Vayakhel

Exodus 35:1–38:20

by Rabbi Steven Pik-Nathan for Jewish Reconstructionist Communities

Reconstructing the Prohibitions of Shabbat

In this week's parashah, Vayakhel, as we near the conclusion of Shemot (which will take place next Shabbat), we read of Moses relaying God's instructions to the people concerning the building of the Mishkan/Mikdash (Tabernacle). In the earlier part of Shemot God gives Moses detailed instructions concerning the Mishkan/Mikdash which are followed by the commandment to observe Shabbat as a day of rest. This is followed by the incident of the Golden Calf, which is then followed in Vayakhel by a reminder to observe Shabbat, including the prohibition against kindling fire on Shabbat. Moses then transmits the instructions concerning the building of the Mishkan/Mikdash to the people and to Bezalel, the artisan entrusted with the actual construction.

Rashi (12th c. France) comments on the reminder that after six days of working we are required to rest on Shabbat by stating that God "prefaced the instructions about the Mishkan work with the warning about Shabbat, to tell them that the Mishkan does not supercede Shabbat." As Aviva Zornberg then states in her analysis (The Particulars of Rapture, p. 462) "an intimate tension is set up between Shabbat and the Mishkan: before even beginning to speak of the building work, it is necessary to articulate a kind of 'anti-Mishkan' principle. One might indeed have thought that the Mishkan does displace Shabbat, that that the crafts that go to create the holy space would continue through the weekly day of sacred [or holy] time. Therefore Moses speaks of Shabbat before the Mishkan work, to counteract perhaps a natural hypothesis." Furthermore, Zornberg reminds her readers that the beginning of the verses concerning the building of the Mishkan begin with the words 'eileh ha-devarim' (these are the things) the 39 letters of this phrase are viewed by the Sages as pointing to the 39 categories of work involved in the building of the Mishkan which then become the 39 categories of work forbidden on Shabbat.

The Talmud teaches that acts of creation are forbidden on Shabbat, not just destructive acts. For just as God ceased creation on Shabbat in order to enjoy the beauty of the world, so too are we meant to simply revel in God's created world each Shabbat. It would seem, according to Zornberg and others, that the work of the Mishkan, which was also holy, became such an obsession on the part of the people that perhaps God was worried that the people would not cease this creative work on Shabbat. Though it may seem extreme to threaten death for those who desecrate the Shabbat, as the Torah does time and again, perhaps it was necessary in order to emphasize the importance of Shabbat and that it supercedes all other holy activities of creation - no matter how important they might seem. Even the ultimate in holy work, the building of the Mishkan (a holy place/space), is suspended in order to observe holy time, Shabbat.

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Ki Tisa

Exodus 30:11−34:35

by Rabbi Steven Pik-Nathan for Jewish Reconstructionist Communities

Two Sides of the Golden Calf

This week's parashah, Ki Tisa, includes the narrative of the Golden Calf. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, according to rabbinic tradition the incident of the calf is contiguous with the giving of the Ten Commandments and precedes the giving of the instructions for the building of the Mishkan/Tabernacle. Sinai and the Golden Calf are inextricably linked to one another. Sinai represents the creation of a relationship between the people of Israel and God. The Golden Calf represents, among other things, their refusal to totally let go of their past and also their inability to maintain their commitment to one concept, symbol or ideal if their patience is tested. In short, Sinai implies trust and the Golden Calf implies its rejection.

Aviva Zornberg discusses the fact that the two sides of the coin that is the Golden Calf may seem to be contradictory, yet are in reality complimentary, or perhaps even symbiotic.

One of the reasons given for the building of the Calf is the fact that the people believed that Moses was late in coming down from the mountain and so they said to Aaron "Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us up from the land of Egypt - we do not know what has happened to him (32:1)." In reading this verse it becomes clear that the idolatry began long before the calf, for the people had already associated Moses with the redemption from slavery and not God. It has been said that idolatry is when people worship a part and confuse it with the whole. If God is the whole - the One of the Universe - then any human being, or any object for that matter, can only be a small part of the whole. But Moses, a mere human, becomes almost deified. According to one Midrash, Satan then shows the people that Moses is either dead or suspended somewhere between heaven and earth. In this mass hallucination, as Zornberg calls it, the people come to see "this man" Moses as no longer with them, and so they must create a new "god" to provide them with a physical representation of that which has no physical representation. They must substitute a new part to worship as a proxy for the whole. The people are unable to face God without Moses, just as they were unable to hear God's voice at Sinai, but instead relied on Moses to relay the message to. The people forget God and God's oneness and instead searched for a new god to worship (even though this new god was still, in reality, a representation of the One God).

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Tetzaveh

Exodus 27:20−30:10 

Eric Mendelsohn for Jewish Reconstructionist Communities

This portion is so anti-intellectual and has so little in of interest even to the traditional community, that rabbis have commented that "it is one of the very few in which Moses is not mentioned". What it
consists of is the ordination of Aaron and his descendants as priests and vast descriptions of the vestments that the priest should wear and the law of the half-shekel temple tax. This segment was probably rewritten in King Josiah's time, and again during the exile, and again upon the return to conform to what the priests were wearing at that time. Nothing in this parasha survived the destruction of the Temple in Judaism, even in traditional Judaism. It is important in Christian
Catholic and Orthodox tradition as the vestments of the bishops and the idea that bishops can ordain priests are implicit. As far as I know Apple computer has not announced a device which will allow users to connect to God via the internet for the expiation of sin and called it the E-phod. Jews have chosen to dress the Torah in a mimicry of the priestly vestments.

So two questions arise:

1) What about this process called ordination.

2) How can we revalue the ancient traditions concerning the priesthood

The answer to the first is found and justified in the next parasha where the Talmud concludes one cannot appoint a rabbi without consulting the congregation.

The second question requires to know exactly what rituals the priests had which survived the second temple and how can we revalue them.

Of all the priestly duties only two have survived the destruction of the temple:

The priestly blessing which we have dealt with well and creatively and is leading edge in that others are adopting our customs and the "redeeming of the first born" pidyan haben which I propose we can deal with creatively.

The priestly blessing was transferred to the home as the parental blessing. In the synagogue there are variations. This ceremony is traditionally performed daily in Israel (except in Galilee), and among
most Sephardi Jews worldwide, during the repetition of the Shacharit Amidah. On Sabbath and festivals it is also recited during the repetition of the Musaf prayer. On Yom Kippur the ceremony is
performed during the Neilah service as well. On other fast days it is performed at Mincha, if said in the late afternoon.


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Terumah

Exodus 25:1−27:19

Ellen Dannin for Jewish Reconstructionist Communities

Filling the Earth With God's Presence

Haftarah Yitro from last week includes words so important they were made part of the service: “Holy, holy, holy! All the earth is filled with the presence of the Lord of Hosts.”

Or it could be, if we made room for that presence.

Making room for God is a task set for us by all of Jewish teaching, and it is one whose details are included in Parashat Mishpatim.

It is only a few weeks since we read that the children of Israel were freed from a Mitzraim (Egypt) of violence, hatred, and slavery. Yet here we have a parashah (Torah portion) in which the children of Israel have constructed a quarrelsome, hate-filled, violent world of Jewish slave owners. Many of the rules in Mishpatim tell us to respond to evil behavior with violent punishment, often with death. We may be repelled by what we read here and assume that is some long past time that says nothing about our world.

But if we think that, we need to pay more attention to the line of the birchot ha-shachar, the morning blessings, about opening the eyes of the blind. If we could only look at our own society as an outsider does, we would find equal levels of violence and oppression all around us. Where here can we find God’s presence?

We are looking in the wrong places if we think that all we need to do is open our eyes. Filling the earth with God’s presence means that we must take on the task of making space for it. To do that, we must reclaim that space inch by inch from pushing out evil conduct.

This is an enormous task, but it is a task that demands attention to small details. They offer the greatest opportunities for us to act.

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Mishpatim

Exodus 21:1−24:18

Rabbi Howard Cohen for Jewish Reconstructionist Communities

Approaching Torah
This week's parashah, Mishpatim, is the continuation of the events that occurred at Mount Sinai. As you may remember from last week's d'var Torah, many classic interpretations are based on the principle that there is no real chronological order to the Torah. An interpretation written by Rashi (12th century France) on this week's parashah again uses this device to interpret the narrative. For Rashi claims that Exodus 24:1-12, which appears to occur after the giving of the 10 commandments, is actually a "flashback" to the events that occurred in the days prior to the revelation at Sinai. In these verses Moses recounts to the people all the words of God and the people ratify the covenant by stating "all that God has spoken we will do" (v. 3). Moses then writes down the "words of God" and reads "the account of the covenant ... in the ears of the people [and the people then respond] 'all that God has spoken, we will do and we will hear'." After this section Moses is then told by God to "go up to the mountain and remain there, that I may give you tablets of stone with the instructions and the command."

It seems plausible to read the text using Rashi's chronology. But the question that must then be asked is "what are the words that Moses wrote down and then read to the people if the Ten Commandments had not yet been given?"

According to Rashi, Moses writes down the narrative of the Torah "from the Creation to the Giving of the Torah." In other words, before receiving the Torah the people hear Moses recount to them the "history of the world" from Creation up until that very moment. Upon hearing this they then respond not only "all that God has spoken we will do," as in v. 3, but "we will do AND we will hear" (24:7).

In her discussion of this commentary Aviva Zornberg ("The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus") discusses various commentaries that emphasize the importance of narrative and narration. Something occurs when we hear a story told to us as opposed to simply reading it ourselves. Upon hearing the words from Moses the people are then "committing themselves to a rearticulated relationship with the world of the past, and declaring themselves ready for the new laws of Sinai." In this way "we will do and we will hear" is interpreted as 'we will do all that has been told to us already (the limited laws and rituals prescribed in the Torah prior to Sinai) and now we are prepared to hear the new covenant that you are about to give us that is the culmination of all that has come before it' (my interpretation of Zornberg's interpretation of Rashi's interpretation - and so the chain of interpretation continues!). Rashi also cites an interpretation of Shemot 19:1 "On this day, they came to the wilderness of Sinai" which states that "on this day" is meant to remind us "that the words of Torah should be new in your eyes each day."

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Yitro

Exodus 18:1-20:23

"Hearing" the "Voice" of God

Rabbi Howard Cohen for Jewish Reconstructionist Communities
What does it mean to "hear" the commanding "voice" of God? A key word in this week's portion suggests that this is not necessarily all that clear. Moreover, one particularly trenchant verse in the haftarah reinforces the problem with understanding revelation (which I am equating with the notion of hearing the commanding voice of God).

After three days of preparing for an event to occur on Mount Sinai Moshe gathered the people together at the foot of the mountain. The summit became engulfed in a furious storm of lightening, clouds and thunder. "The whole mountain trembled violently". Moshe began to speak to God: "The blare of the shofar grew louder and louder: As Moshe spoke, God answered him...". - Before preceding a speculative question: What do you think Moshe was saying to God at that moment? Continuing: The word that the Torah tells us that God answered Moshe with is richly ambiguous. That word is "kol" which literally means a 'voice', 'thunder' or a 'sound'. At this critical juncture of communications between God, Moshe and the Israelites we are left wondering what exactly was heard!

Some have maintained that what Moshe heard was the sound of thunder, which was tantamount to hearing God's voice, as suggested in psalm 18:14 where it says "the Lord thundered from Heaven". His gift of prophecy, if you will, was the ability to "hear" within the sound that everyone else heard as thunder, the "voice of God" and translate this into words, more specifically into the Ten Commandments which immediately follow. (See Seek My Face, Speak My Name, by Art Green, p. 109, for more on this idea).

If Moshe "heard" in the thunder the revolutionary Ten Commandments what meaning of did everyone else take away from this encounter? I think that the haftarah suggests an answer to this question: Hear again and again - but without understanding; Look again and again - but without perceiving. Dull this people's mind, stop its ears and cloud its eyes, or it may see with its eyes and hear with its ears and understand with its mind. Isaiah 6:9 - 10.

In short, they failed to understand the meaning or message of the "voice of God"! To them it was just thunder. But why not? If they are like most us, would they not expect to "hear the voice of God" speaking to them in a familiar language? On some level, do we not expect to literally hear the voice of God as if it were the result of the same mechanics and physics that produce our voices? How often have we failed to hear or understand the "voice of God" speaking to us through nature; or human acts of courage,
kindness, and compassion; or through poetic, musical, and other ingenious human acts of creation; or through scientific inspiration? What is it, in the words of Isaiah, that dulls minds, stops up ears or clouds eyes and results in hearing without understanding and seeing without perceiving?

I am not sure whether it is humbling or comforting to realize that we (or shall I speak only in the first person and say I) suffer from the same kind of difficulties discerning God's voice in the world around me as the Israelites did in the time of Moshe and again hundreds of years later in the time of Isaiah.

B'shalach

Exodus 13:17−17:16

It's Reassuring: Number of Jews Can Increase as Well as Shrink

The other day I had a call from a wonderfully eccentric cousin who is always concocting one scheme or another to save the Jews. Particularly perplexed by the latest release of the National Jewish Population Study, my cousin's imagination was working overtime to figure out how to "replace" the 300,000 Jews "lost" between 1990 and 2000. Reminiscent of Rabbi Alex Schindler's push in the Reform movement to present Judaism as an attractive option to the "unchurched," my cousin began to think of intensive Jewish immersion experiences for non-Jews.

This all sounded quite radical, yet strangely reflective of a thread of Parshat b'Shalach. The Me'am Loez commentary has numerous comments to make about the erev rav, the mixed multitude who accompanied the Israelites as they left Egypt.

Rabbi Jacob Culi, for instance, wonders whether they really were Pharaoh's motivation for repenting of his promise to let the Israelites go. He could dismiss the Israelites' devotion to God. They, after all, were "born" into the traditions of Israel. But that Egyptians would take on the traditions of Israel maddens Pharaoh to no end.

One wonders what kind of spiritual incubation could so quickly convert so many of the erev rav into resolute Israelites? A range of possibilities exist.

Perhaps the most obvious explanation is that the dramatic Exodus story had its intended effect on these marginal residents of Egypt. Clearly, it was better to be on the side of the Israelite God if he could outperform the Egyptian deities so decisively.

Me'am Loez countenances another possibility. Namely, that the erev rav was well aware of the wealth the Israelites took with them from Egypt. Perhaps they could share in that wealth.

Finally, one might surmise, as I believe both my cousin and Rabbi Alex Schindler would want to believe, that the practice of Jewish tradition was inherently rich and compelling for non-Jews with transitional identities.

Surely, for Jacob Culi, who witnessed so many Jews leaving Judaism in droves in the post-Shabbtai Zvi era, there must have been something reassuring that Jewish numbers could grow as well as shrink. Perhaps it can also provide some perspective that keeps our present consternation about losing Jewish numbers from becoming crippling.

Reprinted by permission of the Cleveland Jewish News.

This dvar Torah is one of a series influenced by the Me'am Loez Sephardic Torah commentary. Author: Rabbi Jeffrey Schein