Shabbat Replay: Ukraine, Mirrors, and Plowshares

"History may repeat itself, but it doesn't have to. The story isn’t finished, and we get to choose the role we want to play in this unfolding drama."

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rabbi Lizzi connects current events to ancient ones, and Rashi’s retelling of the building of the Mishkan to a more modern retelling of a cinematic classic.

This episode is the sermon from Mishkan's Friday night  service on February 25th. For full recordings of Friday services, click here. For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Learn more about Mishkan Chicago. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook.

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

Transcript

Transcript

[00:09] Producer

Welcome to Shabbat Replay, a highlight of Mishkan services. This week’s episode is the sermon from Friday, February 25th. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rabbi Lizzi connects current events to ancient ones, and Rashi’s retelling of the building of the Mishkan to a more modern retelling of a cinematic classic. You’ll see.

[00:51] Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann:
Can I start by talking about Star Wars tonight? I promise this sermon will be about more than Star Wars but I want to start with Star Wars because art imitates life, and sometimes life is easier to talk about through the lens of art.

One of the ways that Henry knew I was the right girl for him was that I cried during Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when we saw it in the theater. Both times. 

In many ways The Force Awakens was just a remake of the 1977 original, however there were some new characters that were real wins, and one of those characters was Finn. Finn is a Strom Trooper who defects from the anonymous, synchronized marching ranks of The First Order, the army of the Dark Side. He darts away with another new character Poe (basically the new Han Solo), to make their escape. While Finn’s original idea had simply been to get out of the army of the First Order to simply save himself, he eventually joins the resistance and fights alongside all the good guys for the freedom of the rest of the universe. Finn starts off in the white uniform of the Dark Side. Turns out that individuals are more complicated than the side they may fight for… and Finn ends up being a good guy, even a hero. 

If you’d seen the original, the Force Awakens felt very familiar. 

A lot about this moment in the world feels very familiar, feels like we’ve seen this one before. The characters names are different, but the role they are playing in the story feels frighteninging familiar. 

This moment feels traumatizingly familiar for people who lived through and remember the Cold War– whether you’re Russian or American. The demonization of an entire people, the fear of nuclear war, and of the pretext of that war to develop our own nuclear arsenal and always be prepared for the prospect of war. Now in our classrooms we have drills for active shooters. Not that long ago you had drills for nuclear war, as if ducking under your desk would protect you from an atomic bomb. 

This moment feels familiar for those who fled the Soviet Union, which includes many in our community. Chicago is the largest Ukrainian community in the United States, and what we’re seeing today reverberates with the echoes of a history that didn’t happen very long ago. Ask your friends from the former Soviet Union– they remember. 

This moment also feels eerily familiar for those who know enough world history to recognize a authoritarian leader when you see one, when you hear the rhetoric and lies of one, and who know the lengths to which leaders like this will go to attain land, resources, dominance and power. This moment also feels familiar as we Americans look back over our own history and contemplate the times and places our own government has chosen to get involved in overseas conflicts to protect American interests, or to protect democracy, or to protect people– or hasn’t. And as Jews, we know the pain of being ignored by the most militarily powerful country on earth when we were the targets of state violence in just this place ourselves, or our families… And as Americans we know the toll that putting American troops into wars of foreign soil can take on our country, in terms of resources, sure, but most importantly in terms of the bodies of soldiers. This is a tough one, y’all. 

I’m not going to stand here and pretend to be an expert in the awful situation unfolding in Ukraine right now. I, like you probably, have been shaking my fist, shaking my head, at whatever device is giving me the news, struggling as usual with the frustration of not being able to do anything meaningful from where I sit, but feeling like this demands something of all of us. Today I officiated a funeral in Arlington Heights, and on my way back there were people standing on a viaduct in the snow with posters, “No to Putin!” and I thought, good for them for doing SOMETHING. I affirm and bolster the thousands and thousands of both Ukrainians and Russians pleading for Russia to put down arms. I want to say to our community members from the Former Soviet Union, and who have family still there– we see you, we want to support you, however we can, as you worry for your friends and family.

I can stand here as a rabbi and say that Jewish tradition affirms the right of any person being aggressed to fight for themselves, to defend themselves. To the extent that those of us not directly bodily affected by this war can somehow bring new perspective, a sense of hopefulness, an alternative narrative to the Star Warsy good-versus-evil Dark-versus-light drama of this situation, even tho we may not be able to change anything on the ground, or change Putin’s mind about making war… we can remind each other that people are people, irrespective of national boundaries, and that as people we can be swayed, we have agency, and we can decide what role we want to play in any drama unfolding around us. You and I here, now, have the luxury in this situation of not having to decide whether to stay or to flee. You and I, here now, get to ask: Who do we want to be in the story? 

So recognizing that there’s a limit to what we can do about over-there, but there’s a lot we can do in-here (point to self), for ourselves, in our community, in our environments where we are… let’s zoom out a little, now moving from Star Wars to Torah. How do we change our role, the story we’re in, especially when it’s dark and people around are beginning to adopt a posture of hopelessness, a sense of “there’s nothing we can do here.” What can we do to not just fall in line with the narrative of inevitably? How might we be a little more like Finn? Not accept our complicity as inevitable, but actually believe we could be capable of more, from where we sit?

So I want to share a weird and wild story of sex and seduction from this week’s Torah portion. That OK, can we shift gears a little? I think it carries in it a message of inspiration for each one of us.I want to warn you, this is a WEIRD and fun story.

This week in the Torah portion we read about all the different pieces of the Mishkan– the ancient Jewish space for holiness on the journey through the wilderness– finally coming together. This week in parashat Vayakel we read about how everyone brought their gold, silver and copper, their crimson and turquoise and purple wool, linen, goat’s hair, dolphin skin, incense, gemstones and Bezalel, the great artisan, architect, and interior designer all rolled into one, constructing out of these materials the poles, hook, sockets, material for the the cover of the Mishkan, the ark, the table, the menorah, the incense holder…Bezalel, is so cool- he’s like an architect, interior designer and builder all rolled into one, for the absolute most specific client ever– GOD– anyway the text finally mentions the copper washbasin at the opening of the Mishkan, made with the mirrors of the throngs– Mar’ot ha’Tzva’ot.

The mirrors of the throngs. Anyone know what that means? Mirrors of the throngs?

Any ideas? No? You’re in good company. This is a very strange phrase. So the midrash picks it up and says, throngs, of COURSE. And you, the reader, say… I’m not following. So Rashi, our friend, the great 11th century French winemaker who sheds light on where midrash speaks to our questions, says, oh, sit DOWN, children, and LISTEN to this. Lemme tell you a story:

The copper mirrors came from women that they brought to contribute to the Mishkan. What do you do with a mirror? Look at yourself in it. Moses then says to God, We can’t use mirrors whose purpose is vanity, to create the implements of the Mishkan, whose purpose is holiness! God says back to Moses, “You most certainly WILL accept these mirrors. Do you know the history of these mirrors?” Moses shakes his head, I’m sure you’ll tell me. God says,  “You will accept these mirrors. During the hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt, men became despondant, exhausted, hopeless– felt themselves to be nothing more than slaves, worthless, they completely lost their self-confidence. They lost their sex drives and stopped wanting to sleep with their wives, because what’s the point, they thought, ‘who would want to bring children into this world?’ Against that backdrop the women– hundreds and hundreds of women– took their mirrors, and put them in their bags, and took lunch, and put it in their bags and hundreds and went out to find their men in the fields. And they mounted a campaign of imagination, of playfulness and seduction. 
They decided sort of collectively, just by inertia, that they were not going to create another generation. What's the point in creating another generation when the world looks and feels like this? They figured, why bring children into this world. And so they stopped. And all of the women decided to stage an insurrection. So they took these mirrors, stuck them in their bag, they took a lunch, and they stuck it in their bag, and they went out on the lunch break of their husbands actually doesn't say husbands, you kind of get the sense that it was like, you know, there was a party out there, the women went out into the fields, and they would take their mirrors, and they would take lunch, and they would say Here have some food, they would sit and eat. And then once they'd eaten a little something, she would take out the mirror, and she would look at herself. And then she would turn it to him. And then she would say, I'm more beautiful than you are. And then his competitive spirit arouse would say, “No, you're not. I'm more beautiful than you are.” And they would go back and forth like this, the Midrash says, until they were rolling around making babies, making the next generation who would in fact, walk out on their own two feet from Egypt as free people. And so that copper washbasin honors the Korean tivity and the resilience and the imagination, and the sexuality and the playfulness that the women brought to that dark situation that was actually the tool for liberation. These mirrors like they didn't have much, they had mirrors, and they use what they have in the service of imagination and imagination in the service of liberation. And so God says to Moses, you will in fact, take those mirrors and put them into the Mishkan. So the throng says, The Midrash are the 1000s and 1000s of children who were born, who lived to see redemption, because their parents had the creativity and force of will, and imagination to not succumb to the narrative that the story had already been written, and that the fate was inevitable, and that things would have to go as they had gone before. Right, these people had the faithfulness to actually believe they could write a different future. And that was faith. And so this was a campaign of re-humanizing all these people through food, and through mirrors. And the reward, of course, is that the what went into this washbasin was the water that would cleanse people as they came in, went from the Michigan and help people transform, you know, those mirrors held a kind of transformational power. So I think of how we repurpose how we can repurpose how we might repurpose the tools of our everyday lives, such that we shift our mindset from whatever depressed, demoralized, unhappy, frustrated sense of inevitability that we may live with. How might we do that? How might we look at a mirror with a sense of possibility, but not just a mirror? Like I hope that when we leave tonight, you sort of look around and actually wonder about everything, because everything is up for grabs, and everything can be repurposed into a tool of healing or a tool of hurting you who to me phi has a beautiful poem, where he talks about the line in Isaiah that says they will beat their swords into plowshares, and never will they know war anymore. Now that one he says, don't stop at plowshares, he says, Take your spears and beat them into plowshares, and then turn them into musical instruments

The throngs, says the midrash, are the thousands of children who were born who lived to see redemption because their parents had had the creativity, the force of will and imagination to not succumb to the narrative that their story had been already been written and their fate sealed. They had the faithfulness to believe that they could write a different future, and they did it with the tools they had, which weren’t much: food and mirrors, that led to playfulness and a renewed sense of self-confidence and agency. This was a campaign of re-humanizing themselves through sexuality, therefore it wasn’t transgressive in a licentious way it was transgressive in a counter cultural way, it was playfulness and sexuality as tools of resistance, and liberation. Because had it not been for those mirrors, and the women holding them, wielding them not as tools of vanity but as tools for inspiration, if it hadn’t been for them, there would have been no one to walk out of Egypt when the time came. 

The reward for that creativity is that the copper from those mirrors gets turned into the washbasin at the opening of the Mishkan, cleansing and healing and transforming people in that space.

I pray that our Ukrainian brothers and sisters can remember within themselves that while the world may look very dark now, they mustn’t succumb to a sense of inevitability, that it must be this way. I pray that our Russian brothers and sisters can muster within themselves resistance to a leader who feels very much like a modern day Pharaoh and exhibit the bravery of Shifra and Puah, the Egyptian midwives, who resisted their leaders’ decrees and refused to participate in violence against another people. 

We here can donate to organizations doing relief and rescue and refugee work– Mishkan has posted at least one link, there are many, there are things we can do…We can check in on our Ukrainian and Russian friends, see how they’re doing. We can pray that this madness ends quickly and with as little damage to people and property as possible. 

History can repeat itself, but it doesn’t have to. Even in the reboot of Star Wars, new characters can change the story. The story isn’t finished, and we get to choose the role we want to play in this unfolding drama. Take a page out of Finn’s book, or remember the throngs and how they got there, the next time you look in a mirror. 

Despair and inevitability are not strategies of resistance. There is always another way. May we continue to use the tools we have wherever we are, to find that other way.