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by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
I’d like to share the D’var Torah (teaching of Torah) I delivered this past Friday night, on the eve of celebrating a young person in our community, Isaac Hohns, becoming Bar Mitzvah:
People like to talk about the experience of playing Jewish geography — seeing whether someone Jewish whom you’ve just met knows other Jews you know — but there is another Jewish field of study I’ve been reflecting on lately, and that’s the study of Jewish choreography. No, I’m not talking about famous Jewish choreographers like Jerome Robbins, who choreographed Fiddler on the Roof and West Side Story.
I’m talking about choreography that we all engage in, or which we curiously observe others engage in, throughout the course of a Jewish service. From the times we bow, to times we step up on our toes, times we kiss our tzitzit, and times we cover our eyes, from standing and sitting to the movement which is having the greatest impact on me these days, that is when we take three steps forward to initiate the Amidah.
Judaism has an ambivalent relationship to the sacredness of place. On the one hand, we’ve long had a special relationship to one place in particular, Eretz Yisra’el, the place of our yearnings for millennia of diaspora, the place which symbolizes the promise of redemption and return. On the other hand, as we recite multiple times per day, from the book of Isaiah, “kadosh kadosh kadosh Adonai tz’va’ot mlo khol ha’aretz k’vodo” — holy holy holy is the Lord of hosts, “mlo khol ha’aretz,” the whole earth, is filled with God’s glory. God’s presence is everywhere. Ever since we were sent into exile a couple of thousand years ago, our religion has traveled with us, and we’ve constructed invisible realms of holiness in whatever places we found ourselves. A classic version of this is the Jewish home, which is often referred to as the mikdash me’at, meaning the small holy place, the small sanctuary, and even more specifically, the kitchen or dining room table, is seen as analogous to the ancient mizbe’ah, altar, a place upon which we bring a different version of our korbanot, our offerings, a festive meal, a sacred discussion seen as the present day equivalent to the ancient sacrificial offerings, whose name, korbanot, means to come close, to draw close to God.
Drawing close is what we do when we engage in the Amidah, the silent prayer which we just completed and which is the prayer around which our services are built, three times each day on most days, four on Shabbat, five on Yom Kippur.
The Amidah, like the table in our home, is seen as the present day equivalent of bringing an offering before God. In biblical times, people brought the best of the herds, flocks or produce as a means of drawing close, of opening up the passageways to the divine. Up the smoke would go billowing above the altar, and as the sacrifice was transformed, so, too, was the people’s relationship with God and with themselves. Their renewed sense of connection with God would realign them with their own sense of purpose and direction, and with what was good, just, and holy.
So, in order to facilitate this sense of closeness, we have a bit of Jewish choreography. When we are getting ready to engage in the Amidah, again the central prayer around which our services are built — the Amidah in the Talmud is referred to simply as hat’filah, the prayer — when we are getting ready to engage in the Amidah, we draw three steps forward.
Judaism may have an ambivalent relationship to place; if God’s glory is everywhere, then how does any particular place feel special. But when we take those three steps forward, there is an opportunity, an invitation, to feel a transformation of any space we are in, and like the sacrificial offering, a transformation in our own encounters.
I can tell you that in certain instances, when my consciousness is just right, taking those three steps forward, inviting myself to feel in the presence of divine in a different, more pronounced way, inviting myself to feel, as certain commentators have described, as though I am approaching the Sovereign, the King, can be an almost overwhelming and transformative experience.
It’s no wonder to me in this headspace that the Amidah takes on a threefold structure beginning with expressions of awe. Before we get to the second part of the three, which on weekdays is space for us to articulate our personal and collective yearnings, our personal and collective petitions to God, we simply express our awe in response to the one whose presence we have just drawn close to: awe at the generation upon generation relationship of God to the people, awe and the wondrous ways the divine presence shows up in the world, awe in response to divine holiness and transcendence. But it’s a presence we’re invited to draw close to and to feel more palpably when we take those three steps and when we enter that presence.
When you enter, Ki Tavo, also happens to be the name of this week’s Torah portion, about which our Bar Mitzvah, Isaac Hohns, will teach us tomorrow.
Those words, “ki tavo,” are spoken by Moses to the Israelites as they reach the end of the 40 year journey in the wilderness and prepare to enter the promised land without him. Ki tavo, “when you enter the land that the ETERNAL your God is giving you as a heritage,” he says to them, “you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the ETERNAL your God is giving you, put it in a basket and go to the place where the ETERNAL your God will choose to establish the Divine Name.”
The Israelites were invited to participate in a ritual in which they would enter the presence of the Eternal, bring their offering, and have a transformative relationship in response to a place, to God, and to themselves.
Tomorrow Isaac, in being called to the Torah for the first time as a Bar Mitzvah, will similarly henceforth be invited to feel a palpably different transformed relationship to God, to Judaism, and to himself; he will be Bar Mitzvah, one taking on a sacred relationship to the mitzvot, the sacred invitations of Jewish tradition.
In each of these three layers — the Israelites entering the land; Isaac becoming Bar Mitzvah; each of us taking those three steps forward as we get ready to participate in the Amidah — we are accepting an invitation to experience a sense of transformation: the Israelites in having a transformed relationship to place; Isaac in having reached an age of sacred responsibility and having a newfound autonomy with respect to his Jewish tradition; each of us having entered the presence of God for a few moments as we whisper our prayers.
Jewish tradition has transformative steps we can take that we can think of, on the one hand, as being like something of a mental trick that helps us enter a spiritual state of mind that is otherwise difficult for us to enter, or we can think of it as, perhaps because indeed it is, an ontologically different threshold: once the Israelites were in the land, they had a different relationship to place than they did in the wilderness; once Isaac crosses that threshold of being 13, celebrating becoming Bar Mitzvah, his status, his experience, is transformed; once we take those three steps, we have entered truly holy ground, having drawn near to the presence of God.
So maybe there is a hint of Jewish geography in this after all. Crossing certain thresholds, taking three little steps, can take us to a different place entirely. May we all, following Isaac’s lead, find our experiences of sacred transformation. May you have a transformative Shabbat.
Wishing you all a Shabbat shalom, and shanah tovah u’metukah, a good and sweet new year,
Rabbi K.
