July 25, 2008

Parashat Mattot 5768

When I was a teenager, my family moved to a small town called Clever, outside of Springfield, Missouri. We lived, quite literally, in the “middle of nowhere.” My father, who grew up on a small farm in rural Kansas, delighted in exposing my family to the finer sides of country life. One of his favorite games was to stop his pickup truck directly over the well soiled cow path that ran across our country road, open the car windows, and as the cows milled about, eating hay, say, “Do you smell that country?” Of course, we would all obligingly shriek, lunge for the window controls, and scream, “Eww…that smells so bad!” Let’s just say I was not all that great at the finer points of country life.

This childhood memory comes to mind as I read this week’s Torah portion. In this week’s parashah, Mattot, the Israelites come to the lands of Jazer and Gilead. These lands are very near the banks of the Jordan River and, according to the Torah, “were a region suitable for cattle.” It is not surprising, then, that the Reubenties and Gadites, two of the Israelite tribes that possessed cattle, looked upon these recently conquered lands hungrily. They said to Moses, “‘the land that Adonai has conquered for the community of Israel is cattle country, and your servants have cattle. It would be a favor to us,’ they continued, ‘if this land were given to your servants as a holding; do not move us across the Jordan’” (Numbers 32:4-5). I can smell the cattle land now.

Moses is less than thrilled with this idea. The entire purpose of the Israelites’ journey for the past almost forty years was to reach the Promised Land. The slave generation had been denied access to the land because they were unable to lose their slave mentality. Now, this new generation, on the verge of crossing the Jordan River seemed to be losing sight of the end goal as well. Moses balks. He tells the Reubenites and the Gadites that they must first cross the Jordan, help conquer the land, and then they can return to dwell in Jazer and Gilead. The two tribes agree.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla suggests that the central issue with the Reubenites and Gadites’ initial proposal was that they were only interested in their own personal gain. They failed to realize that their community needed them in order to evolve, in order to reach their final destination.

In response to today’s secular society, in which the individual and the individual’s needs are often valued over all else, Jewish tradition teaches us a very different value. Al tifrosh min ha’tzibur: Do not separate yourself from the community. In order for our community (whether “our community” is Temple Beth Sholom, the city or county we live in, our country, our world, or the Jewish people etc.) to advance, we must remain in tune with communal needs. Sometimes, this week’s Torah portion teaches us, this means delaying or setting aside our own personal gains.

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, I saw a different side of country life. As my family sat shiva, neighbors from the surrounding dairies, farms, and houses entered our home to grieve with us. From my life in Missouri I learned that cattle land may be important, but community is much more so.

July 18, 2008

Parashat Pinchas 5768

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Pinchas, we learn of a groundbreaking legal case. A man name Zelophehad dies and leaves no male heirs. His five daughters petition to inherit his possessions. Moses brings the case before God, and Adonai exclaims, “The plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just: you should give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kinsmen; transfer their father’s share to them” (Numbers 27:7).

The encounter with Zelophead’s daughters is immediately followed with a very different sort of divine decree. “Adonai says to Moses, ‘Ascend these heights of Abarim and view the land that I have given to the Israelite people. When you have seen it, you too shall be gathered to your kin, just as your brother Aaron was’” (Numbers 27:12). Yes, directly after asking Moses to ensure the daughters’ inheritance, God instructs Moses to climb to the heights of a tall mountain and look over the Promised Land, the land which Moses himself will never enter. God shows Moses the land and lets him know that he will die before he ever enters it.

At this point in our narrative, the great Moses, whom we have followed from birth to old age, no longer looms mightily over the people. Moses’ brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, have recently passed away. The people have tried again and again to overthrow his leadership. Moses has proven unable to overcome his tendencies toward anger. And, while Moses continues to stand before God and the Israelites, his fate is also known: Neither he nor the people he led out of slavery will ever step foot into the Promised Land he first prophesied about so many years ago.

Rashi, the great Medieval Torah commentator, wonders why the Torah would follow a passage about the daughters’ inheritance with the decree for Moses to climb the mountain and look out over the future he will never know. What is the link between these two stories? Rashi imagines that the case of inheritance must have stirred up a number of deep feelings and assumptions in Moses. Rashi, quoting Midrash, imagines that this inheritance case (filled with sweet promises of the future) might have led Moses to begin re-imagining what the future might yet hold for him. Maybe, Moses might have thought, his future would be different than God had previously ordained. Rashi envisions Moses thinking to himself: God has asked me to deal with these laws of inheritance, perhaps God’s decree that I must die in the wilderness has been annulled and I will enter the Promised Land.

When God asks Moses to look over the land, a land which he will never enter, God is acting with compassion. The Torah knows that a change in one’s reality can be difficult. How could anyone expect Moses to fully assimilate this new reality into his consciousness? For year’s Moses had envisioned himself leading his people into the Promised Land. How could things have turned out so differently? This week’s Torah portion opens up us as readers to the realities of lost expectations. Moses imagined his future one way, but it will be another. By gently reminding Moses of what will be, God helps to reorient Moses to his “new normal.”

Sometimes life leads all of us down paths we would not choose for ourselves. All of us face disappointments, losses, or unexpected changes. It is natural, Torah teaches us, to resist these new courses. However, we come to learn this week that healing often begins with acceptance and that no matter where our future takes us, God remains by our side. This is not the only time that in Torah that God will remind Moses of his changed future. This is a step in a process. A good reminder for us all.

July 11, 2008

Parashat Balak 5768

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Balak, the foreign prophet Balaam stands on a hill overlooking the Israelites’ wilderness camp, poised to curse the people below. But, instead of cursing them, Balaam blesses the Israelites. Balaam, hired by King Balak to curse the Children of Israel, is overcome with the spirit of Adonai and sings out:

How good are your tents, O Jacob,
Your dwellings, O Israel!
Like palm-groves that stretch out,
Like gardens beside a river,
Like aloes planted by Adonai,
Like cedars beside the water (Numbers 24:5-6)

For Balaam, the Israelites’ desert encampment was a fertile oasis in a stark wilderness. Commentators for generations have wondered: What could Balaam have seen in that desert encampment? What was so special about the Israelite tents that Balaam was overcome with blessing? What could that image have signified to him?

In his book The Spirituality of Welcoming, Dr. Ron Wolfson likens today’s synagogues to tents. He notes that is the above verse from this week’s parashah, “How good are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings, O Israel!” that provides the opening words to every morning service. “In fact,” he writes, “the first ‘prayer houses’ were undoubtedly tents.”

Wolfson, though, takes the image of a tent a step further. He writes, “Imagine what a tent looks like. How is a good synagogue like a good tent?” We would each answer this question differently, but when I think of a tent, I think of a place that is not only open and welcoming, but also provides shelter and safety. It is a place of hospitality. It is portable. It has multiple entrances and exits. It is a home away from home. (Wolfson 48-49).

When I went camping this past spring with members of our tenth grade Confirmation class, I learned an important lesson about tent camping: There is always something to do, and everyone can and must help. During our three days in the desert, I watched our Confirmation students set up their tents, cook our meals, clean up our campsite, help one another on hikes, and build campfires together. In a tent community, everyone must pitch in. In a tent community, there are no passive learners or “back of the class” students. There is only one option, to be an active member of the community.

At TBS, we work hard to create a welcoming “tent community.” We have greeters to receive us on Shabbat. We have nametags to share who we are. We give time to wish one another “Shabbat Shalom” during services. We stay in touch by phone and email. But, to create and sustain a true tent community, each of us must remember that there is always something to do, and that everyone can and must help. And, so I ask you on this Shabbat of Tents to consider how you, yourself, might welcome someone into our TBS tent. Might you introduce yourself to a stranger the next time you are at services? Might you volunteer to help the next time a social action initiative is extended? Might you offer to teach in our community? Might you simply extend a smile or a warm handshake?

Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell points out that it is not only our task to occupy our tents, but also to extend them. As Isaiah 54:2 teaches, “Enlarge the site of your tent, Extend the size of your dwelling, Do not stint! Lengthen the ropes, and drive the pegs firm.” On this Shabbat, let us not only praise the tent that exists, but recommit ourselves to creating the tent that might yet be.

July 4, 2008

Parashat Chukat 5768

In her essay “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” Annie Dillard writes “The island where I live is peopled with cranks like myself. In a cedar-shake shack on a cliff—but we all live like this—is a man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk….Reports differ on precisely what he expects or wants the stone to say.”

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Chukat, God commands Moses to assemble the people Israel and before their eyes to hold up his staff and “speak to a stone.” From this stone, God promises, water will flow out to quench the thirst of the complaining Israelites. Moses disobeys, he smashes the stone twice with his staff, water comes forth, and God tells Moses he will not enter the Promised Land because of it.

I wonder what God intended Moses to say to the stone?

Dillard adds, “I do not think he expects the stone to speak as we do, and describe for us its long life and many, or few, sensations. I think instead that he is trying to teach it to say a single word, such as ‘cup,’ or ‘uncle.’”

A man in his thirties is trying to teach a stone to talk. An impossible task.

All Moses had to do was speak to a stone. I guess he too could have simply said “cup” or “uncle” and water would have gushed out as promised. But he couldn’t utter a word.

What happened to Moses? Was he so overcome with frustration and rage that he lost the ability to speak? Was it that the people around him wouldn’t stop moaning, or that his sister Miriam had just died, or that he was stuck in the desert, or that he had just survived two violent attempts at mutiny? Did he simply snap? Did his anger and grief boil over beyond the point of speech? Was he was left only with hostility?

In the end, God could not teach Moses to talk any more than the man could teach the stone.

Dillard writes, “Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.” The man is trying to teach the stone to talk because the silence of nature—the silence of the divine—can be deafening. The man is trying to teach the stone to talk because he longs for, lusts after, thirsts for communication.

Maybe God tried to teach Moses to talk because he knew the Israelites also longed for communication. The Israelites needed someone to speak a word that they could hear. A word that would break through their fear and pain and soothe their souls. In the end, Moses had no word to give, not to the stone and not to the people.

At times, each one of us is silent when we should speak, or desperate to hear from one who will not. On this Shabbat, let us remember that it is not the word that matters, but the act of speech of itself. Dillard writes, “The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.” Let us open up our souls to speak. Let us allow ourselves to listen.