Skip to content
There is so much coming up at Society Hill Synagogue! We’ve got a Scholar-in-Residence Shabbat this weekend that I am really looking forward to, with Rabbi Michael Cohen from the Arava Institute; we’ve got all of our Purim festivities March 1, 2, and 3, and if you can believe it, it is already time to:
The deadline to register for the Seder is March 13, and space does fill up — we always have a waitlist — so sign up today.
I’ll be leading the Seder — it’s one of my favorite synagogue events of the year and such a joyful and meaningful evening with this community: deep, reflective readings and conversation; joyous songs; delicious food. I hope to see you there!
Meanwhile, I’d like to share the d’var Torah I delivered this past Shabbat, the first of four special Shabbatot in the approach to Passover:
As you may know, this Shabbat is the first of four special Shabbatot in our approach to Pesah (Passover). If you’re anything like me, the prospect of cleaning in preparation for Pesah evokes a strong measure of anxiety, so our tradition gives us time to prepare. Remember, too, that in ancient times, Pesah time was not merely the season in which we celebrated the Exodus from Egypt; it was when the new year began: springtime, rebirth — and our preparations were profoundly important.
As Jews, one of the ways that we collectively prepared (and prepare) ourselves was through the weekly Shabbat service. Shabbat was the moment we all laid down our tools of commerce, put down the busyness of our individual lives, and came together as a community, to be reminded of our communal rhythms, our communal interconnections, and our communal responsibilities.
The first special Shabbat in preparation for Pesah, honored this week, is Shabbat Sh’kalim, the Sabbath of the shekels, the Sabbath of money. So we’ll talk about what that means, how it is commemorated, and what it might teach us.
On Shabbat Sh’kalim, in addition to the weekly Torah portion, we read an additional portion — skipping ahead to a section of the Torah invoking the instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle, the portable reminder of God’s presence in the midst of the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness, where they tended to their connection with the Divine presence.
As part of these instructions, God tells Moses that when a census, a count, is taken of the Israelite people, each person shall pay a kofer, a ransom payment, an atonement payment, a release payment — kofer related to the phrase “Yom Kippur,” Day of Atonement — each person shall pay a kofer that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled in this census, this count.
Counting people has long injected anxiety into our collective Jewish psyche; censuses, in ancient times, were often a prelude to getting ready for battle. Rashi notes that the ayin hara, the evil eye, comes upon the people when there is a count. So, too, does he note that this count came on the heels of the incident of the Golden Calf, after which the people had been afflicted by the plague. He teaches that the census was necessary at this point just like it is of a shepherd for his flock after an epidemic has struck. When the plague ceases, the shepherd says, “woe to my flock, I must count them to see how many are left,” thereby showing how dear the flock was to him. Hence the census was necessary, and in ancient times, a census meant that a kofer, a ransom payment, an atonement payment, was necessary to alleviate this anxiety, to alleviate this evil eye.
Thus God instructed Moses as follows: “This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight” — a half shekel, hence Shabbat Sh’kalim — “a half-shekel as an offering to God. The rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less than half a shekel when giving God’s offering as expiation” — lekhaper, again, from Yom Kippur, as expiation — “for your persons. You shall take the expiation money,” it continues, “from the Israelites and assign it to the service of the Tent of Meeting,” the Tabernacle. “It shall serve the Israelites as a reminder before God, as expiation for your persons. The sockets of the Tabernacle, the anchors which kept it rooted, were constructed from these half sh’kalim, these half shekels.”
So this is what we read, special, each year on Shabbat Sh’kalim, this Shabbat. Now, initially, this text seems to refer only to one storied moment, when the Israelites were in the wilderness.
And yet when they reached the promised land, rooting themselves in its soil, the practice continued, on an annual basis: each year, a half shekel was collected from everyone so that new offerings could be purchased for the Temple, new korbanot, sacrifices, new ways for the people to experience closeness to God, and Shabbat Sh’kalim served to remind everyone that it was time to do so — we’d come to services, we would read this portion, and we would be reminded: here comes our sacred W-2, our sacred 1099, it is time to contribute to the collective.
When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, the emperor Vespasian subverted the holiness of this practice, forcing contributions to be made to the imperial treasury in Rome, a practice which lasted for nearly 200 years. When this ceased, the collection among Jews fell out of practice. And yet, we still read the special Torah portion of Sh’kalim each year lezekher, in remembrance.
So what do we learn from this half shekel legacy? What does this teach us, why still read it? The 18th century Hasidic Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonne teaches that this reading is intended to teach the children of Israel the importance of ahdut, oneness; unity — that no one should ever think that he ought to separate from his fellow person. Rather, he teaches, “he should view himself as being merely half a shekel, half a person, and only after joining all of the people of Israel, all of humanity, does he become whole. Therefore, everyone gives half a shekel.”
It is a reminder each year, that when we’re without others, without community, we are, in a sense, incomplete. The notion that it is a kofer — a ransom payment, an atonement payment — is a teaching, that we are making a correction payment for our illusion of our independence; it helps us underscore our interdependence.
Rabbi Shefa Gold builds on this. She teaches that “the half-shekel is called ‘a ransom for your soul,’ for your soul is truly in danger if you do not consciously contribute to this Mishkan, Tabernacle, sanctuary of community, and acknowledge the equal value of each and every one of us. We can only build this holy place together,” she writes. “And we cannot sustain a spiritual practice that is blind to our interdependency with all of life.”
“Giving the half shekel consciously,” she says, is “as though we are saying, ‘Count me in!’ Just by being alive and present, I become an integral part of this glorious community. My half-shekel redeems me from the illusion of separation.”
And not merely from separation. “The blessing of the half-shekel,” she writes, “is that it saves me from inflation and self-importance… after all it’s only a half-shekel, only a miniscule part of the whole. And the blessing of the half-shekel saves me from invisibility or demeaning of my self-worth… after all, my contribution is of equal value to everyone else’s, and the Mishkan could not be held together without it.”
There is a paradox: we count each and every person, every person matters, but the counting gives us anxiety; we experience wholeness, shalom, peace, with the collective.
We’re not to exclude ourselves from the community, but neither are we to be entirely effaced by it.
We embrace our collective oneness and our individual distinctiveness, our uniqueness and our interdependence, on this and every Shabbat.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi K.
