Parasha BEHA'ALOTEKHA

Parasha BEHA'ALOTEKHA

What can we learn from the parasha this week about journeys? Not the journey you look back on– in my case from Marais Road Shul in Cape Town to NNLS in London here today.

I want to rather look at journeys ahead of us. Because at that moment, between staying and moving forward, that’s a vulnerable place. You don’t know what’s ahead, but it’s probably difficult out there. Or maybe it’s just scary because you are currently living in the privileged, resting place that we call home. I think of my relative who moved from Latvia to Eretz Yisrael in 1934. She didn’t know anyone there and she went from a comfortable life in Europe with her family, to a hard life in the Middle East digging earth, draining swamps, laying water lines, building water towers and planting orchards. There were no guarantees for her when she left home in 1934. But her brother who stayed behind in Riga, was murdered seven years later. You try to read the writing on the wall, but the signs are never as clear as they are in the parasha this week…

We read that the people of Israel had clouds resting over the Mishkan, deciding for them when to go and when to stay…as it says: ‘Whether it was two days or a month or a year—however long the cloud lingered over the Mishkan—the Israelites remained encamped and did not set out; only when it lifted, did they break camp.’

They also had The Ark of the Covenant of יהוה which travelled in front of them on that three days’ journey to seek out a resting place for them.’ Plus, they had Moses’s excellent leadership and silver trumpets blowing. It’s all very easy for the people of Israel. They don’t have to decide for themselves. Between when to go and when to stay, they just go with the flow. But in terms of survival strategies, that’s not always a good move.

But at that moment between staying and going, between advancing and resting, comes one of my favourite parts of the whole Torah…neatly held together by two inverted nuns which we separate in the choreography of the Torah service on Shabbat. The lines are:

׆ וַיְהִ֛י בִּנְסֹ֥עַ הָאָרֹ֖ן וַיֹּ֣אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֑ה קוּמָ֣ה ׀ יְהֹוָ֗ה וְיָפֻ֙צוּ֙ אֹֽיְבֶ֔יךָ וְיָנֻ֥סוּ מְשַׂנְאֶ֖יךָ מִפָּנֶֽיךָ׃

When the Ark was to set out, Moses would say: Advance, God! May Your enemies be scattered and may Your foes flee before You!

וּבְנֻחֹ֖ה יֹאמַ֑ר שׁוּבָ֣ה יְהֹוָ֔ה רִֽבְב֖וֹת אַלְפֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ ׆

‘And when it halted, he would say: Return, O יהוה, Israel’s myriads of thousands!’

These two lines are familiar because the first part is what we say when we take the Torah out of the Ark, and the second part is what we say when we return the Torah to the Ark. The two lines are like the arch though which we take the torah out, read it and parade it and then put it back again.

As the Torah is returned to the ark, but before the curtains or doors are closed, we sing the second sentence between the inverted nuns ... וּבְנֻחֹ֖ה יֹאמַ֑ר שׁוּבָ֣ה יְהֹוָ֔ה רִֽבְב֖וֹת אַלְפֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ ׆

That’s a harder one to understand. The English in Sefaria says ‘And when it halted, he would say: Return, O יהוה, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands!’

What does that mean?

Nechama Liebowitz points out the problem is with the Hebrew word shuva שׁוּבָ֣ה The Hebrew word shuv means ‘return’ but it’s a word that doesn’t take an object and yet here it is, awkwardly followed by a phrase ‘many thousands of Israel’ as a direct object.

Around the year 1,000, in Spain, the commentator Ibn Ezra says it means: Give the myriads of Israel rest that they may be no longer disturbed.

500 years later in Italy, the commentator, Sforno sees it like this: Rest O lord among the myriads of Israel. Let thy presence rest in our midst.

500 years after Sforno, Nechama Liebowitz writing in Israel, describes it in context with the first part like this:

‘He who rose up to Scatter his enemies and remove wickedness from the earth would dwell once more amongst the tens of thousand of his children and followers from all people.’

She compares it to the Messianic time we read about in Zacharia in the Haftorah later. ‘In that day many nations will attach themselves to GOD and become God’s people, and God will dwell in your midst.’

The student of Nechama Liebowitz, Rabbi Chaim Weiner sees it like this: The two sentences between the inverted nuns have military relevance. This means the second sentence means God return our soldiers in peace. Israel’s myriads of thousands are the soldiers that we want God to bring back to us.

I can’t help thinking about the eight Israeli soldiers who died in battle this week. Benny Ganz described them as “the beautiful faces of the people of Israel, the best among us.” Would that all the soldiers and all the hostages be returned home.

For the meantime, in our very long journey from the midst of the wilderness in Sinai, to Israel, to Babylon, to North Africa to Europe and beyond, we are not there yet, and I’m grateful for that. I’m in no rush to get to the end of days, however painful and uncertain it is at the moment. I feel very at home here in New North London and secure in the liberal democracy of the UK. This is my privileged, resting place. I’ve done enough travelling and I’m grateful to be here. But I know that things can change…

There’s another way to read the line from the parasha that we say when we return the Torah to the ark when we ask God to come back to us. In our long journey through history, when we are resting or journeying, where ever we go and however it looks, God really hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s us that must return to God.

Shmini

This is from the parasha today. Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron go into the Mishkan and offer Eish Zara to God, that they were not commanded to do, and God zaps them. And Moses says through those close to me I will be holy. And Aaron is silent.

I want to talk about Eish Zara or strange fire. In our tradition there are hundreds of commentaries on this because many in our tradition are uncomfortable with the pshat version of events. On the surface of it, two enthusiastic sons of Aaron want to get closer to God and are killed as a result and their father Aaron says nothing, while Moses tries to say nice, kind words.

It seems so unfair. Where is the Justice in God’s actions. Why are good people being made to suffer? The boys didn’t seem to do anything wrong and were killed by God for no good reason. In fact, they weren’t just killed, they were burned alive, incinerated. Ribono shel ha olam…And their father says nothing. (Of course, their mother’s response isn’t recorded in the Torah)

Thank God for our Rabbinic tradition to fill in the gaps. The Rabbis of the Talmud, the Midrash and beyond to our modern age, try to explain. They mostly work hard to suggest that the brothers must have done something wrong to merit this punishment.

The reasons vary from it was an improper offering or unsanctioned offering, to them wearing the wrong clothing, to them being naked, to them being drunk, to them being very stoned on the incense, to their arrogance, to them undermining the leadership of Moses and Aaron, to them refusing to marry and procreate. Or maybe it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe they dared to teach the law in the presence of Moses.

I bumped into Laliv yesterday on the high street and she said look at the Rashi on parashat Mishpatim chapter 24, on verses 10-11.

She was right. It was fascinating. For context, this is from parashat Mishpatim in Exodus, chapter 24, on verses 10-11 that we read weeks ago….

‘Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under His feet the like of a paved work of sapphire stone, and the like of the very heaven for clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid not His hand; and they beheld God and did eat and drink’

Rashi puts that together with what we read today – where they get burned up and he suggests:

‘They gazed and peered and [because of this] were doomed to die, but the Holy One, blessed is He, did not want to disturb the rejoicing of [this moment of the giving of] the Torah. So, He waited for Nadab and Abihu [i.e., to kill them,] until the day of the dedication of the Mishkan.

In other words, God didn’t want to spoil the party, but Nadav and Avihu tried to get too close to God, so they had to die. They believed that they could add to their love of God a greater love, in order to melt into His radiance and so God just helped them along with the melting.

That’s Rashi, but take your pick for the reasons why bad things happen to good people. It’s a very uncomfortable place to sit knowing we are powerless against deaths of children, against pogroms, and the pain and suffering we see all around us. Explanations make us feel better. I hear this a lot. Oh Israel deserved October 07 because of this and that reason. If only we did this and that, then we can escape that suffering. But ladies and gentlemen, I believe that isn’t so. We can be as good as gold and still…

This week I heard the mother of a hostage speak. Her name was Orli Shem Tov. It was on Zoom. Her son, Omer Shem Tov is still held hostage in Gaza and she has had to live with the excruciating pain of that for the last six months. Every morning when she opens her eyes, the pain begins again. She spoke to us from her home in Israel to us sitting safely in London, but her pain was palpable. She told us her son is like sunshine and everyone one wants to be in his company. He is a good kid who loves life and freedom, and he was kidnapped from the Nova festival where he went to party.

Because we were so far away, we could only respond with silence when really what we wanted to do was to be there with her and to give her a hug. I am impatient with people that comment from far away when they are not sitting under rocket fire themselves or have not experienced the pain of losing children themselves. People that don’t know the pain of loss that great. I hear Aaron’s silence and cringe at Moses’s explanations.

It’s easier to listen to people who really know. I was pleased to find a commentary from Elie Wiesel on the strange fire of Nadab and Abihu, and why they were killed for offering it. He says, we don’t know.

Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. His sister, father and mother were offered up in the strange fire of Auschwitz.

He says this: ‘it is to teach us that there are events in life -- in our national life, in our personal life -- events that transcend our understanding. God’s motives and ours are not necessarily the same. There is pain, and there may even be injustice, that we cannot understand. We may try to find answers, but we do not have the answers. We understand that we don’t understand.’

There is so much I don’t understand but am absolutely certain that I am grateful to be here with you all now, and for the wonderful tradition that we all share. We are the lucky ones. Shabbat Shalom.

Tzav

Tzav We all do bad things. We offend by accident and on purpose. We don’t mean to, but we hurt people close to us like our children and our parents, and sometimes we offend complete strangers. We frequently sin in big ways and small against our living planet. We try our best but none of us are perfect. What’s needed is a mechanism for repairing the fracture we have caused and will continue to cause. Otherwise, we will be paralysed by a need for impossible perfection. I believe if you aren’t making mistakes, you just aren’t trying hard enough. Or living in the real world.

When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, people would offer korbanot (sacrifices) for their misdeeds. Today in the parasha, we read about the different sacrifices, like korban hattat (the sin offering) and also Korban Asham (the guilt offering). Although administered by the priests, they were made for the benefit of everyone, rich or poor, powerful or unconnected. The sin offering in particular, allowed for a range of sacrifices, from a whole bull offered by the people at the top to just a handful of fine flour offered by the poorest.

Maimonides has something very interesting to say about the altar where these diverse sacrifices happened . He takes considerable historic licence to say that the altar in the Temple has always been in the same place. Going back in time, he says, the altar in both Temples was in exactly the same spot and it was in exactly the same place where Abraham built the altar for the sacrifice of Isaac all the way back to where Adam was created on that very same spot. He says: ‘Thus, the sages have said: Man was formed from the place of his atonement.’ אָמְרוּ חֲכָמִים אָדָם מִמְּקוֹם כַּפָּרָתוֹ נִבְרָא Quite a flight of fancy for the Great Eagle. But he does it, because he wants to say the potential for atonement is built into all people since the very first person was created. We are all created on that fault line. It is the crack through which the light gets in, some might say.

It’s true today, without a Temple, that people still need a way to repair their mistakes. They still need capara, teshuva, atonement. They still need another chance to do better.

The rabbis that created Rabbinic Judaism after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 ACE needed to replace those essential processes that used to happen in the Temple. They stopped killing the animals in one large, centralised place and they went smaller, taking the processes into the synagogues, into the study halls and into the courts. The rabbis understood the value of us taking our court ordered punishment.

Take your pick from punishments available. It’s all going to a good cause. Judaism allows capital punishment, lashes or being cut off from your community. The best punishment in terms of getting a second chance is definitely lashes or flogging. Makot in Hebrew.

This brings me to what I really wanted to share with you today. I learned this bit of Talmud with R. Chaim Weiner three weeks ago and it’s a good one. We were learning Shevuot 20b. In it, the rabbis are trying to figure out the correct punishment for taking God’s name in vain when making a false oath. The ten commandments in Exodus are quoted where it says you should not take God’s name in vain because the Lord will not absolve him of his guilt.

Rav Pappa says maybe this means there’s no absolution for this crime at all. But Abaye can’t be having that. He says yes in the Torah it says that God will not absolve him. But there’s another way out. There has to be. God may not absolve him, but the earthly court flogs him and in so doing absolves him of guilt.

That’s why we don’t kill people who take God’s name in vain. Don’t tell anyone but blasphemy is not a big thing in Judaism. I don’t know for sure, but the God I stand before doesn’t need that from me or want me to kill people in his name. Who knows what happens in heavenly courts. We need creative law makers and just courts down here. We need social mechanisms to get people up and to try again, this next time a little better.

Va'era

Today is day 99, the length of time the hostages have been in captivity. Because the number 132 is too big to visualise, I’m thinking of just two men, Omri Miran and Tzahi Idan, who were abducted from Nahal Oz 99 days ago. This is a picture of Omri and his wife in better days.

In the Parasha today, Moses has a problem. No one is listening to him. Not Pharoah who doesn’t want his Israelites to leave, and not the Israelites themselves either. It’s not hard to understand why Pharaoh doesn’t want to lose his skilled slaves. But why don’t the Israelites listen to Moses? Hasn’t God just promised to take them out of Egypt with an outstretched arm? Don’t they want to leave their difficult lives under the cruel Pharoah? The reason given is that the slaves themselves are too downtrodden to see that they have options.

יְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה ‘But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.’

מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה Sforno (16th century Italy) says about kotzer ruach ‘for it did not appear believable to their present state of mind, so that their heart could not assimilate such a promise.’

As slaves for generations, fear of the unknown keep the Israelites paralysed. They keep their world small and (to their minds safe) because they are too traumatised to step out into anything else. They can’t see that the door is open if they just push it together.

I have great sympathy for the Israelites. I’m also scared. I know theoretically I can have what Viktor Frankl calls ‘the last freedom’. He says: ‘Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind even in terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.’ But honestly, I’m more in the Janis Joplin mindset where freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Last year, on October 07, many of my assumptions were revealed and then shattered. I believed for example that all Jews of all ages and all denominations supported Israel. I believed that what Jews in the diaspora experience is the same as what Jews in Israel experience. I believed that I could change people’s minds through factual debate on Instagram. I believed God was only good.

For most of us, our paradigms are so ingrained that they are invisible to us.

This is mine – I’m a descendant of generations of pogrom and expulsion survivors. A sniff of danger and I’m back hiding in the basket. My suitcase is always packed. I just want to stay safe, keep my friends and keep my job. I’m not interested in resisting the established social order in order to be authentic. I just want to stay alive.

John, my Non-Jewish partner, had no such fear bred to his bones. He insisted we put rescue-the-hostages posters up outside our house. When I tucked in my Magen David on the train, he wouldn’t have dreamed of hiding his bring-them-home wristband.

But we all see things differently – I recently spoke to an American Jewish woman who was terrified lest anyone think she was not publicly 100% committed to the Palestinian cause before anything else. Her belief is tikkun olam, and that any resort to self-defence is a crime.

Another paradigm - On Wednesday I spoke to a 60-year-old Israeli man who picked up his revolver on October 07 and drove down to help the people of the Nachal Oz kibbutz. His belief is - if your friends are in trouble, do what it takes to help them.

I’ve found comfort in reading thinkers who allowed their minds to expand in response to catastrophe. People who experienced the Holocaust like Eliezer Berkowitz although he would have hated me as a non-pious or in his words, non- authentic Jew.

In With God in Hell, he writes that the majority of Jews suffered in the Holocaust because of what he calls ‘the naïve innocence regarding the limits of human degradation.’

I’m wondering about the thousands of Jews in Hungary who didn’t resist going to Auschwitz in May 1944 because despite the evidence, they couldn’t believe the certain fate awaiting them.

That’s also a form of Kotzer ruach.

Berkowitz says he says we need to change how we see ourselves, and also expand how we see our sources. He says for centuries our sources have been reinterpreted in the diaspora to teach that violence and resistance is not for Jews.

Sadly, the Israelites with their kotzer ruach never reached the promised land. Moses schlepped them around the dessert for 40 years and they moaned like bratty teenagers all the way.

If we want to merit our Promised Lands, we first need to see our own kotzer ruach, and occasionally see past it. We need to see the full picture, to know evil exists and feel entitled to resist it. We need to see how amazingly diverse and resourceful we are as a team. We need to have the courage to be comfortable with the unknown, and to wonder what is preventing us from asking what else is possible.

Let’s take a deep breath, hold hands with our friends, and step forward together.

Yom Kippur Shacharit Al Chet

We will soon be saying the Viddui again, the extraordinary words we say out loud to each other, to God and mostly to ourselves. It’s a profound part of the Yom Kippur service that we will be saying today often.

So strap yourselves in, because till Neilah tonight, we’ll be saying the Vidui over and over again. We’ll be saying the short version beginning with Ashamnu with 24 ways we went astray and we’ll also be saying the long version called Al Het Shehatanu which has forty-four ways we missed the mark, again listed alphabetically.

The Viddui is extraordinary because it is the only day of the year in which we make a full public confession like this, out loud and all together. It is also extraordinary because it concentrates on personal moral failures and shortcomings. It’s deeply personal and completely public. Among other things, we’ll be acknowledging our hardheartedness, our disrespect for parents and teachers, our arrogance and our baseless hatred. The list goes on and on.

It's so comprehensive that you may feel some of the list does not apply to you. But that’s not the point. You know it’s not all about you, and yet in a way it is.

The power of Vidui is that it enables Teshuva which is the point of the whole exercise. It’s a way of crafting our moral compass as Ismar Schorsch says. It makes us take accountability for ourselves, instead of blaming the outside world.

By knowing where we need to improve, the Viddui gives us a real opportunity. It gives us the chance to be aware of the places and times we didn’t do well before, and so to do it better the next time. To listen better, to be more reliable, to be more sensitive, to be less reactive, to be gentler, to be less distractable, to be more present, and I can only do those things without the burden of shame or the need to be perfect.

In the Talmud, Kiddushin daf 36, Rabbi Yehudah says that God’s love is conditional and that only when we follow the will of God are we called his children. I prefer how Rabbi Meir sees it. He says that we are always called God’s children even when we sin. Rabbi Meir goes onto to say in Yoma 86b: GREAT IS REPENTANCE BECAUSE THE ENTIRE WORLD IS FORGIVEN ON ACCOUNT OF ONE PERSON WHO REPENTS.

גְּדוֹלָה תְּשׁוּבָה, שֶׁבִּשְׁבִיל יָחִיד שֶׁעָשָׂה תְּשׁוּבָה — מוֹחֲלִין לְכׇל הָעוֹלָם כּוּלּוֹ,

In other words, you and me just have to do a bit better, one action, one relationship and one moment at a time, genuinely out of love and we can change the world.

Gmar Hatimah Tova ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lubavitcher Rebbe: ‘If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete. If you only see what is wrong and how ugly it is, then it is you yourself that needs repair. In either case, it is impossible that you should ever see something and there is nothing you can do

Beha'alotcha

Parsha Beha'alotcha (Numbers 8:1-12:16) <

> It was Rabbi Chaim Weiner who first brought the difference between liturgy and prayer to my attention. He said prayer and liturgy are two very different concepts. Each have their place but they shouldn’t be confused in either form or function. <

> Individual prayer can happen anywhere and at any time and in any language. This kind of prayer follows an emotional, personal impulse. Some people pray like this in a field at dawn hugging trees and others in a bunker at night ducking bullets. This prayer can be a moment of deep contemplation, appreciation or of urgent need. If you are lucky, they can be powerful moments of deep understanding more than was possible to be understood before. Prayers like this involve a shrivelling of the ego and complete humility before the one to whom you are praying. There’s a prime example of this kind of prayer in the parasha today where Moses beseeches God on behalf of his sister Miriam, who has been stricken with horrible white snowy leprosy. <

> Moses cries out to God saying: אֵ֕ל נָ֛א רְפָ֥א נָ֖א לָֽהּ Please God please heal her’ Ibn Ezra, a 12th century scholar says about the words: ‘and Moses cried’ וַיִּצְעַ֣ק מֹשֶׁ֔ה אֶל־יְהֹוָ֖ה ‘This shows that Moses was pained because of what happened to his sister.’ <

> Moses, we know is humble ‘Anav’ more so than any other human being on earth. And now the pain he feels on behalf of his beloved sister, evokes this deep prayer. Moses is partially successful in his prayer; in that she is healed a week later, but not immediately. Everyone must wait for her patiently until she continues along with the rest of the nation on their journey. Her slow recovery is a teaching moment for everyone. <

> This is Moses’s personal prayer - powerful, useful and meaningful, but it is not as popular in our tradition as liturgy. Liturgy is fixed, regular, mandatory and communal. It goes beyond the limitations of individual needs. Private prayer is about the I, and communal prayer or liturgy as about the us. We are all together in this and each person is just one part of the whole. One who is not ill is reminded of others who are ill. Saying the fixed words of the Kaddish in Aramaic, a mourner is heard and held by others. Liturgy restricts self-expression, but there is so much between the spaces of the words. <

> I like the process of saying the same words over and over with my congregation week after week, year after year. I like what it teaches us. Unlike as in other traditions, we don’t speak in tongues or when the spirit moves us. It’s poignant to think we’ve been saying these same, fixed words for so many centuries and in so many places. Some of those words don’t match my beliefs exactly but that’s not what they are for. <

> There are two beautiful examples of liturgy like this taken from the parasha we read today. When we remove the Torah from the Ark, we sing: <

> וַיְהִ֛י בִּנְסֹ֥עַ הָאָרֹ֖ן וַיֹּ֣אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֑ה קוּמָ֣ה ׀ יְהֹוָ֗ה וְיָפֻ֙צוּ֙ אֹֽיְבֶ֔יךָ וְיָנֻ֥סוּ מְשַׂנְאֶ֖יךָ מִפָּנֶֽיךָ׃ When the Ark was to set out, Moses would say: Advance, O יהוה ! May Your enemies be scattered, And may your foes flee before You! <

> And then when we return the Torah to the Aron, we sing: וּבְנֻחֹ֖ה יֹאמַ֑ר שׁוּבָ֣ה יְהֹוָ֔ה רִֽבְב֖וֹת אַלְפֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ <

> And when it halted, he (Moses) would say: Return, O יהוה, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands! <

> Ibn Ezra takes this to mean ‘Moses prayed that God would grant rest and quiet to all of Israel, though they be many.’ <

> Twentieth century Rav Meir Simchah of Dvinsk says it means: Come to rest, Hashem, among the myriads and thousands of Israel. He says: ‘The explanation is that the twenty-two thousand Levites who carried the Mikdash should rest from their labour.’ <

> In the Torah, Moses’s prayer that God goes out with the ark to scatter our enemies and then comes back with the ark so we can rest, are the last two lines 35 and 36 in chapter 10 in the book of Numbers. They are held together in the scroll by two inverted nuns. Line 35 and 36 are adjacent to each other in the torah but in the theatre of the liturgy, they are pushed far apart like gates. <

> The torah for us today is the Aron of old then. It’s a circle within a circle. The outside Aron has become the inside Torah. It’s quite mysterious and there’s a lot I don’t understand about it. But I know for sure that if our tradition was given a choice between public liturgy and private prayer what the preferred option would be… <

> In Berachot 6a it says: God is where there are ten people praying together. עֲשָׂרָה שֶׁמִּתְפַּלְּלִין שֶׁשְּׁכִינָה עִמָּהֶם <

> As tempting as it is to hear and feel godliness alone in a field, our tradition wants us to say our liturgy together, even when we don’t know what the words mean or where they come from. They are our inheritance and we carry them whole from one generation to another, as a precious burden. They teach us not to be so self-involved. <

> One last example of prayer in the parasha today… In the wake of still another complaint by the people, Moses tells God that he can’t any more. He says: ‘I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me’ It is an experience of total surrender which I think is a condition of real prayer. And in response, God tells Moses to find 70 elders. God says: ‘I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and put it upon them; they shall share the burden of the people with you, and you shall not bear it alone.’ <

> That for me is the experience of being part of this community of prayer and liturgy here today. When it’s all too much for any of us, you can feel the support of everyone around you, and know you are not bearing it alone. I hope you hear it too. <

> Shabbat shalom.

Shmini

Last weekend,Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina were murdered en-route to a hiking trail in the Jordan Valley. They were all shot and killed. Their surviving father and husband, Rabbi Leo Dee said in response that we need ‘to bring up our children with strong moral values: helping others, caring for others and building community’. I am in awe of his response to the loss he experienced. But that’s what he came up with. I imagine he came up with that response in the silence of his own experience.

Halachically that’s the way it goes too. When we enter a house of mourning, we wait to be spoken to first by the mourner. We follow their lead. We listen. We say the prescribed words of comfort and we don’t rush in there and impose our own stuff on them. It’s like we can’t stand their pain and we want it to go away so we say things when the better thing to do is to listen in silence. Seeing someone’s pain makes us uncomfortable and we want to explain it away. It can be difficult to be there in silence and mostly still thinking of ourselves. We’re chirping away in our head preoccupied with our own anxieties - Am I being comforting enough? Am I doing enough? Have I said the right thing? We want to be the people who say the thing that makes the difference. To explain why bad things happen to good people.

We’re not just saying it to out of a desire to comfort the mourner, we’re saying it to comfort ourselves too. We want to know we are safe and sound and protected from death because we keep shabbat or we live in the right country or in the right place in the right country. Or we join interfaith groups or we say 100 Berakhot a day. We want to imagine we have some sort of control. It’s easier than accepting that for some questions there are no answers, and there is so much that is not in our control.

Elie Wiesel who survived the Holocaust but lost his family, was once asked, “Is there a tradition of silence in Judaism?” “Yes,” he answered. “But we don’t talk about it.” The epicentre of the Jewish tradition of silence as a response to death is in the parasha today. Aaron’s two sons are killed by God in the line of duty in front of Moses and Aaron. Moses then says some words to Aaron where he tries to provide an answer about why Aaron’s sons were killed. Rashi comments that Moses was telling Aaron, ‘I knew that this Mishkan was going to be sanctified by those closest to God, and I thought it would be me or you. Now I see that they, your sons, are greater than both of us.’

And then comes the next line in the parasha that has generated a thousand words of explanation… וַיִּדֹּ֖ם אַֽהֲרֹֽן Va Yidom Aha’aron. Aaron was silent. Va Yidom means to be silent, be still, to grow dumb, to be mute along with the word Ve-shatik which is the Aramaic word often used in the Talmud. Like the word sheket.

And just like there are many words for silence, there are also many different kinds of silences. There’s the cold, empty uncomfortable silence. And there’s also the wordless place which holds enormous potential from which something unexpected and transcendent can emerge. The kol dmamah daka place. קוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה the voice of silence thin which we only hear when we stop listening to the voices in our heads for a microsecond.

We don’t know which version of silence Aaron was experiencing or why he was silent. Commentators theorise that his silence means he was rejecting Moses’ words of explanation. Or that he was accepting them. Or that he had total faith in God’s actions. Or that he was in shock. I recently read another interesting exploration of Aaron’s silence from the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Halberstam. He was a camp survivor who experienced horrific grief when his wife, all his 11 children and his entire extended family were murdered by the Nazis. His response was to, in his own words ‘build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael where every human being would be cared for with dignity’

And so with no resources or experience, he took it upon himself to build that sort of hospital in Netanya. Today it has two medical centres, a children’s hospital, a geriatric hospital and a nursing school. And it has saved more lives than he had lost. He was once asked why so many of survivors like himself found the strength to rebuild, to re-start families, and to have faith in humanity after what they have experienced.

He answered with a phrase from Ezekiel 16:6 ‘b’damayich chayi’ which means you will live in your blood. We’ve just said it at our Pesach seders where we are redeemed with the blood of the Passover sacrifice. We also say it at a bris because of the blood of circumcision. Rabbi Halberstam made it very clear he wasn’t saying that through their bloody sacrifice they had earned the ability to go on. It wasn’t transactional. He was saying that the source of the ability of the survivors to continue was through silence. He rewrote the verse in Ezekiel as ‘we live in our silence.’ That is the power of silence.

Rabbi Halberstam says that Aaron’s silence in our parasha today allowed him to continue to do the work that he was given to do.

The challenge for us is to listen to someone grieving with love, with the faith that they know what they need and want. They don’t need our theories. They need our loving, comforting presence and also occasionally, they need a cup of tea and a sandwich.