Rabbi's Blog

“Re’eh,” means “See”. The texts says “see!! I place before you today a blessing and a curse — the blessing that will come when we fulfill God’s commandments, and the curse if we abandon them. As the Israelites go into the land, says the text, they should put those blessings on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval. The list of blessings and curses is given in Ki Tavo, along with the procedure. After that, the portion goes onto centralizing worship in the Temple; warnings regarding false prophets, a repetition of the list of kosher and not kosher species, laws regarding the ma’aser, or 10%, to be given to the temple or to the poor, tzedakah, the laws of the shemitah or sabbatical year, and the description of the three festivals in which we would be supposed to go up to the Temple in Jerusalem – Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot.

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KS –  We are called children of God in our reading, and because of that it is requested of us to observe kashrut, to refrain from eating certain animals and from mixing milk and meat. Sounds funny, if you think of it, to the ears of many non-Jews – and to the ears of many Jews as well.

A friend of mine, Barbara Levitt z”l, was kosher. She told me her experience in a wedding in which she had requested salmon. And an acquaintance of hers, also Jewish, was having some sort of meat. And of course, this lady had to tell Barbara how outdated Barbara was, still clinging to the old ways, God does not care about what you eat! God does not care about what goes into your mouth, jut what comes out! The woman was being so strident, that my friend eventually had to say – I have no idea about God, but you are not being nice at all to me right now.

The midrash affirms that God cares about us and gave us the mitzvot – kashrut specifically – because God cares. Not like an OCD guy, taking notes about what you eat, but about who you become. God cares about that immensely – who are you becoming with your actions? The mitzvot are given to make us better people – particularly food, but not exclusively food. Many of our mitzvot are given to accustom us to kindness.

What is the guiding principle of all the animals you can eat? They are not predators. They don’t tear their food. They don’t become feral. You can have feral cats, feral dogs, wild boars are a menace. But deer? No. Have you ever heard of a feral cow? Even sheep, and we see every so often one which has escaped and been in the wild for years, don’t become feral. In 2021 in Australia one such ram  was found, and he had been 5 years in the wild. And he continued to be a sheep. And they took 80 pounds of wool from the poor thing. And he continued to just be a sheep. Sheep, it turns out, do not become feral. You can have wild goats, and wild sheep, but once domesticated, they don’t revert back. And those are the animals you can eat. It is known among breeders of cattle that if a mother rejects a calf, you can always find some other cow that will let it suckle on her.

This is not a trait exclusive to cattle, other animals do that too – the story of the dachshund who raised a pig is so well known that it became a child’s book. But kindness is the basic make up, the Torah says, of the animals you can eat.

The same thing applies to not mixing milk and meat. This is seen as a supreme cruelty: using the liquid that sustained the animal as a way of killing it. The same thing can be said about eating lobsters, that need to be boiled alive, or eating a limb of an animal that is still alive. Those actions are cruel.

The guiding principle, say the rabbis, is kindness. Kosher food should be a reminder, when done right, of the ultimate value of kindness. Eating is something we do every day, we, lucky ones, several times a day. And at every instance we should be reminded – kindness is the point.

Among the many birds we cannot eat is the stork, called hasidah in Hebrew. From that same word comes the word hasid, and the word hesed, lovingkindness. And then, of course, a student asks rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg why the stork, the hasida is not kosher. And reb Shmelke says it has to do with hesed. And the student is even more bothered by this – after all, the hasidah, the stork, is known for her devotion and her lovingkindness to her young! To which reb Shmelke says – yes, but she only cares about her own young. The hasidah never extends that love to any other baby bird, never helps others. And that makes the stork not kosher.

So my friend Barbara, who has died recently, was right in her discussion with the lady at the wedding: Barbara herself was a kind woman, always trying to help, always giving a hand to whoever she thought needed one, and the lady, who did not think about what was going into her mouth, apparently was not paying attention on how she was communicating with other people either.

So may this be a week of awareness of what comes into our mouths, and also of what comes out. May we be kind, loving and forgiving to one another. Shabbat shalom.

Hey Jesse!! It was so wonderful to see you and your parents this past Shabbat. Here’s the notes for the drasha.

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“Re’eh,” summary:

Re’eh means “See”. The texts says “see!! I place before you today a blessing and a curse — the blessing that will come when we fulfill God’s commandments, and the curse if we abandon them. As the Israelites go into the land, says the text, they should put those blessings on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval. The list of blessings and curses is given in Ki Tavo, along with the procedure. After that, the portion goes onto centralizing worship in the Temple; warnings regarding false prophets, a repetition of the list of kosher and not kosher species, laws regarding the ma’aser, or 10%, to be given to the temple or to the poor, tzedakah, the laws of the shemitah or sabbatical year, and the description of the three festivals in which we would be supposed to go up to the Temple in Jerusalem – Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot.

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[Please find in our reading which part is most upsetting to you.]

In our reading we come across one of the hardest pieces of the Torah – the laws regarding the ir hanidachat, the city that is supposed to be destroyed. In the reading, the entire city, led by men called “benei belial”. The translations are fascinating: base-fellows, scoundrels, wicked persons, unscrupulous men. In plain English we would call them nogoodniks. Those nogoodniks lead the entire city astray, and after a legal process that includes investigation and research, in which it is found that the entire city is given over to idolatry, you must, says the text, destroy all of it. Not just every person, every building but even every article and every animal. Everything. Nothing can remain.

What are we talking about here, rabbi – I can just hear you ask. And you know what – you should be bothered. How can the Torah say such a thing?! And let me tell you what you already know – the Torah has several laws that make us cringe.

The rabbis in the Talmud certainly are bothered by the ir hanidachat, the destroyed city. And that is not only case that bothers the rabbis, but the case of the rebellious son – we’ll come across that case in parashat Ki tetze – also bothers them. The rabbis then say – nah, the rebellious son never happened. What? If look in the simple Torah text, this is a much easier case to happen – the child just needs to have a bad attitude and drink a sizable amount of wine or eat a sizable amount of meat. I know many mouthy teenagers tha could easily fall in that category. And yet – say the rabbi – this never ever existed.

And here is the secret, which many people tend to look with askance when I point that out – there are loopholes. And I am here to show to you that loopholes are good – when the final goal is love, tolerance and light.

The obligation of humans is to aim for higher moral and religious standards – and I believe we all share this idea. Because people are created in the image of God, our tradition believes we carry within ourselves moral notions of the highest order, which are very close to God’s ultimate will. An individual may not be aware of them, because those notions, that moral instinct, can remain subconscious.

Throughout Jewish history we had moments when we, as a collective, had these moral instincts dormant, or undeveloped. But at a later stage and throughout all of history, these moral notions slowly develop and come to the forefront.

If you look into how the rabbis make the rebellious child never happen, you will find that the rabbis themselves create so many conditions for the application of this law that no wonder it never happened. And they do that because they cannot believe that the text is saying what the simple meaning appears to be.

Here’s an example – according to the Torah text, the father and mother have to say to the beit din “this son of ours does not obey our voices.” The rabbis affirm that this means that they have to have the exact same voice – they have to have the same tone. And they add – it follows they need the same height and appearance. So any child born from a short mother and a tall father or vice-versa will not fall into the rebellious child category.

And of course, the fact that it is a son, excludes all daughters. The fact that is a son, but not an adult, makes the window for this law to be applied a mere six months – between 13 and a day and 13 and a half. And so on, down to the parents’ height and build.

For the destroyed city, our reading, the rabbis do something similar: they argued that it was impossible to destroy the entire city. There is no doubt! Since there must have been mezuzot on the doorposts of some of its inhabitants, you can’t destroy the city.

One mezuzah saves the entire town! You can be a Jewish idol worshipper, but what Jew doesn’t have a mezuzah on their doorpost?!

Talk about a loophole: you all know that it is forbidden to destroy the name of God, which is found in the mezuzah, and if everything in the city had to be utterly destroyed, the law of ir hanidachat could not be enforced and was meant to be purely theoretical.

This is a pretty good loophole. Now – I love this loophole, and I bet you love it too.

Now, let’s be clear here: One could, and just hear me on this, one could take down the mezuzahs. And then destroy the city. Right? You could, and just hear me out on this, kill everything you could kill. But those solutions were something the Sages did not want even to contemplate! They must surely have been aware of these possibilities – I mean, if I can think it, anyone can.

But the rabbis have a different idea. They really believed that God could never have meant this law to be applied. God is a merciful God, called Rahamanah, the Merciful One, in the Talmud. It is present all over the place. It is the most common name for God in the Talmud. So they created a loophole. In order to make sure that the laws that the Merciful one would give are merciful laws, the rabbis found an extremely far-fetched loophole and based their whole argument on a minor detail.

This is yet another way of reminding you – you heard me say this about 100 times since you met me – Judaism is not the religion of the Torah. Judaism is the religion of the Torah as interpreted, domesticated, reframed by the rabbis.

The rabbis could easily have found a more cruel and violent solution, but they chose to solve this in a different way. A way that they actually knew made little sense. It was deliberate trickery, but deliberate trickery rooted in an unequalled moral awareness: the awareness that the Torah is supposed to be a moral conduit, and that mitzvot are supposed to make us better people – not worse. The rabbis believed that the Torah was completely divine – but that is is their task, and our task nowadays, to refine it and to bring it to the moral level that God intended.

The rabbis will do the same thing to all sorts of other laws. One that has been on the news recently is the question of Amalek. There is the case of the biblical commandment to destroy the nation of Amalek and the seven nations of ancient Canaan. Joshua seems to have done something like that, but even he did not do a complete job. In the Mishnah and the Talmud, the Sages found ways to nullify this law and declared it inoperative by claiming that these nations no longer exist. So anyone claiming that Amalek still exists, as a physical existence of a people that needs to be destroyed, is doing an anti-rabbinic reading of the text. That is not Judaism, that is the religion of the Torah.

And I think that we should be proud Jews – proud rabbinic Jews. Jews that look to the Torah, just as the rabbis have for the past 2,100 years, and see Torah as the point of departure, the point of collective growth to be partners with God, to made this world a better place. Torah and mitzvot are here to impels us forward. Shabbat shalom.

Image credit: Synonyms for Loopholes. (2016). Retrieved 2024, August 30, from https://thesaurus.plus/synonyms/loopholes

Ekev is named after its second word which means literally “on the heel of”, i.e. “in consequence of” your obedience. It starts with one of the prominent themes of Devarim, Deuteronomy: whether or not God carries out the covenantal terms depends on the people of Israel. If Israel fulfills their part, they will get the blessings of protection, fertility of body and soil, health and victory. God then draws His people’s attention to their past; the forty years spent in the desert were meant as an educational lesson for them to learn humility, to acknowledge their own relation toward the power of the Almighty and to save them from false pride. Moses reminds his people of their stiff-neckedness, bringing up the example of the Golden Calf episode and stressing his own role as intermediary between God and Israel. A geographic description of the exceptionally good Promised Land, much better than Canaan, follows. The parsha ends with the text in Deuteronomy 11:13-21, which later became the second paragraph of the Shema (“So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today…”).

But today I want us to focus on two verses of our parsha.

1. Our texts – Deut. 8:10 and 10:12

Most of us recognize the first verse from singing the Blessing after meals, and it is the very verse on which the rabbis affirm you should say a blessing after the meals. The second verse is the one that is treated in the Talmud to give birth to a powerful meditative technique offered by our sources: the blessings for before food and for all sorts of events. It is not a joke when the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof says: wait, there is a blessing for everything.

2. Talmud Menachot 43b

One hundred brachot every day. That seems quite daunting: to stop and think for one hundred moments in a day. Our current lifestyle does not allow us this luxury – to pause. We run everywhere. We are, for lack of better word, slaves to being busy. But our tradition wants us to remember, every day, that we are actually free. So it gives us the system of saying brachot.

This is a bracha, a blessing: a speed bump in your day. To do it, you have to stop a moment and consider what is in front of you, remember the appropriate blessing, and say it. If you really do embark in this exercise, your entire life will become imbued with a special consciousness – the consciousness of gratefulness. This is particularly true with food, given that we eat a few times a day.

Food writer Michael Pollan is able to summarize all that he learned in his studies about food and humans in seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

Probably the first two words are most important. “Eat food” means to eat real food – vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and, yes, fish and meat – and to avoid what Pollan calls “edible food-like substances.”

In contrast to this simple idea, however, Western society’s relationship with food is quite dysfunctional.

On one side, we are given the message that we are to take food for granted. Fast food and junk food are examples: eat quickly, and poorly – after all, it is junk, rubbish, garbage. Not real food. For the same price, or a little above, you can have double the portion: and if you can’t eat it all, throw it in the garbage bin. Seeing the amount of food being thrown away in a restaurant is shocking. Having a meal has stopped being a time to sit down, maybe with family, or even alone: it does not deserve its own time in modern society; it is something that happens on the way to work, or sitting in the car. Everything is take-away, portable, and disposable. Not only the packaging, but the content has lost value, too.

Conversely, we also receive the message that food is bad, pernicious and dangerous. Eating disorders abound in both women and men, there are those for whom having a skinny body is the current idol worshipping we do. Counting calories, grams, percentages – food is their main enemy. Also, when overly processed food comes with many additives, reading labels in search for the enemies has become the way many people deal with food.

Michael Pollan, again, sums up our paradox in a very striking way: “The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world.”

One of the ways to get away from this mentality is to look at what you are eating, and knowing the blessings before you put something in your mouth will help you to analyze what exactly it is: is it food? What kind of food is it? There are basically six blessings for food and drink. If whenever you eat or drink you stop and say a blessing, you are becoming more and more conscious of yourself and the universe around you. If you see yourself saying too many blessings of one type, you know you need to experience more of what life has to offer.

May we find ways to always express our gratefulness to Life, and may every day we find one hundred reasons to do so.

Matot-Masei: what a trip

Summary: The name of the Parshah, “Matot,” means “Tribes,” and it is found in Numbers 30:2. The name of the Parshah, “Masei,” means “Journeys,” and it is found in Numbers 33:1. They are usually read together – the next time they will be read separately will be, bezrat hashem, 2035.

Moses conveys the laws governing the annulment of vows. War is waged against Midian . The tribes of Reuven, Gad and half of the tribe of Menashe ask for the lands east of the Jordan. Moses is initially angered by the request, but subsequently agrees on the condition that they first join, and lead, in Israel’s conquest of the lands west of the Jordan.

The forty-two journeys and encampments of Israel are listed, from the Exodus to their encampment on the plains of Moab across the river from the land of Canaan. The boundaries of the Promised Land are given, and cities of refuge are designated. The daughters of Tzelofchad marry within their tribe of Menashe, so that the estate which they inherit from their father should not pass to the province of another tribe.

KS –

The word Torah is connected to the word horaah, instruction. The idea behind this is that every reading, every verse, every of word and even every letter or lack of it can teahc us something, giving us some instruction. Now the portion of Masei brings 42 stages of the journey of the Israelites, and the question is – what can this teach me, a Jew in the 21^st century in America? What does it matter to me thos 42 stages in 40 years in the desert, from Egypt to the Land of Israel?

The word Mitzrayim, Egypt, is related to the Hebrew word metzar , which means a constricted or limiting place, a strait. Both those words come from the word, tzar, narrow.

Mitzrayim can be seen as a moment of constriction in the life of a person. Every person, in his or her life has situations that are a limitation, a constriction, where the person feels that something is preventing growth and expansion. Those situations can be called metzar. In order to get out of this metzar , a person has to exert energy. And when we manage to escape the metzar we get to a place that it is its opposite, the merchav , a wide-open place. Those two words might be familiar to you from the Halel, in which we sing – min hametzar karati Y=h, anani bemerchav Y=h – which means: from the straits I called to Y=h, I was answered by the expansion of Y=h. Think of a moment that you hada problem, recently – when it was over, you might have breathed a sigh of relief: “I’ve gotten out of that tight spot.” Sometimes we can not even be aware of the tightness of the moment, but when it is over you feel “ooooh! Amazing how much better this feels.”

The verses of our portion indicate, according to the Ba’al Shem Tov, what it means to live the life of a Jew. It begins at birth, and what follows is a succession of tight spots followed by relief and expansion. Every given time in our lives, in every given stage, we will feel in smaller or greater proportion obstacles and tests. These are the tight spots. The idea is that these situations are to be overcome, and through the process of overcoming them we strengthened. Maybe even our awareness of the loving presence of God is deepened and expanded. What we are not supposed to do is to give up, surrender.

In this context, Egypt, Mitzrayim, doesn’t mean a geographical land, a country – the word actually refers to the stages of constriction and development that we all go through on our journey to spiritual development — that utopia, the goal that we follow of becoming more perfect is symbolized by the land of Israel.

Think about your own life and its process. What was difficult at the age of five became almost a joke at the age of ten. What was difficult at the age of ten became a joke at the age of twenty. The difficulties and problems that a young couple faces on the first years of marriage are completely different when they celebrate 20 years of marriage, and yet different when they celebrate 50 years of marriage. Different constrictions come with being a parent and with being grandparents. Every stage in life has its own qualities and challenges. We are contantly being put in new situations, and we have to deal with them and grow through them. Life is a series of metzarim, constricted places and a series of merchavim, expanded places – life is a series of journeys from one to another, and every time you conquered one point, it then becomes a metzar – in comparison to the next stage. As a friend of mine would put it, every time he was telling something difficult that was happening to him, “life is a trip.”

Now, if you are paying attention, this also happens every single day. On any given day, a person goes through journeys from the time we wake up until we goes to sleep. There are days in which waking up and getting out of bed is the hardest thing you can do, and there are days when going to sleep is the hardest thing. Say nothing of avoiding the traps and stumbling blocks in our way.

Prayer, too, works like that – the system itself has stages and levels, and even beginning to davven is a level on its own – just making time, just being disciplined every day. And then there’s the text: we begin trying to make sense of it, we are all intellectual – do we know what the words mean? Can we pronounce them correctly? Are we saying the right words for the right day? But this is all the beginning, and it is quite hard. But once this is conquered and dominated, we get to the next level – paying attention with no distractions: no computer, no radio, not even the distraction of the language. And then we get to yet another level: internalizing prayer. Feeling it. Meaning it. The Baal Shem Tov then says: every word said with the right intention needs a light inside. Your job is to bring the light in. And then, once you are able to get to that point, you move onward to what the Baal Shem Tov calls nullification of the ego. Then, he says, you are no longer in this world, but in Israel, the place where the Divine Presence is revealed. You moved from the constriction to the expansion, going through stages, in davening.

Now listening to all this, you can have the reaction of “why bother? This is impossible!” but then our reading says to you, specifically: chin up! God did not say to go from Egypt, Mitzrayim, to the Merchav, the Land of Israel, in one day! There are 42 stations because we need to appreciate that even if the goal seems far away, the first step of the journey is quite close. You cannot ever compare yourself to anybody else because you don’t know where the other person started from and what their handicaps are. The important thing is to know that you have to keep going. The Torah is saying – just one step. And another. And you will conquer this difficulty, at your own level, at your own speed. Eventually, what is hard today will look easy, and other things will be hard. Different things. And God, as we say every morning, has an enormous faith in us. We can become better people, every day.

Shabbat Shalom

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Morning:

Look at the request of the tribes of Gad, Reuven and half of Menashe, and look at Moshe’s reaction. What jumps out to you?

• Moshe is projecting the past.
• There is an oath.
• The daughters of Tzelofchad, according to the book of Joshua, actually are from the side inside the land, and not Gilead. This makes some look at that story with an eye to a reproach to the rest of the tribe. One of the towns is, incidentally, called by the same name of one of the daughters, Tirtza, and it is in the territory of Menashe inside the land of Israel.

Yitro – “Yitro,” is translated as “Jethro”, as in the name of Moshe’s father-in-law. He hears of the great miracles, comes from Midian to the Israelite camp, bringing with him Moses’ wife and two sons. He advises Moses to appoint a hierarchy of magistrates and judges to assist him in the task of governing and administering justice to the people. And then the revelation at Har Sinai, or mount Sinai is described. The famous words – we should be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Are said by God, we respond by saying “all that God has spoken, we shall do.” As the revelation is occurring, the people are scared and beg Moshe to receive the Torah and convey it to them. This is one of the few moments when the triennial cycle and the annual cycle have no difference whatsoever, as it would make no sense to read the Aseret HaDibrot only once in three years.

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Kabbalat Shabbat – important converts

Our reading is famous because of how it is utilized by our Christian neighbors, who are constantly implying that the Ten Sayings are really Ten Commandments, as in THE ten commandments, and there are no other commandments in the Torah. The Jewish tradition respectfully disagrees, and we see the ten sayings as part of a continuous revelation that contains 613 mitzvot, or commands.

The Ten Sayings are called Sayings because they are paired up with different tens, particularly the Ten Sayings that are the basis of the story of Creation. If you go back to Genesis 1, you will find that the words “God Said” appear 10 times. Those 10 times are also connected to the prayer Baruch Sheamar that we say in the morning, in which the word “baruch”, blessed, appears 10 times. In the Jewish mind, all those things are connected in an organic reality, the reality of ten fingers and ten sefirot, in which ten is a number that indicates a basic makeup of the universe.

Our portion has an important characteristic – it is named after a person. There are six parshiot named after people, three non-Jews and three Jews. Noach, Balak and Yitro are the non-Jews, Sarah, Pinchas and Korach are the Jewish ones. But Yitro, Moshe’s father in law, is different than Balak and Noach in which in our very portion, he becomes Jewish. Whereas we do not have really a ceremony for Moshe’s wife Tzippora, there seems to be a ceremony with Yitro. First the translation says that Yitro heard all that had happened to Yisrael from Moshe, then that he was jubilant, then that he says “baruch Ad-nai” and “now I know that Ad-nai is greater than all gods”, he offers sacrifices to Ad-nai and then all the dignitaries of Israel come to eat bread with Yitro.

The word “jubilant” is yached, in Hebrew, that is connected in the midrash with Echad, one. And so of course, say the rabbis, Yitro has joined the Jewish people. It is not just about what he heard – the exodus, according to the plain meaning of the text, or the exodus and the aseret hadibrot, the ten sayings, according to Rashi and the midrash. It is not just that he heard, but that he decides to act on what he hears: he unifies his own experience through the lenses of there being one God, guiding and nurturing and energizing all creation and all creatures.

“Now I know” says Yitro – indicating an arrival. When you talk to converts in general, most of them will express to you this feeling of having come home. Of things finally making sense. Of the experience of exile ending, and a new phase, a moment in their lives that all is connected, and I can see what brought me here, at this moment, even through the darkest periods of my life I see a guiding nurturing force behind it all, lovingly tending to my future.

Jews never think that just a few verses of the Torah get to be more important, and that Torah is reducible to ten verses or even ten actions. Even when Hilel says “what is evil to you do not do to your neighbor” he adds: now go and study. The ten sayings are a portal – and stopping at the portal because you believe that the portal is the castle is to loose the vision of the castle, and forget the existence of a Ruler and a force behind all of it – the path, the portal, the castle.

Yitro, and many others in Tanach, such as Rahav, Rut, the daughter of Pharaoh, Tzipporah, all looked at the entrance and entered into the palace, according to the rabbis. Nowadays, there is an interesting influx of people becoming Jewish, not only in America but worldwide. Entire families, entire communities, go through a process – whether Orthodox, Conservative, Reform – and throw their fate and their future with our people. And the moment they became one of us, two incredible things happen: the collective unconscious gets transferred to them, and they are supposed to be seen like a Jew in all things. Indeed, it is forbidden to remind them of their past, according to the rabbis.

It is not by accident that the portion is named after this character, one who had another religion – if you remember he was described way back as a priest of Midian. And then he joins our people. Yitro is really a stand in for all Jews who have become Jewish after birth, who have chosen the Jewish tradition as home.

May we all merit like them, to choose Judaism as our ethical, moral and spiritual home, seeing with new eyes and a new spirit the story of our lives.

Shabbat Shalom

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Shabbat morning – eyes for wonder

Count how many times the word “voice” shows up in our reading.

One of the questions of careful readers of our text is how does one understand expressions such as “their saw the voices” at the moment of revelation. Moreover, there are six times when the word “voice” appears in our text, one of those are in the plural, so you could count really seven. One of those voices are of the shofar – and if you recall the extra sentences we say on RH, the shofarot are there, and one of them has to do with the revelation at Sinai.

Now the rabbis in Pirkei Avot say that the shofar that was blown in the revelation moment was from that same ram that Avraham sacrificed in place of Itzchak, AND that particular, metaphysical ram was created together with other NINE miraculous things at the twilight of the sixth day of creation. Those things are all things that will make or be miracles in the rest of the Torah: the rainbow, Bilam’s donkey, the pit that swallowed Korah, manna, the well that accompanied the Israelites in the desert, the staff of Moshe, letters, writing, the tablets. There are other rabbis that add other things to this list, but the idea behind is the same: as creation happens, God makes sure to insiert at the last minute all things that will be needed later.

In a sense, there is nothing new under heaven, as Kohelet says. What is new is our eyes to appreciate and to see the miracles that are already there. In that sense, as we read in Maimonides, creation has a set of springs, ready to deploy when the right times for the miracle happens. So miracles are not haphazard moments, but things that were there just to happen at the precise moment they are needed. In a sense this can be incredibly comforting: everything we need is already there, we just need to open our eyes to see it.

We have what is needed.

Now the voices of our reading are connected by a mimdrash found in the Talmud, with another set of voices, found in Jeremiah 33, and popularized by Shlomo Carlbach: kol sason vekol simcha, kol hatan vekol kalah – the verse continues: ko omrim hodu ki tov ki leolam hasdo. What to make of that?

I think it is a reminder to all of us that with listening to God’s voice, to God’s loving invitation to be in relationship with our Creator and our tradition, we are also needed to make others happy. To make others rejoice. To rejoice and be content ourselves: we have all that we need to support each other and the planet in this journey called Life. Let’s use this, all our powers, already in us and in nature, to truly make the world a place worthy of God’s presence.

Shabbat Shalom

Shemot

Summary: The name of our portion is Shemot, which means “names”, and it is the beginning of the book of Shemot, or Exodus, in English. In terms of the arch of the story, we begin around 400 years after Yosef is arrives in Egypt, not only with the enslavement of the Jews but with the birth and rescuing of Moshe. The narrative will focus on Moshe and his development, to the age of 80, when he encounters the Holy One at the burning bush, and goes to Pharaoh to demand the release of the slaves. The portion ends with things getting worse before getting better, and Pharaoh forcing the slaves to collect straw to make bricks, while demanding the same amount of bricks.

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KS – Names and Identity – Moshe

Our portion opens with the names of the sons of yaakov, but the text is already pointing out that there are people not named: we have the sentence saying “70 people came down to Egypt” while the names given are only 12.

Even Pharaoh is not named, and not even called Pharaoh at the beginning, but called “king”. The anonymity extends to all the courtiers of Pharaoh and all the maids of the daughter of Pharaoh, and of course to the slaves. People who will be the movers and shakers of the story – the mother, the father, the sister of the unnamed child who will eventually be named Moshe, as well as his savior, the daughter of Pharaoh, are all unnamed.

IN that sea of unnamed people, only two names will appear, and they are Shifra and Pu’ah, the midwives that dare to defy Pharaoh – the etxt appears to be raising women as leaders, and we will see that through the book of Exodus. But I want to call our attention to the question of the lack of names.

Even the name Moshe, Moses, is not a name in the Egyptian language – mss // child of / son of / Ramses, Tutmses as examples. The text gives a Hebrew etymology for his name, and many people point out the oddity to have Pharaoh’s daughter naming a child and giving him a Hebrew etymology. The lesson that applies to the character of Moses is that he is straddling two identities: Hebrew and Egyptian.

The identity of Moshe will be quite complicated: he goes out and sees his brethren, defends one by killing an Egyptian taskmaster, so he has some of the identity of a Hebrew. The next day, however, he sees two of his brethren fighting – and is rejected, being sent back to the identity of an Egyptian – just to have that taken away from him as well, with Pharaoh wanting to mete out capital punishment to him for killing the Egyptian taskmaster. He runs away – and the daughters of Yitro will say to their father that an Egyptian saved them. And once he runs away, to Midian, he becomes a Midianite – marrying Tzipporah, being quite content with his sheep and his children. At age 80, however, we know things will again change at the burning bush. When God meets Moses at the burning bush, the question of identity is implied in that encounter since God introduces Godself as “God of your ancestors” – which ancestors?

It bears noting that in the story of the Exodus, Moshe is the only Jew who knows what it means to be a free person, but he does not know what it means to be a Jew, and all those who know what it means to be  Jew do not know what it means to be free.

In the text, we see Moshe skirting God’s call five different times. The first one is very telling: Who am I to go to Pharaoh? The question could stop in: But who am I?

The five times are also an indication of all the tensions within Moshe: the question of identity, lack of relationship with God, lack of relationship with the Jewish people as a whole (they will not trust me), lack of ability to speak, and just please, please find someone else.

It is not so different with us. We, just as Moshe, carry many different identities. American and Jewish are just two of the most glaring ones, but we have plenty smaller identities. Moshe also has an identity of being disonnected to God and the people, and an identity of disability. And God will not so gently push Moshe beyond those self-doubts and those fractured identities to an identity of someone who can do this. It is not so much that Moshe choses his Hebrew identity, but that he is able to understand himself as able to hold on to all those identities and not be pidgeonholed by any one of them. It is only when he moves to accept that yes, this is who he is, that he can move forward in the service of God. And so it is with us – once we can synthetize our many identities, then we too can move forward.

Shabbat shalom.

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Shabbat morning

Our triennial focuses solely on the scene at the burning bush. How many times does God need to convince Moshe? Why do you think that Moshe is so unwilling to do what God is asking?

In your opinion, is Moshe different than others, and so that is why God is chosing him? Or is Moshe just a guy passing near a burning bush, and he happens to be in the right place at the right time?

The month of Elul is here. And for the haftarah of Rosh Chodesh, we read Isaiah 66:1 –

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Download the Powerpoint by clicking here: The Prophecies of Amos

As a way of introducing Amos to the kids of Hebrew School, I made this Powerpoint. It was used to accompany an “interview”. The interview was an activity that involved the kids a bit, with answers taped under the seats. Here’s the script for that:

Interviewer: [Makes a welcome such as a talk show host would] So, Amos, you have been quite in the news, recently! You made a big splash when King Jeroboam the second – remember, viewers, he is the second king name Jeroboam! Our great and mighty king gave a party for all the dignataries of Syria, Philistia, Phoenicia, Edom, Ammon and Moab! And you, a little prophet, crashed that party! Why? That is what everyone wants to know! But I want to know you, before we talk about that! Who are you? Where did you come from?

Amos: It’s not easy to be a prophet. I did not want this job at all! My name means burdened. I am burdened with my visions! My burden is being a prophet and having to speak publicly the words of God! I was a shepherd. Actually, my biggest fear used to be public speaking… I loved being in silence. I worked alone, sometimes with other quiet folk. My sheep were small and speckled, hardy breed to survive the wilderness near Tekoa, where I was born. Let me show you and our viewers some pictures [Fires up Powerpoint]  I also dressed sycamore trees..

Interviewer: And what is that?

Amos: You might not know, being a bigshot and all, but that is what poor people like me eat. The sycamore tree makes a very bitter fig. A dresser of sycamore trees needs to puncture the ripened fig to get the bitter juice coming out, and then to be able to make the dried fig into a flour. This is our bread.

Interviewer: Really? I had no idea… I never knew that poor people struggled that much.

Amos: Let me guess. You have a bed made of ivory, don’t you?

Interviewer: Yes… what’s wrong with that?

Amos: even the children of Adath Israel know how people get ivory! Who can educated this man?

Child: [Answers or reads: Ivory is teeth from elephants, their tusks. To get ivory you have to make the elephant feel a lot of pain, is like pulling your teeth out. People kill elephants just for ivory. It is very cruel.]

Interviewer: It is true that my bed was extremely expensive. But I had no idea… [Smiling] But let’s get back to you! You are from Tekoa, you used to be a shepherd of small flock, and made flour from figs. How did you become a prophet?

Amos: I was taking my sheep to graze, and it was midday. You know how hot it can get. I was looking for a sycamore tree to get the sheep to rest under its shade, but suddenly the sheep stopped and would not move, no matter what I did! Suddenly, I heard this voice, coming from the tree!

Interviewer: [getting up all excited] Are you kidding me? A tree that speaks?! I want to go there! I will worship this tree!

Amos: Don’t be a dunce! Sit down! It was Ad-nai! God! Hashem! God was speaking! The tree was just the meeting point! We, Jews, don’t worship trees! Or idols! Any how, the voice of God said: “Amos! Go prophesy to My people Israel! They have strayed far from Me! They are pursuing the gods of corruption and greed!”

Interviewer: But I don’t know what those words mean! Is there a wise child that can tell me?

Child 1: Greed – Greed is an intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or things. A greedy person is also materialistic and grabby.

Child 2: Corruption – Corruption is using people in power to get something for a specific person. It usually involves bribery, which are illegal gifts of money, to make the people in power to act or make a law in a way that will benefit the person who gave them the money.

Interviewer: But how can corruption and greed be gods?

Amos: It’s not easy to be a prophet. I did not want this job at all! So much explaining! Greed and corruption become gods when people forget the laws of the Torah! When people use their power against the poor and the weak in a society. [increasingly agitated] When the poor have to pay more taxes than the rich, so that the rich will become more rich, that is corruption and greed. When the poor have to eat bread made from sycamore figs while the rich lie in ivory beds, that is corruption and greed! People are forgetting that the Torah tells us that we have to take care of the orphan, the widow, the poor! A Jewish society is to be a just society, where everyone has the same laws, and rights, and chances to be the best they can! Everyone should be able to eat three meals a day! Everyone should be able to sleep in a house, protected from cold and heat! Every child should be able to go to school! When those things don’t happen, that is because corruption and greed have taken over a society!

Interviewer: calm down, no need to be so excited!

Amos: No need to be excited?! Do you know what I see? I see people being exiled from our land! I see the Temple being destroyed! If we do not change our society, and do right by all our citizens, our people will suffer the consequences! God does not like we have been doing! And God does not like what other peoples have been doing! That is why I, in my poor, coarse, robes of shepherd, had to crash that party!

Interviewer: So now let’s get to the main point of our conversation. Why did you crash that party? [derisively, smirking] And why did you not wear a better robe than your shepherd’s robe?

Amos: Because I had to deliver the messages of Hashem! God had messages to all those kingdoms! And I didn’t care that people were looking at me funny. I know who I am! I am a shepherd. I am a Jew! I obey the Torah! I speak for the poor. The robe I have is the robe I have! The sandals I have are the sandals I have! I became a prophet because God said so. But let me tell you and all our viewers the messages! [Fires up Powerpoint, reads animatedly]

And let us say “amen”!

Interviewer ends with thanking Amos and opening a Q&A.