Scrollers Preview - Parashat T'rumah 2014

One third of the Book of Exodus is dedicated to the instructions for and the actual construction of the Tabernacle, or as the Torah calls it, the “mishkan,” or “dwelling place.” In his introduction to this section of the book, Everett Fox lays out the many reasons for Exodus’ emphasis on this highly detailed account of the building of the dwelling place for God. One reason he gives is that a great theme of this book is the question, posed by the Israelites in 17:7 – “Is YHWH in our midst or not?” And here, the answer is clearly, “YES!”

So, yes, God is in our midst. And this parasha describes the environment we are to create in order for God to dwell with us. We will contemplate the qualities of the Mishkan and wonder together about what the design says about how we understand our relationship with the Divine. We will wonder together about why God’s presence and voice moves from the boundary-breaking thunderous mountain of Sinai to a little gold box, the ark, contained in a tent within a tent. We will wonder at the beauty and expense of the materials, the symmetry and pleasing-ness of the dimensions, and ask why such a humble abode – a tent? Moreover, we will take note that this bridge between heaven and earth is not firmly planted in one location. It moves with the Israelites from camp to camp.

We will ask - what in this highly detailed third of the Book of Exodus –the book that recounts how we became US – speaks to us? And we will also look at the Chasidic master Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman’s answer to that question as well.

Looking forward to wondering along with all of you tomorrow!

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Mishpatim 2014

Last week’s meeting between the Israelites and God was full of ambiguity. The text was chaotic, likely a weaving together of more than one account, and by the end of our discussion, we still weren’t sure of what exactly the people had witnessed. The most concrete aspect of the revelation was the ten utterances, or the Ten Commandments, themselves. These basic laws establish God’s expectations of the people if they are to uphold the covenant.

In this week’s parasha, we get even more concrete. Ostensibly, Moses is still up on Mount Sinai, and God proceeds to tell Moses, “Now these are the mishpatim, the regulations, that you are to set before them.” And what we have are a series of very specific laws regulating everything from how we are to treat our Hebrew indentured servants to injury, accidental and intentional killing of another person, to how we are to treat the poor, to public safety and property, to the rituals of the pilgrimage festivals.

The parasha comes to its end, first with some very Deuteronomic sounding language about what will happen if we do follow the laws and what will happen if we don’t. Then there is a covenant cutting or sealing ceremony in which Moses writes down and then reads the terms of the covenant to the people and then sprinkles blood on them. And the parasha ends with Moses, Aaron, Nadav and Avihu and seventy elders going up the mountain where they see God and have a meal.

This parasha is not as scary or chaotic as last week’s. It makes more sense to our rational minds. However, it is not devoid of feeling or even of spirituality. Here we have the spirituality of the every day – the ways in which we will keep the relationship with God front and center in our mundane activities. The regulations are not just dry lists of what to do and what not to do. The rhetoric taps into our historical experience as slaves and strangers and landless, poor marginal people to provide a deep motivation for following these rules. We are not to mistreat the stranger, because we know the heart of the stranger, having been strangers in the Land of Egypt.

As we study together, I want us to think about these two different types of spirituality – the transcendent, other-worldly Sinai moments and these grounded, this-worldly, mundane moments. Which way of connecting to God works for you?

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Yitro 2014

Covenants abound in the ancient Near East, with kings making pacts with vassals and with other kings. But as far as we know, no other ancient society other than Israel ever imagined a god entering into a covenant with a people. The heart of our parasha this week is the cutting of the covenant between God and our people at Mount Sinai. We’ve have covenantal moments before, in the Book of Genesis, between God and Noah, and then God and each of the patriarchs. But this is the first covenant in which both parties have a stake; this is the first one where, according to Everett Fox, “mutuality and conditionality” are a part of the deal.

The scene in which the covenant is made is one of revelation. Yet, this is not primarily a visual experience – it is an aural one. God speaks directly to Moses in the hearing of the people, out of a cloud of smoke atop a trembling mountain. Shofarot are blasting, and God’s words are heard above the noise.

The very moment of the people meeting God is described in only four verses. Yet many more verses are devoted to warnings about boundaries that the people must not overstep lest God “burst out” against them. And the balance of the parasha is made up of the laws that are revealed.

So, at the heart of the parasha is this moment of meeting, but it is only four verses long. What does this mean about how we are to understand our relationship with God? Is the experience of God’s presence more or less important than following the laws and sticking to the covenant? Why do we think that our ancient Israelite ancestors could imagine a covenant between a people and a god, when no one around them was doing this? What does this say about who we are and where we came from?

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Bo 2014

At the beginning of this week’s Parasha, everyone seems to know and acknowledge that Egypt is “lost,” everyone except for Pharaoh himself, that is. As the plague of locusts is about to descend, even his advisors have the chutzpah to confront Pharaoh and ask why he continues to refuse to the let the Israelites go. By the end of the Parasha, as the great cry is heard throughout Egypt over the death of the firstborn, Pharaoh finally relents. As God had predicted, Pharaoh “drives” the Israelites out of Egypt.

Woven through the narrative of the last three plagues are instructions for the Pesach sacrifice and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. These instructions are aimed at two audiences. First, they are meant for the Israelites in the story, the Pesach sacrifice being the source of the blood which, smeared on the doorposts, will protect them from the “Destroyer.” But these ritual instructions regarding the sacrifice of a lamb for each household and the seven day commandment to eat only unleavened bread are meant equally for the generations after the Exodus. The text makes explicit that these rituals are to become eternal reminders, passed down from parent to child. “And you are to tell you child on that day, saying: it is because of what God did for me, when I went out of Egypt.” (Exodus 13:8)

Woven through this narrative that is at the heart of our identity as Jews, we have here the first formally revealed laws in the Torah. And through the revelation of these laws, we are brought into the center of the story – it becomes ours.

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Miketz 2013

Dreaming and waking, forgetting and remembering, recognizing and hiding, “that we may live and not die.” These are the refrains, the poles of this week’s parasha.

Pharaoh dreams of skinny cows eating fat cows and skinny corn eating healthy corn, and when he awakens, he is anxious. The royal cupbearer who forgot Joseph at the end of last week’s parasha remembers Joseph now and recommends him to Pharaoh as a dream interpreter. Joseph is raised up from the dungeon to the heights of power, as Pharaoh entrusts the land and the storage and distribution of its produce to him during the famine. Joseph’s brothers come down to Egypt for food “that they may live and not die,” because of the famine in Canaan. Joseph recognizes them; they do not recognize him. As they bow in front of him, Joseph, who named his son “he who makes me forget my father’s house,” remembers the dreams he had while in his father’s house, of his brothers bowing down to him.

In this parasha, we are making our way towards Egypt, and toward nationhood. The brothers are now calling themselves by the collective, “we,” and we can envision the People forming. The themes of remembering and forgetting appear, themes which will dominate the Book of Exodus, in which the new Pharaoh does not know Joseph, God forgets us as we slave away for 400 years, and finally, God remembers the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. “That we may live and not die.” Egypt –our collective dungeon - is the place where we thrive – where we survive famine and multiply into a nation.

The parasha ends with a cliff hanger. Joseph is testing his brothers to see if they have turned around – to see if they will take responsibility for their brothers Shimon, and then Benjamin, and above all, their father. Perhaps this is a test of whether nationhood is something we are capable of. Perhaps a test of whether we will get out of Egypt alive – of whether we are worth remembering.

Happy Thanksgiving and Chanukah!

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Vayeshev 2013

Unlike Jacob and Isaac, patriarchs whom we follow closely from birth through adulthood to death, Joseph steps into the foreground of our story when he is already seventeen years old.  We did read of his birth to Jacob’s favored wife Rachel, a few weeks back. And, as we have come to expect, he was only born after his mother struggled with barrenness. But the narrative in between Joseph’s birth and this week’s Torah portion has nothing to do with Joseph. It is as if his story really begins this week.

The Joseph cycle echoes many of the themes of the stories that preceded it – sibling rivalry, deception, exile. But now these themes are brought to an intensity we haven’t seen before. We do  not only have a pair of rival brothers here, vying for a blessing and a birthright. In this set of stories, we have a whole band of brothers who sell Joseph into slavery as an alternative to their initial impulse – to kill him in cold blood. The deception this time isn’t about who gets to receive a blessing. This time, the brothers trick their father into believing that Joseph has been torn apart by a wild beast. The protagonist in this story does not only leave home to sojourn with relatives out of fear of his brother. This time, Joseph is sold into captivity down to Egypt, the most foreign of foreign lands.  Whereas in previous stories, love has been prominent, here, hate takes center stage.

We also are not only following the story of one future patriarch in this parasha. Joseph is clearly at the center of the story. But we also have a whole chapter devoted to Judah, who develops from a person whose idea it is to sell his own brother into slavery, to a man whose own sons are dying and who is deceived by his daughter-in-law Tamar, to a man who by the end of the “cycle” or “novella,”  ultimately takes responsibility for his own brother and father.

I look forward to exploring this story with you tomorrow! 

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Vayishlach 2013

According to Everett Fox’s commentary, Jacob encounters God at crucial life junctures, and in this Torah portion, Jacob encounters God three times. In most instances, God speaks to Jacob, reassuring him that God will be with him, that Jacob will be the one to carry on the covenant, that he will give birth to a nation. Sometimes God comes to tell Jacob it’s time to move on to the next phase of the journey.

But in the beginning of this parasha, God comes to him in the form or a man or an angel who wrestles with him, cannot overcome him, injures him, blesses him, and changes his name. In this episode, Jacob encounters God “face to face.” And the next morning, Jacob encounters his brother’s face for the first time in over twenty years – for the first time since Jacob ran away from Esau who wanted to kill him for stealing the first-born’s blessing. One of the key words in this parasha is “face.” Depending on where and when it appears, the word “face” suggests intimacy, close encounter, love, fear, and conflict.

The parasha is full of fear, conflict, love, loss, blessing and violence. There are moments of grace, as when Esau runs to Jacob and kisses him, shedding tears and reconciling with his brother. And there are moments of failure – Jacob hears of the rape of his daughter and doesn’t seem to know what to do.

Fitting then that this parasha would open with a wrestling match and would feature the word “face”. Sometimes Jacob is on top, sometimes on the bottom. His story is close up. He can’t escape the pain of burying his beloved wife; he is caught in an unexpected, tight embrace with his estranged brother. Sometimes he appears to be pinned down, unable to move or act. Other times he prevails. This week, Jacob stares in the face the realities of a life on the road with God.

I look forward to encountering this text, face to face with you, tomorrow!