(Delivered July 27, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

I remember when the boychiks were little and they would occasionally complain to me: Ima, I’m bored. And my reply would always be [shrug] OK. I think there’s something about the impulse to seek what’s new and exciting, that can fool us into thinking that the steadiness of the ordinary is of a lesser value. Yet I’m here today to sing the praises of boredom, to make the pitch for what lies beneath the mundane. 

This year we got to read a passage that probably sounded familiar, since we hear it several times a year at Rosh Hodesh. And actually, it’s that very familiarity I want us to consider a little bit. The last two aliyot today contain, as we said before, detailed descriptions of certain of the korbanot, the animal offerings that were at the center of the Temple culture prior to the destruction. To the casual reader, those daily offerings—the temidin—can be repetitive. Even—dare I say it?—boring. It’s tempting to skate over these parts when they come up in our study of Torah, as if they’re interchangeable and there’s nothing to be found in them. Yet, as always, if we slow down over the text, we can find and ask and feel all kinds of things that might not have been obvious at first glance. 

So what does this seemingly repetitive, semi-boring passage have to teach us? 

As I slowed down over the korbanot in Pinchas this year, the first thing that spoke to me, and spoke quite loudly, was its position in the parsha. Our Sages have taught that smichut parshiot—the juxtaposition of two different parts of a text—is purposeful and meaningful. That is to say, there is substance to be derived from the liminal space between sections. Like notes and prayers tucked into the cracks between the building blocks of the kotel, the in-between parts of a structure are actually part of the structure.

Coming as it does immediately following the section concerning Moses’s succession plan, and Joshua’s becoming the new leader and spokesperson of the Israelite community, the passage describing the daily practices of the Temple seems to me to be offering a subtle but important teaching. The advice—millennia before Change Management was a field—is that when we are in the midst of a leadership transition or, more broadly, in the throes of any sort of major disruption, steady practices offer a way of grounding ourselves and absorbing the change. 

Although it’s perhaps slightly less consequential than what’s described in the Torah, I can imagine that having a new rabbi, even one you basically feel good about, also involves some sense of destabilization. These first weeks, we are learning each other’s tunes, getting acquainted with one another’s customs, and finding our way, I hope, into each other’s hearts. We do this, in part, through the temidin of congregational life: keeping steady with our Shabbat practices, studying Torah, volunteering, coming to Sunday service, keeping up with what’s still the same while integrating what’s new. Having these spiritual habits at the core of what we do, helps us grow closer and knit our worlds together. This is a comfort in a time when it may feel like things are coming apart. With our hostages still in captivity and war raging in the Holy Land, and with political tensions at a high pitch here at home, we need to be able to lean on the temidin of life, to invest in our sense of community and wholeness.

As you probably know, on Monday night we entered into the period of the Three Weeks leading up to Tishaa b’Av, when we will commemorate the very destruction I mentioned earlier. In the book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew articulates the cycle from Tishaa b’Av through Simchat Torah as an extended metaphor of ruin and return. In Lew’s framework, the grief of Tishaa b’Av carries us into the reflective work that culminates in the High Holidays. If you imagine teshuvah as a Temple itself, we have entered its gates and are in the courtyard. We have a ways to go to get to the heart of it, but we are beginning to tune into the frequency, of our own inner work. 

In my exploration of Parshat Pinchas, I found a Hasidic teaching about the temidin that links them to the Three Weeks and the long march to Yom Kippur. It comes from Rabbi Binyamin ben Aharon of Zalocze, whose book Torei Zahav recasts the jewel of the korbanot in an entirely different setting. Rav Binyamin cites a teaching he received from another hasid, Itzik Drobyczer, who made a fascinating linguistic leap to turn the temidin into a moral lesson about anger and forgiveness. Remember the phrase כְּבָשִׂים בְּנֵי־שָׁנָה—yearling lambs? Rav Itzik takes כְּבַשִים and recasts the root letters [chaf vet sin] to get the word כְּבֻשִׁים—things that are suppressed. From this connection, he reimagines the korbanot not as burnt offerings but rather as suppressed resentments and vendettas that, instead of being כְּבֻשׁ—held in check—until Yom Kippur, are offered up to God on a daily basis, through the ritual of the korbanot. Rav Itzik teaches that a person should say every night, paraphrasing a line from Megillah 28a, “May God forgive anyone who has harmed me.” This, then, becomes the רֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ לַיי. The sweet scent that gives God so much pleasure is not a physical smell per se, but the joy of seeing humans do the work of peace. 

So. Two different takes on the temidin: perhaps they are guardrails on the road of life, holding us secure when the path curves. Or perhaps they are an invitation to a daily discharge of hard emotion, a chance to offer up to God what we cannot ourselves express or redress.

Unsurprisingly, I think it’s both. Unsurprisingly, I think the meta lesson is not to take anything for granted, even the seemingly boring passages in the Torah. 

Truth is, the very name, temidin, is a teaching, for tamid carries two ways of thinking about the passage of time. Tamid can mean daily, as in the things that happen every day. That’s what these offerings are, the habitual actions that make up the structure of life. The temidin of modern life might be: brushing our teeth, saying good morning and good night to the people we live with, — if we’re lucky, studying Torah. I’m sure you can think of many more. But remember I said tamid carries two ways of thinking about the passage of time. Here’s where it gets interesting: tamid also means constant and uninterrupted. Think of the words from the first blessing after the Barchu:

רוֹמְמֵי שַׁדַּי תָּמִיד מְסַפְּרִים כְּבוֹד־אֵל וּקְדֻשָּׁתוֹ

The uplifters of Shaddai constantly recount the glory of Adonai and God’s holiness 

Tamid points us to a dual mode of experience: both habitually renewing and constant. Now and always. Particle and wave.

The meta-lesson is that every day, the everyday, is magical, and comes from God. Even when things are barely holding together, even when change and disruption threaten to engulf us, there is tamid: the constancy and the commonplace, the poetic and the prosaic, held and offered by 

הַמְחַדֵּשׁ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּכָל־יוֹם תָּמִיד מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית

The One who, in goodness, constantly renews the works of creation,each and every day.