Many of you know this morning’s Torah portion very well. You know the plagues that were inflicted on the Egyptians. If I say, “dam, tzfarde’ah…” you know what comes next (kinim). If I say “let my people…” you know the end of the clause is “let my people go.”
We know Parashat Va’era so well, not because this morning is “different from all other mornings” and we’ve reviewed the parasha with extra care. We know Parashat Va’era so well because it’s story, the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the exodus from Egypt, is ingrained in our minds, and in our mouths, in our hearts and in our bones through telling the story and reenacting the story at the Pesach Seder each year.
Moses Mendelsohn, the monumentally influential Jeiwsh philosopher argued, in his book “Jerusalem” that while every great religion teaches the same essential truths about his life and ethics and God, or so he thought, Judaism has a uniquely effective method of transmitting those truths within a community and passing them on from one generation to the next. Our rituals and our mitzvot are a giant system of pedagogy that ensures that the philosophical and theological principles of the Torah are known and spread and preserved and transmitted.
So of course we should not be surprised when the system works. The elaborate rituals and traditions and mitzvot of the seder night, have succeeded in inculcating within us a vast amount of knowledge about the Torah.
I’ve shared more than once how Rabbi Aaron Shmuel Tamares, the great Lithuanian Orthodox pacifist rabbi took this idea one step further. By celebrating the seder rituals we remind ourselves that God hates oppression. In the words of Joshua in Cecille B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments, “God made men. Men made slaves.” The rituals of the seder, and the other mitzvot of the Torah create a change of our own consciousness. The seder makes us free. Once we are reminded that God hates oppression; we may be enslaved but we are no longer slaves.
Does it work? Do mitzvot change our consciousness or teach and inculcate the Torah’s religious messages? Rabbi Saul Berman once shared his account of a sort of continuing arms-race in the attempt by rabbis over the centuries and millennia to help us pay attention to the mitzvot that we perform. The first step was the invention of the mitzvah-berakhah. In order to remind us that a mitzvah is a command from God that sanctifies us by its performance, we say berakhot before performing most ritual mitzvot. How could someone not be impacted by saying “asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav” before eating matzah or counting the omer or lighting Shabbat candles.
But, over time, the berachot themselves became rote recitations for too many of us too often. Some suggested that we recite a preface before the berakhah asserting, “Hineni Muchan u’Mezuman – behold I stand ready and prepared to fulfill the mitzvah of my Creator…” before reciting the berakhah. How could we not be moved by such a declaration?
But, over time, these declarations too can be said by rote without meaning. The Kabbalists thought that an added mystical declaration could solve the problem. They recite “in fear and trembling I prepare to reunite the fractured elements of the Godhead through my performance of this mitzvah.” I’m not a kabbalist so I cannot comment on the effectiveness of these declarations but I see them printed in siddurim and I suspect they are no more guaranteed to succeed as any of the other declarations and berakhot and efforts to encourage kavanah, focus, and transformative intentionality in our observance of mitzvot.
The philosopher Martin Buber was once invited to lead birkat hamazon at a large gathering. He did so with tremendous emotion and everyone there felt moved and transported by the experience. One, more cynical guest at the meal, turned to his neighbor and said, “he must not bench very often.” Perhaps ironically, there can be an inverse relationship between the frequency with which we say something, and the ability of those words to actually penetrate our hearts and our minds.
Infamously, it took dozens of takes before the secular actor in the Israeli film “Time of Favor” was able to recite a “boreh pri ha’adamah” berakhah and eat a pickle with sufficient casualness for the scene to look realistic to religious audiences.
In our daf yomi studies this week we encountered several examples of spontaneous personal prayers that were recited by Talmudic rabbis following the amidah. These prayers are beautiful and poetic and each one is different in subtle ways that must have reflected the personalities and the religious priorities of the individuals who composed them and recited them three times each day after the conclusion of the amidah. And…just about each one of those prayers has made its way into the siddur where it is just another collection of printed words, at risk of being recited by rote. Just minutes ago we read one such passage in the beautiful prayer that comprises Birkat HaHodesh.
This is a problem that has been with us for a long time. The earliest example might be a curious phrase in this morning’s Torah portion. When Moshe delivers his message to the Israelites that they will indeed be freed by God, after an initial series of setbacks, the Israelites did not listen to Moshe. In the Torah’s words:
וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃
But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.
Ramban, Nachmanide, the great 13th century Torah scholar, notes that there was no failure of belief on the part of the Israelites. They did not doubt the truth of Moshe’s prophecy or the authenticity of Moshe’s mission from God. They just were not able to “hear” what Moshe had to say. They couldn’t absorb his words. Their break-breaking, soul crushing work closed their hearts to any message of encouragement and deliverance. Their fear of their Egyptian taskmasters kept them from even hoping that their future could be better.
According to Ramban, this dynamic should be very familiar to us. We are not enslaved and we do not live in fear of taskmasters, but we too inhabit that space in between knowing something in the abstract, or affirming our belief in some dogma to check a box on our commitment to Orthodoxy, and then having those truths penetrate and transform us.
Bridging that gap has been the task of millenia and it is the task of a lifetime. I have no easy solutions because there are no easy solutions. What I can suggest is that each of us take advantage of the substantial investment we are already making in connecting to tefilah, to Torah, and Mitzvot, and then adding just a bit more focus and attention and care, so that we can reap as much gain as possible from the investments we have already made. If you show up in shul on Shabbat morning at 10:30 or 11 am – that’s fairly late – but, all the same, you are still spending hours and hours of your life here in shul. What is your return on that investment? Try reciting the words of the siddur a bit more slowly so that the words linger in your mouth and resonate internally. Try hearing God’s revelation, mediated through the voice of the reader, when the Torah is read each week. If you don’t already know the meaning of what you say, take a few minutes with a good English translation and learn the meanings of just one or two new siddur words each week.
Moshe had to convince Pharaoh to free his slaves and Moshe had to convince the Israelites that the redemption they believed in as an abstract principle was actually going to occur in a way that would transform their lives. We have the somewhat easier, but still challenging task of converting the rituals we perform and the prayers we recite and the assertions we confirm as theoretical facts, into emotional facts that thrive deep within our souls in ways that transform every aspect of our lives.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 