Ta Shma

Each of us was brought into this world by someone who allowed their body to become home to a stranger. This is what mothers do before we meet our children: watch, sometimes in wonder, and sometimes in grief, as the bodies which were once ours alone grow, bend, ache, and change in ways that make us unrecognizable to ourselves.  Feel our ribs widen, our bodies force themselves apart, to create room for new life.  Bind ourselves to a person whose face we have never seen.

Although it eventually won out, it was not always obvious that “Hatikvah” would be the Israeli national anthem.  There were other competitors, and various critiques of the poem written by Naphtali Hertz Imber.  Among those critiques was a voice from at least some religious Zionists who thought the work too secular to reflect the religious import of the new state.  Some advocated instead for Psalm 126 (often known as Shir ha-Ma’alot), as the national anthem.

Vayikra is a book that is concerned with the holy and the profane; the pure and the impure.  Nearly every mitzvah in Vayikra contains these categories.  The Jewish people are told that they are to be kadosh because God is kadosh.  In Vayikra, it is the holy that is the primary pathway to God.  The mishkan (tabernacle), the center of holiness on earth, is the pathway for that connection.

It shouldn’t be possible to say such a thing, but I have spent most of my life taking the Holocaust for granted.  My father of blessed memory was a child survivor; my mother, she should live a long life, is herself the child of survivors.  I have no memory of learning about the Holocaust, no recollection of a parent telling me what it was, of what happened there.  It is as if my brain came into the world pre-seared with this knowledge, my father’s screaming nightmares a “normal” part of my childhood, the stories of death and survival, hope and desolation simply the narrative landscape in which I grew up. For me, there has never been a world without the Holocaust.  There has consequently never been a time in which I could think about God and my relationship with God in which the unspeakable was not an assumption of the conversation.

The burnt ashes of the korbanot (sacrifices), piled on the altar, represent the intermingled prayers and dreams, experiences and regrets, of the Jewish people.

We are doing a lot of prep work this week.  We are cleaning our homes, kashering pots and cutlery, making sure we’ve got everything on our Seder shopping lists.

The unspoken drive towards human sacrifice lurks in the background of Sefer Vayikra.  

The first Pesah was a leil shimurim, a night of watching, a night of fear and uncertainty.  Amid darkness and screams, the fate of the Israelites hung in the balance, with hopes of redemption and freedom in their hearts. They were asked to believe in a God they didn't know and to set out on a journey with no destination in sight. Amazingly, they trusted in God and they followed Moshe out of Egypt. What does it mean to believe today in a moment of great uncertainty and doubt?  What is the source of faith and in what must one have faith to believe?  This lecture was delivered in memory of Jerome L. Stern z"l in April 2024.Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/SternPesahLecture2024StrausbergChildrenBelievers.pdf

Human beings love to make idols of our dead.  Desperate to keep our lost loved ones within reach, we create forms that we can cling to in their stead.  We name buildings and mark park benches; install portraits and keep voicenotes on our phones.  We believe, somewhere in our hearts, that if we can create the right form, capture the right image, wear the right talisman—his scarf, her watch—then they are not really gone.

The psalms attached liturgically to each day of the week are often mumbled over quickly, without much attention to their meaning. In this series, we'll engage in careful literary-theological readings of these psalms, looking at how various midrashim interpret the psalms, and bring new meaning to this part of our daily prayers. Key themes explored will include the idea that God creates the world by subduing the chaotic forces that threaten life; the notion that a concern for justice is what makes a god "qualified" to be one; and the question of what kind of character those who seek to live in God's presence must have. Recorded in Fall 2023. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldShirimThursday2023.pdf