Parashat Shəmini: דָּרַשׁ | darash

in

Never content with simple answers where complex ones are available (we do have four different new year’s days, after all), the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud (in Qidushin 30a) identify three different midpoints: one midpoint if you count letters, one if you count words, and one if you count verses. One guess as to which of these I care about for this, the one-word Torah project.

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Pésaḥ VII: יִנָּחֵם | yinaḥeim

in

NḤM is a root that may be familiar in a somewhat different guise: It is the root that rings out twice at the start of the famous passage of consolation in Yəshayáhu 40:1 — “Comfort, comfort My people!” But here it’s inflected differently, and has less to do with consolation than with regret. In the form used in Shəmot 13:17, NḤM/yinaḥeim means to feel bad, frequently because of your own actions. It also carries connotations of feeling pity or compassion for — we might even say solidarity with — others. Why should G-d be afraid of this?

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Parashat Vayiqra: וַיִּקְרָא | vayiqra

in

This is not the Judaism that haSheim desired. G-d wanted us all to know the workings of the cult, even if we aren’t all qualified to run it — just as we might want everyone in our society to know the workings of the government (both its abstract principles and, via FOIA and related legislation, its specific records and actions) even if we aren’t all qualified to enact new legislation. Judaism is a public affair, for the whole community; the central mechanisms for interacting with G-d aren’t the secret knowledge of a select few.

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Parashat Pəqudei: עָשׂוּ | asu

in

My very first year in undergrad, I took a course in philosophy, which impressed on me, among other things, the ease of critique compared with the difficulty of construction. Poking holes in others’ work is much less challenging than building something sturdy enough to resist such poking. Skepticism is safe: If you don’t commit yourself to an idea before you’re convinced it’s flawless, you’ll never have to commit to anything, because nothing will ever be that securely established; by never going anywhere, you avoid the danger of crashing along the way.

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Parashat Vayaqheil: רֽוּחַ | rú’aḥ

in

Roaring or whispering, it takes a constant wind to see a project of any size thru to completion. There’s a common notion that most of the work of creation involves coming up with a really good idea. Once you know what your show or book or painting or movie or whatever is about, the rest is just a sort of tedious, mechanical setting down of the work that already exists in your head. But it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.

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Parashat Ki Tisa: יָדַֽעְנוּ | yadánu

in

When I first encountered the idea that the evil inclination was necessary for human flourishing in shul, it was presented in less sexual terms — I more often heard the evil inclination being described as the ultimate source of the drive to make art, engage in politics, advance the limits of human knowledge — and it left me a little confused. The impulse to write a sonata seemed very far removed from the impulse to lie, and I had trouble making sense of the connection. I think I am finally coming into an understanding.

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Parashat Tətzaveh: הַשֵּׁשׁ | hasheish

in

I am always thinking — worrying, even — about where stuff comes from. To get plain, undyed cloth with no particular embroidered ornamentation, you need all this vast apparatus of production, all these hours and hours of labor and years of learned skill. (There are few things as humbling as trying to spin thread even and fine enough to be woven into clothing using nothing more than a drop spindle and your own two hands.) I often read visions of idyllic, utopian futures where stuff just seems to pop magically into existence, as tho generated by a Star Trek replicator. No one has to harvest the fruit; no one has to lay sewage pipes; no one has to stitch together the pillowcases. But all of these things take work, and if you put that work out of mind, it’s all too easy to put the people who do that work out of mind as well. But without people doing that work, the work does not get done, and if the work does not get done, none of these things can exist.

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Parashat Tərumah: כַּפֹּֽרֶת | kapóret

in

Both the lid and the curtain separate and contain. But there is a key difference: On occasion — once a year on Yom Kipur, in fact — the High Priest can pass thru the curtain; at no point is anyone ever to remove the lid from the Covenant Ark. One is slightly permeable, the other is permanently sealed.

What does this teach us about atonement?

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Parashat Mishpatim: הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים | hamishpatim

in

When we imagine utopia, I think many of us imagine a place without the need for this sort of judgement, a place where we all just somehow magically get along. But utopia, etymologically, is a not-place, a world that does not and cannot exist. To build a utopia of ideas is trivial, and also useless — no one can live there, because it is not real. The useful utopia — the eutopia, if you will, the good-place — will have to exist here, in the world with actual humans in it, the world full of disputes and quarrels and judgements.

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Parashat Yitro: אָנֹכִי | anokhi

in

I sometimes try to imagine myself at scale, fitting myself in to the largest space I can comprehend. I’ll start with holding the entire room I’m in in my head, then the entire building, then the street, the neighborhood, the city, stretching my awareness out and out to the nearest coastline, the nearest ocean, the great grand curvature of the Earth. I usually cannot get very far before my head starts swimming, before the smallness of me and the hugeness of this so so tiny planet overwhelm me and splay me out like so much insubstantial nothing.

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Parashat Bəshalaḥ: יִדְּמוּ | yidəmu

in

As long as our movement is a source of petrifying dread to those who are Not Us, we will never finish our crossing. As long as we cross with the purpose of conquest, destruction, and dispossession, we will never reach the other shore. Only when those we must share this beautiful Earth with have no cause to fear our crossing will we be able to complete it. We will never get truly free if we attempt to build our freedom on the corpse of others’. It’s all of us or none of us.

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Parashat Bo: וְיָמֵשׁ | vəyameish

in

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by the plague of darkness. Maybe it’s the cinematic immediacy of it, the relatability of the fear of the dark; maybe it’s that of all the plagues, the ninth is the most purely psychological — the darkness isn’t said to damage the crops or the livestock or the people or the buildings or any other part of Mitzráyim’s physical infrastructure; it is a plague of pure foreboding, of dread. The lights go out, and they do not come back on again.

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Parashat Va’eira: וַיֶּחֱזַק | vayeḥezaq

in

For my part, I don’t pray to G-d for strength. Better, it seems to me, than asking G-d to strengthen my heart is to ask G-d to batter it. To break, blow, burn, and overthrow me. I pray for G-d, who knits together the wounds of those with shattered hearts, to splinter me. If this is what comes from strength, let me be weak. Let my knees tremble. Let everything pierce me, flow thru me, overwhelm me.

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Parashat Vayigash: מְגוּרַי | məgurai

in

Perhaps some of these are Ya’aqov and some of them are Yisra’eil. Perhaps that is the point: that the same life can be thought good or bad when twisted and turned different ways to emphasize different parts of it. That the very same thing can be a joy or an evil. Perhaps the best we can hope for here is for Ya’aqov/Yisra’eil to hold all of these understandings of his own words together at once, to dwell — to sojourn — in the ambiguity of language, the strangeness of it.

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