Torah For Navigating the Wilderness

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on Friday, June 13th, when Rabbi Lizzi spoke about our ancestors’ harrowing experiences as they navigated the wilderness. How can learn from their wisdom and failure as we chart a course through our own uncertain time?

Pride Shabbat is nearly here! We hope you will join us next Friday, June 27th, in Northcenter Town Square at 6:30 pm for a glitzy, glamorous service complete with a temporary tattoo and glitter station to get into the Pride spirit, and followed by ice cream and snacks catered by Schmaltz & Vinegar. Will we see you there?

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/friday-night-shabbat-062725/

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

Transcript

Transcript

“May the words of Torah, Adonai our God, be sweet in our mouths and in the mouths of all Your people so that we, our children, and all the descendants of the house of Israel– all of us come to know You, and study Your Torah. Blessed are you, the giver of Torah.

I just had my 15 year anniversary of getting ordained as a rabbi. In May of 2010 I stood with my classmates, we stood on the bima at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles (which, btw is the synagogue featured in the show Nobody Wants This), that’s what happens when you go to rabbinical school in LA… anyway we stood on that bima and recited those lines from the traditional siddur’s morning liturgy. 

May the words of Torah, Adonai our God, be sweet in our mouths and in the mouths of all Your people so that we, our children, and all the descendants of the house of Israel– all of us come to know You, and study Your Torah. Blessed are you, the giver of Torah

What can I say… it almost feels quaint. Going to rabbinical school thinking that your job as a rabbi will primarily be teaching Torah, making the words of Torah sweet in the mouths of all who study it, so that they will want to do it more, and grow closer to this tradition. Maybe… but what can i say, that summed me up to a T. That, plus I love leading davening and turning a service into a stomping, clapping, harmonious worship rave. It’s just so good. 

Every rabbi I know feels now that their job is to metabolize the news each week for their communities. Rabbi Steven and I do as good a job as anybody I know keeping up with the news and helping us process it through the lens of Torah– I really do think it's the the unique reason why one comes to a Jewish space.  You can get news anywhere, you can get analysis anywhere, and you can listen to people's hot takes on current events anywhere, but what you can't get anywhere else is the holistic Mishkan experience– the music, the harmonies, the beats, the framing of our prayers, the Torah, and yes, the reflecting on current events as much as we’re able to keep up with them… as rabbis we do feel responsibility to do all of that because it gives us nourishment as much as it creates it for you… and I’d be lying if I said we weren’t also exhausted by it all, too.

Anyway, a lot has happened in the past 24 hours and what I really wanted to do tonight was learn Torah together. So my hope is that as we look at the Torah portion in the context of the moment we’re living in, you’ll do the rabbinic work tonight, you’ll draw out the lessons and analysis that will help us navigate the world we’re living in. OK? Shall we study?

So to set the stage, we’re in the 11th chapter of Bamidbar, in Hebrew, in the Wilderness. One way of understanding the entire Torah is that it’s an extended meditation on uncertainty, wandering, wilderness navigation. And as we get to the book of numbers we’re deep into it. That’s where we begin. The Israelites we’re walking with in the text are the very same ones who were slaves in Egypt, experienced the plagues and crossed the Red Sea, received Torah at Sinai… and now about a year later they’re headed toward the promised land, accompanied by God who shows up as a pillar of fire at night to keep them warm, and a cloud of shade by day to keep them cool. They have a prophet, Moses, who leads them and talks to God for them and adjudicates their conflicts… they have food guaranteed every day in the form of manna. They have a high priest, Aaron, who leads all the ceremonies in the Mishkan where they sacrifice animals and light lanterns and menorahs. This week’s parasha begins with instructions for lighting fancy menorahs, hence the name of the parasha. 

When we learn Torah there are times we learn it prescriptively, meaning, it sometimes offers prescriptions. If you want to live a moral life, don’t murder, don’t steal, do business honestly… but there are other times we read Torah descriptively– meaning, it doesn’t tell us what to do, it shows us who we are. And by showing us who we are we can draw our own conclusions about how to move forward.

With that– is there someone who might read how Chapter 11 begins?

Turn to a neighbor, your new hevruta, say hello… look at Q1– what behaviors and mindsets are you seeing here that look familiar?

[read, study, discuss] 

That’s what the wilderness is– actually, there’s an acronym you’ve maybe heard me use for the times we live in now, that applies just as well to the wilderness:: VUCA, times of vulnerability, uncertainty, chaos, ambiguity.  You have a vague sense where you're going, a vague direction, but you are uncomfortable, often second-guess your steps, your environment isn’t familiar, always changing landscapes. The world in which we live feels very much like the wilderness that the Israelites found themselves wandering through. And so what behaviors do we see? What came out of your conversations?

• Complaining. Inability to appreciate what we DO have, only focusing on what they DON’T have.  These Israelites experienced revelation from God on Mount Sinai, they’ve seen the beautiful majesty of what happens when the Mishkan the temple the traveling, Tabernacle gets inaugurated and filled with God's presence and the priests do their sacrifices and light their lamps and menorah's and you know say their prayers and their blessings and it's like beautiful and powerful and illuminating, and you would think that the combination of all of the spiritual energy and the fact that these Israelites are being given Mana every single day to eat while they're moving through the wilderness, he would think actually they would feel happy and satisfied, but instead what we see is not happiness and satisfaction, but whining, and complaining, and wishing that they had never left Egypt 
  • How often do we do this? So much easier to doom scroll, post, say cynical, undermining, frustrated things, so much easier to complain rather than take action. What action do we even take? Easier to just whine. Cathartic. Not helpful, but feels good in the moment. 
• Magical thinking! Wishing, imagining that if they could go back in time life would be better. Imagine the melons and the leaks in the fish and all the delicious food that they used to eat in Egypt and the meat and it's like…. you didn't have that stuff. What are you talking about? You were slaves! But in their minds it's like they forgotten the bad part and just remember the good parts. 
  • Make America Great Again… but also let’s go back to the 70’s or 80’s or 90’s when we could have made different choices on climate; really engaged in the peace process; time doesn’t move that way. Here we are. 
• Forming corrosive, negative subgroups that seem like they’re serving the people, but actually subvert the general good. Asafsuf, riffraf, only place in the Torah we see this. In Exodus this is the Erev Rav– diversity, is great, all those people joined the Israelites at Sinai. Now tho– this group foments discontent, negativity. First they do it then everyone piles on. 
  • Invitation to wonder aloud when you find yourself piling onto negative critique, how you’re interacting with power structures in a way that actually allow you to be heard and impactful, and when you’re just stirring the pot.
• MOSES: taking a collective experience personally and being really super dramatic. Interpreting a group experience that affects everyone, personally. He’s worn down, burnt out. Not the same Moses who went to bat for this people back in Exodus, when they built the Golden Calf, saving them when God was about to destroy them– stands in the breach, intercedes… Here, a year later… so tired, so dramatic! Did I conceive them? Did I birth them? Did I nurse them? NO! Just kill me!
  • COVID– everyone isolated, everyone suddenly discovering they loved their partner but didn’t want to spend THIS much time together, everyone scared of getting sick… hit everyone differently, personally, people got kind of dramatic!
  • even this moment in history, in Israel, Gaza… I’ve seen marriages be strained, as if these things happening to the collective, affect us personally. We are actually far removed from the circle of trauma… yet it can FEEL like we are at the center. Invitation to breathe and identify where the circle of impact is most felt, and see if you can be helpful, and if not, try to find ways to offgas, to do something where you DO have an impact. Really frustrating to feel like your efforts aren’t seen, appreciated. 
• Miriam and Aaron talking smack about their brother (an ally)… what’s the word for when people on your team are in-fighting and it’s not just insulting, but also self-defeating because actually you have a much bigger and more powerful common enemy??  Enemy is the wilderness, is other tribes trying to hurt the israelites… and they’re taking down Moses, about his choice of wife? God hears… diagnoses the real problem– they feel like Moses is getting more attention as a prophet than either of them. They’re jealous, they want more power, attention. Totally understandable. And in their quest for purity, they might destroy the only hope they have to make it to the promised land. 
  • I’m seeing this all over the place. Last year especially. I don’t know about the right, but on the left, groups and people who are generally aligned, unfollowing, unfriending, insulting, denigrating others because they’re not saying the precise thing that you feel needs to be said in order to be pure, righteous. And in the meantime, the Heritage Foundation, Christian Nationalism, actual Nazi sympathizers, are taking up residence in the White House and at the heads of different government bodies… can we put our smaller differences a side in order to navigate that wilderness together? Maybe? 
  • Rally tomorrow– what if there are folks with signs different from mine? 
    • What is the value of having mutli-faith, multi-racial, multi-viewpoint coalitions in which you know there are differences on certain issues? What is the value? 
    • So don’t stand next to the sign you really take issue with… but maybe ask in a friendly human way if you can have a conversation to learn more? The most you learn from them the more likely they’ll be to listen to you too and maybe, just maybe, instead of fragmenting our movements for justice and democracy and civil rights, we could build it stronger and wiser

What do we do? Describing all the stuff we should watch out for, the stuff that weakens us and makes our movements combust. What should happen?

• they're all tired of wandering they're all tired of the uncertainty and the having to you know, maintain a hopeful face and keep walking and putting one foot in front of the other, and so their trust is breaking down, and their optimism is breaking down and their kindness is breaking down and and they become self-center and 
• (p. 830 in Etz Hayim) the response that God offers them is community. The response that God offers them is not to affirm their isolation but actually to say you need more people; you can’t do this alone! Moses, gather 70 elders, people you trust and people trusted by the people– I’ll spread out the spirit I’ve put on you, to them as well, “V’Lo Tisa Ata L’vad’kha” and you will not bear this alone.”
• Jewish community can’t fight antisemitism alone; black and latino and immigrant communities can’t fight racism and anti-immigrant sentiment alone; Jews and Muslims can’t fight Christian nationalism alone; all of us can’t fight kleptocracy and save democracy by ourselves… when we build movements, they’re going to be messy, but we can’t descend into complaining, backward looking, in-fighting, corrosive talk and behavior, or we’ll cement our fate as doomed. 

May the words of Torah be sweet in our mouths. May they move us to pray with our mouths and our feet. May we join hands and march toward the promised land with the faith, love, resilience and self-awareness that failed our ancestors, and not all victim to all the traps that we’ve been warned about. May we be the lights we need to light the way for ourselves and one another. 

• oh my God, Moses, like you poor guy yeah you need you need a vacation and so you know God, who, in other places in the Torah can be quite reactive you know like for example, with the golden calf when God says you know stand back let me destroy them. God basically says to Moses take a deep breath you're not alone go get 70 people like 70 elders from the community people who have been around for a while to remind you to have some perspective like you're gonna you're gonna share power and authority with them you're gonna share responsibility with them. I'm gonna invest them with my spirit too you know and and such to the point that they're like two people who are you know who who get God spirit and other folks come running to Moses and they're like oh my God Moses there are these two guys who are prophesying in the camp you know what should we do and Moses is I wish more people would do that like don't be so upset like this is great. You know we want more people to have to have a say in this tradition in any case this is one of these places where it's just like as I read Torah what I'm seeing is a group of people who are nervous anxious don't know how this story ends honestly are worried that their story could end with them dying in the wilderness and they're scared and so in their fear, they're acting out against their leaders against one another you know there is this whole scene where Moses's sister and brother start slandering him like gossiping about him and you know like they are each other's allies. This is the first time we've seen daylight between Miriam and Moses and Aron and it's just like they're all tired of wandering they're all tired of the uncertainty and the having to you know, maintain a hopeful face and keep walking and putting one foot in front of the other, and so their trust is breaking down, and their optimism is breaking down and their kindness is breaking down and and they become self-center and the response that God offers them is community. The response that God offers them is not to affirm their isolation but actually to say you need more people you know you need to you need to open this up like you can't you can't do this alone and so that's like that's the message that's and that would be my message of the week is you know like tomorrow we're gonna go to this March. I invite people to join us like I've spoken with people who are honestly nervous because while they feel like yes on the specific issues of you know tyranny authoritarianism, greed, kleptocratic yes I totally agree with the organizers of the March but I'm worried that there may be other people at the march who have different ideas and you know I'm worried about what they might say and what they might think and what Ann And and I don't wanna make it seem like I agree with them and I just kinda wanna say like we all need each other if we retreat to all of our little Silos of you know our little silos of particularity we can maintain like ideological purity maybe but we won't have the strength to navigate this wilderness together and we need each other and it will be messy and there will be moments that you wanna you know speak against somebody who's actually an ally to you and my invitation my plea is that like we basically keep each other kind we keep each other generous we keep each other trusting and in those moments when we feel like we are Moses or Aaron you know wanting to not Moses or Aaron excuse me Miriam or Aaron wanting to slander Moses you know basically lik speaking out against the very people who we are actually allies with to to lean on one another as reminders that like basically to lean on one another to help keep us kind and honest and in community even when it's hard and that's it that's basically

Ha’Asafsuf– What do you do with the complainers, sowers of doubt, cynics, people who are despairing, think they know better… give me? Give us?

What is the value of keeping people in the community who you disagree with, and even disagree strongly?

• The person wearing the kefiyah? Or waving the israeli flag?
• People who disagree with you? Our greatest teachers– help us learn, burnish our ideas, help us understand ourselves and the world better
• It’s hard, wouldn’t want it all the time… but I wouldn’t want to get rid of them either. We don’t get stronger by being comfortable.
• If you want to get stronger you put your body through stress– resistance training. 
• How do you be the person you want to be in the presence of people who bring out your worst?
• If you take out of the community the people who bother you… it is just a prescription for making us weaker. Yes, there are going to be people whose signs you don’t like. You don’t need to stand next to them. After the protest, it’s worth trying to understand where one or two of them are coming from. Maybe you’ll learn nothing… maybe you’ll learn something! And if you listen long enough they might just listen to you.