Rachel Margolis is an educator in Chicago and my partner in crime as co-chairs of the Communications Team for the Association of Reform Jewish Educators (ARJE). She and her husband Ari, a rabbi serving Congregation Or Shalom in Vernon Hills, Illinois. Ari and I have never actually met. When Rachel and I get together with our colleagues, he is usually home parenting their three spectacular daughters. But he has weighed in while Rachel and I have texted while watching the Cubs this post-season. He wrote this drash for Parshat Bereshit this past week. Rachel posted it on Facebook and The CCAR Blog picked it up as well. He gave me permission to post it here.
An ode to the intersection of this week's Torah portion, Bereshit, and my beloved Cubs:
In the beginning. . .
There was a team that experienced an abundance of
success. They went to the World Series three times in a row. But they
fell from grace after two straight championships. Expelled from the
Garden of Greatness, they lost their way, squandering opportunity after
opportunity. They experienced a deluge of misfortune, a famine of talent
and success as they turned away from the land of the World Series,
winding up in the bondage of ineptitude. They wandered, searching to
find the promised land for 71 years, escaping the oppression of poor
management and indifferent ownership, never losing hope.
Suddenly, a new team arose who knew not the Cubs of the past. Together
with new ownership, sabermetric analysis, young talent, and innovative
management, the long suffering crew has found its way to back to the
World Series, standing on the precipice of the promised land.
By
next week, we will all know the outcome of this part of our story, yet
to be written. But what we do know is that sure enough, a new baseball
season will come next Spring with new opportunities for redemption,
renewal, and understanding, just as we have opportunities to find the
same in our own hearts during this next year of reading our Torah.
Here's hoping that the team that taught me to understand the narratives
of our people, always striving to return home to the promised land,
will have found their Jerusalem. And whether they do or not, as we say
at the end of Passover ... Next year in the World Series!
Torateinu ARZA with Rabbi Josh Weinberg, ARZA President, with Rabbi Rick Sarason, and Rabbi Bennett Miller, ARZA Chair
When I open Outlook each work day, I find a an e-mail from the URJ's Ten Minutes of Torah. Some days I read it with great interest. Other days I know I won't have time and set it aside for later. This morning - with one son on his way to a NFTY regional event and the other working out and doing errands (he is cooking Shabbat dinner tonight) - I decided to come into the empty office and finish a project, put away the Chanukah decorations and clean off my desk. But first e-mail.
One day each week, Ten Minutes of Torah is about making Israel Connections. Rabbi Josh Weinberg, the president of ARZA (Association of Reform Zionist of North America) was the author from Wednesday. I was struck by his words. In part because I can visualize the places in Ben Gurion Airport (NTBG) her describes. In part because of the power of a congregation her sharing a Sefer Torah with a new Reform community in Israel. And in part because of the reaction of the elderly woman at NTBG to seeing a scroll in the hands of another woman.
I share this as a Shabbat gift for those who didn't see it. You can see the link after Josh's name to discuss the article on RJ.org. That is the blog of the Reform movement where the article is posted online. I urge you to make any comments there so you will be part of a much larger conversation.
Shabbat Shalom!
Ira Torateinu ARZA: Unto Zion Shall Go Torah
By Rabbi Josh Weinberg
Discuss
on RJ.org
Moses received the Torah from Sinai and gave
it over to Joshua. Joshua gave it over to the Elders, the Elders to the
Prophets, and the Prophets gave it over to the Men of the Great Assembly.
Pirkei Avot 1:1
Dan, the official in customs, told me to
have a seat with my Torah and wait. Well accustomed to Israeli bureaucracy, I
immediately knew I should have canceled my plans for the rest of the day.
When Dan returned, offering me a cup of coffee, I knew I was in for it.
Surprisingly, within 10 minutes, having signed the necessary paperwork and
paid the required fees, Torateinu
ARZA (Our Torah to the Land) and I were cleared to leave.
As I headed into the arrivals hall,
cradling the Torah, Dan asked, "So, is that a real Torah?"
"Absolutely," I responded.
"A great mitzvah…" he called
out with a wink. Even the customs official understood the importance of our
work to bring the gift of Torah to Kehilat Sha'ar HaNegev, a fledgling
Israeli Reform community.
In the back of the hall, near the vending
machines, I
took the scroll from its box, passing it carefully to Yael Karrie, Kehilat
Sha'ar HaNegev's student rabbi . Amidst swarms of Orthodox Jews, we
weren't sure how a woman holding a sefer
Torah would fare, but we needn't have worried. No sooner did Yael
take the scroll than an elderly woman, her head covered in a scarf ran up to
us, asking if she could kiss the Torah, exclaiming, "May it bring good
things for the people of Israel!"
Traditionally, when we take the Torah
from the ark during services we chant these words from the Book of Isaiah:
"From out of Zion comes Torah." With the arrival of this particular
sefer Torah,
we can modify Isaiah's words to these: "Unto Zion shall go Torah."
Generously donated by Congregation
Beth Israel of San Diego, Torateinu
ARZA, an initiative of the Association of Reform Zionists of
America (ARZA), had
traveled throughout North America for nearly six months - from west
to east, from San Diego to the Negev - visiting dozens of congregations and
events on its way to Israel. Recently, I was honored to walk with Torateinu ARZA on
Shabbat morning at the joint URJ-HUC-CCAR board meeting in Cincinnati and to
be granted an even greater honor: to receive the Torah upon its arrival home
- at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. It has since arrived at Kehilat Sha'ar
HaNegev, the congregation that will be its permanent home in Israel.
As we celebrate the last day of the
Festival of Lights, may this Torah be a symbol of much needed light, unity,
and good will in Israel. Let it show the world that the Reform Movement is
building a strong and growing presence in Israel, that we are committed to
making Torah accessible to all Jews, and that our congregations place Torah
at the center of their existence.
This spring's World Zionist Organization
elections have the potential to enhance recognition of the Reform Movement in
Israel, help our communities to thrive, and demonstrate that there are many
ways to be religious in Medinat
Yisrael. If you haven't already done so, please pledge
to vote in the upcoming WZO elections.
One of my dearest friends is Richard Walden. Rich is a member of our congregation and has served on the board for several years. Before that he and his wife both taught Hebrew on Sunday mornings (Susan is coming back to the faculty this year!) He studied the classics and ended up becoming a banker. But every Friday, he boards an early afternoon train from New York to be back in time for our 6:00 p.m. Shabbat service. He is back in the morning for our 8:00 a.m. service. He is generous and an all around mensch. I am biased, but I dare you to find someone to disagree!
Several times a year, he volunteers to read Torah at our service when there is not a 14 year old reprising their Bar or Bat Mitzvah parshah. And when he reads, Rich also likes to give the D'var Torah. This past Shabbat was one of those days. Rich nailed the chanting - he is not a musician but he has a deep resonant voice that brings the emotion of the text right off the page and into your kishkes. And here is his D'var Torah. I felt the need to share. Yasher koach Richard! What is this thing we call fear? It is an incredibly complex emotion that is woven into Torah in many ways and has been with us from Eden right on through our 40 years of wandering. So what is fear? Is it lack of courage? Is it all about rational or irrational phobias?
This week is parashat Devarim, the opening of Deuteronomy, the book in which Moses retells our journey. In this section Moses recalls the spies who are sent to check out the land promised to us by God. As luck would have it, I met them just a few weeks ago when I stood in as Rabbi for the Friday night service at parashat Shlach. Well, I am with the spies once more and we are getting ready to cross the Jordan. Once again we go out and once again we learn that the land is indeed flowing with milk and honey. Oh but we silly, silly spies. We never learn, and we return, still filled with fear about the giants who live there.
Once again God is angry with us, and sure enough, God punishes us for not trusting—40 years of wandering in the desert AND no one but Joshua will enter the promised land.
So, what is FEAR in Torah? After eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve hide their nakedness from God in fear (Gen 3:10). God tells Abraham to “fear not” when he is sent on his journey in Lech Lecha (Gen: 15:1). At the shores of the Red Sea we are told not to fear Pharaoh’s army (Ex 14:13) and endlessly elsewhere it seems we are told to have no fear.
Does God want us to have the ability to look physical or emotional stress in the eye and say, ‘no big deal, I can take it’? We are tough, we don’t fear anything? We are told in this week’s portion that the spies Moses sent to reconnoiter the promised land “have taken the heart out of us, saying ‘we saw there a people stronger and taller…large cities with walls sky-high.” (Deut. 1:28). Is that what fear is, lack of courage in the physical world?
Well wait one minute. That can’t quite be it. Throughout Torah we are absolutely told to fear God. Later on in Deuteronomy we get the classic turn of the Ve’ahavta to love God “with all your heart and with all your soul and all your might”—but FEAR “lest the anger of the Lord your God blaze forth” (Deut. 6:4). We were told directly in Leviticus “you shall fear your God: I am the Lord” (Lev 19:14). It would seem that just as many times as we are told to have no fear, we are told also to be very, very afraid.
Maybe fear is more about a lack of trust. Is that what Torah is getting at? We should have complete confidence in God without any need for evidence or support other than ‘God said so’. If we learn to truly trust God, we will have no fear. We do see this theme regularly in Torah. Think about when Moses is told to talk to the rock to bring forth water, but instead, hits it twice. He is punished for this and we are never told why, but it would seem to be because Moses did not trust in the words and needed that physical manifestation of power.
Torah gives us some interesting juxtapositions about fear, courage and trust. Should we have blind faith in God and complete trust only in the divine? Or, is there some level of human free will that plays a role in any enterprise? Where do the physical and divine worlds of trust and fear meet? We still need to drive our cars, we can’t trust in God to steer a car. It would be unheard of in Judaism to substitute prayer for medical assistance—work to save a life is expressly permitted on Shabbat—even if we believe in prayers of healing. Torah recognizes human action and free will, even while demanding trust in God.
Ok, so let’s recap. We need to stand in awe of God and fear God, but we need to trust completely and have no fear, because if God is on our side we shouldn’t fear. But we need to be responsible for our own actions in the world and can’t rely on God to fix things even if we have complete trust and no fear of God. Got that? Simultaneously we need to be fearful, trusting and courageous and take action into our own hands but leave everything to God. Is that it?
For me, the epitome of this amalgam of emotions and actions is the image of Abraham with his knife raised over Isaac, that moment in the Akedah when he is prepared to sacrifice his son at God’s request. He knew very well that to swing down would end his son’s life, yet he has complete trust in God. That agonizing moment just before any movement of the knife he must have been living all those emotions of fear and courage and trust in that same crazed mix that Torah demands of us. The razor’s edge that is the balance between all those values and commandments…and after all, God did send an angel to Abraham at the last moment.
Ok, if that is what Torah says and means, what do we think of it? How can we possibly have this quantum mechanic ability to maintain completely opposite positions at the same time? What is this idealized state of trust and fear balancing against one another?
In that characterization it doesn’t feel much different than all the other themes in Torah. We are always balancing darkness and light; male and female; kashrut and treyf; Shabbat and work; one God versus idols; destiny and free will; Egypt versus the promised land. All of our stories and lessons from Torah are about that cutting edge where all these things exist and don’t exist, all those places and moments where we are all and none.
The archetypal moment is of course Shabbat. The pause after and before everything. That space between that bridges us from trust to courage or from this world to the realm of the divine. Remember, God is not in the noise and rush of the storm on the mountain, but in that pause just after.
Do I really fear God? Do I really trust God? I am sure that at moments I have had both emotions held in limbo simultaneously, but the sad truth is that most of the time I am just working my way through the world and can neither fear nor love, neither trust nor think of God. Clearly Shabbat is important to me, I keep coming back erev and boker looking for some divine connection. What I find is respite from work, the pleasure of a Jewish community, a little learning and every now and then something divine. Maybe the moments in which we are simultaneously fearful and courageous, trusting and doubtful are meant to be few and fleeting. Perhaps instead, we are meant to keep working at it. The balance is found on the journey not at the destination.
The spies only got one chance and they focused on the wrong aspect—they only thought of the destination and forgot that God was on the journey with them. Unlike the spies, we get endless chances to reach out and find those magic, fleeting moments when we can be one with the divine, or even just one with a fellow traveler. This Shabbat, let’s not be spies feeling like grasshoppers with giants ready to crush us. Instead, let’s see if we can take one moment of trust, or one moment of courage and turn it into something divine, our own personal promised land without fear.
Rabbi Daniel Grossman is an old friend from a dozen or more CAJE conferences. Today I had the thrill of seeing him once again and learning from him at the Matan Institute for Synagogue Educators. The Institute includes interactive sessions on differentiated
instruction, positive behavioral supports, organizational change theory,
executive functioning, first-person experiences, concrete
“ready-to-implement” ideas, resources and so much more. The article below is from the Jewish Week's blog, "The New Normal" which focuses on the the needs of Jews with special needs. BTW, Korach was my Torah portion when I became a Bar Mitzvah 39 years ago!
This week’s parasha focuses on the rebellion of Korach. Korach’s attempt to take power from Moses rests on what at first appears to be an appeal to equality and democracy. “All the community is holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourself above the Lord’s congregation?”
If all of Israel is equal, why should Moses have more authority than others? The problem with Korach’s argument is that to say all are equal in the eyes of God, is not to say we are all the same in our abilities before God.