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This past Shabbat, we celebrated our last day of Hebrew School for the year. “Celebration” is relative, because our Hebrew School students bring such life and vibrancy and insight to our Sanctuary each week, so it’s always hard to see them go; I can only pray they feel a reciprocal level of richness from the time they spend here at Society Hill Synagogue.
Fortunately, I feel that they do, and, as evidence, I would offer the final Sanctuary Torah discussion we held this school year.
As a reminder, at Society Hill Synagogue, each week before the Torah reading, we hold an approximately half-hour long discussion of how this week’s Torah portion is relevant to our lives — how its words are still filled with life, and what new meanings we can discern in them that are applicable to our lives as we make sense of them. Hebrew School students in Kitah Gimel (3rd Grade) and older participate in these discussions, often kicking them off. Our adult participants are regularly wowed by their insights.
In turn, Hebrew School students witness adults taking Judaism seriously and meaningfully for their own lives — not just something that is only relevant for kids in preparation for their B’nei Mitzvah — but as a central part of a lifelong pursuit for meaning and holiness.
In this week’s Torah portion, Emor, we discussed the “לֶחֶם פָּנִים” (lehem panim) that was present in the sanctuary — translated as “bread of display” or “showbread.” It was an offering of bread — the “staff of life” — to God, an offering that was deemed as accepted by God upon being displayed in the sanctuary on Shabbat.
The Talmud notes that a small miracle would take place each Shabbat when the bread was replaced — the week-old bread was just as hot and fresh as the day it was placed down. (Okay, perhaps not a miracle on par with the splitting of the sea, but still something!)
The Etz Hayim Commentary, edited by Rabbi Harold Kushner, cites Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch for the teaching that this miracle “conveys the idea that the sanctuary was immune to the process of boredom and habit that afflict many religious institutions.”
The question we discussed in our Sanctuary this past Shabbat was whether or not the Jewish religion is indeed “boring” and how we ensure it never is.
Now, I’m not going to pretend I’ve never seen the occasional student fidget in their seat as we engaged in the Torah discussion, looking forward to when they can run around with their friends, but as we discussed this question, I took so much satisfaction in the degree to which students seemed to practically be surprised by the idea that Judaism could be considered boring.
They talked about how, in Torah discussions, we get to take ownership of our own interpretations of the text, like a Choose Your Own Adventure story; how the stories themselves can be gripping and how we get to make meaning of them for our own lives; how the stakes of our participation in religion can be high; how it can lead to a connection with God.
I’ve long felt that one of the secrets to a Jewish renaissance — to ensuring that Jewish identification and affiliation remains vibrant — is not to apologize for the religious aspects of Jewishness; to assume that everyone just grins and bears the religion so that we can move on to the eating and the community (as great as those parts are). Instead, we’ve got to steer into the skid, dive head first into religion as a formative part of education and explore how this generations-old sacred order is not a fossilized relic, but rather a deeply alive and evolving source of nourishment and support.
Part of why Society Hill Synagogue is successful, I believe, is because it has focused on revitalizing and re-exploring some of the core experiences of what it means to be Jewish: gathering together on Shabbat to study and to pray, being frank in our exploration of those features — both the challenges we’ve had with them, and what missed opportunities can be found therein of which we can avail ourselves. And then, of course, we top that off with some eating and schmoozing together, also at the heart of what it means to be Jewish.
I am so grateful our students join us for — and lead us in — these conversations, and, while it’s nice to catch my breath over the summer, I already can’t wait for next year.
What follows is the D’var Torah I delivered Friday night, on the eve of the wedding weekend of the son of one of our longtime members, Bill Goldberg:
I’m thrilled, for reasons beyond the obvious, that we are celebrating an upcoming wedding tonight, because it gives me the opportunity to reflect on the significance of a Jewish wedding and its rituals.
Of course, perhaps the most famous ritual of the Jewish wedding is the culminating one, the shattering of the glass. And yet despite its fame, the origin story of this ritual, at least the origin story according to the Talmud, has largely been lost to time. “The ancient Rabbi Mar son of Ravina,” the Talmud says, “made a wedding feast for his son and he saw the Sages, who were excessively joyous.” (Who is to say what constitutes “excessive” joy, but nonetheless that is what Mar son of Ravina experienced.) And so, “He brought forth a valuable cup worth four hundred zuz and
he smashed it before them.
Vetabar kamayhu
וְתַבַּר קַמַיְהוּ
And what was their reaction?
They were saddened.
V’i’atzivu
וְאִעֲצִיבוּ
“Rav Ashi,” the Talmud says, did the same thing: he made a wedding feast for his son and he saw the Sages, who were excessively joyous. He brought a cup of extremely valuable white glass and broke it before them, and v’i’atzivu, they became sad.
Ironically, the symbol of utmost joy — nothing causes us to break out in joyousness and song like the shattering of the glass marking the culmination of a wedding — was perhaps, at least according to this tradition, formed in a moment where the opposite was experienced: sadness.
Of course, we feel all of these experiences — joy, love, sadness — through the same door: the heart. We can’t experience only one of these emotions without the others: being human, and, by an order of magnitude, being in a relationship, being married, means opening our hearts to the full range of human experience — sadness and happiness, love and heartache. The shatter of the glass perhaps signifies our readiness to do this in relationship, bound up in the love of another: no illusions that we can fend off sadness, no denial of the world in which we exist, but also recognizing that in shattering those illusions, we open our hearts to the fullness of that human experience, savoring the joy and the blessedness that comes with forming this new union.
The shattering of the glass, in that sense, also evokes a different sacred shattering in Jewish tradition, known as shvirat hakelim, the shattering of the vessels. In a foundational midrash (interpretation) of the story of creation, the mystical rabbis teach that prior to the creation of the world, all was God — infinite, blessedness, sameness. In order for creation to come to fruition, God had to withdraw part of God’s self, to make space for the world, to make space for us. And yet nothing can exist entirely without God, so God said vayehi or, let there be light, sending God’s light, encased in vessels, into the space of creation, into the space from which God had withdrawn. When the vessels reached their destination, they shattered, shvirat hakelim, bringing about the world we know now through the resulting combination of ingredients: shard of vessel, spark of light, shard of vessel, spark of light.
Our task as Jews and as human beings, tradition teaches, is to redeem those sparks, wherever they may be found, and to do so through the fulfillment of mitzvot, responding to the sacred calls we receive, reuniting the sparks with their source in God, bringing about redemption.
Reality couldn’t exist without a shattering; we human beings are now gently, and with love, drawing on God’s love, putting the pieces back together to bring about an ultimate wholeness, an ultimate shalom.
Surely, no moment is more of a redemptive moment, redeeming more sparks, than kiddushin, a wedding. The blessing that immediately precedes the shattering of glass, the seventh and final blessing of the sheva brakhot, the seven blessings of a wedding, paints a picture of what redemption looks like: Blessed are you, Adonai,
who created joy and gladness, groom and bride, merriment, song, dance and delight, love and harmony, peace and companionship
Gilah rinah ditzah v’hedvah, ahavah v’ahvah shalom v’re’ut
גִילָה רִנָה דִיצָה וְחֶדְוָה, אַהֲבָה וְאַחֲוָה שָׁלוֹם וְרֵעוּת
We sing:
may there soon be heard in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the groom and the voice of the bride, from the wedding canopies: jubilant voices of the married; and from celebrations: festive songs of young friends.
M’herah Adonai Eloheinu yishama be’arei Yehudah uv’hutzot Yerushalayim
מְהֵרָה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ יִשַׁמַע בְּעָרֵי יְהוּדָה וּבְחוּצוֹת יְרוּשָׁלָיִם
This is the picture that is painted in the seventh blessing of the wedding of what can be — and an echo of it, a taste of it, is found in the wedding of a couple in our world, this weekend of Margaret and Zach.
But it is not only redemption that is evoked by the blessings of a wedding; it is also creation.
Just as the shattering of the glass evokes the beginning of creation of a new world, so do the sheva b’rakhot, the seven blessings: the blessings speak of creation, of Adam and Eve, of the Garden of Eden:
Make joyful these loving companions, just as You once gladdened Your creations in the Garden of Eden.
Samah tesamah re’im ha’ahuvim, k’samehakha yetzirkha b’gan eden mikedem
שַׂמַח תְשַׂמַח רֵעִים הָאֲהוּבִים, כְּשַׂמֵחֲךָ יְצִירְךָ בְּגַן עֵדֶן מִקֶדֶם
Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Sovereign of Eternity, who has fashioned human beings in Your image, patterning them in Your likeness, preparing them to share in the foundational structure of life.
As Rabbi Barbara Penzner writes, “images of Adam and Eve convey a couple’s potential to create a whole world. Echoes of a future harmony and love, as well as the rejoicing of Jerusalem, inspire thoughts of this couple’s capacity to bring about the world’s repair.”
These blessings, Anita Diamant writes, “make every wedding the fulcrum of time, the center point between creation and redemption, between the first days and the end of days.
All three of these archetypal moments — the beginning, your wedding, and the end — share the qualities of wholeness, sweetness, and the presence of God.”
This experience is mirrored in a wedding that we have the opportunity to participate in not just when a loving couple in our circle of family and friends invites us, but each and every week.
No Jewish ritual is more synonymous with a wedding and all of the experiences that come with it than right here, right now: Kabbalat Shabbat.
As we said last week, Kabbalat Shabbat is a moment of consummation, in which we experience the sense of harmony for which we unconsciously yearn all week. Remember that according to the Jewish mystics, we and God are made up of the same sefirotic pattern, the same pattern of divine vessels, divine DNA. These vessels can fall out of sync, but when we welcome in Shabbat, we are effecting harmony within ourselves and within God, experiencing that taste of redemption, that taste of the world to come. Kabbalat Shabbat is a wedding that unites us. It is a wedding that unites what is within us so that we are harmonized and so is God, and it unites us, Israel, with God and Shabbat; it forms a union where we are all one.
Lekhah Dodi, come my beloved, my betrothed, likrat kalah to greet the bride. Sh’khinah, the s’firah, the aspect of the divine associated with the feminine, writes Rabbi Reuven Kimmelman, is the bride of both God and Israel, God and us. And the Sh’khinah’s temporal expression, her expression in time, is Shabbat.
There are three partners in the marriage metaphor for Shabbat: God, Shabbat, and Israel. Shabbat, writes Kimmelman, becomes the rendezvous point for all three. The word Kadesh, kiddush, sanctify, is also the word for kiddushin, marriage. We sanctify Shabbat, God sanctifies Shabbat and Israel — the three merge in harmony.
In both cases, a wedding and Shabbat, we are evoking creation, restoring ourselves to a time before a shattering, and redemption, experiencing the wholeness of repair.
But none of that could exist without the shattering: the shattering of the glass, bringing our new chapter of life into existence, laying out our tasks before us, the fulfillment of mitzvot, responding to sacred calls, bringing about shalom, wholeness, peace.
Wishing you all a beautiful chapter of life, an experience of harmony, and a Shabbat of peace.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi K.
