"Are your eyes closed to revelation?" — Shavuot Sermon by Rabbi Steven Philp

Today’s episode of Shabbat Replay is from our Virtual Shabbat service on Friday, May 19th when Rabbi Steven delivered a pre Shavuot sermon.

Celebrate Shavuot and Rabbi Deena’s last service this Friday, May 26th. Join us in Northcenter Town Square at 6:30 pm or come early at 5:30 pm for a Pizza Picnic complete with an ice cream truck and games!

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/events/2023-05-26/

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

So this Shabbat, we start reading from the book of Bamidbar, that book of Numbers and it opens one month after the construction of the Mishkan. This portable sanctuary and community center that the Israelites have built when God's presence comes to dwell among them. And it also starts several weeks before the Israelites will depart from the foot of Mount Sinai to journey toward the promised land. And so as they prepare to set out, God asks for a census to be taken first by designating a representative from each tribe, then by counting every male in that tribe old enough to bear arms. And in doing so, both the size of each tribe and who belongs each tribe is established. And both number and the lineage are key for the Israelites next task, which is to organize their camp. So they can dismantle and rebuild it in a somewhat orderly fashion, along their journey toward the land of Israel. And in the very middle, as this plan is given, in the very middle is the Mishkan. And then immediately surrounding it are the Levites, who are responsible for the care and the maintenance of the sacred center of the camp, as well as the families of Moses and Aaron, the two leaders of the Israelites to this moment, to the east, or the tribes of Judah, and it's a car and saloon to the south ravine, Shimon and God to the west, Ephraim Manasseh, che and Binyamin and to the north Dawn, Asha enough Talia and each tribe, there under their banner, each tribe with their particular place and purpose, their particular way of doing things, their sense of identity, their sense of kinship, in their corner of the camp. And so like most Israelites, I imagine that many of us live in a corner of the proverbial camp with people who look like us and think like us, who speak like us who act like us who eat like us who love like us who pray like us who vote like us. And while most of us know that what we see around us is only part of the bigger picture. We are rarely confronted in real time with this fact. So some of you might have read either on our social media or latest newsletter that Rabbi Lizzi and I were invited to attend an interfaith breakfast celebrating the inauguration of Chicago's new mayor Brad and Johnson. And I knew I knew that I would be one of only a few Jews in the room. And I knew that I'd only be one of a few queer people in the room. And I knew that most likely I was going to be one of maybe like, two queer Jews in the room. But walking into that space, and seeing all of the faces that were there probably 200 300 people in that space, mostly black and mostly Christian and mostly straight. I was really startled by how different my corner of Chicago is from other corners of the same city. So of course, immediately following this event, I went on Wikipedia. And even though I see mostly white and mostly queer, and mostly Jewish faces, where I live and where I work, did you know that Chicago is only 31%? White 31% of our city is a plurality, which is becoming increasingly common in kind of major urban centers in the United States, we're plurality where 30% and 29% of folks who live here identify as Latinx or black respectively, so it's basically 3030 30. And while we as Jews and the city of Chicago are the second largest religious group, the 261,000 of us who live within the borders of the city, only represent 3% of the population. Whereas Christians account for 70% of the population in Chicago pretty much evenly split between Catholicism and Protestantism. And I was really surprised, because I mean, I'm a rabbi, so I get it. I know I mostly exist in Jewish spaces, but I mostly exist in Jewish space. I know a lot of Jews. I'm surrounded by a lot of Jewish people, I'm sorry, but a lot of queer people and a lot of white people. And this is not in any way shape, or form, majorities in any sense of the word in the city. So at his inauguration, a few days after this interfaith breakfast, Johnson carefully chose speakers that represented this incredible diversity, this plurality, and yes, the Jewish community was present in a really beautiful blessing offered by Rabbi Shoshana at Temple Sholom just down the street. But we were one just one of many voices on stage black and Latin X and Asian and indigenous American. And our city is experiencing a shift right now. corners of our encampment, if you will, that were once relegated to the margins are claiming their place in the center. Different banners are being raised than the ones that were raised before perhaps some we have never seen before because of a history of disinvestment or disenfranchisement. And this can be really startling, because the narrative that we know, the story told in our corner by people similar to us, is being challenged what we thought was true about our city. And I think more broadly, the world, its successes and its failures, and its growing edges is being transformed, if not changed entirely, as more voices join the conversation. And on one hand, this is a very good thing. And on the other hand, this can be incredibly hard, incredibly hard. Because it also challenges our sense of person, our sense of place and our sense of purpose, it is, in a way, a moment of revelation. So this coming Thursday, as the sunsets we begin the holiday of Chef Whoa, on this day, we celebrate Revelation, the revelation that the Israelites experience at the foot of Mount Sinai, a moment that also challenged and transformed their sense of person, and place and purpose, turning them into a community whose identity and values have endured across millennia, to this very moment, to people who are tuning in right now. The Torah is clear that every single person standing at that mountain, experienced this transformative moment, every single person, regardless of their background, their gender, their ability, their age. And in this way, Revelation was the great equalizer, but not equal in the sense that each Israelite saw and heard the same thing the rabbi's teach that each person experienced revelation in a way that was particular to who they were, separately, every Israelite could only tell part of the story. Only together, could they offer a complete narrative. The lesson that I believe is embedded in this particular telling is the need to listen to, and learn from one another. This can be challenging, because sometimes we are very attached to the narrow view that we experienced. We know it, it's comfortable, it's ours. It's our memory of that moment. It's what we saw from our vantage point. It's so familiar to us. But it is also only part of the story. To understand something bigger than ourselves, we need to reach outside of ourselves. Shavuos the holidays. Chavo asks us to embody a posture of humility, to understand that we don't know everything. And that's okay. This is why we exist in community to share our unique pieces of a puzzle to make a more complete picture. So one of the practices of cheveux is to stay up all night learning, then you can actually do just that if you join us at on Shabbat synagogue on Thursday. We do this to make up for the fact as the story goes, that on the day, we were supposed to experience revelation at Mount Sinai we slept in. And one of might reasonably surmise that the Israelites were tired. I mean, we had just escaped slavery after all right? The entire Passover story has just happened to them with the plagues and the splitting of the sea and the being chased by soldiers, right? No wonder they slept in. But I also wonder if they slept in because they were also scared, or unsure, or a little avoidant of what was about to happen. how much easier it was to sleep, and have their entire world reshaped as a particular people in a particular place with a particular purpose via their particular relationship with God. How often in the face of being shown a new way of seeing, do adults say? No, I'm seeing adults here because I feel like the kind of beginner's mind to the child is very open to experiencing new things. But how often in the face of being shown a new way of seeing things? Do adults say no. I'm going to look the other way. I'm going to close my eyes to different reality. And I get it. I get it's not entirely our fault. Social media and the bias of our news sources and how search algorithms bring us to certain pages and not others help us subconsciously create echo chambers that affirm our narrative of the world. We live in corners of this global encampment that confirm constantly confirm what we believe to be true as true. And I know that we all know that this is the case I believe that most people are aware of the fact that we mostly live in echo chambers of our own creation, with the aid of social media and undue sources and our neighbors and wherever they live, etc. And shove loads specifically, is a moment of breaching the wall of those echo chambers of wandering outside our corner of the encampment to remind us that we don't have the whole picture. And this is not an easy task at all. We like being in our comfort zone, I like being in my comfort zone, and it's okay to be there sometimes, right, you shouldn't always be in a place of discomfort. But rarely is our comfort zone, a place where we learn. Mount Sinai was in the wilderness far away from everything familiar and comfortable to the Israelites. Revelation was not found in the backyards of our ancestors homes in Egypt, to step into a new understanding of themselves and the world, they had to step out of a way from what they knew best, and open themselves to the possibility of not knowing. So as we prepare to celebrate the memory of revelation from our mythic past, and as we prepare to celebrate the possibility of revelation that exists in this present moment, I want us to begin with ourselves. I want us to ask us a few questions. Where have I willfully closed my eyes to information that challenges what I understand to be true? Where have I turned my ears from voices that tell a different story from my own? Why do I do that? How can I practice being more curious about the parts of this world, this country, the city that are outside my corner? However comfortable and familiar my corner may be and however hard and difficult and unfamiliar and scary, those other corners might also be? How can I be better at not knowing your Shavuot it comes to teach us and I truly believe that is only and not knowing that we come to know more about the world, about each other and about ourselves.