Nine years ago, my daughter Sarah joined her high school swim team and my wife became quite hysterical. No, she wasn’t afraid her baby was going come down with swimmer’s ear. Nor was she perturbed by the thought of spending long weekend afternoons at seemingly endless swim meets, breathing close, chlorinated air while we waited for our child’s two minutes in the pool. What started her crying jag was the fear of what Friday evening swim practices would do to Shabbat dinner.
Sarah only stayed on the swim team for a year, but by then, there were other distractions for a high schooler on a Friday night. Then there was college, and then a job in New York. In the meantime Rachel acquired her own host of young adult interests, all the while this place took up half my Friday nights. And there were friends, and boyfriends, and travel and the other entanglements that lay claim to each of us. The times the four of us welcome Shabbat together are by now so rare that I am actually afraid to try and count.
But one of those rare occurrences took place a few weeks ago and I want to tell you about that night in some detail. That detail, I am afraid, will include some singing on my part, because singing is a big part of Shabbat dinner in my house. But as this is a day when one is supposed to afflict one’s soul, I have no trouble allowing my voice to inflict that affliction on you.
Of course, given the nature and complexity of our lives, even those rare evenings when the four of us share Shabbat dinner together are never quite like they used to be. Its a two hour commute from Sarah’s job to home. And of course, I have my obligations here. So I cooked our Shabbat dinner on Friday afternoon, wrapped it all in aluminum foil, left it on the stove top and headed to Wallingford. After services, I drove into New Haven where I picked up Sarah and her boyfriend Leon at twenty-to-nine. When we got home, I was surprised to find Rachel’s boyfriend Spencer was also joining us. So there would six at our table. Another chair dragged up from the basement, a leaf put in the table and by quarter-passed nine we were ready to go. I watched Terri light the candles at my own table as I had watched Sue Burt light them here hours before. This, of course, is forbidden under Jewish law. When the sun set, it took the time for kindling flame with it. But here’s the thing: you can always hear Terri strike the match to light the Shabbat candles in my house. That’s because in the moment that she strikes it, regardless of how much noise there had been a second before, there is silence. In that moment of silence, Shabbat enters my home. And it doesn’t matter to me where or whether the sun is in the sky.
Then my hands reached for the foreheads of my two girls. I began my blessing upon them with the words ישמך אלהים כשרה, רבקה, רחל ולאה - The Lord make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Then I had a choice. Do I proceed with the blessing in the Torah’s actual language, thus referring to my girls with masculine pronouns, or do I modify the text to reflect who they really are? Based on my rather liberal attitude toward candle lighting, you might think I would equally loose with the text. But I am not. When it comes to words of Torah, the pull of tradition is too strong for me. And while rabbis have an equally long tradition of taking liberties with even the Torah text, I am hesitant to do so. So I blessed my girls with masculine pronouns and then kissed them with the right words - שלום לך.
All the while, my pewter kiddush cup sat, brimming with wine, waiting for me to lift it and sing: יום הששי. וַיְכֻלּוּ הַשָּׁמַֽיִם וְהָאָֽרֶץ וְכָל צְבָאָם.. I sang the entire kiddush - beginning with the biblical account of the creation of the seventh day - and I did so very slowly. To be embarrassingly frank, singing over my Friday night table is, to me, like singing in the shower; it sounds much better in my ears then I am sure it does to anyone else. But I savor the words of the kiddush. אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְרָֽצָה בָֽנוּ - who has made us holy with his commandments and who desires us. In our Hebrew school, I feign anger when one of our kids tells me a מצוה is a good deed. “No,” I tell them for seemingly the hundredth time with a cry in my voice, “its a commandment!” Its our link to God and God desires us. This sentiment is never more palpable to me then in the kiddush.
כִּי בָֽנוּ בָחַֽרְתָּ וְאוֹתָֽנוּ קִדַּֽשְׁתָּ מִכָּל הָעַמִּים For us you have chosen, and us you have sanctified from among all the nations. How antithetical the notion of chosenness has become to so many! It offends our egalitarian sensibilities to no end. I, on the other hand, revel in it; and no more so then when I sing those words on Friday night. The rest of the world stands outside Judaism and when they look in, to the extent they even can, they see an עם קשה ערף, a stiff-necked people, praying to their angry, “Old Testament God.” But a Jew stands inside a covenant whose very purpose is to help her understand that outside world with a caring and compassion that will never be reciprocated. She knows that it paradoxically takes an עם קשה ערף to bring such compassion to a broken world. And she delights in being chosen to do so. I delight in being so chosen, and if I close my eyes when I sing those words, its because in those moments I truly feel how special and important it is to be Jewish.
In a prior iteration of this sermon, I wrote at length about the meal I served. My wife declared that description a wanton act of cruelty inflicted on a people who, throughout its long history and, certainly on this particular day, have suffered enough. Suffice it to say, then, that the meal I served that night was the same meal I serve at every Shabbat dinner. There’s a purpose in the sameness of it all. Like Shabbat itself, its dishes become something you depend on and which form deep and abiding associations in our souls. Shabbat is real because you know it: its look, its smell, its taste, its sounds, its character. But I will come back to this thought in a few moments.
Over dinner we talked as you only can talk among those closest to you; unguardedly and without fear of saying the wrong thing. To me, my kids are the most interesting dinner companions in the world. Part of that is because they are both incredibly smart and incredibly funny. But part of it is because they are the two people in this world on whom I have had the greatest influence, and yet who are entirely their own persons. As the parent of a young child, you tend to think of him or her as a tabula rasa - a blank slate which you fill with knowledge and wisdom and values. But in fact, each child has a distinct personality through which they filter everything you say. And not only do they listen to what you tell them, they watch how you act and they measure those actions against your words. Talking to your kids, then, is a wonderful way of ridding yourself of any illusions you might have as to your own virtue.
On this particular Shabbat evening, our conversation was about the internet: specifically about two books on that subject that Sarah had recommended to me and which confirmed my growing belief that the world wide web is a black hole, sucking the life force out of each and every one of us. I asked my girls and their boyfriends if they were afraid of it all. They answered a patient maturity that would make one wonder who was whose elder. “Of course the internet could be dangerous,” they told me, “but so were cars, subways and public spaces.” But it was also a part of their lives and they treated it with caution, but not fear. Their comments were enough to scuttle my plans for today’s sermon, but not enough to change my mind.
After we wrapped up the leftovers, stacked the plates in the dishwasher and wiped down the table, I reached into what I derisively refer to as “the Jew cabinet” and extracted a copy of the NCSY Bentsher, the little booklet which contains the blessings and table songs one might share over a Shabbat meal. One of my great prides as a parent is that when I opened the cabinet, both my daughters asked for their own copies of the bentsher. And now, with only the half drunk kiddush cup and the half burned down candles glowing on the table, with Terri falling asleep on the sofa and the two boyfriends off doing who-knows-what, my daughters and I sat down and sang. We sang
יוֹם זֶה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל אוֹרָה וְשִׂמְחָה, שַׁבָּת מְנוּחָה.
and
צוּר מִשֶּׁלּוֹ אָכַֽלְנוּ בָּרְכוּ אֱמוּנַי, שָׂבַֽעְנוּ וְהוֹתַֽרְנוּ כִּדְבַר יְיָ.
and
יָהּ רִבּוֹן עָלַם וְעָלְמַיָּא, אַנְתְּ הוּא מַלְכָּא מֶֽלֶךְ מַלְכַיָּא.
Each of those זמירות contains beautiful imagery about Shabbat and the many delights and rewards attached to its observance. But they are, after all, זמירות, songs, and their true beauty comes in being sung - heartily and joyfully. And that is just what we did until we were ready for ברכת.
ברכת המזון - known commonly and mistakenly as the “grace after the meals,” is something of a miracle. It is very long and most people who hear it feel sure they will never master it. But everyone who puts the effort in, does master it and does so remarkably quickly. Perhaps its the prayer’s upbeat style: הַזָּן אֶת הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּחֵן בְּחֶֽסֶד וּבְרַחֲמִים. Or perhaps its the staccato beauty of the words: כַּכָּתוּב, וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָֽעְתָּ, וּבֵרַכְתָּ אֶת יְיָ אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ. Or maybe its the delightful wordplay that is obvious to anyone - even those who don’t understand Hebrew: הוּא הֵטִיב, הוּא מֵטִיב, הוּא יֵיטִיב לָֽנוּ. הוּא גְמָלָֽנוּ, הוּא גוֹמְלֵֽנוּ, הוּא יִגְמְלֵֽנוּ לָעַד. Whatever its source, this extended piece of liturgy truly conveys the sense of blessing.
And for me, that night, it conveyed something else. There are two wonderful notions of Shabbat that our rabbis teach which, for me, came together that night. The first is that on Shabbat, we are granted a נשמה יתרה - an extra soul that descends upon us at kiddush and accompanies us through havdalah, doubling our joy on this greatest of days. And the second is that Shabbat gives us a taste of the world to come, that ill defined after-life promised to all whose virtues even slightly outweigh their vices. That evening, around my table, singing the ברכת with my kids, I had a taste of the world to come. It was a world in which my children sang ברכת at their own Shabbat tables with their own children. And I knew that the sense of שלום that they would feel in that moment – that sense of wholeness – was the same sense that I felt in this one. And I knew also that in their moment of שלום, my נשמה יתרה would be there with them.
We live in strange times. How strange? Consider this fact: In my lifetime, men have walked on the moon. But not in my children's. Now this might strike you as an odd quirk of history, but for me, it is deeply significant. When I look at my children's generation, I see that their lives are lived increasingly not in this world, but in a virtual one; in a place where all conceivable knowledge is free, but where wisdom and discernment are as rare as they have ever been. Its a world in which every keystroke they make can be, and for all we know might be, recorded somewhere, and where a single, ill-considered tweet can make them the subject of viscous ridicule, or worse.
At the same time, theirs is a world in which confidence and trust in our society's institutions has fallen precipitously. Trust in the government is at an all time low. The same is true for our economy. And institutions like the colleges and universities, for which many parents mortgage their homes so their children can attend, seem to have lost confidence in themselves, unwilling as they are to defend themselves against the growing anti-Semitism and assaults on free speech on their own campuses.
I look at the world my kids face and wonder: where is the optimism? Where the hope? Where the sense of the ideal?
In giving them Shabbat, I have given my children an ideal made real. The notion of Shabbat as a day of rest is just that - a notion. But my kids know what Shabbat looks like, what it sounds like, what it tastes and smells like, and what it feels like. Shabbat is no disembodied theological concept to them. It is as real to them as my נשמה יתרה is to me.
This is Judaism’s great power: the ability to project an ideal and then, through its prayers and its practices, make that ideal achievable in our lives. It gives a Shabbat dinner the capacity to transport us into the future, just as it gives a Passover Seder the capacity to transport us into the past. It turns a Torah reading into a reenactment of revelation, and a Megillah reading into a reenactment of redemption. Judaism can turn a week spent shivering in a hut into sense of abiding contentment. And it can transform a day’s worth of hunger and contrition into a sense of absolute purity.
Judaism is often said to be a religion of this world, and indeed it is. But it sees this world not with cynicism or fear, but with hope and courage. This is why I believe so strongly that we must rebuild this place. Our children deserve a heritage that fosters their ideals and charges them to do great and good things. And we need to nourish that נשמה יתרה within each of us whose presence fills us with the sense that our lives and our choices matter for they extend beyond ourselves. The challenge is before us. It brims with possibilities. It only remains for us to take it up, to claim it, to nourish it, and to sing its song. The yearning souls of our children, and the yearning souls within each of us, are watching to see what we will do.
No comments:
Post a Comment