When wisdom is embraced, righteousness, justice and fairness are known;
all paths are illumined and you need fear no detour.
When wisdom enters your heart and knowledge your soul.
you will perceive the order of the univese and never despair
You will be rescued from your own dark inclinations,
and not even the cleverest lies will fool you.

Proverbs: The Wisdom of Solomon (Sacred Teachings)

I am not going to get political here, however, I must express a little outrage at the anti-learning culture that seems prevalent in the US today.

As a minor scholar - someone with a college degree and a six-year professional degree that requires reading knowledge of foreign languages and capacities to understand and teach complex ideas - I find it outrageous that a person given a lifetime position as one of the nine top legal scholars in the land could think it remotely acceptable to not be fully versed in a law upon which he will rule.

This, along with criticisms levied towards people who know foreign languages like French, and towards others who advocate for people getting college educations, makes me wonder who we want to be as Americans.

Our founders - self-starters, autodidacts, and those who actually went to college - all revered learning and wisdom. We are a nation of innovators in fields of science and learning. We set ourselves apart from the rest of the world by pioneering public education, and this continues to be one of the ways that allows us to not fall into the traps of chronic and systemic poverty. Education and innovation lead to better futures for individuals, communities, countries, and the world.

Do not allow this culture to become our norm. Ignorance is not a virtue. Knowledge and a mind open to others who might know more than us, promotes a society wherein people work towards the best for all. Demand that our leaders know about the world, and demand from ourselves a life dedicated to self-improvement, and the improvement of our communities. Should we settle for less, we will get it.

We think that the Israelites of all people should have no excuse for their behavior. They just saw the plagues, the salvation by way of a miracle at the Sea of Reeds, and then a full revelation of God’s splendor at Sinai proper. While they wait for Moses to return, and Rashi explains that they interpret Moses as delaying six hours, or even a day, depending on one’s reading of the text, the Israelites get Aaron to build them the Golden Calf, a more easily engaged image of the divine, and far less demanding.

In this failure to hold out for Moses’ return, however we explain it, we find the Torah offering us a model we can live with – an understanding of the human side of trying to do the right thing. The right thing often emerges as such a simple thing – just look at the Book of Proverbs, which depicts the wise path and the evil path as relatively easy to distinguish from each other. Here is a quote from Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s beautiful translation:

How different it is with wisdom! She lays no snares and has no need to hide, she sings openly in the street... Prov. 1:20-21

We see the way clearly, and yet we stray. We know the right thing to do, it can be so obvious, singing openly in the street, and still we falter. Why?

The Israelites offer us one model – the task can be overwhelming – the clear and obvious miraculous encounter can be intimidating. Living in awe of the universe, in the face of the reality of the enormity of God, can demotivate us. We yearn for a simpler, easier answer, an image of God that we can dance around, one who makes no demands upon us.

Our Jewish year cycle reminds us of this, as we return, literally and through our behavior, over and over again to the High Holy Days in order to re-establish a focus on good behavior. Even our week cycle can offer us help in this. Every Shabbat we can look at our week both with eyes to when we’ve succeeded in being the person we aim to be, and when we have fallen short.

As Jews we embrace the notion that simple teachings often require lots more effort to pursue. We know what we need to do to save the environment, and we do what we can. We know that we need to exercise, and sometimes we do. We know that we need to reach out to each other and our neighbors to transform the world, and sometimes we manage.

Shabbat gives us the option, and the story of the Golden Calf offers us a model, to say, I did well enough this week – more to work on next week. Let us use Shabbat to refine our approaches in anticipation of making things work better next week. Let us embrace ourselves as imperfect and in process, we aim to become better, and are constantly becoming, just like our concept of God, who offers Moses the name, “I will be what I will be.” When we aim to be like God, to be holy, we aim to be becoming, not to be perfect.

This week we begin abruptly with the words of T’rumah: “Now Adonai spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelites, that they may take me a raised-contribution…” Moses left and immediately God commanded the Israelites to begin giving things for the building of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, God’s portable dwelling place.

Some Jewish commentators note that such a transition helped the Israelites cope with the difficulty of leaving Mount Sinai behind. They had just encountered the miraculous, and then built the means to carry that experience around with them.

We face similar challenges and opportunities all the time – how do we continue the feelings of a peak experience after we’ve finished it? How do we reclaim the sense of something wonderful from our past?

Jewish answers include everything from prayer and meditation that allow us to renew our everyday lives with past wisdom to using the teachings of the past to craft a framework for new meaningful experiences.

May we make our transitions better through memories that inspire holy innovation.

Video

[photo copywritten 2011 David E. Powers]

What I find most interesting about your names though, is how we can connect the letters in common - G-E-R - to the parashah that you just read, and to our Haftarah reading.

The Haftarah continues the cycle of consolation that lead us from the lowest point on the Jewish calendar - Tisha be-Av, the Ninth of Av, the worst day of Jewish history, in mid-summer - to arguably the highest point, our High Holy Day Season starting at the end of this month. All our Haftarah readings at this time remind us of our blessings after revisiting the stories of tragedy in our history. Today’s reading, from Isaiah Chapter 54, continues in that theme, and reminds us of the divine promise made to Noah to never destroy the world again. On this weekend of commemoration, we get to strike a hopeful chord.

As to the meaning of your names - the Hebrew word “Ger” refers to the stranger, the traveler between communities. In your parashah, in addition to all of the commandments that you read, we find on other instruction in this phrase in Deuteronomy 23:8: “You are not to oppress the Egyptian, for your were a stranger in their land.”

With all of the other wonderful messages you sent us about this week’s reading, here is one more - all of them are supported by this central ethic in Judaism. Do not oppress others because we have sympathy for the oppressed - we were oppressed before. More importantly, do not oppress others who once oppressed you either!

Both of you have not only read and led admirably today, you also gave of your time and efforts freely in your Tzedakah projects - working with survivors of domestic abuse and the families of our soldiers. You embraced this ethic, this notion that we should not only not oppress others, but that people in difficulty deserve our assistance. That the extension of not oppressing others can be found in working towards a world in which no one is oppressed, either by what we do, or what we allow to happen around us.

Whether by pursuing justice through good deeds, through learning, or through the leadership that you have shown us all today, we honor you both, Gil and Daniel.

Shabbat Shalom!

I am starting with two stories tonight - one about me, and one about Moses - please don’t get the impression that I am drawing any comparisons whatsoever.

Many of you know that I used to do a lot of cycling. Last year, while on a long training ride, coming down a very big hill in Tahoe, and going pretty fast, I approached an intersection where someone made a left turn in front of me. I wasn’t really cut off, but I began to get a little irritated. With my heritage as a recovering inhabitant of New York City, I almost offered a rude gesture in response to my near-inconvenience.

On that same ride I had been listening to some music on my phone, in this case a song by a band called Gogol Bordello. One line in that song is: “There is no us and them”. That line stood out as I realized that this person driving may have had other things on her or his mind. Perhaps they had an emergency, maybe they didn’t see me, and more importantly, if we are all in it together, if there is really “no us and them” then this event on the road wasn’t about me. I stopped the process of getting irritated, and had a better day because of it.

Moses had an anger problem. Way back in the book of Numbers, Moses faces a horde of grumbling and complaining and most importantly, thirsty, Israelites, and provides water for them from a rock. Instead of following God’s instructions and speaking to the rock, invoking God’s name, Moses strikes the rock with his staff to bring forth the water. Considering how annoying the Israelites have been, hitting something didn’t seem like a totally unreasonable reaction, and yet God uses this incident to refuse Moses entrance into Israel. That day, Moses may have thought it was all about him and his importance in front of the people, not about the people and their needs.

So Moses understands the importance of getting out of the way, of not being in the center, of identifying with the bigger picture that includes everyone. Moses spends the entirety of the Book of Deuteronomy sharing his version of the lessons we need to succeed without him.

This week we read from Deuteronomy, particularly Re-eh. Here’s a little section:

12:2 You are to demolish, yes, demolish, all the (sacred) places where the nations that you are dispossessing served their gods, on the high hills and on the mountains and beneath every luxuriant tree;
3 you are to wreck their slaughter-sites, you are to smash their standing-pillars, their Asherot/Sacred-poles you are to burn with fire, and the carved-images of their gods, you are to cut-to-shreds- so that you cause their name to perish from that place!

This is not the first time Moses rails against idolatry, and certainly won’t be the last time a prophet stands in front of the Israelites telling them to avoid idol worship, or abandon it.

Why does our Torah focus so much on this, and what can we do with it today?

Certainly few of us erect tree idols in our homes or back yards, so what can we learn from this?

Let’s expand our understanding of idolatry beyond the simplistic idea of bowing down to physical idols. The attachment of importance, too much or too little, to things and people inappropriately, seems like a good working definition of an idolatry for us to avoid.

Perhaps Moses struggled with this most - he placed too much importance on himself, his hurt feelings, and his abilities, and too little on being part of the group.

How many times do we take a suggestion, a friendly or constructive one, as criticism? Couldn’t it just be that our friends and family really want to help us out? What kind of difficulties might we avoid by seeing a comment as an offer to help, instead of a critique?

How important are our feelings, our sense of self, in the context of working in a team where we all aim to succeed, even if that team might be our closest family?

So the idolatry to avoid becomes self-importance. We often tell each other that we need “thicker skins” as a way of living with comments that may or may not be directed at us. When we take ourselves out of the way of the comment, we need not absorb it. We are no longer in the center.

Even better, let us see whatever the interaction may be as good for the group. When there is no us and them, or “no ‘I’ in team”, then we can pull back to a bigger picture and see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a comment meant to improve the whole, as opposed to the target of a criticism.

Let’s forget being thick skinned, and move towards seeing ourselves in a bigger picture.

Let’s get out of the way, leave an idolatrous treatment of our self behind.

May this Shabbat bring us opportunities to reflect on our place in the long view, allow us to better see the forest for the trees, and not mistake ourselves for the object of all things. In growing a little smaller, may our lives grow bigger.

We reject many of these rules, and have for centuries - for example, we don’t bring rebellious children before the local authorities to have them stoned for rowdy behavior.

Nonetheless, most of these guidelines offer us relevant teachings today, like the strong insistence on fair weights and measures in Deuteronomy 25:13-16, where committing corruption is declared an abomination.

We have thoroughly standardized weights so that purchases in our markets are fair and equal, and yet still unfair influence tends to persist throughout our society. We can take heart from the improvements we have made to our conduct of business while still taking note of how much progress we need to make so that money and connections don’t outweigh fairness in our everyday dealings.

Full Torah portion here