The moment of Exodus is about to begin. Locusts have devoured the crops of Egypt, a penetrating darkness, so thick you could touch it covered the entirety of the land for three days, and the terrible final plague, makkat b’chorot, the killing of the first born has been announced. It is in this anxious moment that Moses gathers the children of Israel to deliver an important message. For the first time, Moses, a prophet without equal is about to address the Children of Israel, sharing with them his first words as a leader. The crowd gathers in excited silence. ‘What will he say?’ They ask. ‘What will be the first words that Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher will share with us?’ ‘What piece of divine everlasting wisdom, what nugget of morality, what essential insight of God will he teach us?’
Moses rises to his feet; he opens his mouth with the words that God had given him:
החודש הזה לכם ראש חדשים, ראשון הוא לכם לחדשי השנה.
“This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.”
‘What?’ They said. ‘Is he talking about the calendar?’ ‘Well, let’s just wait and see where he goes with this one.’
Moses continued: Everyone needs to get a lamb, a lamb for each household, unless of course that household is too small, in which case you can share with a neighbor. A really nice lamb, a yearling, no blemishes whatsoever. And on the night of the 14th of the month you shall slaughter it, taking some of the blood and placing it on your doorposts, then roast it and eat it. Make sure you eat it all, roasted over the fire, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Oh, and as for dress code for this meal, make sure your belt is on tight, your sandals are on your feet and your staff is in your hand, because as soon as we are finished with this meal of ours, we are out of here. And just in case you are wondering, this isn’t a one-shot-deal either; this meal of ours, is going to happen every single year on this date, for all time. Seven days of unleavened bread, you got that? Make sure you have cleaned your house really well - no leaven at all - even under the couch in the living room, because if I catch any of you eating leavened bread, you are cut off! And this is going to be a sacred institution of ours for all time, for you and all your descendants. And when you enter the land that the Lord has promised to you, (by the way, I hear it’s only a short walk from here), when you enter that land, you shall observe this rite. And when your children ask you, מה העבודה הזאת לכם?
What does all this mean to you? You shall say, “It is the Pesach sacrifice to the Lord, because God passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt.”
“And the people then bowed low in homage. And the Israelites went and did so, just as the Lord had commanded.”
So that’s it. That is the account of the first speech that Moses ever gives the Jewish people. It is not about morality, it is not about complicated family dynamics, it is about halachah, Jewish law, and in particular it is about the pedagogic purposes of Pesach. It also marks the first time we as a Jewish people had a collective ‘freak-out’ about all the Passover cleaning we have left to do.
Now for while we modern Jews might think this is a strange way to start off your first day as the leader of the Jewish people, the traditional commentators think it is the perfect place to start, in fact, they wonder why the whole Torah doesn’t just start right here!
In fact, in his famous first words of commentary on the entire bible, the very opening comment that our teacher Rashi, Rabbeinu Shlomo ben Yitzhak offers us, quoting the midrash he asks:
לא היה צריך להתחיל את התורה אלא מ"החודש הזה לכם" שהיה מצוה ראשונה שנצטוו ישראל
“The Torah should not have started here with B’reishit, with Genesis, no, the Torah should have started with “HaHodesh HaZeh Lakhem,” This month shall be for you”; for after all, this is the first commandment which Israel received.”
Rashi and others like him have always wondered, if the Torah is meant to be a book of law, then why not start with the law? Why do we have to slog through 61 chapters of narrative spread out over a book and a half of the Torah just to get to the first time our nation is commanded about a d’var halakhah?
But Rashi does not stop by simply asking the question, of course he offers us an answer as well. He explains that the narrative is important. It forms the core of who we are as a people, who our ancestors were; what they valued, and what they rejected. It tells us how they built their relationships and covenants with God, and what God, in turn, promised us, their descendants. In other words nomos and narrative need each other to survive. Law and lore are necessary partners; the ‘how’ always needs an accompanying ‘why.’
And that is precisely what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, points out about the unique character of Moses’ first speech to the Children of Israel, he writes:
“About to gain their freedom, the Israelites were told that they had to become a nation of educators. That is what made Moses not just a great leader, but a unique one. . . . To defend a country you need an army. But to defend a free society you need schools. You need families and an educational system in which ideals are passed on from one generation to the next, and never lost, or despaired of, or obscured. There has never been a more profound understanding of freedom. It is not difficult, Moses was saying, to gain liberty, but to sustain it is the work of a hundred generations.”
What Rabbi Sacks is pointing out to us is that in each of us, in every last one of us, there is a duty to be an educator of the Jewish tradition. It is the very first commandment we ever received as a people. Before God uttered the first word of the Ten Commandments there was “And you shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants. . . and when your children ask you, “מה העבודה הזאת לכם?” What do you mean by this rite? You shall say, “This is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord.” We are teachers. It is our most sacred job.
Now this phrase from this morning’s parasha, מה העבודה הזאת
לכם?Is familiar to many of us. We recognize it as the question that the wicked son asks in our Haggadah. But the truth is, the authors of the Haggadah took it out of context, added their own emphasis and thus turned a question into a sarcastic attack: What is this rite to YOU? And our Haggadah famously suggests that we should set his teeth on edge and explain to him, “This is because of what the Lord did for me when I came forth from Egypt,” that is why I do this. For me and not for him; for had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.
As an educator, this passage has always greatly troubled me. What is so wrong with the question? מה העבודה הזאת לכם?
Even if we read it as a sarcastic challenge
I get asked this question ten times a day. Rabbi, why do you do this? Why this law, why that law? Why do you say this? In fact, my daughter Ayelet, now two and a half and profoundly aware of everything we say, is fond of asking – “Why Abba say dat?” when she hears something I didn’t mean for her to hear. The fact is, there is nothing wrong with the question, the trouble lies with the answer, not necessarily with its content, but rather, with its tone.
Instead of smacking him in the teeth, instead of responding with defensiveness, why not start by encouraging the question? After all, is not the question of the wicked child preferable to the silence of the child “Sh’eino Yodea Lishol?” The Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask? I, for one, will take heresy over indifference every day of the week.
And so, let us learn from this morning’s Torah portion about our role as Jewish educators. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that “freedom needs three institutions: parenthood, education and memory.” To start with, we need parenthood. Our role as parents and grandparents is indispensable in keeping our Jewish traditions alive. Our children look to us to be role models, to be exemplars for their own religious identities. We must encourage their questions, entertain their suspicions, and support their desires to understand the ‘why’ and not simply the ‘how’. We must not set their teeth on edge when they disagree, but instead make sure they know that questions have always been a part of our pedagogic traditions; and then we must try to articulate what it is that we believe, why it matters to us, and why it matters to us that it matters to them. But, we must also recognize that every mixed-message, every equivocation, every bet that we hedge with regard to our own Judaism is seen and heard and internalized by our children. ‘Why Abba say dat?’ So be careful, make sure your actions correspond with your convictions.
And if we as parents lack the tools to be the primary Jewish educators of the home, then it is our duty, as it has always been to seek out help. To send our child to day school, and if day school is not an option, then religious school is a must - but it should be supplemented with educational programs like USY and with summers spent at immersive Jewish camps such as Ramah.
And finally, and most importantly, there is the memory. Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch once said “The power of a good story is irresistible.” And we have one. We have a story of degradation leading to glory. We have a story of an undying faith in One God, and the miracle of an eternal language being reborn in the land of our ancestors. We have a story of ethics and morality in the face of hardship and discrimination. And we have a story which encourages every doubt, lauds every question, and sees every single individual as a story-teller, an educator, and the most-important link in the never-ending chain of the Jewish people.
Now צא וללמד! Now go and teach.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Feeling with our Feet: Parashat Sh'mot 5772
Today I want to talk about a part of our bodies we tend to take for granted. Most of us go through life with these things, but we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how it is that they work. In fact, since ancient times human beings have devised ways of taking these things, covering them up with several layers at all times, making sure they rarely see the light of day; unless of course sometimes, after a long day, we unwrap them from their dark confinement and reveal them to the world. I am talking about our feet of course, our lovely, brilliant and sometimes smelly feet.
The reason I have feet on the brain lately is two-fold – the first is that I have slowly, but surely become a runner, that is a person who enjoys running as a form of regular exercise.
And the second reason why I have been thinking about feet is because I recently read the book by travel-writer Christopher McDougall called Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen.
This very enjoyable book tells the story of the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico, a reclusive native Mexican tribe of super-athletes who, just for fun, get up in the morning and go for a jog in the Copper Canyons, and at around the 100 mile mark or so, they stop for dinner. This is a true story of a tribe whose favorite pastime is competing in super-marathons; distance races of over 50 miles at a time, and, what’s more, they do it all wearing thin sandals made of leather.
You see, one of the major points in this book is that the reason so many of us don’t like to run, is because we’re not doing it right. We put on thick cotton socks, we buy expensive, cushioned sneakers with pockets of air, or zig-zagging springs, and then we run exactly the way our feet never intended us to run – by slamming our heels into the ground, over and over and over again. No wonder I stop after two miles.
But as some modern running theories go, we would all run a lot better, a lot farther and with fewer injuries if we just took off our shoes and ran barefoot. This is why Nike, Reebok and Vibram have all recently come out with thinner shoes, lighter shoes, and even shoes that have individual spots for each of your toes, so that you would be more likely to run as though you were barefoot. Why make these kinds of shoes at all, you may ask, if going barefoot would be better – well, someone has to make a living, no?
The theory is simple: the more direct contact your feet have with the ground, every single nook and cranny of the earth, the more the twenty muscles in your foot grow stronger, more sensitive, more resilient, and dare I say, more sure-footed.
But all this barefoot theory is nothing new – no, quite to the contrary, in this morning’s Torah portion we read of the first time someone was advised to remove their shoes in order to be in touch with the ground more completely, the person who took off their shoes was Moses, and the advice-giver was God.
In this morning’s Parasha, Parashat Sh’mot, Moses encounters the Presence of God for the first, but certainly not the last time. While he is tending to his father-in-law’s flock, he stumbles upon Mt. Horev, and there he sees a miraculous vision.
וַיֵּרָא מַלְאַךְ יְהוָֹה אֵלָיו בְּלַבַּת-אֵשׁ מִתּוֹךְ הַסְּנֶה
וַיַּרְא וְהִנֵּה הַסְּנֶה בֹּעֵר בָּאֵשׁ וְהַסְּנֶה אֵינֶנּוּ אֻכָּל:
An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed.
This of course, is of one of the most famous moments of theophany, that is a visible manifestation of God, so famous it would become the logo of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and of course, it is what is depicted in the stained glass window above and behind me.
The text continues,
When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: "Moses! Moses!" He answered, "Here I am."
And God said:
אַל-תִּקְרַב הֲלֹם שַׁל-נְעָלֶיךָ מֵעַל רַגְלֶיךָ כִּי הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה עוֹמֵד עָלָיו אַדְמַת-קֹדֶשׁ הֽוּא:
"Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”
This is the moment of Moses’ first encounter with the God of Israel. And God says; take off your shoes, for you are standing on holy ground. The commentators are a little taken aback. Why does Moses need to take of his shoes? Abraham Ibn Ezra seems to indicate that Moshe had reached a certain line in the sand, any closer and he would be in danger of coming into the very presence of the Lord. But this still does not explain why Moshe needed to take off his shoes, surely he could have kept them on, and still fulfilled God’s admonition to not come any closer.
Rabbi Yosef ben Issac, the French tosafist known as The Bekhor Shor, explains, ‘since the shoe treads everywhere, including unclean places, it is not proper to bring it into a sacred place.’
And this is all well and good, and indeed it might be the very p’shat of the verse, take off those filthy shoes because this is holy ground, but then historically it seems a bit odd that Judaism, unlike Islam, never banned shoes from the prayer experience. Before you enter any mosque, you take off your shoes and place them in a small cubby. But I would venture a guess that everyone sitting in the congregation today is proud to be protectively shoed.
Therefore, I went in search of another explanation, one which I found in the Hasidic commentary of the Ollalot Ephraim, where he explains:
The world beneath our feet is always filled with small stones and debris. When we wear shoes, we easily walk upon all sorts of small things which stand in out way; in fact we barely notice them. But, when we walk barefoot, we feel every single stone and pebble, every kotz v’dardar, every thorn and every thistle, every last rock hurts us. He continues: And this then is the hinted meaning of the text: To Moses, the preeminent leader of the people Israel, God said: “Shal na’alekha” “take off your shoes,” meaning, the leader of each and every generation needs to be aware of every barrier, every experience of suffering that is placed upon the way. A leader, says the Ollalot Ephraim, “Yichav et k’ev ha-am,’ must feel the pain of the people, and must be sensitive to their every suffering.
Tomorrow our nation once again celebrates the birth of a modern prophet, and the leader of a generation, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Dr. King knew what it meant to be sensitive to the sufferings of his people. He knew what it meant to walk barefoot through the world, to be painfully aware of every stumbling block, of every thorn which was set upon the way of the African-American people in our country. He did not ignore the pain; he did not seek more comfortable shoes which would afford him the luxury of ignoring each insult, of compartmentalizing prejudice. And Dr. King of course, was someone who was intimately aware of the power of walking.
On this weekend, and next Sunday, as we in the Temple Emanu-El community raise our voices in song with the Congdon St. Baptist Church in celebration of Dr. King, we recognize the Jewish people’s deep connection with the narrative of emerging from the depths of slavery into the warm light of redemption. We recall how our own Rabbi, Rabbi Eli Bohnen, Zichrono Livrakhah, sat on the dais of the Rabbinical Assembly Convention of 1968, With Dr. King seated to his left (just months before his assassination), and with Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel to his right. Rabbi Bohnen presided over this convention, a convention which famously serenaded Dr. King with the spiritual “We shall overcome,” sung in Hebrew.
And of course we remember and we cherish the iconic image of Dr. Heschel, whose Yahrtzeit was yesterday, marching arm in arm with Dr. King and other civil rights leaders as they marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Heschel’s famous quotation about this march is engrained in our modern Jewish consciousness – ‘I felt my legs were praying.” He said.
This is the meaning of true leadership; it is an understanding of the power that comes when we walk barefoot through our lives. When instead of ignoring the pain and suffering of others that abounds, we make ourselves vulnerable to it. When instead of choosing a life of padding and cushion, we understand that we were meant to feel every rock and every pebble, every thorn and every thistle of the ground beneath our feet. On this weekend, the weekend that we remember the legacy of the illustrious Dr. King, on the very week when we observe the Yahrtzeit of our beloved teacher Dr. Heschel, on the morning when we read of Moses, the first barefoot leader of our people, let us remember another teaching of Heschel’s when speaking at the 1963 Conference of Religion and Race, he told the crowd, “The Exodus began, but is far from having been completed.”
Today, let us promise to complete it.
Shabbat Shalom.
The reason I have feet on the brain lately is two-fold – the first is that I have slowly, but surely become a runner, that is a person who enjoys running as a form of regular exercise.
And the second reason why I have been thinking about feet is because I recently read the book by travel-writer Christopher McDougall called Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen.
This very enjoyable book tells the story of the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico, a reclusive native Mexican tribe of super-athletes who, just for fun, get up in the morning and go for a jog in the Copper Canyons, and at around the 100 mile mark or so, they stop for dinner. This is a true story of a tribe whose favorite pastime is competing in super-marathons; distance races of over 50 miles at a time, and, what’s more, they do it all wearing thin sandals made of leather.
You see, one of the major points in this book is that the reason so many of us don’t like to run, is because we’re not doing it right. We put on thick cotton socks, we buy expensive, cushioned sneakers with pockets of air, or zig-zagging springs, and then we run exactly the way our feet never intended us to run – by slamming our heels into the ground, over and over and over again. No wonder I stop after two miles.
But as some modern running theories go, we would all run a lot better, a lot farther and with fewer injuries if we just took off our shoes and ran barefoot. This is why Nike, Reebok and Vibram have all recently come out with thinner shoes, lighter shoes, and even shoes that have individual spots for each of your toes, so that you would be more likely to run as though you were barefoot. Why make these kinds of shoes at all, you may ask, if going barefoot would be better – well, someone has to make a living, no?
The theory is simple: the more direct contact your feet have with the ground, every single nook and cranny of the earth, the more the twenty muscles in your foot grow stronger, more sensitive, more resilient, and dare I say, more sure-footed.
But all this barefoot theory is nothing new – no, quite to the contrary, in this morning’s Torah portion we read of the first time someone was advised to remove their shoes in order to be in touch with the ground more completely, the person who took off their shoes was Moses, and the advice-giver was God.
In this morning’s Parasha, Parashat Sh’mot, Moses encounters the Presence of God for the first, but certainly not the last time. While he is tending to his father-in-law’s flock, he stumbles upon Mt. Horev, and there he sees a miraculous vision.
וַיֵּרָא מַלְאַךְ יְהוָֹה אֵלָיו בְּלַבַּת-אֵשׁ מִתּוֹךְ הַסְּנֶה
וַיַּרְא וְהִנֵּה הַסְּנֶה בֹּעֵר בָּאֵשׁ וְהַסְּנֶה אֵינֶנּוּ אֻכָּל:
An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed.
This of course, is of one of the most famous moments of theophany, that is a visible manifestation of God, so famous it would become the logo of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and of course, it is what is depicted in the stained glass window above and behind me.
The text continues,
When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: "Moses! Moses!" He answered, "Here I am."
And God said:
אַל-תִּקְרַב הֲלֹם שַׁל-נְעָלֶיךָ מֵעַל רַגְלֶיךָ כִּי הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה עוֹמֵד עָלָיו אַדְמַת-קֹדֶשׁ הֽוּא:
"Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”
This is the moment of Moses’ first encounter with the God of Israel. And God says; take off your shoes, for you are standing on holy ground. The commentators are a little taken aback. Why does Moses need to take of his shoes? Abraham Ibn Ezra seems to indicate that Moshe had reached a certain line in the sand, any closer and he would be in danger of coming into the very presence of the Lord. But this still does not explain why Moshe needed to take off his shoes, surely he could have kept them on, and still fulfilled God’s admonition to not come any closer.
Rabbi Yosef ben Issac, the French tosafist known as The Bekhor Shor, explains, ‘since the shoe treads everywhere, including unclean places, it is not proper to bring it into a sacred place.’
And this is all well and good, and indeed it might be the very p’shat of the verse, take off those filthy shoes because this is holy ground, but then historically it seems a bit odd that Judaism, unlike Islam, never banned shoes from the prayer experience. Before you enter any mosque, you take off your shoes and place them in a small cubby. But I would venture a guess that everyone sitting in the congregation today is proud to be protectively shoed.
Therefore, I went in search of another explanation, one which I found in the Hasidic commentary of the Ollalot Ephraim, where he explains:
The world beneath our feet is always filled with small stones and debris. When we wear shoes, we easily walk upon all sorts of small things which stand in out way; in fact we barely notice them. But, when we walk barefoot, we feel every single stone and pebble, every kotz v’dardar, every thorn and every thistle, every last rock hurts us. He continues: And this then is the hinted meaning of the text: To Moses, the preeminent leader of the people Israel, God said: “Shal na’alekha” “take off your shoes,” meaning, the leader of each and every generation needs to be aware of every barrier, every experience of suffering that is placed upon the way. A leader, says the Ollalot Ephraim, “Yichav et k’ev ha-am,’ must feel the pain of the people, and must be sensitive to their every suffering.
Tomorrow our nation once again celebrates the birth of a modern prophet, and the leader of a generation, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Dr. King knew what it meant to be sensitive to the sufferings of his people. He knew what it meant to walk barefoot through the world, to be painfully aware of every stumbling block, of every thorn which was set upon the way of the African-American people in our country. He did not ignore the pain; he did not seek more comfortable shoes which would afford him the luxury of ignoring each insult, of compartmentalizing prejudice. And Dr. King of course, was someone who was intimately aware of the power of walking.
On this weekend, and next Sunday, as we in the Temple Emanu-El community raise our voices in song with the Congdon St. Baptist Church in celebration of Dr. King, we recognize the Jewish people’s deep connection with the narrative of emerging from the depths of slavery into the warm light of redemption. We recall how our own Rabbi, Rabbi Eli Bohnen, Zichrono Livrakhah, sat on the dais of the Rabbinical Assembly Convention of 1968, With Dr. King seated to his left (just months before his assassination), and with Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel to his right. Rabbi Bohnen presided over this convention, a convention which famously serenaded Dr. King with the spiritual “We shall overcome,” sung in Hebrew.
And of course we remember and we cherish the iconic image of Dr. Heschel, whose Yahrtzeit was yesterday, marching arm in arm with Dr. King and other civil rights leaders as they marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Heschel’s famous quotation about this march is engrained in our modern Jewish consciousness – ‘I felt my legs were praying.” He said.
This is the meaning of true leadership; it is an understanding of the power that comes when we walk barefoot through our lives. When instead of ignoring the pain and suffering of others that abounds, we make ourselves vulnerable to it. When instead of choosing a life of padding and cushion, we understand that we were meant to feel every rock and every pebble, every thorn and every thistle of the ground beneath our feet. On this weekend, the weekend that we remember the legacy of the illustrious Dr. King, on the very week when we observe the Yahrtzeit of our beloved teacher Dr. Heschel, on the morning when we read of Moses, the first barefoot leader of our people, let us remember another teaching of Heschel’s when speaking at the 1963 Conference of Religion and Race, he told the crowd, “The Exodus began, but is far from having been completed.”
Today, let us promise to complete it.
Shabbat Shalom.
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