Month: June 2022

Parashah Ponderings

Dear Scouts: When you must cross a very, very narrow bridge, do not fear.

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Parashat Sh’lach 5782 / פָּרָשַׁת שְׁלַח־לְךָ
Torah Portion: Numbers 13:1-15:41

Dear Scouts,

I was sad to read in this week’s Torah portion that your journey toward the land of Canaan has gotten off on the wrong foot. 

On order from Yud-Hey-Vav-Hei, the Big G-dash-D, Moses sent you on a reconnaissance mission to scout out the land that God promised the People of Israel. Moses instructed you to bring back vital information that he and you could use to plan your attack. Forty days later, you came back with answers. You accomplished your mission and could have gone home then and there to reunite with your wives and kids. Why, then, did you go on and on about how impossible it would be to overcome the so-called “giants” in the land, people so gigantic that you felt as small as grasshoppers in comparison? To make matters worse, when you returned to the camp at Kadesh, instead of debriefing privately with Moses and Aaron, you immediately delivered your report to them in front of the entire community of Israel! Now, the people’s trek – which you, yourselves, proved could be accomplished in only a few weeks – will take 40 years! Worse yet, none of you, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, will be able to step foot into that land and watch it blossom into the future homeland for the Jewish people. What were you thinking?

Actually, I know what you were thinking. You had already drawn the conclusion that you were incapable of meeting the challenge that God had set before you. Rather than taking the data you gathered and putting together a workable plan, you had given up before giving yourselves every opportunity to succeed. Rather than having faith in God and in yourselves, you threw in the towel. At least, Joshua and Caleb maintained their faith, and Moses was able to convince God to control God’s anger and not do you all in then and there! So, good luck on that 40-year journey!

Let me share with you some wisdom from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov himself, the founder of hasidic Judaism. Reb Nachman lived from 1772 to 1810 and died at the age of 38. Throughout his life he confronted huge obstacles but he never gave in, he never saw himself as unworthy, and he never lost faith. He had six daughters and two sons, but two of the daughters died in infancy and two of the sons died at about a year and a half. His wife died of tuberculosis and then, right after becoming engaged to another woman, he contracted tuberculosis and survived for three more years before dying from it. Just five months before his death, though, his house burned down, and he was housed and cared for by a group of compassionate secularists in another town. All the while, scholars estimate, he suffered from severe and manic depression. This was not the life that any of us would choose, but he got through it all with his faith.

This was the same man whose words inspired the popular song: “Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar maod v’haikar lo l’fached klal. All the world is a very narrow bridge, but the important thing is to not fear at all.” But that song is a misquote of Reb Nachman’s actual words, which were: “Unde​rstand: that when a person must cross a very, very narrow bridge, the most important​​ and essential​ thing is that he not have any fear at all” (See https://www.zemirotdatabase.org/view_song.php?id=220, accessed 6/24/2022). Despite all the hardship that befell him, Reb Nahman didn’t see all of life as threatening. He understood, however, that there are times when obstacles present themselves and sometimes we are tempted to succumb to our fear and just give in and give up. It’s at those moments, he taught, when we must lean into what intimidates us and just do what it takes to cross those very, very narrow bridges.

Scouts, you’ve got a long 40 years ahead of you. I guarantee there are going to be unpleasant surprises along the way. Some of them may seem even more frightening than the “giants” you thought you saw in the land of Canaan. Rather than panic and cause the rest of the people to give up hope, be like Reb Nachman, or, for that matter, like Joshua and Caleb. See the possibilities that lie ahead of you. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’ll be easy to cross those very, very narrow bridges. It won’t be easy. But don’t let your fear overcome your faith in yourself and your faith in G-dash-D. When you tackle obstacles with preparation, planning, and confidence, you will overcome them.

Now, with your permission, Scouts, I’d like to share this message with my friends in America on June 24, 2022. I’ll spare you the details, but a lot has changed this week and people are afraid. They are already predicting doom and gloom. But with faith that reason and good will will prevail and leaders from all over the political spectrum will rise to the occasion, I am confident that our country will not fall apart, that we will overcome the challenges that await us, and that we will avert the disasters we are so sure will overtake us. We are not grasshoppers, nor should we see ourselves like grasshoppers. We, too, will cross that very, very narrow bridge.

Hazak v’amatz – be strong and courageous,
Rabbi Dan

Parashah Ponderings

Sing like a cow!

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Parashat Nasso 5782 / פָּרָשַׁת נָשׂא
Torah Portion: Numbers 4:21-7:89

I have a confession to make: I don’t perform every mitzvah and every ritual that I have it in my power to do. For example, I do not regularly recite the series of prayers after meals that we call Birkat Hamazon, the Blessing for Sustenance. It is certainly a good thing to give thanks for the food that sustains me, but I’ve yet to make it a habit. To begin to make Birkat Hamazon a regular part of my day, I need to stop seeing the ritual as a burden and, instead, see it as an opportunity to express my gratitude. 

Like many things that I don’t do, I need to stop moaning and whining and coming up with excuses and embrace the act with a song in my heart. I need to whistle while I work, like one of Snow White’s seven dwarves; raise up a song, like the clan of the Kohatites  that carried the sacred vessels of the Tabernacle on their shoulders rather than transport them on a cart (Num. 7:9); like a nursing cow.

Like the clan that carried the sacred vessels on their shoulder and like a nursing cow? Huh?

Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter, the great hassidic rebbe of Ger, near Warsaw, wrote a five-volume commentary on the Torah called Sefat Emet, the Language of Truth. The Sefat Emet notes that all the other Levitical clans, were charged with transporting all the nuts and bolts, beams and bolts of fabric for the Tabernacle were given oxen and carts to do their jobs, but not the Kohatites. The sacred vessels that they were in charge of, such as the menorah and the laver for washing, were too precious to risk loading onto a wagon and, perhaps, falling off. They had to load the vessels into sacks and carry them on their shoulders with long, heavy poles. Not a fun or painless task. We could imagine them moaning and whining and coming up with excuses to not do their job, but that’s not what they did.

The Sefat Emet says they “raised up a song,” quoting a midrash that, in turn, quoted a verse from Psalms (81:3): “raise up a song and offer a drum; a sweet harp and a lyre.”

Abbi Yehudah Leib Alter asks, “What has song to do with raising things up on one’s shoulder?”

He answers:  “This can only be understood by recalling a Samuel 6:12,” where we read that the Philistines had just captured the Ark of the Covenant and God was punishing them with severe illness and death. Realizing what was happening, they loaded the Ark of the Covenant onto a wagon and strapped it to two nursing cows who had never before worn a yoke. If the cows went straight on its way to the Israelites’ camp, they knew God was the source of their suffering. If the cows went some other way, the Philistines would know it was just by chance that they were suffering, and they would have kept the Ark. It so happens that the cows headed toward the Israelites’ camp.

Rabbi Yehudah Leib looks at this verse, I Samuel 6:12, and  interprets it to mean that the cows sang as they carried the Ark to Jerusalem.” He gets to this reading by using a Hebrew word play, changing the word “va-yiSHARnah” – “they went straight on their way” – to “vayiSHARu” – “they sang on their way.” He quotes the Zohar, the seminal book of Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah: “Because they were carrying the Ark, they were given the awareness to sing. It was the Ark on their backs that enabled them to sing.”

Rabbi Dr. Arthur Green, who translated and interpreted the Sefat Emet, explains:

The religious life is not meant to be a weight burden, but one that helps us to feel the lightness and joy of knowing God’s presence. The Levite who carries the ark on his shoulder is also – or is therefore – the one who sings! What a great message, and a typically hasidic one: life in God’s service is a life of happiness and fulfillment. Like those privileged cows who merited carrying the Ark of the Lord on their backs, the service of God should so fill us with joy that we cannot keep from breaking into song.

Green, Arthur. The Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of the Sefat Emet. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998, p. 227.

In other words, when we see the performance of mitzvot and rituals – in the case of the Kohatites, carrying a heavy load of sacred vessels on their shoulders – not as a burden to whine about but rather as an opportunity to serve God and know God’s presence, we are filled with light, joy, and song.

I will take this lesson to heart and work on developing the habit of reciting Birkat Hamazon. I invite you to take the lesson to heart, too, and identify a mitzvah or ritual that you’d like to take on. I’m happy to help you learn the right tune.
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Parashah Ponderings

Making it through the wilderness

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Bemidbar / פרשת במדבר
 Numbers 1:1 – 4:20

I posted this devar Torah a number of years ago, but today I read it with new eyes. If feels to me that our nation and, indeed, the whole world are traversing a vast wilderness. We seem to be confronting so many forces beyond our control (or not) and not doing a very good job of it. Ukraine, global warming, gun violence, white supremacy, homelessness, etc., etc. Of course, all these things are the fault of misguided human beings, but they have taken on a life of their own and so many of us feel we have little power to effect change. It’s like we’re wandering through a wilderness facing all kinds of hazards we have never encountered.

I wish we were doing a better job of navigating our collective human journey. As a nation and as a community of nations, we are not working together to face enormous challenges. Just the opposite. Political and social divisions grow deeper and deeper, preventing us from providing the care we all need and coming up with the creative solutions our times demand. Nor are we as individuals doing the inner work of examining our assumptions and habits and asking how we might do a better job of taking note of “the other” and coming to their aid.

Yet, this book of the Torah, Bemidbar, gives me hope. We know the Israelites eventually made it to Eretz Yisrael, though not unscathed. The whole generation that left Egypt had to perish during the 40 years of wandering before the new generations could enter the land and begin anew. But begin anew they did. 

Every now and then we’ll read of people from opposite sides of “the aisle” coming together to solve problems. Every now and then we’ll read about people who are engaged in great, selfless acts for the benefit of humankind. Sometimes we even meet these people in our own communities. If we would but lift up these sparks and say, “Amen!” we could make this difficult journey through the wilderness so much more joyous and enriching, despite the challenges beyond our control that will always be there.

With this week’s Torah portion, Bemidbar, we begin a new book of the Torah, also named Bemidbar. Bemidbar depicts Israel’s trials during the 40 years of wandering “in the wilderness” (bemidbar, in Hebrew) following their exodus from Egypt. The book also contains multiple censuses of the Israelites. Reflecting this latter focus on counting people, the English title for Bemidbar is Numbers. The relationship between these two themes — the wilderness and the censuses — is full of meaning.

The reading begins:

On the first day of the second month, in the second year following the exodus from the land of Egypt, the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, saying…(Numbers 1:1)

The French medieval commentator Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam, 1085-1174) asks why the Torah here specifies where God spoke to Moses. He posits that the location of God’s speech adds clarity. After all, God had spoken to Moses and Israel elsewhere just a year earlier: “All of the divine utterances that were spoken during the first year, before the Tabernacle was set up, are labeled as having been spoken ‘on Mount Sinai.’ But once the Tabernacle was set up, on the 1st of Nisan of the second year, we find not ‘on Mount Sinai’ but ‘in the wilderness of Sinai in the Tent of Meeting.’”[1] In other words, now that Israel has the Tabernacle, God can speak to them as they wander through the wilderness. Beforehand God could only be present at Mount Sinai. God is now portable.

But why the emphasis on the midbar, wilderness, itself? Of the many explanations for this, I am drawn to two in particular. One sees the wilderness, both a challenging place for human survival and a spectacular show of nature, as the perfect crucible for Israel’s maturation. The Israeli historian Nachman Ran imagines that after Israel’s centuries-long period of enslavement in Egypt, they needed to gel as a nation and to grow spiritually. “To a people whose entire living generation had seen only the level lands of Egypt, the Israelite march into this region of mountain magnificence, with its sharp and splintered peaks and profound valleys, must have been a perpetual source of astonishment and awe. No nobler school could have been conceived for training a nation of slaves into a nation of freemen or weaning a people from the grossness of idolatry to a sense of grandeur and power of the God alike of Nature and Mind.” Indeed, “in the midbar they become free human beings responsible to God and to themselves for every choice they make.”[2]

Another interpretation likens the landscape of the midbar to “the psychological and spiritual realms of human existence.” The 20th century Israeli scholar and poet Pinhas Peli believes there is a “‘wilderness’ within each person, a ‘desert’ where selfish desires rule, where one looks out only for one’s needs. No person is ever satisfied in the desert. There is constant complaining about lack of food and water, the scorching hot days and bitter cold nights. Anger, frustration, disagreements, and hunger prevail… The Torah is given in the desert… ‘to conquer and curb the demonic wilderness within human beings.’… The lesson here is that, ‘if human beings do not conquer the desert, it may eventually conquer them. There is no peaceful coexistence between the two.’”[3]

These understandings of the midbar — the first as Israel’s training ground to serve as God’s “chosen people” and the second as a symbol of the treacherous landscape within each of us — leads me to the next verses in our reading:

Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head. You and Aaron shall record them by their groups, from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms. (Numbers 1:2-3)

What emerges from the census, we learn later, is the creation of an army, on one hand, and a workforce to tend to the Tabernacle, on the other hand. God, thus, provides Israel with a mechanism literally to put its camp in order so that it can survive the tough trek ahead. With no such order, the nation and its connection to God would be doomed.

On a symbolic level, the census represents the moral, spiritual and physical preparation necessary to be able to make something of God’s revelation. Without some kind of ordered society, without a higher purpose, and without personal accountability, Israel would not have been able to actualize the lessons of Torah. They would have been too divided, distracted, and self-interested to build the kind of caring world that God envisioned. What kind of “light unto the nations” would Israel have been if it was at war with itself, unable to know right from wrong?

What we learn from this week’s Torah portion is that in order to bring calm to a world in chaos, we must first take care of business at home and within. Judaism places a premium on shalom bayit, family harmony, partly because it recognizes that the family is fertile ground for sowing the values of Torah and Jewish peoplehood. But family isn’t the only fertile ground. Individual souls and communities, too, are places where values must be allowed to flourish. Without tilling the soil, without bringing order to it, nothing except weeds and wildflowers will grow. Under such circumstances, beauty is left to chance. We can’t leave the creation of a just, compassionate world to chance, however. Instead, let us strive to bring order to the wilderness.

—

[1] Michael Carasik, The Commentator’s Bible: Numbers, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2011), p. 3.

[2] From Harvey J. Fields, A Torah Commentary for Our Times: Volume 3 Numbers and Deuteronomy, (New York: UAHC Press, 1993), pp. 9-10.

[3] Ibid., pp. 11-12.