Rabbi Lewis's Shabbat Message - January 24, 2025

  • Clergy
  • Shabbat
Rabbi Lewis's Shabbat Message - January 24, 2025

We are living in unprecedented times, and everything feels extraordinarily big right now, because it is. 

As we prepare to enter this Shabbat, the fires continue to burn, devastating our community and our entire city. The fragile ceasefire continues to hold in Israel, keeping us holding our collective breath. We have a new administration in the White House. Three hostages are home, and we wait with bated breath for the rest to follow. You get the idea.

While these days are most certainly unprecedented, I think back to the weeks, months and years since that word - unprecedented - became a regular part of my vocabulary. I can’t help but wonder - when do the days that are ‘precedented’ actually arrive? It is hard to imagine, considering the enormity of the feelings that are swirling, and the sense of overwhelm that pervades so many in our community and beyond.

While this confluence of events is most certainly new in our day, the task of making it through the overwhelm is all-too-familiar to the Jewish people. In the generation after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE, the community struggled mightily, overwhelmed by the thought of putting the pieces of their life back together. The great sage, Rabbi Tarfon, saw the people weighed down by the devastation. Concerned that they would be paralyzed by their burden, he famously taught, “It is not your duty to complete the task, but neither are you free to walk away from it.” Rabbi Tarfon may as well have been speaking directly to us.

Long before the days of Rabbi Tarfon, the Torah tells of Moses demanding that Pharaoh let the people go free from slavery in Egypt. In reading parashat Vaera this week, we encounter the start of the unfolding series of destructive plagues. Each time, Pharaoh refuses to let the slaves go free. No less than twenty times in the Exodus narrative, we read that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. One of the Hebrew words used for ‘harden’ offers us yet another lesson during this ‘unprecedented’ time.
 

“And Pharaoh y’kabed/hardened his heart this time also and refused to let the people go.”
(Exodus 8:28)


Pharaoh’s hardening his heart may have given him a false sense of control over his situation, but it would be short-lived until the next, more destructive plague would befall his people. But that same word, kabed, also means ‘heavy.’ If only he would have felt the weight of the situation without hardening his heart, fooling himself that he did not need to get involved, the Egyptian people would have been spared enormous suffering.

This Shabbat, when the weight of the world, of our country, of our city, of our community and of so many of our own lives has the potential to harden us and make us numb, let us remember that until such time as ‘precedented’ days return, allowing ourselves to feel the heaviness will enable us to hold one another up so that we can face the enormity of the task at hand. None of us is responsible for doing it alone, but neither can any of us walk away from it.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Leah Lewis