SEEING, HEARING, AND KNOWING
Thoughts for Parashat Miketz 5770
Our 2nd-year Triennial reading for Parashat Miketz begins with a reversal of fortunes for the people of Egypt. Seven years of plenty have expired, inaugurating the seven years of famine foretold by Joseph. Joseph has engineered a successful plan to stockpile grain during the years of plenty and to ration the food during the famine.
In Chapter 42, verse 1, we read: “Jacob saw that there was food in Egypt.”
RaSHI asks: “How did Jacob see it?” i.e., Jacob lives in Canaan! How could he possibly see what was happening in Egypt?
RaSHI’s answer: “It must mean that he didn’t see, but hear [about it], because it says [in the next verse], ‘I have heard that there is food for sale in Egypt.’”
(RaSHI then goes on in a folkloric way, explaining that the word “saw” implies that Jacob experienced a semi-prophetic vision leading him to place his hope in Egypt.)
However, RaSHI’s first comment on this verse highlights important differences between the knowledge we derive from seeing and the knowledge we derive from hearing.
Knowledge derived from seeing is a direct kind of understanding. We call this kind of learner an “eyewitness.” One directly experiences an event and then formulates conclusions.
Knowledge derived from hearing usually comes to a person second-hand. We sometimes call this knowledge “hearsay.”
What is the source of our knowledge? Think of mail, e-mail, the Internet, the news, radio, television…. How do we know which transmitter of knowledge is most reliable? Do we run the risk of internalizing misinformation if we rely too much on “hearing” and not enough on “seeing?” Alternatively, do we limit ourselves too much if we insist that only “seeing is believing?”
Which source of knowledge do you prefer? Or are both necessary?
I won’t be seeing you at Torah study this Shabbat—I’ll be preparing for my imminent departure—but I have already experienced a semi-prophetic vision that you will be hard at work contemplating these questions. Rabbi Jacobs and/or Rabbi Sklar will join Torah study this Saturday to share the learning with you.
Happy Studying!
Rabbi Jonathan Blake
VAYISHLACH 5770
D'var Torah delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, 12.04.09
Rabbi Jonathan Blake
A familiar Jewish practice appears for the first time in this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach: a gravestone is dedicated. While traveling together, Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel dies in childbirth. Jacob does not carry her body all the way to Hebron, to the Cave of Machpelah, the family burial plot. Instead, he buries her en route and sets up a stone to mark the place forever.
From Jacob’s time to our own, proper burial of our dead has remained a paramount concern. Throughout history, whenever a Jewish community would settle in a new location, even before purchasing real estate for a synagogue, its first priority would be to secure land for a cemetery and to organize members of a Chevra Kadisha, a sacred society of volunteers who assist in the rituals of guarding, washing, and dressing the dead. (As a matter of fact, Rabbi Jacobs’ own Executive Assistant, Amy Rossberg, who observes Judaism in a Modern Orthodox congregation, (has) served on her local Chevra Kadisha for years.)
Around one year after a death, we, like Jacob, dedicate a gravestone at a service called an “unveiling,” marking the formal conclusion to mourning. But as with most Jewish practices, a Rabbinic debate surrounds the use of gravestones. Commenting on the pillar Jacob sets up for Rachel, the Mishna (Shekalim 2:5) says, “Any surplus money [collected in order to pay for the burial] of a dead person [must be used] to [help] his [or her] heirs,” and not, presumably, to buy an expensive headstone. Rabbi Meir proposed that “Any surplus of money [collected to pay for the burial of a dead person] should be left over until Elijah comes,” Elijah’s arrival announcing the Messianic Era; in other words, until the end of time; in other words, we shouldn’t spend it at all. Rabbi Nathan believed that the leftover money “should be used to build a permanent marker or monument [Heb. nefesh] over a person’s grave”; but Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel taught that “We [Jewish people] do not erect monuments [even] for the righteous; their words serve as their everlasting memorial” (Bereshit Rabbah 82:10).
It seems to me that this interesting little debate says so much about the Jewish way of looking at the world, not just in how we approach the rituals of death but in how we approach the meaning of life. For in this passage we see a common practice, the setting up of a stone over a person’s grave, called into question on the grounds that what really endures exists not in the realm of the physical--what we can see or touch--but in the realm of the spiritual: a person’s words, reputation, teachings, deeds. Any of us who have endured the death of cherished people have come to realize that their truest monuments reside not in cemeteries but in the way they touched our lives with beauty and simplicity, with words that still speak to us, with deeds that changed our lives, and maybe even the world, for the better.
What’s more, the priority given to the invisible, the spiritual dimension of life over the physical dimension, displays itself in so many Jewish stories. Beginning with Abraham, who, legend says, shattered his father’s idols; to Jacob, who (also in Parashat Vayishlach) managed to wrestle a blessing from a mystery messenger to become Yisra’el, the namesake of our people; to Moses, who demanded of God, “Show me Your Face!” but who was told to look the other way, because while God’s face cannot be seen, God’s goodness can be felt; to the Ten Commandments, the second of which forbids graven images, Judaism has time and again underscored the invisible, spiritual dimension of life. Time and again, our religion has taught that what really matters is not so much what our five senses can detect but what our heart and mind and soul can perceive.
Jewish law begins as a set of tablets, a one-of-a-kind object, words literally engraved in stone, which later becomes a Torah scroll, just ink on parchment, which eventually leads to “V’hayu ha-devarim ha-eileh asher Anochi metzavecha ha-yom, al le-vavecha” – “These words which I have commanded you this day, shall be upon your heart.” That’s how our religion evolved: from stone to parchment to teachings that live on in the heart, from visible artifact to invisible idea. When we parade the Torah around our congregation with outstretched arms and affectionate kisses, we adore not the scroll itself nor its silver ornaments, but its eternal message.
A week from tonight we will light one candle to announce the arrival of Chanukah. More than any other observance, Chanukah shows us that Judaism starts with the physical but inevitably moves toward the spiritual. Originally Chanukah commemorated a military victory and the rededication of a physical place, the Temple in Jerusalem which the Maccabees captured from the Syrian Greeks after a long, bloody war. The Maccabean family managed to hold onto that temple, ruling as kings and priests of Israel for more than a century. But eventually the Temple was taken again, this time by the Romans. Antiochus had it turned into a pagan shrine, but Vespasian had it burned to the ground. The Jews who survived this war became slaves to Rome or exiles in foreign lands.
A few of them became Rabbis, teachers of the tradition. Their main job in the years after the fall of Jerusalem was to figure out how to be Jewish without a state, without a capital, without a Temple, without a physical monument. They had but one tool: the Torah and its eternal message, which together with their ingenuity and leadership allowed Judaism and the Jewish people to become adaptable and portable. Freed from the physical, wedded to the spiritual, we survived, even thrived, in all the lands to which fortune and misfortune cast us.
For the Rabbis, Chanukah could no longer serve its purpose if it glorified war and a building long since destroyed. They removed the holiday from the physical to the spiritual by remaking its meaning, giving priority to a miracle story glorifying not the physical prowess of the Maccabees but the spiritual power of God.
We’d do well to remember this as Chanukah approaches. This holiday has become so consumed with so much stuff--gifts and gelt and menorahs and dreidls and latkes--consumed with the physical--that I fear we’ve missed its spiritual dimension, its essential teaching: that with God’s power and human dedication, we prevail.
One way to recapture this dimension is to bring the light of hope into a dark corner by dedicating one of the eight nights to tzedakah. Instead of exchanging gifts, a family chooses a night to select an organization in need of assistance, and makes a charitable donation. Another way to elevate the spiritual dimension of Chanukah is to recall the miracle of oil lasting and lasting, by dedicating eight days to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Take time over eight days to replace incandescent lightbulbs with fluorescent ones. For eight days, choose to carpool or take mass transit. Go eight days without red meat. Professor Gidon Eshel of the Bard Center has suggested that the effect of reducing meat consumption by twenty percent would be comparable to every American driving a Prius instead of a standard sedan. I’m sure you can find other ways.
But why am I still speaking? Everything I’m trying to convey tonight was taught long ago, and more succinctly, by The Little Prince of Antoine de St. Exupery, who said: “...[H]ere is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
The Little Prince teaches us not only about Chanukah, and not only about this Shabbat, but about every Shabbat: one day each week for putting aside the physical and celebrating what is essential, invisible to the eye.
Shabbat Shalom!
Dear Friends,As a rabbinical student in Israel I camped out with my classmates under a star-glutted Negev sky to see Comet Hyakutake burn its trail through the night. It was a Shehecheyanu moment and we offered the blessing with wide eyes.
I imagine that some wilderness wanderer may have felt the same thing upon seeing Comet Hyakutake when she passed this way before, 17,500 years ago. Relatively recently, only about 4,000 years ago, a nomad named Jacob is said to have felt the same thing on his journey, a short distance from our campsite.
“Coming upon a [certain] place, he passed the night there, for the sun was setting; taking one of the stones of the place, he made it his head-rest as he lay down in that place” (Gen. 28:11). The story is told in this week’s parasha, Vayetzei. Three times in a single verse we find the word “place,” inviting us to speculate on the mystical qualities of this particular spot. What makes it special? Is it a natural feature, a mountain or an oasis? A rainbow or a comet? Or maybe a supernatural sight, like a burning bush?
No. It is a place of dirt and rocks. It lacks any distinguishing feature as much as it lacks a proper name. Jacob arrives there alone, a stone beneath his weary head. He was a long way from home for the first time in his life.
Jacob “dreamed, and lo—a ladder was set on the ground, with its top reaching into heaven, and lo—angels of God going up and coming down on it…. Waking from his sleep, Jacob said, ‘Truly, the Eternal is in this place, and I did not know it!’ He was awestruck, and said, ‘How awe-inspiring is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!’” (Gen. 28:12, 16-17). It was not the place that had changed. It was Jacob. He discovered that inspiration and blessing can come to us in any place, if we but harness the vision.
These words of Torah arrive in poetic symmetry with Thanksgiving. And so we ask, as we do every year, “For what do we give thanks?” Perhaps the answers come less easily these days. It’s easy to give thanks when jobs abound, when our children know only peace. Today, the housing market alone drives many to despondency. The protracted war in Iraq exacts a burdensome toll on human lives and the American psyche. The horizon looms with the hazy uncertainty of climate change and our dependency on diminishing oil reserves. Who can blame a person for feeling discouraged and depleted? I’m reminded of the story of two cantankerous old men who are complaining about how miserable life can be. One says to the other, “You know, sometimes I think it’s better not to have been born at all.” “True,” says his friend, “But how many people are that lucky?”
Amid this wilderness, can we, with Jacob, yet find cause to say, “Truly, the Eternal is in this place, and I did not know it?”
In the wilderness, a place devoid of life, Jacob found reason to celebrate his life, to give thanks for his journey, and to look to the future with hope. So we must try.
The Psalmist, a certified expert in the art of giving thanks, wrote, “Let all that has within it the breath of life praise God: Hallelujah!” (Ps. 150:6).
Obstacles to feeling joy and contentment are real and serious. In truth the daily grind erodes our gratitude at least as much as the devastating headlines.
A bit of Chasidic wisdom notes that “just as the hand, held before the eye, can hide the tallest mountain, so the routine of everyday life can keep us from seeing the vast radiance and secret wonders that fill the world.” Where a wilderness had loomed, Jacob found a place where earth and heaven met: a ladder rooted in that place (it could have been any place) that reached to a place of radiance.
Life is filled with Shehecheyanu moments. Of course we say that requisite blessing at weddings and holidays and life-altering occasions. But tradition in fact instructs one to recite Shehecheyanu upon building a new house. Or when buying new vessels—pots and pans and the like. Or when putting on new clothes. You say it when you taste the first fruit of a new season.
Maybe we should pause to give thanks every time we’re about to sit down to a good meal – not just this Thursday. A simple blessing would suffice. Luciano Pavarotti (no stranger to a good meal) once remarked, “One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.”
In the movie Manhattan, Woody Allen’s love-struck character catalogs a list of “reasons that made life worth living.” It’s deceptively simple stuff. “Groucho Marx. Willie Mays. The second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. Louis Armstrong's recording of ‘Potato Head Blues.’ Swedish movies. Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Marlon Brando. Frank Sinatra. The apples and pears by Cézanne. The crabs at Sam Wo's.” And, finally, his love “Tracy’s face.”
Take a few minutes to make your list. As you write it down, you may see a ladder that connects the terrestrial to the celestial. We pass them by every day, as we walk in awe-inspiring places, yet do not know it. Cast your eyes to the simple things that give you joy and peace and you may glimpse a sacred stairway. They are everywhere, inviting us to ascend.
The New York Times. June 23, 2071. Obituaries.
Jonathan Blake, Michelin-Star Awarded Chef, Dies at 97.
Jonathan Blake, whose restaurant Fress has long been a shrine to Jewish cuisine and has served as the training ground for rising stars in the culinary world, died Saturday at his home in New York, surrounded by family.
Chef Blake’s innovative spin on classical Jewish cuisine--one of the restaurant’s signature dishes is a mousseline of gefilte fish in a carrot-jalapeño foam--helped transform a modest six-table restaurant in Greenwich Village into a culinary powerhouse that received its Michelin star in 2047, upon moving to its current location opposite Lincoln Center. It has held on to those stars ever since, becoming the first Jewish-themed restaurant so recognized.
Many of the dishes that won that star remain on the menu, like “lox in a box,” a house-cured gravlax of salmon concealed in a perfect cube of brioche and truffled poached egg. In an era of celebrity chefs, Blake was a throwback, a dedicated practitioner more comfortable in front of a saucepan than a TV camera. He also contributed to a renaissance of interest in Jewish cuisine with his popular cookbook series entitled The Well-Tempered Kugel.
Blake was raised in a food-obsessed family, in a home suffused with the aromas of a Jewish kitchen. But it was only later in life, upon retirement at age 65, that the chef answered his second calling. In a stunning act of reinvention, he traded in the modest yarmulke of his first career as a congregational rabbi for the signature white toque of his latter years. Though the rabbinate is sometimes regarded as a footnote in Blake’s otherwise butter-slathered biography, it should be noted that even in retirement, he never missed a Saturday morning Torah study, a pursuit which stirred his passion no less than his restaurant’s most popular appetizer: the purple-potato latke with crème fraiche, chives, caviar, and sweet red onion jam.
Well, one can always dream.
I’ve been inspired this year by stories of reinvention, and the fantasy I’ve just outlined I owe to my college classmate and friend Julie Powell whose name comprises one half of “Julie and Julia,” the uplifting, if now ubiquitous, true story of reinvention for both its namesakes. The popularity of television shows like American Idol and Project Runway, in which a nobody emerges a superstar, suggests that reinvention is part and parcel of the American dream.
As tough times put more and more people out of work, careers undergo re-consideration and, for the inspired, yesterday’s misfortune has become today’s opportunity for reinvention. Layoffs have activated untold numbers of Americans to pursue discarded dreams, reconfigure priorities, take up new hobbies, go back to school, volunteer in their communities, promote their professional expertise online, discover what had been missing from their lives at home and among family members.
Even for cynics the possibility of reinvention holds an allure. “My one regret in life,” Woody Allen said, “is that I’m not someone else.”
Some have been summoned to reinvention by a newfound conscience or consciousness. Last month Nick Kristof wrote an Op-Ed piece about Wendell Potter, a big health insurance executive who for twenty years worked to block health care reform. But in his heart, doubts began to creep in. The defining moment came in 2007 when Potter dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock. “It was a life-changing event to witness that,” Potter said. Since then he has gone public with his concerns, testifying before the Senate, working tirelessly for reform.
Or consider Julius Lester, African-American professor emeritus of Judaic Studies at UMASS. Periodically, Prof. Lester would lead Shabbat services at Amherst College Hillel when I was a student. Trained as a chazzan, the baritone lent a gospel beauty to our prayers. You’d never know that in the 1960’s Lester distinguished himself as a militant anti-Semitic radio host who called his first book, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! With encouragement, love and the guidance of my Hillel rabbi, Yechiel Lander, he reinvented himself. You can read his eloquently testimony in his book, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “There are no second acts in American life,” was dead wrong. Could anyone familiar with Ronald Reagan’s work in the 1940s or 50s imagine him in the 1980s? Or for that matter, could anyone have predicted Al Franken’s second act? Celebrated folk artist Grandma Moses took up painting in her seventies, after arthritis made it impossible for her to continue her career in embroidery. Luciano Pavarotti was an elementary school teacher and insurance salesman who studied voice for six years, performing intermittently at small recitals for no pay. A nodule on his vocal cords and a disastrous concert prompted him to give up singing altogether, a decision so psychologically liberating that he suddenly found his natural voice able to make sounds he never before dreamed possible.
Alfred Nobel, namesake of the world’s most celebrated prizes, undertook a stunning reinvention that began when, quite by accident, he happened to read his own obituary. In 1888, an erroneous publication of a premature obituary by a French newspaper condemned Nobel for his invention of dynamite. The obituary stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort: “The merchant of death is dead,” and went on to say, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Reading those words haunted and transformed him. Seven years later he signed his last will and testament to establish the Nobel Prizes in fields of science and literature and peace, to be awarded annually, without distinction of nationality.
Our sacred texts tell stories of reinvention. Abram reached a ripe old age ambling around his hometown in Mesopotamia until he heard God’s call, Lech-Lecha, “Go forth, go forth from anywhere you’ve ever been and everything you’ve ever known, and forge a destiny, an identity, progeny, people.” Thus was Abram reinvented as Abraham; his wife Sarai, as Sarah.
Moses had more than one “second act.” An infant abandoned; a child of Egyptian privilege; a fugitive killer; a soft-spoken desert shepherd; and then came the mountain and the bush aflame but unconsumed. Returning from the epiphany he descended all aglow, radiating light and law and leadership.
Stunning acts of reinvention, all.
And who can forget Jacob? Tarnished by stealing birthright and blessing from his twin brother, Jacob fled Esau’s murderous rage as a young man. For more than twenty years he has tended sheep, taken wives, raised a family. He decides to return home. He sends his family ahead. Alone in pitch-black night by the riverbank, he awakens to find himself gripped by a stranger, pinned to the ground. All night long he wrestles.
At daybreak the foe, overcome at last, releases Jacob and tries to escape. But Jacob holds him fast. “Let me go,” the adversary cries, “for dawn is breaking.”
“I will not let you go,” Jacob insists, “until you bless me.” His opponent struggles hard, wrenching Jacob’s hip from the socket.
“What is your name?” he gasped.
“Jacob.”
“Your name shall no longer be Jacob but Israel, for you have striven with God and with people and you have prevailed.”
He blessed him and departed.
There, in the dark, a dramatic reinvention. Out of a harrowing encounter, the patriarch emerges transformed. Jacob the sly trickster has become Israel the spiritual victor.
In the course of a lifetime, we all visit this place, the place of life struggle, of wrestling in the dark. The loss of a job, a marriage, a loved one, a cherished hope or dream, can pin us down in an iron grip. From Wall Street to Detroit to the heartland, from last Yom Kippur to this Yom Kippur, we’ve endured a long, dark night. Can we extract blessing from the struggle, emerge transformed? Arise victorious, with new confidence, new purpose? New degrees, new opportunities, new vocations?
I can hear what some of you are thinking:
“Rabbi, this is a retirement account we’re talking about, a life-long endeavor, not a fleeting mid-life crisis. We planned for decades for a quiet golden age of family and travel and togetherness--not for more time at the office. I’m spent.”
Or: “Rabbi, I liked my line of work. Yes, it provided an income, but it also provided happiness and fulfillment. Why should I re-invent myself when I’m happy with who I was, who I am?”
Or: “Rabbi, what’s done is done. My loved one is gone forever. But don’t expect me to pull myself up and look on the sunny side… let alone start dating again! I can’t be someone I’m not.”
And, you know what?
You’re right.
For most mortals, the possibility of reinvention remains vanishingly small. Most attempts end up frustrated, failed. Fitzgerald may have gotten it right after all. Very few are granted second acts. We are not, cannot be, need not be, Julia Child or Luciano Pavarotti or Alfred Nobel, let alone Abraham or Moses or Jacob.
The familiar saying about teaching an old dog new tricks is accurate and wise. Perhaps you have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI is a questionnaire designed to measure personality type: our psychological preferences in how we perceive the world and make decisions, extrapolated from the theories of Carl Jung. Today as many as two million MBTI questionnaires are administered annually, including at WRT among your rabbis and cantors, who have utilized the Index to understand each other’s personalities and work habits, and thereby to improve the way we work together as a team.
Here’s the interesting part. Research shows that one’s baseline personality attributes as assessed by the MBTI will remain essentially unchanged from adolescence until death. If at age sixteen one prefers to make lists than to “go with the flow,” prefers solitude to the company of others, feels moved by passion over logic, then these ingrained tendencies will probably hold fast for a lifetime.
Reinvention? Get real! “I am what I am and that’s all that I am. I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!”
Come to think of it, Jacob didn’t really re-invent himself that night. Even after earning the name Israel, the one who struggles and prevails, the Torah still refers to him as Jacob, even on his deathbed. Jacob could never erase all the things made him Jacob, ugly though some of those traits may have been: sneakiness, narcissism, ambition, stubbornness. Writhing in the dark, battered and exhausted, Jacob won’t just walk away, leave it be, let it go. “No!” he says. “First, I have to get something!” Why should we expect that Jacob would ever let anything go? At every stage of life, Jacob remains quintessentially Jacob: unyielding, unbending, unrelenting.
So it should not surprise us that in old age, Jacob regretted opportunities unmet and relationships unfulfilled. He carried grudges with him to the grave, over children who let him down.
When all is said and done, reinvention is not the ultimate Jewish goal, not even a Jewish way of thinking about what a meaningful life demands of us. The secular world is always telling us, “Change your hair, your clothes, your attitude! You can be someone else.” That is not what Judaism tells us.
The Chasidic Master Reb Zusya famously taught, “When I reach the next world, God will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ The question will be, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” Why were you not the person you were meant to be? Why were you not the most you that you could be?
But if reinvention is not a Jewish path, neither is its opposite: stagnation, complacency, becoming ossified, calcified, set in our ways, unwilling to change. Even among the gainfully employed, how many of us feel stuck, unable to break the old, predictable patterns? Lily Tomlin once said, “The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” It’s no way to live, and, frankly, our faith asks more of us.
Here is what Judaism teaches:
You can change.
You need not reinvent yourself.
But you have to change.
Call it evolution.
Spiritual evolution!
You can evolve.
You must evolve, if you really want to live.
Darwin who taught us evolution is a deeply misunderstood figure. Evolution through natural selection says little about “survival of the fittest” and much about adaptability. Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” The world keeps changing: in some instants, immensely, more often, imperceptibly. But it keeps changing. Why not you?
The Creator made you that way, able to change. At this very moment your cells are replacing themselves: out with the old, in with the new. What is true for the human cell is true for the human body and what is true for the human body is true for the human spirit. You can change. You were born to evolve, and to keep evolving.
Reverend Peter Gomes who serves as the spiritual leader of the Memorial Church of Harvard University is one of America’s great preachers. He recalls meeting two ladies, twins in fact, who had recently celebrated their ninety-third birthday. “In response to the usual newspaper question, ‘To what do you attribute your longevity,’ the laconic answer from Miss Minnie was ‘Time.’”
Upon which, Gomes observes, “...time presents the opportunity for growth and too many people waste too much time waiting for epochal ‘mountaintop’ experiences as a stimulus to growth when there is so much work to be done in the valleys, where we spend most of that time anyway.”
So much time, so much potential growth, so much work to be done down here, in the valleys.
Why are you not the most you that you can be?
And let us ask yet more, on Yom Kippur, day of questions:
If I could read my obituary today, would it say what I would want it to say?
What lies within my capacity to change?
And what lies beyond my capacity to change?
If parts of my life dissatisfy me, am I trying too hard to change the people around me, or the circumstances around me, and not hard enough to change … me?
Is my way in the world--my words, my deeds, my priorities--harmonious with my most cherished values and with the values I espouse to others? If not, why not?
How can I recalibrate my deeds so that they more closely resemble my innermost values, the things that I tell myself and others “really matter the most?”
If I am unwilling to change, how much of that unwillingness is rooted in fear--fear of what I might find out about myself, my limitations, my weaknesses? Fear of abandoning the reassuring familiarity of old ways?
Am I open to the possibility of evolution? Or have I convinced myself that I’m done changing, that my power to evolve dried up long ago?
Am I ready not only for change to happen, but to struggle, really struggle, to make it happen?
To open ourselves to change is to become Israel: to confront the adversary and refuse to let go until we emerge with blessing. Yes, Jacob will be Jacob. He can never undo his childhood mistakes, never recover the misspent years, never change his essential nature. He can never relinquish every regret. Even after encountering his long-estranged brother in a healing embrace of forgiveness, he can never reconstruct a perfect relationship with Esau. He can never make himself impervious to hardship or heartbreak, and he will yet know plenty.
But in that long night of wrestling, Jacob insisted: “I can change. I can evolve. Never again will I run away from my troubles. Never again will I toil for years in silent bitterness, hopeless of my own power to change. I can never stop being Jacob, but I can also be Israel, the one who strives and prevails. I may forevermore walk with a limp, but tonight I will not let go until I change.”
Judaism does not ask us to scrap who we have been. It does not call us to reinvent ourselves. It calls us to evolve, to change, to grow spiritually so that our deeds more closely resemble our innermost values. Judaism never asks us to become someone else. It constantly demands that we become our most authentic selves.
The notion that Yom Kippur furnishes us with a “blank slate” is misguided and a bit ridiculous. The slate is never blank, not even at birth: we come into this world burdened with potentialities and tendencies and family histories, features inscribed by genetics, by parenting, by environment. We’d be fools to think that Yom Kippur can erase the deeds already done, the tenacious habits, the insults and injuries.
What Yom Kippur does give us is perspective: the perspective to see that there’s still plenty of room on that old imprinted slate to add another chapter, to revisit ourselves with unflinching honesty, to go back and try again, and this time, to change it a little bit.
Alice Walker who wrote The Color Purple has said:
“I feel that as long as the Earth can make a Spring every year, I can; I won’t give up until the Earth gives up.”
Great God of Life, you have blessed us with a glorious Earth, constantly evolving, constantly renewing itself. Today, make us like the ever-changing Earth. Help us make our Spring, this Autumn, at the beginning of the year, 5770, and never give up.
Dear Friends and Students of Torah,
As this week's offering, we bring a reprinted commentary on Parashat Ki Tavo.
L'Shalom and Happy Studying,
Jonathan
REFORM VOICES OF TORAH
Parashat Ki Tavo
Rabbi Jonathan E. Blake
The Fugitive Aramean and You
“…My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation” (Deut. 26:5).
Are these words familiar? If you’ve ever participated in a Passover Seder then they might be! This quotation forms the kernel of the Passover Haggadah. When we tell our story at the Seder we begin here.
The line comes from our Torah portion, Ki Tavo. The Israelites await orders to enter the Promised Land. Once they arrive in the land, settle it, and cultivate it, they must present a basket full of the first fruit of their harvest to the priest. They are told to recite a formula, a compact narrative of the Israelite experience, from nomadic roaming to bondage to deliverance to inheritance of the Land. That formula begins with the invocation, “My father was a fugitive Aramean,” or so our text translates it.
In Hebrew the line presents ambiguities that preclude a definitive translation. Arami oveid avi, the Hebrew reads. The words Arami, “Aramean” (meaning a person from the territory of Aram, in modern-day Syria) and avi, “my father,” are easily translated. But the meaning of “oveid” is less clear. Oveid (from the root alef-vet-dalet) can mean “to lose,” but it can also mean “to perish” or “destroy.” In the context of the portion, it might mean “to be lost,” “to go astray,” or, as our translation has it, to be a “fugitive.” But Jewish tradition suggests other possible renderings.
A comparison of different translations of the Haggadah proves this. The most recent Reform Movement Haggadah, The Open Door: A Passover Haggadah (ed. Sue Levi Elwell, CCAR Press, 2002), says:
“My ancestors, wandering Arameans,
went down to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number” (p. 46).
…Adding this explanatory note:
“We are descendants of wanderers from the region known as Aram. Abram and Sarai left their home to follow God to an unknown land” (Ibid).
The Open Door identifies the “fugitive” or “wandering” Arameans with our ancestors, Abram and Sarai—that is to say, the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people. Pioneers who left home to answer God’s call.
On the other hand, the Soncino Koren Haggada (1965) says:
“‘AN ARAMEAN SOUGHT TO DESTROY MY FATHER, AND HE WENT DOWN TO MIZRAYIM [Egypt]….’”
In contradistinction to our first example, the “Aramean” here is an enemy of our people! “An Aramean sought to destroy my father.”
Who is this Aramean bent on destroying our people? The traditional Haggadah identifies him as Laban, who came from Aram. Laban, you might recall, cheated Jacob out of his betrothal to Rachel and presented him instead with Leah—and kept Jacob in indentured servitude for decades. Rabbinic tradition exaggerated Laban’s blemishes and made him an archetype of evil and chicanery.
A typical “Orthodox” Haggadah like the Passover Haggadah (ed. Rabbi Nathan Goldberg, Ktav, 1949-1966) explains:
“Come and learn what Laban the Syrian [Aramean] tried to do to our father Jacob. While Pharaoh decreed only against the males, Laban desired to uproot all” (p. 12).
Thus does tradition present us with a second version of the Arami oveid: not a wandering Jew, but a foreigner bent on destroying our people.
We are left with two divergent understandings of the same three Hebrew words.
One translation makes us into intrepid pioneers. Our ancestors were wanderers who left their home, Aram, setting out on a journey of discovery, prompted by God’s call to Abraham: Lech-lecha, “Go forth.”
The other translation makes us into victims of enemies out to destroy us: Laban the Aramean tormented and pursued Jacob, as have countless tyrants and demagogues.
How we choose to translate our verse speaks to our most fundamental beliefs about Jewish history and Jewish identity.
Are we Jews essentially pioneers, willing to establish home and heritage in all the new lands to which fate and faith have brought us? Or are we essentially victims, perpetually fleeing the next Laban, Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar, or Hitler who would seek our destruction?
My work as a congregational rabbi, and my life-experience as a concerned Jewish citizen of the world, prompts me to worry about anti-Jewish sentiment. The apparent escalation of overt acts of Jew-hatred in parts of Europe, the Arab world, and on college campuses in the United States, alarms me.
But I worry even more about the detrimental effects of the victim mentality. A couple of years ago, when rockets rained down on Israel, I attended a local solidarity rally. How inspirational to stand with more than 1,200 Jews, of all denominations, of all ages! But my satisfaction at the dramatic turnout was tinged with regret, because every rabbi knows that that opportunities to see 1,200 people in Temple are few and far between. Perhaps it is only natural that we put more passion and commitment into our Judaism when we perceive ourselves as under attack, but imagine a Jewish community that would put the same passion and commitment into learning Torah, observing holidays, creating vibrant and meaningful prayer services, and working for a more just society.
A room in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. houses the shoes of 4,000 Jews gassed and cremated at Majdanek. Perhaps you have been there. No one leaves that room unmoved. It contains 4,000 reasons to be Jewish. But this room alone does not inspire us to create an imaginative and meaningful Judaism for the 21st century and beyond.
Rabbi Jack Stern wrote, “We should take our children back beyond Auschwitz to Sinai. We should take our children forward beyond a system of life defense to a system of life value; beyond a sense of Jewish foreboding to a sense of Jewish commitment, and ultimately to the Shabbat and the Torah that some of our forebears left behind, which, in the final analysis, may be the best way of all to combat Anti-Semitism” (The Right Not To Remain Silent, “Anti-Semitism and Israel,” Rosh HaShanah 1983/5744, p. 177).
Arami oveid avi.
My ancestors were victims. From Laban the Aramean to the present we have never been safe.
Arami oveid avi.
My ancestors were wanderers who left Aram at God’s call to start a new civilization in a land of promise.
There are two ways to understand this verse, and there are two kinds of Jews. Look into the Torah and see your reflection.
