Some folks like to claim that Ask Big Questions is inherently Jewish because “asking questions is Jewish.” And to this I usually respond, yes and no. Yes, Jewish intellectual tradition, and particularly the Talmud, is notorious for asking questions. But also no: after all, Socrates is probably the most famous question-asker in history.

There’s nothing inherently Jewish about asking questions. Human beings ask questions. But Jews have built a religious community out of asking questions. And in Parshat Bo, we find the seeds of perhaps the greatest institution in our religious tradition, the Passover seder.

When you enter the land which the LORD will give you, as He has promised, you shall observe this rite. And when your children say to you, ‘What does this rite mean to you?’ you shall say, ‘It is a Passover sacrifice to the LORD who passed over the houses of the sons of Israel in Egypt when He smote the Egyptians, but spared our homes.’” (Ex. 12:25-27)

The Passover seder is built on questions, questions that lead to stories. The mitzvah of the night is sipur yetziat mitzrayim, to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. And yet the story is not prescribed. Rather, in the words of Rabban Gamaliel, “in every generation each person is obligated to see him/herself as if s/he had personally left Egypt.” The story of Passover is to be told and retold, recreated anew every time by every person. The role of the question in this story-oriented view of the seder is to open up space, to usher the individual into an imaginative world in which their own story meets up with, partakes of, and contributes to the story of the Jewish people. Questioning here leads to identification, identity, continuity.

Yet this is a different understanding of what questions can do than we often think of. In much traditional modern discourse, the power of questions lies not in their potential for continuity, but in the fact that they cause discontinuity. In this line of thinking, to question is to not accept things as they are. It is the beginning of doubt. This is the kind of questioning we associate with the phrase, “Question authority.”

Interestingly, both of these forms of questioning are associated with the idea of freedom. In the latter, questioning leads to freedom from, or negative liberty. In the former, questioning leads to freedom for, or positive liberty. Not all questions are equal, just as not all types of freedom are the same. The power of question to unite or divide depends on its content and context.

The midrash Mechilta reads the verse we quoted above as follows: “At that moment, bad news was brought to the Israelites: that the Torah would be forgotten. Some say that good news was brought to them: that they would have children and children’s children!” (Mechilta Bo 12) As Avivah Zornberg writes on this passage, “The bittersweet nature of questions has to do with forgetting and the desire to know. Without forgetting, there would be no questions. Is this – the inevitability of forgetting – bad news? Or is it good news, implying the constant rebirth of narratives, responses to the questions of those in whom distance and forgetting create desire? The issue is not decided, as so many true questions are not decided” (The Particulars of Rapture, 181).

What does it mean to be free? Is it freedom to control our own destiny? Is it freedom to be able to wholly commit ourselves to something larger? How do we answer these questions for ourselves, and how do we answer them for our children while also allowing them to find their own answers? These are the Big Questions of education, of the seder, and of life.

Shabbat shalom.

Just before God utters this famous passage, God tells Moses that God appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and established the covenant with them. This should be reason enough to redeem the people. But then God goes on to say, “And also I have heard the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant” (v. 5). The “also” here is problematic. Rashi reads it as referring not to an additional reason to redeem the people, but as connecting God’s mention of the covenant with the act of redemption: “Just as I have set up and confirmed the covenant so I must fulfill it. Therefore I have heard the groaning of the children of Israel.”

Nechama Leibowitz understands this passage to reflect her view that the covenant is a one-sided affair: an unconditional promise by God to the people. She therefore dismisses the reading of Ibn Ezra, who understands the “also” in this passage more plainly: “My decision to send you was also prompted by the fact that Israel repented and cried to Me.” As Leibowitz puts it, “There is nothing in this passage or in the revelation at the bush to suggest that Israel’s redemption was prompted by their good deeds and repentance.” Rather, the redemption from Egypt was solely an act of Divine grace.

The question of whether the covenant is conditional or unconditional is one that we have discussed before. While I agree with Leibowitz that the Exodus narrative is one-sided, and that Ibn Ezra’s claim of God responding to actual “repentance” by the people is implausible, I also hold the view that the covenant is simultaneously conditional and unconditional. That’s a paradoxical statement, of course. But, as my Rosh Yeshiva Steve Wald once put it, “It’s religion. It’s supposed to be spooky.”

God’s love for Israel is described variously as that of a parent and a spouse. The spousal relationship is ultimately a conditional, contractual one. We strive to make it unconditional, but at the end of the day the possibility always exists of dissolving the union through divorce–an act which itself can be overturned through the process of reconciliation. In some way the spousal relationship is always a back-and-forth of living as though love is unconditional while being aware of the underlying fact that it isn’t.

Parental love is more towards the unconditional side. “Be merciful like a father is merciful to his children,” we say during the High Holidays. The unconditional nature of parental love makes forgiveness and grace endlessly possible. Yet the challenge to parents is to relate to their children both with unconditional love and with expectations and conditions–this is the process of child-rearing, tza’ar gidul banim. Seeing the relationship of God and Israel in this way, God is infinitely merciful and graceful, but God also wants us to grow up.

While the Exodus narrative here emphasizes the patriarchal, fatherly nature of God’s unconditional and unilateral love for Israel, the ambiguity of the phrase “and also,” which leads to Ibn Ezra’s statement about the people’s repentance or turning back to God, is a reminder that a relationship is never completely one-sided. Israel has to be ready to leave. The fact that they groan under their labors is a significant fact–because it means they have recognized they’ve reached rock-bottom. God takes note, and the Exodus begins.

Shabbat shalom.

The first miracle is that of Bat-Paro, the daughter of Pharaoh who rescues baby Moshe from the Nile and raises him as a son. “And she opened the basket and saw the child, and behold the lad was crying. Vatachmol alav, And she had mercy on him, and said, ‘This is a child of the Hebrews’” (Ex. 2:6). This is actually a miraculous moment. Here the daughter of Pharaoh, who has decreed that every male Israelite child is to be thrown into the Nile, violates her father’s decree. Where her father had ordered that the boys be thrown into the Nile, Bat-Paro draws Moses baby out—and this becomes the basis of his name: “ki min hamayim mishitihu, for I drew forth form the water” (2:10).

What is so remarkable about Bat-Paro’s action is that, in spite of her awareness of just who Moses is and what the law requires, her empathy and compassion take precedence. To appreciate the magnitude this act, we need to look at the only other time in the Torah when the word chemla, compassion, is used. In Deuteronomy ch. 13, the Torah commands that “when one of your brothers… or one of your kinsmen who is like family to you comes to you in secret saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods, which neither you nor your ancestors have known… lo tachmol alav, Show now mercy to him.” Instead, you are to put him to death.

In this case, our compassion is normal. The Torah recognizes that our tendency would be to show mercy on a family member—and therefore the Torah has to tell us specifically that we need to submerge our compassion. In the case of Bat-Paro, it is precisely the inverse: here is a child of the Hebrews, someone she should leave to die in the Nile! Miraculously, when she opens the ark, she senses the presence of the shechina, the divine presence, and her mercy is awakened. Without this moment, Moses never comes to be. It is a critical moment in the narrative, one of the great miracles of the Exodus.

A second “minor” miracle of the Exodus story also involves a moment of recognition: “And Moses was a shepherd… And an angel of God appeared to him in a fire from the bush. And he saw, and behold, the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and look at this great thing—why is the bush not consumed? And God saw that he turned aside to look, and called out to him, ‘Moses, Moses,’ and he said, ‘Here I am’” (Ex. 3:1-4).

What is so remarkable? If we read closely, we see that Moses’s turning aside to look is not to be taken for granted. He sees the bush, and then he decides to act: “I will turn aside and look at this great thing—why is the bush not consumed?” Moses here demonstrates another small but powerful miracle, the miracle of curiosity. He could have kept on walking. He could have come up with some explanation in his mind. But instead he decides to turn and look. And when he does, God calls out to him. The rest, as they say, is history.

Like Bat-Paro, Moses here enacts a small but essential miracle of the Exodus story: If he doesn’t turn aside to look, the rest of the story doesn’t happen. No matter how much firepower God will ultimately display in freeing the Israelites, these two small moments are themselves essential miracles in the narrative of liberation from slavery.

For us, these minor miracles of Bat-Paro and Moshe are perhaps the most important. We live in an age when public miracles like those of the Ten Plagues are hidden from view. But all of us have the capacity to show mercy and compassion. All of us have the ability to see the essential humanity of people in pain—whether or not they are our own children, or even those of our people. All of us have the power to turn aside and look, to be curious, to inquire, and to take action. When we do so, we bring the shechina into the world.

The liberation from Egypt is certainly the work of God. But as Bat-Paro and Moshe remind us, seemingly small human actions are no less important in the story. May we learn from their example.

Shabbat shalom.

This is of course woven into the covenant with Abraham itself: “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there” (Gen. 15:13). The exile to Egypt, the formation of the people in a strange land, is not an accident of history. It is part of God’s plan all along.

This is by no means to say that we are meant to stay in exile, as is made clear a few verses later: “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here” (15:16). But it means that the people of Israel are shaped by our experience out of our homeland, and it informs our understanding of what it means to be at home. Home in the exile is always provisional, always tentative, always colored by a yearning to be truly at home–in our own language, our own culture, our own place. But home in the homeland is likewise informed by the experience of exile and Exodus: “In every generation each individual is obligated to see him/herself as if s/he personally left Egypt”–left Egypt, that is, to go to Sinai and the land of Canaan. Thus being at home in Israel carries with it a similar sense of fragility, a provisional quality, a sense that this is not necessarily permanent, an awareness that we also come from somewhere else.

I have been spending much of my time in recent months reading for my dissertation. My focus has been on the development of Modern Orthodoxy in the 1950s (and specifically the role of the university in that development). And one of the things that strikes me in my reading is that among the things at stake in the disagreements between people like Rabbis Yitz Greenberg and Aharon Lichtenstein, or between Rav Joseph Soloveitchik and Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, is in their understanding of how the wisdom we can learn in exile is to be understood and internalized. While all Modern Orthodox thinkers see some possibility for bringing together Torah and secular learning, it seems to me that the camps in this debate disagree on whether that integration can happen only on the individual level, or on the communal or institutional level as well. The more conservative view in this conversation sees possibilities for individual Jews to bring together yeshiva learning and secular learning; the more ambitious view sees whole institutions–schools, universities, publications, etc.–as potentially embodying the synthesis.

My dissertation will likely pick up on some of these themes. But as I think about the parasha this week, and about the experience of Israel in exile, I have the questions on my mind. No less a figure than Moshe Rabbeinu is reared in the palace of Pharaoh. He carries an Egyptian name all his life. On an individual level, Moses figures out some form of synthesis between Torah and the non-Jewish wisdom around him. But to what extent does the People of Israel carry these influences as well? And at what point do they lose their Egyptianness and become fully integrated into a Torah worldview?

I do not yet have answers to these questions, but as we read Parshat Vayechi, I think it pays to reflect on them.

Shabbat shalom.

There are a bunch of noteworthy things about what is happening in Beit Shemesh: As Allison Kaplan Sommer writes in the Forward, the fact that Beit Shemesh is largely populated by American olim is contributing to the backlash against Haredization. As others have pointed out, the entire spectrum of religious leadership, including Haredi figures, are speaking out against extremism. And as I myself noticed while watching the protest in Beit Shemesh the other night, I can’t think of another time that Limor Livnat (Likud) and Shelly Yachimovitch (Labor) would have spoken in one voice, on the same podium, one right after the other. In many ways, the reaction here is a credit to Israel and the Jewish people.

But it also raises questions. Extremism is a reflection of strains that are within the mainstream. While the mainstream separates the wheat from the chaff, the extreme reminds us of the chaff that lies within. Many have asked, “How can these people claim to represent the Torah?” Torah is a sea–hakol ba, everything is in it. Reading Torah, understanding Torah, is not like reading an instruction manual. Torah requires interpretation, and when interpretation enters the mix, the possibilities become very wide in all directions.

In this case, the extremists are picking up on threads within the Talmud which can be read as putting the onus for uncontrollable male sexuality on women. Now, there are also strains within the Talmud that clearly put the responsibility on each individual to control themselves, to comport themselves with a sense of modesty and humility–not because they are sex objects for others, but because they (we) are God’s creatures and should carry that awareness at all times. Part of the Orthodox community’s reaction against the sexual revolution of the later 20th century has been to articulate a sexual ethic of modesty. And in many respects, this is a very healthy thing, particularly when it applies to the universal responsibility–of men and women–to live with a sense of yirat shamayim (awe of heaven) and avodat Hashem (service of God).

Where things get crooked is when we start to make some people responsible for the sexuality of others–in particular, when we make women responsible for the sexuality of men. As one of my Roshei Yeshiva put it to us years ago, “A true ben Torah should be able to walk down Yafo street [in Jerusalem] in the middle of the summer, see attractive women in tank tops, and not be aroused.” That is, each individual needs to be responsible for what he or she does with his or her sense of sexual arousal–it is not the responsibility of one sex or the other, and it certainly is not about trying to impose one community’s self-described extreme (Haredi) ethic of modesty on the rest of society. If anything, Haredi men should strive to be examples of equanimity.

What has sadly taken place, however, is a misreading of Torah. Here, for instance, is a Gemara from Taanit 24a about Rabbi Yosi of Yokeret (thanks to Mori v’Rabi Dov Linzer for reminding me of this):

He had a beautiful daughter. One day he saw a man boring a hole in the fence so that he might catch a glimpse of her. He said to the man, What is [the meaning of] this? And the man answered: Master, if I am not worthy enough to marry her, may I not at least be worthy to catch a glimpse of her? Thereupon he exclaimed: My daughter, you are a source of trouble to mankind; return to the dust so that men may not sin because of you. (Taanit 24a)

One could read this story as saying that the daughter–and by extension, women–is responsible for the man’s sexual arousal. But to read the story that way is to forget what precedes it: A conversation between Rav Ashi and Rabbi Yosi bar Avin.

Rav Ashi enquired: Did you not frequent the discourses of Rabbi Yose of Yokeret? He replied: Yes. Rav Ashi then asked him: Why did you leave him, Sir, and come here? He replied: How could the man who showed no mercy to his son and daughter show mercy to me?

That is, the Gemara is repudiating the view of Rabbi Yosi of Yokeret, not endorsing it! It is saying that his behavior–making his daughter responsible for the sexuality of a peeping tom–is reprehensible. He is a character without generosity of spirit, someone literally not to learn from. And so Rabbi Yosi bar Avin left him to learn from Rav Ashi.

It is this point, this generosity of spirit, this openness to the world and sense of proper self-assurance, that we need to be striving for. This is the classic difference between the approach of Reuben and that of Judah: Where Reuben offers to kill his own sons if he fails to bring Benjamin and Simeon back to Jacob, Judah takes a more mature, self-assured sense of responsibility. Where Reuben displays short-sighted, narrow-minded thinking, Judah becomes an arev: He takes responsibility for himself and shows magnanimity to his father. Like Rabbi Yosi of Yokeret, Reuben is a teacher we should avoid. Rather we should learn from Judah, and assume responsibility for our lives.

Shabbat Shalom.

As I stood on the elliptical machine and turned on SportsCenter this morning, the show was featuring clips of Denver quarterback Tim Tebow. Tebow has achieved notoriety for his very open expressions of Christian faith on and off the football field. And in the clips that they showed on ESPN, Tebow was wearing a microphone during the game. Here was Tim Tebow sitting on the sidelines, humming a hymn to himself. And here was Tebow exhorting his teammates to play hard and win. And here was Tebow “Tebowing,” kneeling and praying after his team’s overtime victory against the Chicago Bears.

Segue to my son Jonah’s basketball camp this week, which is organized and run by Tamir Goodman. Goodman, you may recall, was the subject of a four-page spread in Sports Illustrated and dubbed the “Jewish Jordan” as an Orthodox high school phenom in the late 1990s. Tamir was signed by the University of Maryland and ultimately played at Towson University, which changed their schedule to enable him to avoid playing on Shabbat. He went on to a pro career in Israel, and retired a couple years ago after injuries.

Now Tamir is running basketball camps (Natalie’s project, the iChallenge Ideas Incubator, is sponsoring this community-wide one in Chicago). He is shameless in teaching Judaism and Jewish values through basketball. He wears his kippah on the court. He gets a minyan together to daven mincha (he’s saying kaddish for his father). He highlights how Jewish ideas are mirrored in the ethics of team play, discipline, communication, respect, and all the other middot that it takes to be both a good person and a good player.

Tamir tells lots of stories about how his insistence on keeping Shabbat, keeping kosher, and unabashedly being a traditional Jew, became a kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name in public. His teammates, opponents, fans, and the general public encountered a very public Jew, and learned about traditional Jewish life, as a result of his remaining true to his commitments. Most dramatically, his willingness to give back a full-ride scholarship to Maryland, after the school’s failure to alter its schedule in order to be Shabbat-friendly, made a dramatic statement: Shabbat is fundamental, and no career move is worth sacrificing it.

I see a lot of similarities between Tim Tebow and Tamir Goodman. The NCAA created a “Tebow Rule,” banning writing on eye paint, after Tebow wore “John 3:16″ under his eyes in the 2009 national championship game and 92 million people Googled the verse (a silly rule, in my opinion; how many people would have Googled yarmulke if Tamir Goodman had made it to the Final Four? What’s wrong with trying to do a kiddush Hashem?). With his unashamed commitment to his faith, Tebow is creating a kiddush Hashem in his own religious community, and, like Goodman, showing that religious faith can be deeply woven into a modern life.

Parshat Miketz marks the low-point of Joseph’s running away from his own culture. The parsha opens with the dramatic transformation of Joseph from a prisoner to the second-ranking figure in Egypt. Pharaoh gives Joseph clothes, his ring, his chariot, and a wife of high social station–all the trappings of “making it.” Joseph names his first-born Menashe, because “God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household” (Gen. 41:51). Though Pharaoh’s steward remembers Joseph as an Ivri, a Hebrew–one who is “across,” or over or against–Joseph is ultimately unrecognizable to his brothers when they arrive, and he speaks through an interpreter. To his brothers, Joseph is an Egyptian.

What would have happened if Joseph had insisted on maintaining his identity as an Ivri a little more than he did? What if he had said no to Pharaoh? Presumably no one says no to Pharaoh. But presumably no one says no to the University of Maryland basketball program, and four free years of college, either. Joseph was actually in a strong negotiating position, but he didn’t use it. He simply accepted what was offered to him. While he maintained a strong inner sense of faith (as exemplified in the naming of his second son, Ephraim: “It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering,” Gen. 41:52), he made his identity a private affair. This put him in a position to help his brothers in the end, but also potentially contributed to the simmering negative feelings among the Egyptians towards the Hebrews.

Chabad has embraced this message as the message of Hannukah: Maintain particularity. Don’t assimilate. Be proud to be Jewish. The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s life was the inverse of Joseph’s: The Rebbe was the only one of his siblings to remain religiously observant. (His daughter was his only blood relative to attend his funeral. N.B. Stan Mazo reminds me of the obvious: the seventh Rebbe had no children. I had heard this story in a lecture by Rabbi Aharon Rakeffet, and will check on which Rebbe he was referring to.) Chabad has taken up his message, and it is their greatest contribution to the Jewish people. Hannuukah is indeed a time to be proud, to be out, to be open about our particularities. As Tamir Goodman reminds us, and as Tim Tebow shows too, we have nothing to hide and a great deal to gain in living an undivided life.

Shabbat Shalom and Hannukah Sameach.

From my experience as an educator I know it’s hard, impossible actually, to preach to people who believe that they are the holy defenders of the Land of Israel; that they wave the banner of the pure and genuine Torah; that they are eliminating the conciliatory behavior, the lobbying for favors and the obsequiousness of thousands of years of exile.

“Price tag” rioters who attack Palestinians who have done no wrong, desecrate mosques and set fire to copies of the Koran see themselves as similar to the ancient heroes of Judea, who fought against the Greek-Syrian rabble that desecrated the Temple and forced them to bow down to idols.

And so I say to you:

You consider yourselves the new Hasmoneans, the Maccabees who do not bow their heads before the Hellenizing priestly establishment, which today, you believe, wears the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces. Because you are convinced that all your deeds are for the sake of heaven, you will never admit that you have sinned. And without recognition of sin, there is no repair and no repentance and no atonement.

I am telling you that you are making a fundamental mistake. If a country can be sacred, if there is sanctity in earth and stones, then isn’t it clear that a fortiori there is sanctity in man – whether Arab or Jew – who was created in God’s image? Don’t you understand that there is no “portion of God from above,” as Job described it, in furrows of earth, but that there certainly is in peaceful Palestinians?

Do you have any idea how great that “portion of God” is in Col. Ran Kahane, the commander of the Ephraim Brigade, and in each and every one of his soldiers, who daily risk their lives to defend yours and those of your families from the terrorists who are working to take them? How do you dare to desecrate these holy people? How did it enter your minds to take on the role of our enemies, the terrorists? How did your love of the land become so distorted that it turned into love of bricks and cement and caused you to forget all the rest?

You did not throw stones at me, and still you have mortally wounded me. You have stolen from me one of the assets most sacred to me. I love the Land of Israel with all my heart and all my might. I left the United States, my birthplace, to help to build my beloved city of Efrat and to be built up in it. Wherever and whenever I speak – and I have had the privilege of appearing and speaking all over the world – I present myself as a “proud settler.” And you have robbed this pride from me. You have turned the term “settler” into a dirty word. You have caused me to be ashamed of being a settler, to be ashamed to be called by the same name as those whose love for the land has turned into hatred of human beings.

The Torah is filled with the praises of the Land of Israel, but it never commands us to “love” the land. It commands us to “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18 ). And since the following words, the words that end that verse, are “I am the Lord,” the medieval commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra explains that “thy neighbor” in that context is every human being created in the image of God.

There is a direct and tragic connection between those who perpetrate “price tag” activities against Arabs and those who participate in attacks on the IDF. Shimon and Levi, two of the sons of Jacob, murdered all the men of Shechem, an act of collective revenge that did not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. They ended up harming their own brother, Joseph, for, according to a midrash, or rabbinic tale, they were the motivating force behind his sale to Egypt.

Please, change your minds and repent, before it’s too late. Don’t sell your souls, your portion of God from above, even in exchange for our holy land.

מניסיוני כמחנך אני יודע שקשה, בלתי אפשרי בעצם, להטיף מוסר לאנשים המאמינים שהם מגיניה הקדושים של ארץ ישראל, שהם נושאי דגלה של תורת ישראל האמיתית והטהורה, המזוככת, שהם מסיגי הפשרנות, השתדלנות וההתרפסות של אלפיים שנות גולה.

בעיניכם אתם החשמונאים החדשים, המכבים שאינם מרכינים את ראשם בפני הממסד הכוהני המתייוון – זה הלובש כיום, כך אתם סבורים, מדי צה”ל. קבוצות של פורעי “תג מחיר”, התוקפים פלסטינים על לא עוול בכפם, מחללים מסגדים ומעלים באש ספרי קוראן, דומות בעיני עצמן לגיבורי יהודה הקדומים, שלחמו בערב-רב היווני-הסורי, שחילל את המקדש וכפה עליהם להשתחוות לאלילים. ומכיוון שאתם משוכנעים שכל מעשיכם לשם שמים, לעולם לא תודו שחטאתם – ובלי הכרת החטא הלא אין תיקון ואין תשובה ואין כפרה.

ובכל זאת אומר לכם שאתם טועים טעות בסיסית. אם ארץ יכולה להיות קדושה, אם יש קדושה בעפר ובאבנים, האם לא ברור, מדין קל וחומר, שיש קדושה באדם – ערבי ויהודי כאחד – שנברא בצלם אלוהים? האם אינכם מבינים שברגבי עפר אין “חלק אלוה ממעל”, אבל בפלסטינים שלווים יש ויש?

האם אתם משערים כמה גדול אותו “חלק אלוה” אצל אלוף-משנה רן כהנא, מפקד חטיבת אפרים, ואצל כל אחד ואחד מחייליו, המסכנים יום יום את חייהם כדי להגן על חייכם שלכם ועל חייהם של בני משפחותיכם מפני המחבלים הפועלים ליטול אותם? איך אתם מעזים לחלל את הקודשים הללו? איך עלה על דעתכם להחליף תפקידים עם אויבינו המחבלים? איך התעוותה אהבתכם לארץ עד שהפכה לאהבה ללבנים ולמלט וגרמה לכם לשכוח את כל השאר?

אותי לא רגמתם באבנים, ובכל זאת פגעתם בי אנושות. גזלתם ממני אחד מהנכסים המקודשים לי ביותר. אני אוהב את ארץ ישראל בכל לבי ובכל מאודי. עזבתי את ארצות הברית, מקום הולדתי, כדי לעזור לבנות את עירי האהובה אפרת ולהיבנות בה. בכל מקום ובכל הזדמנות שאני מדבר – ונפלה בחלקי הזכות להופיע ולנאום בכל קצווי תבל – אני מציג את עצמי כ”מתנחל גאה”. ואת הגאווה הזאת שדדתם ממני. הפכתם את המונח “מתנחל” לשם גנאי. גרמתם לי להתבייש בהיותי מתנחל, להתבייש להיקרא בשם אחד עם אלה שאהבתם לארץ התגלגלה לשנאת אדם.

התורה גדושה בשבחיה של ארץ ישראל, אך אף פעם איננה מצווה אותנו “לאהוב” את הארץ. היא מצווה אותנו “ואהבת לרעך כמוך” (ויקרא י”ט, י”ח). וכיוון שהמלים הבאות באותו פסוק הן וחותמות אותו הן “אני ה’”, מפרש אבן-עזרא ש”רע” בהקשר זה הוא כל אדם שנברא בצלם אלוהים.

יש קשר ישיר וטרגי בין מבצעי פעולות “תג מחיר” נגד ערבים לבין המשתתפים בהתנפלות על צה”ל. שמעון ולוי התחילו ברצח כל הגברים בשכם, מעשה נקם קולקטיבי שלא הבחין בין אשם וחף – והגיעו לידי פגיעה באחיהם שלהם, יוסף, כשהיו, על פי מדרש חז”ל, הכוח המניע במכירתו למצרים. אנא, חזרו בכם, חזרו בתשובה, לפני שיהיו מאוחר מדי. אל לכם למכור את נשמתכם, את חלק אלוה ממעל שלכם – אפילו לא תמורת ארצנו הקדושה.

But that’s not what the people who wrote to me want, I suspect. What prompts them to write is a deeper challenge to their own identity as American Jews.

Last week I taught a session on Israel’s Declaration of Independence for heads of central agencies of Jewish education that was sponsored by the iCenter. Anne Lanski, president of the iCenter, began the session by asking everyone to introduce themselves by sharing what connects them with Israel. Some in the room were Israelis by birth. Most had lived in Israel for one or more long-term stays. Nearly all had traveled to Israel in the past year.

When it came to me, I responded that what connects me to Israel is that not a day goes by that I don’t ask, “Why haven’t I made aliyah?” This is one of the great unresolved questions in my life and in the marriage that Natalie and I share. Both of us feel a fundamental desire to live in Israel, to be ‘full Jews’ in the sense that A.B. Yehoshua talks about: enabling our Jewish identity, which is central to our lives, to achieve full expression in the way we actually live. The reasons we’re not there are many and complicated. When children are in the picture, when parnassa (livelihood) is in question, it’s not so simple. But the desire burns every day, and virtually every night before we go to bed Natalie and I have the conversation that begins, “Why don’t we live in Israel?” Ani bama’arav v’libi bamizrach.

In his infamous speech to the American Jewish Committee a few years ago, A.B. Yehoshua pointed out that the State of Israel has a relationship not only with its citizens, but with all Jews as a result of the statement in Megillat Atzma’ut (the Declaration of Independence): “The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles.” This statement achieved expression in the Law of Return. And as a result, even though I am not a citizen of the State, I am a potential citizen. Ahad Ha’Am put it less politically in his formulation, in which Israel would be the spiritual center of Jews worldwide. I feel this every time I face east to daven, and in the central role that Israel plays in so many other aspects of my life, from the publications that I read to the TV shows I watch (S’rugim, Avodah Aravi) to what my children ate for dinner last night (Tival veggie burgers).

All of which is to say that Israel matters to me, deeply. It is impossible for me to imagine my Jewishness apart from Israel. It is impossible for me to imagine not wanting to be in Israel. It is impossible to imagine feeling fully at home in a Diasporic existence, even in a place as full of blessings as America. For me, the fact that when I get a latte in Israel they write yom tov in Hebrew in the foam–I can’t feel more at home than at that moment.

And that’s what makes so much of the news coming from Israel so tragic and painful. Yes, the news about the sickos who kill Arabs and attack IDF soldiers. Yes, the proposed and enacted laws attacking civil society. Yes, the corrupt and shameful Chief Rabbinate. All of that pains me. It pains me far more than any of the ways in which American society is broken, and that reminds me of where home really is for me.

But what it also does is test my ahavat yisrael. Can I call the Hilltop Youth Jews to whom I’m in some way responsible? Can I see the misogynists in Geulah or Beit Shemesh as my kinsmen? Would I count them in a minyan? Ahavat yisrael is the greatest attribute of my rebbe, Avi Weiss, and has always been the growing edge for my judgmental temperament. But sometimes judgment is warranted, sometimes people have to be cast out, because the survival and integrity of the rest of us depends on it.

Knowing the difference between the times for Hesed and the times for Gevurah is the test implied in Parshat Vayeshev and in the story of Hannukah. The brothers’ othering of Joseph, their attempted fratricide, is the lowest moment in the book of Genesis. Since the time of Cain and Abel, we have been trying to find a way for brothers to live together — Hinei mah tov u’mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad — and here another set of brothers fails the test. Reconciliation ultimately comes, but at the price of years of torment and eventual exile.

Hannukah is the story of a civil war, waged by religious zealots–the Hilltop Youth of their day, perhaps. Yet since the time 1500 years ago when the Rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud virtually ignored the story of the Maccabees, right through our own day, the story we tell about Hannukah is less that of religious extremism winning out over accommodation than of the struggle to maintain integrity, identity and commitment in the face of the pressures to give up. The Talmud made the story not about war in the name of purity, but about keeping the miracle of light in a time of darkness.

I am a believer that, though history has its place, Jewish memory is more important than Jewish history. How we tell the story is ultimately more significant than the events that actually happened. The story of Joseph is a story about the challenges of reconciliation, and the long processes we have to go through to bring it about. The story of Hannukah is about the faith necessary to keep on going, even when we think there’s no way left to do so.

This week, this Hannukah, we need to remember those lessons more than ever.

Shabbat shalom.

There is a powerful sense of collapsing time and space that happens in this moment of Jacob’s journey. The place where Jacob slept, it turns out, is none other than Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount, the axis mundi, the center of the world. But Jacob was unaware, and the reality had to come to him. As Rashi famously interprets, Mount Moriah was lifted out of place in order to come and meet Jacob on the way. The text itself implies something out of the ordinary, when it says vayifga bamakom–connoting more than simply “he happened upon the place,” but something akin to “he exploded upon the place.” And time seems to stop for a moment–as it does so rarely in the story of Jacob, who seems constantly to be in motion. God promises Jacob that this place will be the possession of his descendants, and all of us are thereby included in the moment.

But there is more significance to Jacob’s statement: “Achen yesh Hashem bamakom hazeh, v’anochi lo yadati;” “Surely God is in this place, and I, I did not know.” How could he not have known?! Perhaps it is precisely because Jacob is always in a hurry, always on the move. It is the story of his life. As Rashi will remind us in a couple of weeks at the beginning of Parshat Vayeshev, Jacob never really gets any peace in his lifetime. And so even at this moment, when he is passing through the spot that has meant so much in the life of his family and will mean so much in the lives of his descendants, he can’t slow down to notice.

V’anochi lo yadati: And I, I did not know. Simply speaking, this seems to refer to the previous clause: What did Jacob not know? That God was in this place. But a more elastic (Hasidic) reading reveals two more possibilities: God was in this place. Period. V’anochi lo yadati: And I did not know anochi. Anochi here could refer to myself, as in “I didn’t know myself before this moment.” Or it could refer to Anochi, God, the same Anochi that speaks at Sinai. “I did not know myself. And I did not know God.” Before this moment, Jacob says, I had no awareness of who I was or the nature of my relationship with the Divine.

The Piaczezner Rebbe, in his work Derekh Hamelech, elaborates on this point. “The knowledge of God is not some external exercise of the mind alone, like other kinds of knowledge which can be forgotten or hidden when one thinks about other things. Rather, it must enter into his soul and become part of his essence, like the knowledge of his own essence. And it must be with him all the time, whether he is asleep or awake. And it must function as part of all his other knowledge, so that through his knowledge he will recognize God.” (Derekh Hamelech, Vayetzei) When Jacob says he didn’t know God and did not know himself, he means that he did not yet cultivate in himself the ability to be aware of God’s full presence, or his own.

The Piaczezner emphasizes the practice of hashkatah, quieting the mind. To truly pray, and to truly hear the voice of God and our own voices, we have to slow down. Young Jacob is a man in motion, a person on the run. We can imagine him holding a cell phone, making deals, regularly checking Esau’s Facebook status. He has not yet learned the discipline of awareness, of quiet. He has not yet learned to recognize that God is in all places, and that we, we can know–if only we give ourselves the time and space and skill to look.

Shabbat shalom.

The story also contains mirror images. The most famous of these comes at the beginning of the Akedah, when  God instructs Abraham to “take your son, your only one, the one whom you love, Isaac, and lech-lecha, go to the land of Moriah” (Gen. 22:1). This of course reflects back the opening lines of the story of Abraham, which begin with lech-lecha el ha-aretz asher areka: Go to the land that I will show you (Gen. 12:1).

A final recurrence of this type comes in this week’s parasha, when the Torah tells us v’avraham zaken ba-bayamim vadonai berach avraham bakol, “Abraham was old, advanced in years, and God blessed Abraham with everything” (Gen. 24:1). Rashi reminds us that bakol in Hebrew has the numerical value of 52, the same as the word ben, or son. Thus once Abraham had been blessed with a son, he was blessed with everything.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch offers a different approach on the entire verse. In his unique style, he finds philological linkages between the roots of the words zaken, old, and sakanah, danger. Hirsch does not say that old age is a time of danger. Rather, he uses the word sakanah, and its related words saken (risk) and sikui (chance) to reflect that a person who is described as a zaken partakes of the openness to possibility possessed by a person mature in experience.

Most usefully, he contrasts this with the word for adolescent youth, na’ar, which he reminds us also means to shake or shake off. Whereas during the period of adolescence we shake off that which has constrained us in the act of self-authorship, in ripe older age we sense what the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson called a period of “generativity,” when we are open to the world and able to give back to it.

Quoting the Talmud in Bava Batra (16b), Hirsch says that this aspect of Abraham was so pronounced that people from far and wide could readily recognize his wisdom. Abraham’s openness to the world, his sense of integrity of mission and purpose with his outward actions, shone like a jewel.

The haftarah for this parasha offers a useful contrast that further highlights Abraham’s achievement. Here we have the story of King David’s old age and death. And while David is similarly concerned with the future, he handles it far less elegantly than Abraham, focusing as he does on settling political scores and securing Solomon’s place on the throne among his feuding sons. Abraham had some of the same things to deal with–the future was not yet entirely secure, even though the line of succession had been established, since Isaac did not yet have a wife and children. But Abraham exudes a kind of grace and faith that things will work out which doesn’t come through in David’s story. Abraham is elegant, David is rough. Both are real.

Shabbat shalom.