I wanted to begin by sharing with you the d’var torah (Torah-based teaching) I offered this past Friday night at Shabbat services, something that I do most every Friday night mixed into our musically-infused service, which is always followed by a community dinner and always preceded by wine and cheese. We welcome you to join us whenever you can, whether you’re coming straight from work, or deciding at the last second that you want to join. Come as you are.
The d’var torah was as follows:
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This week’s parashah, this week’s Torah portion, introduces a term that has long confounded theologians and scholars alike: geulah, ga’al—redemption. To redeem. What does it mean?
The introduction of the term in this parashah comes on the heels of disappointment; what scholar Nahum Sarna calls “pervasive demoralization.” (Sound familiar?) Moses and Aaron have presented themselves to the people as having been commissioned by God to take them out of the land of Egypt, and v’ya’amen ha’am, the Israelite people believe them, but the Pharaoh not so much. When Moses and Aaron tell pharaoh, “Thus says יהוה, the God of Israel: Let My people go that they may celebrate a festival for Me in the wilderness,” Pharaoh not only rejects their plea, but increases the workload of the Israelites. They now have to not only produce the bricks, but gather the bricks’ ingredients—the straw,; bricks were made of mud and straw—gather the ingredients, too, and still produce the same number of bricks. Hence the “pervasive demoralization” among the people. Spiritually, they are as low as they can be.
God’s response? “Ani Adonai,” God tells Moses to tell them, I am Adoani, the Source of Being… “v’galati otam.” “I will redeem them,” God says. “Redemption.”
What does this mean?
So ambiguous is the term redemption that after one of the first High Holiday services I led here at society hill synagogue, after I had invoked redemption a few times in the course of the prayer service, just like we have tonight, a congregant came up, and very straightforwardly and asked me that very question: what is redemption? My answer was, at best, a missed opportunity, so let me try again.
Scholars have as difficult a time defining it as we do. The renowned theologian Arthur A. Cohen, when tasked with defining redemption for a seminal work on contemporary jewish theology, struggled. “Surely,” he wrote, “redemption is the most extraordinary granting of reward and the most encompassing rebuke to the triumph of evil in a thoughtful universe, but,” he says, “it is still not clear for all this what it is that redemption redeems.”
He names some of the features that, in classical Jewish theology, came to be associated with redemption—the End of Days, the advent of the Messiah, the restoration of the Jewish people to their land, the unification of all mankind in service of the one true God, and the resurrection of the dead”—but recognizes how overwhelming these can be when trying to tap into what the spirit of redemption can mean to each of us.
The words of the weekday amidah, which we’re invited to offer three times per day, contain the following simple prayer: גְאָלֵֽנוּ מְהֵרָה לְמַֽעַן שְׁמֶֽךָ redeem us, soon, for the sake of your name. What does this mean when we offer this simple plea?
Rather than think about the End of Days, perhaps it’s more relevant to understand the notion of redemption in the context in which it was first used. What did it mean to B’nei Yisrael, the people of Israel, when they first heard it?
For that we need to understand how the agrarian society, the farming society in which they lived, worked. Back then, if you were lucky, You owned a small piece of land that you farmed. But you needed investment capital each year to produce a good crop. You needed the seeds, you needed the tools, you needed the animals to help harvest the crops. And to get all of that, you would borrow. And you’d borrow against your land. If the crop failed, to pay back your creditor, you had to give up your land. If that didn’t cover the debt, or if you had no land to start with, debts were repaid through indenturing yourself as a servant. You would bind yourself into the creditor’s service as a laborer.
Here is where geulah, redemption comes in. It was expected that your next of kin, someone in your family, someone in your clan, who had the means would swoop in and goel, and redeem, either the land, which had fallen out of the hands of the tribe/the clan, or, more direly, the person. The person who had become indentured. They would need to be redeemed.
In a sense, this was harder on the redeemed than the redeemer. Putting ourselves in the position of the Israelites, it was hard to be in that position. It could feel like a shameful position to be that dependent on another—to be completely trapped and dependent on a loved one with whom you may not even be on the best of terms.
The PBS Newshour recently reported on Mark Frerichs, a 60-year-old American contractor in Afghanasitanfrom Lombard, Illinois, who was kidnapped and held for 32 months by, U.S. officials believe the Taliban-allied Haqqani group. Who was it who worked tirelessly for his release, lobbying the White House and giving national interviews to bring attention to his case? His sister, whom he hadn’t seen in 15 years. She was his go’el’et, his redeemer. I think about the experience for each of them, that experience of working for someone’s redemption, and the experience of being redeemed, opening ourselves up to being that reliant on someone else’s support. It can be a hard but necessary, and life-affirming, part of life. Redemption
A less intense—and more fictional—example comes at the end of one of my favorite moves: My Cousin Vinny. Spoiler alert: Joe Pesci’s character, Vinny, wins the big case, exonerating his falsely accused cousin from murder charges. It is Vinny’s first ever trial as a lawyer. But he is in danger of losing the case when his wife, Lisa, played by the inimitable, and academy award winning, marisa tomei, swoops in to offer case-clinching testimony as an expert witness. Sulking, his wife asks him what the problem is. “My problem,” he says, “is that I wanted to win my first case without any help from anybody.”
“Well,” she says, “I guess that plan is ruined.”
“You know, this could be a sign of things to come,” she continues. “You win all your cases, but with somebody else’s help. You win case after case, and then you have to go up to somebody and say “Thank you!” Oh my God what a nightmare!”
Redemption. Being redeemed.
Opening ourselves up to the help, the rescue of others—human being or Divine.
This can be an incredibly hard experience, and yet an incredibly Jewish, and human one. Fighting back against the narrative that we can do it all on our own, that we don’t need any help, and instead recognizing the godliness, the holiness when we open ourselves up for help, whether that help is coming from without—from a loved one, from a friend—or from within: turning inward to the portal to the divine that lies within each of us, allowing ourselves to feel the help and support of the Holy One.
Wrestling with that question of what is ge’ulah, what is redemption, we can often find ourselves thinking about the role of the redeemer, but it’s worth reflecting on the other partner in the relationship—the redeemed. Which is so often: us. What does it take to open ourselves up to redemption? How can we recognize the sacredness not only of coming to the help of others, but making ourselves vulnerable enough to let others help us—help they oftentimes no doubt would gratefully give. That, too, is sacred. To be redeemed is in a sense the sacred act of opening ourselves up to help. Shabbat Shalom.
