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On Wednesday night, the students of Treehouse (KT’s afterschool program) planned the sweetest reception for everyone who participated in the Seeds of Torah project. For those who are unfamiliar, six of our young people have been working all year to create a collection of comic parshanut. Every single Torah portion will have a comic strip depiction. (There are still a few left. If you want to make one email [email protected]). The plan is to print the book in time for Simchat Torah!
The comics are beautiful, heartfelt and hilarious. They feature everything from a glittery golden calf to porta-potty jokes. They are digital and hand drawn, made by kids and grown ups alike. The kids planned the entire party from Torah trivia to the menu (featuring cheese, fruit, cookies and seltzer). Each kid even got to add three songs to the party playlist. Vibes were high. It was a very proud moment for Kol Tzedek. Among the display of comics was my own contribution, which just so happens to be this week’s parsha, Bamidbar. When Rabbi Michelle announced the project I immediately volunteered. I love to study Torah and it seemed like a fun challenge. The dialogue came to me late one night on my winter meditation retreat. I wrote it down in a flurry with no idea how I would depict it. Despite my eagerness to participate, the truth is that I am not good at figure drawings. I had no idea how to take the words and make them visual. Out of a deep desire to impress my own children, I had the thought that maybe I could just use images of the Simpsons and insert my words. But it turns out there are some copyright issues with that. Stumped, I had a brand new thought I had never had before (call it a hiddush!?). Maybe I should ask AI for help? So one night while watching the actual Simpsons with my kids, I explained the entire situation to ChatGPT and asked it to illustrate a comic about parashat BaMidbar using my words as the dialogue. It was encouraging yet ran into the same copyright images I had discovered. BUT it was not deterred like I was. Instead it had the genius, ridiculous idea to create a Simpsons-inspired Jewish family. And thus was born “The Mermelsteins!” In my comic you will meet Max, Lila, Mira and Joe. When the comic was done, I was super proud and my kids were not impressed. This in and of itself felt very on par for the Simpsons. Apparently I think it's much funnier than it really is. How Homer, I mean Joe, of me. Take a peak and see for yourself! (Interesting note: ChatGPT cannot depict anything God-like so I had to adjust my Bat Kol expectations and settle for a Marge-like orb. It was refreshing to know it does have limits!) Humor (and Homer) aside, the essential question I was trying to answer, which I find myself asking every year at this time, is why was Torah given in the Wilderness? Many a midrash asks this question and the answers proliferate. The one that resonates most this week, in these times, came to me in the raspy heavenly voice of Mira Mom Mermelstein: “Just think if I gave it to you in your house, you’d think it belonged to you!” Torah was given in the wilderness, a place that is ownerless, so that no one can say they own Torah. In our hypercapitalist world, this is essential for all of us to remember. We are stewards and students of Torah. But Torah is fundamentally hefker – ownerless, everyone’s, up for grabs and open to infinite interpretations. And the fact that Torah is so available, invites those of who study Torah to also make ourselves available to new ideas and insights – including now the creative genius of artificial intelligence. This Shavuot, we have a chance to gather again at Sinai, and allow ourselves to be awash with the wisdom of Torah. To reconstitute the mixed multitude that has always been Jewish community. To remember that no one has a claim on Torah. No one can say Torah is theirs. And as a result, it is available to be shared with abundant generosity. May it bring healing, wholeness and humor from up above, to everywhere that needs it here on earth. This week’s Torah portion reads like speculative fiction. Its opening verse invites us to journey back to Mt. Sinai, to revisit the experience of revelation itself. Parashat Behar then goes on to give detailed instructions for how we observe the shmita and the jubilee years.
The Torah explains that every seventh year shall be a year of complete rest, a sabbath for the land known as shmita. It is a time of fallowness and rejuvenation. In addition to the shmita year, we are also meant to count seven cycles of seven years. This 49 year period is to be followed by a year of release and celebration called the Jubilee. This week, each in our own ways, we feel the chasm between the world of the jubilee and our world. The horrific shooting in DC of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, two staff members of the Israeli embassy, comes at a fragile, perilous time. The famine in Gaza is dire. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil is ongoing. These murders further threaten our already eroding sense of safety and derail the growing movement to get aid to Gaza. They escalate the cycle of violence. Understandably, many of us are reacting emotionally to this news, in grief, fear, despair, and anger, and it can be challenging to parse through our reactions to find a strategic response in moments of crisis. I encourage you to use the pause of Shabbat to be with these emotions and to stay connected to your body and your breath, your loved ones and that which brings you joy. I took some time today to visit DC virtually. I mapped the walking route between the site of the shooting and the National Mall. When I zoomed in I saw the Memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Engraved on it are the words that Rev. Dr. King wrote in a letter from his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in April 1963: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." Reading the news, I keep thinking, there is injustice everywhere and it is a threat to not just justice, but safety and peace, everywherefor everyone. While on my virtual walking tour, I learned something amazing about the Capital Jewish Museum. Inside the brand new museum, there’s an old synagogue. In fact it is Washington DC’s oldest synagogue. Adas Israel was first built in 1876 and in 2019, it was moved to be part of this new museum. You can read the full story here. I am not sure if the architects of the museum had the words of Yehudah Amichai in mind, but I imagine they must have. (Hat-tip to Rabbi Ariana Katz who pointed me to this poem yesterday.) In Poem Without End Amichai wrote, Inside the brand-new museum there’s an old synagogue. Inside the synagogue is me. Inside me my heart. Inside my heart a museum. Inside the museum a synagogue, inside it me, inside me my heart, inside my heart a museum Each of us has within our hearts our own concentric circles of history and community. We are inseparable from each other. Every life is a universe and every loss of life loses that person's unique museum, their synagogue and their heart, whether in DC or in Gaza. The Jubilee, as imagined in this week’s Torah portion, has never come to pass. This is a place where Torah’s idea of justice here on earth exceeds the human imagination and infrastructure. We have yet to turn our swords into plowshares, to study war no more, to hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants; to remove all borders and allow everyone to return to the place they call home (Leviticus 25:10). When the news is dystopian, Torah reminds us to keep imagining something new and better. When I was a kid, one of the regular activities we did with my synagogue was to go gleaning. We would arrive at a farm for the explicit purpose of harvesting the corners of the field and delivering the food to soup kitchens, shelters and food pantries. At the time I knew it was a mitzvah, which I understood to mean a good deed. But I didn’t realize it was literally d’oraita, a written commandment in the Torah.
We read in this week’s parsha, Emor (Lev 23:22), “Now when you harvest the harvest of your land, you are not to finish-off the edge of your field when you harvest it, the full-gleaning of your harvest you are not to glean; for the afflicted and for the sojourner you are to leave them, I am YHWH your God!” The Torah goes on to describe three different categories of gleanings to ensure that everyone who needs it has access to food, known in Hebrew as peah, leket, and shichecha. Peah refers to leaving the corners of the field unharvested. Leket refers to the food that falls to the ground during the harvest, which you shouldn’t go back to regather. And shichecha refers to fruit and vegetables that were left behind during the initial harvest, which you shouldn't return to pick. Between the corners, the dropped food and the forgotten harvest, there should be plenty in the fields for those who are landless, poor and hungry to sustain themselves. This is the entire thrust of Torah’s agricultural laws. That in a just society, everyone should have access to food. Some years ago, before I was a rabbi at Kol Tzedek, I was running an independent Hebrew school. For Sukkot, I brought the entire school to a farm and had them stand around a field of raspberries. Raspberries are both a spring and a fall crop in New England, so they were plump and ready for picking. I had everyone link arms to surround the circumference of the field. And then they released their grip and I asked them to identify the corner of the field which would be left for the community to glean. How many rows of raspberries would they leave for those who needed them? In other words, how big was the peah? The rabbis realized that the instruction to leave the corner of the field is actually not enough information. How do we know where the corner ends? How much of the field is reserved as the corner? Which is why the concept of peah appears at the top of the list of things in the mishnah (Peah 1:1) that have no measure, which is rabbinic idiom for “we can’t do enough of them.” It was the rabbis' way of saying, be as generous as you can with what you have. Do everything you can to feed everyone in your community. Harvest only what you need, and redistribute the rest. And this sentiment persists through rabbinic and medieval teachings. We learn in the Shulchan Arukh, “If there is a hungry person, one must feed them” (Yoreh Deah 250:1) Yes, we work for systematic change, but first we must ensure that every person has access to food. And all the more so, if we are meant to proactively feed people, then we certainly should not be preventing people from getting access to food. In times of war, we are not even supposed to cut down a fruit tree. Nevermind blocking aid and food altogether. Which is why it is unbearable to imagine the famine in Gaza, to know that the only Jewish state is starving the people of Gaza. For the past 18 months I have been donating to soup kitchens in Gaza, reading stories of desperate children now dying of hunger. This is an abomination. This goes against everything Torah teaches. This goes against everything I know about Jewish and Palestinian hospitality, a disgrace to the legacies of Abraham and Sarah. To imagine that there will be shabbes tables in Israel with two loaves of bread tonight, but not even a truckload of flour can enter Gaza, I can’t stomach it. None of us should be able to stomach it. I know from our recent community survey, that as a community we have some consensus. We oppose the forced starvation, displacement and expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza. Given this clarity, I encourage you to join the urgent and growing movement to demand the food be allowed into gaza. Please take a moment to sign here. https://www.foodaidforgaza.org/ And then take a moment to text or email 5 people in your life. Thank you for joining me in working to get food to the people of Gaza. I leave you with the words of two poets. First the Pulitzer Prize winning words of the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha excerpted from his poem, Under the Rubble: He left the house to buy some bread for his kids. News of his death made it home, but not the bread. No bread. Death sits to eat whoever remains of the kids. No need for a table, no need for bread. … And the prayer of Martin Espada, So may every humiliated mouth, teeth like desecrated headstones, fill with the angels of bread. May it be so. This month, I am leading a book group about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, The Message. I want to take the opportunity to share some of the insights and invite you all into the learning too. For those who have not yet read it, the book begins as a letter to his students about why he writes. And then in each subsequent chapter he writes about a distinct and recent pilgrimage in his life. It is his hope, in his own words, that the book “haunts.” That it makes you say to everyone you see, “"Have you read this yet?" Which has actually been my personal experience.
The first trip he takes is to Senegal, retracing his roots across The Transatlantic Slave Trade and back to the shores of Gorée. The island of Gorée lies off the coast of Senegal, opposite Dakar. From the 15th to the 19th century, it was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast. As Coates writes about the experience of arriving at Gorée, this passages haunts: “Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess they are imagined… We have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Gorée, to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning. And we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharoahs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.” So much of Jewish prayer and practice is rooted in our imagined traditions and places. Coates’ words grant me a kind of spiritual permission to long for the places my ancestors sojourned. Rome, Rhodes, Izmir, Andalusia, the Pale of Settlement, Brooklyn. Yet in my own experience, the rare times I have had to revisit one of these places, I realize how imagined my relationship is. This is my best understanding of exile. I am no longer of these places yet I long for them, for what I imagine them to have been. We are in the midst of a very brutal three week period in the Jewish imagination. It stretches from Yom HaShoah, which was observed last Thursday on April 24, includes Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut, which were observed Wednesday and Thursday of this past week. And concludes on May 14 with Nakba Day. Some might even say it began on the 10th of Nisan, known as Yom HaAliyah, which is an Israeli national holiday to commemorate the Jewish people entering the Land of Israel as written in the Hebrew Bible. The holiday was established to acknowledge Aliyah, immigration to the Jewish state, as a core value of the State of Israel. These are days, which for many Jews are holidays, were created alongside the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. They collapse the religious and political imagination in ways that are deep and devastating, and divide. It feels absolutely appropriate and important to honor the memories of our ancestors who died in the Holocaust once a year. In the words of Coates, "We have a right to that memory ... to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning." So why did I not mention it last week? Yom HaShoah is actually timed specifically to lead up to Yom Hazikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut. To inspire us to imagine that the State of Israel redeems the Nazi Holocaust. This narrative haunts and fails. Which is why there is a different day, January 27, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date of January 27 aligns with the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army in 1945. This is a day I hope we might begin to observe more collectively. This commemoration holds no ulterior motives. I think it is precisely this week when Coates’ words are meant to haunt us, to invite us “to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.” And then to invite out memories and our mourning to tell a different story. Where are the places you long for? What piece of your history do you long to recover, redeem, remember? As we pray in the weekday Amidah, תְּקַע בְּשׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל לְחֵרוּתֵֽנוּ Sound the great shofar of freedom, וְשָׂא נֵס לְקַבֵּץ גָּלֻיּוֹתֵֽינוּ Let there be a miracle, and may all refugees, all dispossessed people, all who have been forced to migrate, torn from the fabric of land and community, be regathered, returned, to themselves. בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵֽינוּSpeedily and in our days. May it be so. |
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General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143