inside the museum, a synagogue

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. ​