Shlach: Seeing Goodness

My Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Dov Linzer, offered this dvar Torah, which I think is particularly fitting for this week, which marks graduation at Northwestern.

In his instructions to the spies, Moses includes a potentially problematic phrase. In addition to the general strategic evaluation of the land, Moses asks them to make an evaluative judgment, namely to see “whether the land that they dwell in is good or bad.” (Num. 13:19) The medieval commentators generally explain this as part of the military evaluation. But, Rabbi Linzer argues, it in fact paves the way for the central difference between Caleb and Joshua and the rest of the spies. While the despondent spies emphasize only the strategic challenges, Caleb and Joshua included in their report the very words of goodness that Moses sought: “The land, which we passed through to spy it out, is an exceeding good land.” (Num. 14:7)

I find this observation an approrpriate one for Commencement because the story here is essentially about how we approach knowledge. It is no stretch to say that the spies become a paradigm for our engagement with the world–they interact with new phenomena and make judgments about them. The larger group of spies is unable to see the goodness in the land, or, by extrapolation, in the world. Perhaps more accurately, goodness for them would only come after the empirical facts are dealt with, if it ever comes at all; a moral orientation comes second, not first. Caleb and Joshua, however, approach their discovery with a sense that goodness is there, not in a way that blinds them to the facts, but in a way that sustains their covenantal relationship between the land and the people of Israel.

The Torah is thus instructive about our search for knowledge, which is life itself. In order for life to be meaningful, in order for us to avoid the pitfalls of the relativistic void in which there is no truth except the one each person makes up for him or herself, we have to engage the world with the notion that goodness is possible, that truth is there to be found if only we will look for it.

 

Ki Tissa: Faithfulness, Veils, and Identity

While the dramatic highlight of the Torah portion of Ki Tissa is Israel’s sin in creating the Golden Calf, the theological and human highlight comes in its aftermath. First we have violence, as Moses leads the Levites and those who are “on God’s side” in a civil war to rid the Israelite camp of the wrongdoers. In the wake of that violence, Moses seeks God’s forgiveness (for the Golden Calf, though one could propose a more radical reading and say that the forgiveness sought was also for the killing of 3,000 fellow tribesmen).

Moses pleads on behalf of the people. God would rather wipe out the people and start over with Moses, but Moses tells God that he wants no part of such a plan. “You can erase me from your book” if you do this, he says. So God relents, and grants a pardon. Moses’s advocacy on behalf of the Jewish people  sets the tone for all future prophets of Israel, and is distinguished from the behavior of Elijah, the subject of the traditional haftarah reading for the Torah portion. Elijah chastises the people, and does not seek their forgiveness from God. Perhaps this is why we traditionally say that Elijah is present at ritual circumcisions and at the Passover seder–the two most serious positive commandments in the Torah. It is as though we are constantly reminding Elijah of our faithfulness to the covenant, a faithfulness that he questioned, but which Moses deeply believed in.

Moses then has a forty-day sojourn on Mount Sinai–his second trip up the mountain–during which God reveals as much of God’s essence as possible to a human being. “You will see my back, but no man can see my face and live.” Moses is altered by this encounter, to the point that his face radiates with light when he descends. Here again he offers us a lesson: While at first the people recoil from him, the Torah gently says “He talked with them.” Moses reaches out to his fellow Israelites, and he begins the 3,000 year conversation of Torah study that we continue up to the present moment. We can distinguish his reaction this time from his reaction before: rather than employing violence to achieve his ends, he engages in teaching and learning. We learn here that Torah must be a tool and a process of reconciliation. Or, in the words of Maimonides: “Words of Torah are not meant to bring upon the world vengeance, but mercy, lovingkindess and peace.” (Laws of Shabbat 2:3)

Finally, after he has finished teaching, Moses dons a veil, which he would remove only to talk with God. This is a remarkable, evocative image, bringing to mind the veil of a bride at her wedding, which signifies her intimate relationship with her husband. It also evokes the veil of W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, which he used to describe the double-consciousness of African-Americans, inhabiting multiple worlds simultaneously. The veil can create a beauty of intimacy, and a danger of division. While Moses’s veil was unique, we all wear a veil all the time (see my dvar Torah from last week about clothing and identity). How and when we remove our veil, and how we relate to the rest of the world, constitute the enduring questions of Jewish consciousness.

Shabbat shalom.

 

Yitro: The Beauty of Pardox

The highlight of the Torah reading of Yitro is the Revelation at Mount Sinai. Chapters 19 and 20 of Exodus, which narrate the story of the revelation, are some of the most mysterious and difficult of the entire Torah. What makes these chapters particularly challenging are the paradoxical motions of their words: it becomes unclear who is speaking when and what precisely is happening.

One good example of this is Exodus 20:14, which begins with the words, “And all the people saw the sounds.” Rashi comments that at the moment of revelation, the normal laws of nature itself were suspended, and one could see sound, and hear visions.

The Talmud glosses Ex. 19:19, “Moses would speak, and God answered him in a voice,” by asking, “What voice did God use to answer Moses? Moses’s own voice.” Similarly, the midrash relates that all the people heard the same thing, but heard it in the voice that was appropriate to them: Old people heard the voice of old people, babies heard the voice of babies, and so on.

On more than one occasion I have heard people criticize these chapters, arguing that they are good evidence of why the Torah needed a better editor. Yet, as Prof. Benjamin Sommer of the Jewish Theological Seminar (formerly of Northwestern) has described, the contradictory and paradoxical motions of the Torah’s narration are intentional. Paradox is the point. (Or, as a teacher of mine used to say, ‘It’s religion, it’s supposed to be spooky.’)

The moment of revelation is one that of necessity defies the ability of language, and even the human capacity of understanding. That doesn’t mean we can’t catch glimpses of it. The beauty of being human is our ability to occasionally ascend the heights, and sense what lies beyond the plain facts of the material world.

These are the moments of what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called Radical Amazement. They may come to us when we experience a profound moment of artistic genius, a poem that resounds in our souls, or beholding the miracles of God’s creation. These moments are a shadow of the moment at Sinai, the moments when life is made meaningful and we engage our deepest capacities as spiritual beings. They are moments beyond language, moments of paradox and beauty.

Shabbat shalom.

 

Shemot: The Greatness of Small Miracles

There are a lot of miracles in the story of the Exodus from Egypt, which we begin reading this week with Parshat Shemot. There are of course the Ten Plagues, the splitting of the Sea, the provision of manna. But there are two miracles that really ground the entire narrative: the miracle of the burning bush, and the miracle of Pharaoh’s daughter.

The burning bush is an obvious miracle: though it burned, “the bush was not consumed.” There is obvious symbolism in the miracle: that God’s promise was not extinguished in the midst of slavery in Egypt; that the human spirit of the Israelites was not extinguished either. Yet the greatest miracle of the story, it seems to me, is that Moses noticed: ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’ (Ex. 3:3) What would have happened if Moses hadn’t noticed? The rest of the story may not have happened.

Yet Moses’ entire life was rooted in another act of noticing and acting, that of Pharaoh’s daughter: “The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him.” (Ex. 2:5-6) The pity of Pharaoh’s daughter in this scene is remarkable, as her father had declared that any Hebrew baby boy was to be killed. Yet her sense of pity overtook her. (Rashi comments that upon opening the basket she beheld the Divine presence. Perhaps that presence is most acutely felt in beholding a crying and helpless child.) Had she not acted in this way, we have to wonder how the story would have been different.

Though Exodus is an epic adventure of grand acts, national politics, and divine warfare, it ultimately finds its deepest expression in the small but miraculous acts of ordinary people doing ordinary, yet extraordinary, things. And in particular, the miracles of the Exodus–the overturning of an entire world order based on ‘might makes right’–find their roots in the miracle of the human capacity, our capacity, to notice and to act.

Shabbat shalom.