We’re in the middle of a trying week, with a highly consequential election nearly upon us, settling down from the rhythms of the Jewish holiday season back into the traditional rhythms of our year where, week in and week out, the primary anchor we have as a spiritual community, to quiet the outside noise, to root ourselves in timeless liturgy and wisdom, is Shabbat.
Each week, on Friday evenings beginning at 5:30 pm, people begin to gather to connect over wine and cheese in our historic lobby. At 6:00 pm, folks come up into our sanctuary for gorgeous music and prayer, holding space to let the Divine unfold within us and between us. We offer a teaching from our tradition bearing on our present life experience, and we allow ourselves to experience a sense of rest and rejuvenation that the tradition says we need. By 7:15 pm, we’re in the social hall for dinner for an extended opportunity to connect with one another. All are welcome.
Saturday mornings are similarly peaceful and nourishing here. Services begin at 9:45 am, opening up with traditional prayers and reflection. At 10:30 am, we invite our Hebrew School students into the sanctuary and are holding a community wide Torah discussion for all ages. I hold space for the community to study a particular teaching from the week’s Torah portion, each participant building on, or responding to, the previous comment, living out Jewish tradition’s exhortation that we explore and wrestle with and ask questions of our sacred heritage. Around 11:00 am, the Torah itself is being chanted; by noon we’re downstairs in our social hall for a community wide lunch facilitating more connections.
At this point in our year and in our lives, to me, Shabbat, and how it is observed here at Society Hill Synagogue is such a nourishing feature to build into our lives and our weekly rhythms. I hope you’ll join me. Again, all are welcome.
What follows are the remarks I delivered at this past Friday night Shabbat service when we celebrated the contributions of our communal service honorees:
This is a week in which we are especially celebrating Torah.
We’re on the heels of Simhat Torah, a phrase which literally means “the celebration of Torah.” We celebrate completion one cycle of reading the Torah through in its entirety, and then we begin the cycle again.
Tomorrow, we’ll begin the Torah reading with Parashat Bereshit, the opening section of the Book of Genesis, unrolling and opening up the entire Torah all around the sanctuary as we do so. And of course, tonight we are honoring our Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit, two Honorees for their communal service to this congregation, Brian Mono and Libby Cone. Each will share their own Torah with us, their own journeys of Jewish communal service, honors which are inherently tied to the Torah itself — Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit essentially mean that the recipients are inextricably linked to Torah.
So it’s worth asking this evening, as we often do, what is Torah? Understanding that in the year 2024, the Jewish people have different relationships to Torah and to being Jewish than they did in 1924, or 1424, or just 24 CE, what is Torah? How do we understand the role that Torah plays in the lives of the Jewish people — in our true, lived realities?
I recently encountered a reflection on this by my favorite author, Abraham Joshua Heschel. It’s from 1968, yet his words are still relevant today.
“What is the Torah about?” Heschel asks.
One of the first answers with which we might respond is, in a word: God. The Torah is a religious text, so it’s a book about God, right? “No” he says. Or at least not primarily. Primarily, he suggests, it’s a book about man. Humanity. Us. To put a finer point on it he says, the Torah doesn’t primarily depict man’s theology, humanity’s understanding of God; it depicts, he calls it “God’s anthropology”: God’s study of us.
What does he mean by that?
If it were a book depicting man’s theology, that would mean it would be a book depicting our understanding of the nature of God. And surely, yes, there is some of that in there — but it’s often glancing, allusive, impressionistic. There are few clear statements of who God is or why God does what God does, or God’s back story.
Peek ahead at the first few portions of Genesis, however, and, as we encounter each year with the Torah readings on Rosh Hashanah, there is a lot about man, humanity, families, siblings, our struggles and our foibles, our rises and our falls.
But neither is God absent from these journeys. That’s why Heschel calls it “God’s anthropology,” the study of community, from God’s perspective.
The Torah, according to Heschel, is about the importance of humanity in the story of the redemption of the world, from the perspective of God.
That’s one of the central moves Heschel makes in his perspective on Torah: to invite us to consider the world, and humanity’s role in it, from God’s eyes.
As part of this understanding, Heschel moves away from what theologians call God’s omnipotence. In other words, Heschel, along with a number of other Jewish theologians, argue that to understand God as omnipotent, as all powerful, almighty, that we human beings have nothing to say or do except to keep quiet and accept God’s actions, is not a very Jewish teaching. Rather, Heschel and others teach, God needs our cooperation, our contribution, our actions, striving for collective redemption. God, as Heschel teaches, is yearning for man, is in search of man.
This teaching comes through in a midrash, a rabbinic expansion on the text of the Torah, that our friend and teacher Rabbi Avi Winokur loves to share. The midrash, as he likes to pronounce, is about Nahshon ben Aminadav, Nahshon the son Aminadav, of the tribe of Judah.
Nahshon was among the mass of Israelites and the mixed multitude with them escaping Egypt, Pharaoh’s soldiers barreling down on them from behind, deep sea raging in front of them.
As the surface text of the Torah has it, when the Israelites reached this point, Moses said to the people, “have no fear! Stand by, and witness the deliverance that God will work for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again.” Moments later, we read, “Moses held out his arm over the sea and God drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and turned the sea into dry ground. The waters were split, and the Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.”
In a sense this text lays the groundwork for an impression of God’s omnipotence. God splits the sea for us, and we pray that a similar experience will happen for us again. But the rabbis of the Talmud, presaging and anticipating Heschel’s teaching about the importance of our actions and our choices, say — not so fast.
They teach the midrash of Nahshon ben Aminadav. Rabbi Yehuda taught that, yes, the Israelites reached the sea, Egyptians barreling down on them from behind, sea raging in front of them. But before God split the sea, something else happened.
When the Jewish people stood at the Red Sea, Rabbi Yehuda says, the tribes were arguing with one another. This tribe said: “I am not going into the sea first,” and that tribe said: “I am not going into the sea first.” Then, in jumps the chieftain of the tribe of Judah, Nahshon ben Amminadav, who walked into the sea first, accompanied by his entire tribe. Nahshon, struggling amidst the waters of the sea, then offered a prayer, channeling the words which would become Psalm 69:
Deliver me, O God… Hoshi’eni Elohim… …הוֹשִׁיעֵנִי אֱלֹהִים
…for the waters have reached my neck; I am sinking into the slimy deep and find no foothold; I have come into the watery depths; the flood sweeps me away. Let the floodwaters not sweep me away; let the deep not swallow me; let the mouth of the Pit not close over me.
Only then, the midrash teaches, did God split the sea. Humanity’s action — more specifically, the small steps of one person, prompted God’s miracle.
This emendation to the text, reading between the lines of the traditional text of the Torah — or as some traditions have it — this part of the Torah which accompanied the written text orally, helps fill out a central understanding of Jewish theology, or, as Heschel calls it, God’s anthropology: that central understanding being that we matter.
Our actions matter, our choices matter, in relation to the collective redemption of our community, our people, our world.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, this is an understanding implicit in the lives of our annual Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit honorees. Contributors to our community like Brian and Libby, like many of you, understand implicitly that community does not create itself, that tikkun olam does not effect itself, that, as the famous teaching from another anthropologist, Philadelphia-born Margaret Mead, suggests, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
We need, the world needs, this community needs contributions from each of you, like Brian and Libby have modeled for us, to sustain us. It might mean being willing to serve on our Development Committee even if you do that all day as part of your day job, as Brian did. Or it could mean writing countless condolence notes to fellow congregants, as Libby has done. From stewarding our financial resources as treasurer and supporting the vision of our staff and clergy, as Brian did, to teaching Torah to fellow congregants, as Libby has done, to simply showing up week after week to Shabbat morning services, as you both do.
Jewish community does not create itself, the world does not fix itself — that’s what Jewish theology, or perhaps more accurately, God’s anthropology teaches.
Put more simply, that’s what Torah teaches.
Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi K.