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.