Rabbi Weiner's Blog

Nigel Savage, founder and primum mobile (look it up!) of Hazon, the preeminent Jewish environmental organization, will be visiting the JCA for a scholar-in-residence weekend next week: from 1/27 to 1/29.

This is a great opportunity for the JCA, and the wider community.

I’ll admit to you that I have some concern over the fact that it has not yet seemed to fire the imaginations of the JCA, or the wider community, judging by the number of registration forms currently on file in the JCA office.

I’ve spent some time thinking about why this might be the case–a speaker with less name recognition, publications, or star power than last year’s speaker–Art Green? A topic that might present a conundrum: Torah and food? environment and religion? a late start in publicity owing to Nigel’s prolonged sabbatical? a sluggish winter mentality? a desire to spend that special off-weekend between the conference championships and the Super Bowl at home with family?

I would be glad for more input on this: if you are on the fence about this event, or have consciously chosen not too attend, I’d be grateful if you shared your thoughts with me.

Beyond that, I want to strongly encourage you to take the time to register and attend the weekend–something you can do right now through the JCA website: www.j-c-a.org

Here’s why:

*Nigel is a dynamic and passionate speaker, and his Torah and organization really do represent some of the thinking on the cutting edge of Jewish discourse today: how will Jewish tradition respond as a well of inspiration to the crisis and challenge of our time.

*It is also a fascinating way of considering Jewish tradition in and of itself, as not just something abstract and intellectual, but as a body of wisdom that really does meet us on the level of the physical basis of our lives.

*Hazon has proven particularly adept and effective at reaching a younger generation of Jews, formulating new and compelling visions for how to live a vibrant and relevant Judaism in the real world. You should hear, in particular, about the fantastic long-distance bike rides and weekend retreats that the organization puts on every year.

* And, finally: I really want us to be good hosts to this national figure. If nothing else grabs you, please consider subscribing to the event, and attending, to insure that the JCA retains and intensifies its growing reputation as a Jewish intellectual hub, and an important regional site for Jewish issues of national relevance. All the more so when it comes to Judaism and agricultural–this is an area where we are particularly poised to make our mark.

Let me put it a little more plainly: when all is said and done, I’m concerned about offering an embarrassingly small reception for a national Jewish figure who has expressed excitement about coming to visit us. As our grandmothers would say, let’s avoid a shandah!

Back to the positive: this will be an inspiring weekend of crucial Torah learning, with great food cooked up by our own Karen Loeb, and–this just in–including produce donated graciously to the JCA, for this special occasion by local CSAs, who are delighted to be supporting us in this project of mutual interest.

So, please take the time to register right away, and join us for this great event.

Here is the poem I read at the end of my d’var Torah for Parashat Vayechi, the last Torah portion of Genesis, which tells about the end of the Patriarch Jacob’s life. I wrote this poem a few years ago, after finding it impossible to express some thoughts I was having in the more straightforward way. I was trying to get at the way that Jacob’s life seemed to be characterized throughout by the same tension between himself, his brother, and god. In the end, I found myself imagining how this tension might visit him on his deathbed, in a confused reminisence of the various significant moments of his life. The poem is full of references to the biblical narrative, which I hope will be obvious to people familiar with the story.

Jacob Dying

The eyes of old men
grow heavy, every shape
a shadow in overwhelming light,
every shadow bleeding
into its brother.

The twelve around your bed,
a vision of your death
in their eyes, and your eyes
still squeezing the fluid of dreams
from hard shapes: the lion
and the serpent, the shore for ships,
the wolf, and your heart
still bleeding
like a torn cloak.

He was so close
that you could wear his skin,
body tangled in body, suspended
in convulsing darkness, and
the voice, within, beyond,
whispering, shouting: fight! embrace.
And your own heart screaming:
leave me! love me! be me!
And you grabbed his heel
and made him bless you, when
you saw light breaking
on the other side of the canal,
but he would not say his name.

Though once when you were running
you stopped running.
Your head sank like a stone
and through half-opened eyes
you saw: two bodies,
earth and sky, and angels
passing back and forth
like shared blood.

You bowed down seven times
and then you felt him
standing over you.

He was crying
when he knelt and kissed you,
and he told you:
I am with you.
And you woke up
in the house of god.

The JCA participated in the Rabbis for Human Rights “Human Rights Shabbat” this past weekend, being led by Marcia Black in an exploration of human rights from a Jewish perspective, and learning about the issues of human trafficking and modern day slavery.

Below, you will find two of the teachings that Marcia presented to the community, first some information on how you can do your best to be sure that your shopping is not contributing to the perpetuation of slavery, and second the wonderful d’var Torah she gave about Jacob’s wrestling representing a wrestling with conscience.
—————-
During Human Rights Shabbat, we began a discussion of modern day slavery in the
supply chains of many of the products that we buy. We will continue to explore this
important issue in the coming months. Here are some links to places where you can
learn how to shop for fair trade products, and check out which major companies have
slaves in their supply chains.

http://www.free2work.org/; http://ilrf.org/what-you-can-do/2;

http://transfairusa.org/products-partners;

http://www.rugidea.com/child_labor_carpet_industry.html

—————————

Vayishlach – Wrestling with Our Complicity; Wrestling with Our Conscience
Human Rights Shabbat, December 10, 2011 – Marcia Black
marciablack@comcast.net

In the Talmud we read, “From where do we know that if a person sees his fellow drowning, mauled by beasts, or attacked by robbers, he is bound to save him? From the verse (in Leviticus 19:16) “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood.” Our tradition commands us to act against injustice, to intervene in cruelty, to free the captive. Why, then, do we so often fail to act? fail to protest? fail to protect? How is it that, in the blink of an eye, we go from seeing to not-seeing, from feeling to not-feeling? Why do we turn our faces away from suffering?

More than 27 million people are slaves today, more than at any other time in human history. Many of these slaves are children, bought and sold, and bought and sold again, and again, and again. Right this moment, close to 17,000 people are enslaved here in the United States, a country that outlawed slavery in the 1800’s. These slaves are held against their will, paid no wages, made to work long hours in dreadful conditions, threatened, locked up, beaten. They labor in fields, in factories, in people’s homes, in brothels. They are lured into slavery by false promises of jobs and a new life, are enslaved through false debts and misleading contracts. Many, if not most, are trafficked illegally into our country.

In the global economy of the 21st century, it is impossible not to be complicit. The tomatoes we eat are often harvested by debt-slaves in Florida’s tomato fields ; the chocolate we buy comes from cocoa picked by child slaves in West Africa; many of the cars we drive, the washing machines, driers, dishwashers we use, are made with steel that is made from pig iron that is made from charcoal produced by slaves in Brazil; many of the rugs we purchase are woven by child slaves in Nepal, Pakistan, India and Morocco. Can we come panim el panim with this truth: that our everyday actions as consumers contributes to the merciless treatment of others. More often than not, “we are drinking someone else’s misery for breakfast” (John Bowe, Nobodies), walking on someone else’s misery in our homes, wearing someone else’s misery next to our skin.

Many people suggest that the evasion of doing-what’s-right, the passivity of the bystander, comes from a lack of empathy or a moral cowardice that makes us think only of our own gain, or of a deeply-seated greed for power. I think the opposite may be more true – we turn a blind eye because we identify so strongly with the pain of another. In that moment when we resonate with another’s ruin, we fear we also will be annihilated – annihilated by a deep, reflexive empathy with the other’s terror, the other‘s rage, the other‘s pain.

When someone else feels anguish, pain, terror, heart-break, we, too, feel this. We are made that way: exquisitely sensitive instruments, attuned to the sensations of others, whether we want to or not. To be alive and in the company of others, is to sustain injury. Sooner or later, we all have to wrestle with, and finally accept this simple truth: we are injured by life. If we resist this truth, we either fight with life, or we wall ourselves off from others. If, on the other hand, we accept this wounding, then something else marvelous happens. We see this here with Yaakov – after wrestling with the mysterious being, Yaakov is injured, and only then is he blessed – given a new name, a new identity, a new relationship with God. As the S’fat Emet suggests, he is given a new way towards shalem, safety, and a new way to shalom, peace within himself and with God. (referenced in Etz Chayim).

Midrashic sources refer to Yaakov’s assailant as an angel of God, as well as Esau’s guardian angel. In modern terms, we can imagine that Yaakov feels Esau‘s rage inside of him, and he feels his fear in response to this rage. We can imagine him wrestling with these huge feelings, as well as his guilt and remorse, for they are uncomfortable and he would rather not feel them. We all have had our sleepless nights.

Yet I think that Yaakov’s struggle cannot be reduced to simply a struggle with strong emotions. I think we are witnessing, instead, the steps that Yaakov must take to build a resilient and strong conscience.

In the previous parsha, Laban and Yaakov agree to reconcile their differences, and agree not to harm each other in the future. Yaakov erects a pillar, reminiscent of the pillar that he erected at the place where he dreamed of the ladder connecting him with God. In that previous parsha, God tells Yaakov that He will watch over him, protect him. In this parsha, we hear that God is not just watching in order to protect Yaakov, but also to prevent Yaakov from harming us. When the pillar is erected, Laban says, “No man is here with us, but see, God is witness between me and you!….witness is this mound, witness is this pillar, that I will not cross over this mound to you and you will not cross over this mound and this pillar to me, for ill!” (Gen 31:44-52).

Yaakov has begun to relate to God as Witness, and so has begun to think in ethical terms. And yet in today’s parsha, God as witness, symbolized by a pillar external to the self, is not enough to keep Yaakov from succumbing to terror. Rashi writes that when Yaakov became …frightened, and…distressed at the approach of Esau and his men, “He was frightened lest he be killed and he was distressed that he might kill others.” (Gen. Rabbah 75:2, Tanchuma, Vayishlach 4), His terror was that his relationship with God would not be strong enough to protect him from this double jeopardy of kill or be killed.

This terror propels Yaakov into a dark night of the soul. He must fight for his life after all, but this is not a mortal fight with a mortal enemy. Instead, this is a fight to develop a stronger conscience. Yaakov must accept his capacity for harm, and accept the inevitability of injury. Only then can he move into a different relationship with God and with humans; only then can he develop a conscience that will guide him away from harm and towards kindness.

Rashi describes Yaakov’s struggle, “and a man wrestled……is a term meaning that he attached himself, and it is an Aramaic expression [found in the Talmud] (Sanh. 63b):“After they became attached (___________) to it…. for so is the habit of two people who make strong efforts to throw each other down, that one embraces the other and attaches himself to him with his arms.“ Body to body, Yaakov encounters his worst fears, body to body he encounters his guilt; body to body he encounters the other who is also himself, body to body he encounters God. Through this passionate attachment, Yaakov learned to engage God through his body, not just through his mind.

Midrash tells us that this fight between Yaakov and his assailant was so intense, enough dust was kicked up to touch the throne of Heaven. Through this long wrestling match, Yaakov’s energy touches the hem of God’s garment – the garment that is spread across the heavens to signify peace.

Yaakov names the place of struggle Peniel/Face of God. He then is able to approach Esau with openness, humility and a kind of unspoken resonance of love. Much to the surprise of Rabbinic commentators, Esau runs and embraces him. He flings himself on Yaakov’s neck and kisses him. The description of this meeting is physical, intense, passionate. Body to body, face to face, the two enemies, the twin brothers who resonate with each other, meet. Yaakov says “…I have seen your face, as one sees the face of God…” (Gen 33:10) It seems that only by allowing ourselves to become broken and brokenhearted do we break open a new way of relating to God, to others, and to ourselves.

Taking in – really taking in – the cruelty that humans inflict on each other injures us. Horror pulls hard at our hearts, sorrow rings through our nerves, fear sends rippling signals through our muscles when we resonate, body to body, with the suffering of others. And it turns out we are primed to feel this way by our neurology. We are programmed, through mirror neurons, to feel what the other feels, to want to act the way the other wants to act, to feel a resonance in our muscles and nerves with what the other person feels in theirs. Your body talks to my body, even if we are just seeing these each other in a photograph or a video, or read about each other in the news. Underneath thought, outside personal narrative, regardless of divides of time, distance or culture, our bodies twin with each other. No matter how different we are, like Yaakov and Esau, we feel what each other feels.

By opening to awareness of this grand orchestra of sensation and resonance, and by allowing bodily release of the inevitable pain that comes from living with one another, we become stronger, more resilient, and more actively kind. Yaakov wrestles body to body with the angel until he understands – we must accept the injury of deeply connected intimacy in order to receive the blessing that this intimacy brings.

Can we learn, with Yaakov, to overcome our instinctual responses to fear? Can we learn not to take flight, nor fight, nor freeze? Can we allow ourselves to be deeply injured by the biologically driven twinning with another’s pain and respond to this pain with open-hearted and wise action? Our sages tell us that God loves best the broken-hearted. Can we learn to open more and more and more to the unbidden and naturally occurring intimacy that resonates between us, as creatures living on this planet, who will always and forever be broken-hearted, and broken open?

Perhaps in this way we will find our way to say we did “not stand idly by our neighbor’s blood.”

Biblical quotes from Everett Fox, Five Books of Moses, 1983, Schocken Books, New York.

Information about neurological resonance comes from Peter Levine, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores , North Atlantic Books, 2010.

I want to call your attention to two different pieces currently in press.

The first is Bernard Avishai’s piece on the Palestinian “right of return”, which has come out in Harper’s. I hope you will recall that Avishai was our guest at this year’s Rabin Lecture, which we held back in September. The talk he offered was abstracted from this article, which he was preparing for publication at the time.

Unfortunately, on-line the piece is only available in teasingly small print. You have to subscribe if you’d like to read it without a magnifying glass. But here is the link nonetheless:

http://harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083721

The other piece is by a favorite son of the JCA who we are privileged to have back in our orbit, Rabbi Jacob Fine. It’s a beautiful reflection on the spirituality of gardening, found in the latest issue of Sh’ma:

http://www.shma.com/2011/12/farming-in-the-creator’s-image/

Last Friday night, as part of our “Torah of Creativity and Activism” we were visited by Stephanie Ciccarello, who had that day begun her work as Sustainability Coordinator for the town of Amherst, helping the town to formulate plans and take actions to mitigate the effects of climate change and declining energy resources.

Stephanie mentioned an on-line tool that is very helpful in calculating personal energy use, so as to be able to take concrete conservation steps. It’s called the Western Mass Saves Energy Calculator. Here is the link:

http://www.amherstma.gov/index.aspx?NID=1146

Hopefully, we will find this a helpful tool for developing the ability to cope with some of the new realities at play in our society.

There is a mystery at the heart of today’s Torah reading.  In general, the
parshah makes sense, or at least it makes sense why we would be asked to
read it on the morning of Yom Kippur.  Taken from the middle of the book
of Leviticus, it tells the story of the very first Yom Kippur-the
instructions given through Moses to Aaron, the High Priest, about how and
when he could safely enter and exit the Kodesh Kodashim, the Holy of
Holies, the most sacred precinct of the Tabernacle.  It details the
elaborate sacrificial ritual that is supposed to attend his entry, and
lets us know that the reason for going in at all to is to affect a very
powerful atonement on behalf himself and all the Children of Israel-to
bring about some profound reconciliation with God.

The passage concludes by instructing us that this isn’t meant to be done
only once.  It’s for all time: ve-hayta zot lachem l’khukat olam lichaper
al-b’nei yisrael mikol khatotam achat ba’shanei-and this will be a
longstanding statute for you, to purge the Children of Israel of all of
their sins once a year.  This ritual was slightly modified into the Yom
Kippur service of the Jerusalem Temples, and made its way much altered
down to us.  But, at its heart, all of these manifestations are of a piece
with what’s described in the Torah, which is why we continue to read this
passage today-to remind us of where we came from, and to see what we can
learn from our origins.

It’s true, however, that the details of the day have changed almost beyond
recognition.  Though the ancient Israelites also afflicted themselves with
fasting, the central ritual of their Yom Kippur was not prayer-avodah
she’balev-the service of the heart; but the ultimate avodah b’gashmiut-the
very physical form of worship known as animal sacrifice.  It is in the
details of the sacrificial service that we find our mystery.  Actually,
it’s a mystery within a mystery-a situation in which the explanation
offered for a behavior makes even less sense than the behavior itself.

Many of the sacrificial details might seem familiar from analogous
passages of the Torah discussing the slaughter of bulls and goats and such
for the sake of an olah, a burnt offering, or a chattat, a sin offering,
both of which are stipulated in our parsha.  But then, right in the middle
of all of this, we find something unusual: v’lakakh et shnei  haseirim
v’he’emad otam lifnei adonai petach ohel mo’ed; v’natan aharon al shnei
hse’irim goralot goral echad l’adonai v’goral echad l’azazel.  “He should
take two goats, and stand them before Adonai at the entrance of the Tent
of Meeting; and Aaron should cast lots over the two goats, one lot for
Adonai, and one lot for Azazel.”

This is the famous scapegoat ritual: two identical goats are presented at
the Tabernacle, and a game of chance determines which is sacrificed on the
altar, and which is symbolically invested with all of the sins and
transgressions of the people and their priest, and let go to wander the
wilderness.

This is just not a very common practice in the Torah’s annals of
sacrifice.  There is one thing that might be comparable, the ceremony for
reintroducing a formerly tamei, unclean, person into the camp, which
involves the sacrifice of one bird and the release of another, but beyond
that there is nothing like it.  And even if we accept that as an analogue,
it doesn’t explain the word “Azazel.”  What is this “Azazel”-this term
that is balanced against Adonai in the scales of the ritual?

When I was a kid in Day School, we learned somehow that “Azazel” was a
Hebrew word for Hell, and ran around giddily telling each other to “lech
l’azazel.”  But I found a more intriguing answer to the question in a
traditional commentary, albeit an answer that tweaks the question into the
even more challenging puzzle.  Avraham Ibn Ezra, a Medieval Sephardic
commentator on the Torah, who is generally given pride of place just
behind Rashi and is also sometimes described as a sly, proto-modernist,
has this to say about Azazel: ve’im yekholta l’vahin  hasod she-hu achar
milat azazel, he writes-”And if you strive to understand the secret of the
word Azazel, know that the mystery and the mystery of its name have
analogues in the Torah.  And I will reveal to you a little of the mystery
with a hint-when you are 33 years old you will understand.”

As cryptic as THIS sounds, I tell you it is only after we’ve figured out
what Ibn Ezra is alluding to that we come to the real mystery.  He is
being very coy, because what he has come to believe about the word Azazel
makes him uncomfortable.  As is the case with a number of his rmazim, his
hints, he is trying to say that he has uncovered something that might
trouble the pious, and so he’ll only say it between the lines, and hamevin
yavin, those who understand will understand.

What is the substance of his hint?  It turns out if you count exactly 33
verses, become 33 years old as he puts it, from the first mention of
Azazel, you come to this verse of Torah: “v’lo yizbechu od et zvkheyhem
lase’irim asher hem zonim achareihem-”And they [the Children of Israel]
may no longer offer their sacrifices to the goats, [or, more likely, the
goat demons] after whom they go astray.”

This is the verse of Torah that Ibn Ezra considers analogous to,
explanatory of, the mystery Azazel.  Basically, he think this Azazel is
one of the goat demons-some kind of horned, rutting beastgod of the
wilderness that captivated the imagination of a pastoral people to the
extent that they propitiated him with animal sacrifices.  It is this
possibility, which he clearly considers very very likely, that gives him
such pause-that makes him take refuge in hints and coy explanations; his
urge toward truth locked in combat with his impulse of self-censorship.
And it is this explanation that leads us to our ultimate puzzle:  if we
take Ibn Ezra’s explanation, and I really don’t see any reason why not to,
not having found a better one, then we must somehow explain the fact that
in the heart of the most sacred moment of the Jewish calendar, at the very
doorway of the Holy of Holies, God is asking the people, God is asking the
High Priest Aaron in particular, to commit a flagrant blasphemy: to make a
sacrificial offering that is only 33 verses later branded, in no uncertain
terms, a salacious and forbidden act.

I do think that our parsha provides an explanation for this sanctioned
blasphemy, but it’s very subtle.  To find it, we have to pick up a slender
thread sticking out of the first verses of the passage, and follow it
where it leads.

What makes Torah unique is that it is essentially a law book coated in
stories.  Even when we are given detailed rules, as we are in this
chapter, it is never out of narrative context.  And so we find the
following details at the start of the passage: Vayidaber adonai el moshe
acharei mot shnei b’nei aharon b’karvatam lifnei adonai vaymuto. Vayomer
adonai el moshe daber el aharon akhikha. “And Adonai spoke to Moses after
the death of the two sons of Aaron, who had drawn near before Adonai and
died.  And Adonai said to Moses, speak to Aaron, your brother.”  It is not
at just any time that God decides to give these rules about how to
properly approach the Holy of Holies for this ceremony of
reconciliation-it is soon after the unusual deaths of Nadav and Avihu,
about whom we read the following in an earlier chapter of Leviticus: “And
the sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, each took their firepans and put fire
in them, and incense on top of the fire, and brought before Adonai a
strange fire that had not been commanded of them.  And a fire went out
from before Adonai, and devoured them, and they died before Adonai.”

Rashi himself addresses the question of why a blatant reference to this
incident precedes the laws of the Yom Kippur approach to the Holy place,
citing a teaching from the ancient midrash: “What does this teach us?” he
asks us rhetorically.  “Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah compares it to a sick
person whose doctor tells him not to eat a certain food or sleep on a
certain bed.  If a second doctor comes along and tells him: don’t eat a
certain food or sleep on a certain bed, or else you will die like
so-and-so did, it will make more of an impression.”  The suggestion here
is that Nadav and Avihu are being portrayed to their father as negative
examples.  They, too, were priests, and they attempted a kind of access
to the sacred that was impermissible, and so they suffered the
consequences.  “You are the High Priest-make sure that you do it right,
so that you don’t die like those two so-and-sos.”

The thing about Rashi is that he is essentially an anthologizer, bringing
all kinds of bits and pieces from the Ashkenazic branch of rabbinic
tradition to bear on Torah.  Therefore he does not always come off as
consistent, seeming to say contradictory things in different places.  Such
is the case with Nadav and Avihu.  If we go back again to the incident
itself, we find that it is followed by a complicated statement from Moses.
 Vayomer Moshe el Aharon, and Moses said to Aaron, his bereaved brother:
“It is as Adonai has said, saying ‘By those that draw near to me I will be
sanctified, and before the entire nation I will be honored.”  What does
Rashi say about this?  He offers a commentary in the voice of Moses, “This
is what Moses was really saying to Aaron: “My brother, I knew that this
House would be sanctified by the intimates of God, and I had in mind that
this would be me or you.  Now I see that these two are greater than either
me or you.”

I had a teacher in Israel named Ari Elon, who had a radical take on this
piece of Rashi.  He told me he thought it meant that Moses knew all along
that someone was going to have to die for the sake of the sacred place,
and that what Moses is saying here is that Nadav and Avihu paid that
necessary price.  Whether you want to go down this road or not, it is
still clear that what Rashi is suggesting here is almost the exact
opposite of what he said elsewhere.  Nadav and Avihu are not negative
examples but beloveds of the Most High, who has embraced them in arms of
fire.  They are not sinners-they are martyrs, or, at least we are now left
with both of these possibilities hovering in our minds as we contemplate
the carnage.  But, either way, Aaron’s response, following immediately on
Moses’s words of consolation, is the same:  vayidom Aharon-and Aaron was
silent.

Some read Aaron’s silence as acquiescence: he accepts what Moses has to
tell him, he accepts that there is a good explanation-either his sons were
very bad or they were very good-and he moves on.  But there are other
kinds of silence, and I suspect if this were really finished business
between Aaron and God then we wouldn’t have heard about it again; it
certainly would not have been referred to as the touchstone of Yom Kippur,
the narrative context for this eternal holiday of reconciliation with the
sacred.

What other kinds of silence are there?  There is, of course, the silence
of a man choking on anger or sadness, trying to swallow them because he
has no choice but to soldier on in his duty.  He is the High Priest after
all, he is responsible for opening the doors of the Sacred Place on behalf
of the people, and he has to go through the motions, even if the very
sight of this sacred place is the wellspring of an unspeakable pain; even
if he can no longer feel the glow of this Sacred Place like he used to, at
the very same time that he remains responsible for sweeping out its ashes
and its dung.

But if the God we talk about is any good at all, it should be a God that
can hear this man’s silence.  If this sacred place is really a place worth
being, it must be a place that knows how to call us home, even as we are
ready to burn the bridge that leads to it.

Vayidom Aharon-

And Aaron was silent.  And Aaron was stunned.  And Aaron was unmoved by
Moses’s attempt to justify his tragedy in words.  And Aaron was a zombie,
performing his duties joylessly, unable to understand this thing that he
served, but sure enough able to hate it.

 Vayidaber adonai el moshe acharei mot shnei b’nei aharon.Vayomer adonai
el moshe daber el aharon akhikha–”And God spoke to Moses after the death
of Aaron’s two sons, and God said to Moses, speak to your brother Aaron.

And tell him what?  Tell him that I know this is no longer a place he
wants to be; that his heart his hard, that he chokes that he can’t speak;
tell him that I have heard his silence and that I have thought of a way
for us to be reconciled.

v’lakakh et shnei  haseirim v’he’emad otam lifnei adonai petach ohel
mo’ed; v’natan aharon al shnei hse’irim goralot goral echad l’adonai
v’goral echad l’azazel.  “He should take two goats, and stand them before
me at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and Aaron should cast lots over
the two goats, one lot for me, and one lot for Azazel.”

Aaron should come here and pledge himself to me-I want him to give me
what’s mine on my altar-and at the same time I want him to hurl his Azazel
at me, his obscenity.  I will allow my High Priest to commit this
blasphemy against me, because I have hurt him and I will never be able to
explain why to his satisfaction.  Only let him do it here.  Let me embrace
him as he curses my name.

 And this is what Aaron did.  He made one offer fittingly on the altar of
his god, and at the same time poured out all of his transgression on the
head of a living animal, which he let go to wander among the strange
spirits of the wilderness.  And then he waited in the sacred place, to
hear what song might begin to filter down through his silence.

ve-hayta zot lachem l’khukat olam-this will be a longstanding statute for
you; this will be yours to do every year, once a year, on this day of
mystery and reconciliation, this Yom Kippur.

G’mar Tov

On a recent visit to one of our Hebrew School classes, I was asked what my favorite Jewish holiday is. I answered, “Purim,” naturally, “because I like to be silly.” But the kids weren’t satisfied, so they asked me, “What’s your second favorite holiday,” and I answered, “Yom Kippur.”

I realize, in retrospect, that this might paint me as a man who likes extremes, vacillating between the heights of frivolity and the depths of solemnity in just a few breaths. But the truth is tradition actually links these two incongruous days, Purim and Yom Kipur. The rabbi’s punned on the formal name Yom HaKippurim—the Day of Atonement—reading it as Yom K’Purim—a day that is like Purim, asserting some essential connection between the topsy-turvy revelry of spring and this majestic period of repentance.

There is a related teaching in the Babylonian Talmud: amar Shimon ben Gamliel: lo hayu yamim tovim lyisrael k’hamisha asar b’Av u’kh’yom hakippurim. Shimon son of Gamliel said, “There were no holidays, no yontifs, literally no days as good for Israel as the 15th of Av and Yom Kippur.” The 15th of Av was a cross between Valentines Day and a Sadie Hawkins dance, it was a day when the young women of Jerusalem would go out to the woods in white dresses and dance an invitation, or a challenge, to potential partners. What is striking is not only that the rabbi’s claim a similar joy, a similar goodness, for Yom Kippur, but that they also tell us it was a day on which the same thing happened. While the High Priest was fulfilling the ordered ritual through which he was prepared and authorized to enter the Temple’s Holy of Holies—the only time in the year that anyone was allowed in there—the white-clad daughters of Israel were already beginning to dance in the vineyards of the land.

This—what we’re doing here—is not your mother’s Yom Kippur. Your mother’s Yom Kippur seems to have been much more interesting. In ancient times, apparently, it was understood that this yom tov possessed a degree of goodness that could find expression only in such a way; that it was a day not just for fasting and self-denial, but for ecstatic dancing; worthy of comparison to Purim and Tu b’Av, these two other, unambiguously festive occasions.

This is the mystery I would like to spend a little time unraveling tonight (unless anyone has someplace they’d rather be.) What is the goodness of Yom Kippur? What joyful quality does the holiday possess in the secret recesses and chambers of its essence? And how do we find it for ourselves?

The Talmud offers its own answer to these questions : b’shleima yom hakipurim, we read, meeshum d’eet bei slichah u’mekhilah yom she’neetnu bo lukhot ha’akhronot. It makes sense that Yom Kippur would be considered such a good day because of slicha and mekhilah—forgiveness and pardon. And then it continues: it was the day, after all, that the second set of tablets was given. This is a reference to the rabbinic teaching that Yom Kippur was the day Moses brought the second set of tablets down from Mt. Sinai. You’ll recall that the first set were shattered in response to the sin of the Golden Calf—the great catastrophe of the Israelites engagement in idol worship, just as they were about to receive the Torah. If this shattering is read as a punishment for sin, then the second tablets must represent a profound act of forgiveness—God’s way of saying, “I consider you worthy of this after all.” And therefore it would be this slicha and mekhila, this reunion with the divine, that makes it such a happy day.

But there is another interesting trail leading out of this teaching for us to follow. Looking at this another way, we might read it as teaching us not just that this is a day of forgiveness and restoration after something has been broken, but that brokenness, shattering of something fundamental, is somehow necessary for the atonement to happen in the first place. If it weren’t for the initial breaking, the Israelites would not have had the opportunity to become as intimate with the divine as they did through the act of forgiveness.

This is actually not such an esoteric tradition in Judaism—the idea that a kind of breaking of the self or ego is what makes tshuva possible, bringing about greater closeness with god. Karov adonai l’nishberei lev, we read in the Psalms, v’et dakei ruakh yoshia. God is close to the broken-hearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Not only are the second tablets a sign of forgiveness for the sin of the Golden Calf, but the shattering of the first tablets—this breaking—is a necessary part of the process of atonement, without which its full joy could not be realized.

I have long suspected that this same sentiment can also be found hanging out in a fairly unlikely location—the dry, legalistically formal language of Kol Nidrei, which we chanted earlier this evening. I learned something new about this prayer this year, while reading the commentary in the excellent, fairly new Conservative Mahzor, Lev Shalem. It has to do with the specific language of the prayer, all those dry terms that we think of more often than not merely as workmanlike syllables hauling a beautiful melody on their shoulders. “Kol Nidrei mentions seven types of promises,” I read, “and uses seven verbs expressing nullification.” I had never really thought about this before. Every action in this prayer has an equal and opposite reaction, in a way that we can best perceive by disassembling it, and instead of reading the list of words synonymous with vows first—nidrei, essarei, haramei, kinusei etc., and then the nullification– shran, shivikin, shivitein, biteilin umivutalin etc.—match up each word with its partner as we go down the list:

Kol nidray—all of our VOWS. Shran—UNDONE.
Essaray—all of our RENUNCIATIONS. Shivikin—REPEALED.
Haramay—our Bans. Shivitin—CANCELLED.
Konamay—our Oaths. Biteilin—VOIDED.
KHINUEI—obligations. Mivutalin—annulled.
Khinusei—Pledges. La Shririn—Not valid.
Shevuot la kayamin. Our promises not binding.

More than a dry legalistic formula, this becomes an incantation, a kind of rhythmic, verbal magic, the casting of a spell. And the rhythm of the spell is like the famous image of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus in the Odyssey, sitting at her loom, weaving and unweaving. We can see this prayer, especially when we read it like this, as a weaving and unweaving. We summon up the idea of all of the bonds we have made that give our senses of self their firmness, and then, with the magic cancellation, we unbind. Our sense of the firmness of ourselves, patched together out of the words we have used to shape and pledge ourselves, is shattered like the first set of tablets. The result, however, is not destruction or annihilation, but an atmosphere charged with a kind of unformation—like a metal object becoming molten again, a primal chaos of done things becoming undone; the world tohu vavohu, darkness upon the face of the deep and the divine wind rippling the face of the waters; in the moment just before the voice gives shape to the world and calls it good.

And, indeed, in this state of unformation, of brokenness, we can go places that we don’t normally go, just like the High Priest, daring to enter into the Holy of Holies. If YK does have a secret chamber, as I suggested it might, then this is surely it; this room that we can only go to sometimes, and only with the right preparation. But, at first glance, it doesn’t seem as if it’s joy that we find there. The rituals that the priest must go through in order to enter are detailed and intense—they bear the weight of the atonement of the people and the alternate fates of blessing and curse that hang upon it. The rabbis said that once this ceremony could no longer be performed on behalf of Israel, because the temple was destroyed—once all of the people could no longer wait in the Temple Court, in anticipation of a flesh and blood ceremony performed by one man on their behalf, the only thing left to do was to read the words describing it, as imagined in the Mishnah—to make it a journey of the imagination, with the high priest as avatar, going with him into the Holy of Holies as a way of entering into something profound within the language of our own spirits.

We follow him every step of the way—we become him, in a sense, joining ourselves to the ritual in a way that must not have been possible if and when this was actually performed in the flesh, our imaginations taking us to places that our bodies would not have been permitted to enter. He makes the ordinary morning offering, all the while aware there is something extraordinary about this day. Throughout the day he changes his garments many times, from gold to linen and back again, immersing and washing between each transition. He stands before two goats and by lots determines which is a sacrifice and which a wanderer. There is the sound and smell of animals, the sight of blood and entrails, moments when he stands before the throng, and the moment when he is alone in the chamber, wrapped up in the smoke of the incense. He is constantly shifting and changing throughout, washing and changing clothes, concealing his own flesh behind the animal bodies he opens with his knife, as if to evade some danger, as if he knows he is playing with some danger that might catch him square and unprepared. On the most basic level it is death he is playing with—we know from the fate of priests that do it wrong that these are the consequences. It’s right there in Leviticus 16, as we’ll read tomorrow. But in the language of the spirit it is something else, though it is related. Death is difficult, but we only face it once. While we live, what we seem to hide from more often is the knowledge of death.

I imagine there must be some moment in this ritual that the mishnah fails to describe, maybe because it is not supposed to be described, but only experienced. We, the High Priest, finally find ourselves in the inner chamber, a room from which there is no escape. Kol nidrei—shran. Shevuot—la kaymin. All of my vows—undone. All of my promises—no longer binding. What I see, feel, taste on my tongue is all that there will ever be for me, and there is nothing else. No more. My breaths are full, but numbered. This is a room called reality, and it is not easy to stay in it for very long—our tradition only asks us to visit it this intensely once a year. But I want to suggest to you that it is at this moment, in this Holy of Holies, that Yom Kippur will call out to us with its secret reserve of playfulness k’purim—like Purim—and with its offer of a profound joy.

I have been thinking of how to formulate this point as clearly as possible, and I have been at a loss. In the end, I have somebody else to thank for putting it plainly, the same person I have to thank for the computer on which I typed it out. Yes, I want to give the role of the voice of the divine, the voice of Yom Kippur this year, to Steve Jobs, of blessed memory, and an amazing passage you may have seen in the press over the past couple of days, from a commencement speech he delivered at Stanford a few years ago, between bouts of the illness that claimed his life earlier this week.

“Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure,” he said, enumerating a list whose rhythm could easily encompass all of our vows, bans, oaths, obligations, and pledges, “[all of] these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Our traditional liturgy contains a hymn to the Kohen HaGadol, the high priest, describing what he looked like when he came walking out of the Holy of Holies, trailing the incense smoke behind him. It is said that his face was streaming with light—like Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai—with light and delight. And there were women dancing in the vineyard, and a divine wind was troubling the surface of dark waters. And it was good.

G’mar chatimah tova.

I’m going to try something different today–

Instead of trying to be original, I want to restate a theme that I explored last year in the context of the Akedah, and I want to give you some time to process with each other and maybe respond to me–it often seems like I launch a lot of words at you at the High Holidays, and I want you to have the chance to role them around with each other while we’re still here (so it won’t disturb your appetite too much at lunch). I want to frame a question by reiterating what I said about this parsha last year, and then offer to you to discuss.

*I have an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Akedah, which I’ve been working on for at least ten years, and offering in a variety of styles and settings. I came up hearing this story interpreted in the traditional way–it was a test of Abraham’s faith in God, which he passed through his willingness to sacrifice his son–this is what God wanted, to see if he would do it, and when it turned out he would, that satisfied God enough that he didn’t have to actually do it…

I was also raised with what has now become the classical progressive Jewish abhorrence of this story–the horror at the idea that a father would be ready to do this, and that a god we are asked to revere would want this. I really received the story wrapped up in these questions, which I think encapsulated for me, to some extent, my frustration with the Judaism I was brought up on–how it seemed content, in a way, to wrap itself up year after year in the same insoluble dilemmas in the text, in the manner of good, thinking people who seem to prefer angst and self-doubt to genuine spiritual intensity and transformation. (Not that there’s anything wrong with self-doubt–I find it a healthy antidote to some of the nastier states of being that unchecked spiritual intensity can lead to.)

But I think it meant a lot to me to find a way to unlock this story in a way that salvaged it as a positive experience–to cut the Gordian knot, or, in the terms of Captain Kirk, to solve the Kobiyashi-Maru. And, for myself, I did this precisely by abandoning the angst-ridden dilemma manner of receiving it, and instead reread it indeed as a story of intense transformation–of a deeply primal, and tribal type.

For some reason, when I was fairly young, my father took me to see a film called The Emerald Forrest, directed by John Boorman. It’s the story of a young white child who is kidnapped by an Amazonian tribe, who are in the process of being displaced by a dam project that the boy’s father is working on. Much of the movie tells the parallel stories of the boy’s coming into manhood as a part of the tribe, and his father’s unrelenting search to find him and bring him back to what he considers civilization.

There is one scene in particular that sticks out in my mind from the first of these two tracks–after some adolescent prank, the boy is taken into the hut of the man who has become his tribal father, who looks at him squarely and says, “It is time for you to die.” What follows is an ordeal. If I recall correctly, the boy is bound at night to a tree in a swamp, from which an army of fire ants emerge to sting him until he passes out, and seemingly dies. In the morning, the tribal father comes to the spot, lifts up the boys lifeless head, and says, “The boy is dead.” And then the eyes of what seemed like a lifeless head open up, and the tribal father continues, “And now the man is born.”

At some point in my early-twenties, I made the connection between this movie scene I had beheld as an impressionable child, and this story about a father bringing his son to an altar to be killed, and then raising him up off that altar alive–this story that we struggled with year after year–and something clicked. It occurred to me that what really happens in the Akedah is the same kind of developmental death and rebirth. God says to Abraham: the boy must die, and the boy dies. And then God says to Abraham: now the man is born, let him up off that altar.

A big difference between the movie and the biblical story, however, is that the movie follows more closely the boy himself and his experience of coming to manhood. Our story puts the focus on the father, and that changes things a bit. Instead of being the story of a boy whose pranks suggest to his spiritual father that it is time for part of him to die so that something more mature can emerge, our story, in the way that I came to see it, is about a father who is not quite ready to allow that thing in his son to die, because he is not ready to give up being a father to it–and this is where God comes into the story for me, not as the capricious deity who wants to test his servants faith, but as that power that demands that we grow, whether we are ready to or not, and that cuts into us like a knife when we resist what cannot be resisted: God as the power that makes for transformation, ready or not…

With this view in mind, I found all kinds of things in the language of the story that would support my reading. Before the Akedah, God refers to Isaac, in talking with Abraham, as “your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac,” but after the Akedah says only, “Isaac whom you love.” I found a way to reread the term “your only son” yikheedkha in the Hebrew, as a reference not to an only child, which of course is factually inaccurate in this case, but as a reference to a child inextricably intertwined in his father’s ego, his sense of individuality, his yikhid, as a ram might be caught in a thicket by its horns. And so the father must take the son up to an altar, bind him with rope, hold a knife above his throat, and then be told to stop what he is doing, and let him go. As a result the father may lose his son, his only son, or yikhid, but he can still come to know the man named Isaac, whom he loves. And this becomes an ideal story for the High Holidays–a story about what it takes to let go of what we cannot bring ourselves to release; or, as we will say on Yom Kippur, in the words of kol nidrei, what it means to release all that we have bound, and release all that binds us.

And this is what I want to give you a few moments to reflect on with each other now. I drew on one modernist author in my talk yesterday, and I have another one in mind today. When William Faulkner was asked to give advice to aspiring writers, he said, “Kill your darlings.” This is generally understood to mean that writers can be come so proud of, and attached to, certain passages they have produced, that they fail to realize that this passages are choking the proper development of the larger work. Reflecting on the place of the Akedah in our High Holiday story telling, it makes me thing that we talk a lot about greed and avarice, sloth and apathy as the sins that blind us. But what about love and attachment? Because, I think in the end that this is the hard question the Akedah forces us to confront. When is our love itself a stumbling block? What does it take to realize that something we cherish must die–and just in case it needs to be said I’m not talking about murder but the kind of metaphoric or ceremonial death that we encounter in the Akedah, and that I described in that movie that made such an impression on me. Abraham’s example challenges us to confront the reality that we must sometimes kill our darlings. What, if anything, does this mean to us in the context of tshuvah?

For some reason, as I was preparing for the High Holidays this year I had a phrase from a poem by T.S. Eliot going through my mind. It goes like this: “Thoughts of a dry brain, in a dry season.” This seems incongruous on a number of levels. First of all, this summer has not exactly been a dry season in the Pioneer Valley. It would be more appropriate to the weather we’ve experienced if the line read: thoughts of a waterlogged basement in a deluge. Secondly, the image of an arid and spent old man that the poem conveys is not necessarily one that we would associate with this feast of apples and honey. It could be that the dry brain was just my own—struggling to find the words to this and the other talks I’m expected to deliver over the next week and a half, while at the same time moving house and setting up a small farm. But on closer analysis, I think I found a more intrinsic relationship between the words and the sense of the High Holidays that I’d like to convey to you this morning, and in particular the way I would like to draw upon the Torah and Haftarah portions we’ve read to enhance our understanding of what it is we’re doing here.

The poem is called Gerontion. It was written in 1920, and contains at least one line that could be construed as anti-Semitic. But nonetheless I love it. Eliot begins and ends on this same note of arid weariness. He actually begins with the English version of that venerable Hebrew word that to my mind holds the key to the essence of Jewish spirituality (though I doubt he was aware of this): Hinneni. “Here I am,” reads the first verse, “an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.”

The image of an old man being read to by a boy does seem a powerful symbol of the turning of the year, but beyond that there is something in the idea of “waiting for rain” that is essential to an understanding of the High Holidays in a way that we seldom consider. Why has our calendar developed such an intense concern for atonement, for the wellbeing of the spirit in its relationship with the divine, at precisely this time of year? Because for millennia, at least since the book of Deuteronomy, Jews have linked blessing with rain, and rain with morality, and this is the time of year that we begin wondering if the rain will fall. Rosh Hashanah is not a holiday of abundance, even though we’ll celebrate the harvest festival of Sukkot only 15 days from today. It is a holiday of anticipation, when our ancestors would cast their first wary glances at the sky and wonder if the rain would fall, and then look inward and ask themselves if they deserved it. “Here I am,” they would say, like the old man in the poem, “a dry brain in a dry season waiting for rain.”

What was agricultural for our ancestors has become spiritual for us. Even if we do not need to wait for rain at this time of year, as they do in the Middle East, we may still find ourselves looking inward in contemplation of a parched spirit, wondering what, it anything, will bring it life in the year to come. This may be a radical new understanding of Rosh Hashanah—that, to borrow another famous term from Eliot, it is in fact a wasteland, a landscape baked to hardness by the summer heat in which the very potential for vitality is a matter of speculation and doubt. If you think of the traditional liturgy, particularly Unetanah Tokef, then maybe this idea becomes a little less radical: who will live and who will die in the coming year, we ask? Who will be raised up and who laid low? The power of this day comes in the fact that we do not know, and yet we dare to ask the question. We bring ourselves to the crisis point of the dry season, hoping the rain will fall, and in the meantime we pass through an existential wilderness.

But the question I really want to ask this morning is: what does it mean to come out on the other side? Or, to put it another way: what do we discover when we pass through?

For an answer to these questions, I want to turn away from modernist poetry and go back to the bible. Our Torah and Haftarah readings for today provide us with at least two responses, one traditionally pious and the other more humble and human. Extrapolating from the theme of wasteland or wilderness, it is interesting to note that the theme of the barren woman is very active in both of our readings. Barrenness can be considered a state of being in which the body itself is like a dry landscape, bereft of the expected vitality, causing an emotional turmoil that almost rivals the physical distress of rainlessness. It is also a familiar biblical theme: we should know by now that anyone who is anyone in Torah is either barren herself or the offspring of a once barren mother. It was clearly a theme that captured the imagination of our storytellers—that meant something powerful to them. We find it as the backstory to today’s Torah portion. Sarah and Abraham have been delivered from the trauma of her childlessness, but its residue continues to affect the way that Sarah anxiously guards her miracle son, Isaac, against the perceived threat of his half-brother Ishmael. We might even say that Hagar, Ishmael’s mother, passes through a metaphoric crisis of barrenness. When she must flee to the desert with her son, she enters a period of mortal concern—not with whether or not her body can produce a child, but with the related dilemma of whether or not her resourcefulness can keep him alive.

We find one of the most fully articulated expositions of this biblical theme not in the Torah portion, but in the Haftarah—the first chapter and a half of the book of Samuel, which tells the story of the prophet’s mother Hannah, in particular the tale of the tribulation and triumph that accompany her giving birth to this illustrious man. Our biblical authors make it clear, almost from the start, that barrenness is not to be understood as a fact of nature, but as a manifestation of the power of God. This is stated bluntly in verse five of chapter one: va’adonai sagar et rachma. Hannah is not able to get pregnant because God has closed her womb. No explanation is given as to why—it does not seem to be a punishment as such, though I would imagine that those carrying a moralistic theology might speculate it springs from some unnarrated misdeed. Either way, it is traumatic—resulting in taunting from Hannah’s husband’s other wife, who is fertile, and the curdling of Hannah’s own expectations.

The biblical solution to this dilemma is obviously not surgery or fertility treatments, but a heartfelt plea, with a fervency that is mistaken for drunkenness, to the Master of heaven and earth. “Lord of Hosts,” Hannah prays, while standing at the altar of the pre-Temple Israelite shrine at Shiloh, “if you plant a human seed in the womb of your serving woman, I shall dedicate the child to you.” Her prayer is granted. Vayehi l’tkufot hayamim—and it was at the turning of the season that Hannah became pregnant, and bore a child. And true to her word, when he is good and weaned she brings him back to the shrine to become a servant of the Most High.

Barrenness may not have been a punishment, but it nonetheless teaches Hannah a pious lesson. God is in charge of all things, ordering them according to His will. “Adonai owns the pillars of the earth on which the world was placed,” she sings out in her triumph, “and guards the steps of the righteous.” She has prevailed by placing her faith in God, as His righteous servant, and her reward is all the sweeter, is in fact truly deserved, because of her perseverance through the wilderness. It has been a dark night of the soul, but now it is morning and blessing is falling like rain.

This is what I referred to as the “traditionally pious” answer. Why do we go through this wasteland every year at the turning of the seasons? Because we are seeking a reward from God when we come out on the other side. Why do we pray and sound the shofar? Why will we fast? Because we hope that this affliction, together with the fervent pouring out of our hearts will cause God to remember us like God remembered Hannah, to vindicate us and deliver us with the rains of heaven.

This is the pious answer, but I mentioned that there was another one. We don’t find it in the broad strokes of the Haftarah, but in a careful reading of a corner of the Torah portion that we don’t often visit. It is an answer, I want to argue, suggesting we should not set our sights, like Hannah, on the benefit we accrue on the other side of the dry season, but focus instead on what we can find in the very midst of the wilderness.

The real drama of our Torah reading today lies in the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael, sent away from Abraham’s household, at Sarah’s request, so that Isaac’s inheritance will remain unchallenged. But the last two aliyot tell another story, which I have always thought of as “filler”—just so much additional leyning to make sure we get to the requisite 5 aliyot on Rosh Hashanah. It was only the anxiety of originality that made me give them a second look this year—the sense that I had to do a little Torah bushwhacking to bring back something fresh after so many years of reading the same stories. But I’m glad that I did.

These later aliyot speak of a peace treaty between Abraham and Avimelech, the charismatic king of the Philistines. It takes place at Be’er Sheva, now the large Israeli city to the north of the Negev desert, but originally just the name Abraham gave to the spring of water this treaty established as his: be’er—the well, sheva—of the oath. The oath sworn at this well provides Abraham with the water he needs to sustain his household in the barren land he has chosen to inhabit, but it’s not so much this fact as what happens afterwards that I find so remarkable. The fifth aliyah ends with two extraordinary verses, which I’ll take out of order by dealing with the second one first:

Vaya-gor avraham b’erets plishteem yamim rabim.

This seems simple enough, but the first translation I happened to look at actually got it wrong.  It read: “And Abraham lived near the country of the Philistines for many days.” But the preposition b’ doesn’t mean near, it means in, and so the verse should read: “And Abraham lived in the country of the Philistines for many days.” It occurs to me that this mistranslation might have been something like a Freudian slip, a mental short circuit eliding a counterintuitive fact: the fact that the Abraham we envision as the bold adventurer, journeying to the promised land to take possession of it, is not the whole story. Whatever was promised to his descendants, Abraham himself is a sojourner, and as such he must compromise his vision, dwelling not in the full victory of a divine reward, however much this may be what he ultimately desires, but in realistic negotiation with his circumstances. He has in common with Hannah that they both dwell for a time in a dry land—hers in her body and his in the scrub country of the Negev. But on one crucial point they differ: the rain does not fall for Abraham on cue.

He is concerned with wells, after all, not rain, and though there is an obvious connection between the two—water has to come from somewhere—having access to a reliable well means making do for a while even when there is no rain. His desire to establish a claim is therefore understandable, but what he does immediately afterwards is a little more esoteric:

Vayita eshel b’v’eer sheva, vayikra sham b’shem adonai el olam—

“And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree at Be’er Sheva, and called upon the name of Adonai El Olam.”

This verse contains two rarities. The first is El Olam, the name Abraham gives to God, which occurs nowhere else in the entire Torah. It is hard to translate precisely: “God of the world”, “God of the Universe”, “God of eternity,” “God of existence.” Why this strange name here? What is it about Abraham’s prayer at this moment that calls it into being? Maybe it is only in the service of a Universal God, a God representing existence itself in all of its forms, rather than the God of Hannah’s prayer who hears and answers only the prayers of His righteous, that Abraham can accept the reality of compromise and unmet expectations; that he can set aside, at least for a time, the dream of a vindicating triumph, and concentrate instead on what it takes to thrive in a barren landscape.

Vayital eshel b’v’e’er sheva—

“And he planted a tamarisk tree—an eshel—at Be’er Sheva.”

This is the other rarity. There are only two other times in the entire Bible that the eshel, the Tamarisk, is mentioned, and both times it is in conjunction with an unexpected character—Saul, the tragic first king of Israel. When he first learns that David is rising against him, he is sitting under a tamarisk. After the men of a town he once befriended have pity on his corpse, and take it down from the Philistine wall where it is hanging, they bury it properly under the gangly branches of a tamarisk. By association, we can only understand this tree as a symbol of solace to the thwarted and the circumscribed. And now, in the midst of a strange land, with a blessing to the God of reality on his lips, Abraham plants an eshel beside his well.

There is one other interesting fact I discovered about the tamarisk, in an old encyclopedia that offers a tentative analysis of the natural history underlying the bible. A desert tree, capable of withstanding extreme conditions, it produces a subtle kind of food, a resin of a dirty-yellow color that is sweet and aromatic like honey. In the Arabic of the early-20th century it was still being called man es-simma, which we could translate into Hebrew as manna-min-hashamayim, or just manna. The speculation was that the real basis for the story of the manna that fell from heaven, and sustained the Israelites as they wandered through the wilderness, could be found in the tamarisk. Likewise, for Abraham, miraculous sustenance does not fall from the sky, but is rather brought up from a well in the earth and derived from the bark of a humble tree, in both cases by the work of his own skillful hands.

I found a picture of a tamarisk on the internet—on Wikipedia actually. It sprawled across a rocky embankment, set against a backdrop of scattered clouds and hot blue sky, brushing the desert sand with its long, spindly branches, and wispy, bleached-green leaves. It wasn’t that hard to imagine Abraham, beside his well, resting under the tree’s meager shade in the heat of the sun, listening to the noises of his flock and his family, marveling that this thing he had planted from a root or a seed had grown in such an inhospitable landscape—Abraham, the dry brain in the dry season, savoring his first taste of the subtle honey of the wilderness.

I see no reason not to hold out hope that we will be rewarded like Hannah, that the dark night of our souls, our prayer and our penitence, will give way to a morning light, in which the deepest wishes of our hearts, mishalot libanu, will be granted for good, for life, and for enduring peace. But in the meantime, while we wait for rain in this wilderness, we are presented with an equally important opportunity: to look inward, like Abraham, and realize that there is already a seed in our possession, and it is ready to stir.

Shana tova.

I’ve been seeing signs for “Westernmassready.org” on the sides of buses recently, and I thought I’d take a look. It seems like a good site to help people in our area orient themselves to the skill set and procedures required to respond to emergencies, with some helpful suggestions about preparedness.

Certainly, whether you happen to be a hardcore survivalist (and there are a few of those in our area, if not our congregation, from what I understand) or if you just want to make sure you’re comfortable should snow knock the power out for a couple of days, it’s good to be prepared. So, anyhow, here’s the link:

http://www.westernmassready.org/

As we begin to figure out how to use the new Zera’im fund to do what we can at the JCA to educate, inspire, and celebrate, in the midst of economic, resource, and climate uncertainty, this seems like a gentle first step along the road to a resilient community.

And, if you’re interested in taking another step, we’d love to have you at the organizational meeing for the JCA mini-farm project, on Monday night, 2/21, at 7pm here at the JCA. This initial meeting is limited to JCA members, though we look forward to involving the wider community as the project gets off the ground!