05/29/2016
I wrote the following commentary on Leviticus 25:35 as a way of celebrating my birthday and I want to share it with my friends here on Facebook. It was fun to write and more fun to share.
Commentary on Leviticus 25:35, B’har
(With additional music and lyrics by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen)
This portion seems to set up impossible goals for us. Working out the logistics of a sabbatical year and, even more, the jubilee year is maddening in its specificity of the unattainable. I especially, a sufferer of math anxiety, usually run screaming from any obligation to consider numbers higher than 3. So when faced with questions like how could we work this out and has it ever been done, I run away as fast as I do when a politician offers new tax plans alone that are supposed to save us from unemployment, failing schools and crumbling infrastructure. I know somebody has to take care of these things but my mind will not bend that way. Like my mother, I just want us all to get along and be happy.
(Sing)
Imagination is funny
It makes a cloudy day sunny
Makes a bee think of honey
Just as I think of YOU
But as I read on, I know there is something crucial to learn about how we might create an ideal society so that we may all live in peace and rest in the sanctity of our families and I love the feel of that. It sounds so fair. Let the land rest every seven years. It needs it no less than we need to rest at night and on our blessed Shabbat. And in the Fiftieth year, give it all back to whoever lost it, for whatever reasons, and start again. We don’t need to hold on to so much. Fair! Yes! And, in the same way as when I saw one or both of my two sisters getting something I wanted desperately and cried out, it’s not fair! I what I want is fair.
I want to know that teachers can be paid wages commensurate with their contributions to our children, which is already immeasurable. I want communities to value their school buildings more than their sports stadiums. I’m sure that the folks wrenching their backs in the fields to provide food for the rest of us are at least as valuable to society as a whole, as doctors, lawyers and bankers
I know that the contribution of the bit player is certainly as valuable to the play as is the star because she is an intrinsic part of the whole production, and without her at her best, the audience will lose track of the story and their willing suspension of disbelief will fade as they turn their attention to checking their phones and reading their programs.
(Sing)
Imagination is crazy
Your whole perspective gets hazy
Starts you asking a daisy
"What to do, what to do?"
So I don’t think it matters if the Seventh year and the Jubilee year were ever actually practiced. It only matters that the Rabbis imagined that they might have been. It matters that so many centuries ago there were some wise people who looked around and said to one another something like, “This Life (with a capital L) does not belong to me, this Land (also a capital L) does not belong to me. And so, together we must find ways of defining ourselves as part of this Life. Together, as a people we can celebrate the gifts of this Life. And one way, we tell ourselves, that we might learn how to do this, is to listen to one another’s stories, to sing one another’s songs. We must finally discover that we are all on the same side, that we are all made in the image of the One Source of Each of Our Lives.”
What is more important to us than what the literal truth of the past might have been, if there even is such a thing, is that we have a written record of the thoughts, musings, poetry and fictions of our ancestors, who through millennia did their best to understand the workings of their world and tried to help to create a better life for the people who lived there.
I take great pleasure in imagining a gathering of that ancient tribe that made the leap from gestures and grunts into language. Gestures and grunts must have done well by us for untold millennia. I know from my work with actors that often the unspoken can communicate an immediate experience more delicately than the finest words we might cull together. We can easily recognize one another’s needs and desires in behaviors and the relative urgency of the sound of the grunts. Think of those long scenes in movies where no words are spoken yet we understand every single complicated emotional nuance.
(Sing)
Have you ever felt
A gentle touch and then a kiss
And then and then
Find it's only your imagination again?
Oh, well.
Even so, can you imagine the wonder as some one (and it had to have started with some one) who began to transform those generalized sounds into specific phonemes, distinguishing one from another then adding meaning to those sounds so that they could be understood and repeated and shared? All of a sudden we could communicate about things that had already happened and might happen in the future. All of a sudden we could think about a future, the way things might be. All of a sudden we could imagine a world for our children, distinct from our own.
And as caves became canvasses, as early drums gave rise to dance, as well as becoming the forerunners of the Internet, we humans went to work to develop the art of language.
It would take someone an awful lot more skilled in that art than I to describe the blessing of poetry that grows out of every day language and sometimes even seems to rise to the musings of God. But if we can stop for a moment to consider what it is that happens to us when we absorb heightened, richly magnificent musical sounds that merge into mesmerizing, wisdom filled symbols bursting with luxurious visual imagery and wordplay that simply dances off the page, then we might have a glimpse of what good those words do for our souls. And we cannot be other than grateful to the generations and generations of folks who first told the stories and then the scribes who sat down to scrupulously pen our blessed, blessed Torah scrolls with their echoes of white and black fire etched into the parchment. These humans, our ancestors, were able, because they had the language, to look around to see what was and wasn’t working in their individual lives and societies and then imagine ways they might make it better.
And we, as Jews, have had what I consider the brilliance to revere that Language of our People and what became our Torah, our Talmud, our more contemporary writings and conversations throughout the ages. We converse together; we imagine together, we argue together, we create together. We did then and we do now.
And if our sages from so long ago could imagine a world where the Land belonged to God and had to be treated with love and respect and divided among us so that none were left out, what can we imagine that will insure our bright future, one that is shared by all?
Stuck as we are in this moment of time where the Earth itself seems in danger of no longer being able to provide a home for us, where scientific and technological changes happen so rapidly that no one knows how or what to regulate or deregulate, where some of our politicians and their followers descend into the ravings of frightened children, the balance of power between women and men along with gender, ethnic, racial and economic categories has shifted beyond recognition and we despair of discovering a new balance that will give us any sense of well being, it is our traditions and imaginations that we must turn to.
Allowing our carefully chosen ancient and modern teachers to be our guides we can and must project ourselves into a future where we can be secure and live well with the land.
And here is where the mathematicians, accountants, philosophers, politicians, doctors, lawyers bankers, engineers, inventors, farmers and laborers must join with the artists and keepers of the faith to maintain our conviction in a future as bright and shining (and yes, dark and dirty as all human times have always been) that we may move through this particular crisis by not only imagining our hope filled future, our own land of milk and honey, but by joining ourselves with the wisdom of our ancestors and those yet to be born, to continue to work to bring it to being.
May we combine our passions, insights and love of learning with those of students of humanity all over the globe that we may reveal new, visionary, fair and far- reaching solutions to the dilemmas we encounter every day. May the spirit of the Seventh and Jubilee Years invade our longings, occupy our musings and dwell deeply in our hearts that we may help to move humanity further towards a world of people who do Justice, love Mercy and walk Humbly with our Source, our Breath, our Life as it Unfolds, Our Yud Hey Vav Hey, Our God.
(Sing)
Imagination is silly
You go around willy-nilly
For example I go around wanting you
And yet I MUST imagine
That YOU want me, too.
My personal study of Torah is a pathway into the deepest core of my imagination as it meets the visionary minds of my mothers and fathers from ages past and combines with the inspired thinking of my study buddies.
Little these days, gives me more pleasure th
an joining in the process of unpacking ancient words of Torah, the very existence of which are as much a miracle as the Burning Bush and the Parting of The Sea of Reeds.
I am and will continue to remain grateful to my teacher, Rabbi Jonathan, The Woodstock Jewish Congregation, The Lev Shalem Institute and the dedicated people who show up, who have shown up for years at our Thursday study sessions, our newer Tuesday night Pathways to Jewish Prayer classes, as well as the folks who drop in on occasion to offer their questions, doubts and insights.
As I celebrate my 76th birthday, my love of Torah, my love of language, story, communication and imagination, indeed my love of Judaism, grows exponentially.
Thanks for listening.
(The original lyric is “And yet I can’t imagine, That you would want me too.” I thought it worth changing when referring to God!)
