Monday, October 31, 2016

Bi'ray'sheet - Starting the Torah reading again -- 5777/2016



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.

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