Rabbi Ed's Reflections: Who Knows Two?

Rabbi Ed's Reflections: Who Knows Two?: "Toward the end of every Passover Seder we sing a song of numbers, ascending from one to thirteen. “Who knows one? I know one, on..."

Who Knows Two?

Toward the end of every Passover Seder we sing a song of numbers, ascending from one to thirteen.  “Who knows one?  I know one, one is our God in the heaven and on the earth.  Who knows two?  I know two, two are the tablets of the covenant, one is our God in heaven and on the earth.  Who knows three? Etc. etc.”

“Two are the tablets of the covenant.”  We just read about them in last week’s Torah portion, twice.  Why two tablets of the covenant?  Anyone who recalls Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I, knows the answer to that.  Moses couldn’t carry three tablets without breaking one.

Rashi, the 11^th century French sage, has a different answer.  He explains that one tablet included the laws of our relationship to God while the other contains the laws of our relationship to one another.  Both tablets are of equal significance and both should be fully observed.

Others suggest that the dual nature of the tablets reminds us of the two parts of the law, the written Torah and the oral law, later codified in the Mishnah and the Talmud and the endless stream of commentaries and elucidations ever since.

The tablets were given to Moses twice.  A careful reading of the two passages describing the tablets, one prior to the sin of the Golden Calf and the other after God forgives them, reveals that they were not identical sets.  Regarding the first set we read, “The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, inscribed upon the tablets.”  The second time around, Moses is told, “Carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered.”  The first set of tablets were entirely God’s work.  One cannot imagine a holier object, carved out by God and inscribed by the Almighty with the sacred words.  Yet they were smashed to pieces when Moses saw the people dancing around the Golden Calf.  One might say they were too holy for human beings to incorporate into their lives.  They were too heavy for us to bear.

One midrash attempts to explain how Moses at age 80 managed to shlep these two heavy stone tablets down the mountain.  According to the midrash, God helped him by holding on to the tops of the tablets.  It was only in the presence of the people’s sin that God let go and Moses had no choice but to let the tablets slip from his hands.

The second set, however, was a joint effort.  Moses carved the tablets and God did the calligraphy.  It is a perfect symbol for the Conservative concept of revelation as a joint effort by God and humankind.  It is up to us to work together with God to adapt the Divine law to the real world.  It is a struggle to live up to a divine standard, but human beings have been ready to argue and debate and discuss the law until it responded to human needs as well as the requirements of the Almighty.

British Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, brings in a mystical concept to explain why this second set of tablets was more enduring than the first.  The first he notes was an example of itaruta de’l’eylah, an awakening from above, a Divine initiative.  Such an act, he says, is “spectacular, supernatural, an event that bursts through the chains of causality that at other times bind the natural world.  An ‘awakening from below’ has no such grandeur.  It is a gesture that is human, all too human.”

Even so, he notes, the heavenly act may change nature, but it does not change human nature for no human effort has been expended.  It is overwhelming while it happens, but only while it lasts, we humans remain totally passive in its presence.  Itaruta d’letata, awakening from below, involves human participation, human initiative and thus leaves a permanent mark and is more enduring.

The sages tell us that both the second set of whole tablets and the fragments remaining from the shattered first set were ultimately placed in the holy ark within the ancient tabernacle.  Together they remind us of the miraculous appearance of God in our midst at the revelation at Sinai on one hand and, on the other, of the continuing need for us to be active participants in the revelation of Torah, thus the need for the oral Torah along with the written.  The oral Torah is the ongoing application of the teachings of God in our lives.

Who knows two?  I know two, two are the tablets of the covenant.  God is indeed One in the heaven and the earth, but to bring Torah to earth, you need two, God along with an earthly partner.  That’s were we come in, struggling to reassemble those broken tablets in a way that makes sense in our broken world.

Happy Anniversary to Janice and to Me Too

Today is my wife Janice’s and my wedding anniversary.  It has been several years now since we have managed to be in the same city together for this occasion.  She has been in the South since we drove down there before New Years’ Eve and will not be back up North again until the end of March when I’ll meet her in Dallas to drive back together.  She tries to get away from the cold weather each year (not always successfully) and I have to head back home to my work at the synagogue.  Meanwhile she can do her photography work equally well or often much better in the places she visits in the South.  (Feel free to check out her work at  http://www.jwfphotography.smugmug.com/.)

            Last year, for our 30^th wedding anniversary, I had great plans to get together with her to mark that milestone.  I was to fly down to Charleston, SC, meet her and together we would drive to Florida and vacation for a few days in St. Augustine, a place we’ve never been which she hoped to photograph.  Unfortunately, the Almighty had other plans (see my last blog post) and dumped an incredible amount of snow that weekend in the central region of the country, you may recall.  So even though the Manchester, NH, airport was open for business and the Charleston, SC, airport was also open, there was no place in between where I could fly and change planes to get to Charleston.  All the hubs from New York down to North Carolina and Atlanta were shut down.  By the time they reopened, it no longer made sense to fly down to Charleston since I would have needed to turn around and fly right back home again.

            We owe this inconvenient anniversary date of February 10 to my parents (of blessed memory) who urged us to schedule our wedding in Dallas at a time which was convenient for their vacation and business plans.  My Mom was a school teacher in Connecticut and had a school vacation in February and my Dad had a cheese and gourmet food store and had plans to go with my mother to the annual Fancy Food Show to be held in San Francisco that year during her school break and his quietest season in the store. They thought they could stop over for a few days in Dallas en route to the West Coast.  So we scheduled our wedding at their convenience, at the worst possible time of the year for planning any event in Dallas.  Naturally there was an ice storm that weekend.  (That didn’t keep most of the 400 invited guests from showing up on Sunday anyway.)  A year later, we celebrated our first anniversary with a large crowd of synagogue members once again.  It seems that it fell on the night of the synagogue’s annual Chevra Kadisha (burial society) dinner, a major annual event that we were expected to attend though it was hardly an occasion to celebrate.  A picture of the two of us from that night still sits on my desk in my office. (Boy, we were young then!)

            We have considered choosing another date for our anniversary arbitrarily that would be much more convenient.  After all, the Queen of England, though born in April, celebrates her birthday in June each year when the weather is presumably warmer.  There is a Talmudic precedent as well that we find in the Tractate of Rosh Hashanah.  We’re told that the first of Nisan is the New Year for Kings.  This meant that, for official documents which mention the monarch’s regnal year, the official anniversary date was Nisan 1 regardless of when he actually came to the throne.  So perhaps we should celebrate our anniversary in July or August when the weather is warmer and we are usually in the same place at the same time.

            I realized the other day that since this is our 31^st anniversary, that I have now been married to Janice for more than half of my life so far.  Surprisingly it does not seem strange that it has been this long, but rather almost unbelievable that I spent half of my life without her. It may be that after so many years together and sharing so many stories and so much family lore, viewing pictures and meeting family members our stories have merged into one long saga and her earlier years before we met have become part of my story and mine of hers.

            I won’t claim that we’ve had a storybook marriage, I don’t know that anyone does. But I truly feel that I have been blessed to have found her and to have shared so many years with her and, God willing, will continue to do so.  I also hope that she feels the same way about me, at least on occasion.

            So across the miles I send my love to my bride and wish her a happy anniversary, today or whenever we choose to celebrate it.

“He Sends Down Snow as White as Wool”

I’ve been called upon to deliver many invocations and benedictions over the years for a wide range of events and activities.  One of the most unusual occasions was the request some years back from the President of the synagogue I was then serving in Charleston, SC, to invoke Divine favor at the dedication of an ice skating rink he was opening.  I generally try to avoid what I call “the we’re here because we’re here” type of invocation that many clergy use in favor of sharing words of Torah relating to whatever occasion for which we have gathered.  So I sought out appropriate texts within the Jewish tradition to mark this auspicious occasion.

            Fortunately the center was to be called the “Carolina Ice Palace” which allowed me to quote the Psalmist in my opening: “Peace be within your walls and prosperity within your palaces.”  I went on to quote the Book of Job where we are told, “By the breath of God, ice is formed and the expanse of water becomes solid” and I moved from there to gratitude for the other things that the “breath of God” has done for us all, like inspiring creativity in the minds of humankind so they could devise the equipment necessary to open an ice arena for kids and hockey players to skate on a frozen surface even in the Southern heat.

            In recent weeks, the breath of God has been very busy here in New England and throughout much of the country forming ice and snow and dumping it in prodigious quantities on the inhabitants of these northern climes.  The Psalmist, who probably didn’t get to see a lot of snow over his lifetime, writes rapturously about this natural phenomenon, “God gives His command to the earth; swiftly God’s word issues forth.  God sends down snow as white as wool and scatters frost as thick as ashes.  God pelts the earth with a storm of ice.  Who can withstand God’s wintry blasts?  At God’s command the ice melts; the wind is stirred and the waters flow.”

            Personally, though I can appreciate the beauty of new fallen snow, enough is enough already!  I’m anxiously awaiting the arrival of Spring.

            Meantime, I came across a book on my shelves by an Israeli rabbi, Yishai Mazlomian, entitled Sefer HaNotein Sheleg: B’inyanei HaSheleg, HaBarad v’HaKerach b’Halacha, (The Book of ‘He Sends Down Snow’:  On matters of snow, hail, and ice in Jewish Law.)  In his introduction, the author says he was inspired by the heavy snows in Israel in the winter of 2000, to gather together the laws relating to snow in Jewish tradition.  The situation that year led him to seek out answers to various questions relating to snow particularly in regard to Sabbath observance.  He also decided, in order to make the book of interest even to those who might rarely get to see any snow on the ground, to add in related laws about hail and ice in general.

            Among the areas he considers are questions about fulfilling the requirement of ritual handwashing by sticking one’s hands into snow three times in succession. What blessing should one say if one eats snow and does it require an after-blessing?  He asks whether one may handle snow on Shabbat and whether snow falling on one’s clothing is considered a burden which one should not carry on Shabbat.  Is snowball making prohibited or permitted on the Sabbath?  Can one use snow or ice to surround a bottle to cool it off on Shabbat?  Is it permitted to arrange for snow removal on Shabbat by non-Jews and if so may they use machinery to do so or only snow shovels?  How should one remove ice from an icetray on the Sabbath,?  Is it okay to urinate in the snow on Shabbat even though it changes the color of the snow? Inquiring minds want to know these things and many more.

            The point Mazlomian makes in his introduction and through the book and the point I’m making as well is that whatever one finds in this world, even snow and ice, provides us with opportunities to engage with the Almighty and to fulfill God’s will in some way.

            My colleague and educational director, Rabbi Margaret Frisch Klein, in a recent snow cancellation notice sent out by email to our religious school parents, suggested that the children spend a few moments of their free time to reflect on the new fallen snow and perhaps come up with an appropriate blessing to respond to this phenomenon.  Of course, after I saw this email, I pointed out to Margaret that I have a book on snow and Jewish law. (She was not surprised.) I told her that, no doubt, Rabbi Mazlomian has dealt with the question of a blessing for snow.

Sure enough, on page 194, he addresses a question to his rebbe, Rabbi Chayim Kanievski:  Why did they (the Sages) not establish a blessing for seeing snow or a blessing of praise for snow, just as they established  blessings for lightning and thunder, rainbows, and others such events?  Rabbi Kanievski apparently has no poetry in his soul, for he answers tersely:  “Because it is nothing but frozen water.”  Of course, earlier in the book, Rabbi Mazlomian notes that if one eats snow, there is a required blessing beforehand, the same as for water, “shehakol nihyeh bidvaro” “who created everything by His word.”  But the appearance of snow on the ground is apparently not sufficiently exciting to call forth a blessing in itself.  I still would encourage our children to try to come up with religious expressions regarding this natural phenomenon even if it does not call for a formal bracha (blessing).

            For most of us here in New England, particularly for those who are not into winter sports, the record-breaking snow this winter is more than overkill at this point and brings forth more cursing than blessing from many folks.  It has become a nuisance which interrupts our schedules and ruins our plans and forces us to re-schedule and rework our lives around it.  We need to remove it from our driveways and sidewalks to be able to get out of our homes and on with our business.  It is an annoyance for many and its beauty has faded in our opinion as it now towers over our homes and places of business and we search for more room to pile it up off the pavement.

            Perhaps, in spite of our annoyance though, it may be good for us to stop and take a good look at the beauty of the snow and to recognize this gift from God that has come not merely as frozen water for the soil, but as a reminder from on high, forcing us to take time off from our too busy lives and to realize that our plans are truly secondary to those of a Higher Power.  No matter what we have planned here on earth, we must acknowledge that it can wait while we take a snowday.  Like other meteorological phenomena there is little we can do about the snow but receive it with good grace and perhaps offer this prayer:

            May it be Your will O Lord to transform your gift of snow in our minds from burden to blessing.  As it brings moisture to the winter soil, so may it refresh our lives with unexpected opportunities to read and to study, to play and to exercise, to relax with our families, and to acknowledge Your sovereignty over the world that You have created. Amen.