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The final chapters in the book of Leviticus turn our focus to our relationship to Ha’aretz, The Land or the Holy Land. In the Torah, this refers to the Land of Israel, which is certainly related to but distinct from the State of Israel.
The previous parsha, Behar, which on a typical year is read along with Bechukotai, asserts a vision for how to live in alignment to the land so that it yields produce and rain, necessities for a thriving civilization. This week’s parsha, Bechukotai, is a painful read. This is generally true any year, but it burns today. And I do not use the word burns lightly. It burns because of what is happening in Rafah. And because it contains an impossible premise. Leviticus 26 begins, “If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit…” God’s promise peaks in verse six, וְנָתַתִּי שָׁלוֹם בָּאָרֶץ “And I will give you peace in the land…” If only this was a thing that the Holy One could grant. If only this was a thing that a life full of mitzvot could facilitate. What follows is the flipside. Known as the tochechot, and chanted in a whisper (if chanted at all). 35 verses of terrifying rebuke, outlining the consequences for spiritual disobedience. “But if you do not obey Me and do not observe all these commandments…I will wreak misery on you” and everything bad will happen sevenfold to you and your people in The Land. The rebuke is not just threatening, it is mean. Needless to say, we have chosen to omit this section from tomorrow’s Bat Mitzvah service. This year this text feels descriptive more than proscriptive. Watching the news, my eyes are sick and my soul is full of sorrow. .(26:16) מְכַלּוֹת עֵינַיִם וּמְדִיבֹת נָפֶשׁ The suffering of the people of Gaza is incomprehensible. And yet I feel called back to verse six, to the idea that there can be peace in the land, wholeness, return, healing. It must be possible. Over and over again, Palestinians in my life remind me, lovingly rebuke me, despair is a privilege. I am so inspired by the growing number of students and teachers, organizers and educators, bringing us closer to this vision. So this shabbat, I invite you to choose hope, to let yourself imagine the promise of this parsha is a just peace, in which everyone who dwells in the land will know within themselves peace. Palestinians and Israelis, Bedouins, immigrants, and refugees, “shall lie down to sleep untroubled by anyone.” May it be so. About six weeks ago, at our first Saturday morning service in our new building, one KT member voiced a unique and resonant concern. Without multi-stall bathrooms, where will the teens hangout? I laughed out loud. She was only half-kidding. A significant motivating factor to move to a building of our own was the need for accessible, clean, functional, single stall bathrooms. Despite knowing that all change involves loss, it had never occurred to me that there was in fact any loss this particular change.
In an instant, her question transported me back to my own childhood synagogue memories. I remember the deep red carpet in the low-lit vestibule outside the bathrooms, where women sat on stools that swiveled to put on makeup and tweens waited for them to leave so they could exchange first kisses. Some of my most formative memories of being Jewish took place in my childhood synagogue. Hebrew school twice a week, youth group meetings, Shabbat dinners, B’nei Mitzvah parties, Purim carnivals and the list goes on. It was a place I felt comfortable. I loved to discover the secret staircases that connected one corner to another, probably the result of different generations' attempts to update and expand the building. More than sermons or prayers, what I remember of synagogue is how I felt in the building. To this day, decades later, these memories remain vivid and sweet. I remember playing hide and seek in the coat closet, burying myself in mink coats and wool top hats, checking the aisles to be sure services had not let out. I remember fogging up the glass case in the Judaica shop, waiting as the notably gay member showed the latest broach or mezuzah to my father, who can’t refuse a chance to shop for jewelry. And I remember many moments spent staring at the yahrzeit wall in the chapel, rows and rows of names with little lights beside them. Who were these people and who turned on and off the lights? I would read the names, trying to render these Jewish ancestors fluent on my tongue. For me, being Jewish has always been visceral, a felt-sense of knowing in my body. We know from the many chapters in Exodus that detail the building of the mishkan, that the contours of the places we gather greatly impact our experience of the sacred. But we also know that so much of what is sacred is invisible, ineffable, intangible. So how important is the physical plant? Rabbi Michelle pointed me to the commentary of R. Isaac Abravanel (15th cent. Spain) on Exodus 25:8 where he asks, “Why did The Holy One command the building of the mishkan, when The Holy One said "that I may dwell among them," as if The Holy One were an object demarcated and limited in space — which is the opposite of the truth!... After all, The Holy One spoke these words through the prophet Isaiah (66:1): "The heavens are my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what kind of house can you build for me?" This suggests that space is only one axis of our experience. Our ability to access the Divine is also about dedicating the time to do so. It is fitting then that this week’s parsha, Emor, includes within the Jewish sacred calendar. It is where we learn how and when to mark sacred time in space together. Leviticus 23:4 reads, אֵ֚לֶּה מוֹעֲדֵ֣י יְהֹוָ֔ה מִקְרָאֵ֖י קֹ֑דֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר־תִּקְרְא֥וּ אֹתָ֖ם בְּמוֹעֲדָֽם׃ “These are the set times of יהוה, the sacred occasions, which you shall celebrate each at its appointed time.” These words are not just a preamble to the holidays in Torah, but they are placed in our festival liturgy, and we sing them before reciting Kiddush on festival mornings. The answer to both mine and Abravanel’s question is both/and. We need both a time and a place to cultivate holiness in our lives. We are a community bound together across time and space; across generations and time zones. For the first time in the life of Kol Tzedek, and the first time in 40 years in West Philadelphia we have the opportunity to access the Divine in the nooks and crannies of our own synagogue. I can already tell you the coat closet isn’t as big as the suburban shul I grew up in, but it does have a sacred back recess that I think would make a great hiding spot. Now we have a sanctuary in the cloud and a sanctuary on Whitby Ave, holy places to observe our sacred calendar together. Knowing how much of Judaism is transmitted in the act of being together, it is precious to have a place we can gather to learn, connect and reveal the Torah of our times. Earlier this week I had the privilege of taking a group of Kol Tzedek teenagers on a field trip to the encampment at UPenn, where students gathered as part of a nation-wide university divestment effort. I had originally imagined it would be a quiet night on campus, marked by an interfaith prayer service and hopefully a chance to talk to some students. As it turns out, there was a last minute student march which led to increased police presence and a more confrontational tone. I kept the young people close as we took in the sea of flags, posters, and t-shirts, surrounded by many familiar Kol Tzedek faces. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a young Jewish student put on tefillin and began shouting the Shema over the din of the protest. At which point the protest began chanting over the sound of the Shema. Our heads scanned back and forth as we found ourselves suspended in the political theater.
When a quiet moment emerged, I gathered the students and we walked to a grassy knoll to debrief our experience. We were joined by another KT member, who is now a student organizer at Penn. The teens asked thoughtful questions about the goals of the encampment and the organizing process. As I began to recount the experience of the Shema, one of the teens asked if they were just praying or if it was meant to be disruptive. In the moment it was hard to tell. We learned that this had become a regular tactic for counter-protestors on campus, to interrupt the activities at the encampment by loudly chanting the Shema. Apparently the student organizers have spent long hours trying to decide how best to respond. Sometimes the crowd quiets. Sometimes they chant over it. I am still processing the cognitive dissonance of hearing the Shema and not instinctively joining in. Those six powerful words are meant to unify not just Jews, but humanity. And yet in that moment, they were divisive. Sitting with these students I felt the pain of not knowing who my people are. In a week when there are congressional hearings about antisemitism in schools and Israel begins to invade Rafah, it is a complicated time to be Jewish. The intentional fusing of Jewishness with the Israeli state has proliferated very real antisemitism. And it has also criminalized very urgent righteous protest. My week has been full of conversations with members who are ashamed and horrified by the actions of the Israeli government. They do not want to be implicated in this catastrophic attack on Palestinian life in Gaza. I have been called in to consult at my kids’ school in response to concerns that students of different backgrounds are struggling to talk about what’s happening in Israel and Palestine. Reading the news I find it can be hard to discern what is and isn’t antisemitism. Just this week I read an article in the Times about Republicans who are propagating antisemitic tropes while simultaneously supporting the State of Israel in the name of Jewish safety. It is a confusing time to be Jewish. I am a rabbi, and I barely know how to thread this needle. It is not new that we as Jews disagree about questions that are core to our self-understanding. It is also not new that we as Jews disagree so aggressively about Zionism and the question of a Jewish nation state. This disagreement long precedes the founding of the state itself in 1948. How on the one hand can I feel a bone-deep love for Jewish traditions and prayer, and on the other hand feel threatened by the sound of the Shema? There is so much at stake in this political moment that it feels hard to know how best to live our Judaism. Whether at home or in the streets, I invite you to return to the basics. To the Shema. To the Holiness code in this week’s parsha. To the most foundational teachings in Torah. To treat others with dignity so that we can remain connected to our own inherent dignity. In the words of Marcia Falk, Hear, O Israel-- The divine abounds everywhere and swells in everything; the many are One. May it be so. There are many beautiful verses in this week’s parsha, Acharei Mot, and yet it is best known for its most perverse teaching. Leviticus 18:22 reads, “Man shall not lie with a man as he does with a woman, it is an abomination.” The Hebrew word for abomination is To’evah - and I have a piece of art in my office with just that word. This verse has been used to shame and scar generations of Queer Jews.
A few years ago a colleague of mine, Rabbi Guy Austrian, gave a very memorable d’var Torah on this week’s parsha that did not redeem the verse, or reverse the harm, but did give me a way to relate to this and many other painful verses in Torah. Rather than wrestling with the translation or interpretation, he opted to wrestle with the trope, the melody with which they are sung. Classically there are six different melodies with which we sing the Torah. The most common is of course the trope we use on weekdays, shabbat and holidays. In addition, we often hear the Haftarah for the prophetic readings and the special trope for the High Holidays. And but once a year we get to hear the special trope of Lamentations on Tisha B’av, Esther on Purim, and if we are lucky the three megillot that are ready on the festivals of Passover (Song of Songs), Shavuot (Ruth) and Sukkot (Ecclesiates). That particular Shabbat, Rabbi Guy posited: what happens to this verse if we make it a lament and read it in Eicha trope? What happens if we eroticize it and sing it in the trope of Song of Songs? Can we flip it on its head with the playful trope of the Purim megillah? Can we give it gravitas with the Days of Awe trope? Changing the melody was an unexpected way to reclaim agency over this verse in Torah. To reclaim queer sexuality and sing it as a love poem. To reclaim queer grief and cry out in lament. The one thing I wasn’t able to do was make it into prophecy and sing it like the Haftarah. I offer you all of these options as a way to heal this part of Torah. Honestly, these days this verse hurts less than many others. The treacherous teachings about the sotah waters, the instruction to stone the rebellious child, the endless chapters of conquest in the land. Which is why, despite being musically challenged, I think it is so beautiful and important that we chant the words of Torah week after week. To remind ourselves that their meaning is not static. Every Torah service truly is an act of revelation. What Torah “means” is contextual, impacted by the reader, the teacher, the time, and as it turns out, the trope. Torah is a tree of life, and we give voice to its evolving truths. How might we sing our way back into the painful verses of Torah? What might that teach us about how to relate to the harm and contradiction present in other parts of our lives? In this complex political moment, Rabbi Mó pointed me to another verse in Torah, a prayer which is typically sung as a way to bless the places we gather. It emerges from the book of Numbers (24:5) and blesses the places where we pitch our tents. These words have taken on new meaning in this time, in which college students are bravely rising up and calling for divestment on college campuses around the country. מַה טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ, יַעֲקֹב; מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶיךָ, יִשְׂרָאֵל Ma tovu ohalekha Ya'akov, mishk'notekha Yisra'el. How lovely are your tents, O Jacob; your encampments, O Israel! In singing these words, may we like Balaam, transform the harshness in our hearts, and in the world, into blessings for protection. |
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Office & Mailing Address: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #2, Philadelphia, PA 19143
General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143
General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143