One of our 8th graders, Noah, in Project Gadol (our monthly teen learning program) challenged me this week to teach about Hanukkah and last month’s events in Pittsburgh, at the same time making sure this all related to cookie decorating. Noah claimed that Hanukkah was made up to compete with Christmas.
Cracking my knuckles and stretching my forearms, I began. “You’re right,” I said, “but you’re also a bit wrong.”
Hanukkah feels like a pretty big deal to Jews in America. It is by far the most commercialized of Jewish festivals. Religion Reporter Emma Green at The Atlantic, who met with our 6th/7th graders last week to talk about covering religion in America and her own Jewish identity as a journalist, sums up the American contribution to many Hanukkah “traditions” beautifully in her article here. That’s where Noah was right.
But here’s where he was wrong:
Historically, Hanukkah was a minor festival to Jews living in the land of Israel and their counterparts living in the diaspora after the days of the original Maccabean revolt in what was then the land of Babylonia (and what is now the lands of modern day Iraq and Iran).
A good 600 years after the Maccabean revolt, a small paragraph about Hanukkah appears in the Babylonian Talmud. The line in there of particular interest to us says, “it is the custom to put the Hanukkah lamps in the window to publicize the miracle, but in a time of a danger, it is sufficient to put them on the table instead.”
This strange comment prompts later Rabbis to ask, what kind of danger would prohibit a Jew from putting his Hanukkah lamp in the window? Rashi, probably the most famous of Jewish commentators, provided the answer 600 years later: because the Persians had a law on their holidays that fire could only burn in their temples.
Thanks Rashi for solving that mystery! The Persian majority culture at the time of the Rabbis of the Talmud in Babylonian were followers of an ancient faith called Zoroastrianism (which yes, in case you were wondering, is a real thing and is still around today in small numbers!). Around the same time as Hanukkah, celebrated at the winter equinox, the Zoroastrians seemed to have had their own fire festival and had a law that fire could only burn in their temples. Apparently, the Zoroastrian fire priests would go around enforcing this law by putting out Hanukkah lamps of unsuspecting Jews!
The quirky intercultural exchange of Zoroastrian fire priests trying to extinguish the Hanukkah lamps of well-intentioned Jews aside, this text teaches us something historical about Hanukkah. Hanukkah seems to have drawn some of its own significance from its proximity to this Zoroastrian winter fire festival—the story of the oil burning and the customs of lighting the candles coming into centrality and focus only in the lands of Babylonia (and only found in texts from those lands).
It turns out that Jews have been absorbing and accenting our own traditions in the light of others for centuries, not just based on the last 100 years of commercialization of Christmas. You might say at this point, it’s a tradition and a deeply authentic Jewish act in and of itself, to look at the world around you and to see yourself and your Judaism in it.
And Pittsburgh? When I asked our learners if they felt they were living in a time of danger and were afraid to put the Hanukkah lamps in their windows or in the window of JCP, they all agreed: Maybe there are places where Jews should feel more alone and more vulnerable, but New York City is not one of them. What another miracle—a group of teenagers finding Jewish community in their own neighborhood, finding a deep sense of faith and conviction and fellowship in each other, and feeling warmth and optimism about their own futures as Jews in America.
And then, we decorated cookies. To publicize the miracle, of course.
To however you celebrate, may this Hanukkah be filled with light, laughter, and love!
My teacher Irv Saposnik, of blessed memory, loved the Biblical patriarch Jacob. During our one on one learning sessions each Friday afternoon at Hillel on Langdon Street in Madison, Wisconsin, Irv ploughed into Jacob with all the tools in his kit: as English professor and Yiddish scholar; as son, father and husband; as Brownsville-East New York kid yearning to breathe free; and as rebbe (though Irv was never a rabbi). Each of these manifestations of his own character found their way into his confrontation with, and analysis of, Jacob. It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least, and the
first time I came to realize that the text we inherit from our ancestors, teeming with letters and words, is also a blank canvas upon which we are generously invited by its Author to paint our own masterpiece.
And if you think that last notion is heretical, good. You’re in fine company. “It is not possible to engage in the study of Torah without innovation,” the Talmud teaches. The “black fire on white fire” description of Revelation is as dangerous as it is sustaining; it is never static and it is always dynamic. Irv taught me that. And by the way, Irv’s Hebrew name was Isaac. Fancy that.
So Jacob in Isaac’s hands was a pleasure to behold. There were the accusations flung at him for stealing Esau’s birthright and chuckles of pleasure at the homebody Jacob needing his mother Rebecca to devise a scheme to win the blessing of the first-born from a blind and dying Isaac. “The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau.” This is some fine kabuki. Isaac knew, deep down, that he needed a clever conniver to take over the family mantle and that Esau was too simple to wear it. He needed assurance that he could not trust resided in his actual firstborn, and so he passively relented to the scheme. Rebecca, from Isaac’s father Abraham’s clan in the east, knew what to do to keep the family intact. She arranged the whole thing. Isaac went along. Jacob went along. Esau was robbed. And we Jews are still here today because of it.
When Irv first laid that theory at my feet (mic drops hadn’t been invented yet) I was dumbstruck. But then I realized it was true. There is, perhaps, an element in all our lives where there is some breach in the past, a transgression even, or a betrayal, that scars but never disappears. The real meaning of being a Jew in the world is not striving for perfection but rather gaining wisdom and understanding from our own weaknesses in order to eventually ensure that good and justice are done. It’s a tricky thing. Hardscrabble stories of mythic pasts are romantic; but they can also be disturbing and damaging.
My great grandfather Chaim Siegel was a saint when I was growing up. I never met him. He died long before I was born. But his dark eyes and goatee, styled jacket and tie, popped from the sepia colors in a family frame that conveyed brilliance, a scholar’s mind and business acumen that brought the family to safety in America at the turn of the century. He snuck Shakespeare into the pages of his prayer book in the Orthodox synagogue where he was president. He won communal awards for the money raised on behalf of the early Zionist enterprise in British Mandate Palestine; two sons became doctors and his daughter married another. Success.
But a few years ago, in researching his burlap bag factory history (Siegel Bag Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) I discovered that in 1930 there was a terrible fire in his factory, and that in the attempt to put it out, the water-soaked burlap collapsed the floors of the building and two firemen died. There was a court inquest. It was found that the building had an illegal floor added to it. I read the transcripts and found my saintly great grandfather sounded rather slippery, not as contrite as I would have hoped; frightened, defensive, and ultimately diminished. I scanned newspaper accounts of the fire and found stories of the two men who had died. One had yet to have children, a family line snuffed out. I felt awful and somehow responsible. My family did this.
And so one autumn a couple years ago, I traveled back to Milwaukee and visited two cemeteries, one Protestant and one Catholic, and found the graves of these men in simple, humble, unadorned plots. I remember the frost on the grass. I remember the late fall leaves crunching underfoot. I remember the wide expanse of other graves and other stories crouching toward the quiet road in the distance. “I came here to apologize for what my great grandfather did,” I said. “I ask forgiveness on his behalf.” And then I said the Kaddish. It was my belief at the time, and still is, that to be a Jew, to be human, is to recognize that our inherent imperfections require taking responsibility for our own errors as often as we take responsibility, in some form or another, for the hurt and pain caused by those who came before us. Just look at America today, for God’s sake. We would do well to exercise humility and work together to right past wrongs rather than shirk a responsibility that awaits our ready hands, no?
In this week’s Torah portion, Va’Yiggash, Jacob is anxious about his journey down to Egypt, where he has been summoned by his son Joseph, who was considered dead. Fooled by his jealous sons in their effort to best their brother, whose gifts of prophecy and favor were better than theirs, Jacob was passive in the face of their sibling strife, did nothing to prevent their division, and accepted the ruse of Joseph’s disappearance with astounding selfishness. Some patriarch. But here in this week’s reading, he is close to the end of his life. He is dying and he is afraid. And it is God who reassures him that while this journey down to Egypt will likely be his last (and we readers know the dire future of 400 years of slavery that lie ahead) there is the promise of ultimate redemption.
“God called to Israel in a vision by night: ‘Jacob! Jacob! He answered, ‘Here I am.’ And God said, ‘I am God. The God of your father. Fear not to go down to Egypt, for I will make you there into a great nation. I Myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I Myself will also bring you back. And Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.’” (Genesis 46:2-4)
Jacob’s deepest fears of dying and not being cared for, not being returned to his final resting place with his father and grandfather, of not being made whole, as it were, is intuited by God, who speaks with confidence that Joseph will care for the father who neglected him. Sure, he favored him by giving him that nice jacket, but then what? Jacob left his son as prey for cruel and envious brothers who kidnapped Joseph, stole his jacket (dipping it in blood to fake his death), and then never sent out a search party to rescue his beloved child. I can still hear Irv laughing at Jacob to this day. “He could be such a schmuck!”
But Joseph is our hero this week. He accepts his father lovingly. He brings him into exile to die but arranges with Pharoah to bury him back up in the land of Israel. So present is he in these final moments that it is Joseph who closes his father’s eyelids after death, a Jewish practice to this day, according to Ibn Ezra.
We may suppose that Joseph would have had every reason to reject his brothers and his father for the damage done, but it’s what Joseph does with his scars that presents us with a model for wisdom. He forgives. He sees the greater path to humility and responsibility. By accepting death with grace, he offers redemption for his family.
I remember standing over Irv’s grave after he died. The Jewish cemetery in Madison is one of the most beautiful tracts of prairie land you’ll ever see. Within a few steps is the grave of another teacher I buried, George Mosse. And in the distance is a nice golf course, which my dad would have appreciated—not so much Irv and George. But as we threw down the last shovelfuls of earth and laid his body to rest, I was filled with a feeling of warm mercury coursing through my body. Mercury, the Roman god of the underworld and luck; of commerce and trickery; of messages and conveyance; of boundaries and borders and eloquent words.
Heretical to end a Jewish teaching with Roman myth? Ha! “It is not possible to engage in the study of Torah without innovation,” the Talmud teaches.
In David Blight’s stunning and brilliant new biography of Frederick Douglass, the historian describes a moment early in Douglass’ writings where the orator and freedom fighter articulates his “existential core” as a man: “I have often wished myself a beast,” Douglass wrote in 1845. “I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had aroused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”
What remarkable eloquence and inspiration! What resilience! If you have ever read Douglass, you know his story. Born into slavery but as you can see from the above passage, incisively and deeply aware of his own gifts of humanity. Douglass was in possession of an exceptional personality that calls to mind George Mosse, a Berlin Jewish refugee who became one of the most important European historians of the twentieth century. As once told to me by George’s partner John Tortorice: “His life was a triumph.”
Yes. Frederick Douglass lived a life of triumph. He transcended the insidious and racist efforts to enslave and dehumanize his essence as a person, as a boy who would be a man, as a Black man, as an American; and in so doing he became not merely a “leader” or an “abolitionist,” but an eloquent exemplar of the universal striving to be human.
The sage Hillel said in Pirke Avot, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be one.” If consciousness and our thumbs separate us from animals, and there is something truly remarkable about what it means to be human, it’s worth pausing for a moment and noting what those characteristics may really be. Andrew Buskell, who teaches philosophy at the London School of Economics, argues that there are three basic areas of development in which the human clearly differs from animals, based on the notion that humans live within “cumulative cultures” of our own making. We exist within a structure of ever-increasing complexity and adapt accordingly; we are, therefore, always innovating in order to continue addressing the growing complexities of life; and as a result, we must always keep adapting, growing, changing, and evolving, with this keen awareness of our humanity.
There is a dangerous hubris that lies beneath the surface. The Biblical Joseph knew it well. He begins his life seeking the mantle of leadership, dreaming great visions, the second youngest among a band of brothers who, with an unrestrained ego, accords himself loudly a prophetic vision of unvanquishable singularity. How annoying he must have been. “Here comes Joe, blah, blah, blah,” one imagines his brothers saying, sending each other texts with eye-roll emojis. And then the coat! He got the coat! Dad’s coat! I’ll be honest: I’d have tossed him down into the pit as well.
Here is FD, crouched beneath a kitchen table, watching in horror as a master beats a slave, knowing from the earliest age that the slave and the master need each other if one is to be defined as slave and one is to be defined as master. And yet, the child Douglass knows that his mind, his humanity, his adaptiveness, is the “silver trump of freedom” that will bring his own and his people’s liberation. Joseph was a bit slower on the uptake but we can safely surmise that it’s because he had yet to suffer. He was born a dreamer and rewarded for it. He didn’t have to earn it. It took family strife, jealousy, rivalry, violence, a conniving deception of the father Jacob, a faked death, an accusation of attempted rape, jail-time, and finally a real and symbolic famine, to bring the family back together.
In last week’s parashah, Va’Yigash, Joseph reconciles with his brothers who had sold him into slavery by recognizing his own elevated understanding of the suffering the brothers caused. “Now do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you” (Genesis 45:4). No longer the crazed dreamer of his youth, his egoistic effulgence blinding his brothers, Joseph has been raised up by being brought low. He has turned his suffering into wisdom. Instead of breaking him, it made him. Though the brothers likely hated to admit it, in the end Joseph was triumphant. But not merely of his own accord, but because he could see that in suffering there was purpose, a searing focus and a direction to his existence.
In this week’s parashah, Va’Yehi, Jacob draws his last breath and is “gathered to his kin,” the Torah’s way of describing where we go when we die. And as promised, Joseph delivers his father’s body back up to the family burial plots in Hebron before returning (returning!) to Egypt, where he himself will die. Then, as the brothers approach, fearing that with their father Jacob now dead, Joseph will finally carry out his revenge, a powerful moment plays out. They throw themselves at Joseph’s feet, and say, “We are prepared to be your slaves!” But Joseph says to them, “Have no fear. Am I substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result, the survival of many people.”
Here we see the magnanimity of Joseph. He transcends himself because he understands his agency in the world, we might say. Or, to put it more colloquially, we might say, “It’s never really about us but something greater than us.”
This is Joseph transcending the ecology of his family dynamic and finding his “true north.” And it is Frederick Douglass understanding that the master is as much a slave as the man, woman or child subjugated to a radically inhumane ecology of American bondage.
We have purpose as Jews. We have purpose as humans. Joseph teaches us to see that in our pain there is hope; in our suffering there is light. And what makes the human project so compelling is that we have it in us to keep moving forward toward a better, more peaceful and just world.
“I actually want to continue with something you were saying last week.”
“Okay.”
“You were complaining about the new brickwork installments. Your people were upset that the orders increased even though supplies were short.”
“He said, ‘No straw.’ I distinctly heard him say that. He’s a cruel tyrant.”
“I understand that. But when the people came to complain to you, you said nothing. You kept it all in. And then you sat down here and attacked me. Classic displacement. Impotent rage.”
“Must you always use this terminology with me?”
“It’s useful. Plus, in another generation, there will arise among My people one such as Sigmund Freud. He will explain it all quite well. Anyway, It is written in plain enough language, Moses. ‘And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the children of Israel, and God took cognizance of them.’ That was in Exodus 2.23, 2.24, 2.25.”
“You only mentioned the fathers. What about the mothers? Why are you always ignoring the mothers?”
“Stop interrupting. And you should talk. Anyway, then I said, ‘I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt . . . And I will put forth My hand, and smite Egypt with all my wonders which I will do in the midst thereof. After that he will let you go.’ That was Exodus 3.17 and 3.20.”
“Your point?”
“You’re as impatient as a bar mitzvah kid with a new iPhone. Listen! Instead of dealing with the issue in front of you; rather than addressing the people directly, counseling with the patience that you so sorely lack, comforting them in their affliction, you yell at ME! You said, “Lord, wherefore hast Thou dealt ill with this people? Why is it that Thou hast sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Thy name, he hath dealt ill with this people; neither hast Thou delivered Thy people at all.”
“Exodus 5.22-23. I know you. You made me write it all down.”
“But you missed the last part. Your ears were stopped up with anger. I said right at the end last week, ‘Now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh; for by a strong hand shall he let them go, and by a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.’ Exodus 6.1. You may think it cruel of me to say so, Moses, but as God I am not human. I didn’t make this mess. You humans did. And you humans need to understand that the mess is yours to fix. The best, the very best, the absolute best I can offer you is not that you will never suffer or die; hardly—that is axiomatic to what it means to be a human. But there will be meaning in the suffering. Metal forged and strengthened is made more strong. There will be compassion and love and kindness shown from one to another in the midst of the suffering that will transcend the darkness and teach us that we are better than the worst things ever done to us. It means that at the foundation of our existence is the capacity for hope, for light, for love. That is when I stopped talking last week, but I don’t think you heard me. And I get it. The cruelty of what is going on is incomprehensible. The suffering is enormous. And yet I am here to say that in every generation, among all My people all over the planet, there is pain and suffering and strife. There is unjustified cruelty. And yet. And yet it is actually all within your capacity to change. One person at a time, one conversation at a time, one act at a time, and yes, even one argument at a time. I actually like it when you argue with me. I appreciate your righteous anger in defense of your people.”
God and Moses exit, pursued by a rabbi
***
In Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land, the final book from the late, great Amos Oz, we are reminded of Uri Zvi Greenberg’s poem about Rabbi Levi Isaac of Berdichev. Paul Robeson sang about this as well. The actual song is here. “Good morning to you, Lord of the universe. I, Levi Isaac, son of Sarah, of Berdichev, have come to you in a lawsuit on behalf of Your people Israel. What have you against Your people Israel? And why do You oppress Your people Israel? And I, Levi Isaac, son of Sarah, of Berdichev, say: ‘I will not stir from here. An end there must be to this! It must all stop! Hallowed and magnified be the name of God.’”
And the plagues came. This week, in parashat Va’era, the retribution begins. It is not just frogs and lice, but bombs and bullets. It’s planes and tanks. It’s horrible destruction and conflagration. It is the price we humans inflict upon ourselves for the suffering we humans inflict upon ourselves. It is young men and women, by the millions, sacrificing their lives to defeat evil in the Second World War and not just in wave after wave at Omaha Beach, but in rationing, and letter writing, and love notes, and being a modest link in the supply chain to soldiers abroad. It is in the uncommon bravery of Congressman John Lewis, once a young man kneeling in prayer as his head is broken open on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. It is Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney being lynched in Philadelphia, Mississippi so that African Americans could vote.
And it is this: Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg of blessed memory once recounted that after the Second World War, an escaped survivor came to Baltimore to bear witness to members of the Hertzberg family who were killed in Poland. He told us, his students, that this witness recounted an incident where a small band of Jews were planning to go to their deaths fighting; if the end was to be the ovens, then they might as well die resisting. And I will admit my own attachment to this idea. During my trips to Vilna and Minsk in the last year, I imagined often what I would have done had I been born into those circumstances.
But one relative of the Hertzbergs, a rabbi, counseled differently. The resistance came up against not only Nazis, but Shabbat. “It is the Shabbat,” this rabbi is purported to have said. “That is greater than all of us.” And according to Rabbi Hertzberg, the rabbi and his people were marched to their deaths singing songs to welcome Shabbat.
It is one of the most humbling and challenging stories I have ever encountered as a rabbi. But it echoes in ways that are eternal and true and perhaps most important, universal.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in the midst thereof, we hanged up our harps. For there they that led us captive asked of us words and song” (Psalm 137).
“Avadim hayeenu (Once we were slaves) atah bnai chorin (and now we are free!)” we sing each Passover. We sing our oppression.
Alan Lomax discovered such resilience when he lugged his recorder throughout the South more than 70 years ago to catalog the African American voices of resistance and freedom. Amiri Baraka writing as LeRoi Jones showed this to be true in “Blues People” when he demonstrated how the slave song was a matter of both survival as well as moral and spiritual transcendence.
We all suffer. We all complain. We all laugh and sing. Herein lies our hope.
I will leave you, fittingly, with Amos Oz. He did not “go gentle into that good night” but rather implored us, his readers, to keep reading, to keep arguing with one another and with God, and to forge an even stronger alloy of justice, love and hope.
He writes in Dear Zealots: “There is a little guide in each of us. We are a nation of guides. We all like to teach, to enlighten, to disagree, to shed new light, to oppose, or at least to interpret everything differently. A climate of disagreement is often the right climate for a life of creativity and spiritual renewal. In its good times, the Jewish civilization is one of doubt and disagreement. For thousands of years, Jews added layer upon layer of texts that refer to the texts that preceded them, which in turn refer to even earlier ones. ‘Refer’ does not always mean merely adding on another level or building up another floor. Very often, the new text aims to undermine its predecessors, to show them in a different light, or to suggest a change, an improvement, or a replacement. The story of Jewish culture is an age-old game of interpretation, reinterpretation and counter-interpretation.”
Though Passover is still a few months away, we are in the thick of the Exodus narrative in our weekly Torah reading cycle. This week, we read about the last three plagues that God visits upon Pharaoh as punishment for refusing to let the Hebrew slaves leave Egypt. The plagues cripple Egyptian society as locusts “cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen” and the darkness pervades so that “no one could see anyone else or move about for three days.” Yet while Pharaoh momentarily considers releasing the Hebrews from bondage after each plague, he ultimately refuses to back down.
As I reflect on this famous story from a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. during the third week of a government shut-down, I cannot help but see its relevance. While there are no locusts and the sun is shining, the public museums are closed, garbage lines the streets, and the roads are empty. The glimmer of the city has darkened. Unseen are the families whose lives are being held hostage.
We don’t yet know how this government shut-down will end, but we do know the tragic ending of Pharaoh’s story. Pharaoh’s obstinance causes God to send the ultimate punishment: the slaying of all Egyptian first-born. The Torah tells us: “At midnight the Eternal struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well. Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was a loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.” Only after this plague does Pharaoh finally relent and say to Moses: “Up! Leave…and go!”
This plague finally changes Pharaoh’s mind because he was so deeply and personally affected by it. No punishment could be more painful than the death of his own child. Only after this experience is he willing to blink, and Moses seizes the opportunity to lead his people out of bondage, not even allowing them a few minutes for their bread to rise lest Pharaoh change his mind yet again.
In these verses, it is easy to see Pharaoh as the villain who lacks empathy. But just like in our own lives, nothing in the Torah is ever that simple. After each plague, Pharaoh has a moment of clarity where he wants to free the Israelites. But immediately after Pharaoh relents, God “hardens his heart,” and forces him to change his mind and hold the Israelites back. Why does God prevent Pharaoh from freeing the Israelites? Perhaps God is trying to demonstrate the universal human tendency to get stuck in a position or in a mindset. Most people have had the experience of taking a stand or making a claim and then feeling that they can’t back down, even if they might want to. Saving face can often feel as important as doing the right thing. It takes a tragedy for Pharaoh to humble himself and to let go of his desire to look consistent.
In our current moment, political leaders on each side of this government shut-down battle appear stuck in their respective positions. One side seems inured to the hardship of furloughed government workers, while the other refuses to take the time to understand why this particular issue is so important to some Americans. The result is an ugly stalemate where both sides are entrenched in their positions, unwilling to back down, leaving innocents in the cross hairs.
A moment of vulnerability ended the stalemate between Pharaoh and the Israelites. It will take a similarly humane moment to end our current government stalemate. But I am optimistic. If Pharaoh and Moses — arguably the two most stubborn figures in the Hebrew Bible — can do it, so can our leaders.
We meet our ancestors on their escape from Egypt in this week’s parashah, B’shallach. We have resolved the encounter between the Israelites and Pharaoh; between a God of the Universe and the God of the Egyptians; between belief in the ineffable, yet unifying, nature of the laws of truth and justice versus the oppression of slavery and service to a human, not the Divine. The agency of Moses “administering the plagues” and the people’s hasty escape sets the stage, dramatically, for that age-old Jewish custom: complaint!
“And when pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and, behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out unto the Lord. And they said unto Moses, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, thou hast taken us away to die in the wilderness? Wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to bring us forth out of Egypt? Is this not the word that we spoke unto thee in Egypt? Saying, ‘Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians? For it were better for us to serve the Egyptians then that we should die in the wilderness’” (Exodus 14:10-12).
How soon we forget the battles we fought. Moments after our liberation, miraculously rendered, there is a sense of dread over the hard road ahead to make it to the Promised Land. “The Torah speaks in human language,” the Talmud teaches. Never is that more true than here. The human propensity to pivot quickly from achievement to second-guessing, from exaltation to despair, happens in an instant. Leadership, we see in Moses’ exasperation and in God’s advice to him, requires perseverance and patience that are not always in ample possession in most of us. But one way or another, when a crisis demands leadership, it usually takes just one to inspire us to get the job done.
So God says to Moses, who has just conveyed his people’s complaint, “Why are you complaining to me? Go lift your rod, stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it!” He might even have muttered, “And stop kvetching!” under the Divine Breath. Who knows? It’s certainly possible.
Building a civilization founded on principles of justice and truth and peace requires the long view. Leaving the condition of slavery is just the beginning. There are generations to go before we get there.
In Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume history of Martin Luther King, Jr., he details King’s reaction to the landmark legislation of the civil rights movement: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A monumental achievement, no doubt. But also nowhere near the end of the struggle.
The legislation, King argued, advanced the “football of civil rights to about the fifty yard line.” And it was only then that the real discord occurred. “As we move on,” King said, “sometimes we may even fumble the ball but for God’s sake, recover it. And then we will move on down the field.”
Thinking of this rhetorical analogy in the context of the Israelites’ complaint upon leaving Egypt is poignant and instructive. But I am also particularly struck by the quote in the context of the ways in which Rev. King’s legacy is deployed each year on his birthday by varieties of activists who claim his mantle of leadership in the contemporary struggles for justice and freedom. Reading the words of many of my rabbinic colleagues this week, a number of whom are struggling mightily to confront the odious and inexcusably virulent anti-Semitism of Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory, leaders of the Women’s March, is one such example of how important it is to recognize that these struggles for freedom are long and complex.
More than fifty years ago, Dr. King was the first to admit that while he didn’t have all the answers, he could readily offer one: that love must always conquer hate. History makes this very clear. Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory’s blatant anti-Semitism and false claim that all national liberation movements are justified except the Jewish national liberation movement—Zionism—are so profoundly wrong and ahistorical as to be laughable. But as Dr. King and others have taught (often through the ultimate sacrifice of their lives): Hate is no laughing matter.
Whichever rabbi among my colleagues grabs the ring and becomes the Chief Rabbi of the Resistance will benefit from the humbling lessons of the Torah and of Dr. King. Oppression and hateful doctrines, whoever espouses them, need and deserve direct and swift condemnation. Period. Even rebuke, the rabbis taught, must be delivered in a compassionate manner. But it must nevertheless be direct. And then, the hard work of building a just society continues.
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” Dr. King told an overflow audience on a stormy night in Memphis. It was April 3, 1968, and less than 24 hours before he was assassinated by James Earl Ray. “But it really doesn’t matter to me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you but I want you to know that we as a people will get to the promised land.”
Keenly aware of the analogy to Moses, King chose wisely to stand tall, to love fully, and to provide the promise of a hopeful future. He didn’t divide with hate, struggled mightily with his own and others’ demons, to be sure, and died putting forth a vision of openness, acceptance, non-violence and love. And for a man of such remarkable talent, intelligence and energy, it is truly humbling to recognize that in his own life, he only made it to the fifty yard line.
It is one thing to resist. It requires far more patience and tolerance to remain in coalition and loving partnerships that don’t demonize one over another in an effort to pass the necessary laws and legislation. To finish the work, to get the ball all the way down the field and into the end zone—over and over again—that takes teamwork.
At JCP in the coming weeks, we will be continuing to explore these ideas, specifically the ways in which the Jewish community and the African American community can learn together and work together to achieve this shared vision, inherited from our Torah-reading ancestors, to realize the Hebrew prophets’ charge to build a world of justice and peace.
I hope that in the spirit of learning, stretching ourselves, and engaging deeply in these urgent matters, our JCP community will continue to grow and amplify our impact for good in the world.
This week’s Parashah offers insight into the timeless lesson of leadership.
The Israelites have successfully fled Egypt. Moses is reunited with his wife, children and Midianite father-in-law Yitro, to whom he recounts all the things that have transpired.
All seems well to Yitro until Moses describes the way in which order amongst the people is kept. Moses is single-handedly judging every dispute that needs to be settled. Yitro is concerned. And rightly so. How could one person oversee the entanglements of an entire nation? He tells Moses, “It is not a good thing what you are doing. You will surely wear yourself out and these people as well. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” (Exodus 18:17)
Yitro goes on to describe a system of appointing reliable people to help Moses oversee the needs of the Israelites. If Moses works out such an arrangement, the people will “be in peace” (Exodus 18:23).
I think it’s really interesting that Moses – a character that is so vocal and talks directly to God – utters not one word in the entire exchange. The text only tells us that he “listened to the voice of his father-in-law.” That’s it. There is no rebuttal, no response showing us how Moses actually felt about his father-in-law’s advice. Why? I think it’s because Moses, probably recognized, that he needed help, didn’t know how to ask for it and perhaps, felt simply relieved that someone offered him a solution.
Can’t we all identify with this? In asking for help, we reveal certain needs and open ourselves up to critique. This is a difficult situation to put oneself in – especially in a leadership role. The classic archetype of a leader is solitary, one in which there is a need to be independent and to figure things out without the help of others. That being said, it is only one archetype. I feel as if I’ve had enough experience in life at this point that I can say that there is no one that has everything figured out. Furthermore, I have also come to believe that it is the leaders that know how to ask for help in times of need that are the ones to be our eternal role models. While this isn’t Moses in this moment, he does display another important characteristic of leadership – receptivity to feedback. He follows Yitro’s advice in appointing people to help him govern.
Lastly, I also love how this episode ends because there is a symbolism in it. Yitro vanishes just as quickly as he appears, “Then Moses bade his father-in-law farewell, and he went on his way to his own land” (Exodus 18:27). Sometimes good advice is like that too. One moment it is in front of us and in the next moment it is gone. It’s just up to us make an actionable step.
I have a confession to make. The idea of a “mitzvah project” for a bar/bat mitzvah has always made me feel a little cynical. When parents ask me if I know of a good organization or project for their pre-teen to take on, I want to respond, “Life is a mitzvah project!” After all, each day presents full of opportunities to give back, make a difference and shoulder responsibility for one’s local community. Just like a bar/bat mitzvah celebration shouldn’t be the end of a Jewish journey, adopting a particular cause should ideally be part of each individual’s life journey well beyond the prescribed projects of their teenage years. However, in our overbooked, chaotic world, it is far too simple to reduce the experience of service, of time and resources given, to a box on the check list, somewhere after the Torah portion, the speech and the party planner.
And when I’m feeling particularly snarky about this important element becoming rote and perfunctory, I remember that at its core, the process of becoming a bar or bat mitzvah captures a once in a lifetime opportunity to expand the worldview of preteens. Through the act of participating in a mitzvah project at 12 or 13, you not only become responsible for your tradition, but you also become increasingly more responsible for the broader community and the world around you. Moreover, the possibility of taking on a single project now has the potential to impact the course of a life and grow a developing person’s own connection and relationship to the work of doing good in the world.
In our weekly bar/bat mitzvah preparation program, we have been exploring the Jewish relationship to justice (tzedek), in part through inviting different organizations to share the impactful work they do in a variety of communities. Each week, these diverse and amazing organizations present and partner with our teens, empowering them to see their own potential impact as individuals as well as their own ability to improve the world at large through their unique gifts and talents.
Last week, we found an unlikely and delightful partner in the Dough Project, a local New York-based start-up owned by a fabulous entrepreneurial woman who makes her own handmade (from scratch!), plant-based, chemical-free play dough to sell and to give to those in need. It was like resistance training for mitzvah projects—if we could figure out how to connect play dough to repairing the world and to Jewish tradition, we could pretty much do that with any affinity in the weeks to come.
We started by challenging our learners to think: How can we use play dough to make a difference? Who do we think would benefit most from play dough? What’s Jewish about making and giving away play dough?
Not only did they have a blast creating their own jars of play dough from scratch, but the depth of their thoughtful answers blew us away: I would give dough to people who are less fortunate; senior citizens; people who have experienced bad things and need comfort; young kids; sick people in hospitals; people with anxiety.
So what’s Jewish about making and giving away play dough? We reflected as a group on the Jewish values our learners have been studying throughout this course: Tzedekah – charity; B’tzelem Elohim – all people are created in the image of God (therefore worthy of a type of dignity you would reserve for the divine); Chesed – kindness (whether you like the person or not); Bikkur Cholim – visiting and comforting the sick; Mitzvah – a Jewish obligation; Tikkun Olam – repairing a broken world. We tried to find the right Jewish label or category for giving away play dough—was it Tzedakah if the play dough went to a person in need? Or Chesed if it went to a friend or teacher? Or Bikkur Cholim if it went to someone in the hospital?
One learner shared a connection to a traditional text from the Mishnah about human beings all being minted from the same original coin; likewise, each group made play dough from the same recipe, but chose colors that made each dough unique. While humans may be similar physically, it is their personalities, character traits and individuality that makes each one special and worthy of respect. I love seeing a Jewish text digested in that way, especially when our goal is for each learner, as they approach bar/bat mitzvah, to see themselves as capable of contributing to the world around them in a way that is unique to their own interests and passions.
Mostly, I was struck by how convinced they all were that “giving” itself was a fundamental Jewish concept. And no matter how hard we tried to break it down into categories of mitzvot and Hesed and tzedekah, they responded, “No, it’s giving. Giving is just a Jewish thing to do.” And you know what? I’m actually pretty okay with that takeaway. Maybe there’s really something to that whole “mitzvah project” thing after all.
My daughter Audrey is in her final year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and this semester, she is taking a James Baldwin seminar with Professor Craig Werner. A Baldwin scholar, Dr. Werner is retiring after a long career by teaching his eight favorite works by the great writer. Thanks to FaceTime and Google Docs, I have the thrill of participating from afar. I am able to read along with Audrey, reflect with her after each book, and do a deep dive into one author’s voice. And what a voice it was. James Baldwin was a voracious and prophetic observer of the American project. He stood face to face with God, reckoned himself the man he was to be, and forever plumed the ocean’s floor and the very heights of heaven in his quest to articulate truths about race, identity and the historical narrative of the United States. He never shirked from telling his truths and though dead more than 30 years, his words are a wonder to behold, they leap off the page.
In his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Baldwin’s characters are forever journeying up and down mountains. From from despair to elation; from depression to joy; from sin to redemption. Up and down the mountainside, steep and treacherous, Baldwin hoists us along, with no rope or rig—only our own hands and hearts and minds and souls. To wrestle and grapple with it means to believe or not to believe and ultimately to reckon with what it means to be human. Engaging in the process, one might say in the rather prosaic language of today, brings out the truth. “Folks can change their ways much as they want to,” says one character in Go Tell It On the Mountain, “But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.”
There is much resonance in this line for us as we read this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa, the iconic (ha!) story of the Golden Calf. The “stiff-necked” and ever-impatient Israelites, losing hope with Moses gone so long up the mountain receiving the commandments from God, rebel by forging a calf of gold from their jewelry. They dance around it; they declare it their god who freed them from bondage; they establish the moment as a festival to their new lord. It’s rather outrageous, to be sure, and the people are gravely punished. On one hand, we blame them for their lack of patience and rectitude; for their flimsy devotion. On the other hand, what was taking Moses so long? Perhaps he was having too much fun up there, alone with God, talking “face to face, as one man speaks to another.” I’d have a hard time pulling myself away from that conversation too. But you know, it was “in them” and it had to come out: The people’s impatience and the people’s rightful sense of grievance that Moses was keeping God to himself; Moses’ earned righteousness and sanctimonious judgmentalism. To truly understand this story, we benefit from holding both conflicting views in our mind.
What is in us is in us and it has to come out.
After the requisite punishment and plague falls upon the people for their grievous sin and catharsis has been reached, the people finally receive the Torah. Moses, in a moment of yearning, asks to see God’s face. He wants assurance that God will be with him throughout the journey, given that the people may rebel yet again. But God doesn’t grant him his wish to see the materiality of the Divine; rather, God says, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name Eternal, and the grace that I grant and the compassion that I show. But you cannot see My face, for no person may see Me and live.”
Perhaps herein lies the ultimate lesson of the Golden Calf: It is not in materiality, in gold, in wealth, in power that we encounter what is eternal and true, but rather in goodness and grace and compassion where we see God’s face. Whether white or Black, gentile or Jew, rich or poor, straight or gay, female or male—this is texture and context to what is in actuality real: our capacity to lead lives of meaning and connection and to build a world of justice and peace.
I had the great good fortune to see James Baldwin speak myself in Madison one winter evening in 1985, two years before he died. Lake Mendota, which abuts the Memorial Union where he spoke, had frozen over as it usually does each year. And as Baldwin approached the microphone, cigarette in hand, he mused about walking into the Union for his talk. “I saw the frozen lake and noticed students walking on it. It was dark and so I couldn’t make out if the students were Black or white. And then I wondered what if the ice should break and someone should fall in. And a hand reached up out of the frozen water, begging to be saved. And I asked myself, ‘Would it matter if the hand were Black or white?’”
Courtesy of UW Madison Archives
Baldwin paused. He let the weight of the question, the daring truth of the question, the potential disturbing answer to the question, hang in the air. We would go up the mountain and come down the mountain with him. Would we build a Golden Calf to material identity? To the color of skin? To the value of a bank account? Or would we stand face to face with our radical humanity?
There are those who believe and those who do not. There are those who remain unsure. And I suppose there are even those who are simply indifferent to the existence of an Eternal Being. But as our rabbis have long taught, we all stood at Sinai. We have all been at the mountain. And if Moses could not see God face to face, then neither could we. But each of us are given the grace to do good, to show compassion, and therein do what is right and just.
Whether we climb the mountain with great writers like Moses, or the Biblical authors, or James Baldwin, what’s in us is in us; and the truth comes out.
Late one Friday morning some 25 years ago, a cohort of fellow rabbinical students and I were studying with our teacher Rabbi Stanley Dreyfus, of blessed memory…
We were deep into our third year of these Friday morning sessions, an independent study of the great Jewish Torah commentators, Stanley’s particular area of passion and expertise. The three students would huddle together, debate one another, and try to provoke their teacher (whose legendary sense of humor was wickedly dry and funny). As the sages wrote in Pirke Avot, we would “drink up his words with thirst.” His teaching was masterful, these gatherings otherworldly. There was coffee and sweets graciously served by Marianne Dreyfus, Stanley’s generous and brilliant wife, herself a survivor of the Kindertransport and the granddaughter of the great Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck. In the classical midrashic work Genesis Rabbah, the rabbis claimed that in the messianic age, God will slay the Leviathan and we will all study and feast on fish for eternity. Perhaps this explains the lines at Russ and Daughters. Who knows?
We could talk about anything, as long as it related to Torah. He taught through a close reading of the text and had an inimitable way of framing a story and rooting it in the history and moral scaffolding of Jewish thought. And he wasn’t afraid to stir the pot. His knowledge of the Mishnah and Talmud was encyclopedic; and he could quote the Gospels (contemporaneously composed and therefore relevant) by usually referring to it as “the other half of the Good Book.” One Labor Day when we studied together, the West Indian Day Parade was joyously and noisily shaking the windows of the Dreyfus’ apartment above Grand Army Plaza, where revelers celebrated. Attempting to teach a text about Abraham and circumcision over the raucous din, Stanley said, “Well, the uncircumcised sure seem to be having fun today.” On another occasion, studying a difficult passage in Leviticus about childbirth and the ritual defilement of women, a fellow student made the claim that the text was obviously and inherently misogynistic. Rabbi Dreyfus didn’t argue; he agreed. But when the student went on to explain that some modern feminists now make a meal of the placenta or bury it with a newly planted tree, Stanley paused, sighed and remarked, “I have just two words to say: Jesus Christ.” For a Classical Reform Jew of a certain generation, some new rituals were a bridge too far. But man, did we laugh at his response.
Each year at Rosh Hashanah, when we read the story of the Binding of Isaac, I will always teach in Stanley’s name the text from Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michel Wisser (otherwise known as the Malbim). We students were rebelling vociferously at Abraham’s heartlessness and religious fanaticism for offering up his only son. We were outraged. Stanley calmly walked us through the Malbim’s reading of the verses, where he showed that at every step of the way, Abraham spoke to Isaac with clarity, with sensitivity, with faith and love. “It’s not where you’re going,” he said, “It’s how you get there.” It is a truth I have carried with me, like the wood for the burnt offering, ever since.
So it went, week in and week out, year in and year out, easily one of the greatest gifts I had ever been given, to learn with such a magnificent teacher.
Late one morning, we were deep into a philosophical argument over the reality of God; the leap of faith required by a rational mind to grasp that God had dictated the words of Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai; the crisis of faith necessitated by one’s refusal to believe in an all-powerful God Who chooses to act or not when the innocent are under attack. Why part the Red Sea but remain silent in Concentration Camps? Where is God’s power to save? On we went.
Finally, after an extended hour of our heated exchanges, Rabbi Dreyfus abruptly pounded his fist on the table and exclaimed, “As they used to say in the Beit Midrash, ‘Eh, shut up and pray the afternoon service!’”
We looked at him in amazement. He brought the intellectualism to a halt by reminding us, with precision, that Judaism is a system of doing. That commandments, however we feel about them, however we justify our relationship to commandedness, are meant to be performed. This approach is best summarized by the sage Shammai (who appears in Pirke Avot as the sparring partner of Hillel) and who said, “Say little, do much.”
Yes.
This idea, of doing as the precedent of Jewishness, is found first in Exodus, as Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and shares the Word of God with the people. “Then he took the book of the covenant and read it aloud to the people. And they said, ‘All that the Eternal has spoken we will do and we will hear.’” Notice the order. The doing precedes the hearing. Often exemplified as ancient Israel’s faith in God, agreeing to obey before knowing what the contract was all about, the text speaks to us today, whether we believe or not, as the quintessential notion of the importance of action over words. “Don’t say you love me, show me.” “Prove it.” “Just do it.” You get the point. We effect the world and bring about justice and kindness and peace not by professing to do so, but by the work required of us in bringing this reality to fruition.
So in this week’s Torah portion, Va’yakhel, “Moses gathered all the congregation of the children of Israel and said to them, ‘These are the words which the Eternal has commanded, that you should do them’” (Exodus 35:1).
The drama of the mountain; the charisma of Moses who met God “face to face”; a covenanted people. No sooner do the words get spoken than the teaching is rooted in its ultimate expression. Less talk, more action.
“People differ in their understanding and appreciation of the different commandments,” Rabbi David of Chortkow taught. “But when it comes to performing the commandments, there is no difference. You have to perform them. Thus we see that in gathering the people, Moses emphasized that we come together as a people in order to do.”
This is such a profound teaching, especially for contemporary Jewish communities that choose quite deliberately and mindfully not to observe all the commandments. Instead, we dedicate ourselves to adhering fully and meaningfully to those commandments we do choose to observe.
In our JCP community, we create multiple points of entry for our fellow community members, Jews and non-Jews alike. We recognize that each have our own approaches to, and engagement with the many voices of tradition and the reality of the Divine. And that what ultimately makes a community, a gathering of people dedicated to leading lives of value and meaning, is what it means to do: to take action, to engage, in order to impact the world with the living and dynamic reality of love, justice, kindness and peace.
So that’s enough words for now. I’ll shut up. Time to go do something.
Join us on October 20th for a meaningful evening of reflection and connection as we welcome Liat Atzili, a former hostage taken by Hamas, and family of hostages from Kibbutz Nir Oz. After hearing their powerful stories, we’ll dive deeper with our incredible breakout session facilitators.
