Dvar Torah Shemot 5786
There are weeks when clergy have to be acrobats and contortionists to get the parsha to line up with current events that we feel the need to discuss. There are other weeks when the cycle of Jewish text selections conspicuously aligns with what is happening in the world around us. This week was, unfortunately, the latter.
Parshat Shemot opens with the story of how a free people under a good Pharaoh came to become slaves under a bad Pharaoh. And it is also the foundational narrative of the man who would come to lead the people to freedom, Moses. His origin story is that he was raised in Pharaoh’s palace, and in his first venturings out to see the nation he was a part of, he witnesses a taskmaster beating a slave. He kills the taskmaster and flees. Put another way, Moses comes to see with his own eyes the brutality of a fascistic state in which the fundamental definition of the state is violence, brutality, genocide, injustice infanticide, and slavery. The authority for governing is brute force. Submit or be killed. And Moses kills the taskmaster and flees Egypt for what he probably thinks is forever. This is an act of the ultimate rejection of Pharaoh’s might makes right ideology. Moses, in leaving, is in effect saying ‘I want no part of this society.’
What we saw this week in Minnesota with the killing of Renee Nicole Good was the wanton and unrestrained display of violence, brutality, and injustice by the state. The justification that might actually does make right. This past week a senior administration official was quoted as saying the following, “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
You tell me how that is any different from what Pharaoh says in the parsha this week to his taskmasters when the Israelites ask for one day off to celebrate a festival to God. The Torah says in Exodus 5 “That same day Pharaoh charged the taskmasters and foremen of the people, saying ‘You shall no longer provide the people with straw for making bricks as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But impose upon them the same quota of bricks as they have been making heretofore; do not reduce it, for they are shirkers. Let heavier work be laid upon the men; let them keep at it and not pay attention to deceitful promises.” In both quotes, those that rule state that they derive their power not from the consent of the governed, but rather from violence or the threat of violence to anyone that would stand in their way. And by the way, that principle of rule by the threat of force isn’t just appropriate in regards to this weeks news story about ICE, but also in regards to Venezuela and Greenland, which were also in the news this week.
The Passover story and the book of the Torah we begin this week focuses on two grand ideas: slavery - or avdut, and Exodus, or yitziat mitzrayim. The rabbinic tradition of the Talmud, and the medieval period, and of the Hassidim of the 18th and 19th, is overwhelming concerned with a completely different core Jewish idea that originates in Parshat Shemot. And that idea is called galut, or galus. (I’m gonna use the two terms interchangeably because I believe in honoring both the modern Israeli pronunciation and the traditional ashke-normative pronunciation. I also want to just be able to get up at the bimah and occasionally use a word like ashke-normative.) Galus has come up from time to time in my teachings and divrei torah here, but always as an aside. But from where we are right now, and what is on my mind this past year in America, it seems very appropriate to look at this weeks parsha through the lens of one idea, and that is that Parshat Shemot is where the Torah tells us we begin our experience of galus.
What is galus? Well, literally, it means exile. If Israel is the land promised to Sarah and Abraham, Rebekah and Isaac, Rachel and Leah … and Jacob; then exile is being outside of the land without the ability to get back in. But, for a people of God who exist in spiritual state as well as a physical state, galus cannot simply be a physical location, or maybe it is davka not a physical state. A simple question illustrates this: is a Jew living in Tel Aviv that defrauds his business partners, cheats his workers, acts with malice and violence to his loved ones, slanders his neighbor, violates the sabbath and consumes bacon cheeseburgers <quote> redeemed <unquote>? The tradition generally regards this person as deeply in galut - a state of personal spiritual exile.
Multiple hassidic scholars over the years that I have learned happen upon their understanding of this spiritual state of Galut in this weeks parsha. They say it like this: the Israelites go down to Egypt, and everything is fine, and then they forget God, and they become oppressed, and they don’t even know how to cry out.
And then in Exodus 2:23 and 24, after 400 years of slavery, they cry out, and in verse 25 it says
וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיֵּדַע אֱלֹהִים׃
God looked upon the Israelites, and - either the translation here is ‘God knew Israel’ or ‘Israel knew God.’ And that means that exile - galus - wasn’t the physical state of being in Egypt but rather the spiritual state of living without God. Yeah the Jews were in Galut because they were in Egypt, but they were REALLY in galut because they did not know God. THAT’S the real galut.
The rabbis of the Talmud had that same idea a little bit earlier. They come to ask a question regarding God’s Divine presence after the destruction of the Temple. The destruction of the Temple, of course, creates not one but two Jewish exiles; the first to Babylonia; and the second time into the world at large for the next 2000 years. The question they ask is: where does God dwell if the holy of holies, the resting place of the divine presence called the shechinah, is destroyed? The Talmud answers in Berachot 8a: Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Ami said in the name of Ulla: Since the day the Temple, where the Divine Presence rested in this world, was destroyed, the Holy One, Blessed be God, has only one place in the world – only the four cubits where the study of halakha is undertaken.
In other words, when Jews are physically exiled, then God is physically exiled. But when a Jew communes with God spiritually, they both transcend the state of exile, through either study or observance, or both. It is worth noting something very interesting here. The Talmud does NOT say ‘the only way for the Divine Presence to return is for Jews to move to Israel’. It transforms the concept of exile from physical to spiritual.
Moreover, the fact of galus creates a theological problem that the rabbis need to solve. If God is behind everything and particularly the grand movements of the people Israel throughout history, then why would God permit the Jews to be in exile? Why not just let the Jews dwell in the land eternally? Aren’t we the chosen people? There are many potential answers, but one that the Zohar and Kabbalah and the hasidic rebbe Rabbi Yehuda Lieb Alter of Ger gives us is uniquely moving to me: that God scattered the nitzutzot of shvirat hakelim - God spread Divine radiance which is a remnant of the creation of the universe - in galut. And the Jew’s holy task in the world is to find the scatter shards of Divine light and return them to God. And we do that, of course, by doing mitzvot. These Divine shards of light - were specifically placed in galus.
In Rabbi Yehuda Lieb’s words “The Torah says in the final parsha in Genesis that God said ‘and I Myself will also bring you back’, And what that means is that exile exists in order that we should redeem the holy sparks which were in Egypt - Mitzrayim.
In other words, the purpose of galus is that God created it so that humans could go on a Divine scavenger hunt. We must do the mitzvot and find the lost shards, and only then do we get out of galus and bring the redemption.
This movement of galut into a spiritual idea became so pervasive for a thousand years that it is in some part the basis for why the desire for the creation of a modern state of Israel was so controversial amongst Jews. In the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the Reform movement actively argued against a return to Israel in any form - believing that America was the new promised land and that Isaiah’s vision of a universalist truth of all being equal was the ultimate goal. In other words, Reform Jews simply denied they were in Galut, or rather, believed that the move towards a better world and future was not at all connected to a physical Jewish return to Israel.
The Orthodox had a few strong proponents of Zionism at the 1904 Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland and the subsequent conferences, but the majority held what Rashi and the Talmud and the later Kabbalists said: the return to Israel would occur when the Messiah comes and the Third Temple is built. Only a Davidic monarchy and a restored bais hamikdash would establish a return to Zion. The Religious Zionist effectively argued: let Hertzl and his nutty Labor Zionist pals from Poland try their idea at a return to the land and a democracy and maybe that will lead to a Davidic king and a third Temple. To this day, there is widespread disagreement across Orthodoxy as to whether the state of Israel is the path towards moshiach and redemption from galut, or a false start – whether modern Israel is a part of redemption or an impediment, or worse. There’s also a wide range of cart and horse, chicken and egg problems of whether you need the people in the land and then the messiah and then the temple or the temple comes first then the people then the messiah or what.
Conservative Judaism, always on brand, split the difference. It was the only movement to be fully Zionist from the outset, and it fully endorsed a democratic political state in the land of Abraham and Sarah. But – the language the movement adopted leaves the question of this modern state is unanswered. In the prayer for Israel that we said this morning, we did NOT call Israel our redemption - geulateinu. What did we call it? PAUSE – Reshit smichat geulateinu – the first flowering of our redemption. That means that the Israel we know might be the first steps towards a messiah and a temple. But it isn’t the end product. Additionally, when given the option to amend or edit the 19 blessings of the Amidah we say every weekday, the movement fought vociferously over whether we should desire a return to the fire offerings at the temple, and fought for a decade over whether we should amend the first blessing to include the names of the matriarchs. But it left in the paragraph requesting our return to Jerusalem, and our rebuilding Jerusalem, and it left in the paragraph about messianic redemption.
Modern Israel continues to present a great challenge to the idea of galut. If 80% of the country identifies as secular, but they live in the biblical land of Israel, eating cheeseburgers and not feeling connected to Judaism, are they in Zion, or in Galus? For the roughly 20% of Israelis that are religious or haredi, have they achieved spiritual geulah - redemption, but remain in physical galus until Israel becomes a monarchy or a pure theocracy? And if the kabbalists are right – that galut was created because God needs us to do the holy work or redeeming the sparks everywhere before the Messiah comes, then the only way we get back to Zion physically or spiritually is by raising up all the sparks and fulfilling every available commandment and repairing the world completely. By the way, a welcome back to Robert Gleiberman who just returned from Israel - both physically and spiritually, I’m sure.
America this week was in overdrive embodying all the characteristics of galut
- the oppression and subjugation that defines the human state of exile. The galut makes the argument for a state based in force and not morality. The Galut mentality is that of Pharoah – that if your army is big enough, no constitution, no international law, and no God can stop you from doing what you want.
Our task as human beings, in America and in Israel and for Jews everywhere, is to transcend galus, to rise above the physical manifestation of our world’s coarsest influences of subjugation and materialism and selfishness and oppression and violence, and to resist them. Nothing is above God, Torah, and morality.
Redemption comes from a faith that God and justice and morality supercede force and that we must be guided by those principles. But redemption only comes for us if we put in the work; if we seek out the injustice and immorality in galut and repair it and redeem the sparks. Shabbat Shalom.
There are weeks when clergy have to be acrobats and contortionists to get the parsha to line up with current events that we feel the need to discuss. There are other weeks when the cycle of Jewish text selections conspicuously aligns with what is happening in the world around us. This week was, unfortunately, the latter.
Parshat Shemot opens with the story of how a free people under a good Pharaoh came to become slaves under a bad Pharaoh. And it is also the foundational narrative of the man who would come to lead the people to freedom, Moses. His origin story is that he was raised in Pharaoh’s palace, and in his first venturings out to see the nation he was a part of, he witnesses a taskmaster beating a slave. He kills the taskmaster and flees. Put another way, Moses comes to see with his own eyes the brutality of a fascistic state in which the fundamental definition of the state is violence, brutality, genocide, injustice infanticide, and slavery. The authority for governing is brute force. Submit or be killed. And Moses kills the taskmaster and flees Egypt for what he probably thinks is forever. This is an act of the ultimate rejection of Pharaoh’s might makes right ideology. Moses, in leaving, is in effect saying ‘I want no part of this society.’
What we saw this week in Minnesota with the killing of Renee Nicole Good was the wanton and unrestrained display of violence, brutality, and injustice by the state. The justification that might actually does make right. This past week a senior administration official was quoted as saying the following, “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
You tell me how that is any different from what Pharaoh says in the parsha this week to his taskmasters when the Israelites ask for one day off to celebrate a festival to God. The Torah says in Exodus 5 “That same day Pharaoh charged the taskmasters and foremen of the people, saying ‘You shall no longer provide the people with straw for making bricks as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But impose upon them the same quota of bricks as they have been making heretofore; do not reduce it, for they are shirkers. Let heavier work be laid upon the men; let them keep at it and not pay attention to deceitful promises.” In both quotes, those that rule state that they derive their power not from the consent of the governed, but rather from violence or the threat of violence to anyone that would stand in their way. And by the way, that principle of rule by the threat of force isn’t just appropriate in regards to this weeks news story about ICE, but also in regards to Venezuela and Greenland, which were also in the news this week.
The Passover story and the book of the Torah we begin this week focuses on two grand ideas: slavery - or avdut, and Exodus, or yitziat mitzrayim. The rabbinic tradition of the Talmud, and the medieval period, and of the Hassidim of the 18th and 19th, is overwhelming concerned with a completely different core Jewish idea that originates in Parshat Shemot. And that idea is called galut, or galus. (I’m gonna use the two terms interchangeably because I believe in honoring both the modern Israeli pronunciation and the traditional ashke-normative pronunciation. I also want to just be able to get up at the bimah and occasionally use a word like ashke-normative.) Galus has come up from time to time in my teachings and divrei torah here, but always as an aside. But from where we are right now, and what is on my mind this past year in America, it seems very appropriate to look at this weeks parsha through the lens of one idea, and that is that Parshat Shemot is where the Torah tells us we begin our experience of galus.
What is galus? Well, literally, it means exile. If Israel is the land promised to Sarah and Abraham, Rebekah and Isaac, Rachel and Leah … and Jacob; then exile is being outside of the land without the ability to get back in. But, for a people of God who exist in spiritual state as well as a physical state, galus cannot simply be a physical location, or maybe it is davka not a physical state. A simple question illustrates this: is a Jew living in Tel Aviv that defrauds his business partners, cheats his workers, acts with malice and violence to his loved ones, slanders his neighbor, violates the sabbath and consumes bacon cheeseburgers <quote> redeemed <unquote>? The tradition generally regards this person as deeply in galut - a state of personal spiritual exile.
Multiple hassidic scholars over the years that I have learned happen upon their understanding of this spiritual state of Galut in this weeks parsha. They say it like this: the Israelites go down to Egypt, and everything is fine, and then they forget God, and they become oppressed, and they don’t even know how to cry out.
And then in Exodus 2:23 and 24, after 400 years of slavery, they cry out, and in verse 25 it says
וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיֵּדַע אֱלֹהִים׃
God looked upon the Israelites, and - either the translation here is ‘God knew Israel’ or ‘Israel knew God.’ And that means that exile - galus - wasn’t the physical state of being in Egypt but rather the spiritual state of living without God. Yeah the Jews were in Galut because they were in Egypt, but they were REALLY in galut because they did not know God. THAT’S the real galut.
The rabbis of the Talmud had that same idea a little bit earlier. They come to ask a question regarding God’s Divine presence after the destruction of the Temple. The destruction of the Temple, of course, creates not one but two Jewish exiles; the first to Babylonia; and the second time into the world at large for the next 2000 years. The question they ask is: where does God dwell if the holy of holies, the resting place of the divine presence called the shechinah, is destroyed? The Talmud answers in Berachot 8a: Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Ami said in the name of Ulla: Since the day the Temple, where the Divine Presence rested in this world, was destroyed, the Holy One, Blessed be God, has only one place in the world – only the four cubits where the study of halakha is undertaken.
In other words, when Jews are physically exiled, then God is physically exiled. But when a Jew communes with God spiritually, they both transcend the state of exile, through either study or observance, or both. It is worth noting something very interesting here. The Talmud does NOT say ‘the only way for the Divine Presence to return is for Jews to move to Israel’. It transforms the concept of exile from physical to spiritual.
Moreover, the fact of galus creates a theological problem that the rabbis need to solve. If God is behind everything and particularly the grand movements of the people Israel throughout history, then why would God permit the Jews to be in exile? Why not just let the Jews dwell in the land eternally? Aren’t we the chosen people? There are many potential answers, but one that the Zohar and Kabbalah and the hasidic rebbe Rabbi Yehuda Lieb Alter of Ger gives us is uniquely moving to me: that God scattered the nitzutzot of shvirat hakelim - God spread Divine radiance which is a remnant of the creation of the universe - in galut. And the Jew’s holy task in the world is to find the scatter shards of Divine light and return them to God. And we do that, of course, by doing mitzvot. These Divine shards of light - were specifically placed in galus.
In Rabbi Yehuda Lieb’s words “The Torah says in the final parsha in Genesis that God said ‘and I Myself will also bring you back’, And what that means is that exile exists in order that we should redeem the holy sparks which were in Egypt - Mitzrayim.
In other words, the purpose of galus is that God created it so that humans could go on a Divine scavenger hunt. We must do the mitzvot and find the lost shards, and only then do we get out of galus and bring the redemption.
This movement of galut into a spiritual idea became so pervasive for a thousand years that it is in some part the basis for why the desire for the creation of a modern state of Israel was so controversial amongst Jews. In the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the Reform movement actively argued against a return to Israel in any form - believing that America was the new promised land and that Isaiah’s vision of a universalist truth of all being equal was the ultimate goal. In other words, Reform Jews simply denied they were in Galut, or rather, believed that the move towards a better world and future was not at all connected to a physical Jewish return to Israel.
The Orthodox had a few strong proponents of Zionism at the 1904 Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland and the subsequent conferences, but the majority held what Rashi and the Talmud and the later Kabbalists said: the return to Israel would occur when the Messiah comes and the Third Temple is built. Only a Davidic monarchy and a restored bais hamikdash would establish a return to Zion. The Religious Zionist effectively argued: let Hertzl and his nutty Labor Zionist pals from Poland try their idea at a return to the land and a democracy and maybe that will lead to a Davidic king and a third Temple. To this day, there is widespread disagreement across Orthodoxy as to whether the state of Israel is the path towards moshiach and redemption from galut, or a false start – whether modern Israel is a part of redemption or an impediment, or worse. There’s also a wide range of cart and horse, chicken and egg problems of whether you need the people in the land and then the messiah and then the temple or the temple comes first then the people then the messiah or what.
Conservative Judaism, always on brand, split the difference. It was the only movement to be fully Zionist from the outset, and it fully endorsed a democratic political state in the land of Abraham and Sarah. But – the language the movement adopted leaves the question of this modern state is unanswered. In the prayer for Israel that we said this morning, we did NOT call Israel our redemption - geulateinu. What did we call it? PAUSE – Reshit smichat geulateinu – the first flowering of our redemption. That means that the Israel we know might be the first steps towards a messiah and a temple. But it isn’t the end product. Additionally, when given the option to amend or edit the 19 blessings of the Amidah we say every weekday, the movement fought vociferously over whether we should desire a return to the fire offerings at the temple, and fought for a decade over whether we should amend the first blessing to include the names of the matriarchs. But it left in the paragraph requesting our return to Jerusalem, and our rebuilding Jerusalem, and it left in the paragraph about messianic redemption.
Modern Israel continues to present a great challenge to the idea of galut. If 80% of the country identifies as secular, but they live in the biblical land of Israel, eating cheeseburgers and not feeling connected to Judaism, are they in Zion, or in Galus? For the roughly 20% of Israelis that are religious or haredi, have they achieved spiritual geulah - redemption, but remain in physical galus until Israel becomes a monarchy or a pure theocracy? And if the kabbalists are right – that galut was created because God needs us to do the holy work or redeeming the sparks everywhere before the Messiah comes, then the only way we get back to Zion physically or spiritually is by raising up all the sparks and fulfilling every available commandment and repairing the world completely. By the way, a welcome back to Robert Gleiberman who just returned from Israel - both physically and spiritually, I’m sure.
America this week was in overdrive embodying all the characteristics of galut
- the oppression and subjugation that defines the human state of exile. The galut makes the argument for a state based in force and not morality. The Galut mentality is that of Pharoah – that if your army is big enough, no constitution, no international law, and no God can stop you from doing what you want.
Our task as human beings, in America and in Israel and for Jews everywhere, is to transcend galus, to rise above the physical manifestation of our world’s coarsest influences of subjugation and materialism and selfishness and oppression and violence, and to resist them. Nothing is above God, Torah, and morality.
Redemption comes from a faith that God and justice and morality supercede force and that we must be guided by those principles. But redemption only comes for us if we put in the work; if we seek out the injustice and immorality in galut and repair it and redeem the sparks. Shabbat Shalom.
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