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Rabbinic Reflection By Rabbi Michael Berk
How Temple Involvement Improves Your Vision
February 2008
I hope you don’t tire of me telling you how much I am enjoying my return to the congregational rabbinate and especially becoming involved with this sacred community – Congregation Beth Israel. There are many reasons for this joy, but one reason is how I’ve been reminded about the way in which involvement in Temple life improves one’s “vision.” I put the word vision in quotation marks because I’m not talking about physical vision. I’m speaking about a different kind of vision.
We are in a kind of countdown towards Passover, the great and original Festival of Freedom. One of the last steps in securing the freedom of the Israelites was the plague of darkness which enveloped Egypt. A ten-year-old yeshivah student was studying the plagues for the first time and was puzzled about the plague of darkness. “What kind of plague was that? After all, they could have lit their lamps and been able to see despite the darkness. Isn’t that what they did every night when it got dark?” His rabbi answered: “The darkness from which the Egyptians suffered was a special kind of darkness… it was a darkness that afflicted the heart. They could physically see, but they didn’t feel for each other. Each person saw only himself; and that is a terrible plague.”
Judaism is a great antidote to narcissism, because it expects us to “see” each person on this earth as a human being, created in God’s image with needs, feelings, fears, hungers, hopes – a human being who is like us, who is a child of God just as we are, who is fully entitled to be treated with the dignity, justice and compassion we expect for ourselves. I think this might be the most important message Judaism has ever taught. It is the entire basis of our religion. The most revolutionary idea Judaism introduced to the world is the idea of betzelem elohim – humanity created in the image of God. That’s why the Torah says you cannot kill a slave — he’s also created in God’s image. That is why the Saadia Gaon could make the stunning statement: “One who slaps a human being slaps the face of God.” God is not just a force of nature; God is not just a Creator; God is a God of history, the God of possibilities. Before Judaism no one ever imagined slaves could be free.
Sacred communities remind us to keep our vision sharp – to be like Moses who, though raised in a privileged household, was able to see the pain of other human beings. He was not blinded by the plague of darkness: he saw and he cared and he acted.
That is why the social justice and acts of loving kindness we do in our congregation are so important. It explains why we collect food for the hungry, build homes for the homeless, collect books for the needy, support Israel and work to save Darfur, visit the sick, arrange rides, reach out to others in our community and more. We do this work because we must, if we wish to rightfully consider ourselves a Jewish congregation.
I hope your affiliation with our sacred community improves your “vision” and helps you see where you are needed in this world. Everything depends on our ability to “see” one another - to be truly caring for each other and for those with whom we share this planet. The Torah tells us that during the plague of darkness in Egypt, “all the people Israel had light in all their dwellings.” This is one of the primary reasons for CBI to exist – to help each of us see and care. Only when we see others, when we see the divine in everyone around us, only when we see that we are, in fact, all God’s children, only then can we preserve and promote the humanity within ourselves.
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