Why You Can't Be Jewish Alone - Wednesday Kavvanah, 2/22/2012

When I was in my mid-twenties and still working as an engineer, I moved to Houston to take a new job, arriving not long before Pesah.  I knew next to nobody, had not yet joined a synagogue, and could not fly back to my parents for sedarim, so I did nothing.  No Four Questions, no plagues, no fun songs.  I ate matzah alone.  It was the most miserable holiday of my life. 

A fundamental characteristic of Judaism is that it requires community - family, friends, even strangers.  Unlike those spiritual traditions that emphasize one's individual path, Jewish living requires participation with others to be done properly.  We read this week in Parashat Terumah:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ; וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם

Ve'asu li miqdash veshakhanti betokham
Build me a holy place and I will dwell among them. (Deuteronomy 25:8)

God, of course, speaks in the singular (almost always the case in the Torah).  The references to God's partners here in building the mishkan (the portable Temple-like structure for sacrificing to God while the Israelites were wandering in the desert) are plural: the builders who are being commanded, and those among whom God will dwell.  This is a departure from elsewhere in the Torah, particularly the Decalogue, where God speaks as if to an individual. 

The message is clear: this first act to be executed after the covenant at Sinai, the building of this holy place, is to be understood as the cornerstone of the community.  You (plural) shall build it together, and I will reside with you as a people.  And the same principle is still in play today: we make holy moments together, we celebrate together, we grieve together.  God dwells among us when we join hands, hearts, and minds.

(Roughly) Ten out of 613 - Thursday Kavvanah, 2/9/2012

We have come to think of the Decalogue (aka the "Ten Commandments" or "Aseret ha-dibberot") as the basic template for God's expectations for us.  The Torah calls special attention to these mitzvot, with the whole Mt. Sinai thing and the major Exodus special effects budget and the days of preparation and so forth.  But really, these ten (which, depending on how you count, can number as high as fifteen distinct statements) are just the tip of the Jewish iceberg.

And yet, whenever many of us talk about commandments, we reflexively refer to the "Top Ten," as Kinky Friedman once put it in song.  Perhaps it's because we have ten fingers; perhaps because "ten" sounds much less daunting than "613."  Maybe this is simply a nod to human nature: that we need to understand God and life and the rules in small, discrete chunks.  If there are ten things to heed, says the Torah, these are they.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

Yitro 5771 - This is a Holy Place

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel, Friday night, 1/21/2011.)

Because of the centrality of the Decalogue (often known as the "Ten Commandments," even though you might be able to count as many as 13 separate mitzvot within that passage), we often overlook the fact that as soon as they have been issued, God simply keeps talking. The mitzvah count keeps going up.

For example, just a few verses later, God tells Moses the following (Ex. 20:21):

;מִזְבַּח אֲדָמָה, תַּעֲשֶׂה-לִּי, וְזָבַחְתָּ עָלָיו אֶת-עֹלֹתֶיךָ וְאֶת-שְׁלָמֶיךָ, אֶת-צֹאנְךָ וְאֶת-בְּקָרֶךָ
.בְּכָל-הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר אַזְכִּיר אֶת-שְׁמִי, אָבוֹא אֵלֶיךָ וּבֵרַכְתִּיךָ

"Make for Me an altar of earth and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your sacrifices of well-being, your sheep and your oxen;
in every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you."

Now, in a later time the officially-sanctioned place of sacrifice is the Temple in Jerusalem. But the Israelites are still standing at Mt. Sinai, at least 40 years away from arriving in Israel, and more than 200 years from the establishment of the Temple. So this is where the latter part of the verse is important: everywhere that we mention God's name is a place of holiness.

And this is especially important today, 2000 years after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. We make the holy places, and we make the holy moments, by offering the words of prayer that we do right now, in this place and in every other place where we invoke God's name.

This is the place that God was talking about. Right here.