Wash Your Hands! / Parshat Ki Tissa 2016/5776

When you wash your hands, are you cleaning them or purifying them, and what’s the difference? And who said, “Cleanliness is next to godliness?” Paul F. Boller terms it a “pseudo-Scriptural” quote originating with the 18th century founder of Methodism, John Wesley. In a  sermon entitled, “On Dress,” Wesley said: “…slovenliness is no part of religion; that neither this nor any text of Scripture condemns neatness of apparel…Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness.”^[1] Curiously, although Wesley clearly had physical cleanliness in mind, Boller believes that Wesley was quoting not the Bible, but R. Pinchas b. Yair in the Talmud!^[2]

Our Rabbis taught: The words, Be on guard against any evil thing (Deuteronomy 23:10), meaning that you should not think [of forbidden things] by day and become impure by night. From here, Pinchas b. Yair said:  Torah [study] instills diligence, diligence leads to cleanliness, cleanliness leads to self-denial, self-denial leads to purity, purity leads to piety, piety leads to humility, humility leads to fear of sin, fear of sin leads to holiness, holiness leads to divine inspiration, divine inspiration leads to resurrection of the dead.^[3]

R. Pinchas ben Yair uses the term “cleanliness” (nikiyut), which may have connoted physical hygiene, but given the context—the other attributes in the cluster are diligence, self-denial, purity, piety, humility, fear of sin, holiness, divine inspiration—it is far more likely and logical that he intended nikiyut to connote a character attribute: ethical cleanliness or, as Rashi tells us, being free from sin.^[4]

Perhaps the confusion arose because Bible translations use “clean” and “pure” interchangeably.  Living after the Destruction of the Second Temple, R. Pinchas is translating ritual purity and purification into a program for spiritual purity and purification for people who can no longer bring sacrifices to the Temple.

R. Pinchas b. Yair is not the only one to “update” the washing ritual. But first, let’s take a look at what Torah tells us about ritual of washing. In parshat Ki Tissa, God instructs Moses to make a copper laver, a basin for the priests to wash their hands and feet prior to their service in the Mishkan (Tabernacle).

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: make a laver of copper and stand of copper for it, for washing; and place it between the Tent of Meeting and the altar. Put water in it, and let Aaron and his sons wash their hands and feet in it. When they enter the Tent of Meeting they shall wash with water, that they may no die; or when they approach the altar to serve, to turn into smoke an offering by fire to the Lord; they shall wash their hands and feet, that they may not die… (Exodus 30:17-21)

The warning that the priests might die if they don’t wash when entering the Tent of Meeting and prior to offering sacrifices makes no sense if we’re talking about physical hygiene. This is about ritual purity, not physical cleanliness.

Just as R. Pinchas b. Yair reinterpreted ritual purity practices to speak to spiritual purity for his post-Temple generation, the hasidic Ishbitzer rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801-1854), in Mei ha-Shiloach, connects the priests’ hand-washing in the Tabernacle with one’s spiritual state of mind. His sincere concern with the “cleanliness” or “purity” of the soul in connection with performance of ritual has something valuable to offer us.

The act of the priests washing from the laver signifies the removal of affliction, for washing teaches of this, as mentioned in the passage of the eglah arufah (the heifer whose neck is broken), and the elders of the city shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the wadi (Deuteronomy 21:6). With this they are saying that they have no affliction [in connection with the incident] and are clean regarding it.

The Ishbitzer’s point of departure is a bizarre ceremony of expiation described in Torah, which is to be undertaken if a body is discovered in a field far from any town and the murderer cannot be discerned (Deuteronomy 21:1-9). Priests and elders from the nearest town assemble and break the neck of a heifer as expiation to atone for the murder committed. The priests recite a blessing and the elders wash their hands over a heifer. The Ishbitzer rebbe understands the elders’ hand-washing to be a ritual of spiritual cleansing from guilt associated with the murder and their inability to either have prevented it or after-the-fact find the culprit: nothing that happened in the wadi was the elders’ will; hence it must be God’s will (please see addendum below).

So too, the priest who serves needs to wash, meaning that he removes any affliction, nullifying his own mind and will before the will of the blessed God. This means that all his service is only what the blessed God desires.

So, too, he tells us, the priest in the Temple preparing to offer a sacrifice washes his hands in order to “cleanse” his soul of all desires that don’t align with God’s will, and thereby culpability for wrongdoing he cannot prevent. The priest is an agent or implement of God, doing only God’s will when he offers the sacrifice. After the Temple was destroyed, the Rabbis ordained that the hand-washing ritual be incorporated into people’s homes and daily lives, to be performed upon awaking and prior to eating bread (bread being an acknowledged substitute for sacrifices in the Temple).

So it is with how we are commanded to wash in the morning and before a meal, for before one begins to fulfill the needs of the body he must pray to the blessed God. As his dealings in the world may result in his doing something contrary to the will of the blessed God, here he asks the blessed God to remove any desire he has from this action, even from something permitted to us that contains both good and its opposite. For if one were to eat in a way permitted to him and then go on and use the energy from this to transgress the Torah, then it is made clear that this person received no good energy from this action…

When we perform the ritual hand washing, the Ishbitzer tells us, we can understand it as a mechanism for emptying ourselves of our unreliable will and problematic desires so that our lives proceed according to the will of God. It would appear that our hands symbolize our deeds and power, influence in and effect on the world.

From this, two insights emerge. First, the Ishbitzer's comments reveal a keen insight into the human psyche. Sometimes there is a disconnect between our ritual actions and our ethical behavior. We do what is ritually required or expected, but our inner desires and intentions do not align with what we know to be the proper path: we wash our hands but then use them in ways that cause others harm. We eat kosher food and allow it to fuel inappropriate and hurtful behavior. The first insight is the connectedness of all things in our lives: physical, emotional, and spiritual. The Ishbitzer encourages us to keep them closely connected, lest our lives become fractured reflections of hypocrisy.

The second insight concerns rituals, in general. When we perform them for their own sake—an act in response to “commandment” rather than a meaningful ritual, we nullifying our own will—including the will to do good. The ritual of hand washing permits us a tangible, physical ritual to remind ourselves and push ourselves to be God’s agents in the world in a way that is not mindless or amoral, but quite the opposite. For us, mindfulness and morality are paramount. Imagine washing your hands and saying the berakhah, Barukh Ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha-olam (or: makor ha-chaim) asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivu al netilat yadayim / “Blessed are You, Lord our God, sovereign of the universe (or: source of life) who makes us holy with mitzvot and has given us the mitzvah of washing our hands” — and then you stop and think: now what, exactly, am I going to do with these hands, and what can I do with them, and what difference will I make?

Maybe cleanliness is next to godliness.

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

Addendum:

I don’t often quote the Ishbitzer rebbe, because I find his orthodox determinism deeply problematic. He was a proponent of hashgachat pratit, the doctrine that all events and actions, including sins, are committed in accordance with God’s will. Viewing the Ishbitzer’s commentary from our perch in the 21st century, there may be several points of discomfort. The first concerns the notion of “doing the will of God” in the context of “nullifying our own mind and will before the will of the blessed God.” We live in a world inhabited by people who kill viciously and maim brutally, claiming their deeds are the will of God. How do we know the will of God? Even within the Jewish community, there is fierce disagreement concerning what God wants us to do; the struggles between liberal Jews and ultra-Orthodox Jews, and between Israel and the extremist settlers (especially the “Hilltop Youth”) are prime examples. This conundrum leads to a second problem. If “nullifying his own mind and will before the will of the blessed God” doesn’t evoke images of dangerous brainwashing, then it suggests a failure or refusal to accept responsibility for one’s actions: “This was God’s will, not mine; I was just following orders.” Here is another possibility: The Ishbitzer is a hasidic rebbe, and hence his thinking is built on a foundation of Kabbalistic mystical thinking anchored in pantheism, according to which everything is contained within God because God is the totally of everything there is and existence itself. Given that, when the Ishbitzer says that all actions are under God’s control and occur in accord with God’s will, one can understand this to mean that everything happens within God—by definition. Yet moral accountability still hangs in the air.

---

^[1] Paul F. Boller, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quote, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions.

^[2] It seems doubtful that Boller is correct that Wesley had in mind R. Pinchas b. Yair’s teaching, both because Boller quotes the Talmud entirely incorrectly and because it seems illogical that Wesley would zero in on one of the lower rungs of R. Pinchas ben Yair’s ladder of spirituality.

^[3] BT Avodah Zarah 20b.

^[4] R. Pinchas understands the verse from Deuteronomy to be talking about ritual impurity from nocturnal emissions (hint: read the verses that follow it); it’s unlikely that in this context he has physical hygiene in mind.

What are Urim v’Tumim? / Parshat Tetzaveh 2016/5776

The seal of Yale University displays words from this week’s parashah, Tetzaveh, across an open volume. When our daughter attended Yale as an undergraduate, I asked her: What are those words doing there? She replied: Yale started as a Divinity School. And at the time, the conversation ended there. But now that she’s completing her PhD at Yale, I find myself wondering: How did they get there? So I did a little poking around.

Timothy Cutler (b. 1684 in Massachusetts), after graduating from Harvard College at the age of 17, moved to Connecticut and assumed the post of preacher at the Congregational Church in Stratford.  A few years later, Cutler was called to serve as the rector of Yale College (a Congregational college), being a “good Logician, Geographer, and Rhetorician,” “an excellent Linguist,” and beyond those, “in the Philosophy & Metaphysics & Ethics of his Day or juvenile Education he was great… He was of an high, lofty, & despotic mien. He made a grand figure as the Head of a College”—according to ironically-named The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles. It’s not for me to say, but it may be that his appointment to rector of Yale College might also have had something to do with Rector Cutler’s marriage to Elizabeth Milford, whose father was the previous rector of Yale College. On September 13, 1722, Rector Cutler and several others met with the trustees of the college and, espousing an Anglican-Arminian viewpoint, called into question the validity of the ordination of, well, most every minister in New England. This amounted to a rebellion against Calvinism. On October 17, the Yale trustees fired Mr. Cutler and directed that all faculty members be required to make a confession of faith. Thereafter, Yale students studied Johannes Wollebius’s The Abridgement of Christian Divinitie every Friday afternoon. Samuel Johnson (Yale 1714) observed, tongue-in-cheek, that Wollebius was “considered with equal or greater veneration than the Bible itself.” On that same day (October 17), the trustees applied for the seal that to this day bears words of great significance to Wollebius, who wrote that Urim v’Tumim signified “Christ as the Word and Interpreter of the Father, our light and perfection.” (“Light and perfection” was rendered “lux et veritas” in the Latin beneath the book in the seal; that’s a whole other story, not for this drash.) 

The pursuit of God’s will, God’s law, God’s word, and God’s purpose animate religious people around the world in every generation, the the claim to know conclusively God’s will, God’s law, God’s word, and God’s purpose, is not the same thing. Certainly Christian history is shaped by the struggle to assert one understanding over another, and battles for authority and power have caught many in their claws. (Recall that the Salem Witch Trials, supported by the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, had ended less than 30 years prior to Mr. Cutler’s pronouncement and firing, and taken place less than 150 miles from New Haven.)

The Urim v’Tumim, oracles worn and employed by the High Priest, facilitated decision-making that could not be questioned. They are first mentioned in Parshat Tetzaveh, which opens with the instruction for lighting the ner tamid (eternal lamp) in the Tent of Meeting and then moves on to Aaron’s elaborate priestly vestments. Next you shall instruct all who are skillful whom I have endowed with the gift of skill, to make Aaron’s vestments, for consecrating him to serve Me as priest. These are the vestments they are to make: a breastplate, an ephod, a robe, a fringed tunic, a headdress, and a sash (Exodus 28:3-4). Of the items named, the choshen mishpat (breastplate of judgment/decision) that hangs across Aaron’s chest arguably receives the greatest attention. It is encrusted with twelve stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel, set in a three-by-four array. Each gem is engraved with the name of one of the tribes of Israel and framed in gold. Torah next tells us about the Urim v’Tumim, a mysterious apparatus—some sort of oracle—with which Aaron divines the correct answer to questions he poses to God:

Aaron shall carry the names of the sons of Israel on the breast piece of decision over his heart, when he enters the sanctuary for remembrance before the Lord at all times. Inside the breastplate of decision you shall place the Urim v’Tumim, so that they are over Aaron’s heart when he comes before the Lord. Thus Aaron shall carry the instrument of decision for the Israelites over his heart before the Lord at all times. (Exodus 28:29-30)

In other words, Aaron discerns God’s will, God’s law, God’s word, and God’s purpose from the Urim V’Tumim.

If you’re finding Torah’s description of the Urim v’Tumim inscrutable, you are not alone. The classical commentators struggle to comprehend everything from its physical nature to its functionality.  Behind their confusion lies some discomfort. Here’s a brief survey: Rashi (11th century) says that the Urim v’Tumim was writing enfolded in the breastplate and engraved with God’s Name. Ibn Ezra (12th century) thought they were figurines sculpted of gold and silver, much like those used by astrologers. Ramban (13th century), based on the definite article “the” preceding Urim v’Tumim (contrasting with Torah’s instructions to make an ark, a table, etc.) concedes that Moses made the Urim V’Tumim himself with secret knowledge imparted to him by God. He explains how the Urim v’Tumim functioned based on the Talmud (BT Yoma 77): answers were spelled out from the letters of the names of the tribes plus several phrases added to insure the entire alphabet was available. 

Perhaps most interesting is the explanation of the Vilna Gaon (18th century) who applies Ramban’s explanation to the famous interchange between Hannah and Eli (1 Samuel chapter 1, the Haftarah for the first day of Rosh Hashanah). Here’s the backstory: Hannah has been unable to bear children. Her husband, Elkanah, an egregiously insensitive boor, takes Hannah to the sanctuary in Shiloh along with his other wife, Peninah, and Peninah’s many children. Hannah, overcome by sadness that she is childless, weeps and cannot eat. Her husband Elkhanah said to her, “Hannah, why are you crying and why aren’t you eating? Why are you so sad? Am I not more devoted to you than ten sons?” (1 Samuel 1:8) Elkanah’s rival for the Clueless-Clod-of-the-Year Award is the priest who presides over Shiloh, Eli. Eli sees Hannah praying fervently—her lips move but she prays silently, pleading with God to give her children. Eli presumes Hannah is drunk and callously chastises her for making a spectacle of herself at a public sanctuary. Being a priest, the Vilna Gaon brilliantly explains, Eli had consulted his Urim v’Tumim, and it delivered the letters שכרה, which he read as shicorah (״drunk”). Eli was too incompetent to arrange them properly to reveal כשרה, which could be read as either ke-Sarah (“like Sarah”) or k’sheirah (“fit/reputable”). The Vilna Gaon explains that Hannah, realizing that Eli has misread the Urim v’Tumim, gently informs him that he is lacking the ruach ha-kodesh at that moment. The Urim v’Tumim do not guarantee a direct line to/from God. There is still a level of interpretation that is required. The one wearing the Urim v’Tumim, regardless of lineage and the authority invest in his position, must also have the skill to interpret the message communicated by the oracle.

The Yale seal translates Urim v’Tumim as “lux et veritas” (Latin for “light and truth”), a presumptuous rendering. Urim comes from or, which  certainly means “light,” in the sense of clarity of vision and understanding; tumim comes from tam which means “innocent.” From the wisdom and warning implicit in the Vilna Gaon’s commentary, let me suggest an alternative rendering: “insight and innocence”—a phrase that, rather than claim divine authority for one’s own understandings and interpretations, is aspirational in nature, reflecting the insight and humility an authority figure requires to arrive at decisions that will serve the best interests of everyone.

Like many people, I am deeply worried about the political fight that is brewing over filling the position on the Supreme Court left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died this past weekend. His intellectual acumen was matched by the passion he held for his positions. But the “originalist” and “textualist” approaches, claiming to know the full intent of the Constitution for issues that could not even have been considered in the 18th century, strike me as equivalent to Eli’s misreading of the Urim v’Tumim with full assurance that the interpreter always gets it right when, in fact, personal views and values are frequently misconstrued as those of the document. The Republicans have openly threatened to block the nomination of a successor in President Obama’s term, in the hopes of finding another right wing jurist to fill the empty chair on the bench, obstructing the proper functioning of our courts and our democracy. If they do so, they will unabashedly seek to turn the Supreme Court into a political tool to serve partisan political, economic, and social ambitions. They have the murky clarity of Eli where they need the insight humility of Moses and Aaron, without which we are all ill-served.

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

The Ketubah & the Kotel / Parshat Terumah 2016/5776

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about prayer space at the Kotel, which raises several questions: What’s the buzz about? Why is the Kotel so important to Jews? Should the Kotel be of importance to progressive Jews?

First question: What’s the Kotel buzz about? Last week, the Israeli government approved a plan to establish an egalitarian prayer space at the southern end of the Kotel, the Western Wall (so-named because it is the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount) thanks largely to Women of the Wall and the Israel Religious Action Center, under the leadership of the indomitable Anat Hoffman. Celebration among progressive Jews, and the predictable and appalling comments of ultra-Orthodox reactionaries swirl together in the media haze surrounding the announcement of the compromise agreement.

 Second question: Why is the Kotel important to Jews? This week’s parashah, Terumah, tells the story of one of the greatest moments of Jewish unity: The Israelites bring gifts to Moses for to be used to construct the portable Tabernacle that will accompany them throughout their 40-year journey through the Wilderness. The people bring so much that eventually Moses tells them, “Enough!” At the center of the Tabernacle is the  enclosure for the ark containing the tablets Moses brought down Mount Sinai. Later, long after the people have settled in the Land of Israel, God assigns King Solomon to build a Temple to replace the Tabernacle. The Holy of Holies, containing the ark, will stand at its core.

The Temple of Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., rebuilt by those who returned from Exile, and then underwent a massive expansion by King Herod in the first century B.C.E. Herod began the project by shoring up the hilltop on which the Temple will be built, reinforcing it with a retaining wall. He then rebuilt and refurbished the Temple. When the Romans tore it down in 70 C.E., they were unable to dismantle the entirety of the Western retaining wall because the stones were so massive. Today those that remain constitute the bottom layers of the Kotel, with smaller stones from the Umayyad period filling in the gaps.

The Destruction of the Temple was a cataclysm for the Jewish people. In the wars with Rome thousands upon thousands of Jews were killed and the country was decimated. The loss of the Temple spelled the loss of the religious space that united the people in worship of God. A nascent rabbinic movement gradually filled the void with a growing library of forward-looking rituals and laws that breathed life into the nation again. But at the same time, the Rabbis looked back at the Destruction with an array of intense emotions. We have a wealth of their writings that reflect a spectrum of reactions. On one end of the spectrum, there were those who felt the Destruction was God’s just judgment against Israel for sins she committed. On the opposite end of the spectrum we find enormous anger expressed at God for overreacting, abandoning Israel to her enemies, and participating in the torture of her people.

This week, I want to share with you just one parable of the many, many stories, commentaries, and parables that address and reflect the pain and sadness, confusion and disillusionment, anger and resentment that the Destruction engendered, sentiments that lasted for several centuries. (I’ll interweave an explanation, but I recommend that you first read the parable intact; it is reproduced at the bottom of this drash for that purpose. We are accustomed to reading stories once through and moving on, but to fully understand and appreciate rabbinic stories—even seemingly simple ones—we need to read them many times. Please keep in mind as you read that in rabbinic parables, the king is always God, and the king’s wife, son, or servant is Israel.)

This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope (Lamentations 3:21). R. Abba bar Kahana said: [This situation] is like a king who took a certain woman to be his wife. He wrote her a very large marriage contract. “So many bridal chambers will I make for you,” he wrote her. “So many jewels will I bestow upon you, so much silver and gold will I give you.” Then he left her for many years while he journeyed to a distant province.

The parable opens with a verse from Lamentations, the biblical book of dirges composed in response to the destruction of the First Temple. Tradition attributes them to the prophet Jeremiah. Lamentations 3:21, significantly, tells us where the parable is going to go: hope.

R. Abba bar Kahana tells the story of a king who wrote his wife a generous ketubah (marriage contract). He then went away without explanation and without communicating with her for a long time. In a similar way, the Rabbis mean us to understand, God wrote Israel a generous marriage contract. Can you guess what the rabbis have in mind? And then, from the perspective of the Rabbis, God essentially abandoned Israel, failing to protect her from her enemies and allowing the Romans to enter the Land and destroy the Temple. Abandonment is a strong emotion and, indeed, an accusation, yet the Rabbis did not hesitate to express it.

All this time her neighbors taunted her. “Has your husband not abandoned you?” they said. “Go! Take another man for yourself.” The woman wept and sighed, but then she would go inside her bridal chamber, read her marriage contract, and console herself.

Alone and bereft of her husband, the woman’s neighbors take advantage of her fragility and tempt her to find another man, but she resists the temptation. What makes it possible for her to wait for his return? Her marriage contract, which she reads again and again in their bridal chamber, reinforces her love for, and loyalty to, the king even though his presence is neither seen nor felt. Similarly, after the Temple was destroyed, other nations taunted Israel, suggesting they follow other gods since theirs had abandoned them. What is it that Jews do that is equivalent to entering the bridal chamber and re-reading their ketubah?

Many days and years later, the king returned. “You amaze me!” he said to her. “How have you been able to wait for me all these years?” She replied, “My lord, O king! If not for the generous marriage contract you wrote me, my neighbors would indeed have led me astray!”

When the king finally returns, he is amazed that his wife has waited for him and remained loyal to him. She is quite honest and admits that the only thing that kept her loyal was the sense of love ignited by reading the ketubah—she certainly hadn’t heard from him nor did she feel his actual presence. And now the Rabbis will decode the parable for us:

So the nations of the world vex the children of Israel. “Your God no longer wants you,” they say. “He has abandoned you, and removed His Presence from among you. Come! Join us, and we will appoint you rulers and commanders and generals.” But the children of Israel enter their synagogues and study houses where they read in the Torah, I will look with favor upon you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you; and I will maintain my covenant with you…and I will establish My abode in your midst, and I will not spurn you (Leviticus 26:9, 11)—and so they console themselves. And in the future, when the redemption arrives, the Holy One, blessed be God, will say to Israel, “My children, you amaze me! How have you waited for me all these years?” They will reply, “Master of the universe! If not for the Torah you gave us, and the verse, I will look with favor upon you… and I will not spurn you, which we read when we entered our synagogues and study houses, the nations of the world would indeed have led us astray.” This is what is written: If Your law had not been my delight, I should then have perished in my affliction (Psalm 119:92). And therefore it says, This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope (Lamentations 3:21).

Torah is the ketubah God has given us. We read and re-read it in our bridal chambers: our synagogues and study houses. When we pray and when we study Torah, we are reading the ketubah, the marriage contract, that God gave us. The Rabbis often likened the Giving of Torah at Mount Sinai to a wedding in which God is the groom and Israel is the bride. While we often cannot feel God’s presence directly, Torah—and especially God’s promises as expressed in Leviticus 26:8-11—keeps us connected to God until we can feel God’s presence again. That is why there is reason to hope. The parable therefore ends on a hopeful note: We always have Torah to keep us connected to God. Today, the Kotel serves as a connection with what once was, and perhaps, for some, a promise of what may yet be.

Third question: Should the Kotel be important to progressive Jews? For many progressive Jews, the Torah is the ketubah that matters. The Kotel is an ancient artifact of a by-gone era, not even part of the ancient Temple but merely of the retaining wall around the Temple Mount. I have heard people express the concern that the worship at the Wall borders on idolatrous worship of the Wall. I can appreciate the concern that perhaps there has been too much focus from all sides on the Wall, and not enough on the real ketubah: Torah. Yet I can also see that the Wall has become a manifestation of the ketubah in the parable: it is a tangible sign of our deep and abiding historical and religious connection to the Land of Israel. Tzur Yisrael; the Rock of Israel.

For the Kotel agreement to become a living, breathing reality, Israel must allocate the funds to

build the platform stipulated in the agreement, as well as access to the area. No doubt there will be an unpleasant fight to make this happen. Yet the precedent has been established that different Jews live their Judaism differently and that the State of Israel  has the moral and political obligation as the state of the Jewish People to recognize and respect this. For this reason, alone, the agreement is a landmark event. From here, we move to the next issues: equality in governmental support for non-Orthodox synagogues, marriage, and conversion. Chazak chazak v’nitchazeik — May we go from strength to strength.

© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

Eichah (Lamentations) Rabbah 3:21 

This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope (Lamentations 3:21). R. Abba bar Kahana said: [This situation] is like a king who took a certain woman to be his wife. He wrote her a very large marriage contract. “So many bridal chambers will I make for you,” he wrote her. “So many jewels will I bestow upon you, so much silver and gold will I give you.” Then he left her for many years while he journeyed to a distant province. All this time her neighbors taunted her. “Has your husband not abandoned you?” they said. “Go! Take another man for yourself.” The woman wept and sighed, but then she would go inside her bridal chamber, read her marriage contract, and console herself. Many days and years later, the king returned. “You amaze me!” he said to her. “How have you been able to wait for me all these years?” She replied, “My lord, O king! If not for the generous marriage contract you wrote me, my neighbors would indeed have led me astray!” So the nations of the world vex the children of Israel. “Your God no longer wants you,” they say. “He has abandoned you, and removed His Presence from among you. Come! Join us, and we will appoint you rulers and commanders and generals.” But the children of Israel enter their synagogues and study houses where they read in the Torah, I will look with favor upon you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you; and I will maintain my covenant with you…and I will establish My abode in your midst, and I will not spurn you (Leviticus 26:9, 11)—and so they console themselves. And in the future, when the redemption arrives, the Holy One, blessed be God, will say to Israel, “My children, you amaze me! How have you waited for me all these years?” They will reply, “Master of the universe! If not for the Torah you gave us, and the verse, I will look with favor upon you… and I will not spurn you, which we read when we entered our synagogues and study houses, the nations of the world would indeed have led us astray.” This is what is written: If Your law had not been my delight, I should then have perished in my affliction (Psalm 119:92). And therefore it says, This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope (Lamentations 3:21).