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.
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
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).]
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).]
Friday, January 21, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
BaMakom HaZeh
[The following was a sermon given at Temple Beth Am in Monessen, PA and adapted from a sermon given at Shir Tikva in Winchester, MA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the congregation I am privileged to serve.]
I used to go out to the promenade across the valley from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem just before sunset, my favorite time in Jerusalem, Yerushalaim shel zahav time—Jerusalem-of-gold time. The time when the slanted rays of the sun hit the sand-colored stones and the entire city shines gold.
Anyone who’s been to Jerusalem knows that it’s just not like anywhere else.
In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, the narrow alleyways criss-cross sudden courtyards, winding up and down stairs, built upon layers and layers of stones attesting to the special place this hilltop city has held in Jewish history for centuries upon centuries. Suddenly, the city opens up and you’re standing at the Western Wall plaza. Thousands of people stuff notes into the crevices between the stones, carved and set in place during the time of King Herod. But around the corner, at the Southern Wall—that’s the spot I loved best.
The Southern Wall plaza contains a set of stairs leading to arches long since filled in with massive stone blocks. Pilgrims to the ancient Temple climbed these stairs and entered those arches to make sacrifices to God. Before them stood what must have been the largest human-built structure they had ever seen: the Temple of Solomon, and within it, the Holy of Holies. Unlike other sanctuaries of the Ancient Near East, the Temple in Jerusalem contained no statue. Instead, it held the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets on which the finger of God wrote the commandments.
It also held something else: a stone.
Jewish tradition says that the Holy of Holies stood upon the precise peak of Mount Moriah, the very spot where Abraham willingly offered his son Isaac as proof of his loyalty to God. But Abraham wasn’t the only Jewish patriarch to come into contact with that stone. The peak of Mount Moriah served not only as an altar but as a pillow. According to the rabbis, when Jacob camps out in the wilderness, the stone on which he rests his head is indeed the very same stone Abraham used for an altar.
From the Torah: Jacob leaves home to escape his brother Esau’s anger about the stolen birthright. Along his route, Jacob stops to rest, taking a stone for a pillow. In his sleep, “He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached the sky, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (28:12).
But Jacob’s experience on that night involved not only a vision of angels and a stairway and a realm beyond human experience.
As Jacob lay on the hard ground, his head upon the stone, he experienced a physical presence. “[Hinei ADONAI] And here is the Eternal [nitzav alaiv] standing beside him.” The God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham stood, a physical act, with Jacob, promising to give land, prosperity, and blessing to his descendants.
Jacob’s nearness to God motivates and changes him. When he wakes, he wonders aloud at his blindness to the significance of this place:
[Vayikatz Yaakov mishnato vayomer:] And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati”] “Aha! The Eternal was in this place and I did not know it!” [vayirah vayomar:] and he was shaken/awed/afraid, and he said: [“Mah-nora hamakom hazeh! ] “How awesome is this place! [ein zeh ki im beit elohim v’zeh sha’ar hashamayim”] This is none other than a house of God, and that is the gateway of heaven.” (28:16-18)
Jacob immediately erects a pillar and makes a vow to honor Adonai as his God.
While we tend to think of the presence of God as spiritual, we are strongly encouraged in this Torah portion to imagine the presence of God as physical—as upon us, aleinu. Jacob experienced the presence of God as an overwhelming, physical, bodily sensation. There was the Eternal in this place, here, at that very moment.
We might lament that we have no such opportunity. God simply doesn’t do that anymore. Or we might think, perhaps God appears in Jerusalem, at the peak of Mount Moriah, but not in the Monongahela Valley!
Jacob’s reply can guide us: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh] “Aha! There was the Eternal in this place [v’anochi lo yadati] and I did not know it!” (28:16). In Hebrew, personal pronouns are not necessary; verbs tell us all we need to know about both actor and action. Here, however, we read “v’anochi”—and I—“lo yadati”—I did not know. “There was the Eternal in this place and I, I did not know.”
In other words, how could I not have known? How could I not have seen? How could I not have felt? What was it about me that prevented me from recognizing the presence of God bamakom hazeh, in this place?
Torah commentators pore over the exact, earthly location of Jacob’s dream site. Rashi infers from this passage a remarkable reshaping of the physical world that brings Jacob close to important sites in the history of the covenant between God and Israel: “God folded the entire Land of Israel beneath [Jacob]” (Genesis Rabbah). Jacob’s pillow represents layer upon layer of sacred spots: Hamakom hazeh, “this place,” is at once the site of Abraham’s prayer and worship; Mt. Moriah, the place of the near-sacrifice of Isaac; and the field where Isaac prayed after his ordeal. Rashi argues that “this place” is extraordinary, linked to the Jewish past and deeply significant to the covenant between God and Israel.
We can wait for a dream of our own—one in which we are seamlessly folded into the Jewish past—but this is not the only way our Torah portion imagines the potential for humans to encounter the Divine.
Perhaps the key is that God was indeed bamakom hazeh, in this place—not at the top of the stairway, not behind the gate of heaven, but standing over Jacob, who slept on the hard ground with a rock for a pillow. What if that rock was “just” a rock?
Standing on the stairs by the Southern Wall in Jerusalem, it’s all too easy to think, “Achein! ” The rise is steep; you are truly climbing, the closed arches before you, behind you, the rocky hills of Jerusalem and beyond, the expanse of the desert and the looming mountains of Morav. Awesome.
In arguing that God provided a very special pillow for Jacob, the rabbis imply that certain places offer unique access to the divine.
When we pray in this sanctuary, do we have a special access to God? Do you feel differently in this room than you do in your living room? I do. But I am not sure that what is different about this place is the presence of the sefer Torah or the smooth stone surrounding the ark or the lovingly-tended and beautiful mantles covering the scrools. I am not sure it is the physical structure, this building with its ritual objects and works of art, its Talmud volumes and schooldesks. Rather, what makes this place sacred, what makes this place a Beit Elohim is you, is us, is the community we form each month when we gather to hear the words of our tradition, the community that continues to nurture one another in very real ways throughout the year, throughout the lives of each of its members. What makes this space sacred are the memories of b’nei mitzvah celebrated on this bima, offers of food and sympathy carried to a mourner’s house, the names of this community’s ancestors displayed on the memorial plaques, holiday dinners shared down in the social hall, lively arguments at Torah study. This Beth Am, a house of the people, is indeed a Beit Elohim, a House of God. Like Jacob’s dream-place, like hamakom hazeh, this place offers us a vision of a stairway to the divine.
Jerusalem is special. And being in this sanctuary helps many of us to differently focus our attention toward Jewish ideals, our own Jewish memories, and the Divine. But we learn in this week’s Torah portion that we can connect to our Jewish tradition in any and every place. God manifested in an ordinary place, a physical spot in the real, tangible world. The fact that Jacob, upon waking, builds not a temple or a palace but a pillar, a marker for the next passerby, suggests not that bamakom hazeh is the lone, particular, special dwelling-place of the God of our ancestors, but that we, if we are open to it, can experience the presence of God in the places where we find ourselves.
So, despite the rabbis’ confidence that Jacob’s makom hazeh marks an actual location in Israel, we need not conclude that we can find God in only a finite number of places. Rather, our tradition tells us that God loves the Jewish people enough to transform any place—even a bed on the ground and a stone pillow—into a space in which we experience God’s nearness. If we are open to the surprise (Achein! ), we too might find God bamakom hazeh, in this place. As Lawrence Kushner writes, “There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006: 25). We can open our hearts and minds to the surprise that, unbeknownst to us, God has been bamakom hazeh, in this place, all along.
I used to go out to the promenade across the valley from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem just before sunset, my favorite time in Jerusalem, Yerushalaim shel zahav time—Jerusalem-of-gold time. The time when the slanted rays of the sun hit the sand-colored stones and the entire city shines gold.
Anyone who’s been to Jerusalem knows that it’s just not like anywhere else.
In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, the narrow alleyways criss-cross sudden courtyards, winding up and down stairs, built upon layers and layers of stones attesting to the special place this hilltop city has held in Jewish history for centuries upon centuries. Suddenly, the city opens up and you’re standing at the Western Wall plaza. Thousands of people stuff notes into the crevices between the stones, carved and set in place during the time of King Herod. But around the corner, at the Southern Wall—that’s the spot I loved best.
The Southern Wall plaza contains a set of stairs leading to arches long since filled in with massive stone blocks. Pilgrims to the ancient Temple climbed these stairs and entered those arches to make sacrifices to God. Before them stood what must have been the largest human-built structure they had ever seen: the Temple of Solomon, and within it, the Holy of Holies. Unlike other sanctuaries of the Ancient Near East, the Temple in Jerusalem contained no statue. Instead, it held the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets on which the finger of God wrote the commandments.
It also held something else: a stone.
Jewish tradition says that the Holy of Holies stood upon the precise peak of Mount Moriah, the very spot where Abraham willingly offered his son Isaac as proof of his loyalty to God. But Abraham wasn’t the only Jewish patriarch to come into contact with that stone. The peak of Mount Moriah served not only as an altar but as a pillow. According to the rabbis, when Jacob camps out in the wilderness, the stone on which he rests his head is indeed the very same stone Abraham used for an altar.
From the Torah: Jacob leaves home to escape his brother Esau’s anger about the stolen birthright. Along his route, Jacob stops to rest, taking a stone for a pillow. In his sleep, “He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached the sky, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (28:12).
But Jacob’s experience on that night involved not only a vision of angels and a stairway and a realm beyond human experience.
As Jacob lay on the hard ground, his head upon the stone, he experienced a physical presence. “[Hinei ADONAI] And here is the Eternal [nitzav alaiv] standing beside him.” The God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham stood, a physical act, with Jacob, promising to give land, prosperity, and blessing to his descendants.
Jacob’s nearness to God motivates and changes him. When he wakes, he wonders aloud at his blindness to the significance of this place:
[Vayikatz Yaakov mishnato vayomer:] And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati”] “Aha! The Eternal was in this place and I did not know it!” [vayirah vayomar:] and he was shaken/awed/afraid, and he said: [“Mah-nora hamakom hazeh! ] “How awesome is this place! [ein zeh ki im beit elohim v’zeh sha’ar hashamayim”] This is none other than a house of God, and that is the gateway of heaven.” (28:16-18)
Jacob immediately erects a pillar and makes a vow to honor Adonai as his God.
While we tend to think of the presence of God as spiritual, we are strongly encouraged in this Torah portion to imagine the presence of God as physical—as upon us, aleinu. Jacob experienced the presence of God as an overwhelming, physical, bodily sensation. There was the Eternal in this place, here, at that very moment.
We might lament that we have no such opportunity. God simply doesn’t do that anymore. Or we might think, perhaps God appears in Jerusalem, at the peak of Mount Moriah, but not in the Monongahela Valley!
Jacob’s reply can guide us: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh] “Aha! There was the Eternal in this place [v’anochi lo yadati] and I did not know it!” (28:16). In Hebrew, personal pronouns are not necessary; verbs tell us all we need to know about both actor and action. Here, however, we read “v’anochi”—and I—“lo yadati”—I did not know. “There was the Eternal in this place and I, I did not know.”
In other words, how could I not have known? How could I not have seen? How could I not have felt? What was it about me that prevented me from recognizing the presence of God bamakom hazeh, in this place?
Torah commentators pore over the exact, earthly location of Jacob’s dream site. Rashi infers from this passage a remarkable reshaping of the physical world that brings Jacob close to important sites in the history of the covenant between God and Israel: “God folded the entire Land of Israel beneath [Jacob]” (Genesis Rabbah). Jacob’s pillow represents layer upon layer of sacred spots: Hamakom hazeh, “this place,” is at once the site of Abraham’s prayer and worship; Mt. Moriah, the place of the near-sacrifice of Isaac; and the field where Isaac prayed after his ordeal. Rashi argues that “this place” is extraordinary, linked to the Jewish past and deeply significant to the covenant between God and Israel.
We can wait for a dream of our own—one in which we are seamlessly folded into the Jewish past—but this is not the only way our Torah portion imagines the potential for humans to encounter the Divine.
Perhaps the key is that God was indeed bamakom hazeh, in this place—not at the top of the stairway, not behind the gate of heaven, but standing over Jacob, who slept on the hard ground with a rock for a pillow. What if that rock was “just” a rock?
Standing on the stairs by the Southern Wall in Jerusalem, it’s all too easy to think, “Achein! ” The rise is steep; you are truly climbing, the closed arches before you, behind you, the rocky hills of Jerusalem and beyond, the expanse of the desert and the looming mountains of Morav. Awesome.
In arguing that God provided a very special pillow for Jacob, the rabbis imply that certain places offer unique access to the divine.
When we pray in this sanctuary, do we have a special access to God? Do you feel differently in this room than you do in your living room? I do. But I am not sure that what is different about this place is the presence of the sefer Torah or the smooth stone surrounding the ark or the lovingly-tended and beautiful mantles covering the scrools. I am not sure it is the physical structure, this building with its ritual objects and works of art, its Talmud volumes and schooldesks. Rather, what makes this place sacred, what makes this place a Beit Elohim is you, is us, is the community we form each month when we gather to hear the words of our tradition, the community that continues to nurture one another in very real ways throughout the year, throughout the lives of each of its members. What makes this space sacred are the memories of b’nei mitzvah celebrated on this bima, offers of food and sympathy carried to a mourner’s house, the names of this community’s ancestors displayed on the memorial plaques, holiday dinners shared down in the social hall, lively arguments at Torah study. This Beth Am, a house of the people, is indeed a Beit Elohim, a House of God. Like Jacob’s dream-place, like hamakom hazeh, this place offers us a vision of a stairway to the divine.
Jerusalem is special. And being in this sanctuary helps many of us to differently focus our attention toward Jewish ideals, our own Jewish memories, and the Divine. But we learn in this week’s Torah portion that we can connect to our Jewish tradition in any and every place. God manifested in an ordinary place, a physical spot in the real, tangible world. The fact that Jacob, upon waking, builds not a temple or a palace but a pillar, a marker for the next passerby, suggests not that bamakom hazeh is the lone, particular, special dwelling-place of the God of our ancestors, but that we, if we are open to it, can experience the presence of God in the places where we find ourselves.
So, despite the rabbis’ confidence that Jacob’s makom hazeh marks an actual location in Israel, we need not conclude that we can find God in only a finite number of places. Rather, our tradition tells us that God loves the Jewish people enough to transform any place—even a bed on the ground and a stone pillow—into a space in which we experience God’s nearness. If we are open to the surprise (Achein! ), we too might find God bamakom hazeh, in this place. As Lawrence Kushner writes, “There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006: 25). We can open our hearts and minds to the surprise that, unbeknownst to us, God has been bamakom hazeh, in this place, all along.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Changing Expectations
[The following was a sermon for Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA, on Shabbat Noach. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]
The story of Noah and the flood is a tale of violence, destruction, and renewal. Just last Shabbat Jews across the globe read of the creation of a world God unequivocally proclaimed “good”; indeed, after the sixth day of creation, the day on which adam, the human being, was made, God pronounces v’hinei tov m’od—“and behold! It was very good” (Genesis 1:31). As generations live and die upon the earth, however, something goes terribly wrong: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). God decides to drown all of creation in the chaotic waters of the Flood; the only person God warns of this plan and the impending doom is Noah, whom the Torah describes as ish tzadik, a righteous person (6:9). God instructions Noah to build an ark, to save his family, and to preserve pairs of animals to repopulate the world after the Flood waters recede.
For forty days the rains pour down, and the water rises so high that even the tallest mountains are submerged in its depths. For one hundred and fifty days Noah and the other inhabitants of the ark float upon the surface, their futures uncertain.
During the Days of Awe, our futures, too, were uncertain, and in that uncertainty we called out, “yizkor”—May God remember. May God remember our loved ones who have died, we pleaded; may God remember the good deeds of all our ancestors, judging us less harshly on their account; may God remember the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all Israel.
In the story of Noah, God remembers:vayizkor elohim et Noach v’et kol ha’chaya v’et kol ha’behema asher ito bateiva, vaya’aver Elohim ruach al ha’aretz vayashku hamayim—“God then remembered Noah and all the animals and all the beasts that were with him in the ark, and God caused a wind to sweep over the earth, and the waters subsided” (8:1).
After the Flood, God takes care that this remembering will always serve for renewal, not destruction: “And when I cause clouds to form over the earth, and the bow appears in the cloud,” God proclaims to Noah, “I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all living beings, all flesh, and never again shall the waters become a flood, to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the cloud, and I see it, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings, all that live upon the earth” (9:14-16).
God makes a covenant with Noah, charging Noah and his descendants, like Adam and Eve, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and prohibiting violence and murder. God reminds Noah and his descendants that human life is precious, ki b’tzelem Elohim asah et ha’adam, for human beings were made in the image of God” (9:6).
How are these survivors of the devastating Flood, human beings, made in the image of God, different from the souls drowned in the waters that rose higher than the mountains? What changed after the Flood?
“The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11) God brings the Flood to wipe away the corruption and violence, leaving the earth to the descendants of Noah, a righteous man. But it is not the nature of human beings that changes after the Flood; as biblical scholar Tamar Cohn Ezkenazi argues, it is God’s expectations of human beings that changes.
Before the Flood, at the end of last week’s parasha, God decides to destroy the first creation: “And the Eternal saw how great was the wickedness of human brings on the earth,” v’chol yeitzer machs’vot libo rak ra kol ha’yom—“and the entire inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only wicked all the time, the Eternal regretted that He had made human beings upon the earth, and was heartsick. And God said, ‘I will wipe the human beings that I have created from off the face of the earth […] for I regret that I made them’” (6:6-7). Saddened and disappointed, God destroys the works of God’s own creation, human beings corrupt in their yeitzer, their inclination and instinct.
After the Flood, Noah builds an altar and offers sacrifices to God. In verses I chanted this evening, we learn, “The Eternal, inhaling the soothing fragrance, thought: ‘Never again will I bring doom upon the world on account of what people do,” ki yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—“though the inclination of the heart of the human is evil from his youth; never again will I destroy all living beings as I have done’” (8:21). Eskenazi finds this verse “striking,” for it represents “God’s change of heart” (WTC). What changes in the Flood?
The story of Noah shares some similarities with the creation story: the waters of the flood parallel the waters described in the time of tohu va’vohu, the unformed chaos that immediately precedes God’s first act of creation (Gen 1:2); the ruah Elohim—the breath or spirit or wind of God that “hovers” over the water just before God speaks, “Let there be light” (1:2-3)—can be likened to the ruach God sends to blow away the waters of the Flood (8:1). But Noah’s story is not the tale of a completely new creation, resulting in some new human being free of the potential for corruption and violence displayed by the preceding generations drowned in the Flood waters of God’s disappointment and anger. The human beings formed in Genesis, those drowned in the Flood, and the survivors, the descendants of Noah who are blessed to enter into a covenant with God—each of these human beings possesses a yeitzer, an inclination or instinct, toward evil, corruption, and violence. Human beings do not emerge from the ark changed; rather, as Eskenasi writes, “The transgressions that led to the Flood transform God’s expectations. They result in new rules to guide humankind and a promise of a perpetual covenant” (WTC 44, emphasis added). According to Eskenazi’s interpretation, the covenant God makes with Noah, a covenant that brings both responsibilities and rewards, is one that “aim[s] at channeling impulses and containing them” (Ibid.) God will never again Flood the earth, but not because human beings will never again distress God’s heart so with our wickedness, corruption, and violence. Instead, God acknowledges the limitations of these beings created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, but created, too, with free will, with a yeitzer, an inclination or drive, that can sometimes lead us astray.
The Sages argued that we were created with two yeitzers, a yeitzer ha-tov as well as a yeitzer ha-ra. In the Torah, when God forms the animals, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer, spelled with one yud (2:19). But when God forms the first human being, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer—with two yuds (2:7). Why? Why is the same word spelled in two different ways in the Torah? In the Talmud, Rabbi Nachman explains that the two yuds “show that God created two inclinations, one good and the other evil” (Bavli Berakhot 61a). Both the yeitzer ha-tov, the impulse toward good, and the yeitzer ha-ra, the impulse toward evil, were created in us by God, the same God who created us b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s own image. Indeed, the Sages, in the midrash collection Genesis Rabbah, find the yeitzer ha-ra in the story of the first creation, on that sixth day when God creates the first human being and declares, v’hinei tov m’od—“Behold! It was very good” (Gen 1:31). Believing that no word in the Torah is superfluous, the Sages wonder why, on this day, the Torah declares not just hinei tov (“it is good”) but hinei tov m’od (“it is very good”). Rabbi Nachman responds that tov m’od—“very good”—indicates both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). “Can the yeitzer ha-ra be good?” the Sages chorus. Indeed, it can: “But for the yeitzer ha-ra […] no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children” (Ibid.). Our impulses and drives lead us to all kinds of endeavors and actions, some of them good, some of them wicked. Our impulses motivate us to take action in our lives.
From a midrash on the Noah story, Genesis chapter eight verse twenty-one:
If you argue: “Is it not the Holy One Himself who created the impulse to evil, of which it is written, yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—‘The impulse of man’s heart was evil from the time he was expelled from his mother’s womb’? Who then can possibly make it good?” the Holy One replies, “You are the one who makes the impulse to evil stay evil. How? When you were a child, you did not sin. Only when you grew up, you began to sin.” If you argue: “But no man can guard himself against it!” the Holy One replies, “How many things in the world are even less bearable and more bitter than the impulse to evil, yet you manage to sweeten them. […] if you sweeten for your need bitter things that I alone created, all the greater is your responsibility for the impulse to evil, which was placed under your control.” (Sefer ha-Aggadot quoting Genesis Rabbah).
In this imagined argument, God reminds us that we have the power to shape our own actions, that our yeitzer is an impulse, not a mandate. It is up to us to discern when our impulses are good and when they are wicked. It is up to us to take responsibility for the choices we make in reaction to the realities we face. Our drives and impulses, like our skin color or our nationality, are accidents of our birth. We cannot control how we are made, how we emotionally respond to the world. But we can control what we do with our emotions and our impulses and our drives.
God takes mercy on human beings after the Flood, not because we emerged from the ark all tzadikim, all righteous like Noah, but because God decided to deal with our humanness differently. Human beings are capable of good and of wickedness; our drives and impulses sometimes lead us astray. Shall God utterly destroy us all each time we slip up? No. Instead, God makes a covenant with us and calls us to ethical behavior; it is our responsibility to respond to our impulses and drives, directing them toward the good. As Tamar Eskenazi writes, “God recognizes that the inclination to do evil is part of human beings. God’s observation does not claim that humans are inherently sinful but rather recognizes human limitations” (WTC 43). Sometimes we will slip up. But sometimes our desires will motivate us to live and work and create.
God entered into a covenant, with such imperfect beings. God let go of the anger and disappointment God felt in seeing the wickedness in the yeitzer of human beings—an anger and disappointment that led to the Flood and the destruction of a work of creation God had previously deemed “very good.” God replaced that anger and disappointment with new, more realistic expectations. God cut us some slack.
I find it particularly inspiring to read the passage where God smells the fragrance of Noah’s offering and decides, in full awareness of human limitations, to enter into a covenant with us—I find it particularly inspiring to read this so soon after Yom Kippur, the day on which the ways we followed our yeitzer ha-ra to terrible consequences are laid bare before us, before the community, and before God. I find it inspiring that our Torah does not only ask us to lament our sins, but asks us, too, to be gentle with ourselves, to be realistic. Our actions have consequences; we reap what we sow. And yet, God takes enough mercy on us to acknowledge our humanness. And if God can treat us with such mercy and kindness, all the more so should we be merciful and kind toward one another.
When God sees the rainbow in the cloudy sky, God will remember. God will remember that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim and that this “very good” world we inhabit contains both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra. Let us be patient with ourselves and one another, human beings worthy of being remembered, human beings created b’tzelem Elohim.
The story of Noah and the flood is a tale of violence, destruction, and renewal. Just last Shabbat Jews across the globe read of the creation of a world God unequivocally proclaimed “good”; indeed, after the sixth day of creation, the day on which adam, the human being, was made, God pronounces v’hinei tov m’od—“and behold! It was very good” (Genesis 1:31). As generations live and die upon the earth, however, something goes terribly wrong: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). God decides to drown all of creation in the chaotic waters of the Flood; the only person God warns of this plan and the impending doom is Noah, whom the Torah describes as ish tzadik, a righteous person (6:9). God instructions Noah to build an ark, to save his family, and to preserve pairs of animals to repopulate the world after the Flood waters recede.
For forty days the rains pour down, and the water rises so high that even the tallest mountains are submerged in its depths. For one hundred and fifty days Noah and the other inhabitants of the ark float upon the surface, their futures uncertain.
During the Days of Awe, our futures, too, were uncertain, and in that uncertainty we called out, “yizkor”—May God remember. May God remember our loved ones who have died, we pleaded; may God remember the good deeds of all our ancestors, judging us less harshly on their account; may God remember the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all Israel.
In the story of Noah, God remembers:vayizkor elohim et Noach v’et kol ha’chaya v’et kol ha’behema asher ito bateiva, vaya’aver Elohim ruach al ha’aretz vayashku hamayim—“God then remembered Noah and all the animals and all the beasts that were with him in the ark, and God caused a wind to sweep over the earth, and the waters subsided” (8:1).
After the Flood, God takes care that this remembering will always serve for renewal, not destruction: “And when I cause clouds to form over the earth, and the bow appears in the cloud,” God proclaims to Noah, “I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all living beings, all flesh, and never again shall the waters become a flood, to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the cloud, and I see it, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings, all that live upon the earth” (9:14-16).
God makes a covenant with Noah, charging Noah and his descendants, like Adam and Eve, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and prohibiting violence and murder. God reminds Noah and his descendants that human life is precious, ki b’tzelem Elohim asah et ha’adam, for human beings were made in the image of God” (9:6).
How are these survivors of the devastating Flood, human beings, made in the image of God, different from the souls drowned in the waters that rose higher than the mountains? What changed after the Flood?
“The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11) God brings the Flood to wipe away the corruption and violence, leaving the earth to the descendants of Noah, a righteous man. But it is not the nature of human beings that changes after the Flood; as biblical scholar Tamar Cohn Ezkenazi argues, it is God’s expectations of human beings that changes.
Before the Flood, at the end of last week’s parasha, God decides to destroy the first creation: “And the Eternal saw how great was the wickedness of human brings on the earth,” v’chol yeitzer machs’vot libo rak ra kol ha’yom—“and the entire inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only wicked all the time, the Eternal regretted that He had made human beings upon the earth, and was heartsick. And God said, ‘I will wipe the human beings that I have created from off the face of the earth […] for I regret that I made them’” (6:6-7). Saddened and disappointed, God destroys the works of God’s own creation, human beings corrupt in their yeitzer, their inclination and instinct.
After the Flood, Noah builds an altar and offers sacrifices to God. In verses I chanted this evening, we learn, “The Eternal, inhaling the soothing fragrance, thought: ‘Never again will I bring doom upon the world on account of what people do,” ki yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—“though the inclination of the heart of the human is evil from his youth; never again will I destroy all living beings as I have done’” (8:21). Eskenazi finds this verse “striking,” for it represents “God’s change of heart” (WTC). What changes in the Flood?
The story of Noah shares some similarities with the creation story: the waters of the flood parallel the waters described in the time of tohu va’vohu, the unformed chaos that immediately precedes God’s first act of creation (Gen 1:2); the ruah Elohim—the breath or spirit or wind of God that “hovers” over the water just before God speaks, “Let there be light” (1:2-3)—can be likened to the ruach God sends to blow away the waters of the Flood (8:1). But Noah’s story is not the tale of a completely new creation, resulting in some new human being free of the potential for corruption and violence displayed by the preceding generations drowned in the Flood waters of God’s disappointment and anger. The human beings formed in Genesis, those drowned in the Flood, and the survivors, the descendants of Noah who are blessed to enter into a covenant with God—each of these human beings possesses a yeitzer, an inclination or instinct, toward evil, corruption, and violence. Human beings do not emerge from the ark changed; rather, as Eskenasi writes, “The transgressions that led to the Flood transform God’s expectations. They result in new rules to guide humankind and a promise of a perpetual covenant” (WTC 44, emphasis added). According to Eskenazi’s interpretation, the covenant God makes with Noah, a covenant that brings both responsibilities and rewards, is one that “aim[s] at channeling impulses and containing them” (Ibid.) God will never again Flood the earth, but not because human beings will never again distress God’s heart so with our wickedness, corruption, and violence. Instead, God acknowledges the limitations of these beings created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, but created, too, with free will, with a yeitzer, an inclination or drive, that can sometimes lead us astray.
The Sages argued that we were created with two yeitzers, a yeitzer ha-tov as well as a yeitzer ha-ra. In the Torah, when God forms the animals, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer, spelled with one yud (2:19). But when God forms the first human being, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer—with two yuds (2:7). Why? Why is the same word spelled in two different ways in the Torah? In the Talmud, Rabbi Nachman explains that the two yuds “show that God created two inclinations, one good and the other evil” (Bavli Berakhot 61a). Both the yeitzer ha-tov, the impulse toward good, and the yeitzer ha-ra, the impulse toward evil, were created in us by God, the same God who created us b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s own image. Indeed, the Sages, in the midrash collection Genesis Rabbah, find the yeitzer ha-ra in the story of the first creation, on that sixth day when God creates the first human being and declares, v’hinei tov m’od—“Behold! It was very good” (Gen 1:31). Believing that no word in the Torah is superfluous, the Sages wonder why, on this day, the Torah declares not just hinei tov (“it is good”) but hinei tov m’od (“it is very good”). Rabbi Nachman responds that tov m’od—“very good”—indicates both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). “Can the yeitzer ha-ra be good?” the Sages chorus. Indeed, it can: “But for the yeitzer ha-ra […] no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children” (Ibid.). Our impulses and drives lead us to all kinds of endeavors and actions, some of them good, some of them wicked. Our impulses motivate us to take action in our lives.
From a midrash on the Noah story, Genesis chapter eight verse twenty-one:
If you argue: “Is it not the Holy One Himself who created the impulse to evil, of which it is written, yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—‘The impulse of man’s heart was evil from the time he was expelled from his mother’s womb’? Who then can possibly make it good?” the Holy One replies, “You are the one who makes the impulse to evil stay evil. How? When you were a child, you did not sin. Only when you grew up, you began to sin.” If you argue: “But no man can guard himself against it!” the Holy One replies, “How many things in the world are even less bearable and more bitter than the impulse to evil, yet you manage to sweeten them. […] if you sweeten for your need bitter things that I alone created, all the greater is your responsibility for the impulse to evil, which was placed under your control.” (Sefer ha-Aggadot quoting Genesis Rabbah).
In this imagined argument, God reminds us that we have the power to shape our own actions, that our yeitzer is an impulse, not a mandate. It is up to us to discern when our impulses are good and when they are wicked. It is up to us to take responsibility for the choices we make in reaction to the realities we face. Our drives and impulses, like our skin color or our nationality, are accidents of our birth. We cannot control how we are made, how we emotionally respond to the world. But we can control what we do with our emotions and our impulses and our drives.
God takes mercy on human beings after the Flood, not because we emerged from the ark all tzadikim, all righteous like Noah, but because God decided to deal with our humanness differently. Human beings are capable of good and of wickedness; our drives and impulses sometimes lead us astray. Shall God utterly destroy us all each time we slip up? No. Instead, God makes a covenant with us and calls us to ethical behavior; it is our responsibility to respond to our impulses and drives, directing them toward the good. As Tamar Eskenazi writes, “God recognizes that the inclination to do evil is part of human beings. God’s observation does not claim that humans are inherently sinful but rather recognizes human limitations” (WTC 43). Sometimes we will slip up. But sometimes our desires will motivate us to live and work and create.
God entered into a covenant, with such imperfect beings. God let go of the anger and disappointment God felt in seeing the wickedness in the yeitzer of human beings—an anger and disappointment that led to the Flood and the destruction of a work of creation God had previously deemed “very good.” God replaced that anger and disappointment with new, more realistic expectations. God cut us some slack.
I find it particularly inspiring to read the passage where God smells the fragrance of Noah’s offering and decides, in full awareness of human limitations, to enter into a covenant with us—I find it particularly inspiring to read this so soon after Yom Kippur, the day on which the ways we followed our yeitzer ha-ra to terrible consequences are laid bare before us, before the community, and before God. I find it inspiring that our Torah does not only ask us to lament our sins, but asks us, too, to be gentle with ourselves, to be realistic. Our actions have consequences; we reap what we sow. And yet, God takes enough mercy on us to acknowledge our humanness. And if God can treat us with such mercy and kindness, all the more so should we be merciful and kind toward one another.
When God sees the rainbow in the cloudy sky, God will remember. God will remember that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim and that this “very good” world we inhabit contains both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra. Let us be patient with ourselves and one another, human beings worthy of being remembered, human beings created b’tzelem Elohim.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Saving Fishes
The father of this little family is a rabbi, head of a yeshiva (Jewish school). He is intense and serious; his day is filled with prayer, study, and teaching. One day, a student alerts him to an opportunity to fulfill a strange and counterintuitive commandment (mitzvah): “If you chance upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, and the mother is sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go and take only the young” (Devarim 22:6).
Menachem, the rabbi’s young son, a sincere and loving boy but not an eager scholar, is interested in the mother bird and her young. He has watched the nesting process from the window of the yeshiva and smiles at the hatchlings’ daily developments. When he learns that his father has shooed the mother away, he worries. He does not understand why God would require anyone to separate the young from their mother.
His father’s answer is somewhat harsh, and it made me consider my own thoughts on God, commandments, and our responsibility to fulfill them. You must fulfill the commandment, he warns, without asking, “What is the reason?” He warns, too, that performing a seemingly merciful act that is not commanded in the Torah is simply doing an evil disguised as a good. It may seem merciful, in other words, to allow the mother to nurture her young, but God commanded the opposite, and what could possibly be more merciful than God?
Menachem has animals on his mind when he asks about the mother bird. A few days before, he saw a woman being taken from her apartment building in an ambulance, in critical condition. Her dog remains faithfully by her side, whimpering and crouching, obviously in distress. That night, Menachem asks his father whether dogs “have a soul.” They have nothing, his father answers, “no soul, no commandments, nothing.” When he and his father bathe at the Dead Sea later in the summer, Menachem again takes mercy on an animal, his wide eyes revealing the feelings in his heart. He has learned, of course, that there are no fish in the extremely salty Dead Sea, yet he is certain he has seen some. These fish, his father explains, swim in from the fresh springs and streams that feed the sea, but they quickly die. Menachem takes a plastic bag and sets about saving a fish , catching it in a stream before it reaches the harmful salt. But his plan goes awry, the knot in the bag loosens, the water spills, and the fish flounders on the muddy shore. An uncommanded merciful act gone awry, perhaps—just like his father the rabbi warned.
This family is the center of an Israeli film called Chufshat Kaitz (“Summer Vacation”). The film touches on many themes, but the question of commandedness lies at its center. The rabbi is certain of his actions; he performs mitzvot each day and says the proper blessings at the proper times. But his own certainty fails him when, in pursuit of the distressed fish, his son, unattended because his father is busy at prayer, wanders alone into the salty sea and drowns.
The notion that Menachem is punished for performing an act of mercy for an animal, an act not commanded by God, is ludicrous. The notion that it is the rabbi who is punished for his inability to see beyond the letter of the law is ludicrous. If one cannot believe in a God who commands us and then holds us, harshly, to those commandments, can we believe in a God at all? Why do we observe holidays and worry about the “repair of the world,” why do we go to synagogue, if we are not commanded to do so?
Talking about this at all already makes me feel a little uneasy. In many communities I belong to, “God” isn’t a usual topic of conversation. There’s an underlying suspicion about God. Are we talking about reward and punishment? Are we talking about hearing voices? Are we talking about denying evolution and enforcing fundamentalism on everyone?
I know I am in rabbinical school, but I am still ambivalent about answering questions about God, commandments, and my personal relationship to both. But just last week, I remembered the feeling I had when I was a child, and I believed in God though I didn’t think so much about it then. I remembered feeling comforted and relieved, not afraid and pressured. And when I re-watched the film Usshpizin, I found words to express that feeling: joy, gratitude, wonder, intimacy.
The couple in this film came to their religious practice later in life, and their prayers seem to have a more direct relationship to their daily lives than the scheduled prayers of Menachem’s father. Moshe and Mali are childless and poor; nothing seems to be going right for them, and Moshe assumes it is all a “test” from God. I don’t want to discuss the entire film here, but in a key scene, the couple receives a sum of money—well-timed, right before the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. When a man pushes the stuffed envelope under her door, Malki immediately sees this gift as a response to her prayer (“Give us a miracle.”). Dancing in her kitchen, Malki raises her arms and her eyes to God and sings: “For You are holy, and Your name is holy.”
I don’t want to argue that God does not command us, or that performing mitzvot isn’t important. But in my own mind and heart, I feel the mercy young Menachem yearns to demonstrate to the dog and to the young birds and to the fish to be God, to be the fulfillment of a commandment. I find God in moments like the one Malki responded to with such love and gratitude, and I don’t just mean “miracles.” I have never received an envelope full of money under my door, and I have rarely prayed directly for something that subsequently was granted, just the way I asked. But there have been times when I feel alone, in despair, left out, and weary. Suddenly, something happens that reminds me that I am not alone, and I am pulled back into the flow of the community. For example, on one of my first Shabbat evenings in Jerusalem, I went to an Orthodox synagogue for the first time, and I felt lost and conspicuous. And then the congregation sang a song I have always found comforting, in a familiar melody. It is the same song that Menachem’s community sings on the shores of the Dead Sea when a helicopter hovers above, looking for a sign of life that never comes: “Esa einai el he-harim. Me-ayin yavo ezri? Ezri me’im Adonai, oseh shamayim va-aretz,” “I lift my eyes to the mountains. From whence will my help come? My help is from Adonai, the maker of heaven and earth.”
I can remember moments when I felt certain of my relationship with God: crying in my childhood bedroom at the death of my grandmother, standing on a mountainside in Colorado looking at a faraway snow-covered peak, saying the words “I am gay” out loud to another human being for the first time, standing at the Kotel. Trying to decipher what these moments have in common, I think most of them point to a feeling of being called into relationship (with a family member, with a stranger, with the Jewish people) and of being called into that relationship truly and completely as myself—no pretenses, no lies, no adaptations to please others. And for me the notion of God and commandment means that, when a moment like this happens, the tears well up in my eyes, and my heart is full of passion, and I simply feel grateful.
In the song Malki uses to express her gratitude, the lyrics argue, “This culture is not for us, for there is fire in our hearts. […] And I am small, the last of the people, standing here excited, very excited.” Unlike Moshe and Malki, whose Haredi (Orthodox) lifestyle cordons them off from secular Jerusalem society, I don’t believe that this culture, a pluralistic world, is not for me, but sometimes I do feel like there is fire in my heart. And I do not think I am small or I am nothing, but I do acknowledge that the world does not begin and end with me. I want the fire in my heart to lead me to gratitude, like Malki’s joyful dance. And I want it to lead me to mercy, like Menachem’s compassion for the dog and his worry for the hatchlings. I want God and commandment and my own passionate response to lead me to scoop the fish up from danger, and to tie the knot stronger this time.
Menachem, the rabbi’s young son, a sincere and loving boy but not an eager scholar, is interested in the mother bird and her young. He has watched the nesting process from the window of the yeshiva and smiles at the hatchlings’ daily developments. When he learns that his father has shooed the mother away, he worries. He does not understand why God would require anyone to separate the young from their mother.
His father’s answer is somewhat harsh, and it made me consider my own thoughts on God, commandments, and our responsibility to fulfill them. You must fulfill the commandment, he warns, without asking, “What is the reason?” He warns, too, that performing a seemingly merciful act that is not commanded in the Torah is simply doing an evil disguised as a good. It may seem merciful, in other words, to allow the mother to nurture her young, but God commanded the opposite, and what could possibly be more merciful than God?
Menachem has animals on his mind when he asks about the mother bird. A few days before, he saw a woman being taken from her apartment building in an ambulance, in critical condition. Her dog remains faithfully by her side, whimpering and crouching, obviously in distress. That night, Menachem asks his father whether dogs “have a soul.” They have nothing, his father answers, “no soul, no commandments, nothing.” When he and his father bathe at the Dead Sea later in the summer, Menachem again takes mercy on an animal, his wide eyes revealing the feelings in his heart. He has learned, of course, that there are no fish in the extremely salty Dead Sea, yet he is certain he has seen some. These fish, his father explains, swim in from the fresh springs and streams that feed the sea, but they quickly die. Menachem takes a plastic bag and sets about saving a fish , catching it in a stream before it reaches the harmful salt. But his plan goes awry, the knot in the bag loosens, the water spills, and the fish flounders on the muddy shore. An uncommanded merciful act gone awry, perhaps—just like his father the rabbi warned.
This family is the center of an Israeli film called Chufshat Kaitz (“Summer Vacation”). The film touches on many themes, but the question of commandedness lies at its center. The rabbi is certain of his actions; he performs mitzvot each day and says the proper blessings at the proper times. But his own certainty fails him when, in pursuit of the distressed fish, his son, unattended because his father is busy at prayer, wanders alone into the salty sea and drowns.
The notion that Menachem is punished for performing an act of mercy for an animal, an act not commanded by God, is ludicrous. The notion that it is the rabbi who is punished for his inability to see beyond the letter of the law is ludicrous. If one cannot believe in a God who commands us and then holds us, harshly, to those commandments, can we believe in a God at all? Why do we observe holidays and worry about the “repair of the world,” why do we go to synagogue, if we are not commanded to do so?
Talking about this at all already makes me feel a little uneasy. In many communities I belong to, “God” isn’t a usual topic of conversation. There’s an underlying suspicion about God. Are we talking about reward and punishment? Are we talking about hearing voices? Are we talking about denying evolution and enforcing fundamentalism on everyone?
I know I am in rabbinical school, but I am still ambivalent about answering questions about God, commandments, and my personal relationship to both. But just last week, I remembered the feeling I had when I was a child, and I believed in God though I didn’t think so much about it then. I remembered feeling comforted and relieved, not afraid and pressured. And when I re-watched the film Usshpizin, I found words to express that feeling: joy, gratitude, wonder, intimacy.
The couple in this film came to their religious practice later in life, and their prayers seem to have a more direct relationship to their daily lives than the scheduled prayers of Menachem’s father. Moshe and Mali are childless and poor; nothing seems to be going right for them, and Moshe assumes it is all a “test” from God. I don’t want to discuss the entire film here, but in a key scene, the couple receives a sum of money—well-timed, right before the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. When a man pushes the stuffed envelope under her door, Malki immediately sees this gift as a response to her prayer (“Give us a miracle.”). Dancing in her kitchen, Malki raises her arms and her eyes to God and sings: “For You are holy, and Your name is holy.”
I don’t want to argue that God does not command us, or that performing mitzvot isn’t important. But in my own mind and heart, I feel the mercy young Menachem yearns to demonstrate to the dog and to the young birds and to the fish to be God, to be the fulfillment of a commandment. I find God in moments like the one Malki responded to with such love and gratitude, and I don’t just mean “miracles.” I have never received an envelope full of money under my door, and I have rarely prayed directly for something that subsequently was granted, just the way I asked. But there have been times when I feel alone, in despair, left out, and weary. Suddenly, something happens that reminds me that I am not alone, and I am pulled back into the flow of the community. For example, on one of my first Shabbat evenings in Jerusalem, I went to an Orthodox synagogue for the first time, and I felt lost and conspicuous. And then the congregation sang a song I have always found comforting, in a familiar melody. It is the same song that Menachem’s community sings on the shores of the Dead Sea when a helicopter hovers above, looking for a sign of life that never comes: “Esa einai el he-harim. Me-ayin yavo ezri? Ezri me’im Adonai, oseh shamayim va-aretz,” “I lift my eyes to the mountains. From whence will my help come? My help is from Adonai, the maker of heaven and earth.”
I can remember moments when I felt certain of my relationship with God: crying in my childhood bedroom at the death of my grandmother, standing on a mountainside in Colorado looking at a faraway snow-covered peak, saying the words “I am gay” out loud to another human being for the first time, standing at the Kotel. Trying to decipher what these moments have in common, I think most of them point to a feeling of being called into relationship (with a family member, with a stranger, with the Jewish people) and of being called into that relationship truly and completely as myself—no pretenses, no lies, no adaptations to please others. And for me the notion of God and commandment means that, when a moment like this happens, the tears well up in my eyes, and my heart is full of passion, and I simply feel grateful.
In the song Malki uses to express her gratitude, the lyrics argue, “This culture is not for us, for there is fire in our hearts. […] And I am small, the last of the people, standing here excited, very excited.” Unlike Moshe and Malki, whose Haredi (Orthodox) lifestyle cordons them off from secular Jerusalem society, I don’t believe that this culture, a pluralistic world, is not for me, but sometimes I do feel like there is fire in my heart. And I do not think I am small or I am nothing, but I do acknowledge that the world does not begin and end with me. I want the fire in my heart to lead me to gratitude, like Malki’s joyful dance. And I want it to lead me to mercy, like Menachem’s compassion for the dog and his worry for the hatchlings. I want God and commandment and my own passionate response to lead me to scoop the fish up from danger, and to tie the knot stronger this time.
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