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.

Pointing to the Divine Soulmate

The talmud in Taanit 31a describes an incredible scene:

Ulla Bira'ah said in the name of R. Eleazar: In the days to come the Holy One, blessed be He, will hold a circle/dance for the righteous and He will sit in their midst in the Garden of Eden and every one of them will point with his finger towards Him, as it is said, And it shall be said in that day: Lo, this is our God, for whom we waited, that He might save us; this is the Lord for whom we waited, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation (Isaiah 25:9)

There is something so striking about this image of the righteous dancing in a circle and pointing at God. The word for "this", zeh, in its essence implies pointing, according to the rabbis. In the first commandment of the Torah, החודש הזה לכם = this month shall be for you the head of the months, the word hazeh (this) is taken by Rashi to mean that God is pointing at the moon.

Similarly in the second chapter of Genesis, when Adam, after searching in vain for his helpmate amongst the animals, finally awakes from his slumber and sees Eve, he exclaims (Gen 2:23):

This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

His use of the feminine word for this, zot, implies he is pointing to and identifying the woman, sensing viscerally that she is his true soulmate.

Just as Adam points to and identifies his beloved, so too the righteous dancing in the circle point to and identify God as their true "soulmate" so to speak. (The reference to God sitting in the Garden of Eden also helps us make the connection between the two disparate texts).

For anyone who goes beyond superficial worship, and is truly authentic about it, relationship with God is complex. But this is the work of faith, to come to recognise God as your soulmate with tremendous clarity: as clear as the moon in the sky.

Often it takes many years of wandering, lost, in various wrong directions before such a thing can occur. Just as it was Adam's time spent fruitlessly trying to find a match amongst the animals that led him to his clarity when finally meeting Eve, it is precisely this wandering that leads eventually to finding the path of truth, and feeling the absolute clarity of the discovery.

And if you are looking for an even higher level of spiritual functioning:

Michael Attias has pointed out that in a dance you move into the place occupied by your friend a moment ago. Thus, each of the dancers described in the talmud gets to see what God looks like from his friend's perspective.

So I would add to this: in this dance, we get to understand how God is a soulmate for another person, in a way different from our own. This is challenging. It truly is work on an elevated spiritual level. For this, someone can be called "righteous".

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”. 

Miriam's Trauma/Healing By Water

Let’s talk about Miriam – prophetess, leader, water-bringer. In her life, there are two crucial scenes that take place next to water:

(1) BY THE NILE

 As a young girl she stands by the Nile, watching her baby brother Moses float in a basket, placed there anxiously by his mother after Pharaoh decreed that all baby boys must be thrown in the Nile (Exodus 2):

3. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark made of reeds, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child in it; and she laid it in the rushes by the river’s brink.

4. And his sister stood far away, to see what would be done to him. 

Pharaoh’s daughter takes him and saves him from the genocidal decree by adopting him, and Miriam is instrumental in that.

(2) BY THE SEA

Much later, as a woman of eighty-five, after the Red sea has split allowing the Israelites to go through and then closed over the Egyptian foe, she witnesses her brother Moses singing the famous song known as “Az Yashir”. Then, following his  lead, she takes up her tambourine and leads the women in song and dance by the sea (Exodus 15):

20. And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines, dancing.

21. And Miriam answered them, Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider has he thrown into the sea. 

In the first instance, she is not named – she is only named in the second story, many decades later. Why is this? And moreover, why don’t hear anything of Miriam in the intervening years between these two scenes? What was she doing in Egypt? Was she not involved in leading the people? What happened to the resourceful little girl who spoke up boldly to Pharaoh’s daughter – why does she vanish from the text?

And since we are asking questions, let us also wonder why Miriam is described here suddenly as “sister of Aaron”?

* * *  

Many answers are possible, but one that ties all these threads together emerged during a Bibliodrama I ran in Rechovot. It goes as follows:

Let’s conjecture that the first incident caused young Miriam to experience a trauma. Yes, her baby brother was saved from death, but he was still ripped away from his family, taken to the palace of the cruel tyrant whom the Israelites hated and feared, and raised there by another woman as an Egyptian. We have no idea if Miriam even saw him from that day forth. Perhaps this took all the wind out of her sails. She was unable henceforth to step up to leadership roles; she could never forget her little brother or stop being worried about him.

Fast forward to the redemption by the sea.

If the first scene took place by the Nile, the god of the Egyptian, water that belonged to the enemy and served its genocidal purposes, this scene takes place by a sea that was friendly to the Israelites, that opened for them and closed over the Egyptians. Finally, they were safe. And now Miriam also sees her brother sing gloriously, leading all the people – something he has never done before. A moment before that, we learned that the Israelites “believed in God and in Moses his servant.” Miriam can finally put her mind at rest. Moses is okay, he is whole – she can see it. She is entirely joyous now - where in the previous scene "she stood", here she dances. 

In this moment, as her trauma recedes in what we in Hebrew call a חוויה מתקנת. a rectifying experience, she can come into the fullness of her being and be named. She can also finally let her anxiety about Moses rest. And if all these years she neglected her middle brother, Aaron, being unable to give him the attention and love he deserved, perhaps now she can finally become his sister.

* * * 
Two verses later, and surely not by coincidence, the letters of Miriam’s name מרים appear again as “Marim”, bitter. But Miriam’s bitterness has now receded, just as the bitter waters will recede when Moses puts a tree or stick into them. The tree of life. A sweet experience of life – and the tree of life, the Torah – can heal bitterness, as it did for Miriam.

Then, in her merit, the well of life-bringing water comes to the people and remains with them until her death.

[1] With thanks to Aviva Harbater-Tsubeiri for her insight regarding the trauma of the first incident, and to other members of the Berman synagogue in Rechovot for their input and ideas.  

 [2] For more on how the Israelites' belief in Moses enabled him to sing his song, see here.

Turn Turn Turn - the Key to Change

TURN TURN TURN - THE KEY TO CHANGE

Israeli rabbi Yuval Cherlow shared that in his yeshivah high school the report cards contain an interesting hiddush. Along with a numerical grade, each boy is also graded with an arrow pointing either up or down. Because the numerical grade doesn’t convey enough information: the teacher needs to be able to communicate to the parents whether the student is moving in a general positive direction or is spiraling down.

Rabbi Aryeh Nivin teaches the same thing: he says that even more significant than the place where we’re at is the direction we’re moving in.

It seems that the key to making change, to the very valence of your existence, is to turn in the right direction (as the song says, “Turn, turn, turn”).

We need to point our spiritual nose forwards + upwards; then take a step, however small, to get going and keep going.

“Bederech she’adam rotze leilech, molichin oto” – the direction in which one desires to walk, that is the direction in which one is assisted in walking.

It’s about setting up the right desire in your heart, the right directionality. It’s like an escalator: you need to carefully and intentionally put your foot onto the one moving in the right direction, otherwise with each passing moment you’ll get further and further away from where you want to be.

This year I was so inspired by the scene in the book of Ruth where Naomi tries to push her Moabite daughters-in-law away, back to their original homes.

Orpah cries; she does care, she will miss Naomi; but she is not fierce enough in her desire, she is facing the wrong way (oref = back of neck), towards Moab. Thus Naomi successfully turns her back on her and leaves her behind.

Ruth is different. She clings to her mother-in-law, she is determined to accompany her in her direction. She is actively facing away from Moab and towards Bethlehem, towards the great unknown. That is where she will head, step by step. She will walk in the direction of love – her love for Naomi, her God and her people – and trust that love will see her through.

“Which way are we facing?” That is the real question, Hamlet.

This also answers another question we have. Why on Rosh Hashanah do we look ahead to the New Year, while on Yom Kippur we look back at our past year and do teshuvah? It’s logically backwards. First we should look back, and then we can look ahead, no?

Well, you can answer that crowning Hashem on Rosh Hashanah is the right springboard for our teshuvah. Teshuvah without recognizing G-d is only a shadow of itself.

But we can now add another answer: that if on Rosh Hashanah we’ve turned our faces in the direction of G-d and Kingship, then when we look back at our years on Yom Kippur, it will not be while facing that old year and its crimes and misdemeanours. Instead we’ll be doing that cheshbon nefesh with our minds looking back but our hearts and eyes looking ahead in a positive direction, the one to which we turned our faces on 1st Tishrei.

Because looking back is dangerous, it can transform us into a pillar of salt.

So let’s pick ourselves up

dust ourselves off

of whatever was past

and turn our nose in the

forward + upward direction for 5779.

Let’s connect to love of G-d and life

and rebuild trust

in the infinite possibilities awaiting us.

We take one small step

asking heavenly help to take the next

as the positive escalator moves forward

to take us

higher and higher

higher and higher.