Zecher Litziat Mitzrayim: Shabbat and the Remembrance of Things Passover

For Congregation Ner Shalom, March 15, 2013

As we planned this musical Shabbat, Lorenzo and I had particular ideas about some Classical Reform hymns of my grandparents' era that we might be able to reclaim and bend a little and present in a fresh way. We began doing our research and found that those anthems, which everyone thinks are really dated, are, in fact, really dated. For the most part, our hopes for a Union Hymnal revival night began crumbling, and we fell back to our default plan of just having a night of beautiful music.

Then Gale Kissin stepped in. Gale's custom is to find music that excites her, rehearse it with the band, and then let me in on it. That gives me the holy challenge of figuring out how the various usually secular, sometimes sad, always beautiful songs, often in Yiddish, can function to prop up a night of Shabbos ritual. Sometimes that's hard to do, although mostly I'm the only one who sees the bumps, since mostly we're awash in the beauty of the music itself more than we are figuring out what prayer thematic it is supposed to relate to.

So this time I asked Gale, "What are you thinking of playing," and she told me that her band, Mama Loshn, was freshly rehearsed and ready to go on a variety of songs related to Pesach and our long-rehearsed story of liberation from bondage in the narrow land of Mitzrayim.

I found myself a little resistant to the idea, as Gale will attest from the whiny emails I sent her about whether this music wouldn't just be better for the Seder. Of course, Gale and I have enough of a relationship for her to know to ignore me; my complaints are the birth pangs of ideas, and all she has to do is sit tight.

So I began to wonder about my own resistance. I shouldn't be resistant. First of all, I find ancient Egypt interesting; I took a semester of Egyptian history in college, plus a full year of Classical Egyptian language, which has, alas, over the intervening decades, eroded into cocktail party chit-chat about hieroglyphics and bad snippets of jokes, such as singing "I got plenty Akhenaten" whenever there's a suitable setup. But that said, ancient Egypt has been an object of interest for me; and you all know how much I love Torah. So why am I resistant to another retelling of our ancient enslavement and flight to freedom?

I realized suddenly that it was a Pesach spillover effect. We tell the Exodus story on Pesach and I've frankly come to have mixed feelings about the holiday. It was once my very favorite. As a child, I loved seder, even though it was done in a kind of rote manner; nonetheless I was with grandparents and great aunties around a table doing a fancy ceremony and I was happy. Then as a young adult I began to appreciate how I could exercise my compulsive Virgo tendencies through the yearly ritual of cleaning and kashering the kitchen. And I loved the special diet, a daily reminder and signal of my Jewishness. I've never been a regular kippah wearer, but during Pesach I was revealed to the world as a Jew by the unmistakable trail of matzah crumbs wherever I went. In my twenties and early thirties I would attend or host seders that would go on until three in the morning, with singing and poetry and debate and the kind of fellowship that you only experience in the middle of the night after hours of group effort and perhaps one or two more than the customary four glasses of wine.

But then came middle age, when life became more complicated. Touring schedules that make it so that you will never have time to kasher your kitchen, at least not the way you want to; and worse, you will often arrive home on the morning of the day of seder, and hopefully you will have cooked and frozen some Pesach food in advance. And in any event, your seder that used to be so stimulating now has to work for the young children and the older children and the enthusiastic adults and the disaffected adults too. Your table will be filled with Jews, and there will no longer be enough non-Jews present to keep the Jews on their best behavior. And there's no more time to prepare yourself spiritually or to prepare a well-crafted seder. In part because now, at least for me, there's a congregational seder to prepare, which inevitably edges out the planning that used to be devoted to what happens at your own table. All in all, Pesach has, I confess, lost a bit of its sparkle.

And with my conflicted feelings about the holiday, so went the story itself. So now, when I hear about Pharaoh, or taskmasters, or plagues, I get sucked into a vortex of overwhelm and frustration and anxiety.

So: that was a big, if tangential, confession.

But in any event, I've concluded that my resistance is a disservice to an important story. The Exodus is a formative story. Right up there with Isaac being bound, or receiving the Torah at Sinai. This story is one so important that we retell it over and over. Not just in our annual Torah-reading cycle, but in our liturgy, for instance in the extended-play version of the V'ahavta, in multiple Psalms and, of course in the Mi Chamocha where every day we celebrate the crossing of the Red Sea. A story so important that we are commanded to tell it to our children, and we do so not at synagogue but around a table every year. It is a story that is supposed to live at home with us and suffuse our domestic spaces like the steam and aroma of Grandma's matzahball soup simmering on the stove.

This is a story that lends itself easily to metaphorical rather than historical readings. Mitzrayim as metaphor: enslavement, narrowness, oppression, injustice, fear. Everything that holds us back as individuals, as a society, as a world. And the Exodus, yetziat Mitzrayim, assures us of our ability, with some amount of chutzpah and some amount of faith, to break through those obstacles into the great wide unknown that awaits us.

But besides being a metaphor for our lives, there's another connection explicitly drawn by our tradition, and that is the relationship between the Exodus and Shabbat. In the Kiddush that we chant on Shabbat evening, the valences of Shabbat are explicitly laid out. We first call Shabbat zikaron l'ma'aseh v'reishit - a memory of the act of Creation. Shabbat is the pause that punctuated and gave final shape to that first week. Then we continue in the Kiddush: ki hu yom t'chilah l'mikraey kodesh. Shabbat is the beginning of holiness. It is the first thing mentioned in Torah that God calls holy. It is not the end product of holiness but rather the first occasion of it; it is what opens the floodgates of holiness into this universe.

Both of those understandings of Shabbat - creation and holiness - make sense to us; intuitive and clear.

Then we continue: Shabbat is a zecher litziat mitzrayim, a remembrance, a souvenir, of the departure from Egypt.

What does that mean? What do Shabbat and the Exodus have to do with each other? Shabbat is other-worldly, primordial. It was God's first thought and last act of Creation. Whereas the Exodus already takes place in another kind of time, within the much smaller scale of human history, or what we imagine to be human history. Shabbat has to do with our cosmology of holiness and time. The Exodus, at least on its surface, is about politics and migration.

How are they connected?

The rabbis would undoubtedly say that God brought us out of Egypt in order to keep Shabbat. They would say that Shabbat, though ancient, couldn't be practiced until there was a people who agreed to practice it, that people being us, in the desert, free at last, beginning our long wanderings.

But there's more to say here, because Shabbat is not just a day on the calendar, but is in itself the breath of freedom. The pause where something that has engaged you and burdened you stops and you perceive the difference. It is the sensation when, after a hard illness, you wake one day feeling better. It is the moment of quiet gratitude after you've fixed dinner and set it on the table and you finally sit down to eat, no longer the maker but the receiver. It is the sensation of relief you feel when you finally close your computer at the end of the day and you notice the cricket call outside replacing the psychic buzz of the Internet. Shabbat is not unlike the chord that continues ringing through the concert hall after the last note of a symphony is released. The moment of sad-happy-fulfilled directionlessness when you close the last page of the novel you've spent the last week with.

And the experience of Shabbat is not unlike the surprise and bewilderment and relief of the Israelites when they realized they were, at last, beyond Pharaoh's reach.

Shabbat is zecher litziat mitzrayim: either a souvenir of the Exodus or a remembrance offered for the Exodus. What I mean is that it's not clear which concept is the reminder and which is the reminded.

We can say that a way to get at the feeling of Shabbat is through the idea of the Exodus. Shabbat is a release from the narrowness of the week, in which we were enslaved to our ambitions, our struggles, our things. But it could work the other way. If you want to understand what the departure from Egypt might have felt like, but let's say you live in a shtetl in a country where you've never been free of persecution, where real freedom is practically unimaginable, then the way to imagine liberation is through the familiar experience of Shabbos.

Both Shabbat and the Pesach story represent a courtship with God, with the Shechinah. God called on the slaves in Egypt like a beau standing at the door, asking, "May I take you out sometime?" And on Shabbat, every week, the Shechinah arrives at our doors as a bride awaiting us. Both Shabbat and the Exodus mark relationship, even love affair, with the divine.

But I guess if I were to try generalize anything about this connection, I'd say that we are taught by our experience of Shabbat that there is a rhythm to things. Just as a sentence of speech arrives inevitably at a pause and a breath, so too the rhythm of our lives. And the rhythm of our societies. And our biology. And our cosmology. Every tyrant will eventually fall. Freedom will keep happening again and again. The days of our weeks and the years of our lives will succeed and supplant each other like Egyptian dynasties. We will build monuments with our hands and with our words. We will be our own slaves and our own taskmasters until the breath of possibility that we learn from Shabbat reminds us how to remove ourselves from the machinery of our slavery.

And one day our bodies will stop altogether and, we pray, what comes next will be freedom, spaciousness, relief, Shabbos. Forever Shabbos.

So let us sing the songs of our enslavement and our liberation, in all of our languages. Let us feel the rhythms of this life and this world, knowing that at the end of six days comes rest, at the end of pain comes release, at the end of struggle comes delight, at the end of our narrowest places a great and unknown land awaits.

Parashat Bo: Freeing the Hard Heart

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, January 7, 2011]

I've been thinking about freedom lately. I just got back from Washington, DC which, despite all that frustrates us in American politics does, after a couple weeks, leave one feeling steeped in lofty ideals. I went to the Museum of American History and, after the quick gay pilgrimages to the the ruby slippers, Julia Child's kitchen and Carol Burnett's famous Gone with the Wind curtain rod dress, I settled in and got serious. I walked through the dimly lit, humidity-controlled gallery that houses the Star Spangled Banner which is, I'd never realized, enormous. And I confess that, for all my counter-culture rhetoric, I found myself choked up.

I then visited the African American gallery. There I saw physical artifacts of American slavery, including first editions of slave memoirs. I thought, "How am I 50 years old and have never read a slave memoir?" On display was Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. I bought a reprint in the bookstore and read it in a single breath. In elegant prose Jacobs gives over both her painful experience and her sense of moral outrage. She could not threaten military action to end slavery or promise political reform. She could only offer her words. I thought about how much ink was spilled trying to end the institution of slavery on this continent - and how much blood. And how a practice so obviously, deeply wrong could have been defended - to the death! - by the white, slave-owning South.

This week's parashah, which is called Bo looks at the question of the price of freedom, and why that price might in fact be so high. In the story, we, the Children of Israel, are still in bondage in Egypt. God has already inflicted seven plagues to free the Hebrew slaves, and the Egyptians are certainly suffering. Yet Pharaoh has not relented. God says to Moshe:

בא אל פרעה כי אני הכבדתי את לבו ואת לב עבדיו למען שתי אתתי אלה בקר

Bo el Par'oh ki ani hichbadti et libo v'et lev avadav l'ma'an shiti ototai eleh b'kirbi.

Which means: "Come to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants so that I might show my signs among them."

Hichbadti et libo. "I have hardened his heart." This is a troubling bit of Torah that countless generations of Jews have had to contend with. The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is mentioned 19 times in the book of Exodus. In 10 instances, Pharaoh does the hardening; in 9 - nearly half the time! - it is God. What possible purpose is served by God hardening Pharaoh's heart? The text implies, and the sages agree, that it is so that the remainder of the plagues may be inflicted; so that the oppressor comes to have a full appreciation of God's power. Somehow the process of change must be big, and dramatic, and violent. But for whose benefit? So the Egyptians give up and don't chase down the Israelites? If that's the case, the project was a failure; they chased the Israelites down anyway, even after 10 plagues. Or maybe the purpose was to establish a level of violence and suffering compared to which the state of slavelessness would ultimately feel preferable?

Or maybe the end is retribution, plain and simple. That no one should profit by acts of cruelty and oppression. As Lincoln wrote in his Second Inaugural Address, in the middle of the Civil War:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

But of course no matter how much violence we think the theater of social change requires, we're also stuck with a tricky theological problem. According to the p'shat, the simple reading of this verse, God is setting Pharaoh up by hardening his heart. God is nullifying Pharaoh's free will in order to impose punishment. Pharaoh is framed. Not that one needs to feel excessive sympathy toward him; but one might certainly feel some suspicion here about God.

Taking a second look at the phrase hichbad'ti et libo - "I have hardened his heart" - might be fruitful. The root is k-b-d, which in Hebrew doesn't have to do with hardness as much as with heft. Kaved, heavy. Koved, weight. "I have made his heart heavy," could be another way to translate this verse. Said this way, it sounds less like God announcing a strategy than God admitting a sad fact. "I have made Pharaoh's heart too heavy to move, too cumbersome to change."

I think this reading says something about the nature of our hearts and the nature of power. Change is not easy in the best of circumstances. But when one has become accustomed to power, to ease, to privilege and safety, the heart can become so weighty as to be immobile. Under this reading, God is not acting on Pharaoh at all. God is acknowledging, perhaps even lamenting, the human nature that God created. "Yes, Pharaoh's heart is now immobile; and yes, that is the nature of the hearts of tyrants; and yes, I'm responsible for the nature of the hearts of tyrants - and of all people."

Another resonance of this word, hichbadti, is one you might have already guessed at. The same root gives us kavod - "honor." If we project this shade of meaning onto it, you have an even greater resignation on God's part. God says, "I am forced to honor Pharaoh's heart." That is, I made it, I am prevented from changing it; all I can do is show signs and wonders.

"Poor Pharaoh," this reading seems to suggest, stuck in his narrow place with his heavy, unchangeable heart. So burdened with years of power and profit and fear of the unknown that the machinery of his heart has come to a standstill.

I know it might not sit well to look at Pharaoh this way; it feels too sympathetic toward the archvillain of our collective imagination as he holds firm against the inevitable tide of emancipation. But the parashah seems to invite it. After all, it opens with bo el-Par'oh, - "come to Pharaoh," not lech el-Par'oh, "go to Pharaoh." The vantage point is Pharaoh's; he is the fixed point and Moshe - and we - are being invited into his world.

Uncomfortable, certainly. But while sympathy might in fact not be required, looking deeper than the villain archetype is valuable. We know no one is simply evil. That's comic book stuff. Seeing southern slave owners as something other than human; seeing Hitler as a monster and not a person; are both errors. Dangerous errors. It's uncomfortable to sit with the idea that we share anything with these people, let alone the capacity to do terrible things.

But of course we do. We are not just Moshe. We are Pharaoh. We have the capacity to hurt, to kill, to enslave. But we don't. Maybe because we've made our moral choices. Or maybe we haven't; we are simply spared that trial because the opportunity has never arisen.

But our hearts do share something with Pharaoh's. We feel how difficult it is to acknowledge when we're wrong. How difficult it is to change. How difficult to give up power. How difficult to acknowledge the suffering of others, and to see our own complicity in it.

I hope you will forgive me as I point out things we know but which are hearts are hardened against.

We know how our cars and air conditioners poison the environment. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

We know the unspeakable cruelty enacted on animals through factory farming, approved by us every time we choose the cheap meat or eggs at the grocery store. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

We know that many of the cheap tzatzkes we buy are that way because children overseas are making them in conditions of near-slavery. When future generations say, "They must have known it was wrong; why didn't they stop," we will have no defense.

Or when we learn new ways that our actions might cause harm that we weren't previously aware of - even how our use of perfume and scented detergents can cause others physical suffering. We could ask ourselves right now, "why don't we stop," And we will have no defense.

Unless the defense in all of these cases is: Adonai hichbid et libi. God hardened my heart. This is our nature. We do not give up power or privilege or habit easily. And we cannot at every moment have our hearts open to the full suffering of this planet.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote thirty years ago regarding the horrors of the Vietnam War:

Most of us prefer to disregard the dreadful deeds we do over there. The atrocities committed in our name are too horrible to be credible. It is beyond our power to react vividly to the ongoing nightmare, day after day, night after night. So we bear graciously other people's suffering...O Lord, we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage.

Yes, we are evolved from the same Creation that gave us Pharaoh and that gave us generations of holders, traders and hunters of slaves on American soil. Our hearts are not identical to theirs, but they are akin.

But buck up. We are also different; or at least we can be. If not in our natures, then in our choices. We can choose to change. We can choose to change now. We do not need to wait for the signs and wonders. We do not need to suffer the plagues or wars or disasters or other retributions that will change us by force. We can jumpstart our immobile hearts and act on what we know, even if it's inconvenient or painful.

And our ability to choose to have less power, less ease, less comfort because there is something else that matters more, well that, thank God, is in our nature too.

So when we sing for the freedom of the slaves - the Hebrew slaves of Egypt, the black slaves of the Americas, or all who are oppressed in the world today - let us also sing for Pharaoh's freedom. For our freedom. That we may not be oppressors. That when a new prophet comes and says, "Let my people go," we may have the strength and wisdom to say, "Yes. It's time. Let us all be free."

The Omer: From Bondage to Bonding

[for the Ner Shalom Malakh, May 2009)

Welcome to the in-between days, the days of the Omer, which run from Pesach to Shavuot. These are our days of historic (and spiritual) wandering, with miraculous escape from bondage in Egypt behind us, and the receiving of Torah at Sinai still ahead. These are our days of anticipation.

The vocabulary of Pesach is basic for many of us. Our tongues speak words of liberation in many of our politics and theologies and life stories. But these forty-nine days remind us that it is not enough to achieve freedom “from.” Freedom is also “for.” But for what?

In our tribal imagination, we were freed from Pharaoh in order to enter into relationship with God. In our modern imagination, you might say we free ourselves from our biases, our weaknesses, our “narrow places” so that we can make better commitments to the world around us – to our families, our community, our planet; to justice, to peace, to right action.

It’s kind of like this: you get out of a bad relationship, and at first freedom from it is enough, and your freedom is all you can think about. But eventually, if you truly honor your wandering, that freedom prepares you for your next relationship or your next life commitment. And looking back, it seems like that was its purpose all along.

Are you free to commit? Do you feel bound in a way that is of your own choosing? I urge you to use these days of the Omer, the days between the planting and the first fruits, between Redemption and Revelation, between the Parting of the Sea and the Opening of the Heavens, to consider your freedom and what it is for. When is the next time that you, like Ruth, whose story we read on Shavuot, will say, “Whither thou goest, I will go,” and to what person, community or cause will you be saying it?