We See What You’re Doing, Chapter 5

Now it came to pass on the third day

Esther got all dolled up

Dressed like a queen

All for the king.

And she waited in the courtyard

To attact the king's attention

Knowing she is beautiful

Because everyone tells her so.

They tell her that's where her power lies

But she knows better.

Because Esther is used to being looked at

She knows what it's worth

That is, she knows about the people who only look

But cannot see.

But she looks at them, too.

And she can see.

They can look and look and never see the truth

The power that she has

That she has to have

When you have no power.

So she waits in the courtyard

Because if the king lets her touch his golden scepter

(Insert double entendre here),

She lives.

But if he is offended

That she came to him without permission

She dies.

But here she is

She has to be

Because Esther sees what the king is doing.

Now it came to pass

That Esther is beautiful

And so she found favor in the king's eyes

So she invites him to a party

And Haman, too.

Especially Haman,

Only Haman.

And Haman gets all puffed up

Full of his glory

He can only see himself

The Great Man

Going to the queens banquet

And he walks past Mordechai

At the King's Gate

And Mordechai looks at Haman

And thinks to himself,

Feh

What an asshole

So Mordechai refuses to stand up

Because Mordechai sees what Haman is doing.

And it came to pass

That this really freaks out Haman

Haman sees himself through Mordechai's eyes

And everything crumbles

Classic narcissism

On one hand

Oh the glory and the money

Haman the Big Man

The king's right hand

Invited to the Queen's banquet

And on the other hand

Mordechai, that Jew, said,

Feh.

It kills Haman inside

Getting dissed by Mordechai

And he goes home to complain to Zeresh, his wife.

How, Haman asks,

Can I have a good time knowing Mordechai doesn't respect me?

So Zeresh the loyal wife says,

Look, Haman, love of my life,

don't let the Jew ruin your fun,

The solution is simple!

Build a gallows

50 Cubits high

And in the morning

Tell the king to hang Mordechai from it

Until he's dead.

Then party with a happy heart!

So Haman builds the gallows

Oy, he's in such a good mood

But as we all know

God sees what Haman is doing.

Mishpatim, A Dvar Torah

These are the rules that you should set before them.  This is God, speaking to Moses, setting the rules.  There are different kinds of laws in Torah and Talmud:

• those which signify a special relationship with God
• those that are not understood by us, the  chukim
• those that exist in order for a group of people to function as a society.  These are the mishpatim

Mishppatim are the laws that make intuitive sense to us, these are laws that any sensible community would pass.   Don't murder or steal. These are laws that settle disputes.  These are laws of civilization.  These are laws of peace. 

And this parsha is called Mishpatim, after the laws that makes sense to us.    They come right after the Ten Commandments, and are the first set of detailed laws that might follow logically from the first ten. What if you get in a fight and in the course of it a women miscarries?  What do you do if your ox gores a man, or if you dig a pit and someone comes by and falls in it?  Is it okay to lie in court?  Do you have to return lost goods?  Logical laws of peace and civilization.

As Rashi explains, the first set of laws God gives after the ten commandments are these sensible laws because they are easy to follow.  The laws that don't make sense are the laws that will mark us off as Jews, these are the laws that make the covenant so difficult and so special.  But first we have to be trained on how to follow the rules with, well, the loss leaders of Jewish Law.  Suck the people in with laws that make sense and then we can lay kashrut on 'em.   And thus, after hearing these rules, the people say,

So-

These are the rules that you should set before them.

All the things that Adonai has commanded we will do!

I am an American, a middle boomer, who grew up believing in democracy with a small d, in a household with crazy and arbitrary parents, in a school system run by martinets and a religion run by men who wouldn't answer my questions or let me participate simply because I'm female, during a war that was stupid and destructive.  And my first impulse for much of my life has been that when you set rules before me, I am going to argue with you.  As that great sage, Bruce Springsteen wrote, when they said sit down I stood up.

Or at least that's how I like to think of myself.  The truth is, I'm actually a law-abiding coward.  When they say sit down, I sit down, fancying myself an anti-authoritarian because I make a few wise ass comments as I park my butt in the comfy seat.

Well yes.  But I also sit down because it makes sense to sit down.  There is a right and wrong.  I don't murder or steal, I don't go the wrong way down a one way street.  Partly because that's how I was taught and partly because it makes sense.  Societies where people murder or steal at will are considered barbaric and broken.  Economic systems that don't allow their workers any rest are ripe for a well-deserved revolution.  We all know this.  We know what is fair.  We are, perhaps, born knowing this.

Researchers have found babies as young as six months old already make moral judgments, and they think we may be born with a moral code hard-wired into our brains. 

These are the rules that you should set before them.

Do we need religion and the threat that a supernatural being is going to ruin our lives or send us to hell if we aren't good in order to do good?  Don't you all, past a certain age, and assuming you're not a psychopath, know what's good and what's bad?

Do you need to be a good Jew to be good?

Do we need God in order to be ethical, in order to lead a good life?

Jewish tradition and teaching comes down on the side as firmly as it is possible to come down on a side, of Yes.  We must have laws and these are God's laws.  The Torah and Talmud and Halakha are all about the rules of what to do and what not to do.     We humans live in community and these are the laws of how to do that in peace. 

how beloved we were by our rabbis, that that they took such care to make sure we lead safe and righteous lives. 

how poorly the Moses and the rabbis must have thought of us to need to control us so completely with so many rules?

Societies without the rule of law are chaotic or tyrannical.  We need to agree on standards of behavior and enforce them.  But do we need moral laws?  And whose morality do we enforce? God's?  Is God the final arbiter, some grand outside force?  Who is this Torah God to be setting rules for us?  What does any of this have to do with us, now.

It feels like I'm being told to sit down.  I want to stand up.

At the end of the parsha, Moses invites Aaron and the other tribal bigshots up to the base of Sinai to have a close encounter with God, who has enveloped the mountain with a cloud. 

So Moses and his attendant Joshua arose, and Moses ascended the mountain of God. ¹⁴ To the elders he had said, "Wait here for us until we return to you. You have Aaron and Hur with you; let anyone who has a legal matter approach them."

At the most holy of moments, as Moses is about to be embraced by God for forty days, to have the entire Torah downloaded into him, to be in intimate relationship with God, Moses makes sure that the chain of command is clear in case anyone has a legal dispute. We don't need God to remind us of how to run things.  God doesn't need to give us the mishpatim.  We know what we need.

But we need God in the mishpatim, at least I think we do, however we might define God at any given moment.  I define it, for the purposes of this drash, as the embodiment of our best selves, of the impulse towards community and peace.  The mishpatim are our holy parameters, so that we don't forget that as mortal humans our vision is limited, our compassion is sometimes lacking, and that our self-control is not always functioning. 

God and God's law, whether real or our own created construct, extends our vision, reminds us that being our best selves is practical, that choosing the ethical and righteous options is sensible. The mishpatim are the creation of a community that wants and needs to live together in a feeling of holiness and one-ness.  

These are the rules that you should set before them.

All the things that Adonai has commanded we will do!

Rabbi Arthur Green writes,

The statutes can only be placed "before" us:  it is we who have to choose to walk in their ways.  In our day it seems harder than ever to find out how to walk in a way that will lead us all to peace with one another.  But the message is one we need to take to heart:  there is no path to God's teachings, no way to open the divine wellsprings that lie within us, except that of peace. (From his commentary on his translation of Sefat Emet, Mishpatim)

Moses went inside the cloud and ascended the mountain; and Moses remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights. 

Shabbat Shalom

Rosh Chodesh

Eternal One-ness, 
Living outside of time
Blessed HaMavdil,
The One Who Divides:

We live our lives in discrete increments
And we imagine that long ago

We might have been afraid

When the moon disappeared.

It was so dark at night

Like the end of the world.

We howled at the empty sky

And then, like a miracle,

A sliver appeared:

We give thanks for the returning moon.

Did you know that in the fifites

The United States Goverment

Considered blowing up the moon

Right out of the sky

Just to freak out the Russians?

But smart people decided it was too dangerous

And the moon was saved:
We give thanks for the sane and the rational.

Over the centuries
We have noticed
The tides of the ocean both high and low,
The seasons of the year that are hot then cold,
The fertility of the earth that flows and rests,
The faces of the moon that wax and wane. 
Whatever arrives, leaves,
Whatever is gone, returns:
We give thanks for the regularity of nature.

Blessed One-ness 
Outside of Time, Eternal.

Blessed HaMavdil
Dividing time into years and months and days
And sharing the skies with us.
For that and so much more, we give thanks.

Amen

New Moon in January: Rosh Chodesh Shevat

Eternal One-ness, 

Living outside of time

Blessed HaMavdil,

The One Who Divides:

We imagine that long ago

We might have been afraid

When the moon disappeared.

It was so dark at night

Like the end of the world.

We howled at the empty sky

And then, like a miracle,

A sliver appeared.

The moon, it's back!

We gave thanks for the new moon.

This new month,

Rosh Chodesh Shevat,

The new month of winter,

Begins as the month of Tevet ends.

Tevet is the month of resting and darkness.

Shevat is the month of days growing longer

But somehow also colder,

January and February.

When the world seems the most devoid of life,

We give thanks for the future.

Yes,

This is the month when we tell the story

Of the escape from the narrow place.

This is the month of Shabbat Shirah,

When we sing the song of liberation

And Martin Luther King.  

We give thanks for the freedoms we have and we work for the ones we do not.   

This is the month when we talk of wine and nuts and fruit,

The New Year of the Trees,

We give thanks to the earth

This is the month of Tu Bishvat

When we eat the gifts of our planet.

And pray that we are doing enough to preserve it.  

Blessed One-ness 

Outside of Time, Eternal,

Blessed HaMavidil

Dividing time into years and days.

And every month,

Sharing the new moon with us, 
Sharing the future.

For that and so much more, we give thanks.

Amen

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.