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Rabbinic Reflection By Rabbi Michael Berk
God Still Loves Us
Shabbat Vayakhel,
February 29, 2008
Many of you probably remember the movie Fiddler on the Roof. One of the most poignant moments in that movie was when Tevye turns and asks Golde, “Do you love me?” Remember the look on her face? … Like she never thought of it before.
Some say that the very notion of romantic love is a modern idea. I don’t know why they say that; the Bible itself has erotic love poetry in it – just read Song of Songs. It was so “hot” that the rabbis imposed a fanciful interpretation on the book to get our minds off its eroticism and insist that it actually describes the love between the people of Israel and God.
Aside from getting our minds off carnal relations, the rabbis were making an important point. It was during the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine in the 1st century that their interpretation became popular and it couldn’t have come at a more auspicious time for the Jewish people – they probably never felt more unloved or abandoned by God than at that horrible time in Jewish history.
But the rabbis were not the first leaders of the Jews to face a depressed people who felt that God no longer cared for them. The first temple was destroyed in 586 BCE by the Babylonians. As the Jews marched into diaspora, they wept. The prophet Jeremiah told them not to cry, for God still loved them and he reassured them with the inspiring words, yesh tikvah l’acharitech – there is hope for your future.
The prophets faced a religious crisis that no other people in the ancient world ever survived: the destruction of the central shrine. In the polytheistic world of the time, people imagined that their wars had a parallel in the heavens. If you lost your war on earth, it was a reflection that your god “upstairs” had also been defeated. That meant there would be no reason to continue worshipping that god. You would begin absorbing the religion of the conquerors and eventually fade from human history. When’s the last time you met a Prizite?
The prophets had to overcome this view of the world and they taught the Israelites that their God was indeed the only God, and that those who defeated them in battle were merely “etzba Adonai” – the finger of God; they were God’s instrument, punishing Israel for their sins. But the prophets insisted, there will come a day when the Jewish people will repent and God will take them back in love and restore them to their homeland. That’s the hope in the future; God will always be ready to accept us back.
It is the strength of faith inspired by those prophets that sustained the Jewish people throughout the ages and enabled them to believe, despite their sufferings, that they were still God’s chosen people. The rabbis faced a similar spiritual crisis. The comfort they added to the prophet’s message made Judaism more intimate: personal salvation could be achieved by following the commandments as interpreted by the rabbis, and the reward would come in the next life; olam ha-ba, the world to come. The afterlife is mentioned hardly at all in the bible, but became a major tenet of rabbinic Judaism. The message was essentially the same as the prophets’: God still loves the Jewish people, even though the evidence you see in the world around you challenges that belief. But looks are deceiving.
Whether it is a melancholy spouse who wonders if she is loved, or the Jewish people turning to their leaders for reassurance of God’s love, the poignancy is the same: we all yearn to be loved and to know we are loved. Two weeks ago on this pulpit we had an interfaith dialogue between me and Monsignor Mikalanus on the subject of suffering. The following week I received an email asking important questions: Has God revoked the covenant with the Jewish people, and has God transferred the covenant to another? These are important questions and my interlocutor correctly added that they have to be addressed. Her questions remind me of Golde’s question to Tevye and the Israelites’ existential angst as they marched into exile.
This week’s Torah portion offers us another affirmation of God’s continued love of the Jewish people. The portion is hardly a candidate for anyone’s favorite. It consists largely of a listing of the materials that went into the constructing the tabernacle in the wilderness and the dimensions of each of its important accessories. Those of us who don’t have any conspicuous architectural skills or curiosity will probably find little of interest in the portion.
When the portion begins, Moses has just returned from Mt. Sinai, where he was summoned by God after breaking the tablets of the Law when he saw the Golden Calf and the debauchery of the Israelites partying around it. His face, now, after another forty days and nights in God’s presence, without food or drink, actually radiates – keren or panav – rays of light emanated from him – the origin of the famous depiction of Moses with horns due to a mistranslation of those words. At this point, Moses could have decided to spend the rest of his life bathing in the sublime bliss of the divine, veiled because of the brightness of his glow and aloof from the people that had betrayed him and caused him so much trouble and pain. Instead, he loses no time after coming down from the mountain, and communicates with his people. it’s obvious that there is something important he wants to tell the entire congregation, namely, the message regarding God’s presence in their midst, about which he had spoken to them earlier, before the tragic events of the Golden Calf, when he had related to them: “And they shall make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”
Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, the famous mystic commentator known as the Ramban, describes this moment as “the renewal of the youthful love affair between God and God’s people.” This becomes clear in the chapters of the Torah that follow, where we read of the glowing spirit of dedication and generosity which overtakes the people as they become involved in the building of the tabernacle, the dwelling place for God’s presence in their midst.
It is interesting to note that in this portion, before going into details about building the sanctuary, Moses tells the people again about the importance of the Sabbath. There are two sanctuaries, he is telling them; one in space and one in time. Enthusiasm for the building of the one should not make them forget about the other. A pause would be needed every week from the building to remind them of why they were building the sanctuary in the first place.
So, perhaps the love affair that was renewed and that caused Moses’ face to shine as it did and that gave the Israelites such enthusiasm for their labors was the assurance we all seek - to know that we are loved, or still loved. Moses was comforting his people with the promise that God would always love them and would forgive them. God would not abandon them; God would always be in their midst. The Sabbath would be an eternal sign of the continued covenant with the Jewish people.
We too can be assured of this message, of this ongoing love affair between God and the Jewish people. But it takes sacred time, like the time the Sabbath provides, to recognize this, to appreciate and be reminded of this. The cessation of all work on the Sabbath occurs to make sure that even in building the sanctuary, or whatever it is we are busy building, we do not lose our sense of direction, and that the building impetus does not overwhelm us. Shabbat is the momentary pause for listening to our inner voice, to reconnecting to our community, to reaffirm the great ideas and ideals of the Jewish people, to be reminded of the partnership we have with God and the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people.
In his sermon on Shabbat morning of the URJ biennial in December, Rabbi Eric Yoffie devoted a large part of his attention to an initiative to revitalize Shabbat in the Reform Movement. He mentioned a great Reform Rabbi, Arnold Jacob Wolf, who has taught us, Shabbat is not in heaven or beyond the sea. It is part of the divine agenda and a taste of eternity, but also wholly human and humane. Without Shabbat we may be lost; in its rediscovery, we may yet be found.
To that I would only add, in its rediscovery, may we find the love that is all around us; the love of our friends and family, and the abiding love of our God, who ever loves His people Israel.
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