Pesach - Chol Ha'Moed, 'In the Middle and looking ahead'

Dvar Torah – Chol Hamoed Passover

5773/2013

As the Israelites leave Egypt, with Moses leading the way, everyone is full of hope, fear, and wonder.  The after-effects of the plagues, the Egyptians handing over gifts on the way out, are still in the air, and Moses is full of deep reflection, but he feels something pricking at him, cannot figure out what it is.  With each step that he takes, something is irritating him, he can feel it.  It is slowing him down.  Chaim the shepherd is walking just behind him, smiling.  Moses smiles back.  Ah, he says to himself, God is reminding me to slow down, to experience this moment, to be humble as I lead the people – Thank you, God!  After 10 years in the wilderness, he still feels this irritation, always in the same place.  One day, out of pure curiosity, he looks over his shoulder as he is walking and sees Chaim the shepherd again, and with each step Moses notices that Chaim is stepping on his heel, rubbing his ankle and causing his sandal to pop up.

There are moments when we begin to wonder whether we are feeling inspired, or just living with all the typical comforts and discomforts, or ideally a combination of the two would be ideal.

During this middle Shabbat of Pesach, we are all like the Israelites, walking in the middle of the wilderness, coming off the high of the Seders and settling into a new pattern, especially a new diet for the next several days. 

The Torah portion follows the same range of emotions.  Giving of the Torah at Sinai lifted us up to the heights, as the Rabbi of Ger might say, at Sinai our souls lifted up closer to their source in the Eternal One.  Then everything came crashing down as we turned to the Golden Calf in a moment of national weakness.  Fascinating then, that as we read from this section in Exodus that one verse reads ‘Do not make idols [to worship]’ and the very next verse, without any hesitation or break in between, says ‘Keep the Festival of Matzah for 7 days…for in the month of Nisan you went free from Egypt.” 

We need to refocus ourselves after the Seders, reset ourselves to adjust to these middle days without a major ritual event, and to make sense of the 7^th and 8^th days of the holiday that also do not feature another Seder or other specifically Passover ritual or event.

It is at this time that we, just as the people at Sinai did, could get bogged down in the low after the Seder high.  The Rabbi of Ger (Gora Kalwaria, south of Warsaw) teaches a classic lesson that chametz, the leavened products we do not eat on Pesach, represent over-confidence, a too deep sense of our own esteem, we might call it arrogance – as represented by the ‘inflated’ quality of leavened bread that rises.  And he points out that in terms of the letters, there is only a one letter difference in Hebrew between chametz and matzah, chet-mem-tzadi, mem-tzadi-heh – hay and chet are the unique letters in each word.  In matzah the key letter is hay, a horizontal-vertical with a small dot below – that small dot represents the humble, simple bread of Passover, and the quality of humility and gratefulness we feel for being free.  The chet in matzah represents the way that the small dot of the hay rises up and turns into a chet, the way that leavened bread rises, for sure a rising sense of self but we must be careful not to get carried away, to get distracted from the message of the holiday both for us as a nation but also as individuals – as people who are seeking to live out the message, that since we know the sufferings of being slaves, of living under oppression, we are sensitized and well-equipped to notice injustice in the world and repair it.

As I read recently in Irving Howe’s wonderful book “The World of Our Fathers”, about the Exodus of East European Jews to America in the period of the 1880s through World War I, Romanian Jews, following repressive decrees, the 1899 pogrom in Jassy, and subsequent mass expulsions, caused the Romanian Jews to do something unprecedented.  They organized into ad hoc committees, and left Romania as fusgeyer – walkers – tramping hundreds of miles across the country,  walking in ‘double file, brown khaki, military leggings, broad-brimmed canvas hats, with an army knapsack and water bottle over the shoulder.’  Marching on the order of a cornet, with a Romanian and a blue & white flag flying.

I hope that we can summon the energy, courage, hope, and strength of the Romanian fusgeyer as we walk forward in this year’s Exodus, heads held high, walking as a community, and singing together along the way.

Shabbat Shalom.

Aftermath of Obama visit to Israel

The Committee for Accuracy on Middle Eastern Reporting shared an interesting article about the views of Palestinians of East Jerusalem.  Once again, we find that to get the real story on Israel, and the Israel-Palestinian situation, we must look beyond the headlines, read multiple sources, and be wary of media bias.

March 25, 2013

USA Today Gets It Mostly Right

USA Today’s “Palestinians not optimistic about Obama’s agenda” (March 20) reminded readers that many Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem wouldn’t want to live in a Palestinian state. Overall, the article was a relatively rare example of a major news outlet including essential context in an Israeli-Palestinian report.

Reporters Michele Chabin and Vanessa O’Brien noted “a recent survey conducted by Pechter Middle East polls showed that 35 percent of East Jerusalem residents said that in any two-state solution, they would prefer to live in Israel, while 30 percent preferred to live in a Palestinian state.” In addition, the survey “showed that 40 percent would prefer to move to Israel if their neighborhood [of Jerusalem] became part of Palestine.”

While only five percent of Jerusalem Arabs have opted for Israeli citizenship since 1967, the number applying to change their permanent resident status to citizen is rising, one resident of eastern Jerusalem told USA Today.

The dispatch also:

* Refers accurately to Hamas, which targets Israeli non-combatants and takes cover among the Gaza Strip’s civilian population, as a terrorist group that desires to eliminate Israel instead of calling it a “militant” organization, and

* In the print edition correctly describes the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, not the adjoining Western Wall, as Judaism’s holiest site. The longer, updated online version muddies the language in this regard. (CAMERA has obtained numerous corrections from media that have erroneously termed the Wall the most sacred physical location for Jews.) By accurately describing the importance of Temple Mount to Jews, USA Today’s print report helps clarify why the site is a source of contention.

The article does err by saying that Israel’s West Bank security barrier and checkpoints “bar all but a few thousand Palestinians from accessing jobs, universities and hospitals in Israel.” The Israeli foreign ministry reports that last year more than 200,000 West Bank and Gaza Strip Arabs, patients and accompanying family members, were permitted to seek hospital treatment in Israel, and the Associated Press said recently that approximately 40,000 West Bank residents now are authorized to work in Israel, up from virtually none during the second intifada (2000 – 2005).

The newspaper commendably published a clarification in this regard in its March 25 print edition .

A reference to the “right of return for all Palestinians and their descendants to live in what is now Israel” should have been to the “alleged right of return …” No such right exists, as indicated by the early U.N. General Assembly resolutions on the subject, 194 (1948); 393 (’50); 394 (’50); and 513 (’52). That’s one reason Arab delegations voted against them at the time.

But overall, “Palestinians not optimistic about Obama’ s agenda” provides readers with important information routinely ignored in other major media. – Andy Wallin, CAMERA Washington research intern.