A Bar Mitzvah Teaching on Kashrut and Belonging, and an Extended Teaching on the Last Remaining Ounce
As is our custom its my privilege to share some words of Torah from him. Skylar’s parashah (Torah portion) was Shemini, a portion that is situated partway through the book of Vayikra (Leviticus). Vayikra, which takes place in the aftermath of the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai, lays out, essentially, part of the new covenant between the Israelite people and God. After having been taken out of Egypt to freedom, the Israelites are now called upon to live out their lives in accordance with God’s holiness.
One of the fundamental ways of expressing that yearning for holiness, and which remains one of the central features of Jewish life to this day, is to eat in a highly conscientious way, especially when it comes to fellow living creatures, as detailed in Skylar’s parashah, and which has come to be embodied in the laws of kashrut (fitness).
In Skylar’s D’var Torah, he shared his own relationship with the role of kashrut in being and feeling Jewish. While Skylar wanted to emphasize that he does not see keeping Kosher as a requirement to being Jewish—he emphasized that his own experience of being and feeling Jewish was rooted more in the feelings of connection he had to previous generations, and to celebrating shabbat and holidays and being in synagogue—neither did he think Jews who don’t keep kosher should discard the teachings around Kashrut. “When you are reading this part of the Torah,” he wrote “it is important to think about others who do keep kosher, and reading this could make you more connected to them.” He extended this idea both to members of the present Jewish community and generations past. It was a powerful statement of Jewish pluralism: that even if we have different means of practicing our Judaism than other members of our community, immersing ourselves in learning about different Jewish practices and traditions can help us better connect to our fellow community members.
Reconstructionist Judaism often talks about multiple entryways into one’s relationship to their Jewish identity, including through belief, behavior, and belonging. Even if their is diversity of belief around one’s relationship to God, or diversity of practice with respect to different rituals and traditions, a sense of belonging and connection that Skylar spoke to can be one of the central means of experiencing one’s Jewishness. Thank you, Skylar, for your teaching.
I wanted to share the D’var Torah I offered on the eve of Skylar’s Bar Mitzvah celebration which was also the eve of Shabbat Parah:
Tonight, we are celebrating Skylar’s Bar Mitzvah, and we are also celebrating a a special shabbat called Shabbat Parah, the Sabbath of the Cow, or, more accurately, the sabbath of the red heifer, and so I want to talk for a moment this mysterious but significant moment in the Jewish calendar, what it could mean, and what relevance that might have for our own lives. That’s in some ways the project we’re engaged with this Shabbat and at every Jewish service: the project of opening ourselves up to the wonders of this tradition and asking how our wrestling with it might impact our lives, and, in turn, giving space for a young person in our community to wrestle with the tradition themselves, forever leaving their imprint on it, this dialectal process where we impact the tradition and the tradition impacts us.
So Shabbat Parah, the sabbath of the red heifer. What is it? Well, this Shabbat we read from not one Torah portion but two.
We continue our chronological march through the Torah; we began with Genesis in the fall, and now we’re about midway through the book of Leviticus, and we’ll keep going, finishing the Torah up in the fall and starting all over again, as we do every year
But this is a special shabbat because we read not only the normal portion in our chronology, but a special portion. We drop what we’re doing and skip forward to the Book of Numbers to read a section about, you guessed it, about a cow, or more specifically, about the red heifer. This section discusses the tabernacle, the portable sanctuary that traveled with us, with our ancestors, as we made our way through the wilderness after leaving Egypt on our way to the promised land. The tabernacle, the sanctuary, was the visible reminder of God’s presence in our midst, the space around which the community oriented itself. It was a visible reminder to conduct ourselves with holiness, with purity. It was a reminder that as we lived out our lives, it was our duty to stay attuned to, to be aligned with, the fundamental holiness underlying, permeating each corner, every molecule of the universe.
Perhaps paradoxically the sanctuary was also the means through which, if we ever carelessly misstepped, if we ever acted out of step with or in misalignment with that fundamental holiness, we could right the ship.
There was a recognition that inevitably, as human beings, though we were to seek to point our compass in the right direction, we would fall out of alignment, we would run amiss, and we would need a means to bring us back to God, to reconcile with God, with our source. In a sense, that remainder, that missing piece, that ounce of holiness we couldn’t achieve became our offering to God. Through the tabernacle, we would make an offering which said, in effect, I love you God, and this is as far as I could go. Accept this offering of the last ounce, that last degree of alignment I couldn’t manage. Bring me back to you once again. Realign me with your goodness, with your holiness.
And, to our ancestors’ understanding, it would work. They would feel that nearness. By raising their consciousness, that last ounce would be transformed from alienation to intimacy. The word for offering, sacrifice, korban, means to draw near. Bringing an offering of that which was beyond our grasp to achieve, in the form of an animal from our flock, righted the ship, at least until the next time lost our way.
The parah, the red heifer, was one such ancient means of realigning with holiness once we’d gone off course. Specifically, when certain circumstances had us impure, misaligned with holiness, we were called upon to bring the offering of a red heifer, an auburn cow, burn it up, and sprinkle a mixture of its ashes and water upon us. Hence Parah. Shabbat Parah.
So what does this have to do with us? Why are we reading it this shabbat, when we’re not anywhere near this section of the Torah this shabbat?
Well as some of you know, we’ve got a pretty big holiday coming up. In about, well exactly, three weeks, we celebrate the holiday of Pesach, Passover, our annual springtime celebration, celebrating rebirth, renewal, coming out of the waters of the sea, from oppression to freedom, that salty taste forever on the tips of our tongues so that we remember, when we are low, that we have made it through before and can and will again.
So Pesach is coming up. But we don’t just wake up and celebrate Pesach. If there’s ever something to prepare for, ever something to make sure we’re in the proper headspace, heart space, spirit space for, that we’re properly aligned for, it’s this signal moment where we celebrate our fundamental story and get ready to turn the page on the winter of our lives and get ready for its spring. Sacred moments like this require preparation.
In ancient times, in order to prepare for Pesach and the sacred pilgrimage our ancestors were going to make to Jerusalem to celebrate it, they needed to realign, and so as a means of preparation, they would undergo the ritual of, you guessed it, parah, the red heifer, sprinkling the water and ashes, the water of lustration, as it was called, on those who needed to be pure, who needed to realign themselves with holiness. And, let me just say, over the course of a year, it was pretty much all of us who needed to be realigned. So this portion was read a few weeks in advance of Pesach to remind everyone to undergo this ritual.
Today, we still do this, but it takes a different form. Today, the alignment, the purification, the renewal, takes place through the process known as bedikat chametz, an intensive, exhaustive cleaning and search for all the unleavened products in our home—bread, crackers, cakes, down to the smallest crumb, to ensure we’ve rid ourselves of chametz, of leavened products, in advance of the weeklong Pesach celebration where no leavening is allowed.
I find this annual ritual to be both profoundly spiritual and frustratingly painful. Frustratingly painful in the sense that each year, the night before Pesach, I find myself scrambling to complete this tedious work, vacuuming underneath couch cushions, scrubbing out refrigerator drawers that haven’t been touched since last Pesach. I think last year I may have, in a weak moment, melodramatically whined to my wife about it saying something like, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” Not my finest hour.
But on the other hand, profoundly spiritual. What does it mean to prepare for the holiday that is synonymous with springtime, rebirth, renewal, bursting forth to a new page? How might the act of deep cleaning, the scouring of our homes, which translates to the the scouring of our souls, our psyches, searching for those crumbs that are long overdue to dust away, that weigh us down, what effect might this cleaning ritual have on us as we prepare for this springtime holiday, returning to the community after a season of hibernating? It’s important spiritual work to realign ourselves, to get ourselves back on track.
And yet, here again, there is a recognition in our tradition that we might not get it completely right. That no matter how hard we look, we may not have the wherewithal, the ability, the means, the strength, the clarity, to find each crumb, to search each nook and cranny in our homes, in our beings. As with the ancient need to offer up sacrifices symbolic of that last degree of holiness we weren’t able to achieve, thereby reconciling ourselves with God, we offer up the remaining crumbs, the remaining foods, we weren’t able to discover as a blessing. כָּל־חֲמִירָא וַחֲמִיעָא, says the traditional blessing after we went as far as we could go with our search. Any leaven that is in my possession, that I have not seen or not removed, shall be unclaimed and considered as the dust of the earth.
There is that fundamental remaining portion that becomes our offering. That transforms from a missing link to a bridge to God. One might say it’s our fundamental humanness, inevitably flawed. And yet, in offering that missing link up before God, we see its Godliness, too.
Pesach isn’t the only signal Jewish moment we’re engaged in intense preparation for this week. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the parallels between the holiday and the reason many of you are here, Skylar Goose Hunter’s becoming Bar. Skylar has been preparing for months, for years for this moment. For that moment where, like Pesach, he’ll be turning the page on one season of his life and entering another one.
And there will almost assuredly be a moment tomorrow, Skylar, like the ancients trying to stay pure, like the search for chametz in our homes, where things go astray. Even if just for a moment. A fumbled word, someone missing their cue, the rabbi forgetting which page we’re on, you forgetting a piece of trope. That is part of this. The system is built for that. That remainder, that misalignment is your korban, your offering, the moment where you transform the gap into a link to God’s presence, accepting it as part of what it means to be human and to be holy.
And Skylar isn’t the only one who will be feeling the significance of tomorrow. B’nei Mitzvah are many ways as big a deal, if not more, for the parents, as they are for the celebrants themselves. It’s their opportunity to see the seeds of Jewish education they’ve planted come to fruition, to feel like they have been links in a chain to the next generation.
And what better representation of the idea that, prepare as we might to do things the right way, pour our hearts, our souls into something, someone, as much as we can to ensure their goodness, their safety, their security, that as much as we do that, there will inevitably be missteps, shortcomings, imperfections, moments where it got away from us; what better embodiment of this notion than: parenthood. Than raising a child to the precipice of adulthood. Here, too, perhaps here especially, we need a moment where we say, “God, we have done what we can. Transform the remaining portion into goodness, into holiness. Accept our humanness and recognize its bridge to you. Help us, through these challenges, feel our closeness to you.
As a father, I only have a two year old and a two week old, and I already feel this, but my wife, who is wise beyond her years tells me this will feel especially true as our daughters become teenagers and on into adulthood.
So Elana, Jonathan, Skylar, Mimi, Jack, all the loved ones who have helped Skylar reach this moment, I want to say God bless, thank you, your work, all of it, is holy.
