Drashot

How does disease change us, as individuals and as a society? 

For more than a year now the entire world has been gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 550,000 have died from the disease, millions more have been infected, and a small but significant percentage are suffering from the long-term effects of COVID. To keep the disease under control, to minimize its impact on our collective health, we have moved into physical isolation, distancing ourselves from one another and living much of our lives online, if we can.

This week’s Torah portion, Tazriah-Metzora, explores how our ancestors dealt with skin disease, tzara’at, “He shall be unclean as long as the disease is on him. Being unclean, he shall dwell apart; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.” (Leviticus 13:42). He is socially isolated to contain the spread of the disease. 

Commenting on this verse, Chizkuni wrote, “the disease from which he suffers is contagious to people who conduct social intercourse with him.” (France, 13th Century) This should sound familiar; we, too, have been struggling to combat a deadly disease that is highly contagious, so we have isolated ourselves from one another to keep ourselves and our community safe. 

All of us are living outside the camp and suffering from the social isolation that comes with that condition. Hopefully, soon, with enough people vaccinated we will be able to emerge from this isolation and come back to life as a community, to “reenter the camp.” 

When the victim of tzara’at is healed, the priest would perform a ritual to enable them to reenter the camp. Perhaps we can can learn from our tradition and begin planning a ritual of reentry and reconnection

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

Judaism is often characterized as a religion of petty details, rather than a religion of soaring spiritual concepts. Judaism does pay close attention to the details of daily life–how we treat employees, how we speak to one another and about one another–not out of pettiness but out of a desire to sanctify life. No behavior is more essential to life than eating, and it, too, is subject to Jewish law. 

This week’s Torah portion explains one of the fundamental restrictions of kashrut, which types of meat can or cannot be eaten. Acceptable or fit (kosher means fit) animals are primarily vegetable eaters, like ruminant mammals (cows, sheep and goats) or birds that do not hunt or eat carrion, and fish with scales and a backbone. By the way, there are no restrictions on the consumption of any food that is grown, only food that comes from living creatures. 

A reasonable person can argue that this list is arbitrary and serves no useful purpose. They are right and wrong. Right in the sense that the system is arbitrary, unless you believe God established it. But wrong, because conscious eating serves a profound purpose. 

Making conscious choices about what we eat and what we do not eat cultivates a deep sensitivity to the foods we eat and can elevate the purely physical act of consuming nutrients to a spiritual act, particularly if you add a blessing. 

Kashrut is not different from vegetarianism, veganism, or the locavore movement. All of these systems of eating place a deep value on the choices we make as consumers of food. Some people eat to feed their bodies; kashrut teaches us that food can also feed our souls. 

You are what you eat.

We are celebrating our second Pesach of this pandemic and last Sunday evening had our second online community Seder. When we went into lock down, I thought it would be for a few weeks. Now it has been more than one year. 

This has been a hard year. A year of fear, of anger, of loneliness and of division. 

It has also been a year of hope. A year of finding new ways to stay connected and new ways of caring for each other. A year in which science and medicine developed a viable vaccine at never-before-seen speed. This vaccine gives us hope that we are nearing the end of this pandemic’s terrible reign and the cost we have all paid, in lives lost, in incomes vaporized, in isolation and depression. 

This year Pesach feels like a new celebration of freedom, a celebration of the coming end to the pandemic. This year the seventh day of Pesach falls on Shabbat. We step away from the weekly cycle of our annual Torah reading and have special readings for the holiday. 

In addition to special Torah and Haftarah readings, we also read the Song of Songs, an extended love poem, attributed to King Solomon. The subject of this book is the erotic love between a woman and a man, and it contains some of the most beautiful poetry in the Hebrew Bible or in all literature. 

According to scholars, its inclusion in the Jewish sacred canon was controversial, but Rabbi Akiva ensured its status as a sacred text by describing the story as a metaphor for the love between God and the Jewish people. 

At least that is the stated reason. So why do we read a book about love on Passover, our annual celebration of freedom from slavery? Perhaps it is to remind us that love is the great antidote to much of what ails us, as individuals and a society: isolation, suspicion, anger, fear, intolerance. 

Love is the force that binds people together in relationship. When we feel love for another person, we cannot degrade them, we cannot enslave them, and we cannot mistreat them. 

As we emerge from this difficult and dark time, let us all resolve to reenter the world in love, caring for others, and building a better society than the one we left behind before the pandemic. 

Just as God liberated our people from slavery in love, so may we build a society in which all can be free, founded on love. The Song of Songs can guide our way.

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

This Shabbat we begin the Book of Leviticus, Sefer Vayikra, the third book of the Torah. This is the book with which, traditionally, a child begins their study of Torah. The central topic of Sefer Vayikra are sacrifices and just as the sacrifices were pure, so children are pure. Thus, our sages say, the pure begin studying the pure. 

Sacrifices were the primary way the ancient Israelites connected with God. It was how imperfect human beings could maintain a relationship with a perfect God. 

How can we maintain our connection with God? We who are not pure as children are. We who no longer have access to sacrifice. 

Perhaps it is found in the first words of our Torah portion, vayikra el Moshe (And God called out to Moses). The first word vayikra is written on a Torah scroll this way וַיִּקְרָ֖א, with the final letter aleph much smaller than the other letters. The Hassidic mystics of the 19th Century taught that this tiny aleph shows us that at Sinai God spoke only the letter aleph, the letter that has no sound. 

Thus, if we want to connect with God, we must learn to sit in silence, for it is in silence that God chose to be revealed at Sinai and it is in silence that God can be revealed to us. If we have the courage and the patience to be silent and to hear God’s call.

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

This Shabbat is Shabbat Ha Hachodesh, the Shabbat of the Month, marking the beginning of the Hebrew month of Nissan and the imminent arrival of Pesach, on 15 Nissan.
This Shabbat will also mark a year since we went into physical isolation as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and moved all our activities from our physical space to online. When we first went into lockdown it seemed this would be a short-term, temporary situation: a few weeks at most. Here we are now, 52 Shabbats later (but who is counting?) and we are still physically distanced and conducting our congregational life online.
As strange as it seems, we will be doing our second community seder online this year. I choose my words carefully here, I do not say socially distanced, but physically distant, because over the past year our congregants have worked mightily to maintain the cohesion of our community in the face of the essential physical distancing that keeps us safe. With the development and approval of three different vaccines and the accelerating pace of vaccinations, I hope and pray that we will soon be able to return to something that approximates the emotional and spiritual enrichment that physical connection provides.
This week’s Torah portion discusses the gifts that the Israelites bring to construct the Mishkan, the Tabernacle the Israelites used to worship God through the sacrificial service. “Take from among you gifts to the LORD; everyone whose heart so moves him shall bring them—gifts for ADONAI…” (Exodus 35:5). Commenting on this verse, Rashi (12th Century Germany) wrote, “Because his heart prompts one to generosity, he is called נדיב לב, one who is prompted to generosity by the heart.”
As we mark our year of physical isolation and living online, it is important to acknowledge all of our congregants who have so generously shared their gifts, of technological skill, of creative thinking, of time and energy, to make the continued spiritual life of our community possible. From enabling us to use Zoom to its highest potential, to helping design and deliver our “High Holy Days in a Box,” to improving the quality of our email update, to helping us strengthen our technological infrastructure, to continuing to generate and carry out new ideas and programs to keep us connected, to paying your dues.
We could not have survived this challenging time without you. There are too many people to name, but you know who you are and we thank you deeply for sharing your gifts with the community.
This week’s Torah portion ends the Book of Exodus. Whenever we conclude a book of the Torah the congregation stands and says, חזק, חזק. ונתחזק – Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek – Be strong, be strong, may you be strengthened.
May all of us stay strong and continue to be strengthened by the care and generosity of our fellow community members.
~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

How do we know if God is present in the world? Whether we are believers or not it is a question many of us ask ourselves. Or we ask for a sign that God is real. This is one of the fundamental challenges to the believer, for in the end belief in God is an act of faith; a willingness to believe that something exists whose existence cannot be proven. 

However, this week’s Torah portion provides an intriguing answer to the question of God’s presence. After the sin of the Golden Calf and his destruction of the original Tablets of the Law, Moses returns to Mt. Sinai and asks God, “Oh, let me behold Your Presence!” (Exodus 33:18) and God answers him, “you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live… you will see My back; but My face must not be seen.” (Exodus 33:20 and 23) 

We learn from this that we experience God indirectly. We cannot see God’s face, but we can see God’s back, the impact of God in the world. When we experience love or selflessness, we are experiencing God’s presence. When we see someone doing good in the world, we are experiencing God in the world. When we see someone soothing someone’s suffering, we are witnessing God’s action in the world. We cannot see God’s face, but we can bring God into the world by the ways we work to make this world better. 

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

Light can be practical: it can illuminate a room, or it can be a metaphor for finding our way, or for blazing a trail. 

This week’s Torah portion begins with the instructions for the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Light, “You shall further instruct the Israelites to bring you clear oil of beaten olives for lighting, for kindling lamps regularly. Aaron and his sons shall set them up in the Tent of Meeting, outside the curtain which is over [the Ark of] the Pact, [to burn] from evening to morning before the LORD. It shall be a due from the Israelites for all time, throughout the ages.” (Exodus 27:20-21) 

The light is not for practical use, as we read in Midrash Tanhuma, “He does not require your light. It was instituted solely for your sake, so that the world would be illumined in the future,” In other words, the light of the Ner Tamid represents God’s presence. 

Light is like God–we cannot see it, but we experience it. God illuminates the world through the beauty of nature, through human love, through our capacity to do good in this troubled world. Each of us can be a Ner Tamid by our actions. 

What can we do tomorrow to bring light, to bring God’s presence into this world? 

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

It is a commonplace observation that human beings are social creatures. We seek the company of others. We desire community. We take it for granted. But at times like these when we are forced into a kind of solitary existence, we realize how much community means to us. How much we need it. 

This week’s Torah portion, Terumah, begins the chronicle of the building of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle in which God’s presence dwelt. It begins with these words: “Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves him.” (Exodus 25:2) From this we learn that community is built when we each bring our talents and gifts and share them with each other. 

Building community is a collective endeavour. This is even more true now, when we can not come together physically, so each of us contributes in new ways to keep our community alive, technical skills, graphics, the willingness to teach others how to get online or on Zoom. The gifts may be different, but the goal is the same. 

Our Torah portion also reminds us that when we succeed we create holy space, as we read, “And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” (Exodus 25:9) That is, when we bring our talents together to create and sustain community, we make a space for holiness, for the divine presence to dwell. Lord knows, we need that holiness, now more than ever.

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

What is our responsibility to the weakest among us: immigrants, the poor, and the weak? This is a political debate we have been having for decades, even centuries. But it is also a moral imperative, as we read in this week’s Torah portion, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan. If you do mistreat them, I will heed their outcry as soon as they cry out to Me, and My anger shall blaze forth…” (Exodus 22:20-23) 

In ancient Israel “stranger, orphan and widow” meant the weakest members of society, those with no one to help or protect them. Commenting on this verse Ibn Ezra wrote, “whoever sees a person oppressing an orphan or a widow and does not help the orphan and the widow, he too is considered as an oppressor. You must not mistreat any widow or orphan. Widows and orphans, like strangers, are in a disadvantaged position relative to other citizens.” 

Judaism is very clear here, we are obligated to help the disadvantaged. The stranger is included to remind us that we must help, particularly when the needy are different from us, when they are the other. 

In Judaism the poor and the needy are not judged as being morally deficient because of their poverty. Rather, we are judged to be morally deficient if we do not come to their aid. 

Our Torah portion continues with the reminder that God (or our conscience) will see how we act and judge us accordingly.

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz

It is a commonplace of political and social analysis that our society is deeply divided: Democrat and Republican, Liberal and Conservative, white and people of color, urban/suburban and rural, so called “native” Americans against immigrants. Our politics is descending into political warfare, climaxing in the attack on the Congress on January 6, spurred on by President Trump and lies about the election being stolen. There are politicians, news channels, talk radio personalities and individuals who seek personal gain, whether power or profit, by pitting us against each other, regardless of the cost to our society. The politics of division always exact a cost. 

This week’s Torah portion shows us another way. Following the crossing of the Sea of Reeds to freedom and a battle against the Amallekites, the Israelites are encamped. Yitro, (Jethro) Moses’ father in law and a Midianite priest, comes to visit Moses. When Moses tells him of all that God has done for the Israelites, Yitro responds by blessing God, “Blessed be the LORD,” Jethro said, “who delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharaoh, and who delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods, yes, by the result of their very schemes against [the people].” (Exodus 18:10-11) 

Commenting on this verse, the Mekhilta (a first century CE commentary on the Torah) says, “that Yitro knew of every idol and god in the world.” Thus despite being an idol worshiper, he could recognize what God had done for the Israelites and bless God for it. In other words, he could see beyond his own beliefs and values and recognize another’s. 

Imagine how much better our country would be if we focused on our commonalities rather than our differences. 

~Rabbi Dean Kertesz