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Va'eira: Leadership

1/4/2019

 
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This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Sinai of Cranston, Rhode Island.

What is a leader? What qualities make a person worthy of leadership? What style of leadership, ultimately, is the most successful? In the book of Exodus, we recognize two distinct styles of leadership that could not be more different from each other.

Pharaoh seems to embody the attributes that we stereotypically associate with a strong leader. Pharaoh was decisive in confronting the threat that he saw in the growing number of Israelites in his kingdom. He was shrewd in the way that he placed taskmasters over the Israelites to force them into slavery and to build military cities for him. Pharaoh was cunning in the way that he secretly instructed the midwives to allow the Israelite’s baby boys to die in childbirth.

When Moses and Aaron appeared before Pharaoh and asked him to free the Israelites, Pharaoh was confident and determined. He refused to let the slaves go and he even made their servitude more harsh by denying them the straw they used to make bricks. When Pharaoh’s advisors told him that they feared the kingdom would be lost if he did not change course, he adamantly brushed them aside and kept his resolve. When the slaves did escape, Pharaoh ruthlessly employed his superior army to bring them back.

​Pharaoh is everything we expect of a ruler who acts with an iron fist and a determination to work his will upon others. Yet, the book of Exodus also depicts Pharaoh as a failure and, even, as a buffoon. His plan to control and destroy the Israelites was completely thwarted. The more he oppressed them, the more they grew in numbers. The two women he enlisted to kill the innocent baby boys easily tricked him and he was utterly deceived by their simple lies. His determination to defy the demands of Moses and Aaron proved disastrous. In the end, he lost everything: his slaves, his farmlands, his cattle, his entire army, his own firstborn son, and his nation.

What went wrong for Pharaoh? Why does the book of Exodus overturn and undermine all of the images we have of powerful leadership? What is the book trying to tell us about Pharaoh’s style of rule?

The book of Exodus gives us another model of leadership – that of Moses. Wherever Pharaoh seems strong and decisive, Moses appears to be weak and vacillating. Moses did kill Pharaoh’s taskmaster who was beating an Israelite slave, but when he was discovered, Moses ran away rather than confront Pharaoh. Rather than come to terms with his past, Moses gave up the life of being a member of the royal household and became a simple shepherd. When God called to Moses and told him to return to Egypt to free the Israelites, Moses put up a pathetic refusal, saying that Pharaoh would not listen to him because he had (of all things) a speech impediment. God had to convince Moses to lead his people by saying that Aaron would speak for him and by giving him a few magic tricks to perform before Pharaoh.

Once Moses did come before Pharaoh, he produced the first two plagues that God instructed him to use: blood and frogs. After those two, Pharaoh promised to let the Israelites go if Moses would just end the plagues. Moses believed him. Once the frogs were gone, Pharaoh, predictably, returned to his stubborn ways and refused to free the slaves.

As if that was not bad enough, Moses then let Pharaoh get away with the same behavior no less than four more times. After the plague of lice was lifted, Pharaoh deceived Moses again by breaking his promise to free the slaves. He did the same thing after the plague of hail, and then after the plague of locusts, and, of course, after the death of the firstborn. Moses kept accepting Pharaoh’s word that he would free the Israelites once the plague had ended, but Pharaoh never did. The Torah does not even raise the possibility that Moses could have, you know, not ended a plague until after the Israelites were free. It never even seemed to cross Moses’ mind.

It doesn’t even end there. Once the Israelites were standing at the Red Sea with the army of Pharaoh at their backs, Moses had his greatest moment of indecision. Unable to decide what to do in a moment of crisis, Moses must have called up to heaven for an answer. God had to shout down to him, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward!” (Exodus 14:15).

What kind of a leader is this? Moses is nothing we expect from a leader. Rather than being bold and decisive, he dithers, he changes his mind, he allows himself to be deceived when he has no reason to believe the words of a villain. Why then does he succeed? What is the book of Exodus trying to tell us about Moses’ style of leadership and what it means to be a leader?

The Torah wants us to recognize that everything we think we know about leadership is wrong. Pharaoh is not a great leader. What seems like resolve is actually just stubbornness. His refusal to take good advice is denial of reality and delusion of grandeur.

And, of course Pharaoh has delusions of grandeur! He thinks he's a god! And he relies on people believing that he is a god. To compromise or capitulate to Moses in any way would be an admission that he is not. It would be a threat to the entire basis of his rule over Egypt.

Leaders like Pharaoh, who insist on complete domination and the subservience of all to their will, always base their authority on a lie. Such rule always is doomed to collapse — to be exposed as buffoonery. Once the lie is found out, once the truth is known, the domineering leader’s seeming resolve and strength are proven to be nothing more than false bravado and egotism. The house of cards comes crashing down. The mighty army is drowned in the sea.

And what of Moses and his style of leadership? Note that, in the story, Moses really does have great divine powers at his disposal, but he does not rely on them. In fact, he lets go of that power at the very moment when he might have used it to crush his opponent. Instead, Moses’ most powerful quality is the quality we are least likely to associate with power. It is his humility. Over and over again, M​oses behaves as a man who knows that he is not God.

This week’s Torah portion, Va’eira, opens with God telling Moses as he is about to confront Pharaoh for the first time, “I am Adonai.” Moses hears it, and he recognizes that this is all he needs to know. God is God, and he is not.

Moses is not a powerful leader because he knows how to take decisive, bold action. Rather, he is a great leader because he knows that his fate and the fate of the world around him is not in his hands. He knows the truth that he is human and that there is something beyond him that directs his life’s journey. Despite all the power that is given to Moses by God and by the Israelites who follow him, Moses knew this truth. Knowing it, he could never be seduced into believing that he was himself a god.

That is the great lesson we learn from the confrontation between the leadership styles of Pharaoh and Moses. A true leader has no use for threats, deceit, manipulation, and abuse of power. Such traits only prove a leader to be a weakling and a failure. True leadership is knowing in all humility that redemption and victory come from knowing ourselves to be human and that we live in the light of a power beyond ourselves.

May you become the true leader of your own life, and may we all live in the light of truth.

Shabbat shalom.

Va'eira: God's Hidden Name

1/8/2016

 
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This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island. Tonight's service is a "Visual T'filah" service in which the words of the prayerbook are projected onto a screen. This allows me to include some visual images to go with the sermon. I've included a few of them in this post.

This week’s Torah portion is Va’eira. It continues the story of Moses’ conflict with Pharaoh over God’s demand that the Israelite slaves be freed. When Moses famously told Pharaoh, “Let my people go,” Pharaoh responded angrily by ordering the Israelites to make their bricks without straw. The Israelites became angry with Moses for making their work even harder for them. Last week’s portion ended with Moses feeling pretty disappointed in himself and pretty discouraged about convincing Pharaoh. 

In the very first verse of this week’s Torah portion, God responded to Moses’ discouragement by saying, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name: Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey” (Exodus 6:2-3).

It’s hard to know what to make of this verse. In context, it appears that God told Moses God’s personal name – a name that was unknown even to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – as a form of reassurance. It is as if God was putting a divine hand on Moses’ shoulder and saying, “Don’t worry, Mo. I know that your mission seems impossible right now, but you should know that you have the best possible weapon in your corner in your conflict with Pharaoh. You have the God of heaven and earth as your best buddy. I’ll even let you call Me by the name that only My very best friends call Me. Do you trust Me now?” 

Was Moses encouraged by the knowledge of God’s name? It doesn’t appear so. Moses next complained that God must have made a mistake in choosing him. Moses said, “I have a speech impediment. Why should Pharaoh listen to me?”

So, maybe knowledge of God’s name isn’t really a form of encouragement for Moses after all. Maybe God’s name has a deeper meaning. We should wonder: What is God’s name and why is it so important here? Let’s explore.

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The super secret name that God tells Moses in this passage is spelled with four Hebrew letters: Yud. Hey. Vav. Hey. You may know that we never pronounce this name in Jewish tradition. Wherever it appears in the prayerbook or in the Torah, we usually substitute a different word. We say, “Adonai,” but Adonai is not God’s name. Adonai is a Hebrew word that means, roughly, “My Lord.” That is why most Jewish and Christian translations of the Bible into English use the word “Lord” wherever Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey appears, even though that is not what the text says. 

Over the centuries, some Christians have tried to restore the original Jewish pronunciation of God’s name. You may have heard some people use the name “Jehovah” for God’s name, but that is one hundred percent not the way God’s name was ever pronounced in antiquity. There is no way that any Israelites used a pronunciation even close to “Jehovah.” Sometimes, people use the pronunciation Yaweh or Yaveh to approximate the sound of God’s name. Those pronunciations at least have the advantage of using the right consonant sounds for Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and vowels that look like Hebrew vowels. However, it is highly unlikely that this was the ancient pronunciation, either. 

The truth is, we don’t know how the name was pronounced in ancient times. The only person who was ever allowed to say God’s name was the High Priest of Israel, and he was only allowed to say it in the Temple on one day of the year – Yom Kippur – as part of an annual purification ritual. Once the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 CE, there was no opportunity for anyone ever to say the name aloud, and the correct pronunciation was lost forever.

We can learn something about God’s name, though, just by looking at the letters. You may know that Hebrew – like all Semitic languages – is built on three-letter roots. Almost all verbs and most nouns are built on these roots. Looking at the letter combination Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, a person familiar with Biblical Hebrew is likely to think, “That looks like a verb.” 

Why? Well, it starts with the letter Yud, which is commonly an indicator of a future-tense verb. Also, it ends with a Hey, which is often at the end of a past-tense verb. In the middle, there is a Vav, which is typical of a present-tense verb. (Actually, there is no present tense in Biblical Hebrew, which is admittedly confusing. Let’s just say that it looks like a verb that is frozen into the present.) 

So, what do we have? Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey looks like a verb form of the three-letter root Hey-Yud-Hey that is simultaneously in the past, present and future tenses. What is the meaning of the root Hey-Yud-Hey? That’s easy. It’s the verb “to be.” Here’s how it usually looks:

היה means “He was.”

הוה means “He is.”

יהיה means “He will be."

So, what is Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey? It must be something like “The One who was, is and will be.” I think you will agree, that is a pretty cool name for God.

It gets more interesting, too. Some people think that it is possible that the four-letter name of God, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, was never meant to be pronounced at all. They notice that all the letters of the name share an unusual quality. They are all letters that in Hebrew can serve as both consonants and vowels.

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Yud can have the sound of the consonant “y,” or it can sound like the vowels “ee” or “ay.”

Hey can have the sound of the consonant “h,” or it can sound like the vowels “ah” or “eh.” 

Vav can have the sound of the consonant “v,” or it can sound like the vowels “oh” or “oo.”

Hebrew was the first language to have any letters that could make vowel sounds. All written languages before Hebrew only had symbols for the consonant sounds with no letters at all for the vowels. It is possible, therefore, that the ancient Israelites gave God a name that only they could write – a name that consisted only of vowels. If that is the case, then God’s four-letter name is not pronounceable at all. It is just a flow of sounds: 

EE   AH   OO   AH

It is not really a name. It's not even a word. It is a sound, like the sound that the wind makes, that contains the meaning: “This is the God who cannot be explained or described in words, the God who has existed forever, exists in every moment, and who will exist for all eternity.” 

So, why did God give Moses this name in the moment of Moses’ despair? Why is it that when Moses complained about the impossibility of his mission, God responded by uttering this strange, unfathomable name? Maybe God was telling Moses that he was asking all the wrong questions.

Moses wanted to know, “Why did You send me?” God’s answer is not to give a reason or a purpose. Rather God says, in effect, “That’s not how this works. I don’t create plans and go on missions the way that human beings do. I just am. I am the quality of justice. I am the quality of love. I am the quality of freedom. I am the quality of right in a world full of wrong. I am existence itself. I am not sending you. You are sending you, and I am the reason why you will do what is right and necessary. I was. I am. I will ever be. Now get going.”

Is there a lesson for us in this strange understanding of God’s name? I think so. We human beings have a habit in our moments of stress and uncertainty to raise our eyes up to heaven and cry out. Take a moment right now to think about the cries that you are sending up to heaven at this moment in your own life. Is it a cry to God that asks, “Why me?” Is it a cry that is demanding, “Help me”? Is it a cry that complains, “I can’t do what is expected of me”? We all have a cry because we all face issues and challenges in our lives that are bigger than we are. All of us have questions that we cannot answer. To all of these cries, God has an answer: 

Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. I am. I am here. I always was. I always will be. I am the sound of the wind purring past your ears that reassures you that, no matter what you face, there is a reason for your existence, a purpose for which you are here, values that will guide you to do the best you can.” 

Now get going.  Shabbat shalom. 


Other Posts on This Topic:

Va'etchanan: Six Words
​
Shemot: Names

Va'eira: The God of Everything and Everywhere

12/25/2013

 
PictureJohn Martin (1789–1854), "The Seventh Plague" (Boston Museum of Fine Art)
It would be easy to assume that the point of the plagues that God brought upon the Egyptians was to convince Pharaoh to free the Israelite slaves. The Torah, however, repeatedly insists that this is not the case. God and Moses knew that Pharaoh would not budge in his refusal because of the plagues. The plagues served a different purpose.

God tells Moses in this week’s Torah portion (Va’eira): 

I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply My signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. Pharaoh will not hear you. I will place My hand on Egypt and bring out My army, My people the Israelites, from the land of Egypt with great judgments. Egypt shall know that I am Adonai when I stretch out My hand over Egypt and bring the Israelites out from their midst. (Exodus 7:3-5)
The point of the plagues was to serve as a demonstration project. God wanted the Egyptians to know that the God of Israel was God Almighty, more powerful than any of the idols of stone worshipped in Egypt. The plagues — prolonged by God hardening Pharaoh’s heart — served to make sure that the Egyptians would never forget the power of the God of Israel.

Why? Why does the Torah repeatedly say that the plagues served only to make "Egypt know that I am Adonai" (Exodus 7:17, 8:18, 10:2, 14:4, 14:18)? Why would it matter to God, Moses or the Israelites whether the Egyptians believed in God? 

It is, actually, a radical question. In the ancient Near East, every nation had its own gods. Every nation recognized the gods of every other nation, but believed that their own gods reigned within their territory. The idea that Israel’s God must be acknowledged by the Egyptians as superior to their own gods, even in the heart of Egypt, overturned all the expectations of ancient civilizations.

Unlike any other nation of the time, Israel insisted that their God was the only God worthy of worship, the God of everything and everywhere. That may sound arrogant and chauvinistic — perhaps it is — but it is also central to the concept of a God who can command morality and a God who can unify our lives.

The God of Israel does not represent values and ethics of only one particular time and place. God is not in competition with other, equally valid gods that represent different values and moral positions. The God of the Hebrew Bible is the God of ideals that are universally true for all nations, all people, and for all time. When God says, “Thou shall not kill,” there is no alternate god to whom you can turn who will say, “Okay, you can kill sometimes.” God’s rule is exclusive, the highest authority on everything that will admit no equal.

That does not mean, though, that God is always clear on every moral question. A God of everything needs also to be a God who does not rule in black and white. With no alternate authority, the God of Israel must be a God that encompasses all of lived human experience. This is a God of nuance and complexity. Human imperfections and our complicated human relationships mean that God must reflect a range of conflicting interests to guide us toward doing the right thing.

Judaism, with its God of everything, teaches a single morality over all reality — even if it is a complex moral order that does not have specific answers for every human situation. That reflects the lived reality of our existence. We are multifaceted beings, but we require a unifying principle that makes our lives coherent. 

Like the pantheons of the ancient nations of the Near East, our own psyches are filled with competing forces. Sometimes we are ruled by the demigods of our own desires and craving for pleasure. Sometimes we are ruled by the demons of our fears. When we are able to admit to ourselves that all of these imagined forces within us are ruled by the one God of our higher selves — our best and noblest aspirations — we, ourselves, become unified beings. When we are ruled by the one God of everything, we find greater clarity in facing life's challenges. We find greater joy in living a life of meaning, undying values, and bedrock principles. 

God told Moses that the plagues would teach the Egyptians to know that "I am Adonai." The same lesson applies to each of us individually as we confront the Pharaoh within us — the part of ourselves that believes that we can make up our own rules and that wants to declare ourselves to be autonomous gods. Like Pharaoh, we also need to see the "signs and wonders" that prove that we are not nearly as in control of our lives as we like to imagine. We need to be reminded that there is a great power that rules our destinies far better than our desires and our fears. 

One hopes that we won't need to be overrun by frogs or pelted by burning hail to see it. Inevitably, though, life's hardships will teach us some of our most profound lessons of humility and acceptance. As we read this week's Torah portion, we can remember that there is a part of us that is Egypt, waiting to be awakened by the realization that there is a God of everything and of everywhere, and that it is not us. 

Other Posts on This Topic:
Va'eira: Playing God?
Va'eira: When We Cannot Be Joyful 

Va'eira: When We Cannot Be Joyful 

1/8/2013

 
This blog is supposed to be about "Living a joyful Jewish life and bringing joy to synagogues and the Jewish community." But life is not always joyful. Judaism also has to speak to us in moments of sadness, bereavement and despair if it is going to be a source of meaning in our lives. God has to be able to speak to us in times of grief as well as times of celebration.
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The father, brother and husband of Irit Shitrit, a 39-year-old mother of four who was killed in December of 2008 by a Hamas rocket in Ashdod.
 In just the first year after I was ordained as a rabbi, I faced a situation that made me wish that I had a million years of preparation. A few days before I was scheduled to officiate at the wedding of a young couple, the father of the bride died suddenly of a heart attack. The family, of course, was in agony. I felt completely unable to handle the situation. How do you console someone at such a moment? What can you even say?

In retrospect, I wish that I had tried to say less. God can speak to us when we are in such pain, but listening can be very difficult. That was something I needed to recognize in the young couple in front of me, and it was something I needed to recognize in myself. I now wish that, instead of offering so many words, I had had the wisdom to listen more to them and to my own feelings of powerlessness. The pain of the situation made me deaf to both.

There is a Chasidic teaching about the way that pain deafens us in this week's Torah portion (Va'eira). It comes from an apparent contradiction in the text.

When God instructed Moses what to say to the Israelites, God told him, "They will listen to your voice…" (Exodus 3:18; the preposition "to," as we shall see, is important). However, when Moses actually does speak to them, the text says, "Moses spoke thus to the Israelites, but they did not heed Moses because of their crushed spirits and harsh labor" (Exodus 6:9). 

Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Kotzk once asked Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Worka, "How do we reconcile these two Scriptures? Heaven forbid that the words of the Holy One of Blessing were not fulfilled!" Is it possible, he wondered, that God was wrong about the Israelites paying attention to Moses?

Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Worka's answer turns on a small detail of the Hebrew. He explains, "God said to Moses, precisely, 'They will listen to your voice.' It is not, however, written, 'They will listen in your voice.'" He points out that when Moses later wants to makes sure the Israelites pay attention to him, he says, "And now, if you will listen in my voice…" (Exodus 19:5). 

The distinction, says Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Worka, is critical. He says that when God told Moses that the Israelites would "listen to his voice," it meant only that they would hear the sound of his voice, not the content of his words. Why didn't they hear what Moses was saying? “Because of their crushed spirits and harsh labor.” Their spiritual pain prevented them from taking in the full depth of Moses’ words. (Itturei Torah, Vol. 3, p. 55).

This is an experience that we all have known from childhood. When we are distraught, angered or in distress, we seldom hear clearly what is being said to us. Words that are meant to calm, soothe or comfort us do not come through. The words might even be misunderstood as challenging, judgmental or condescending. 

There is a corresponding teaching in Pirke Avot that tells us, "Do not attempt to appease a person when he is angry, to comfort a person when his dead lies before him, or to question a person when he utters a vow" (M. Avot 4:23). There is a time when we should acknowledge the limitations of words and to understand that even beautiful words will not be truly heard.

That is not an indictment against the person who cannot hear. It is not a spiritual failing. It is part of how we experience life with all of its ups and downs. 

There is a cycle of "a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance" (Ecclesiastes 3:4). Wisdom comes from recognizing each time and its appropriate boundaries. Wisdom is seeing that there is no joy that will drive away all sorrow, and there is no loss that will drive away all hope. Torah teaches that slaves may arise to see God's presence and hear God's voice on a mountain top. A bride who has lost her father may later find joy and fulfillment in marriage, children and family. Life goes on.

When I say—as I often do on this blog—that the challenge for our era of Judaism is to rediscover joy, I am not preaching a Judaism that is all happiness, all the time. That would be a Judaism no deeper than the light pablum of a television sitcom. Rather, I want to nurture a Judaism that speaks to us—and listens to us—through all the difficult passages of our lives and helps us return to joy. 

Joy is not the precondition of Jewish living. Life takes us through dark moments that must be acknowledged. But finding joy and returning to it is part of the life of Torah.


Other Posts on This Topic:
First Post!
Not Turning Away from Grief

Va'eira: Playing God?

1/17/2012

 
In a midrash, the rabbis teach that Pharaoh was punished for claiming to be a god (Exodus Rabbah 8:2). In a case of "let the punishment fit the crime," God sent Moses to Pharaoh with the instructions from this week's Torah portion (Va'eira): "See, I place you in the role of God to Pharaoh" (Exodus 7:1). The punishment for pretending to be a god is to be brought down by a human being whom God has designated to act as God. Poetic justice.
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There is nothing that Judaism seems to despise more than human beings who believe that they can take the place of God. That is a dire warning for an age in which we constantly play God. We manipulate DNA to create new life forms. We kill people on the other side of the world by pushing buttons. We carry access to the world's largest libraries in our pockets. We scoff at the stories of miracles in the Bible, not because they seem unbelievable, but because they seem so puny compared to what we can do with our technology. (Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and the walls come tumblin' down? A single B-2 Stealth Bomber armed with precision weapons could do the job undetected in under a minute.)

So, the question we must be wondering is this: What shepherd dressed in Bedouin's clothes will come walking into our halls of power to bring us down, acting as God's agent? There are plenty of candidates. If we so insist on playing God, taking all of our power for granted, how will that power be turned against us in another case of cosmic comeuppance?

Perhaps, it is time for us to be less focussed on what we can do and more concerned about what we should do with our power. There is a man with a beard and a staff at the door and he is asking us to let his people go.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Vayikra: Should I Bow to a Block of Wood?

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