parsha

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young…Calf

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This week’s Torah portion, parshat Ki Tisa, is filled with the definitions of Jewish art.  We don’t often think Judaism is filled with artistic expressions because we’re not allowed to make graven images…or images of God…or images of things that others worship as God…so, anything.

But we forget that most of Jewish expression is actually artistic.  We don’t read the Torah, we sing it. We sit at our Shabbat tables and sing blessings for wine and bread.  We even get creative with sculptures when we braid challah – 3 strand braids or 4 strand braids or twisted or round – it seems trivial, but we all love a beautiful challah.  

We are created with artistic souls, as proved by our kids.  All children are artistic and only colour inside the lines to please the adult world.  There are no lines constraining their artistic thinking. Several of my kids decided to express their artistic passions in our home, specifically in the wall to wall carpet.  I’m not being sarcastic, I’m being quite literal. One of my daughters noticed the carpet looks different if you brush it up or brush it down. She discovered her preferred artistic medium.  The carpet of an entire floor would be used to show grand portraits of cities or people that resulted from her moving her fingers through the carpet. It was beautiful, I beamed with pride, how creative, how artistic…how tremendously inconvenient!  If anyone walked on the carpet, we risked disturbing her masterpiece and no amount of explaining could move her artistic soul one bit. We all had to walk around the edges of the rooms. Artists can be very headstrong.

One of my sons did a similar thing with pennies lined up on the carpet (he loved the colour contrast) and towers and citadels built with pennies (he preferred the 3D approach to art and I gained incredible insight as to how a Roman army would lay siege to a city).  Usually a jar of pennies was a good idea – rookie mistake. Same problem with the carpet, same problem walking in the rooms. 

I’d had enough when I walked into my youngest daughter’s room one day and noticed she was lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, creating a mosaic on her floor.  Lying next to her on the floor was a pile of her hair. I froze, stared at it for a while and finally asked her if that was her hair. Without looking up, without breaking her concentration to speak, my 6 year old daughter simply said ‘uh huh’.  Why is it not attached to your head, I asked. She told me it kept falling on her face and getting on her work so she cut it off.          

For clarity,  she had long hair that reached her hips.  She didn’t give herself a haircut, she only cut the part that bothered her, so only a chunk was missing.  I reached my ‘living with an artist limit’.  

We bought disposable cameras (…back when the dinosaurs roamed…) and I told them they could take pictures of their art and they could pay to develop the film (it’s better when the artist suffers).  I got my floors back.

We are all artists and our artistic visions have no limits – in our heads.  Judaism does not discuss limiting our creative visions but we most certainly are told to limit our creative products.  In this week’s parshah, we are introduced to directed artistic passion that brings others to inspired expressions of their own, as well as chaotic artistic passion that brings others to destruction.

While instructing Moses on how to create holy space, God introduces Moses to Betzalel, the artist that is inspired with the creative expression to form the articles of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle.  He has the skill and God will fill his heart with the inspiration. It is a passion project that results in artistic objects whose purpose is to move the observer from the mundane to the holy. It is the path, the journey, the window through which others can travel.  It is transformative.

But later in this parshah, Israel notices Moses is late coming down from Mt. Sinai.  We’re never quite sure how being punctual became the definition of Jewish behaviour, certainly that didn’t continue to inform our Jewish identities, yet, somehow, all of covenant is going to sit on Moses being late.  He’s only perceived as late, he’s not really late because he never said what time he’d be back…but I digress.

The mob turns to Aaron and demands he make them a god.  According to Aaron, he gathered gold, threw it into the fire and (poof) out came a calf.  It is the description an artist would give of how the art forms itself as inevitable, the artist is but the instrument.  

While God is teaching Moses how holy space is created through the inspired heart of an artist, Israel is demanding that Aaron create a profane object through mob pressure and fear.  While God shows that the creativity of an artist can transform any moment into a meaningful one, Aaron creates something that transforms those moments into ones of betrayal and chaos.  Juxtaposed examples of Jewish art and the power to transform.

Artists must express their passion, they are driven, they are inspired, but Jewish art is the result of transformative intent.  Judaism commands us to engage with Torah, its concepts, its ideas, its values. We do not read, memorize, rinse and repeat. Engagement means we creatively explore, interpret and share.  The pinnacle of text study is to create a ‘hiddush’, a newness, another doorway through which to explore a new thought, a new artistic moment. We create conceptual artwork that contains a spark of our being and we passionately debate and defend our artistic interpretations.  Pluralism is hard because we’re trying to get Picasso and Van Gogh in a room together and have each credit the other’s vision as equal to their own.

So, embrace the artist within you, celebrate your childrens’ artwork, fill your fridge with your grandkids’ beautiful drawings as they beam with pride.  When it comes from a giving heart with a transformative intent it opens the door to a new meeting place of meaning. When it feeds fear and panic, when it results from opportunistic intentions, it is the betrayal of a nation, a faith and each other.

Parshat Terumah: Angels and Demons and Shades…Oh My!

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This week’s Torah portion is parshat Terumah.  It includes the details of building holy objects for the Tabernacle…the details that make many people’s eyes glaze over.  It lists colour selections and table dimensions and what gets coated in gold and what doesn’t. Because we don’t have a Tabernacle anymore, or a Temple, we don’t build these objects today and so we don’t often listen with a keen ear while this portion is read in synagogue.

But, amongst all these details is the description of the cherubim that will sit on the Ark of the Covenant.  A cherub is a type of angel. It is not a pudgy baby angel with a diaper and a bow and quiver waiting to shower us with ‘love arrows’.  It does not have rosy cheeks and a ‘cherubic smile’. By Jewish mystical accounts, a cherub is a fierce, frightening looking and not-happy-to- be-among-us type of angel.  There are two of them sculpted onto the lid of the Ark. They look down, toward the Ark and their wings are spread over them, almost touching wingtips. Almost touching, because the Divine Voice will speak from the space between – the tiny void framed by their wingtips.

Everything about it begs the question of why are there angels in my holy spaces?  Why do I keep inviting them into my world?

On Friday nights, with family gathered around our tables, we sing Shalom Aleichem.  It’s a beautiful, soulful song that frames our Shabbat meal. The phrase ‘shalom aleichem’ means ‘peace on you (plural)’ and we are welcoming the ministering angels and the angels of peace into our homes.  Verse 1 welcomes them, verse 2 beckons them to come in peace, verse 3 asks them to bless us with peace, verse 4 asks them to leave. We don’t want angels hanging around us for longer than needed.

Many ancient Jewish texts tell us that angels and demons are around us all the time and interact with us constantly.  As long as we think of angels as sweet, benevolent miracle workers, we like that they’re here. On a personal and very mundane note, I have struggled with my hair all of my life.  It is very fine. I always remember my mother putting bobby pins in my hair to keep it out of my eyes, only to have the pins float out the bottom of my hair an hour later. It’s a struggle that continues to this day.  Hair stylists have always told me I have baby fine hair. It sounds lovely but imagine being told you’re still carrying your baby weight with you all your life. A year ago, I walked into a salon and the stylist looked at my hair and told me how wonderful it must be to have angel fine hair.  He is now my regular stylist.

But, unfortunately, there really aren’t sources that tell us angels are saints.  They don’t sit on our shoulders whispering good things into our ears. Angels are messengers who do what God bids them to do – they have no free will and they are not always on our side of things.

According to the Kabbalah, angels were created before humanity was created.  That makes them our older sibling species, since God is the Divine Parent. We are the younger sibling that bothers them.  God will command some of them to protect us (Guardian Angels), just as an older sibling is responsible for its younger ones, not a cherished moment for an older sibling.  God will give us special things (the Torah) that the angels will argue they had first and don’t want to share. We overhear them say something that pleases the Parent and then we usurp it (“Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh”).  We bother them.

There are positive and negative angels.  A midrash tells us that angels follow us into our homes on Friday evenings.  If they see a home of peace and readiness for holiness, the positive angels say this should continue and the negative angels must answer ‘amen’.  If they see a home of conflict and chaos, the negative angels say this should continue and the positive angels must answer ‘amen’. I’m not sure I want them in my home.

But, just as we live with our siblings from cradle to grave, we live with our angelic siblings every moment of every day.  The Talmud says there isn’t a blade of grass that doesn’t have its angel tapping the earth above it and coaxing it to grow.  When two friends who have been apart for over a year reunite, they are to recite the blessing that thanks God for resurrecting the dead.  This is because love and fellowship create positive angels. The angel of our friendship will guard the relationship and will be nourished by it.  It takes a year apart to starve that angel, but when friends meet again, the angel is immediately resurrected, triggering the blessing.  

This week’s parshah teaches us how to create holy objects, and ultimately, to create holy space.  But we are always warned that holiness is powerful and extreme holiness is dangerous. The Cherubim on the top of the Ark of the Covenant are keeping Israel at a distance from the power of such holiness.  The fierceness of their appearance is protecting us and they stare at the Ark, directing our focus. By spreading their wings to almost touch, they create the void in which to hear God’s Voice. Like an older sibling, they teach us about the world and how sometimes it is the spaces of silence that carry the greatest of revelations.

Parshat Mishpatim: Something’s Not Kosher in Denmark

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This week’s Torah reading, parshat Mishpatim, has some very controversial and challenging laws.  Statements about witches and slaves and seducing virgins seem to fade into the background as compared with the tiny statement about not cooking a kid in its mother’s milk.

For many people, the parameters of kosher revolve around not eating pork or bacon, not eating any shellfish, and separating milk and meat.  When my kids were little, my father would tell them they were so delicious he could eat them up. One of my kids looked at him and said ‘silly Zaidy, people aren’t kosher.’  It was a sweet moment for me because my dad usually didn’t tease that way (grandparenting is a whole new way of expressing) and I got to see that my kid understood that people are animals who don’t have split hooves or chew cud.  Win/win.

But living in a community that keeps kosher creates a familiarity with something we easily forget is so foreign to others.  A friend of mine once told me about a time that he had non-Jewish colleagues over for dinner for the first time. They planned to cook a meal together.  He explained to them how his kitchen was laid out and that he keeps meat and dairy separate. Every cabinet and drawer was labelled in advance and meat and dairy were colour coordinated so things were pretty easy to navigate.  Dinner went great and while they were cleaning after and he was doing the dishes, he decided to have a moment of what he thought would be levity. He turned to his friends and said ‘Oh no! You put the dairy garbage into the meat garbage!!’  He went back to washing dishes chuckling to himself about how cute and funny he was but when he turned back around his friends were rummaging through the garbage separating the meat from the dairy. When he told me the story I started laughing and he chuckled again, this time at my reaction.  He asked me why separating the garbage was any more ridiculous to them than anything else about his kitchen.

He was right.

In fact, there are two different categories of keeping kosher in the Torah: the rational and the irrational.  An irrational law in Judaism is called a ‘hok’. That is where we find the categories of kosher animals and the list of birds we can and cannot eat.  They are irrational because left to our own devices we would never have figured out not to eat a pig. Once we can eat another living thing, why would we be limited to some and not others?  It does not lie within the realm of logic, it lies within the realm of meaningfulness and so each Jewish approach will give it meaning in different ways.  

Then there are the rational laws, ‘mishpatim’, the laws we would have derived on our own because they are the result of logical thinking.  Laws like not stealing or murdering fall in this domain. The laws in this week’s parshah fall in this domain…and so does separating milk and meat.

We mark this separation because the Torah forbids cooking a kid in its own mother’s milk.  Since we can never be sure which animal belonged to which mother, we separate all meat from milk.  The law has grown into separating our dishes, our utensils and in some communities, separating appliances as well.  But how is it logical?

There is definitely a cruelty to taking a baby animal, slaughtering it and then cooking it in the milk its own mother made.  But the cruelty only exists within us, the animals would never know. The Torah is teaching us the logical understanding of cruel concepts that embed within innocuous actions.  And that’s just the start.

The milk a mother produces is specifically there for her offspring.  Its purpose is to nourish and secure a new life. It has no other purpose and most animals become milk intolerant once their digestive systems mature.  Milk’s function is to promote life and begin the relationships of bonding and trust with another. (See my blog on Parshat Beshalach for other “mother’s milk” imagery in the Torah.)

Eating meat, according to the Torah, is self-indulgent.  Something Judaism tells us is a concession on God’s part introduced into the world after the Flood.  It is understood as more of a lust than a reasoned choice. Immediately after the Flood, the Torah lists the 7 Noahide laws, one of which is to never eat the limb off a living animal.  Humanity may eat meat but must kill the animal first. In other words, eating meat must now necessitate interacting with death.

So while milk exclusively supports life, meat must interact with death.  As Judaism often reminds us to choose life, it is now crucial that we understand the images and symbols we use everyday.

It is logical to not inculcate cruel concepts within us; to recognize that hurting anything must begin with an internal dismissal that it matters.  We would never cook a baby animal in the milk its mother made to nourish it. And growing in holiness, we would understand what we see when we see milk and what we have done when we see meat.  Both are permitted but both must be allowed to speak to us separately.

The complexities layer on top of each other so much, you yearn for the irrational laws that just say ‘do this…don’t ask because it will never make sense anyway’.  But in a parshah that discusses the logic of building a society that tries to give people rights and fairness, how subtle and humbling to see that even the baby kid should be on our minds.  

It’s not about how complicated I can make my kitchen, so much as knowing that avoiding concepts of cruelty and building clarity in my world could bring me to endless layers of meaning.  When symbols work properly, they have no limit to their meanings. I may separate my food but not my dishes or I may separate my dishes but not my sinks, or my sinks but not my dishwasher racks, or… but I could never judge someone who is so struck by the profound message of clarity between life and death that they separate it every way they can.  

The only reason we don’t separate our garbage is because, well, that would be irrational.

Parshat Yitro: Even Moses Had In-Laws

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This week’s Torah reading, parshat Yitro, contains the Ten Commandments, which tends to always catch our attention.  But the parshah begins with, and is named after, Moses’ father-in-law: Yitro. It is the part of Torah that shows us the father-in-law/son-in-law relationship…and it’s timeless.

There’s an interesting dynamic that exists between fathers and daughters that I’ve watched in my own family.  I quickly learned to brush up on my Freud and then quickly remembered why I don’t like Freud. I watched with confused interest as my husband and my daughters figured things out with each new stage of maturity.  I most definitely remember that each time a new boy showed up at the house to pick up one of our daughters for a date, my husband would greet them at the door with an apple.

I kid you not, my husband would stand in the hallway by the front door with his hand open and an apple lying on his palm.  He would make eye contact with the boy and would say ‘watch this’ as he closed his hands over the apple and split it in half with his hands.  He then opened his hands to produce two perfect halves of the apple, one in each palm. Through it all, he never broke eye contact. I always thought he was showing off his martial arts training and I thought it was cute.  Apparently the boys watching didn’t think it was so cute. It seems they all read it as a message. Years later I found out from my daughters that all their friends were aware of the ‘apple thing’ and it intimidated the boys who’d witnessed it.  I told my husband that it was making them uncomfortable and he smiled a bit and said, ‘is it really?’, but the next date faced the apple.

Ah, yes, fathers and daughters.

When it comes to our in-laws, relationships suddenly become very complex.  They are parents within our marriage, they’re just not our parents. They embody knowledge of our partner that we will never have – they know who they were and who they became.  But we know who they became and who they are becoming, something their parents no longer witness moment to moment. And yet, the Torah commands us to teach our children, no matter whether or not they are young, old, married, single, parents or even grandparents.  We are to evolve into new relationships as they evolve into new stages because we are always obligated to teach them. When they no longer respond to our lessons, we are the ones who must change how we teach them. We are commanded to teach, they are not commanded to learn.

When Yitro joins Moses in the wilderness, he brings Moses’ wife and sons with him.  Moses has not called for them but Yitro decides it is enough time apart. He does not accuse Moses of anything, he simply reunites him with his wife and sons.  It is hard to discuss personal family matters between father-in-law and son-in-law so action is what is needed. They speak all night about the events of Egypt and God, and since Yitro is the High Priest of Midian, this is akin to talking shop.  

The next day, Yitro watches Moses at work and critiques his process.  After all, Yitro knows what it is to lead a people and he’s watching Moses devote his entirety to leading Israel and has nothing left for his family life.  That’s when we remember fathers and daughters.

Yitro tells Moses to delegate, to build a system of appeals that will free Moses from this crushing burden (…and maybe get home…).  Yitro has no vested interest in making Moses the best leader of the Jewish people, but he does have a vested interest in getting Moses to find room in his life for his family.

The only problem is that the system Yitro suggested was one of privilege – only the important people would end up in front of Moses.  For a foreign leader, that has worked, but for the vision of covenant, that would be a betrayal. So Moses sets up a system of challenges rather than privilege.  The cases that are too challenging for a lower court would bump up to eventually come before Moses. He will solve what others could not, regardless of the importance of the participants.  It is this system that we inherit which is why, much later in our history, King Solomon will adjudicate a case with two prostitutes standing before him each claiming motherhood over a single baby.

Once Moses has taken the idea from Yitro and shaped it into what he needs…he sends Yitro home.  Moses will keep his focus on the people and his family life will suffer. Moses will not raise his sons as leaders and he will eventually live apart from his wife.  If Moses were to find a work/life balance, Israel would suffer. If Moses is always monitored by Yitro, his father-in-law, he would insist on sending Moses home at the end of the day.  Choices must be made and Yitro is sent home.

It’s an extremely delicate balance when a relationship between two men exists only because they are bonded to the same woman.  Not enough credit is given to that relationship. Jewishly, we praise the relationship between Ruth and Naomi, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law who brought us defining concepts that include “whither you go, I will go”.  That relationship speaks so loudly and clearly that we all but ignore that men may not express their interactions the same way.

Yitro will protect his daughter and mentor his son-in-law while bringing his grandsons to their father.  The Jewish people are better off because Yitro spoke with familial authority to Moses. He was the only person in Torah to ever speak as a parent to Moses and it gives us a glimpse into how complex that relationship can be.

To the fathers-in-law and sons-in-law all around us, I tip my hat to you for navigating these nuances as often as you do.  I support you in any hallway you choose to stand with every apple you hold in your palm.

Parshat Beshalach: The Miraculous, Wondrous, Unimaginable, What-cha-ma-call-it

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A while ago I saw a funny cartoon (I think today it’s called a meme though I still don’t understand why we can’t just keep calling it a cartoon…) that I thought speaks beautifully of our era.  It generally goes like this: two rabbits sitting on a park bench and the caption reads: ‘Life Before Google’. One rabbit says to the other, ‘I wish I knew more about the history of rabbits’ and the other rabbit says, ‘Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice.’   Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate how everything is at our fingertips and communication is but a few clicks away. When my husband is late getting home, I admit I have said to him: ‘if only there were a handy little device in your pocket that could help you let me know.’

So, I can’t help but wonder if there is any excitement left in the unknown.  Do we feel that things are beyond our reach conceptually? Could we ever be the rabbits on the park bench?

One of the great moments of mystery is when we explain to our kids that they’re going to have a sibling.  I remember understanding never to tell a child that we love them so much, we just couldn’t wait to have another.  It’s like telling your spouse you love them so much you couldn’t wait to be intimate with someone else. It sounds logical but it’s a terrible thing to communicate.

Whichever way we told our kids about a new addition to the family, I am always struck by the things kids filled in because we neglected to address their perspective.  Some of my kids assumed that the new baby would live with my parents. Friends of mine mentioned their kids thought the new baby would come home with its own mother because they didn’t agree it could share theirs.  Other friends mentioned that they dropped their daughter with her grandparents on the way to the hospital to deliver the new baby. After coming home with the baby, the daughter refused to visit the grandparents for a long time, afraid the parents would pick her up with yet another new baby.  When we think we know everything about something we’ve been doing since the dawn of time, we are suddenly struck with understanding how little we really know.

In this week’s Torah reading, Parshat Beshalach, Israel leaves Egypt and starts to complain about not having food.  God sends manna from heaven. The description of manna is that it’s off-white, moist, spoils easily, it’s flavour changes person to person although it always looks the same.  The Sages tell us that the way God sends the manna and feeds Israel is a means of building trust between God and Israel. In essence, the Torah is describing mother’s milk.  

It also fits the context in that Israel, as a people, were just born by walking through the dry canal of the Red Sea and now they want to nurse and bond.  In fact, later in the Torah, Moses will get angry with God and say he no longer wants to ‘nurse’ the people. Remembering that Israel left Egypt with full supplies of everything they need, including cattle, it completes the image of a newborn in a household filled with food but unable to access any of it.  The newborn needs a special food relationship that nourishes and builds trust.

But while the imagery is familiar to us, it is completely unknown to Israel.  The Torah says they wake up in the morning, look outside and see the ground covered with this stuff, at which point they exclaim: ‘what is that stuff?’, in Hebrew: ‘maan hu?’, in transliteration: ‘manna’ and in translation: ‘It’s manna’.  And that is how we get the word ‘manna’ that literally means: the ‘what is that?’ (the word what-cha-ma-call-it comes to mind).

We are so baffled by it, that we perpetuate the name that embodied the wonderment.  And yet, it is the Divine expression of what goes on naturally between the females and babies of every mammal in creation.  We’ve taken it for granted to the extent of not recognizing it when we see it in our parshah.

The Torah shows us that wondrous things occur around us constantly.  With our phones in our pockets, and seemingly unlimited access to everything through our electronics, we can still be the rabbits on the bench.  Abraham Joshua Heschel used to teach that we should opt not to ask God for success or power, but choose instead to ask God for wonder. It sits around us all the time, it’s a matter of perspective.

Parshat Bo: Even God Makes a Mess of Things Sometimes

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I was helping someone move into their new home this week.  They pre-warned me that I would be walking into a mess. Lots of boxes, lots of chaos, piles of things waiting to be organized.  I thought of my life and whether or not being in the midst of a mess bothers me. I decided…it depends.

I always have a mess in my car.  I consider my car a big purse on wheels.  If I were stranded somewhere for a while, I could exist on what is in my car – pillow, blanket, dental floss, lots of books and…yes…emergency popcorn.  It is a purposeful mess, in that I know where everything is and why it’s there. To others, it’s messy, to me it’s organized chaos. If you move anything around in my car, I won’t understand where and why you put ‘that thing’ where you did, so I will now be confused. Once, years ago, I got into my car one morning only to find it had been broken into.  Nothing was taken (I never leave valuables in my mess). How did I know it was broken into? The thieves left piles of things they had gone through searching for anything worthwhile. My stuff is never in piles – that’s how I knew. For neighbourhood statistics, I reported it to the police who kept asking if there was any damage to anything. I finally had to admit that the thieves left it neater than they found it.  Not my best moment.

When we encounter a mess, it is our inclination to tidy it or find ‘method to the madness’.  We don’t ever intend to create chaos. It’s actually really difficult to do.

Have you ever intentionally tried to make a mess?  I don’t mean have you ever ended up with a mess, but have you ever tried to make a mess?  Most often, a mess is the result of trying to do something else.  It’s easy to make a mess when you try to cook something, or when you’re trying to fix something.  I can’t actually think of a situation when the goal is to make a mess and nothing else. In fact, we usually ask people not to leave a mess behind them – our goal is anti-mess.

We come by this honestly, so much in Judaism is about ordering chaos. Whether it’s the beginning of Genesis, where God is ordering chaos, our prayer book, a Siddur (which translates as ‘Order’), or the Seder (‘the Order’) at Pesach, our model is to organize everything around us.  Even our texts are formatted on each page so there is order to the commentaries. We are never presented with disarray.

So, if everything is about ordering chaos, we come to this week’s Torah reading, parshat Bo, we read about the plagues God brings to Egypt, and we have to ask…what’s going on?  If the goal is to get us out of Egypt, surely God can do that in an instant without bothering anyone. Sitting on the wings of eagles comes to mind. In other words, why have plagues?

Maybe Egypt needs to be punished for what it did.  Except, God never mentions punishing Egypt as a goal when he enlists Moses to lead.  In fact, we are so bothered by the plagues that during the Seder we take wine out of our cups when we recite them because we are reducing our joy.  We are troubled by those plagues enough that we have to ask: why have them?

If we go back to the job God describes to Moses, we notice that there are two parts to it.  The first is the one we all know: get Israel out of Egypt. The second goal is the lesser known one: all of Egypt must know that God is God.  Basically, change Egypt’s world view. Get Pharaoh to acknowledge that he, in fact, is not a deity and they’ve had it wrong all along. When Moses insists to God that he doesn’t want the job, I believe he’s rejecting the second goal.  When you’re dealing with a powerful God, the first part of the task is easy. It’s when you’re dealing with people’s attitudes that the task becomes unimaginable. How can Moses possibly change Pharaoh’s mind?

And so God proceeds to undo creation in Egypt.  Each plague will remove another element of the creation of the world, and Egypt will be plunged back into primordial chaos.  For example, the first thing created in Genesis is light. It lasts for three days as a unique light of creation that the Sages describe as light that can be felt.  Undoing this light results in the plague of darkness in Egypt. The darkness lasts for three days and is described as a darkness that is heavy upon the person. It can be felt.  

But the most obvious example of God’s message is the last plague: the death of the first born.  The opposite of God creating the first person. The undoing of life. God breathed life into Adam and God will pass through Egypt taking the breath out of every first born.  

The message now becomes: only the God who created the universe would know how to undo it.  God is deliberately putting chaos back into Egypt with the goal of having them realize God is the One who created it all.  The plagues trouble us because they weren’t meant to speak to us and, in the end, they don’t.

Judaism is a model of order from chaos and organization from disarray, but not all of God’s messages are meant for us. The Torah always lets us know that God has relationships with all people and all beings.  How humbling to realize that the redemption from Egypt, the pivotal moment in creating the Jewish people, is framed with unique and monumental events that were never meant to speak to us.

Parshat Va’era: But Shoes Are Shoes…Aren’t They?

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I spent some time this week focusing on the Mussar value of ‘Hakarat hatov’ – recognizing the good.  We often reduce it to the expression ‘thank you’ and file it under gratitude. Actually, to be honest, we often say ‘thank you’ and file it under ‘things I do when triggered by something that doesn’t have too much relevance or meaning anymore’.  In other words, things I say when I’m in automatic.

There is a foundational value in Judaism of recognizing the good, reframing ourselves to view things positively.  We are commanded to choose life, we are also told to do things from within a place of joy and, most obviously, we toast to life.  We are cautioned to stay away from the dark negative places both physically and mentally. Finding the darkness within us and others comes too naturally to us because, on a very base level, it keeps us safe.  If I expect the worst, then I am prepared for it, whereas if I expect the best, I could easily be blindsided and hurt.

So, in the first steps of recognizing the good, we are taught to say ‘thank you’.  But the nuances of thanking someone are huge when we recognize how it opens endless explorations of our perspective.

When I was potty training my kids, each of them reacted differently.  One of them chose to completely ignore the potty sitting in the middle of the room and defiantly chose to use the floor right next to it. The message was clear: ‘I can control this, but I will choose where and when’ – message quickly received.  Another of my kids explained to me that they know I want them to use the potty but they prefer their diaper (those are the exact words used as they felt they needed to explain to me why this is a doomed venture and I somehow don’t get it).  But one of my children thanked me each and every time. 

With this child, I would remind him of the potty as clearly as I could.  Often, that would take the shape of my saying ‘do you have to pee’ every few minutes and his answering “no, thank you.”  It was never just a yes or no answer, it was always followed with a ‘thank you’. I couldn’t tell if I should correct him because I wasn’t sure it was incorrect.  He somehow heard my question to him as an invitation, or maybe he heard my question as a consideration of him. I’m not sure, but without doubt his ‘thank you’ made me explore what my question meant.  Was I worried about having to clean up a mess next to the potty? Was I worried that he would never train and would somehow be marching down the aisle to his chuppah in a diaper? Was I worried that if he didn’t train by a certain age then I had failed as a mother?  Was I worried about him or me?

He gifted me the ‘thank you’ because he heard me inviting him to an action.  He heard that I had extended to him with consideration. His ‘thank you’ humbled me and I have never treated gratitude the same way since then.

This week’s parshah, Va’era, has Moses and Aaron in Egypt and the plagues begin.  But Moses is not the one to start the plagues, it is Aaron who turns the Nile into blood and it is Aaron who brings frogs from the Nile.  We know that when it comes to Torah, it is rare to see agreement in the commentaries, but in this instant there is agreement. Moses cannot harm the Nile, it must be Aaron.

While the Nile represented the instrument of death for the baby boys of Egypt, for Moses alone, it was a place of refuge and safety.  The Nile could have upturned the little ark Moses was floating in, but it did not. It kept him safe and brought him to the hands of Pharaoh’s daughter, the woman who would save him.  Moses cannot harm the Nile because he must show gratitude to its waters.

But is the Nile a living thing?  Must we show gratitude to inanimate objects? Interestingly, Judaism says we must.  There was a sage in the Talmud who would wrap his shoes carefully before discarding them.  When asked by his students why, he explained that those shoes kept his feet from harm for years and so he will treat them with respect to show his gratitude.  Of course, the shoes don’t know…but he does.

There was a rabbi who headed a yeshiva in Jerusalem in the 1980s.  His name was Rabbi Yisrael Zeev Gustman. He was the last ‘dayan’ (rabbinical judge) in Vilna before the Holocaust and when he fled, he hid in the forests.  Upon establishing his yeshiva after the war, he insisted that he, and only he, be the gardner of the grounds. Some students felt it was not respectful to have him fill that role and he answered, “my life was saved by the shelter of the bushes and the fruit of the trees”.  He said that he was expressing gratitude to the forest that sheltered him. The trees will never know…but he will.

So, Jewish environmentalism is not based on the logical argument not to poison the nest we live in.  That is an argument of self-interest. Jewish environmentalism sits on the idea of ‘Hakarat hatov’, gratitude.  We are forbidden to harm something that has treated us so well, that has fed us and sheltered us and quite literally given us the air we breath.  We are commanded to take care of the earth because it is how we say thank you.

And the Talmud takes it even further.  There is a verse in the book of Deuteronomy that commands us not to despise the Egyptian because we were a stranger in his land.  In other words, before Egypt enslaved us, we were welcomed in and fed during a famine. The Torah tells us we must not hate them, but the Talmud tells us we must never harm them.  Now it is not only about how we should feel but it is also about how we act toward them.  

Except, are we supposed to simply erase the sufferings and the torture of slavery?  Of course not. Human suffering is never to be ignored, but should the pain of it be perpetuated?  The Torah tells us to learn from our Egypt experience. Never treat the stranger badly, never turn away someone in need.  But our suffering in Egypt ended, we were brought to freedom and the Torah tells us we were paid before we left. In other words, learn what we need to learn from the suffering in order to create a positive future.  Carry the lesson forward, not the hatred.

The opportunities to ‘recognize the good’, the moments that slip by us and are then lost, but with a simple thought to gratitude, we could change so much.  Maybe the next time a guest thanks us for our hospitality, instead of automatically saying ‘you’re welcome’, we could stop ourselves and sincerely express, ‘thank you for your visit.’

Parshat Shmot: Sugar and Spice

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This Shabbat we start reading the book of Shemot (Exodus).  And the first parshah takes us quickly into the land of women.

For any of the men reading this, be aware that I am venturing into female territory – discussing ‘womens’ things.  To refer to the sage advise of Bette Davis: fasten your seatbelts, boys, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

To begin, there are topics women discuss easily with each other and the moment these topics arise I witness men finding ways to leave the room.  When I was young, if my sister and I ever mentioned our periods, my brothers couldn’t get away fast enough. When my daughters likewise mentioned it, my sons would diplomatically excuse themselves and only come back into the room after checking if it was ‘safe’.

But for women, these kinds of topics are so much part of our reality, so frequently part of our mundane, that we forget not everyone around us shares these things.  When my oldest daughter began her cycles, I went through all the beautiful concepts of maturity and womanhood with her. Everything was perfect until she realized this would happen every month.  She was then pretty angry – it’s beautiful once in a while but what did I mean EVERY month?!? By the time my youngest daughter crossed that threshold she was so used to hearing about it from her sisters that she had no hesitation communicating why she was moody.  I had to put my foot down when she would curl into a ball, snap at her brothers and then exclaim: ‘Leave me alone, my ovaries are killing me!”

What is mundane and routine for one gender can be totally opaque to the other.  I remember the predicament of watching feminine hygiene commercials with my sons in the room.  They weren’t curious about what the products were for (they were quite young at the time) but they were livid that girls get something with ‘wings’ and they don’t.  In their minds their sisters get to be airborne with these things – why don’t they get to fly too?!

We all get to a point of accepting that some things will be natural to one gender and somewhat enigmatic to the other.

I raise all this because this week’s parshah talks about Israelite women giving birth in Egypt and the midwives who attend them.  Pharaoh has issued an edict for the midwives to kill all the baby boys. The midwives refuse. But why would Pharaoh command midwives to do his dirty work?  He has soldiers, he has unlimited ways to get the job done. The problem he faces is that while a conquered people will endure almost anything, they do it in the hopes that the future for their children will be better.  People will bear the burdens put upon them as long as they feel they can protect their children. If a tyrant targets the children, he is risking a revolt. Pharaoh is a brilliant tyrant, we see it again and again in text. He is instructing the midwives to kill the baby boys on the birthing stones so the mothers won’t know what they did. Present the baby as stillborn.

And here is where we delve into the world of women.  In the ancient world, women did not give birth lying on a bed. That would be silly, because then the women are pushing a baby laterally while gravity is pulling the baby downward.  Women would squat on stones that allowed gravity to help with the delivery. As any pregnant woman can tell you, there comes a point in the pregnancy when your can no longer see anything below your belly button.  Whatever is below that sight line is a blind spot. So, a woman giving birth in ancient Egypt cannot see the baby birthing. The midwife will narrate everything and then produce a baby…or not.

But these midwives, these women in charge of ushering life into the world, defy Pharaoh’s edict.  So he commands that the babies be ‘given’ to the Nile. Make it a religious sacrifice – anything but an open attack on the children.

Pharaoh is set up in the text as the destroyer, while the women are set up as the life givers and Egypt now represents a world of black and white. When Moses is born, he is a male rescued by women and named for Pharoah’s daughter.  He is the intersecting moment of black and white that produces the grey zone. It is only then that Israel can be redeemed.

Often times in today’s world, we crave the simplicity of black and white definitions.  We leave the room when we don’t want to hear the other opinion or entertain another point of view.  We might think we’re avoiding being uncomfortable, but maybe avoiding Egypt is worth a bit of discomfort

Parshat Vayigash: The Human Family Blood, Sweat & Tears

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I was on vacation with my family for 10 days, together, 12 of us, in one house with one virus we all shared.  Like dominoes, one by one, each of us developed a cough, a fever, aches, pressure in the sinuses…and lousy moods.  Innocent questions of ‘how did you sleep’ were often met with variations of responses from ‘how do you think I slept’, to ‘what did you mean by that’.

We struggled to understand why medicines we can get on the shelf at home were only available by prescription where we were.  In moments of respite, we played games together in one room until someone started to cough at which point we all pulled our shirts over our mouths and noses.  People were sent into their rooms for the duration as others dreamed of bathing in hand sanitizer.  

In the midst of the roller coaster of vacation get-away and sickness overload, I heard someone ask a sibling why they were moody.  The question was posed as: isn’t blood thicker than water? And because we were all stuck in a house together and had already talked about anything interesting, and because…we are who we are… we argued about whether or not that phrase makes any sense.

If it’s a declaration of fact, then of course blood is thicker than water…big deal! (Amazing how being sick robs you of any sense of nuance or compassion).  But the phrase is used to indicate that family is more important than other things. How do blood and water mean that? We all agreed that ‘blood’ is family, but then how does ‘water’ mean everything else?

In my family there are history buffs and the historic phrase ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than water’ was volunteered as a source.  Pooling the information people had, as well as a quick check on the internet (which, by the way, doesn’t know much about the phrase), here’s what we came up with:

  1. The ‘blood of the covenant’ is an image of warfare. Those who spill blood together with you on the battlefield are more your family than your biological family – ‘water’ being the waters of the womb.  Your brothers-in-arms should come first.

OR

  1. The ‘blood of the covenant’ is the blood of the New Covenant, the blood of Christ.  When women would join a convent they were taught that the ‘blood’ of Jesus as redeemer is thicker than their biological families.  The church family should come first.

So, it actually never means that family should come before all else.  It clearly means the opposite!

Yet, there’s no question that it is ALWAYS used with the intention of saying that family should always come first.  But, in a way, it opens the possibility of defining families as those with whom we strike a covenant. It is not the womb alone that defines a family and the pull we feel toward it.

A friend of mine is adopted and she knew from her earliest memory that she was adopted.  Her parents put it to her that she was ‘chosen’. In fact, they explained to her that they felt bad for other families because other parents were stuck with what they got but her parents felt lucky because they got to choose her.  She was told that she was born of their hearts.

This idea of family by choice speaks clearly in this week’s parsha, Vayigash.  Jacob and his family have been brought to Egypt to reunite with Joseph. In fact, it is Pharaoh who commanded that they all come to Egypt.  Pharaoh is not unbiased in this matter. In essence, Pharaoh adopted Joseph when he renamed him, gave him a wife and a job as second in command.  Pharaoh has heard that Jacob, the biological father, is still alive. As the head of an empire family, Pharaoh knows ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’.  Jacob must appear before him.

When Pharaoh and Jacob meet, they both realize they represent different families to Joseph.  Jacob is the family of birth, while Pharaoh is the family of choice. Why else did Joseph never send for his father in all the years of Egypt?  One of Pharaoh’s first questions of Jacob is to ask how old he is (in other words, how much longer do I have to worry about you). Jacob answers by saying ‘I’m old but I come from a line of people of longevity’, (I might be old now, but I’m not as old as I’m going to get – I’m not going anywhere fast).  Interesting response, since earlier Jacob stated that he only wants to live long enough to see Joseph, then he can die. Now, with Pharaoh in the picture, he suddenly indicates he’s got a lot of living to do.

There are many relationships in our lives and we build many families around us.  Some feel the commitment of blood should surpass all else while others feel the commitment of loyalty should define.  The Torah commands us to behave a certain way toward family, without stating that the family of birth is of preference to all others.  Family is a foundation from which we build more families and we define and navigate peace within our families – all of them.

As Pharaoh and Jacob stand facing each other, I can’t help but think each of them, in their own cultural language, is looking at the other and thinking ‘but blood is thicker than water’ and they’d both be right.

Because He Dared to Dream

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a good week.  I’ve spent a few days hearing about strange dreams.  Not the kind that come from daydreams and zoning out but actual dreams.  A young woman I know is expecting her first baby and is starting to have very strange dreams. They are shocking to her and a bit frightening and so I have been reassuring her that everything is fine and that pregnancy brings about strange dreams.  This week’s parshah, Vayeshev, is filled with Joseph’s dreams and so my mind has been circling back and forth around dreams.

The Sages in the Talmud tell us that dreams are messages you send yourself.  It is then important to try and read those messages (somewhere Freud is dancing a hora).  The Sages then repeat in several different places that the power of the dream never lies within the dream itself, it lies within the interpretation of the dream.  It is not the content of the message that will matter, it is how we hear it. Put another way, meaning does not rest within a book, it rests within the reader.

When I was teaching Tefillah in kindergarten, we were discussing the morning prayer of ‘Modeh Ani’.  The first words uttered when opening our eyes in the morning is to thank God for returning my soul to me.  Of course, the kids all ask where their souls went at night that now they’re back. The conversation pretty much centred around God showing our souls wonderful things when we sleep as a reward for the good things we do.  One kid asked if nightmares are then a punishment for bad things we do. Everyone agreed that nightmares are punishment (ah, if the world could only stay as black and white as this). But one kid objected and said that dreams can’t be punishments.  Nightmares are when God takes our souls and shows them the things that scare us the most so we can see them when we’re safe in our beds and together with God. That answer has stuck with me all these years. This is why the Sages tell us to learn Torah from children.

Interestingly, the Talmud also mentions that our souls journey at night and bring us dreams of things we have never seen or hear languages we have never learned.  In the Talmud, we journey with angels.

I can’t help but think of Joseph and his two dreams.  The Torah tells us that Joseph and his brothers don’t get along.  It’s only made worse by the ‘special’ robe Jacob gives him. It’s not a multi-coloured robe, it’s striped.  That actually makes all the difference. A richly coloured robe would designate royalty while a striped robe designates being the heir.  Jacob has designated Joseph as his heir because he is first born of Rachel, the loved wife. Of course his brothers will hate him now – it is a terrible insult to them, but most importantly, to their mother, Leah, the first wife.  Insulting someone personally is minuscule in comparison to insulting their mother. The Torah tells us they cannot ever speak a kind word to Joseph.

And so Joseph dreams his dreams.  The first one has him working with his brothers in the fields as they bind sheaves.  He says the brothers’ sheaves circled his and bow. The brothers are appalled and blame him for dreaming that they should serve him.  Things get worse between them, which leads us to the crucial question: why would he then tell them of a second dream?

Joseph returns to his brothers and describes a second dream where the sun, the moon and stars are bowing to him.  He also tells his father this dream. Everyone gets mad at him. How dare he think that the family would worship him?  Jacob seems to understand that the sun and the moon represent himself and Rachel, except some commentaries point out that Rachel has already died so Jacob’s interpretation could not be true.  In other words, maybe the problem isn’t the dream, it’s that it’s being wrongly interpreted.

What if Joseph isn’t dreaming a dream of worship but rather a dream of welcoming.  In the ancient world people bow to each other to welcome each other more commonly than to worship.  Joseph’s first dream has him working with his brothers, sharing a common activity in the field. Maybe their sheaves surrounded him in an image of inclusion and then bow with a gesture of welcome.  Maybe the brothers have entirely missed what he was trying to tell them and so he tries telling them again with a second dream. He tries to tell his father how isolated he is feeling.

When everything backfires so badly, Joseph doesn’t stop dreaming, he just stops telling them about it.  They never get past feeling insulted by the striped coat and so it is the insult that is dictating the interpretations.  The dreams trigger Joseph being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Only when Joseph masters interpreting dreams will he rise to great power in Egypt.

The key is not in the dreams, it is in how we choose to hear them.  We have two options: the first is to accept the brothers’ interpretations and conclude Joseph was self-centred, ego-driven and thoughtless.  The second option is to question their interpretation and conclude the brothers could not put aside feeling insulted in order to hear a genuine appeal coming their way.  

We learn nothing from the first option.  The second option makes us question how often we allow a perceived insult to block us from hearing an authentic plea.  

Dreams are messages we send ourselves, they are journeys of the soul. We must read them with care, and when we hear the dreams of others, we must always hear the person speaking the dream before we hear the dream.