When my wife Rachel was little her parents planted a blue spruce tree for her. Last year, we were traveling near where she grew up and we all wanted to see the small town of Orwigsburg, PA and their old house. The tree was still there, standing tall, now 39 years old. But what was the story of the tree?
We never know the story of a tree just by looking at it. We don’t know their good or bad years. When you chop down a tree you can examine the rings and start to understand more of the trees story, with fatter rings you can see years with good rain and thinner rings representing drought. But those marks are on the inside.
It is kind of like that with us too. When we look at someone we don’t know about their joys and the traumas that they carry. They may smile and be standing tall like the tree but be hiding tremendous pain. They may look like they have everything, but might have experienced tremendous loss and not have who they really need in life with them. It’s also possible that someone looks weathered on the outside, having been through life’s gauntlet, but on the inside they have a well of peace and strength.
We all live a story, a holy story that gives context and meaning to our lives in relationship to the larger story of the Jewish people.
This week we experience the confluence of three stories of the Jewish people, International Holocaust remembrance day, the day we remember the liberation of Auschwitz, Tu Bishevat, the new year of trees, and our parsha from today, the miracle of God splitting the sea – the last act that seals our physical freedom from Egypt.
I use the term physical freedom for a reason, our ancestors may be physically free but mentally, emotionally, they are not fully free yet. It is one thing for God to take the Israelites out of Egypt, it is another thing altogether to take Egypt out of the Israelites.
In our parsha, our ancestors joy comes after they’ve experienced tremendous suffering. They were slaves to pharaoh in Egypt – they were oppressed in so many horrific ways. And they weren’t just freed when Moses came, and demanded their freedom, as if things couldn’t get any worse, they were tortured even more and had to work doubly hard. The plagues were as much about convincing our ancestors God cared about their fate as they were about persuading Pharaoh to change course.
After the Israelites are saved from the Egyptians at the Red sea, the Torah proclaims, “Vayosha Hashem bayom Hahu’ – (14:30)God saved them on that day. The Ohr Hachaim explains that it was only on ‘that day’ (the day of being rescued at the see rather than the day that they were released from Egypt) that the Israelites were saved by Hashem, since they now had the opportunity to have emotional freedom (in addition to physical freedom). Until they saw the dead face of the Egyptian that tried to kill them, the Israelites were emotionally scarred and haunted, still in fear that they might come back. Thus only when the Israelites saw the Egyptians crushed under the water they were truly saved. In other words, knowing that their trauma was truly over and they could not be enslaved by Pharaoh again, gave them the beginnings of an emotional freedom they did not previously have.
Like the trees we celebrate on Tu Bishevat, the emotional scars of slavery and exile in Egypt are engraved inside the people. Long after their external wounds heal and they can take deep breaths, set their own calendar, and live their own lives, the marks of years and generations past are there, no matter how old or young they are. Tu Bishevat, through this lens, is a holiday of resilience, of growth with and despite the elements, like the olive trees, hardy trees that once established can survive drought, neglect, fire and wind. While we usually sing about the beautiful shekdiyah on Tu Bishevat, the almond tree, I vote for the olive tree, etz zayit, as the leading example, whose branch symbolizes renewal and peace in the mouth of the dove after the flood, whose oil has sustained people in Israel for centuries, and also lit the Temple menorahs – including the rededicated menorah after the Syrian-Greeks defiled the Temple. Yes, other trees die, and olive trees are not immortal, but they shape the landscape and tell the story of our people from the earliest years to the most recent.
International Holocaust remembrance day tells a story similar to the Exodus, except that unlike that ancient story it happened in our time, and strikingly, it was only at Auschwitz that our people were tattooed with marks on their arms, showing their degradation both outwardly in addition to the unspeakable emotional wounds inside. Like the weathered and beaten olive trees though, some of those who survived rose from the ashes , journeyed here and elsewhere, and created new lives, new families, and new hope.
All these story lines from this week connect to us, but they’re over there, so to speak, in ancient Egypt, on the hills and in the forests of Israel, and in the darkness of Europe during World War 2.
Right now we are all living through a personal and communal trauma, a story, a sad one – the coronavirus pandemic. We live with the fear that we can catch this horrible virus. And I think there is a parallel – a 2 step process we will go through to reach our own full emotional and physical freedom. Right now we are getting vaccines – Thank God for the vaccines. Thank God for the scientists who helped create them. Thank God for the pharmacists who are injecting the vaccines. Thank God for every member of the supply line from the people manufacturing the vaccines to those delivering them, and then the next step comes, in the aftermath…
When we move past the pandemic, in what ways will it still be inside us? What lines are being written inside of us, like the rings of trees that record their lives? And how will we re-adjust our lenses like the survivors who moved forward with determination?
As I often explain at the beginning of classes I teach, I see my role in teaching as bringing the questions to the table, sparking discussion so that we can sharpen the questions. The better the question, the more successful the search for truth will be. Answers are elusive, and certainty is fleeting.
Between these questions and the search for truth is faith, and for today’s story to be fulfilled and fully realized inside us, we need to try our best to do what the Rabbis ask us to do every Passover, bechol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo ke’ilu hu yatzah mimitzrayim, in every generation each of us must see ourselves as though we went out of Egypt with our ancestors, or equally, that we are going out of an Egypt-like situation yesterday, today, tomorrow – Mitzrayim is the word for Egypt but its root word means a place of narrowness, restriction, trouble, suffering, and by extension they ask us to have faith that God’s saving hand will come again, despite all the moments when it appeared God was distant and silent.
And so we hope that we can say Vayoshienu Hashem bayom hahu- and it was on that day God saved us, instead of the way the same word appears and speaks about God saving them, our ancestors back then. The word Vayoshienu is in the TaNaKh – one time in Isiaiah (25:9)– where the text reads – Vayoshienu – God will save us because, as the prophet proclaims, You have been a strength to the poor,
A strength to the needy in his distress,
A refuge from the storm,
A shade from the heat…
And God will swallow up death forever
And wipe the tears from your faces…
We always experience frustration, between the story of the world and our lives as they are now and the many alternatives we imagine they would have been or could be now. But in God all those are one, let’s place all our frustrations on our journeys in the hands invisible One of the Universe…at least we can try, at least on Shabbat, at least for today, and then hopefully we’ll feel other emotions, other memories rise up, rekindle the spark of our interests and passions, and ironically muse about all the things we want to believe in and accomplish on the one day that God tells us we don’t need to do or make anything new. But again, hopefully, we’ll feel that flow of energy into the week ahead.
May the stories we told last week give us strength, the strength to have faith, the strength to live fully and spread our resilience to a world grinding through adversity, the strength of the blue spruce in Orwigsburg, PA that’s been growing for decades through the hottest summers and coldest winters.
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