Tazria/Metzora – April 28, 2012
Catherine Madsen

Both of these parshiyot deal with the condition of tamei, ritual impurity, a state which is incurred as a result of particular illnesses, contact with the dead, and bodily emissions of a reproductive nature, including childbirth. The modern sensibility tends to be disturbed by the idea that natural experiences are impure; perhaps that objection is traceable to Rousseau, perhaps to our experience of invented compounds that turn out to be pollutants, or perhaps it’s just that we have easy access to running water. At any rate we resent any suggestion that the body isn’t clean. But tamei isn’t quite about dirt or contagion; it’s about boundaries and seclusion, keeping certain experiences separated. In Etz Hayim on p. 649, a prefatory note to the parsha suggests that tamei is one half of a two-tiered definition of holiness, an individual one and a collective one:

“We might postulate that there are two types of holiness in life, two ways of encountering the divine. There is a natural holiness found in the miracles of pregnancy, birth, and recovery from illness. And there is a stipulated holiness—the arbitrary designation of certain times, places, and activities as sacred. One meets God in the experiences of birth and death, sickness and health. But they are not everyday occurrences. The person who yearns for contact with God on a regular basis must rely on sanctuaries, worship services, and prescribed rituals, all of which are holy only because we have chosen to designate them as holy….A woman who had just given birth might feel the presence of God so strongly in that experience that she would feel no need to go to the sanctuary to find God.”

Etz Hayim is trying here to rehabilitate the state of ritual impurity as a parallel, but private, form of holiness. Perhaps as a consequence, their formulation is a bit decorous and disembodied: it doesn’t evoke the woman who’s just given birth, it evokes the woman talking about giving birth well after the fact in a Torah discussion.

But we might imagine tamei a bit differently. An experience that makes us ritually impure is, as it were, a direct experience of God which temporarily unfits the individual for contact with communal ritual. It throws us back upon our individuality: it renders us impure because it’s disorderly, messy, preoccupying. The woman who’s just given birth has been taken over by necessity: the exigencies of labor and the obligation to keep the baby alive. The person who has touched a dead body has come face to face with the final necessity, a sober confrontation that takes recovery time. The sick person has faced the uncertainties of when and whether the illness will end, and the full-time job of attempting a cure. The person with the bodily emission may be absorbed in shame or joy or a sense of lost control, or in the case of menstruation a lot of mess and perhaps some physical debility. Seclusion during and after such times allows for a kind of private woundedness, a period of convalescence from vulnerable states. Even Moses wears a veil after talking with God. Maybe the motto of such occasions is “I vant to be alone.”

Is seclusion also necessary because communal ritual will seem less convincing after an intense experience? Because after such an experience you’ll look at the familiar rituals with an alienated eye and think “What is all this mumbo-jumbo?” Because the world of people who are trying to be holy according to stipulated forms will be an assault on your intimate knowledge? Because your intimate knowledge will be an assault on them?

There is a mountain—here we would call it a mountain; it’s 700 feet higher from its valley than Norwottuck is from ours, but in a place whose topographical landmarks range from 12,000 to 20,000 feet it is not strictly speaking mountainous. Still it dominates the western skyline of Fairbanks; it draws the eye from any unobstructed view. It’s a shapely mass, with great ripples of ridge and valley and a rough symmetry; it gives the sense of being a guardian, a boundary, a protector. In the spring and fall the sun sets behind it. Its slopes are covered with dark spruce, and patches of aspen and birch; on a little bald spot at the summit there are several cell phone towers and a radio tower. When I lived in Fairbanks in the early ’60s there was an observatory and a ski lodge up there, so sometimes a light shone on the summit. Beyond it only two roads go farther west, and only for a hundred miles or so; it is only marginally inaccurate to say “Beyond it the roadless wilderness.”

And how is that to matter to anyone who hasn’t seen it—who hasn’t lived with it as the snow fell and as the snow melted, as the leaves came out and as the leaves turned yellow? How is it to mean anything at all to people who’ve never been there? My friends can be happy for me that I’ve seen it again, but something else makes each of them happy; some other landscape, or something else altogether, gives each of them the longing this mountain has given me. William Butler Yeats wrote of the power and the incommunicable privacy of such experiences of longing in the poem “Towards Break of Day”:

Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?

I thought: ‘There is a waterfall
Upon Ben Bulben side
That all my childhood counted dear;
Were I to travel far and wide
I could not find a thing so dear.’
My memories had magnified
So many times childish delight.

I would have touched it like a child
But knew my finger could but have touched
Cold stone and water. I grew wild,
Even accusing Heaven because
It had set down among its laws:
Nothing that we love overmuch
Is ponderable to our touch.

I dreamed towards break of day,
The cold blown spray in my nostril.
But she that beside me lay
Had watched in bitterer sleep
The marvellous stag of Arthur,
That lofty white stag, leap
From mountain steep to steep.

The couple are divided by their dreams of the unattainable: Yeats can recover nothing of his childhood experience but the waterfall’s indifferent physical elements, and the woman who sleeps beside him sees the white stag escaping beyond reach. In Arthurian legend, the white stag was so compelling that the king forgot his sweetheart; Yeats alludes here circumspectly to his wife’s knowledge that the unattainable Maud Gonne, whom he had loved for decades, would always be first in his imagination.  Both dreams, and both experiences, remain profoundly inward, isolating.

Why, in the levitical scheme of things, are the “stipulated forms” of collective ritual considered (of all things) purer than the direct individual experience? Why is purity located not in the state of nature but in the contrivances of collective religious practice?  Perhaps because communal ritual draws people together across the gaps and barriers of these isolating lone experiences—which are not mutually intelligible, cannot be told, cannot be healed. Communal ritual abstracts the strength of these experiences, drawing it from all its separate contexts and fusing it into shared myth and practice. This fusion costs something: your experiences are still deeply private and are now also eclipsed, supplanted by the shared myth and not allowed to rule or define your life. You’re prevented, or at least discouraged, from paying your experiences what you owe them. I remember being told, during my abortive attempt to be Christian, that my profound experiences couldn’t lead me to God, only Jesus could lead me to God. Judaism too has its own blunt dismissals of private experience and its own ruling obsessions with identity and boundaries. Yet you also gain something, because now you have people to sing with.

Perhaps it isn’t so different from being a small aboriginal people that depends on the forest or the tundra or the polar ice to yield it a living: long solitary hours on the hunt, which is mostly waiting for something huntable to appear; hunger and privation, with their accompanying bodily weakness and visionary outbreaks; the mortal necessity of good temper, kindness and cooperation. The singing and dancing of the small community doesn’t eclipse the private experiences of the individuals, it embraces and relieves them.

People very commonly, these days, say things like “I find God in nature, so I don’t need to go to synagogue.” They put themselves, as it were, in a permanent state of tamei, looking with a perpetually alienated eye at the quaint practices and pathetic dependencies of people who “need” to worship together. I’m impatient with this; of course they find God in nature, do they think people who go to synagogue don’t find God in nature? M’lo khol ha-aretz k’vodo, the whole earth is full of his glory. But in another sense they’re accurately identifying a critical difference between the private and the public. I don’t think Etz Hayim is quite right that communal ritual is for those who “yearn for contact with God on a regular basis”; you could get that by taking more walks in the woods. You can’t expect to find God in synagogue in that way, and maybe finding God in synagogue isn’t quite what communal ritual is for. You might find God in nature and be so disconsolate at never finding such an experience among people that you have to patch together a public religious experience that at least refers obliquely to the private one. A constructed holiness that gestures toward the revealed one.
You might also discover that what you love IS ponderable: it’s real, all you have to do is buy a ticket and you can go there and call the hill by its name to people who know it. There are real estate agents and utility companies and car dealers and used furniture stores and people to pump out your septic tank. The competencies generated by communal ritual are enough to detach you from desolation and hopeless longing; they give you back your life and the length of your days. If communal ritual puts your profound experiences brutally into perspective, it also gives you sane ways to recover them: it doesn’t allow you to marinate yourself in them, like Miss Havisham feeding her grief in a decaying mansion. In that sense the individual experience is impure, not because it’s intense and private but because after a while it festers. The communal experience is pure in the sense that it’s cooperative, it’s a form of mutual aid, a medium of exchange. If psychotherapy is a talking cure, maybe there’s such a thing as a praying cure, that heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Saturday, May 5, 350.org’s world-wide Climate Impacts Action Day: Connect the Dots– Stop Climate Change! No Tar Sands Pipeline!

Every day between Monday April 30 and Saturday May 5, during rush-hour from 8 to 9am and 5 to 6pm, groups of 10 or more people will stand on the sidewalk of the Coolidge Bridge between Hadley and Northampton.

We’ll hold large signs calling for President Obama and Congress to stop climate change by rejecting the Keystone Tar Sands pipeline, oil drilling offshore and in the Arctic, and continued reliance on coal and nuclear energy; and by supporting much larger investment in renewable energy sources and energy conservation and efficiency.

To ensure safety, children under 12 along with their parents will be asked to not stand on the bridge’s narrow sidewalk, but to hold signs and stand on or walk along the sidewalk off the bridge, which is still very visible to passing motorists.

“Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights . . . to a safe climate and clean energy future!”

“Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight . . . for your kids, grandkids, and all life, we must act now!!”

OCCUP-OETRY

{& Prose, Song, HipHop, etc}

for Earth Day & May Day

{and the 1st anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster,

and 2nd anniversary of the Gulf Oil spill}

SLAMMIN’ the STATUS QUO (the 1%)

&

SAVIN’ the ECONOMY, the PEOPLE, (the 99%)

and the PLANET

Friday May 4 Northampton Friends Meeting House, 43 Center St.

Wednesday May 9 Greenfield Arts Block, 289 Main Street

Friday May 18 Amherst Food for Thought Books, 106 N. Pleasant St.

(all from 6:30 to 9pm)

* Poetry, prose, and song about war and peace, economic and social justice, environmental protection, racism, women’s/LGBT/human rights, and immigration. Spoken word that speaks truth to power, and empowers and inspires us.

* Authors welcome to submit work by Friday April 27 (maximum of 10 minutes) for consideration by a panel of local poets for the Northampton event. Deadline is Friday May 4 for Greenfield event; Friday May 11 for Amherst event. And please share this invite with others who might like to participate or attend.

* 2 periods when audience can respond to what they’ve heard.

* Poems and lyrics will be available on paper (with poets’ permission) for audience to read along if they wish, and take home

Sponsored by: Pioneer Valley Climate Action; GreenNorthampton; Grow Food Northampton; River Valley Market; Peace and Justice Committees of First Churches, Northampton, and Haydenville Congregational Church; Greenfield Community College’s Peace, Justice, and Environmental Studies Program; Safe and Green Campaign;Center for Environmental Civics; 20/20 Action; Arise for Social Justice; MoveOn Councils of western MA; Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign

More info: John Berkowitz, PVCA Director and Poet,

413-625-6374 johnpberk@gmail.com www.pioneervalleyclimateaction.org

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What’s with the Weird Weather?

Climate Change Teach-in

Thursday, May 17 6:30-9pm,

Unitarian Universalist Society 220 Main Street, Northampton

The following climate scientists and energy experts in the Pioneer Valley will discuss the latest science and increasing extreme weather events, and call for more urgent federal and state clean energy policies:

* Asst. Prof. Michael Rawlins, UMass Geosciences Dept.;

Manager, UMass Climate System Research Center

* Prof. James Lowenthal, Smith College Astronomy Dept.

* Prof. Michael Klare, Hampshire College and 5-College Sustainability Program, author of “The Race for What’s Left: the Scramble for the World’s Last Resources”

* Prof. Jan Dizard, Amherst College Sociology Dept.

* Prof. Alan Werner, Mt. Holyoke College Geology Dept.

–Cash Prizes of $50, $25, and $15 to those who invite and bring along the most other

people –relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow workers or students, members of your faith community or local organization—especially those who are not yet convinced of the

urgency to stop climate change.

–Co-sponsors: Grow Food Northampton; GreenNorthampton; River Valley Market; Peace and Justice Committees of First Churches, Northampton, and Haydenville Congregational Church; Traprock Center for Peace and Justice; Safe and Green Campaign; Greenfield Community College’s Peace, Justice, and Environmental Studies Program; Center for Environmental Civics; 20/20 Action; Arise for Social Justice; MoveOn Councils of western MA; Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign

–More Info: Pioneer Valley Climate Action 413-625-6374 pioneervalleyclimateaction.org

and on Facebook

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I taught this week about the parasha: Mishpatim. We discussed the two traditional categories of Jewish law–khok, and mishpat–how the first is considered a law without a rational explanation, the following of which is a demonstration of faith, and the second, Mishpat, is a mitzvah that can be rationally understood.

Rashi has a charming comment at the beginning of parashat Mishpatim, that really builds a sense of what a mishpat is all about–what it means to be invited to a rational consideration of mitzvot.

Noting that God instructs Moses: “Eleh ha’mispatim asher taseem lifneyhem”–these are the instructions you should ‘set out before them’–he essentially asks: why “set out before them”? Why not use some stronger language to express the act of commanding?

His answer is delightful–”God said to Moses, ‘It shouldn’t enter your mind to say: “I will repeat the chapter and verse to them two or three times until it’s fixed in their mouths like a rote teaching, and I won’t bother myself to lead them to an understanding of the explanation of the matter, and its meaning.”‘ To prevent this is why God said, ‘Set out before them,’ as a banquet table set before the human being to be digested.”

A mishpat is a rule that we are to be given time to taste, chew and digest. (As moderns, we might add–we are also free to determine whether or not it is palatable.)

I also had a story in mind to read from the Ma’aseh Book, the classic medieval folktale book of Ashkenazic Jewry, with legends drawn from Talmud and later sources.  It didn’t really dawn on me till I was reading it aloud how effectively it served as a counterpoint to the Rashi–telling, to my mind, a poignant riddle about the nature of a khok, rather than a mishpat–about the rules of life that, in the end, fundamentally baffle our rational minds. It’s also the story of a banquet, like the Rashi, but with profoundly different implications. I don’t know if the original storyteller intended it as a Zen riddle, but it works that way.

My reading of it was met with (bewildered?) silence, which I considered appropriate!

Here it is:

Rabbi Joshua and the Emperor Who Wanted to Prepare a feast for God

The Emperor said to Rabbi Joshua, “I should like to prepare a banquet for your God that we may partake of it together.” Then Rabbi Joshua replied to the Emperor, “It is beyond your power for God has many servants.” Then the Emperor said, “I can do it.” Rabbi Joshua said, “Very well, go to the empty road on the shore of the river Rebita, and spread your banquet there.” The Emperor worked six months during the summer and put up many chairs and tables covered with food, thinking that he had prepared everything properly. But there arose a mighty wind which carried all of the tables and food into the stream. The Emperor again prepared a banquet during the six months of winter and set up many tables laden with excellent food. But then a heavy rain came down and flooded the country and carried the tables with the food into the stream. Then the Emperor said to Rabbi Joshua, “What does it all mean? I have been preparing for a long while and no one has come to the banquet to partake of the meal, and yet it is all gone.” Then Rabbi Joshua replied, “The servants of God have eaten it all up.” Then the Emperor replied, “It such is the case, all my efforts are in vain, and I had better give up the idea.”

I met the Yiddish Farm folk this past Labor Day at the Hazon bike-ride retreat. I haven’t seen them farm, yet, but I can attest that they speak some pretty great Yiddish.

Here’s some information about applying to their summer program:

**
Yiddish Farm Summer Program

http://www.yiddishfarm.org/summerprogram.html

*Application deadline one month away!*

*Speak Yiddish.* *The best way to master a language is to speak it.*Participants in our program experience hundreds of hours of sustained Yiddish immersion with native speakers.

*Build Community.* *Yiddish is more than a language.* It is the
culture that unites our intentional community. Join us as we eat, learn,
work, sing and dream together in Yiddish.

*Live sustainably.* *Not just a fad:* We grow food, enrich the soil,
and minimize waste. Our goal is a Yiddish-speaking community living in
harmony with history and nature. Help us get there.

Want to live in a pluralistic Yiddish-speaking community this summer?
Spend your days farming organically and studying Yiddish language,
literature and theater? You can’t experience this anywhere else but
Yiddish Farm! For more information, please visit our Summer
Program page: http://www.yiddishfarm.org/summerprogram.html
or email
info@yiddishfarm.org

*Registration closes on March 15. For dates and applications,*

Yiddish Farm
71 Dzierzek Lane
New Hampton, NY 10958

I walk through the woods. How great the stillness
in its cold bosom; how deep the silence.
Nothing but spirits whisper here among the branches
looking at me, and running ahead.

I walk through the woods, hearing the mute prayers for dew
of oak and pine, the bushes and flowers.
It seems to me now I will never arrive
and the woods will stretch on all around and forever.

A trace of sky, the size of my heart
bleeds from between the green canopy
and below the shadows switch and live
running the gamut from dark gold to black.

A sunbeam breaks through and suddenly vanishes
and the heart that is sky quickly shimmers with joy.
There, to the side, as if frightened from sleep
a bird gives a peep, and then thoughtfully sits
and is quiet a while, and then for a while sings.

I walk through the woods, where my footsteps are marked
by the moisture of grass, the dew of the morning.
For protection from sorrow and shelter from care
I give thanks and I praise you, oh merciful god.

Thanks for returning, in mercy, my pledge,
my body and breath, without blemish or harm,
for guarding my poor, fragile image in darkness

Therefore I will bless you, give praise to your name.
Joy to you, trees, and to birds and to people.
Joy to you, world!

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.