Repetition as Spiritual Dynamism
I have read one book to our kids for the last thirty nights, perhaps more, I have simply lost count. It is ‘The Book with no Pictures’ by BJ Novak. Novak, I don’t know who you are and whether I love you or hate you. I have certainly read this book more than 100 times alongside another half a dozen books that for a moment capture the imagination of one or more child. ‘The Ladybird’, ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’, both Julia Donaldson; ‘The Lion Inside’, ‘The Koala who Could’, both Rachel Bright and Jim Field. Actually, all amazing books; part of the genius is capturing the adult imagination alongside the kids. I often think about these books in my day to day.
What if repetition is our spiritual home, what if doing exactly the same thing every week is the heightened ideal state and if variety is the aberration. Each week in our home we have broadly the same meals Sunday through Thursday, we keep to the same bedtime ritual, dinner, bath, bed with the same time schedule both for wake-up and bedtime. It’s boring and sometimes feels a bit like watching paint dry. In some weeks my imagination goes wild for all the desert islands, mountains and places I would dream to visit, but perhaps it is in the repetition of our lives that we are able to find the greatest spiritual elevation.
In our Parsha this week, sandwiched into the days of the festival of Purim, we read of some of the words of Shabbat: ‘אַךְ אֶת־שַׁבְּתֹתַי תִּשְׁמֹרוּ’, ‘God says: keep my Shabbat’ [EXODUS 31:13], why you might ask? What is the purpose of this Shabbat? I can’t give you one answer but I can tell you that this Shabbat has been one of the most meaningful parts of my existence, it is a day on which I experience gratitude for the life that I live. It is a day in which I am not distracted by all of the clatter and noise of our everyday existence, it is a day on which I find renewed focus for the things that matter. Some weeks I wonder how I would survive this world without Shabbat. The words of Ahad Ha’am ring more true now than ever: ‘More than Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews’. More times in my life, Jewish people tell me, it is Shabbat they are drawn to, the sharing of a meal with loved ones. In my imagination, in my Shabbat, it is more than this; it is sharing space with my family and friends with nowhere else to be, no interruptions or timetable, that is sacred.
It is also Purim this week. Purim is the festival of the fate of Esther and Mordechai, who are fated to be killed by the Persian Empire by the designation of Haman the wicked royal advisor. It is the classic, ‘they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat’ story. It is the festival of ‘Nafoch Hu’, the turning around one fate for its opposite outcome.
But how does the flexibility and ingenuity of Purim relate to the proposition of Shabbat? In the Midrash, the Mekhilta D’Rabbi Yishmael, one of our most ancient rabbinic interpretive texts, traditions from more than 2000 years ago, we read some of this linguistic and religious ingenuity: ‘כְּשֶׁהוּא אוֹמֵר "אַךְ", חָלַק: יֵשׁ שַׁבָּתוֹת שֶׁאַתְּ שׁוֹמֵר, וְיֵשׁ שַׁבָּתוֹת שֶׁאֵין אַתְּ שׁוֹמֵר’. Rabbi Yossi HaGalili reads the verses of our Parsha and finds one stray word: ‘אַךְ’, it can mean ‘but’ or ‘nevertheless’ but rather than trying to understand a simple placement of the word, he adds to the discussion on when you keep Shabbat and when you are obliged to break it, a poetic framing. Here too, Torah commands places in which we have to break the Shabbat, here is the dynamism of a tradition amidst its rigidity and repetition.
One verse over in the Parsha we read: ‘וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־הַשַּׁבָּת כִּי קֹדֶשׁ הִוא לָכֶם’, ‘You shall keep Shabbat, for it is holy for you’ [EXODUS 31:14], the same midrash, flips the simple meaning of the verse around and says: ‘לָכֶם’, ‘for you’, this Shabbat is for your profit and spiritual elevation and you can’t therefore give yourself for the Shabbat – if your life was at risk, you would be obliged to break the Shabbat.
The last reference is a play on the words: ‘כִּי אוֹת הִוא בֵּינִי וּבֵינֵיכֶם לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶם’, ‘Shabbat will be a sign between Me and you for all the generations’, the Mekilta, the same Midrash, returns to a word play, ‘פַּקֵּחַ עָלָיו שַׁבָּת אַחַת, שֶׁיַּעֲשֶׂה שַׁבָּתוֹת הַרְבֵּה’, ‘Desecrate one Shabbat in order to keep many Shabbatot’ [MEKHILTA DERABBI YISHMAEL, TRACTATE SHABBATA 1, KI TISA]. The presence of the word ‘le-dorot-ai-chem’, ‘for all the generations’, is indicative of the need to ensure the continuity of faith and practice, which sometimes necessitates the breaking of these sacred rules.
Our Parsha describes some of the most carefully observed rules of the Jewish tradition, those of Shabbat. These are kept in repetition, a continuity of practice which has spiritually elevated and connected our community across the generations. Blink and you could miss it, according to our rabbis; written too, into the fabric of the written sanctity of that tradition, are the rabbinic work-arounds which present a dynamic response to threat. Alongside the story of Purim, the capacity of our tradition is to flip itself in its entirety in order to protect the future of our people and our community. An ethic of dynamic, pragmatic interpretation which comes to teach a dynamism and an ingenuity of thought and action, which preserves the sanctity and essence of our tradition for generations to come, and ultimately become our resilience and our capacity to survive.
Shabbat shalom, Purim Samaych
