A part of my week this week was in prison, in service as a chaplain, often the part of my week which leaves me with the most to ponder.
The person I was talking with told me of his desire to stay on the right path, keep busy and not return to the temptations of the road (a descriptor of a life of gang culture or making ends meet by dealing drugs, can also just refer to the place or people you grew up with).
I was thinking about the fantasy of Purim that we just celebrated; the fantasy that on one day our fate can be ‘x’ and the next day ‘y’. This fantasy is a representation of the world we know, life can turn on a dime, switch with merciless pace. It is also a fantasy in the sense that many of us live with problems we cannot fix and habits that are hard to move beyond.
As I write, I am on a plane to Israel to take part in a seminar ‘Masorti Futures’ bringing together some of our brightest and best student rabbis and educators to talk about what the next 20 years of leadership in our movement will look like. Life or movements are not turned around in an instant but over weeks, months and years, hard slog and a lot of work. Vision and dreams are just a part of the story.
The same is true for Israel right now, the news we read over these days, is shocking for Jewish community and many more. We cannot be taken hostage by a far-right forces in Israel, however strong they might be at this moment. This spiral of destruction that Israel’s government is in at this moment has been coming for a long time - the erosion of minority rights, the gradual degradation of the freedoms of non-government organisations, the enabling of the far-right including failures to arrest and prosecute those who attack an intimidate Palestinian community and organisations. These are the steps we need to walk back.
There may well be a crescendo moment in this crisis but much of the work to be done will be on a long walk back to democracy, the building up of civil society, the building of bridges once again with our Palestinian and Arab neighbours. There is no future in a zero-sum story of violence and destruction.
What is the Torah, the teaching, that unites these aspects of our week? A torah related to the description of Moses’s ‘tent of meeting’ in this week’s Parsha. There exists discrepancy in the Torah around what the ‘tent of meeting’ is, what is ‘Ohel Moed’? Is it a place of communal worship at the center of the Israelite camp in the desert or is it Moses’s tent outside of the camp in which he speaks to God? Modern scholars will present that these competing options are evidence of opposing sources which make up our Torah. I am inclined to hear the spiritual lesson which emerges from this textual flair.
In the name of Rabbi Shimon in the midrash (Sifrei) we read his take that we have two tents in our Torah, ‘אהל העבודות ואהל הדברות’, ‘the tent of service and the tent of speaking’. Here these two options disclose something crucial about the very essence of being. In times of crisis and even in times of still seas, an aspect of our spiritual lives is to find our Avdut, the work to which we dedicate our selves, the service we offer. These are gradual, incremental acts of service in honour of family, community and nation. Alongside this ‘Avdut’ is our ‘divrut’, the opening our hearts to family, community and nation, speaking our honest truth and hearing others. Living a life of a closed heart can be so painful, opening up in vulnerability, to the degree to which we are able, permits us to live in truth with those around.
Our Torah, a teaching this week – ‘eye on the prize’, in all that we see and do, to stay in relationship with two core aspects of our lives, our ‘avdut’ and ‘divrut’ – the baby steps of continued commitment to our work and contribution to our community and the way we open our mouths to share in our struggle and the struggle of others building a web of relationship which internally strengthen us and lift us up to the next challenge.
Shabbat shalom, onwards to a Passover of liberation x
