One of my favorite urban legend
stories, urban legend only because I cannot verify it, comes from Jewish
Theological Seminary, my school in the City.
It’s told that one of the Bible
professors, a rather quiet soul – a great writer but not a very engaging
teacher – was known to enter the classroom at the time the session was to
begin, and he would start to teach without paying much attention to who was in
the class, nor for the formalities of greetings and check-ins. The story goes that one day, none of his
students showed up for the session, and without looking up, and as usual, he
started teaching to an empty room.
This teacher may have said amazing
things, but without anyone to hear them, the message will fall flat.
The same is true with God – out of
an empty universe, God creates a world, full of life, full of color, and with
us, students, partners, living images of Godself.
We’re here not to take God’s place
and pretend to be the masters.
Our goals are different.
We’re here to hear, to listen to
God’s voice ringing out from the moment of creation, from the moment that the
Rabbis teach us God looked into the Torah itself as a blueprint and created the
world we can see (Pesikta Zutarta Gen 1:1) – from the moment God created the world
for the merit of the Torah as the first word is B’raysheet, and Torah itself is
known as ‘ray’sheet’, as it says in Proverbs, God created the ‘ray’sheet’, the
beginning, of God’s way before creation.(Midrash Rabbah)
And so we are here to listen to the
Torah again, to pay attention, make mental notes, and most of all to
internalize the message again this year as we begin to hear today the first of
the 54 weekly Torah portions.
For more than 2,000 years Jewish
communities have established the regular chanting of the Torah.
The custom may have begun as early
as the 3rd century Before the Common Era, since the Septuagint, the
Greek translation of the Torah was intended for public reading.
But we do not read out loud
anymore. Others do – While I don’t agree
theologically with them, I do admire the motivation and passion of those
Christians who hop onto the subway trains in New York, open their bibles, and
preach the word of God on the train ride.
I’ve seen this a few times and felt the surge of feeling, not the
intellectual feeling of coaxing meaning out of the Torah verses, but the
reverence for the presence of God in the words, for the good energy that flows
from the sense that God cared enough to share wisdom with us so that we could
have a way of becoming the people and the nation God hoped we could be.
And we need this feeling now, in a
critical time for our country and the Jewish people.
The rhetoric of the election, even
in its final stages, suggests that it’s ok to say almost anything regardless of
its truth or falsity, regardless of the impact of the words on others. Many school districts across the country,
especially in this election, are either cancelling classes on November 8th
or trying to move polling places outside of the school due to the contentious
nature of the debate, with self-appointed groups planning to go to polling
places in different cities to verify results.
The rhetoric from UNESCO that we
discussed a couple of weeks ago continues to be harshly anti-Israel despite
official statements from its director.
As we begin to hear the Torah
again, we know that we do not agree with every point, nor do we find immediate
relevance in each story or passage, but we do find when we hear the words of
Torah again the sense that we can rely on the Torah as a source of God’s
Presence and power in the world – a reminder that we can lean on God, lean on
each other, and find strength in the courage of generations past who negotiated
some of the most tumultuous and oppressive eras of human history. Shabbat Shalom.
