This is Torah Study
Dear friends,
Hebrew school kicked off this week and it reminded me how fun it is to have conversations with young people about questions of spirituality and tradition. We sat in a circle and spoke the words of the Ashrei: we will praise you forever. I asked the kids about the notion of praising God and whether it makes sense to them. Answers differed as you might expect, but there was a general sense in the room that there is certainly something strange about praising God. I shared with them that when I was their age I didn’t understand why God would need my praise, or the praise of any human being, but that eventually I started seeing it differently, realizing that the praise we say is not for God but for us.
After learning a niggun we turned to the Torah. Naomi unwrapped it and Aliyah held The Yad in her hand, the pointer. When you introduce kids to a Torah scroll you sometimes realize what a crazy thing is. The scroll we were reading from was over 100 years old, and had survived the Holocaust in Romania, traveled to Israel in the 60s and then flew to Brooklyn at some point after that. It is identical or almost identical to almost every other Torah scroll in the world, including those that are written today. I watched as the kids touched the parchment and told me it felt like leather or paper or animal skin. Their eyes grew big when they were taught the labor went into this scroll, and goes into every one of these scrolls.
Finally we all chanted the blessing before the reading together and then Yoni chanted the first day of creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. and the earth was formless an empty and darkness hovered over the surface of the deep.”
This is one of my favorite lines to teach. You can pause on pretty much any phrase and ask all kinds of questions. In the beginning. Of what I ask. What is this beginning? Is it a prolonged period or a moment? And what are our beginnings, as we start this new year? The question that came up with the kids this week was about that second verse. What does it mean that the earth was formless and empty? Did it exist or did it not exist ? is emptiness really empty and is formlessness not there? Aliyah said it’s a blob. June said it’s potential. Jacob said in any case it exists.When one goes slow she can scratch at what’s underneath these words. This is Torah study.
Then We chanted the blessing after the Torah together.
Later that week I met with Rami who has his bar mitzvah coming up in a month. As we were discussing his Torah portion suddenly he felt the need to share with me something: I don’t believe in God. Great, I said, but you know you’re going to have to speak to God at your bar mitzvah. When you say Baruch Atah Adonai, Blessed are you Adonai, what is it that you are going to be saying do you think? How can you construe those words to make sense for you? This is a question I often ask students who struggle with their belief in God, but really it’s a great question for theists to ask themselves as well. How can you re-construe ancient words to mean something for you? And specifically the recurring phrase Blessed are You Adonai. What might that mean to you today, and why actually are you saying it? For Ramy it had more to do with tradition, with his parents, but he also suggested something incredible: I’ll be saying goodbye to God. We ploughed that statement, imagined his future speakings of the same phrase, and wallowed in time for a moment. This is Torah study.
In our conversation about praise Daniel suggested that praise is easier once you’ve come out as a difficult situation. I shared with him that earlier that day I conducted a funeral, in which the family and I paused to consider the words we say when we hear of a loved one who has passed: Baruch Dayan Emet, Blessed is the Judge of truth. An amazing woman had lived an amazing life that she filled with beautiful creativity, questions, answers, movement and richness. Surrounding her casket where her seven grandchildren, walking her on her last way, And then singing her praises. That is also Torah study.
I very much look forward to seeing you at our first in person Kabbalat Shabbat next Friday at 630 on the roof of the 14th Street Y, or on Zoom if you can’t make it in person.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha