Parashat Vayikra 5781 / פרשת וַיִּקְרָא
Torah Portion: Leviticus 1:1-5:26

The following was my weekly message to Congregation Ahavas Achim on March 18, 2021.

Whenever a community is attacked and blood is shed by deranged murderers, our nation mourns with that community and with those whose loved ones perished. And so it is, once again, that the Jewish community joins all peoples of faith and conscience in expressing its sorrow and extending its support to one such community. As Jews, we, of all people, must speak out. We’ve been there. We’ve felt that loss. 

On Tuesday evening, Atlanta was rocked by a massacre in which a 21-year old lone gunman killed eight people — seven women, of which six were of Asian descent, and one man. As of Thursday morning, the police did not believe the shootings were racially motivated but had not ruled it out, nor was it clear whether state or federal officials would treat the massacre as a hate crime.  

Given the current climate in which many Americans refer to Covid-19 as “China flu” and violence against women is its own “shadow pandemic,” it makes sense that this massacre is being experienced as an attack both against Asian-Americans and against women, even if it is not ultimately declared a hate crime against either group. The shootings follow a year in which nearly 3,800 incidents of hate against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders had been reported nationally according to Stop AAPI Hate and in which some major US cities experienced a 150% spike in crimes targeting Asian-Americans. Just as importantly, this horrific incident occurred against a global backdrop in which 1 of 3 women experience violence. In other words, to dismiss as merely coincidental that the gunman’s victims were mostly Asian-American and female would be turn a blind eye to the larger scourges facing our nation and our world. 

This week, in synagogues around the world, Jewish communities will begin reading the Book of Leviticus, whose message is that we are all accountable for protecting life and creating a just world. True, on its surface the Book of Leviticus appears to be addressed primarily to the priests and Levites of Ancient Israel: much of it reads like a professional manual, providing instruction on the sacrificial system, matters of cultic purity and the observance of the Sabbath and sacred festivals. Yet, the very first word of Leviticus — vayikra, in Hebrew (lit. the Lord “called”) — is addressed not to Aaron, the high priest, but to Moses, the leader of all the people. Why? Because at its core the Book of Leviticus is a call to all of Israel to be “a holy people.” What’s more, to the extent that being a “holy people” means calling out injustice, depravity and cruelty wherever we see it, this most peculiar of all books of the bible is calling to us in this moment. 

Heeding the words of our tradition, let us all speak out when one person or one ideology targets a community to terrorize or, worse, eliminate. Let us support our leaders and officials charged with protecting the lives and rights of all human beings. Let us pray that the hearts of the hateful and lawless be turned toward peace and love. And let us embrace those who bear the brunt of bigotry and hatred in all its forms, just as we embrace those who were targeted in Atlanta this week — our Asian-American brothers and sisters and women, who suffer violence all too routinely. 

Bivrachot/With blessings,
Rabbi Dan

Parashat Vayakhel-Pekudei 5781 / פרשת וַיַּקְהֵל־פְקוּדֵי
Exodus 35:1-40:38

One of my favorite comedians, Steven Wright, has this one-liner: You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? Pretty funny. Right? But all Wright has done is taken an ostensibly philosophical statement and boiled it down to its most rational truth. As some might say, “Well, duh!” 

At the risk of further eviscerating Steven Wright’s witticism, I would observe that just as there are limits to what we can possess, there are also limits to what we can give. This truism is illustrated beautifully in this week’s Torah portion, as you’ll see. 

What isn’t addressed in the Torah is the emotional response of the people whose contributions are no longer needed. Just as it can be a let down to realize you can’t have everything you want, it can also be a let down when what you really want to give away is not received. What do you mean you can’t take everything? Can’t you find a place to put it? Think about that, and I’ll loop back to this question in a minute.

The story in Parashat Vayakhel goes like this: Moses gathers the whole Israelite community together and conveys to them God’s instruction to “Take from among you gifts to Adonai. Everyone whose heart so moves him shall bring them” (Ex. 35:4-5). Moses then recites an extensive list of precious materials required for the construction of the mishkan — the Tabernacle that would serve as God’s dwelling place within the midst of the nation — its assorted ritual items and the priestly robes. Gold, silver, copper; blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, and goats’ hair; oil for lighting, spices for the anointing oil and for the aromatic incense. Special gems and wood. And don’t forget the dolphin skin! (Ex. 35:5-9).

Meanwhile, Moses has put together an all-star team of architects, engineers, builders and craftspeople to take all these things and fashion a house for God according to the plans that God had provided Moses.

At the conclusion of this gathering of young and old, rich and poor, children, women and men, Moses says, “Okay, everyone. Hands in. Who’s the best? God’s the best? Go, God!” Then they all disperse to get the things they so eagerly want to bring to the mishkan. They are psyched to help build this magnificent structure that would bind them with God and with each other.

As the people bring their wheelbarrows full of lapis lazuli, acacia wood and, yes, dolphin skins, the artisans realize they have plenty of material and they say to Moses, “Moses, the people are bringing more than is needed for the job God has given us.” At which point, Moses, standing on a rock, whistles with two fingers in his mouth and proclaims, “That’s enough. Stop bringing your gifts.” The Torah adds, “So the people stopped bringing: their efforts had been more than enough for all the tasks to be done.” 

The word for “enough for them” in the Hebrew is “dayam,” similar to “dayenu,” the refrain we sing during Pesach to say that any single act that God had done for us would have been sufficient on its own. Yet, we learn in the song that God kept on giving, whereas in our story here, the Israelites had to stop. Enough was quite literally enough. Bring no more. There’s no place to put it!

So if you were standing near Moses with a cart full of turquoise, chrysolite and dolphin skins, how would you have felt? Maybe you would have felt rejected. Everyone before me got to contribute. Why shouldn’t I? I may snooze, but I don’t want to lose. Maybe you would feel angry. I went through all this work, schlepping this stuff from Egypt, not even knowing why, and now you’re saying, “Thanks, but no thanks?”

As I said at our board meeting this past week, there are so many talented and generous people who want to make a contribution to our community. Of course, we can’t use everyone’s talents and generosity all the time. There aren’t enough hours in the day and there isn’t enough space in the synagogue to be able to take advantage of all that people have to offer all at once. So community leaders are often in the unenviable position of having to say, “We have enough for now.” AND they also have the responsibility to care for those people whose “terumah offerings,” whose gifts from the heart, are not needed at that moment.

I think these last three words are key — “at that moment.” When Moses said, “Enough!” he didn’t say the gifts weren’t welcomed. They were! I’m sure Moses and the artisans were ecstatic by the outpouring of gifts. But, the artisans also specifically said, “The people are bringing more than is needed for this particular project.” 

One medieval biblical commentator, Isaac ben Judah Abarbanel (1437–1508) from Portugal goes a step further. He says “the gold, silver and copper, as well as the silk and yarn, were kept, to make new clothes for the priests and to pay for the public sacrifices and other things that might be necessary later” (Carasik, The Commentators Bible: Exodus, p. 319). These extra gifts were critically important because they would be needed in the long-run to maintain garments and finery of the priests.

Still another medieval biblical commentator, Ovadia ben Jacob Sforno (about 1475-1550) from Italy, adds this: “The people’s efforts had been more than enough. Therefore, the artisans did not need to cut corners for fear they would run out of materials.” Knowing the community possessed this surplus of building materials gave the artisans peace of mind, and it’s much easier to excel at one’s work when you have peace of mind.

The message I want to convey is this: Our community needs you and the gifts, interests and generosity you have to offer. We are only as strong at the contributions that we can muster up together. Understand that we don’t have room for everything all at once, though. Okay, our treasurer surely disagrees, so let me correct myself. There is a miraculously ever-expanding vault for certain kinds of gifts, but for other kinds of gifts, we want you to know that the time will come when we’ll be able to take advantage of those special offerings. In the meantime, knowing that you are there and ready to make a difference lifts our spirits and makes our work more meaningful, enjoyable and effective.

Parashat Ki Tisa 5781 / פרשת כִּי תִשָּׂא
Torah Portion: Exodus 30:11-34:35

One of my favorite Hebrew words is savlanut, patience. I remember hearing it often in Israel. Savlanut. There’s more than a little irony in my association of this word with everyday Israelis because one stereotype of Israelis is that they are notoriously impatient.

On the website of a travel agency called Culture Trip, I found an article entitled 6 Things You Only Learn About Israel When You Live There. Number four on that list is “Israelis are extremely impatient”:

From incessant beeping on the roads (sometimes it seems like there’s a national competition for who can honk their car the longest and loudest), to pushing their way through lines and losing their temper in supermarkets, Israelis show their impatience and short fuse in a multitude of ways.

You can picture someone trying to make their way to the front of a line who is then nudged by someone else also trying to make their way to the front of the line. Suddenly person one turns to person two and says, “Savlanut!”

What’s most interesting to me about the word savlanut is that it derives from the three letter Hebrew root samech-bet-lamed that means “to carry a load; to endure; to suffer.” Several times in the book of Exodus the labors of the Israelite slaves were referred to as sivlot, heavy labor, heavy burden. In Lamentations, when the text says (5:7) “Our fathers sinned and are no more; And we must bear their guilt” the word for “we must bear their guilt” is savalnu.

To be patient means to carry the burden of waiting for a certain outcome. If you don’t remember what it feels like to wait for something you want or even for an outcome you don’t want, just hang out with young children and they’ll remind you. Waiting stinks. 

Sometimes patience involves real suffering. It’s not just the waiting that stinks, it’s also the inconvenience, or worse, the pain we must endure while we wait that poses the heaviest of burdens.

When I think of patience as bearing a burden, as enduring real suffering, I become much more sympathetic to our ancestors who pressed Aaron into fashioning a golden calf out of the people’s gold jewelry. In this week’s Torah portion, the people freak out because Moses hadn’t come down from receiving the Tablets of the Ten Commandments on the exact day they expected him to come down. In that moment of feeling that they lost the one person who could safely intercede on their behalf with God, they grew so insecure that it was too much to wait one more day for their leader to return. So, out of fear, they created a replacement for Moses — a calf — which was a symbol of deities which would have been familiar to them from life in Egypt or, perhaps, from their encounters with other peoples in the ancient Near East. 

The calf wasn’t an idol. They weren’t going to worship it. Biblical commentators of the middle ages wrote that ‘“the people could not have been so stupid” as to believe that this freshly manufactured image was itself a deity. Rather, it was a symbol of God’s presence, perhaps an instrument to discern God’s will. In other words, the sin of the Golden Calf was not that the people had abandoned God and had reverted to idol worship. It’s that they buckled under the burden of their patience. 

They had only left Egypt three months earlier and had just begun to develop faith in Moses and, therefore, in God. So at the moment they felt the most vulnerable, they took matters into their own hands. This really made God mad. So mad that God yelled at Moses, “Get out of my way. I’m going to kill them all!” Fortunately, Moses convinced God to be patient and to cool the Divine jets. He reminded God that God had made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that Israel would become as numerous as the stars of heaven. “Be patient, God. Give it time.”

Who here cannot relate to the Israelites, who had the base of Mt. Sinai, in Moses’ absence, looked at the second in command, Aaron, and said, “Enough is enough. No more waiting!”

It has been about a year since we at Ahavas Achim close our doors to in-person services. And despite the re-opening of some businesses, churches and other institutions around us, we have chosen to err on the side of caution. And we will continue to err on the side of caution, even as more and more people get vaccinated, until our hospitals no longer face the prospect of being overrun by Covid patients and our funeral homes face the prospect of being overrun by death. We have seen over and over again this past year that it’s when we as a society become impatient that we experience a surge in cases. As Jews, our priority is always the health and safety of the living. Pikuach nefesh — saving life — is the most sacred of all mitzvot. So, while it hurts to be patient a little while longer — It hurts to tell your parents not to come to your child’s bat mitzvah. It hurts not to be able to hug people you love. It hurts not to be able to wrestle with your best friend or give a classmate a high five. — it’s what we have to do.

When the time is right, we will begin to open our doors to in-person gatherings as will every other synagogue in the world. When we do, it will happen gradually, at a measured rate, to ensure that we can re-open without contributing to greater community spread and putting lives — our own and others — at risk. 

It is painful to be patient. The alternative to patience, however, comes at great risk, as we learn from this week’s Torah portion and as we have seen time and time again in our country. The reward for patience will be great. We will gather with renewed commitment to love and care for one another. We will emerge from this dark period satisfied that we did our part to end this pandemic. We will look at ourselves and realize how incredibly strong and resilient we’ve been this past year. We will do great things because we know we have already done something great together as a community. We have carried the burden of patience, and what a burden it has been.

For a little while longer, let us avoid public gatherings, let us practice wearing masks and keeping our distance, and let us continue to practice savlanut — patience.