Sometimes the brain freezes and all one can do is say oh no. Stay with me now, for a moment:
Our parashat hashavua is an amazing snapshot of many different human emotions and actions. People complain, people gossip, people go about their lives; and all while living through the profound impact on their lives of escaping slavery, and now setting out for a new home.
As I’ve heard it is said in Buddhism, “after nirvana, the laundry”. In Jewish terms we might put it this way: yes, there was a Sinai moment, but we don’t live our lives at the peaks of mountains, but rather, most of the time, down in the valleys. That’s where the best grazing land is for the sheep, and it’s where one finds water, and navigable passes. One must focus on the day to day, and it takes up most of one’s attention. Then one begins to measure one’s life by the everyday moments, rather than the vision one once remembers having on a mountaintop.
That’s what Shabbat is for, every week; to remind us that there are mountaintops. There are moments. They remind us of many things. As we absorb the shock of today’s news from the Middle East, watching helplessly from a great distance as Israel enters into a state of war with Iran, it is, initially, difficult for the individual Jewish mind to focus upon anything.
That’s the human brain. It has three responses to a shock: flight, fight, or freeze. Especially from our distance, where flight or fight is not particularly applicable, we may join in a moment of freezing: of holding our collective breath. Oh no. And then, as Jews, our next move, once we have a shred of a grasp of our wits about us again, might be to turn to Torah, that Tree of Life, grab it with both hands and shake it, hard. What? what is there to think, to feel, to say?
At the first moment of shock, where we hardly feel we have the breath to react, there is not much to be said. Coincidentally, it is in this week’s parashah that we find Moshe in exactly that same emotional place, when his beloved big sister Miriam is stricken with a terrible leprosy. Helpless and horrified, he gasps the shortest prayer in our tradition: אל נע רפא נע לה – El na’ r’fa na’ lah, “O please G*d please heal her!”
Having begun to react, the mind is now able to begin to focus. Keep shaking that tree and see what falls out: Moshe, threatened with war on all sides as he leads our ancestors through inhabited territory in parashat Devarim. Moshe tries everything to maintain peace, because, simply and unequivocally, war is bad. In another place, in parashat Mishpatim, we learn that if you see the ass of your enemy fallen under its load you must stop and help him raise it. Not just your friend; your enemy. In thirty-six more places (some say thirty-nine) we are told to care for the stranger, and empathize with the stranger, since we know what it is to be a stranger.
In all this rain of Torah learning falling like ripe apples all around us, we can catch a glimpse of the truth that the great Rabbi Louis Jacobs ז”ל asserted: the meta-ethic of the Torah is to treat others as you wish to be treated yourself. After the repeated shocks that every news day brings, after the frozen sense of what now, we Jews are lucky to have a framework of meaning come into focus for us.
The prophet Micah put it simply and profoundly: עֲשׂ֤וֹת מִשְׁפָּט֙ וְאַ֣הֲבַת חֶ֔סֶד וְהַצְנֵ֥עַ לֶ֖כֶת עִם־אֱלֹ-ךָ – do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your G*d. (Micah 6.8)
You are not on this planet to represent all Jews, nor the Jewish state. You are not alive in order to torture yourself with all you are not able to influence. You are only here to walk in humility, aware of both your capacities and your limitations. Keep on doing the justice that comes to your hands to do; feed the fire on the altar of your heart to be strong in mercy for all human beings (including yourself). That is our daily flight. And let Shabbat be our weekly flight, in a healthy, necessary way: no news (it will be there when you return), just human interaction.
May we join with all people of all places who seek peace and pursue it, in Israel, in Palestine, in the U.S., and in this entire gift of our world.
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 