Shavuot - Reflections on Ruth

On Sinai, amidst thunder and lighting, great noise and a huge crowd, the people received Torah.

I can still hear the echoes of donkeys braying and goats bleating.  Parents quieting frightened babies.  Young children running around, playing games in the background.  Teenagers talking one to other, just waiting to be silenced by an adult.  People losing focus and then regaining it.

The messiness of mass revelation…

And they had their whole lives ahead of them…

The wounds from the shackles of slavery still healing…

The taste of freedom still just an imagined palate of honey and milk…not yet even touching the tongue.

When our ancestors received Torah, they were just a newly formed group of wanderers, not even sure yet what to expect.

And Torah, full of her commandments and laws.  Rules for a new way of life.  A gift.  A tree to hold fast to.  A way to live…

This was still a new relationship for them.  Still figuring things out and how to relate to this God, who both whispered and bellowed, and this Moses, who stumbled as often as he stood.  What did it even mean to be an Israelite?

No golden calves yet.  Or uprisings.  No dashed hopes or longings for Egypt. 

Just possibility and future and hope…

Revelation with the promise of redemption.

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You know, we read another story on Shavuot.  The book of Ruth.

Called the book of Chesed, the book of lovingkindness, this tale begins with sorrow.

Naomi and her family live in that Promised Land.  No longer just a hope.  This is new a reality. Generations after slavery.  Kings come and gone.  Freedom fully ours.

And Naomi’s town is auspiciously named Beit Lechem, the House of Bread.  But her windowsills are empty of rising dough.  Famine grips every home.  Until one night son turns mother and wife to husband. 

And the family leaves the land of promise.

Naomi and her family off.  Out of that promised land and back into the wilderness.  Hoping for a better life there.  The desert not so bleak after all.
   
They arrive in Moab, bread baskets empty, not a drop of sweetness in sight…forbidden landscape before.

And there, misfortune falls.  Husband and sons pass away. 

Naomi left with Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. 

No options.  No protection.  No future in sight.  Calling out to God like her slave-ancestors before: Deliver me.

And so she sets out once again on a journey back to Canaan.

A journey of loss and disappointment and defeat.  In Naomi’s mind, there is nothing left.

Orpah turns back and Ruth remains.

Silent steps.  No children to cry out, no laughter seeping out of surrounding tents, no animals to bleat or bray, no thunder, no lightning.  Whispers so quiet they barely even reach the women’s ears. 

Until Ruth, frightened and alone, takes her adopted mother’s hand and says to Naomi “Your people will be my people, Your God will be my God.”

Both women dusty from the journey.  Tear lines tracked across their faces.  So much devastation.  So much sorrow.  What is left to see in this world?

No sacred letters etched on stone in the mountains above.  No great leader.  No voice of God.  No scrap of holy text. 

Just two women with empty pockets, who lost everything.  Alone and a little desperate.  Turning to one another.  And making a new covenant. 

And Ruth intones:  That story you sung to me while hanging laundry.  That God you cried out to at my husband’s grave.  That people whose language you speak.  That journey you traced.  All that you claim as yours, I claim as mine.

And Ruth promises Naomi redemption.  And Naomi can only taste bitterness. 

But the two walk on into a town that once again fills its bread baskets.  And meet a people who are willing to bend every rule for the good of the women who rejoined them.

This is our Torah they tell them.  And Ruth grasps it.  This is her tree.  And she holds fast to it. 

The townspeople sing to them quietly, words of Psalms “She who went out weeping carrying seeds to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves.”

This is a new revelation, born not out of promise but out of the knowledge that not every promise is fulfilled.

This is a new revelation, born not out of commandments, but out of broken rules and changed expectations.

This is a new revelation, born not out of noise and fanfare, but out of the quiet, even the darkness.

And this our revelation as much as the first.  Revelation happening not at one moment in time but again and again in our lives.  No matter which side of hope we find ourselves upon.  No matter which side of the promises we have made or have been made to us.

Torah revealing herself not in one form, but in many, opposites even.  Ready for us to add our stories to hers.

Parashat Bamidbar -- Tikkun

“Teach us to number our days,” declares the Psalmist, “that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12) .

For the past 45 days, we have counted.

Seven times seven, from Pesach to Shavuot…so close to the end now, 49 in sight.  Our days of counting almost complete.

This week, we begin a new book of Torah.  This Shabbat we are told to expand our enumerations: “Count people,” Torah tells us.

In Hebrew, this new book of Torah is called “Bamidbar,” in the wilderness.  In its columns, the Israelites are neither enslaved nor free.  They are the great wanderers trapped in a spiraling 40 year journey.  They are neither here nor there.  This is the desert.

In English, this new book is called Numbers, called by the Rabbis “The Book of the Census,” for it is bookended by two census takings.
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Rabbi Yaakov Culi teaches that something which is counted cannot lose identity or impact. From this interpretation, a great network of meaning is spun.

For the rabbis, the countings in Bamidbar were not just tactical exercises, but spiritual expressions.  The rabbis understood these to be the moments in which each individual Israelite became a part of history.  Each one remembered.  Black fire on white.

And yet, when I read this week’s parasha, I can’t feel poetry.  All I see is injustice.  When days are numbered, none is skipped.  But in Torah, when our people are supposedly numbered, only some are counted, others pushed aside.  These great moments of Numbers, recalled as empowering, are actually alienating and exclusive.

In the opening verses of Numbers, God commands Moses, “Take a census of the entire community of Israel.”  But, God continues, “Listing the names, every male, head by head” (Numbers 1:2). According to this, the entire community of Israel only includes Israelite men (and later priests).  What to make of this oversight?  The qualifiers continue: Only the first born priests, only Israelites of fighting age.  For generations, men and women, children and the elderly, teens and toddlers, labored through enslavement together.  Now, in the desert, they were sectioned off.  You are favored.  You are cast aside.

In Hebrew, the words for “take a census” are “s’u et rosh,” or, literally “lift the head.”  I imagine a cosmic game of duck, duck, goose taking place in the wilderness.  The people sat clustered, waiting with bated breath, tingling with anticipation, yearning for that divine tap, and with it the knowledge that they too were a part of the eidah, of God’s Israelite community.  And the disappointment they must have felt, when only some were tapped, others passed.  Their heads left fallen.

This is not the only time in which Torah says “the people,” but does not include all.  In fact, next week, as we welcome in Shavuot, the holiday on which we receive Torah at Sinai, we will read the famous revelatory passages of Exodus 19.  In these verses Moses commands “the people” in the preparations for Sinai, “do not go near a woman” (Exodus 19:14).  Clearly “this people” excludes the mothers and grandmothers, daughters and sisters, nursemaids and widows.  Duck, duck, goose…

In the 16th century, the rabbis of Safed created a tradition of Leil Tikkun Shavuot, meaning “repairing the night of Shavuot.”  This custom, of staying up all night to study, stemmed originally from the rabbis disappointment in their Israelite ancestors, who chose to sleep away the night before receiving Torah.  The mystics decided: we will now stay up all night studying Torah every Erev Shavuot in preparation for revelation.  A classic act of tikkun, repair.  Take something that you wish was done differently in the past and reenact differently—better in the present.

I am inspired by this Shavuot tradition.  If the kabbalists can rework aspects surrounding revelation and desert life, why can’t we?   Biblically only some were counted, others left marginalized.  And so, let us include.  Let us make whole.  Let us repair.

The rabbis clearly saw the dual nature of counting—both external (How many are we?) and internal (Who are we?).

On an external level, we at TIOH see counting as a value.  We are a diverse and inclusive community and pride ourselves on being such.  Our membership rolls are, in and of themselves, a tikkun to our ancestors’ missed opportunities to number fully their community.  We reject an exclusionary Torah or Judaism.  We seek to welcome everyone who walks in our doors.  In this community, every child, every man, every woman, every newborn, every senior citizen is not only counted, but also celebrated.  We are Jews by birth and Jews by choice, Jews of color, Jews of European descent and Jewish of Sephardic descent.  Intermarried, single, gay, straight.  And our efforts are ongoing.  This past Tuesday night, our Temple took another step toward full repair.  Our board unanimously passed a resolution in support of marriage equality.  Let every family be counted in this community, they said.

On an internal level, as well, we are left now to do our own spiritual work.  This tikkun is each of ours alone.  This is the time for both counting and receiving Torah.  This is the time to take stock of our own internal lives.  Let us claim our own Tikkun.  Our ancestors ignored, pushed aside, and made invisible members of their own community.  We too ignore, push aside, and make invisible aspects of our own selves.

Which aspects of ourselves have we pushed to the side?
What internal work have we chosen to ignore?
What difficult conversations have we left unspoken?
What needs have we made invisible?
Which feelings have we left unexpressed?

This is a time for counting that which has been left uncounted.  A time for numbering and naming.  On this Shabbat let us be reminded: Our work toward a desert tikkun always holds the reward of a Promised Land.

“Teach us to number our days,” declares the Psalmist, “that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

Teach us to number ourselves, we learn, that we may live lives of fullness.