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Just in case you didn’t get enough of the Thirteen Attributes during Yom Kipur last week, we get them again this Shabbes, this time in their original context: G-d passes thru on Mt Sinai and proclaims them loudly and dramatically for all to hear.

Well, for Mosheh to hear, at least. No one else, or at least no other human, is on the mountain at that time. And Mosheh has to take cover himself; before the theophany, G-d wedges our great prophet בְּנִקְרַ֣ת הַצּ֑וּר | bəniqrat hatzur | “in the cleft of the rock” (Shəmot 33:22).

A cleft — in Hebrew or in English — is a kind of narrow opening, frequently hewn by a narrow or pointed tool, and what’s fun about the word for rock, tzur, is that visually it seems to have a little cranny right in the middle of it in the form of the thin vertical dash of the vav (ו), its middle letter. It’s almost like the word itself is showing us Mosheh’s hiding place. Where was he hidden? Bəniqrat hatzur | In the cleft of the rock. Which cleft? Well, this one right here, the little vertical cranny right in the middle of hatzur.

Vav, in Hebrew, is a prefix that means “and”. It’s almost as if, to be a rock, this verse is telling us that we need some and-ness. If we want to be sturdy and dependable, we have to be connected to others, we can’t be islands surrounded on all sides by or and not. It’s not me versus you, but me and you, both of us, together.

This is true on the individual and communal levels. I am part of many communities living with an undercurrent of fear these days. This fear isn’t always fully justified and rational, but it’s seldom wholly disconnected from the realities of living as one of many targets under a fascist regime. The state sending armed posses of thugs thru the streets of our cities to terrorize our families, agents of the law midnight-raiding our homes and handcuffing our children while they destroy the places we live, dissidents being arrested and disappeared with barely a fig leaf of any kind of due process — these are not hypotheticals nightmares, they are real things our government is currently doing, albeit not always equally to all of us\footnote{Surely part of living with andness is holding a broad and expansive us while also — and — holding the real differences between the different vulnerabilities and realities of different members of that us. X and Y doesn’t mean that X equals Y, that the two are interchangeable and indistinguishable.}. It is bad here, and it is likely to get worse.

In the face of this fear, it can be tempting to sever the links of ands that bind us together. Sometimes this can be a turning-away — “That’s happening to them but not us, so we actually are fine and don’t need to do anything” — but it can be more actively malevolent, too — “Maybe we can secure our safety if we just toss enough of those not us people under the bus”.

Not only is this latter stance monstrous on the face of it, it’s also futile. To over-extend the metaphor: The bus is sturdy and well-built, there will never come a time when the shattered bones of those it has already run over will puncture its tires, never will its engine be choked by the shredded viscera of those shoved in its way, there is not enough blood in the world to clog its gears, axles, and wheels. If the bus is coming for you (and the bus is coming for you), there is no appeasement you can make that will make it stop.

And indeed, if you take the vav out of hatzur, the andness out of the rock, you are left with, at best, הַצַּר | hatzar | “the distress” or, at worst, הַצָּר | hatzar | “the oppressor”. Cutting yourself off from others is no path to safety; it is a path to ruination, only. Real world examples — as of a state predicated on Jewish security unconnected to anyone else’s committing genocide ostensibly for that end, say — are easy to come by.

The word vav in Hebrew means “hook”. The letter looks a little like a hook, and it’s easy to follow the conceptual linkage to “and” as a word that hooks two words or clauses or sentences together. But it also refers to real, physical hooks, like the ones that held the coverings of the Mishkan together. And I think that physicality is important here.

In English, if I say that something has really gotten its hooks into me, I’m most likely talking about an emotional sensation: I can’t stop thinking about a book I just read, or I’m obsessively counting down the hours until I get to spend time with a special someone again. But this is all insubstantial: Feelings are just chemicals sloshing around in my brain; they have no effect on the wider world unless they lead me to take some concrete action, some action that changes, however subtly, the shape of my life.

And that is precisely what a hook can do: reach out and pull you in a different direction. And that is what the hooks of the ands that bind us together can do for us: they can pull our lives out of (or, better, into) shape, inflecting us towards one another so we can help each other writhe free of our constraints. We are all obligated to one another, hooked into one another, in ways that are untidy, disorienting, inconvenient. We have to pull on each other anyway, we have to let ourselves be pulled. Sometimes we will be able to help; sometimes we will be in need of help; sometimes we will be both, simultaneously, bewilderingly, in incoherent contradiction. It will be tempting to pull away, but we have to resist that temptation. We have to stay hooked together. Only then will we split distress into a rock sturdy enough to withstand even the direct overhead passing of the full blast of the Glory of G-d.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]