Shema: From child to adult, trust and faith

Many Jewish parents, tucking in their children at night, chant the bedtime “Shema Yisrael” (“Hear O Israel”) with them. In a situation of healthy parenting, the room is quiet and dark; the child is swaddled and safe, engulfed in a feeling of trust and wellbeing as the parent sits close by. The child knows that even when the parent leaves the room, it’s not to go far; one call or cry of alarm is enough to bring that loving presence hurrying back.

I want to suggest that this scene, these feelings, might also be being replayed as the child grows into an adult – with the same feelings now transposed onto the Transcendent Divine Parent. What are the rituals as we say the shema? We pause for a moment; the room is quiet. We place a hand upon our eyes, swaddling ourselves, creating darkness. God is close by. We make ourselves aware of that by declaring that God is one with everything, and hence everywhere. One in the mystical sense, that “there is nothing beside Him.” Even when we ourselves do not see or feel God, one call or cry is enough to connect us to the Presence.

The faith and trust that what we practice nightly in a healthy childhood emotional situation, is then in maturity applied to healthy faith emotional development. It is a daily affirmation of basic trust in the Creator and in our own worthiness as created beings. And even if the childhood situation was not healthy, there is still hope for the adult who intentionally creates healthy faith structures, that this may, we hope, actually rectify some of that childhood dysfunction.

(With thanks to Rabbi Dr Elie Holzer, in whose class on the Sefat Emet these insights arose.)

What Abraham Starts, Hannah Completes

On each of the two days of Rosh Hashanah there is one reading from the Torah and one from the Prophets.

The Torah portions are Gen 21:1-34 - the miraculous birth in Sarah's old age of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael; and Gen 22:1-24 - the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.

The Prophetic readings are I Samuel 1:1-2:10, the story of childless Hannah who finally makes a vow to dedicate the son born to her to the service of God in Shilo; and Jeremiah 31:1-19, about the ingathering of the exiles.

A theme running clearly through the first three is the complex interplay between parents, their love for their children, the sacrifices they make and God's response. The fourth reading, Jeremiah 31, also contains the verses:

So says the L‑rd: A voice is heard on high, lamentation, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, for they are not.

So says the L‑rd: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is reward for your work, says the L‑rd, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy.

Unlike Hagar, Rachel is not "exiled" with her children. She remains behind, lamenting their absence.

I want to, however, speak of the other two and the connection between them. I have spent years wondering what went through Hannah's mind, what was the process that she went through as she wept bitterly for many years in her barrenness, before finally finding the way to pray in order to open her locked destiny as a mother.

Did you ever wonder if the later biblical figures had the stories of the earlier biblical heroes to draw upon? Surely Hannah knew the story of Abraham and the Akeda.

I imagine her drawing upon this story with its example of the ultimate sacrifice (that was not made in the end), whether conciously or uncosciously, in casting around to try to answer for herself what God's will for her could be, or what God might want her to do, in order to revert the harsh decree upon her. She hits upon the idea of doing a kind of Akeda - offering her son to God, in the best way she knows how. Not for death, but for life - for a life sanctified and elevated.

We see how once this idea arises in her, a calm descends upon her, and she finds the words and the way. Eli the priest accuses her of being drunk, but even that cannot shatter her calm, for she knows she has found the right path.

Ultimately God did not want Abraham to kill his son. God apparently only wanted to bring Abraham (and Isaac) to the very edge of religious devotion. The lesson for the world was: do not kill your children. This is not the way to serve God.

But it is in the Hannah story that this lesson reaches its culmination. God says, if you however wish to dedicate your child to Me (assuming it is the right child for it), then that is welcome. That is the evolved path. And it leads to the birth of the prophet Samuel.

From Abraham we learn the negative, what God does not want us to do. But from Hannah (inspired by the Akeda, perhaps) we learn the positive, what God wants us to do.
Most of us will not dedicate our children to temple service, and neither should we. But we can find a way to convey to our children that we are willing to let them go, however painful that is, if they need to evolve in ways that leave us behind.

The Seder's Wise Child - Missing the Point?

Of the four children at the seder, the answer to the wise child is the only one not taken from the biblical verses. Instead, we teach this child a law, that

one does not eat anything after the Pesach sacrifice (afikoman).

While we hold the oral law in high esteem, the fact remains that for whatever reason (and many reasons are offered for this anomaly), this child is set apart from the other three, in that the educational words explicitly laid out by the Torah itself are not given over to this child. The child is willy-nilly “poresh min hatzibbur”, separated out from the community of children and deprived of the original words of the Torah.

Could this in some subtle fashion result from the fact that this child is not whole-hearted (is not tam)? is too involved with his or her own intellect, the minutiae or casuistry, to be listening to the other children’s questions with any interest, due to undervaluing the place of fresh and innocent questions? Does this child perhaps not want to be lumped with the others, and is trying very hard to talk on an adult level – and has therefore forefeited a place with the children, the central feature of the seder, and the biblical verses given to them as a gift?

Ultimately, the child is included in the four children, of course, but we cannot but notice this fact setting him or her apart.

My advice would be, do not let the wise child grow up too quickly. Help these children stay connected to their genuine childish nature and educate them not to look down on the other children for fear of missing Gd’s revelation in the verses, that comes marked with a big sign marked “CHILDREN ONLY”. 

Parents Take a Step, Children Take the Next

G-d's command to Abraham in Genesis 12:1 "Lech lecha - Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you" is one of the most powerful and significant verses in Jewish history, setting in motion a journey of peoplehood, ethics, and worship still in force today.

Yet the verses just before it explicitly tell us that Abraham's father Terach had set out already, to go to the land of Canaan (the mystery land is even named!). So we have to ask, why is G-d telling Abraham to "leave your father's home and go to a land i will show you" when his father was already on the way (presumably with son Abraham in tow)?
This question could bear a number of answers. But I want to suggest that if we read it symbolically, then it can be taken as a statement of parents and children. Many, if not all of us, have traits and talents we inherited from our parents, but are able to take one step further. Our parents travel a certain distance with their own skills, and then we get to travel the next part of the way and maybe even reach a destination they could never have achieved. Without them, however,  maybe we couldn't get there at all.

And our children will take this inherited spiritual material one step further too. So we should appreciate what our parents have done with what they were given, and that they have travelled the part of the journey that they could. Moreover, without them we wouldn't be who we are and where we are. Everyone does their part.

So Terach might not have known, or been aware, of why he needed to get up and go to Canaan. He might have thought he was going for trade reasons. But in reality, a deeper intention was carrying him along, part of the Divine plan. He was taking Abraham part of the way (to Haran, to be precise), so that Abraham could continue from that springboard. Abraham would eventually have to separate from him, per "Go from your father's house...", but, hopefully (and despite the deep ideological gap between the two), with deep gratitude for everything he had received.