Hallelujah

I was in Edinburgh watching a gospel choir from South Africa singing songs of freedom, with colorful costumes, soaring voices, dancing and much gusto.

The final song they sang, though, was Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. While this is not my favourite of songs, the fact that they were singing a song by a Jew and through it were intending to praise God moved me; and I was even more moved when the entire audience rose to their feet and sang in unison "Hallelujah" with incredible joy and vitality. 

And it suddenly struck me that every time someone says the English word Hallelujah, since fortunately in this case the annoying J that creeps in in English versions of Hebrew words is not pronounced, they are literally saying the Hebrew words הללויה or הללו יה, Hallelu Yah, praise God.

Meaning that, without ignoring negative things this religion has wrought such as the Crusades and anti-semitism, one good thing Christianity has certainly done is brought millions of mouths down the ages to say the words "Praise God" in Hebrew, and that goes on until today.

And each time a mouth does that, surely that is a bolt of good energy in this troubled world?
Perhaps it even creates an angel?

Sing Hallelujah
Sing it!

The Precise Thing for Every Moment

In Bamidbar chapter 27, God tells Moses that his life is drawing to a close. Moses’ concern, upon hearing this news, is not for himself but for the people. They will need a new leader. He says to God: 

16. Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation,

17. Who may go out before them, and who may go in before them, and who may lead them out, and who may bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd.

Wait a minute! Isn’t there a person who has been groomed for the leadership for the past 39 years - Joshua? He was placed in charge of the battle against Amalek. He was the only one Moses took with him (at least partway) up Mt Sinai. He was at the Tent of Meeting with Moses. He was one of the only two good spies. Isn’t it obvious that he is to be the successor, having been mentored by Moses, having spent all these years learning from him, and being the only Israelite with the military experience necessary to conquer the land?

So why does Moses phrase it as if there is no specific candidate, and his request is for God to choose “someone”? Does Moses really expect God to reply, “Ok, appoint Joe Shmoe.”

I’ve been pondering this question and for me, the point emerging from this one brief interchange is that we should never think we know God’s will. Even Moses, the prophet who “knew” God better than any human, needed to humbly acknowledge that God’s will is connected to a larger picture that we can never fully fathom, and therefore there may be surprises. Moreover, even if God’s favour seemed in the past to have been leaning towards Joshua, that doesn’t mean that at this moment it is still the same.

Important to note: This does not mean that God is capricious and acts on whims. What it means is that life is dynamic. Every moment comes with new energies, new strategies, and new mindful behaviour. As the verse is Psalms says, “Today, if you listen to his voice” and as Rebbe Nahman of Breslov points out, “This is to remind us that we must do our living in the present, in today. Every day, every hour has its own specific work, regardless of the past.”

This is a lesson I learned from Yemima Avital, creator of the Yemima method (see my article here for more): that every moment has its diyuk, its precise action. So Moses, accordingly, did not make assumptions and he waited to see what God’s will was in the now. 

We too need to become aware that whatever was right in the past might not be right for now – but if we plug into our intuition, do a clarification process, pray, we will hopefully discover what that precise right thing actually is.

Joshua: Son and sacrifice

Joshua is an enigmatic figure. He is present in a number of stories in the Torah and yet slips under the radar, such that people are not able to, off the cuff, recall much about him except for his being one of the “good spies” and eventually taking over from Moses.

We know nothing about his childhood or background apart from the fact that he is the son of a man named Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim. But there is a fascinating midrash from Yalkut Shimon that suggests a very formative incident:

Rabbi  Eliezer said: For all those years in which Israel sat in Egypt, the Ephraimites sat securely, tranquilly and serenely, until Nun, a descendant of Ephraim, came and declared, “The L-rd has appeared to me and commanded me to take you out.” [He felt/He did it due to the] pride in his heart that they were of royal descent and great warriors; and they got up, took their sons and daughters and exited Egypt. Then the Egyptians arose and killed all their warriors.

In this narrative, where Joshua as a young man experienced this tremendous failure on the part of his father, and perhaps his death, we could understand it if he began to see his teacher and mentor Moshe as a surrogate father figure. Moshe clearly trusts him, appointing him to be the military leader in the battle against Amalek. But we have stronger indications of a bond that is more akin to father and son.

When Moses climbs Mount Sinai, he takes only Joshua with him (although Joshua seems to vanish immediately, with Moses ascending alone – Ex. 24:13,15). Moses tells the elders “Wait here until we will return” (Ex. 24:14) in language very reminiscent of the Akeda story in which Abraham says to his servants, (Gen. 22:5) “Stay here with the donkey… and we will return to you.” Yet Abraham is misleading them. He cannot be sure that “they” will return; according to God’s command, only he will come back.  

In suggesting “And we will return”, Moses is referencing that foundational Jewish story. This does two things: (a) He is placing himself and Joshua in a father-son type relationship (b) He is placing Yehoshua into some kind of sacrificial role. But what that is unclear.

The sacrifice theme continues much later when Joshua is finally officially appointed as Moses’s successor. Moses lays his hands upon him, an action associated with sacrifices.[1] However, Joshua is not to be “sacrificed” in the sense of being put to death. How is he a sacrifice then? The answer I can think of would be that He is a sacrifice in the sense of something pure and worthy, being offered up to God’s service. The intertextuality here hints to us that he has the purity both of Isaac and of the animal at the altar.

Moses’s own children are not worthy successors; Joshua functions as his surrogate son. For Joshua, Moses replaces his failed father Nun, unlike him being someone who genuinely hears God’s voice, correctly and accurately, and leads the people into life, not death. It may even be, as is so often the case, that this early trauma propelled Joshua into his role, spurring him to take on responsibility and leadership so as to fix the crack that opened in his soul.

* * These ideas emerged during a Bibliodrama on Joshua in Efrat, August 2022, based on insights by Rabbi David Debow and others. Yael Valier was the first to suggest the connection between the language of the Akeda and that of the scene at Mt Sinai, but she takes it in a slightly different direction. Her own interpretation of the connection of Sinai with Akeda is that it is intended to indicate the selection of Joshua at this moment for something "big", just as Isaac was being selected for something important – with the others (Ishmael, Eliezer) being told to “remain behind”. 

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[1] God says “lay your hand” and yet Moses lays both hands. It seems as if Moses deviates from the details of the divine command. The Talmud (Menachot 93b) discusses the discrepancy between one hand and both hands, and there Resh Lakish concludes that in the context of animal sacrifice, it is the same thing and the language is interchangeable. He explicitly excludes this case, when the hands are laid upon Joshua; but the idea suggested in this blog would allow him to include this case too in the same category, of "animal sacrifice" so to speak, in a metaphorical sense. Which saves Moses from the charge of not properly fulfilling the divine command.

Shema: From child to adult, trust and faith

Many Jewish parents, tucking in their children at night, chant the bedtime “Shema Yisrael” (“Hear O Israel”) with them. In a situation of healthy parenting, the room is quiet and dark; the child is swaddled and safe, engulfed in a feeling of trust and wellbeing as the parent sits close by. The child knows that even when the parent leaves the room, it’s not to go far; one call or cry of alarm is enough to bring that loving presence hurrying back.

I want to suggest that this scene, these feelings, might also be being replayed as the child grows into an adult – with the same feelings now transposed onto the Transcendent Divine Parent. What are the rituals as we say the shema? We pause for a moment; the room is quiet. We place a hand upon our eyes, swaddling ourselves, creating darkness. God is close by. We make ourselves aware of that by declaring that God is one with everything, and hence everywhere. One in the mystical sense, that “there is nothing beside Him.” Even when we ourselves do not see or feel God, one call or cry is enough to connect us to the Presence.

The faith and trust that what we practice nightly in a healthy childhood emotional situation, is then in maturity applied to healthy faith emotional development. It is a daily affirmation of basic trust in the Creator and in our own worthiness as created beings. And even if the childhood situation was not healthy, there is still hope for the adult who intentionally creates healthy faith structures, that this may, we hope, actually rectify some of that childhood dysfunction.

(With thanks to Rabbi Dr Elie Holzer, in whose class on the Sefat Emet these insights arose.)

Orphans

Esther is orphaned of both her father and mother; that is why she is raised by her cousin Mordechai. Under the assumption that every detail of a person's biography shapes them in a certain way, what is the significance of her being an orphan?

It has been pointed out many times that the Esther and Joseph story share similarities - both in the storyline (dragged away from their homes, to make their way alone in a foreign context; becoming close to a powerful ruler and being able to help their families through their position of power etc.) and in actual intertextual connections, of similar words and phrases.

Joseph too was an orphan - his mother having died when he was a young child. Although his father Jacob is still alive, Joseph does not see him between the age of 17 and 39, until they are reunited. Conceivably, he feels abandoned by him, for allowing his brothers to sell him and not coming to look for him. Additionally, he cannot even know if Jacob is still living all this time. Thus, for all intents and purposes he is orphaned of both parents for most of his young adult life: in Potiphar's house, in the prison, and in the first part of his service as Pharaoh's viceroy.

There is a commandment to be kind to the orphan, because this person is vulnerable, lacking the basic parental care and nurturing needed for fundamental security in the world. It seems, looking through the prism of every detail carefully calibrated by the Divine, that Joseph and Esther being orphaned at a young age was part of what shaped these two for their important and historical destiny. How exactly it did so only God knows; but I imagine that it created a sensitivity, a reflectiveness, and a shyness that was part of their appeal, that meant that they both "found favour in the eyes of all" - which was an important part of their success. 

We also know that they were both described as beautiful. Rabbi Isaac Luria, the Arizal, points out that the word for orphan, YaTOM is the abbreviation for Yefeh Toar V'yefeh Mareh, meaning beautiful of form and countenance - a phrase used to describe Joseph (Gen. 39:6). We can see that Esther is similarly described (Esther 2:7) as Yefat Toar V'Tovat Mareh - again, spelling YaTOM. 

I think what we learn is that being orphaned at a young age is a traumatic experience, and can undoubtedly leave scars. At the same time, it can create a delicacy of feeling, an empathy to others, that may be the incubator for future leadership - provided the person can get past the psychological damage entailed.