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One of my mentors and comrades, Claudia Horowitz, has had the same signature on her email for the decades that I have known her. It reads, “Don't push the river; it flows by itself.” Every time I encounter this wisdom, I think of skipping rock from the sandy banks, wading into to feel the strong current, the way a river bends, the continuous and determined flow of water, uninterruptible.
I recalled the phrase yesterday when a beloved friend gave me some honest feedback. Reflecting on recent interactions, they felt I was being too pushy. Being the generous friend they are, they said it was part chutzpah and part pushy. What arose was shame, some embarrassment and some sadness (including some tender tears). I don’t mean to be pushy and I don’t want to be pushy. I also know that pushiness, on some deep level, is what allowed me to become myself. It can be hard to know when to assert, when to push, when to allow, when to trust. After talking with my friend, I went for a run to help the feedback settle. As I watched the sun set in the Woodlands, I considered the time of year. We are in the second week of the Omer. A time of spiritual awakening and consciousness raising that follows the liberation of Passover. Everything is possible again. Flowers are blooming, leaves are unfurling, the days are longer. The earth’s resilience can inspire our own. In the mystical tradition, each of the seven weeks of the omer corresponds to each of the seven lower sefirot. Sefirot are portals for different aspects of the Divine which manifest in the natural world, in Torah and in us! So for example, the first week is the week of Hesed, which relates to the right hand, to water, Abraham, and kindness. Hesed flows. It dawned on me, in the counting of the omer, we were in the second week, the week of Gevurah. Gevurah is Hesed’s counterpart. It is strength and discipline, courage and boundaries. Not only that but yesterday was the fourth day of the second week, which corresponds to Netzach sh’be’Gevurah, the day of enduring strength, aka pushiness. I chuckled to myself, this would be the day to reflect on pushiness. I have no doubt that there are times when my own capacity for netzach sh’be’gevurah is an asset. And also no doubt it is a liability. The omer is a reminder that like the Divine, we contain it all. Nothing is inherently good or inherently bad. The work of the omer is to come into balance with each of these aspects of ourselves. The last 100 days have been dysregulating, and I am appreciative of the Omer’s invitation to rebalance. In my case to encourage today’s sefirot - hod sh’be’gevurah - acceptance rather than insistence. I know in my heart the good that can come from gevurah, but I also know when overused it can turn into a strong arm, which I do not want. If you have been on the receiving end of my pushiness, I sincerely apologize. I am already looking forward to week three, the week of Tiferet - a week devoted to cultivating beauty, compassion and integrity. I invite you to take a moment to pause and acknowledge today is the 12th day of the Omer, which makes one week and five days of the Omer. Hod Sh’be’gevurah. The day when we remind ourselves we don’t have to push the river, it flows by itself. Strong currents and all. What a relief! With gratitude to Claudia’s practice and wisdom, I offer you her 100 days of meditation. When I was parenting toddlers one of the most delicate determinants of my days was how well I managed to get my kids through a transition from one activity to another. From having breakfast to going to school or dinnertime to tubtime. In order to soothe myself and cope with what were some very difficult transitions, I started singing a parody of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof in my head, “Transitions! Transitions!” This made me chuckle and helped soften me to the challenges of transitioning. (Which you would think as a trans person I would be familiar with).
But the truth is, transitions are most enjoyable when there is spaciousness. The clutter of daily activities seeps into the moments between them, which minimizes necessary time to integrate, arrive, pivot, be present. Which is why I think Judaism calls our attention to transitions. Judaism sees transitions as holy carve outs. Our prayer services mark transitions in time. The reddening of the morning sky. Twilight. The moment the sun dips below the horizon. The first three stars in the night sky. Our festivals mark transitions in seasons and the natural cycles. Sukkot brings on the rainy season in the Fall and Passover the dry season in the Spring. And our lifecycles call attention to personal transitions. The onset of puberty with B’nei Mitzvah, the time between the death of a loved one and burial known as aninut, to name just a few. This Saturday night we get to make one of the most sacred and storied transitions, from havdalah to seder. Much rabbinic ink has been spilled about the holy handoff between Shabbat and Passover, notably how do we honor both sacred times as we end shabbat and begin Pesach. “Transitions! Transitions!” I love to imagine the delicacy of trying to avoid our sacred holidays from getting cranky. We must both sanctify the new holiday and separate between Shabbat and the weekday using the same ritual act of drinking wine. The Havdalah cup does double duty as the Kiddush cup. But how do we manage these simultaneous obligations? Or, more precisely, in what order ought we combine all the necessary blessings? It's a tricky spiritual transition. Both shabbes and Passover want our undivided attention. But the truth is, I am realistically going to be preparing for seder on Shabbat afternoon. How do we offer each the kavod they deserve, and how might we learn to offer that to ourselves? In the Babylonian Talmud, the rabbis imagine this moment with royal hospitality. In masechet Pesachim, Rabbi Hanina teaches that this is comparable to a queen who is exiting a city and a governor is entering. Etiquette dictates that the inhabitants of the city first escort the queen out of the city to take leave of her in a dignified fashion, and afterward they go out to greet the governor. Similarly, one should first recite havdala, to take leave of Shabbat, and only then recite kiddush over the Festival, whose sanctity is lesser than that of Shabbat. Now mind you, I am not so deferential to queens and governors as these texts suggest. But I do love considering the social etiquette of sacred time and how to be most hospitable to the flow of honored guests in our home. The answer the rabbis offer is my favorite acronym: יקנה״ז, pronounced YaKNeHaZ: יין (yayin) for the blessing over the wine; קידוש (kiddush) for the blessing over the new holiday just beginning; נר (ner) for the blessing over the flame; הבדלה (havdalah) for the blessing Hamavdil; and זמן (zman) for Shehechiyanu. May we be blessed in our comings and our goings. My father’s charoset and matzah ball soup, afikomen fondue and the full moon. These are a few of my favorite (Passover) things. Part of me is very much looking forward to the songs and flavors of seder season. But another part of me is feeling quite anxious and avoidant, even fearful. (I have uncharacteristically not started my Pesach cleaning).
As one of the three pilgrimage festivals, Passover is designed to bring us all together, across time and space. That is its legacy. Seder night connects me to all the other seders I have been at and all the people I have told this sacred story with. The year I wandered Istanbul searching for matzah, the year I dressed up as a wild beast, the years we were in quarantine. Perhaps one of the most profound moments for me as a Jew is sitting down to seder on Erev Pesach and imagining a web of Jews all over the world also sitting down to their seders. On every continent (except maybe Antarctica), tables will be set, stories will be told, questions will be asked. Even Jews who consider themselves secular find themselves celebrating Passover. Even under duress, even during the Holocaust, Jews found ways to make seder. Passover traditions are one of the most palpable expressions of clal yisrael / the entity, the entirety of Israel. But this year I am really struggling. The concept of clal yisrael has never been easy for me to swallow whole, but these days it feels indigestible. The chasm is deep and so painful. The image of settlers sitting down to seder in the West Bank, rifles around their chests, young Jewish soldiers at checkpoints, Palestinians captive in their homes on their ancestral lands, I can’t stomach it. Death of the first born, death of 10,000 children in Gaza. Will they use the plagues to justify it? Will they claim them as liberation casualties? And then there is the rising fascism here in the US, and its manipulation of antisemitism to silence free speech, deport immigrants and disrupt democracy. I am sick watching so much of clal Israel respond with indifference and in some cases actively cheering on extralegal deportations of people for writing op eds. This administration's explicit manipulation of antisemitism to undermine democracy and the Jewish establishment’s collusion with it is deplorable and dangerous (I highly recommend Rabbi Sharon Brous’ Purim Sermon: I am not your pawn! on this topic.) On April 12 1941, 84 seder years ago to the (seder) day, Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, known as the Esh Kodesh, the rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto, was teaching about exactly this. He wrote, “No Jew is a separate individual. He belongs to the entirety of the congregation of the Jewish people. Thus when one person learns Torah and worships God, he thereby illuminates all Jewish people.” He explains that when one Jew does teshuvah, it benefits all Jewish people. But then I suppose the inverse also applies, when one Jew strays horribly from the path of righteousness, it affects all of us. On my recent road trip to Detroit for Shosh’s grandma’s funeral, I opted to take off my kippa at the rest stop. I am still unsure, did I not feel safe or did I not feel proud? The Esh Kodesh goes on to explain that there is a kind of clal in which the whole is composed of separate parts. As any whole thing, take a car or a book, is made up of many smaller parts (metal, words, etc). But then, he elaborates, “There is another kind of clal that constitutes an essential, simple unity from which the details are branches that diverge…When we reach the source or root of such a clal, everything has become one. An example of this is fruit that has fallen from a tree. When we cut it off from its source, we watch it decay. The germ of the tree unifies and sustains all the disparate parts…” For the Esh Kodesh, this is how it is with the congregation of israel. The whole is not comprised of individuals. On the contrary, the individuals are branches of the whole. “The Congregation of Israel exists not because of a decision to join together and unify, but because the germ is the Jewish soul that includes all Jews and from which individual Jews branch out.” As I read this I felt so much grief and disconnect from his romantic vision of clal yisrael. This year, we are more like a broken down car than a tree of life. For the Esh Kodesh, it turns out Passover is also a pinnacle moment for clal yisrael. The Haggadah explains that the wicked child is wicked because he excluded himself from the clal. He asks, “What does this ritual mean for you?” and not “for us?” And the Esh Kodesh takes that to mean that the wicked child has cut himself off from his source, he is like a piece of fruit fallen from the tree, rotting on the forest floor. I am in a bit of an existential spiritual crisis, imagining seders across the Jewish world. This year I’m feeling both part of them and not part of them. I want to feel connected to them, and I want not to feel connected to them. All of this has me wondering, am I the wicked child? Are they? What might it take to feel part of the whole? What might I risk? What might I lose? It is yet unclear to me if I believe in an essential Jewish soul, though it's a soothing image to see us as connected in such a Sinai way. I know it feels bad to fray from my Source, to fear my own people, even my own family. I know I am not alone in this existential discomfort. I know that a big part of what keeps me tethered to clal yisrael is you all. This community makes me believe in a Judaism worthy of our children’s children and the earth itself. I can tell you I plan to clean for passover and brave seder night. To sing songs that have been sung for more than a thousand years. To allow myself to hope it might be healing. To hope it might widen the narrow places in my heart, to taste the tears and bless them. This morning when I woke I saw six daffodils had bloomed in front of my house, three yellow and three white. I planted those bulbs 8 years ago when Naim was a baby and Trump had just been elected. Another moment when I needed hope. How do they do it? Year after year?
They looked so spry and delighted to be on earth, which was a helpful counterpart to my heart state. I am so so sad. I am devastated that Israel broke the ceasefire and the fighting has resumed. There is famine in Sudan. Our own government is disappearing people and democracy is disintegrating. This week, I am disgusted by greed and cruelty. And I am delighted by the natural world. A playful pod of dolphins greeted the astronauts as they splashed down from space. Today it is officially the first day of spring and I am grateful. When I stop to consider the implications, I am actually overjoyed that it is Spring. Infuse me with your vitamin D. Please Earth, I am begging you, pepper my days with flowers and bright green everywhere. Break through the cement, remind me that the urge to grow is stronger than rock. Many of us are accustomed to saying blessings over challah and wine, and even all food and water, from which we derive life and pleasure. But we are less practiced at reciting blessings over the natural world. A thousand years ago, Maimonides wrote, “Over winds that blow with force, and over lightening and over thunder…and over light that appears in the air like stars falling or running from place to place, or over stars that appear with a tail, over each of these we say, “Blessed is the one who strength and power fills creation.” There is a blessing for the light that lengthens, the fruit trees that bloom and the joy they inspire. Blessings call our attention to latent and life giving gratitude. In commenting on this week’s parsha, Vayakhel, the Sefas Emes describes all of creation as an act of profound generosity. The Holy One just keeps giving and giving, (light, land, animals, trees, people, rest). In that spirit, he sees the mishkan as the Israelites generous offering. They too just kept giving and giving (silver, gold, bronze, purple, crimson, gemstones, yarn, dolphin skins). Generosity is at the core of the natural world and our spiritual lives. If creation was God’s generous act, and the mishkan was the ancient Israelites’ response, the question is, What is our generous act? What can we create with wild abandon and unceasing creativity? Yesterday on NPR I listened to an interview with the poet Amy Gerstler. (Poetry is saving me these days!) Her forthcoming book includes this poem, Anticipating Spring. Mosses, pollens and grasses tune up. Can you listen without needing to speak? That fox wants to tell you something. Drunk on crumbs of the dead, roots sing. Blossoms ache to flash their panties, a la can-can girls. Scholars mumble. Pages crumble. Wild parrots scream between rainstorms. Slow-growing saplings groan. Don't pray aloud, just wish from inside your hideout of silence. Ah, goddess, please touch me. Each week I crawl inside the quiet of my own heart and dig deep to connect the dots and draw out some words of wisdom (ideally!). But today is not an ordinary Friday, it is also Purim!
Purim is a holiday devoted to blurring boundaries, subverting power and inverting reality. It is a brave, cathartic and risky spiritual practice to loosen our moral grip and allow the absurd to be our primary teacher. The enduring irony of the Book of Esther comes to a spiritual head in Chapter 9. Last night, as Avra chanted Rabbi Tamara Cohen’s brilliant and necessary rewrite of the 9th chapter, I was transfixed by its capacity to imagine a world at once whole and ridiculous. I found myself thinking, “Yes! This is the world I want to live in.” A world where enemies become anemones and all trees are made for climbing. In her vision I also felt grief. How far we are from that world. And how far her vision is from the canonical 9th chapter of Esther (which we also read in lament). In her Yom Kippur sermon last year, Rabbi Alana Alpert of Detroit’s Congregation T’chiyah spoke about a phrase near the end of the Book of Esther in Chapter 9, “V’nahafoch hu” — “And the opposite happened. We confuse ourselves to the point of being unable to tell the difference between good Mordechai and evil Haman, because there is no actual difference between them, not essentially. When the tables are turned, we have the same capacity for cruelty as anyone.” In a recent OpEd in The Forward entitled, “Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza demands a new reading of the Purim story’s final chapter.” Michael Lukas comments, “This is the moment in the story when the Jews’ fortunes reverse, when everything is turned upside down, the origin of the holiday’s tradition of getting so drunk you can’t tell the hero from the villain… Once we recognize our own capacity for evil — and by us, I mean not only Jews, but anyone — once we see our own power and the suffering it can cause, the violence at the end of the Book of Esther becomes something much more meaningful than fantasy or farce. The holiday is an invitation to put on the clothes of another, to forget for a moment who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.” In truth, the entire Purim story and our communal observance of the holiday, hinge on these two potent words in Chapter 9: “וְנַהֲפ֣וֹךְ ה֔וּא // V'nahafoch Hu!” In his commentary, Ibn Ezra notes, grammatically speaking, the verb N’afoch is in the passive voice. As if to say, “On the contrary, everything inverted itself all by itself.” Well to that I say, On the contrary! While God may not be an active voice in the book of Esther, its characters certainly are. They repeatedly assert their own agency to chart a new destiny. May we too have the courage to reclaim our voice, act with courage and feel called to answer Mordechai’s charge to Queen Esther: “וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃” “Who knows – maybe you were made for exactly this moment!?” In a stunning poem that evokes the crossing of the Sea of Reeds, the teacher, poet, and theologian Joy Ladin writes: “The soil between your toes is damp. You lost your shoes some ways back. This is holy ground, the waters said . . . You were trying To learn to walk When you needed to learn to swim. You part The grass that whispers Through the waters that sing in your ears. You can’t make out the question So you answer Yes.” On this absurd day, when everything is possible, may we have the necessary courage to answer Yes! "Why did the Jewish person bring a ladder to the synagogue?
Because they heard the service was going to be uplifting! " This really is my hope each week. To bring some joy and levity to this community. Especially these days, when the news is grim and stress is high. Over the years I have noticed that my favorite teachers are the ones who make me laugh, while imparting their wisdom. From them I have learned to bring humor to shabbat services. Shosh says I am most funny on the bima. I am accepting that as a challenge. I need to bring more silliness to the rest of my life. We learn in the Talmud that when the month of Adar arrives, (as is the case today!), joy increases. The coming of Adar heralds the holiday of Purim. It broadcasts that Spring is coming. The days are getting longer, the sap is beginning to run, the earth is preparing to bloom. It is a strange and wonderful thing to feel religious pressure to express joy. Every year I find the spirit of Adar and the practice of Purim unexpectedly cathartic. This year, as the moon of Shevat began to wane and I realized Adar was on the horizon, I felt called to investigate my relationship to joy. I realized that right now, more than joy, I am trying to levitate, to experience more levity. I am seeing becoming more lighthearted as a spiritual pursuit, probably always but especially now. Which is to say, the giggles are very welcome. Many people want to know the secret to longevity. I am not a scientist or a doctor, but I have been spending a lot of time with Shosh’s grandmother, Harriet who is 102. Some decades ago she read that laughing can make you live longer. So she bought a book of jokes. At night, Harriet and her husband of 60 years, Al, would lie in bed, hold hands and read each other silly jokes. I am so endeared to this practice. From Harriet I have learned to lead with gratitude and encourage laughter. It's helpful to remember that laughing is good for us. I notice it loosens me up. Softens my shoulders. Makes me more forgiving, more flexible, more receptive. This Rosh Hodesh Adar, I am leaning into Grandma Harriet’s wisdom. I am in the market for some new jokes so I can take myself less seriously and fill my days with more levity. If you see me, feel free to tell me a joke. I am collecting them! What can you do to levitate? This joy, the world won’t give it to us. But we can give it to each other! For most of us, the image of God as King is uncomfortable. On Rosh Hashanah, we sweeten and swallow it with apples and honey. We mumble it in Hebrew blessings (eloheinu melech haolam), but when confronted with the English translations, we cringe and rewrite the metaphor.
But this week, God as King is strangely comforting to me. The entire rabbinic tradition of talking about kingship makes sense to me in a new way. As if to say, something compassionate, just, indivisible, and even ineffable is ultimately in charge, not you mortals who cannot control your desires for power and money. I noticed this spiritual shift as I was reciting Ashrei, an acrostic psalm we are instructed to say three times daily. Most weeks I am drawn to the word selah at the end of the first line, to the spacious pause it invites. But this week it is the letter mem that calls to me. It reads, מַלְכוּתְךָ מַלְכוּת כָּל עֹלָמִים, וּמֶמְשַׁלְתְּךָ בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדֹר Malkhutekha malkhut kol olamim, umemshaltekha b’khol dor vador Your kingdom shall last for ever and ever, and Your rule shall extend into each and every generation. I took refuge in the repeated emphasis on a divine monarchy in the heavenly realm. I have always been drawn to the midrashim that distinguish between a King of flesh and blood and Melech Malchei HaMelachim - the King of Kings, aka God, because they are a reminder that our ancestors conjured the image of God as King in contrast to the terrible monarchs of their time. And they took the time to reimagine a sovereign source of power that was in service to its subjects, not the other way around. I have been singing this line from Ashrei with fervor, reminding myself that for thousands of years Jews have lived under foreign rule that has not represented their best interest or their values. And we developed our own moral codes and spiritual hierarchies to counter the unjust hierarchies we lived under. On Thursday night, Rabbi Gila taught me and the KT teens a wild story from the Babylonian Talmud about Alexander, the Great (Tamid 32b). “After his death, Alexander arrived at paradise: He called out: Open the gate for me! A divine being from within the Garden of Eden called back: Only the righteous shall enter. He said to them: I too am worthy, as I am a king; I am very important. If you won’t let me in, at least give me something from inside. They gave him one eyeball. He brought it and he weighed all the gold and silver that he had against the eyeball, and yet the riches did not balance against the eyeball’s greater weight. He said to the Sages: What is this? Why does this eyeball outweigh everything? They said: It is the eyeball of a mortal person of flesh and blood, which is not satisfied ever. The Sages instructed to take a small amount of dirt and cover the eye. He did so, and it was immediately balanced by its proper counterweight. The eye is never satisfied while it sees what it wants.” Then and now, the richest men on earth, who dare to call themselves kings, are insatiable and unworthy of our allegiance. May we have the courage and clarity to honor our ancestors, to defy the will of tyrants and to live righteous lives worthy of the Garden of Eden. As we sing in Avinu Malkeinu, ain lanu melekh ela atah - there is no King but You! Such a desperate plea. May it be so. It is strange how often I find myself asking “What is Torah?”
As a rabbi, one might think the answer would be straightforward. Yet, as both a student and a teacher, I keep returning to this question. Not just what can Torah teach us, but what is Torah itself? It comes up in nearly every grade at Torah school, as they iteratively expand their understanding of what Torah includes. From the sacred scroll to the ever-expanding midrashic traditions, to their own ideas and insights. It comes up in conversation with my B’nei Mitzvah students as we prepare for their Dvar Torah. It comes up on Simchat Torah. And certainly it comes up this week, as we read parshat Yitro, which includes an account of the giving of Torah on Mt. Sinai. At its root, Torah comes from the root ירי meaning to point, aim, shoot or direct. The same root creates the word yoreh, the first drenching rainfall at the beginning of the farming season, which one midrash describes as “rain that pervades and satisfies the earth and gives her drink down to the deep.” Rain is afterall water directed at the earth. It is also an archery term, used when one points an arrow at its target. From these two usages alone, we learn that Torah is meant to sustain us at our core and direct us on our path. I thought of all of this on Monday night, as I had the honor of hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates read from his new book “The Message.” (Spoiler: I am planning a virtual Omer book group for this book in May, in case you want to reserve a copy at the library now!) Coates spoke to a crowded auditorium at Swarthmore College. During the Q&A students repeatedly asked him for advice, which he was very reluctant to offer, with one exception. He implored these young adults to stop using social media in general and X specifically. Quoting, “It is extremely important that you not engage in distraction. Do not spend time trying to disprove people who do not believe you to be human. You’ll never win.” He went on to describe social media as addictive, defeatist, and designed to drag you into irresolvable fights with people with whom your disagreements are minor. He concluded, “Get it off your phones!” This was a stark moment. I think the crowd was looking for organizing advice, not screen time suggestions. I know our relationships to screens and digital communities are complex. And even as I tend to agree with Coates’ advice, I am aware that social media is a place of so much connection and resource sharing. So even more than his directive, I am drawn to the sentiment behind it. We find ourselves in uncertain times. Heed Coates’s sacred advice, “It is extremely important that you not engage in distraction.” Whatever that may be for you. There is a tension between stay informed and becoming distressed, even panicked. This is by design. Coates reminded me we need to be disciplined in our intake of the news. The world needs your attention whole, unfragmented, clear, critical, alert, aware. In my own life, Torah serves as the opposite of a distraction. It is an anchor, pulling me down through the present to something ancient and enduring. It is directional. It is meant to guide and quench. Time studying Torah is time well spent. Each week Torah is here to connect you down to the deep. I will end with prophetic words that come directly from this week’s parsha. In Exodus 19, the Holy One tells Moses to tell the Isrealites, it’s me God, remember “How I carried you on eagles’ wings!?” וָאֶשָּׂ֤א אֶתְכֶם֙ עַל־כַּנְפֵ֣י נְשָׁרִ֔ים I am a green football fan (pun intended). The city pride has been palpable and contagious. What a joy to be carried on these Eagles’ wings! Go Birds ! And to imagine this feeling as the origin story of a collective faith that bound us together and first connected us to something Ineffable. One of the most precious parts of every week is joining the KT Torah School during their prayer time with Rabbi Michelle.These kids have learned to pray, from their hearts, for what they care about most. Apparently, last week, when asked who they wanted to pray for, my younger child responded, “For every country who will be part of World War III.”
When Rabbi Michelle told me this, my heart sank. Granted my kids have been playing a lot of Risk (a board game about imperialism). And we have been listening to a lot of Les Miserables and Hamilton, which leads to lots of talk about the French Revolution and the American revolution, respectively. So that is part of where this is coming from. Amidst all this talk of war, when they ask about WWIII I always assure them that hopefully there will never be another world war again. But they have also been asking me questions like “What if Trump allies with Putin and North Korea?” which is their way of expressing concerns we all share. Their questions are reasonable and I don’t have a rational answer. But I also don’t need one because Torah teaches me that miracles happen. That nothing is unchangeable, including the course of history. If at the end of this week, you, like me, are feeling we are collectively in need of a miracle (or several), you are not alone. (Take a lion’s breath with me. Roar if you can.) This week’s Torah portion is replete with miracles. The story picks up after Pharoah has agreed to let the Israelites go. Rabbi Elliot Kukla writes, “As they fled slavery with their taskmasters in hot pursuit, they came up against the Sea of Reeds —a churning, impassable ocean. But suddenly, their horizon literally expanded: “Moses held his arm out over the sea and the Eternal One drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and turned the sea into dry ground (Exodus 14:21).” This was arguably the pivotal moment in Jewish history. We tell and retell the story of the parting of the sea in every weekday, Shabbat, and holy day prayer service, morning and evening. It is recounted in prayer more frequently than the details of the creation of humanity or the giving of the Torah.” We learn in Pirkei Avot (5:4) that there were 10 miracles at the sea. Here are the miracles I noticed. Certainly it was a miracle that the sea parted. That it revealed dry ground in the midst of the sea (this is mentioned three times!). That children and elders could reach into the sea walls and grab pomegranates to satisfy their hungry cries. That Miriam had the spiritual resolve to lead the Israelites in song and dance. That the sea returned which prevented the Egyptians from continuing their chase on the other side. Moses turned the bitter water they found into sweet water. Then the oasis in Elim provided shade and water to rest and restore. And truly it was a miracle that the people were brave and scared at the same time, and found the faith to cross the sea. Rabbi Kukla continues, “Why do we need to hear this story so often? Because it is in this moment that we realized that nothing is immutable.” This shabbat, may the merit of our ancestors open us wide like the sea, fill us with courage, song, faith and determination. And the knowing that the miracles we need are close at hand. In a week that has felt like quicksand, I am grateful for the reminder that dry ground appeared in the midst of the sea. May it be so! This week previews the undoing of creation.
In the beginning, the Torah asserts, the world was tohu va’vohu - vacuous and chaotic, teeming with possibility and lacking order. The creation story that begins with the famous words “let there be light,” includes six days of creation and culminates in a dynamic pause known as Shabbat, is well known to many of us. What many of us (self included until this week!) may not realize is that the story of the 10 plagues, which concludes in this week’s parsha Bo, is not just a story of escalating tactics, it is a paradigm for the unraveling of creation itself. One of God’s very first acts is to separate the waters above from the waters below. And in the very first plague water becomes blood. Just as the God creates animals to fill the land and the sea, the second, third and fourth plagues send forth an overabundance of those very animals that teem in the water (frogs), on land (lice), and in the sky (locusts), to plague the people. And unspeakably, whereas God creates humans on the 6th day, God takes the first born Egyptians. The parallels are eerie. The plagues were temporary, deliberate and Divinely ordained. The fact that they threaten to return to the world to pre-creation chaos tells us something of what was at stake in Moses’ mission to free the Israelite slaves. But the full impact of this destructive paradigm hit me when I got to the ninth plague, the plague of darkness, whose description brought my studies to a halt: וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהֹוָ֜ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֗ה נְטֵ֤ה יָֽדְךָ֙ עַל־הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וִ֥יהִי חֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־אֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם וְיָמֵ֖שׁ חֹֽשֶׁךְ׃ The Holy One said to Moshe: Stretch out your hand toward the heavens, and let there be darkness over the land of Egypt, so that they will feel darkness! (Exodus 10:21) The declaration “And let there be darkness” is an exact undoing of the very first seminal words of creation, “Let there be light!” How could anyone, let alone the Holy One, instruct Moses to say “Let there be darkness”? And not just darkness, but a palpable darkness. A darkness that they can feel and touch (וְיָמֵ֖שׁ חֹֽשֶׁךְ׃). A darkness that Ibn Ezra explains was so thick that it made time stand still for the Egyptians, quoting, “The Egyptians had no way of knowing that three days passed except through the Israelites, who had light.” This week has felt like a series of plagues cast upon us, each executive order revealing the newest threat to our well being. We are experiencing a deliberate and expedient unraveling of our already imperfect government, which has created an air of fear and uncertainty. I imagine some of us feel more personally vulnerable than others. But I imagine many, if not most of us, are experiencing this time as scary and destabilizing. And I think that is one of this administration’s goals. But one of our goals is to allow our spirits and our nervous systems to recover from the stress of the week. To reclaim time and allow it to stand still on our terms. Forever and ever, I choose the world of “Yehi Or - Let there be light.” Before the sun sets on this week, I invite you to return your attention to the world of creation. To trees and pets and neighbors, and all the wonderful things that bring order and joy to your life. To invite in the blessings of the new moon of Shevat whose tiny crescent light is waxing in the shabbos sky. To invite in the light of shabbat candles and the deeply needed rest of the 7th day. |
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General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143