This week’s Torah portion is Mishpatim, which means, ordinances, or laws. It directly follows the Ten Commandments, and consists of over 50 rules that lay out the workings of a just society. There are laws concerning murder, injury, theft, care of and destruction of property, negligence, and social justice. There are laws about the punishment fitting the crime, integrity of words and actions, and also about helping and not oppressing a strangers, widows, and orphans, those weakest in society. Finally, there are laws about the 3 agricultural pilgrimage holidays and a vision of God, seen by the Moses and over 70 elders.
Tonight I’d like to examine three incomprehensible laws. They are: “One who strikes his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. One who kidnaps a man and sells him and he was found in his possession, shall surely be put to death. One who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death” (Ex. 21:15-17). Of course we don’t agree with these laws, and the ancient rabbis didn’t either. They limited them severely to adult children who have the intention of causing death to their parents. But what the laws say and what they mean, I think, are two very different things. In the 10 Commandments, we are told, “Do not take the name of God, your God, in vain,” and also, “Honor your father and your mother.” Both of these commandments concern respect: respect for God and respect for parents. The Torah is informing us that respect is an important value in Judaism: that it’s good for us, good for society, and that developing respect will help us and make us happier.
In Mishpatim, the failure of an adult child to manifest any respect for parents is deemed so dangerous to society that the courts need to be involved. It is the task of the community, the Torah tells us, to make sure that people who are a danger to their parents are dealt with not by the parents alone, but by the entire community. It is interesting that the commandment concerning kidnapping is between the two directives about parents. Rabbi S. R. Hirsch says this is because the kidnapper treated the person he kidnapped and sold as a thing, not as a person (P. 290, Hirsch Chumash). Respect is a value which has changed greatly in our society. People used to respect the king, the Pope, even rabbis. Our grandparents had respect for their teachers, for the doctor, for authority figures in general. This was a patriarchal hierarchy in which there was more of a certain type of respect throughout the society.
We know that things have greatly changed. There is much less respect for individuals, but perhaps more respect for groups. Our great grandparents may have respected the teacher, but what about a person of color? What about women, or those with disabilities, or those whose sexual preferences differed with their own? Respect has shifted, I think, not diminished. Perhaps now, in our psychologically attuned time, there is more self-respect and also more willingness to treat others as people and not objects. Perhaps, as Rabbi Elimelech taught, that is one meaning of the commandment, “Do not show favoritism,” (Deut. 16:19) which distances us from God’s Panim, face. There is a growing recognition that respect must be accorded to everyone equally, not just to parents, teachers, and authority figures: that respect should be not a component of fear, but of love. The French novelist Albert Camus wrote, “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
Perhaps the Torah stresses respect to parents because it is through our parents that we learn how to respect, and also how to love. If we formed healthy, nourishing attachments to our parents, then we can not only love, accept, and respect others, but we have also developed the capacity to love and respect the Source of life. Respect for God, and as the V’ahavta prayer urges, love for God, helps us to rise spiritually. One can be a moral person out of a conviction that doing the right thing is valuable in itself. It may however, be easier, to tackle the self and make the changes necessary for spiritual advancement, if we have developed the respect for the rightness and goodness of God’s teachings, if we can love our Divine parent.
Respect flows from the purifying force of love in our lives. When we do the inner work to purify ourselves, we can accept, love, and respect others. The Torah and the Midrash ask us to rise in the presence of the aged and also of a sage (Levit. 19: 32; Ex Rabba 31:16). This is respect based on love, and perhaps we are moving from respect based on fear to respect based on love. There is great strength in having respect for each other. Rabbi Elimelech quotes a story told by the Baal Shem Tov that you may have heard: “All the birds fly to warmer countries in the winter. A beautiful multicolored bird appeared atop a very high tree in a certain country. The king commanded his servants to bring him the bird. They climbed on top of each other’s shoulders, forming a tall ladder. After a while the ones below decided they were no longer necessary and left. This caused the man at the top to tumble and fall to the ground. He was injured and failed to capture the bird.” The Baal Shem Tov continued: “We must always be attached and connected with each other with love.” May we have the wisdom to accord our respect not only to those who exhibit the highest human values, but also to respect our Divinity within, that we may recognize and respect that divinity of each person and be guided toward greater respect for God and each other.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
A Teaching for Tu B'Shevat
Tu B'Shevat, the New Year of the Trees is our environmental and spiritual holiday. Here is a teaching for the occasion:
How is a person like a tree? A tree gives shade, beauty, and fruit.
Like a tree’s shade, we can provide protection for each other.
Like a tree’s beauty, we can be a source of love, friendship, wisdom, and inspiration.
Like a tree’s fruit, we are not diminished in the giving; for we participate in the nourishment and life of the greater web of all existence and always have more to give. Thereby are we enriched.
How is a person like a tree? A tree gives shade, beauty, and fruit.
Like a tree’s shade, we can provide protection for each other.
Like a tree’s beauty, we can be a source of love, friendship, wisdom, and inspiration.
Like a tree’s fruit, we are not diminished in the giving; for we participate in the nourishment and life of the greater web of all existence and always have more to give. Thereby are we enriched.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Emerging Into the Light
This week’s Torah portion is Bo, which means, Come. God commands Moses to go to Pharaoh to warn him of the last three plagues. Later in the portion, the Israelites are given instructions about the Pesach offering to God, in preparation for departure; the protection of marking the doors with the blood from the Pesach offering; and also staying inside, away from danger. We are given our own calendar and the commandments concerning Passover, to celebrate it with matzah and bitter herbs as an eternal decree; the first borns are consecrated to God. Then Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt.
After the ninth plague, Pharaoh is ready to let the people go for a three day period to bring offerings to God in the wilderness. But when he hears that the people will take even their herds and flocks, there is an exchange between Moses and Pharaoh that reads like a page from a super-hero comic book. Pharaoh says: “Go from me! Beware! Do not see my face anymore, for on the day you see my face, you will die.” Moses then says, very evenly and with dead seriousness, “You have spoken correctly. I shall never see your face again.” But just then, God gives Moses more instructions for Pharaoh. I imagine that perhaps Moses is halfway down the hall when he has to go back and warn Pharaoh of the last plague, the only one that the Torah calls a plague: the killing of the firstborns. After carrying out this terrible task, telling Pharaoh about all the death that will occur, the Torah says, Moses “left Pharaoh’s presence in burning anger.”
We can only imagine why Moses was so angry. Here are some possibilities: 1) Because he had to go back on his word? 2) Because he was so frustrated with Pharaoh? 3) Because there was to be so much death and it was all avoidable? 4) Because he sensed that he was a pawn in a game he did not understand? 5) Because he had agreed to be God’s voice to improve the lives of people, and here, the longer he speaks for God, the worse everything has become? 6) He is caught in what to him may have been a hopeless situation, in which he is impotent: unable to bring about any positive change. No wonder he was so angry. God then explains to Moses, maybe to calm him down, that “Pharaoh will not heed you, in order to increase my wonders in the land of Egypt.”
Immediately after that, God says to Moses and Aaron: This month shall be for you the beginning of the months, or in Rabbi Hirsch’s translation, “This renewal will be for you the beginning of renewals.” This year, Rosh Chodesh, the new month and the new moon occurred yesterday, on the evening of January 1st. In both the secular and the Jewish calendars, there was a new month, a renewal, and the renewal of the New Year. Rabbi Hirsch has a wonderful teaching about the new moon and for us, the New Year. He says: “In the land of the most stubborn paganism…did God call forth the future leader of God’s people (to) show them the sickle of the moon struggling to emerge from darkness into renewed light….Every time the moon reunites with the sun, and receives new light from it, God wants us to find our way back to Divinity and receive new irradiation from God’s light, no matter where we may be and through what periods of darkness we may have to pass.”
Moses did not know that just one week later, all the people would have left Egypt, the Sea of Reeds would have parted, and the people would be freed from bondage. He didn’t know that a few months after that, God would reveal the Divine Presence to over a million people, giving them the Ten Commandments: a body of Law that has stood for all time. We have no idea what renewals await us, just a few days, weeks, or months away. In the Hebrew calendar, the first month, Nisan, corresponds to the beginning of the spring: April, the time in Israel of the first plant growth: the time of maximum hope and beautiful renewal for us all. This is what we call God’s daily continuing and renewing the work of creation, the words of which we pray in the Shacharit service, the morning service each Shabbat, which itself is meant as a weekly renewal.
We know that in this new year, there will be challenges as well as blessings. May we be patient through any frustrations we may experience, knowing that the difficulties are the prelude to our emergence into the light. May we be hopeful and secure, knowing that what we encounter are part of the process of Divine renewal, allowing us to play a part in the unfolding of goodness and blessing by striving to move out of darkness into renewed light. May each of us have a year of marvelous growth, increased understanding, and great blessings: of good health, prosperity, and happiness. May our renewal, as part of the Divine Plan, bring more Divine light to all.
After the ninth plague, Pharaoh is ready to let the people go for a three day period to bring offerings to God in the wilderness. But when he hears that the people will take even their herds and flocks, there is an exchange between Moses and Pharaoh that reads like a page from a super-hero comic book. Pharaoh says: “Go from me! Beware! Do not see my face anymore, for on the day you see my face, you will die.” Moses then says, very evenly and with dead seriousness, “You have spoken correctly. I shall never see your face again.” But just then, God gives Moses more instructions for Pharaoh. I imagine that perhaps Moses is halfway down the hall when he has to go back and warn Pharaoh of the last plague, the only one that the Torah calls a plague: the killing of the firstborns. After carrying out this terrible task, telling Pharaoh about all the death that will occur, the Torah says, Moses “left Pharaoh’s presence in burning anger.”
We can only imagine why Moses was so angry. Here are some possibilities: 1) Because he had to go back on his word? 2) Because he was so frustrated with Pharaoh? 3) Because there was to be so much death and it was all avoidable? 4) Because he sensed that he was a pawn in a game he did not understand? 5) Because he had agreed to be God’s voice to improve the lives of people, and here, the longer he speaks for God, the worse everything has become? 6) He is caught in what to him may have been a hopeless situation, in which he is impotent: unable to bring about any positive change. No wonder he was so angry. God then explains to Moses, maybe to calm him down, that “Pharaoh will not heed you, in order to increase my wonders in the land of Egypt.”
Immediately after that, God says to Moses and Aaron: This month shall be for you the beginning of the months, or in Rabbi Hirsch’s translation, “This renewal will be for you the beginning of renewals.” This year, Rosh Chodesh, the new month and the new moon occurred yesterday, on the evening of January 1st. In both the secular and the Jewish calendars, there was a new month, a renewal, and the renewal of the New Year. Rabbi Hirsch has a wonderful teaching about the new moon and for us, the New Year. He says: “In the land of the most stubborn paganism…did God call forth the future leader of God’s people (to) show them the sickle of the moon struggling to emerge from darkness into renewed light….Every time the moon reunites with the sun, and receives new light from it, God wants us to find our way back to Divinity and receive new irradiation from God’s light, no matter where we may be and through what periods of darkness we may have to pass.”
Moses did not know that just one week later, all the people would have left Egypt, the Sea of Reeds would have parted, and the people would be freed from bondage. He didn’t know that a few months after that, God would reveal the Divine Presence to over a million people, giving them the Ten Commandments: a body of Law that has stood for all time. We have no idea what renewals await us, just a few days, weeks, or months away. In the Hebrew calendar, the first month, Nisan, corresponds to the beginning of the spring: April, the time in Israel of the first plant growth: the time of maximum hope and beautiful renewal for us all. This is what we call God’s daily continuing and renewing the work of creation, the words of which we pray in the Shacharit service, the morning service each Shabbat, which itself is meant as a weekly renewal.
We know that in this new year, there will be challenges as well as blessings. May we be patient through any frustrations we may experience, knowing that the difficulties are the prelude to our emergence into the light. May we be hopeful and secure, knowing that what we encounter are part of the process of Divine renewal, allowing us to play a part in the unfolding of goodness and blessing by striving to move out of darkness into renewed light. May each of us have a year of marvelous growth, increased understanding, and great blessings: of good health, prosperity, and happiness. May our renewal, as part of the Divine Plan, bring more Divine light to all.
Friday, January 3, 2014
A Personal Experience of the Divine
This week’s Torah portion is the second in the Book of Exodus, Va’eira, which means, “and I appeared.” It begins with God returning to the topic of the Divine name. God makes several promises to the Israelites, and then returns to a second topic, that of hardening Pharaoh’s heart, first mentioned in the previous portion. God instructs Moses to speak to Pharaoh, that he send the people out of Egypt; and the portion goes on to give an account of the first seven plagues.
The portion reads at the beginning: “God spoke to Moses, and said to him, I am yud hei vav hei (Being, Existence). I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, by the name of El Shaddai, God Almighty or God the Provider, or God who is Sufficient, but by my name yud hei vav hei I did not make myself known to them.” (Ex. 6:2-3). This introduces the theme of knowing. There is something new that God wants Moses and the Israelites to know.
God also says, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh will not listen to you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and take out my legions, my people the children of Israel, from the land of Egypt with great judgments. And the Egyptians shall know that I am yud hei vav hei, when I stretch forth my hand upon Egypt, and bring out the people of Israel from among them.” (Ex. 7:3-5) We usually think that the 10 plagues were primarily for Pharaoh’s benefit, so that he would let the people go. But thinking about the changes that would occur, after the people left, the lives of Pharaoh and the lives of the Egyptians were not so very greatly transformed. The two excerpts quoted tell another story, giving us an additional perspective.
All religion is experiential. That’s why no one can prove the existence of God to anyone else, but each person can prove the existence of God to herself or himself. Being slaves, the people were sunk in a very low state: they were demoralized, probably even devoid of hope. Given that God can do anything, it would have been relatively easy to convince Pharaoh to let the people go. This was deliberately delayed again and again so that God could multiply the signs and wonders: what we have called the 10 Plagues.
The two much greater tasks than convincing one person to do one thing were to give each Israelite an experience of God’s Presence and mastery in the world, and also to unify the Israelites to the point that they would have hope and willingly follow Moses out of Egypt, to a place with no water and no food, no cities and no houses, no clothing and no resources. What person in their right mind would do such a thing? My favorite sage, the S’fat Emet quotes Midrash Rabbah, which comments on Proverbs: “God will grant wisdom; from God’s mouth, knowing and understanding. (Prov. II, 6). Wisdom is great, but knowing is still greater…For God gives wisdom; but to one who God loves, out of God’s mouth comes knowing and understanding. R. Isaac & R. Levi…taught, it can be compared to a rich man's child, who, on returning from school, saw a dish of food in front of his father. When the father offered him a helping, the son said: I would rather have some of that which you yourself are now eating. The father complied, on account of his great love for him, giving him from his own mouth. (Ex. Rabbah XLI:3) The S’fat Emet adds that “this is knowing in your very soul.”
It is one thing to have someone tell you that God exists and that God is Existence, and further that God will take you out of slavery. It is something very different and very precious to have a personal experience that forms the basis of an unshakable conviction that this is really true. This is God’s task, not only at the time of the bondage in Egypt. This is an ongoing task between the Divine and every human being. Is there anyone among us who has not had a strange coincidence, or a personal epiphany, or an experience of being led to do something or meet someone who came to be important in life? Is there anyone who has not felt support at a crucial time or received some kind of blessing that was totally surprising at the time?
We might ask, why should God care so very much to contact each person, in his or her very soul? Why did God enslave us in the first place? Why did God care so much to take the Israelites out of Egypt? The aim of taking us out of Egypt was surely not just to make our lives easier. The larger purpose was to improve the world: to improve human beings, human life, and to point the way to the knowledge of a universal spiritual body of law; to facilitate progress, goodness, and kindness; to make known a better way to live.
God’s task will never stop. It is eternal and ongoing, and each of us is a vital part of it. We are each coming out of a personal Egypt; and God cares very, very much that we do. May we know in our very soul that we are being fed from, to put it figuratively, God’s own mouth, and may we realize how very important each of us is to God and to the improvement of the entire world.
The portion reads at the beginning: “God spoke to Moses, and said to him, I am yud hei vav hei (Being, Existence). I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, by the name of El Shaddai, God Almighty or God the Provider, or God who is Sufficient, but by my name yud hei vav hei I did not make myself known to them.” (Ex. 6:2-3). This introduces the theme of knowing. There is something new that God wants Moses and the Israelites to know.
God also says, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh will not listen to you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and take out my legions, my people the children of Israel, from the land of Egypt with great judgments. And the Egyptians shall know that I am yud hei vav hei, when I stretch forth my hand upon Egypt, and bring out the people of Israel from among them.” (Ex. 7:3-5) We usually think that the 10 plagues were primarily for Pharaoh’s benefit, so that he would let the people go. But thinking about the changes that would occur, after the people left, the lives of Pharaoh and the lives of the Egyptians were not so very greatly transformed. The two excerpts quoted tell another story, giving us an additional perspective.
All religion is experiential. That’s why no one can prove the existence of God to anyone else, but each person can prove the existence of God to herself or himself. Being slaves, the people were sunk in a very low state: they were demoralized, probably even devoid of hope. Given that God can do anything, it would have been relatively easy to convince Pharaoh to let the people go. This was deliberately delayed again and again so that God could multiply the signs and wonders: what we have called the 10 Plagues.
The two much greater tasks than convincing one person to do one thing were to give each Israelite an experience of God’s Presence and mastery in the world, and also to unify the Israelites to the point that they would have hope and willingly follow Moses out of Egypt, to a place with no water and no food, no cities and no houses, no clothing and no resources. What person in their right mind would do such a thing? My favorite sage, the S’fat Emet quotes Midrash Rabbah, which comments on Proverbs: “God will grant wisdom; from God’s mouth, knowing and understanding. (Prov. II, 6). Wisdom is great, but knowing is still greater…For God gives wisdom; but to one who God loves, out of God’s mouth comes knowing and understanding. R. Isaac & R. Levi…taught, it can be compared to a rich man's child, who, on returning from school, saw a dish of food in front of his father. When the father offered him a helping, the son said: I would rather have some of that which you yourself are now eating. The father complied, on account of his great love for him, giving him from his own mouth. (Ex. Rabbah XLI:3) The S’fat Emet adds that “this is knowing in your very soul.”
It is one thing to have someone tell you that God exists and that God is Existence, and further that God will take you out of slavery. It is something very different and very precious to have a personal experience that forms the basis of an unshakable conviction that this is really true. This is God’s task, not only at the time of the bondage in Egypt. This is an ongoing task between the Divine and every human being. Is there anyone among us who has not had a strange coincidence, or a personal epiphany, or an experience of being led to do something or meet someone who came to be important in life? Is there anyone who has not felt support at a crucial time or received some kind of blessing that was totally surprising at the time?
We might ask, why should God care so very much to contact each person, in his or her very soul? Why did God enslave us in the first place? Why did God care so much to take the Israelites out of Egypt? The aim of taking us out of Egypt was surely not just to make our lives easier. The larger purpose was to improve the world: to improve human beings, human life, and to point the way to the knowledge of a universal spiritual body of law; to facilitate progress, goodness, and kindness; to make known a better way to live.
God’s task will never stop. It is eternal and ongoing, and each of us is a vital part of it. We are each coming out of a personal Egypt; and God cares very, very much that we do. May we know in our very soul that we are being fed from, to put it figuratively, God’s own mouth, and may we realize how very important each of us is to God and to the improvement of the entire world.
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