This week’s Torah portion is Bemidbar, the very first portion in the book of Numbers. Bemidbar means, “in the wilderness.” It’s always read just at the time of Shavuot, when we commemorate the receiving of the Ten Commandments and celebrate the great gift of Torah. This portion begins with a charge to take a census, hence the name of the Book, Numbers. The plan of how the tribes will encamp around the Tabernacle is laid out, with banners and insignias for each tribe. The Levites replace the first born and are appointed to dismantle, carry, and re-erect the tabernacle on their journeys.
All the drama the Israelites have witnessed: the plagues, the parting of the Sea of Reeds, the giving of the Ten Commandments; all the building of the tabernacle, the crises of not enough food and water have stopped. We are all alone in the desert – but not alone. We are with God. Now we have to begin to just live. How do we do that?
The Torah has very practical advice for the Levites, that for us, can take on deeper meaning. But before we can take this advice into ourselves, we must go back to something God said to us right before the giving of the Ten Commandments. God said, “ V’atah t’hiyu li, ma-m’lechet Cohanim v’goi kadosh. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”(Ex. 19:6) Of course, this is both an offer and a prophecy: a commandment and the beginning of a brand new religious system. In idol worship, the priest spoke through the idol to the God, who spoke back to the priest, who then reported to the people. Judaism was to begin the democratization of religion. Each of us was to be our own priest. We, then, are the Levites: the priests. We are to interact directly with God and to become holy individually, so that we can be a holy nation.
Here is God’s advice. “…you shall appoint the Levites over the Tabernacle of the Testimony, over everything that belongs to it. They shall carry the tabernacle and all its utensils and they shall tend, (guard, and watch) over it; and they shall encamp around the Tabernacle. When the tabernacle journeys, the Levites shall take it down and when the tabernacle encamps, the Levites shall erect it….and the Levites shall protect the guarding of the tabernacle of the testimony.”
We have to remember what was in the center of the Tabernacle: words. We also have to imagine how weird that must have seemed: no idol, rather laws that were available to all. The sages interpreted the commandment to safeguard the charge of the Tabernacle literally. In ancient times, Levites were stationed around the Tabernacle, and later the Temple at 21 different stations, according to Nachmanides, as an Honor Guard. Our task is to go deeper into the symbolic meaning of the text. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach said a beautiful thing: “Imagine if I knew the Torah was given only to me, all its holiness was made just for me – how I would throw myself at every word! How I would cry over every word to understand it! When I receive a letter from someone I love I can’t stop reading. This is how we have to learn Torah, as a love-letter from God to us.”
Rabbi Carlebach captures the spirit of the verses from Bemibar. We are to carry the Torah: to carry it with us, because it truly is within us, as it says in Deuteronomy (30:14), “in your heart and in your mouth.” It is part of us and we are part of it. We are to tend, guard, and watch over it, by developing within ourselves that sense of awe and gratitude which we must have once felt, when we received it, and by putting it into practice in our lives so that we can become Torah; not just know it, but live it and be it. We can encamp around it by making it central to the way we live our lives; not something that is part of our cultural and religious heritage only, but by taking it seriously enough to believe that its wisdom is greater than our own. We can take it down when we have searched our hearts in total honesty, and know with all our being that there is something in the text which we, as a society, cannot agree with any longer: such as the practice of slavery or the exclusion of people on the basis of sexual preference. And we can erect it when we look to it for guidance, when we have a difficult choice and don’t know which way to go. Finally, we can protect it by nurturing its truth within our hearts and by refusing to abandon its teachings; by proudly standing up as Jews, and refusing to abandon our unique destiny as guardians of this precious teaching. By protecting Torah, it protects us. By loving it, it will send loving blessings to us.
In the Zohar it says, “How beloved… is the Torah before the Holy One, blessed be God, …. wherever words of the Torah are heard the Holy One, blessed be God, listens together with all the hosts. Indeed, the Divine Presence comes to lodge with the one that gives utterance to those words, (III:118a)... In all one’s deeds it behooves a person to imitate the celestial model, and to realize that according to the nature of a deed below there is a responsive stirring on high ….When one … turns one’s eyes to the heavenly light, that person will be illumined by the light that God will cause to shine upon him. (III: 118b-119a). At this time of Shavuot, when we ready ourselves to receive the Torah once again, may we all be bathed in the heavenly light of understanding, that we may honor and love the Torah. May we carry it with us, tend it within us, strive to understand the spirit of what it is saying to us, and live by its light.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Friday, July 6, 2012
We Were There
This week’s Torah portion is Ki Tissa, which means.” when you take.” It begins with the taking of a census, goes on to appoint two people to oversee the work of the Tabernacle and holy vestments, and reiterates that Shabbat observance supersedes work on the tabernacle for God. Later in the portion, while Moses is gone, the people make and worship a golden calf. Moses wins forgiveness for them and has an intimate encounter with God, in which he hears a description of God’s attributes: that God is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger, forgiving, and great in kindness and truth.
I’d like to tell you about something I saw while in Peru. My husband and I traveled to Cuzco, which used to be the capital of the Inca Empire. It is over 11,000 feel above sea level, where the oxygen is pretty thin. It has been called the bellybutton of the world. On one of the hills, overlooking the city of Cuzco, there is a major archeological site, whose name is Sacsayhuamán. This site dates from the middle ages, and in Inca times, probably during the 1400’s & 1500’s it was a religious site associated with the worship of the Condor. The Incas had many gods who represented what they called the 3 worlds: the sky, the earth, and the underworld, the world of death. So this site was part of the worship of the forces of the sky. It is a vast site, a very grand plateau probably the size of several football fields, capable of holding thousands of people, with three levels of undulating walls on one side. The guide for our group told us that in 1536, Francisco Pizzaro and his troops began the siege of Cuzco. It took almost a year.
At the end of the siege, the Spanish came up to Sacsayhuamán. There was a religious ritual being enacted there, in which the Inca placed grain on the ground for the condors to descend and eat. The Spanish soldiers massacred every person there: many, many people, and managed to capture a number of condors. They brought the condors down into the city and massacred them too. Thus the Spanish destroyed the religious site, the people, and the Inca religion all in one day. Later they removed stones from the walls there to build churches and cathedrals in Cuzco.
Standing there, I could feel that I was standing on holy ground. It was sanctified by the blood: the deaths of the hundreds and perhaps thousands who were killed there. And I realized that we were the ones who died and we were also the ones doing the killing. God and life are all one. We are one soul, past present, and future. Our Jewish sages have said that to God, there is no past, present, and future. This is also what Einstein believed. Einstein wrote a letter to the family of his friend, Besso, after Besso passed away. He indicated that although Besso had died before him, it was of no consequence, since "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."
In Ki Tissa we read about the making and worship of the Golden Calf. We may fault the Israelites for their abandonment of the sole worship of one God, but we were there too: not always being able to live up to the level of our knowledge and experience; not always able to live up to our own values and ideals. We are they, but we are also Moses, who knew with a deep, natural knowing, that he must plead for the people, since they were a part of him and he of them. When Moses asked God to give him more information and let him know why Moses found favor “in God’s eyes,” God gave him what we call the 13 attributes: a description of God’s personality: They are: Being, Existence, God; compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth, forgiving willful sins and errors, and who cleanses, but who does not cleanse completely, allowing us to take responsibility for our decisions (the last especially, being an interpretation).
We have made progress since the worship of the Golden Calf. We have made progress since the massacre of the Inca and their sacred birds. But in our world, killing still goes on: in Sudan, in Syria, in the Congo, and elsewhere. Part of us has come so far, but not all of us. The closer we come to being gracious and kind and forgiving to each other; the closer we come to compassion, and truth; to being slower to anger, more patient and more accepting, the closer we will come to what God said to Moses: my Presence shall provide you rest. God’s Presence, that Divine Rest is what we will experience eventually; but also what we can experience occasionally, right now, out of our choosing to live from our knowledge of what we should be striving for. We have been given the goal and the answers. They are right here in Ki Tissa. We can sanctify life not only through death, but through goodness and holy action. May we choose the path of life, of beauty, and of God’s Presence, experiencing the flashes of inner peace and holiness that are truly ours to possess.
I’d like to tell you about something I saw while in Peru. My husband and I traveled to Cuzco, which used to be the capital of the Inca Empire. It is over 11,000 feel above sea level, where the oxygen is pretty thin. It has been called the bellybutton of the world. On one of the hills, overlooking the city of Cuzco, there is a major archeological site, whose name is Sacsayhuamán. This site dates from the middle ages, and in Inca times, probably during the 1400’s & 1500’s it was a religious site associated with the worship of the Condor. The Incas had many gods who represented what they called the 3 worlds: the sky, the earth, and the underworld, the world of death. So this site was part of the worship of the forces of the sky. It is a vast site, a very grand plateau probably the size of several football fields, capable of holding thousands of people, with three levels of undulating walls on one side. The guide for our group told us that in 1536, Francisco Pizzaro and his troops began the siege of Cuzco. It took almost a year.
At the end of the siege, the Spanish came up to Sacsayhuamán. There was a religious ritual being enacted there, in which the Inca placed grain on the ground for the condors to descend and eat. The Spanish soldiers massacred every person there: many, many people, and managed to capture a number of condors. They brought the condors down into the city and massacred them too. Thus the Spanish destroyed the religious site, the people, and the Inca religion all in one day. Later they removed stones from the walls there to build churches and cathedrals in Cuzco.
Standing there, I could feel that I was standing on holy ground. It was sanctified by the blood: the deaths of the hundreds and perhaps thousands who were killed there. And I realized that we were the ones who died and we were also the ones doing the killing. God and life are all one. We are one soul, past present, and future. Our Jewish sages have said that to God, there is no past, present, and future. This is also what Einstein believed. Einstein wrote a letter to the family of his friend, Besso, after Besso passed away. He indicated that although Besso had died before him, it was of no consequence, since "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."
In Ki Tissa we read about the making and worship of the Golden Calf. We may fault the Israelites for their abandonment of the sole worship of one God, but we were there too: not always being able to live up to the level of our knowledge and experience; not always able to live up to our own values and ideals. We are they, but we are also Moses, who knew with a deep, natural knowing, that he must plead for the people, since they were a part of him and he of them. When Moses asked God to give him more information and let him know why Moses found favor “in God’s eyes,” God gave him what we call the 13 attributes: a description of God’s personality: They are: Being, Existence, God; compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth, forgiving willful sins and errors, and who cleanses, but who does not cleanse completely, allowing us to take responsibility for our decisions (the last especially, being an interpretation).
We have made progress since the worship of the Golden Calf. We have made progress since the massacre of the Inca and their sacred birds. But in our world, killing still goes on: in Sudan, in Syria, in the Congo, and elsewhere. Part of us has come so far, but not all of us. The closer we come to being gracious and kind and forgiving to each other; the closer we come to compassion, and truth; to being slower to anger, more patient and more accepting, the closer we will come to what God said to Moses: my Presence shall provide you rest. God’s Presence, that Divine Rest is what we will experience eventually; but also what we can experience occasionally, right now, out of our choosing to live from our knowledge of what we should be striving for. We have been given the goal and the answers. They are right here in Ki Tissa. We can sanctify life not only through death, but through goodness and holy action. May we choose the path of life, of beauty, and of God’s Presence, experiencing the flashes of inner peace and holiness that are truly ours to possess.
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