Freedom, Oneness and God's Name

This week’s Torah portion is Va’eira, which means, and I appeared. In this portion God speaks to Moses about the Holy Name, and how God appeared to the patriarchs as El Shaddai, which may mean, God Almighty, God who is sufficient, or God the Provider; and not as Yud hei vav hei, the name of God which means Being or existence, in the past present, and future.
The rest of this portion tells about the Divine promise to free the Israelites and take them out of Egypt, leading them to the Land. Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and demand that the people be freed, but Pharaoh refuses repeatedly, bringing upon himself and his people the plagues of blood, frogs, lice, swarms of beasts, and fiery hail. Each plague brings Pharaoh to consider freeing the people, only to renege and reconsider, once the plagues have been removed.
It is interesting that the portion begins with a discussion of God’s Name, Yud hei vav hei, a conjugation of the verb, To Be. The Torah says, “I am Yud Hei vav hei. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but with my name, Yud Hei vav Hei I didi not make myself known to them.” Why does God care what name we use? What is so important about the Name? We could call God anything really, but Moses is being given a vital piece of information here. God is saying – I am being - I am existence, which is One. You are on the brink of a completely new understanding – a shift. What Rabbi Zalman Schacter Shalomi of the Jewish Renewal Movement, has called a paradigm shift, to quote the title of one of his books. And this is an understanding that we are still working on coming to terms with, even now.
Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites, the Other. For him, he and the Egyptians were US and we, the Israelites were THEM. By not having the understanding of Yud Hei vav Hei, that spiritually speaking, there is no us and no them, only US, Pharaoh brought suffering to himself, misfortune to his people, and brought his country to the brink of ruin. Pharaoh was under the mistaken impression that there can be persecution without negative consequences. The cycle of repression, pain, persecution leading to bankruptcy, ruin, and destruction has been enacted again and again in history, for us, for African Americans in this country, and for so many other peoples.
This leads us to the question – If God is One, then how does God experience our suffering? Perhaps it is like having a splinter in our finger or breaking our toe. Our finger, our toe, is a part of us; and we feel the pain acutely. When a part of us is injured, it hurts. When we cause another human being to suffer, we cause the Eternal pain. When we alleviate someone’s suffering, perhaps we even cause God to smile.
If God told Moses, I am Yud Hei Vav Hei, being, existence, Oneness, over 3,000 years ago, why do we still not understand the implications of that piece of information ? Why do we not immediately follow the logic of that statement to its conclusion: that if God is One and God brought forth all existence from that Oneness, that there could not ever be an Us and a Them. The realization of that reality has been slow in coming. Many of our sages were prepared to understand that Israel, all the Jewish People were one, but it has not been until recently, perhaps only until the second half of the 19th Century that we as individuals and also as a society were prepared to understand God’s statement profoundly, in its essence. While I was writing this sermon, I recalled the quotation, "Until we are all free, we are none of us free." And I tried to find its author. Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. had written it, I thought, which would be great for timing, given that this is the Shabbat before the national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Maybe Gandhi, I thought? Do you know who wrote it? Emma Lazarus: a Jewish woman, born in 1849 and died in 1887. Since she said those words, the understanding of Universal Oneness has been gaining ground. Abraham Joshua Heschl wrote, in his book, Man is not Alone, “Divine is a message that discloses unity where we see diversity, that discloses peace when we are involved in discord. God is the One who holds our fitful lives together, who reveals to us that what is empirically diverse in color, in interest, in creeds: – races, classes, nations – are one in God’s eyes and one in essence.” Later, Martin Luther King said, “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” And also “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” And he also made an inexact paraphrase of Emma Lazarus, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” But perhaps we can go to the S’fat Emet, who lived at approximately the same time as Emma Lazarus, and who wrote that “we must be empty of everything before we can hear.” We can extend this to sight as well. We must empty ourselves of what we see and think we know, to understand our oneness and then to feel it and act upon it. How would we speak to God, how would we treat God if we had the opportunity to talk to the Holy One? That’s how we could treat each other. To believe that we are all a part of each other, to regard the problems we encounter in ourselves, in others, in our society not as evil, reacting with fear or hatred, but as the unredeemed parts of God that we can play a part in redeeming, would be a major shift in our thinking. If we let ourselves, we can feel our connection to each other. These are ideas whose time is coming, or perhaps whose time has finally come. But the profound understanding of Yud Hei Vav Hei, is more than an idea – it is a universal truth; and the ability to live out of that truth is a great challenge that brings great blessings. May we realize the tremendous potential we have to bring the realization of our Oneness finally, after 3,000 years, into our lives and into the consciousness of the world. In so doing we will bless each other and ourselves, and perhaps even, to cause God to smile.

Hiding and Revealing

This week’s Torah portion, the first portion in the Book of Exodus, is Shemot, which means, Names. It is about the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt, Pharaoh’s decree to drown every male Israelite baby, the birth of Moses, his exile in Midian, and his call by God and eventual return to carry out God’s plan for him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. This portion has a number of references to something hidden. The first reference says, “A man went from the house of Levi and married a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and gave birth to a son. She saw that he was good and she hid him for three months. She could not hide him any longer.” We know what happened next: She placed Moses in a waterproof basket, put it into the River, and sent Moses’ sister Miriam, to watch it as Pharaoh’s daughter discovered it. Pharaoh’s daughter had pity on the child and decided to raise Moses as her own. As Moses’ mother became his caretaker, he never lost touch with his family and his people.
The text says, “She saw that he was good.” What did Jocheved, Moses’ mother, see? The Torah says, Ki Tov, for he was good. This phrase, Ki Tov reminded the sages of the primordial, spiritual light of the Divine Presence, about which, on the first day of creation, God said, Ki Tov, for it, the light, was good. In Midrash Rabbah, it is written, the Sages say: When Moses was born the whole house became flooded with light; for here it says: AND SHE SAW HIM THAT HE WAS A GOODLY CHILD, and in (Gen. I, 4) it says: And God saw the light, that it was good. Another commentary is from the Zohar, where it is written, “That light is the sacred and hidden temple wherein is concentrated that divine essence from which all the worlds draw sustenance, and all divine hosts are nourished and so subsist.( I:6b). From this comparison, it is tempting to create a very small bit of Kabbbalah for our times. What did Jocheved see? The sages say she saw Moses’ inner radiance. She saw his life force, the life that God gives to each of us. So she hid it, allowing it to grow, to develop. She nurtured his radiance, protected it, covering it when danger threatened. Just as we cover, hide, and protect our inner soul light. But after three months, when she could hide him no longer, she put him in a basket. With trust in the Eternal, and with the prayers she must have prayed, she placed him carefully in the water, the birth waters of the Eternal – attached to the womb-wall of the bank of the Nile, protected by the reeds, yet partially exposed. All it took was the kindness of another human being, to open the basket and expose the radiance within, and the baby was crying – the cry of our soul light when there is none to share it.
Just as God has hidden the Divine Radiance from us, so do we hide away our own spiritual spark. It is deep within us, protected by layers of ourselves: layers of reason, scientific knowledge, fear, insecurity, hurt, and pain. God saw the sparkle in Jocheved, the brilliant beams in Moses. God sees our light as well. But how aware of it are we? After hiding it away for so long, do we often bring it forth? Have we protected it for too long? Do we dare to shine, as God intended us to? In Walt Whitman’s the Song of Myself, he writes, I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good- belongs to you. Whitman’s words unleash the passion of sharing the light with another person. To uncover our light is to share it, to connect and join the flow of the River of life, in which all light is connected, and all passion becomes compassion. The Psychologist Erich Fromm has written, "Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself." And the philosopher Derrida has written, I give birth to myself and I write myself.
Jocheved gave birth, then hid away her light until it was developed, and finally, shared it with the world, making possible a glorious redemption of her people and also all humanity, through the revelation of Torah. The nurturing of our Divine spark is precious work, but letting it out and sharing it is not only holy but redemptive. The Eternal Holy One knows that each of us is part of the Divine Plan. As God is Ki Tov, Goodness, we are goodness. Our light is desperately needed in the world. It is our task not only to protect it so that it can grow, doing the inner work that supports its nurturing, but to let it out, that we may illumine the world for others. It is our light that can repair the world, if we are willing to share it. And when we birth it and share it, Ki Tov, it feels good, is good; and we mint even more goodness and more light, fulfilling the Divine purpose for which we were created.

Resolutions for the New Year

This week’s Torah portion is Vayigash, which means, “and he approached.” Judah comes before Joseph, the Vizier of Egypt, to plead for his youngest brother, Benjamin, and to offer to take Benjamin’s place in jail. Benjamin has been framed by Joseph, in order to see whether the brothers have changed and grown; whether they hate Benjamin as they hated him; and whether they will abandon Benjamin or try to free him. In this speech, which has the reputation of being one of the most beautiful sections of the Torah, Judah speaks movingly of his father’s love for Benjamin. He says, “Now, therefore, when I come to your servant my father, and the lad is not with us; seeing that his soul is bound up in his soul; It shall come to pass, when he sees that the lad is not with us, that he will die; and your servants shall bring down the gray hairs of your servant our father in sorrow to the grave. For your servant took responsibility for the lad, saying, If I do not bring him to you, then I will have sinned to my father for ever. Now therefore, I beg you, let your servant remain instead of the lad as a slave to my lord; and let the lad go up with his brothers. For how shall I go up to my father, and the lad not be with me? ” (Gen. 44:30) After this speech, Joseph is overcome with emotion and reveals himself as their brother. What makes this speech so effective? The Torah commentator Nechama Lebowitz points out that Judah uses the word “father” 14 times in 17 verses. Judah shifts the emphasis of the speech away from himself and Benjamin to his concern for his father. But this is only part of the power of Judah’s oration. Judah took a chance and courageously bared his soul to Joseph, who he thought was a stranger. He could have protested Benjamin’s innocence, which was the truth, but instead he spoke a deeper truth from his heart. The Chassidic Rabbi Asher Horowitz noted that Judah’s mouth and heart were united. When we encounter another person’s truth: their vulnerability, their humanity, we realize our humanity and we are drawn to that person, heart to heart. It is what Martin Buber calls the “I and Thou:” honoring another person’s holiness. When a person bares his soul, it is irresistible, because our need to love and be loved is greater than our need to hate or take revenge. Our need for harmony is greater than our urge to maintain divisions. Joseph felt the genuine-ness, the sincerity of Judah’s feeling for his father and identified with the love Judah expressed.
The question for us then, is how to live in that place of truth, sincerity, love, and even vulnerability? There is a custom at the changing of the secular New Year to make resolutions so that the New Year will be better than the old one. So here are some of the resolutions that could improve not only the year but our very lives. We could give up hatred, the hatred in every human heart. It is easier than you think. It absolutely can be done, if we wish to do it. We could give up anger. We could give up revenge and grudges. This is what Rabbi Gelberman has written on this subject: “Thoughts can dominate us or liberate us. Tame the tyrannical thoughts of fear and hate with thought of faith and love, and we have overcome a meek adversary. If we allow rampant domination of negative thinking we are defeated by a foe with no more power except that which we thoughtfully grant to it. With love and wisdom we are capable of control over what enters and leaves our mind.” This is what Joseph, the only person in the Torah to be called a Tzaddik, a righteous person, did. He gave up anger. He gave up hatred. He gave up revenge and grudges. He forgave his brothers for what they did, thereby creating blessings for millions of people, and of course, for himself. We can strop creating misfortune for ourselves in this New Year, by being willing to give up the habit of creating negativity. Joseph is our role model: the person who was willing to be moved by another person’s love. As we anticipate this New Year, let us be willing to give up that which we no longer need; that which we have grown out of. What can we give up before the new year begins? What are we willing to give up so that, like Joseph, we can be greater than we are?