Dear Friends and Family:
We each anticipate Rosh Hashanah in a variety of ways, from the special psalms and shofar blasts during the preceding month of Elul, to the cooking and cleaning which are a part of family celebrations. At many of my colleagues’ workplaces, they have been thinking about the holiday for months and........ well, enough said!
I find comfort in the communal rituals of the season, and in the familial and personal rituals of preparation for the Yamim Noraim. We anticipate what is to come, be it the melodies of the holidays, the reunions with friends and family, or the texts we encounter and re-encounter each year.
In traditional congregations, on the first day we read the story of Sarah’s barrenness and the birth of Isaac. We then read of the expulsion of her maidservant Hagar and Ishmael, who posed a threat to Isaac’s inheritance. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we read the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac.
Why do we read these particular stories on Rosh Hashanah? On this day when we celebrate the birth of the world, the selected texts imply that we, mere mortals, cannot appreciate the enormity of Creation, and instead we are asked to examine the concept of God’s Plan through the lens of this one, dysfunctional family.
The story of Ishmael and Hagar is troubling: the text really says nothing to indicate that Ishmael is anything but a devoted son to Abraham (although the midrash is rich in stories trying to portray him as a harmful influence on Isaac). Sarah appears as a jealous and ungrateful person, and Abraham is a reluctant participant in Sarah’s rejection of Ishmael. This story of the separation of Ishmael and Isaac has echoes today, of course, in the never-ending Israeli-Arab conflict.
However, it is the story of the Binding of Isaac that, to me, remains at once supremely compelling and virtually incomprehensible. How can we reconcile on the one hand a God who orders the death of a beloved son, and on the other hand a God who listens to our prayers to “remember us for life?” Is the lesson of the Akedah that we are to accept God’s will without question? I think not.
I choose to focus on Abraham’s statement to the servants before ascending the mountain (“we will return”) as evidence that Abraham knew that God would not, could not, allow His demand to be fulfilled. In this light, Abraham knew that God only gives us challenges (“tests”) that we can overcome. Our strength and faith may be sorely tested by these ordeals, but we can survive them. That is the essence, I think, of Abraham's faith.
As such, we can look at t’shuvah (repentance, from the verb meaning “turn”) not only as a turning away from our errors, but also as a “re-turning” (in the sense of restoration) to the strength we have lost in our on-going battles against life’s challenges. As we look to the coming New Year, we need a "restoration" of strength to meet the “tests” ahead, and we can rejoice in a tradition that tells us that God will not give us “tests” we cannot overcome.
May we all go from strength to strength in the coming year. Shabbat Shalom and Shannah Tovah.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
The Land of Redemption
Nitzavim/ Va Yelech
Précis: Moses comes toward the conclusion of his final address to the People: You stand (nitzavim) this day before Adonai. In his final words to the People, Moses recounts the wonders Adonai has done for the people, and calls upon them to remain loyal to God through the covenant. The extent of the covenantal relationship is explained: it will survive exile and captivity with a return to the Land. The Torah is an “open book” that is accessible to all the People. A blessing and a curse have been set before the People, and they are to choose their path. Moses urges them to choose the blessing, to choose life, so that they may inherit the Land which God has sworn to their forefathers.
In Va Yelech, as the death of Moses approaches, he transfers his mantle of leadership to Joshua as his successor. Moses orders regular reading of the Law, and then transfers the written Torah into the hands of the Levites for safekeeping, in the Ark of the Covenant.
Deuteronomy 30:3 “Then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you."
JTS Chancellor Schorsch writing in his Parashah Commentary (9/11/04) focuses on this verse. After the terrors of the prior parasha's curses, we come to this promise: after exile, God will bring the People back to the land.
As a result of the destruction by the Assyrians in the 8th Century BCE of the Northern Kingdom and its 10 tribes, that part of the Jewish People was lost forever. The promise of this verse does not seem to have been fulfilled for the 10 Lost Tribes.
When the first Temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Exile began in 586 B.C.E. how could this remnant (Kingdom of Judah) of the Jewish People survive, given that their central mode of worship and identification, the Temple itself, was now gone, and they were faced with the kind of exile which ended the existence of their Northern brethren? How could they keep their belief in the promise of this verse?
Writing 1,500 years later, Rashi offered an answer: As Schorsch explains, “the Hebrew verb for restore ("God will restore your fortunes") is intransitive rather than transitive, meaning that "God will come back with you out of captivity…’From this verse our sages learned that God's presence (shekhina) dwelled with Israel in the torment of its exile. And when they were redeemed, it is as if God ordered redemption for Himself, that He would return with them’."
The midrash cited by Rashi is an expression of God’s compassion and identification with Israel. God suffers along with Israel. This helped the Jews of Babylonia to re-imagine Jewish theology: God was not limited to the Land of Israel, but was Universal. God could be worshipped anywhere. It is ironic that the birth of Judaism can be traced to the loss of the Jewish national home. The sacrificial cult was to be replaced by study of Torah, acts of righteousness, and prayer. This was the beginning of the change from a sacrificial cult centered on sacred space to a religion centered on sacred text, which, over the following thousand years, came to fruition with the Mishnah and Talmud.
This is not, in any way, to diminish the centrality of the Land of Israel from the religious life of Israel: in fact, it is the central point of the restoration of the “fortune” as promised in this week’s verse. What it also shows is that Jews did not await the redemption from Babylon passively: they created a religious way of life and communal institutions that prepared them to fulfill the promise of this verse: to be restored to the land from among all of the peoples among where God had scattered them.
We in the Diaspora have a repsonsibility to support the restoration of the Jewish People to the land. As we come to the New Year, let's resolve to make sure that our support for Israel remains constant.
Précis: Moses comes toward the conclusion of his final address to the People: You stand (nitzavim) this day before Adonai. In his final words to the People, Moses recounts the wonders Adonai has done for the people, and calls upon them to remain loyal to God through the covenant. The extent of the covenantal relationship is explained: it will survive exile and captivity with a return to the Land. The Torah is an “open book” that is accessible to all the People. A blessing and a curse have been set before the People, and they are to choose their path. Moses urges them to choose the blessing, to choose life, so that they may inherit the Land which God has sworn to their forefathers.
In Va Yelech, as the death of Moses approaches, he transfers his mantle of leadership to Joshua as his successor. Moses orders regular reading of the Law, and then transfers the written Torah into the hands of the Levites for safekeeping, in the Ark of the Covenant.
Deuteronomy 30:3 “Then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you."
JTS Chancellor Schorsch writing in his Parashah Commentary (9/11/04) focuses on this verse. After the terrors of the prior parasha's curses, we come to this promise: after exile, God will bring the People back to the land.
As a result of the destruction by the Assyrians in the 8th Century BCE of the Northern Kingdom and its 10 tribes, that part of the Jewish People was lost forever. The promise of this verse does not seem to have been fulfilled for the 10 Lost Tribes.
When the first Temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Exile began in 586 B.C.E. how could this remnant (Kingdom of Judah) of the Jewish People survive, given that their central mode of worship and identification, the Temple itself, was now gone, and they were faced with the kind of exile which ended the existence of their Northern brethren? How could they keep their belief in the promise of this verse?
Writing 1,500 years later, Rashi offered an answer: As Schorsch explains, “the Hebrew verb for restore ("God will restore your fortunes") is intransitive rather than transitive, meaning that "God will come back with you out of captivity…’From this verse our sages learned that God's presence (shekhina) dwelled with Israel in the torment of its exile. And when they were redeemed, it is as if God ordered redemption for Himself, that He would return with them’."
The midrash cited by Rashi is an expression of God’s compassion and identification with Israel. God suffers along with Israel. This helped the Jews of Babylonia to re-imagine Jewish theology: God was not limited to the Land of Israel, but was Universal. God could be worshipped anywhere. It is ironic that the birth of Judaism can be traced to the loss of the Jewish national home. The sacrificial cult was to be replaced by study of Torah, acts of righteousness, and prayer. This was the beginning of the change from a sacrificial cult centered on sacred space to a religion centered on sacred text, which, over the following thousand years, came to fruition with the Mishnah and Talmud.
This is not, in any way, to diminish the centrality of the Land of Israel from the religious life of Israel: in fact, it is the central point of the restoration of the “fortune” as promised in this week’s verse. What it also shows is that Jews did not await the redemption from Babylon passively: they created a religious way of life and communal institutions that prepared them to fulfill the promise of this verse: to be restored to the land from among all of the peoples among where God had scattered them.
We in the Diaspora have a repsonsibility to support the restoration of the Jewish People to the land. As we come to the New Year, let's resolve to make sure that our support for Israel remains constant.
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