Tag Archives: Jewish calendar

Lech Lecha – the covenants of peoplehood and land

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After giving a talk at a Muslim interfaith forum, entitled “One God, one humanity, many religions” I was asked after it by a group of interested young Muslim men – What makes the Jews Jewish?  Christianity they understood, Islam they understood, but Judaism – what makes Jews Jewish?

What gives us our special identity and our difference is the way we see our relationship with God, the understanding we have of being in a relationship of Covenant. The contract/covenant we have with God is unbreakable, however many times we don’t keep to the rules, however many times we transgress. The covenant we have with God is always there, it is inescapable, it defines us and creates the parameters of our religious identity. We know of it, we live with it day in and day out, but I don’t think that any of us can say that we really understand it.

The bible contains within its narrative many different sorts of covenant. Already there has been a covenant with Noach, and one with all of humanity – defined through the sign of the rainbow. This sidra, Lech lecha, sets the scene for some of the specifically Jewish ones. Brit milah, the covenant of circumcision and more puzzlingly the “Brit bein habetarim” the covenant of the pieces.

God appeared to Abraham seven times in his career, and put him to the test, made demands, held our promises and endowed him with the blessings of land and of descendants. The fourth appearance, the middle one of the revelations, was different from those that came before and those that followed it – it came in the form of a vision.

This vision begins with God telling Avram not to fear, that God will be his shield, that he will ultimately have a great reward – but immediately we are into a problem – what is it that God thinks that Avram fears?

Only AFTER the divine reassurance does Avram speak, asking what of worth could God possibly give him, seeing that he has no child of his own to be his heir. His question is answered – his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of heaven. God is the redeeming God who has brought him out, who will give him a new land to inherit. But Avram has another question – “how will I KNOW that I will inherit it?”

Maybe this second question is too much for God – although that statement may itself be a heresy. Whatever the reason for it, we are suddenly plunged into a difficult and obscure text. We don’t even know if the vision is the framework, or if Avram is operating in the physical world when, under divine instruction, he takes a three year old heifer, a three year old she-goat and a three year old ram, and two birds – a turtle dove and a young pigeon, and apparently slaughters all the animals, dividing each of the three animals in half, laying each half over against the other, and when the birds of prey come as they naturally would, Avram drives them away. What is the symbolism of three? Three animals, each three years old?  And of the six parts as each of the three is halved? And what of the two, the birds who are untouched?

The vision deepens into a tardema– the kind of magical sleep that happened to Adam in the Garden of Eden during which Eve was created. And for a second time Avram hears the promise that he will be a father of a great nation, and also that the nation will know suffering, although not in his own lifetime. And then the covenant is ratified as a smoking furnace and a flaming torch, symbols we can only assume of the presence of God, passed between the pieces.

We don’t see Avram wake up as we saw Adam awake and meet his companion. We don’t know how Avram interpreted his vision, who he told, how it altered him. We are left only with a description, a sense of deep symbolism, an awareness that while the human side of the covenant is still unclear, God is obligated by the event. Just as with the covenant with Noah God is obligated but nothing is demanded of humankind. The later covenants don’t work like this – the Brit is generally dependent on Israel’s faithfulness to God, but here in the early covenants with humankind the remarkable fact is that they are unconditional, they demonstrate entirely selfless love given by a God who is prepared to be faithful and unchanging when responding to humankind.

The true symbolism of the covenant of the pieces is lost in the mists of the past, although we can intuit a reasonable amount of understanding. The three sets of three – a magical number long before the existence of Christianity, denoting a special kind of wholeness. The birds of prey driven off symbolising the nations who would try to pre-empt or even destroy the covenant, being defeated by Avram. The other birds, symbols of liberation, of perfections, of the divine presence, who become invisible in the text. And the cutting into two and then passing through the pieces denotes the parties to the contract guaranteeing the wholeness of it. Dividing as a way of symbolising completion has been around for a long time – even today we cut a deal. Or cut a ribbon or smash a bottle or a glass, and circumcision too requires the action of cutting.

We have a contract with God. Unlike any other formulation of any other religion, ours is based unequivocally on this idea of covenant of mutual obligation. God is our God because we are God’s people – that is the bottom line. But just how do we understand that contract and how do we honour it?

Traditional Judaism is clear about this –the system of mitzvot which provides a framework for all we do and all we are, this is the content of the contract. By observing the mitzvot the commandments, we are honouring the metzaveh, the commander. Whether we understand or not, whether we get a spiritual feeling or not, whether we feel good about it or not, this is the way of the relationship forged with our ancestor Abraham, this is the obligation to which we are signed up

Progressive Judaism has a slightly harder time of it, for the idea of covenant remains, and the framework of acting within a system of mitzvot remains, but quite what the content is and how one squares the unconditional acceptance of the obligation with more rational and libertarian thinking is, to say the least, problematic. And as soon as one begins the questioning there is the fear that the questioning will take over, that the precious essence of the covenant will in some way be lost to us.

What one might call the covenant par excellence, Brit Mila – has been the object of much questioning recently. It seems to be as obscure in its way as the covenant of the pieces, for there is the quality of unreality about it, of vision. There is the cutting of the flesh and the exposure of vulnerability, the division symbolizing the wholeness, Brit Milah perfecting the child on whom it is done.

Why do we circumcise our baby boys, and what symbolism does it hold for us? We do so at one level because it is a mitzvah, it is commanded of us by God, it symbolises brining that child into the covenant. Of course any Jewish boy remains Jewish even if Milah doesn’t take place, but somehow the ceremony is seen as essential in denoting the identity of the male Jew. Throughout history Jews have risked death to circumcise their sons, throughout history it has remained an act of pride, sometimes of defiance, always of inner if not outer freedom. We circumcise our sons to mark their bodies indelibly with this sign of our ancient covenant. Whatever we think it to be, deep down is that sense of unconditional obligation, of God being our God if we are God’s people.

The covenant is the framework for religious identity, forming the inner core and the outer parameter of Judaism. In an increasingly rational and libertarian world we need to understand the nature of covenant, to orient ourselves within it as best we can, and to teach its meaning to our children.

When God created two different covenants with Abraham, one to do with descendants the other with land, the model was set for all time – people and land, Jewish people and Jewish land. What each was to become was left unclear, but that both are necessary and each needs the other is certain to us.

So what is the meaning of the Jewish people and of a Jewish land? We are in a time of enormous uncertainty, of wildly differing opinions.  I offer my own thoughts now – the Jewish people are neither more special nor more talented than any other, what we have is an attachment to being God’s people, by which we mean we try to bring God more closely into the world through what we do. Listening to the different voices from different traditions earlier this week, that idea is not unique to us, but what is unique is our covenantal relationship that both binds us and frees us to relate in our own way to God, safe in our chutzpadik challenges towards God that God will not ever abandon us for good.

And our land is where we are supposed to bring God’s presence most potently, a place where God’s eyes are always watching, a place close to God’s heart.  I grieve for how little we are fulfilling our role there at the moment, I despair when I see the values and teachings of our religion traduced or ignored.

Abraham is told lech lecha, to go – but where? The Hebrew is obscure. Is it to go to a different physical place or to go into himself and draw from himself his essential humanity?  He is told to be a blessing. And this is our ultimate purpose, to understand that all humanity is under the special care of God, all humanity is equal in God’s eyes; to use this understanding to bring about blessing in the world.

Right now I fear that we are not doing our job well. The two contracts of peoplehood and land are both under threat from our own actions. But the imperative to go out and be a blessing, that still feels true and possible. And that must be our task – to speak out, to go that extra distance, and create blessing in our world.

Parashat Emor: Proclaim God’s Time or Time is more than a packages of moments; it encodes our history, our identity, our meaning, our purpose

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Right at the beginning of the bible comes the need to distinguish time. God divides the phases of creation into days and nights and sets up structures in the universe to define the time that already exists, making the sun, moon and stars. Then God models for us the structure of six days of work followed by a seventh day of rest.

Jewish time is further developed in the rest of the bible. In the book of Exodus in Parashat Bo we find the very first commandment in Torah that is addressed to the entire Jewish people and we find that it is about Time. “Hachodesh hazeh lachem rosh chodashim rishon . . . , “This month shall be to you the first of the months . . . “(Exodus 12:2).

Tradition reads this as an instruction to organise a calendar. And this week, in Parashat Emor, we are given the monthly and daily specifics of what goes on it. Mo-adei Adonai Asher Tikr’u otam . . . , “These are God’s set times which you shall proclaim . . . “(Leviticus 23:2).

Jewish time is the ebb and flow of working week and restful shabbat; it is structured around the major festivals which bound the year – so that until recently most Jews would remember a birthdate or a yahrzeit as being in relation to the nearest festival.

Our calendar is a way of making sure that life is not simply the flow of one homogenous day after another.  It is a way of structuring and therefore being able to use and understand, time.

But it’s not just a matter of giving dates for our holy days in order for us to remember and mark them. Our calendar is more complex and more nuanced than that.

First of all, the days of the year must be indexed to the seasons, otherwise even the tiniest annual discrepancy would, over the decades and centuries, mean that we would be celebrating the Spring festival of Pesach in the winter, and the Autumn festival of Sukkot in the spring. So we have to intervene in how we describe time in order to allow it to work in the right and proper place.

Our sages quickly worked out that neither the solar nor the lunar calendar on their own will solve our problem.  Counting full days does not bring the earth back to precisely the same place in its solar orbit. The solar year – the time it takes the sun to pass from vernal (or spring) equinox to vernal equinox is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, so there is about a six-hour  or quarter-day margin of error each year. If we did not compensate for this we would create a margin of error of about 24 days after only 100 years.

So in the Gregorian calendar we add a “leap year” with one more day every four years to bring us back to ‘true’.

The lunar calendar, while having the great visual advantage that the eve of the fourteenth day of every lunar month has a full moon (Pesach, Sukkot, Purim, Tu B’Shevat), still brings the difficulty of being one whole lunar month short every two or three years as it is about eleven days shorter than the solar month. We solve this by adding an Adar Sheini, a second month of Adar nine times every seventeen years.

The creation and structuring of time in order to use it is one of the things that makes us human, and how we do it in our particular tradition is one of the things that makes us who we are as Jews. By our working alongside the natural world of day and night, of solar year and lunar cycle and by adding something of our own so as to keep our festivals in their seasons, we are working alongside of God to co-create both our environment and our expression of our history and spirituality. And it is the list of festivals in parashat Emor which gives us the permission and the expectation to do this.  Having been able to create our time and associate our festivals not just with dates, not simply with seasons, but also with a quasi historical meaning, we Jews, so long uprooted from our land and from the agricultural tradition, have learned to build and to buttress our identity and our history through the use of time. Pesach has become the time of redemption from slavery, Shavuot the time of connection with God through Torah, Sukkot gives meaning through our recognition of our mortality and fragility, as well as acknowledging God’s real and practical gifts to us.  Time is more than a series of events of packages of moments; it encodes our history, our identity, our meaning, our purpose.

However secular or distanced from tradition we may be, we still sense the flow of sacred time alongside our awareness of our routine diaries and the calendars of secular events. Spring time still brings thoughts of Pesach, the Autumn heralds the solemn festivals of new year and Yom Kippur. And Jews who rarely feel the need for community or ritual will contact a local community to find out about seder, or a ticket to the high holy days. We still sense the sacredness of time, but how do we express its holiness apart from a tug into community a few times a year? The psalms tell us the messianic age could arrive tomorrow, if only we would listen. Today’s sidra is called “Emor” – the imperative to speak. Yet if we focus only on speaking we would quickly dislocate ourselves in our dialogue, for just as time is lunar AND solar, so is communication about speaking AND listening.  What we listen to, what we hear bible telling us again and again, is the requirement to be holy because God is holy. And how do we do that? Clearly in part it is a focus on what we do, how we act in the world, but Emor tells us also that becoming holy has something to do with how we ‘make time’ for the important things in life, with we use our time on this earth.

Rabbi Jon Adland (US Reform Rabbi) put it like this: “Time is all we’ve got in our lives, and how we use this precious inheritance will determine the mark we leave on this world. Holy days and holidays are not only about acknowledging God, but also about affirming community and remembering that which came before. The rest of time, the majority of moments outside of the holy days, are left for us to structure. In many ways, every day that isn’t a Jewish holiday is chol hamo-eid, an “intermediate day” in a year-long calendar. Just because a day is not a holy day on the calendar doesn’t mean it can’t be made holy through our actions.”

So we need to be asking ourselves each day: “What should we be doing to sanctify our time?”  “In what way should we be speaking out? In what way should we be listening?”

Our religious practise has moved on since the days that we brought offerings to God at set times to the Temple. Now we have to ask how we use our time in a way that honours God and our tradition. Be it fighting for social justice or bringing compassion to individuals in distress; be it offering gifts of food or money or opportunity to those in need or our living with low impact on the environment; be it political activism or small acts of kindness – there are a myriad ways we can use our time in this world. The important thing is that we use our time well, and create holiness in our world.

 

Sermon 2018