Maurice Sendak, the children’s author who died in 2012 wrote about an encounter with a young fan:
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
“He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.” What a wonderful way to express passion. A young child cannot write a poem. A young child will not buy you flowers. But a child is capable of loving with a fierceness that rivals anything that an adult can produce.
The experience of consuming, or being consumed and surrounded by the object of one’s devotion recurs in Jewish spiritual history and exemplifies the mikdash, where Heaven and Earth touched, where the Divine had a home, and where humanity could encounter the presence of our Creator.
The Talmud tells us, in Ketuvot 62b, how Rabbi Hiyya arranged a marriage for his son to the daughter of Rabbi Yossi ben Zimra. Rabbi Hiyya was able to negotiate twelve years of Torah study for his son, funded by his future father in law, prior to the marriage. What an incredible deal he had negotiated! But almost immediately the deal began to unravel when Rabbi Yossi’s daughter, the bride to be, passed before Rabbi Hiyya’s son for the first time. Rabbi Hiyya’s son asked to renegotiate the terms of the marriage. “Actually,” he said, “I only want to delay our marriage for six years.” She then passed before him a second time and he said, “on further thought, I want to marry her first and then go and study.”
Rabbi Hiyya’s son was embarrassed to share with his father that he had undermined the great deal that had been negotiated on his behalf, but his father, Rabbi Hiyya, was actually quite supportive. He said to his son, “My child, you have within you something of the mind of your Creator. For, at first we are told, (Exodus 15): “I will bring them and I will plant them” and then, ten chapters later (Exodus 25), “make for me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst.”
First
תְבִאֵ֗מו וְתִטָעֵ֙מו֙ בְהַ֣ר נַחֲלָֽתְָ֔ מָכ֧ון לְשִבְתְָ֛ פָעַ֖לְתָ ה׳ מִקְד֕ש אֲד-נָ֖י כונְנ֥ו יָדֽיָ׃
You will bring them and plant them in Your own mountain,
The place You made to dwell in, O LORD,
The sanctuary, O Lord, which Your hands established.
and then
וְעָ֥שו לִ֖י מִקדָ֑ש וְשָכַנְתִ֖י בְתוכָֽם׃
The original plan, when we crossed the sea, was for the mikdash, the temple, to be built in Eretz Yisrael on the top of a mountain. Moshe taught the Song of the Sea to Bnei Yisrael with this plan in mind and we sang the Song of the Sea in gratitude for being rescued from Pharaoh’s chariots and in praise for God’s grand plan to one day establish a sanctuary on a mountain.
But ten chapters later, God changed the plan and decided that God wanted a structure now to facilitate an intimate and ongoing encounter with B’nai Yisrael and the command was given to construct a Mishkan, a portable sanctuary, to bring God’s presence to our sojourn in the desert without delay.
Just like Rabbi Hiyya’s son, God, as it were, is unwilling to delay the consummation of the relationship. The original plan is replaced by one that foregrounds passion and love. Last Shabbat, Dan Troy shared some of the scholarly views on the Song of the Sea and the way it describes events separated by many years and many miles from the exodus. For Rabbi Hiyya, the incongruities in the Torah are clues to a cosmic drama unfolding just beyond view. Rabbi Hiya recognized those incongruent elements of the song but saw in them proof of Divine love and impatience.
This love does not only appear in poetry but is incorporated into the first and greatest code of Jewish law, Rambam’s Mishneh Torah. Rambam was perhaps the unlikeliest romantic among the rishonim; his Aristotelian rationalism seemingly leaves no place for stormy emotions. And yet, Rambam describes the love that each one of us should cultivate for God in the final chapter of Hilkhot Teshuvah, the summation of his Sefer HaMada:
וְכֵיצַד הִיא הָאַהֲבָה הָרְאוּיָה. הוּא שֶׁיֹּאהַב אֶת ה’ אַהֲבָה גְּדוֹלָה יְתֵרָה עַזָּה מְאֹד עַד שֶׁתְּהֵא נַפְשׁוֹ קְשׁוּרָה בְּאַהֲבַת ה’ וְנִמְצָא שׁוֹגֶה בָּהּ תָּמִיד כְּאִלּוּ חוֹלֶה חֳלִי הָאַהֲבָה שֶׁאֵין דַּעְתּוֹ פְּנוּיָה מֵאַהֲבַת אוֹתָהּ אִשָּׁה וְהוּא שׁוֹגֶה בָּהּ תָּמִיד בֵּין בְּשִׁבְתּוֹ בֵּין בְּקוּמוֹ בֵּין בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁהוּא אוֹכֵל וְשׁוֹתֶה.
What is the proper love? That a person should love God with a very great and exceeding love, until their soul is bound up in the love of God, so that they are constantly preoccupied with it, as though stricken with lovesickness—such that their mind is never free from the love of that person, and they remain absorbed in it at all times: whether sitting or rising, whether eating or drinking.…This idea is alluded to by Solomon in the verse (Song of Songs 2:5), spoken metaphorically: “I am lovesick.” Indeed, the entire Song of Songs is a parable for this love.
My teacher, Rabbi Ebner, of blessed memory, frequently told a story of a lovesick student in the yeshiva who was caught daydreaming about his beloved. Rabbi Ebner told him, “This is actually good because Rambam explicitly writes that someone who is lovesick shouldn’t be able to focus on anything else. If you were able to focus on my lecture, it would be a contradiction in the Rambam!”
The Song of the Sea that we read this morning praises God for a plan that never was implemented because God’s desire for an intimate relationship with us meant that God could not push off that intimacy just like Rabbi Hiyya’s son decided he couldn’t delay his marriage.
From the Song of the Sea to the Song of Songs, Jewish life is sustained by passion. Jewish communities that inculcate fervor and passion survive and those that offer only tepid doses of Judaism are not able to sustain commitments in an open society or withstand the pressures of persecution..
The Yeshiva World has oriented an entire society around passion for high level Torah scholarship in a way that generates commitment among those who are doing the high level Torah scholarship and those who admire it and support it and sustain it.
The Hassidic World has oriented an entire society around the opportunity to bask in the glow of holiness that emanates from the court of the rebbe. That experience too has generated loyalty and commitment even through periods of recent history when most Jews abandoned their pious upbringings.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and his students in 19th century Germany inculcated a passion for ethical excellence that was seamlessly and holistically integrated into a life devoted to mitzvot and to being a good neighbor and citizen.
The pioneers of HaPoel HaMizrahi, the Mizrahi Workers Party, rebelled against both the Orthodox and the Zionist establishments and restored, with unimaginable dedication, Yishuv Eretz Yisrael to its place among the Torah’s mitzvot.
These communities of the recent past and present look different from each other but each are organized around an orienting passion.
As Pesach comes to an end, we need to ask ourselves: what are we passionate about, as individuals and as a community? Pesach is not a holiday of commemoration, it is a festival of education and a celebration of the transmission of a story from one generation to the next. That transfer cannot be imparted in a lecture, it can only be imparted by revealing a bit of our love to those with whom we are closest. But we cannot share what we do not ourselves possess. Love is both an emotion and a choice. Let’s use the final days of this holiday to clarify what we love about Jewish life and then, today, tomorrow, and in the weeks to come, fan those flames into a fiery passion that can inspire us and that can ignite a flame among our children and community as well.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 