Avot

Vayeshev for TAA

(Delivered December 21, 2024)

There’s a teaching from Pirkei Avot that I return to again and again. In Chapter 2, Mishnah 5, we read:

בְּמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ:

In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be a human

I understand this beautiful teaching to mean that while the opportunity to do the right thing is always there for us, it’s much easier when the circumstances push us in the right direction to begin with, when the wind is at our backs. But in a setting where the impetus is toward cheating or inflicting pain or lying or simply doing nothing, it takes real courage and striving to resist the prevailing winds and walk the path of righteousness. 

In the middle portion of Sefer Breishit—the Book of Genesis—there are two instances where the Torah teaches us about an encounter with an אִישׁ (ish). Both Jacob and Josef have such encounters, and each of them is changed in surprising ways through their respective experiences. 

In last week’s parsha, Vayishlach, Jacob is preparing to be reunited with his estranged brother Esav after many years apart. He sends his family ahead across the river Yabok. Then:

וַיִּוָּתֵר יַעֲקֹב לְבַדּוֹ וַיֵּאָבֵק אִישׁ עִמּוֹ עַד עֲלוֹת הַשָּׁחַר׃

And Jacob remained alone, and he grappled with an אִישׁ until daybreak.

The tradition explores the meaning and nature of this אִישׁ. There are all sorts of possibilities: is it God? An angel? And if it is an angel, what kind of angel? In Breishit Rabbah, the Midrash posits that perhaps the אִישׁ is Esav’s guardian angel. The Bechor Shor, a 12th century French rabbi, suggests:

מלאך היה שהיה רוצה לְהַפִּילוֹ אלא שהק’ עזרו

It was a messenger who wanted to cause his downfall,
but the Holy One helped him

Many think that the אִישׁ represents Jacob’s conscience: as he reflects on the chaos that his youthful deceptions caused, as he wonders and worries about how his brother will receive him, his inner churn is embodied through this mysterious encounter. 

However we might understand the nature of Jacob’s אִישׁ, we do know that this dustup has a strong and lasting effect on him. When the stranger renames him Yisrael it is כִּי־שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁים וַתּוּכָל׃—because he has reckoned with both God and man and held strong. The felt sense of struggling with forces larger than himself, forces he doesn’t fully understand, helps Jacob see himself more clearly. And his new name gives him—and us—a model of relationship with God that admits complexity, ambiguity, and struggle. Becoming God-wrestlers turns out to be central to Jewish identity, and our capacity for considering and reconsidering contributes to our resilience throughout our history. Only God-wrestlers could have endured the millennia of hardship and struggle and still maintained faith in God and a sense of purpose as a religious group, even as fractious as we are. Jacob’s encounter with the אִישׁ and his transformation into Yisrael lay the groundwork for what we would become as a culture. 

On the other hand, the אִישׁ that Josef encounters is of a different sort, indeed their meeting is so short and seemingly mundane that we might overlook it in the sweep of the overall narrative arc. It comes in this week’s parsha, Vayeshev. The Josef cycle opens with a depiction of Josef and his brothers, a relationship full of conflict & rivalry, which, frankly, Josef doesn’t handle well. Meanwhile his father Jacob, widowed of his beloved Rachel and perhaps overwhelmed by the difficulties between and among the brothers, plays favorites and ignores problems. And in this dynamic of Jacob not really fully seeing how his other sons regard Josef, it happens that when the brothers go off without Josef, Jacob sends his beloved favorite child to catch up.

Josef, wandering the fields to try to find his brothers and the flocks of sheep they are allegedly tending, runs into (you guessed it) an אִישׁ.

וַיִּמְצָאֵהוּ אִישׁ וְהִנֵּה תֹעֶה בַּשָּׂדֶה וַיִּשְׁאָלֵהוּ הָאִישׁ לֵאמֹר מַה־תְּבַקֵּשׁ׃

An אִישׁ came upon him wandering in the field, and the אִישׁ asked him,
“What are you looking for?”

It might be tempting to write off Josef’s אִישׁ as a random minor character, a mere plot point for getting Josef physically near enough to his brothers that the conflict can play out through the cruelties they are about to inflict. But I actually think there’s more there. This אִישׁ is a model for the Jewish tradition of chesed, of caring for one another and offering companionship and support when needed. Josef’s אִישׁ has no particular reason to approach and could just as well have passed right by the young man with the colorful cloak wandering aimlessly by. The Torah doesn’t say that Josef was in distress, but something makes the אִישׁ take note of him and offer gentle assistance. And in so doing, the אִישׁ teaches us a mode of offering care and a clarifying question. 

Of course, where would we be without this essentially anonymous figure? His gentle question and then pointing Josef in the right direction opens up the whole grand story—of the brothers faking Josef’s death and selling him off into slavery in Egypt; of Josef leveraging his wit and skill to make something of himself, even as a slave in a foreign land; of the famine that made Josef a hero in the region and eventually brought his brothers back into his orbit in a stunning scene of reconciliation—and eventually, of the rise of a Pharaoh who knew not Josef and the ensuing enslavement and redemption that is at the core of Jewish identity. 

Both Jacob’s אִישׁ and Josef’s are formative, representing the chesed and the gevurah—the kindness and the strength—of Jewish culture. These two mysterious beings teach us about ourselves and our values, even as they resist easy explanation. 

בְּמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ:

Both of these אֲנָשִׁים —these ishes—show us that each and every life, no matter how long or how short, has the potential to be meaningful and to make an impact. Over the course of our unfolding lives, we too can read our small encounters as sources of learning, insight, and meaning. And each one of us can be an אִישׁ in someone else’s narrative; in fact we never know when we will be. Through seeing the importance of everyday moments and everyday people, we become more fully human.

Shabbat shalom!

Chayei Sarah for TAA

(Delivered November 23, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

What I’m about to say this week might be troubling or uncomfortable for some of you to hear. Some of you may even be offended, for the same reasons or maybe for opposite ones. I’m going to have to let that be, in the hopes that something in it may also inspire you. As always, I’m happy to talk and, more importantly, to listen. But we’ll get to that.

As you know, there is an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service on Monday afternoon at the Episcopal Church just down the street from us. I’m looking forward to sharing this experience with my new colleagues, with our fellow citizens of Cape Ann, and, of course, with you. But getting to this point has not been simple. The planning process has been filled with misunderstanding, awkwardness, and some well-intentioned cultural appropriation. Knowing that it’s worked out well, I want to share a bit about how it unfolded and what it’s taught me. 

Believe it or not, this will tie back to the parsha. 

When I first saw the service plan for the interfaith event, my heart sank: the primary musical expression was hymns; some of the names for God were atypical in Jewish parlance; there was an offertory planned, complete with collection plates! And the only explicitly Jewish thing was something that’s so out of place for this season and setting as to be absurd. My well-intentioned colleagues, knowing that we Jews don’t believe in Jesus as a divine figure, had studiously avoided any reference to him. But still, the absence of Jesus did not make it authentically interfaith. In that first iteration, this was clearly a Christian service at which I was to be a welcome guest. 

I knew I couldn’t participate in something like that, but also—once I cooled down—I knew that if I just walked away and didn’t speak up, not only would I be the one who was unable to do interfaith work, but I would be giving up on the chance to help our treasured Jewish values and culture be more known. So with my heart in my throat, I wrote a message to articulate all the ways in which the service as it was then configured missed the mark as an authentically interfaith endeavor. And, not wanting to just point out the problems, I offered some suggestions for how to bring it more into alignment with our shared intention.

Thankfully, my colleagues were more than receptive, and eager to learn why elements of the service—things that are totally normal to them because of the world we live in—were actually just not quite right. They took my feedback without defensiveness, and what we’ve gone on to create feels like a truly interfaith effort. And in the meanwhile, these folks who couldn’t have known any better about what they were doing wrong, now know a little bit more and will surely do better next time.

That feeling of misalignment, of being a minority in a majority culture is something that we as Jews experience all the time. Although we are blessed to live in less difficult times than many of our ancestors did, there are still occasions, such as my experience with the interfaith clergy, when the dominance of the dominant culture is so strong that it begins to seem more like wallpaper. We don’t even notice it. All the more so, the folks who hung the wallpaper in the first place really don’t notice it.

This feeling of being slightly out of step with our surroundings, the sense of being here but not here, is part of the Jewish soul. I think it has always been with us in one way or another. We see it in the opening of our parsha, Chayei Sarah. Avraham, who has made his way to Eretz Cana’an—the land of Canaan—in fulfillment of the divine message he heard years ago, pauses from mourning his wife Sarah. Then, he sets about finding a place to bury her. Seeing as he has no ancestors and no land holding of his own in that region, he has to seek assistance from the Hittites, the very people God has told him to supplant. He begins:

גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב אָנֹכִי עִמָּכֶם
I am a stranger dwelling among you

Ger: stranger, toshav: dweller, these two words pulling in opposite directions. Even the calligraphy in the scroll shows it, connecting the two words with a makef, a slight horizontal line that visually counteracts their inherent tension. There’s a whole world in that makef, a sense of the paradox that so many of us live inside. 

From the stories I’ve heard, both past and present, the experience of being Jewish on the North Shore, of being Jewish in Gloucester, has a lot of resonance with that makef. In decades past, there was a thriving Jewish merchant presence in downtown Gloucester and, at the same time, the beach clubs didn’t allow Jews on the premises. Ger v’toshav. Here and not here.

Perhaps that tension is still present today, as evidenced by my experience with the Thanksgiving service, and as evidenced by the strong feelings that are surfacing with respect to the Gloucester City Council’s back-and-forthing about whether and how to both acknowledge the realities of antisemitism and be even-handed in the matter of rejecting all forms of bigotry and hatred. Both of these are important values that deserve to be uplifted. Antisemitic attacks and rhetoric have increased at alarming rates in the past year. This needs our attention and advocacy. But surely that does not negate the necessity to vigorously reject other forms of bigotry and hatred like Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. While local City Council votes don’t appear to have a great deal of influence on the course of history, the manner in which this debate plays out will tell us a lot about the community we share, both within these walls and outside them. 

This is a matter about which there can be a wide range of reasonable, ethical, well-considered, and deeply-felt responses. If there were one obvious response, we would all agree on it, because we are all good and moral people. The fact that there is disagreement indicates that it’s complex and doesn’t lend itself to slogans or sound bites or oversimplification. What this moment demands of us is not to silo ourselves with our own ideas but rather to listen for what we might be missing. Our tradition makes a spiritual practice of considering multiple viewpoints, as even a cursory glance at a page of Talmud will demonstrate. Our core theological teaching begins with the word שמע—listen! Our way of being in community asks us to remain in conversation, even when what we hear challenges our own assumptions and preferences. 

Going back to the matter of ger v’toshav: the 12th century French commentator, the Bechor Shor, reads our pasuk along with the one after it, in which the Hittites answer Avraham saying, oh no, you are no stranger but a prince of God among us. The Bechor Shor fills in the space between psukim, making this lovely connection. He writes: 

גר שבאתי מארץ אחרת ותושב שדעתי להתיישב עמכם 
והם השיבו אין אתה גר בעינינו רק נשיא אלקים 
Stranger: for I came from a different land. Resident: because I intend to settle here with you. And they answered him: you are not a stranger in our eyes, but rather a prince of God.

Avraham, the stranger who dwells among, the figure known for his own sense of hospitality and capacity to connect, had become known in the eyes of the Hittites and, for the Bechor Shor at least, this made all the difference. I imagine them listening well enough to get beyond the trap of thinking he is completely different and therefore unreachable—and also to get beyond the trap of thinking he’s just a slightly different version of themselves. 

By working through those misconceptions, they are able to see his humanity, and thereby to soften the strangeness with which they’d regarded him prior. They come to see the צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים—the divine image—within him. He becomes, in their eyes, a prince of God.

As we face the gathering darkness, may we meet it with the courage to allow ourselves to be known by those whose intentions are wholesome, and may we listen carefully to the voices around us that challenge us, locating the divine every place it can be found. As we read in Avot chapter 2, mishnah 5:

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Shabbat shalom!