2 Queers 5 Books

A writing project by Agnes Borinsky and Ezra Furman. We are studying the weekly Torah portion. Available in audio form, read by us, on various podcast platforms under the name "2 Queers 4 Questions."

[2q5b]

PEKUDEI

By Agnes

March 15th, 2024

I asked GPT-3 to write me a drash about Pekudei, and mentioned a few of the questions and themes that have been on my mind. What the bot came up with felt a little… bland? And suffice it to say this is me talking now, not a chatbot. But I am kind of fascinated by these language models, and I think there’s something in them that runs alongside the theology our tradition has articulated around revelation. Revelation as a flood of language with its source of Sinai, a flood that rushes on through generations, incorporating new teaching, new Torah, deeping, evolving, transforming — a voice that both has a singular source — God — and a collective source — our living, our learning, our teaching.

But more on GPT-3 — on the idea of a language model — later.

I want to start with a story about a figure from Genesis who becomes important in the midrashic tradition: Serah. Serah is link across history and generations. She lives for hundreds of years. Whenever something important is happening, she’s there. We may not see her right away, reading Genesis or Exodus, but if you squint, you can catch the hint of her in the background. Serah is the daughter of Asher, one of Joseph’s brothers. And she came down to Egypt with the Israelites. And she was pretty old at this point, like, several hundred years old, the only living Hebrew who would have known the figures from Genesis. And so, early in Exodus, when Moses was first making noise, people came to Serah and said, This guy is going around saying he’s here to redeem us, what do you think, is he the real deal? And at first she shook her head and said no, no. But then someone recounted something God told Moses to tell the people:

I have surely taken note of you, פָּקֹ֤ד פָּקַ֙דְתִּי֙ אֶתְכֶ֔ם

(3:16)

And when she hears this, Serah bat Asher says, Oh! Actually no — he’s the guy. And suddenly everyone takes Moses seriously. 

What that tips her off is that phrase — פָּקֹ֤ד פָּקַ֙דְתִּי֙

Because when Joseph was dying, he used a similar phrase:

God will surely take note of you, וֵֽאלֹהִ֞ים פָּקֹ֧ד יִפְקֹ֣ד אֶתְכֶ֗ם

And the midrash tells us that Asher passed that phrase on to his daughter Serah, and she remembered it, and it was a kind of secret code. So that when she heard Moses use the same phrase, she knew it was actually God who was speaking to him.

Which brings us to our parsha, Pekudei, and its opening words:

These are the records of the tabernacle, the tabernacle of the testimony, that were drawn up at the word of Moses.

אֵ֣לֶּה פְקוּדֵ֤י הַמִּשְׁכָּן֙ מִשְׁכַּ֣ן הָעֵדֻ֔ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר פֻּקַּ֖ד עַל־פִּ֣י מֹשֶׁ֑ה

And it’s not quite the gorgeous folded doubling of the earlier phrases — פָּקֹ֤ד פָּקַ֙דְתִּי֙ or פָּקֹ֧ד יִפְקֹ֣ד — but the same root does show up twice here — פְקוּדֵ֤י, the records — and פֻּקַּ֖ד, were drawn up. I’m struck by the recurrence of these words here, at this moment when we’re ending the second book of the Torah. It always feels like a new book means a key change, some deep shift in the framework with which we’re being asked to read. It is often destabilizing. 

So what difference is being signaled here?

For one thing, the words are split — rather than a single phrase, with a root doubled to create a poetic kind of emphasis, the words here describe two separate activities. There is the record of the work of building the tabernacle, and the command from Moses to keep that record.

For another thing, they’re both curiously passive. In the secret code that Serah bat Asher was tracking, we’re talking about an intensely activated verb — not only will I notice, but surely I will notice. It has a clear subject, this verb — God. And but even when it becomes a phrase — spoken by Joseph about God, or related by Moses to the people — that phrase itself is a wildly powerful catalyst. Hearing those words sends a shock through Serah’s body, and her affirmation of Moses is, midrashically at least, what sends a shock through the whole people.

So what do we make of the fact that here, our secret magic code is not particularly verb-y. Pekudei, the records, is a noun, not a verb. And pukad, were drawn up, is a passive verb. They were drawn up al pi Moshe, literally on Moses’s mouth, at his command, but he isn’t the one who draws them up.

So our phrase — this central, wildly, explosively catalytic phrase, the phrase that bridges Genesis and Exodus, that links an operatic era of heroes to an earth-shaking chapter of collective liberation — has shape-shifted in quite a profound way.

I can’t help but think that this is a hint about how we are to read the book to come, Leviticus, a book that is famously dry, legalistic, obscure, thorny. A thicket, really, of rules of conduct, many of which we find either irrelevant or abhorrent, and now-defunct ritual instructions.

Something is shifting. A key change. The framework for who our story is fundamentally about is shifting once again. It has already shifted from the flawed and big-souled loners of Genesis to the unruly but beloved collective of Exodus. And now it’s going somewhere else —

If I had to go based on this concluding parsha, I would venture to say that the protagonist of our next book is going to be something even stranger and more expansive: something like systems of meaning, patterns of behavior — as expressed in language.

The narrative content of this parsha primarily concerns the last stages of the building and assembly of the tabernacle. We are getting it, finally, to the place where it is ready to be used to serve God, and to travel with the people through the desert.

There are more spices, and oils, and curtains. There are tables and lavers and hooks and rings and utensils. The breastpiece that the high priest will wear, and all his robes, are being constructed. Betzalel and his assistants are completing their work. And it’s partly Betzalel, and it’s partly the Israelites as a whole who do it. The pronouns slide from singular to plural — he to they — without notice. We go from hearing that Betzalel made hooks for the posts, in 38:28, to “the Israelites did so” in 32. And then they bring everything to Moses, and he finishes the work.

There’s a whole poem there, in those shifting pronouns and sentence subjects, about the nature of collective creation. About the ways each individual’s labor may be distinct or symbolic but ultimately, if hearts so conspire, the work can reflect something done together.

But there’s also a refrain here, which doesn’t show up as noticeably in the last parsha. It appears both in the phrases describing the work of the Israelites and the work of Moses:

They attached to it a cord of blue to fix it upon the headdress above—just as Hashem had commanded Moses.

He spread the tent over the Tabernacle, placing the covering of the tent on top of it—just as Hashem had commanded Moses.

And it comes back, like a refrain in a Ginsberg poem:

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you laugh at this invisible humor

They do this — just as God commanded Moses.

They do this — just as God commanded Moses.

And on and on.

And it’s subtle, but this refrain is tipping us off to a huge inversion. A few parshiot ago, in Terumah, we got a series of instructions for how to build the tabernacle. Then we got a description of the actual building last week, in Vayakhel. The order is clear: God says, and, eventually, we do.

But here, as the book of Exodus closes, the order has flipped. We might expect: God commanded X, and they did X. But no. Our doing comes first. And God’s command comes second. Our action leads, and God’s wishes come in like an echo, an approving nod.

The language by which we codify behavior — the systems of meaning by which we conduct ourselves — and here I mean we, not in the symbolic Passover-seder sense that you and I are commanded to see ourselves as if we ourselves came out of Egypt — but literally you and I, now, today — the systems of meaning by which WE conduct ourselves – this alchemy of systems of meaning and behavior are becoming the protagonist of this wild, wild book.

It’s part of why I started by talking about GPT-3, a language model. A system of patterns and meaning and we can’t stop wondering if it’s “alive” or not. And the more we use it, the more we take it up, the more living it seems to be. What if Leviticus is a language model? And it, too, is alive, but only if we ourselves take it up.

Okay. Before I start rambling about AI, I want to step back and consider the stakes of what I’m proposing. If we are being told that our protagonist is shifting again — from historically specific individuals to a historically specific nation to a framework of meaning that gets transmitted in language — rules — what does that do to our sacred individuality? Every one of us is unique, we are taught. Every one of us is created in the image of God. If the focus is turning to rules, then what of each of our particular lives? Our waywardness, particularity, mess, joy, queer fuckery?

I’ve been reading about Simone Weil. And she talks about the I in a very particular way:

"We possess nothing in the world,” she says, “a mere chance can strip us of everything — except the power to say I. That is what we have to give to God.”

She further distinguishes individuality from personality. The I, she says, is a person’s sacred individuality. This is worthy of respect and honor. Personality, on the other hand, is more an accessory — it is the parts of us that are actually the least deep. The parts we list on dating apps and fret over, the parts that turn us towards self-absorption. The parts in which we so often locate our own value.

Weil writes: "Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.... Our personality is that part of us which belongs in error and sin.”

In her drash on Vayechi, Ezra wrote about the movement over the course of Genesis and Exodus from a book centered around certain exemplary figures to a book about a people:

The transformation of the patriarch era into an era of communal expansion in Egypt has [an]... opening quality, an uncovering that also entails a loss. The patriarchal intimacy with God, a clarity and protection, give way to an imperfect but much more widely shared relationship with God.

And I think there’s a loss here, too. We are leaving behind something of the idea of narrative. Something of the attachment we have to the personalities of Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Serah bat Asher. We’re entering a different kind of story. A story that exists in the fizzing, spitting mess that is some weird alchemy of fearless action and righteous compliance. We are entering a sacred language model. Our personalities are burning off, and only our blessed individualities remain. We may feel both erased and made sacred.

This is not a storybook anymore. We’re not hearing tales about other people way back when. We’ve been swallowed. We are doing this book. This book is inside us.

Pekudei was the first important word of our parsha. Our parsha ends with the word מַסְעֵיהֶֽם, their journeys.

For over the Tabernacle a cloud of Hashem rested by day, and fire would appear in it by night, in the view of all the house of Israel throughout their journeys.

לְעֵינֵ֥י כׇל־בֵּֽית־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בְּכׇל־מַסְעֵיהֶֽם

Rashi notices a tension here. A few verses earlier, we are told that the Israelites travel when the cloud lifts. When the cloud is there, on the other hand, they stay put. So if, when they are traveling, presumably the cloud has lifted, what does it mean to learn that the cloud and the fire remain in the view of the Israelites “throughout their journeys”?

We end the Book of Exodus on a word whose root suggests pulling up tent stakes, setting out. A word of instability, of break. And yet at the center of this particular unstable journey is something called a Mishkan — I have been translating it as tabernacle, but really it’s a dwelling-place. 

Way back in Genesis, God said to Isaac: 

 אַל־תֵּרֵ֣ד מִצְרָ֑יְמָה שְׁכֹ֣ן בָּאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֹמַ֥ר אֵלֶֽיךָ

Don’t go down to Egypt, dwell here. (Gen 26:2)

Dwell here, he said, and I’ll bless you.

I wonder if we might extend that, twist it. 

Don’t go down to Egypt. Don’t even go to the promised land. Dwell here, where you are, in the dailiness of your doing and being with others. 

There is going to be some tension. We are going to feel unsettled. And yet, at the center, we have this dwelling place that comes to live — not inside Abraham or Isaac or Jacob — or even Moses — but literally inside us. In a pattern of words that shapes how we understand ourselves, how we behave.

We are the protagonists now. My stomach turns. And also: It feels like home.

Chazak Chazak V’Nitchazek…. 

[2q5b]

VAYAKHEL

By Ezra

March 7th, 2024

In five parts.

א

In my early teens I wore a gold star of David necklace at all times, which my grandfather gave me. It wasn’t an heirloom. It was new and shiny. For me, it was a symbol of my connection to my grandfather and to Judaism. It was also, on one level, a symbol of the state of Israel, and that was fine with me. Throughout my teenage years I subscribed to a fairly uncomplicated Zionism. I understood the state of Israel to be necessary for Jewish survival, and I didn’t look much into the details. The concept of Israel was just one of the notes in the stately concerto of American Jewish life. My necklace was very dear to me. My grandfather was old, and had narrowly escaped the Holocaust.

I no longer have the necklace. I misplaced it at some point in my teens. My shame and dismay at losing the necklace was overwhelming. I didn’t mention it to anyone. I just privately carried my sense of myself as a fuck-up who loses important things, who didn’t deserve jewelry. Instead of the necklace, I wore the shame of having lost the necklace, under my shirt, over my heart.

But I also knew that it was just a piece of gold jewelry, nothing more.

ב

Our parasha this week is largely a description of the building of the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary in which God has promised to dwell, the ritual center of the first Jewish community, the group of escaped slaves walking through the wilderness on their way to a promised land. The meticulous instructions were already given in a previous parsha, weeks ago. But now they are carried out, in just as meticulous detail, every necessary action reiterated, but this time in the past tense instead of the future tense.

Every generation of this book’s readers asks the same question: why this repetition? It is almost comical. The most detailed and, let’s be honest, boring description of anything in the Bible, and it’s all repeated a second time. But Gertrude Stein comes to mind. “There is no such thing as repetition,” she wrote. “Only insistence.” And each insistence is its own. Each insistence comes at a different time, in an altered context.

The contextual change between the instructions for the Mishkan in parashat Trumah and the building of the Mishkan in parashat Vayakhel is earth-shattering. In between the two, the Israelites build and worship an idol, the Golden Calf. The people’s first collective sin. Moses intercedes with our infuriated God and obtains communal divine forgiveness. He goes back up the mountain and encounters God even more intimately and intensely. Some new relationship between God and the people has been established, but the Israelites are reeling from shame. Can the national spiritual mission really just continue as if nothing has happened?

Our parasha is not a repetition of the details of the Mishkan, but an insistence. We have failed tremendously, in some ways irreparably. And yet the work we have to do is still not done: the work of building a home for God in the physical world

ג

Never in my life have I seen the Jewish people so deeply morally degraded as we are now. Israel has responded to the horrific October Hamas attacks with months of overwhelming violence and destruction, killing tens of thousands of people with no clear positive result. Opportunities to bring hostages home safely in exchange for a cease-fire have been repeatedly refused. I do not absolve Hamas for the atrocities they’ve committed. Neither can I excuse Israel’s atrocities, far greater in scope and human impact. We are watching some of the most terrible humanitarian crimes ever committed by Jews in Jewish history.

This is a spiritual crisis for the Jewish people. It involves us all whether we like it or not. The monstrous acts in Gaza are grievous sins of the Jewish collective.

But these sins are being committed by the state of Israel. Jews are not the same entity as the state of Israel. The distinction is crucial and it must be crystal clear. The tendency to equate all Jews with the state of Israel can and does cause deadly anti-Semitism. And there has been an enormous uprising of Jewish dissent against the state of Israel’s ongoing moral travesties. 

         And yet the symbol I wore on a gold chain over my heart as a teenager is also on the tanks that roll through Gaza, killing civilians and destroying their homes.

ד

Jewelry is a mysteriously persistent motif in this part of the book of Exodus. The Golden Calf is built with contributions of jewelry, gold earrings are melted down to build the idol. After the people are punished, jewelry appears again. God tells Moses that the Israelites will still go to the Promised Land, but God will not go there with them. This is when the enormity of their sin really seems to register with the people.

וַיִּשְׁמַ֣ע הָעָ֗ם אֶת־הַדָּבָ֥ר הָרָ֛ע הַזֶּ֖ה וַיִּתְאַבָּ֑לוּ וְלֹא־שָׁ֛תוּ אִ֥ישׁ עֶדְי֖וֹ עָלָֽיו׃

When the people heard this terrible thing

they went into mourning,

and no one wore his jewelry.

Jewelry is emphasized in three successive verses. Next God commands them not to wear the jewelry, though they’ve already removed it. And then the situation is grimly, insistently summarized: the children of Israel stripped themselves, vayitnatzlu, of their jewelry. This is the same word that was repeatedly used to describe the Israelites’ acquisition of the wealth of their enslavers in Egypt.

Some legitimate splendor has been lost. The jewelry they once deserved and triumphantly wore has become unacceptable. They’ve given up any claim to splendor, to a narrative of beauty and victory. They’ve chosen the path of disgrace, and now they can see it. They feel like fuck-ups who don’t deserve jewelry.

There is a well-known midrashic tradition that women did not participate in the Golden Calf. It is based on two verses in the Golden Calf narrative: first Aaron asks the people to give him the gold earrings in the ears of their wives and children, but the next verse says that they “broke off the gold rings that were in their own ears and brought them to Aaron.” Aaron addressed only the men, and they gave the rings from their own ears, not their wives’. The midrash hears this as female refusal to participate.

In contrast, this week’s parsha has an unusual emphasis on female participation. In the narrative of the communal contribution to building the Mishkan, women are specifically mentioned four times. And the first thing they contribute is their jewelry.

וַיָּבֹ֥אוּ הָאֲנָשִׁ֖ים עַל־הַנָּשִׁ֑ים כֹּ֣ל ׀ נְדִ֣יב לֵ֗ב הֵ֠בִ֠יאוּ חָ֣ח וָנֶ֜זֶם וְטַבַּ֤עַת וְכוּמָז֙ כׇּל־כְּלִ֣י זָהָ֔ב

“The men came in addition to the women; anyone whose heart moved them brought brooches, earrings, rings, and pendants —gold objects of all kinds…”

Rashi, commenting on this verse, cites the Talmud, which identifies the last item, “pendants,” chumaz, as referring to gold jewelry women wore on their private parts. They even gave their clit rings to make a home for God.

It’s not the jewelry, then, that God rejects. Not the gold. It’s that you can’t decorate yourself in gold if you’re going to spit in God’s face. It is an insult to wear a Star of David while you’re murdering the poor. Such a symbol becomes a disgrace. 

In contrast, the clit ring of a righteous woman is welcomed as part of the glorification of the Holy One on earth.

ה

It is my practice to pray once a day. There are three daily prayer services, but I pray just one each day, whichever one I am able to. I talk to God, the infinity that causes existence, as if we knew each other.

Weekday prayer always includes prayers for forgiveness for sin, most of which are spoken in the first person plural. “Slach lanu avinu ki chatanu,” we say. “Forgive us, our father, because we have sinned.” No matter how much the state of Israel is on my mind these days when I think of Jewish sins, the prayer is not “they have sinned.” It is “we have sinned.” Praying for forgiveness collectively, as a unified people, means that I can’t ignore the worst actions of my fellow Jews. I cannot dissociate from those actions or fully disown them. The consequences of those actions implicate me. They demand some response.         After the Golden Calf crisis, Moses’ first act of leadership, the first verb ascribed to him, is the name of our parasha, “Vayakhel.”

וַיַּקְהֵ֣ל מֹשֶׁ֗ה אֶֽת־כׇּל־עֲדַ֛ת בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֲלֵהֶ֑ם אֵ֚לֶּה הַדְּבָרִ֔ים אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֥ה ה’ לַעֲשֹׂ֥ת אֹתָֽם׃ 

Moses then congregated the whole Israelite community and said to them: These are the things that Hashem has commanded you to do.

Vayakhel, he congregated them. The word is from “kahal,” community. He treated the people as a single entity. He didn’t divide the Israelites into those who sinned and those who abstained. What they needed to move forward after a disastrous national failure was to think of themselves as one group, with important work ahead of them. They are told to observe Shabbat, and then they are asked to contribute gifts to the building of the Mishkan.

Not everyone committed the sin. But everyone is called on to heal it. 

Living my comfortable American life, reading the news, seeing the images of mass starvation, bodies blown apart, neighborhoods turned to rubble, I have felt so powerless to respond. But this is incorrect. Being powerless to prevent destruction is very different than being powerless to respond to it.

The Jewish people have the work of rebuilding ahead of us, the work of healing the damage we have done. Everyone is invited to contribute to that healing. Anyone whose heart moves them.

[2q5b]

KI TISA

By Agnes

March 6th, 2024

There is often a moment before a collapse that the collapse really begins. I’ve had relationships where there’s a thought – something like, Oh, I think this might be over – that appears in the mind. And I might persuade myself that I can make things work, and not yet, and I don’t want it to end, and relationships take work, etc etc. But some part of me knows that it’s already over. The thought has been had. The threshold has been crossed. It’s just a matter of time. 

I have it with migraines, too. Oh, I’m going to have a migraine in a few minutes, I find myself thinking. And sure enough, in a few minutes, the familiar symptoms – the sensitivity on my skin, the fleck of blur at the edges of my vision. I am nervous to say this now, honestly, worried that the thinking will bring one on.

There are beginnings. And there are the beginnings before the beginnings.

This week we read about one of the biggest collapses in the history of our people – a mess for which we bear sole responsibility. God brought us out of Egypt with an outstretched arm. God brought us through the desert to the foot of Mount Sinai, where we heard God’s voice – saw the sounds – the mountain was consumed in fire and smoke – and the first thing we heard, the most important, really, was “I am your God. You shall have no other Gods before me.” 

This is too terrible, we said, too overwhelming. We get it, we get it. Please, Moses, go up and get the rest of the message for us. And he does. And we wait at the bottom of the mountain, slowly recovering, and beginning to make sense of where we’ve been, what has been done to us and for us. 

A week goes by. Two weeks. Three. Five. Six.

Six weeks. Six weeks is time, but not that much time. If we had applied for an artist’s residency, we’d never expect to hear back in six weeks. We’d give it, what, three months? Four? At best. Six weeks is enough time to worry, but you’d think not so long that we’d forget the feeling of the voice, the rumbling of the mountain. 

And yet we seem to lose our cool. And we come to Aaron, panicky, sweating, fidgeting, unable to make eye contact. And we insist that we need a new God. One we can see, and touch. One who can lead us through the desert. Aaron spooks. It’s something in our eye. It’s a little scary. And he goes along with it. 

I have this theory that the seed of this great betrayal – this moment of idolatry – the moment before the collapse where the collapse really begins – is in a single word. Yadah. Know. 

“Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.” (32:1)

לֹ֥א יָדַ֖עְנוּ מֶה־הָ֥יָה לֽוֹ

What kind of a statement is that?? We do not know what has happened to him. They’re talking about knowledge but really they are avoiding talking about all the things they’re feeling. 

They might have said: Aaron, we’re terrified. We need guidance. We are panicking, the future seems unfathomable, the journey ahead overwhelming. What kind of God, what kind of leader, leaves us alone in this state? Help us. They might have said: Aaron, we’re angry. We feel betrayed by this silence, by all the destruction wreaked on the place we were born, by the suffering of the people we knew back in Egypt. What kind of God, what kind of leader, would want to cause that kind of misery, even in the name of our freedom? Help us.

But no: they take all their fear, and anger, and trauma, and they try to contain it, clean the edges off it, wrap it neatly in this little word: know. We do not know. 

And they throw it, petulantly, in Aaron’s face. Asking him to take responsibility.

As if knowing Moses’s whereabouts would ease the terror of freedom, resolve the catastrophe of unequally distributed suffering. 

As if what they are facing is a failure of knowledge, and not a crisis of being. 

-

The parsha begins with a census. An attempt to figure out how many people are in the camp. You take a census when you want to know who, exactly, you are.

But we are told, in a roundabout way, that we have to be careful when we take a census. It can be dangerous to count the people. 

When you take a census of the Israelite men according to their army enrollment, each shall pay God a ransom for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled. (30:12)

It’s as if being counted makes us vulnerable. Knowledge does not offer security here. It opens us up to danger. On a certain level, it’s superstition. You get counted and you make yourself vulnerable to the evil eye. Isn’t there a rule where it’s bad luck to point at someone? It’s like that. 

The 16th century Italian commentator Sforno has a beautiful read on this, actually. Why is it that we need to count? He asks. We need to count because the number of us is always changing. And why is the number always changing? Because we are mortal. And why are we mortal? Because, back in Eden, we sinned. Every census, he says, is a reminder of sin. God has reason to punish sinners. So a census may be a practical necessity, Sforno tells us, but every time we undertake it we are putting ourselves in grave danger. 

I love this reading. I am not sure I agree that sin is the right framework to describe what happens in Eden. But I am very moved by the idea that knowledge is somehow deeply entangled with a sense of our own vulnerability. Our history of violence, our inheritance of fear. The parts of us that want to know are the mortal parts of us. They are small, tender, exposed. 

And we deny that connection at our own peril. 

We live in a world where knowledge is a source of power, control. It is our knowledge, we think, that keeps us safe. Science will save us from climate change. The experts know best how to solve this or that global crisis. If I can analyze my own emotions, and how they arise from particular patterns in my family, they will not overtake me so totally. I will not have to feel them. 

I do believe in scholarship. I believe in reflection, and research, and learning, and therapy. 

But I also know that when knowledge becomes a shield we think can protect us from fear, and uncertainty, and the precariousness that is a part of being human, then it quickly becomes a kind of false god.

Later, in second Samuel, God will get angry at the people and incite King David against them. And what does David do, when he gets worked up? He calls for a census. His advisor seems to know what is going on. He says, are you sure? And David says yes, definitely. Do it. So they do the census. And when David has cooled down a little bit, he feels bad. 

…afterward David reproached himself for having numbered the people. And David said to the LORD, “I have sinned grievously in what I have done. Please, O LORD, remit the guilt of Your servant, for I have acted foolishly.” (24:10)

Suffice it to say, things don’t go well after that. 

This week’s parsha ends in a plague. So does second Samuel. Neither plague follows directly from the census. Other things happen in between – the connection is not direct – but when you zoom out, it’s hard not to feel the inevitability of the link between this act of counting ourselves, which Sforno tells us is a kind of shameful reminder of our own mortality, and this spectacular moment of mass death. The narrative ducks and weaves. It’s like we’re not allowed to draw a straight line. That would be too easy. Too… rational. The story won’t let itself be known that way, parsed that cleanly. The actual unfolding is wayward, startling, scary, violent, unpredictable. 

At the same time, seeking knowledge is a part of what we do. It’s not “If you take a census,” it’s, “When you take a census.” We need our scientists, we need our historians, our statisticians, our doctors, our brilliant weirdos with deep wells of learning and experience. But we need to pair that urge towards understanding with a necessary humility. When we take up knowledge, we must also remind ourselves of our fragile mortality. We must pay a ransom – each of us – a provisional prayer that we might be spared. 

The angel of death came through Egypt and slew all the firstborns. The angel of death didn’t know Egyptian from Israelite, the angel of death just knew to skip the houses with the blood on the doorpost. The Egyptians are the ones who lost their children that night. But the Israelites left knowing that for their freedom, they owed a life, too. They were not exempt, they were just spared. And so they pay a ransom. There is literally a ceremony for this – pidion ha-ben, in which parents pay a certain amount of money to a Cohen to redeem the life of their first-born child. The implication of the census in this week’s parsha is that we all need to be so redeemed. 

I read this parsha and I am reminded of something my rabbi recently said. “Do not entrench,” she said. Meaning: don’t dig yourself into a certain position and refuse to be moved. 

I read this parsha and I am reminded that my anguish, my grief, my rage, have something to teach. That I cannot avoid them by either deflecting engagement onto someone else, someone with more expertise. 

Do not treat knowledge like a god. Do not entrench. 

Do not treat knowledge like a shield. Do not deflect. 

Let us remember what it is we are here for. We are here to take care of ourselves, and each other. To walk with mystery. To honor the divinity that surrounds us. To work steadily, and unrelentingly, for a more whole and just world. We are here, in the words of my prayerbook, to praise, to labor, and to love. 

What false idols are we worshipping? Is our desire to serve God, and God’s vision of justice? Or is our desire to be right?

We are limited, we are vulnerable. 

Let us seek knowledge, but let us do it in a way that acknowledges our fear, our anger, our hope, our desire, and our mortality. 

Just before David orders a census taken of the people, we are told that“The anger of the LORD again flared up against Israel”. Rashi offers a comment on this verse. It is unclear from the text what the Israelites did that provoked God this time. And what is it that Rashi says? “I do not know what it was [they did].” 

I simply do not know.

[2q5b]

TETZAVEH

By Ezra

February 20th, 2024

We are deep in the second book of the Torah, the book called Shmot. That doesn’t mean Exodus. It means “names.”

Why is the book called the book of names? On the surface, it’s a reference to its opening sentence:

 וְאֵ֗לֶּה שְׁמוֹת֙ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל הַבָּאִ֖ים מִצְרָ֑יְמָה אֵ֣ת יַעֲקֹ֔ב אִ֥ישׁ וּבֵית֖וֹ בָּֽאוּ׃

And these are the names of the children of Israel who came into Egypt, with Yaakov; every man came with his household.

The names listed are the literal children of Israel, the twelve brothers whose names became the names of the tribes of Israel. Every man came with his household. No sisters are listed by name, though there were sisters. Wives, children, no names for them. Just these twelve brothers.

The theme of names hangs over the whole book, but only if you are paying attention. And so does the theme of siblings. Names and siblings are of course ideas that are linked: who gives a name? Usually a parent, a different name for each child.

These twelve brothers had a terrifyingly fraught relationship. Joseph’s brothers nearly killed him. They hated him, partly for the special garment their father had made for Joseph and only Joseph. They tore it off of him, stripped him naked, threw him into a pit and sold him to slave traders. The end result was that they all ended up in Egypt, where their descendents were slaves.

In the second chapter of Shmot, we meet a family that contains three young siblings. In that chapter, we only hear about two of them, and they do not yet have names, nor does their mother. A woman, she is called. A son. His sister. Living in slavery, it’s as if they’ve been dehumanized beyond nameworthiness. And when the nameless mother puts her nameless son in a basket on the river in hopes that he might escape the government child-killers, the nameless sister makes sure that he isn’t harmed.

וַתֵּתַצַּ֥ב אֲחֹת֖וֹ מֵרָחֹ֑ק לְדֵעָ֕ה מַה־יֵּעָשֶׂ֖ה לֽוֹ׃

And his sister stood far off, to know what would be done to him.

Cain kills Abel. Ishmael is driven out of Abraham and Sarah’s home in favor of Isaac. Jacob outwits Eisav and Eisav plots to kill him. Joseph’s brothers sell him to slave traders. But Miriam looks out for her brother. She saves his life.

Miriam, Aaron and Moses grow up to be a trio of siblings working in beautiful cooperation to rescue their people from Egypt and lead a social and spiritual revolution. In the midrash, Moses and Aaron do this dance of humility and mutual encouragement, each ceding leadership to the other. Aaron, the older brother, is not jealous when he finds out Moses has been chosen by God to bring their people out of Egypt. He collaborates with him, he helps him speak to Pharaoh. And then Moses reciprocates that support. Here’s a bit from the Midrash Tanchuma:

Moses said to [Aaron], “The Holy Blessed One has told me to ordain you as high priest.” Aaron said to him, “You have labored on the tabernacle; should I be made high priest?” He said to him, “By your life, even though you are being made high priest, it is as if I were being made [high priest]; for just as you were glad for me in my greatness, so I am glad for you in your greatness.” 

-Midrash Tanchuma, Shemini 3

Our parasha consists of commandments given by God to Moses about how his brother Aaron, and Aaron’s sons, are to be dressed while they perform priestly rituals. The clothing is so fabulous, and so meticulously described, it can almost seem like God is rubbing it in Moses’ face. Why, after all, is Moses not the high priest with a dynasty of heirs? Numerous midrashim frame Aaron’s anointment as priest as a punishment for Moses’ initial attempt to refuse God’s call to prophecy. You didn’t want the hard job, now you don’t get the fancy job.

But Moses not only steps aside from the highest position of ritual authority, he himself does every physical preparation for Aaron to occupy that position. Moses lovingly returns the favor of his older brother’s steadfast support up to this point. The tenderness and positivity is almost overwhelming. It’s as if Cain, instead of killing him, had knitted Abel a sweater. 

וְעָשִׂ֥יתָ בִגְדֵי־קֹ֖דֶשׁ לְאַהֲרֹ֣ן אָחִ֑יךָ לְכָב֖וֹד וּלְתִפְאָֽרֶת׃

You are to make garments of holiness for Aharon your brother, for glory and for splendor.

-Shmot 28:2

Do not overlook this moment. The exile in Egypt began with a garment torn off in a jealous act of brotherly violence. Now those brothers’ descendents have come out of Egypt, and their leader is asked to create and dress his brother in a beautiful garment, in love and humility, as an indispensable part of their service of God.

Something is being healed in this relationship, something about what siblings can be to one another. The garment Jacob made for Joseph is called a k’tonet passim, often translated as an “ornamented tunic.” And now Moses makes a k’tonet for Aaron to wear. And how is it ornamented?

וְלָ֣קַחְתָּ֔ אֶת־שְׁתֵּ֖י אַבְנֵי־שֹׁ֑הַם וּפִתַּחְתָּ֣ עֲלֵיהֶ֔ם שְׁמ֖וֹת בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

שִׁשָּׁה֙ מִשְּׁמֹתָ֔ם עַ֖ל הָאֶ֣בֶן הָאֶחָ֑ת וְאֶת־שְׁמ֞וֹת הַשִּׁשָּׁ֧ה הַנּוֹתָרִ֛ים עַל־הָאֶ֥בֶן הַשֵּׁנִ֖ית כְּתוֹלְדֹתָֽם׃

And you shall take two shoham stones, and engrave on them the names of the children of Israel:

six of their names on one stone, and the other six names on the other stone, according to their birth.

-Shmot 28:9-10

Here they are again: shmot b’nei yisrael. The brothers who nearly killed each other, now listed in perfect equality on an ornamented tunic, made by one brother, worn by the other.

It’s all so positive and warm and fuzzy. Brothers, at last, have learned to cooperate.

So here’s the feminist buzzkill: What about sisters? What about Miriam, the oldest sibling among the leaders? What about Dinah, the daughter of Israel, not listed with the sons on the holy breastplate? Where the hell are they?

There are a lot of answers one could give. But in my heart, there are two: one short, one long.

The short answer is easy, it’s baked into all of us who live in a patriarchy built on countless generations of patriarchal norms: they’re women. They’re not there because they never are. They’re supposed to be invisible. They do the dirty work, they cook and clean and they raise the babies. They don’t have their name on a plaque, they don’t serve in public office. Out of sight out of mind.

The long answer does not deny the short answer, which accurately describes the past and present. But the long answer dares to include the future.

When I am most able to believe in the Torah as a divine document is when I can see it as laying out paths for us that we have not yet fully walked. We say in the Torah service every Shabbat, “d’racheiha darchei noam, v’chol netivoteha shalom.” Her ways, the Torah’s ways, are ways of pleasantness, and all of her paths are peace. It can be a hard thing to say when you have just finished reading a portion of a text steeped in ancient habits of misogyny and violence. But the emphasis, in my mind, is on ways, paths. The most transformative ideas in the Torah are the ones that can point us in a direction, that lay out a pathway to be walked in our time and in the future we face.

The progression from Cain and Abel to Miriam, Aaron and Moses, by way of Joseph and his siblings, show us a pathway from violence to cooperation, from scarcity to abundance, from male infighting to feminine leadership. The walking of this pathway is nowhere near finished in the Torah as written. But it has begun. We have moved from a garment violently torn off of a sibling to one lovingly wrapped around a sibling. We have moved from brothers who kill each other to a sister who leads her people in song. We notice that Miriam’s name means, literally, rebellion, and we know that the feminist rebellion of our era is in her name.

Aaron’s breastplate bears shmot bnei yisrael, the names of the children of Israel. Those brothers had a sister named Dinah, whose name is not included. The gap where women have been erased in our Torah feels like an insult, but it can also be an invitation. We can take the loudest silences as opportunities to speak.

The name Dinah means justice, but conjugated in the feminine. In the space where her name should have been, the unwritten future calls to us. In that space, I see visions of priests of all genders with feminine justice emblazoned on our holy garments. 

[2q5b]

TRUMAH

By Agnes

February 16th, 2024

This week’s drash is dedicated to Cecilia Gentilli, who passed away last week. She was kind of a legend, activist, mother, storyteller, performer. If you don’t know her, or her work, there are all kinds of interviews and profiles. And her book, Faltas, is funny and moving and complex — one of the deepest reckonings with something like a moral order that I’ve read in a long time.

She had a huge impact on many people’s lives. I’m still a little shocked she’s gone. I see part of her legacy as an invitation to consider how huge a life can be. How much fight it can hold, how much humor, how much joy, how much love. She was also funny as hell and described herself as a “grudgy bitch.” So — no sanitizing please. Just — what a fucking woman.

Zichrona l’bracha.

It feels fitting that this week’s parsha, then, is about the building of a house. A house that was, if you’ll excuse my language, glamorous as fuck. All acacia wood and gold and silver. Ram skin and dolphin skin. Copper instruments and the finest yarn of blue, purple, and crimson. Linen woven with a pattern of angels. Filled with incense and spiced oils. I can see it in the desert now, glowing, and billowing. Light, and mobile, like a cloud. And also solid, formidable, like a rock.

God is talking to Moses. Let the people build me a sanctuary, She says, that I may dwell among them.

I’m not the first to hear this parsha as an echo of the story of creation. Jacob bar Issi says, “the Tabernacle is equal to the creation of the world itself.” And in Midrash Tanchuma, he gives us an elaborate set of correspondences — God stretched out the heavens like a curtain, and here we are supposed to stretch out a curtain. Etcetera. And I love this. To build a meeting place — a place for encounter between humans, and between humans and the divine — is to build a world. That, already, is Torah enough for me as theater-maker. All the world’s a stage, etc.

But there is something heartbreaking, too, in all the ways that this moment is not like Creation. In creation, of course, God speaks things, and they are done. It’s immediate. No gap. The Word is the Doing, the Speaking of the Word is the Becoming.

But this is different. Speaking has been sundered from making. Language is no longer a doing, it’s a preparation for doing. God is speaking, is giving instruction, but the instruction won’t be fulfilled until much later.

And there’s the horrible dramatic irony to it, too, knowing that even as God is speaking these words to Moses at the top of the mountain, the people are starting to murmur to each other. The promises they’ve just made to God — not to worship idols — are beginning to be forgotten. I wonder if the gathering of the materials for the Golden Calf is not happening literally as God is describing how She wants us to gather materials for her own home.

I see God in her frilly pink prom dress. She’s telling Moses how much she loves her boyfriend. She’s telling Moses that she wants him to take her out to a certain restaurant after the dance, that she wants him to bring her certain flowers, and a certain kind of chocolate. She’s talking about what they’re going to do after graduation, how wonderful their lives are going to be.

Meanwhile we cut to God’s boyfriend out behind the football fields, making out with some other girl, already planning to ditch God and leave her waiting at home.

It makes the speech — and then you’re going to do this, and do this, and then dolphin skins, and copper lavers, and the finest linen, and really nice spices — a little sad, honestly.

God is already stooping. She’s putting down the power She once had to make with language — a power where Speaking and Doing are identical — and offering this limited, human, husk of speech — asking, with what I read as a sweet and vulnerable desire, to be taken care of a certain way. Even as the Israelites are preparing to betray her.

There is a phrase in Hebrew, “Galut ha’dibbur,” the exile of speech. When the Israelites went down in the Egypt, the rabbis tell us, language, too, went into exile. This is why Moses talks about himself as slow of speech, and as having an uncircumcised tongue. In one particularly beautiful image from the Zohar, Moses is described as voice, coming for the sake of speech, to bring it out of exile. And when he arrives with the people at Sinai, voice and speech are finally reunited. Sinai, in this framework, represents the hope of an end to that exile.

But Sinai happened two weeks ago! In theory, voice and speech are already one. God has spoken to the people from the top of the mountain. In fact, the rabbis describe the moment of God speaking directly to the Israelites in the erotic language of the Song of Songs: “He Kissed me with the Kisses of his Mouth”!

So what does it mean that we spend all this time listening to God give a set of instructions. Language separated from action. Desire for a collectively built sanctuary that we know, even as it is being spoken, won’t happen, at least not yet.

This parsha in particular feels like a profound deflation. A poem chanted in a degraded, and tawdry tongue.

For most of the Torah we lived under the theology of Genesis, in which Language is a creative Act. Speaking is a Doing. To speak is to be in relationship — God spoke to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob. When someone speaks, the fabric of the world shifts. There are obligations that are enjoined, somehow, automatically.

And here we are, now, in a theology of the Desert. In which language does not Make. Language explains. It describes. It can articulate desire but there is no guarantee that that desire will be met with response. Language is an instruction manual, left to crumple in a kitchen drawer somewhere. It’s easy to ignore.

I wonder where that leaves us.

The horror of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues to mount. It has reached such a fever pitch — and the silence of politicians, the hesitations, the couched language; the muteness of so many Jewish institutions — feels like a degradation of all of us. A crumbling of our relationship to both language and action. And then there is social media — one posts, one doesn’t post — the whole nightmare feels like it gets framed as hinging on the question of speech. Let us not remain silent, we say. And also: What do we believe our speech does? Are we living the theology of Genesis, or the theology of the desert? What, actually, do we believe about the power of our language?

I have been thinking a lot about how I was raised, and educated. I was educated, I think, in the theology of Genesis. In which there was a vitality and a creativity to language, and to the act of naming, inventing, narrating. I was raised to believe in specialness. That if you were smart, or creative, you could do something of value in the world. That your speaking would conjure relationship. That hard work would be met with reward. That creativity could make change.

And yet here we are. My creativity can’t save a single life.

I know now that I live — that we all live — under the theology of the desert.

And what happens, I think, when we feel a crisis of this sort — a failure of language as action — is we shut down. I don’t know what to do. And so I do nothing.

I think that at the heart of this parsha is some sort of answer. The building of the mishkan is not a project for one person. It’s a project of many hands. It requires everyone to bring gifts — everyone, at least, whose heart impels her to. It requires artists, and designers, and planners, and craftspeople. It requires, I imagine, lots of spreadsheets and emails and zoom meetings.

And above the ark in which the tablets are to be kept, there are to be built two angels.

וַ֠עֲשֵׂ֠ה כְּר֨וּב אֶחָ֤ד מִקָּצָה֙ מִזֶּ֔ה וּכְרוּב־אֶחָ֥ד מִקָּצָ֖ה מִזֶּ֑ה׃

Make one cherub at one end and the other cherub at the other end...

וְהָי֣וּ הַכְּרֻבִים֩ פֹּרְשֵׂ֨י כְנָפַ֜יִם לְמַ֗עְלָה... וּפְנֵיהֶ֖ם אִ֣ישׁ אֶל־אָחִ֑יו

The cherubim shall have their wings spread out above, ... They shall confront each other....

(25:19-20)

וְנוֹעַדְתִּ֣י לְךָ֮ שָׁם֒

There I will meet with you

(25:22)

The two angels face each other. Literally, “a man to his brother.” The JPS translates it as confront, which feels like an interpretive jump to me, but it’s true there is a sense of facing, of opposition — they’re not with each other, they are to each other.

And it is inside the space that God will meet with us. וְנוֹעַדְתִּ֣י.

יָעַד. An appointment, and also a kind of betrothal.

There’s another gorgeous reading of a line from Song of Songs that links our theology of the Desert to the erotics of speech, the wilderness to God in her pink prom dress.

Shemot Rabbah tells us:

Ein midbar ella dibbur.

There is no desert [midbar] other than language [dibbur]. Why, the rabbis are asking, is the desert so essential to the history of our people? Because the experience of the desert IS language.

And they cite, again, as if to seal the legitimacy of the pun between midbar and dibbur, the Song of Songs, Your lips are like a scarlet thread, your mouth [midbarech] is lovely (Songs 4:3).

For us, my dears, language isn’t the kiss of God. Language is the desert.

There is no desert other than language, and there is no language other than the desert.

Language no longer guarantees relationships. It can no longer separate light from darkness or bring a world into being. It cannot end a war. Language will feel a little pathetic sometimes. Sometimes we’ll be speaking words of love, getting all dolled up for the prom, only to realize later that our lovers were betraying us with some Golden Heifer.

But that is language. Language as desire that won’t always be fulfilled. Language as a vision, as a set of possibilities, that may not come to pass.

AND YET. That is not a reason to stop speaking. Ein dibbur ella midbar. 

To actually build something requires action. And collaboration. And gifts, and emails, and meetings, and artists, and planners, and administration. If we are to continue the work of creation, we are going to have to face each other and talk. That talk will not always correspond precisely or efficiently or neatly or consistently with action – but the building we need to do cannot happen without it. 

Cecilia was an organizer. I interviewed her once, and I told her when we finished that I’d send her a draft of what I’d written to get her okay, before sending it to the editor. One wants to be respectful, you know? One doesn’t want the wrong words to get out there into the world. Oh, no, she said, it’s fine. I’m sure it’ll be fine. And she smiled.

It’s a small thing, but it stuck with me. Probably she just knew she was very busy. She’s done a lot of interviews at this point. She wasn’t worried about this one more. But also: it was a reminder that sometimes it’s okay for words to get a little messy. As long as they’re in service of the work. Ein dibbur ella midbar. 

This week’s parsha is an instruction manual. And we feel its limitations, its pathos, given the fickle fucked up mess that are, at this point, the Israelite people. Us.

But we need it. And we do build, eventually. And that’s the important thing. Between us – in the space where we do eventually face each other — we have a date with God. 

Our words aren’t going to bring the world we dream into being. Our words are going to fall flat sometimes, and land wrong. We’re going to feel embarrassed sometimes, for having spoken. But that doesn’t mean we stop speaking.

We try to speak in the hopes that our speaking might bring people together. We speak because we are still in the desert. We speak because we need each other. We speak because there are sanctuaries we still need to build. (I’m seeing photos of Cecilia’s funeral earlier this week, in St. Patrick’s cathedral – she was sent onwards truly truly in Splendor.) 

When we finally build our sanctuaries, for this desert, they will be glamorous as fuck.

[2q5b]

Mishpatim

By Ezra

February 7th, 2024

There’s the top of the mountain, and there’s the bottom of the mountain. Each and every Israelite, in this famously egalitarian way, is present at Mt. Sinai, but only Moses goes to the top. Everyone hears the voice of God, at first. But only Moses gets to stay with God for weeks on end, taking in the full teaching. The rest of us have to wait at the bottom of the mountain and wonder what is going on up there.

         The verticality is invoked again and again. Moses goes up, comes down, goes up, comes down. Three times even before the ten commandments, and then more times after. The rest of us stand b’tachtit ha-har, underneath the mountain. Moses is told, aleh el hashem, go up to God. Our parasha even explicitly mentions, v’ha’am lo ya’alu imo. And the people are not to go up with him.

         Last week I was in the grip of some really dark days. No energy, no drive, no self-confidence. Hopeless thinking, dwelling on thoughts of disaster, suffering, pointlessness. People reached out to me and I didn’t get back to them. I read the news and thought, everything’s just going to get worse. I didn’t want to work on the things I had previously been passionate about. My whole body was aching and I was exhausted– another flare-up of the mysterious illness that’s come and gone over the past nine months that my doctor can’t seem to figure out. And I stopped praying. It is my practice to pray at least once a day, either the morning, afternoon or evening service, even if I’m distracted and busy, even if it feels mechanical or burdensome. But in this place of stuckness and negativity and pain, day after day, even though I had the time, I skipped it. I just couldn’t get there, couldn’t see the point of it.

         This mode of alienation is familiar to me. I know dark days well, have had many different types with different levels of intensity. I don’t have the kind of depression that afflicts me for weeks at a time. Mine comes and goes in a day, or three days. Sometimes I have to claw my way out of it, sometimes it just lifts. It’s nowhere near as debilitating as the kind some friends of mine have. But the experience of it is overwhelming, sometimes shocking. Especially strange is the transition in and out of that state: seeing the same world, my same life, through my same eyes, only a day later, and it looks utterly different.           

         Agnes and I, researching for our podcast a while back, found this other podcast called Inward with Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld, an addiction and recovery therapist with a Chabad background and who is extremely well-versed in Hasidic literature. Reading this week’s parasha I found myself remembering a teaching of his from around Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. He teaches, with reference to various classic Hasidic texts, that there is a dichotomy of two modes in which one can receive the Torah, the divine wisdom: me’al ha-har, atop the mountain, and b’tachtit ha-har, underneath the mountain. One is a state of transcendence and freedom, where one can experience the pure unity of God. The other, the underneath-the-mountain consciousness, is a place where one feels stuck, without illumination, weighted down by the physical, living under a shadow, a place where “I don’t have that idealism, I don’t have that freedom to fly into states of transcendence, but rather, I feel the heaviness and the cords of connectivity of this world.” And the point is that both of these places are essential modes of the human encounter with God, that both are equally necessary for the receiving of the Torah. And though the holy and pure experience that Moses is having on top of the mountain is exalted and cosmic, it is the experience of being at the bottom of the mountain and still receiving the Torah from there that really brings the fullness of all that is human in contact with all that is beyond the human. And that’s the encounter that really needs to happen, that really causes God and the world to meet.

         And what, after all, is God saying to Moses up there on the mountain, shrouded in darkness with fire burning at the top? Well, it is our parsha, Mishpatim, civil ordinances. Ordinary rules of how to deal with everyday life in human society. Penalties for property damage, for theft, for injury. You can point to various quotable statements of high-minded principle, but you can’t help but be struck by the immediate abundance of detail, the this-worldliness of it all. These are, apparently, the first topics on God’s mind when God finally instructs Moses on what to tell everyone. It’s as if God, having kept silent for centuries with regard to what human beings should be doing down here on Earth, is bursting with desire to be involved in our most non-Godly affairs. Whenever you think the text is about to lapse into the transcendent, it always regrounds itself in the physical. “People of holiness, anshei kodesh, you shall be to me,” one verse begins, and then finishes, “Flesh that is torn off in the field, you are not to eat; you shall throw it to the dogs.”

         But maybe most un-transcendent of all is the section that opens the parasha, the first rules given to Moses alone. It is an extended section about the laws of slave ownership. Everyone hates this part. Nothing takes you out of the experience of reading the Torah like this moment. Not only is this where the epic saga of miracles and liberation turns into a meticulous law book, but the laws are about slavery. Here God seems to permanently enshrine the practice of human beings owning other human beings, the practice that has been the source of some of the worst exploitation and human suffering in history, in memory both ancient and recent, even contemporary, its poisonous effect materially reverberating through our society, our communities, our own bodies.

         This is the moment where some get bored and some get sick, and either one can be your reason to walk away from this book. This is where depression sets in, where the whole thing, the whole Torah, can suddenly seem pointless, a story of liberation and mountaintop-reaching that immediately puts you right back at the bottom of the mountain, crushed by its uncaring weight, right back in the grip of slavery, in the world of the domination of subordinates and the perennial invincibility of the rich. I feel that alienation from our Torah. There are sections I read and feel that not only is God no longer speaking to me, but that God is so far from this text that I feel like a fool for ever listening for a holy voice between its lines.

         And then a day or two goes by, or a year, or five years. And I read it again, because that’s what we do. And I see it a new way.

         I see a nation of escaped slaves who have just met God, waiting hungrily for a system that addresses what’s happened to them. A law that is not pure idealism and transcendence of society, but takes the ordinariness and difficulty and even the trauma of life as we know it, the world as the refugees from slavery in Egypt know it, and asks that world to evolve, asks it to begin to reach toward somewhere holier, more just. It is not accidental that the law begins with laws of slavery. That is where its recipients have experienced the most pain. That is the part of them that needs healing. And the Torah comes not merely to legislate, but to heal.

I make no apology for the section on the laws of slavery. I wish it were not there. But it is perhaps possible to read these laws not as a statement that slavery should continue, but that law should first deal with the parts of us that are most broken. This is law as a trauma response. You can see these rules as a disastrous capitulation to power dynamics of the ancient world, or as a radical rebellion against them in that they put major limits on slave ownership and grant legal rights to slaves. Either way, what amazes me is that they are the first section of laws given through Moses, and they address issues not of the leadership, but of the underclass, not triumph but trauma.

         There is a story in the Talmud, masechet Shabbat page 88:

And Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: When Moses ascended on High to receive the Torah, the ministering angels said before the Holy Blessed One: Master of the Universe, what is one born of a woman doing here among us? The Holy Blessed One said to them: He came to receive the Torah. The angels said before Him: The Torah is a hidden treasure that was concealed by You 974 generations before the creation of the world, and You seek to give it to flesh and blood?

         The Holy Blessed One said to Moses: Provide them with an answer as to why the Torah should be given to the people.

         The angels want to know how it’s possible that such a transcendently holy spiritual gift, the foundation of the world, could be given to mere mortals. God leaves it to a human to speak for the humans. After expressing great fear and humility and asking for encouragement and protection from God, which God grants, Moses gives his answer.

Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, the Torah that You are giving me, what is written in it? God said to him: “I am the Lord your God Who brought you out of Egypt from the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). Moses said to the angels: Did you descend to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why should the Torah be yours?

         This is not just semantic. It points to the one spiritual experience to which the most enlightened beings have no access: the experience of suffocating pain, being trapped, being subjugated in a world of limitations. Not only is that experience included in the law, it is the very beginning of the Divine communication, the foundation on which our relationship with God is premised.

         The psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou writes about traumatophilia: thinking of trauma not as something that can be transcended or left behind, but that needs to be repeatedly revisited to keep it from unconsciously controlling us. “Much as we would want to think otherwise,” she writes, “the impact of traumatic experiences cannot be eliminated or repaired: at best, we live in their aftermath on different terms than when they were inflicted on us. Relinquishing the idea that trauma can be repaired opens paths to thinking about what subjects do with their trauma.”

         God brings us out of slavery to speak to us in the wilderness, and the first thing God says is to remind us of slavery, to situate the entire Divine-human relationship in the wake of slavery. What does this tell us about past suffering, about building a decent society in the wake of leaving one that harmed us immeasurably? What does this ask us to do with our trauma? How can we re-encounter it in a way that allows us to live honestly with it, and not to be controlled by it?

         One answer may be the commandment that comes toward the end of this first dispatch to Moses, a concept that is reiterated and rephrased, re-encountered, dozens of times going forward throughout the Torah:

A ger, an outsider, you are not to oppress: you yourselves know the life of the outsider, for you were outsiders in the land of Egypt.

         This is a Torah that cannot only be given to a deeply free, spiritually connected, Moses-like figure, experiencing intense closeness with God on top of a mountain, seeing beyond all obstacles. This is a Torah that is given to those in the shadow of that mountain, blocked from lofty consciousness by the limited and embodied life of human beings who feel pain. That experience, that knowledge of the life of the ger is what allows the Torah to outlaw oppression, what allows it to be a healing gift, a world-transforming gift, allows it to not just stay up in heaven but to touch the earthbound. The Torah is not a gift that entirely soars above and beyond the physical in a transcendent space. It is one that is received through the physical, from the bottom up, not out of reach of the worst experiences of the human condition, but incorporating those experiences.

When we are in great pain, depressed or shattered or terrorized, we are underneath the mountain. The Torah was given there, too. There is no other place where its healing can be felt as deeply.

[2q5b]

Yitro

By Agnes

February 2nd, 2024

There’s a book by the writer and artist Joe Brainard called I Remember.

It starts like this.

I remember the first time I got a letter that said "After Five Days Return To" on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed to return it to the sender.

I remember the kick I used to get going through my parents' drawers looking for rubbers. (Peacock.)

I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.

I remember pink dress shirts. And bola ties.

I remember when a kid told me that those sour clover-like leaves we used to eat (with little yellow flowers) tasted so sour because dogs peed on them. I remember that didn't stop me from eating them.

I remember the first drawing I remember doing. It was of a bride with a very long train.

I remember my first cigarette. It was a Kent. Up on a hill. In Tulsa, Oklahoma. With Ron Padgett.

I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.

And then it keeps going like that for the whole book. It’s wonderful, and complicated. And seems simple but is full of all this intense discipline and strangeness and difficulty.

I got to know it really well early in the pandemic. The poet Ariana Reines was leading these groups six mornings a week – like eighty, a hundred people. We talked about Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and then we talked about the Innana poems, and then we talked about I Remember. I have a lot to say about those groups. They were wonderful.

We talked about how easy it seems to imitate Brainard’s text, and actually how much discipline each statement contains. There’s very little sentimentality. There’s no nostalgia. Everything very concise and coiled, even as it seems breezy and effortless.

We talked to about how the verb “remember” is a present tense verb. It’s not so much a book about the past as it is about the present.

In that first pandemic summer I was coming back to LA after having been away for many months. My relationship had ended, I’d moved out of our apartment, and drifted a bit. Things were bad between us, we weren’t really talking, and now I was back in our apartment, half-emptied, and I had just a few days to clear out the rest of my stuff — the furniture and objects my ex and I had, through a kind of miserably practical process, decided to divide between us.

It was a golden LA evening, I was jetlagged and alone and the whole place was mostly empty. The bed was gone, the couch. And I just came unglued. Total, snotty, weepy, self-pitying mess.

I had really loved this apartment. I had loved so much about the life we made together in this city. It seemed clear to me that I would never have another apartment I loved. That I would never fall in love again either. That all these parts of my life — beautiful and painful — were gone.

But then Joe Brainard was in my ear. And I remembered the refrain of that book.

And I remembered what we had said about remembering as a present-tense verb.

How the book is not a series of statements about the past, but statements about the future.

How we remain constituted by our memory — that our experiences are ours, and can’t be taken from us.

I stood in that apartment, a sentimental, sloppy puddle, and I just said it over and over again:

I remember!

I remember!

I remember!

This week’s parsha is a big one. We get the revelation, we get the ten commandments.

I want to talk about just one of them.

זָכ֛וֹר֩ אֶת־י֥֨וֹם הַשַּׁבָּ֖֜ת לְקַדְּשֽׁ֗וֹ׃

Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.

The rabbis have a lot to say about the fact that later, in Deutoronomy, when Moses recaps these commandments, we get a different word:

שָׁמ֣֛וֹר אֶת־י֥וֹם֩ הַשַׁבָּ֖֨ת לְקַדְּשׁ֑֜וֹ

Guard the sabbath day, to keep it holy

Remember and observe.

These are very different commandments. The Rabbis teach us that שָׁמ֣֛וֹר, guard, or observe, is a negative commandment. It tells us what we are not supposed to do. What we’re supposed to guard against. Shabbat, in this case, is something we protect. It covers, for instance, all the forms of work we’re not supposed to do.

Whereas זָכ֛וֹר֩, remember, is a positive commandment. We hold the sabbath in our minds all week — we think about it every day. When we see nice food, we set it aside, say, Ooh! I’ll save this for shabbos. We remember the spacious feeling that descends into our bodies, and find ways to access that during the week. We look forward, we long. The whole week revolves around this one day. In this way, the commandment — zachor et yom ha’shabbat — comes to apply to every moment of our lives, not just to every seventh day.

(Both words — shamor and zachor — are important. There is one tradition that says that in the revelation at Sinai, God did what no human can do, and said both words at once.)

Remember the sabbath.

What, exactly, are we remembering?

In our parsha, shabbat is tied to the Creation. In Deutoronomy, it’s tied to the Exodus from Egypt. And both of those events are invoked in the weekly kiddush — zikaron le-ma’aseh bereishit, zecher l’y’tziat mitzrayim. Shabbat reminds us of these two formative experiences.

But also: we’re remembering the shabbat itself. Shabbat is a day — it happened last week, and the week before; it will happen again this week, and the week after. It’s a day, but it’s out of time. We live it every week and every week it is both particular and abstract. It feels more like a substance, than an event.

I remember.

I remember.

I feel a lot of sadness, honestly, about everything I don’t remember. I remember very little of my childhood. I remember very little of middle school. I mean, I remember events, but I don’t remember the feeling of it. I wasn’t a kid who, at least in my memory, had really intense desires. Or like — surely I did, but they were buried so deep…

I have wondered sometimes if this has something to do with being trans. I have talked to other friends who have said similar things. The conditions for my desiring were so confusingly obscure, so impossibly nonsensical, that it just didn’t register.

In my darker moments I feel like I was sleepwalking through life until I finally entered the room of my own body, self, clarity. And this makes me very sad. Like a whole piece of myself is missing. Like years of life — years that become constitutive of a self — are in fact just an emptiness.

Brainard’s book is actually a kind of autobiography. The “I” is more important than the “remember” is. Who is Joe? Joe is an ongoing act of remembering. He is who he is because of all he remembers.

But where, I wonder, does that leave me? Since I remember so little?

There is a teaching that when we fail to honor the sabbath we are offering a kind of slight to God — God worked six days, and made everything. And then God decided it was good, it was done, and it was time for God to rest. So when we work on the seventh day — what are we saying? That the six days weren’t good enough? The creation isn’t complete? You have notes?

The seventh day is a kind of holy completion. It is also a kind of holy void. A space. No-creation. An opening, a stillness, a gorgeous ringing golden emptiness.

The Vilna Gaon teaches us that there are seventy powers of the soul. Seventy… energies? Forces?

The things on his list range from faculties to feelings — speech, vitality, coldness, moisture, dryness, digestion, love, desire, hate, jealousy…

But the first of them all is a kind of nothingness. Heder kodem le’havayah. The nothing that preceded being. I could go on forever about what that might mean — but I am moved and struck that our “I” is constituted, first of all, by an emptiness.

I am holding, this week, those two empty spaces with tenderness.

The emptiness that precedes existence.

And the emptiness that comes after completion.

It is peaceful in those spaces, it is still.

There aren’t any pink dress shirts or bola ties or first cigarettes. 

I am comforted by the thought that those emptinesses are central.

To who we are, and to our becoming.

We remember. We remember. We remember.

We remember creation, yes.

And we remember exodus, yes.

But we also remember the open spaces. The stillness. The absences of memory.

And we allow ourselves to be constituted by those, too.

[2q5b]

BESHALACH

By Ezra

January 25th, 2024

I don’t know why it was this one. I was hyper-aware of so many others. I learned the awful and intricate details of the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore. I followed the aftermath of each one with heartbreak and disgust and fear. But in December 2015, when I saw the bystander footage of the police shooting Mario Woods, 26 years old, twenty times on the street in San Francisco, something snapped in me. Something changed for me in that moment about what it meant to live in America. The state is allowed to kill you for being poor, for being black, for being “suspicious” in any way, on the spot, at the discretion of a phalanx of cops, armed and unregulated. State power is not a source of care or protection for the residents of this country. It is a cause of death. I think more than any other moment, watching Mario Woods die was the moment where that became real for me, where it hit me. Once you are aware that you are subject to a government that is allowed to decide to suddenly kill you, life in that society becomes an entirely different proposition.

Regarding law enforcement’s habitual murder of the poor, we are told that it may be regrettable, but it cannot be changed. The end of policing as we know it, any significant revision of the practices of the state’s merchants of death, is simply impossible. Politically, logistically, structurally. Just one of so many impossible fantasies of those concerned with public safety and justice.

I am thinking about where and how the lines of the possible are drawn. And by whom.

The moment the Jewish people was truly born was the moment of leaving a society like ours, one where the powerful are allowed to kill you. Early in the Egypt narrative we see the government order the drowning of infants. We see the dehumanization, enslavement and physical abuse of the children of Israel. And in this week parsha, as the traumatized survivors finally walk out of the empire’s territory, we see Pharaoh’s armed phalanx of cops chasing after them, armed with military technology, ready to capture and kill.

Here, God puts the Jewish people in an impossible situation, intentionally. At the beginning of this week’s reading, we get a rare moment of divine internality. “God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, though it is nearer, for God said: ‘Lest the people regret it, when they see war, and return to Egypt!’” God sees where the lines of possibility are drawn for the people. They are not equipped for brave feats of self-confidence. They have only ever been defeated. If the path of least resistance is left open to them, they will follow it, like water follows topography.

God also explains the rationale for the circuitous route from Pharaoh’s perspective of what’s possible. God explains to Moses, “Now Pharaoh will say of the Children of Israel: ‘They are confused in the land! The wilderness has closed them in!’ And I will strengthen Pharaoh’s heart and he will chase after them…”

Nature itself, Pharaoh knows, is stacked against the weak. The wilderness has no moral values or pity. In the unregulated state of nature, as in Egypt, the most powerful force wins, as inevitably as osmosis. Water rushes to fill whatever empty space is available.

The powerful being overthrown by the weak?

a slave becoming free?

the way things are giving way to the way things ought to be?

these things are impossible.

But Pharaoh has misunderstood the wilderness. The wilderness is full of danger, but only because it is full of possibility. Things can happen there that were not previously imaginable. It is outside of society.

There is an old poem by Shel Silverstein that I hadn’t heard in years. One day my partner Rosie recited it to me from memory and, quite unexpectedly, tears streamed down my face. It is so simple and ordinary and sentimental in that Shel Silverstein way, and yet it made me cry not only that day but pretty much every time I have heard it or read it since then, too, even when I really try hard not to. And of course I’m a little embarrassed to tell you, because I have extensively read and studied all sorts of hip intellectual poetry, and this is basically a poem for children, and the whole thing brings up all these big clunky uncool feelings to which I never consented and can’t control. But I’m going to read it now.

Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts.

Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts.

Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me:

Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

Everyone told me being trans is impossible. People still tell me. They say it in public every day. Presidential candidates and popular entertainers say it for all to hear. Others tell me without saying it out loud. But every day I hear it. Impossible.

Everyone says a total revision of the role of police is impossible. So many social realities that we know are terrorizing and killing people are called immovable. The rich, the abusers, the killers cannot be stopped. They have the chariots, they have the throne.

And then. In our story. The sea parts, the escaped slaves walk through on dry land. Water refuses gravity, nature makes way for the oppressed. When Pharaoh and his army try to follow them, nature reverts to its previous stance, the one Pharaoh believes in. Water rushes to fill the available space, and the killers are drowned.

We are not shown these miracles, we do not tell these stories, so that we might hope for them to happen to us. We are not told of miracles as something to rely on to get us out of trouble. They are shown to us as a doorway to a different way of thinking. The parting of the water, when we re-tell it year by year, day by day, is a spiritual rehearsal. That’s what it will feel like: when something you know needs to happen, and likewise you know can’t happen, does happen.

To have this story, to really have it and keep it and re-learn it and know it ever deeper, is to be able to imagine beyond the social facts we were born into.

Being trans is impossible. Disability justice is impossible. Land back is impossible. So many people believe these things. Or maybe they believe something more specific, something true: these things are impossible under the system that exists today, in our hearts as they exist today.

Until the system splits open. Until our hearts split open.

Almost as soon as they are out of Egypt and safe from Pharaoh’s army, the Israelites begin to observe Shabbat.

Here’s the story, the miracle we tell and rehearse: God rains manna down from heaven, again taking care of the people in defiance of nature. But each person will only be able to gather enough for themselves and their household; hoarded manna does not remain edible. And then, not yet a commandment but a new natural fact, comes the Sabbath: a double portion of manna will fall on Friday. No food will fall on the seventh day. No one will have more or less than they need. And a day of rest, of freedom, is built into the system.

The refugees have gone outside of society, and they are being shown the conceptual bones of a new one, one whose values are not based on power and domination and survival of the fittest, but on care and equity, with space to breathe.

We remember the initial Israelite response, or non-response, to Moses’ message of liberation: “They did not listen to Moses, out of shortness of breath and out of hard servitude.” (Shmot 6:9)

Now, they can breathe. Shabbat is impossible for a people saturated in hard labor. Holiness is not easily accessed, Torah is not easily learned. In the wilderness, before the Torah is given, before law exists, this practice is the ground on which their new reality is built. Out beyond the bounds of society as we know it, there is time, there is breath, there is Shabbat.

We remember the dying words of Eric Garner and George Floyd: “I can’t breathe.” A bare and brutal fact, there is a way to hear this as the most fundamental call to protest. They, and the activists who took up the phrase as a rallying cry, reminded us that the very breath of a human being can be in permanent defiance of a system built to constrict it and snuff it out.

We call Shabbat “zecher l’yetsiat Mitsrayim.” A reminder of the going out of Mitsrayim, Egypt. We need this reminder because we need to practice, ritually rehearse, how to live in opposition to societies built on killing and oppression. To deeply experience Shabbat we must spiritually exit the empire under which we live. We must become inwardly independent of it, even as it suffocates us, or tries to.

Subservience to the empire is the Red Sea. Light the Shabbes candles, and watch it part.

[2q5b]

BO

By Agnes

January 23rd, 2024

1.

And then darkness fell. The midrash tells us that there were in fact two periods of darkness. During the first darkness there was a gloom so thick no one could see each other, and during the second darkness the darkness became even thicker, so thick that no one could move. If you were standing when the darkness fell you remained standing. If you were sitting you remained sitting. If you were bending over your child, you remained bent over, if you were climbing up a ladder to change a light-bulb there you were balanced and immobile, atop the ladder.

I think they died, all of them. The Egyptians. Before the killing of the first borns, before the departure from Egypt. I think they died. I think they died the ninth plague, the plague of darkness. Because what is darkness, if not a kind of death? Those bodies frozen in place — in chairs, up ladders — it was a kind of rigor mortis. “כֻּלָּ֥נוּ מֵתִֽים,” they say. We are all dead.

2.

I think this Parsha is a parsha about love. And this is the breakup. It’s the end of a very long relationship. A four-hundred year relationship. This parsha tells the end of a love story in which the lovers got tangled up in each other. They had gotten to the point where they couldn’t understand themselves without the other. They didn’t know how to be alone. And so the relationship ended. This week’s parsha is the breakup. The awful, messy, devastating breakup.

We’ve all known people in what we might call toxic relationships. Call it co-dependence, call it enmeshment, call it a controlling attachment style. You can go to the concert with Tina and you can stay over at her place but I want you to text me, okay? Text me when you get there and text me when you leave and text me in the morning as soon as you get up and come right back home. And sometimes that feels like love. And sometimes you just wanna go to the concert with Tina.

But there are forms of entanglement, a blurring of self and other, that can happen in any kind of close relationship. We pull people close because it is scary to be alone.

When we love someone, our sense of who we are gets tied up in who that other person is. They are brave, say, and because of our intimacy with them we get to feel that we too have some of that bravery. Or they are tender, say, and because of our intimacy with them we get to have access to a certain kind of tenderness. But then — who are we, when they are gone?

I know I have been in relationships like this. Where I saw in someone certain qualities that I wished I had, and loving that person became a way of bringing those qualities into my life. A way that was a little easier than finding those qualities inside myself. In relationships like that you are asking someone else to make your identity for you. You turn them into a kind of servant, or slave. You are forcing them to build your pyramids.

This week I have been listening to Lou Reed sing Walk Alone.

When you walk, he sings, you know you're gonna walk alone.

And when you talk, and when you make love, and when you die, he sings, you’re gonna do it alone.

It’s not an easy truth.

Is this a way of reading these early books of Exodus? As a story in which which one people, Egypt, falls in love with another people, Israel? In which Egypt comes to dominate Israel because that feels like intimacy, and because difference is just too much to bear? In which the dominating people’s identity gets tangled up in the subordinated people’s identity? So much so that when it comes time for the subordinated people to leave, the dominating people are devastated. They spend six days in darkness and they die a kind of death.

3.

Let me try out another version of the story.

Pharaoh is a very lonely person. He’s very powerful. He controls a whole empire. Everyone comes to him with wishes, and needs, and deference, and fear. Who is such a person to love, and be loved by?

Who but God?

God, who is also very powerful. Who also gets approached with wishes and needs and deference and fear. God, who must also be terribly lonely.

And so Pharaoh falls in love with God. In fact, he feels — what luck! — he’s finally found a lover who understands him. When Pharaoh meets God he can’t get enough. He wants to text God all the time, he wants to talk for hours on the phone, he gets restless and moody whenever God is off doing other things on the weekend. Pharaoh feels, finally, understood. He feels like God is the first being to understand him. And it’s because they’re just so similar. They’re so similar, they’re almost like one being. It’s like I am God, thinks Pharaoh, and God is me.

And God maybe was open to a kind of a relationship with Pharaoh, but then it started to get so intense, and weird. And God started to feel like Pharaoh wasn’t actually talking to God, or listening, or seeing God. Pharaoh was relating to a projection, to a fantasy. And God would try to say something, like, hey, Pharaoh, we’re not exactly the same. Pharaoh would order the lamb vindaloo, because we love that, don’t we, God, and God would get quiet and order the aloo gobi, just to make a point.

And Pharaoh can feel God pulling away. And it only makes him panic. It makes him cling harder. It muffles his hearing and blurs his vision. It hardens his heart. This thing he calls love which is actually a fear of being alone. A fear of dying.

When you make love, you know you're gonna love alone

And when you die, you know you're gonna die alone

When is loving a deep form of knowing? Of giving and receiving and holding and being held?

And when is loving a drug we take because we’re afraid of our own limitations?

Because we don’t know to change?

Because we think that love can protect us from dying?

Exodus is the book in which we become a people. It’s a book about togetherness. And that togetherness saves us. It fills our days with joy. We eat, we laugh, we make music, we dance, we fuck.

But when we forget that we are also, all of us, alone, we start to drift into a kind of denial. We forget that there are no shortcuts, that each of us has to cross our own internal oceans and wander in our own internal deserts and face the fire and the smoke and the water and the hunger and the silence.

I feel for the Egyptians in this parsha. I feel for their suffering. And I am thinking about all the cries and all the protests of the last three months. Let my people go! Let my people be free! From the river to the sea. Is every story of domination a kind of love story? And is every moment of liberation a kind of breakup? A kind of death?

4.

There’s this beautiful book, Who Dies?, by Stephen Levine, that I’ve been reading slowly for like 4 years now. It’s about dying, in the sense that it’s about end of life. But it’s also about dying in the way the mystics talk about dying. It’s about the dying we have to do every day. Dying over and over and over again in order to live.

Levine writes:

“When we speak of loving someone, what we mean is that that person acts as a mirror for the place within us which is love. That being becomes our contact with ourself. When that mirror is shattered, the grief that we feel is the loss of contact with that place within us which is love. Thinking of that person as other than ourself, we mourn our loss, we reexperience our sense of separateness and isolation that originally motivated us to look outside of ourselves for that essential unity we call love.”

To lose someone, he is saying, is to feel we are losing ourselves.

And that is the most frightening form of aloneness you can imagine. You are in darkness, you can’t see your own body, you can’t sit or stand, you don’t know how to move, you feel that you are not there, even, except for this anguished and terrified voice inside you crying out I am here! I am here!

Egypt is losing Israel. Egypt feels it is losing its mirror. Egypt feels it is losing itself.

5.

There was the first darkness, and it was dark.

And then there was the second darkness, and it was darker. It was the darkness inside the dark.

But there is always a third darkness. It is the darkness inside the darkness and inside the darkness there is light.

And that light is love.

We are not our bravery, or our tenderness. We are not our pyramids. We are not, in fact, anything. Except the capacity to love.

Let me tell you one last version of the story.

During the second three days, the darkness inside the darkness, the Israelites lived inside light. Darkness was everywhere for the Egyptians, but the Israelites could see. They walked among the houses, and they saw the jewels of the Egyptians.

They picked up the things they had never been allowed to touch

and they were silent in the face of death

and the angels looked down from heaven, quiet and watchful, because God had never done this before, spread darkness so thickly over the planet, and the angels thought the Israelites would all be happy

A fantasy, no?? To wander the homes of your oppressors, invisibly -

But the Israelites were silent

in the houses of the people they had known

They looked and saw them frozen

And the Israelites were confused

And they came to Moses and they said, Moses, we have all died

We are like ghosts wandering the city

“כֻּלָּ֥נוּ מֵתִֽים,” they said. We are all dead.

And Moses said no no you don’t understand! You are not dead, you are alive, you are surrounded by light

and the people were confused

And the people said, this darkness is death!

Look at the Egyptians, they have all died!

And we too, they said, we too, must be dead!

Because everything we know about ourselves is changing.

And Moses said no, no

This isn’t death, this is just darkness.

This is darkness, Moses said.

This is life.

[2q5b]

VAEIRA

By Ezra

January 11th, 2024

Moses and God were in the 6th grade. They were best friends. Not that either of them really had any other friends. They hardly spoke to anyone but each other. But they told each other everything. They had sleepovers almost every weekend, usually at Moses’ house because Moses was one of those kids who get to roam free everywhere because their parents are kind of checked out. Always busy with something or worried about something, but never about what Moses and God were doing up in the guest room til 3 a.m. Anyway, they didn’t do anything bad. One time they smoked cigarettes out the window, but mostly they just talked for hours. About music, about dreams, about things they’d heard but weren’t sure, about their childhoods, their regrets, about sex (of course), and all the great mysteries of the sixth-grade universe. They told stories, wild made-up stories about all the other kids they knew, most of whom treated them like they were a bit of unidentified scum on the underside of a picnic table at the park. The stories weren’t true but the human details were. They watched the other kids, tried to learn everything about them, traded intel, almost like they were building a database, but they didn’t know for what other than for making up the stories. God always noticed the best little details about people, stuff that when They told Moses Moses was like how the heck did you get that one. And God would always say, all you have to do is just pay attention.

Moses knew God was trans. They didn’t even have to say They were trans, God and Moses just told each other things and told each other things and looked things up and after a while the two of them put the pieces together, almost at the same time. Actually neither of them had heard of being trans before, but God had told Moses They weren’t a boy or a girl but something else instead, and then Moses heard about being binary transgender, and read a whole lot about it over a few weeknights. And he told God all about it and said, maybe it’s that? And God said, No, I think I heard about that too a little, but it’s different because I’m not one turning into the other, I’m just neither. And then one weekend even before the two of them got to Moses’s house God had this thing They wanted to tell Moses and was kind of excited about it but waited a while. And then at like ten o’clock finally They told Moses They heard about this thing called being non-binary or some people call it trans non-binary and explained all this stuff They’d read about it. And Moses was super psyched and hearing all about it was like, okay so that’s it! That’s what you are, right?

And God’s affect kind of changed and They got quiet and then was like, I guess, maybe.

And Moses knew something was wrong but didn’t know how to ask what.

So he asked, so do you want to tell people or is it a secret?

Tell them what? said God.

I don’t know. Like do you want to use different pronouns? God was still using He/Him pronouns at this time.

And God waited a minute and said quietly, it’s not a secret. You can tell anyone. You can tell everyone. I want everyone to know.

And Moses was sort of stubbornly not getting quiet, like not matching God’s affect, because he was really excited and wanted God to be excited too. Moses said, Okay, so but what do I tell them? Like should I tell them you’re trans non-binary? Or like what should I say you are?

And there was a pause and then Moses kept pushing: Like, imagine I’m talking to, I don’t know, I’m at lunch talking to Benji Eisenbaum, and I say, God told me this thing, and he wants everybody to know, God is… what?

And God said, in a way that Moses knew that it was really important: I’ll be what I’ll be.

But Moses was still excited and almost even a little angry. And he was like, really just as a joke: Okay so I’ll tell them, ‘God is I’ll-be-what-I’ll-be’? 

And right away Moses knew it was the wrong thing to make a joke, maybe even before making it Moses knew not to make a joke, it wasn’t a moment for jokes. But God didn’t seem offended at all, just seemed really calm and serious and said, Yes. Exactly. Tell them that.

Our parasha this week begins after God and Moses have already known each other for a while. They’re adults, forget the sixth grade thing, I changed my mind. They met out in the wilderness, when Moses was all alone and had no one to talk to, and God seemed extremely cool and mysterious and confident and Moses was pretty much a nervous wreck. But what Moses didn’t realize is that God didn’t have anyone to talk to either. At least Moses had his family and some sheep. God hadn’t spoken to anyone, like at all, in years.

Moses was so nervous. Moses is always nervous when he has to interact. He has social anxiety, or something like that. Maybe something worse than that. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, but he spends basically all his time alone. But Moses connects with God. Like right away. Pretty soon they’re obsessed with each other. 

God gives Moses a mission: to tell everyone about God and demand that the king of Egypt let all the slaves go free to be with God out in the wilderness.

Our parasha opens with a long monologue by God describing what sounds to me like some kind of breaking point.

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו אֲנִ֥י הֹ’׃

וָאֵרָ֗א אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֛ם אֶל־יִצְחָ֥ק וְאֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֖ב בְּאֵ֣ל שַׁדָּ֑י וּשְׁמִ֣י ה’ לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם׃

God spoke to Moses and said to him, I am yud-heh-vav-heh.

I appeared to Avraham, to Yitzchak and to Yaakov as “El Shaddai,” but my name, yud-heh-vav-heh, I didn’t make known to them.

There’s a side issue often raised here: didn’t God use that special name before? It appears many times in Genesis. But don’t get distracted. What God is trying to say is an emotional reality. God does not feel known. God has been so lonely. Yes, okay, God has been “out” for a while to some people, but on a deeper level God has still been in hiding. Not really showing Themself. Names aren’t the point, getting pronouns right isn’t the point. Coming out is deeper than that. God doesn’t want to just exist, just be tolerated and allowed to do whatever out in the desert as long as They don’t bother anyone. And God doesn’t want to be politely included in the existing system, with everyone going around in a circle and saying their pronouns. God wants to be known. And the system, as it exists right now, is incapable of real inclusion, real respect, real knowing. God doesn’t just want crumbs thrown to Them by the empire, and a few friends whose shoulder They can cry on. 

If They’re honest, God wants a fucking revolution.

God’s taken a few steps, but it hasn’t been enough. They’ve been trying to make a change, trying to get Moses to talk to everyone and explain who They are, but it hasn’t worked. Pharaoh laughed Moses and Aaron out of the room. God is not real to rich motherfuckers like Pharaoh. He treats God like shit. It doesn’t affect his bottom line so fuck it. God is exasperated. God is sick of being invisible, being treated like They don’t exist. It’s time to stand up for Themself. God’s mad as hell and They’re not gonna take it anymore.

God is going to bring the children of Israel out of Egypt. That’s who God is. Maybe people have heard God’s name. But they don’t know the real God. And they’re about to find out.

But the situation is bleak. Moses has pretty much given up. Nobody’s listening. Moses tries to explain all of this stuff to the slaves, but all his fears come true, again. 

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃

Moses told this to the children of Israel, and they didn’t listen to Moses, because of shortness of breath and because of hard labor.

Of course they didn’t. They live in a society that doesn’t let them breathe. It’s Egypt that’s sick, not the slaves, not Moses. But Moses doesn’t see it that way.

See? says Moses to God. I told you. Something’s wrong with me. I can’t talk to anyone. Nobody listens to me. I’m just nobody, I live far away from everybody, they all hate me.

But that’s exactly why you’re perfect for this, says God. You get it. You know what it feels like to be invisible.

I’m just worried it’s not gonna work out for us, says Moses.

Honey, says God, we’re going to be just fine. Watch this.

[2q5b]

SHMOT

By Agnes

January 11th, 2024

Well, I’m a little late with this week’s drash. I was sort of scattered last week, but still – I spent time with the parsha, Shemot, the beginning of a whole new book — and all I felt was silence. Which is a little wild, right? Since so many iconic moments happen in this first few chapters of Exodus.

We’ve got a new pharaoh who decides to persecute the Israelites, we’ve got midwives saving babies, we’ve got Moses and Pharaoh’s daughter and the burning bush and I-Will-Be-What-I-Will-Be. We’ve got exile and marriage and the people crying out and snake tricks and leprosy tricks and blood tricks and brother Aaron and the launching of an entire political movement.

And it’s not like there was nothing to say. There’s everything to say. There is a Red Sea of commentary and a Jordan River of theology and flowering wadi after flowering wadi of relevant questions about justice and violence and political regimes and belonging. I had some thoughts and I wrote them down but in my heart I felt… silence.

Large portions of my life, including my life now as a writer, revolve around coming up with things to say. I can do that. And sometimes the muscle that comes up with things to say feels like the smallest most marginal muscle in the body.

This morning I got up before sunrise and shoveled snow off my friend’s car. The sky was light by the time I left, all the snow that fell this weekend glowing, and there was a gray mist hanging over the black pavement and the white and brown farmhouses. I drove forty-five minutes down country roads to the nearest train station and rode into New York. It was raining and I had a little time to kill so I stopped into a gallery.

In one room were these beautiful erotic sketches from the fifties, a few paintings and collages. There was a film showing in the back – do you know this film, Fuses, by Carolee Schneeman? It’s a collage of footage shot on 8mm, and she first screened it in 1967. Schneeman is having sex with her partner James, and their cat, Kitch, appears sometimes. There are windows and flashes of light, blurred forms, and moments of clarity. The bodies move and touch and grasp and the camera moves, too, and dances and blurs. The colors are blue and gray and there is no sound.

A few people came in and out of the office in the back but mostly I stood there in my yellow-beige jacket and pink hat, black dripping umbrella in hand, and watched the light move on soft bodies and flicker through tree branches and the cat came in through the window. There is something steely and direct about the film but it is mischievous, too, without being cute. Mostly it is joyful and tender. It is easy and open and just right.

I want my life to involve lots of afternoon sex by an open window. I want to lie in blankets, watch the cat wander the apartment. I want the smell of cooking from the kitchen.

That is what I am thinking as I am watching this film by Carolee Schneeman.

A midrash tells us that many of the Israelites stopped having sex with their partners when the edict came down that boy children would be thrown in the Nile. Husbands and wives separated, because, the midrash says, what was the point? It fell to the women, we learn, to seduce their husbands again.

In the other part of the gallery was a show of newer paintings by an artist I don’t know. Many of them meticulously rendered images of foliage, leaves on top of leaves on top of vines on top of branches. I stopped in front of one painting, maybe three feet tall, two feet wide. I stood close enough that it filled my whole field of vision. In the painting is a dense stand of tall trees. They resemble the trees in the forest I have been walking through every day for the last three months. You can see a tiny sliver of lurid teal sky at the very top of the painting but mostly it is just tree beyond tree beyond tree, and they’re all in bright colors. One tree in the foreground is an electric blue — the blue of irises in spring, the blue of the eyes of a woman I knew once in Lebanon. There are green trees beside it, one the green of fresh olives from the Whole Foods olive bar and one the green of someone’s LL Bean backpack circa 2003. Beyond those trees are trees in golden yellow and deep purply crimson and rich brown like milky black tea and a few in vibrating persimmon orange and salamander red and more blue, but deeper blue, blue like you only see in the sky beyond some saint in a Tintoretto painting.

I stood so close to the painting that I felt the colors overtake my body. It was like they flooded my eyes and had nowhere else to go so they spilled down my back and sloshed up my legs and held me around the waist. And I felt so grateful. I felt so startled and lucky and held.

Then it was time for me to go. And headed north, across Canal Street, I rode an elevator to the seventh floor of an office building and rang the bell on a door next to a realtor’s office and the doctor I’d come to see’s sister opened the door and pointed me to the middle room. And then the doctor came in and asked what was wrong and how long had it been since I’d seen her — a year, right? Maybe two years? I fell in the woods, I said. It was about a month ago. I hurt my leg. I don’t live in New York City anymore but I came down to see her. She said Ahh, okay. Yes, I wondered. Take your pants off, she said, and lie down. I asked how her father was, I remembered he was quite old and she did acupuncture on him every night when she went home. She told me he died last February, and I said I was sorry, and she said yes, it’s very sad. She asked where it was I’d hurt myself and I pointed to a place behind my knee and then she lifted my shirt and pressed on a place on my lower back and I went, Oof! And she went, Right? And I went yes, and as she started to put all these needles in me I felt like I wanted to cry because it is an extraordinary thing when you have been hurting somewhere for a month and you come to someone for help and they teach you about another, perhaps deeper place where you are hurting.

An hour and a half later, after the needles and a good long stretch of her digging her sharp elbow hard into my back and leg, up and down, up and down, and suctioning glass cups all over my lower body that tugged madly on the skin and muscle and left big bruises I was sitting back outside with her sister and eating the raisin pastry she’d given me and drinking the coffee she insisted I sit and sip (are you rushing off somewhere?) and looking at the light green plants under the windows and the deep red Buddha on the altar. I looked around the office and tried to remind myself to drink slowly and asked the doctor when she popped back out from one of the other rooms if it was okay to be doing yoga. And she said maybe, maybe, what kind of yoga, you have to be careful, she said, you need to find a physical therapist when you go back to California. And then the doctor’s husband was there, and he offered me another pastry, and the doctor was joking that he had come for his acupuncture but he was afraid of needles, and it had been a stressful month for him, his blood pressure was a little high.

And I thought about how God says to Moses that Pharaoh will not respond to Moses’s requests, or to the magic tricks he learns with the snake and the leprosy and the blood. Pharaoh will only respond to a greater might, God keeps saying this, Pharaoh will only respond to a greater might, yad chazakah, which literally means a strong arm, and I thought about the doctor’s elbow, and I wondered how many people use their elbows as much as this doctor does on a day to day basis. What a miraculous part of the body, the elbow! And so underappreciated. Maybe God’s strong arm, and greater might, is an elbow.

And I looked at the green plants and the red Buddha and I thought, I want my life to be very simple. I want to work hard and care for things and be around the people I love.

And when I finally left it was still windy and rainy and everything looked gray. And I heard it was snowing upstate, and my friend was wondering whether it would be safe to drive home from the train station, whether I should find another place to stay tonight and I said hm, and I would ask another friend who lives closer by.

Why am I telling you all of this?

One of the things I read last week when I was trying to find my way out of a silence was a commentary in the Zohar. It’s a commentary on a line that is technically in the next parsha, but I think it’s still relevant.

I’m going to read you a little bit of it, if that’s alright.

And so all week I have been thinking about colors. And what colors might be calling to me out of the parsha. And I didn’t know what to do with that, what to say about it , but I felt like it was important.

But now I think I wasn’t ready to know, and that certain things had to happen first. I had to sit with the silence a while, and feel a little sad, and stressed, and what would I write for the podcast? I had to notice that the little muscle I have trained for years to come up with things to say on command — that this muscle was twitching and maybe a little injured. And then I had to make a wildly inconvenient trip to see a doctor about the injury in my leg. And I had to have time to kill on a rainy day and wander into a gallery and find myself in front of this painting of bright and intricate trees and to feel something like the essence of color completely overtake my body. And remember what it’s like to feel startled by life, and overtaken, and remember that I want to approach Torah from that place, or let Torah approach me. And I had to remember sex by an open window and feel an intense dawning clarity that even though I have been floating for several months now I know, deep down, exactly what I want my life to be. I had to text with my friend about the snow, my friend whose apartment is full of plants and who cares for them so well, I had to find out about where I might stay the night. I had to take a long trip so that a sharp and mighty elbow could press into the parts of me that hurt.

We are starting a new book. It’s a book about becoming a people. It’s a book about how painful and difficult it can be to love a people, specific people, and the divine. It’s a book about rushing and ingratitude and the pains we don’t even notice because we are focused on the wrong injuries.

I wanted to tell you all this as a kind of a prayer. When we hear silence, let us acknowledge the silence. Let us be tender with ourselves, let us be slow. Let us not grasp anxiously after this Torah. Let us let it find us.

[2q5b]

VAYECHI

By Ezra

December 26th, 2023

I am a diaspora Jew. This is partly by accident and partly by choice. I was born in the U.S. My Jewish grandparents came to Boston from Poland and Germany after the Nazis made them into child refugees. My mother, raised Catholic, chose Judaism, married my father and converted.

As for me, I could move to Israel, the Promised Land, anytime I want. Many people I know have done this. But I don’t want to.

How can this be? I am a religious person. My prayerbook is dripping with longing for this land, full of texts written by people who couldn’t get there. The Torah that I study week after week is in large part a chronicle of my people inhabiting that land and then trying to return to it. And even if I prefer to stay in the US, how is it that millions of traditional religious Jews are happy to live all over the world, when they could easily relocate to their beloved spiritual homeland?

Today, that land has descended into hell. The IDF perpetrates mass murder, Hamas insists on acts of war, prisoners suffer in desperate conditions, Palestinians starve en masse in a Gaza that has become a ghetto.

It is more obvious than ever that Jewish statehood in the Holy Land has not ended our spiritual exile. A Jewish state may be a political reality, but it is not a spiritual solution. It cannot satisfy our longing. We yearn for something far, far deeper. We yearn for the repair of the world, the end of falsehood and bloodshed, the reign of peace and justice.

I think this deeper yearning, not satisfied by land acquisition, goes way back, back before the Exodus, back to the late chapters of the book of Breishit.

In this week’s Torah portion, Jacob and his children are living happily in Egypt. Before Jacob dies, he asks that they bury him in Canaan. After his death, the Jewish people travel together to the Promised Land for his burial and funeral. It’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t take forty years. They just ask the Pharaoh, he says yes, and they go. And then they come back to their homes in Egypt.

These are, maybe, the first diaspora Jews, and their exile seems voluntary. They could move to Israel, but that’s not where they live, that’s not where they’re raising their children and involved in government and generally thriving. And more: there is a deep purpose, perhaps one they’re not even aware of, for their exile in Egypt.

Jacob’s death ends the period of the patriarchs and matriarchs, the avot and imahot. These iconic three generations of ancestors–Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah–are credited as the originators of our spiritual tradition. Genesis has been largely a book not so much about a community as about these towering individuals, whose personalities and accomplishments still reverberate in our liturgy, our mythology, our souls. 

And from the beginning there is this strange pressure for each of these generations to have one single spiritual inheritor. A chosen child to continue the mission, to receive messages from God, never mind the familial discord this may create. It’s Isaac, not Ishmael. It’s Jacob, not Eisav. And Jacob seems poised to father the next great inheritor.

But something changes in Jacob’s generation. His plan to marry Rachel goes awry when he is tricked into marrying Leah first, and he eventually also marries two of their servants for a total of four wives, with whom he fathers thirteen children. Rachel is the last one to give birth, and her firstborn son Joseph seems, early on, to be that special chosen one, the one Jacob favors. But that plan, too, goes awry. Joseph has ten older brothers who are not happy about this favoritism, ten Eisavs to worry about compared to his father, who had a hard enough time fending off just one. And the old model, of one saint passing the torch to the inheriting saint, finally breaks. The brothers turn on Joseph and sell him into slavery in Egypt.

Joseph, like the three patriarchs, is a singular personality. His individual story is dramatic and righteous. But what he’s not is the next Isaac, the next Jacob. There is no next Jacob. A new era has begun: the era of B’nei Yisrael, the children of Israel (Jacob’s alternate name). This becomes the name of the nation which will be used throughout the Bible. The dynasty is no longer a dynasty, but an expanded family in which all are equal inheritors of the tradition, with no single clear leader. A large group in solidarity and spiritual alignment.

Simultaneous with this shift is the movement from Canaan to Egypt. Our parasha is the end of Breishit and the beginning of Shmot, the second book of the Torah, which will be radically different than the first. Jacob gives his parting blessings to his children at the dawn of the exile and transmits a crucial message: “God will be with you and will bring you back to the land of your ancestors.”

They could return right now. The text makes sure we know that they are able, shows us how easy it is. But they don’t. Instead they allow their holy land to exist as a horizon of spiritual possibility. Here the Promised Land becomes what it remains for the rest of the five books of Moses: an ever-receding myth, somewhere we approach, but never fully reach.

And this is how the Jewish people as we know it is born.

Exile is dangerous, make no mistake. Though Joseph wants his family to live with him in Egypt and share in the power and abundance he has attained there, Jacob needs explicit encouragement from God before going. “Have no fear of descending to Egypt,” God told him in last week’s parasha, “for I shall establish you as a great nation there. I myself shall descend with you to Egypt and I myself will also surely bring you up.” Jacob is right to be afraid: in Egypt, his descendants will face mass enslavement and murder. And yet there is something about exile that is necessary to the Jewish mission in the world, that both expands and deepens it. As Joseph tells his brothers when they are first reunited, “Don’t be distressed…God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival in the land and to sustain you for a momentous deliverance.”

Exile is not all bad, the Torah tells us. In fact it is indispensable. It has a very real purpose. It widens the capacity of the Jewish people. It allows us to grow beyond a closed-off little family that talks to God. It allows our spirituality to impact history.

The late 19th-century Polish hasidic thinker known as the Sfat Emet is one of my personal favorite Torah commentators. I doubt my love for his teachings can be separated from my love for my own Polish grandfather, z”l. Living amidst rampant and institutionalized anti-Semitism, the Sfat Emet taught, “This is the purpose of exile: that Israel make visible God’s kingdom, which is indeed everywhere. The true meaning of the word galut (exile) is hitgalut (revealing), that the glory of God’s kingdom be revealed in every place.” 

These two Hebrew words share a root for a good reason. Exile is dangerous, one is uncovered. Without protection, vulnerable. Showing oneself, speaking truth, can be dangerous in the same way. The faith of the Jewish diaspora is that this kind of vulnerability can be worth it. If you stay in your fortress, you are safe but you are cut off, you cannot communicate. If you grab your flashlight and walk into a dark, uncertain world, you light up the road on which you walk.

The transformation of the patriarch era into an era of communal expansion in Egypt has a similar kind of opening quality, an uncovering that also entails a loss. The patriarchal intimacy with God, a clarity and protection, give way to an imperfect but much more widely shared relationship with God.

Jacob himself feels this loss as it happens. His blessing of his twelve sons in this week’s parsha begins with a mysterious introduction. “Assemble yourselves,” he announces, “and I will tell you what will befall you in the latter days.” B’acharit ha-yamim. But he never seems to get to that information, nor does he specify what days he means. What follows instead is an oblique poem containing cryptic blessings for his children. An old midrash sheds light: “He wanted to reveal the end of the exile, but the Shchinah (the Presence of God) departed him, so he began to speak of other things.” 

This failure to communicate is connected to exile. Far from home under foreign rule, Jacob is in some way blocked from prophecy. A kind of perfect awareness has been lost to him, signaling the end of his era of patriarchal perfection and the beginning of something else, something larger and deeper.

When the Sfat Emet, a wise man living in the exile of his own time, tries to teach about this midrash, he too is partly blocked, his memory fails him. He teaches, “I believe my grandfather quoted the Rabbi of Pr-shiss-cha (Przysucha) as wondering why Jacob wanted to reveal the end. His answer was that when the end is known, exile is made easier. That’s all I remember, but it seems to mean the same: revealing the end means knowing there is an end to exile, and that shows it to be but a matter of hiding, not a force of its own… Jacob our Father just wanted there to be no mistake about this, that it all be obvious, but that goal eluded him. You need to struggle to find truth.” 

The contemporary spiritual exile, the one you and I are living through, is not easy, at times it is horrific. How it will end, how a better world could be revealed, is not yet clear. But if we are struggling to find the truth, struggling to uncover it, then we will not have wasted our time. Wherever we are in the world, it is our task right here and now to reveal and enact the good and the holy, the better world that is possible, hiding in plain sight.

Chazak Chazak v’Nitchazeik.

[2q5b]

VAYIGASH

By Agnes

December 21st, 2023

I think this is a drash about faith.

Faith is sort of embarrassing to talk about.

It has gotten branded as a kind of Christian word.

And yet — it’s all over Judaism — but aslant —

There is God’s faith...fulness. Which is more about loyalty, steadfastness.

And as for us, we are more often enjoined to fear God than to have faith in God.

Ask a Jew if she believes in God and often the answer will be, Ehhhh…

I have a memory of my father saying, once, “Oh, friendships will sort of fade away. You’ll have a family, that will be the focus. And your friendships will become less and less important.”

Friendship was then — continues to be — central to my sense of self, to my sense of the life I have participated in creating.

And yet — there is so much in our society that insists that friendship – which is to say, relationships without a certain legal or ritualized container – are lesser, somehow. I go to a shul that goes out of its way to honor the centrality of community to Jewish life — and actualizes that commitment in any number of ways — and yet, when it comes to the moments of ritual at the center of weekly services, legal and biological family comes first. There is an aliyah for wedding anniversaries. There are aliyot for parents of new children. The unit of the immediate family is central to every bnei mitzvah. And who says mourner’s kaddish? Really a very narrowly defined set of relationships — parents, grandparents, children, siblings, spouses. The rest of us sit, and think privately of the people we loved and lost. Specific legal obligations define familial relationships, make them real. 

Friendship is nice, sure. But it rests on different grounds. It is not made official, legally or halakhically. It rests on a ground of faith.

Towards the end of this week’s parsha, we read about how Jacob slowly acquires all the farmland of Egypt on behalf of Pharaoh. The famine he predicted is on, and getting worse. Egyptians from all over come to Joseph for food. And Joseph takes their money, and gives them food. And then the money is gone, and they come back, because they still need food. Give me your livestock, says Joseph, and I’ll let you eat. And they do. And then the livestock is gone. And they come back, because they still need food. And they say, we have no money, we have no livestock. All we have left is our land, and our labor. And Joseph says, okay, I’ll take both, and then I’ll let you eat. 

And in this way all the money, all the livestock, all the farmland of Egypt passes over into Pharaoh’s hands, by way of Joseph, and all the people of Egypt become serfs. Sharecroppers, really. 

And to complete this process of ensuring complete dependency, Joseph takes one last step. 

“And [Joseph] removed the population town by town, from one end of Egypt’s border to another.”

And then Joseph says to the people,

הֵן֩ קָנִ֨יתִי אֶתְכֶ֥ם הַיּ֛וֹם וְאֶת־אַדְמַתְכֶ֖ם לְפַרְעֹ֑ה ׃

“Whereas I have this day acquired you and your land for Pharaoh.”

It’s chilling. Joseph, in this moment of natural disaster, happens to have a lot of power. And he seeks to make that power permanent. I don’t need to remind you that we have a long history of forced relocation in this country. 

And the Hebrew word here has that edge to it — קָנִ֨יתִי אֶתְכֶ֥ם — I have acquired you — purchased, even.

That word does have other resonances, elsewhere.

Famously, in the song of the sea, just after God has brought the people out of Egypt:

עַד־יַעֲבֹ֤ר עַמְּךָ֙ ה

עַֽד־יַעֲבֹ֖ר עַם־ז֥וּ קָנִֽיתָ׃

Till Your people cross over, hashem, Till Your people cross whom You have acquired.

(Exodus 15:16)

We, in that story, become like the Egyptians — we become dependents on someone else. And in that way enter into a kind of relationship.

So we may be chilled by the ways in which Joseph “acquires” the Egyptian people. But there is a model for it elsewhere — God acquires us. In fact, according to the midrash, there are four things God is said to acquire in Tanach: Israel – us; Wisdom, or Torah; Heaven and Earth, and the Holy Temple. 

Purchasing, acquiring, then, can’t be all bad, no? If it’s something God does?

How bad can it be, if one of the things one can acquire in this way is wisdom? 

The rabbis cite Mishlei, Proverbs, when they talk about God’s acquisition of wisdom.

ה קָ֭נָנִי רֵאשִׁ֣ית דַּרְכּ֑וֹ קֶ֖דֶם מִפְעָלָ֣יו מֵאָֽז׃

“Hashem acquired me at the beginning of God’s path As the first of God’s doings of old. (8:22)

But there is something missing there. Later in Mishlei, we get the following: 

לָמָּה־זֶּ֣ה מְחִ֣יר בְּיַד־כְּסִ֑יל/ לִקְנ֖וֹת חׇכְמָ֣ה וְלֶב־אָֽיִן׃

What good is money in the hand of a fool To purchase wisdom, when he has no heart? (17:16)

Acquisition – even as practiced by God – even when its object is something as deep and unlimited as wisdom – has its limits. 

Joseph, dear Joseph, was so often invited into relationship and then tossed aside — into a pit, into a prison. He was invited into intimacies, and then forgotten. Dear Joseph! Tender, visionary, sensitive, and queer. And also: he has a complicated relationship to relationship. He was shaped by trauma and exclusion. 

It is understandable that he might seek a relationship that would feel solid, undeniable. 

A relationship that doesn’t require the painful, terrifying work of faith. A relationship rooted in power and dependency. “I have acquired you,” he says to all the people of Egypt. I have built, step by step, an unbreakable relationship. It’s foundation may be power and dependency. It may be built on fear, control, and precarity. But to Joseph it feels safe. 

It feels safe because it requires very little faith to sustain.

And a relationship without faith is maybe the only kind of relationship he knows how to form. 

I wonder if I am thinking about faith this week because I have been struggling. I have felt unable to enter the room of certain conversations. I am not replying to emails, I am quiet in group texts. A little hopeless, a little middle-of-the-night awake and sad, anxious; a little stuck in grief of all that has already happened. It all feels so impossible already – what point is there in continuing to try so hard? God’s presence feels more like an idea than a daily accompaniment. I talk to her and that feels good but then there is a reminder of the world. 

I wish there was something I knew I could do, and be done with it. I wish there could be some relief. 

I don’t know what will happen in Gaza. I don’t know what will happen to all the relationships frayed and bridges burned and lives destroyed. But some part of me knows that there is a thing called faith and I need to have that. 

Joseph must have learned about relationships, at least a little bit, from his father, Jacob. Jacob, after all, is the one who tried to secure his father’s love by changing his legal status, purchasing a birthright on the DL with a bowl of soup. This is the Jacob who wanted a blessing from an angel, and got it because he had a mean chokehold when he got that angel on a wrestling mat. This is a man who felt that love was scarce, that it was only through strength and shrewdness that it could be secured. Epic Jacob, gorgeous Jacob, legendary, iconic Jacob!

And this is the Jacob who, in this week’s parsha, tells Pharaoh, מְעַ֣ט וְרָעִ֗ים הָיוּ֙ יְמֵי֙ שְׁנֵ֣י חַיַּ֔י.

My days have been bitter and few.

Two weeks from now, we’ll read how a new king arose over Egypt. And that new king did not know Joseph. And all the power Joseph felt he acquired will be gone. His days, in the eyes of this new Pharaoh, might as well have been bitter and few as well. 

I don’t think our texts only show us things that are supposed to be clearly admired or condemned. I think our text shows us messy things, ugly things. I think our texts show us people shaped by their parents and their broken hearts. People acting in messy ways, ways that have generational consequences. It’s good to have this kind of ugliness in our pasts, because it is a way of saying, this past, too, can have a future — now find it. 

You cannot acquire faith. It is not a legal status. It is not a form of ownership. You cannot buy it with a bowl of soup, and you cannot buy it with all the grain in Egypt, even during a famine. You step into it, day after day.

For love is fierce as death,

Passion is mighty as Sheol;

Its darts are darts of fire,

A blazing flame.

Vast floods cannot quench love,

Nor rivers drown it.

If a man offered all his wealth for love,

He would be laughed to scorn.

(Song of Songs 8:7-8)

I will not be called to the Torah with my friends, to mark any anniversaries. We will not, in a traditional service, at least, say Kaddish for each other when, God forbid, one day one of us is gone. Our friendship cannot be acquired, it can only be sustained, as an ongoing work of faith. 

The name of our parsha is Vayigash. And he approached. 

An approach can be a risky move. A move of vulnerability.

Our hearts are broken. The world is a nightmare. 

I do think there are forms of relationship that can never be secured legally.

I do think there is ugliness in our past.

I think we need to talk to each other.  

I think we need to dream towards relationships.

Relationships that will scare us, compromise our defenses, sustain us. 

I do think we need faith.

Bo-u, ve-nigash.

[2q5b]

MIKEITZ

By Ezra

December 13th, 2023

There was no such thing as a gay religious Jew. Such a thing had never been imagined, much less heard of as actually existing. This is what I thought, anyway. It was the early or mid 2000s. The word “queer” was an insult. I was a teenager and I didn’t know how big and various the world really was. I didn’t even know I was gay, much less trans. I had never heard of trans people. I didn’t know I existed. I was not yet imaginable to myself.

I wanted to be an Orthodox Jew. I got into it via an older kid who I looked up to, who was passionate, full of fire. I wanted to go toward the fire. I wanted to really live, not just watch TV and go to the mall and do my homework. I wanted to devote myself to the ultimate. Orthodoxy was a far cry from the hippie-adjacent Reconstructionist Judaism of my parents and synagogue, or even from the Conservative Judaism of the private Jewish school I went to until I was thirteen. Attempting Orthodox observance was a transgression, a passionate non-conformist campaign I undertook, closely parallel to my obsession with punk rock.

The inconvenient facts of my sexuality and gender were very slowly coming into view, through the charged fog of adolescence. I thought I could carry it all, and keep the inconvenient parts hidden. I thought I wouldn’t get hurt.

Our parsha is about the life of Joseph after he is exiled from his family at age seventeen, after he wears something pretty and gets the shit beaten out of him. His brothers want to kill him, but they throw him into a pit and sell him into slavery instead. They get rid of him, is the point. In a way, they did kill him. His life as he knew it has been stripped from him, and no one knows where he is. He no longer exists. The word Joseph’s family use again and again for his non-existence is “einenu.” He is not.

 But Joseph is. He has survived his own extinction. His life in Egypt has the frenzied zigzag of the young and untethered. He is traumatized and vulnerable, but also vigorously himself. What is striking is how spiritually connected he remains in the wake of his banishment from his community. He mentions God almost every time he speaks. Multiple Egyptians recognize that “God is with him,” and people repeatedly entrust him with positions of enormous responsibility. “The spirit of God is in him,” says the king of Egypt. Everyone seems to fall in love with him. 

But when it comes down to it, all the charisma in the world won’t protect a member of the despised underclass, an immigrant, a slave. Joseph is incarcerated for years for a crime he didn’t commit. The text calls it a prison, but he himself, still in the wake of his teenage trauma, refers to it as “the pit.” He asks a fellow inmate who is about to be released, the royal wine steward, to plead his case to the king, but as last week’s parasha concludes, “The chief wine steward did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.” Once again, Joseph does not exist. Einenu.

When Joseph finally gets out, he becomes instantly and maximally assimilated as an Egyptian. He becomes second in command over the entire Egyptian empire. He is dressed in new clothes and is given an Egyptian name and an Egyptian wife. The Torah breathes no hint of disapproval at this total assimilation. Just the opposite: this is the rise to power that saves countless lives from the severe famine that begins seven years later, including the lives of Joseph’s entire family, the forebears of the Jewish people.

In the process of gaining this crucial influence, he becomes unrecognizable, completely cut off from his origins. Almost no one even knows he is, or once was, a Hebrew. He has fully transitioned, and he passes. Entirely stealth, he is finally fully succeeding in life. He names his first born son Menashe, a form of the word “forget,” in gratitude that “God has made me forget all my hardship and my father’s entire household.” He makes his son into a constant reminder to forget his terrible past. It sounds like a contradiction, but people who have needed to flee from their past know that it’s not. There is the passive kind of forgetting, simply dropping the thread of memory, but then there is active forgetting, forgetting forward. It is enshrined in your present day life: my past can no longer hurt me. The road I took has led me to healing. The old Joseph is dead. Einenu.

It is a natural, and often a necessary, thing to turn away from the home community that harmed you and completely sever your ties to it. So many of us urgently need to leave our religion or family behind in order to thrive. And yet. There is no total escape from one’s past. Even when the way toward healing involves a clean break from a former life, we avoid a relationship with our origins at our peril. Even if no interpersonal reconciliation is possible, you are going to have to learn how to live with your past. Like it or not, your memory and your present-tense self are roommates. And memory is the messy roommate. You and your memory can stagger your schedules, even avoid each other completely, but you will still find dirty dishes left out in the middle of the living room. 

Eventually, Joseph’s past comes knocking on his bolted-shut door. Ten of his brothers show up in Egypt, devastated by the widespread famine, desperate to buy food, and it’s Joseph they have to deal with. He knows who they are, but they don’t know who he is. “We, your servants, are twelve brothers, the son of one man in the land of Canaan,” they tell him when he grills them for information. “The youngest is with our father, and the other is gone.” Einenu.

Again, Joseph undergoes the experience of not existing. Of outliving himself. His brothers do not see him. But this time, the power is all his. They tried to kill him and now they are entirely at his mercy.

But even more urgent than the opportunity for revenge is that Joseph has a chance to rescue his youngest brother, the only other son of Rachel, who never did anything wrong to him, and who has had to live with these abusers for years now. He projects his hurt onto Benjamin and desperately tries to seize this moment, as if he could undo his own trauma by saving another child from having to go through it. In trying to remove Benjamin from the other brothers and bring him to Egypt, Joseph is trying to save the child in him who was hurt so badly, who was thrown into a pit with no one to help him. The innocent child who is no more. Einenu.

Joseph is now reliving the past that he swore he would always remember to forget. He’s stuck in the old story, replaying it and scrambling to undo it. He creates a drama of false accusations and manipulation to bring Benjamin to Egypt and to put his brothers through psychological torture in the process. But as he spends this terrible time with his former family, disguising his intentions throughout, his anger begins to lapse into heartbreak. More than once he leaves the room to weep in secret. It starts to slowly dawn on him, even amidst his deceitful engineering of the situation, that perhaps his brothers really have changed. That maybe it is possible to see the past differently, to see it as a prelude to a liberated future. Never to excuse what was done to you, but to understand it differently as the story gets longer, as life gets longer. To allow it to mean something new, something better.

So many of us have been traumatized by where we come from. So many of us Jews have been not just alienated from Jewish community, but harmed by it, attacked by it, erased from it. 

You may be a Jewish woman who was forced by a misogynist tradition to be silent, subservient, domesticated, degraded.

You may be a politically inconvenient anti-Israel Jew, asked to ignore your moral conscience, to excuse the continual oppression and recurrent murder perpetrated by the state of Israel.

You may be a non-white Jew harmed by creeping white supremacy in Jewish community. A disabled Jew blocked and degraded by ableism. A convert or a non-Jew drawn in by love  and spirituality, and then othered and erased.

You may be, like me, a queer Jew who was told by people she trusted that she had to throw her queerness into the deepest darkest pit and never let it out.

Or maybe you were just not loved by your community, not listened to, not cared for, and you knew in your bones you had to break away.

Regardless, I hope you got free, or are getting free.

Joseph’s story is asking us: how do we want to live with the painful past? What could it start to mean for those of us who have now found a way to thrive despite it? If the ones who hurt us came begging our forgiveness, ready to care for us, ready to see that we do exist, that we are human–what would we say to them?

I don’t know what I would say. What I know is that I am trying to unclench the fist that I have closed over my hurt, to open my hand and let myself heal. To allow memory to be only the painful beginning of a very long and very beautiful story.

[2q5b]

VAYESHEV

by Agnes

December 8th, 2023

So much happens in this parsha. It’s almost too much to narrate.

Joseph gets his fancy coat, he has the dreams that make his brothers hate him, he goes to find them in the fields, they conspire to kill him, end up throwing him in a pit and then selling him into slavery. He ends up in Egypt, rising in the house of Potiphar, only to be tossed in prison, interpret more dreams, think his interpretations might save his neck, and then find himself again forgotten.

Meanwhile there’s an interlude with Joseph’s brother Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, involving two dead sons, a lot of resentment, some birth control, a retrogressive legal structure that allows a disengaged slash probably grief-stricken Judah to leave Tamar in a legal and emotional limbo. There is some deception, some prostitution, and a pregnancy with twins.

It’s a lot! And all of it is hard to talk about without talking about what happens later.

The fact that there will be more reversals of fortune in Joseph’s future, that a famine will come, that he will find himself in a position to save his brothers…

More than any parsha, it’s hard to talk about what happens here without talking about what happens after.

Two parshiot from now, Joseph will insist to his brothers that the whole thing needs to be interpreted in light of a larger divine vision: “it was not you who sent me here, but God,” he says, and “it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.”

Which all feels like a kind of lesson to us, as interpreters of story, as readers of our own lives.

It’s as if we are always going to fail to recognize what is actually going on, in the moment of its unfolding.

So what are we to make of the little word that comes up twice in this parsha — להכיר, to recognize?

The first time it comes up, the brothers have sent Joseph’s coat back to their father, Jacob. They have slaughtered a baby goat and smeared its blood all over the beautiful garment, thinking that they can disguise what has actually happened — they have sold Joseph into slavery.

The coat, of course, is already emotionally charged. It’s a beautiful coat, a rare coat, a singular coat — a coat that Jacob has given Joseph because, as everyone knows, he loves Joseph most of all his children.

They send the coat and they say, do you recognize this (הַכֶּר־נָ֗א)? It’s your son’s coat, no?

And then we are told that Jacob does indeed recognize it — same word (וַיַּכִּירָ֤הּ) — and comes — a little too quickly — to a sort of melodramatic but tidy conclusion.

“My son’s tunic!” he says. “A savage beast devoured him!”

I want to pause and unpack the symbolic drama a little bit here.

My memory of this parsha was always that this savage beast idea is one that the brothers plant in their father’s head — we’re gonna make it look like X, and convince him that X happened.

But when the brothers dip the coat in blood, the text never actually tells us why.

Which makes Jacob’s hasty and sort of random conclusion ever stranger.

What if the brothers are not trying to hide something?

What if they are trying to reveal something, something too painful for words?

What if they are actually asking their father to look at something he doesn’t want to look at?

What if the bloody coat isn’t a lie, but a deeper kind of truth?

(Judah, in fact, has just asked: What do we gain by killing our brother and covering up his blood?)

Let us kill him in a different way, and make the blood visible.

This blood that ties us to him, that ties us to you. This blood that represents our murderous anger.

Because if the idea that Joseph has been murdered is a lie, it is also a kind of truth.

The brothers originally wanted to murder Joseph.

In a funny way, the brothers dip the coat in blood because they want to reveal something about themselves, not conceal it.

And do we really think that Jacob didn’t see all that when he saw the coat?

Of course he did.

Of course he saw in that moment how his own refusals of love had given birth to such rage, and, ultimately, such pain, within his own family.

I refuse to believe that he did not see it all.

That the father did not understand his sons perfectly well.

We have murdered your love, they told him, we have murdered you. We loved you and you refused to see us. You loved Joseph. And that love has murdered us. You have murdered us.

Look at us all, here, together, Dad; drenched in blood.

But that is so much, so painful for Jacob in this moment.

So he externalizes it.

A bloody beast did this!

When the bloody beast is actually his own children.

When the bloody beast is himself.

It is not because he is confused that Jacob mourns for many days, and refuses to be comforted.

It’s because he sees the truth.

He grieves himself, his own looking away, his own cruelty.

And he cannot be comforted because the things he’s grieving have not actually died.

The same word, recognize, comes up later in the parsha, in the story of Tamar.

Tamar has, trapped in a misogynistic legal nightmare limbo, decided to get her father-in-law’s attention by pretending to be a sacred prostitute and getting him to sleep with her. She succeeds.

He gives the woman he doesn’t recognize as his daughter-in-law, the daughter-in-law who has lived in his household many years now, through the death of two sons and the long childhood of a third, his seal and cord and staff as a guarantee of future payment. Later he goes looking for the prostitute he thought he slept with, to pay her, and, she isn’t there. Eventually, Tamar gets pregnant and comes to Judah with the seal, cord, and staff, and says, “Recognize these?” (הַכֶּר־נָ֔א)

She’s asking him to look at a situation that he has decided is unrelated to him — a situation in which he sees he has no agency or involvement — and says, no, look. This is you. You are here.

And also: Look at me.

I am here. I have been here a long time. I loved at least one of your children.

And perhaps there was a time when I loved you.

So what particular kind of a call does this word represent?

The text could have easily given us a simpler word — Look (הַבֶּט־נָ֣א), or look (רְא֗וּ), which is what Potiphar’s wife says in this parsha: “Look [at this coat!], he had to bring us a Hebrew to dally with us!”

Instead we get the twisted, painful idea of recognition.

It is, on the one hand, a call for justice.

Look — see — we have been wronged.

I — we — are tricking you, have lied, have trapped you, are hurting you — but you are complicit here.

You are hurting but you must see your part in the way things have unfolded.

Christina Sharpe, in Ordinary Notes, writes about how whiteness is so obsessed with innocence.

Rather than seek justice, so many of us just want to be innocent, to be reassured.

Horrible things have happened, but we are good, aren’t we? We, personally, have no part in this.

Recognition — הַכֶּר־נָ֔א — is a word of messy complicity.

It’s messy because in the stories here, the brothers have done something wrong. And so has Tamar, she has deceived her father-in-law, made him a nonconsensual father of twins.

No one is innocent.

But in the brother’s violence and Tamar’s deception, Jacob and Judah are forced to confront the ways in which years and years of passive cruelty and neglect have put the people around them in impossible situations.

We have murdered your son, but so have you.

You have murdered us.

I have deceived you, but you have deceived yourself as well.

You have refused to see me all these years.

So it’s a call to justice.

But it’s also a call of love. And a call of hurt.

It’s a call of the kind of complicated love that hasn’t been given its due. Love that hasn’t been tended to, love that has been blocked, ignored, starved.

Love thwarted, love denied, love met with indifference.

הַכֶּר־נָ֔א is a phrase of brokenheartedness and betrayal.

I am this week, as every week, thinking about the war in Gaza.

And we may feel that we are at a point where love is impossible.

But I feel that our sacred obligation is to believe that the story isn’t over yet.

That there is a future parsha, in which some measure of grief is given space, where some measure of justice is done, and a path towards love — or at least relationship — is possible.

הַכֶּר־נָ֔א

הַכֶּר־נָ֔א

הַכֶּר־נָ֔א

In grief, in rage, we are talking about complicity.

We are not ready, yet, to talk about love.

And so how do we get there?

In September of next year, we will read Ki Tetzei. In a long list of laws, we will hear about the issue of a husband who has two wives, one loved, one unloved. And who, because he loves the one wife and not the other, decides to favor a younger child over an older.

It will be hard not to think about Jacob, and his preference for Rachel over Leah. It will be hard not to think about Jacob’s blinding love for Joseph.

But here we get a legal solution.

Instead, he must accept the first-born, the son of the unloved one, and allot to him a double portion of all he possesses; since he is the first fruit of his vigor, the birthright is his due. (21:18)

כִּי֩ אֶת־הַבְּכֹ֨ר בֶּן־הַשְּׂנוּאָ֜ה יַכִּ֗יר

It’s the same word, יַכִּ֗יר.

Love is hard to legislate.

I believe in love, as radically framed by prophets and mystics from Meister Eckhart to Martin Luther King. And that love is a demand, that love is a form of justice, of revolution, of creation.

And also, there is the daily love. Which is hard. It can be hard to get there, when we are hurting.

But we can start with legal measures. We recognize injustice, we recognize our own complicity.

There are reparations, there is land-back, there is an end to occupation.

There is a provision of resources to rebuild what we ourselves have destroyed.

These stories are long.

The ask is hard:

הַכֶּר־נָ֔א

It may be demanding of us things we are not ready to see, or say, or do.

But the story is not over yet.

We have to find a path.

[2q5b]

VAYISHLACH

By Ezra

November 30th, 2023

How does Israel approach an enemy?

I’m asking a spiritual question. I am not asking a logistical or tactical question or even a political question.

How does Israel approach an enemy?

Logistics and tactics and politics have something beneath them: core values. Elemental questions of what is valuable, what is doable, what is believable and who we are.

This question of how a member of the in-group approaches someone outside that group is possibly the key theme of the book of Genesis. It’s Abraham against the world, Isaac struggling to make peace with the Plishtim, Jacob vs. Eisav and Lavan, Joseph and his brothers hating one another until they encounter the overwhelming power of Egypt.

         At the beginning of our parasha, Jacob is still only named Jacob. Since birth, his name has carried the baggage of his adversarial relationship with his brother Eisav. He is a heel-clutcher, he is a trickster, he grabs and he hoards and he deceives and he gets his way. But so much has happened since he last saw his brother. He has been away for years in Charan, he has married two women and fathered many children. He has put up with an abusive father-in-law and become very rich and successful. And he has encountered God. He has held onto a private covenant with God, that God will protect him and eventually deliver him home unharmed, and that Jacob will be devoted to God in all that he does.

         Now he is coming home again. He has not seen his brother since Eisav swore to kill Jacob for deceitfully taking the family blessing that Isaac intended for Eisav. He doesn’t know where their relationship stands, but when he sends messengers toward his destination, they find that Eisav is coming toward Jacob with an army of hundreds of men.

         Jacob panics.

וַיִּירָ֧א יַעֲקֹ֛ב מְאֹ֖ד וַיֵּ֣צֶר ל֑וֹ

Yaakov became exceedingly afraid and was distressed.

There is a famous midrash from Bereishit Rabbah on this line. Why is this expression of anxiety doubled? What does “and was distressed” add when you already have “Yaakov became exceedingly afraid?” The answer: He was afraid that he would be killed, and he was distressed that he might have to kill someone else. He is faced with the terrible situation of balancing his own safety against his deepest ethical commitments.

Maybe this reminds you of something contemporary.

So what does Jacob do? First, he begs God for protection, and then he makes hasty arrangements to avoid the worst possible outcome. He sends a giant gift of livestock toward his brother’s army. The sun goes down. Jacob sends his family away from him, for their own protection, and spends the night alone, in terror of what might happen in the morning, or even sooner.

In this moment of total vulnerability, Jacob is transformed. 

“And Yaakov was left alone—and a man, ish, wrestled with him until sunrise.” We do not know who this man is. The wrestling match is intense. The man dislocates Jacob’s thigh, but Jacob eventually pins him and won’t let him go until the man blesses him.

The blessing is this: “No longer will your name be spoken as Yaakov (Jacob), but rather as Yisrael (Israel), for you have struggled with God and men and have prevailed.”

This is very confusing. Did Jacob just wrestle with a man, or with God? If this was a battle with God, why did the text refer to God as a man, whom Jacob was able to physically overpower? And why would God attack and injure Jacob?

But a few verses later, now walking with a limp, Jacob reinforces the divinity of the encounter: “Yaakov called the name of the place: Peniel, Face of God, because: ‘I have seen God, face to face, and my life has been saved!’”

Jacob approached his enemy with intense fear of retribution for all he has stolen, frantically pitting safety against ethics.

But how does Israel, the Jewish spiritual namesake and role model, approach an enemy?

Israel was attacked in the middle of the night and permanently injured, and the attacker was: God.

And now we see that he has been changed, that he is starting to become worthy of a new name. 

It was unclear, at first, whether the lavish valuables he sent toward Eisav were purely out of self-protection, or freely intended as a gift. Perhaps this gift was meant to buy his safety, just another clever act of self-preservation, with no spiritual progress made since his days of manipulation and theft. But when Eisav and Yaakov finally do embrace, when they make peace or at least cease fire, Israel’s true intentions become clear. When Eisav graciously tries to refuse the gift, Yaakov speaks the key lines:

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יַעֲקֹ֗ב אַל־נָא֙ אִם־נָ֨א מָצָ֤אתִי חֵן֙ בְּעֵינֶ֔יךָ וְלָקַחְתָּ֥ מִנְחָתִ֖י מִיָּדִ֑י כִּ֣י עַל־כֵּ֞ן רָאִ֣יתִי פָנֶ֗יךָ כִּרְאֹ֛ת פְּנֵ֥י אֱלֹkהִ֖ים וַתִּרְצֵֽנִי׃

Yaakov said:

No, I pray!

Please, if I have found favor in your eyes,

then take this gift from my hand.

For I have seen your face, as one sees the face of God,

and you have accepted me.

Here we hear a direct echo of Abraham’s ambiguous encounter in parshat Vayera. 

“God appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre as he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. And he raised his eyes and saw, there were three men standing over him. [When] he saw them, he ran to meet them from the entrance to his tent and bowed low to the earth,”

וַיֹּאמַ֑ר אֲדֹנָ֗י אִם־נָ֨א מָצָ֤אתִי חֵן֙ בְּעֵינֶ֔יךָ אַל־נָ֥א תַעֲבֹ֖ר מֵעַ֥ל עַבְדֶּֽךָ׃

and he said:

My lords, Adonai, I pray, if I have found favor in (singular!) your eyes,

please do not pass by your servant! - again in the singular!

Did Abraham meet God, or did he meet three strangers, or both? Or are these meetings somehow one and the same? The confusion of human and divine is directly parallel to Jacob’s story, as are the phrases “al na” and “im na matzati chen be’einecha,” “if i have found favor in your eyes.” 

Jacob, speaking to Eisav, concludes:

קַח־נָ֤א אֶת־בִּרְכָתִי֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר הֻבָ֣את לָ֔ךְ כִּֽי־חַנַּ֥נִי אֱלֹהִ֖kים וְכִ֣י יֶשׁ־לִי־כֹ֑ל וַיִּפְצַר־בּ֖וֹ וַיִּקָּֽח׃

Please take my blessing that has been brought to you,

because God has shown me favor—and because I have everything.

And he urged him, so he took it.

This from the man who once impersonated his brother to fool his father and take the family blessing! At this point, he knows he is safe and that Eisav meant him no harm. He could have kept all the wealth. But he needs Eisav to take the blessing back. 

Return of stolen property heals not only the offended, but the offender. When we propose returning stolen land to indigenous people, such as the Massachusett, Pawtucket and Naumkeag lands I am on right now, it is because we seek healing for all of us. When one proposes to repair the damage wrought by one’s own actions, such as the IDF’s catastrophic bombing and starving of Gaza, or Hamas’s campaign of murder and terror, it is for the sake of not only material restitution, but spiritual health. We seek to repair the values that have underlined our actions.

“I have seen your face, as one sees the face of God… please take my blessing… I have everything.”

The secret of Jewish spirituality is that the face of the enemy is the face of God. Hoarding and theft are unnecessary because if we have this knowledge, we have everything. Is it possible that the enemy, created in the image of God, hates us, is coming to attack us in the night, wants to hurt us? Yes, it is possible. They are a vision of divinity anyway. The line between human and divine is blurred. You can’t find it. We are to treat each other accordingly.

[2q5b]

VAYETZE

By Agnes

November 24th, 2023

In Vayetze, Jacob has a dream.

He has just fled Beer-sheva, and the anger of his brother, Esav. And on the way to Haran, he stops for a night.

And he dreamed; and here, a ladder, standing on the ground, and its head, reaching to the sky; and here, angels of the Divine ascending and descending on it.

And here, God, standing on it; (28:12-15)

In some ways the message of the dream is quite clear. God proceeds to tell Jacob who She is, and makes promises about the land, and about Jacob’s descendents. But it is the first part of the dream – the ladder – that stays with me, and that has lodged itself in the imagination of our culture.

“There is no dream without its interpretation,” Bar Kapparah tells us, in Bereishit Rabbah. Every dream can be interpreted. And also: without an interpretation, you don’t really have a dream.

“A dream that is not interpreted,” the Zohar tells us, “is like a letter that is not read.”

It sits there on the kitchen counter. It may as well have never been sent.

The interpretation of the dream is arguably as important as the dream itself.

Jacob wakes up the next morning. And he begins to interpret his dream.

And Jacob woke from his sleep and he said, Surely there is God in this place, and I, I didn’t know.

And he was afraid, and he said, How awesome is this place; it is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of the sky. (28:16-17)

What struck me, reading the parsha this week, is that he’s really offering two distinct interpretations. 

“Surely there is God in this place, and I, I didn’t know.” God is in this place, just as there might be God in any place.

“How awesome is this place; it is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of the sky.” This place is unique. It is none other than THE house of God. And this is none other than THE gate of the sky.

There’s a certain psychological logic to it. He’s surprised at first. And then he lets the dream settle in, and he becomes awed, even frightened.

His second interpretation is more intense, more definitive. It overtakes the gentleness of the first.

We often use the word dream, colloquially, to talk about the future. My dream is to have a house on a mountain in Tennessee. Or: I have a dream.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

That’s Dr. King. He’s talking about a reality that doesn’t exist yet, but that, he insists, will one day come to be.

And in Jewish tradition, too, dreams are often interpreted as clues to what will happen in the future. Joseph, Jacob’s son, will be a great interpreter of dreams, and his whole career will be built on the fact that he’s able to look through the blurry glass of dreams and see future events that others cannot.

In Pitron Chalomot, a sixteenth century treatise on Jewish dream interpretation, we read that a person’s dreams are a divine gift, Almoli writes, that enable them to see some hint of the future, and adjust their behavior accordingly. The idea is not that these glimpses of the future override our agency. A person’s dreams allow them “to make the choice to avoid evil, or, by means of repentance, good deeds, prayers, and supplications before the Lord, to reverse God’s decree.”

A dream can be a kind of hint, a reminder. A be-careful, a take-courage. 

But we, of course, are still our dreams’ interpreters. And what we choose to say about our dreams matters.

In Berachot 56a, we read, All dreams follow the mouth.

A story:

A certain woman went to Rabbi Eleazar and said to him, “I saw in a dream that the loft of the upper story of my house was split open.” “You will conceive a son,” replied the rabbi. She went away and it happened just as he told her. Later she dreamed the same dream again, and again came to Rabbi Eleazar and told him of it, and he gave her the same interpretation, which was fulfilled just as it had been the first time. She then had this dream a third time and again sought out the rabbi. She did not find him, however, and so she told his disciples, “I saw in a dream that the loft of the upper story of my house was split open.” “You will bury your husband,” replied the disciples. She went away, and it happened just as they had told her. Rabbi Eleazar, upon hearing weeping and wailing, asked what had occurred, and the discoples related it to him. “You have murdered the man!” he said to them. (Ber. Rabbah, Mikketz, 89:8)

The same dream, three times! And it’s just when the interpretation shifts that the outcome takes a turn. All dreams follow the mouth.

Ezra tells me they call Kislev the dreamers’ month. Because there are so many parshiot with dreams in them.

I want to come back, at last, to Jacob’s dream. And to his two, slightly different, interpretations of it. 

What strikes me about the dream, or at least Jacob’s interpretation of it, is that it’s not really a dream about the future. It’s a dream about the present.

There is God in this place. This is the house of God. This is the gate of the sky.

What if that is part of the Torah we’re being asked to consider this week? 

That the present can be as mysterious as the future. That today can be as unknowable as tomorrow. And that what we say about what is unfolding around us matters. 

We are all of us always dreaming the present. And we are always interpreting it.

What else might Jacob have said about his dream?

What if, instead of being afraid, and turning towards the terror of the dream, he had dwelled in his own humility? I did not know, he says. There must be so much that I don’t know.

What if, instead of God, he had lingered upon the angels? Wondered about their multiplicity, their variety, their beauty, the countless messages they carried between this world and the next.

By the end of this week’s parsha, twenty years have passed. Two marriages, twelve children, and a near-catastrophic conflict with his father-in-law later, Jacob encounters the angels of God once again. And this time it is not in a dream: וַיִּפְגְּעוּ־ב֖וֹ מַלְאֲכֵ֥י אֱלֹהִֽים. The angels sieze upon him. They catch him, they will not be avoided. You will not miss us, this time, I imagine them saying, our beauty, our multiplicity, the countless messages we carry between this world and the next.

What, in our dreams of today, are we not attending to? 

What are we missing? 

What will catch up with us twenty years from now, accost us on the road? 

The parsha ends with Jacob’s performing another act of naming. Twenty years earlier he called the place of his dream Beit-El, the house of God. This time he gives the place of his vision a very different name. “This is God’s camp,” he says. מַחֲנֵ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים זֶ֑ה. And he names the place, Machanayim. Strangely, a plural form — two camps.

Jacob has moved from the singular, to the plural. From the hardened certainty of his second interpretation, to the soft wonder of his first. 

I would like to imagine that the plurality of Machanayim echoes the plurality he is starting to find in himself. Two camps, for two interpretations of the same dream. He is split, he dwells in two places. 

We aren’t just dreaming what might be.

We are dreaming what is.

What is here, and we don’t see it?

What is around us, that we do not know?

When we wake up from the dream of the present, the dream may seem singular, but there is always more than one way of interpreting it.