Saturday night begins the final week of preparation for the Days of Awe: Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement. We pray for forgiveness and strength and courage of spirit using the words of Psalm 27, which begins “The Eternal is my light and my help; whom should I fear?”
A few lines down, the psalmist declares, “One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”
Just this one thing, the psalmist says, and then lists what appear to be three requests, all of them magnificent in scale: to dwell with God, to see God’s beauty, to visit God’s abode.
Just this one thing.
I seem to have innumerable requests of God this coming year: health for loved ones, a smooth acclimation to rabbinical school for me and my classmates, the humility and confidence to enter this profession, and other, sometimes petty, sometimes weighty concerns that often come with a new year. Help me keep up the weight loss. Help me balance school, work, and home. Don’t let me make a complete fool of myself in front of my fifth-graders. Help us continue to strengthen our marriage. Don’t let me lose touch with my sisters, my in-laws, my cousins, and my friends as the year gets busy.
Resolutions and reflections are common even at the secular new year, but the Jewish Rosh HaShana takes place in the context of the Days of Awe—days of terrible and awesome power and import, days in which, it is said, God decides the fate of all living things for the coming year. Even the angels tremble, according to the central prayer of Rosh HaShana, before the judgment of God. We are called to make a heshbon nefesh, a spiritual accounting, a detailed balance sheet of our lives and deeds over the past year. It is a daunting and certainly a humbling task.
And in the course of all this self-searching, as we make amends face-to-face with the people we have wronged over the past year, knowing that the forgiveness God can grant on Yom Kippur will not erase our duties toward other human beings, we pray Selichot, pleading prayers for forgiveness and for the ability to repent, to turn to God, to start the new year with sincerity.
And we make requests.
“One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”
What would your one thing be? What deep desire lies at the heart of your turning to God and to good this year?
I’ve already joked that I can’t cut it down to just one thing, but I wonder if the psalmist was on to something, declaring his “one” request and then listing what seem to be three. Perhaps living in God’s house, gazing upon God’s beauty, and visiting God’s Temple are, indeed, all one thing. Perhaps it’s about how we look at the world, how we perceive the limited reality that surrounds us, and in some cases (I know in my own and, during this economic crisis, in many others’ lives it does) burdens us.
If the one thing I seek is to live with God all the days of my life—and I am most certainly not talking about afterlife—where might I gaze upon God’s beauty and visit his Temple? I’m not generally a literal reader of the Tanakh, and so I can imagine many situations in which we do gaze upon God’s beauty and visit God’s Temple: live with God in the days of our own lives. I think about the amazing experiences of the past year: sharing Shabbat during the joyful holiday of Sukkot with family in Tzfat, standing under the huppah and singing the Sheva Brachot (the seven wedding blessings) for my friends, hugging and kissing Rachel in the airport upon my return from Jerusalem, hearing an amazing sermon about our duties to ourselves and each another from Dean Idelson of HUC, sharing a Shabbat meal with old friends and new around our table in Brooklyn. In small ways, we can get a taste of what it’s like to live in the house of the Eternal, but we have to be open to feeling those moments.
Sometimes the one thing we ask for is a huge thing. We can’t put it into words or separate out its components. It seems un-grantable. It seems too big and too far for us to grasp. But it might be around us, in little pieces. We have to look at them, to turn them in the light. But they are there. They are little pieces of that one thing we seek.
“Hear, Eternal, when I cry out; have mercy on me, answer me […] Do not hide Your face.”
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Dust, Ashes, Everything
Since my childhood, I have struggled with “Pride.” In Catholicism, pride is a sin—a grave one. And when I was just six years old, a nun implied that I danced dangerously close to committing that grave sin.
I can’t remember what prompted the conversation, but this nun—who was well-meaning, I am sure—warned me not to discuss my academic accomplishments in front of other children, but she warned, too, that I must not earn anything less than an “A” in every class or activity. “God gave you a gift,” she said, “and you shouldn’t waste it. But God didn’t give all the other children the same gift, so you shouldn’t brag.”
I am fairly certain that, at six years old and already fairly self-critical, I had no real notion of the difference between proudly acknowledging my “gifts” and sinfully bragging about them. The conversation left me ashamed of my “natural” abilities and terrified of noting when I had, indeed, worked hard to achieve something. Every hard-earned milestone in reading and writing came to feel like an amazing gift I did not deserve.
Over the past year in Jerusalem, I have learned much about pride from my colleagues in rabbinical school—many of whom seem to have been, like me, self-critical and extremely bright children. One, with whom I share a joy (and I suppose a fear) of “grades,” introduced me to a famous Chasidic teaching. I am sure she did not know she was introducing me to the teaching, and I am positive she knew nothing of how much it has influenced my thinking about the upcoming year at the New York campus.
Here is the story: A Chasidic rabbi taught that a man ought to carry two slips of paper, one in each pocket. “I am but dust and ashes,” one reads; the other, “The world was created for me.”
Perhaps humility, awe, and gratitude are better words than “pride” to describe what this rabbi was getting at. The phrase “I am but dust and ashes” is taken from the story of Abraham confronting God about the plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham approaches God and God’s power with humility, with an awareness of his humble beginnings and of his mortality. Even in his moment of audaciously challenging God, Abraham knew his limits. We are here temporarily, and we are small. Yet, “The world was created” for each of us. This phrase appears in the Talmud (a long and complex work of rabbinic literature edited around the year 600 CE), and it is part of a longer discussion about Adam, the first human being, and about what it means to be human. Human beings were created from one original creation, Adam, in order to teach all human beings several lessons about our place in the world. For example, we learn that, while human beings use a single stamp to produce many identical coins, God used one image (Adam, created in the image of God) to produce many human beings who are far from identical. The Talmud concludes, “For this reason, every individual must say, the world was created for me.”
I am trying to approach the coming year, and my own studies and growth, with these two pieces of wisdom in mind. I am indeed but dust and ashes, and no matter how clever or accomplished I am, I am but one person trying to approach the world in humility, in awareness of my own limitations. But the world was created for me: I need not sink into self-deprecating despair at my small place in the universe but instead celebrate my uniqueness and indeed take responsibility in the world. If the world was created for me, what I am asked to do in that world? I am not utterly powerless. I have a role to play. And I want to approach the year with gratitude to the One who created this world for me and who created me from dust and ashes.
I can’t remember what prompted the conversation, but this nun—who was well-meaning, I am sure—warned me not to discuss my academic accomplishments in front of other children, but she warned, too, that I must not earn anything less than an “A” in every class or activity. “God gave you a gift,” she said, “and you shouldn’t waste it. But God didn’t give all the other children the same gift, so you shouldn’t brag.”
I am fairly certain that, at six years old and already fairly self-critical, I had no real notion of the difference between proudly acknowledging my “gifts” and sinfully bragging about them. The conversation left me ashamed of my “natural” abilities and terrified of noting when I had, indeed, worked hard to achieve something. Every hard-earned milestone in reading and writing came to feel like an amazing gift I did not deserve.
Over the past year in Jerusalem, I have learned much about pride from my colleagues in rabbinical school—many of whom seem to have been, like me, self-critical and extremely bright children. One, with whom I share a joy (and I suppose a fear) of “grades,” introduced me to a famous Chasidic teaching. I am sure she did not know she was introducing me to the teaching, and I am positive she knew nothing of how much it has influenced my thinking about the upcoming year at the New York campus.
Here is the story: A Chasidic rabbi taught that a man ought to carry two slips of paper, one in each pocket. “I am but dust and ashes,” one reads; the other, “The world was created for me.”
Perhaps humility, awe, and gratitude are better words than “pride” to describe what this rabbi was getting at. The phrase “I am but dust and ashes” is taken from the story of Abraham confronting God about the plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham approaches God and God’s power with humility, with an awareness of his humble beginnings and of his mortality. Even in his moment of audaciously challenging God, Abraham knew his limits. We are here temporarily, and we are small. Yet, “The world was created” for each of us. This phrase appears in the Talmud (a long and complex work of rabbinic literature edited around the year 600 CE), and it is part of a longer discussion about Adam, the first human being, and about what it means to be human. Human beings were created from one original creation, Adam, in order to teach all human beings several lessons about our place in the world. For example, we learn that, while human beings use a single stamp to produce many identical coins, God used one image (Adam, created in the image of God) to produce many human beings who are far from identical. The Talmud concludes, “For this reason, every individual must say, the world was created for me.”
I am trying to approach the coming year, and my own studies and growth, with these two pieces of wisdom in mind. I am indeed but dust and ashes, and no matter how clever or accomplished I am, I am but one person trying to approach the world in humility, in awareness of my own limitations. But the world was created for me: I need not sink into self-deprecating despair at my small place in the universe but instead celebrate my uniqueness and indeed take responsibility in the world. If the world was created for me, what I am asked to do in that world? I am not utterly powerless. I have a role to play. And I want to approach the year with gratitude to the One who created this world for me and who created me from dust and ashes.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Jubilee
The following was given as my student sermon at the end of the academic year in Jerusalem.
In thirteen days, a voice over a loudspeaker will proclaim: “Now boarding El Al Flight 331 to New York.” My jubilee.
At least, that’s what I first thought when I sat down to write about this week’s parasha, which includes instructions for counting to the Jubilee year. I admit it: I am counting down, and in my mind I’m counting down to “jubilee,” popularly connoting joy and celebration, a translation of the Hebrew yoveil,.
When the ancient Israelites followed the laws of the Jubilee year, what did they do? We heard this morning, V’kidashtem et shnat hachamishim shana u’kratem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha—yoveil hi t’hiyeh lachem –You shall sanctify the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty in the land, unto all its inhabitants: it shall be a yoveil for you.
The Torah instructs us to observe the yoveil by counting seven times seven years, and by blowing the shofar to proclaim the fiftieth year, a year of liberty—d’ror. Any Jew who has sold himself into slavery is released; planting and harvesting cease. Land sold in the previous years reverts to its original owner, and we live on the previous crops, like in the Sabbatical year. As Modern Orthodox commentator Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch notes, the yoveil year is a leveler: all people become equally dependent on God for their sustenance, from the rich landowner to the poor slave. All are reminded that what we own in this world does not belong to us, but rather, is given by God. We remember that we cannot be slaves to any human master because our only avodah, our only service, is to God.
Most of us aren’t counting out the years to the Jubilee, carefully planning our crops. In the past, the yoveil concretely reminded us that we don’t own this world in which we live. Today, without that concrete returning, what does the yoveil teach us? What does the word itself mean? And how helpful is the contemporary association with release, freedom, jubilee and, indeed, jubilation?
While Rashi tells us yoveil means “ram’s horn,” to symbolize the shofar proclaiming liberty, Ramban wonders, “what sense is there” in declaring that a year “shall be unto you a blowing of a ram’s horn”? Instead, the focus of the yoveil, for him, is the d’ror, the liberty. This freedom is not the shichrur we hear about in the news, hoping for the release of Gilad Shalit, nor the chofesh of vacation. D’ror is a unique word, appearing only this once in the Torah. Brown, Driver, and Briggs translate it as both “a flowing” and as “free run, liberty.” In Jeremiah, a d’ror is a stream, an abundant flow of water, and a d’ror is a swallow, a bird that resists captivity.
The shofar blast announces, then, that we are, each of us, free to flow where the current will take us, free to bear responsibility only to ourselves and to our God—no longer bound, no longer slaves. The yoveil announces this freedom, but, according to Ramban, it also does something else. Yoveil denotes transportation. The word is derived from the root yud-vet-lamed, l’hovil to conduct, to bear along, yuval, to to be transported. The 18th-century commentary MeAm Lo’ez reads this “transportation” literally: things are returned, physically moved. Land reverts to its original owners, slaves return to their ancestral homes. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch digs a bit deeper, saying that the yoveil is a kind of spiritual homecoming, “to bring a person to where he is suited to be, or a thing to whom it really belongs.”
So we’re back to the beginning, then: I will return to where, and to whom, I really belong, in thirteen days, and it will be unto me a yoveil.
But I’m not so sure. Because the yoveil is also about being transported, being carried … but carried to where?
U’kratem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha—yoveil hi t’hiyeh lachem—v’shavtem ish el achuzato v’ish el misphachto tashuvu—and each of you will return to his holding and each of you will return to his family.
The yoveil, after the counting of seven times seven years, in the fiftieth year, an occurrence perhaps as rare in our lives as the word d’ror is rare in the Torah—the yoveil carries us, brings us home. We return to our source, Ramban says, referring to a verse in Jeremiah: Baruch hagever asher yivtach b’adonai, v’haya Adonai mivtacho. V’haya c’eitz shatul al mayim, v’al yuval y’shalach shorashav—“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Eternal, whose trust is the Eternal alone. He shall be like a tree planted by waters, sending forth its roots by a yuval, a stream.” The yoveil promises to return us to our roots, to our nourishing source, to a cool and steady stream.
Where is your source, the place where your roots drink deep? When the shofar proclaims d’ror to all the land, where will the yoveil transport you?
Perhaps the sound of the shofar has already proclaimed d’ror, and the yoveil has carried us to the Year in Israel.
What if this has been our Jubilee year?
D’ror might not be the first word that comes to mind, but what else has this year brought?
It’s brought culture shock, tiskul, dramatic surroundings and spiritual heights. It’s brought moments you’ll remember: your first trip to the Kotel, a sunrise in the desert, and meeting a new friend who has become a lifelong friend. We have lived a unique experience, one intended to nourish our roots and make them stronger.
We have been transported to the land to which Avram migrated, sight unseen, leaving behind his land and his birthplace and his father’s house—the land that became the birthplace of the Jewish people as a people. Whether we criticize it or praise it, Israel remains an origin, the achuzah, the portion or holding that one returns to during the Jubilee year, the achuzah of the Jewish people. However much Hannah Shafir and of course Harrison would be thrilled to hear it, I don’t mean that we should all cancel our return flights and set up permanent homes here. I mean that we will always be linked to this place; our future congregants and students will expect us to have a relationship to Israel as a State, a homeland, or a nation—positive, negative or indifferent—but some kind of relationship. During this Jubilee year, how has Israel served as your achuza?
Or perhaps it has not. Perhaps you’ve learned that your roots are utterly disconnected from this physical place, but they are nourished by Israel in the sense of peoplehood. Our parasha instructs us, v’ish el misphachto tashuvu, each of you will return to his family. Our community can strive to be for one another a mishpacha of colleagues. And we can continue to engage with Hebrew, the language of the Jewish mishpacha.
Yoveil comes from the verb l’hovil: to bring, to bear, to carry. I don’t know about you, but I was carried here—carried here by Judaism, faith, career goals, idealism… and, sure, carried here (somewhat unwillingly) by HUC. We have been brought, and we have brought with us our histories, our knowledge, our ignorance, our faith, and our doubt. I sincerely challenge each of us to recognize that this year has indeed served as a yoveil, a return to origins, a release into a year of introspection, study, and relationship to God, Israel, and the Jewish community. I have been carried to Israel, but I hope and pray that I have also been transported—transported to a new understanding of what it means to live a Jewish life, transported and transformed.
After all, we won’t get a chance like this for another forty-nine years.
In thirteen days, a voice over a loudspeaker will proclaim: “Now boarding El Al Flight 331 to New York.” My jubilee.
At least, that’s what I first thought when I sat down to write about this week’s parasha, which includes instructions for counting to the Jubilee year. I admit it: I am counting down, and in my mind I’m counting down to “jubilee,” popularly connoting joy and celebration, a translation of the Hebrew yoveil,.
When the ancient Israelites followed the laws of the Jubilee year, what did they do? We heard this morning, V’kidashtem et shnat hachamishim shana u’kratem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha—yoveil hi t’hiyeh lachem –You shall sanctify the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty in the land, unto all its inhabitants: it shall be a yoveil for you.
The Torah instructs us to observe the yoveil by counting seven times seven years, and by blowing the shofar to proclaim the fiftieth year, a year of liberty—d’ror. Any Jew who has sold himself into slavery is released; planting and harvesting cease. Land sold in the previous years reverts to its original owner, and we live on the previous crops, like in the Sabbatical year. As Modern Orthodox commentator Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch notes, the yoveil year is a leveler: all people become equally dependent on God for their sustenance, from the rich landowner to the poor slave. All are reminded that what we own in this world does not belong to us, but rather, is given by God. We remember that we cannot be slaves to any human master because our only avodah, our only service, is to God.
Most of us aren’t counting out the years to the Jubilee, carefully planning our crops. In the past, the yoveil concretely reminded us that we don’t own this world in which we live. Today, without that concrete returning, what does the yoveil teach us? What does the word itself mean? And how helpful is the contemporary association with release, freedom, jubilee and, indeed, jubilation?
While Rashi tells us yoveil means “ram’s horn,” to symbolize the shofar proclaiming liberty, Ramban wonders, “what sense is there” in declaring that a year “shall be unto you a blowing of a ram’s horn”? Instead, the focus of the yoveil, for him, is the d’ror, the liberty. This freedom is not the shichrur we hear about in the news, hoping for the release of Gilad Shalit, nor the chofesh of vacation. D’ror is a unique word, appearing only this once in the Torah. Brown, Driver, and Briggs translate it as both “a flowing” and as “free run, liberty.” In Jeremiah, a d’ror is a stream, an abundant flow of water, and a d’ror is a swallow, a bird that resists captivity.
The shofar blast announces, then, that we are, each of us, free to flow where the current will take us, free to bear responsibility only to ourselves and to our God—no longer bound, no longer slaves. The yoveil announces this freedom, but, according to Ramban, it also does something else. Yoveil denotes transportation. The word is derived from the root yud-vet-lamed, l’hovil to conduct, to bear along, yuval, to to be transported. The 18th-century commentary MeAm Lo’ez reads this “transportation” literally: things are returned, physically moved. Land reverts to its original owners, slaves return to their ancestral homes. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch digs a bit deeper, saying that the yoveil is a kind of spiritual homecoming, “to bring a person to where he is suited to be, or a thing to whom it really belongs.”
So we’re back to the beginning, then: I will return to where, and to whom, I really belong, in thirteen days, and it will be unto me a yoveil.
But I’m not so sure. Because the yoveil is also about being transported, being carried … but carried to where?
U’kratem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha—yoveil hi t’hiyeh lachem—v’shavtem ish el achuzato v’ish el misphachto tashuvu—and each of you will return to his holding and each of you will return to his family.
The yoveil, after the counting of seven times seven years, in the fiftieth year, an occurrence perhaps as rare in our lives as the word d’ror is rare in the Torah—the yoveil carries us, brings us home. We return to our source, Ramban says, referring to a verse in Jeremiah: Baruch hagever asher yivtach b’adonai, v’haya Adonai mivtacho. V’haya c’eitz shatul al mayim, v’al yuval y’shalach shorashav—“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Eternal, whose trust is the Eternal alone. He shall be like a tree planted by waters, sending forth its roots by a yuval, a stream.” The yoveil promises to return us to our roots, to our nourishing source, to a cool and steady stream.
Where is your source, the place where your roots drink deep? When the shofar proclaims d’ror to all the land, where will the yoveil transport you?
Perhaps the sound of the shofar has already proclaimed d’ror, and the yoveil has carried us to the Year in Israel.
What if this has been our Jubilee year?
D’ror might not be the first word that comes to mind, but what else has this year brought?
It’s brought culture shock, tiskul, dramatic surroundings and spiritual heights. It’s brought moments you’ll remember: your first trip to the Kotel, a sunrise in the desert, and meeting a new friend who has become a lifelong friend. We have lived a unique experience, one intended to nourish our roots and make them stronger.
We have been transported to the land to which Avram migrated, sight unseen, leaving behind his land and his birthplace and his father’s house—the land that became the birthplace of the Jewish people as a people. Whether we criticize it or praise it, Israel remains an origin, the achuzah, the portion or holding that one returns to during the Jubilee year, the achuzah of the Jewish people. However much Hannah Shafir and of course Harrison would be thrilled to hear it, I don’t mean that we should all cancel our return flights and set up permanent homes here. I mean that we will always be linked to this place; our future congregants and students will expect us to have a relationship to Israel as a State, a homeland, or a nation—positive, negative or indifferent—but some kind of relationship. During this Jubilee year, how has Israel served as your achuza?
Or perhaps it has not. Perhaps you’ve learned that your roots are utterly disconnected from this physical place, but they are nourished by Israel in the sense of peoplehood. Our parasha instructs us, v’ish el misphachto tashuvu, each of you will return to his family. Our community can strive to be for one another a mishpacha of colleagues. And we can continue to engage with Hebrew, the language of the Jewish mishpacha.
Yoveil comes from the verb l’hovil: to bring, to bear, to carry. I don’t know about you, but I was carried here—carried here by Judaism, faith, career goals, idealism… and, sure, carried here (somewhat unwillingly) by HUC. We have been brought, and we have brought with us our histories, our knowledge, our ignorance, our faith, and our doubt. I sincerely challenge each of us to recognize that this year has indeed served as a yoveil, a return to origins, a release into a year of introspection, study, and relationship to God, Israel, and the Jewish community. I have been carried to Israel, but I hope and pray that I have also been transported—transported to a new understanding of what it means to live a Jewish life, transported and transformed.
After all, we won’t get a chance like this for another forty-nine years.
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