A little bit of silence and a long walk

A piece of commentary from last week…

This week we read the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, I know, again.

Still, it may contain the most important long walk in the entire Torah, if not in our entire tradition.

God sends Abraham on a long walk to bind and, in Abraham’s mind, sacrifice Isaac. Here’s the text from Genesis, Chapter 22, just to refresh our memories:

Gen. 22:2 He said: Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Yitzhak, and go-you-forth to the land of Moriyya/Seeing, and offer him up there as an offering-up upon one of the mountains that I will tell you of.

Gen. 22:3 Avraham started-early in the morning, he saddled his donkey, he took his two serving-lads with him and Yitzhak his son, he split wood for the offering-up and arose and went to the place that God had told him of.

Gen. 22:4 On the third day Avraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar.

Rabbi David Kimchi remarked on this, nearly 700 years ago, that God could have asked Abraham to do this immediately. God doesn’t. God says go on a walk. Think about it, in Rabbi Kimchi’s words, so that he would have three days’ time to build insight for himself on the matter.

That seems pretty reasonable. Most of us take at least that long to make a decision of importance. From relationships, to large purchases, from job changes, to college applications – we spend a lot of time reflecting on what to do in those moments of our lives. The wisdom from the Torah here reminds us that we do well when we do this, especially if we give ourselves the time to take a walk.

On that walk we may find the moments to reflect and to listen. We have to listen to the quieter voices around us and within us. In the words of Hannah Senesh, “the rush of the waters, the crash of the heavens,” – we are often too caught up in the noise of the everyday to even notice the thundering of the world beyond our walls.

Our prayers on Shabbat offer us moments to take an inner walk, to find our ways within. These moments of silence that we enter together every week, every time we offer t’fillah, can be that walk. They can be the time to travel deeper, to build upon our insights, to construct new frames of wisdom.

May the silence we find together allow us to walk towards a meaningful Shabbat.

Let us take a few longer moments of silence to deepen the walk into our selves.

 

Make a home for yourself

God said to Abram: Go-you-forth from your land, from your kindred, from your father's house, to the land that I will let you see. (Genesis 12:1)

This opening verse to this week’s parasha includes the words that the parasha is named for, Lech Lecha, and we translate them above as “Go-you-forth”. We could just also read them as “Go to yourself”.

Journeys to other places often mean more about “finding our selves” than finding a new place. As Abram, not yet Abraham, and his family set out from home to find a new place for themselves we can hear the observation of Paul Monette: “Home is the place you get to, not the place you come from.”*

We descendants of Abraham, we journeyers, we must remember that the transformation we seek by leaving must still be found within us. We may find a home by moving, in that by moving we also change our selves. Just as the Mishnah asks us to “make for ourselves a teacher” (Pirkei Avot 1:6), so we must also make a home for our selves.

*From: Halfway Home, (New York: Crown, 1991) p. 262; Quoted by Caryn Aviv and Karen Erlichman in the collection Torah Queeries, Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser, David Shneer (eds.), (New York: NYU Press, 2009), p. 24.

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Joseph and Forgiveness

Back to our parashat-ha-yom, daily Parashah, commentary heading into the High Holy Days, after a Labor Day hiatus - remember that Shabbat was the first fair labor practice ever!

Today we look at Va-Yechi, Genesis 47:28 - 50:26 - the end of Jacob's life, his blessings for his sons, his request that his remains be buried near his fathers', and Joseph's fulfillment of that request - so ends the book of Genesis.

Near the end of Joseph's stories, after his father Jacob has died, his brothers worry that without their father around, their now powerful brother will now seek revenge upon them.

Joseph responds:

Gen. 50:20 Now you, you planned ill against me, (but) God planned-it-over for good, in order to do (as is) this very day- to keep many people alive.

During our season of forgiveness and making apologies, Joseph stands as a model, letting bygones be bygones, and forgiving his brothers. So may we all bury the hatchet and move into the new year holding peace in our hearts for our family, friends, and communities.

Reflecting on Rights in Elul

For today, Va-Yeishev, Genesis 37:1 - 40:23 - the beginnings of the stories of Joseph, and some other stories about Jacob's household.

The story of Tamar is here, a wife of two sons of Judah who don't provide her offspring. When Judah shirks his obligations to her, she tricks him into doing the right thing.

This story, a triumph of a woman for justice over a society that tends to ignore women, reminds us that the fight for equality even within Jewish culture has gone on for millennia.

The reflective time of Elul offers us the reminder that we should not take our rights for granted. We should appreciate how far we've come as people and individuals, and how much work we still have ahead of us.