Speak.
As the Torah reading for this week begins, God told Moses, EMOR, speak to the priests to offer them instruction on preserving holiness among the people.
I decided a long time ago that EMOR can also mean to “speak out,” to raise a voice when there is a need for personal evaluation and improvement.
In one of the first sermons I gave on this parashah nearly 30 years ago, I told a Bat Mitzvah to speak out at times when her peers allowed their relationships to deteriorate to the point of being based only on gossip, hostility and bullying. After my conversations with her before her special day about what went on in school, it was an important message to deliver at her service, especially with her peers sitting right there.
Now, in 5779, I focus on what I consider to be my favorite part of this portion, the holiday calendar in Leviticus Chapter 23, and I think about the lessons that our festivals teach us here and now.
This section of Leviticus begins, “These are My fixed times, the fixed times of the Eternal, which you shall proclaim as sacred occasions.”
In this passage, the “sacred” part did have to do, primarily, with performing the appropriate rituals for each holiday.
I believe there is much more to consider.
Shabbat reminds us that we, like God, are creators, and that we need to take time to reflect on the lives we are leading and what we are contributing to the world and to the people closest to us. It is important for us to take our responsibilities and our actions seriously at every moment.
The festival of Pesach recalls when the Israelites were freed by Pharaoh. That experience calls on us to work for the freedom for all people, to fulfill the words of Emma Lazarus: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
The feast of Unleavened Bread, CHAG HAMATZOT, refers to the initial Exodus from Egypt. The Israelites hurriedly made bread that did not rise. Matzah came to signify the need to preserve the freedom that we have with dedication and wisdom, sometimes using our own hands to do so.
The OMER period was a counting of seven weeks beginning with the second day of the feast of Unleavened bread. It offered our ancestors a time to give thanks for the coming barley harvest. That observance was their way of showing gratitude for the opportunity to work the land and to produce food for themselves and their communities. And it offers one of the best examples from the Torah of optimism, because the ritual of marking each new day of the seven week period involved counting up rather than counting down.
The fiftieth day, the culmination of the barley harvest, was a celebration of the human-divine partnership in coordinated creation of life-giving crops. Tied to this observance, which we now call Shavuot, the Torah states: “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the Eternal am your God.” Assisting people in need demonstrated the gratitude of the people for, what they believed, God had provided them.
What used to be the seventh month on the Jewish calendar, now the first month of the year, began with a day of blasts on a shofar that would prepare the people for a time of self-denial on the tenth day, YOM HAKIPURIM, the day of atonement. Those days, even in ancient times, directed the people to heal their relationships with each other and with God. Striving to live a moral life was important, even then, for each person and for the community as a whole.
The feast of SUKKOT, with the commandment to live in booths for seven days, recalled the years-long march of the Israelites fully-realized freedom. It signified their closeness to and their dependence on the natural world, as well as their need for security and protection. Sukkot taught our ancestors to appreciate all that God had given them: this earth, their families and communities, and their very lives.
What follows this recounting of the festival calendar is a second reference in the Torah to kindling lamps regularly, using the familiar words, NEIR TAMID.
At this time in our history, I believe that the light we offer, as members of the worldwide Jewish community, reflects the values that we have given to the world through our celebrations: freedom and its preservation; appreciation of the natural world; optimism; caring for people in need; doing our best to assure that our actions are moral and godly; and providing each other with security and support as fellow citizens of this planet that we call our home.
And so, when we see anyone jeopardizing the freedom of others, sometimes claiming that only their freedom matters; when we sense that some people are proposing strategies and policies that might harm the fragile balance of the natural world; when caring for people in need is near the bottom of a list of communal priorities; and when treating each other with decency and respect seems to no longer matter, it is time to speak up and raise our voices....because, based on the principles embodied in the festivals we celebrate, it has been, and always will be, the Jewish thing to do. May this be our task and our mission in the days to come.
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