Rabbi Wolpe - ADL Impressions

Purim is a holiday of masks. A mask doesn’t fully change you, but it obscures identity, distorting who you are. The boy who dresses as Mordechai can act old and wise, but everyone recognizes him as a boy playing a role; the girl who dresses as Esther can play at being bold, heroic, and a queen, but everyone knows she is still a little girl.

There are many reasons why Purim is associated with masks, but surely a deep meaning is that it is a diaspora holiday. Purim takes place in ancient Shoushan, Persia. The plot revolves around Haman, who hates the Jews. The reason given is that Mordechai, a Jew, will not bow down to him, but the story implies that Haman’s rage is what we have come to know as classic anti-Semitism — a hatred in search of a rationale.

In the diaspora, Jews were forced to wear masks all of the time. In Muslim lands, we were dhimmi, second class citizens subject to a vast range of indignities and periodic persecutions. Since we were powerless to change it, we wore the mask of acceptance and accommodation. In Christian Europe, Jews were regularly exiled, oppressed, targeted for conversion, and sometimes killed. But in country after country, we donned the mask of the willing subject, because rebellion only made it worse. The few who did not wear a mask, the Mordechais who did not bow down, paid a terrible price.

Even in the United States, for a long time, Jews were afraid. During World War II, many Jewish leaders were reluctant to challenge the government’s indifference to the massacres in Europe for fear of stoking anti-Semitism here at home.

With the founding of the State of Israel, Jews finally took their masks off. This is who we are, we declared to the world, a free people who can practice our own tradition. Part of the rise of anti-Semitism today is the resentment of those who are angry at unmasked Jews. But we have worn masks long enough. This Purim, we will put on temporary, celebratory masks, but as the holiday ends, we will take them off — because the Jewish people need never wear masks again.

At the very end of the book of Exodus, we read that a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night led the Israelites “in all their encampments.” The word for “encampments” is Masa, which refers to travel as well. Rashi, the great medieval commentator, says that an encampment is also a journey. In that profound observation, we learn something about Jewish history and about life.

Jewish history demonstrates that every stop along the way before the land of Israel is temporary. Since the destruction of the Temple and the exile thousands of years ago, Jews have prayed for rain according to the season in Israel, not in the lands of their residence. We would ourselves toward Jerusalem in prayer and dream of the return to Zion. Rashi, in France in the 11th century, understood that the Jewish encampment was one step along the journey, whose culmination would be a return to the land.

The second message is that we stop in order to renew our efforts, not to cease from striving. This past week at the #NeverisNow conference, we saw people gather in one place to talk about the work of the ADL in combatting hate and building bridges. But the conference was not an end in itself. It was an encampment, a stop on the journey. From the meetings and discussions, people gathered hizzuk, encouragement and strength, in order to renew the efforts to combat hate in our world. We all left stronger, more resolute, and more able to face the challenges ahead.

In Pekuday, we see that the Israelites need to pause in their journey across the wilderness to gather their strength. But they know they are heading somewhere; that each rest is also a renewal for the path ahead. Along with the ancient Israelites, we too travel in the wilderness. For us as well, our tradition and our vision serve as a fire by night that allow us to see the way forward. So together, as pilgrims of the soul have always done, we journey toward a better world in which antisemitism and other forms of hate will be a memory, and in Israel and around the world humanity will live in peace.

In our parasha for the very first time, Moses calls the people together. He does not do so in the face of Amalek or another enemy. War is not Moses’s method of unity. Rather, he calls upon all of Israel and starts to tell them of Shabbat and of donating to the Tabernacle.

The ideal of gathering in Judaism is to do it for joy – to celebrate, to worship, or simply to feel the glow of another’s presence. But over the centuries Jews have also gathered for solidarity. In an often hostile world, rather than dissipating and leaving one another alone, we have found strength in coming together both with other Jews and friends of goodwill who stand beside us.

This week at ADL’s major conference, “Never is Now,” we saw thousands of hopeful, resolute, and passionate Jews and non-Jews join one another in New York to insist on the vitality of our tradition and the resolution to fight hate.

Here we bring together speakers from across the range of cultural and political trends in the U.S. We open ourselves to listen and to engage. We are here to sharpen our skills in the unending practice of confronting antisemitism and other forms of hate that plague our society. By being present we pledge to be both witnesses and catalysts for change.

In Vayakhel, the Israelites build the tabernacle. The Torah highlights Bezalel, the artist whose skill was essential to the sacred task. It reminds us that creativity, artistry and care must be taken in the great tasks of life. The way we design our discussions with one another should be a product of creativity as well as kindness.

As Vayakhel reminds us, we have gathered since ancient times – conferences are nothing new on the Jewish calendar! All of us need to feel our community, our closeness, our common cause – to move forward together. It was not easy in the time of Moses and it has not grown easier in our own day. But we are still responsible for one another and we still have to hold hands on our way through the wilderness.

Coming down from Sinai with the carved tablets from God, we can understand Moses’s anguish at witnessing the Israelites worship the golden calf. Still, it is hard to understand why Moses then takes the tablets and smashes them on the ground.

One explanation among many offered is that it was pure rage. Once he saw the Israelites dancing about an idol, Moses could no longer contain himself.

But this seems inadequate. Would Moses really allow anger alone to lead him to destroy the work of God, the most valuable single item in the history of the world? Was he that incapable of self-control? Better to have marched back up the mountain to deposit the tablets somewhere safe.

Arnold Ehrlich, author of Mikra Kipshuto, has a provocative and interesting answer. He notes that the Rabbis relate that God said to Moses: “Yishar kohacha (i.e. good for you!) that you broke them!” (Shabbat 87a). God apparently approved of Moses’s action. This signals that more than anger was at stake.

Ehrlich believes that Moses saw the calf and thought: If the Israelites worship this calf, which they created with their own hands, what will they do when they see the tablets carved by God? Surely, they will turn these tablets, which are so much more precious than the calf, into an idol! If I don’t destroy the tablets, they will commit the ultimate desecration.

By smashing the tablets, Moses was making a declaration to all of Israel: Even the handiwork of God, which you might think of as inviolable, is nonetheless just another material object. It is not a God – it is a physical artifact. I am destroying it to return you to the greater truth, which is that you were not delivered from Egypt by a thing, but by an intangible, unfathomable God, no more embodied in the tablets than in the calf.

We live in a world that venerates the accumulation of things. Idolatry is a persistent temptation – to worship at the shrine of stuff. Moses is reminding us that the ultimate reality, the greatest reality, is not material. Even in God’s world that which we most value – goodness, justice, love – are intangibles. We feel them, we enact them, but they are not material. Like the tablets of the covenant, long after the item has crumbled to dust, the meaning, and the Creator, endure.

Prophets are dramatic. Everyone loves a prophet (so long as the prophet is not angry at them.) The prophetic voice is rich with indignation, laced with scorn and elevated by righteousness.

By contrast, no one loves a bureaucrat. The person who files papers, insists on the correct manner of filling out forms, the one who draws lines and limits – it seems to bespeak a timidity of soul. Prophets are lone figures thundering from mountaintops. Bureaucrats are paper pushers who write bullet-pointed emails from the office.

Of course this is a caricature. This week, however, we turn in the Torah from the world of Moses to the world of Aaron, from the prophet to the Priest. And the Priest may be said to be, with some exaggeration, a kind of sacred bureaucrat. The Priest was there to follow procedures, to do things correctly, to maintain the institution of the tabernacle and the Temple.

In our world we see that institutions are not valued as they once were. From the courts to the universities to the halls of congress, people distrust the institutions that for so long stood as pillars of American life. For Jews, the synagogue was the central institution of Jewish life, but that too has come under pressure in an anti-institutional age.

Yet the Torah reminds us that institutions are critical to the health and survival of a community. They take time and care to build and are all to easy to destroy. Everything from the clothing of the Priest to the exact procedures matter; they are not trivial details but essential accoutrements of a properly functioning system.

We don’t note often enough that sacred work happens in synagogue committees. Over the coffee and stale bagels, congregants and lay leaders in all sorts of organizations are doing something holy, but the day to day arrangements are essential to seed the ground for spiritual growth. In a beautiful parable, our sages speak of two men carrying large stones. An observer asks them what they are doing. “I’m carrying a heavy stone,” says the first. The second answers, “I’m building the Temple of Solomon.”

Earlier, I commented glibly about no one loving a bureaucrat. Yet Aaron was dearly loved by the people, and not only because he was a pursuer of peace. I believe Israel understood that institutions are essential and those who care for them are shepherds of our welfare.

A rabbi once told me of teaching young children about the Jewish idea of God. He told them that God was everywhere. One boy reached out his hands, clapped them together and said, “Got Him!”

We are spatially oriented creatures. Although love, justice, mathematics, and other accompaniments of life exist apart from physicality, God remains difficult to separate in our thoughts from notions of place. The rabbis explain that God is indeed called makom (place) because God is the place of the world, although the world is not God’s place. In other words, God encompasses this world but is also greater than it. Yet in our thoughts, we locate God spatially, imagining God dwelling in the heavens or being more present in synagogues than in sewers.

Terumah, with its detailed creation of the mishkan, the tabernacle, reminds us that human beings need sacred space. “Make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them (Exodus 25:8).” God dwells not in the sanctuary but among the people. You will feel God’s presence if there is a space to do so.

We realize, at least intellectually, that God is not in fact ‘more present’ inside the sanctuary than out on the street. The building of the mishkan did not entice the divine presence to dwell where it would otherwise be absent. Rather, the human demonstration of devotion evokes God’s spirit. God’s presence awaits our willingness. God is, as the Kotzker Rebbe famously said, wherever we let God in.

With all its specifications, the mishkan is intended to produce an effect on human beings, not on God. There is a beautiful story told of the great Seer of Lublin when he was a boy. He used to visit the forest and when his father asked him why, the boy explained, “I go there to find God.” When his father smiled and said, “But my child, don’t you know that God is the same everywhere?” the future hassidic master answered, “God is, but I’m not.”

The building of the mishkan did not change God, but it changed Israel. It taught us to both seek out and create spaces where we can feel God’s presence. God may be the same everywhere, but we are not.

The Torah reads, “Six days shall you do your work, but on the seventh day you shall cease from labor” (Ex 23:12). But last week, we read, “Remember the seventh day and keep it holy. Six days shall you labor and do all your work…” (Ex 20:8-9).

Why is the Sabbath mentioned first in one and last in another verse? The Izbitzer Rebbe, the Mei Hashiloah interprets this difference referring to the Gemara that asks: What happens if one is in the desert and has lost track of time and does not know when to observe Shabbat? (Shabbat 69b): One Rabbi says to count six days from the day one loses track of time. Another says observe Shabbat first and then the following six days. What is the difference?

For some people, says the Mei Hashiloah, it is required that you do the work before you can get to Shabbat. First, the six days: In other words, you must cultivate good habits before you can consummate the week with holiness.

But, he says, there are times when you have a sudden, remarkable moment, when “Shabbat comes first,” and one can do something sacred and powerful without preparation.

The great violinist Isaac Stern was once approached by a fan after a concert who said, “Mr. Stern, I would do anything to play like you.”

“Really?” answered the virtuoso. “Would you practice 10 hours a day for 20 years? Because that’s what I did.”

That is usually the way – constant, intense effort. But there are blessed moments: Esther risks her life and saves the Jewish people. An obscure shepherd named David is anointed King. The Talmud teaches that some earn eternal life through many years of effort and others in an instant (Avoda Zara 18a).

Last week, we read about the ineffable moment of Sinai. This week, Mishpatim, is about the daily rules, the effort, the rungs on the ladder to a good life. Much accomplishment is due to daily effort, but we also cherish instants of inspiration when the apple falls, the penny drops, and our vision shifts. If we are blessed, we will merit both.

Psychologically, we are predisposed to pay close attention to beginnings and endings.

Origin stories are seen as the keys to people’s lives. And psychological research has often shown that how something ends – whether an ordeal or a joyous occasion – has a greater impact than other features of the experience.

What begins and concludes the most significant event in the history of Israel?

God begins the Ten Commandments with “Anochi,” “I am.” There is a discussion among the commentators as to whether this constitutes a declaration or a commandment. Abarbanel, the great Spanish sage, declares that it is a preamble, making clear to the Israelites who was speaking to them. Rambam, however, insists that it is a commandment, a mitzvah, the mitzvah of belief in one God.

The Israelites had seen God’s wonders enacted in Egypt, but they had not “met” God. Now, the voice comes from the sky and creates the frame for everything that will follow. The “I” of God is the opening of the Ten Commandments.

How does the revelation conclude? The last commandment concerns coveting. The final words are “that belong to your neighbor.” Therefore, the first word is “I am,” and the final word is “neighbor.”

The motion from God to neighbor is the movement from the greatest generality to the most particular specific – like a movie shot that opens far above the earth and lands in someone’s kitchen. We thought we were dwelling in the empyrean only to find ourselves at the dinner table.

These laws are woven into the fabric of the universe. They are the will of the Creator, not the arbitrary decision of a jurist or the law of social cohesion. You can violate them, but you cannot change them.

Socially, observed standards do change, sometimes radically, in the course of history. We abhor things today – slavery, child labor – that were once considered normative. Some therefore conclude, mistakenly, that there is no standard. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” as Hamlet forlornly declares. The revelation at Sinai makes clear: there is a right and a wrong.

How we treat each other matters, and not only to one another, but also to the One who created us, for we are all children of God.

There is an old joke about a rich man who dies and stands before God. God asks, “I made you so wealthy, why did you give nothing to charity?” The man answers, “I will, I have many assets on earth, just let me give now!” The response from God thunders, “Up here, we only accept receipts.”

It is axiomatic that you cannot take anything with you when you die. But the reverse is not true – you can take the dead with you when you are alive. This finds both literal and metaphorical expression in this week’s Torah portion when Moses locates and carries the bones of Joseph with him as the Israelites leave Egypt. The verse says Moses took the bones “with him” and the Kli Yakar comments that Joseph stayed with him, for while gold and silver passes away, the merit of this act endures.

Centuries before, at the end of Genesis, Joseph entreats his brothers to swear that when God remembers them to bring them to the Promised Land, “You shall carry my bones from here” (Gen. 50:25). In Ex. 13:19, we read that Joseph “exacted an oath,” which in Hebrew is two words, hashbe’a hishbia. What does the doubling mean? Joseph knew that his brothers would not live to see the redemption. He was exacting an intergenerational promise: throughout the servitude and oppression of Egypt, the Israelites would remember that the bones of Joseph waited for liberation as well.

We are all born into networks of responsibility. We feel the tug of family, community, country. When Judaism enjoins us to teach our children, it reminds us that to be Jewish is both a command and an honor, and part of it is to ensure that the next generation remembers the sacrifices and celebrations of those who came before. The simultaneity of Jewish life means we live in the past and the present at once. We stood at Sinai and we stand here.

All of us carry a great deal through life – memories, aspirations, relationships, burdens, natural gifts. Some focus on carrying material possessions. To carry the bones of Joseph is the Torah’s way of telling us that Moses bore the past of our people with him as they began the journey to Israel.

What do you carry?

There is an obvious question about the plague of darkness that arises with no other plague – why didn’t the Egyptians just stop it?

When locusts are swarming in the sky, or hail is pelting the ground, human beings are helpless. You cannot trap every frog that infests the land. But we all know how to counter darkness – light a candle.

A deep answer comes from a famed Sephardi commentator and kabbalist. The Or Hahayim says the darkness was not in the atmosphere; it was in the Egyptians. The Egyptians could not truly see those who were not like themselves.

In 1915, the philosopher William James wrote an essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” The essay concerns “the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.”

The Rabbis comment that the blindness was the “thickness of a gold dinar” – that is, a gold coin. (The Torah Temima says this was like a cataract over the eyes of the Egyptians, keeping faith with the idea of darkness being an attribute of the Egyptians, not the atmosphere.)

This reminds us how easily wealth can blind us to the plight of another. Several years ago, I wrote about this phenomenon: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wolpe-wealth-compassion-deficit-20130908-story.html : In studies, people in big cars are more likely to ignore pedestrians, and the wealthy give a smaller percentage of their money to the poor than those with far less.

This is not because rich people are bad, since you can create this bias artificially with monopoly money in a board game. Rather, wealth insulates people from need and from dependence. The fortunate must battle against the tendency to allow the gold dinar to blot out the suffering of others. That is part of the mitzvah of tzedakah.

Wealth is not the only cause of indifference, of course. One’s own narcissism can prevent us from seeing the other. The Mishna fixes the time for morning prayer “when one recognizes the face of a friend.” We turn to God through acknowledging another human being.

The plague of darkness dramatized the extent to which people could not see each other – not because they were strangers, but because each one could not overcome self-absorption.

This is the darkness we fight. This is the light we must bring to the world each day.