For the past few weeks, my husband has been urging me to clear off my desk so that we can replace it with a baby crib. The crib, which arrived just a few days ago from my sister-in-law along with an array of car seats, strollers, and bright orange garbage bags filled with baby clothes, will not fit in our apartment until I get rid of my desk. But I have not been able to let it go. And so my great wooden desk–stacked with folders marked “ideas for the Pesach seder,” “Bronfman seduction,” “Babylonian menstruation,” as well as a pile of books including the JPS tanakh, Masechet Menachot, the current issue of Lilith, and Benne Lau’s book on Hazal–is an island in a sea of baby supplies. When sitting down before it, I cannot get up unless I push back one of the strollers, climb over a garbage bag, and straddle a big wicker box labeled “toys.” You might say that the baby supplies form a wall, to my right and to my left, and I am harboring a murderous urge to hurl rocking horse and rider into the sea.

Of course, I am extremely grateful to have received a full supply of baby goods from my sister-in-law, which saves us many hours and shekels in the weeks ahead. But the sheer physical reality of this paraphernalia crowding what was once my office has left me quite overwhelmed. In an attempt to reclaim some idea of order, I packed my bag for the hospital tonight, as instructed by the stack of eleven baby books behind my bed (all courtesy of the literary agency where I work): It is never too early to pack for the hospital – you must be prepared! In stuffing my hand cream, underwear, hot water bottle, and Alexander McCall Smith novels (I chose my hospital reading three months ago) into a tote bag, I felt a bit like the Israelites packing to leave Egypt. I too was gathering all the possessions I would need to take with me into the uncharted wilderness of motherhood, a land of flowing with milk, which I am told is characterized by many a Leyl Shimurim– long nights of no sleep without even a pillar of fire to keep vigil beside me.

On the other hand, once the baby is born, it will no longer be inside of me, which I suppose offers some degree of relief. I find it amusing that watermelons came into season in Israel the very week I entered my eighth month, just when I began to feel like I was carrying one around. Perhaps in a few weeks, when beset by the wailing cries of a baby that wishes it were back in my narrow womb, I, too, will pine for the watermelon to be curled up mutely inside me again. We remember the watermelons we ate in Egypt….

That watermelon-sized baby inside me is really all I need at this stage. If I had to, I could flee to the hospital b’chipazon, without my hospital bag and with only my girded loins and my sandals on my feet. If my contractions drive me out of my home so that I cannot delay, I could leave even without preparing any provisions for myself. After all, Pesach is not a holiday of preparedness. No one is ever fully ready for Pesach when the sun sets on the fourteenth of Nisan. There is always more to cook, more to clean, more to study, more to prepare. Perhaps that’s why the matzah is such a powerful symbol. Matzah is unfinished bread. It is dough that has not been given sufficient time to rise. Eating matzah is a reminder that we don’t always have time to plan in advance, and that sometimes we must just pick up and run, placing our trust in God as we hurl ourselves forwards towards our divinely ordained destiny. I hope the baby that is cooking inside me does not emerge half-baked–and certainly I feel quite puffed up and leavened–but I don’t think I’ll ever feel completely ready for labor and childbirth, let alone motherhood. I do know, though, that this year I have a very different understanding of what it means to see myself as if I have left Egypt. I will be as prepared as I can be, and, in spirit of Dayenu, it will have to be enough.

Tonight I went to a lecture by Rabbi Arthur Green, professor and rector of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College and author of Radical Judaism. As soon as I got home, I typed up everything I could remember. I post it here:

During the twentieth century, traditional religion fought and lost two great battles against modernity. These were the battles against Darwinism and against Biblical criticism. These battles are over, and what we are left with is a level of consciousness that has to confront the radical awareness that God is not there. But if this is Emet, there is also Emet L’Amito, and that is the even deeper level of consciousness that says that nonetheless, God is there. How do we live with and make sense of that double consciousness, in light of the strides made by both evolution and Biblical criticism?

Evolution takes us to the subject of creation, which was the focus of medieval theology and the theology of the Zohar. But throughout the past hundred years, Jews have been primarily concerned with providence (is God there?) and authority (why listen to Him?). We moderns must realize that creation is every bit as essential to our theology, if not more. We speak often of Nachshon ben Aminadav, the first Israelite to jump into the Red Sea — but what about the first organism to come out of the sea, and try to make its life on land? Evolution is the greatest sacred drama of all time. The question we must ask ourselves is what do religious people have to offer to this drama? As religious people, we understand that creation is the ongoing inbuilt desire in God to reveal itself to its many forms. Creation is the push towards greater diversity and greater complexity. Greater diversity means greater beauty, and greater complexity means greater consciousness. This greater consciousness pushes towards beings who are ever more aware of God. This notion of God is both immanent and transcendent, but its transcendence is a part of its immanence. We access the transcendent God when we realize that God is present in every moment in such a profound way that we will never be able to grasp it. Transcendence is thus the elusiveness of immanence.

We must strive to access a God that is both immanent and transcendent so that we can be partners in creation. Heschel spoke of being partners in creation, but when we say this today we speak with much more urgency. To be partners in creation is to take responsibility for the future of the planet. We live in an age of great environmental responsibility. We will need to change human behavior in massive ways, making drastic transitions in our lifestyle if we want to ensure the future of humanity. We would like to think that in another 100,000 years, the human beings of the future will be as ashamed at the terribly misguided decisions that we have made as we are ashamed of our chimpanzee ancestors.

In terms of Biblical criticism, we must recognize that yes, the Torah is human; but yes, the Torah is divine. The first question that God asks man in the Bible is Ayeka, where are you. This is the same divine voice that continues to call out to us. But it calls out in a language beyond words; it is we who create the words. The Torah that preceded creation contained nothing other than the name of God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, which is just vowels, just aspirated breath from a time before language existed. It is we who add the consonants. God spoke the first two commandments, Ehyeh and Lo Yihyeh (both plays on the divine name), and then Moshe translated the rest. This process of translating the divine call into words is a sacred process, which is why Torah is sacred. At the same time, though, we must remember Heschel’s answer to the question: Is the prophet an active partner in prophecy, or is he an empty vessel for the divine voice? Heschel answered the former. But if so, then the prophet is fallible, and is shaped by the constraints and conventions of his age. Prophecy (i.e. Torah) is a partly human creation, with all the limitations of any human creation. Sometimes we have to object to it, because it is antithetical to the values of our own age, which are ever-evolving. We must remember that it is we human beings who brought God into language, but that in bringing God into language, we ourselves were transformed. This is the Sfat Emet’s midrash on
את ה’ האמרת היום…וה’ האמירך היום
At Sinai human beings spoke God into words. And so yes, I believe in the covenant at Sinai, even though I believe that it was our idea. Sinai is essential language for me; it is a key element of my spiritual life, and of our spiritual language as Jews, regardless of whether or not it happened historically. We must not forget that when Moses took blood and dashed it on the people in Exodus 24, he was not doing so because God had told him to. This blood covenant was Moses’ invention for the sake of binding the people to God. And so the human impulse to create ritual is encoded in our divinely inspired human text.

The subject of ritual brings me to the subject of Mitzvah. A Mitzvah is a man-made opportunity for encountering the divine. Davening with tefillin is a reminder to stop for a moment in our fast-paced cyber-wired lives to listen to the call of Ayeka. Tefillin, like Shabbat, is a sign and reminder to heed the divine call. Unfortunately, we sometimes get so involved in doing the reminders that we forget what it is that we are supposed to remember. The rabbis thought that if they told us to say one hundred brachot every day, they would ensure that we live each day with a consciousness of God. But Jews are smart. They found a way of forgetting God even with one hundred blessings. They became so obsessed with counting the blessings that they forgot Who it is they are meant to be blessing.

Of course, Judaism is not the only response to the divine. All religions are human creations in response to the divine call. Is Judaism better than all the others? I wouldn’t say that. But I consider it a privilege to be born into a small religion that has such a great tradition, and I want to be part of developing and updating that tradition. I believe that Jews have some specific things to say that no other tradition says as well. Shabbat is one of the great gifts of Judaism to humanity. I’d love to be able to give it to the world, if I could first give it to the Jews again. And then there is the notion of being created in the image of God, one of the most important ideas that Judaism has to offer. Who would have thought that having a Jewish state would call this fundamental religious notion so much into question? We Jews have not done a good job of spreading the notion of Tzelem Elokim in the last 65years. This is not a political lecture, but given our track record, it will be very hard to convince the world that Tzelem Elokim is a fundamental idea of our tradition.

You ask me how to know which mitzvot to follow, and how to find a Jewish practice that works for you. To this I say: Learn a lot, try a lot of experiments, and take responsibility for your own Neshama. Theology is an art, not a science. We religious people have nothing we can prove, but proving and disproving is not a chessboard I am interested in playing on. I believe that religion takes place in the realm of the imagination, that realm which allows us to open our minds to music and poetry and to deeper levels of reality. Our job is to bring evolution and science to that realm of poetry. To do so we must silence ourselves to hear the Ayeka, and seek out ever richer and more vibrant language in which to translate the divine call into the language of human beings.

It happened as if on cue. The moment we finished reading Parashat Noach in shul this past Shabbat, just after the forty days of rain came to an end and God promised that “so long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease,” the floodgates of the sky opened and a heavy rain poured down over Jerusalem. Those who were early to shul came in summer clothes and stayed dry; those who were late walked in sopping wet; and those who were really late arrived in long-sleeves and raincoats. It was the first real rain of the season (other than a brief 7am drizzle a few weeks ago), and we could feel the ground thirsting to drink up every last drop after six months of parched dryness. By the afternoon the air was clean and crisp as if the whole atmosphere had just been laundered, and we went for a walk under the clear blue sky to mark that summer had ended and autumn had begun.

At kiddish after shul I told a friend that I don’t think women menstruated on the ark, because all natural processes ceased. There was no seedtime in the earth or in the human body. The ark was a place of stasis and suspended animation, with no birth or growth or death or rebirth. It was the opposite of the world we know, with its changing seasons, its days that grow longer and shorter, its waxing and waning moon. Although sometimes during hot August afternoons it may seem that “summer days will never cease,” as Keats said in his majestic “Ode to Autumn,” the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” always comes around. This year, when we sat sweating under the hot sun in the sukkah on account of the early holiday schedule, I found myself memorizing Rilke’s “Autumn Day,” a poem that captures the bittersweetness of summer’s end:

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

The first stanza captures the immensity of summer, whose hot days are as oppressive as its long evenings are liberating. In those last hot days we find ourselves entreating the Lord to rein in the long days and dispel the heat with autumn breezes. And yet as the second stanza indicates, we don’t really want summer to end quite yet:

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

We want just a bit more summer, enough to allow the final fruits to ripen and swell and sweeten. Like Chazal, Rilke distinguishes between all fruit and the heavy wine, which is worthy of its own mention and its own blessing: Let all fruits be full, but blessed and sweet be the fruit of the heavy vine. This stanza is clearly heavily influenced by Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” which the poet composed on a September afternoon while taking a walk through the fields:

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Summer cannot end until all fruit is filled with ripeness to the core. We must have the last pomegranates and mangoes to seed and peel with sticky hands as the redness splatters the cabinets and the yellow juice trickles down to our elbows. It cannot rain before Sukkot because first we must gather in the gourds and the hazel shells and all the bounty of the harvest. Rilke invokes Keats’ powers of close observation and rich sensual language to describe the natural world at a particular moment in time. But Rilke is not a nature poet like Keats; he is, primarily, the poet of loneliness. And so for Rilke, the end of summer is about ripeness, but also resignation. As we see in the third and final stanza, the winds that are let loose are also stately sighs:

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Conjoining house and spouse, as the Talmud, too, is wont, Rilke asserts that to everything there is a season, and the time of building is over. Those who did not find someone to snuggle with during the cold winter nights ahead will have to wait until the next seedtime. Those who are alone—a state with which the poet is clearly intimately familiar—will find themselves staying up alone and wandering the avenues “restlessly,” a word that sounds (in this beautiful translation) like the rustling of the leaves with which the poem concludes. I imagine these solitary souls wandering with their chins up and their heads held high, and even as their jaws tremble with the enormity of the pain of loneliness, they do not cry. They have fixed their sights on the next corner, and the next, and they will acquaint themselves with the night until they are so tired that they are ready to collapse from exhaustion — and only then, when they can be sure there is no danger of crying themselves to sleep, do they permit themselves to go inside again.

When I think of these night wanderers I am reminded of Steven Millhauser’s hypnotic novella “Enchanted Night,” about the lonely inhabitants of a small town in Connecticut who cannot sleep on a hot late summer night. Indeed, the first chapter is called “Restless,” and depicts someone who can’t bear to stay inside anymore:

“A hot summer night in southern Connecticut, tide going out and the moon still rising. Laura Engstrom, fourteen years old, sits in bed and throws the covers off. Her forehead is damp, her hair feels wet. Through the screens of the two half-open windows she can hear a rasp of crickets and a dim rush of traffic on the distant thruway. Five past twelve. The room is so hot that the heat is gripping her throat. Got to move, got to do something. Moonlight is streaming in past the edges of the closed and slightly raised venetian blinds. She can’t breathe in this room, in this house. Oh man, do something. Do it… She can’t stay in this room, oh no. If she doesn’t do something right away, this second, she’ll scream. The inside of her skin itches. Her bones itch. So how do you scratch your bones? She has to get out there, she has to breathe. If you don’t breathe, you’re dead. The room is killing her.”

When does the moment come when we accept that summer is over and the long, lonely coldness is beginning to set in? e.e. cummings takes a hard-nosed look at the cruelty of summer’s end, with the loss of any hope that blossoming friendships will ripen into mature love:

“summer is over
— it’s no use demanding
that lending be giving;
it’s no good pretending
befriending means loving”
(sighs mind:and he’s clever)
“for all,yes for all
sweet things are until”

“spring follows winter
as clover knows,maybe”
(heart makes the suggestion)
“or even a daisy—
your thorniest question
my roses will answer”
“but dying’s meanwhile” (mind murmurs;the fool)

“truth would prove truthless
and life a mere pastime
— each joy a deceiver,
and sorrow a system—
if now than forever
could never(by breathless
one breathing)be” soul
“more” cries;with a smile

The mind, ever clever, knows that summer is over, because experience has proven that nothing lasts forever: “all sweet things are until.” And yet while the mind has acknowledged the reality of the changing seasons, the soul is not ready to let go. As in Rilke’s second stanza, the soul cries out “more” in a final gasp for fresh air to breathe in a hot stuffy room, wishing for just a bit more ripeness and fruitfulness, and another chance for friendship to become love. The brain may be an expert in truth, but truth would have no point (“truth would prove truthless”) if the soul did not retain the hope that “now” could become “forever,” that is, that summer days might never cease. The stubborn soul will continue to write the poetry of summer in the lonely days of winter, to enclose those poems in long letters, and to memorize them while walking up and down the Connecticut avenues at night.

But summer is over. There’s no use pretending. This week the creation and destruction stories will give way to the beginning of the saga of the Jewish people, starting with the charge to Abraham to get up, leave his home, and walk the streets from Ur Kasdim to Canaan. By the end of the week we will have begun praying for rain and dew, and Lord it is time. But I still want to carry with me some of the wonder and marvel of the first two parshiyot, those end of summer weeks when life remains full of ripeness and precarious potential. And I want to imagine that when the rain comes again, even the poet of loneliness will find himself seeking refuge in another’s arms, two by two.

Each year on Shavuot I debate whether or not to stay up all night. After a few hours of learning Torah, inevitably my eyelids begin to droop and I realize that I am unlikely to retain anything else. I could stay up all night, but wouldn’t it be better to wake up early to study when I’m more alert? This question is in fact the subject of a debate between two Talmudic sages, Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish, each of whom offers an opinion on the proper time for studying Torah. Their debate appears in Shir Hashirim Rabbah in the context of their exegesis of the words שחורות כעורב, “black as a raven.” Punning on the two Hebrew words, the midrash explains that Shchorot refers to Shachar (dawn), and Orev refers to Erev (evening). So too is Torah learned only by one who wakes up at dawn and goes to bed late in the evening, thereby maximizing time for study. But for those of us who can’t burn the candle at both ends (a phrase that refers not to both ends of the candle, but to both ends of the night – that is, late in the Erev and early in the Shachar), is the late night or the early morning the preferred time to learn? Here is where Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish chime in:

Rabbi Yohanan said: The threshing time for Torah is only at night, for it says, “She rises while it is yet night” (Proverbs 31:15), and it also says, “Arise, cry out in the night” (Lamentations 11:19).
Reish Lakish says: Both by day and by night, as it says, “You shall meditate on it day and night.” (Joshua 1:8)
Reish Lakish said: Rabbi Yohanan was right in teaching me that the threshing time of Torah is only at night.
Said Reish Lakish: After I had labored at the Torah by day, it was remembered at night, as it is written, “And you shall meditate on it day and night.” (SSR 5:11)

Before trying to make sense of these opinions, it is worth pointing out the strange use of the words Grana shel Torah, which I have translated as the “threshing” time for Torah:
אין גרנה של תורה אלא בלילה
The Goren, as we know from Megillat Ruth, is the threshing floor – the place where the stems and husks of grain are beaten to separate the seeds from the straw. The English word “thresh” also means to discuss or examine an issue repeatedly, which may reflect the notion that the agricultural activity of threshing requires the repeated shaking of each stalk of grain until all the seeds are removed. In Hebrew, the word גורן , whose root meaning is “collection,” refers not just to the threshing floor but also to the harvesting season — that is, the time of year that is celebrated on Shavuot. The term גורן thus connects both the agricultural and the historical significance of this holiday – it is a harvest festival but it is also a time of receiving and learning Torah. Or, to use an English pun that approximates this double entendre, it is a time both of collection (of grain) and of recollection (of Torah).

Reish Lakish, after trying to learn Torah both by day and by night, realizes that Torah cannot be learned all the time. His final two statements seem to contradict each other — If he agrees that Torah is threshed only at night, why does he then say that he would labor in the daytime to find that his Torah became remembered (נהיר — a word that Jastrow defines not just as “bright” but also as “remembered”) at night? Perhaps this contradiction can be resolved as follows: Reish Lakish comes to accept that the Torah that is collected in the day (the proper time for learning Torah) must be recollected at night. This notion is attested by modern research into the science of sleep: Neuroscientists tell us that it is during sleep that our brains compact what we learn in the day and transform it into long-term memory. We can learn all day long, but unless we allow our brains time to recollect all that we have collected, we will not retain much.

The experience of learning and forgetting Torah is an appropriate subject for Shavuot, because elsewhere in Shir HaShirim Rabbah we learn that the children of Israel went through the experience of learning and forgetting Torah while standing at Mount Sinai at the original Zman Matan Torateinu:

At the time when Israel heard “I am the Lord Your God,” Torah became fixed in their hearts, and they would learn Torah and they would not forget it.
They came to Moses and said: Moshe Rabbeinu! Be our intermediary!! As it is written, “You speak to us and we will obey, but let not God speak to us lest we die” (Exodus 20:16). What would be the point of our dying now??
Immediately they went back to learning and forgetting. They changed their minds and came to Moses. They said: Moshe Rabbeinu, if only God would reveal Himself [directly] to us again! If only He would kiss us from the kisses of His mouth! If only Torah would become fixed in our hearts as it once was!
Moses said to them: It is not the case now, but in the future it will be, as it is said: “I will put my Torah into their inmost being and inscribe it upon their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). (SSR 1:2)

This midrash teaches that the first commandment was fixed in the hearts of the Israelites such that they learned Torah without forgetting it. But something about this experience was too much for them, and so they asked Moses instead to serve as their intermediary. When they learned the rest of the commandments from Moses, they began to forget Torah, a condition that (as per the midrash) will continue until the eschatological realization of the messianic vision described by Jeremiah.

What was so unbearable about learning Torah without forgetting it? Perhaps the answer becomes clearer when we consider a parallel midrash that follows immediately after this one in Shir Hashirim Rabbah:

At the time when Israel heard, “You shall not have other gods,” the evil inclination was uprooted from their hearts. They came to Moses and said: Moshe Rabbeinu! Be our intermediary! As it is written, “You speak to us and we will obey, but let not God speak to us lest we die” (Exodus 20:16). What would be the point of our dying now??
Immediately the evil inclination returned to its place.
They changed their minds and came to Moses. They said: Moshe Rabbeinu, if only God would reveal Himself [directly] to us again! If only He would kiss us from the kisses of His mouth!
Moses said to them: It is not the case now, but in the future it will be, as it is said: “And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh” (Ezekial 36:26).

This midrash about the evil inclination describes a similar process as the previous midrash about forgetting: In both texts, first the children of Israel hear a commandment in a manner that is too much for them; then they plead with Moses to serve as a buffer; then they regret that decision and are told that they can only return to the former state in the messianic future. But what is it living without the evil inclination that is too much for them? To answer this question, we might look back to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, before they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What was life like for humanity before the evil inclination became part of the fabric of their being? The Torah does not tell us much about this experience, but inspired by our Shir HaShirim Rabbah source, I am tempted to imagine that Adam and Eve were bombarded constantly with blasts of “I am the Lord Your God” driven into their ears both night and day. They could not sin because to do so would be to bump into the legs of the divine presence (Chagigah 16a). Everywhere they turned they heard the piercing and deafening cry of God’s revelation. They lived in a constant and terrifying ever-present awareness of God, a state that Wordsworth romanticizes when he says, perhaps echoing the psalm for Elul, “I only have relinquished one delight / To live beneath your more habitual sway.” So when the snake came on to the scene and offered them a chance to banish God from one tiny corner of Eden, they leapt at the opportunity.

And since the two consecutive Shir Hashirim midrashim so closely parallel one another, I must imagine Adam and Eve learning Torah, too. What was it like to learn Torah in Eden? There was no toil, because Adam had not yet been cursed. Nor were there any fertile and fruitful insights born, since Eve had not yet received the curse of the pains of childbirth. Devoid of toil and pain, learning Torah was an experience that required no effort from Adam and Eve. They did not have to struggle to learn because they never forgot anything. The midrash in Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer comments on the Torah’s statement that Adam was placed in the garden “to work it and to guard it” (Genesis 2:15):

“And what work was there in the garden, such that it is said ‘to work it and to guard it’? If you should say that there is labor in Eden—to plant the vineyeards and plow the earth or pile or cut the grain—didn’t all the trees blossom on their own? And if you should say that there was labor in Eden—to water the garden—wasn’t there a river that went through the garden? What did it mean to work it and to guard it? They would preoccupy themselves with the study of Torah and guard the way to the tree of life, which is Torah.” (PRE 13)

Until they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve had no evil inclination, and nor did they ever forget Torah. In the messianic days, when we are all laid to rest in an eternal garden of Eden, we will be restored to this pre-lapsarian state. We will have no evil instinct (because how can there be evil in a world that is Kulo Tov?), and we will not forget Torah. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to learn without forgetting. If everything that we have ever learned is constantly present in our minds, then there is no sense of time; every moment is ever-present, and thus every moment is the present. A world of no forgetting is like a wrinkle in time – a tesseract in which every moment can be conflated into the present one, and (given that there is no evil inclination) the Presence is always present.

As I stay up well past 2am writing this d’var Torah on Leil leil Shavuot, I am reminded that the world in which we live is a far cry from the Edenic end of days. We live in a world in which our evil inclination often gets the better of us, and a world in which much of what we learn tonight will be forgotten in the morning. We will have to relearn and review our Torah, and even “sleep on it” before it becomes recollected in our minds. We will have to go down on our hands and knees and beat out the seeds of new ideas from the stalks of the old. And yet it is this very toil that we rejoice in and celebrate at Zman Matan Torateinu. “Lie down for the night,” Boaz says to Ruth, inviting her to join him on the threshing floor after she has spent the day collecting sheaves of grain. “Then in the morning, if the redeemer will come, good! Let him redeem.” On this holiday of Shavuot, we take our places on the threshing floor of Torah to learn and forget and then learn again, awaiting the redeemer.

In honor of this week’s parsha, I went on a tour of my local leprosy hospital. I am fortunate to live around the corner from Hansen Hospital, an asylum and treatment center for patients with leprosy (or, more accurately, Hansen’s Disease) from 1877 to 2000. The building, a spacious two-story stone structure set in a walled compound across the street from the Shalom Hartman Institute, was designed by Conrad Schick, a German architect and missionary who also designed Mea Shearim and built several models of the Second Temple.

The outside of the Hansen building bears the inscription Jesus Hilfe, which is German for “Jesus Saves,” a testament to the Protestant community of Jerusalem which originally founded the hospital both to heal and to mission to the lepers who had formerly congregated as beggars at Zion Gate. The leprosy asylum, built to accommodate sixty patients, was a self-sufficient institution containing its own water cisterns, a vegetable garden, fruit trees and livestock. Patients spent their time sewing, drawing water, and performing daily chores. Since there was no known cure for the disease, they were treated with fresh air, a healthy diet, and a daily work routine, all of which were regarded as therapeutic.

Although the asylum was not a closed institution—patients were free to leave and entertain visitors—it was regarded as such. Leprosy still had tremendous stigma attached to it, although its bacterial etiology had been discovered by the Norwegian physicist Armauer Hansen in 1873. As Hansen proved, the disease is neither infectious nor hereditary. Nonetheless, the Biblical associations with the leper as unclean and impure, which can be found throughout this week’s parsha, continued to dominate:

As for the person with a leprous infection, his clothes shall be rent, his head shall be left bare, and he shall cover over his upper lip; and he shall call out, “Unclean! Unclean!” 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 13:45-46).

The Talmud, too, warns of the dangers of coming too close to lepers. The term used in Masechet Ketubot is not Tzara’at (the Biblical word which the Septagint inaccurately translated as “lepra” — a general term for skin diseases already in the first century) but rather Ra’atan. Steinsaltz defines Ra’atan as “the disease of Lepra, Hansen’s Disease, erroneously termed Tzara’at.” The Talmud offers a detailed description of the causes of the illness:

R. Yose related, An old man of the inhabitants of Jerusalem told me: There are twenty-four [kinds of] skin disease, and in respect of all these the Sages said: Intercourse is injurious. But most of all is this is the case with those afflicted with leprosy. What is the cause of it? — As it was taught: If a man had intercourse immediately after being bled, he will have feeble children; if intercourse took place after the man and the woman had been bled they will have children afflicted with leprosy. (Ketubot 77b)

In other words, according to the Talmud, leprosy is a congenital disease of those whose parents conceived them right after bloodletting. It was clearly thought to be contagious, since the rabbis kept their distance from the afflicted:

R. Yohanan issued the announcement: Beware of the flies of the man afflicted with leprosy. R. Zeyra never sat [with such a sufferer] in a place where the wind blew from their direction. R. Eleazar never entered his tent. R. Ammi and R. Assi never ate any of the eggs coming from the alley in which he lived.

There was, however, one rabbi who used to sit with the lepers and even study Torah in their presence:

R. Joshua ben Levi attached himself to these [sufferers] and studied the Torah; for he said, “A lovely gazelle and a graceful doe,” (Proverbs 5:19). If [the Torah] bestows grace upon those who study it, would it not also protect them?

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi believed that the contagion associated with leprosy would not affect him because he studied Torah. He cites a verse from Proverbs which, in its original context, refers to marital fidelity: “Find joy in the wife of your youth. A loving gazelle, a graceful mountain goat. Let her breasts satisfy you at all times. Be infatuated with love for her always.” He interprets this verse as being about Torah, and argues that if Torah is graceful (i.e. a bestower of grace), surely it also has protective power over those who study it. That is, he knows that the lepers are contagious, but he believes that by virtue of his Torah study, he is immune to illness.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi came to mind today when I learned about Rabbi Aryeh Levin (1885-1969), who is part of the lore of the Hansen asylum. Reb Aryeh, who was appointed the official Jewish Prison Chaplain of the British Mandate in 1931, was famous for his visits to members of the Jewish underground imprisoned in the Central Prison of Jerusalem in the Russian Compound. He was also considered a tzadik for his work on behalf of the poor and infirm, and particularly for his visits to the leprosy patients. While most people kept their distance from the lepers, believing that they should “dwell apart,” Rabbi Levin visited them regularly, teaching them Torah and sitting with them outside. In this sense, he was a modern-day Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, a man who studied Torah in the presence of lepers with no concern for his own well-being.

Did either of these rabbis believe that Torah was a cure for leprosy? Is that why they studied with the lepers? It is difficult to know. The Talmud prescribes an elaborate treatment for those afflicted with this malady:

What is the cure? Abaye said: Pila, ladanum, the rind of a nut tree, the shavings of a dressed hide, sweet-scented clover and the calyx of a red date-tree. These must be boiled together and carried into a house of marble, and if no marble house is available they may be carried into a house [the walls of which are of the thickness] of seven bricks and a half. Three hundred cups [of the mixture] must then be poured upon his head until his cranium is softened, and then his brain is cut open. Four leaves of myrtle must be brought and each foot [in turn] lifted up and one [leaf] placed [beneath it]. It is then grasped with a pair of tweezers and burned; for otherwise it would return to him.

The Talmud seems to suggest that leprosy was some sort of bug in the skull requiring elaborate surgical extraction. Prior to the surgery, the cranium had to be softened by means of a concoction worthy of the weird sisters in Macbeth. All that toil and trouble, once the cauldron had bubbled, was then poured onto the skull to prepare it for surgery. This is a far cry from the first modern brain surgery (with anesthesia and antiseptic methods) performed in 1884 at the Epileptic Hospital in London, just one year before the cornerstone of the Hansen asylum was laid. The surgery was to remove a tumor, and not to treat a leper. The modern cure for leprosy is an antibiotic discovered in 1981; today it is administered free of charge by the WHO to patients around the world. The last leprosy patients left Hansen’s Hospital in 2000, and the building was closed and shuttered until April 2009, when it was re-opened to the public as a museum. “I grew up down the street from here,” one elderly woman told me during our tour this afternoon. “We used to pass the hospital on our way home every day. We’d always cross the street and run as fast as we could, so that the lepers would not catch up with us.”

The fear of lepers seems to be as old as recorded human history. Ancient legends suggest the reason that the Israelites were released from bondage in Egypt was that the ancient Hebrews were carriers of leprosy. Perhaps the fear stems from the mysterious nature of the illness, whose cure was unknown for so long yet whose symptoms were so alarming and repulsive: inflamed and discolored skin, and limbs that rotted and then fell off. In the Bible, Miriam gets leprosy for speaking Lashon Hara about her brother Moshe, suggesting an association between leprosy and sin. Indeed, the Talmud’s cranial surgery remedy is not surprising given that the stigmas associated with leprosy are not all that different from those associated with mental illness, whose etiology remains largely unknown to this day. We do not know what makes a person schizophrenic or bipolar, so we feed a concoction of chemicals that block the reuptake of serotonin to the little bug in the brain. Mental illness is often thought to be someone’s fault – the bad mother, or the hyperactive school child (or the parent who conceived after bloodletting, say). Our understanding of the brain—that organ by means of which we learn about everything in the world including the brain itself—is vastly behind our understanding of any other aspect of our biology. In lieu of scientific knowledge, we speak in terms of legend and lore, sin and blame – which is what leprosy and mental illness have in common.

When we exited the leprosy hospital into the bright light of a warm spring afternoon, D and I thought we might sit and learn Daf Yomi in the beautiful overgrown garden surrounding the hospital building. We wanted to imagine ourselves as Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, learning Torah among the lepers. After the horrific pictures of skin inflammation and suffering that we had seen inside the hospital museum, some sort of remedy seemed in order. But instead of daf yomi, I thought of a sugya in Eruvin that begins with a statement of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, the rabbi of the lepers:

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi stated: If a man is going on a journey and has no one accompanying him, let him occupy himself with the study of Torah, since it is said, “For they are a graceful wreath upon your head” (Proverbs 1:9). If he feels pain in his throat, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, “And chains about thy neck” (Proverbs 1:9). If he feels pain in his bowels, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, “It shall be a healing to thy navel” (Proverbs 3:8). If he feels pain in his bones, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, “And marrow to thy bones” (Proverbs 3:8). If he feels pain in all his body, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, “And healing to all his flesh” (Proverbs 4:22). (Eruvin 54a)

Does Torah really bring “healing to all his flesh”? Is it really a סם חיים, an elixir of life, as we are told later on in this Eruvin sugya? I do not know. But if someone had to open my skull and pour something inside, I, for one, would like that thing to be Torah.

Much of parshat Vayechi consists of Jacob’s blessings to his sons, introduced by the verse: “And Jacob called to his sons and said, ‘Come together that I may tell you what is to befall you in the days to come.” Jacob wishes to reveal his sons’ destiny to them. And yet what we find in the coming verses is not a revelation of the future, but a description of each of the sons in difficult Biblical poetry that is rich with imagery and metaphor. Reuven is “unstable as water”; Yehuda is “a lion’s whelp”; Isachar is a “strong-boned ass”; Naphtali will “yield rich dainties.” Why does Yaakov, in spite of his stated intention to bless his sons, in fact go on to describe them poetically? And how to account for this turn to richly metaphorical language at this point in the Torah, at the end of Sefer Breishit?

In Rashi’s first comment on this parsha, a Rashi that I have studied on many occasions with Avivah Zornberg, we find one answer to this question. The answer, says Rashi, is because Yaakov wished to reveal to his sons the end of days, but the shechina departed from him. He lost his connection to divinity, and could no longer reveal the future. Or, in more modern terms, his internet connection suddenly died on him. Now I don’t know about you, but when my internet connection dies—when I can no longer answer emails or read articles online or connect to the world outside myself—I tend to start writing poetry. In fact, for a long time I had no email at home just so that I would discipline myself to write more. And so identify with Yaakov’s turn to poetry at this moment when his own divine internet suddenly dies on him.

Rashi brings this comment about Yaakov’s desire to reveal the future in response to a different question – the question of why this parsha is “stuma,” closed. Rashi is commenting on the fact that the new parsha of Vayechi is written without any break from the previous one – there is no white space between the two parshiyot. Yaakov feels blocked; there is no white space in which to breathe free. And so what does he do? He composes in language that involves that maximum amount of line breaks and white space, that is, poetry. In a novel that I am reading now, The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, the author describes reading a poem in the New Yorker, and highlights this very feature of poetry:

“Let’s have a look at this poem. You can tell it’s a poem because it’s swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it’s a poem. All the typography on both sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they’re saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here’s the guy who is going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spout it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton.”

Poetry allows for maximal white space. It is an atteempt to fight the blockage. Perhaps this is the blockage that comes with old age; Yaakov knows that he is to die soon, and death is the great unknown. This might explain why both Yaakov and Moshe turn to poetry at the end of their lives – Yaakov at the end of Sefer Breishit, in parshat Vayechi; and Moshe at the end of Sefer Dvarim, in Ha’azinu and V’zot Habracha. Perhaps we feel a natural affinity with poetry at the end of life, when it becomes clear how much of the future will forever be blocked to us, because we will be cut off from it. This hypothesis reminds me of a theory of my professor Elaine Scarry, who argues in her book Fins de Siecle that the end of a century inspires poets to great heights. Scarry shows that a surprising number of history’s great poets did some of their most important work in the final decade of a century – from the 22 plays written by Shakespeare in the 1590s; to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the 1290s; to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in the 1790s. She argues for an inherent link between poetry and endings, a link that I would posit has as much to do with the end of life as it does with the end of a century. At the end of life, when we are drawn to reflect on the past and compelled to resign ourselves to what we will never know of the future, the soul turns to poetry to stave off blockage.

Of course, the knowledge of the future is not the only blockage. In parsha 11 of Kohelet Rabbah, the rabbis assert that
שבעה דברים מכוסים מבני אדם
Seven things are concealed (or kept secret) from a person. The Talmud goes on to list these items:
Yom HaMitah – the day on which we will die
Yom HaNechama – the day on which we will be consoled – or, in more human terms, the day on which we who are down and out will finally begin to feel better again.
Omek HaDin – The full depth of justice. A judge can never know whether his ruling is completely fair – at some point he makes a judgment call.
BaMeh Hu Mistaker – How a person will one day make a living, or, as we would put it in colloquial terms, “What am I going to do with my life?”
Mah B’libu shel chavero – What another person is thinking. You can never really know what is going onj in someone else’s head!
Mah B’Ibura shel Isha – What is inside the belly of a pregnant woman.
And finally, the emphatic, impassioned finale:
Malchut Zeh Shel Edom, Ematai Nofelet – When will this kingdom of Rome finally fall? Or, to quote my chevruta Sara, who tried to put this in more relevant terms when we learned this parsha on Thursday – “When will the bus finally come?!”

Now all of us are familiar with these unknowns. We all know what it is like to feel so distraught that we cannot possibly imagine when and how we will begin to feel better. We know what it is like to feel like you would to anything to know what another person is thinking! For better or for worse, our knowledge is inherently limited as human beings. We do not see the world through an Aspaklaria Me’ira, through a clear, illuminated lens. Only Moshe was able to see the world thus, as the Talmud tells us in Masechet Yevamot (49b). But even Moshe had his moment of blockage at the end of his life, as Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev explains:

“At the end of Moshe’s days, the wellspring of wisdom was blocked off from him. And with this you can understand something wondrous: Why, in the song of Ha’azinu, the prophecy of Moses is so blocked? This is different from what we find in the rest of the Torah. Because Moses’ prophecy was generally through a clear illuminated lens, whereas all other prophets saw through an unilluminated lens. Thus Moses had the power to say what he had heard from God without any adornment through parables or riddles.”

The Kedushat Levi actually criticizes Moses for his turn to poetic language, for he views that as the sign of a flaw in Moses’ prophetic ability. If only Moses could still see through the Aspaklaria Meira at the end of his life, he would not need to resort to the impenetrable poetry of Ha’azinu! Likewise, we might add, if only Yaakov did not have the Shechina Mistalek from him, he would have been able to reveal the end of days to his sons and not resort to such difficult poetic language.

Unlike the Kedushat Levi, I must admit that I’m rather happy that Moshe and Yaakov had their moments of blockage, because I am a lover of poetry. As a person who sometimes tries to write poetry, I know that it is in the moments of blockage and darkness that poetry is born. When meaning eludes us, we turn instead to language. When we are unable to focus on what we want to say, we focus on how we want to say it. When the view through the Aspaklaria window is unclear, we dress the windows in fancy curtains of similes and metaphor. Blockage, then, is an occasion for poetry. I think this notion is best captured by Wallace Stevens in his poem “The Motive for Metaphor”:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon–

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound–
Steel against intimation–the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

The season for poetry is not the summer solstice, or primary noon, when the sun is high in the sky. Poetry is born in the shadows of autumn and the half colors of spring, when the obscure moon lights an obscure world, and the unknown and variable X replaces the clear and predictable order of ABC. This is a time of obscurity and shadows, when the Aspaklaria is only partially illuminated. At this moment when things will never quite be expressed, we cannot know what things are, but only what they are like. This is the motive for metaphor, and this is when poetry is born. None of us can know the future. But as I have come to learn in recent months, that inability l’galot et ha-ketz does not need to paralyze us or prevent us from getting married or moving forwards or blessing those we love. Rather, it can become, and often is, the impulse for poetry.

D and I have chosen to speak today from Masechet Bava Batra, the tractate of Talmud that we are currently learning as part of Daf Yomi. This is a program in which thousands of Jews the world over learn the same page of Talmud every day, completing the cycle in seven and a half years. We began this masechet last August, and our learning has taken a variety of forms – some days we meet at a morning shiur in a local synagogue taught by Rabbi Benny Lau; other days we learn on our own after work; and still other days we meet in the evening to learn the Daf together over dinner. Our original goal was to wait until we finished the Masechet and then have a siyum-slash-wedding. But as we did not particularly want to put off today’s celebration until February, we decided that we’d get married now, and share with you some of what we have learned until this point.

I’d like to teach from a recent daf, 98, where we find a mishnah about a person who accepts a contract from a friend to build for him a wedding house בית חתנות for his son. The Mishnah considers the minimum size of house that is acceptable for this purpose – touching upon such issues as whether a person can choose to live in a home that resembles a cattle barn, and why a bride and groom are not advised to move in with their in-laws (at least according to Ben Sira, which may help to explain why his work is known as wisdom literature!). These digressions aside, in its discussion of the minimum dimensions of the wedding house, the Talmud draws an analogy to the Temple, which is often used as the model for other structures in rabbinic literature. Rabbi Chanina points out a contradiction between two different measurements of the Temple stated in two verses from the book of Kings – in one verse, the Kodesh Kodashim (Holy of Holies) is thirty amot high; and in another verse, it is twenty amot high. The Talmud reconciles this contradiction by explaining that one measurement refers to the height of the Holy of Holies from floor to ceiling, whereas the other measurement starts from the tops of the Kruvim (cherubim), which were ten amot tall, and goes up to the ceiling. But why would one opt to measure from the tops of the Kruvim rather than from the floor? The Talmud answers that this way of measuring comes to teach us that all thirty amot of the Holy of Holies were as empty as the uppermost twenty because the Keruvim, the cherubs, took up no physical space. Or, to quote the Talmud:
כרובים אינו מן המידה

Miraculously, the Kruvim did not take up any room. They existed in spiritual space only, and not in the physical world. This expression speaks to me, for I am a person who lives very much inside her head. I feel very grateful—and relieved!–to have found a partner who is so practical and down-to-earth — someone who reminds me to cook food for myself, and prevents me from burning down my home while doing so. Much as I admire D’s pragmatism and his masterful organizational skills, I also feel privileged to be privy to his intellectual and spiritual depths. So much of our relationship developed in the context of classes we attended, poems we read, Shabbat meals we shared, and other tastes of the world to come—that world that is suspended somewhere beyond the physical and material realm. And so I love the next phrase that the Talmud uses to describe the Kruvim:
כרובים בנס היו עומדין
The Kruvim were suspended in a miracle. This is the same image that the Talmud uses elsewhere to describe the letters Mem and Samech in the Ten Commandments, which, although they were identical to their mirror images and although they are round, miraculously did not fall out of the tablets, but hung there with the other letters, suspended in a miracle. This notion of being suspended in a miracle is very much how I feel today – as if my whole life until this day hangs in balance with the wondrous miracle of joining my life today with D’s, surrounded by so many people we both love. On this day of Kedusha and of our Kidushin, we are not unlike the Kruvim, suspended in a miracle in the midst of the Kodesh Kodashim.

The Talmud explains that part of the miraculous positioning of the Kruvim was due to the fact their wingspans alone were equivalent to the entire width of the Holy of Holies. Where, then, were their bodies? The Talmud posits a series of possible answers: Perhaps they stood on a diagonal, or perhaps they stood with their wings overlapping, or perhaps they stood with their wings protruding from the center of their backs like chickens (this is the Talmud’s image, not my own!). What I like about all of these answers is that they all have to do with how to share space – how to make room for another person, and how to let another person into your space. That this space is the Holy of Holies is not incidental. I feel privileged, in the past few months, that D has made room for me in his life, and that I, in turn, have felt so eager to let him into mine. This intimate shared space, built on a deep trust that developed between us over time, is truly, to my mind, a sacred enclosure.

In speaking of the Kruvim, the Talmud goes on to ask
כיצד היו עומדין
How were they standing? Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Elazar disagree about this. One rabbi says that they were facing each other
פניהם איש אל אחיו
(perhaps looking into each other eyes?)
And the other rabbi says that they were facing the walls of the Kodesh Kodashim, meaning that they were turned away from each other, as per a verse from Divrei Hayamim (II 3:13):
ופניהם לבית
The Talmud famously resolves this contradiction by saying that both answers are correct, though they apply at different moments. When Israel is doing God’s will, the two Kruvim are facing each other; when Israel is not doing God’s will, they are facing away from each other.

It is my hope, in our marriage, that we will spend most of our time facing towards and not away from each other, working in partnership to do God’s will in the world. After all, it is from the space between the Kruvim that God speaks to the people –
ונועדתי לך שם ודברתי אתך מעל הכפורת מבין שני הכרובים
There I will meet with you, and I will speak to you, from above the cover, from between the two cherubim.” (Exodus 25: 22)
God speaks from between the two Kruvim, a space that our teacher Avivah Zornberg describes as the “locus of desire.” I like to think that this is also the space between Ish and Isha, that is, the space of Shechina — the presence of God whose dwelling place is the Holy of Holies and all our holiest moments.

Of course, two people, no matter how much they are in love, cannot and should not always be looking at each other. And so when we are not looking at one another, I hope that we are at least looking in the same direction, as expressed by the poet Frank Bidart: “The love I’ve known is the love of two people staring not at each other, but in the same direction.” Bidart’s image offers me a new way of thinking about this sugya. When both Kruvim are facing the walls, Pneyhem LaBayit, perhaps they are looking not at opposite walls but at the same wall, as D and I look together today towards our shared future. As we prepare to move into our own Beit Chatanot, we set our sights towards a future in which we will always have moments of looking into one another’s eyes; always make space for one another; and always carry with us the memory of today, of standing suspended in this miracle.