Question 6: How do we find wholeness? (Rosh Hashanah 5784/2023)

Hi folks. Shanah tovah! Taking a slightly different approach for these next couple of posts and sharing my High Holy Day sermons. They’re the only writing I’m able to manage during this season, and I hope they’ll resonate for y’all! May you have a happy, healthy new year.

“Tiny Tubs”

West End Synagogue, NYC, Rosh Hashanah 5784/2023

What makes you feel whole? It’s a question we’ve been asking the West End Synagogue community over the last several weeks as we approached these high holy days, crafted around the theme of “Wholly, Holy Community.” For those of you on the WES mailing list, you’ve received emails from Cantor Melissa and me with invitations to reflection, musical centering, and a question to answer. I want to thank everyone who answered the questions online or as part of our selichot service last week. 

There were many beautiful responses to the question of what makes you feel whole. People wrote of swimming in the ocean, resting their head on their partner’s chest, being in balance with different parts of their lives, watching seniors walking hand-in-hand and toddlers just learning to walk, losing themselves in music and dance and art and writing, feeling fully a part of the world, truly listening to the universe, and of course welcoming people to the WES community. I smiled as I read each person’s reflections, grateful for a synagogue with such beautiful and diverse perspectives. But among all of the many responses, there was one that took my breath away, from a WES member who wrote that what makes them feel whole is “any experience that takes me out of ‘the tiny tub of myself’”. If this was you, thank you. This whole drash comes from your beautiful framing. If you’re willing to come forward after the service, I’d love to thank you personally. 

I found myself googling the phrase “the tiny tub of myself,” wondering if perhaps it had come from a movie or book or poet. Finding nothing with which to further contextualize this congregant’s words, I was left with a gorgeous, nearly blank canvas upon which to begin to paint.

So I found myself thinking about creation. The story we tell at the start of the Torah is that of creation from nothing, of tohu vavohu, the null and void starting point from which the Divine One began to make all that we know in the universe.  And of course the story we tell in the Torah reading Eva chanted for us earlier today includes that of Isaac’s start. When Isaac is a baby, it seems that all is well. He is born after much yearning, he’s named and circumcised, Sarah laughs with delight, and Abraham throws a feast when he is weaned. But then Sarah sees that the tiny tub of Isaac’s existence could be easily displaced by the tiny tub of his older half-brother. Just after the verse in which Abraham throws the feast, “Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian-woman, whom she had borne to Abraham”...doing… something. 

What exactly Sarah witnesses is unclear. The Hebrew says that Ishmael was m’tzaheking. It’s the same root word as Isaac’s own name, the tzadi chet kuf of laughter. It can mean play or laugh, both perfectly reasonable acts for a teenage boy, and our sages—  the rabbis who first began the work of commentary that we continue to engage in to this day—couldn’t have that. After all, if Ishmael were an innocent child, Sarah’s next words, “Drive out this maidservant and her son, for the son of this maidservant shall not share-inheritance with my son, with Yitzhak!” would be unredeemable.

So the sages spun some stories. What did “play” mean when Ishmael played? According to Bereishit Rabbah, an early midrash on the book of Genesis, play here was far from innocent. Rabbi Akiva said that it was sexual play, and that Sarah saw Ishmael seduce and dishonor married women. Another rabbi in the same passage said that the play Sarah witnessed was a form of idol worship with Ishmael making sport by building altars to false gods. Still another claimed that the sport was that of bloodshed. There’s even a story that young Ishmael took younger Isaac to a field and made a game of shooting arrows at him, after bragging that as the older son he will receive a double inheritance from their father. 

These three acts— sexual impropriety, idolatry, and (attempted) murder— are the Big Three in Jewish law. There’s a precept I’m sure many of us are familiar with, pikuach nefesh, stating that a Jew can break any commandment in order to save someone’s life. You can eat bacon-wrapped shrimp fondue, work on Shabbat, lie, steal, and dishonor your parents. But you cannot, under any circumstance, worship idols, engage in improper sexual acts, or murder another person. It’s better to die or let another die than to transgress the Big Three. And so of course, for Sarah, it’s better to cast out Ishmael than to allow him to at best influence and at worst overtake Isaac.

(Now for those of you here who know that Jewish law was barely dreamed of at this part of the story and therefore shouldn’t have had a bearing on Sarah’s actions, 1— you’re absolutely right. 2—the sages didn’t typically busy themselves with such concerns as narrative continuity when character was on the line.) 

In much of our tradition, we treat our Biblical characters as flat because that’s what’s necessary in order to maintain a particular sort of order. In the stories we read on Rosh Hashanah, Abraham must be righteous, Isaac must be obedient, Sarah must be protective, Hagar must be haughty, and Ishmael must be devious. If Abraham were a pushover, Isaac was rebellious, Sarah was cruel, Hagar was innocent, or Ishmael was sweet, it would be difficult to cast this story of outcasting as a moral one. But of course, the text of the Torah itself is limited in what it offers us, and so our commentators fill in the gaps as best they can, in alignment with their own stated or silent agendas.

Now, not all of the sages were so kind to Sarah. Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, a commentator who lived in the 12th century over 500 years after the composition of Bereshit Rabbah, had a different take on her actions. He said that, in fact, Ishmael was simply playing as children do, and that Sarah was jealous because he was older and presented a threat to Isaac. There was no need to attribute to Ishmael some terrible act. Fairly or not, Sarah was acting for her own best interests and those of her son, and Ishmael— the son born because of Sarah’s initial offering of her servant Hagar to Abraham in order to provide him an heir—  was the casualty. 

I think I like ibn Ezra’s Sarah better than Bereishit Rabbah’s, even though she’s not kind. I don’t mean I’d want to be friends with her, but as a character, I appreciate her humanity. I like the realism of a Sarah who waited almost her entire life to become a mother to her one child and as a result is willing to do anything to protect him. I like the uncomfortable possibility of Sarah mistreating her servant Hagar, not because I want her to be cruel but because I want her to be a human being with deep flaws. Whether she existed or not doesn’t matter— her character has informed all of Jewish history, and as a Reconstructionist seeking always to make sense of Torah for our time, I want to learn from her. And today, looking at the way that the sages try to make sense of Sarah’s actions makes me think of the assumptions we place on people in our own lives. 

We might see an older person and assume they aren’t strong enough to lift the Torah. We might see a child and assume they aren’t mature enough to sit through the adult service. We might see a BIPOC person— someone who’s Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color— and assume that they either aren’t Jewish or converted to Judaism. We might see someone wearing a suit and assume they have a job. We might see someone singing on the subway and assume they’re unhoused. We might see a man wearing a kippah on the street and assume he’s observant. We might see a woman wearing a kippah on the street and assume she’s a rabbi. 

The thing about assumptions is that, sometimes, they’re correct. But, often enough, they’re not. And when they’re not, the time we’ve spent assuming is time we’ve not been able to spend engaging with the reality of someone else’s whole existence. Of course when we’re passing someone on the street there’s only so much we can do to engage with their existence without crossing some boundaries. But as part of a synagogue community, or any community, we have so much more opportunity. 

We have the opportunity to be with one another wholly— to bring our complete selves to the community. Now I’m not saying that this is easy. Being wholly present, especially in a community of wholly present people, is intensely vulnerable. You have to operate with the knowledge that you might experience life very differently from the person next to you, even as you both show up for Shabbat, and that your different ways of living might mean that you won’t understand each other for a long time. You have to gradually, slowly, carefully peel back the differences between you and those around you to find the core of divine reflection beneath. As it’s said in Pirke Avot, chapter 3: “if two sit together and there are words of Torah [spoken] between them, then the Shekhinah — the Divine presence—abides among them.”

In the Torah, Sarah and Hagar had set and separate social roles, however fair or unfair they may have been. But what would have happened if Sarah had met Hagar and Ishmael as strangers at Kiddush? Maybe they would have shyly sat next to each other, the older grandmother-type Sarah with the young or perhaps middle aged Hagar and gangly teenage Ishmael. Sarah with immense wealth and status, Hagar and Ishmael trying to make it in a society stacked against them. Perhaps they could have bonded over the egg salad. But, maybe, the tiny tubs of their respective existences would have seemed like oil and water— far too different to mix— because that mixing takes work. 

When we’re born, we are all “tiny tubs of ourselves,” with no clue that other people exist or, frankly, that we exist. We are nothing more than need and instinct. As we grow, we come to understand that there are other tubs of other beings, and, eventually, that others have different needs from our own. We can be hungry when someone else is full and someone else can be tired when we are energized. It’s a profound realization— the idea that what feels essential for our bodies is not shared in all bodies. But still, anyone who’s familiar with the concept of being hangry (so hungry that you get angry) or anyone who’s found themself stuck behind a slow walker in midtown, knows what it can mean to be sucked back into that tiny tub of self at any age. 

Sometimes, we have to be. When we’re sick, or in some form of physical danger, the only way to remain whole is to turn into ourselves and our immediate needs. But, most of the time? Being whole means leaving that tiny tub of ourselves and entering the pool with everyone else. 

Boy is that risky. 

When we leave the protective tiny tub of ourselves, we have to confront the reality that some people are simply going to experience everything very differently from us. So, when faced with difference, we learn coping strategies. We meld. We talk about the weather. We dress neutrally. Or, alternatively, we pull an ibn Ezra-style Sarah and we try to remove the difference from our community entirely, or remove ourselves from the community. And let’s be clear— it’s good to have communities where we don’t have to worry about whether what matters to us matters to other people. It’s good to have sports bars where everyone cares about the game, community gardens where everyone cares about tending plants, and of course synagogues where we all care about Jewish holidays. But it’s also good to have communities where oil and water can, somehow, mix, where we can be full versions of ourselves and where the fullness of ourselves— of our unique characters— enhances the whole. 

Isn’t that part of what makes a synagogue like ours so special? That we can have upper west side septuagenarians raised in Ashkenazi Orthodox homes sitting next to tattooed Gen Z Jews from Bushwick, who sit by 90-something-year-old retired professors, who sit by new empty nesters returned to the city after raising families in suburbia, who sit by purple-haired Lesbian Boomers, who sit by children of interfaith couples learning by osmosis that the Jewish community is made whole by each of us and by them too?

The words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel resonate here. He wrote, “Our first impulse is self-preservation. It is the essence of organic living, and only he who has contempt for life should condemn it as a vice. If life is holy, as we believe it is, then self-regard is that which maintains the holy. Regard for the self becomes only a vice by association: when associated with complete or partial disregard for other selves. Thus the moral task is not how to disregard one’s own self but how to discover and be attentive to another self.” 

I want to imagine how Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael’s story could have gone differently if Sarah could have been attentive to another self, if she could have recognized the wholeness of the other. Given the intense power discrepancy, perhaps they could never really have become equals, but things could have gone much better than they did. Today’s chapter is the last we see of Hagar— at least according to the plain text of the Torah. In today’s reading, we witness Hagar crying as she thinks she’s about to lose her son to thirst, then giving him drink, and then she’s gone. Sarah, too, is silent after this chapter. Her last words are her instructions to Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out. She is mentioned again in the text 2 chapters later, when her life comes to an end, but she never again speaks. 

In Torah, there’s always much more left unsaid than said, but a few chapters and many years later, we witness the holiness of wholeness. Following Abraham’s death is in one of my favorite verses in the entire Torah, Genesis 25:9. “Yitzhak and Yishmael his sons buried him, in the cave of Makhpela, in the field of Efron son of Tzohar the Hittite, that faces Mamre.”

As far as we know, Isaac and Ishmael haven’t met since Ishmael’s banishment, long before Isaac’s near sacrifice. They’ve lived lives apart from one another in geography and in culture. Ishmael has every reason to be angry at Isaac for being his father’s preferred son, and Isaac every reason to be fearful that Ishmael will want vengeance for his earlier treatment. But none of that matters. The two exchange no words that we know of. They simply meet as brothers, and as brothers, wholly connected across their differences, they are able to move beyond the tiny tubs of their own existence. In this new year, may we too seek opportunities to test the communal waters, leave our own tiny tubs of existence and in doing so perhaps find a more wholly, holy community . Shanah Tovah u’metukah u’shleimah- wishing you a good, and sweet, and whole 5784.