blessings

Parshat Va’etchanan: God will Provide

A phrase I heard frequently in my household growing up was, “God will provide.” My sweet father used to say it a lot. Still does, at age 90. He is not a very religious man, but he is gentle and optimistic, which is almost the same thing. His faith is not often articulated at all—much less in fancy words—but more times than I can count, when we asked him how something we had doubts about was going to work out, he would say, “God will provide.”

He was usually right.

Our Torah reading this week, Parshat Vaetchanan, begins with Moshe pleading with God for a bit of grace: the opportunity to enter the Land of Israel despite God’s determination that he wouldn’t be permitted to do so. The word vaetchanan is rooted in the letters chet-nun-nun, and depending on the conjugation, can mean either to be gracious or to seek grace. Rashi suggests that the word could also be interpreted as being from the root letters chet-nun-mem, (as in sinat chinam, baseless hatred) to mean something unearned—so in this case, according to Rashi’s reading, Moshe might be asking for an unearned gift.

The two meanings pair nicely, and the parsha supports both. In chapter 6, verse 10, we read Moshe’s prediction that the Israelites, upon entering the Land, will find waiting for them: cities they didn’t build, houses full of things they didn’t fill them with, cisterns and vineyards and olive groves…  וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָעְתָּ and you will eat, and you will be satisfied. The promise of the Promised Land here is that the Israelites will have their needs fulfilled, without having to work for it. They will have a head start in life, seemingly offered unconditionally from God. This seems to me the very definition of grace, and very much unearned. 

So Moshe goes on to warn the Israelites not to get so caught up in their bounty that they imagine their success to be to their own credit. Usually the so-called self-made man has a whole lot of unacknowledged help. We all do.

Vaetchanan reminds us that there is still a covenant in place. As Moses steps back from his leadership role, he reiterates this foundational teaching: 

הִשָּׁמְרוּ לָכֶם פֶּן־תִּשְׁכְּחוּ אֶת־בְּרִית יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר כָּרַת עִמָּכֶם
Watch yourselves so you don’t forget the covenant
that Adonai your God sealed with you. (Deuteronomy 4:23)

That is, the unearned goodies are actually part of a spiritual ecosystem and we have a role to play. Our role comes from words so familiar that their meaning may have dissolved in our minds; these words, too, come in our parsha this week.

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכׇל־מְאֹדֶךָ
You shall love Adonai your God, with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your being. (Deuteronomy 6:5)

You could recite it all by memory, no doubt, but let’s linger over it for a moment and make a point of not taking it for granted. What is it to love God with all the fullness of our selves?

It’s complicated: we don’t even really know Who or What God is, so that makes love hard to define or fathom. And how can we be commanded to love; aren’t feelings out of our conscious control? The Israeli Torah scholar Nechama Leibowitz offers two possibilities for approaching the question of how to love God: she suggests it can mean either to love the world that God created with undistracted passion, or to sever our connections to the world in order to focus solely on God. 

I am typically wary of answers that come in black and white. After all, if we drop everything and focus only on God, we risk isolation and myopia. And if we are locked in undiscerning gratitude, we risk squandering chances to improve the world through acts of kindness and righteousness. I would rather look for a way to unbind the Leibowitz binary and find a flexible approach that allows for a little of both. 

Love, of course, is both a feeling and an action. In any deep and sustaining relationship there are times when the feeling comes to the fore, and times when the feeling might seem dormant but action carries us through. Think of it this way: When your toddler suddenly grasps a concept they have been reaching for, or mixes up their words to say something adorably wrong, or covers you with hugs and kisses, the feeling of love is the most obvious thing in the world. When your toddler dumps baby powder on the carpet five minutes before guests arrive, or falls into a lightning-storm of wild emotion because you served the Ovaltine in the wrong sippy-cup, or rips several pages out of your favorite book, the feeling of love might go quiet for a while, but the action of love will keep you steady. 

So it is with God. At different moments, we have different experiences of our love for God: sometimes all-consuming, sometimes making the long way round through deep appreciation of the world’s many blessings. Sometimes, it’s easy to feel God’s presence and love as an emotion suffuses us; sometimes not so much, and our covenantal responsibility is to love anyway, as commanded. 

Sometimes it is easy to see what God has provided; sometimes God provides us with a challenge or a question. Our task is to love through feeling—through noticing and attending to the world in all its complicated glory, and through action—in the form of mitzvot, the things we do simply because the Beloved asks.

A Meditation on Time & Space

I hear and say it all the time these days: the world is so different now, nothing is the same, it all feels so unreal, so surreal, so theoretical. Time and space are collapsing. 

Gertrude Stein’s phrase, “There is no there there,” was originally her description of her experience revisiting the site of her family home as an adult and finding it had been torn down. It has come to mean much more over the years: everything from a half-horse town to a person who seems more substantive than they are. At this point it feels universal, like it describes everything. 

These days, there is no there anywhere. 

I imagine this might feel like a whiff of what it was like after the Temple was destroyed. Our center of our communal and religious life is barely available to us; it is virtually unrecognizable. Torah scrolls across the world sit lonely in their Arks, fallow, unread, longed for. Shabbat is virtual or solitary. Community interaction is flattened and packed into boxes on the screen. Weddings are postponed or pared down to the bone. Families mourn in isolation. 

Rabbi Harold Kushner’s teaching, “Jews don’t pray for, Jews pray with,” is one I return to often; it is a touchstone of my religious life. I am deeply moved by the very experience of sitting in synagogue in a community at prayer. I love the sound of voices going in and out or raising up together in song. I love the swaying. I love wrapping myself — and on rare, blessed occasions, my children — in a tallit. I love the feeling of being in a group of people united in hope and longing. Even if we are all hoping or longing for different things, each navigating our own idiosyncrasies of desire and need, we do it together and that, to me, feels holy. The vertical and the lateral entwine, filling the expanse. 

In pandemic time, it feels unsettling to think of praying with. Just when I need it most, my prayer life has shriveled to almost nothing. When I pray with others on a screen, I unwittingly become a spectator. My longing is mine alone and has no place to go. When I pray alone, the isolation is unbearable.

My world is at once tiny and unfathomable. The predictable physical space is accompanied by an inner space of such uncertainty and churn that it is sometimes hard to remember who I am or why I am here.

The Hebrew word עולם (olam) carries meanings of both time and space. It means world, and it means forever. It is all over the sacred texts, in phrases that conjure a beginningless, endless expanse: 

וחסד יי מעולם ועד עולם
And Gd’s love is from forever to forever (Psalm 103)

אתה הוא עד שלא נברא העולם
It was you who existed before the world’s creation (liturgy)

I have always been fascinated by the time/space one-two punch in עולם: in my imagination, the ancient Hebrews perceived a relationship between time and space that we moderns have a harder time accessing. They knew, I tell myself, that the things that are eternal are beyond easy categories. The sense we nowadays have, of time and space being two different things, is a construct. A wise friend once said to me, “Time is a dream.”

All the more so now. The days run together; the weeks fly; the months disappear, bringing May before we remember even to change the calendar page to April. It’s rushing by and going impossibly slowly all at the same (yeah) time. It feels like endless expanse, and like we’re all running out of time.

The book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) teaches that the wise and the foolish, the kind and the wicked, the joyful and the morose all come in time to the same end. The entirety of human experience is laid out in a book-length menu; we will at some point end up dining on each item. There is no implication that good behavior carries a reward, nor that bad behavior will be punished. We are told that a person’s ability to enjoy the pleasures at hand is a gift from Gd. 

ביום טובה היה בטוב וביום רעה ראה
In good days, dwell in the good; and in bad days, reflect. (Kohelet 7:14)

In this time period that feels both stretched and contracted, both eternal and ephemeral, time seems to fill every corner of the expanse and yet seems impossibly, terrifyingly short.

The present moment is all we have; let us meet it with all the joy we can muster.

We are alive, and that is blessing enough.

Four Blessings for Tu BiShevat

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Trees give us air to breathe, helping to sustain life. So, too, may you have a long, happy, healthy life. May you have space to breathe and may you breathe life into others by your example.

 

 

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Trees have roots that go deep into the ground and connect not only with the earth but with other trees. So, too, may you always know the joy of family, close friends, and a community to keep you company throughout your life. May you always be surrounded by people who love you and keep you connected.

 

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Tree trunks hold steady through harsh conditions. So, too, may you be held steady through life’s inevitable bumps. 

 

 

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The leaves of trees know when to hold on and when to let go. Called by the voice of nature itself, they follow a rhythm of their own. So, too, may you hear the still, small voice within you, and may it inspire you to a life of goodness in harmony with the world around you.