Category Archives: parashat hashavua

Parashat Terumah: Building the space for a non incarnate God to not dwell – the elevation of giving

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In parashat Terumah we are given the instructions for building a sacred place, and a very detailed directive it is. Almost an architect’s blueprint. It seems all the more strange that such a clear and comprehensive picture is drawn for the building in which a totally abstract and absolutely non incarnate God may (or may not) dwell.

The sacred place is described as “mishkan”, the place of dwelling, yet that is decidedly what it is not. It is, instead, a signal to remind the Israelites that God is among them – and God makes this clear in the instructions for the Children of Israel to build the sanctuary – “Make a mishkan so that I will dwell among them.”

The Torah makes clear that this mishkan is to be symbol and metaphor of the relationship between God and the people who are in covenant bond with God. It is to describe, in a variety of different ways, the relationship between them; it will even in some way create the relationship, it will certainly make clear some of the central requirements.

To begin with, God involves and obliges the whole people. “Daber el bnei Yisrael va’yikhu li trumah me’eyt kol ish asher yid’vennu libbo, tikhu li et trumati – Speak to the Israelite people and accept for Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves them” (Ex25:2) Because the mishkan is to serve the entire community, it must also be constructed through the involvement of the entire community. But this is not a tax on the people; instead Moses is to accept the free will offerings of the people. The Terumah is specifically something set aside by its owner and dedicated for sacred use.   In other words, the people must be in the habit of thinking of their property not as theirs alone, but as something over which they have current charge – much, I suppose, as we are encouraged to think of our children. The use of this property therefore is to do the best we can with it – it is only a loan to us, not our exclusive asset. For the people to give a portion of their property to a sacred purpose, willingly and with the intention of creating a better world, is an implicit assumption behind the building of the mishkan.

The word Terumah is an interesting one. Its root is from RAM – to lift up, to elevate. Presumably it derives from the physical act of lifting up that which is offered to God, but there are Chasidic teachings that the act of offering a gift to God elevates not so much the gift as the giver. We are told that those who collect for charitable purposes must ensure that they have pure intentions before they start, but those who give to charity don’t have to be so worthy – the act of giving purifies them ( (Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev/ Shalom of Kaminiki).

So the giving must be from everyone, it must be offered willingly with the understanding that God is the source of all, as part of the working construct that we must acknowledge God’s place in our world.

The mishkan is also the demonstrable proof that the agreement at Sinai is working. When Moses repeated to the Children of Israel all the commands of God and all the rules, at the theophany at Mt. Sinai, we are told that they replied “All that the Eternal has spoken, we will faithfully do” (Ex24:3,7etc) The phrase ‘na’aseh v’nishma’ – ‘we will do and we will understand’ – the literal response of the people, is borne out here in the building of a sacred space which is both the dwelling place and emphatically NOT the dwelling place of God. . In building the mishkan they will take the step into putting into material practise what has only now been a verbal agreement.   In building the mishkan they will learn much more about God.

When people built holy places in the ancient world, they were constructed to house the image of the deity to whom they were dedicated. This holy place was different, for there was to be no image at all. It is – if you will pardon the expression – a graphic representation of the non-representation of the Jewish God.

However there was something in the mishkan, and that something was the Ark, the first of the furniture of the mishkan to be described, and lovingly detailed. The Ark and its cover were explicated carefully, and the Torah instructed the people that the ‘Edut’ the witnessing, was to be placed in the Ark. Quite what was it that was to go into the Ark? Edut is an ancient word meaning covenant or treaty – and it seems that what went into the Ark was the physical container of that treaty – the tablets of the brit (covenant), the stones on which were written the ten commandments.

cherubimIn the ancient Near East, there would be boxes placed under the throne of the ruler, and in those boxes would be placed the laws of the land, and the treaties made with other peoples. In effect, the foundation of the throne of the monarch was a box which stored the laws.

The Ark contained the Edut, the treaty of the children of Israel with God. It is, in effect, the box at the base of the throne of the divine monarch. It would have been very clear to the people of the time that the presence of the Ark pointed up the absence of the throne above it – a clear symbol of the abstractness, yet absolute monarchy of God. Above the Ark was the kapporet, the cover made of a flat sheet of gold, from whose two ends rose two cherubim. God told Moses that he would meet Moses there “I will speak to you from above the kapporet, from between the two cherubim” (Ex 25:22). There is no description of the cherubim, though one can safely assume that they were not the chubby figures of gently winged angelic babies we see depicted in religious art. It may be that they are related in some way to the verb karov, to be near, the word which we use to denote the way of prayer (drawing near) implicit in the making of sacrifice. It may be that they are related to the Akkadian word ‘kuribu’ originally meaning ‘to pray’, but also used to describe creatures which were part human, part bird and part beast, and which would guard the entrance to pagan temples and petition the deities on behalf of the worshippers.

Whatever the cherubim were, they were clearly of significance, not the least being that they symbolised the difference of this understanding of God from any other – they could not petition a deity for there was none in the holy place to petition. Instead they highlighted the abstract nature of the Jewish God, the absence of a discernible throne, the absence of a depiction of the deity. The book of psalms (99:1) describes God as one who is yoshev ha kruvim – the one who rests upon the cherubim. The cherubim, like the Edut, represent the base of the throne of God – a throne which is not built, a throne which will remain empty.   When God speaks, it is from above the Ark, from between the cherubim, from a place outside of space.

When all the people willingly bring their offerings to create the place that represents an understanding of God they are still finding difficult (witness the golden calf episode that began this enterprise); when they elevate themselves by giving, when they demonstrate their understanding that God is the source of their wealth and their possessions, when they deliberately build a shrine that is to remain empty, a throne that does not exist, then God dwells among them. The building of the mishkan teaches us so much about Jewish values and Jewish community, and it points out to us the limit of our understanding of God.

Shekalim: The imperative to never diminish people by reducing them to numbers on a list

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“The ETERNAL spoke to Moses, saying: ‘When you take the sum of the children of Israel, according to their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul to God, when you number them; that there be no plague among them, when you numbers them. This they shall give, every one that passes among them that are numbered, half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary–the shekel is twenty gerahs–half a shekel for an offering to the ETERNAL. Every one that passes among them that are numbered, from twenty years old and upward, shall give the offering of the ETERNAL. The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less, than the half shekel, when they give the offering of the ETERNAL, to make atonement for your souls. And you shall take the atonement money from the children of Israel, and shall appoint it for the service of the tent of meeting, that it may be a memorial for the children of Israel before the ETERNAL to make atonement for your souls.'(Ex 30 11-16)”

Shabbat Shekalim comes around the beginning of the new month of Adar, in order to give a good month’s notice of the beginning of the month of Nisan, the month in which Pesach falls at the full moon. It is also read at this time because, according to tradition, the census of which it speaks was taken on the first of Nisan, so the reading is also acting of a reminder of that census and its purpose. The passage reminds us of the census taken in the wilderness through the donation of a half shekel coin, given not apparently only for the purpose of counting people, but also as a kind of sacrifice to offer atonement for sin, and also to provide for the maintenance of the Tent of Meeting – the forerunner to Temple and Synagogue as the space which reminds the people that God is among them. On Shabbat Shekalim, we also read a haftarah portion from 2 Kings which also makes reference to the census money and the use of it for Temple maintenance.

It is a complex text raising a lot of questions. What is the atonement being offered? What plague is being avoided? What could possibly be the difficulty with a census, a direct count of the military age men? There seems to be an ancient taboo against counting people which operates still today. By tradition one never counts people – when checking that there are ten people for a minyan a verse from the psalms is read “Hoshia et amekha, u’varekh et nahalatekha, ur’em v’nas’em ad ha’olam” [Save Your nation and bless Your inheritance, tend to them and raise them up, forever – Psalm 28:9]. It has ten words, each used to check off the people until it is clear that there are ten or over.

So why don’t we count people? Rashi suggests that numbering people means we don’t see their full humanity, and in some way we diminish them. He brings to his argument the ancient text of the Hebrew bible translated by Onkelos into Aramaic – the word for census becomes ‘taking’ – in some way by numbering people we take from them something essential. So he tells us we should never do a head count, but instead take from each of them a token, and then count those tokens. If we do not, we risk a plague coming upon us, as happened when David conducted a census. The Talmud also asks and answers our question – but differently:

“Why are people not counted directly? … Rabbi Isaac says ‘It is forbidden to count Israel, even for the performance of a mitzvah.’ … “The Talmudic discussion focuses on the verse: “The number of B’nei Yisrael will be like the sands of the sea which cannot be measured or counted …” (Hosea 2:1). In other words it is a sort of denial of faith, that the promise given to Abraham that his descendants would be beyond counting would somehow be compromised by the act of counting.

I am not sure that either of these responses gives us the authoritative reason for why counting people is so viscerally wrong. But there is something very powerful in the refusal to see people in terms of numbers. And interesting too that in the act of finding out how many men of military age are available in the community – for that must be the primary purpose of this counting – other things are woven in. Each person who is eligible gives half a shekel, something we are reminded is based on a known weight of silver equal to twenty gerahs. So each person gives the equivalent of ten gerahs. This half shekel coin must have been one of the smallest – but possibly not THE smallest – coin, something that was within everyone’s reach to donate. But add to that is the instruction – both rich and poor will contribute the same amount, neither more nor less. This reminds us that both rich and poor are equally valued in the eyes of God. The contribution of each one is of equal importance. So in the act of assessing capacity for military strength, everyone is expected to give something, and relative wealth is made irrelevant – everyone contributes the same. The fact that it is coins and not people being counted for this is also a salutary lesson – on the one hand there is something that seems to be a little coldly dispassionate about counting the silver tokens rather than the human beings, but at the same time the humanity of the individuals is being preserved – only the contribution they give is being counted. And then the piece de resistance – the silver tokens that are given are to be used not for war, not in any way for aggrandizing the powerful or for claiming the territory of others – all the contributions are used to maintain the Tent of Meeting – in effect they are the synagogue subscriptions. It is no accident that many synagogues finish their financial years at this time – the Torah reading reminds everyone of the need to give, to contribute to the well-being of the community. Without such offerings no synagogue or Jewish institution would survive.

The passage we read as maftir for Shabbat Shekalim is a well known one with clear parallels in today’s practice. The need to be able to call together a force to defend the people and the land; the need for the humanity of that force to be defended too so that the soldiers do not lose their essential souls in the fighting they do is vital, and there is much to be said about how that particular lesson is not being applied well in the current situation in Israel – just look at the website of Breaking the Silence, the testimony of Israeli soldiers, to see how values and humanity can be eroded. The imperative to never diminish people by reducing them to numbers on a list is one to which our own recent history bears painful testimony. But something else struck me powerfully this year when reading the piece. The half-ness of the shekel and the fact that a half shekel is ten gerahs.

Why a half shekel? One response is that this is a coin within reach of everyone, something that is not too big a sacrifice to give but not so small as to be insignificant. That may well be true, there is no clear economic scale for us to check it against but it has a sort of inherent likelihood. But think a little more and other values emerge. A half shekel is not complete – it requires another half to complete it. What we are saying by giving this ‘half’ is that we are making a contribution, but on its own it is not powerful enough – we need to be part of a community in order to play out our values successfully.

To be part of a community, we have first to count ourselves, to give something that can itself be noted and counted. The half shekel that we give demonstrates that we need someone else in the community to fulfill us and make us whole, to partner us and complete us. Judaism teaches that life is not to be lived as an ascetic, removing ourselves from the pleasures of people – life is to be lived in community – so public prayer for example requires a minyan – hence the need to count the people to ensure ten are present. Community is an essential tool in tikkun olam, in repairing the world. It is certainly true that one person alone can make a difference, but working together with others creates a whole world of other possibilities. We all need other people to fulfill us and the offer of a half shekel not only allows ourselves into the community, it invites others to be our partner.

We hear God differently through our diversity: the trick is to listen fully and to know that different voices tell of the same God

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The sidra begins with the words “vayishma Yitro – and Jethro heard” – but we don’t know what exactly it was that Jethro heard and understood. The information about what had happened in Egypt, the splitting of the sea and the war against Amalek didn’t have much effect on others who knew of it, so why does only Jethro respond in this way? There must be something else in the text….Either Jethro heard something more than we are told, or else he heard in a way that moved him powerfully and changed him.

Jethro seemed to hear in a particular way, the kind of hearing that happens when someone is moved to re-examine feelings, and so change the direction of their life.   This is more than active listening; it requires openness to the other, readiness to be affected by what one hears.

Hearing is a theme in this sidra. For of course we also have the people hearing God speaking, as the foundational event of Judaism, the giving of Torah at Sinai, happens in the hearing of the people at the foot of the mountain.  But what does it mean to hear the voice of God? And how can we possibly know when we have heard it, let alone allow ourselves to be changed by it?

After three days of preparation, the people are gathered at the foot of the mountain, the summit of which seems to be hidden in a storm of lightening, fire and smoke, and there is thunder and what appears to be the sound of the shofar, though it is never clear who is blowing the shofar. The whole mountain is trembling violently and Moses begins to talk to God and God answers: “And when the voice – Kol – of the horn grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by a Kol -voice. It isn’t really clear what it is that people hear when God answers – the word Kol can mean a voice, a sound, even a thunderclap. The ambiguity is important, for each person could claim to have heard God, and yet each may have heard something quite different from others. Rabbi Art Green suggests that what Moses heard was the thunder, just as everyone else did, but that within it he was able to hear the voice of God, even though others could not. Moses’ special ability was that he could translate the voice of God into the words we have– the Asseret haDibrot, the Ten Commandments.

The Talmud (Berachot 45a) records an amazing discussion: “From where do we know that, in the ancient practice of reading the Torah, when an interpreter would translate the Hebrew words of the Torah reader into Aramaic, the interpreter was not allowed to raise his voice above the level of the reader? From the verse: “Moses spoke, and God answered him in a voice.” What does the text mean when it says “in a voice?” asks the Talmud “It means The voice of Moses,” which is understood by them as meaning that God’s voice was at the same volume as Moses’ voice. But it is possible to read this at face value- as Art Green does – So when the Talmud says “God spoke in the voice of Moses” we could understand that God actually did speak in the voice of Moses” That is, at the moment of revelation, the voice of God and the voice of Moses were identical, indistinguishable. The human and divine voice was apparently the same – and this is why Moses was able to discern within the thunder the voice of God – it was his own voice he could hear.

There is a great deal of rabbinic storytelling around the events at Sinai. One of the most important is that it wasn’t only the Israelites at the foot of the mountain who heard the voice of God. The Midrash teaches that the voice went out to all the seventy nations of the world, each in its own language (Shabbat 88b), and another Midrash tells us that every person heard the voice of God differently, each in their own head (Shemot Rabbah 5.9). These are two different Midrashim, with quite different understandings from the text of what was actually heard. And this is diversity of interpretation is important to us. The Talmud, recording the debates of generations of rabbis about what text means, and what God’s will might be, shows us that disagreement and creative understanding are all part of the process of trying to discern what might be the truth of God’s words to us. The only agreement in this diverse process is that there is indeed a truth, but it is not clear what that truth might necessarily be. In the words of Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, “The Midrash can present on one page many contradictory interpretations of any given biblical verse. Certainly our sages realized that if one Midrash gives one version of events and a second Midrash gives a contradictory version, they can’t both be true at the level of what physically happened. However, they understood that each Midrash taught us something they saw as true about the world.  What does this teach us about truth and legitimate disagreement? Judaism does not teach that everything is relative. The message of the Parasha is that there is ultimate truth. However, we don’t always have a common understanding of what that truth is.

How do we negotiate this?  What are the ground rules and red lines when we all passionately believe we are right?  Civil debate becomes even more challenging when we are not merely talking about theoretical issues, but issues that impact upon our most deeply held moral values.” In other words, debate is all the more difficult for us when we are required to really hear the other side, to be prepared to give up some of the things that we hold dearly to ourselves, in order to serve the higher principle of making the world a better and more just place for all.

How do we hear the voice of God in our world? How can we trust what we think we hear? How do we choose between what we want to hear and what is authentically the voice? Firstly, like Jethro, we must listen completely, hear truly what is said and be open to it being something that might challenge what up till now we have held true and firm. And, like Moses, we must let the voice of God sound through our own voices, not that we may think we can speak for God but that we allow God to speak through us.

God is not us, and we are not God, but we must experience God with our own selves, our own experiences, our own way of understanding. And listening to the voice of God, true listening, should inform our choices and challenge our assumptions and some of our closely held attitudes. God is calling us to be something more than we are, to be more the people we should be. That is the voice we must listen to, and give others the right to hear the voice that they also hear – for the one thing our tradition is quite clear about is that each will hear the voice of God differently, but each of us is quite capable of hearing the voice of God.

Parashat Beshallach: lessons to survive national trauma in Holocaust Memorial Week.

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Seventy years ago this week, the twin camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated, and no-one in the outside world could ignore any longer what had been going on in territory controlled by Nazi Germany.

The western world is ready to recognise some of its collusion with what happened, but 70 years on is anxious to consign much of it to the history books, and looking at modern world events one can truly say that while some of the responsibility for the Shoah being allowed to happen is being accepted, much of it is not, and clearly nothing is being learned from it which might guide our politicians and their constituents to meaningfully help the oppressed peoples in Europe and beyond who are suffering under harsh and racist regimes today.

The Jewish world is still trying to come to terms with the events of the last century, though the pogroms and persecution are often still too recent and too raw for us to deal with yet, and we are stumbling around in the darkness of the early stages of the attempt to find meaning in what has happened to us. Post the Shoah, the trauma that our people endured, we have to assimilate something of value into our tradition and our ritual if we are to continue choosing to be Jews into the next generations. I don’t have any answers to how one deals with the experience, but reading Beshallach can help to point the way maybe, for it records the trauma of being thrust out from Egypt, the plagues which the Jews almost uncomprehendingly witnessed, the way in which the world changed so totally for them, and all security was gone – even the security of slavery. It records too the continued pursuit of them by the Egyptians, even into the inhospitable wilderness, the hopelessness and helplessness and victim positions of all those who had survived.   We read in Beshallach how the children of Israel turned on Moses, how they wished to be back in slavery in Egypt rather than in the wilderness, how they feared for themselves and their future, how they could not yet cope with what had happened to them, and did not know how to find meaning to guide them. What happened in sidra Beshallach is a paradigm for us to use to begin to deal with the Shoah. The first clue is in Moses’ speech to the people–“Fear not, stand still and see the salvation of the Eternal….for whereas you have seen the Egyptians today, you shall see them again no more for ever”   The removal of fear which comes from the certainty that the persecutors will be disabled and will no longer threaten the victims is a vital beginning to being able to move on from the trauma of the experience.

The second clue must surely be the fact that the children of Israel walked into the midst of the sea upon dry land – as the midrash takes it the sea did not fully part until the first Israelites had taken the risk and jumped in to it, risking at the very least cold and discomfort in the darkness and swirling waters.

The third event of use to us – that there was active and knowledgeable participation by Moses in what ultimately happened to the Egyptian army – God had made their wheels stick so that their passage through the sea was too difficult and they stated very clearly that they wanted to run away from the Israelites and go back to Egypt. It was then given for Moses to choose to stretch out his hand over the waters so that the Egyptians would drown before they could escape.

And finally the fact that the survivors recognised the hand of God in what had happened to them and around them, and “they believed in the Eternal and in Moses God’s servant” – they recognised that God is present in the world, and that his purpose is served through human beings. And they sang a song of praise – they worshipped God wholeheartedly and meaningfully.

Four factors in how the children of Israel dealt with their own pain and their own survival. The removal of the fear of immediate threat, the active choice to survive, the active choice to participate in dealing with the enemy rather than relying on a greater power to sort them out, and the understanding of and communication with Gods presence.

We can take the model and use it – removing the fear and immediate threat of racist oppression by standing out against it where ever it appears, whether directly focussed on Jews or not. Making active choices to survive as Jews, teaching our children, identifying ourselves, playing a part in the Jewish community. Dealing with our enemies directly, facing up to what terrifies us and not expecting them to shelter under the protection of others. And finally through exploring and exposing ourselves with prayer, recognising the place that God has in our lives, and accepting that we have an obligation in God’s scheme of things too.

We can look at what we as a Jewish people are doing post Shoah, and find that much of it fits into the model first offered in sidra Beshallach. We have structures to fight racism and oppression. We have structures to help us make active choices about our Judaism. We have structures to make us a people to be reckoned with, a nation state, and a high profile in diaspora. And we are beginning to develop a ritual and a liturgy to remember the Shoah within our religious identity too. We’re following the pattern, but much remains to be done. We have the structures but we have to really make use of them. We have some prayers but we have to seriously pray them.

Seventy years after the liberation by the Soviets of the Jews who survived Auschwitz, we are just beginning to make a glimmer in the darkness of the pain and the confusion. The generation who physically experienced it are dead or dying and rely on us now to continue their work. We shall not let them down, but will absorb the lessons we can, and be changed as Jews because of what happened to them.

Parashat Bo: speaking up against injustice is time critical, though many of us wait for too long

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Pharaoh is remembered for his certainty that he is the supreme power, for the battle between him and God that he is drawn into, for God’s deliberately manipulating him so as to make sure he keep his resolve in the battle – the famous hardening of his heart.

But along with this absolute dictator, the early stages of the Book of Exodus gives us little hints of people not accepting his power unquestioningly, sometimes with some civil disobedience, sometimes with some actions or remarks that don’t take him on face to face but clearly demonstrate other viewpoints.

So we have the midwives, Shifrah and Puah, who choose to fear God over Pharaoh and who do not follow his orders to destroy the male Hebrew babies at birth. We have the female relative of Pharaoh who must certainly know that the baby she is rescuing and keeping alive is supposed to be killed as an enemy of the state. We have the ordinary Egyptians who are forced to dig around the Nile for fresh water after it has been turned into blood and Pharaoh has returned to his Palace- a picture the bible gives us that surely reflects some of the anger of the people, and finally in chapter 8 with the arrival of the fourth plague, that of the lice, we have the magicians who give voice to their frustration: “And the magicians did so with their secret arts to bring forth lice, but they could not; and there were lice upon man, and upon beast.  Then the magicians said to Pharaoh: ‘This is the finger of God’; but Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he listened not to them; as the Eternal had spoken.” (8:14-15)

A little while later we get yet another insight into the people’s refusal to follow Pharaoh’s dictatorial stubbornness – the plague of hail is announced 24 hours earlier when Moses says “Behold, tomorrow about this time I will cause it to rain a very grievous hail, such as has not been in Egypt since the day it was founded even until now.  Now therefore send, hasten in your cattle and all that you have in the field; for every man and beast that shall be found in the field, and shall not be brought home, the hail shall come down upon them, and they shall die.’  He that feared the word of the Eternal among the servants of Pharaoh made his servants and his cattle flee into the houses; and he that regarded not the word of the Eternal left his servants and his cattle in the field.(Exodus 9:18-21). The same description that applied to the midwives – Yirat Adonai, the fear or reverence or awe of God – is now applied to the ordinary Egyptians, some of whom are clearly transferring their feelings from Pharaoh to God.

And now here, at the beginning of the sidra Bo, after seven terrible plagues, they are able to challenge Pharaoh directly. As Moses brings the warning of the eighth plague, the bible records that the servants of Pharaoh say to him   “How long shall this man be a snare unto us? let the men go, that they may serve the Eternal their God, do you not understand yet that Egypt is destroyed?” (Exodus 10:7)

At the very beginning of the story the disobedience is shown by the families who stand to lose a child to Pharaoh’s decree (in particular the family of Moses) and also by the brave women who are themselves described as Yirei Adonai – people who revere God. But when challenged of course they do not say so, instead they hide behind a stereotype of the foreign Hebrew women who, they say, are not like Egyptian women – with the implication that they are somehow less human than the Egyptian women. Only one person with no obvious motive is prepared to disobey the Pharaoh, and that is his unnamed female relative.

The magicians only mutter their disobedience when they are unable to replicate the plagues with their own enchantments. Almost as if to save themselves they attribute the more powerful magic to a more powerful magician. And the ordinary Egyptians who are described as Yirei Adonai become so only in order to protect their material goods. No one actually took on the Pharaoh until after the seventh plague, when Egypt is already, in their words, destroyed.  Finally there are courtiers and advisors who are willing to put their heads above the parapet and challenge Pharaoh. Finally the people who have been in a position of some kind of power are able to dare to use it. It is, sadly, too late though for many Egyptians and others who live in the land, and by now Pharaoh is unstoppable – the complete destruction of the place is assured. They have found the courage to speak up too late.

There is a lesson for us in this – a lesson that Pastor Martin Niemoller most famously gave expression to:

“First they came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

Parashat Va’era: encountering God both as Ani and Adonai

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As we begin to read Sidra Va’era one phrase jumps out – God says “אֲנִ֥י יְהוָֹֽה (Ani YHVH I am Adonai)” four times in the first seven verses, and we are also told in verse 3 “and I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El Shaddai, {God Almighty), but by My name  יְהוָֹֽהYHVH I made Me not known to them”.

Now we know of course that the name of YHVH was actually used repeatedly before this conversation with Moses, so it is clear that something else must be happening rather than the revelation of a name for God.

The four letter name given to Moses reveals something of the essence of God. An amalgam of the verb ‘To Be’ in past present and future form, it bespeaks continuous being, eternal existence.

It may also be a causative of being, the bringer forth of existence. In a sense it contains everything we can know of God, formulated as being that is outside of time. Here in Va’era it seems to me that God introduces God-self to Moses with the information that this is the same God who spoke with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all those generations ago. This is the Being who continues to be; the link to our history and roots, the companion of our present as well as the one who will walk with our children’s children. Did Abraham Isaac and Jacob know this or were they somehow caught in the moment of their relationship, aware of the covenantal promise but not fully understanding that this same God would be with their descendants. The same God, but experienced differently in each generation; the God who brings forth and is brought forth in our interactions.

What can we really say of God? Not much. And yet here is God repeating with a sense of urgency and emphasis    “ אֲנִ֥י יְהוָֹֽה Ani Adonai”.

Judaism bases itself on this two word statement. Everything our religion expresses can be said to flow from it, how we see the world, how we see ourselves and our possibilities in it:

YHVH that God is, was and will be.

And Ani – that God has an aspect that we can relate to, God is “Ani: I am” and exists in relationship to our own Ani or our collective Anachnu.

So with יְהוָֹֽה YHVH, this four letter name of God, we can understand something about the nature of God and existence but this is a cerebral connection only and we cannot encounter God in the understanding. But when the wordאֲנִ֥י  Ani is added we can be in relationship with God, can experience directly the divine rather that have our religion mediated through language and thought. We meet god in both ways. And this I think is new with the meeting in Va’era. A richer understanding of divinity, a gateway opened to our relationship with an ineffable God.

אֲנִ֥י יְהוָֹֽה Ani Adonai. Everything for us flows from this short phrase. It reminds us that God sustains existence, our mortal lives and the variety of lives that connect with us over time and space. It reminds us that we can create a relationship with the immanent aspects of God but that that relationship whilst rich and sustaining will only ever be partial. It reminds us that God is bigger than we can understand and has relationships with all who choose to be in relationship themselves. It reminds us that we relate to God as much through our relationships with others as we do in an I-Thou bond.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had individual encounters with God, each had a blessing, each was given a sense of continuity that would live long past them. But when Moses encounters God, he encounters the one who says אֲנִ֥י יְהוָֹֽה – the Sustainer and Creator of existence who wants to work together with the people of Israel, for them to learn to sustain and bring forth existence too.

Parashat Shemot: naming the past honestly with all its inglorious realities

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In his Chumash, Rabbi Dr Hertz comments on the story of the exodus of the Jewish slaves from Egypt, and, as part of his argument for the historical reality of such an experience says “What people would invent for itself so ignoble a past? A legend of such tenacity, representing the early fortunes of a people under so unfavourable an aspect, could not have arisen save as a reflection of real occurrences”.

His comment brings home to us the truth of the way we write history. Written most often by the winners, it us usually a tool for the glorification of our past. Rarely do we record the miserable realities of hardship or pain, the mundanity of grinding poverty, the banality of living simply to survive – instead we tend to cast a glowing light on our past, speak of the golden ages when everything was apparently so much better than it is now, ascribe attributes and events to show our antecedents fitting an image we feel they should have.

Only the Jews it seems, record our history in all its embarrassing baseness. We record the anger of God against us, as well as God’s redemption of our people. We record our lowly origins, our family breugess’, our bad behaviour as well as our good

.  Reading the Hebrew bible we find real people emerging from the narrative, people in bad moods, people who are afraid or selfish, who favour one child over another or who can’t quite let go of a bad habit. We meet character traits in our ancestors that we can recognise easily today, the challenges that face us now can be seen to have been faced before. We are unusual in that our stories about our past show the meanness, the sadness, the destitution, the low social status. Our history is too important to us to leave to the myth makers – we have to have it recorded as it was, and we have to repeat it year on year in public, reminding ourselves of the shortcomings in our less than glorious past.

It is because we have recognised the importance of our history, its centrality and its impact on our present that we have continued to be Jews. It is because we know and reprise our origins that we are able to develop our covenantal relationship with God. There are no secrets, no glosses, and no skeletons in the cupboard which might suddenly appear and throw us off balance. And with the stories of our past of slavery and poverty, of ancestral wrongs and religious dead ends, we tell the other stories too – of those who listened and heard the presence of God, of amazing selflessness, of faith and courage, of journeys into the unknown leading to blessing and covenant.

The word ‘Shemot’ means ‘names’. We will be reading the names of those who went down to Egypt with Jacob, in preparation for telling the stories of Exodus, the journey into the desert, the leap of faith into the future. Before we can go forward, we must root ourselves in our history, before reading of the exodus we remember how we got to where we are. Jewish tradition is very clear that our present is rooted in our past, and who we will be must emerge from who we have been.

Beginning to read the second book of Torah, with its sense of new beginnings, of God returning into history, of a great journey about to be made, we remember the weight of our history even as we start a new year in the secular calendar. We may be closing the door on another year, but all that has gone on in this last year should not be forgotten by us. We are the people who remember things as they really were, not as we should like them to have been. We are the people who are not afraid to write a history that does not glorify us, whose heroes have faults, whose stories expose problems. As the New Year promises a new future, remember to honour the past by remembering it as it really is.

Vayechi: Chesed ve’Emet, Acknowledging truth allows us to offer our compassion fully.

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וַיִּקְרְב֣וּ יְמֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל֘ לָמוּת֒ וַיִּקְרָ֣א ׀ לִבְנ֣וֹ לְיוֹסֵ֗ף וַיֹּ֤אמֶר לוֹ֙ אִם־נָ֨א מָצָ֤אתִי חֵן֙ בְּעֵינֶ֔יךָ שִׂים־נָ֥א יָֽדְךָ֖ תַּ֣חַת יְרֵכִ֑י וְעָשִׂ֤יתָ עִמָּדִי֙ חֶ֣סֶד וֶֽאֱמֶ֔ת אַל־נָ֥א תִקְבְּרֵ֖נִי בְּמִצְרָֽיִם:

And the days of Israel came close to death and he called to his son, to Joseph, and he said to him “If pray I found favour in your eyes, pray put your hand under my thigh, and treat with me with Chesed and Emet; do not, I pray, bury me in Egypt” (Exodus 47:29)

Chesed and Emet – two of the thirteen middot, the attributes of God explained by God to Moses, after the incident of the Golden calf, and which continue to be used liturgically in the same way that Moses used them then– to ask for divine mercy when there is no legal basis or reason for it.

Essentially, used as the centre of the selichot prayers of the Days of Awe, these words, taken from Exodus 34 (vv6-7) remind God of our individual and group relationship with the divine, and that sometimes it is only the mercy of God that allows that relationship to continue. They set the scene for teshuvah, for repentance or rather for a return to God after we have strayed.

Of the thirteen middot derived from this text, all but one refer to mercy, kindness, favour or forgiveness –the second of our pair here in Vayechi, when Joseph asks Jacob, Ve’asiti imadi Chesed ve’Emet.

The word Emet means truth or faithfulness. Its presence in the request is a problem for classical commentators on this text, and is beautifully glossed by Rashi who quotes the midrash (Gen. Rabbah 96:5) which uses the context of the proper burial of the dead by understanding Jacob to be saying to his son “The chesed/loving-kindness that is done for the dead is here a true loving-kindness, entirely altruistic, since one cannot expect payment or reward of any kind from the dead for caring for them”. And from this reading grows the mitzvah of Chesed SHEL Emet – truthful kindness or perfect kindness, the entirely altruistic mitzvah of helping those who are powerless and completely vulnerable and who will never be able to recompense or return the favour – the unburied dead.

It is a beautiful platform on which to stand this most selfless and necessary of activities, yet I find myself not entirely satisfied either with the midrashic gloss of Rashi or with the usual interpretation that “chesed ve’emet” in this context is simply an idiomatic phrasing of doing a favour or a good deed. It seems to me that the two words mean very different things, and placing them together (as happens fairly often in the bible) creates a new thing, a tension between loving kindness and truth/faithfulness with which we must engage.

As well as being in the verses which give us the attributes of God, the combination of words comes to describe God and God’s work, for example in psalms such as

“All the ways of God are Chesed and Emet to those who keep his covenant and his testimony” (25:10)  כָּל־אָרְח֣וֹת יְ֭הֹוָה חֶ֣סֶד וֶאֱמֶ֑ת לְנֹצְרֵ֥י בְ֝רִית֗וֹ וְעֵדֹתָֽיו:

Or “Righteousness and truth are the foundation of Your throne, Chesed and Emet go out from before You”        (89:15)    צֶ֣דֶק וּ֭מִשְׁפָּט מְכ֣וֹן כִּסְאֶ֑ךָ חֶ֥סֶד וֶ֝אֱמֶ֗ת יְֽקַדְּמ֥וּ פָנֶֽיךָ

Chesed and Emet come together in God, and are a fundamental part of the Covenant relationship we have with God – this is clear from the texts. So it is a very easy stretch when reading those same texts to understand that we expect Chesed/loving-kindness from God EVEN THOUGH the truth of our being is not always deserving – hence the use of the middot in the selichot prayers of pardon throughout the Days of Awe.

But the real lesson in the deathbed conversation between Jacob and Joseph is not that we expect unconditional love and forgiveness from God, but rather that we have to mediate the one with the other for ourselves, that however we might perceive the truth of our relationship with someone else, when the chips are down, then Chesed also has to be in the equation. Indeed sometimes compassion has to override the truth of someone’s behaviour.

What Jacob is asking of Joseph is not couched in the patriarchal power language – “you are my son and must follow my wishes”. It is phrased very much as a favour – “if I have found favour in your sight….” But then he adds to the request: “deal with me with both Emet and Chesed”.

It may be that Jacob know that he cannot order this son of his who has become so powerful in Egypt, and who may have his own political reasons to decide on the funeral planning for his father. It may be that Jacob knows that he may not even be successful when he appeals to Joseph’s magnanimity with his request formed in such conciliatory words as the formulaic “if I have found favour in your sight”.  He does this but then he goes on to nuance his words with the appeal to both Chesed and Emet. It seems to me that Jacob is asking of his son something quite new in human interaction at this point – he is acknowledging that the Emet, the truth of their relationship is that has been strained for many years, that he has not parented Joseph well, that he has little claim on his son for his request, and yet he is asking for the compassion of Chesed. He is saying to his son –“ I know who I am to you, and you know that I know this, but my request is so important to me that I am asking you to see past this truth we both acknowledge and help me.”

The honesty with which Jacob is speaking here to his son is the Emet he is asking for from his son. He does not want their story to be airbrushed or hidden from their interaction, but to be part of the decision making process that Joseph will go through. He does not want the failures in their relationship to be buried and treated as if they never existed. With the words “ve’emet” he is telling his son that the unfinished business of their relationship was real, that the pain felt by Joseph was real too, and he is asking Joseph to honour his wishes despite this pain, through the power of his compassion for his father. Essentially with the combination of Chesed ve Emet Jacob asks of his son not only great compassion, but great compassion in the light of the knowledge of the painful truth.

The lesson is well taught. Joseph honour his father’s wishes and the sibling rivalry ends here with the death of Jacob. The pain is recorded, and it does not go away or be hidden from view but neither does it sprawl out into the next generation. Once faced with integrity and acknowledged by the person who is perceived to have caused the pain, it can be overcome and compassion allowed to take its place. Psalm 89 tells us that the world is built with Chesed (v3) – it is the tool of creation, a new possibility.

כִּֽי־אָמַ֗רְתִּי ע֭וֹלָם חֶ֣סֶד יִבָּנֶ֑ה

And Jacob is asking for this too – once the truth is acknowledged a new possibility emerges and compassion has its place. The importance of the mitzvah of Chesed shel Emet, of the altruistic treatment of the dead who cannot repay us for what we do for them is great. But the importance of treating others with Chesed ve’emet is equally great, for only then do we truly let go of what is holding us back from our potential and our future.

Vayigash: making peace is a process with which we have to keep faith, however unlikely it may seem

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Making peace between two hurt and damaged parties must be one of the hardest activities in the world. Often, simply the absence of war must be enough for us, something which may look like peace but which is a far more shallowly rooted plant than we would like to acknowledge.

Sidra Vayigash tells the story of the making of peace between brothers – not a new story in the book of Genesis, and when one looks closely not even a real and complete peace – but at least it is more than the simple absence of war.

The sidra opens with the encounter between the powerful Egyptianised Joseph and his distraught and powerless older brother Judah. Judah cannot bear having to return to his father to tell him that Benjamin, only remaining son of Rachel, is held hostage in Egypt. With an impassioned speech he offers himself as hostage instead. This has an unexpected result – the man before him cries loudly and reveals himself to be the long lost boy who had been so hated by his older brothers they had thrown him into a pit to die a slow and pitiless death, but who had been rescued from that fate and sold into slavery instead. Now he stands before them, the second most powerful man in Egypt, and he is weeping and embracing them and forgiving them and even suggesting that everything had been God’s plan – they bear no fault for what they did.

This is the third meeting of the brothers with Joseph, and one has to ask – what finally prompted him to reveal himself and to effect reconciliation with them? Up till now he had treated them quite cruelly – accusing them of being spies, demanding that Benjamin be brought to Egypt, framing Benjamin as a thief and in an act of summary justice ruling that Benjamin must remain in Egypt, leaving his father totally bereft.

What is the riddle enmeshed within the story for us to untangle here? Is it about revenge? About justice? About the ongoing quest for repentance and forgiveness? And if so, is there real repentance and can we say that there is real forgiveness?

The whole of the book of Genesis speaks of rivalry between siblings, of the terrible situations such jealousy can cause; about the ways that people can continue to live with a partial resolution, and about the quest for a real resolution.

Here in Vayigash comes the resolution par excellence – but even this is not some fairy tale ending, but a qualified and measured response which is part of a longer process.

Joseph meets his brothers three times before he reveals himself to them. Each time he ends in tears which he sheds privately. In the first encounter the brothers have come down to Egypt for food and Joseph is the man in charge of rationing. We are told “when Joseph saw his brothers he recognised them, but he acted like a stranger toward them and spoke harshly to them.” (Gen. 42:7). He accused them of being spies, confined them to jail for three days and then demands that they return to Canaan and bring back Benjamin to Egypt. He is completely unaware of them as human beings – they are objects for his anger and revenge, and tools for him to contact his full brother Benjamin – nothing more. He does not trust them, he does not care about them, he knows nothing much about them and doesn’t try to find out whether they feel bad about what happened to him, or whether they have felt remorse about what their father had suffered with Joseph’s loss.

When he meets them for a second time, Joseph is brought a step closer towards reconciliation. This time he asks some questions which bring him into a connection with his family – he asks about his father’s health. When he sees Benjamin he is overcome by emotion – but he takes care that no one shall see his tears and hurries out of the room to weep in private, then washes his face and returns composed. (Gen. 43:30). It is through Benjamin, his full brother, the one who had not conspired to murder him that Joseph begins to reconnect with his past. But he controls himself and his emotions enough to set a test – in effect he recreates the same scenario that had him sent into slavery as a young boy – he puts the older brothers in charge of the fate of the younger one, what they do will determine his life or death. So he puts his silver goblet in Benjamin’s sack, sends his steward to retrieve the men and discover the stolen goblet – and now how the brothers respond will be crucial – will they let Benjamin be taken into Egypt and lost to his father, or will they try to save him

And so to the third encounter – Judah, wholly repentant and distraught, pleads with Joseph on behalf of his father who has already lost a child dear to him. He offers himself in place of the boy – and Joseph sees that the brothers really have changed, they have made teshuvah and when given the opportunity to sin again they set themselves against it.   Joseph finally gives way to his feelings and sobs so loudly he can be heard all over the palace. He confronts these Canaanite strangers as brothers and forgives them. There is reconciliation and the book of Genesis is able finally to witness a sibling rivalry that is resolved, to show that with repentance comes forgiveness, and so it is possible to move on in one’s life into new and different places.

But there is more to this story than a happy ending – we know that life is no fairy tale, and neither is bible. The reconciliation between the boys is certainly more than we have ever seen before, but we should not forget that it took over 20 years to achieve, that during it there was much pain and anger, thoughts of revenge and retribution, a clear denial of what had gone on and long term suppression of guilt and responsibility. We know that Joseph did not contact his family – not even his father or his beloved younger brother – who lived with the knowledge that he had gone to his death in a horrible way, that there was no certainty however, no possibility of complete and completed mourning. We know too that Joseph had to struggle with his own feelings about his brothers. A gap of 20 years did not automatically resolve the pain and the animosity – just because time had passed it did not mean that time had healed, and anyway there had been such hostility between them for so long that even before they had placed him in a forsaken pit they were unable to even speak civilly with him.

Having forgiven them he set them up in Goshen, far away from the palace where he continued living. When their father lay dying they had to send for Joseph – evidently he was not a frequent and dutiful visitor to his resettled family, and he waited till his father lay dying before introducing his own two sons to him.

The narratives about rivalry between siblings, begun with the murderous anger of Cain against Abel, finally end here with the tears and embraces of Joseph and his bothers. There is forgiveness and some limit to the ongoing anguish, but all is not sweetness and light. It never is and we would find the bible unbelievable if, after all that had gone on, there would be no hint of the shadowlands of pain left as a result of those relationships over so many years. As Ishmael and Isaac could never fully reconcile, as Jacob and Esau were able to weep and kiss and then go their separate ways, so too there is a boundary to this rapprochement. What makes this story different is that it is enough – there is repentance, there is forgiveness, there is insight, there is an element of acknowledgement of wrongs on both sides.

Making peace is never easy, it doesn’t simply happen, it takes time and it takes insight and it takes some unqualified repentance and some unqualified forgiveness. There will be the urge to punish, to take vengeance, to hide one’s tears in private and present a tough and intractable face in public. There will be the urge to accuse the other of all sorts of crimes, to see them as less than valuable. All this is normal and natural and part of the process, but for peace to come about – even for this curious state of cold peace that we are so used to in our modern world – there has to be a willingness to keep faith with the process, to meet the other side again and again, to keep trying.

The person who broke the impasse between Joseph and his brothers was not Joseph, it was Judah, one of the brothers who had been central to the plot to destroy him years before. Judah, who is our named ancestor, from whom the word Jew is derived. It was Judah who put himself on the line for a more important principle, who offered himself as hostage if it would free Benjamin from slavery and return him safely to the old man who was their father. Judah was the one who took the risk, who took the initiative and approached the harshly judgmental and uncompromising Egyptian potentate if front of him. He is our ancestor and he is our role model. He shows us that even in the most unlikely of situations our insight and our willingness to act upon it, will save us. May we continue his work in our own generation, and help to bring about some form of peace in our own time.

Mikketz: raising up the light and keeping hope alive

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Rabbi Hugo Gryn famously told a story of his father in the winter of 1944, while they were together in a concentration camp called Lieberose. Having announced that it was the eve of Chanukah, he took a homemade clay bowl and lit a wick immersed in is precious, now melted ration of margarine. Before he could recite the blessing, Hugo looked at his father and protested “we need the food – we can’t afford to waste it on a candle” his father looked at Hugo then His father looked at Hugo-and then at the lamp—and responded, “You and I have seen that it is impossible to live up to three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water; but you can’t live at all without hope.”

Rabbi Moshe Prager told the story of a young boy in Auschwitz whose Barmitzvah fell on the first day of Chanukah. He too painstakingly collected scraps of oil to craft a makeshift candle and invited a small group to celebrate with him late at night in his ‘bunk’. In the blackness of the night in Auschwitz, a small band of hungry and frightened Jews huddled together to watch the Barmitzvah light the candle and intone the blessings when a Nazi guard entered the hut and shouted at the lad at the centre of the activity to put out the candle. The Barmitzvah looked at the Nazi and said “we Jews do not extinguish light, we make light”

What both the stories have in common is the importance of retaining identity, and that in holding on to who we essentially are, we keep alive not only ourselves and our hope, but also God’s place in our world.

At the very beginning of creation God commands y’hee or – let there be light. Long before the sun and moon have been created, even before night and day have been differentiated, even before the division into light and darkness, the command booms out in the Universe – y’hee or. God, who commands us to walk in God’s way and emulate God’s actions as best we can, enters the tohu va’vohu, the confusion and blackness of the deep and brings light. It is a command for us to do the same.

In the sidra Mikketz, which is always read on Shabbat Chanukah, Joseph, the arrogant young boy who had been sold into slavery by his brothers and who had, by his own efforts, survived Egyptian imprisonment and become a noted interpreter of dreams, seems to shed his own Hebrew identity and becomes an officer of Pharaoh’s court. His name is changed to an Egyptian one – Zaphenat Parnea, he marries an Egyptian woman Asenat, the daughter of an Egyptian priest and wears the clothing of Egyptian nobility.

Nachum Sarna explains the etymology of the new name – Zaphenat Parnea in this way:

“Traditional exegesis connects the name with Joseph’s penchant for interpreting dreams, seeing in the first element a derivation from the Hebrew stem ts-f-n to hide, and rendering the second contextually as “to elucidate”. The name would thus mean “The revealer of hidden things”. However an Egyptian origin is evident and a widely held view regards it as the transcription “God speaks; he lives” … In choosing this name, Pharaoh finds a title for Joseph as the one in whom God speaks, and the people live

So even Joseph, the assimilated one, the one who leaves home and family and chooses never to go back; even Joseph, who marries out and whose children are adopted back into the family as half-tribes; Joseph who gives his sons Hebrew names even while describing them as the ones who will help him forget his own past; with all of this, even Joseph retains his essential identity, keeping alive hope, keeping alive God’s place in the world, bringing light into the world through his management of resources and his conduit to God’s speaking.

We always read Mikketz in Chanukah. We always read of the name change on a day we will be lighting the candles of witnessing to God’s continuing care for us. We always face the tensions embedded in Jewish identity, in Jewish historical experience at this time. We read about Pharaoh’s description of the most assimilated of our ancestors as “a man in whom there is the spirit of God”. The story reminds us – as do the two Chanukah stories of the holocaust with which I began – that no matter how dark, how distressing our world, God is not really hidden far away. Maybe hidden, but not far away, and we can bring forth light for ourselves and so reveal the divine that is all around us.