Sermon: Ve'etchanan 5779
Sep. 6th, 2019 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI was asked at somewhat short notice to give a sermon, and we're supposed to write up sermons to share around and for accessibility reasons. I've been procrastinating on writing down what I said for a couple of weeks, not because it's aversive in any way, just because it never quite made it to the top of my priority queue. So I reckoned if I put it in a DW post, the old habits of typing things here would unblock me, and maybe a small handful of people are interested in what I had to say about the Torah reading from a couple of weeks ago.
This shabbat [the one I was preaching on, namely 17th August] is known as Shabbat Nachamu, the first sabbath after the fast of Av, when we read the haftarah from Isaiah 40 that starts: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. This is the start of a new section of Isaiah, known as Deutero-Isaiah. If you follow the historical-critical interpretation, it was probably written by a different author living around two centuries later, or if you follow the Torah min haShamayim [direct revelation of all of Scripture from heaven] view, it's a change of topic and tone. The first 39 chapters warn the Israelites that if they continue acting sinfully, disobeying God's law and using their power to oppress the needy, God will punish them with exile. From Ch 40 onwards, Deutero-Isaiah is referring to the period when the threatened exile has already happened, and he's offering words of comfort.
It's perhaps not the most comforting sort of comfort. Mostly the theme is that humans are mortal and irrelevant compared to God's greatness. Human experience and human suffering aren't really important, compared to God's eternal power over the whole universe. Indeed, international politics and wars and empires are also relatively trivial. Something as huge and terrifying as the Babylonian empire is only the instrument of God's punishment, and God is unimaginably greater still. It's reminiscent of the words of the morning prayer:
It might be possible to find reassurance in thinking about God, our God, who loves us, as being immeasurably more powerful than any of the forces that are persecuting and killing us. There are some hints of the more emotional sort of comfort; the haftarah does mention Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, literally
On 9th Av, we marked a day of mourning for historical violence against Jews. We read the words of another prophet, Jeremiah, in the book of Lamentations. Jeremiah is very vivid in his descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem and the events leading up to exile. He's not talking about some kind of abstract or ennobling suffering, he's giving us detail of military violence, starvation, people turning on their own family and neighbours from sheer desperation, graphic accounts of rape. And we know those things are not made up by the prophet to make a point, we see intentional mass starvation and deliberately planned rape campaigns being used as tools of genocide in current conflict zones, in the Yemen and Syria and elsewhere, all the places refugees are fleeing from into Europe to escape experiences all too resonant with the ones we read about in Eicha.
Lamentations says starkly that these horrifying experiences happened because we deserved it. It was a just punishment for our sins when we kept up the forms of religion but broke the Covenant which committed us to providing justice for all oppressed people, widows and orphans, the poor, outsiders and migrants. Instead of acting against oppression, we contributed to it. That's pretty universally how Tanach addresses persecution of the Jews, including in the book of Isaiah. Post-Biblical Jewish thought can be more nuanced, and questions the view that this level of violence and destruction was a just and proportionate punishment. And certainly looking at the experiences of Jewish communities in Mediaeval Europe and those some of us remember from the 20th century, it's hard to definitely accept the idea that it was all just and deserved.
But no matter how horrifying the experiences of persecution, we can't dwell on them forever. Just as personal mourning has a set period, with the seven days, then the thirty, then the year of mourning, the period culminating in the 9th Av comes to an end, and we're supposed to move on to the seven weeks of consolation, starting with this Shabbat and leading up through Elul to the High Holy Days. When we move on from thinking about misery and suffering, that doesn't mean it's erased, it's still part of our history. The Consolation haftarah readings, including today's, are addressed to an audience who are at that time still in exile, still being persecuted. And we read them now in an imperfect world, a world where the fear of anti-Jewish violence is still with us.
Even if the prophet Elijah arrived tomorrow and promised us that it's all over: We will never again turn on the news and see that some white supremacist came into a synagogue and shot people celebrating Shabbat, never again read about security guards from ICE deliberately driving vehicles into Jewish protesters against new concentration camps being built in the US to prepare for the mass murder of people from a different ethnic group from the majority, the world is ready for redemption, no more violence! Even if that happens, we'll still have to live with the knowledge of what happened to us and to others in the past, we will still be part of a world where humans can commit these terrible atrocities against each other. There is comfort, God is greater than all this human warfare and hatred, but moving on and finding comfort doesn't mean that the past is erased. As we say in the Yom Kippur Yizkor liturgy:
Today's Torah reading, Ve'etchanan, is about a whole range of different things, but one of them is the repetition of the Ten Commandments. The section we read included a reminder of how terrible it was when we received Torah directly from God: You came near, and stood beneath the mountain, and the mountain was ablaze with fire to the heart of heaven, with thick, dark clouds. And later on, in the section we don't read in this triennial cycle, Moses also reminds the Israelites that it was so terrible that the elders begged to stop hearing God's voice directly: Why should we die and be consumed by this great fire? If we hear God's voice any more we will die!.
I learned a really fascinating midrash about this from the Israeli Orthodox rabbi R' Nathan Lopes Cardozo, who blogs at the Times of Israel. He quotes from Shir haShirim Rabbah, the Great Midrash ie the collection organized in Biblical verse order, on Song of Songs. According to this midrash, the Israelites literally died as soon as they heard the first word of the Ten Commandments, אָנֹכִי as in
The Torah in the midrash asks God, why have you sent me to all these dead people? I'm a Torah of eternal life! And God "sweetens" the Torah and brings everybody back to life to hear the rest of the Commandments. The midrash here brings the verse from Psalm 19 which says that
Based on this midrash, when we accepted the Covenant, we agreed that we would keep God's law, and we agreed that if we disobeyed it would be just for God to punish us with all the horrors we read about in Lamentations and the earlier chapters of Isaiah. That's too much, we can't survive such a harsh punishment for not living up to the best of who we could be and what God wants from us. So we have to rely on God to make the Torah sweeter for us (as in the prayer we say after the morning study passage, asking God to
As ever, please feel free to ask for more detail if any of this is confusing or too jargony. I pitched it at a relatively knowledgeable Jewish community, though it turned out my congregation included a Christian first-time visitor and a recent convert who wasn't really familiar with how midrashic interpretation works, so that was an interesting Kiddush after the service explaining some of this from first principles...
This shabbat [the one I was preaching on, namely 17th August] is known as Shabbat Nachamu, the first sabbath after the fast of Av, when we read the haftarah from Isaiah 40 that starts: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. This is the start of a new section of Isaiah, known as Deutero-Isaiah. If you follow the historical-critical interpretation, it was probably written by a different author living around two centuries later, or if you follow the Torah min haShamayim [direct revelation of all of Scripture from heaven] view, it's a change of topic and tone. The first 39 chapters warn the Israelites that if they continue acting sinfully, disobeying God's law and using their power to oppress the needy, God will punish them with exile. From Ch 40 onwards, Deutero-Isaiah is referring to the period when the threatened exile has already happened, and he's offering words of comfort.
It's perhaps not the most comforting sort of comfort. Mostly the theme is that humans are mortal and irrelevant compared to God's greatness. Human experience and human suffering aren't really important, compared to God's eternal power over the whole universe. Indeed, international politics and wars and empires are also relatively trivial. Something as huge and terrifying as the Babylonian empire is only the instrument of God's punishment, and God is unimaginably greater still. It's reminiscent of the words of the morning prayer:
Everything is trivial except the pure soul [...] Yet we are your people.
It might be possible to find reassurance in thinking about God, our God, who loves us, as being immeasurably more powerful than any of the forces that are persecuting and killing us. There are some hints of the more emotional sort of comfort; the haftarah does mention Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, literally
speak to the heart of Jerusalem, and there's the image of the shepherd gathering up and cuddling little lambs. But mostly the comfort is in the form of contemplating God's unfathomable greatness.
On 9th Av, we marked a day of mourning for historical violence against Jews. We read the words of another prophet, Jeremiah, in the book of Lamentations. Jeremiah is very vivid in his descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem and the events leading up to exile. He's not talking about some kind of abstract or ennobling suffering, he's giving us detail of military violence, starvation, people turning on their own family and neighbours from sheer desperation, graphic accounts of rape. And we know those things are not made up by the prophet to make a point, we see intentional mass starvation and deliberately planned rape campaigns being used as tools of genocide in current conflict zones, in the Yemen and Syria and elsewhere, all the places refugees are fleeing from into Europe to escape experiences all too resonant with the ones we read about in Eicha.
Lamentations says starkly that these horrifying experiences happened because we deserved it. It was a just punishment for our sins when we kept up the forms of religion but broke the Covenant which committed us to providing justice for all oppressed people, widows and orphans, the poor, outsiders and migrants. Instead of acting against oppression, we contributed to it. That's pretty universally how Tanach addresses persecution of the Jews, including in the book of Isaiah. Post-Biblical Jewish thought can be more nuanced, and questions the view that this level of violence and destruction was a just and proportionate punishment. And certainly looking at the experiences of Jewish communities in Mediaeval Europe and those some of us remember from the 20th century, it's hard to definitely accept the idea that it was all just and deserved.
But no matter how horrifying the experiences of persecution, we can't dwell on them forever. Just as personal mourning has a set period, with the seven days, then the thirty, then the year of mourning, the period culminating in the 9th Av comes to an end, and we're supposed to move on to the seven weeks of consolation, starting with this Shabbat and leading up through Elul to the High Holy Days. When we move on from thinking about misery and suffering, that doesn't mean it's erased, it's still part of our history. The Consolation haftarah readings, including today's, are addressed to an audience who are at that time still in exile, still being persecuted. And we read them now in an imperfect world, a world where the fear of anti-Jewish violence is still with us.
Even if the prophet Elijah arrived tomorrow and promised us that it's all over: We will never again turn on the news and see that some white supremacist came into a synagogue and shot people celebrating Shabbat, never again read about security guards from ICE deliberately driving vehicles into Jewish protesters against new concentration camps being built in the US to prepare for the mass murder of people from a different ethnic group from the majority, the world is ready for redemption, no more violence! Even if that happens, we'll still have to live with the knowledge of what happened to us and to others in the past, we will still be part of a world where humans can commit these terrible atrocities against each other. There is comfort, God is greater than all this human warfare and hatred, but moving on and finding comfort doesn't mean that the past is erased. As we say in the Yom Kippur Yizkor liturgy:
These I recall, and pour out my soul within me. This happened to us...
Today's Torah reading, Ve'etchanan, is about a whole range of different things, but one of them is the repetition of the Ten Commandments. The section we read included a reminder of how terrible it was when we received Torah directly from God: You came near, and stood beneath the mountain, and the mountain was ablaze with fire to the heart of heaven, with thick, dark clouds. And later on, in the section we don't read in this triennial cycle, Moses also reminds the Israelites that it was so terrible that the elders begged to stop hearing God's voice directly: Why should we die and be consumed by this great fire? If we hear God's voice any more we will die!.
I learned a really fascinating midrash about this from the Israeli Orthodox rabbi R' Nathan Lopes Cardozo, who blogs at the Times of Israel. He quotes from Shir haShirim Rabbah, the Great Midrash ie the collection organized in Biblical verse order, on Song of Songs. According to this midrash, the Israelites literally died as soon as they heard the first word of the Ten Commandments, אָנֹכִי as in
I am the Eternal your God. They weren't just figuratively dying because they were so afraid, they actually fell down dead! This is connected to the verse from Song of Songs where the narrator's
soul departedwhen her beloved spoke, which is from the door knocking scene; in context it probably means she swooned because he was so sexy, but here it's interpreted to mean that she died. Typically midrash takes the male lover in Song of Songs to represent God while the woman represents Israel, so if the woman in the Song died when she heard her lover's voice, the Israelites died when they heard God's voice.
The Torah in the midrash asks God, why have you sent me to all these dead people? I'm a Torah of eternal life! And God "sweetens" the Torah and brings everybody back to life to hear the rest of the Commandments. The midrash here brings the verse from Psalm 19 which says that
God's Torah is perfect, reviving the soul, literally מְשִׁיבַת נָפֶשׁ – returning the soul, to the people who are implied to have died. Now R' Lopes Cardozo is going somewhere else with this idea of sweetening the Torah, and you should definitely read his drash, but I wanted to pick up on this idea that hearing the Commandments, receiving the Torah, was actually not just scary, but deadly.
Based on this midrash, when we accepted the Covenant, we agreed that we would keep God's law, and we agreed that if we disobeyed it would be just for God to punish us with all the horrors we read about in Lamentations and the earlier chapters of Isaiah. That's too much, we can't survive such a harsh punishment for not living up to the best of who we could be and what God wants from us. So we have to rely on God to make the Torah sweeter for us (as in the prayer we say after the morning study passage, asking God to
Make the words of Your Torah sweet in our mouths). It's God's love, God's consolation as we experience on Shabbat Nachamu, that makes our deserved but unbearable punishments survivable. It's only knowing that God loves us that gives us the strength to move on from remembering the terrible things that happened to our ancestors and continue happening to Jews and other peoples today. And with that perhaps sparse comfort of God who is far greater than anything in our experience yet still loves us, we can move towards the New Year when we will ask God to sweeten the Torah and not punish us for our sins as much as tradition teaches we deserve.
As ever, please feel free to ask for more detail if any of this is confusing or too jargony. I pitched it at a relatively knowledgeable Jewish community, though it turned out my congregation included a Christian first-time visitor and a recent convert who wasn't really familiar with how midrashic interpretation works, so that was an interesting Kiddush after the service explaining some of this from first principles...
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-06 03:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-06 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-06 07:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-06 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-06 11:22 pm (UTC)It's a bit difficult to find a space where "we deserve it, but this, too, shall pass" is a comforting space for someone. But it sounds like that's what's on offer here. Am I misunderstanding?
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-06 11:53 pm (UTC)I can only hear that section of Isaiah as Handel set it to music, as I encountered it there as a choral singer long before I started studying Torah. I put it on while reading R' Lopez Cardozo's drash, which turned out to be very appropriate!
I do love midrashim where Torah is personified, or Shabbat or the Moon or what have you, and challenges or argues God into being a better God.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-10 06:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-04 12:49 pm (UTC)