God’s Vulnerability and Bringing Forth Sparks of Light from Egypt
This past weekend we held two Shacharit (morning prayer) services accompanied by Torah study sessions, one for Shabbat, as we do every week, and one on Sunday, which was the first day of Passover. (Recall that in Judaism “days” start in the evening; thus the Saturday night Seder kicked off the first “day” of Passover. The first day concluded this past Sunday night.)
Recall, too, that our Torah study sessions, like much Torah study today, focus not on narrow questions of Jewish law, applicable only to those who consider themselves highly religious and traditional, but rather are meant to be spaces where we investigate life’s confrontation with mystery. Through dialogue and question and answer, much like the format imagined for a classic seder, our Torah study participants bring their life experiences to bear, and, building off one another’s questions and insights, our learning takes shape.
On Shabbat, we studied the weekly parashah (portion), a selection from Leviticus, which summarizes a series of laws pertaining to the array of different sacrificial offerings individual Israelites would bring to the tabernacle. How could such a text, seemingly so obsolete, remain relevant today? It’s a question Jews and our loved ones having been exploring for centuries, yielding beautiful results. Rabbi Zev Wolf of Zhitomyr (d. 1798) taught that the brokenness of our world signifies that not only are we in exile in need of redemption but that so, too, is God. He writes that we are “prepared at any moment and any time to restore the configuration of the Shekhinah [the Divine presence], by means of… our service of God, both before the time of the Temple and after its destruction. The prayers on our lips take the place of the sacrifices, and our table stands in place of the altar.” The sacrificial offerings serve as the paradigm for our service to God even while the medium, from offerings to prayers, from altar to table (and yes this includes, for him, the dinner table, celebrating a meal with friends and family) has shifted.
More important to our Torah study participants was the insight that this midrash (rabbinic elucidation) invites us to think about God’s vulnerability and what that means for us. If God is vulnerable, as the midrash suggests, what does that mean about our own permission to be vulnerable? Further if God is in need of repair, how much does that raise the stakes, the meaning, the dynamism of our own actions in this world? How much more purposeful our lives become.
The very next day on Passover we studied the classic text from the book of Exodus describing the first Passover but we focused on an oft-overlooked passage. “The Israelites had done Moses’ bidding and borrowed from the Egyptians objects of silver and gold, and clothing. And Hashem had disposed the Egyptians favorably toward the people, and they let them have their request; thus they stripped the Egyptians” Exodus 12:35-36. We examined texts that explained this maneuver as one necessitated by the yearning for justice, the need for reparations.
One Torah study participant had a different take. Taking gold and silver with us from Egypt symbolized that even as we seek to move past challenging conditions we’ve encountered, stages in our life that were marked by hardship and pain, there are pearls, gems, sparks of light that can be brought forth from those moments, taken with us and we journey on to our next adventure. Sparks of light can be found in all corners of our world, our life, our time.
Through the contributions of participants on each day of our learning together this weekend we continued to dive more deeply into Torah.
