The many lessons of the season

 The many lessons of the season.

 

Pesah celebrates freedom.  Of course, the freedom we celebrate is literal: we express our gratitude for not being slaves. Had we not been liberated from the grip of Pharaoh we would have long ago ceased to exist. The Jewish people would have succumbed to the planned genocide.   

 

Besides relishing our freedom and existence the import of G-d leading the people Israel from slavery was that we developed an empathy for anyone afflicted.  Lesson: Torah directs us to be an “or la-goyim” an emblematic light to show how people are supposed to behave as protectors of one another.

 

Countless times the Torah and our prayers recount the great liberation as an ongoing reminder of this history-changing event.  Along with being empathic we are also directed to not venerate the man Moses as the liberator but G-d.  

Lesson: there is a caring G-d who is involved in our lives and deeply cares for our wellbeing.

 

Pesah is also a reminder of a broken-spirited human being.  In the midrash we read, Rabbi Abba bar Yudan said: “Everything that God disqualified in animals, He endorsed in people. For animals, He disqualified the blind or broken or maimed, but in humanity He endorsed the broken, downtrodden heart.” 

 

How many of those who were enslaved lived with the ongoing physical as well as psychic pain of having been abused?  We live in a community where everyone matters.  All are scarred.  All are wounded, not by the master’s whip but by verbal abuse, as victims of fraud and deceit, manipulated by those who wanted to impose their power over us. Pesach also teaches:   All the broken are cherished by God.  And we are all broken.

 

The table where we sit also seeks to teach us a mighty lesson.  It is not only the acceptance of all types of character that the story of the four sons tells but we are also prompted to ask, who is absent?  Who is so alienated from our family that they cannot sit with us?  Or whom have we cut out of our lives?  Who lives in the margins of our community that we cannot even conceive of inviting them to our table?    Maybe the undrained cup of Elijah is more than a request for deliverance, maybe it is also a recognition that we have missing parts of our relationships.  Lesson: Do not ignore the empty chair.

 

Pesah is not about flying frogs or getting to the meal more swiftly, it is about becoming aware of the signs and symbols that surround us that can make our lives more meaningful, endowed with a greater quality.  Even the great Moses had to be cajoled by G-d to remove himself away from the simple life of a shepherd with few responsibilities to become the champion of the Jewish nation.  “In every generation…” begins the narrative.  But we could easily change that to read, “In every generation people do their utmost to escape the real truth of their life – that they are endowed with unique gifts that once realized can make their entire life purposeful and meaningful.”  Most people want more by doing less.  And yet the simple truth that we all know is that our life takes on meaning only when we act upon our gifts, which means doing, sharing, and giving.  Think of all the accomplishments you would want remembered when you die.  Not the salary or vacation home.  Certainly not an accumulation of wealth.  Are the aspects that we will be remembered for not all basically the same? They incorporate the things we did for others, not for ourselves.  Think of the memories we hold for those who have died: they are invariably about their contributions, not about what they accumulated.  Lesson: Life is about what we give, not what we take.

 

Thought: Saul Levinsky interpreted the meaning of the Star of David.  “While the first triangle points one way, the second triangle insists on pointing in the opposite direction.”  

Perhaps Pesah’s lesson is to conceive of life differently.

The End

One of my teachers in London used to tell the story of a man who jumped into the Mersey River in order to drown himself.  As he jumped into the waters he shouted, “Don’t try to save me!”

A second man came along, plopped into the river screaming, “Nobody try to save me!”

Along came a third man and stood by the water as bystanders watched the unfolding scene.  They yelled at him, “Don’t do it!”

He turned to them and replied, “I am not. I just want to know where they work.”

 

We all attempt to avoid pain; some by jumping into dark waters and others by watching and learning from their experience.   Yet pain is a great teacher, if we choose to view it that way.  It imparts lessons that we would otherwise never learn because we get stuck in the old ways we are used to doing things.

 

Pesach is one of those attempts at learning from past pain.  We experienced slavery and replay that event each year on the anniversary of our liberation.  Yes, we observe the festival to appreciate God’s saving power and His endless patience.  Yes, we go through the rituals yearly as our ancestors did for centuries, millennia, in order to spiritually connect with them.  And, yes, we observe the holy days as a reminder that our task is to bring justice to the world, especially to the needy and persecuted.

 

But Pesach is also about learning the lessons that only pain can teach.  We may choose to avoid those lessons but sooner or later they will catch up with us.  We can run and hide but not forever, from ourselves, or God.  That is why we read Jonah’s story each year on Yom Kippur; in order to be reminded that it is time to stop running from ourselves.

 

We have been through a long dark year of suffering.  The separation, fear of an invisible enemy, the ever-changing rules of distancing, masking and protective measures have left us drained.  We are nearing the edge of the long tunnel and light is beginning to appear.  The question that Pesach asks is the same one we ought to be asking ourselves now. What have we learned from this pandemic?  How have we changed?  Have the conflicts we have witnessed in the world hardened our hearts, like Pharaoh’s when confronted by a threat?  Ask yourself: Have you lost friends, become bitter toward people unlike yourself, paranoid that unknown powerful actors are threatening your existence or controlling your life?  Or has the danger made us more mindful of the need for love, forgiveness and understanding?

 

We are all changed because of the pandemic.  The most important question is how we have changed.  Are we better, more compassionate people?

 

Ever evolving, we readjust our understanding of the world and ourselves all the time.  Thank God for the corona virus.  I am not dismissing or minimizing the pain and deaths so many people throughout the world have endured.  Their pain was real and for many will never entirely disappear.  There are so many broken hearts among us.  Still, I write thank God for what was.  Why?  This painful year has given us an opportunity to rethink and realign our beliefs and practices.  It has pushed us to the limits of what we thought we could not endure and have emerged on the other side of this with a greater sense of what is possible.

 

Robert Fulgham wrote, “…no matter how old you are – when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”  I see the little children in the school in a long line holding hands daily and it brightens my heart.  A long period of separation is coming to an end and we can now appreciate the simple joys of life in being together again.

 

I pray that we will take time to pause and reflect on what we have, or could have, learned.  God inheres in every moment, in what we perceive as joyful and painful.  What is the take-away lesson we bring with us into our new future?

 

“Tears may linger for a night;

joy comes with the dawn.”  -Psalm 30

 

It is dawn with all its portent for new beginnings.

 

 

Ode to a Synagogue

Rabbi Akiva was asked, “Since your God loves the needy, why doesn’t He care for them Himself?

The sage responded, “God, the father of rich and poor alike wants his children to help each other. The Lord desires a world of love.”

Our purpose is not merely to survive.  Survival itself is not noteworthy or even worthy of comment.

So what then is our purpose?

We celebrate life, those who preceded us and upon whose shoulders we stand. We celebrate marriages when we sweated under the chairs of the bride and groom. We celebrate the warm friendships on Shabbat morning.  The evening services where we come together to console the bereft at the house of death. We celebrate the countless baby namings and Brit Milahs. We remember the little ones who spilled wine on the carpet who now have children of their own. We relish the Passover Haggaddas whose pages are stained a dark hue. We remember Friday evening dinners. We revel in recalling High Holy Days and our precious relationships.  The loves, the tiffs and the forgiveness.

The Puritans called marriage “the little church within the church.” Every day without letup our synagogue functions as a sacred place where love and forgiveness are continually recycled. Just like marriage. That is what community is.

George Hallas, owner of the Chicago Bears, work well into his 80s.  He was once asked, “George, at your age what are you doing here working?” Halas responded, “It's only work if there's some place else you'd rather be.”

There is no other place we would rather be than standing shoulder to shoulder with devoted members of our sacred community. Our children have played together.  They have learned in the classrooms.  All of us have grown up together and fought for the sake of goodness throughout the years.  After all this, we still say, there is no place we rather be.

There is a reason we call the place where we pray a "Sanctuary."  It is a place of respite from harm, malcontent and soothing our roughest edges.  When we gather later this month to celebrate our freedom from bondage, remember that it is not our survival that brings us together.  We collect ourselves to remember that we must aid one another.  Our task is to bind the wounds of our sisters and brothers.

Invite someone new to your seder.
Focus on the lesson God wants you to learn from the Haggadda's narrative and then be that change.   Pay for someone you do not know to come to the congregational seder.  

Rabbi Akiva was right, “God, the father of rich and poor alike wants his children to help each other. The Lord desires a world of love. This is our charter.

Pesach

Pesach is conditional.  Let’s take a quick look at the familiar story:

Moshe rabbenu had to work with the people to convince the Pharaoh to release the slaves.  God did not do it.  Moshe did.

During the last plague the Jews were told to gather sheep* into their homes (for a festive meal) and to paint their lintels with blood to deter the Angel of Death.  

Later, trapped by the Red Sea and the approaching chariots God taunted Moshe and the people to stop praying and have a hand in their own salvation.  The sea only split when they waded in.

“Put your trust in God, but mind you keep your powder dry,” declared Oliver Cromwell.

A unique attitude I have found in our faith and nowhere else is that we are ‘partners’ with God and not dependent underlings.  We are key players in doing the Will of God.  As the Aleynu reads, our task is “To complete the world under the Kingship of the Lord.”  This is sanding the hard surfaces from Creation.  God deliberately left the world unfinished.

There are numerous objectives in the Pesach seder.  Yet, one that often becomes forgotten is the idea is to become engaged with God.  We are challenged by the 613 mitzvot.  The beg us to enter into a relationship with the Giver.  Mitzvot are our connection to the Divine.

Scholem Asch told of a few survivors of a terrible pogrom that decimated Lublin.  One man returned to find his parents were murdered and many of the town’s inhabitants forcibly converted.  He roamed the streets and heard the stories and sighs of the survivors.

He found himself on a narrow street where merchant’s stalls were located.  There was one man calling buyers to his booth.  But when he looked inside there was nothing there.  He asked the old man, “What do you sell here?  Your booth is empty.”

And the old man answered, “I sell faith.”

Faith is imperative to continue fulfilling our destiny of marrying God’s Will to bring “light to the world.”

Perhaps then on Pesach we can look for clues – lying in full sight-  to bring much needed relief to our fellow Jews and the world.

*Bear in mind the sheep was a deity in ancient Egypt.

From Freedom to Free

A few weeks back we celebrated Pesach, a breathing memorial to enslavement to freedom.  We sang, “How is this night different!” in wonderment as celebrated our first freedom.   We declared, “Let all who are hungry come and eat” as if for the first time we had bread on our tables and declared that anyone could partake.

Seven weeks later we became a “holy nation” at Sinai as G-d shared His vision in the revelation.  This became Shavuot.

At the first celebration we are bound by history.  The shared past of pain and liberation is a story that continues to unite us.  We recall other seders, people who used to sit at our table, sang songs, and recounted a story that is part of our collective past.  We use the anniversary of the Exodus to appreciate what has happened to us, to give new focus to the past year and remember an event that made us a people.  We are bound to each other because of our mutual experiences, our history.

We used to be Ivrim, “others,” then we became am Yisrael, a people united by common shared experience.

Sinai is a radical shift in thinking.  Israel was freed through water but forged in fire.

Sinai is a vision that begins with a mountain swamped by smoke and fire and ends with a blueprint, a plan, for the future. 

When G-d revealed the Torah at Sinai it was not an event for posterity; it was an ever-unfolding moment that would reveal itself in stages through the prophets and holy rabbis.  Torah was always about the future, never the past.  And it holds out the vision of a new order, one where equality reigns paramount; where human dignity is a universal right (and demand); where every member is a holy priest; where a covenant connects all to the same end.

As if to prove the point, Torah indicates that “all the people” were present at Sinai and each accepted it.  Not the officers, the influential or the entitled were addressed and responded but “all the people.”  In Judaism there is no privilege.  Each person is equal and defined by his or her actions.  Even G-d is subject to covenant, which is why the Torah later declares, “it [the Torah] is not in heaven.”

Pesach is what G-d did for us, Shavuot is about what we are pledged to do for ourselves.   This sacred time is about our passage from slaves to visionaries.

“The day is long, the hour is late and the Master is impatient,” declares the Mishna.  We have ideals set before us; we are people of vision.  We remain unified by our shared history while being cognizant that we are covenanted to construct a better future based on what we can be.

Listen

“…With signs and wonders…” always vexed me.  The phrase is tried and tired.  I have long lost track of what it means.  The first word, ‘signs’, is otot in Hebrew.

According to the great Master, Rebbe Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger, otot comes from the same root as the word otiyot, letters.  Kabbalah informs us that the universe was spawned from a mixture of the holy letters uttered by God at Creation. 

An old argument amongst theologians, cosmologists and logicians is the debate as to whether the universe was created from something, or from nothing.  According to some, scientific theory has it that the universe came from something.  That is the universe contracted upon itself until it exploded spewing its infinitesimal nothingness into the void.  According to other scholars, it is inconceivable that something can emerge from nothing, so something must have existed to have caused the universe.  In our mysric tradition, the matter of the cosmos emanated from the letters or words of the Holy One, blessed be He.  Note that the Torah describes God as using language to create (like: “Let us make Man….”).

One reason why Hebrew is labeled as the lashon ha-kodesh – the holy tongue- is precisely because the strung-together letters, forming words, resulted in Creation.  We hold that words are holy creations and, in turn, create.  Avtalyon, an early Sage, warned that a misuse of words could lead to the worst types of destruction (Pirkay Avot 1:11).  Ill-spoken words cause the world to plunge into a terrible irredeemable dark abyss.  Many centuries later, Rabbi Israel Salanter commented that people do not die of hunger; they die of being ignored.  That is, everyone can have enough food to survive but humans will often suffer and collapse at the spoken or withheld, word.  Perhaps then, the Kabbalists are correct in calling the otot, powers that have the strength to create or destroy.

Remember Tevya and Golda in Fiddler on the Roof?  When Tevye asks Golda if she loves him (“Do you love me?), he is essentially begging for the kind of nourishment that makes life worth living when all else looks bleak.  Words.  Holy words.  Words of love that can restore Tevye’s aching soul.

In the real version of Fiddler on the Roof, Golda is dying.  Her last words to Tevya are, “Tevya, ich gey ois.  Tevya, ver vet dir machen vetchera? – Tevya, I am dying.  Who will prepare supper for you?”  Sholom Aleichem, Tevya’s and Golda’s creator, understood the import of such words.

Otot, otiyot.  Then there is simply ot, sign or letter.  We sing on Shabbat about the Sabbath being an ot he l’olam, an eternal sign.  What is the eternal sign of Shabbat?  That we are intimately connected to God and the rest of Creation.

What were the “signs” in Egypt?  Not merely the plagues.  Not simply the sea.  Not the staff of Moses.  Or the manna raining from the heavens.  The “signs” were the moments of recognition that there is a captain at the helm.  In those ineluctable moments of clarity, the universe comports.  Everything makes sense.  The otot are the moments of inner understanding when the communication of God finally reaches our ears.

Pesah (Passover) is not about the Haggada as an end; it is about the Haggada as a means of connection.  The passages in that narrative are the nexus between heaven and earth.   To be frank, there was no need for “signs and wonders” at the time of the Exodus.  It was enough that they were released from slavery.  What is the point of those “signs and wonders?”  They are the words that course the boundaries of time.  They seek our minds and souls and receptors of the otot and otiyot.

We are told to set a place for Eliahu HaNavi – Elijah the Prophet -- at our seder table. May we find that his seat is filled by the Presence of the Holy One, whom we have invited.  And heard.  Just like all the other signs and words He leaves for us.