down to it, about “Bates College” and “Jewish students,” but about you and your professor, the one who was willing to give you some extra time on that assignment because you told her about the conflict between the academic calendar and the Jewish holiday. And, when you think about it, “Israel” and “Palestine”—symbolic and overdetermined as those categories have become—are really just collections of relationships, one person to another.

We will achieve nothing of peace and mutual understanding by thinking and strategizing only at the level of the nation, the icon, the generalization. We will achieve peace only if we look to individual relationships. The authors of the Midrash knew, in their heart of hearts, that banishments and birthrights and blessings were not the only story. There was also the tugging pull of love, the trail cut deep across the desert, leading one person to his beloved.



[I gave this as the Yom Kippur sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there for a wonderful experience! I thank my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen, for his reflections on the Midrashim about Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar in his Introduction to Midrash course at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.]

We Will Be What We Never Always Were

If you’re a nerd like me, then you remember the sheer childhood joy of back-to-school shopping… and I don’t mean the new shoes. I mean the trip to the stationery store: all those pencil sets with matching erasers and sharpeners, all those empty folders waiting for labels and stickers, and, best of all, the blank notebooks full of promise. Each page clean.

Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.

Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.

Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.

Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.

And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.

God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).

For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?

Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?

Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.

When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.

Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).

Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”

The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.

Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.

When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”

As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.



[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]

Wonder-Worker

Traditionally, every time a Jew uses the bathroom, she says a blessing thanking God for creating the human body, with all its passages and orifices. If even one of these passages or openings reverses its natural course, we cannot be sustained, we cannot stand before God, says this blessing. “Blessed are You, Eternal, healer of all flesh, and worker of wonders.”

My son is a wonder!

From the moments before his birth, as I worried about his mother’s well-being as she labored and pushed him into the world, through the first days of his life, as we watched him in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit under observation and again under a lamp to treat his jaundice, I looked at my son, praying to the God who is healer of all flesh and wonder-worker.

Thus far, our little nameless boy (until his eighth day) has been receiving attentive care and doing well on all counts, despite some scares. Though he did spend about a day in the NICU, the time there turned out to be merely a precaution. During that stay, we watched as the cardiologist examined his heart on a screen via an echocardiogram. Four chambers pumping, arteries delivering blood to all the tiny parts of this five-pound fourteen-ounce person. Wonderful. Under the blue jaundice lamp, our son squirmed and slept. When the nurse came to draw his blood to check his jaundice level, he used his muscles and his might to push away her hand! Wonderful.

It is so strange—and wonderful—to look into the eyes of this little stranger, a sojourner in this world with us. He trusts us completely and turns to us for food and for comfort and for care and for love, and we of course offer all to him freely. He is beautiful: a face just like his mother when she was a baby, a cute nose and big upper lip, a full head of dark brown hair, and magical blue eyes.

How can such a small creature motivate such big feelings? When I look into my son’s eyes, or watch him sleep, I feel how big a responsibility and how big a joy this next phase in our lives will be, as we take on the role of parents. And I have already let out the mama bear claws, refusing to compromise on his care, asking the doctors all the questions, demanding what he needs. I know I would do anything for him.

As I write this, our son is with us at home after receiving treatment for his jaundice, and as of right now, all indications are that his body is responding the way we would hope—all his passageways and organs are wondrously doing what they need to do. I will continue to pray that my son will be sustained, that all his passages and orifices will continue to function and to respond to all the efforts to improve his health as he transitions from the only environment he knew to a world where he will learn what it means to be a human being and a Jew and, we hope, a mensch.

We will welcome our son into the covenant of the Jewish people on Tuesday, surrounded by family and friends, and we will pray for his continuing development. I wonder who he will become.

How wonderful.

Where You Come From, Where You're Going

We have come from Egypt, through the sea, on dry land, with the water like a wall to our right and to our left. We wander in the desert, but we know where we are going: to Sinai, the mountain of revelation. We will stand there, all of Israel, to make a covenant with the God of our ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.

We have come from slavery and degradation. We go to freedom and responsibility. We stand in relationship with the Jewish past, the Jewish present, and the Jewish future. We stand in relationship with God, Torah, and community.

[The following was sung to a beautiful tune by Cantor Joshua Breitzer.] Da me’ayin bata, u’l’an atah holech, da me’ayin bata, u’l’an atah holech, v’lifnei mi atah atid—HaKadosh Baruch Hu…

“Know where you came from, and where you’re going, and before whom you will stand in the future—the Holy One, Blessed be He” (Pirkei Avot 3:1).

These words of wisdom come from a chapter of the Mishnah called Pirkei Avot, the Chapters of our Fathers. It is a custom among many Jews to study these collected teachings from our Sages each year between Passover and Shavuot. We can mark the time of wandering with learning. We can spend the time of transformation enriching our minds and our hearts by learning more about how to live not as a “mixed multitude” of those enslaved to bitterness or idolatry, but rather, how to live as a people committed to love the Eternal our God and to love the stranger as ourselves.

This Shabbat, as we enter the fourth week of the omer, the count between Passover and Shavuot, it is customary to study Pirkei Avot, chapter 3, which includes the teaching: Da me’ayin bata, u’l’an atah holech, v’lifnei mi atah atid—“Know where you came from, and where you’re going, and before whom you will stand in the future” (Ibid.).

This teaching serves well as a preparation for Shavuot: it is important to remember our experience of slavery so that we truly understand our charge not to oppress the stranger. It is important to know that the wandering in the desert will lead to the Promised Land. It is important to remember, with humility, that it is God before whom we will stand in the thundering revelation at Sinai.

“Know where you came from, and where you’re going, and before whom you will stand in the future” (Ibid.).

In a similar teaching, Rabbi Eliezer advises, “[W]hen you pray, know before whom you are standing” (Bavli Brachot 28b). Indeed, in many synagogues, above the Ark are carved the words: Da lifnei mi atah omeid—“Know before whom you stand.”

Conventionally, we understand what this phrase means: Know that you are standing before God. Speak each word, take each action, conduct each relationship—in the knowledge both that God is with you, supporting you, and that God knows and sees and remembers all.

Over the past year, you have taught me to understand differently what it means to “know before whom you stand.” When we gather in this sanctuary to pray, we stand before God. But we stand, too, in Beth Am, a House of the People.

I stand before you.

I stand before a community formed by Jews willing to be flexible enough to merge several traditions into one Temple. I stand before families who have lived and worked in the valley for generations. I stand before people dedicated to learning Torah each month, bringing their unique perspectives to our study of sacred Jewish texts. I stand before non-Jewish spouses who raised Jewish children in beautifully mixed family traditions. I stand before parents and children and grandchildren who gather to hear the shofar and to light the menorah and to recall the Exodus from Egypt.

Before I came here, I had never heard of the Monongahela Valley or the steel mills or the coal mines or the Jews of Pennsylvania—and I only vaguely knew of the Steelers... I knew where I had come from: a Catholic upbringing, an “out” life with my partner Rachel, a meaningful and enriching conversion process, a strong love for Jewish learning, an urban home in Brooklyn. I didn’t really know where I was going when I came to this community! Would we connect? Would our worship together feel at once comforting and challenging, familiar and new? Would we learn together, and would we learn from one another?

Now, as I prepare to leave the valley and return to the city, I know where I come from: I come from Beth Am.

“True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required, too),” writes the philosopher Martin Buber. “[B]ut rather on two accounts [does true community happen]: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another” (I and Thou 94).

Beth Am is—and has become for me—a true community. It is a place where people have feelings for each other: you are blood relatives and friends; you have opened your homes to one another; you have watched your children learn and grow and establish families of their own; you grieve together; you face the new year with collective anticipation. I have felt and I have been blessed by that feeling of warmth, from the moment you welcomed Rachel and I here to celebrate the High Holy Days with you to your continued well wishes for our baby-to-be.

And Beth Am is a place where each of us stands in relationship to a “living center”: the Torah we gather to hear and to study each month. Jewish tradition serves to bind this community in a way that personal feeling alone cannot. Dedication to Jewish tradition both ancient and modern keeps these doors open, keeps the Eternal Light burning, in this small community.

And Beth Am is a place where members and their families and the student rabbi all stand “in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another.” You have opened your homes and your hearts to me. You have shared your pains and your fears with me. We have discussed the meaning of Judaism and the presence or absence of God. We have studied challenging texts and asked what kind of God demands the death of an only, beloved child. We have watched films that ask us to consider what it means to repent and what it means to pray. We have sung songs new and old. We have meditated on our own personal struggles with bitterness and turned those struggles over to God for help and support. We have prayed for peace and healing.

I have learned to know before whom I stand.

I stand before each of you, blessed and grateful for the opportunity to serve as your student rabbi.

I stand before you humbled and awed by how much you have demonstrated for me the openness and the dedication related in this story:


R. Yose bar Judah of Kefar ha-Bavli said: To whom is he who learns from the young to be compared? To one who eats unripe grapes or drinks new wine fresh from his vat. And to whom is he who learns from the old to be compared? To one who eats ripe grapes or drinks aged wine.

Rabbi [Judah, the Patriarch] differed: Look not at the container, but at what is in it. A new container may be full of aged wine, while an old container may be empty even of new wine. (Pirkei Avot 4:27)



Beth Am learns from young and old, male and female, Jew by birth and Jew by choice. Like Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, a beloved teacher of the people Israel, this community does not judge the container but tastes the wine, to learn for themselves what it has to offer.

The first time I spoke with Phyllis on the phone, I knew and understood immediately that Beth Am rejoices in the opportunity to welcome and to nourish and to teach the next generation of Reform rabbis. “When we travel for a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah,” Phyllis said, “we often sit in the pews saying, ‘That was our student rabbi!’” The surprise and the joy and the pride in seeing how your community has enabled each student rabbi to grow bolsters me, and I know it will bolster next year’s student rabbi when he arrives to serve as your student rabbi in the fall.

“Look not at the container, but at what is in it.”

“Know before whom you stand.”

“Know where you come from, and where you’re going, and before whom you will stand in the future.”

I thank each of you for truly looking at what I brought to this community.

I thank each of you for pouring your own wisdom and doubts and questions into our time together this year.

I thank each of you for making me your rabbi.

I thank each of you for allowing me to know you.

I thank you for becoming a part of where I come from and where I am going.

And I thank each of you for helping us all encounter the Divine in this Beth Am, this House of the People.



[With gratitude and joy for the community at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA]

Bedikat Chameitz

“When [Aaron] has finished purging the Shrine, the Tent of Meeting, and the altar, the live goat shall be brought forward. Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness […]. Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness” (Leviticus 19:20-22).

All your mistakes, all your second guesses, all your imperfections, all your regrets—lifted from your shoulders in one ritualized moment, placed as a burden on a goat who will be sent so far away, to a land so desolate, it will never return. Your sins disappear into the harsh desert on the head of a goat condemned to heat and hunger, thirst and sun. You are left feeling cool and light, with a chance to start over.

Aharei Mot, our Torah portion this week, gives instructions for the rituals for atoning for sin. Some of these rituals we keep each Yom Kippur, but many of them have become obsolete. For example, we no longer sacrifice two goats: one on the altar to the Eternal, and one, the scapegoat, burdened with our sins and released into the wilderness.

It is highly unlikely that we will ever personally know the feeling of release in watching that goat trot away into the wilderness, our iniquities and transgressions with it. But we might begin to understand that release—that freedom—as we rid our homes of chameitz in preparation for Passover.

Our ancestors could not wait for the leaven to rise to bake their bread before fleeing Egypt and slavery for the wilderness and freedom. In memory of their haste, we eat matzah, lachma anya, bread of poverty and affliction. We are commanded not only to eat matzah, but to completely rid our homes of chameitz. The Torah commands: מצות יאכל את שבעת הימים ולא יראה לך חמץ, Matzot ye’acheil et shivat ha’yamim, v’lo yei’ra’eh l’cha chameitz—“Matzah shall be eaten for those seven days, and no leavened bread shall be found with you” (Exodus 13:7).

To paraphrase the Haggadah, מאי חמץ—What is chameitz?

The word “chameitz” appears relatively few times in the Hebrew Bible. In most instances, it indicates leavened bread or the leavening process. But, as anyone who’s ordered extra pickles on their falafel sandwich in Israel knows, chamutz, from the same linguistic root as chameitz, means “sour.” Chameitz, the material that makes our bread rise to fluffy perfection in baking, can spoil, embitter, and sour. This type of chameitz is like the process that turns sweet cucumbers to sour pickles that make us pucker our lips, piercing our tongues with a sharp sensation. In the Bible, the root ח-מ-ץ (chet-mem-tzadee)—chamatz—also means to sour or to embitter.

At our seder tables, we recall the bitterness of Egyptian bondage. This bitterness utterly altered the lives of the people Israel. We will recall as we read from the Haggadah, “[The Egyptians] made life bitter for them with harsh labor at mortar and bricks and with all sorts of tasks in the field” (Exodus 1:14). They embittered their lives, וימררו Vay’mar’ru. Recalling this bitter bondage, we will eat maror, bitter herbs, during our seders. If you crunch into fresh horseradish, you will feel that quick burn, and your eyes might even well up with tears that echo the salted water into which we dip our greens. These are the tears of a people enslaved, a people whose lives were embittered by cruel oppressors, a people called to love the stranger, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.

But what if we are the enslaved and the taskmasters? What if the bitterness is not the bitterness of bondage but our own soured attitudes and habits? What if we sour our own experience by letting our pain fester into suffering?

Some people wake up each morning simply grateful to be alive to welcome another day. A pleasant smile never leaves their faces—even when someone cuts the long line at the grocery store or the pilot announces that it’s going to be another half hour waiting on the stuffy plane. They smile not only through these petty pains, but through their chemotherapy sessions.

But others of us are not so free from bitterness and doubt and worry and jealousy. Our minds spin out to so many “what ifs” that we cannot focus on the very moment we are living right now. We compare ourselves unfavorably to our peers, convinced we could never do as well—or, conversely, convinced we obviously could have done it better. We fight our negative emotions, trying to stuff them down and suppress them; we may not even realize how these negative emotions escape in other ways, hurting those around us. Pain can turn us chamutz; it can embitter and sour us.
Psychologist Marsha Linehan distinguishes between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable; negative experiences are part of the human condition, and our negative emotional responses help us to understand and to cope with the full range of human experience. How we react to those experiences and emotions can sour and embitter us. When we sour ourselves in our pain—this is suffering. It is a place of chamutz, a sour stewing in all that makes our lives difficult and challenging.

Why do we sour our own lives? Is there a cure for this bitterness? Why do we rid ourselves of chameitz only once a year? Why not strive to rid ourselves of it permanently?

We do not make our lives sour on purpose. Linehan offers a way to integrate and accept all our emotions in our lives. On the contrary, she writes, “most people […] feel badly for good reasons” (Marsha M. Linehan, Skills Training Manual for Borderline Personality Disorder, The Guilford Press, 1993, p 85). Things turn sour when we forget how temporary and how inevitable painful emotions can be. Linehan reminds us, “Emotions come and go. They are like waves in the sea” (87). We can wait for God to part the waters miraculously. We can cling panicking to the shore, never crossing into freedom. Or we can begin to wade in, learning how to gauge the power of each swell and crest so that we stay afloat. Wading in requires courage and trust: we must be brave enough to cope with pain, trusting enough in our own resources, in our support communities, and in our faith to believe that we will not sink beneath the surface.

How can we escape the bitter bondage of emotional suffering? A cold, rational, logical approach might help us accomplish tasks, but all reasonableness drowns beneath the surface when we face pain (Linehan 65). A hot, emotional approach allows us to feel passion and connection, but when emotions take over completely, we can begin to slip beneath the surface ourselves, drowning in fear and worry, anxiety and depression. Where will we find the strength to wade into the waters? Linehan calls that place of strength “wise mind”—a balance between the logical and the emotional. Linehan writes, “You cannot overcome emotion mind with reasonable mind. Nor can you create emotions with reasonableness. You must go within and integrate the two” (Linehan 66).

Imagine yourself ridding your home of leaven, carefully searching the cabinets, separating the chameitz from everything Kosher for Passover. You are cleaning under all the cushions. You scrub out the refrigerator and the freezer. You pack away even the dishes and utensils that have touched chameitz in exchange for pristine Passover plates. You search for places you might otherwise ignore and dig out every last crumb. Just before the day of Passover arrives, you search again, in the dark, guided by a flickering candle, and sweep away any tiny piece of chameitz you might have overlooked. Finally, you recite an ancient vow nullifying whatever miniscule particles remain that we cannot hope to find, and we burn those pieces we recovered, watching the chameitz turn to smoke like the ancient sacrifices on the Temple altar.

Relief. And freedom.

We do not pack our chameitz onto the back of a scapegoat, sending it out into the wilderness. Instead, we make our best effort to gather the destructive chameitz and purge it from our lives for the days of Passover, turning over what we can to God, and making a vow to minimize the rest, like those miniscule particles of chameitz we can never sweep away.

Our chameitz cannot be destroyed completely like our sins on the scapegoat. At the end of the festival, we purposefully invite chameitz back into our lives.
Where does that leave us? The Torah itself links chameitz with something negative—the sour and the embittered. In the Psalms, to be chamatz is to be ruthless, unjust or evil (Psalm 71:4). In the book of Exodus, God twice warns Moses, “You shall not offer the blood of My sacrifice על חמץ, al chameitz—with anything leavened” (Exodus 23:18, see also 34:25). Indeed, the book of Leviticus repeatedly gives instructions for sacrifices, warning against mixing leaven into the meal offerings for the Temple (Leviticus 2:11, 6:10, 7:13).

Yet, when we bring our first fruits as an offering to God, the Torah tells us, “You shall bring from your settlements two loaves of bread as an elevation offering; […] תהינה חמץ תאפינה t’hiyehna chameitz tei’afehna—“baked after leavening” (Leviticus 23:17). When we bring to God the first fruits of our harvest, we bring also our chameitz.

At Passover, for seven days, rid your settlements of chameitz. And also, bring to God offerings of your first fruits, among them cakes baked with chameitz.

Chameitz is the tendency in us to spin from pain into suffering, from the maror of those events in our lives that embitter – to the chamutz of our own sour reactions. During Passover, we have an opportunity to examine our souls as carefully as we examine our cabinets for crumbs, separating out the chameitz and reflecting on how we will reincorporate it into our lives when Passover ends. We have an opportunity to practice being mindful not only of whether we ingest leaven, but of our own reliance on the emotional alone, or on the rational alone (See Linehan). We have an opportunity to learn where our personal place of “wise mind” rests.

This year, as we search our houses, let us also search our souls. We cannot sweep our embittered moods or tendencies or actions into a neat little pile and nullify them for all time with an ancient vow. But we can make Passover a time to rid ourselves of the chameitz that rises and rises in our hearts until it threatens to suffocate us. Like those miniscule particles over which we recite the vow, we may not be able to completely eradicate this spiritual chameitz, but we can search with our best efforts.

Baruch atah HaShem, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kideshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al bi’ur chameitz. Blessed are you, Eternal our God, sovereign of the universe, who sanctifies us with your mitzvot and commands us concerning the removal of chameitz.

All my chameitz: all my jealousy. All my chameitz: all the times I snap at my spouse when I am having a bad day instead of voicing my frustration calmly. All my chameitz: All the “what-ifs” that prevent me from seeing the positive opportunities and good moments. All my chameitz: All the stress that overwhelms me despite how hard I work to find means of relief and distraction. All my chameitz: All the “could haves” and “should haves” that lead only to regret and despair. All my chameitz: All the social messages that convince me I must always please and serve others and never take the lead.

We take a moment now, in this sacred community, to be mindful of our own chameitz—the fears and worries that threaten to turn to chamutz, to sourness.

Let us recite a vow together, releasing ourselves of the bitterness of guilt and the sourness of worry this Passover.


All spiritual hameitz that I have not removed from my heart, my soul, and my mind, or of which I am unaware, is hereby nullified and ownerless as the dust of the earth.


May we sweep away all that sours and embitters us. And, when the festival is over, may the chameitz we re-invite into our lives be leavening that bubbles us into action, allowing the best in us to rise.



I thank the community at Beth Am, where I gave this as a sermon for Shabbat Aharei Mot.

My People and I

“I don’t understand why you have to tell everybody about your private life,” my dad said.

My dad and I weren’t arguing about my words. We were arguing about how I dressed. To be specific, we were arguing about a necklace I used to wear incessantly: rainbow-colored rings dangling from a silver chain. A symbol for the gay rights movement.

Each year, approaching Purim, I think about the conversations I’ve had with my dad since “coming out”—conversations about how and when I reveal this fact about myself. I think about why I wore the rainbow ring necklace: a symbol that I belonged in a certain community, a symbol of the struggle for visibility and acceptance. I think about why I wear a wedding ring: a symbol that reminds me of the love and commitment I renew each day. I think about why I wear a kippa: a symbol of my role and responsibility as a student rabbi. And I think about Queen Esther—no outward, visible symbol of her Judaism paraded before King Ahasueros. I think about Queen Esther, boldly approaching the king, demanding an audience rather than waiting to be invited. I think about Queen Esther, laying her life on the line to say: “Let my life be granted me as my wish, and my people as my request. For we have been sold, my people and I, to be destroyed, massacred, and exterminated” (Esther 7:3-4).

Influenced by my personal experience and by the work of one of my mentors, Professor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (may her memory be a blessing), I have often looked at Megillat Esther as one long coming-out story: the tale of a woman who hid a part of her identity and, at great personal risk, revealed the truth to improve conditions for her entire community (For more on this idea, see Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet). The story of Esther certainly hinges on a dramatic moment of self-identification that Esther chooses.

But I’ve also been thinking about the Book of Esther in terms of the symbols of our identities, the brands we display and the loyalties and values we communicate through our choice of wardrobe. It might be a rainbow necklace or a wedding ring or a Steelers jersey. It might be a discreet star of David pendant or a tall black hat. What do these markers of self-identification serve? What do the symbols we wear communicate?

When I eat my breakfast on Sunday mornings in the Hampton Inn dining room, I am usually wearing my kippa. People always stare at me, whisper to one another—last month two women laughed at me openly. I definitely heard the word “Jew.” Rarely does anyone smile at me, say hello, and ask me about my “strange” head covering. And, I admit, I’ve never initiated such a conversation myself. I usually sit there, stunned and a bit annoyed, eating my oatmeal. I sit there, displaying a symbol that does not communicate what I intend it to communicate.

Symbols inspire solidarity. Wearing a symbol can be a welcoming wink to those “in the know”—like the rainbow rings I wore, which often brought supportive comments from older gay and lesbian people on the street, and which certainly signaled to other gay students on my college campus that I was a safe person to approach to discuss coming out issues. But wearing a symbol can also be a brick wall blocking out those who are not “on the inside.” Symbols insulate and isolate. And symbols can backfire, as we know all too well when the Star of David was cruelly transformed into the yellow star of the ghetto and the camps.

Although they can be misused, symbols still hold power. Some people wear their Judaism all day, every day. Why does it seem that more and more people, not just in faraway places but in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, display their Judaism by wearing a certain style of clothing? A member of this community recently spoke with me about this phenomenon, asking, “Does it matter a great deal” to the God of Israel whether Jews walk in public with our heads uncovered?

For some Jews, the kippa is a sign of piety and humility. One wears a kippa to remind oneself that God reigns above us, that we are small in a vast universe. In the Talmud, we read about Rabbi Huna, who would not walk even a short distance with his head uncovered because, as he explained, “The Shechina—the Presence of God—is above my head” (Bavli Kiddushin 31a).

Over time, the custom of covering one’s head as a sign of piety or humility before God became Jewish law. No longer a symbol of personal faith or a physical reminder to the self, the kippa became the object of a law, formulated in cold, impersonal terms: “It is forbidden to walk four cubits with an uncovered head” (Shulhan Arukh Orach Hayyim 2:6).

And not only that, but the kippa has become, for some communities, a way to identify insiders and outsiders. In Israel, one learns to label men by their kippa: Is he a Breslav Hasid? A Hareidi Jew? An ultra-conservative religious Zionist? An environmentalist? The color, shape, style, and even placement of a kippa often sends a message that has nothing to do with God or humility or faith. It is a message of belonging and not-belonging, inside and outside. A kippa can cut off communication. A kippa can become a symbol of insulation or fear as much as it can be a symbol of pride or humility.

Why wear our Judaism on our sleeve?

In Jerusalem, I once saw an ultra-Orthodox boy and his little brother, tousling over a book while they waited for their mother on a park bench. Another woman saw the older brother slap the younger brother’s hand and she shouted out, איך מתנהג ילד עם כיפה? –“Is this how a boy who wears a kippa behaves!?”

A kippa might be a personal reminder of our smallness before God’s vast power and love. A kippa might be a sign of humility and faith. A kippa might indicate our status in a certain community or political group. A kippa might indicate our unwillingness to connect with those who are different from us. Or a kippa might signify that we are modeling Jewish behavior.

Like the kippa of that little boy in Jerusalem, our symbols indicate that we represent our communities. Our behavior reflects on the entire community—whether we like it or not.

For many in the gay community, this sense that we are representing more than just ourselves is keenly felt. I am sure that many of you feel such a sense of responsibility toward other Jews, living in a majority-Christian region. I have heard many of you tell stories about being the only Jew—or one of a handful of Jews—in your graduating class. I have heard stories of suspicious neighbors who wondered whether your hair was hiding those infamous Jewish “horns.” I have heard about the judgments ignorant non-Jews have made against you. How do we respond to those stereotypes and fears? Do we seek solace in symbols? Do we fear labels will hem us in? Do we use outward markers of our identity to raise awareness?

Esther didn’t wear her Judaism on her sleeve. On the contrary, she hid her true identity. Like many of us, she had a second name—rather than the Persian “Esther,” her everyday name, she also had a Hebrew name, “Hadassah.” Modern Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Telushkin calls Queen Esther “highly assimilated” (Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History, 103). Part of the surprise of the Book of Esther, Rabbi Telushkin suggests, is that this “unlikely” character would “risk her life on behalf of her people” (Ibid.). And yet this is precisely what Esther does: we read in the Megillah, ““I shall go to the king, though it is contrary to the law; and if I am to perish, I shall perish!” (Esther 4:16).

Esther lives out her Jewish values, risking her life to put a stop to Haman’s murderous plot to destroy the Jewish people. Esther doesn’t don a symbol. She stands up. She speaks out. She takes action.

Esther risks being judged based on stereotypes about the Jewish people. Many of us know what it feels like to be seen only as the member of a misunderstood or maligned group. Gays and lesbians in the 1970s and 80s faced stereotypes that painted us as degenerates. Gays and lesbians were judged to be sick and depraved. We could not be productive citizens. And so many groups sought to counter these stereotypes. One group of women sought to let their actions demonstrate their values, changing social perceptions about the gay community. These women, like any good citizens, would help strangers in need—assisting someone climbing up onto the bus, carrying heavy groceries out to the parking lot, signaling for traffic to stop to allow the person in the wheelchair to make it safely across the street. After offering their help as they would naturally do, these women took one more step—a risky step. They identified themselves as lesbians by handing out a small calling card before walking away. The card read: “You’ve just been helped by a lesbian.”

The “Lesbian Helpers,” as they called themselves, tried to challenge negative stereotypes by doing good deeds. Their actions were neither publicity stunts nor insincere “tricks.” Their actions were genuine. But they did take that extra step to self-identify as lesbians. Why? Doing so motivated the people they had helped to rethink their perceptions about the gay community. Someone who thought all gays and lesbians were anti-social, destructive, sick people now had to integrate into their definition of “gay” this story of a complete stranger who had helped them kindly. I am sure you have encountered the kind of non-Jew who says, “Well, you’re not like other Jews, you know how they are.” You represent the “exception,” the Jew who is different than other Jews. But hopefully, eventually, the “exception” becomes the rule, and people learn that hurtful stereotypes inaccurately describe a multifaceted Jewish community.

Esther didn’t need a kippa or a rainbow necklace. She needed her own powerful voice, the support of her family and community, her convictions, and her courage. And yet, even if Esther did not rely on symbols, she did identify her Jewishness. In a way, Esther handed out her own calling card. The favored queen, Esther could have asked King Ahasueros to spare the Jews without identifying herself as “one of them.” And yet she spoke to the king as part of a community, as part of a we. “Let my life be granted me as my wish, and my people as my request,” Queen Esther said. “For we have been sold, my people and I” (Esther 7:3-4). Esther cast her lot in with the entire people. Esther risked punishment for brazenly approaching the King this way. Esther risked death if Haman’s decree were carried out in the end. And Esther also risked ridicule and rejection at the hands of a man she called husband. What would he think when he learned that his beloved and beautiful Esther was … one of them? Queen Esther of Shushan—a Jew! Queen Esther of Shushan, kin to that “certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws” (Esther 3:8)!

And yet, here stands Queen Esther, tall and proud and beautiful, saying four short but immeasurably brave words: “my people and I.” Esther’s revelation could have brought death and destruction. Instead, the King changed his mind about the Jews, letting their actions (and not Haman’s lies or stereotypes) speak to their values.

When I think about Queen Esther, I think about my old rainbow necklace. I think about how I hid behind that symbol, used it—more often than not—to push people away.

We can let symbols cover and hide us like masks, like walls to keep insiders in and outsiders out. Or we can use symbols to remind us that we belong to something larger than ourselves, a Jewish community that lives Jewish values.

Now, when I think about my rainbow necklace, I think about other models for living our values and revealing our identities: Queen Esther pleading for the Jews not in the dispassionate voice of a humanitarian queen but with the very personal cry, “my people and I.”


[This post reflects my own views and does not necessarily represent the views of the congregation I am privileged to serve.]

Collaborative Freedom

[Thank you to the community at Temple Beth Am in Monessen, PA for your amazing and valuable feedback on this sermon, given on 18 February, Shabbat Ki Tissa.]


Chaos replaced Law. The people gathered, but their leader could not discern whether their gathering was a rebellion or a celebration, a war or a party. After days and days of his absence, this leader finally descended into the throng. Enraged, he smashed the Tablets of the Law at the foot of the mountain.

Tonight, we stand at the foot of Mount Sinai. We, the people Israel, in despair and confusion, worried that our leader Moses would not return. We yearned for some tangible proof that the God who led us out of Egypt would not abandon us in the desert. We regressed to what we had learned in the land of our slavery. We made a mistake. Our minds still enslaved, we tried to fashion an outward sign of power and authority because we understood neither an invisible God nor a covenant with that Ultimate Being. We did not know how to be free.

Yet God, a God compassionate and gracious, taught us about freedom.

In this week’s paresha, we read about Moses’ ascent to the summit of Sinai to receive the Tablets of the Law from the very finger of God. Twice the Torah describes these remarkable tablets, shaped and carved by God from the stone of Sinai: in Exodus, chapter thirty-one, they are called “stone tablets written by the finger of God” (31:18), and in chapter thirty-two we read, “the two tablets of the Pact, written on both their surfaces […]. והלוחות מעשה אלוהים המה והמכתב מכתב אלוהים הוא חרות על הלוחות – The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, inscribed upon the tablets” (32:15-16). The Torah tells us that these Tablets represent nothing less than the Law of God inscribed by the finger of God on Tablets carved by God. Talk about the word from on high… Power and authority descend to us from the summit of Sinai in the hands of our leader Moses.

The Tablets bear the Law, our responsibilities under the covenant between us and God. The Torah tells us these tablets were “inscribed by the finger of God.” “Inscribed”—in Hebrew, חרות (harut). In the Mishnah, the rabbis play with this word, reading not harut but heirut—freedom. The Tablets are freedom, say the rabbis, “for no man is truly free until he occupies himself with study of Torah” (Pirkei Avot 6:2).

Law is freedom, heirut, say the rabbis. We are free when we study the Law, inscribed, harut, by the finger of God upon the Tablets.

We might read the rabbis’ statement as an endorsement of submission to law and authority. The finger of God inscribes the words and, following those words to the letter, we are free.

But, in this week’s Torah portion, God sends us a different message about freedom.

The Tablets of the Law, written by God, inscribed by the very finger of God upon tablets carved by God out of the side of the mountain—these remarkable Tablets lay shattered at the foot of Sinai, broken in Moses’ anger. But the covenant was not shattered with them. After anger and punishment come forgiveness and a new freedom, symbolized by a second set of Tablets. Are these second Tablets exact replicas of the first? Not quite.

God instructs Moses, “Carve two tablets of stone like the first, וכתבתי and I will write upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered” (34:1). We already see a difference here: Moses must participate more actively in the creation of these new tablets which will bear the terms of the covenant between God and Israel. Moses will carve the shape of the tablets from the stone of Sinai, but God will write the words and inscribe them upon the tablets.

And yet, a few verses later, God speaks to Moses again, commanding: “כתב לך Write down these commandments” (34:27). Now it seems that God wants Moses to not only carve the new tablets but to write the words as well. The Torah says, “And [Moses] was with the Eternal forty days and forty nights; […] ויכתוב and he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments” (34:28).

Wait a minute, ask the rabbis. Who wrote on these Tablets, the very Tablets preserved in the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies? Was it Moses, or was it God? Who is the subject of the verb ויכתוב, and he wrote? Our rabbis, thinking of God as “he,” worried over whether God wrote on the second set of Tablets or whether Moses did. Many classical commentators say that of course the Torah means that God wrote the second set (Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Sforno). The rabbis note the apparent contradiction in the text: How do we reconcile verse 1, וכתבתי, God saying, “I will write upon the tablets,” with verse 27, the command to Moses to כתב לך “Write down these commandments”? The rabbis resolve the contradiction by ignoring God’s command to Moses to “write” and focusing on verse 1, the verse that says, Moses, you carve the tablets yourself, since you broke the first ones, but I, God, will write and inscribe upon them the Law. The worried rabbis seem to be saying, of course these sacred Tablets, carefully preserved in the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple’s very Holy of Holies, of course these Tablets were written by the finger of God.

But what if they weren’t? What if the second set of Tablets bore words spoken by God but written by Moses?

The rabbis envisioned freedom, heirut, through God’s Law inscribed, harut, in stone. Follow the Law to the letter and we are free.

But what if we think about freedom as emerging from that second set of Tablets, the ones written by Moses? Then heirut, freedom, emerges from a collaborative process—human beings and God working together. Freedom emerges when God speaks the words and Moses writes them, when Moses writes them and passes them down to the people, and when the people—when we—interpret those words so that we can live them out in freedom.

At the foot of Sinai, the people Israel felt lost without their leader. They did not understand a God they could not see. In their fear and confusion they turned to the ways of slavery, the habits of a people habituated to submission. God punished them for their idolatry and for their refusal to stand by the God of their ancestors, yet God also forgave Israel and re-established the covenant. God re-established the covenant through a second set of Tablets created in collaboration with Moses. God recognized that, in order to teach an enslaved people to live in heirut, in freedom, the harut, the inscribed law, had to emerge from power shared between God and human beings. כתב לך You write. Or, write for yourselves. And then you will be בני חורין, free people.

With their heirut, their new freedom, Israel created a portable reminder of God’s presence. In the next Torah portion, they build the sanctuary in the desert. They build it with their own hands and through their own free will. The place that will remind Israel of God’s presence among them, the site of communal rituals and gatherings—this place was built not by Moses alone or even by its primary artist, Bezalel. The sanctuary was built by כל אשר נדבה רוחו, by every single person whose spirit was generous (Exodus 35:21), by האנשים על הנשים כל נדיב לב, by the men together with the women, all whose hearts were generous (25:22). Indeed, this people who only recently became so frightened at the prospect of freedom and covenant gave so much of themselves that Moses had to tell them to stop. “Their efforts had been more than enough for all the tasks to be done,” says the Torah (Exodus 36:7).

God took the risk to say to Moses, כתב לך, write for yourselves. Write these words, although you may make a few mistakes. Write these words and live them in freedom, although you may misinterpret them at times. Write these words and build a community with the contributions of all its members, men and women, young and old—all whose hearts are generous are welcome to build this community, to live out this Law in heirut, not in submission to the Law, but in freedom through a collaborative covenant. כתב לך, write for yourselves. God will share the power and the responsibility. God will trust you to interpret the words and live them.

God understood how to transform an enslaved people into a free nation. God understood collaboration. And if tradition claims that even God was willing to take the risk to share power, then so much the more so ought power among human beings be shared. So much the more so should human political freedom emerge from collaboration.

Tonight, Egypt stands at the foot of its own Sinai of sorts. We have watched anxiously the anger and the violence, the demands and the celebrations in Tahrir Square—Freedom Square. We have heard the cry of a people demanding, as one protestor’s sign read, “Pharaoh Mubarak, Let the People Go!” We have worried about the involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood and the implications for Israel—a reasonable response, for freedom is risky. How have we listened to the people’s cry for freedom, open access to information, and self-determination? Can we listen to that cry with our second set of Tablets in mind? Can we listen to that cry as the outpouring of so many—men, women, children, professionals and workers, religious and secular—so many individuals, each נדיב לב, willing of heart to write and interpret their own freedom?

We do not yet know what form Egypt’s freedom will take. And we tremble in fear, for the stakes are immeasurably high. Egypt is deciding how they will participate in the community of democratic nations, how they will live their collective national identity, how they will pursue freedom while allowing citizens to express their religious and political convictions. These struggles are so like the struggles of the Jewish people, trying to live out a covenant in freedom, trying to interpret and reinterpret ancient words while never, ever letting go of those Tablets, trying to elicit the willing hearts and contributions of each member of our community. Ours is a freedom that carries responsibility. Ours is a freedom that requires us to partner with God. I pray that Egypt’s freedom will be such a freedom: humble and responsible and collaborative.


[I am thankful to my homiletics instructor, Rabbi Margaret Wenig, and my classmates Jillian Cameron, Rachel Maimin, Lisa Kingston, Vicky Glickin, Daniel Kirzane, and Ilene Haigh for their comments on a draft version of this sermon. In thinking about the second set of tablets as written by Moses, I was inspired by an article by Bowdoin College Professor Aviva Briefel in which she talks about Moses as “plagiarist” (“Sacred Objects/Illusory Idols: The Fake in Freud’s ‘The Moses of Michelangelo,’” American Imago 60,1, 2003, pp 21-40).]

A God Far and Near

Passing through the Sea of Reeds, with the water like a wall to their right and to their left, the people Israel praise God in song. Describing God’s mighty acts, the Song of the Sea praises God as ish milchama, a man of war. With anger and triumph, with a strong hand and marvelous wonders, God acts in history, performing miracles to prove that the God of Israel is incomparable, defeating Pharaoh with his courtiers and chariots and magicians and pantheon of gods carved in stone. Israel’s God of War sends a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, majestic and amazing and even perhaps terrifying. The God of Exodus is a transcendent God: beyond the limits of human experience, lofty and mighty, capable of deeds we could never achieve, huge in ways our mind cannot even comprehend.

God not only frees the people Israel from enslavement but brings them to the foot of Mount Sinai. There the people experience the cacophony of the giving of the Ten Commandments. A distant God sends forth a thunderous voice, and the people respond by recoiling in panic and fear: “[A]ll the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance” (Ex 20:15). Speaking from on high, God’s voice overwhelms the human senses. The God of Sinai is transcendent.

Yet the God of Sinai, the God who gives the Ten Commandments in a rush of wind and smoke, with the blast of the shofar and in a booming voice—this God of Sinai points to another image of God—a God not transcendent but immanent. This God of Sinai gives the Torah not to Moses alone but to all the people Israel—past, present, and future. This God of Sinai speaks the Ten Commandments to “you,” to each individual standing there at the physical Sinai, and to each of us, standing symbolically at Sinai each week when we ascend this bima to carry the Torah scroll to be touched and heard by our whole community. The God of Sinai is immanent: a God who dwells with us, a God who can and does act in the lives of individuals.

God as transcendent, God as immanent. God as incomprehensible, God as intimate. In many communities, these two contrasting images of God serve to close our service in the song Adon Olam, “Eternal Lord” (My People’s Prayerbook, Vol. 5, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman). The poem Adon Olam begins with an image of the transcendent God as King, distant and mighty, but it ends with an intimate God, a God I can count on as an individual. Often we miss the remarkable lyrics, caught up in the many sing-song melodies for this typical closing hymn. Here is the entire poem, as translated in Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman’s guide My People’s Prayerbook:

Eternal Lord who reigned supreme,
Before all beings were created,
When everything was made according to His will.
Then He was called ‘King.’


And when all shall cease to be,
He alone will reign supreme.
He was, He is,
And He will be crowned in glory.


He is One. There is no second
To compare to Him or consort with Him.
Without beginning, without end,
Power and dominion are His.


He is my God, my living redeemer,
My stronghold in troubled times.
He is my sign and my banner,
My cup when I call on Him.


In His hand I trust my soul
When I sleep and when I wake.
And with my soul, my body too,
Adonai is mine. I shall not fear.

The beginning of Adon Olam presents an image of God the Judge and King. This is a God who always reigned; before creation, before there were even human beings to worship God, God ruled. In the moment of creation, with works to prove God’s power and with human beings to serve God, God is called “King.” Yet God will rule, as the poem says, “when all shall cease to be.” With or without creation, with or without human beings to worship God, this Eternal Lord, this transcendent God, has always ruled, will always rule. Past, present, and future, the transcendent God is eternal, “crowned in glory,” with no one to compare. This all-powerful God is distant and cold, a sort of Intelligent Design, scientific or philosophical God, a power that sets the universe in motion and withdraws to the heavenly heights.

And then, as Rabbi Hoffman notes, “just when the poem overwhelms us with God’s grandeur, it changes course to proclaim God’s intimate involvement with each and every one of us” (My People’s Prayerbook, Vol. 5, p 97). In the last two verses of Adon Olam, we each proclaim that this transcendent, mighty, all-powerful God is “my God, my living redeemer, my stronghold in troubled times.” This God is close and involved, like God at the end of the Noah story, giving the rainbow and a promise never to flood the earth in hasty anger again. But the God in Adon Olam is more intimate than that. This God, “my God,” is the one to whom I entrust every single night my very being, all that I am, in the faith that this same Eternal Lord who rules forever will return my soul to me each morning. As Torah scholar Dr. Ellen Frankel writes, “This awesome ‘Eternal Lord’ who made everything, who rules supreme, this very same being I am able to invoke by name: Adonai” (Ibid., 95, emphasis added). As we leave the safety of the sanctuary and walk out into the night, Jews declare faith in a transcendent God who is, for us, immanent—an all-powerful God upon whom we can call, in whom we trust our souls.

The final words of Adon Olam are “Adona li, v’lo ira”—“the Eternal is mine, and I shall not fear.” This is what Rabbi Hoffman calls “the greatest Jewish promise of all: [that] even the most miniscule and shattered of lives matter to the infinite intelligence of the universe whom we name God; since ‘Adonai is mine; I shall not fear’” (Ibid., 97). A powerful assertion: that this abstract notion we call God, this powerful being sitting in judgment over the entire universe, this all-knowing being cares for even the most imperfect, the most insignificant, of human experience. No matter who I am, God cares about me and for me. I matter to the Ultimate Being in the universe.

Where is this immanent God in the Ten Commandments? It is easy to identify the transcendent God at Sinai, with the overwhelming voice and the fire and the smoke and the thunder and the lightning and the blasts of the shofar. Yet it is God who, in this week’s Torah portion, encourages us to understand God as immanent, as with us, as in relationship with each of us.

After the parting of the Sea of Reeds, after the signs and the wonders, after the plagues and the drowning of Pharaoh and his chariots and his charioteers, God speaks to Moses and the people about their relationship. But God speaks not of mighty deeds and power and loyalty to the Eternal Lord who rules eternally. Instead, God says, “You have seen […] how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me” (Ex. 19:4). We sometimes associate the eagle with might and majesty, but this image of the eagle bearing the people Israel on its wings is the image of a parent bird teaching its young to fly (see, for example, The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, p 413). God could have listed all the mighty acts it took to free Israel from Egypt, but in this first conversation with Israel in the wilderness, God does not focus on the kingly or the transcendent. Instead, God focuses on a loving relationship with the people Israel. God depicts this relationship as intimate. God informs the people of the covenant they will soon make at Sinai by invoking the image of a parent bird nurturing its young and teaching them to act on their own in the world. God says to each of us, through this covenant, I will teach you to fly.

Each of these ways of thinking about God—transcendent and immanent—can nourish us or push us away. Neither is “better” than the other, and the Torah offers us both ways to connect. In some ways, it is up to us: can we hold onto the notion that the created world, huge and powerful and incomprehensible and impersonal, moving according to scientific processes that certainly do not need us to continue in their natural cycles, might also contain a Divine power that cares for each of us? To be God’s chosen, then, would mean being cared for, being the young eagle lovingly taught by its majestic parent. But sometimes being chosen feels different; sometimes we wonder, if God is so very active in human life, precisely what God is doing. When we experience a tragedy, when we lose a loved one, when we struggle with infertility, when we face disease or loneliness, we do not always feel borne up on eagle’s wings, but cast from the nest before we’re ready to fly. Perhaps, in those moments, we’d prefer that God “choose somebody else for a change.”

This summer, in my hospital chaplaincy work, I often felt the pull of each of these ways of relating to God: transcendent, immanent. In the chaos and the accident of how disease strikes, I saw the transcendent God, what philosophers of the past called the “Unmoved Mover,” the power that created the universe and set all its processes in motion, then withdrew, letting the universe continue in its natural cycles and evolutions. I thought about a transcendent God who created the human body, with all its strengths and daily miracles, certainly, but with all its vulnerability and impermanence.

And yet how unsatisfactory that view can be when we face death or illness or uncertainty. I recall my conversations with a Pentacostalist Christian woman, lying in bed for months in the ward reserved for women with “at-risk pregnancies.” This woman, happily a mother of two, had already endured years of infertility, two miscarriages, and a stillborn child. She knew tragedy and pain, and now, here she was, facing an uncertain future. Where was God for this woman? When her baby went into cardiac failure in her womb, the doctors took her for an emergency C-section. She survived, but her tiny son did not. And as I sat with her and her husband, each of them asked, Where is God? Is God in this moment, now? Did God make this happen? Whether transcendent or immanent, none of us in that room could imagine a God who would make this happen or even “let” this happen. Instead, we found the intimate, caring God in the comfort we could offer one another. We found the immanent God in our ability to cry out to God and receive, not necessarily the answer we were looking for, but a response nonetheless. We found the immanent God in the Psalm that encourages us to reach out to God with all our emotions: “Out of the depths I call to you, God.”

In our darkest moments and in our most joyous, when we mourn and when we dance, in our sowing in tears and in our reaping in joy, we can fulfill our side of the covenant established at Sinai by relating to God both as transcendent and as immanent.

Even in those overwhelming Ten Commandments, God reminds us of the intimate relationship we are invited to cultivate through the covenant. When the people heard the overwhelming voice and the thunder and the lightning, they heard God begin, “I, Adonai, am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (Ex. 20:2). The first commandment is a declaration: I the Eternal am your God. Perhaps this is merely an introduction. But the Midrash interprets this commandment differently: “I am the Eternal [if I am] your God”—in other words, “I can be myself only if you acknowledge me” (Midrash haGadol in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, p 490). Here in the first commandment, the first words God speaks directly to the entire people Israel gathered at Mount Sinai, we find both the transcendent and the immanent God, both the God of all time and space (the immeasurable God) and the God of our individual days (the intimate God). “Anochi Adonai Elohecha,” “I am the Eternal your God,” we each heard at Sinai. Each time we conclude a service, we have an opportunity to respond, “Adonai li, v’lo ira,” “The Eternal is mine, and I shall not fear.”

Shabbat Shalom to the community at Temple Beth Am, and thank you to those of you who helped to inspire this sermon.