As Chanukah Wanes: Guest Post by Debra Shaffer Seeman (Written on the 8th Day, Inspired by Previous Post on the "Beyond")

If creation is 7 days, the perfect completion. And Chanukah is 8, למעלה מן הטבע - that which goes beyond the natural world - then here we find ourselves on that day. That 8th day of Chanukah; the day that goes beyond. That day when boundaries melt and worlds conflate and being created into the perfect world isn't quite enough anymore. This is the day of completion plus one. It's the day when the Divine sparks within each of us dance freely and join up with their Source under the cosmic disco balls of the worlds. It's the day when the fire, the heat and light and warmth and scorch and potential for both building and destruction, when the flames no longer visible to the naked eye take root within us to be accessed during the darkness of the seasons to come. It's the day when we transition the light, the totally and completely non-utilitarian light, the light which may be used for nothing except to teach us to truly see, the "new ray of peace uncalled (which) illumes my inmost mind" - it's the 8th day when we transition that light from "beyond" into the rest of our lives.

Some Chanukah Thoughts

#1: Chanukah and the "Beyond"

There is more to us than flesh and bones. There is more to the world than its physical appearance. There is something “beyond” – beyond nature, beyond our physical limitations, beyond this world.

Chanukah reminds us of the existence of this “beyond.” It is a holiday of 8 days. The world was created in 7 days – that is the simple physical truth of nature. But 8 – that is “beyond” creation, beyond nature, beyond the normal workings of the world.

For the Jews to have won against the Syrian Greeks was a piece of this “beyond,” as was the miracle of the light lasting so long – “beyond” its normal natural physical limitations.

We are more than we think we are, and there is more to the world than we see at all times. Light, fire is a symbol of this divine spiritual energy, felt yet difficult to hold or explain, effervescent yet extremely powerful.

We are not allowed to “use” this light we light on Chanukah for normal physical purposes, to count coins, for instance. And women have a custom not to do any practical work during the time the candles are lit, laundry or cooking, for instance. Why? Because Chanukah is not about the practical in this world. It asks us to take a step out of our normal selves and see that we are more than physical bodies needing to count coins and do laundry and cook meals. Yes, fire is practical – it helps us see and cook and be warm. But there is also a spiritual fire – kodesh hem – these candles are sacred – they partake of the divine light of our spirit, the part of each one of us that is from the “beyond.”

We often feel so daunted by our limitations in this world, so weighed down by mere survival and getting through our daily routines. Chanukah asks us to remember the spirit, to remember the “beyond” that is inside us and all around us, to feel the spark that is not limited by the normal workings of the world.


#2: Chanukah: An Education in Miracles

Chanukah is related to the word chinuch, education. On Chanukah we educate ourselves, we train ourselves in the ability to see miracles in the world.

Daliya Wallenstein, one of my high school students, had a beautiful explanation for Bet Shammai’s Chanukah candle-lighting opinion. According to Bet Shammai, we begin with 8 candles and light one fewer each night until on the last night we light one. Why? This student suggested that it is a matter of spiritual training.

When we begin Chanukah, we are not yet adept at seeing miracles in the world. The only type of miracle we can acknowledge is the really big one, the kind that has 8 candles with all their sparkling fireworks, the kind that hits us over the head with its magnificence and clarity, like the miracles of Chanukah itself, the uneven battle and the oil that kept lasting. We can look back on history and marvel, and acknowledge that God’s hand is in this world through such miracles. So that’s the starting point – we are turned on to thinking about miracles through a jolt to the system of 8 candles and great miracles.

But gradually the point of this exercise is to learn to see the smaller miracles, too. It is a training in our eye-sight. At first we can only detect the light that is really bright, but gradually we learn to see light that is a little less bright, too, 7 candles worth, then 6, and so forth, until on the last night we are able to see the light of a single candle; we have learned to see even the smaller miracles of this world. Now we are ready to return to the everyday world and see the hidden miracles there, too.

Another support for this conception of Chanukah as a training specifically in “seeing” is the strange halakhah, not often put into practice, that if one will not be able to light candles that night, and one “sees” someone else’s lit menorah, one can say the brachah of she’asah nissim on the simple act of seeing the light. This is the brachah in which we acknowledge that God did miracles for us. Lighting the light is important, but there is also here something key about the ability to see, to learn to see and witness God’s miracles in this world.

Though we don’t follow Bet Shammai, may we learn from him to train ourselves to “see” even the smaller lights of the miraculous in this world, perhaps, like Bet Hillel, learning to see more and more of them over time.

Parashat Vayishlach: The Sun Rose For Him

I was taking a walk the other day, feeling a little glum, when I noticed the ginkgo tree up the street. The sky was blue and the sun was shining on it just so, making its yellow leaves radiant and aglow. I stopped in wonder and thought, “Thank you, God, for this gift today.” I felt a tiny sliver of warmth enter my system. At that moment, it seemed that that tree’s beauty was created just for me, to give me joy and remind me of God’s care.

Was I wrong? Wasn’t the whole world created for each and every one of us? At all moments this is true; the world was created and continues at each moment to be created and to exist for our sakes; it runs off the energy of divine love. This is true at all moments, but we only perceive it on rare occasions.

Yaakov had such a moment in this week’s parsha. After his struggle with the angel on the night before he meets Esav, the Torah says vayizrah lo hashemesh, “The sun rose for him” (Gen 32:32). What does that mean -- “the sun rose for him”? Didn’t the sun rise over that whole part of the world and all the people in it? Why “for him”? Rashi explains that a miracle occurred and the sun literally did rise for him -- a little early that day – because God wanted to heal him from his limp injury.

God wanted to take care of Yaakov in his time of need, and the expression of that care was the shining of the sun. Miraculous sunrises don’t happen for most of us, but maybe this miraculous one is a symbol of all the regular everyday signs of God’s continuous care of us – the daily rising of the sun and blooming of the trees and flowers, the daily gifts of life and nurturing in us and around us.

Did Yaakov feel taken care of? Did he notice the sun rise early and think, “God did that just for me?” We don’t know. We only know that it was intended “for him.” So much may be intended “for us” that we don’t notice or appreciate, not just God’s love, but also the love and care of those around us. Sometimes we are in a place where we can take it in and sometimes, often when we most need it, we don’t see it and we don’t feel it; we are alone in our neediness. This sunrise of Yaakov’s is a good reminder in those low moments that there is always love and care “for us” available in the universe; it is always there; we just have to remember to notice it and feel it.

Parashat Toldot: Rivka's Love

The Torah says that Yitzhak loved Esav ki tzayid befiv, “because” of the hunting that Esav used to bring him to eat, while Rivka loved Yaakov. There is no reason attached to Rivka’s love; she simply loved him. The rabbis cite this love as an example of ahavah she’einah teluya badavar, a love that, unlike Yitzhak’s, is not dependent on anything.

The rabbis explain that while love that is dependent on something fades easily, as soon as the thing is gone, love that is not dependent on anything lasts forever. For this reason the pasuk uses the present tense to describe Rivka’s love, ohevet, instead of the past tense as it does for Yitzhak. Rikva’s is a love that is ever present, ever growing, ever constant, not capable of becoming past tense.

The Sefat Emet connects this model of love to God’s love for us. It is forever. It is constant. It is not capable of being annulled because it is not dependent on anything. As he says, God loves us just because we are His; there is no reason; His love is not dependent on a single thing, af lo bema’aseyhem, “not even on their deeds.” Not even on our deeds, not even on the doing of the mitzvot He commanded us to do. Yes, God wants us to live a good life, so He gave us the Torah and advised us how to live, but we need to know that His love for us does not depend on our following His command. We are simply loved.

Do we feel this love? Do we feel its constancy, its unwavering stability, the way it holds us in whatever place we are? Do we feel its present tense – like Rivka, God is ohev – He loves us right now, at this moment, whatever the moment. Do we feel its unconditional nature – how we do not need to earn it or deserve it in any way? We don’t have to measure up. We are simply loved.

Yes, yes, God also has expectations of us and wants us to be good in the world and follow His mitzvot. But it feels to me that the only real way to spread love in the world – our ultimate goal – the only real way is to first of all feel that you yourself are loved totally and unconditionally. It is only out of this place of love that we can let that love spread out in streams to all those who need it. Change, goodness, fixing only happens in such a loving embrace. May we love and feel loved in this Rivka way.

Parashat Haye Sarah: On Pittsburgh, Yitzhak and Love

In the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, what I feel and what I think many of us feel, is vulnerable, insecure. We are suddenly acutely aware of what has always been true – that there are people who hate us and want to kill us, that we may at any time be killed for being Jews.

Looking at the end of last week’s parsha and this one through this prism, I am struck by the realization that Yitzhak must have had a similar feeling of vulnerability. He would have been the first martyr, the first to be sacrificed for the sanctification of God’s name. He was saved from the knife, yes, but that experience of being under the knife, of being so close to mortal danger, surely must have inscribed into his psyche the constant spectre of being killed as a child of Avraham.

But of course he doesn’t die, and nor do all of us at any time. What we are left with is, like Yitzhak, to figure out how to live with this spectre of the knife hanging over us.

When we next see Yitzhak after the akedah, he is standing in a field, “contemplating.” Perhaps he is contemplating precisely this question – how does one continue to live in such a world, where God seems to sometimes want Jewish souls as sacrifices, how does one face the constant fear of danger and annihilation?

The answer comes soon afterwards, as the camels carrying Rivka rise on the scene. The Torah tells us that Yitzhak takes her into his mother’s tent; she becomes his wife; he loves her; he is comforted over the loss of his mother.

The loss of his mother. Sarah, in some ways, ended up being the real sacrificial lamb of the akedah. Her death is told to us immediately after that story, and she dies young – almost 50 years younger than Avraham when he dies. The midrash says she dies when she hears the news that Avraham had gone to sacrifice her son, not knowing that he would be spared.

And so Yitzhak is left with a double burden post-akedah. Like us, he has on the one hand to mourn those that did die, and on the other hand, to figure out how to continue to live in the face of the knowledge of such tragedy and perpetual danger.

The answer is LOVE. I believe that this is the first time in the Torah that the root ahavah , love, is used. Through his encounter with suffering, Yitzhak discovers love. Yitzhak discovers that the only comfort in such a situation, the only way to move forward is to focus on love. He loves Rivka and that love is itself a comfort.

Love is more than a comfort. It is an anchor and a purpose in a tops- turvy, inexplicable and occasionally miserable world. Connection to others – whether in synagogue at a memorial service, in school teaching Torah to students, or at home with my family – these connections, these places of love are indeed what comfort me and give me hope. Not hope for myself, necessarily, but hope for our people and for all of humanity. Love lifts us out of ourselves. We are attached to something beyond ourselves, to other humans and to a force that is stronger than hatred, stronger than death, stronger than any individual’s life. There is nothing that can destroy love.

Viktor Frankl famously recounts how, on one frozen miserable forced march from the concentration camp gates to the inmates’ working trenches, a fellow inmate whispers to him: “If our wives could see us now!” Frankl tells how he is reminded of his wife and completely transported by this thought and his intense love for her:

"My mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."

Yitzhak knew this. The salvation of man is through love. Having seen the knife, he knew that love was the only answer.

Parashat Lekh Lekha: Purity of Heart

Intention matters. Most of our mitzvot we fulfill through physical action. But our heart, our intention, our deepest kavannah, when we do them, also matters.

Avram was already on his way to the land of Canaan with his father. When he continued on his journey at God’s command, he could have thought of it as a continuation of this original journey, an ordinary change of location done for whatever human reasons originally initiated the move.

But the Torah tells us that Avram did it kaasher diber elav Hashem. Literally, this phrase means “as God had told him.” In other words, Avram carried out the command in the way that God had said it should be done. The Sefat Emet, though, reads it differently – he explains that kaasher diber elav Hashem means that Avram did it only because God had commanded it; he abandoned all other reasons for going. Even though he had had his own reasons for taking this journey, now that God commanded it, he did it with the sole intention of fulfilling God’s will.

That is what we mean when we say in the brachah before we do a mitzvah asher kideshanu bemitzvotav vetzivanu, “as He sanctified us with His mitzvot and commanded us.” What we are saying is essentially what the Torah says about Avram – we are here, doing this mitzvah, shaking this lulav, lighting these Shabbos candles – we are here right now doing this solely because God commanded us to. We have a pure heart of service, a heart directed not in a million directions as it normally is, but in one direction only. We are here fulfilling Your command.

What happens when you do even one mitzvah in this intense way, with total purity of heart? You become a vessel for divine energy to enter the world. The world is uplifted and you are uplifted. We are normally so distracted and so full of complex motivations for every action; when we stop and direct our hearts, there is a power and intensity that we barely dreamed of, and there is light and there is peace. Doing a mitzvah with total intention, we walk the path of Avram, at one with God and the universe and ourselves.

Parashat Lekh Lekha: To the Land that God continues to Show Us

What God wants from us is continually unfolding. There is not a set, fixed destination point.

That’s why, when God tells Avraham to go on his journey, He says, go “to the land that I will show you.”

The Kedushat Levi asks –how could Avraham have taken the liberty to endanger his life and Sarai’s life by going to Egypt when he was not commanded to go there?

His answer – Avram was commanded to go there. The initial command “to go to the land that I will show you” meant “that I will continually show you.” It did not mean a one-time showing of the land of Israel. What God was saying was that He would provide Avram with guidance on his journey, continually show him the way. Initially, this meant entering the land of Israel – that was the first destination point – but as time and circumstances unfolded, a famine occurred, and Avrahm understood that God was now showing him the next land, the next move on his journey – Egypt.

When we read the story of Avram, we may feel a little distance – well, yeah, if God actually spoke to me and told me where to go and what to do, I would do it, too. But no, it turns out that God’s directions even to Avram, are more subtle than that. Yes, there are direct communications, but there is also a continual “showing” or unfolding. Even the first step is not explicit – how did Avram know that God meant the land of Cannan when He said “the land that I will show you.” How did God “show” him where to go? The text doesn’t explain it, I think, because it was intuitive. Avram searched out what God’s will might be by the signs and circumstances around him, and through his own reflection on what those signs might mean for him.

We are not so different from Avram, then. After all, we know we have a generalized duty to go on some journey in this life, to leave our (childhood) baggage behind and go to a place that God has in mind for us. What, where, this place is – what God really wants from us – that is for us to inuit, for us to search out based on what God “shows us,” based on the clues that continually unfold in our lives.

And at different points we may be led in different directions. Sometimes it may even seem that we are being led to “Egypt,” to the wrong kind of place, in the opposite direction of our destiny. What we learn from Avram is not to hold on to the original destination point or to some idealized notion of what our destination point should be, but to allow ourselves to be continually led, to allow ourselves to be continually “shown” – through all the seemingly random happenings of our lives – the next step and the next step on our divinely guided journey.

Compassion in a Time of Judgment

Hashem, Hashem, Kel Rachum VeChanun, . . . Oh God, Oh God, O Merciful and Gracious God, . . . This time of year we cry out these 13 divine attributes over and over. Why? What is their message?

Yes, we are reminding God to be kind and compassionate to us, full of mercy, as He sits in judgment over us.

But there is more here. These attributes are not just about God, but also a model for us. Mah hu rachum. Af Atah teha rahum. ”Just as He is merciful, so, too, should you be merciful.”

God is teaching us how to be in this world of judgment, how to be not just with each other, but also how to be with ourselves, and especially how to be with ourselves in our lowest moments, our moments of failure and mistake and transgression. In those low moments, we are to adopt the stance of God here, to embrace ourselves -- all of ourselves, faults included -- with love and compassion.

During this season of teshuva and transformation, we often think the best way to improve is to be critical and harsh, to attack our flaws with a sharp pair of scissors and to “fight” the Evil Inclination. But does such a combative approach work? Does it help to transform us? Think of what happens when you feel attacked by that inner critical voice we all have: “Why did you do that? That was a terrible thing to do!”. Does it propel you to change? Perhaps a little bit. But mostly what it does is to bring your mood low, to make you feel guilty and depressed about who you are and to wear you out emotionally. Without love we don’t have the fortitude, the energy or the desire to change. We are too low.

If, on the other hand, you focus on the problematic part of yourself with gentleness, compassion and a little curiosity, like you would a small hurt child, there is enough space and good energy for things to shift on their own. There is also greater honesty. In an open, loving space, without the fear of attack, truths will out more easily. Perhaps this is why, right along with hesed, loving-kindness, comes emet, truth. Truth can only come forward fully in a space of love.

There is another benefit to a compassionate teshuva process; it allows you not to throw out parts of yourself but to reclaim them for the good. In a self-critical approach there is a tendency to want to identify certain aspects of yourself as bad and try to excise them or at least exile them. But with compassion, we can actually work with them, find the goodness underneath and redirect them for the better. Resh Lakish, a rabbi who in a previous life was a warrior-thief, famously said that teshuva has the capacity to turn sins into merits (Yoma 86a). Perhaps what he meant was that through teshuva we can transform the very aspects of ourselves that we consider most problematic into our greatest strengths.

This is the “return” (teshuva) that we seek – it is a return to the original purity and goodness of our own selves. There is no rejection here, no cutting and removal, but only a loving return to truth and goodness of what has gone astray.

May we feel the loving compassionate embrace from above and learn from it how to turn with compassion on ourselves and our faults. May such compassion help us to truly transform and return.

Collection of Rosh Hashanah Thoughts

This is a link to a collection of my thoughts from over the years on Rosh Hashanah. It is set up so you can print it and read over the holiday. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing it.

Parashat Eikev: Undaunted

“Perhaps you will say in your heart: these nations are greater, more numerous, than I – how will I ever be able to drive them out (Deut. 7:17)?”

Moshe understands that this is what the Israelites will feel at the prospect of the enormous task of conquering the land. The enemies, the obstacles, are too large and too many for us. We feel small and incapable. How can we possibly deal with them all?

This is a familiar feeling, this feeling of overwhelm and impossibility. We are often in this place, this place of the small self, where we see ourselves – not incorrectly – as vulnerable and limited and surrounded by insurmountable obstacles to our goals.

The answer, Moshe says, is to remember God. “Do not be afraid of them.” Zachor tizkor -- remember, oh, remember God and what God has done for you in the past (7:18). We quell our fears and our sense of inadequacy to the task at hand by remembering God’s part in this drama. If we are doing the work of God in the world – and surely all of our best work is God’s work – then we need have no fear of overwhelming obstacles. We are not small. “You shall not be broken before them, for Hashem your God is in your midst, a great and awesome God (7:21).”

We are not small when we are in touch, when we remember, this connection to God. There is inside each of us that inner point of connection which is infinite and indomitable, like its source. All those nations, all those obstacles, they do exist, but they somehow don’t matter, as Moshe says, they don’t break us, when we are in touch with this infinite side of ourselves. We see them and we persevere and keep climbing. We have work to do and God is with us. We are not daunted.

Parshat Devarim: Shabbat and Tisha B'av

This Shabbat is the ninth day of Av, and yet we do no mourning or fasting on it until the following day. There is a powerful message here.

Tisha B’av speaks a certain kind of truth. It speaks the truth of judgment and sadness and suffering and destruction and disconnection and dislocation. And also the truth of human imperfection – we were and are still not worthy to sustain the Presence of God in this world as it once was. We fall short; we are limited; we fail. Life is difficult and overwhelming.

These feelings are encapsulated in the three cries of Eikhah, how, that we find on this Shabbat and Tisha B’av. The Book of Lamentations cries out Eikhah yashvah badad, How has a once robust city now turned desolate and alone? Isaiah 1 (the haftarah on Shabbat) says Eikhah haytah lezonah, How has a faithful city turned into a harlot? And Moshe, in Devarim (this week’s parsha), exclaims: Eikhah esa levadi . . . How can I carry the full burden of this large people all by myself?

The first two are cries of sadness over the sudden change in status of a beloved city; we feel how quickly life can turn from good to bad, how destruction recurs in our history; how ongoing is suffering; how impermanent and unstable are our lives and fortunes. There is change and suffering and we mourn the truth of these in the world. And most especially, we mourn our role -- through our neverending capacity for faithlessness -- in contributing to this suffering. There is sadness and it is partly our fault. The third is a cry of overwhelm. Really, God put me on this earth to accomplish something, but it all seems like too much sometimes. How can I possibly carry this full weight?

These are gnawing existential burdens that we carry, our knowledge of our limitations and our failures and the truth of our impermanence and continued suffering in the world.

When Tisha B’av falls on Shabbat, we have a special opportunity to see these truths, these burdens, through the prism of Shabbat.

What is the message of Shabbat? First, the eternity of our relationship with the Holy One. Beyni ubeyn beney Yisrael ot hi le’olam. Between Me and the children of Israel it, Shabbat, is an eternal sign.

An eternal sign. Temples can come and go. Destruction and suffering and mass killing can come and go. But Shabbat wraps us in the knowledge that through it all God stands with us. Shabbat is the touchstone, the eternal Rock that reminds us we are forever. On one level, there will always be sadness and suffering coming and going. But in some other realm, beyond this world, there is eternity and we are part of that eternity.

Even as we mourn the loss of our temple of space, we hold on to our temple of time, Shabbat, our expansive sense of the whole span of human history, past, present and future, and our little taste of divine time, eternity.

We are comforted by these Shabbos concepts because they remind us that we are not alone, badad, striving in our limited way to fix a broken world. Our work is indeed imperfect and impermanent. But we are embraced by the Eternal One, embraced by the knowledge that come what may, no matter how we fail and mess up this world, we are held by the Rock. Ot his le’olam. An eternal sign.

Parashat Pinchas: My Grandfather's Inheritance

In devoting my life to Torah, I consider that I am carrying on the legacy of my father and my grandfather. My father loved Rashi so much that he believed that he was given an extra four years of life in order to pursue more of his work on Rashi. My grandfather was shot in a ghetto when he was found studying Talmud. My attachment to Torah is a legacy. I feel myself to be a link in this chain.

And yet I wonder – would my grandfather be happy that I, a woman, am part of the chain? Would he want me to be studying and teaching Talmud? My father was a deeply open person, and in spite of his upbringing, a feminist. But my grandfather, whom I never knew, was part of a world in which women were not taught Torah, were not considered part of this legacy. Would he, does he, smile down on my learning?

Surely in heaven what one sees is the heart.

At least that’s what the daughters of Zlophehad in this week’s parsha thought. Seeing that the land of Israel was being divided based on the male descendants of tribes and having no brothers who would inherit and a father who was already gone, they stepped forward bravely to articulate their desire also to be part of the legacy, to take their share in the nahalah, the inheritance. According to the midrash (Sifre Bamidbar 133), this was their thinking:

The mercies of flesh and blood are not like the mercies of the Omnipresent. The mercies of flesh and blood are over the males more than over the females, but He who spoke and the world came into existence is not thus. Rather, his mercies are over the males and over the females. His mercies are over all, as it is said: “The Lord is good to all, and His mercies over all His works” (Ps.145:9)

Indeed, the daughters of Zlophehad stepped forward and were not directly answered by flesh and blood, by Moshe, but were instead granted an answer from the Holy One Himself, who heard their plea and saw their sincere desire simply to be a part of the legacy, and answered them – ken, yes. Yes, when someone comes forward with a sincere desire to be PART of things, God says yes; down on earth, things might be more complicated, but God says yes to a joining heart.

I imagine that my grandfather, now taking the divine view from heaven, sees my desire to be a part of his inheritance and does smile.

At the Pesach seder, we reject only one son – the one who excludes himself, takes himself out of the game, out of the legacy and looks at us from the outside. But anyone who comes forward and says simply – I want to be part of this inheritance – how can we exclude them? I am thinking now of many others, not just women, but also those on the road to conversion or those who feel excluded for any number of reasons – if they sincerely and bravely come forward to say simply -- I want to be part of this legacy, shouldn’t our mercies be not like those of flesh and blood but rather like God’s – open and embracing and loving and compassionate to ALL?
:

Parsaht Balak: Use the Energy; Don't Fight It!

Use the energy; don’t fight it or squash it. The energy may be manifesting in a negative form, but it can be turned to good.

At first, God forbade Balaam from going to curse Israel. No, you stay home and don’t prophesy at all rather than use your talents to harm My people.

But God could see how much Balaam wanted to go. Bederekh she’adam rotzeh leilekh bah molikhin oto. “ It is on the path that a person really wants to go that they are directed to go.” So, rather than fighting with Balaam’s desire and squashing it, God uses it. God moves forward with Balaam, with the energy, not against it, ultimately using that energy, Balaam’s gifts, his words and his passion, to bring forth blessing upon Israel instead of curse.

This is a model for us of how to deal with what appear to be negative forces inside us. The Talmud tells us that someone who has great sexual passions should turn those passions into a strong love of God. Don’t squash; redirect; make use of the energy rather than fighting it. We are to love God bekhol me’odekha – with all of our inclinations, both good and evil; they all have power and energy and need to be directed into service of God.

A story is told of a fight between the sun and the moon. They both looked down on a human wearing a jacket and each claimed they would be better able to get that jacket off. The wind blew and blew, sending large gusts down to the poor human below, trying to rip that jacket off him. The human only huddled and drew the jacket tighter around him, as the wind became more and more frustrated, trying to wrestle the coat off, but with no success. The sun then came out and shone brightly. The person started to get hot and took the jacket off of his own accord.

It is hard to fight the human will and we won’t succeed. It is better to go with the energy, to make use of the will and the drive that already exists and learn to use it well.

There are many parts of us that we dislike or are ashamed of – parts that make us suffer deeply or even harm us like Balaam wanted to harm Israel. We often have inner fights with these parts and try to squash them – Stop being so angry! Stop being so sad or selfish or anxious! We admonish ourselves. But maybe this is precisely the wrong approach. Maybe we need to go with the energy, to follow it and respect its power and gifts and learn to redirect them. Fighting only wastes energy. Respecting and redirecting brings us the gifts of blessing like the words of Balaam – Mah Tovu ohelekhah Yaakov. How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob.

Parashat Naso: We Need Each Other to Be Blessed

May God bless you and keep you. May He shine the light of His face on you and show you grace. May He lift up His face toward you and grant you Peace.

The priests bless us through these words. The priests are the conduits through which God’s blessings -- blessings of prosperity, protection, light, grace and peace – physical and spiritual blessings, both – they are the conduits for these divine blessings.

Why do we need intermediaries? Why can’t we each simply say: “May God bless me and keep me. May He shine His light on me and give me peace. “ Why can’t we draw down these blessings by sincerely asking for them ourselves?

Because we can’t be fully blessed on our own. It doesn’t work that way. We are not each just separate individuals with a separate path to God. God created the world in such a way that we are dependent on one another to receive His blessings. Maybe there are some small individual pipelines to God, but the major pipelines are joint. We have to help each other receive blessing.

“I get by with a little help from my friends.” This week was Senior Night at Atlanta Jewish Academy. I was struck by how many seniors said about friends, family and teachers that “I wouldn’t be here today without you.” Hyperbole, I thought. Each of those kids did the work on their own, got themselves through high school.

But the past two weeks I have been having experience after experience that teaches me that those seniors are right, and I, too, am only here because of the kindness of others.

A few times, I have been thrown into the pit of my own anxiety, despair or insecurity by something that has happened, and each time, what brought me out – as much as I tried on my own – what brought me out was a kind word from a friend or partner. I felt like I was drowning and someone passed by and saw and offered me a life preserver ring, drawing me out, back to light and life, with kindness.

The Talmud in Brachot 5b tells three stories about Rabbi Yochanan and visiting the sick. In the first and last story, Rabbi Yochanan is the one who visits – he comes and helps “raise up” the sick person to wellness. But in the middle story Rabbi Yochanan is not the visitor, but the one who is sick and suffering. Another rabbi comes and helps him. The Talmud asks – if Rabbi Yochanan could help others, why couldn’t he help himself? Answer: “A prisoner cannot free himself from prison.”

We are all prisoners in some way, stuck in the trap of our own minds and egos. We cannot get out of these prisons ourselves – often, we can’t even see what is wrong on our own. We need another person to lift us up, to free us, to show us the way.

It is an old truth but one I am just beginning to really understand; it’s not that some people are great and can do it on their own. No one can, and it is a problematic myth to think that we can. We all need each other. We need each other to buoy us in times of trouble and we need each other to draw blessing down from above. We are all priests for one another, calling down the blessings of prosperity, light and peace, and freeing each other from prison in a way that only another person can do.

May God bless you and keep you. May He shine the light of His face on you and show you grace. May He lift up His face toward you and grant you Peace.

I am grateful to those who lifted me up this week and helped me see God’s shining face.

Parashat Kedoshim: Be True to Your Best Self

Elokay neshama shenata bi tehorah hi. We each have a pure soul, a piece of the divine inside us, our best, highest self. But we often forget this soul, forget our roots above, in the daily mess of life here on earth.

What it means to be kadosh, as the Torah enjoins us this week, is to remember this higher aspect of self. Kedoshim tehyu ki kadosh ani Hashem Elokeikhem. Be holy because I, Hashem, your God am holy. Our holiness stems from the mirroring of God’s holiness in ourselves, from our knowledge of our connection, our source, above.

This sense of remembering our higher selves is expressed in many of the laws:

Keep Shabbat – a weekly reminder of your connection above, as you stop the business of this-worldly achievement to be attuned to the soul.

No idol worship -- Don’t get involved in worshipping other things in the world that don’t really matter and take you away from your true self. Don’t be confused about who you are.

Leave the corners of the fields for the poor -- Yes, you need to be involved in the world, but in doing so – when you grow things in the ground or on trees – don’t rush like an animal to eat it all up. Have dignity and compassion and love for others. These are the higher sides of yourself and you need to uncover and develop them through constant limitation and giving.

Do not curse a deaf person. Why? He won’t hear you anyway. Ah, but it will affect you – it will debase you, the speaker, take you away from your true elevated self. To lie and to cheat others are similarly degrading, a debasement of the kedushah that lies in each of us. It’s not just that it’s wrong to hurt others; we are better than that. We should hold ourselves to a standard of dignity and love, be mirrors of the loving holy God who created us.

The parsha repeats again and again the reason for all these laws of kedushah -- Ani Hashem Elokeikhem. I am Hashem your God. Certainly there are other ways to interpret this phrase, but this year, what it says to me is -- Remember who your God is; remember who you are and where you came from; be true to this mirrored image of God in yourself; be true to your highest self.

Read this way, the constant enjoinment ani Hashem Elokeikhem becomes not a threat – I am the God who will punish you if you don’t follow My laws – but a source of encouragement and hizuk (strengthening). You can do this. You already have inside you what it takes to be holy and good and loving and dignified. You are already connected above. All you need to do is remember that connection.

Remember that connection in every aspect of your life. Not just when you are in shul davening, but also when you are in your fields harvesting grain or in the supermarket buying apples or eating breakfast on the run or doing the dishes or interacting with a colleague or client or child or other driver. Kedushah means bringing God into the world by remembering who we are at all times, remembering our pure soul from above, letting that knowledge seep in to every detail of how we act and every moment of our lives.

For Yom HaAtzmaut: Shuli Rand's "The Poet" and the Journey Towards Peace

In honor of Yom HaAtzmaut, I taught a song of Shuli Rand’s in the high school this week called Hameshorer, “The Poet.”

The song tells a story about Shuli Rand, a Haredi Israeli singer, and a friend of his, a famous secular Israeli poet. In the song the two meet while swimming in a pool and again on a city bench. Both times they connect and converse but end up in argument and discord over religious questions. “You said no. I said yes. If I said there is, you laughed, there isn’t.” The second time, Shuli says they almost end up coming to blows over the argument. A huge gulf opens between them.

The song begins with argument but ends with peace. In the final scene, the secular poet is sick in the hospital, “entangled in frightening tubes” and Shuli comes to visit him. This time, they talk little. Shuli says, “I had feelings. I had no words.” They both sense the end is near. They both see the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, above the poet’s bed. They do not speak. They cry together. Shuli blesses his friend: Sa Leshalom. “Travel in peace.” And the friend answers: “Amen.”

Peace. Shalom. How do we move from argument to peace? Shuli Rand shows us here. The answer is Shekhinah. Not just Divine Presence, but human presence. Perhaps we can even say that the Divine Presence is drawn down to earth in places, as here, where humans are being present for one another. There is a quality of presence here that we don’t normally achieve. It is presence beyond words and beyond the ego involvement of an argument. Beyond -- I’m right. You’re wrong. We each need to defend our positions. To be present is not to be right but to care, to connect. The illness of the poet helps them see what matters, helps them see their shared humanity and mortality and understand that to be right is not as important as to love, to connect, to be at peace with another.

Ideological divisions abound in this world. What ultimately drives peace may not just be national or international work, but simple encounters like the one described in this song, person by person, in intimate and less intimate relationships, simple everyday encounters where we learn not always to assert our views with words and arguments, but to cry together, to feel together, to be present and connected, simple encounters where we ask ourselves – do I want to be right or do I want to be at peace?

Sa Leshalom. May we all be travelling daily toward peace and presence.

Reflections from the Second Generation: On Torah and the Shoah (Talk Given at Young Israel of Toco Hills)

When I was a child, brushing my teeth at night, I would set up little tricks for myself in order to make sure that the Holocaust did not happen again. If I was very careful about closing the lid of the paste or putting it on the right and not the left side of the faucet, then I could be sure to stave off the likely event of another Holocaust happening at any moment. This was magical thinking, born of a very deep fear that has always lived inside me.

My father was born in Krakow, Poland in 1934. On September 1, 1939 he was 5 years old. He was with his mother and two younger sisters, ages 3 and 1, out in the countryside enjoying the end of the summer in my grandmother’s childhood shtetl home of Mishlinetz. His father was not with them that day, as during the summer, he would stay in the city to work during the week and join them in the country for Shabbat. That Friday in September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the trains were taken over by soldiers so he was not able to rejoin them.

My father and his mother and sisters survived the war in Siberian slave labor camps. They were evacuated from the Polish countryside into the Ukraine and taken from there by the Russians as slave labor, part of a large group of Jewish refugees, quote “saved” by the Russians, though at the time they thought they were the unlucky ones. They endured their own suffering.

But we were asked to tell one story – and I want to share the story of my grandfather, who was left behind in Krakow. He ended up in the Tarnow ghetto. My dear cousin Lala chronicled what happened to him there – alone in a small room, he was studying Talmud one day when Nazi soldiers passed by and saw him with the Talmud through the window. They ordered him out into the courtyard and barked at him to sweep the floor. They shot him in the back while he was sweeping.

I chose this story because it gives me something positive to hold on to, to live for. The legacy of the Shoah for me has been primarily a deep sense of fear, depression and insecurity about the future. A part of me knows with certainty that the world is primarily evil – that evil is likely, at any moment, to swallow up the good. My dreams are like Pharaoh’s –yes, there are fat cows – that’s how we live now – but eventually the skinny cows will eat up the fat ones. This I know. That is the way of the world, and especially the way of the Jews. My father, too, lived a good life before the war. I expect my own life or worse, my children’s or granchildren’s lives, to be disrupted at any moment by war and persecution.

That is the dark side, the abyss I stand next to, circling, at all times. I am thrown back into it by an article about the horrors of the American prison system or the Syrian refugees or the rise of white supremacists. Any sign of evil triumphing can throw me.

I struggle with the question – what can we do to prevent this? How can we stop evil from triumphing in the world? How does one tip the balance to the good in this world? What is my role in particular? I don’t want to play toothpaste tricks anymore. I know things can’t be controlled, but I want to play my part for the good.

There are many answers and I admire those who have chosen other responses – helping other refugees, being strong about the State of Israel, fighting injustice in all its forms, healing and helping people in many ways.

But the reason I chose the story of my grandfather’s shooting is because for me the answer that has become clearer and clearer over the years lay in my grandfather’s hands just before he was shot – Torah. Torah is the antidote to evil in the world. Ki lekah tov natati lakhem. Torah is goodness. A good teaching given by the ultimate Good One to help us slowly, over time, uncover the true goodness of a world created out of love. Torah is the tool to tip the balance. Perhaps not today, perhaps not in our lifetimes. But slowly, one letter at a time, we effect the world through Torah.

In the end of the day, I do not believe that those Nazis killed my grandfather. He was attached to something above death, beyond denigration, something true and eternal and elevated and strong and steadfast in the face of evil. I attach myself to this same chain, to this same eternity. I am comforted and strengthened and energized. And sometimes, when I am studying a piece of gemara, I can feel my grandfather’s blood coursing through me.

For Pesach: Listening at the Seder

Pesach is a time to tell the story to our children. It is a time to speak. But perhaps it is also a time to listen.

At the beginning of Magid, we are told a story about 5 rabbis who held a Seder together. What do we hear of their Seder proceedings? Only one teaching: Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah says that he was never able to prove to others that the exodus needed to be mentioned at night (in the nightly Shma) until Ben Zoma came and expounded it from a certain verse.

Discussing this passage with my high school students, they suggested that more than the content of the teaching, what is being taught here is the process. These rabbis, after all, are our model for a Seder. What does the conversation at their Seder look like?

The conversation involves not just saying your own ideas, but also listening and repeating what someone else has said, and really learning from them. Ben Zoma’s insight could easily have been quoted in his own name: Ben Zoma said . . . .. But no. Instead it is introduced by Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, who frames it through his appreciation of its value; “Behold I am like a man of 70 years” and I was never able to prove this point until Ben Zoma explained it. Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah is humble enough to give full credit to Ben Zoma.

Interestingly enough, the sage who is quoted here, Ben Zoma, is the very same sage to have said, in Pirke Avot 4:1: “Who is wise? One who learns from every person.” Ha! Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah clearly learned both Ben Zoma’s teaching in the Haggadah and this Pirke Avot teaching – he learned from Ben Zoma how to learn from Ben Zoma.

There is more. Ben Zoma’s interpretation of the verse in the Haggadah is actually only one side of the coin. The Haggadah (also cited in Mishnah Brachot 1:5) goes on to quote the opinion of the Sages who disagreed with him. What is the content of the Sages’ opinion? That the phrase kol yemei hayekha, “all the days of your life,” which Ben Zoma understood to be teaching us to include night as well as day, according to the Sages comes to include the Messianic era in addition to the world of today.

The Messianic era? Also in Pirke Avot, we are told that a person who cites a teaching bshem omro, “in the name of the one who said it,” in other words, a person who cites his source by name, mevi geulah la’olam, “brings redemption to the world.” Citing a source by name? That is just what Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah did here in quoting Ben Zoma! Did he bring redemption into the world? His citation did bring the mention of the Messianic era into the Haggadah. It is as if there is a little hint here that acting like Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, being humble enough to learn from others and give them credit, this is what brings about redemption, the very type of redemption we once experienced in Egypt and hope to bring about and experience again.

How do we get there? How do we get to a place of redemption? By talking and telling the story, yes. But also by listening to others – by getting outside ourselves and our need to be the smart ones at the table, by being humble enough to hear the wisdom of others, take it in, celebrate it and cite it, as Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah did. May our listening bring redemption.

For Pesach: Rise Up in Praise

Our main purpose on this earth, says the Sefat Emet (and others), is to praise God, to be witness to His existence and deeply grateful for the gifts He has bestowed on us.

That is the tachlit, the destination point, of creation and that is the tachlit, the destination point, of leaving Egypt. In both cases, the goal is reached on the 7th day. On Shabbat we stop our own creative endeavors to testify that all creative activity is really God’s and we sing, as the Psalm of the Sabbath day says – tov lehodot Lashem ulezamer lishimkha elyon. “It is good to give thanks to God and to sing to His exalted name.” That is our job on Shabbat – the end-point of creation – and that was our job on the 7th day after leaving Egypt – we stood at the Sea and sang praises to the Lord, an experience that tradition considers one of our highest points of connection to God. We stood and sang out with all our hearts and rose above ourselves as we exalted God.

All of Pesach is moving inexorably toward this height of praise. The gemara says that the seder “begins with shame and ends with praise.” We are moving towards praise: We begin with stories and words, and we conclude with Hallel and song. Hallel is the end-point of our speech in Magid, and an extended Hallel and the songs of Nirtzah are the end-points of the whole seder. They lead naturally to the Song of Songs, which is read on the Shabbat of Pesach, and some read on the night of the Seder. And then we reach the pinnacle of praise – the moment at the Sea. For this purpose were we redeemed, for this moment of praise.

What does it mean to say that our life purpose is to praise God? Isn’t there so much else that needs fixing in this world? What sense does it make to focus on thanksgiving as the main goal?

The Mussar teacher Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe teaches that the virtue of hakarat hatov, gratitude, has great powers. Hakarat hatov literally means “to recognize the good.” To see the good in another – to appreciate the letter carrier for delivering your mail even though he is paid to do so, to see this act as itself a kind of small hesed— to see all those acts of goodness in the world, to notice them, is to bring warmth and friendship and love into the world. To see God’s hand of goodness in everything around you, to understand deeply that none of it, really none of it -- not the life nor the health nor the roof – none of it is deserved or obvious but all are acts of divine kindness, to understand all that is to be in a state of Dayenu, a recognition of the neverending shefa or overflow from above. Seeing the good is not passive, but active and transformative – it awakens the good and the love that is always just beneath the surface in our universe. As Rabbi Wolbe says, by noticing the good in the world, we actually “build” a world of hesed. We often think that the ultimate good is to do good; perhaps we should add to “doing good” the role of “seeing good.”

Praise transforms the world and it also transforms ourselves. On Pesach, we move from “shame” to “praise.” Shame is self-directed; it represents the normal way we exist in this world – referring everything to ourselves through the prism of the ego – did I sound ok? Did I look good? That was so embarrassing! These are the self-directed thoughts of our ego prison. On Pesach, we are delivered from many straits, including the confines of the self. Instead of shame, we emerge into the wide world of “praise,” a place where we move out of ourselves by acknowledging the existence of a Being so much larger than ourselves. We come out of the dark narrow cave and into the open light; we are no longer a little tiny ego on its own, but, in praising God, become part of the praise of the Universe, part of the waves of Halleluyahs and Hodu Lashem ki tov’s that go on without end. We raise God up, and in doing so, raise up ourselves, draw ourselves out of the self and into the vast expanse of Sea. We are free, not floating alone and free, but deeply connected and free precisely because of our connection. To this end were we made.

Post-Purim Shabbat: Walking, Not Running

In honor of the Shabbat after Purim:

Rest. Balance. Peace, inner and outer. These are among our tools for fighting powers of evil like Amalek.

The Sefat Emet points out the strangeness of the date of our celebration of Purim – we celebrate and say “for the miracles that happened at this time” on the day the people rested after their fight, not on the day of the victory itself. “With this rest [menuchah],” says the Sefat Emet, “they destroyed him [Amalek] more than with war.” Our rest is a way of fighting Amalek! We kill evil, not just through physical fighting (and I don’t deny the need also for the fight), but also through our special role in this world as carriers of God’s menuchah.

Indeed, in the megillah, the world of Haman and Achashverosh is always rushing. They have professional “runners,” ratzim, who are sent out, dechufim and mevuhalim, “harried and rushed,” with messages. And they “rush” to bring Esther her beauty needs. And later, Haman is rushed to the banquet with Esther.

Everyone is running around all the time. But not Mordecai. One gets a sense from him of steadfastness and balance. He is a calm, centered, devoted person who knows what he is about; he is said to be mithalekh, walking by the palace day in and day out to find out how Esther is faring. Notice the contrast – he walks; the rest of the world runs. Maybe that is why he finds out about the plot of Bigtan and Teresh; he is around in a calm enough state to overhear them.

Nor does Esther rush. She takes 3 days to prepare for her meeting with Achashverosh, and then meets with him twice before asking her question, striking at the right moment, not rushing into anything.

Such balance and patience are the mark of a person with faith, a person who knows, as Mordecai knows [the only person in the megillah of whom “knowing” (yada) is said, Esther 4:1] that salvation will surely come, whether through Esther or through another. Such a person has no reason to rush because he understands that he is not in charge and he trusts the One who is. He plays his part calmly and with dignity; he is on the alert to act and do his part, but he is never rushed or nervous or harried. Day in and day out he is devoted and balanced and available.
This is the rest – the peace of Shabbat – that is one of the Jewish people’s primary weapons in the war against Amalek. We walk through life in a strong steady pose of faith, trusting that the Good One is in charge, alert to play our role in His plan.

Or course, we are sometimes (often?) harried and rushed and impatient. And sometimes, as when we leave Egypt on Pesach, it is appropriate to rush, or at least to be ready, on the spur of the moment, to drop everything and follow God. But most of the time, this harriedness is a kind of imbalance, an unsteadiness and an impatience which shows – like the people in this week’s parsha, who rush to the building of a Golden Calf when Moshe is just a little bit later than expected – most of the time our rushing shows a lack of faith that all will be well, a lack of understanding about our role in the world. The world will continue to turn without us; ultimately, we do not need to rush around to make sure all will be well. We need simply to walk, like Mordecai, with faith and patience, ever-ready to seize the opportunities that emerge to those who carry themselves with balance and steadiness and menuchah.

We are not the runners of Achashverosh -- running back and forth and back and forth to little effect; we are the peaceful walkers of God.

Purim: Fighting Hatred With Love

In the face of senseless evil, be kind to each other.

Haman, like the nation of Amalek from which he springs, represents pure, incomprehensible evil and hatred, a desire to totally annihilate us.

What do we do to commemorate our salvation from this evil? We send gifts to each other; we take care of the weak and the poor; we eat together and enjoy each other’s company. We fight hatred with love.

In the megillah, of course, we also stood up for ourselves and militarily fought back. This stance, too, has its place in Jewish tradition. But we don’t commemorate this redemption with military training. We commemorate it with gift-giving.

In the face of evil, we take care of each other. In the face of hatred, we are generous and kind and inclusive. This is the world we want to live in, not Haman’s.

In the end of the day, there is so much we can’t control, so many forces awry in this world; in the face of everything evil that we worry about, our response on Purim is simple acts of kindness.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” On Hanukah we drive out darkness with light. On Purim, we drive out hatred with love.

The Sefat Emet says that the reason we read Parashat Zachor (last week) on Shabbat is because Shabbat, with its own kind of Zachor, is a tikkun, a fixing, for the actions of Amalek. We fight Amalek, which represents perpetual war, with Shabbat, which represents eternal peace, Shalom. We fight war with peace. We fight hatred with love and kindness.

May we all have a joyous and kind Purim!

Parashat Tetzaveh and Purim: Carrying Each Other

We carry each other in our hearts, and there is no greater divine service than this.

This was the service of the kohen gadol. He wore a breastplate and two stones on his shoulders and in both places, on his heart and on his shoulders, the names of the children of Israel were inscribed. The Torah says specifically that he “carried” (nasa) the names of the children of Israel “on his heart as a reminder before God at all times” (28:29). He carried them – no, he carried us – in his heart, and as a burden on his shoulders, all the time. Where did he carry us? Lifnei Hashem. Before God. This was his divine service – to be mindful of the people, to help shoulder their burdens, to keep their troubles in his heart, to remember them and think of their needs.

There is no longer someone bringing our needs before God at all times, but we, each of us, serves as a kind of kohen gadol, for one another. When we pray in our daily Amidah and include the names of the sick, we are not just reminding God to pay attention, but reminding ourselves. We inscribe their names on our own hearts just as the Kohen Gadol had them inscribed on his breastplate. Their names, their burdens, are ours to carry.

On Purim, what we celebrate is not just our redemption, but our redemption by means of the caring and efforts of fellow Jews. Esther could easily have hidden away in the castle, as Mordecai implies, and ignored the problem, but she carried the burden of her people. This was not Egypt, where God would do the work. This redemption required the real effort of the people.

Our means of celebrating is also peculiarly inter-personal. On Sukkot the mitzvah is for you to sit in your own sukkah and shake your own lulav, and on Pesah, for you yourself to eat the matzah. But on Purim two of the mitzvot are about caring for each other’s needs – matanot la’evyonim, gifts to the poor and mishloach manot, gifts to one another. You have an obligation to feed one another. The give and take symbolizes the give and take of our care for each other, the way that our fates and hearts are intermingled. We are responsible for each other’s meals. We are responsible for each other’s well being.

Carrying food to one another, carrying each other’s names and burdens – these, too, are the service of God.

Parashat Yitro: Approaching the Cloud

One of the best moments of my week involved crying.

Crying with one of my children as the child cried, too, half lying in my arms. Before that moment, I had been walking around with a vague sense of hurry and worry. At that moment of crying, I was entirely at peace, sad, but entirely at peace. There was nowhere else to be and nothing better to do than this. Above all, I felt connected, connected to my child, connected to myself and that deep point of sadness inside me, connected to all the troubles and sadness in the universe, connected to the God who cares about all that sadness, who, as one of my students reminded me this week, is “the healer of broken hearts” (Ps. 147:3).

Sometimes it requires going into the sadness, not pushing it away, but actually approaching it, to feel this sense of connectedness. When Moshe approaches God on Sinai in our parsha this week, the Torah says that everyone else stood back, but Moshe approached the arafel asher sham Elokim, “the thick dark cloud where God was” (Ex 20:18). That is where God resides. In the arafel. In the clouds. In the moments of darkness and worry and confusion and sadness. Yes, of course, God also resides in joy, but here in our parsha, the pinnacle of revelation is depicted as a thick dark cloud. The moments that we run away from, like the people do here, those are the moments that perhaps offer the deepest of connections and revelations if we could only muster the fortitude, like Moshe, to approach them.

Ki shamah, ki shamah, ki shamah Elokim. The Israeli singer Shuli Rand sings a song about this passage entitled Arafel and his refrain is this – ki shamah, ki shamah, ki shamah Elokim. “Because there, because there, because there is God.” There, in that sadness, in our very brokenness, there, in the places we hide from, it is there that we will find God, feel our connection to Him, to each other and to ourselves. There, in the crying, in the thick cloud of darkness.

The Piasetczner Rebbe talks about moments like this as cracks in the soul. Normally we go about our lives with our soul covered over with a thick impermeable layer. Then there are moments, moments of intense emotion, whether sadness or joy, and at these moments cracks open in this covering. The goal is to use these cracks to fully access our soul and our connection to God, to fully enter those moments as opportunities for spiritual connection, moments when we, too, have the ability to approach the arafel.

Parashat Shmot: No Matter How Low You Sink

The rabbis say that the Israelites in Egypt had sunk to the lowest (49th) level of impurity when God redeemed them. Reading the parsha this year, I see what they mean.

When the Israelites cry out from suffering over their enslavement, their cries go up to God, but the Torah does not say that they were directed that way. They simply cried, but not to God, as if without a protector, as if they no longer feel they have that divine angel that, as Yaakov said at the end of his life, had always saved him from all evil.

When Moshe finds out that his killing of the Egyptian has been discovered, he is very frightened and runs away. He does not turn to God, beseeching Him to protect him as Yaakov did when he was frightened before he faces Esav. Moshe simply runs.

When Moshe names his first child Gershom, he explains, “I was a foreigner in a foreign land.” There is no God in this name. The naming is reminiscent of Yosef’s naming of his children. He, too, had been a stranger in a foreign land, but his names refer to God’s help – “for God has made me forget my troubles” and “God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.”

It seems that the descendants of Yaakov, Yitzhak and Avraham have not continued their legacy. God is not on the tip of their tongues or in their hearts. They have indeed sunk low. And so it is that when Moshe does discover God, as if anew, through the burning bush, and is asked to bring back word of this God and His plan of redemption to the people, Moshe asks for a name – Who are you? I have no tradition of you nor do these people, apparently.

The people have forgotten God, lost sight of Him in their misery and lost the thread of their tradition of faithfulness to this God. Yes, the people have lost their connection, but not so God. God remains faithful. God remembers and appears and redeems.

The symbol of the burning bush is important in this regard. It is a bush that burns but is not consumed, like God Himself. He does not wear out; His love has not been used up by our ancestors; God’s symbol here is one of a never-ending supply of ardor and passion and connection. Most resources are finite and can be used up. Not so God’s love for us.

Sometimes, I think more often than we like to admit, we do not feel worthy of connecting to God. We are not necessarily on the lowest rung like the people of Israel, but we do sink pretty low. We forget God; we go about our business without paying attention to the divine glory around us; we don’t name the divine in our children; we don’t see their kedushah, their holiness. We are frightened and overwhelmed by difficulties and we cry out but not to God; we are simply hopeless.

If we add to this distance, this forgetting, a certainty that because of our forgetting we therefore no longer have access, no longer deserve to have God’s love, then we are doomed. We need to know that just because we have abandoned God, as did the grandchildren of Yaakov in Egypt, does not mean that God has abandoned us. Like the little light that would not go out on Chanukah, God’s love for us burns eternal without ever consuming its energy source.

Moshe was, in a way, the first real ba’al teshuvah. He knew he was “Jewish” on some level, but does not seem to have a tradition of what this means. He rediscovers the God of his ancestors and in this rediscovery, brings about redemption and the eventual revelation of the whole Torah.

Later, after the miracles of the exodus, when the people of Israel stand at the Sea and cry out to God, this time the Torah tells us that they cried out “to God.” The rabbis add: tafsu umanut avoteihem, “they caught up the art of their ancestors.” To return to such a call is to know that this connection can never be severed, to know that, like Moshe and his generation in Egypt, we will always have access, can always return to the ever-burning Source that is waiting for us to rediscover Him.