What We Owe

Dear friends,

A couple weeks ago at his Bar Mitzvah, Henry asked us the following question: Do we owe God anything for passing over the firstborn of our ancestors on the night God killed the firstborn Egyptians. It’s a provocative question, but a curious one. First of all, while some of us take this story to be true, it’s far from a piece of history. The idea that we would owe anyone anything based on a story seems tenuous until you look at the myriad of fictions we base our lives upon. There are borders we agree upon simply because we’ve etched them into our consciousness, things we are allowed and not allowed to do because of laws dating back tens and sometimes hundreds of years. If you’ve ever been to a court of law anywhere in the world you will have seen a high drama of various people playing different roles, all accepting the entirely made-up structures at play, which carry very real consequences. As Jews we also created stories that reach back into time to find a frame for our years, months and days, as well as our sense of identity.

So okay Henry, maybe we could owe something based on a mythical story of ours, real or not.

Secondly though, I wonder about the notion of owing God anything whatsoever. Some of us don’t even believe in God. How could we owe something to an entity we’re not even sure exists?! This one I find easier to answer. Whether God put us here or not, whether God is the one who protected our ancestors ancient and more recent or not, we are here. Gratitude, appreciation, a sense that we have been given this life, these are natural human tendencies. We have certain responsibilities as human beings. We receive and we give back. Call it God or life or what you will, we have a life and have to make something out of it. We owe it to something or someone.

So okay Henry, we do owe God, as you called it, something.

Third comes the complexity of the specific incident Henry defined, the firstborn sons that were spared in Egypt. For me the story lives more in the drash than the pshat, in the expounding than in the simple understanding. It is a metaphor of how my life happens, an echo of moments of fear and salvation in my past and future, a miracle of survival that replays itself over and over in my personal and collective history. In that sense it happened to me, and therefore of course I do owe a debt of gratitude to God for that event.

So okay Henry, for me the answer is yes. But what is it that we owe exactly?

For this the Torah has an answer, which we find in this week’s parasha.

“Every firstborn in Israel, whether human or animal, is mine. When I struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, I set them apart for myself.”

We owe God our firstborn children. Luckily, within months of that deadly night God changed the terms of the deal.

“And I have taken the Levites in place of all the firstborn sons in Israel.”

Instead of the first born of our people (most of whom can be pretty sinful and kvetchy) God took the Levites. The Levites were the temple poets and musicians.

In order to understand what that meant for the Levites back then and what it might mean for us today let’s take a look at a surprisingly poetic verse fragment from the parasha:

כִּי֩ נְתֻנִ֨ים נְתֻנִ֥ים הֵ֙מָּה֙ לִ֔י

“For given given are they to me.”

That’s not a typo. It’s meant to express different ways in which the Levites are given to God. Rashi explains: “Given to carry, given to sing.” These are the two responsibilities of the Levites. They carry the tabernacle from place to place and they sing.

The 15th century Italian commentator Sforno has a different take on it.

“Given by themselves, for they gave themselves of their own volition to My work, and given by the children of Israel who provide the means for the sustenance of the Levites with their offerings, so that My work will be done by all through their participation.”

What God wants in return for saving our firstborns is that we all participate in carrying our temple around, and in song. God wants us to find creative ways to keep this tradition moving from place to place and generation to generation. And just as importantly, God wants art, music, poetry. We owe God art. We owe God poets. We owe God singing. We owe God the sustenance of a small but dedicated group of people who will keep our boat floating along on the sea of song and change.

Please join us this evening at 6pm for a levitical Kabbalat Shabbat with poetry and music.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha