Rabbi Aaron will be away from Beth Sholom from Monday, June 23rd
through Friday, July 3rd
He will be attending the Bat Mitzvah of the oldest daughter of friends and colleagues,
Rabbis Tom Cohen and Pauline Bebe, In Paris and
joining Les Rocking Rabbi's in performance:
Torah - Sacred Canopy of Love or a Mountain Looming Overhead?
Shavuot has just passed, and we have considered Ruth's declaration of loyalty and love toward Naomi and her people. Somehow, in an gesture both redemptive and subversive, Ruth the Moabite entered the Congregation of Israel. Moab, the reviled lineage stretching back to the darkened cave near the smoking ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, Moab, the child of the broken laws - becomes Ruth, who is the great grandmother of King David...King David, the harbinger of the Annointed One, the Mashiach...
The Law delineates those acts which are sacred from the acts which are profane. The Law is the keeper of the keys, the sentry who guards the boundaries separating Israel from the Nations. And yet...woven into the texture of Zman Matan Torateinu - the Time of the Giving of Our Torah, is a boundary-crossing rebellious strand, a cluster of ideas which looks past the black and white of the Torah and suggests a horizon etched in shades of gray.
Above this text there is a ketuba between Israel and God, written by Rabbi Israel Najara (born circa1530, poet, mystic, wrote in Turkish, Greek, Spanish). Torah as wedding document presents us with the commitments of love that are honored within our relationship with God, our Beloved. This audio link allows us to listen in to various chants, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, of Ibn Ezra's Tzamma Lecha Nafshi - My Soul Thirsts For You.
On the other end of the spectrum is the awful weight of the mountain looming over the terrified Israelites. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, author of The Nakedness of the Fathers, captures this awful, awe-inspiring burden:
“The Rabbis tell that at Sinai when God proposed the covenant to the multitude, the multitude refused it. They refused until God held the mountain over the heads of the people, saying that if they accepted the covenant, good; otherwise they would find their graves under the mountain. Then they agreed.
But others tell it that God scowled and dropped Sinai onto Moses, who supported it on his shoulders until the moment of his death, while the Israelites stumbled forward under its massive shadow. For those forty years when they looked up they saw no sky, only hanging roots, raw rock. After a while they forgot the distinction, and thought it was the sky.
And yet others declare that even after death Moses remained unrelieved of his burden, although Sinai lightened somewhat when the Israelites began immediately to argue over the meaning of the Law; lightened again when David touched harpstrings and lifted his eyes unto the hills; lightened vastly when Isaiah imagined swords hammered into plowshares; when Akiba demanded the canonical inclusion of the Song of Songs over the heads of a rabbinical committee; when Maimonides affirmed the God of the philosophers and Spinoza denied him; when semi-literate Hasidim began to dance; when Peretz wrote certain fables, and Kafka others; when Chagall having settled in Paris brightened his palette; and when Einstein puzzled and Heifetz fiddled. Today let us suppose that the mass of Sinai has decreased by the weight of a sparrow. Let it be pronounced that we are making excellent progress. We are making history.”
Torah - which is it - ketuba or crushing mountain? Joni Mitchell’s, “Shadows and Light” speaks to the struggle between Ostriker's crushing mountain and Najara's mountaintop ketubah. The answer, of course, is both.
