We are in the Valley: Parshat Re'eh
As we prepare for Shabbat and think about parshat Re’eh I’m thinking about all of us listening to Moses. We were there together at Sinai, and I’m coming to feel that actually we were also all there listening to Moses, too. Every one of us who ever was and who is and who will be part of the Jewish people.
My Jewish community gathers in time and not space.
We don’t have roof beams and paving stones, as it were.
We join together from France and Iceland and Germany and California and Arizona and Texas and New York and Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Massechusettes and Wisconsin and Minnesota . . . and lots of other physical places.
Just over a year ago, someone reached out to me looking for Jewish Life Coaching . . . someone who also wanted to join the Jewish people. What was local to them was not available for them. I’ll write more about that another time.
I asked myself, “How can I facilitate a conversion across an ocean?” in the tone of - this probably isn’t possible. Then I asked myself again in the spirit of yes, and . . . “HOW CAN I facilitate a conversion across an ocean?”
Over the past few months, after meeting with many people who have personal experience becoming part of the Jewish people, I created a coaching plan for conversion candidates and a very traditional and very not-traditional expansive two-part, over two days, conversion ritual to welcome someone to the Jewish people online. It doesn’t try to replicate a shared-physical-space conversion. It is its own, fully authentic self and the second part is designed for the beit din, the supervising rabbi and witnesses, to join the one we are welcoming as they say the brachot - the blessings - for welcoming Shabbat for the first time as a Jew.
Today I experienced the great joy of welcoming someone to our people and of saying “Amen” to their brachot alongside two wonderful colleagues.
In honor of the new member of our people, I wrote the d’var Torah I am sharing now:
In Parashat Re’eh, Moses is in the middle of his farewell address to the Israelites. He describes Deuteronomy’s perspective clearly early on, pointing to two mountains, one on one side, and one on the other, and saying, “Re’eh” - See - “I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.” We are blessed if we obey the commandments and cursed if we stray and go after other unfamiliar gods. (Deuteronomy 11:26-28.) If we are cursed, we will lose the Land of Israel. The Land is a conditional possession and to keep it we must (12:2-27) utterly destroy all of the places of worship of the people in it already, overthrow their altars, break their pillars . . . and so on. If we don’t, we will be exiled.
One way to better understand this text is to accept its invitation to explore where our ancestors might have been coming from when they wrote it.
Contemporary Biblical scholars mostly agree that these verses were written by Judean - southern - leaders after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Those leaders blamed that catastrophe on the sins of the North - including the Northern accommodation of non-Israelite rituals. Judea had no military defense. Xenophobia and religious fear was a strategy to enlist God to fight for them.
Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, a current scholar of intergenerational trauma and healing, bases her teaching on the work of the NARM Training Institute and the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM). She explains that blame and shame are both trauma responses. With that insight, we can see that the Judean leaders blaming the catastrophe on the sins of the North was a strategy to make sense of the trauma - a strategy they were probably not employing consciously. Perhaps lacking the emotional capacity to fully experience the grief and anger rising up in them after such a tremendous loss, they indelibly etched into our narrative a dangerous fallacy: The only way for us to be safe is to destroy anyone who isn’t us.
Possibly by those Judean leaders, as Moses is written in Re’eh, he says over and over that everything in the universe is one thing or its opposite: Blessed or cursed, faithful or idolatrous. This Moses insists that whatever isn’t commanded must be destroyed. Inheritors of this binary are so likely to return to the Creation story and see light and dark, land and water, man and woman as opposites as well. Everything in Creation, we might think, can only be one or the other.
But we know that is another fallacy. Darkness and Light being one day cannot be binaries when there are also twilight and sunrise and that delicious moment before dawn when the birds begin to chat with the world. Land and Water cannot be binaries when there are shorelines and swamps and bogs and fens and mires. Human spiritual and embodied experience is expansive. After all, we are created in the image of the most expansive idea ever conceived.
Re’eh could certainly provide the foundation for anyone inclined toward, as Rabbi Jacob J. Staub wrote in 2008, intolerant self-righteousness. We see that, and so did the Talmudic rabbis who did their best to mitigate the fanaticism we encounter throughout Deuteronomy by explaining that the conquered people were extremely sinful. Corrupt. Irredeemable. Uniquely deserving of being eradicated. No other people, they said, are we commanded to destroy in this way.
Or we could say that our ancestors misunderstood God.
Idolatry, we might argue, is our acceptance and reliance on capitalism run amok, multinational corporations that entrench poverty and discrimination, the prison industrial complex, the mess we’ve made of healthcare, and so on.
Here’s what I’m seeing this year: When the Israelites occupied and conquered Canaan, they believed their allegiance to and covenant with God would protect them. When the Northern Kingdom fell, those in the south needed - desperately - a way to make sense of it and a strategy to cope with the immediate pain. It is hard, so hard it shouldn’t be surprising when it’s not possible, to keep an open heart when one is terrified. When our human hearts are curled up protectively, like armadillos, it can be unbearable to name, much less fully feel, the emotions we experience in the midst of trauma. The grief. The anger. Our nervous systems, teaches Rabbi Goldstein, tell us we will die if we really feel those emotions. We very strategically, if not intentionally . . . don’t. Instead we swallow shame and spit blame.
We risk not only becoming destructive, but becoming destruction itself.
What if we could ask our Judean ancestors what it was like for them to be in that moment? What if we could ask them how it hurt?
What if we could ask them the color and texture of their grief?
What if we could ask ourselves what it is like to be in this traumatic time we are in right now? What if we could really feel the way it hurts?
What if we could name the colors and textures of our grief?
Re’eh sets us up to see the world as either blessing or curse, with us or against us. Right. Or wrong. Us. Them. A fallacy. Almost nothing in life is actually that clearly delineated.
It is a relief to me that Re'eh is not our only Jewish text and that Re’eh’s Moses isn’t the only one to model a Jewish way to see the world. Re’eh’s Moses isn’t even our only version of Moses. We can have deep compassion and empathy for whoever wrote this parsha, and we can also choose to see the world in a different way.
Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, born in Ukraine in 1865 to a long line of rabbis and himself a Jewish scholar, wrote, “It is not we alone who pray; all things pray. All things pour forth their souls. The heavens pray, the earth prays, every creature and every living thing prays. In all life, there is longing. Creation itself is but a longing, a prayer to the Almighty. What are the clouds, the rising and the setting of the sun, the soft radiance of the moon, and the gentleness of the night? What are the flashes of the human mind and the storms of the human heart? They are all prayers — the outpouring of boundless longing for God.”
In his words I feel Modah Ani on my lips and in my lungs and the color and texture of my soul. In his words there is space for my Oseh Shalom for Israel, for Ishmael, and for kol yoshvei tevel - all of the beings in the world. I think Micah Beredichevsky invites us, and invites the Moses of Re’eh, and us, to see that we are not on the mountain of blessing or on the mountain of curses. We are not on the extreme of ‘do every mitzvah flawlessly’ and neither are we on the extreme of ‘do nothing but wickedness.’
We are in the valley.
Re’eh, see, all around us are mountains of insistence that everything is one thing or another, but us?
We are in the valley.
We are in the both-and.
We are in the space where we are enough.
We are in the reading of our text that gives us permission to feel with our ancestors and make different choices than they did.
We are in the valley where sometimes we have a fancy table cloth and flowers and sometimes we order pizza or make a sandwich and then light Shabbat candles because that’s what remembering and keeping Shabbat looks and feels and sounds like for us. We are in the valley of knowing we have obligations and also where we don’t do the mitzvah of visiting the sick maybe every time we technically could, but we do whenever we actually can. We are in the valley where we have blessings in our hearts but don’t always know how to sing them. So we read them in Hebrew . . . or in transliteration . . . or in translation.
We are in the valley where loving God and loving our ancestors and being deeply Jewish isn’t all or nothing. May we all go from strength to strength, and from compassion to compassion.
Shabbat Shalom.