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!
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Friday, February 23, 2018
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.
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.
Friday, February 2, 2018
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.
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.
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