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I’m so excited for this coming Shabbat. While we’re calling this weekend a rabbinic installation, it’s about so much more than that. It’s a chance to celebrate everything that makes Chevrei Tzedek the gem of a community that we are, to show off a little bit, and to publicly acknowledge the relationship that we’re developing together with me as your rabbi.
That relationship is a sacred one and so we look to our sacred texts for the values and ideals that form its foundation. Parashat Ki Tisa might not seem the most obvious place to look for those values and ideals, given that much of the narrative is concerned with the sin of the Golden Calf and its devastating aftermath. But within and around that difficult part of our story, we find a number of important components for creating and sustaining a sacred relationship. In describing Moshe’s convenings with God in the Tent of Meeting, the text relates: “God would speak to Moses face to face, as one person speaks to another.” (Exodus 33:11) This relationship is close, intimate, personal. When you speak to someone face to face, you give them your attention. You see them as they are, without pretense or prejudice. In his elucidation of this verse, the medieval commentator Ḥizkuni notes another important feature of this relationship - its parity. To speak face to face, as one person speaks to another, both parties must be on the same level. Ḥizkuni comments that, in their moments together in the Tent of Meeting, either God came down to Moshe’s level, or Moshe ascended to God’s level, allowing each of them to take full and equal part in their conversations. Sacred relationships are honest. They are deep. They are about making room for the other, not asserting power. Face to face, however, does not mean all-access. We read later in this same section of the Parashah that Moshe beseeches God, “Oh, let me behold Your Presence!” (33:18) The Hebrew for Your Presence, כְּבֹדֶךָ, is translated and interpreted in a number of ways - God’s unfettered self, God’s heavenly glory, God’s fundamental operating principle. What links each of these translations and interpretations is the idea that Moshe is asking to see God’s most personal side, “the man behind the curtain,” as it were. And God says no, explaining that no person may see that part of God. Instead, God tenderly promises to show Moshe all of God’s goodness, and places Moshe in a rocky cleft when passing by, so that Moshe can see and feel these parts of God’s presence from a place of protection. Sacred relationships respect people’s boundaries. Asserting and honoring those boundaries, as we see with God and Moshe, is an act of kindness and love. Moshe spends a lot of time in conversation with God in the Parashah: 40 days of carving new tablets, reestablishing the covenant, teasing out the parameters of how the people would relate to God and how God would relate to the people. When Moshe finally returns to the people, “the skin of his face [is] radiant, since he had spoken with God.” (Exodus 34:29) He is permanently changed by his encounter with the Divine. God’s presence is described in a number of different places in the Torah as fire and light. It’s almost as though Moshe’s glowing face is the result of a little bit of God’s fire rubbing off on him. Sacred relationships change us. We leave pieces of ourselves on each other, and when we do it well, our light grows. As we prepare to celebrate together this weekend, I am inspired by the sacredness we have already discovered in each other and am looking forward to continuing to grow and deepen our relationship. May we continue to bring out the light in one another. Shabbat shalom.
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One of the key ideas from the parts of the Torah we read over these weeks is the message that a community is greater than the sum of its parts. Over the course of the final five parshiyot of the book of Shemot, we read, in exhaustive detail, of the ingredients and procedures for building and maintaining the Mishkan. On a basic level, the Mishkan wouldn’t be complete or fully functional without any one of those pieces – so one could say that the community is exactly the sum of its parts. But when those parts come together in the way they’re intended to, the magic happens and something holy is brought into the world, making the Mishkan – and any sacred community – so much more than just the conglomerate of things that went into building it.
As we well know, so much can happen to a community to compromise that magic. Our community has been weathering such a challenging period and we’ve been working to find opportunities to bring us back together, reconnect us as individuals and as a larger group. The first step to beginning this work is creating spaces for really and truly listening to each other. This past week, we were fortunate to welcome Daniel Langenthal, a community consultant and educator from the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, to help us take the first steps on this journey. Starting with a smaller group, we spent an evening working on attuning our listening skills. We began by singing together, each of us spending some time contributing to the music in the room and some time taking a step back to listen to each other’s voices. The depth and connection that emerged from that experience were palpable. We then spent time looking inward, exploring our own responses to conflicts we’ve individually experienced and thinking deeply about the perspectives of the others with whom we’ve had discord. We turned next to each other, sharing our feelings about the challenges in our community, aiming to speak from our own experiences and feelings rather than rehashing what had already happened. We learned a number of important lessons from this first conversation:
During this time of sacred building in the Torah, I’m grateful to be living that out in the work we do together. I hope you’ll join me in it. Shabbat shalom. This is the week in our yearly Torah cycle when we first shift away from the story and narrative and majesty that have characterized the first book and a half of the Torah. As we move into the parts of the Torah detailing the plans, construction, and ritual use of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle that traveled with the Israelites on their journey, the narrative arc becomes less constant. Instead we have the technical writing section of the Torah, the blueprints and user manuals that underlay our sacred text.
As more of a humanities person, I have always struggled with this section of the Torah, preferring to stick to searching for deeper meaning in the pieces that felt more relatable to me. The first community I served as a rabbi, however, was chock full of scientists and engineers. To my utter surprise, they absolutely loved this part of the Torah. In our years together, they opened my eyes to the beauty and power contained in the detailed lists that make up much of this section. Parashat Terumah begins with such a list, detailing the items that were to be collected from the Israelites for the construction of the Mishkan. Among the more conventional building supplies, we read that they were to collect “tanned ram skins and taḥash skins,” (Exodus 25:5) which would be used as a covering. While I am deliberately leaving the word taḥash untranslated, English versions of the Torah often render this word as “dolphin,” “seal,” or even “dugong.” Not a material you see every day. And although I just said that the narrative arc all but disappears in this section of the Torah, let’s remember where we are for a moment - in the wilderness, just a few months out from having left Egypt and the momentous Revelation at Mount Sinai. In other words, in the desert. No matter which aquatic mammal you prefer as the translation of taḥash, they were all in short supply at this point in the people’s journey. Rashi’s commentary on this word draws from the Talmud’s discussion of the taḥash (Shabbat 28a) as well as a related midrashic account (Tanḥuma, Terumah 6:1). Evidently, the taḥash is a miraculous creature of the wilderness, distinguished by its massive size, single horn protruding from its head, and the many colors of its skin. It was known by the name Sasgona, because it prided itself (שש / sas) in its vibrant colors (גוונין / g’vanin). What can we learn from this mysterious taḥash and its role in the construction of the Mishkan? In many ways, the Mishkan was both a reflection of and an aspirational statement about the Israelite community. Built from voluntary donations, it was a house of the people. Meant as a locus for God’s presence, it was a place where the Divine could be experienced. Constructed from both common natural resources and precious materials, it symbolized the blending of mundane and sacred. Covered by vibrantly colorful taḥash skins, it represented the diversity of the people and the necessity of inclusivity. The taḥash took pride, found joy, in its many colors. As a Jewish community, we should also experience the diversity that exists among us - of background, of opinion, of identity - as a source of joy and pride. The Midrash explains that the taḥash existed only at this time, and that it disappeared after the construction of the Mishkan. This is also instructive. Maintaining our openness to diversity, our pride and joy in the differences that exist within our community, is challenging. True and lasting inclusivity can be elusive. However, the Mishkan stayed with the people, accompanying them on their journey through the wilderness and even into the Promised Land. That whole time the vibrant many-colored covering of taḥash skins remained in place. That, too, should be our aim. May it also be our blessing. Shabbat shalom. I didn’t watch the Grammys this past week and I honestly hadn’t thought about the awards ceremony at all when I began seeing my social media feeds blow up with people offering commentary, posting videos, and sharing articles about one or both of two performances: Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell.
That made me pay attention. In addition to the sheer volume of things I was hearing and seeing about the two performances, Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell had been key parts of the soundtrack of my college years. I had listened to their music on long walks, analyzed their lyrics in my dorm room, and had sung their songs at karaoke bars with friends. And as both artists had come back into the public consciousness over the past couple of years, I had followed along here and there - weeping while watching videos of Joni’s performance at the Newport Folk festival with Brandi Carlile and singing along at full volume when I heard Luke Combs’s cover of Fast Car on the radio (even as I imagined it was Tracy’s iconic original I was hearing). So I clicked around the interwebs over the past few days, mesmerized by what I saw and heard. Hearing both of these singers share their music was a powerful experience. Even more meaningful to see, though, was the profound love and respect being shared with them, both from the stage and from the audience. It seemed clear to me that the other musicians and performers in the room, extremely accomplished themselves, knew that they were in the presence of giants - giants on whose shoulders they stood. They looked at Joni and Tracy with adoration and awe, the way a young child looks at their parents, when they very easily could have seen them as relics, whom they had surpassed. As I was reading Parashat Mishpatim this week, I was struck by how so many of the mitzvot in its chapters are couched in the negative. Mishpatim serves as the practical counterpoint to the majestic words of Revelation we read last week in Parashat Yitro. Focusing largely on how we are to treat one another, Mishpatim contains the details of our covenantal relationship with God, which we act out in our relationships with other people. But rather than telling us what to do, Mishphatim mainly tells us what not to do and details consequences and reparations for when things go wrong. In one stark example, the Torah instructs us that the punishment for one who curses their parents is to be put to death (Exodus 21:17). A good number of the mitzvot in Parashat Mishpatim are the “You shall not” side of other mitzvot that instruct us in what *to* do. And with the reverence I saw in the videos from the Grammys fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but be reminded of other mitzvot from the Torah that detail the ways that we are supposed to treat our parents and our elders. Most notably, just a chapter earlier, we read “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12), the fifth of the Ten Commandments. Midrash Tanḥuma picks up on the connection between the mitzvah in Mishpatim and its positive counterpart in Yitro. In commenting on the verse from our Parashah, it says (Tanḥuma, Kedoshim 15:1) “Come and see how precious honoring one’s father and mother is to the Holy Blessed one; for the Holy One never withholds the reward for this mitzvah.” The midrash then goes on to present different biblical examples of people being rewarded for honoring their parents. The midrash concludes by envisioning a world perfected through this reward: “The Holy Blessed One said, “In this world the people are afflicted because of the yetzer hara (evil inclination); but in the world to come I will remove the evil inclination…And I will put My spirit within you.” What I saw in those videos was perhaps a glimpse of that reward. Respect, reverence, love, and the spirit of the Divine. May we all be fortunate to witness such blessing in our own lives. Shabbat shalom. I didn’t watch the Grammys this past week and I honestly hadn’t thought about the awards ceremony at all when I began seeing my social media feeds blow up with people offering commentary, posting videos, and sharing articles about one or both of two performances: Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell.
That made me pay attention. In addition to the sheer volume of things I was hearing and seeing about the two performances, Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell had been key parts of the soundtrack of my college years. I had listened to their music on long walks, analyzed their lyrics in my dorm room, and had sung their songs at karaoke bars with friends. And as both artists had come back into the public consciousness over the past couple of years, I had followed along here and there - weeping while watching videos of Joni’s performance at the Newport Folk festival with Brandi Carlile and singing along at full volume when I heard Luke Combs’s cover of Fast Car on the radio (even as I imagined it was Tracy’s iconic original I was hearing). So I clicked around the interwebs over the past few days, mesmerized by what I saw and heard. Hearing both of these singers share their music was a powerful experience. Even more meaningful to see, though, was the profound love and respect being shared with them, both from the stage and from the audience. It seemed clear to me that the other musicians and performers in the room, extremely accomplished themselves, knew that they were in the presence of giants - giants on whose shoulders they stood. They looked at Joni and Tracy with adoration and awe, the way a young child looks at their parents, when they very easily could have seen them as relics, whom they had surpassed. As I was reading Parashat Mishpatim this week, I was struck by how so many of the mitzvot in its chapters are couched in the negative. Mishpatim serves as the practical counterpoint to the majestic words of Revelation we read last week in Parashat Yitro. Focusing largely on how we are to treat one another, Mishpatim contains the details of our covenantal relationship with God, which we act out in our relationships with other people. But rather than telling us what to do, Mishphatim mainly tells us what not to do and details consequences and reparations for when things go wrong. In one stark example, the Torah instructs us that the punishment for one who curses their parents is to be put to death (Exodus 21:17). A good number of the mitzvot in Parashat Mishpatim are the “You shall not” side of other mitzvot that instruct us in what *to* do. And with the reverence I saw in the videos from the Grammys fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but be reminded of other mitzvot from the Torah that detail the ways that we are supposed to treat our parents and our elders. Most notably, just a chapter earlier, we read “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12), the fifth of the Ten Commandments. Midrash Tanḥuma picks up on the connection between the mitzvah in Mishpatim and its positive counterpart in Yitro. In commenting on the verse from our Parashah, it says (Tanḥuma, Kedoshim 15:1) “Come and see how precious honoring one’s father and mother is to the Holy Blessed one; for the Holy One never withholds the reward for this mitzvah.” The midrash then goes on to present different biblical examples of people being rewarded for honoring their parents. The midrash concludes by envisioning a world perfected through this reward: “The Holy Blessed One said, “In this world the people are afflicted because of the yetzer hara (evil inclination); but in the world to come I will remove the evil inclination…And I will put My spirit within you.” What I saw in those videos was perhaps a glimpse of that reward. Respect, reverence, love, and the spirit of the Divine. May we all be fortunate to witness such blessing in our own lives. Shabbat shalom. In the Jewish professional world that I inhabit, “unity” is a word that gets used an awful lot. Community crises of all sizes demand a united approach. In considering the curricula or methods we want to teach, we need to be united behind a particular philosophy or approach. We often issue calls for Jewish unity, asking us to set aside our differences in pursuit of what’s seen as a higher goal.
In those first dark days after October 7, the calls for Jewish unity came frequently and from different sources. In our own community, I remember opening up a discussion on Simḥat Torah to allow us to talk through our experiences and feelings. During that conversation, several of us spoke passionately about the need to be united as a community during this painful time for Israel and the Jewish community. At that time, at least to me, it felt that the calls for unity were about standing in solidarity and supporting each other. It was about sharing our pain and offering a familiar embrace. It was not necessarily about uniformity. Perhaps things were too raw and new; perhaps we needed each other so much that we didn’t even consider the things that divide us. Over the ensuing months, I have seen a painful shift across the Jewish world: more insistence on sameness or uniformity of opinion; less tolerance for difference and diversity in one space. In our Torah reading for this week, Parashat Yitro, we see perhaps the most united gathering of Israelites in the whole Ḥumash. Standing at Sinai, awaiting God’s word, the people are together, both physically and spiritually. A number of well-known midrashim and discussions of this scene and what follows paint a picture of a people entirely in lock-step with each other, speaking and acting as one. Staying that united is hard, and we know that the people will soon fall apart, just as they have before. And perhaps their perpetual disunity was in part due to seeking out the wrong kind of unity. Perhaps they needed instead to seek out God’s unity. The opening words to the Ten Commandments give us a glimpse, if we look deeply enough, of a different sort of unity, a unity that is more honest, more inclusive, and more sustainable. “God spoke כׇּל־הַדְּבָרִ֥ים הָאֵ֖לֶּה (all these words).” (Exodus 20:1) Picking up on the use of the word כׇּל (all), the Talmud engages in a discussion about the essential nature of the words that God spoke, namely the Torah (BT Ḥagigah 3b). Torah can be compared to a goad, as Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah taught, because just as a goad is flexible and not rigid, so too words of Torah can be moved from one interpretation to another. And God’s word can be compared to something well-planted - just as something well-planted can flourish and multiply, so too words of Torah flourish and multiply. One of the ways, says the Talmud, that words of Torah flourish and multiply is in the multiple groupings of scholars who each read and interpret the text in different, often contradictory ways. Should a person despair of learning Torah due to the presence of so many divergent opinions, the Talmud reminds us that God spoke *all* these words. God’s singular utterance contained multitudes. God’s unity has room for difference, dispute, and contradiction. God’s unity can hold us all - not because we are the same, but because we are unified in just how different we are. Shabbat shalom. |
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