January, 2025 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
This January will include the swearing in of Donald Trump on January 20th at 9:00 AM Pacific time. Two days before that, on Shabbat, we will read the first Torah portion in Exodus, which almost immediately announces ominously that “there arose a new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.” The new Pharaoh will summarily rescind the years of prosperity and favor enjoyed by the Israelites and impose brutal slavery upon them. When it becomes clear to the Pharaoh that slavery has not broken the Hebrew tribe, he will decree that all their male babies should be executed by drowning.
According to rabbinic tradition, the Israelite enslavement lasted 400 years. Torah tells us little about those centuries. It telescopes the narrative of enslavement, introducing us to Moses just 23 sentences in. Moses grows up, leaves Mitzrayim, spends yamim rabim (many days) herding sheep in Midian. It is there that Moses encounters the burning bush and is called to return to Pharaoh and begin the process that leads to the liberation of the slaves. We know that Moses lived to be 120 years old and that the last 40 years of his life were spent post-liberation. So, by my calculations (hi Raven!), he would have been 80 years old at the time of the Exodus. Which would have him born 320 years into the generations of enslavement. All of which is to say that there was a long time about which we have few details, but we can imagine that they were grim and relentless.
As I look ahead a month to the beginning of the new dispensation in this country, I join many of us in anticipating a harsh new reality and the rescission of many freedoms and protections that we treasure. I look ahead with dread to… oh, I started making the list we all know. I don’t need to write it here.
Even as I look ahead, I pause for a few minutes at the beginning of Exodus and notice some details. I notice that, despite bitter work and cruel taskmasters, the Hebrew population actually grows and spreads out. I notice that the plan to kill the male Hebrew babies is thwarted by two midwives. I notice that the crafty midwives use a calumny often directed against persecuted populations—that the birthing women are “like animals“—to save the babies. I notice that the genius of the two midwives is seen by God, and they prosper and “build houses.”
I notice that the daughter of Pharaoh rescues a baby she knows is a Hebrew. I notice the older sister of that baby follows alongside and, also cleverly, arranges that the baby’s birth mother will nurse him.
I think of the midrashic tale that says, during this time of peak oppression, when the babies of the Hebrews were threatened with death (and maybe, in fact, were being killed before the advent of Shifrah and Puah, the two brave midwives), the Hebrew men despaired and refused to make love with their wives. Whereupon the women went out to the fields with their hand mirrors in one version, baskets of small fish in another, and enticed their men. Which means, among much else, that throughout the period of enslavement couples were having sex. Good sex, or unsatisfying sex, who knows? But the wild thing continued, and so did the Israelites.
None of this is to minimize the horror of enslavement in any way, or the misery experienced by these ancestors or any since. But sometimes I think that, in difficult times, it is helpful not only to look towards the horizon, but also to look close-in at the details.
Thankfully, most of what I know of intense suffering I know from books, sometimes from talking with people who have lived through harrowing experiences, and not from personal recollection. It seems possible to me—though I hesitate to write about something I know only minimally and mostly second-hand—that suffering may be unremitting, but it is not monochromatic. The actual experience of pain, of loss, has color and texture. Things happen.
In a memoir, one of my heroes, the South African freedom fighter and jurist Albie Sachs, minutely describes his experience in solitary confinement in prison. He describes acquiring a fish bone and using it to clean his comb: “I pile my blankets up as high as I can, place the apple wrapper on my lap, and with a feeling of delight plunge the fishbone into the first gap between the teeth of the comb—a thick piece of dirt comes out. My pleasure is intense” (The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, p. 78). I haven’t read that book in years, but the detail about the comb and the moment of intense pleasure has been with me ever since.
Today I listened to the latest “This American Life” podcast; it was an interview with a lively, extroverted eight-year-old girl in Gaza. Among many details she wanted to share was that she and the other young children in the packed apartment where she and her family were sheltering played school every day. She hadn’t been in actual school since the invasion began. I don’t mean to make Bania’s daily life in war sound charming—it is anything but. However, her words busted a stereotype I think I held without realizing it: that being a child in Gaza was just a vague grey cloud of unchanging terror.
It is very possible that things will get difficult in days to come, in ways we anticipate and ways we don’t. It is possible that some or many of us will be impacted ourselves. It seems very likely that people we care for, and people we don’t know personally, but whose fates matter to us, and landscapes and plants and animals, will suffer under this new dispensation.
Of course we will all do whatever we can in the practical realm to reduce suffering, to provide refuge, to try to change what can be changed. But it is very possible that we will be facing situations in days to come—our own and those of others—for which we have little help to give. We may simply be looking at suffering.
One small thing we can do is to refrain from stereotyping suffering. Much will go on in the days to come. We will see headlines. Sometimes we will see people around us in very difficult situations. It may come close to home. In any of these instances I think it helps to look closely, or to imagine closely, to notice the texture, the variation in the experience, how some moments are better than others, some even funny, some inspiring, even while other moments will be pointed in their brutality. It helps with despair. And it also honors the resilience of people and creatures under a hard hand.
We know from the Exodus story that the actions of those midwives, and Pharaoh’s daughter, and Miriam all had outcomes that resonate to this very day. And thank God they do! But even if their resistance wasn’t effective—even if the midwives did not succeed in saving those babies, even if Pharaoh’s daughter was forced by the regime to return baby Moses to the river to drown—those moments still would have happened. And they would have been sacred.
PAIGE NOTES
Once again, in perfect alignment with the new moon, this first day of January, 2025 also starts the Hebrew month of Tevet. That means that December 31st was the darkest night of the year, being the new moon closest to the Winter Solstice. So not only did the sun rise the latest and set the earliest, but there was no moonlight to light up the dark sky. I love picturing all the New Year's Eve fireworks that went off around the world, coincidentally lighting up the darkest sky of the year. Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday that straddles two months, beginning in Kislev and ending in Tevet. This represents how it, like every holiday or journey, transforms us. We begin with sunlight decreasing and the moon waning, and then through community-gathering, ritual-blessing, latke-eating, gift-giving, and dreidel-spinning, we transform into light increasing and the moon waxing.
Sefer Yezirah, an ancient book of Jewish Mysticism, connects this month of Tevet with the Hebrew letter ayin, meaning “eye.” This is a month of seeing, watching, observing. We see the Hanukkah flames dance, we watch the glorious rain out our windows, and we observe our spirits settle into a nourishing, winter rest. As Kohelet/Ecclesiastes teaches us, la’kole z’man v’et (“there is a time for everything”), and winter reminds us of the need for seasonal rest, hibernation, and recharging. I think that’s why this has become the month of ayin; we cannot truly be seeing, watching, and observing when we’re busy doing. We take this time to activate our eyes and pause the rest of our body.
Additionally, with the first day of any month (Rosh Chodesh) being traditionally associated with women, Rosh Chodesh Tevet is known specifically as Chag HaBanot, “the Holiday of Daughters.” Rabbi Jill Hammer teaches us that, in Sephardic/Mizrachi culture, "Jews of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia celebrated 1 Tevet as the Festival of the Daughters, a time to honor Judith and all heroines. Mothers would give their daughters gifts on that day and pass inheritances to them. Old women and young women would come together to dance. Mothers prayed for the health of their daughters.” What a beautiful sentiment to fall on the very first day of this Gregorian year 2025! As we conclude Hanukkah and our days start getting longer, may our eyes observe more community gathering around the fire and more mushrooms popping up in the woods. And may we enjoy more deep soul-rest.
