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This past weekend was my mother’s fifth Yahrzeit. It was a kind of surreal milestone, made more unusual by the snowy quiet of the day that preceded it. As I was settling into my time of remembering on Saturday night, I was fortunate to join in a post-Shabbat jam, led by my friend and colleague Rabbi Ben Shalva.
There are few things I find more healing than singing with other people, and I was starting to breathe a little more easily when Ben started playing the familiar strains of “If I Had a Hammer.” Almost immediately, I was transported in my mind to a memory of standing on my parents’ front porch, hearing my mother sing that song to me. It was as if she was right there with me. I was so grateful for her presence on a night when her memory was very much on my mind. My parents raised me and my brother on a steady diet of Motown and folk music. We saw Peter, Paul, and Mary in concert a good number of times, and I knew their songs by heart. “If I Had a Hammer” was definitely in the regular rotation. And although both of my parents couldn’t have possibly been more “square,” they never shied away from the social messages often at the heart of the songs in the folk music tradition. It was in part through those songs that I learned to care about the values of equality, justice, and making room for multiple voices to be heard. Indeed, the songs we sing speak volumes about who we are and who we might become. Mom’s Yahrzeit falls on or around the week of Parashat B’Shalaḥ, when we chant another song, the Song of the Sea. After escaping the violent pursuit by the Egyptians and miraculously crossing the sea, the Israelites, led by Moshe and Miriam, cry out in song. Their song is an expression of their gratitude, of their joy that God protected them. At the same time, a well-known midrashic interpretation of this week’s Torah reading (Babylonian Talmud Megillah 10b) envisions the heavenly angels bearing witness to the Israelites’ escape into the sea and seeking to turn to each other in joyful song. But the Holy Blessed One said, “My creations are drowning in the sea and you wish to sing?!” While it was acceptable for the Israelites to focus on their own experience and sing about their miraculous deliverance, God expected the angels to have a broader perspective, understanding that the salvation of the Israelites brought with it the destruction of the Egyptians. We are not angels and we can only really know our own experiences. But the Talmud’s words are meant to be instructive to us as well. Everything that happens in this world has multiple points of impact. Our moments of song and celebration may entail suffering for others. Our own songs should be sung, but we must not allow them to drown out everything else. Shabbat shalom.
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One of my favorite questions from a student centers on Parashat Bo, from which we read this week. About a million years ago, in my first congregation, I was discussing Parashat HaShavua with the fifth grade students. We were talking about the importance of the story of the Exodus, how it’s the story of our becoming a nation, the story that drives our celebration of Pesaḥ. One student insightfully asked: If this is the story of Pesaḥ, and that story is so important to us, why do we read it now, in the winter? Why don’t we read it in the spring, closer to the holiday?
Her question parallels another question about the way the Torah tells the story of Pesaḥ, a question about the anticlimactic pause right in the middle of our parashah. The beginning of Parashat Bo tells of plagues number 8 and 9, locusts and darkness. Moshe then comes before Pharaoh with Aaron and explains what will happen for the tenth and worst plague, the death of the firstborn. And then…we learn the rules for the Jewish calendar and the procedure for celebrating Pesaḥ. It does get back to the exciting stuff after a good bit, detailing the Israelites’ night of painting their doorposts with the blood of the sacrifice and waiting through that terrible night for the right moment to leave. But it’s a noteworthy place to have a pause in the action. There are innumerable commentaries and midrashim offering explanations for the presence of this legal passage in the midst of an otherwise pretty exciting part of the Exodus narrative. However, the answer that speaks most to me right now is the same answer I gave my fifth grade student all those years ago: Planning ahead is important. We read the story of Pesaḥ in the dead of winter, when we can better appreciate its twists and turns, allowing ourselves to feel the desperation and the awe without worrying about making shopping and clearing lists. This no-strings-attached reading helps us more openly engage with the story, planting a seed for how we envision our celebration of Pesaḥ a few months down the road. Similarly, the break in the narrative right before the final plague’s execution serves as an instruction both to the Israelites and to us to pause and make a plan before jumping into something big. The plan that’s given to the Israelites in that moment isn’t intended for so far in the future; it’s meant for more immediate use. Still the message is there - before you do something, stop and figure out how you want to do it. This is advice I need to hear and I imagine I’m not alone. From the busy-ness of our lives to the expectation that things like social media posts need immediate responses, we can easily forget the value of pausing and planning. I invite you this week to follow the underlying message of Parashat Bo and find an opportunity to pause and plan. Maybe you take a night to sleep on an email response. Or you give yourself room to breathe and think about what you want to say when a child or partner says something that pushes your buttons. Or you make a meal plan for the week before you do your grocery shopping. Find the opportunity to pause and plan that makes the most sense for your life. Try it out. I’ll be doing it too. Shabbat shalom! Recently, I had the most wonderful opportunity to spend a quiet, child-free evening with my closest friend. We ordered in dinner, camped out on the couch, and talked. For hours. And hours. This is not a new thing for us. When we were roommates our first year of college, we would stay up until far too late in the night talking about everything. But it had been a good long while since we had been able to reenact our college dorm days so closely.
During our far-ranging conversation, we reflected on our parents’ friendships, how we would see them interacting with their dearest friends and how this would give us a glimpse of pieces of our parents that we didn’t really know. We talked about how we have only gotten to know certain aspects of who our parents are as adults, when both we and they were ready to share those parts of themselves with us. We reflected on how this was also true for our own children. Even though we parent very differently from how we were parented, being far more open with our children than our parents were with us, we realized that our children, too, only know pieces of who we are. We see something similar happening in our Torah reading this week. Parashat Vaera begins with God speaking to Moshe with an act of introduction. “God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord [YHVH].” (Exodus 6:2) At first read, this passage is perplexing. God and Moshe have already met. The burning bush has already happened. And even though God doesn’t use God’s name the first time Moshe encounters the Divine, God does use this name when telling Moshe what to say to the Israelites. It’s a name that should be familiar to Moshe. There’s no reason to start from scratch here. A number of commentaries and midrashim pick up on this inconsistency, going in different versions of the same direction to explain it. In one way or another, they each say that God was introducing Moshe to an aspect of the Divine self that he hadn’t before known. Moshe is being introduced to God’s promise to reward the faithful, or to God’s merciful nature, or to God’s power to sustain the entire universe, or to God’s eternality, and so on. Each of these attributes of God, previously unknown to Moshe, would be important for their relationship and for liberating the Israelites. Moshe didn’t know these parts of God’s character before, because he wasn’t ready to. Reading this text through the lens of my conversation with my friend highlights for me something about my ever-evolving relationship with God. As children, we thought we knew our parents so well and as adults, after putting ourselves in our children’s shoes, we realized that we didn’t know them very well at all. Only over time and with experience did we come to know more and more facets of our parents as people. Similarly, we often read our sacred texts and find in them prescriptions and descriptions of God. We sometimes come out of that, like children, believing that we know who and what God is, that we know God well. This scene at the beginning of Parashat Vaera is telling us that God is not static. Our relationship with God also need not be static. We can hope to be like Moshe, over time seeing more and more facets of who God is, when both we and God are ready. I love to read the text of the Torah closely, noticing how the text’s word choices and turns of phrase add nuance and, layers of meaning to my understanding. One of my favorite close readings comes right at the start of this week’s parashah, right at the beginning of our new book of Shemot.
The book opens by reminding us of the journey down to Egypt, and lists the names of בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (b’nei Yisrael), the children of Israel - that is to say, Jacob - who traveled to Egypt in search of food. This passage connects us back to the book of Bereishit, revisiting the members of the family, our ancestors, who were the primary subject of that first book of the Torah. Just a few short verses later, the text jumps several generations and tells us, וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל were fertile and prolific, multiplying greatly and filling the land. This time, the use of the term בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (b’nei Yisrael) describes not a family, but a nation. And for the remainder of the Torah (and the rest of the Tankah that follows), the term בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (b’nei Yisrael) always means the entire people, the nation of Israel. Here at the very beginning of the book of Shemot is where we see the denotation of the phrase suddenly shift from a collection of individuals to a national collective. I usually read this section of Shemot just as I described above, noting that by changing the meaning of the phrase בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (b’nei Yisrael), the Torah is moving its focus from our family of origin, away from the particular, to our whole people, to the more universal. But today, I’m feeling inspired to flip things around a bit and read the text in the opposite direction. Rather than seeing the individual children of Israel overtaken by the large and populous (and therefore more anonymous) nation of Israel, I want to remind myself and all of us that our nation, our community, is not one monolithic organism, but made up of distinct individuals. Each of us brings something unique to our community. We have our own personalities, talents, needs, passions, vulnerabilities, histories, and beliefs. We contribute to the community in many different ways and we each feel part of the community in our own way. In my first reading of the text, the strength of the nation lies in its collective identity. We had become too many to count, filling the land in fulfillment of God’s promise to our forebears. In this flipped around reading, our strength as a community lies in our ability to recognize each other’s unique perspective. We may differ from each other in significant ways, but we need not all be the same to be one nation, one community. When we allow ourselves to express our differences and respect each other for who we truly are, we create a community that embraces diversity and values the role of every individual. May we continue to work together to build and sustain such a community. |
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November 2024
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