This morning, I am going to rant a ittle bit
I hate talking about security. This is not why I became a Rabbi.
My semichah, or Rabbinic ordination certificate, says Ḥakham yitkarei v’Rav yitkarei l’harbitz Torah barabim ul’hafitz ruaḥ da’at v’yirat hashem bein kahal eidato. “He shall be called wise and he shall be called teacher so as to disseminate Torah in public and to spread a spirit of knowledge and awe of the Lord among the congregation of God’s people.”
Nowhere on that document does it say anything about conducting active shooter drills, or installing panic buttons on the podium from which I give my sermons. Or hiring armed security guards.
Antisemitism is so distracting. I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to say this Shabbat, and I just kept losing focus. And so the first thing I wrote down was “I hate talking about security.” And then I figured, “just go with it.”
But, a big part of my job is to reflect on the current moment through the lens of Jewish tradition. And that is hard in a moment like this, because I do not have any answers to the questions that I think a lot of us are probably wrestling with. Is the war in Iran good for Israel? for the Jewish people? for American Jews? for America? What should we be doing about antisemitism? Are we secure enough?
I don’t know. None of us can know with certainty. We are all just doing the best we can with limited knowledge and our best intentions. So I am going to talk about Torah, something I know at least a little bit about.
This week’s double portion, Vayak’hel – Pekudei, opens with Moses assembling the entire congregation of the children of Israel. He is going to pass along the instructions about building the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. But first, he spends two verses on Shabbat: “On six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord…”
Several places in the Torah talk about Shabbat. Why here? Our tradition notes the juxtaposition of this passage with the rules for the Mishkan and draws what is perhaps an obvious conclusion. Even such a holy undertaking as building a dwelling place for God must be paused on the seventh day. I am not going to go into a deep discussion of the rules of Shabbat. I would simply like to share a reflection by the German-American psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm.
Shabbat “is the expression of the central idea of Judaism: the idea of freedom; the idea of complete harmony between humanity and nature… By not working—that is to say, by not participating in the process of natural and social change—man is free from the chains of time, although only for one day a week.”
He points out a modern misconception about the ancient idea of Shabbat. It seems fairly obvious to us that we need at least one day a week to take a break, “to be present” or “to unplug” as we would say in contemporary terms. Fromm refers to this fairly self-evident, secular understanding of Shabbat as a “social-hygienic measure intended to give [us] the physical and spiritual rest and relaxation [we] need in order not to be swallowed up by [our] daily work, and to enable [us] to work better during the six working days.” (153)
In ancient times, the “work” that the Torah prohibits was understood as “any interference by man, be it constructive or destructive, with the physical world. ‘Rest’ is a state of peace between man and nature.” (154) This is why ancient Rabbinic sources describe Shabbat as a taste of the world to come, or compare the experience of Shabbat to that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is a return to an idyllic state in which we are totally at one with the universe in which we reside.
As Moses sends the people off to build the Mishkan, he places this freedom before them as an even higher ideal than building a home for God in their midst.
At the very end, as the Book of Exodus comes to a close, God’s Presence, manifested as a pillar of smoke and fire, descends upon the completed Mishkan. The final verse, from the end of the Book of Exodus, reads: “For over the Tabernacle a cloud of the Lord rested by day, and fire would appear in it by night, in the view of all the house of Israel throughout their journeys.” (40:38)
The Israelites have this constant visible sign of God’s Presence among them. It is a Presence that assures them of protection from their enemies, and unlimited access to food and water. In Deuteronomy, we learn that for forty years, their clothing and their shoes never wore out. It was an unnatural time in the history of the Jewish people. Similar to Shabbat as a day of freedom from the chains of time, God’s visible Presence frees the Israelites from the challenges of life in the complicated real world. These two passages bracket our double parashah in which the Israelites work together in apparent harmony and cooperation to build the Mishkan.
As it turns out, the Torah gives us the date of when it all takes place. They bring the various parts to Moses, and on the first day of the first month of the second year after leaving Egypt – in other words, the first day of the month of Nisan – Moses puts it all together. It so happens that the first of Nisan is this week, on Thursday.
That is why this Shabbat is Shabbat Haḥodesh, the Shabbat of the new moon. We read a special maftir from a second Torah, and chant a haftarah from the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel prophesies to the Israelites in exile after the destruction of the first Temple. He addresses his words to the entire people, who are scattered into many nations in the Diaspora. Ezekiel describes how God will bring them back: “I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh; and I will put My spirit into you.” When that happens, there will be abundant grain in the fields and fruit on the trees. People will say, “That land, once desolate, has become like the Garden of Eden; and the cities, once ruined, desolate, and ravaged, are now populated and fortified.” Ezekiel is also describing a reality that is perfect, in which all of the troubles of the real world are solved.
In these three passages, we find three episodes in which people facing dangerous, uncertain times are presented with models of hope. Shabbat, as originally presented by Moses to the Israelites, offers a weekly return to the innocence of Eden. The Mishkan serves as the place over which the visible assurance of God’s protection can be seen. Remember, Moses is speaking to people who, only one year earlier, were slaves in Egypt and who are now homeless in the middle of the desert. Centuries later, Ezekiel is also speaking to persecuted refugees. He tells them that their fortunes will change.
And so, when I think about the challenges of today: of synagogues being attacked, of Jews being assaulted when they are overheard speaking Hebrew, and of vitriolic antisemitism that is becoming more bold, I try to remember that we have been here before.
We have always had the confidence and hope that things will get better. We have Shabbat, which gives us a taste of the world to come. We have the synagogue, taking the place of the Tabernacle, which brings us together from wherever we happen to be in our journeys. And we have our prophets and timeless teachings which give us a vision of what a perfected world could be, and a roadmap of what we need to do to create it.
Rebyehoshua 