When Israel was in Egypt’s land / Let my people go
These are the words of the old spiritual, originally
composed and sung by black slaves in America about their plight, their desire
to be set free from bondage. Slaves who were brought here from Africa were stripped
of their original tribal cultures and made to worship as their white Christian masters
did, and they found strength and solace in the messages of the Bible. The thematic
line of this spiritual, “Let my people go,” comes from Parashat Va-era,
which we chanted this morning. God instructs Moses to go to Pharaoh and say:
ה' א-ֱלֹהֵי
הָעִבְרִים שְׁלָחַנִי אֵלֶיךָ לֵאמֹר, שַׁלַּח אֶת-עַמִּי, וְיַעַבְדֻנִי
בַּמִּדְבָּר
The Lord, God of the
Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in
the wilderness.”
What the spiritual leaves out is the second part
of that verse, about worshipping God in the desert. What is God’s justification
for requesting freedom for the Israelites? It is not necessarily that they deserve
freedom because slavery is wrong. Rather, they should be released so that they
could receive the Torah and thereby worship God freely. The command given to
Pharaoh from God is as much about religious freedom as it is about physical freedom.
Moshe delivers this request to Pharaoh multiple times in this parashah and
next week’s, as the plagues are unfurled on Egypt, and it is always couched in
the language of spiritual purpose. As our Etz Hayim commentary points
out (p. 359), “It was not only freedom from something, it was freedom for something.”
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| The Kotel in 1910, with men and
women praying in close proximity, without a mehitzah. Many such
images exist. |
The religion that God bestows upon the
Israelites in the latter parts of the book of Shemot / Exodus is, of
course, that of the priestly sacrificial worship, practiced first in the desert
using the portable tabernacle, the mishkan, and in later centuries in
Jerusalem at the First and Second Temples. Fast forward more than a millennium,
to the year 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and the Jews
needed to find a way to reach God through a means other than sacrifice. And
that route was prayer, which we continue to do today. Rather than animal
sacrifice, we offer today avodah shebalev, the service of the heart, as
Maimonides puts it.
Here at Temple Israel, as is the custom in
virtually all Conservative synagogues, we pray in a style that reflects the openness
of our society to full participation of men and women. This is, of course, a break
with historical Jewish practice that only came about within the last
half-century or so. We are egalitarian; we count women and men equally under halakhah
/ Jewish law. And this is as it should be, because the world has changed in
the last 2,000 years.
In our society, women can be doctors,
lawyers, CEOs, judges, politicians, or even the leader of the most powerful country
on Earth. So why, when it comes to Jewish ritual, should they be confined to
the “back of the bus”, that is, the other side of the mehitzah (the
wall separating the sexes in Orthodox synagogues)? Why should women be
prevented from leading the community in tefillah / prayer, reading from
the Torah, becoming rabbis or mohalot (those who perform ritual
circumcisions) or soferot (scribes that write holy documents like the
Torah)? The very idea of keeping women from participating in all aspects of
Jewish life is not just absurd, but deeply offensive.
Times have changed. We have changed. And
mainstream Judaism has always accommodated change.
I was recently asked by a member of this
community if I would work as a rabbi in an Orthodox synagogue. My answer was,
as you may not be too surprised to hear, no. Not because I do not respect Orthodoxy
and those who choose to pursue Judaism according to its principles - I do very
much so, as an advocate of religious freedom and pluralism. Not because
Orthodoxy is inauthentic - it is of course as authentic an expression of
Judaism and at the same time in many respects just as modern as we are. And not
because much of Orthodoxy does not accept me as a rabbi. I could never be
an Orthodox rabbi because this, the Conservative movement, is my spiritual home.
There are three principles of Conservative
Judaism that are to me non-negotiable:
1. That we accept that Judaism has developed
and changed historically, and what we today call Judaism was not handed to
Moses on Mt. Sinai, but is a product of two millennia of natural growth.
Judaism as we know it, including Orthodoxy (a modern concept in itself), has
never been fixed.
2. That we accept modern understandings of
God and the Torah, according to the tools of academic inquiry and contemporary philosophy,
and allow them to stand alongside and interact with the traditional views;
3. (and this is the most important item) That
we accept men and women as being equal before God - the principle of egalitarianism.
Today is not only Shabbat, the second-holiest
day of the Jewish calendar, but also Rosh Hodesh Shevat, the
first day of the eleventh month of the Jewish year. Rosh Hodesh
is not really a holiday; it is a day that is slightly elevated above the rest
of the month because it marks the renewal of the lunar cycle that was so
important to our ancestors. Today is the day of the new moon.
Unlike other, more significant holidays, Rosh
Hodesh has no special practices other than a few liturgical changes.
There are no special foods, no particular ritual items like ram’s horns or palm
fronds or a candelabrum. To my knowledge, there are no Rosh Hodesh
songs or stories.
In his comments to the story of the Molten
Calf (Parashat Ki Tissa), Rashi cites a midrash that the women are given
Rosh Hodesh as a day of rest because the female Israelites
refused to surrender their jewelry to Aaron to build the calf. So there is at
least a midrashic basis for making Rosh Hodesh a special day for women.
As such, there are two things that have developed
for Rosh Hodesh in the last two or three decades. One is the widespread
establishment of women’s Rosh Hodesh groups, which can take a variety
of forms because there is nothing in classical Jewish literature or practice
that indicates how to do this. Rosh Hodesh groups often feature discussion, recitation
of tehillim / psalms, some group activities, and of course food, and all
for women. I have, in fact, never been invited to participate in a Rosh Hodesh
group! (But hey, I’m not bitter.)
The second is the Women of the Wall. I
have mentioned them here before - this is the Rosh Hodesh group
writ large, consisting of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform women, that has
been meeting in Jerusalem at the Kotel, the Western Wall plaza, every Rosh Hodesh
since 1988. They feature a shaharit / morning service
conducted entirely by and for women. They did not meet today, because it is Shabbat,
but will reconvene again for Rosh Hodesh Adar in a month.
Here is the troubling part: since 2002, when
the Israeli Supreme Court allocated the Robinson’s Arch area of the Western
Wall for non-Orthodox, egalitarian groups who wanted to conduct mixed-gender
services at the Kotel, it has been illegal for any group to conduct a service on
the women’s side of the mehitzah at the traditional Kotel, and illegal
to conduct egalitarian services anywhere in the Kotel plaza. Furthermore, any woman wearing the
traditionally male tefillah accessories, tallit or tefillin,
can be arrested, and some of the Women of the Wall have indeed been taken to jail
and subjected to harsh treatment.
The Kotel, the exterior western retaining
wall of the Second Temple complex, rebuilt by King Herod in the 1st century
BCE, has long been considered the holiest site in Judaism. Every tourist group
goes there; I remember my first visit as an eager 17-year-old, when the tears
welled up from deep within me as I extended a hand to touch the ancient Herodian
stones.
The area that is traditionally thought of as
“The Kotel” is actually a very small fraction of the total surface area of that
western retaining wall; it became elevated because for many centuries, it was
the only part of the wall that was accessible to visitors.
Today, the entire Kotel plaza is effectively
an Orthodox synagogue. It has its own rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, of Haredi
(ultra-Orthodox) extraction, appointed by the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Recently, Rabbi Rabinovich wrote an
opinion piece in Israel’s Yedi’ot Aharanot newpaper explaining how he is a moderate fighting off
the intrusions of “extremists” like Women of the Wall, in which he said the
following:
This is how fanaticism operates. It asks for
protection in the name of tolerance, then thrives and flourishes until it
becomes too late to stop the devastation it brings on us all.
I'll say it loud and clear: As long as I am
the Western Wall's rabbi, fanaticism will not establish a foothold at the site.
The Kotel's stones can teach us about the price of zealotry.
Women who want to hold a prayer service, who
want to participate in the mitzvot of Jewish life, and men and women who
want to pray together near the traditional Kotel are “fanatics” who will bring
“devastation” on all of us. Thus saith Rabbi Rabinovich.
The worst possible kind of fanatacism is that
which has the gall to declare itself mainstream. Non-Orthodox Jews represent
more than 80% of American Jewry. What we do is not extreme. We are the mainstream.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Kotel is not a
synagogue. It is a very old wall. And it belongs to all of us: Haredi, Modern
Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, secular, humanist, Zionist,
non-Zionist, etc.
Some of you might be thinking right now, “Why
does this matter? Why should I care if the Kotel functions like a Haredi
synagogue?”
Let me tell you why this matters. We live in
an age in which our children’s commitment to Israel, something which the
American Jewish community has long taken for granted, is undeniably on the wane.
So when they go to Israel with their synagogue or youth group or Birthright or
whatever, and they see that the State of Israel, aided and abetted by the
intolerance of the Israeli Rabbinate, dismisses the mode of Judaism in which
they were raised, this only creates doubt about their connection to the Jewish
State. For most of us, ladies and gentlemen, our connection to Judaism is deeply
associated with what we do in synagogue. Rejection of our mainstream practices
by the increasingly right-wing religious authorities, in league with the
Israeli government - THAT is what will bring devastation on us all.
Let My people go, that they might worship Me.
Indeed.
There is here a slight glimmer of hope: Natan
Sharansky, the former Russian refusenik who is now the head of the Jewish
Agency, has been assigned by PM Netanyahu to study the matter and come up with
a plan. I am cautionsly optimistic, but let’s see how this plays out.
Meanwhile, let us hope and pray that we are
soon set free to worship as we please, as our ancestors once were.
Shabbat shalom.
~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
