Shemot

Names

This parsha is Shemot, which in Hebrew means names.  It's also the name of this second book of the Torah.  In English it is called Exodus, which means the mass departure of many people.   Life sucks in Egypt for the Hebrew slaves and so they leave.  Stuff happens.  Exodus.  

The plot of this one little parsha is hard to sum up quickly:  The torah names all the tribes of Israel who have moved to Egypt, they become enslaved, AND THEN  after 400 years they become so numerous and the Pharoah is afraid of them so he orders the midwives to kill all the male Hebrew babies.  AND THEN Two midwives manage to save a lot of the male babies, one in particular is hidden from the bad guys until he gets too big and loud to hide, AND THEN his mother puts him in a basket and floats him towards Pharoah's daughter, who adopts him and names him Moshe AND THEN he is given to his mother to nurse and then back to Pharoah's Daughter to be raised as an Eqgyptian prince.  AND THEN One day Moses sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave AND THEN he kills the Eqgyptian so he has to skedaddle AND THEN he faces the fact that he is a Hebrew  AND THEN He runs away to Midian, marries Zipporah, has children, becomes a shepherd and generally drops out, AND THEN one day, just when he thinks his life is settled, God appears in a burning bush that is not consumed, insists that Moses go back to Egypt and liberate his people with the help of his brother Aaron AND THEN God teaches the reluctant Moses some magic  tricks AND THEN  Moses goes back to Egypt, confronts the Pharoah of all Egypt and says, no, demands that he let his people go, AND THEN Pharoah says hell no and gets even meaner to the slaves than he was before, AND THEN God tells Moses that he is going to kick Pharoah's ass.

Great story.  Can't wait to see what happens next.

But for me, this is not about the journey, epic though it may be, but about something as simple as a name.  With a name you are given a place, in your family and your community, and sometimes within your soul. The Israelites and then Moses, and then God, are named and found in this parsha, and the nexus is the Burning Bush, when God invites Moses back into who he is, Mose the Hebrew, the friend of God and the savior of the slaves.

The slaves are the children of Israel, known as the, Ivrit.  The word Ivrit, meaning, Hebrew, comes from the shoresh Ayin, Bet, Raish.  As a verb, it means to cross over, and it's first used to describe that wanderer, Abraham.  But by the time the people are in Egypt they are definitively known to the Egyptions as the Hebrews, re the people who crossed over, from Canaan to Egypt.  And Shemot is the story of when those Hebrews go across the desert to go back home.  The name is descriptive of how these people, our people, act and how we are seen.  We know how to move on, when necessary.  History acts upon us, we change as we must.

The second name is that of Moses, which is taken from the meaning, to be drawn out, Pharoah's daughter names him that becuase he was drawn out of the water..  It is apparently also now meant that it is also Mose who draws the people out of Egypt.   Moses is given his name as a child, acted upon by others, until he kills the Egyptian and runs away, spending his time in Midian becoming a new person until his encounter with God, at which point he can reclaim himself and that name and become the agent of his own life.  He draws himself out and discovers his true self, who is is, his I am that I am and embraces his connection with the one-ness and his people and goes back into the story.  Moses, the protagonist, changes dramatically.  Pharoah, his mother, his sister, Pharoah's daughter, Jethro, Zipporah, and God, they all act upon him, but finally, when Moses sees the Burning Bush, when he chooses to see the Burning Bush, he draws himself out and becomes his people's leader.  He names God and becomes Ivrit at last.

And what about God's name?  Many observant jews never call God by any name other than HaShem, The Name.  I'm not totally sure why, but to me it seems that it's as if, by naming God you quantify God, you surround and separate and personalize, you make the Is-ness into a human or a supernatural that which cannot be surrounded or separated or personalized or be human or a being. 

And yet we insist on giving this non-corporeal non-being a Shem, a name.  In fact, Shemot.  Names:

El

Elohim

El Shaddai

Elyon

Shechinah

Yah

Adonai

Yahweh

Jehovah

Ruach HaOlam, The Breath of Life

The Eternal

The Righteous One

Ha Makom, The Place

Adon Olam, Lord of the World

Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father Our King

Elohei Avraham, Elohei Yitzchak ve Elohei Ya`aqov

Elohei Sara, Elohei Rivka, Elohei Leah ve Elohei Rakhel

E'in Sof—"endless, infinite",

HaKadosh, The Holy One

 Barukh Hu , Blessed One

HaRachaman-"The Merciful One"

Melech HaMelachim—"The King of kings" or

Ribeinu Shel Olam, Master of the World

Rofeh Cholim, Healer of the Sick

Tzur Yisrael, Rock of Israel

Oseh Shalom, Maker of Peace

And my personal favorite, Zokef efufim, Straightener of the Bent.  What ever does that mean, I wonder?

God is not nearly as pretentious as we are.  When Moses asks God what he should call God, God simply (!) says, Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh.  I Am That I Am.

Rabbi Art Green interprets this to be not the description of something that has ever been, is now, and ever will be, outside of time and space, Was/Is/ Will Be.  It is the essence of, well, IS, and this Is-ness knows it.  For the first time, The Was/Is/Will Be, the I AM THAT I AM, doesn't identify itself as God or Lord or Father or any of that.  This Is-ness sends Moses off on his quest to bring the Hebrews out of Egypt and into covenant with I am that I am.  So HaIvrit, The Hebrews, and  Moses and I AM THAT I AM have come together and the story that will climax at Sinai in Torah and Jews and you and me.

So  What are the names you were given at birth? 

What are the names you were given by your history? 

What are the names you have chosen for yourself at your burning bush? 

My parents gave me the name, Patricia Ilene Arlin.

AND THEN They gave me a name for my religion, my people, my history, Aleeza Bat Rut v'Shlomo.  Aleeze means Joyful.  That's me, Full of Joy.

I always hated that name, Aleeza.   I didn't have much joy growing up and I don't present as joyful lke some people do, even when that's how I'm feeling.  So the name Aleeza never sat well with me.  So when I started studying Jewish stuff, I thought I wanted a more appropriate Hebrew name.  My hero became Rabbi Akiva, who was illiterate until he was in his forties and who then started to learn from scratch and who became one of the greatest rabbis of his time.  I decided I wanted the female equivalent of the male name, Akiva, but when I looked it up one one of those sites for finding Hebrew names, it said there was no female equivalent.  AND THEN, I complained about this to a friend who had some knowledge of hebrew names, AND THEN she suggested what she thought was the closest female equivalent to Akiva:  Aleeza.

I've been thinking about it, and I think I am almost ready to drop the name I was given, and reclaim my name and draw myself out and choose to be joyful. 

Aleeza. 

Baruch atah HaShem, Blessed be the Name, blessed be that which cannot be named and blessed be our names, those we receive because of love, and those we receive because of our history and culture, and those names we choose for ourselves, because we are B'tzelem Elohim, made in the image of the I AM that chooses to be I AM.  

Amen.

Miketz, a drash

Pharaoh dreams of seven handsome fat cows being eaten by seven ugly, skinny cows.  Pharaoh dreams of seven solid healthy ears of wheat on a single stalk, being followed by seven thin sickly ears on a stalk scorched by the east wind.  He is a hereditary monarch, and therefore not very bright, so he calls for a man of discernment and wisdom to interpret the dreams, and Joseph is remembered and summoned. 

Joseph tells Pharaoh that God had determined there were to be seven years of plenty that would be followed by seven years of famine, when, as Rashi wrote, “the plenty would be forgotten”.  Joseph, not being an idiot, follows this interpretation with a recommendation to Pharoah that he find a man of discernment and wisdom to oversee a program of gathering food during the good years so that it can be distributed during the bad years. We know our man Joseph got the job, and the rest is, well, Exodus.

Seven years of plenty and seven years of famine; seven years of good-looking and seven years of ugly;  seven years of profit and partying; and seven years of grief and shock.  We know this cycle.  Boom and bust.  And we’re busted. 

So now, some of us are oblivious and some of us are scared.  Some prosper and some barely get by.  Some get bonuses and some have been broken.  Some of us blame the greedy and some of us blame ourselves.  Some of us have been permanently beaten down and some of us have risen up.

Good times, bad times.  Good guys, bad guys.  Good and evil.  How can the good survive the evil? And, why do we read this parsha, Miketz, on Chanukah, the Festival of Light & Dedication?  

Rabbi Arthur Green, in his interpretation of the Hasidic Sefat Emet’s commentary on Miketz, writes:

 “Divinity is everywhere:  there is no other source of being.  All that exists is of God, whether revealed or in hiding.  But the power of hiding, the exile of the mind from any awareness of divine presence, can sometimes be very great.  And the evil that human beings can perpetrate in the course of hiding from God’s light can indeed be without end.”

I hate the banks.  I hate the banks so much that I can’t walk past an ATM without wanting to throw a rock at it.  I hate the banks so much, that even as I quote Arthur Green telling you that God’s light is without end, when it comes to banks and bankers, I don’t believe that for a minute.     How can God be in something that is so impersonal, so uncaring, a machine that crushes without a glance at who or what it is crushing?    It’s hard to see the people in that machine.  I know they’re there.  I know most of them must think of themselves as good people. I must try to have compassion for them, find  God’s light in them, even if they can’t see it themselves, even if they hide from that light, I should be able to see it.  But it’s hard work.  I want justice.  I want consequences.

Since the recession I have not been able to get a full time job but I lived like I was working.  I refused to forget the time of plenty.   I hid from the truth of my own financial foolishness and trouble, and I hid from the inevitable consequence of waiting to for someone else to fix up my personal mess.    I find myself desperately wanting a man of discernment, a Joseph to come and organize me through the lean times.  For a while after the recession began, I wanted to rely on Obama to get us through this experience and I squirmed or denied or felt hopeless when he did not or could not fix our economic mess.  We are on our own.   We must organize ourselves.

Why do we read Miketz on Chanukah, the Festival of Light and Dedication?   This is the time when the mighty were delivered into the hands of the weak.  Chanukah is a Festival of a light that shines on the lies and delusions, on the delusions of the fat years and the troubles of the lean ones.  It shines on the pharaohs and the starving peasants and the banks and the unemployed.  And it asks us to choose whether we will embrace or hide from God’s light. Joseph was in prison, falsely accused with no end in sight.  The Maccabees lived under the thumb of invaders and a mad capricious king.  But neither wallowed in the despair of their situation.  They did what they needed to do. 

So, are we Joseph, that discerning man who serves the powers-that-be so he can feed the hungry?  Or are we Maccabees, resisting the bad guys with direct action?

Good and evil, boom or bust, all that exists is of God.

Rabbi Shefa Gold writes:  

“We can honor and protect the seeds of liberation that are in us - our compassion and open-hearted vision of the preciousness of every being. When we carry old hurts, and the bitterness that surrounds those wounds, then our every attempt to do justice is distorted by a sensation of pain.  And so the spiritual challenge is to heal those deep places of bitterness. In that healing, the Spirit of God in us is made manifest.”

So—

It’s the winter solstice,

The earth tilts away from the light,

The east wind scorches.

So we must lean forward

And light candles

So we can see whatever there is to see.

And the days will grow longer

When the earth tilts toward the sun.

Shabbat Shalom.  Happy Chanukah.

Yitro: Between Before and After

What is revelation? What does it mean to get ready for revelation, what leads to revelation, how does it changes everything afterwards, what of the Before and After, of the stories of Genesis and Exodus that lead to this moment, and the repercussions afterwards,

From the Liktuim Yekarim (sp?):

It is actually very surprising that a mortal human being should be able to attach himself to God. Besides his physical body, many Husks separate him from God. Even though, “the whole earth is filled with His glory”< God is still hidden behind many barriers. But all the barriers that separate and restrain can be torn down by the word that you utter. Your words should therefore be attached to God. This means that you must intimately feel that you are actually speaking to God. If we could speak just one line, or even two or three words, to God in each service, in the above mentioned manner, it would be sufficient.

What are the husks the Hebrews went through to get to that moment on Sinai, and what is it we go through to get to it? And let me just say here that for me anyway, it really doesn’t matter if it actually happened, or what any of us believe about that, because what we know happened are that stories got told about what got us here, and then there was the story of the moment, and then all the stories that stem from it. We’ve got Torah right here. This we know exists.

The Before is these two parallel stories, both a bout young men who are gifted but foolish, who get themselves in trouble and are pulled away from everything they knew or thought they knew, who have to re-invent themselves and in the re-inventing, find their true selves. And the first boy pulls his family into this re-invention and makes a family into a tribe. And the second boy pulls his tribe into the re-invention and turns the tribe into a people. And the people re-invent themselves and turn themselves from slaves into free people, from a people into a nation, from brutes into people of covenant with laws and ethics and spirituality. And all of this re-invention, it’s all to get them all there, at Sinai, at one place and one time, so that something huge can happen, so that everything and everyone can change, all at once, during this one incredibly special moment.

And this experience, it is so huge that it happens outside of time and maybe even out of space, I think when you hear some rabbi say that we were all at Sinai it’s because we were, because we’re there now, right now, at this moment.
And it was the biggest most important moment ever, and I know this because we tell this story every year, thousands of years later, even when it seems ridiculous or barbaric, yet we are compelled to work our way to the stories leading up to this moment, and then the stories that follow from it, from the words that were uttered on that day.

The Before stopped, the After hadn’t started yet, we were just there. Which is as complete a description of what Shabbat should be as I can come up with. So every Shabbat, we are in that moment of revelation of one-ness, of community, of connection, of right and wrong.

If we could speak just one line, or even two or three words, to God in each service, in the above mentioned manner, it would be sufficient.

Imagine if you could find that moment, those two or three words, at every service? And what is a service, what is a prayer, but the stories we tell ourselves, the Before of revelation, to get us to those two or three words of God, that will lead to completeness, no before and after, to shalom, wholeness, even if only for a moment.

And what would be revealed? Same thing at Sinai, on Shabbat, during a service, in a prayer….the Ten Commandments. Which for me boil down to this. Know this transcendence, recognize the moment. Respect your experience, don’t trivialize it, don’t try to make it small or material. Don’t forget this experience, give it to yourself once a week, call it Shabbat. Internalize the experience, live consistently within it, which means you treat your community and yourself with the same respect that you give to this moment.

If we could speak just one line, or even two or three words, to God in each service, it would be sufficient.

So what if, from now one, we start looking into each Shabbat, each service, each prayer, and look for the two or three words that might lead us to that moment. Maybe it’s this word. Maybe it’s this moment.

Maybe it’s this moment.

Baruch atah Adonai, Brucha At Yah, Blessed Ruach Ha Olam, God of my ancestors, God of my current understanding or lack thereof, God of my belief and disbelief,

I pray for those two or three words.
I pray for that moment.

It would be sufficient.

Amen.

Shabbat Shalom.

Bereishit: Understanding Light and Dark, Five Strategies

Torah begins, appropriately enough, with Beginning:

“When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was a chaos, unformed, and on the chaotic waters face there was darkenss. Then God’s breath glided over the face of the waters and God said, “let there be light and there was light. And when God saw the light, that it was good, God divided the light from the darkness."

Okay. So there was darkness but there was no light, thesis with no antithesis, but how can darkness exist if light does not exist as its opposite? Then God speaks, God uses words and describes the existence of light, so there is light? But light still wasn’t separate from darkness, light and dark were one! So God divides the light and the darkness, there is now morning and night and bang, we have a day, the first day. But how can dark and light exist and not be divided? So was there light before God created light? When God began to create the world, but there was already the earth, though it was in chaos? So …so when did the chaos get created? What was before the chaos? And what was the source of the light? The sun wasn’t created until the fourth day!

Questions. Many questions. I guess at this point, we need citations…
As it is written by Shalom Noach Berezovsky, in the Netivot Shalom,(and thank you to Rabbi Jonathan Slater and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality for passing this on):

The Zohar (II 148b) teaches that the light of the first day was hidden away, but not completely. If it were completely hidden, the world itself could not exist for a moment. Rather, it was hidden as a seed which, obscured in the earth, produces seeds and fruits, and through it the world is sustained. This means that God’s light is always present, even if it is hidden. But, the whole of creation is made up of earthy, material things which would, of themselves, lead us astray. The response is to bask in the divine light that is always present in that very creation.

Okay, good. Another one!

Rabbi Larry Kushner, on G-dcast.com, says “Let there be light wasn’t optical light, the light of day one was consciousness, or awareness.”

More! The Women’s Torah Commentary says that, “as the first of Gods creative acts, light becomes not only a physical phenomenon but also a symbol of clarity and illumination that extend beyond the physical.”

Fantastic~ And…well, I could go on. And on.

I could cite Talmud, midrash, commentaries and the internet along these lines all day. I was doing the research for it, I had an outline, but what was I doing? What was I trying to accomplish? I’m trying to make something that is ancient into something contemporary, trying to interpret something that comes from a culture that shares almost no references or paradigms with the culture I live in, trying to find linear rationality in a creation myth that was never meant to be linear or rational. Why?

Don’t get me wrong. I love this stuff. I’ve barely dipped my toe into Talmud and midrash, in how the rabbis and scholars have worked to understand the anomalies, or as Larry Kushner calls it, the “not fitting of ideas”, but it’s fascinating and deep. I’d happily spend the rest of my life learning this cumulative and associative way of thinking, but, at the start of a new year of Torah study, is a list of citations in the search for logical consistency of a few lines really where I want to start? Where we want to start? How else can I reconcile the contraditictions and gaps of Torah?

What is to be done? Thus far I have found five possible strategies for reconciling the ancient and the contemporary:

One. Scoff at the contradictions and walk away from the whole thing. I hit upon this brilliant idea at the age of fourteen. And it worked for me for over twenty years. But I couldn’t stay away so then I tried-

Two. Live with the contradictions and don’t try to make then work. I used to think that the only way to have intellectual integrity was to have consistency. I thought that God as I was taught God as a child was nonsensical, then I had to reject everything else that came along with that God. I decided I could resolve this by giving up consistency, by saying, okay, I want rational empirical thinking and transcendent religion and Torah knowledge in my life, I will just wall them all off into their separate worlds, won’t try to make them gibe, enjoy them all just as they are but separately. After all, am I not capable of holding more than two opposing ideas in my mind at the same time without my head exploding?
But then I started to do study, really started to see a glimmer of the coolness of midrash. Those guys, they wanted consistency, too, and they were gonna make it work, which led me to -

Three. Intellectualize the contradictions away. At least on some level, that’s what a lot of midrash and Talmud is about. Reason your way through all the permutations until you can come up with a rational reason why the Torah is sometimes inconsistent, nutty or creepy. Much of their work is brilliant and forms the basis of how we think. Some of it is kind of sad and ridiculous but dazzling nonetheless. I adore the intellectual gymnastics but it’s not always enough. So,

Four. Meld the contradictions with feelings and stories so that they make a kind of sense: stories that are the Hasidic equivalents of the Zen koan, the sound of one scroll clapping, more or less; poems that capture the basic human needs and feelings and perceptions within the framework of Jewish thought. They sound right, they feel good, they capture the essence of what we know to be true. But it’s often a feeling thing, for me anyway, not a thinking thing. And I need both. Lately I’ve begun to glimpse an alternative.

Five. I begin to think that they’re not contradictions at all, that they’re part of a larger understanding of connection and learning and yearning, that it’s okay if I can’t always see those connections, I can just let them be there, and if at some point I manage to put it together, great and if not, that’s fine.
I think all five approaches are a necessary part of understanding the light and dark of Torah. Each approach is just one aspect of a Torah life. God’s light is in the questions, not the answers, the argument not the resolution. This is truly doubt as an act of faith. As we begin the year of Torah study, I can't help but feel lucky for the opportunities to scoff, ignore, intellectualize, poeticize and accept it all, as God (however I understand that at any given moment) speaks and creates.

One last citation, again from Netivot Shalom,

"The light made available to those who study Torah is a “thread of light”, which in its source in the Talmud is a “thread of love (chesed)”. The light in the Tabernacle was the cloud of God, the Shekhinah. The Shekhinah and God’s love are always present to sustain the world, and those in it. Those who study Torah bring this light into the world."