Friday, July 26, 2019

Parashat Pinchas


            Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion contains one of my favorite stories of early female empowerment. In Parashat Pinchas, the daughters of Tzelafchad advocate for themselves to inherit their father’s legacy, including the parcel of the Promised Land he would have settled when the People of Israel enter the land. Normally, this inheritance would be only for sons, but leaving none Tzelafechad’s legacy was up in the air. The daughters ask Moses, who asks God, for guidance, and are granted their rightful inheritance.  
            The Yalkut Shimoni, a book of medieval Midrash, offers the commentary, “When the daughters of Tzelafchad heard that the land was being divided among the tribes but not among the women, they convened to discuss the matter. They said: G‑d’s mercy and compassion is not like the compassion of man. Mankind favors men over women. G‑d is not like that; His compassion extends to men and women alike.”
            This teaching reminds us that God has created all of humanity in the Divine image, with inherent worth, and the right to live with dignity equal to that of all others. As humans, we often fail to see this. We forget, we miss the mark, we progress slowly and we never seem to reach our holy potential of taking care of our fellow man. But, it is our job as humans to be ever-striving to reach a Divine level of compassion, to remember to see people as God does: equal and inherently worthwhile.
            Just a few verses after the story of the daughters of Tzelafchad, Moses asks God to pick the leader that will replace him. Rashi offers his drash on this: “So said Moses to G‑d: ‘Master of the universe! You know the soul of each and every individual; You know that no two are alike. Appoint for them a leader who can relate to each and every one of them in accordance with his individual spirit.’”
            An important element to seeing the Divine spark in each person is being able to meet them where they are, to be open to dialogue and discourse, to be willing to be vulnerable and to understand the vulnerability of others. This is of course a particularly important in a person with authority, as Moses points out. But we all have the capabilities of being leaders in our own rights, and so we all need to be willing to embody this spirit of openness. We all have the power to connect with one another, to see the inherent worth of each and every person, and to lead our peers by example toward a more equal and kinder world. May we each take these opportunities each time they arise, and step into our own leadership roles with compassion and vision for a brighter future. Amen and Shabbat Shalom!

Friday, July 19, 2019

Parashat Balak and the 17th of Tammuz


Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Balak, a wild story about a talking donkey, angels, false prophets turned to true ones, and a curse that becomes a blessing. This Shabbat is also the 17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz. Though traditional observance of this fast day is moved to after Shabbat so as not to decrease the peace and joy of the Sabbath, we are told that this is the date on which five calamities befell the Jewish people: Moses broke the two tablets of stone on Mount Sinai; the daily tamid offering ceased to be brought; during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the city walls were breached (proceeding to the destruction of the Second Temple); prior to Bar Kokhba's revolt, Roman military leader Apostomus burned a Torah scroll; an idol was erected in the Temple. This date begins the three weeks of mourning that lead up to Tisha B’Av, the date on which both Temples were destroyed by the Babylonians and the Romans, on which the Bar Kokhba revolt was fully crushed, on which the Jews were expelled from medieval England, and on which the Final Solution was determined in Wannsee.
Now, these are all terrible things, and most of them had lasting effects on the Jewish people. The most egregious atrocities were curses brought upon us by “enemy” nations. Unlike in the story of the prophet Balaam in this week’s Torah portion, these aggressors were not thwarted in time, and they were successful in bringing seeming ruin to the people. And yet, we survived. We thrived. And we will outlive all those who seek to destroy us.
When the non-Israelite prophet Balaam seeks to curse the Israelites on behalf of the Moabite king Balak, he is instead moved by the spirit of the Lord to speak the words that become the start to our Mah Tovu prayer: How lovely are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel. His curses were literally turned into blessings. We, the Jewish people, have managed to make some of the tragedies that have befallen us into blessings as well. We were slaves in Egypt and now we have the beautiful festival of Passover. We survived the attempted genocide of ancient Persia and now we have the feast of frivolity, Purim. The Babylonians destroyed our First Temple, but our ancestors and prophets maintained their Judaism in exile as best they could, and eventually built a second one. The Romans destroyed that one too, and we created synagogues, wrote the Talmud, and instituted rabbinic Judaism and prayers in lieu of sacrifices. Europe forced conversions, terrorized our communities, and kicked us out of nearly every country in the continent, so we picked up and formed new communities: in the Pale of Settlement, in the Holy Land, in the New World. We have known at least since the 3rd century CE that wherever we go, that is our homeland, that we are a resilient people who will form sacred communities wherever we find ourselves.
I often say, when we sing Mah Tovu, that what makes the tents of the Israelites lovely, what makes our synagogues a blessing, isn’t just the physical location and excellent design of the building, but the people in it. The love, the spirituality, the kinship that fills the space, that is what makes our houses of worship and meeting places beautiful and allows us build up a world of justice and love that helps us survive through difficult times. Even as we argue through our differences as Jews tend to do, may we all work to build unity and strength with our wider community and turn curses into blessings for our people, and for the world. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

Friday, July 12, 2019

Parashat Chukat


            Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Chukat, focuses a lot on water: how it nourishes, how it purifies, how it can be monetized, how it can be withheld. It starts out with ritual laws commanding a cleansing done with “living waters” after a person has come into contact with a corpse. It continues with the narrative of the wells drying up after Miriam’s death, and the plight of a thirsty people wandering through a desert. The arguable climax of this part of the narrative is the infamous tale of God telling Moses to speak to a rock that water may spring forth, but instead he strikes the rock – twice – and speaks condescendingly to the thirsty Children of Israel as he does so. As a result, he is forbidden from entering the Holy Land. The parasha continues on from there about the attempts to enter the Land, and finding barriers from the people already living there. Moses promises them that they will not drink from the wells (which may mean, “we will not take your resources”, or some rabbis argue may mean “we will not drink from our own well, but promise to buy sustenance from you and support your local economy”). Yet, they are denied and forced into violent conflict and more wandering as they seek to enter into their Promised Land. 

            On the matter of the “living waters,” the Chassidic Masters say, “In other words, a spring which runs dry once in seven years is considered ‘false’ even when there is water flowing in it. This is lesson in the meaning of truth: something which exists under certain circumstances but ceases under other circumstances is not ‘true,’ even when it does exist.” The flip side of this also is that some things are still true even when we cannot see them, or try to ignore their reality. In reading this this commentary, I was reminding of the anonymous Holocaust-adjacent poem, “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining, I believe in love even when feeling it not, I believe in God even when God is silent.” Goodness, light, love, and the Divine spirit are present even when we feel at our lowest, and unfortunately, injustice, darkness, and brokenness are present in the world even when we try to look away from it. 

            On the matter of the attempts to enter the Holy Land and being met with resistance, Rabbi Shai Held reminds us that the main lesson of the Torah is, “Be kind to the stranger for you were strangers.” Although we most often hear this in connection with the experiences of Egypt, it is true here too as our people seek to resettle in the land that has been always been their Promised Land, a piece of their familial tales. We remember to be kind to travelers, for as travelers our lives were made even more difficult than need be. 
            Our country is currently facing a crisis with immigration. Due to many instabilities throughout the world, some of which our own foreign policies have contributed to, we have seen an increase in refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, people seeking safety in these lands sometimes without the access to the proper channels of legal resettlement. As Jews with a long history and varied cultural memory of being wanderers, refugees, exiles, outsiders in lands we thought of as part of our own, it is our responsibility to acknowledge the injustices happening now. In some of the detention centers, which primarily and racially target Central and South American immigrants, people are being denied, among other basic human necessities, fresh waters. There are no “living waters” with which to cleanse, and in some cases, people have reported being told to drink out of the toilet as drinking water is withheld. These camps are just one aspect of the wider concerns of American hospitality to immigrants and Jewish values of justice and truth-telling. They happen to be very distressing to me, but there are so many areas to get involved with these wider issues. We must use our cultural memories as Jews to be a teaching tool, to learn from history, face the dark truths we’d rather pretend don’t exist, and do what we can to change the situation going forward. 
            Thankfully, at Ner Shalom, we are already doing this as a community. We have signed our Good Neighbor partnership, and just this week had a training with the staff liaison at Lutheran Social Services. We will be settling a refugee family from Afghanistan, showing the hospitality that is denied to the Israelites in this week’s Torah portion, and bringing the Divine light and love of Judaism into the holy work of welcoming the strangers. If you weren’t able to attend the training, I hope you will still find ways to plug in and help. It is a big task we as a community have taken on, but with the help of our own Good Neighbors at Dar al Noor, and with all hands on deck from within Ner Shalom, it won’t be too much work for any of us to accomplish. 
            This Shabbat, may you feel the sunshine on your skin, have plenty of water to cool you down and slake your thirst in the hot sun, may you feel the love of community, the friendliness of strangers, and may you share your Divine Spark with the world. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.