July-August, 2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
One of the unexpected delights of this past year for me has been studying the weekly Torah portion with four other rabbis. I adore each of my study-mates: love their minds, love their beings, love how they each open up Torah in their unique ways. Conversations with these Torah friends inspired me to have a weekly Torah conversation with our community, and those of you with whom I study here, whom I love every bit as much, have also delighted me this year.
These weekly Torah sessions have given me the opportunity to pay attention to Torah in a more flowing and sequential way than I usually do. Typically I skim the portion and, if I’m giving a drash that week, I dive down deep into a sentence or paragraph or single idea that catches my attention and swim around from there.
Translation interlude here: drash, from “to explain,” means a Torah teaching, a sermon; davar Torah, literally “a word of Torah,” means the same thing; parshah (plural parshiot) means the weekly Torah portion. The Torah is essentially divided into 52 consecutive parshiot. It’s a little more complicated than that because there aren’t always 52 weeks in a Jewish year and because different sections are spliced in on holidays. But more or less, on the Shabbat after Simchat Torah we start reading Torah with the creation of the world and we read it like a long, unfolding story until the Israelites are standing on the bank of the Jordan River and Moses dies.
The weekly study group with the rabbis began last year right about when we were entering the book of Exodus. With my friends I cringed at the cruelty of Pharaoh, celebrated the birth and unlikely adoption of Moses, suffered through the plagues, saw the Red Sea split and the slaves walk to freedom, entered the wilderness, stood at the foot of Mount Sinai to receive Torah (the book that tells the story of its own revelation), built the mishkan (the traveling tent sanctuary), put up the Golden Calf and saw its terrible aftermath.
Then came Leviticus, the book people love to not-love. But I do love Leviticus! It’s the priestly book, detailing the rituals and offerings that were to happen in the mishkan, and later in the Temple. I started to cartoon Leviticus so I could sort out the various kinds of sacrifices (and amuse my study-mates). I hope to finish up my cartoon Leviticus one of these days.
The book of Numbers—called in Hebrew, trenchantly, Bamidbar, “In the Wilderness”—is where we are now, slogging through the desert, fighting, dealing with plagues, drought and the occasional swallowing-up by the earth, despairing, freaking out. Bamidbar seems like it takes a hundred weeks to get through, not ten (even fewer if there’s a double portion or two). It’s pretty much pure misery.
Deuteronomy, the last book of Torah, is the great desideratum of Moses. He is 120 years old, about to die, standing at the edge of the Jordan River after a 40-year journey. An entire generation, except for two companions, has died along the way, and children have grown up. The people are about to enter the land they were promised long before. Once “slow of speech,” Moses now pours out his heart for 11 weeks in a row before ascending the mountain where his life will end. Finally, we will celebrate Simchat Torah, reading of Moses’ death and then rolling the story right back to the creation of the world to start it again.
Because of my conversations, I am seeing the flow of Torah differently; I find myself overlaying the path of an individual life onto this great narrative: Genesis holds space for birth, childhood, parents, siblings, cousins, family love and struggle. Exodus is about becoming an adult, breaking free, finding your identity, establishing your home, your ways, your path. Leviticus is about meaning, values, vision, and connection with the Divine. Numbers is the slog of life, the relentlessness of aging, loss, disintegration, limitation, opposition, failure and despair. Deuteronomy takes stock of it, ending on the mountaintop, our souls leaving our bodies and reconnecting with the infinite.
I’ve long wondered why so much of Torah takes place in the wilderness, why it ends before the people reach their destination, why it involves so much struggle and loss. I was talking recently with an old friend, not Jewish, about the long ordeal of reading the book of Numbers, with all its defeat and despair. He asked me, “Why do you think it has to be that way?” And I found myself answering, “Because life takes place in the unknown. We are born and grow up there. We become ourselves, make family, community and nation. We encounter the Mystery in many guises, some uplifting, some devastating. We learn to care for ourselves and each other, to love, to grieve, to grow and transform, to bring forth the future and finally to lay it all down, both finished and unfinished. The wilderness is where it all happens.’
I’m writing this in my little makeshift guest room shul, with our sefer Torah in its homemade corner ark behind me. My mind wanders back to various times I’ve lain down on a roll of paper and had a friend trace my body, or when I’ve traced the outlines of someone else, and we’ve colored in our features. I remember with a smile the “kavods” a bunch of us made at 3 AM one Shavuot, tracing each other and collaging in the Divine glory (kavod) that fills us as it fills every being.
I think of the holy scroll behind me with the story line of life inscribed in it. I think of how we take our Torah scroll out of her ark each week, open her up and bless and read a little part of the story, moving on the next week (relentlessly, I want to say) to the next parshah. I think of the sacred slogginess of life, the loss and failure as well as the joy and success.
I think of how Torah, by being Torah, elevates and honors the texture of life, with all its bumps and divots, the ALL of it. I think of how life is holy in all its dimensions, its difficulty as well as its ease and pleasure, and I pray that we are able to honor the wilderness and our time on its sacred ground.
We ARE written in the Book of Life.
