Kehillat Ma'arav - Santa Monica, CA | Conservative Synagogue

Parsha by Gura

Home > Education > Parsha by Gura

Parshat Va-Yiggash (Genesis 44:18-47:27)
11th of Tevet, 5761

"The existence of Jews is provocative. The Jewish concept of God is provocative. The challenge cannot be terminated from within or from without; it has to be lived with, along with the reaction to the provocation. Neither assimilation nor Aushwitz are appropriate solutions to the problem. The problem of this provocation must be faced. "Why don't they dissolve into the surrounding majority? Why don't they give themselves over completely? Why do they identify with the passions of their environment only partially and conditionally? "Why isn't the Jew Christian? Why isn't the Jew Muslim?" --George Konrad, The Invisible Voice: Meditations on Jewish Themes

An absent G-d reappears, speaking to Ya'akov in a vision. The lost-now-found son Joseph is alive. Benjamin is safe. The ordeal of the famine mitigated.

"And Israel set out with everything he owned. And when he reached Beer-sheba, he offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac. "And God spoke to Israel in a vision by night and said, "Jacob, Jacob." "And he said, 'Yes'. "And he said, "I am God, the God of your fathers. Don't be afraid to go down to Egypt: I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down to Egypt with you, and I myself will bring you back up. And when you die, Joseph will close your eyes. "Then Jacob set out from Beer-sheba." (Genesis 46:1-5a, translation by Stephen Mitchell, 1996).

There is, we are taught, no end to the making of books. That's definitely the case for the would-be well-educated Jew today. Every so often, there seems to be a rash of primers or introductions to sundry aspects of Jewish life. Just within the past year, I can reckon three or four works attempting to broadly draw the outlines of modern Jewish life.

But often what isn't in those books can be nearly as illuminating as what is. Rabbi Arthur Green is clearly one of the most prominent guides to Jewish spiritual life writing today. His work on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslev, for example, re-introduced to American Jewry that great hasidic master. Recently Jewish Lights Publishing issued his "These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spriritual Life". In it, he gives short, thorough definitions of 149 of the "most essential terms that an educated Jewish seeker needs to know". The words offered range from the mystical language of Judaism to ritual objects, holy days and community life. Many of the concepts he underlines draw from Rabbi Green's long and deep interest in mysticism, hassidut and kabbalah.

But an idea central to thousands of years of Jewish self-conceptualization is missing: Galut, golas, exile.

The vagaries and preciousness of Jewish life was defined up to the Second World War almost exclusive by resort to that term, galut. Whether Zionism, which designed to create a normalized Jewish nation standing proudly among the nations of the world; whether traditionalist religious thought, which accounted for Jewish suffering as The Refiner's fire; whether assimiliationism, which sought personal escape from the burdens of statelessness; exile was the motif by which Jews understood themselves.

Rabbinic thought, forged in catastrophe after the destruction of the Second Temple, shook these lines from Genesis: "I will go down to Egypt with you, and I myself will bring you back". Exile followed by redemption, exile tempered by G-d's loving presence.

We don't speak much of exile today. We in the United States certainly should not feel marginalized or excluded. It is not as if we can not feel at home here. When we regard the idea, we tend more often than not to spiritualize or intellectualize our use of it.

To be sure, that did not originate with us. Hasidic thought expanded the idea of exile to include not only Jewish statelessness and powerlessness, but our deeply human and natural estrangement from the source of all holiness. To the degree we strive for and attain holiness, to the degree we bring our lives into service of the One, we can mitigate, minimize our personal exile, find a way out of the narrow places of the soul.

But we still don't have access, we still haven't retrieved, the idea of collective galut.

I wonder, is that idea really available to us now? Those few I know who have wrestled deeply with the conundrum of galut exerted themselves to resolve it. Many have moved to Israel, and now they often tagged as the major Jewish impediment to Middle Eastern peace. They have settled the areas of historic Jewish, biblical land, the West Bank of the Jordan river. Many have been moved by the idea attributed to Rav Kook, that the settlement of the land, the redemption of the land, is part of the messianic redemption we Jews have awaited breathlessly for 1900 years or so. Jewish history teaches us that messianism is dangerous: but without messianism how could we Jews suffer exile? Without some claim to the land, how can we define exile?

In the vast array of new books presented to us each year about Judaism and Jewish life, few speak about exile, at least not in the corporate, collective sense of exile. In large part the idea has fallen in to disuse, if not outright distaste, because of Auschwitz. If, as traditional thought argued, exile is G-d's punishment, than where was G-d? Neither answer, that G-d disappeared, contracting in the midst of evil, nor that G-d sent the enemy as a scourge, satisfies us. But, likewise, we need to be consistent-for if the Shoah was not punishment, than neither is the political State of Israel reward.

Perhaps we need to make some greater effort to retrieve the idea of galut. Rabbi David Novak suggests a way: "The proper theological connection between the two events (the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel) is not causal but analogical. The similarities are located in the very similar responses that are prescribed for those who have experienced either event: God is to be thanked now for our survival then. Our suffering does not admit of any theodicy because the ways of God are mysterious, the ultimate secrets are yet to be revealed.By tempering the fear of the Holocaust with the joy of the State of Israel, and by tempering the joy of the State of Israel with the fear of the Holocaust, we are able to speak to God and of God in the world, without presuming to speak for God or in the place of God. That is the true task of Jewish theology at this juncture of history." (David Novak, Arguing Israel and the Holocaust, First Things, January, 2001, number 109)

In fear and yet with hope, Ya'akov departs for Egypt. Ya'akov, named Israel, is called twice by G-d. Rashi explains the double calling as a term of endearment. He answers as Avraham answered, 'Hineni', 'Yes, I am here'.

Perhaps our midrash here could be that Ya'akov called twice to G-d, with love, endearingly, and G-d answered, 'Hineni'. Our task in a broken world, an exiled world, is to find G-d's hineni, but not to speak for Him. G-d's "hineni" cushions Israel's exiles, then and now.

Shabbat Shalom

Dennis Gura