This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tetzei holds within it 74 of the 613 total mitzvot in Torah. As part of Moses’ lengthy final discourse to the Children of Israel, this week’s Torah portion highlights the bedrock of mitzvot designed to help us live in community with one another. It is interesting to me that these mitzvot for living in society are given to us not once, but twice— both times before we even step foot in the land. That in itself feels like interesting commentary on what it means to prepare.
Tonight, I want to spend some time with you thinking about the intersection of Torah and Time— about what it means to prepare to live in community with one another, and how we are to discern what is most essential.
When we are preparing for new beginnings, what do we need to hear?
At first glance, Ki Tetzei contains within it a seemingly disparate and random collection of laws— everything from the importance of returning a baby bird to it’s mother’s nest, to building a parapet around the roof of our house, to the infamous instruction regarding ben sorer u’moreh; the insolent and wayward child. The Torah of Ki Tetzei is both imaginative and specific: we receive everything from laws for sexual relationships, loans, vows, and divorce, to laws for commerce.
Instead, I want to invite you to zoom back out with me— imagining ourselves together at 10,000 feet above the words of Torah, to allow ourselves a broader horizon against which to consider its impact.
This week’s Torah portion invites us to sit at the edge of transition with Moses.
Quite literally, perched on the steppes of Moab, looking out across the Jordan to a promised land, we are given instructions that will enable us to create a sustainable and resilient society.
It is a moment where almost anything and just about everything is possible: as a people, we are not yet who we might become.
And yet I can’t help but wonder— what did the people want to hear?
What did they feel like they needed to hear?
After the long journey, with it’s challenges, was this review of the rules really what they needed?
For me, these questions are fertile ground for imagining, as a parallel, what we need to hear as we approach our own season of change and new beginnings.
This season is so rich: the rhythms of life in New England seem to conspire with the rhythms of our Jewish calendar, beckoning us to pay attention.
This is a time for paying attention.
When we are preparing for new beginnings, what do we need to hear?
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I had the opportunity recently to ask a group of congregants about these very questions recently, in the context of thinking ahead to the High Holy Days.
Each person around the table received a piece of paper with four questions: What do you need to hear over the days ahead?
What do you want to hear?
What you not want to hear?
Which elements of the High Holy Days at Hevreh in the past are most essential to you?
The answers varied— and in their non-uniformity pointed me in a direction I hadn’t previously considered.
In a year like the one that is nearly past, it is hard to see past the big and heavy things. It’s easy to feel like that is all there is; that the only thing we need to talk about is the division, the war, the pain, the election. You name it: there is no shortage of difficulties for us to face.
And yet, we know: we need more.
The answers shared with me included reminders that we need reassurance and hope, we need to feel seen and to see others as they are, we need community and optimism, we need to be called to action, we need Jewish values to help us navigate all of those big and heavy things, we need empathy, we need to mourn our losses and pray for redemption, we need to feel welcomed and included. We need to know that being Jewish matters, and that Jewish joy is available to us.
But perhaps more than all of those things, the one answer that was consistent was that we need music. We need familiar melodies. We need to hear the cello play Kol Nidre. We need to “sing our way through the high holidays”.
Perhaps this sounds like a surprising answer to the question “When we are preparing for new beginnings, what do we need to hear? In a year that has held so much division, pain and bloodshed, what if what we really needed right now was music, and beauty?
How do we want to cross over those metaphorical rivers from this year that has been, into the new year ahead? With hope and optimism and with music.
In that response, I hear something very specific: not that we should bury our heads in the sand and stick our fingers in our ears to drown out the noise of reality, but rather that beauty and hope and optimism might be just the spiritual vitamins we need to strengthen ourselves for the road ahead.
“We’ve learnt about nutrition, we’ve learnt about sleep, we’ve learnt about exercise, we’ve learnt about mindfulness,Now what we’re looking at is how arts and aesthetic experiences are essential to the human condition.”
I am reminded of a story that I both heard, and was a part of this past spring, when I was in Israel. During the last week in May, I went to Israel to spend time with my family and friends, and to visit our partner organizations in the Afula-Gilboa region, with whom I have developed a close relationship over the years as part of our Partnership2gether relationship through the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires.
We were standing at the entrance of the Mishkan Art Museum in Ein Harod— Ein Harod is itself a storied location; the site of one of the earliest kibbutzim in pre-state Palestine. It was established first in 1921 by a group of young Russian Jewish pioneers, in the Harod valley at the foot of Mt. Gilboa.
On that warm day in May, we stood in the entrance of the museum, with our guide, Ofri.
Ofri Gardi Cohen is the head of the Education department, and she planted our group in front of a large black and white photograph—
“Look” she said.
“What do you see?”
I took a step back.
A large crowd of people— many dressed in white.
It looks like a stone quarry, someone says.
“Very good” murmurs Ofri. “What else?”
“Oh, there’s a stage, sort of.”“I see now— there’s someone playing violin”.
Ofri smiles and says “Yes. Now who is it? Does anyone know?”
Someone else in my group laughs a little as if to say “How the heck would I know who is playing a violin in an old black and white picture”.
Ofri continues– “any guesses at all? It was 1926…”
“Jascha Heifetz”, I say— somehow just knowing, it had to be him.
I’ll pause here to tell you that my mother’s maiden name is Heifetz.
I grew up playing the violin, and before she died, I had the chance to play for my great-grandmother Esther, who was a cousin of Jascha Heifetz, the famous violinist.
And so in that moment, standing in the warm lobby of an art museum in Ein Harod, Israel, I felt the press of Jewish history like a kaleidoscope— and in the center of the story was not a famous rabbi, or a famous tractate of talmud, or a political treaty— but rather, a violin.
Ofri went on to tell us the story of this picture of my distant relative Jascha Heifetz performing a concert on his violin in a stone quarry at the foot of Mt. Gilboa in 1926.
The residents of the kibbutz were insistent that this concert take place, though they had no theater or stage, nor a proper piano for his accompanist. In fact, Ofri told us— there were some who thought “what business do we have bringing a famous violinist for a concert? We barely have anything!”
In the 1920s the fields of the Jezreel Valley were covered in bushes and rocks, and swarming with mosquitoes. Equally threatening to the community’s survival was its members’ growing disillusionment with the rules and demands of the collective, which many felt subsumed their individual needs. Having abandoned the Orthodox world of the shtetl, the members of Ein Harod were rootless, with nothing but philosophical abstractions to guide them. ‘‘Leaving God behind caused a terrible shock to us all,’’ one member recalled. ‘‘We had to start from scratch and build a civilization from the very foundation. Yet we had no foundation to build on. We had no Ultimate.’’ In that void, the denizens of Ein Harod sought solace not in religion but in art.
In considering this moment on the Jewish calendar— this moment in our weekly cycle of Torah readings, and this moment in the world— I am inspired by this clear-eyed dedication to art: to music, and to beauty.
Ofri insisted on taking a picture of me in front of the picture— she couldn’t believe I guessed the violinist correctly, until I told her why.
This picture, for me, is a visual reminder of the kaleidoscope of Jewish time.
We have been here (wherever here might be for you) before.
On the verge.
Standing at the edge.
Knowing that there have been some really difficult moments behind us, but there’s no guarantee that what is ahead will be any easier.
I took this picture standing in front of the picture of a world famous violinist playing for a committed but disillusioned community of Jews. This picture was our entry into understanding the role that this particular art museum had played starting on October 8th, 2023.
Ofri continued on- showing us some of the new exhibits that were almost ready for opening, and then she took us back into the artists workshops, where she told us what they did on October 8th. Going against shut-down orders, the Mishkan Art Museum opened their doors wide. There was coffee and cookies, and charcoal and paper and watercolor and scissors and glue. What emerged over those weeks ahead, for both the local community and the thousands of evacuees from both the north and south of Israel, was a program they called “Breathe Move Draw”.
We sat quietly, taking in the tiny dioramas that some of the children had made, depicting the homes and bedrooms they had left in miniature. As though answering an unspoken question, Ofri said quietly “This place is a lighthouse.”
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In moments of great change and anticipation, and when standing on the precipice of a new beginning, like the one we find ourselves in now, perhaps we might give ourselves a little more grace. We don’t have to have all the answers.
As we move through this month of Elul, I invite you to that essential question— when you are preparing for new beginnings, what do we need to hear?
Our tradition offers us so many words. The book of Deuteronomy is called Devarim in hebrew, literally meaning “words”. And perhaps we are not so dissimilar from our Israelite ancestors, who needed Moses to remind them of the rules that would help them shape a resilient society. But it is also possible, that sometimes, we need a little beauty, to remind us not just what matters, but why.
My hope and prayer is over the days and weeks ahead, that this sanctuary will be a sanctuary for all who enter; not a fortress from the realities of the world, but as a spiritual refill station, where the beauty and majesty of our people, our music, and our world might strengthen us for the year ahead.
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