Harry Schachter, Jan 1, 2005
Sometimes we can read through a parsha and find it triggers certain unexpected reflections and memories. This parsha has been particularly rich in such reflections for me. And so I hope you will indulge me as I present some of these reflections.
Shmot begins, as we all know, with an account of the Israelites in Egypt in their growing multitudes, and the Egyptians worried about the presence of these aliens, these foreigners, in their midst.
Minorities in the midst of majorities. I suddenly found myself thinking of my own childhood, growing up in a very Jewish neighborhood in south Winnipeg, only vaguely aware of the surrounding non-Jewish world. And I remembered an odd bit of language usage. We used to refer to non-Jews as English, as in "that new kid down the street, is he English?" This was a leftover from a time when the Jewish community spoke Yiddish, and it didn't really fit my particular circumstances, or most of my friends, because our families were all English speaking. Nevertheless there it was. But the passage of time has been relentless, and my children have never heard of such an expression.
Then it occurred to me that this was a memory that fit with our parsha in more than one way. The passage of time, the passage of generations, is another theme of this week's Parsha. Those opening verses of Shmot, are after all, all about the passage of time as the older generation of Joseph and his brothers dies off, and their descendants multiply, with the consequences that we experience to this day.
Here is another memory that came back to me this week. As I was looking into other, more learned, dvars about Shmot, I came across one from January 1998, presented by Arthur Waskow, the writer and indefatigable activist, author, for those of you who like me are from an earlier time and might remember, of the famous Freedom Seder.
The occasion was the 25th yahrzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, which happened on that day to coincide with the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr, and the yahrzeit of another rabbi and activist named Marshall Meyer, an American who had been a rabbi in Argentina during the military dictatorship of the 1970s where he had fought against the torture, murder and anti-Semitism of that regime, and had then returned to America where he created an important progressive synagogue in New York on the upper west side called Bnai Jeshurun. Waskow was speaking at Bnai Jeshurun, and it so happens that on that Shabbat morning seven years ago I was there, along with my wife Donna.
For me, that event was among the most moving, even transformative, occasions of my journalistic career. I was there to prepare a radio documentary on the life and thought of A. J. Heschel, and I had the great privilege of speaking with William Sloan Coffin, an anti-war leader and friend of Heschel's, with Susannah Heschel his daughter, with Edward Kaplan of Brandeis University, who is Heschel's biographer, and with Arthur Waskow, who also knew Heschel personally.
I asked Arthur Waskow about Heschel's famous idea of the holiness of time, which is described in Heschel's wonderful book on the Sabbath. Waskow explained that it is easy to grab hold of space. It's much harder to grab hold of time. But in the Sabbath, Judaism has in effect done that; we have created a kind of temple or palace in time. As Heschel put it, "The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space." Heschel wrote: "Space is exposed to our will; we may shape and change the things in space as we please. Time, however, is beyond our reach, beyond our power. It is both near and far, intrinsic to all experience and transcending all experience. It belongs exclusively to God."
That day, in my conversation about time with Arthur Waskow, he turned to another image, from our parsha, Shmot which we have been reading today. This parsha includes the story of Moses' encounter with God at the burning bush. The burning bush has many possible meanings. But one of its meaning is time. The fire burns and burns, but the bush is never consumed. Time burns and burns, but it too is never consumed. It always remains eternal.
So on this day, which in our everyday secular calendar also marks the passage of time, the beginning of a new year, I'll conclude with another quote from Arthur Waskow, from his dvar on Shmot. In that remarkable encounter at the burning bush, God reveals a name to Moses: Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. "I will be who I will be." Time inevitably passes; but the lesson from God's name is that we are not stuck through time with who we are. We too can be what we will be. The lesson we ultimately take away from our parsha is one of the possibility of transformation.
Shabbat Shalom.