Ki Tissa—Drash by Sid Goldstein

February 2022

Shabbat Shalom

Exodus 4 :10 

Moses said to the lord. “I have never been a man of words, either in times past or now. I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.”

And the Lord said to him “Who gives a man speech ?Who makes him dumb., deaf or blind? Is it not I the Lord?”

Moses said “Please, Lord, make  someone else your agent.”

The Lord became angry with Moses “There is your brother Aaron the Levite. I know he speaks readily.”

Thus Aaron is introduced into the drama of the Exodus and its aftermath. 

Curiosities abound here.

When Hashem sends Moses and Aaron to speak with Pharaoh, he tells Moses “See I place you in the role of a god to Pharaoh with your brother Aaron as your prophet. You shall report all that I command to you. Your brother shall speak to Pharaoh to let the Israelites depart. But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart that I may multiply my signs in the land of Egypt (Exodus 7: 2,3) 

So here is the dynamic. Moses complains to Hashem that he is slow of speech. Hashem tells him that he can make him fast of speech but Moses refuses the “honor.” Hashem  then puts Aaron in the spokesman’s role and tells Moses that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart.

So- here is a question to ponder: Why didn’t Hashem just make Moses more articulate AND willing to speak to Pharaoh?

 If he was capable of hardening Pharaoh’s heart through plague after plague, he was certainly capable of making Moses  both articulate and willing. 

I believe that all of this was all necessary to get Aaron into the story. 

But… Why does the story require Aaron? 

Because…without Aaron, we have no Ki Tissa.

Ki Tissa tells the paramount story of the entire Torah.  

After one of the greatest epics in the history of western religion, Israel’s exodus from Egypt, replete with the parting of the Red Sea–the people demand that Aaron forge an idol. 

The sin was so egregious that it caused  Hashem to say to Moses  “Now do not try to stop Me when I unleash My wrath against them to destroy them.” (Ex. 32:10).

So what do we make of Aaron, the ringleader of the gross act of idolatry?

Remember, Aaron was the de facto leader of the people in the absence of Moses. Thus, it was he whom the Israelites approached with their proposal:

“The people began to realize that Moses was taking a long time to come down from the mountain. They gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Make us a god [or an oracle] to lead us. We have no idea what happened to Moses, the man who brought us out of Egypt.’ (Exodus 32:1)

Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him, melted it down, cast it into a mold, fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a calf. 

Then the people said, “This, Israel, is your god, who brought you out of Egypt.”

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the Calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented peace offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and indulge in revelry.” (Ex. 32:2-6)

Aaron is not an insignificant figure. He shared some of the burdens of leadership with Moses. He was about to be appointed High Priest. What then was in his mind while this drama was being enacted?

Let’s look at what the Sages say about Aaron and his role:

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks documented what the sages say about Aaron: 

Essentially there are three lines of defense in the Midrash, the Zohar and the medieval commentators. 

According to the first, Aaron was playing for time. His actions were a series of delaying tactics. He told the people to take the gold earrings their wives, sons and daughters were wearing, reasoning to himself: “While they are quarrelling with their children and wives about the gold, there will be a delay and Moses will come” (Zohar). 

The second defense is to be found in the Talmud and is based on the fact that when Moses departed to ascend the mountain he left not just Aaron but also Hur in charge of the people (Ex. 24:14). Yet Hur does not figure in the narrative of the Golden Calf. According to the Talmud, Hur had opposed the people, telling them that what they were about to do was wrong, and was then killed by them. Aaron saw this and decided that proceeding with the making of the Calf was the lesser of two evils:

Aaron saw Hur lying slain before him and said to himself: If I do not obey them, they will do to me what they did to Hur. “Shall the Priest [Aaron] and the Prophet [Hur] be slain in the Sanctuary of God?” (Lamentations 2:20). If that happens, they will never be forgiven. Instead, let them worship the Golden Calf, for which they may yet find forgiveness through repentance. (Sanhedrin 7a)

The third, argued by Rabb Abraham Ibn Ezra, the 12 century sage, is that the Calf was not an idol at all. What the Israelites did was, in Aaron’s view, permissible. Remember, their initial complaint was, “We have no idea what happened to Moses.” They did not want a god-substitute. They simply wanted a Moses-substitute, an oracle, something through which they could discern God’s instructions.

What Sacks shows us is nothing less than a  systematic attempt in the history of interpretation to both mitigate and minimize Aaron’s culpability. 

 Yet, with all the generosity anyone can muster, it seems difficult to see Aaron as anything but weak, especially in the reply he gave to Moses when his brother finally appeared and demanded an explanation:

“Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us a god who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this Calf!” (Ex. 32:22-24)

So blaming the people becomes a staple in the history of explaining away sin. 

Think about the answer King Saul gave to Samuel, explaining why he did not carry out the Prophet’s instructions.” I saw the people scattering and leaving me. And You had not come at the appointed time.” 

Like Aaron, Saul blames the people. He suggests he had no choice. He was passive. Things happened. He minimizes the significance of what has transpired. 

In both cases we see weakness, not leadership.

What is really extraordinary, therefore, is the way later tradition made Aaron a hero, most famously in the words of Hillel:

Be like the disciples of Aaron, loving peace, pursuing peace, loving people and drawing them close to the Torah. (Avot 1:12)

There are famous haggadic traditions about Aaron and how he was able to turn enemies into friends and sinners into observers of the law. The Sifra says that Aaron never said to anyone, “You have sinned” – all the more remarkable since one of the tasks of the High Priest was, once a year on Yom Kippur, to atone for the sins of the nation. 

So, as with all things  Jewish, there is even disagreement about the culpability of Aaron’s involvement in the greatest sin committed in the Torah. 

So I will now offer my thoughts, which are neither rabbinical nor of the sages and only carry the weight of minimal scholarship.

Leviticus 10:1

“And Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his pan, put fire in them, and placed incense upon it, and they brought before the Lord foreign fire, which He had not commanded them. And fire went forth from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.”

When Moses recounted what the Lord told him, Aaron was silent. 

Remember, this was supposed to be Aaron’s greatest day – the day when he officially assumed his role as the first High Priest of the Jewish people. He had even slaughtered a calf- of all things- and offered it as a sacrifice for the day.

Yet on that very day, Aaron received his judgement from Hashem. I believe that his two sons  died before the Lord because the ‘foreign fire’ they brought was nothing less than a reminder of the fire that Aaron had used to fashion the Golden Calf. 

But let me leave you with this thought: Aaron’s sin was necessary.

It was necessary to ensure that the people understood the sanctity of the law they were about to receive. 

Remember- it was Hashem who deliberately placed Aaron in the position to speak the words that Moses could not. 

With a highly Jewish sense of irony, the spokesman who looked eye-to-eye with and spoke directly to Pharaoh, could not convince his own people to simply be patient wait for Moses to return.  

Ki Tissa, then, is at least partially the story of Aaron, the necessary man.

Like most of the necessary men in the Torah, Aaron takes actions for good and for evil.

And like all necessary men from Abraham on down, he both reaped the glory and paid the price. 

Shabbat Shalom. 

 

Parshah Terumah

February 2022

Drash by Marc Flitter

To place Parshah Terumah in context, Moses has ascended to the mount. He is to be there 40 days and 40 nights. And God commands, “They shall make me a sanctuary so that I might dwell among them.” There is no ambiguity in that verse. Instead it is a divine rationale for the nation… “This is why we shall contribute to and build, according to specific instructions, a tabernacle, the Mishkan.” And with equal clarity in it shall be placed a table, a menorah, and an arc, guarded by fashioned Cherubin, where in the tablets of testimony will be stored and above which God shall speak further with Moses.

Received on Mount Sinai, that God would dwell among them, posed no apparent contradiction. Why wouldn’t God reside among Israel, his chosen nation? Today, a Torah and Talmud later, a history of a people blessed and exiled, persecuted but enduring, a minority census in the religions of the world, “favored nation status” carries a different concept of the presence of God among us. For we have inherited from time, memory, record and tradition, a refinement, the concept of the Schechina as God’s presence among us.

We have come to accept that the spatial confinement of the creator of all things was never literally available to us. So how do we each year consider Parshah Terumah as it conveys the specific instructions for the construction of the tabernacle, beyond its moment in time in order to better appreciate the concept of the divine presence which is accessible to us today? Not surprisingly, as promised by the sages, delving further into the Torah provides a possible answer.

We need not look far. In fact at the conclusion of Parshah Yisro, Shemot Chapter 20 verse 21, after the Revelation was experienced by the entire nation, the Ten Commandments uttered, and Moses had received yet another admonition regarding idolatry, a further instruction was received. “An altar of earth shall you make for me, and you shall slaughter near it your elevation offerings and your peace offerings, your flock and your herd… wherever I permit my name to be mentioned, I shall come to you and bless you.” To paraphrase Cynthia Ozick’s characterization of Ruth’s reply to Naomi, “Where you go I will go, your people are my people,” what an incandescent proclamation! I would share that as a succinct distillation of the whole of Torah I find it more resonant than that attributed in the Talmud to Hillel, “that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” Ethical humanism, unlike Judaism, does not for me advance the concept of the presence of God.

But the phrase “Wherever I permit my name to be mentioned “ connotes that there must be limitations to man’s behavior. The mentioning of God’s name is implied and accomplished with the performance of all of Halacha. And to utter the Name, for anything less than to serve God’s holiness, is deserving of no less than a commanded prohibition. Finally, what greater blessing can be received than to experience the presence of the Schechina? Returning to the parshah, we encounter the details of how the Tabernacle was to be constructed , prescribing for the new nation a practical path forward from the idolatrous practices of its rivals. In the parshah’s first verse, we read,“ From every man whose heart motivates him you shall take my portion.” Moses was not being instructed to impose a tax nor introduce a tithe. Instead the basic building materials to be utilized for the construction of the tabernacle were to be donated. This was not a call for a building fund. There were to be no promised plaques acknowledging major contributors. Instead the call went out for gold, silver and copper, turquoise, purple and scarlet wool, linen and goat hair, red dyed ram and takish skins, acacia wood, oil, incense, and stones. It was a directive intended for each individual motivated by their heart. This was not a “NASA we have a problem,” moment of desperation requiring the cannibalization of Apollo 13 in order to save the crew.

Instead we understand it now as prelude to “service of the heart,” how rabbinic Judaism refers to worship in the absence of the Tabernacle and the subsequent Temples in Jerusalem. Let us consider how these donations of the specific materials slated to be transformed into a dwelling place for God might have affected the same people who witnessed the Revelation at Sinai. We have no similar opportunity available to us today. Writing a check or entering a credit card number, while laudable when executed for tzedakah, conveys only a monetary sum, and I have no personal experience in what an attempted transfer of Bitcoin might provide a donor (aside of recognition of donated food items on a collection table throughout the High Holidays). But then amidst the tumult of the Exodus, the fear and awe inspired by their witness, some might have sought and been rewarded for a moment of recognition for what once might have been theirs, now transformed into a Tabernacle like no other.

What if some of the gold that glittered had been theirs? Would seeing the textured fabric bring back memories of touch? And what of the Acacia wood, indispensable to the erected structure, previously functioning only in the mundane. It is true we can only speculate about the people’s possible reward, but in doing so, even now, we might capture ,if only in the barest sense, the fulfillment of their donations, their portions, every man and woman answering the call of Moses as instructed by God.

As for where the Schechina resides in our time, I would offer that the 19th psalm addresses this contemplation. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” introduces the psalm, continuing,“the firmament tells of his handiwork.” It is an opening verse which calls us not to visual exaltation but instead directs us to narrative, to “the tale of his handiwork.” Commentary explains the following verse, “Day unto day utters speech and night unto night declares knowledge,” as speech and knowledge discerned by the soul of man. The psalm continues ,”The Torah of Hashem is perfect, restoring the soul.” Our Torah, that “provides wisdom, gladdens the heart, enlightens our eyes, is more desirable than gold and sweeter than honey,” allowing us in an age absent the Tabernacle and the Temples, to bask in the presence of the Schechina.

Shabbat Shalom

 

Tradition and Change

March 2022

Pekudei Drash by Sandra Z. Armstrong

When I taught preschool, I explained to the children the concept of same and different. It is a pretty elementary school basic concept and easily understood by most. These 3-5 year olds could grasp it but we as adults are now struggling with the reality. The last time we were back in person at Sof Ma’arav was December 18, not quite 2 months ago. And here we are back again, yet we and our world are not the same and very different.

I can count the ways for you, but that might not be the proper thing to do. And yet perhaps today on this Shabbos we finally understand what it means to be different to be a stranger in a strange land that we continue to call home. As the refugees, Jewish and not Jewish leave their beloved country under harsh conditions, so do our hearts and souls go with them. We want to reach out, make it better, make the world a better place for all but now all we can do is be together and pray, send money and continue to look to the heavens for relief. We Jews have been struggling for thousands of years. And as we begin again seeing our own struggle in a faraway land we struggle inside in the pit of our stomachs aching to do more to help.

I sent around a Federation response to the congregation yesterday, But there are plenty of ways to reach out and connect to help. We are Sof Ma’arav the westernmost synagogue in the world and we stand with the people of the Ukraine in spirit and in Jewish advocacy. Just the fact that we have spent 2 years bouncing back and forth between Zoom hybrid in person and total Zoom from our homes speaks volumes of who we are as a people and the strength that this small congregation in the middle of the Pacific can whip up on a minute’s notice.

Has any of this been easy? No on the contrary, it has been hard yet, and I say yet, because with the incredible work of keeping us close to Torah we have been creative and found peace and joy.

In addition, our loss of Naomi Olstein most recently has made us weep with sorrow. Naomi embodied a personal strength that now we can all tap into as our days without her move ahead. It is because of Naomi that we came together to help one of us in great need. And even in the darkest moments on the day that I found her helpless in her apartment. I knew that neither she nor I would ever be alone. This journey she took up to the end, we stayed with her, helped her, told her we loved her and she knew it. Yet it was time for her to leave us on earth and time for us to connect to her in heaven.

In Pekudei, the Israelites continue to build a home among them for HaShem’s presence to come to earth in a cloud, in their midst because the need was great and these were new people who had to learn the ways of heaven. How to embrace a greater good even when things looked awful and how to have the strength of character to do so. We at Sof Ma’arav have been granted 50 years of growth, change, and now a movable feast of loving Shabbat and being together. Has this been a miracle in itself that we are able to keep reading out of our Torah, the same Torah that Moshe received from God 3,000 or more years ago? Yes, I believe this is the miracle of Sof Ma’arav. We represent the Pacific Southwest Region of the United Synagogue in the Conservative movement of Judaism. We are in the middle of the ocean and we are in the middle of the range of Jewish religious options of worship.

Will our lives in Hawaiʻi and around the world ever be the same before Covid and now war in Ukraine? Probably not. But we as Jews understand what it means to live differently, what it means to cling to our traditions and hope for a brighter future when we will all be together, all of us in great peace and joy. Today on Shabbat, let us sing and rejoice as our forefathers and foremothers danced and rejoiced in the desert on a path they didn’t know, in a place they didn’t know, accepting strangers they didn’t know and accepting a God they were learning to know.

As the Jews built the Tabernacle and covered parts of it including the Aron Kodesh with gold, the brightness of the gold, the golden face of Moshe after he came out of his session alone with HaShem. Let these golden moments in our tradition, these streaks of lights and compassion, the love Moshe had for his people and the golden love we all have in our faith continue to guide us as Jews in a place far, far away in the state of Hawaiʻi.

 

Aharei Mot

May 2022

May 29, 2022

Drash by Sandra Z. Armstrong

We were instructed and guided out of Egypt to a new place and now we are to receive the noblest instructions from God. The final separation, death, is confronted in the opening line of Aharei Mot – after death. 16:1 The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons Aaron…

As most of you know, Don owns Abraham’s Garden in Hawaiian Memorial Park, Kaneʻohe. Who ever thought that we would be in the cemetery business? But the need was great, so we did. In our home, we balance the joy of Sof Ma’arav with the solemnity of Abraham’s Garden.

Something changed last Sunday when a group of UH Hillel students, led by Mason Russo, came to help us prune, weed and replace stones neatly around grave markers. The seriousness of the task evolved into sharing memories and stories of those interred. We chatted while we worked and got to know each other. These wonderful, young and vibrant students gave us hope. The time passed quickly in the two hours with six of us working side by side. Quiet exchanges could be overheard of “where are you from” and “where are you going.” The beauty of youth and the vitality of life against the sorrow of loss impacted us greatly. Don and I walked away renewed on our commitment to the Jewish task of “Aharei Mot” after death.

This parsha, Aharei Mot, is read right in the middle of our Jewish year with 6 months from Yom Kippur 5772 to 6 months towards Yom Kippur 5773. Exactly in the middle of today’s parsha, the 4th reading by Don, The “nots” and “the specific should nots” are summed up with a “chai” chapter 18:1-5:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: speak to the Israelite people and say to them: I the Lord am your God. You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or the land of Canaan to which I am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws. My rules alone shall you observe, and faithfully follow My laws: I the Lord am your God. You shall keep My laws and My rules, by the pursuit of which man shall live: I am the Lord.

Before we come upon this verse, the Torah describes rules for both the Israelite and the stranger who resides among us. It is here that God states specifically do not become like the strange cultures that surround you. Separate from their ways. The stranger in your midst among you will follow your ways. But you do not follow the ways of immoral cultures as in Egypt and Canaan. Treat strangers among you with kindness but do not take on immoral cults of others.  

Let’s look at what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says about Aharei Mot in his book Studies in Spirituality – A weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible. 

In regard to the observance of Yom Kippur, Rabbi Sacks states that repetitive moments of asking for forgiveness as a whole community changes us. Our role model is Aaron as the high priest. Aaron begins with his own failures and represents confession, atonement and a search for spiritual purification. On Yom Kippur, a community of people come together in awe inspiring moments to ask God for forgiveness while not standing alone. As Rabbi Sacks states, “It is so much easier to admit your sins, failings and mistakes when other people are doing likewise. If a high priest, or other members of our congregation, can admit to sins, so can we.”

That brings us back to Sof Ma’arav. Our congregation began 51 years ago by highly motivated, Jewishly educated, well organized and passionate members including (and along the way) Jordan and Ann Popper, Sally and Joe Morgan, Robert and Bernice Littman, Bob and Judy Goldman. These pioneers established our baseline of changing, growing, adapting and maintaining our goals including reading out of our Torah on Shabbat mornings.

We are facing over 2 years of the Covid pandemic along with the enormous changes and stresses in our lives. In Hawaiʻi, we are free to maintain our Jewish lives, to make Jewish choices, and establish Jewish relationships. We sometimes begin as strangers and end up friends with those we live among here. This diversity in Hawaiʻi is an enormous and positive benefit of living in the middle of the Pacific. At some point, those who moved here were adventurers coming into a new land of hope, love of freedom to “do the right thing.” We offer compassion and mercy for the stranger, the downtrodden and especially now for friends faraway in Ukraine and around the world who suffer. Our hearts go out to the people of Ukraine. There are no words for the horror of this invasion.

We, at Sof Ma’arav, gather together each Saturday, not because we have to, but because it is the Jewish way to pray, learn from the Torah and study (including Talmud with Gregg). We have come back “in person” and on Zoom as a hybrid service to joyously dance in the aisles and sing at the top of our lungs, thanking God for our lives, for each other and for the angels who live among us.  

Shabbat Shalom.

Sandra Z. Armstong

 

Spiritual Acts of Faith

July 2022

Parsha Chukat Drash by Donald Armstrong

I have always enjoyed the poetry of Ogden Nash. He wrote:

The cow is of the bovine ilk. One end is moo, the other milk.

A short, clean and humorous poem that is so unlike today’s parsha, Chukat.

Not to be out done, King David composed the following haiku (try saying Chukat haiku fast three times):

 

Heifer red so fine

whose ashes make tamei tahor

so inscrutable.

 

Now I channel Ogden Nash:

 

No matter how I try to grasp her

this decree is greased like butter.

Cleansing cow ash is some part udder

but Chukat haiku makes me shudder.

 

Finally Rashi weighs in on the relevance of this purification procedure, given that the red heifer no longer exists:

How now, brown cow?

But on a more serious note, I kid because today’s parsha makes me nervous. The message of the parsha seems to be that in matters of obedience to and faith in Hashem, if you don’t get it right then you die in the wilderness like Moshe, Aaron and Miriam.

Commandments in the Torah are divided into three groups:

1. Mishpatim are those which make common sense, like the 10 Commandments.
2. Edot are testimonies that are reasonable but not logically compelling, e.g., eat matzoh to commemorate our exodus from Egypt, celebrate Shabbat to remember Hashem’s creation etc.
3. Chukim are decrees that may not be logical or even knowable but they are followed because they are the will of Hashem.

Interestingly,  a pentecostal preacher/cattle breeder named Clyde Lott contacted Israelis who were interested in rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. He proposed that they use his red angus cattle to breed red heifers. The Israelis used his livestock to breed a perfect red calf named Melody. Unfortunately, as she matured Melody sang off-key when she grew a white tail.

So what else is going on in today’s parsha? Miriam dies in the wilderness. The Jews complain, asking Moshe “Why did you make us leave Egypt to die in the wilderness?” Moshe strikes the rock for water and is condemned by Hashem to die in the wilderness. Aaron fails to stop Moshe from striking the rock and he also is condemned to die in the wilderness. Yet again the Jews complain about leaving Egypt. Angered, Hashem sends serpents to kill the ingrates, but Moshe uses a cadeusus to save them and to restore their faith in God’s directions.

Chukat marks a generational transition of the Jewish people. Born out of slavery in Egypt, delivered to Hashem at Sinai, banished to the wilderness for their idolatry and the spies lack of faith in Hashem, all of the older generation except Caleb and Joshua will die in the wilderness outside the the Promised Land. But the new generation is like the acorn that does not fall far from the prior generation’s tree.  Like the tree of life itself, the Torah and the challenge of faith in its commandments provides continuity throughout the generations of Hashem’s chosen people.

On a more personal note, faith makes sense to me. Just because I can’t find my glasses doesn’t mean they are lost and I should stop trying to find them. Or just because I have refrigerator blindness doesn’t mean that my favorite foods aren’t in there or that I should give them up. With the communal effort of my wife and family, I know that we can make things right. And so it is with our more serious, spiritual acts of faith.

It is no accident that parsha Chukat follows parsha Korach. Korach’s rebellious arguments were rational, but he lacked humility before Hashem. His logic did not fail him; it was his lack of faith in God’s will. Korach and his people were entirely consumed by fire or swallowed whole by the earth. No red heifer was needed because no bodies (or parts) were left to contaminate the Jewish people.

The Gemara notes that the deaths of Aaron and Miriam are juxtaposed to the decree of the red heifer. What does this mean? Just as the ashes of the red heifer cleanse  contamination caused by contact with the dead, so do the deaths of the tzaddikim atone for the sins of their people. When  tzaddikim are in our midst we feel closer to Hashem. Their holiness inspires us and their faith creates a stronger awareness of Hashem’s presence. When they depart from this world, their absence reminds  us to carry on our faith in and service to Hashem in their memory. I’m sure that Rabbi Goldfarb of blessed memory continues to inspire many members of our congregation.

We must have faith in Hashem and his commandments, just as God trusts us to follow Torah. But having faith and acting on it can be hard because faith often isn’t rational, scientific, modern or trendy. It may not even seem fair or relevant in the face of evil like the Holocaust. Our struggle with faith is an ancient one that goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve lost their faith in Hashem’s will with life altering consequences for all of humanity.

So what is faith and why are chukim important? Faith is doing God’s will, living a righteous life of Torah, even and especially when it is hard to do so. Observing chukim is important because it requires faith in Hashem’s will. By observing Hashem’s commandments we become more holy and we come to know Hashem better as we improve ourselves, our communities and so that we can be a shining example for all the peoples of our world.

But like the Zen master says, you can’t get fit by visualising push-ups. Similarly to be Jewish you have to do Judaism, even the chukim. Transcendence is in the doing, not the contemplation. I pray that each of us will do Hashem’s will and follow his commandments.

Shabbat Shalom

 

Grasshoppers and Giants

Parashat Shelach Drash from visiting Rabbi Norman Levin

 I want to thank you for inviting me to give the dvar Torah this Shabbat. This is my first time in Hawaiʻi and I am very pleased to be here. Feel free to give me your recommendations about where my brother and I should visit in our limited time here. Contradictory recommendations are welcome.

Today’s parashat Sh’lah L’kha is actually all about contradictory recommendations. It relates the well-known episode of the 12 scouts sent to Canaan by Moses. The Israelites are approaching their destination, and representatives from each of the twelve tribes are sent to reconnoiter the land. 

Moses instructs them as follows: “Go up into the hill country, and see what the land is, and whether the people in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many. And look to see if the land they dwell in is good or bad, whether the cities they dwell in are camps and strongholds, whether the land is rich or poor, whether there is wood in it or not.  (Num. 13: 17-20)

וַֽיַּעֲל֖וּ וַיָּתֻ֣רוּ אֶת־הָאָ֑רֶץ     

                  They went up and scouted the land.

Forty days later, they return. (Forty days – interesting; we’ve encountered something special happen over forty days before.) Of the twelve spies, ten are quite apprehensive about what they’ve seen. The Torah reading tells us that they acknowledge that the land is good and fruitful “but it is a land that devours its inhabitants, all the people that we saw there are men of tremendous size. There we saw the Nephilim, the Fallen Ones, and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.” (Num. 13: 32-33)

But two spies, Caleb and Joshua, repudiate that report and step forward to placate the Israelites’ fears, reminding the people of God’s promise to bring them to a land of Milk and Honey : 

“Listen up,” they say, “we can do this.”  

 הָאָ֗רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֨ר עָבַ֤רְנוּ בָהּ֙ לָת֣וּר אֹתָ֔הּ טוֹבָ֥ה הָאָ֖רֶץ מְאֹ֥ד מְאֹֽד׃ 

“The land that we scouted and explored is “tov m’od, m’od” – very very good.”

But, as we read, upon hearing those fearful reports, the Israelites panic!

 They kvetch to Moses and Aaron, The place is filled with giants! We don’t stand a chance against them! 

 “If only we had died in the land of Egypt!” they confront Moshe. “Or if only we might die in this wilderness! Why is the Lord taking us to that land to die by the sword?  Our wives and children will be carried off! We would have been better off back to Egypt!” (Num. 14:2-3) 

A rejection of freedom is, after all, a rejection of God and of His promise, and God is legitimately enraged. “Despite all the signs that I have performed in their midst, they still do not have faith in Me, they spurn me? I will strike them down and start over. I’ll start a new nation with you, Moses.” 

And so we have an existential crisis. One year into their wilderness journey, the Israelites are close to being obliterated. So it takes a certain incredible chutzpah, for Moses to start debating God. But Moses speaks up and says, “ if You destroy this entire nation, the Egyptians will hear the news, and the other nations will say, ‘It must be because ’ה was impotent, powerless, unable to bring these people into the land, and so You slaughtered them in the wilderness.” 

What’s Moshe’s argument? A shande fun deGoyim, Don’t do this terrible thing because What will the Gentiles think? “God, you’re reputation is on the line.” 

And then, Moshe reverts to a holier strategy: He appeals for mercy.  

“Let my Lord’s patience be great, as You Yourself declared, saying, 

יְהֹוָ֗ה אֶ֤רֶךְ אַפַּ֙יִם֙ וְרַב־חֶ֔סֶד נֹשֵׂ֥א עָוֺ֖ן וָפָ֑שַׁע וְנַקֵּה֙ לֹ֣א יְנַקֶּ֔ה פֹּקֵ֞ד עֲוֺ֤ן  יְהֹוָ֗ה  

“…slow to anger and abounding in kindness; forgiving iniquity and transgression; yet not remitting all punishment.. (Exod. 34.6–7).”  This is the verse we chant every Yom Kippur when we ask Adona-ai to forgive us for our failings.

God finally relents from destroying the entire People of Israel and declares, “I pardon, as you have asked,” but God recognizes, as do we, that Bnai Yisroel simply cannot escape the slave mentality. Adon-ai exacts a strict penalty: They said that they would prefer to die in the wilderness? OK then, they will die in the wilderness.

 The Israelites have had to survive an arduous life traipsing in the wilderness to a place unknown. The people that Moses had brought out of bondage had no stomach for adversity. They were always on the brink of turning back. 

So here we have this critical, phenomenal destiny-deciding saga.  It is about challenge, about fear, about anger. 

But there is one overriding theme in our parshah: Courage. This is a story about courage: courage on Moshe’s part; to argue, to say to God, what you are proposing is morally wrong. And courage on Caleb and Joshua’s part, to stand up against the masses. You can imagine the anxiety and tension that Joshua and Caleb felt, but they stuck to their convictions and said, We can do this. It is difficult but not impossible. 

 This is not just a story about an ancient tribe. It is our story. It is the very situation in which every one of us have found ourselves over and over again.

Each of us has had to face times when we needed to stand up for beliefs which we hold important, but which were unpopular or controversial. Think of an experience you had, where in the face of a crowd, or a boss, or a parent, you had the guts to stand up for a truth － maybe someone being bullied, or for a belief that might be ridiculed, or a word of bigotry that you refused to tolerate. Or think of a situation where you were too timid, too bashful, too sheepish, to stand up － I know I have had many of those moments. Too often, I joined the naysayers when I should have been Caleb, or Joshua. 

So many of the problems we encounter in the world seem overwhelming, complicated and insolvable. Often, social conditions and structures of power seem too deeply entrenched to change. We live as explorers, and we journey through the wilderness of distortions and fabrications; and when we encounter the Nephilim spewing falsehoods and lies, we hope we will have the courage to confront and defeat. 

Rabbi Melissa Crespy of Jewish Theological Seminary once said of this parashah, that we are 

ultimately immensely powerful, with the ability to bring to bear not only the power of ourselves, our community and our nation, but the promise of a God who compels us to seek justice. 

We may indeed be confronting giants, but we are not grasshoppers.

 

Irony and Role Reversal

August 2022

Parsha Balak Drash

by Fran Margulies

Our word irony comes from ancient Greek theater device erroneia. A comic character was an eiron, a faker who pretended to be dumb but was really smart. At end of the play the eiron triumphs over the loud-mouthed braggart who is actually stupid. So the characters in an ironic story switch roles: good guy becomes bad guy, or the reverse, or the winners and the losers switch, for comic (or serious) effect, to confound characters and delight the audience.

We at Sof feel this irony every shabbat when we open  Shacharit with Balaam’s sweet words of praise – this very Balaam whose job was to curse and destroy the Hebrews: “Mah tovu! Ohalecha Ya’akov, mishk’notekha Yisra’el:” How lovely are your tents, O Jacob! Your sanctuaries, O Israel! Indeed, on the third try, Balaam is told to look only at the edge of the Hebrews because they will be so multitudinous, so spread out! So this morning just for the fun of it, I will try to look for more ironies.

But first, Where are we? Let’s step back and take a  wider look at the setting. These events are happening  maybe 38 years after the Exodus. The Israelites are  almost there!, not quite, but close. To get to the banks of Jordan and cross over into the promised land of Canaan, they must move farther up North, and pass through Moav.

These approaching Israelites scare the Moav’s King Balak because they are second generation and they are strong now. The old, worried, frightened Exodus generation has died off; now they are winning more battles. So Balak is the worried one now. Will their passing through be overwhelming and destructive or not? He doesn’t know. He is scared. So he tries to defend  himself by calling in the professional seer Balaam to use magic and put a hex, a curse, on them. And what are the approaching Israelites thinking?  They are sort of worried too. But for different reasons. So close now to the Promised Land – but – will it really happen? Will Canaan in truth be as good for them as promised? Will they truly be able to settle down, expand, and grow as a people? A strong pep talk is needed!

So I consider our Balak/Balaam story, its placement in our narrative today, as a pep talk by God to this new generation, poised so near their goal: You will prosper there! Don’t worry! Good times ahead! I said I will bless you, and I will! A star —a scepter! —has come up from Israel. And I have indeed already blessed you. And only I,  God of all, heaven and earth, not any magician, only I have the power to control your destiny, to bless you or curse you. But in our drama, the players will try anyway, and that is, of course, ironic. But let’s look for more. The very names tease us with their similarity: Balaam/Balak! Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee! Let’s see now: which one is the king?

We have a seer who cannot see, but ends up seeing. We have God who first says “Don’t go” to Balaam, then says “Go!” So Balaam saddles his donkey and goes. But, switch again! God is angry at him for going and tries to stop him. Comes now the most famous irony; the role switch between Balaam and this donkey. The professional seer cannot see the blocking angel but the animal plodding along has perfect vision. Balaam strikes the donkey and splutters at her in dumb rage, while the donkey objects, quite cooley, in reasonable words. When is a seer not a seer? Who is the animal here? They ride on.

Roles reverse again in the next scene. And I thank Lorna Holmes for this insight! King Balak now plays the frustrated and fuming, clueless Balak while Balaam is the reasonable donkey, cooley explaining what he can and cannot do. And how about Balaam? Is he a good guy or a bad guy? He is the veritable Eiron. In the first scene he appears shallow, worldly, seduced by all the money and goodies that the King dangles in front of him. By the end, he is revealed as a vessel of divine inspiration, as open as a true prophet to God’s words and spirit and a veritable fountain of elegant poetry.

One more appeal – and fun – of the story is that the ironic reversals come in threes like familiar folk tales: think of the three little pigs, or Goldilocks and the three bears. Balaam strikes his donkey three times; Balak sets up three altars, and the gotcha comes on the third time. I leave you with a question. In the midst of Balaam’s vision of a prosperous Israel, he says we will be a people set apart. Is that an ironic prediction? It has certainly come true, but has it been a good – or a bad thing? Shabbat Shalom.

 

Memory, Forgetting, and Accuracy

September 2022

Drash on Va’etchanan

by  Alex Golub

There’s an old joke about a guy who is sent to prison. He’s terrified to be there and nervously, he sits down with some of the oldest convicts to try to blend in. “18” says one of them, and they all laugh. “23” says another and they all crack up again. “What’s going on?” Asks the new prisoner. “We’ve been telling these jokes for so long we memorized them” says one of the old timers. “Oh really?” says the new guy. He’s real eager to fit in, so he says “9.” No one laughs. Instead, all of the old-timers stare daggers at him. “What did I do?” he asks, panicked. One of the old timers says: “You told it wrong.”

Memory is a funny thing. Nothing illustrates this better than our parshah today. On the one hand, Ve’etchanan tells us that we must remember the commandments and that we cannot change them. “Do not forget the things you saw with your own eyes” (Deuteronomy 4:9), it says. “Take care, then, not to forget the covenant” (Deuteronomy 4:23). It tells us to “take care not to forget” (Deuteronomy 6:12). “You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it” (Deuteronomy 4:2). “Do not turn aside to the right or to the left” (Deuteronomy 6:30). So we must remember the law and we must not change it. That’s the one hand.

But then on the other hand, when Va’etchanan repeats the ten commandments, it isn’t the same ten commandments as in Shmot! In Shmot we are told to ‘remember’ shabbat. In Vaetchanan we are told to ‘observe’ it. Vaetchanan also adds the phrase “as the lord your God has commanded you”. The command to honor your father and mother has been sweetened to include the incentive that if you do so “you may long endure and you may fare well”. In Shmot the sabbath is supposed to memorialize God’s day of rest, in Vaetchanan it is supposed to memorialize the exodus. A bunch of ‘ands’ have been added to the beginnings of commandments seven through ten. In Shmot we are told not to covet our neighbor’s house or his wife. In Vaetchanan we are told not to covet our neighbor’s wife or his house. So we must remember the laws and cannot change them but… we have two versions of the ten commandments? What’s up with that?

I was thinking about this conundrum this week while also listening to news coverage of the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Guadalcanal, the World War II battle in the Solomon Islands that stopped the Japanese advance in the Pacific. Mindful of China’s growing influence in the Pacific, the US pulled out all the stops for the commemoration, flying several dignitaries to the Solomons, including Cindy Sherman, our deputy secretary of state, and Ambassador Caroline Kennedy.

The event was personal for Sherman because her father was wounded in the battle. “This is the dreadful cost of war,” Sherman said at the commemoration. “Not only blood and treasure but human souls. As we have lost the Guadalcanal generation to the passage of time we have seen some around the world who seem to have forgotten the awful lessons learned here.”

The trip was even more personal for Caroline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s daughter. She met the descendants of  Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, the two Solomon Islanders who helped save her father when his PT boat was sunk by the Japanese. She gave them a replica of the coconut shell which JFK carved his location on, and which he gave to Eroni and Biuku to take to the military authorities. The original coconut shell is still in the JFK Presidential library. JFK had it covered in plastic and used it as a paperweight — it was on his desk in the oval office on the day he was assassinated.

 Memory, forgetting, and accurate transmission are at the center of these commemorations as much as they are in Parshah Va’etchanan. You can’t remember something that didn’t happen to you. Sherman is wrong to say that our current generation has forgotten the lesson of Guadalcanal — none of us were there. We cannot remember Sinai today. Forgetting is the default in life. It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of teaching to transmit memory from one generation to the next. Like joke number 9 being told wrong, or a replica of a coconut shell covered in plastic, what our children learn from us is always slightly different from what we are trying to teach them. Duplicates and copies proliferate endlessly. If you want, you can go to the store in the JFK presidential library and museum and purchase your own replica of JFK’s coconut shell for only seventy five dollars. Va’etchanan teaches us that we must reconcile our desire for perfect transmission with a world in transmission will never be perfect.

Of course, we shouldn’t be too content with errors in transmission. When I was in the Solomon Islands, every man I met over the age of sixty confidently informed me that he personally had saved John F. Kennedy. That can’t be right. Luckily, we have writing: to create things that do not change. The Torah itself does not change — we know that its message has remained the same across the centuries. The Torah is a coconut shell covered in plastic, sitting on the president’s desk. But here is the fascinating thing: by giving us two versions of the ten commandments, it unfailingly and permanently shows us that we will always change. Vaetchanan teaches us that we live in a world where drifts in memory are inevitable — even Moses does it. It teaches us that we should not let our desire for perfect transmission make us inflexible. A wise man once said: We are all ancestors in training. What this parshah encourages us to do is to be good teachers. We cannot blame people for not knowing things they haven’t lived through. It’s not fair to blame people for having bad teachers. Instead, we must recognize that remembering requires teaching, and what we choose to teach our students and children is a reflection of our values, culture, and history. They will never perfectly or completely learn the lesson we are teaching, because that is not how teaching works. Instead, we should try to live with the fact that what they make of our memories will always ultimately be up to them. Shabbat shalom.

 

For more information on the Guadalcanal Commemoration:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/472418/their-homes-were-turned-into-a-battlefield-80th-anniversary-of-guadalcanal-campaign

 

Hear and Remember

September 2022

ʻEkev Drash by Sandra Z. Armstrong

The great joy of Shabbat carries through every day until the time comes when we open up the Torah and the words flow through us. In ʻEkev, Moses stresses the importance of “remembering” to his people, Israel. For instance: 7:18 “You shall always remember,” 8:2 “Remember the long way,” 8:14 “Take care lest you forget,” 8:18 “Therefore remember God,” 8:19 “It will come to pass, if you should nevertheless forget,” and 9:7 “Remember, never forget.” Then in our haftarah today, Isaiah reiterates the need to keep our covenantal relationship with God. Zion says: “The Lord has forsaken me, My Lord has forgotten me. Can a woman forget her baby? Or disown the child of her womb? Though she might forget, I never could forget you. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. Your walls are ever before Me.” God has not forgotten. Yet the secret of keeping the relationship alive is a two way open channel of remembrance. To achieve this purpose, rabbis designed the B’racha (blessings), an ingenious invention of remembrance – when we sit, when we lie down, when we get up, and when we eat. We remember our mothers, our fathers, our family members and friends by lighting memorial candles at their yahrzeit. We have weekly reminders of who came before us. Reading and studying the weekly parsha in the Torah takes you into the silent, unspoken world of heaven while still being on earth. Whether or not our people followed the words of Moshe, after 5,000 years, we survived and so has our weekly Torah reading. Imprinted in our makeup and our DNA these words expressed by Moshe guide us into every future generation.

אלֹהיךָ–  לבבךָ  –נפשיךָ  –מְאֹדֶךָ  – ביתיךָ

The Shema is extended this week into an entire parsha of ʻEkev as spoken by Moshe. The active voice of the Shema “Hear” is an aerobic activity for Jews. Throughout this parsha, words are personalized with the poetic -kha, your: eloheykha, your God, Levakha your heart, nafshekha, your soul, m’odehkha, your might, baytekha, your house. ʻEkev translates as obey, heed…and the poetry within the Hebrew language is a symphony that touches our hearts. Western culture is caught up in the idea of “seeing” as knowing. Devarim 4:12 addresses this – “The Lord spoke to you out of the fire.You heard the sound of words, but you saw no image: there was only a voice”. Speaking and listening are forms of engagement that create a relationship. The Hebrew word for knowledge is daat, which implies involvement, closeness, intimacy . Listening to a person’s feelings is of utmost importance as God listens to us. Listening is a profoundly spiritual act and sometimes even painful. It is the greatest gift that we can give to a fellow human being.

Recently I had a procedure done at the Windward Surgery Center at Castle Hospital in Kailua. I can’t say enough wonderful words about this staff of nurses, aides and doctors. I absorbed what I learned from studying ʻEkev and applied it to my experience. As I lay in a hospital bed, I listened to nurses call everyone from the day before and ask “How are you doing” and “Could we have done anything better for you?”  I heard it over and over again. The kindness and the laughter that went between the patients on the phone and the two nurses was positively uplifting. Two other nurses came by, one to help me before the procedure and one after. Both times, I asked them, “How are you doing? What is your life like being a nurse?” And then I listened intently and learned a lot. Sometimes nurses and aides in hospitals could be overlooked but the truth of the matter is, every person benefits from sharing themselves with others and all we have to do is listen.

 

Tzedek

October 2022

Shoftim Drash By Marlene Booth & Avi Soifer

Marlene: The portion of the Torah I read today emphasizes the need to have two witnesses in a criminal case.  No conviction can be based on the testimony of a single witness.  There must be testimony by two or more witnesses. Fran’s son, Rabbi Natan Margalit, in his wonderfully thought-provoking book, The Pearl and the Flame, writes beautifully about the individual and our roles in a minyan of obligation and satisfaction. We come together as a minyan, a term Rabbi Margalit explores and describes as central to Jewish life. He declares: “We find our own personal wholeness within our interdependence with others.”

In other words, the minyan functions to link and expand the holiness and wholeness of each of us with the holiness and wholeness of the group.  It raises us up together.

Avi: In an important sense, this connection recapitulates the intertwining of procedure and substance in seeking justice, which this parsha famously and emphatically commands us to do: Tzedek, Tzedek terdof. (Deut. 16:20). As Elliott Dorf points out in “Justice,” his excellent essay near the back of our Eitz Hayim:  “The Torah indicates its awareness that [procedure and substance] are inextricably intertwined, that procedure affects substance and substance demands certain procedural rules” (1427). By contrast, Thomas Reed Powell, a somewhat sardonic law professor, wrote long ago: “If you can think about two things inextricably linked to one another, and think about only one of them,, then you are thinking like a lawyer.” And Grant Gilmore, another late, great law professor, ended his The Ages of American Law this way: “The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”

A discussion of these claims must await another day. Yet last June our current Supreme Court insisted  that procedure and substance must be clearly separated. In Dobbs (2022), the decision that overruled Roe v. Wade (1973), the crux of Justice Alito’s majority opinion was rejection of a constitutional doctrine called substantive due process. That, too, is for another time.

The entire Shoftim parsha emphasizes the role of communal norms and procedures, as Marlene just pointed out. For example, bearing false witness is prohibited in both of the Torah’s versions of the Ten Commandments: and the community will judge—and perhaps stone to death—a false witness in a capital case. Further, once a verdict is announced, one should not “deviate… to the right. Nonetheless,  rabbis and scholars, have long recognized that one can be “a scoundrel within the four corners of the law.” (1428)

For example, judges are instructed to judge as does God, and God “shows no favor and takes no bribes.” (But aren’t our communal prayers and pleas during the High Holidays meant as bribes to receive long life, forgiveness, etc.) On the other hand, directly following the exhortation to judge evenhandedly like God is the following: “but [God] upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deut. 10: 17-19]

The apparent tension here mitigated, at least somewhat, if we recognize that the law of the written Torah is not the only source of Jewish law. We also accept the oral Torah and even, as Rabbi Goldfarb delighted to point out, minhag (custom) as legitimate sources. In fact, in some situations , even a communal custom can override some rules of the Torah. Like other portions of the Torah, Shoftim emphasizes additional paradoxes and striking gaps between “the law in the books and the law in action.”

Indeed, we count on the community to make sure, for example, that a parent, seeking to stone to death a rebellious teenager, never actually does so. Shoftim’s instruction: “Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, and foot for foot” (Deut. 19-21) states an important restorative justice principle, but the rabbis insist that its retributive focus has always been countered by equitable communal norms.

As Bernice famously replied when, as the President of our congregation, a caller phoned and asked if we still stone homosexuals, “I’m so sorry. We haven’t the facilities for that.”

Marlene:

Avi and I are going to be doing a different kind of raising up ourselves.

This is our final shabbat before we leave for the fall semester to join our daughter Amira, her husband Al, and our grandson Sam, to welcome the birth later this month, b’sha’a tova, as we say, of our new granddaughter.  We will miss you all, but we will take with us a piece of our minyan, our holiness and wholeness, that makes us whole each shabbat.

As a postscript, I had a dream the other night that involved Amy/Naomi.  I don’t remember the story of the dream, but I remember that at one point, several people were scrambling to get to a litter of newborn kittens.  Amy was among them, and the final image of her I had as I woke up was of Amy sitting in an easy chair, very contentedly petting a little kitten.

 

Divine Justice & Free Will

October 2022

Reʻeh Drash by Howard Streicher

Reʻeh, “see,” is the longest parsha with the most words in the book of words (Devarim) 7442 letters, 1932 Hebrew words. 

To begin the parsha, God appears to offer a clear choice placing both blessing and curse before the Israelites. They are taught that blessing will come through the observance of God’s laws and curses for doing what is abhorrent.  “Behold, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.”  Maimonides in Mishna Torah states it is the pillar on which the Torah and the commandments affirm divine justice based on free will to make the choice and on communal responsibility. The commands are given in both the singular and plural (a common theme in Deut., eg, shema). The consequences for failure are so dire that knowing how to follow the rules becomes an existential necessity. And you cannot make up or interpret your own rules – God says – as you did before entering the land. As a consequence, you need a strong central authority to create interpret and enforce the rules to follow in detail—– and maybe that is the idea– to create a cohesive community without an authority ruling arbitrarily by fear or force. And over the centuries perhaps we have adapted this idea to substitute prayer, ritual, charity, and moral behavior to replace altars, sacrifices, and red heifers to ensure our sense of existential wellbeing.  But if we believe that these consequences are based on an omniscient supernatural justice rather than conscience who wouldn’t want to choose life by obeying God to the letter? On the other hand, we all act as though we do have a choice, but it is “to our own self be true” which determines our sense of right and wrong.   

In the modern world I don’t do much to incur curses or garner blessings in any biblical sense. I haven’t set up any pillars nor given tithes or remitted debt, but I also haven’t donated to the sons of Moloch nor seethed any kids recently. So where does this leave us in trying to understand what controls our fate in a complex world.  In modern terms perhaps rather than famine, will we be wiped out by CoViD and tormented by politics or enjoy our health with low inflation and a rising stock market? 

I think we, especially in the conservative movement, are caught between the more ancient orthodox view of following the established rules strictly as the way to obey God and the reformed theology which essentially allows each individual his or her choice in observing these rules. The ideas created by reform movements — idealizing humanity, keeping the theme of individual responsibility without a personal living God who rules the world, are embodied in a belief that present generations have a higher and better understanding of divine will that can and should change and refashion religious precepts and practices. 

This is the fault line that underlies the split perhaps among Jewish sects. Explaining how contradictions can be resolved, Maimonides said that just as God desired that fire rises upward, water descends downward. Sounds surprisingly like Aristotelian physics. It leaves little room for human creativity or progress in accepting things as they appear to be natural as God’s will. Perhaps Isaiah gave us a better perspective– Isaiah 55:8 says, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways My ways.”  (Of course, this is the great part of doing a drash – you can pick and choose)

So, as I see the parsha scene laid out right in front of us today (or every third year): Curses on Mount Ebal to the left and Blessings on Mount Gerizim on the right, I am reminded of the instruction —   do not deviate to the left or the right.  On the right, 5 tribes on Mount Gerizim recite blessings embodying our guiding principles and 5 on the left on Mount Ebal representing perhaps not so much evil as the necessary creative force, the yesha rah that allows us individually to imagine, to create, to visualize what has not been seen before (and so the command at the start is to see rather than hear and obey) enjoins us to be strong and have courage 

“Do not turn to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go.”  The way into the promised land is to use imagination and creativity to better understand and control ourselves, but at the same time keep in mind the guiding ritual and principles that have kept us together for centuries yet to come.  

 

The Blessings of Yaʻakov

December 2022

Toldot Drash By Alexander Fellman

There’s a story I like. A Jew was found on a deserted island. He’d made quite a time of his prison there, building himself a house, a street, and two synagogues. “I go to that shul every day to pray,” he said, pointing at one. “When do you use the other?” His rescuers asked. “That one? I wouldn’t be caught dead in that shul!”

We are a people who love to argue. And most of the time, who we love to argue with is each other. But at the end of the day, we are all part of one big messed up family. A Jew is a Jew.

And Esau, for all his faults, is a Jew. Now, hold on. What do I mean by calling him, of all people, a Jew? Just that. He was born the legitimate son of Yitzhak Avinu and Rivka Imeinu, and unlike Yitzhak’s brothers there was never a question of his place in our company until centuries after his death. A good Jew? Nu, but still a Jew. The sages say that he sits in Gan Eden with his brother, father and grandfather, even if there’s some dispute on what becomes of him later. Ishmael, and Keturah’s sons, have never been so counted.

Two weeks ago, in Parsha Toldot, we watched our ancestor Yakov steal his brother’s blessings, having already stolen his birthright. He was, we are told, unworthy of them. And so he was. He is the prototype for many Jews in our history given the opportunity for greatness who have it stripped from them for their sins. That we don’t know the details of Esau’s sins does not mean that they were not the equal in depravity of Saul Hamelech or the kings in the north. But we don’t deny their Judaism, as much as we’d like to. So, Jew he is, and sinner he was, and cast out he was, and remained, and when it was all over and done with Yitzhak Avinu didn’t seem too heartbroken, did he? He blesses Yakov with all that is good, and tells Esau that at some point he will be freed from his second place. But not to take back his birthright, simply to stand besides his brother. And so it will be, and so it was.

In this week’s Parsha, we see that Yakov takes possession of his father’s property as the heir, with Esau taking only what he had earned of his own. Yakov then takes ownership of the land of their fathers, while Esau goes across the river to the lands that would be home to his descendants, the land of Edom. At the end, the list of Esau’s descendants are given, and the sages often draw attention to the presence in their midst of Amalek. Amalek is singled out because, unlike most of the rest of our kin, his descendants attack our people on their way to the land of Canaan out of sheer spite. And for this they were cursed. But they began cursed, too. They are excluded, at the end of this parsha, from the tribes of Edom, the legitimate descendants of Esau.

What our sages don’t often do is talk about what happened to the rest of the Edomites. There’s a very interesting answer to that, and it isn’t what the sages say. Esau was no more the ancestor of the Romans, save in the most metaphorical of ways, than he was the ancestor of the Chinese. We know who the Edomites were then, and we know who they are now. Look around you. To the left, to the right; We are the Edomites, as we are Israelites. Indeed, the last Kings of Judea were descended as much from Esau as from Yakov. How is this?

The lands across the river from Israel, or in the south, the modern Negev, have never been pleasant or comfortable. It’s a hard living there, and the Edomites found it growing more and more intolerable as time went on and the climate grew worse. Their cousins, our cousins, the Ishmaelites, were more hardened to the desert and gradually began to move up, and the Edomites began to return to their ancestral home. There was space for them; As the kings of Judah fought war after war with Assyria and Babylon and Egypt, the lands in the south around Beersheva grew depopulated. Nature, and people, abhor a vacuum. The people of Judah moved out, willingly or not, and the Edomites moved in, willingly or not.

When the Prophet and our people returned from the Babylonian captivity, they reestablished themselves around Jerusalem. Our cousins were left to their own places in the south and their own business, while we concentrated on rebuilding the temple. There was peace in the land. Except for all the times there wasn’t, and they largely kept themselves out of that, despite our prophets occasionally slandering them with the crimes of others. They even tried their best to keep out of our struggles with the Greeks. We all know how that ended for us, eventually. If you don’t, the coming holiday is a good time for you to learn. We never talk about how it ended for them.

It isn’t what I, or our sages, call our finest hour. As I say, we don’t talk about it. But it took longer to drive the Greeks out than we tend to talk about, and they weren’t so much driven out as they decided to cut their losses, and one of the consequences of them doing so was that suddenly for the first time in centuries Jews ruled much of Judea. Including the part where the Edomites were busy keeping to themselves and worshiping their, or our, God in their own way.

For the first, and so far as I know only, time in our history a leader of the Jews decided that this would not do. Yohannan the High Priest, known to history as John Hyrcanus, marched south and gave the Edomites, or the Idumeans as the Romans and Greeks called them, an option. They could convert, or they could leave, or they could die. They chose to convert. And as converts, a Jew is a Jew. With the exception of the children of Amalek, who had always been marked out as apart even from their kin, the descendants of Esau returned to the faith of their fathers. Don’t ask me what happened to the Amalekites; we lost track. But the rest of them joined Israel. Or, rather, rejoined.

Fittingly for the season, Herod the Great, Herod the Idumean, was one of their descendants. Whatever our sages thought of him at the time and since, he always considered himself both a Jewish King and King of the Jews. And we’re happy enough with him when it suits us. Indeed, all the surviving remnants of the Second Temple, including the Kotel, the western wall, were built by his men under the direction of his priests. That’s the mark of a Jewish leader, by my reckoning. That we, his co-religionists, can curse his name and bless it at the same time.

And it was his line, mingled with the Hasmoneans, that contained the last Jews to rule over the land of Israel until 1949. And when we went on our last exile, they came with us; and when we returned, so did they. Brothers by brothers. And as no one knows the tribes beyond Levi, none know a convert as anything besides a Jew.

Yitzhak’s blessings, then, were fulfilled. And may it be Hashem’s will that as our people lived to see the blessings of Yitzhak come true, that we live to see the blessings of Yakov Avinu come true and the exiles be gathered, and those of Avraham Avinu, and there be peace between us and all our kin, and we be numbered as the stars in the sky, and of the prophet: That nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war anymore.

Good Shabbos.