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Hello there, I'm Tanya Hazana, and
[music] you're listening to Human and
Holy. Today, in honor of Shavuot, which
is just a couple days away, we are going
to be learning some Torah together about
the receipt of the Torah and a machlokes
[music] about the hearing and seeing,
and what that teaches us about having a
more general picture of our Judaism
versus a relationship to all of its
parts [music] individually, and how
receiving the Torah means both hearing
the Torah and seeing the Torah, and we
are going [music] to dive into what that
means, what it means to be both a
traveler and at home, what it means
[music] to see the larger narrative
while also being deeply invested in all
the parts and the particulars, what it
means to witness and perceive [music] a
person in full versus experiencing them
from within. All of these are going to
help us tease out what it means to
receive [music] the Torah through sight
and sound. Keep your eyes out cuz next
Sunday we are going to be airing a
really special episode, which is a round
table conversation about women's Torah
[music] learning. This week we're going
to be receiving the Torah, and I think
that question of what does it mean to
receive the Torah happen the week after.
So, Sunday after Shavuot, we're going to
be sitting down for an incredible round
table conversation exploring women's
Torah study, women's experiences of
their own study, how to integrate it
into your life when you are busy and
have so much else going on. Is Torah
just for the scholars? Is Torah study
just for women who are intellectuals?
How can we communicate to our daughters
that the Torah belongs to them and so
much else? This is a really rich and
fascinating conversation and I'm very
excited to share it with you. Today's
episode is dedicated in honor of Reuven
Morison, Hashem Yikom Damo, may God
avenge his blood, who was killed on Erev
Chanukah at the bombing attack. This
episode is dedicated in honor of my
father, Reuven Morison.
His daughter writes, "Born in the USSR,
my father understood what it meant to
fight to keep Torah and Yiddishkeit
alive. He knew what it meant when being
openly Jewish came with fear and
sacrifice. Later in life, he chose a
life of Torah and mitzvahs with complete
conviction. He lived with pride in who
he was and wanted every Jew around him
to feel that, too. My father spread the
Rebbe's flames of Yiddishkeit in the
most real way possible. He was
unconventional and completely
unapologetic about who he was. People
connected to him because nothing about
him felt polished or performative. He
was honest, direct, warm, emotional, and
deeply real. He made people feel proud
to be Jewish simply by the way he lived.
But more than anything, he was the most
incredible father, father-in-law,
husband, and zaida.
Our family felt his love in everything
he did.
May this learning be a zchus for his
neshama, and may his story continue to
encourage people to live openly and
proudly as Jews. Never forget the video
of Reuben Morison at the Bondi attack
lifting that brick, and you can feel
through this message of his daughter
what a remarkable larger-than-life man
that he was.
Today's episode and today's Torah is
dedicated to him.
It feels very rabbinic to start with a
joke, for this is actually a joke that
the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself said, and
it's the perfect framing for the
conversation that we're about to have.
There was once a new rabbi who was hired
by a less affiliated shul. He wanted to
give his first speech, so he told the
president, "Why don't I talk about
mezuzah?" And the president was like,
"Uh, it might be a little offensive to
people." So he said, "Okay, why don't I
talk about shmiras Shabbos, Shabbos
observance?" And he said, "Nah, lots of
people here don't practice, so talk
about something else."
So he said, "Okay, why don't I speak
about kosher?" And the president was
like, "No, you can't."
So he says, "So what should I speak
about?" And the president says,
"Judaism. Talk about Judaism."
Is there a broad vision of Judaism that
supersedes all of these different parts,
that supersedes Shabbos, mezuzah,
kashrus? Can you talk about Judaism
without talking about its parts? Should
we have a broad framework and vision of
our Judaism that everything else in our
lives fits into? Or should we have
multiple frameworks and perspectives,
each that individually live in our
lives? Let's begin with the question of
Rav Gedaliah Schorr. He says that we see
a little bit of a contradiction in the
Torah. One midrash says that all of the
Torah was included in the first set of
luchos, of tablets. Everything was
there, the entire Torah.
And in Talmud Yerushalmi, in another
source, it says that Hashem told Mosha,
"Don't worry that the first Luchos were
broken because that was just the Aseres
Hadibros, that was just the Ten
Commandments, and the second set of
Luchos has the whole Torah." So, which
one is it? Did the first set of Luchos
have the entire Judaism or was it only
in the second set of Luchos that we
received the entire Judaism? Are all of
the particulars contained within the
overarching message of Judaism? There's
a dispute in Sota Talmud Zion between
Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael discussing
how Torah Shebaal Peh, how the Oral
Torah was transmitted. Rabbi Ishmael
said, "The general principles were set
at Sinai, but the details of Torah
Shebaal Peh, of the Oral Torah, were set
by Mosha at the Ohel Moed in the
Mishkan." Rabbi Akiva said, "No, the
whole Torah was taught at Sinai and then
again by Mosha at the Ohel Moed. So, it
wasn't that Mosha was teasing out the
details of the Torah, but that he was
just repeating what was already given."
If we have to break down this conflict
of opinion, it's that Rabbi Ishmael saw
the Torah as particular truths and Rabbi
Akiva saw the Torah as a single
universal truth and all of the details
of the Torah being subsumed within that
single truth. We see this underlying
conflict of opinion in another conflict
that Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael have
around the Jewish people's experience of
the Torah. Let's pull to the text to see
it inside of the verse. "Vayakhel ha'am
ro'im es hakolois, v'es halapidim, v'es
kol hashofar, v'es hahar ashein, vayara
ha'am vayanua, vayaamdu merachok."
All the people witnessed the thunder and
lightning, the blare of the horn and the
mountain smoking, and when the people
saw it, they fell back and stood at a
distance. "Vayakhel ha'am ro'im" the
entire nation saw
"kol hashofar" the sound of the shofar.
Were they seeing sound and hearing the
sights? There's an enormous amount of
Torah on this question asking if the
Jewish people's senses were mixed up, if
they were getting this supernatural
ability to literally hear an image and
see a sound. There's a fascinating
medical condition called synesthesia,
where which is a neurological experience
where people have sensory crossover,
where the five senses, which are
normally five different modalities of
experiencing and intellectually
processing the world, melt with each
other. So, a person can see shapes when
smelling or perceive the taste of words
or sounds can have colors. And
obviously, we can see how this can lead
to tremendous creativity. Beethoven
described music in this way. B minor is
black, D major is orange, and this gives
a person crossover between their senses,
where they are experiencing almost the
wrong sense for the experience that
they're processing, and it gives them a
remarkable and interesting crossover.
So, is this what the Jewish people were
experiencing at Har Sinai? Were they
experiencing synesthesia? According to
Rabbi Shmuel, they saw the sights and
they heard the sounds and there was no
crossover of the senses. According to
Rabbi Akiva, their human senses were
switched over, and they heard the sights
and saw the sounds. In order to
understand the underlying conflict have
happening between these two sages, in
order to understand what the
disagreement is about the general
overarching truth of Judaism versus the
particular truths of Judaism versus the
experience of seeing and hearing clearly
versus seeing and hearing in this
crossover experience, where the senses
melt, we have to dive into the different
experiences of sight or sound. Seeing
something and hearing something is a
vastly different experience of the
world. When you see something, it is
immediate. You were immediately
confronted by the totality of the object
or experience in front of you. You don't
take it in part by part. You see the
entire thing all at once. You don't need
to piece the thing together. You
immediately get the whole. When you walk
into an art gallery and you see a large
massive painting, you are immediately
confronted, overwhelmed, immersed in the
lines, colors, shades, hues, shadows of
this piece before you. The first
experience of sight is taking it all in
at once, getting this panoramic effect
of whatever stands before you. It's
called the overview effect, and
astronauts report having a totally
different relation to planet Earth after
seeing its totality, after seeing it in
full. Over time, in the example of the
art exhibit, you spend you can spend
hours staring, noticing the details,
filling in the granular view, all the
details that make up this large
painting. With the person, you could
first have the first impression of just
what you feel when you're around this
person, and then over time, you could
begin to understand the details of what
makes this person who they are, what
contributes to that whole image. You
begin to get the details, the prot that
contributes to this claw, to this
general and whole picture. Everyone says
a picture is worth a thousand words, but
if you ask someone who sees a picture,
"Can you give me a thousand words?" they
would say, "No. I need to peer at this.
I need to study this. I need to notice
all of the details in order to give you
the thousand words that this whole image
expresses. Through sight, you absorb a
huge amount of data, but that data is
subsumed within the whole. You go from
the center outwards, from the holistic
to the granular, from the overview to
the details.
From the panorama experience to zooming
in. What is hearing?
Hearing is the exact opposite. When you
hear something, you hear one detail at a
time.
There is no immediacy.
You absorb slowly, point after point,
and slowly build up your knowledge of
what this thing before me is.
Your relationship is bottom-up or
outside-in. You start on the outside,
and you reach from puzzle piece to
puzzle piece until, hopefully, you put
everything together and get a glimpse of
the claw, of the general picture. You go
word by word, sentence by sentence. Why
is this relevant? What does this mean?
Understanding each point individually,
and then it all comes together. Now I
see the full picture. Now I see the full
view. So, I walk into an art gallery, I
see the full image. I see a picture, I
get a whole mood, a whole feeling. When
I listen to something, when I hear
something, when someone communicates an
idea to me, I get a piece by piece by
piece,
detail by detail by detail, until
finally, it makes up a whole. So, seeing
is seeing the whole thing first and then
all of the details. Hearing means
getting all of the details first and
filling that in to make up the larger
whole. It's interesting when you think
about how we absorb other people and
that first impression versus all the
details that make up who a person is.
There's an amazing story with the Alter
Rebbe and the Tzemach Tzedek. The Alter
Rebbe is the first Chabad Rebbe and the
Tzemach Tzedek was his grandson, which
really demonstrates this point. The
Alter Rebbe was holding his young
grandson, the Tzemach Tzedek, and the
child looked up at his grandfather and
said, "Zeda, Zeda." And so, the Alter
Rebbe asked him, "Who is Zeda? Where is
Zeda?" The grandson pointed to the head
of his grandfather. And the Alter Rebbe
said, "This is the head. This is not
Zeda."
So, the child then pointed to the Alter
Rebbe's heart and said, "This is Zeda."
And the Alter Rebbe said, "This is the
heart. This is not Zeda." The grandson,
the Tzemach Tzedek, continued to point
at other parts of the Alter Rebbe's body
in order to find a place where Zeda
lived. His beard, his face, his arm. And
in response to all of these attempts,
the Alter Rebbe responded that
his grandson had indicated a specific
limb of Zeda, but not Zeda himself. So,
the Tzemach Tzedek started walking
around on his own and when he got to the
door, he pretended that his finger had
gotten caught in the door and he began
to yell, "Zeda, Zeda."
And the Alter Rebbe turned to the child,
turned to his grandson, and said, "What
is it? What happened?" And the child
replied, "This is Zeda.
This is Zeda."
That person who turned around when I
called him.
That whole you that responded
to my gaze, that made eye contact with
me just now. That is Zeda. Zeda is not
the head. Zeda is not the heart. Zeda is
not the beard. Zeda is not the arm. Zeda
is you standing before me exactly as you
are, meeting my gaze. Zeda is you
responding to me in this moment and you
in your wholeness turning towards me
when I call out in pain.
There's a remarkable essay written in
1953 by Isaiah Berlin called The
Hedgehog and the Fox, which takes its
title from a fragment by a Greek poet.
The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing."
>> [snorts]
>> And Isaiah Berlin uses this line as a
way of dividing thinkers and people in
general into two temperamental types,
the hedgehog and the fox, two different
ways of perceiving the world and
receiving and experiencing ideas.
Experientially, what it feels like to be
one or the other is that the hedgehog
lives inside of a unified vision.
Everything that she encounters refers
back to a single organizing center, a
master idea, a moral principle, a
metaphysical conviction, a sense of how
history or human life is supposed to add
up. Everything is an episode in a larger
story. The fox's experience of life
is one that is irreducibly plural. The
fox attends to a particular on its own
terms, takes pleasure in variety and
contradiction,
doesn't feel a constant pressure to fit
what she encounters into an overarching
scheme.
The hedgehog feels like the entire world
is cohering and finds coherence under
one principle and idea. And the fox
feels like the world is teeming and is
just full of range and flexibility and a
thousand different perspectives. The
hedgehog reasons from the top down.
There's a central truth and the work of
understanding and knowing is to grasp
that central truth and then interpret
all particulars in its light. That means
that knowledge is systematic, the many
is explained by the one, apparent
contradictions are signs that you
haven't yet seen deeply enough.
And the fox reasons from the bottom up.
Knowledge for the fox is the
accumulation of many distinct things.
Everything is observed in its
specificity. Not everything has to add
up to a single theory, and different
domains, according to the fox, may
require different methods and different
vocabularies. Each type of thinker has
its own strength and its own failing.
For the hedgehog, the hedgehog, there
really is this unifying principle and
truth, which is very grounding and
rooted, but the system could become
reductive.
For the fox, the fox has a strength,
which is also its risk, which is that
it's able to witness contradiction in
life and see how they can both live side
by side, but
there can also be no center to stand on,
no essential truth. If we had to put the
hedgehog and the fox, which we have to,
which I want to,
put it into the framework of seeing and
hearing, the hedgehog is seeing,
immediately taking the whole thing in,
all of the particulars being subsumed
and bound up with this one unifying
vision. I walk in and I see the
painting. I walk in and I see the whole
vision. And the fox would most closely
resemble hearing, taking something in
piece by piece, every piece of
information needing to stand on its own,
and then that making up the larger whole
of reality. So, let's look back at what
the machlokes of Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi
Akiva were saying. Let's look back at
what this machlokes of the first dibros,
the first set of luchos, and the second
set of luchos were saying. What is the
underlying contradiction that we are
addressing? This contradiction of
letting the sight and sound of receiving
the Torah exist for what it is, versus
allowing it to mess with your senses.
Rabbi Shimon's argument, which is that
they heard the sounds and they saw the
sights, is telling us to stay local, to
perceive
Yiddishkeit
by the particulars,
to not superimpose Judaism on your life,
but to look at every single detail. To
talk about Shabbos, to talk about
kashrus, to look at the mitzvos, to look
at my experience of the mitzvos, to go
granular on the details of Judaism.
Rabbi Akiva's argument
was that they
saw the sounds, they heard the sights.
He's saying, let it mess with your
senses. Let every particular be subsumed
by the whole. Let the Torah completely
shift how you see things. Let everything
fall under this greater truth that
transforms you. If we look at their
biographies and their background, their
perspectives are going to make a little
bit more sense. Rabbi Akiva was on the
outside looking in for so many years. He
became a scholar when he was 40. So,
paradoxically for him, he wanted to
adopt the avodah, the service of an
insider to see the transcendent, to see
the whole Judaism, not just to learn the
particulars, but just to witness the
whole and be completely moved by it, to
be completely shaken, completely
changed. He wanted to emphasize his weak
point. He constantly searched for the
transcendence, for the perspective of
the creator.
Something that will that one unifying
frame that shatters your new normal
frame of reference. And that's the
experience of receiving the Torah and
having all of your senses scrambled,
perceiving the unity of God and having
all of your senses of reality scrambled.
Your whole sense of self turned upside
down. Your entire experience of this
world just completely pulled under that
framework of this one unifying truth of
God. This experience of receiving the
Torah lifts us out of our humanity and
allows us to just completely experience
the essence in a way that totally
transforms our experience of ourselves.
We'll be small headed a different
perspective. He was born into holiness.
He was born on the inside. So, he wanted
to experience the opposite. He wanted to
go to the outside. He wanted to
experience the details, the particulars.
He wanted to be the fox experiencing
everything for what it was. He was born
into this overarching Torah truth of
Judaism. And he said, "Now I want to
touch the details, the particulars, and
the way those meet me where I am, the
way I see with my own physical eyes, the
way I hear with my own ears, the way I'm
not scrambled by the truth of Torah, but
where I am, who I am, where I'm at meets
it exactly eye to eye. I'm not overcome.
I'm not passing out. I'm not fainting
under this larger truth. Everything in
my life may not naturally fit like the
hedgehog into this one system, this one
truth, but I meet each piece of my
Judaism for what it is. I meet I meet
each truth of the Torah that I received
at Sinai for what it is in my life. The
question is, should my focus be on the
macro, on this all-consuming truth, or
should my focus be on the micro, on the
details of Yiddishkeit as it relates to
me, on the particulars of the mitzvahs,
the ones I struggle with, the ones I
don't understand, the ones I love, my
own particular experience of my Judaism
is exactly as I am? Or should I just be
consumed by this larger truth? Should I
have my senses scrambled? Should I be
completely consumed by this fire of
receiving the Torah, this experience of
thunder and lightning, where suddenly I
can taste God in the world? I want to go
back to the joke about the new rabbi who
wanted to talk about Shabbos, but the
president found it a little bit
offensive. What is Shabbos on its own,
and what is Shabbos within the broader
framework of Judaism? It's two separate
questions.
And the contradiction of Rabbi Akiva and
Rabbi Ishmael are telling us we need
both. We need to understand what Shabbos
is within the broader framework of
Judaism. We need to be a hedgehog. And
also, we need to be a fox. What is
Shabbos on its own? What is each
particular of Judaism on its own,
standing for what it is as a detail that
I don't only see within a larger whole,
but I see for what it is in my life as
its own value, as its own meeting place
between me and this Jewish value, me and
this Jewish idea, me and Hashem in this
very particular way, not just in the
larger framework and the larger system
of Judaism, but this actual mitzvah in
front of me, this actual moment in front
of me, and me as I am right now meeting
this mitzvah and meeting this moment and
meeting this part of my Judaism. I think
you see this duality and the necessity
for the duality very clearly in the
experience of human relationships and
how a relationship has this
meta-narrative and this overarching
story and the origin and the
years of time and the ways you've given
to me over the years and the resentments
I may hold and the recurring
disagreements and the acts of love and
this whole overarching truth and story
that I have in this relationship, this
overarching narrative. But then there's
also the experience of I go for a walk
with you. And it's lovely. It's a
Wednesday afternoon. We're on a walk.
I'm talking to you. You're listening. We
We could be two strangers having a
conversation. This conversation is
lovely outside of the narrative of our
relationship, outside of our history and
our story and everything we are to each
other. Right now we're two human beings
taking a walk together, having a
conversation. And how lovely is this?
And this experience of accessing the
particular moment of this relationship
allows me to
see it in a fresh light, to find relief
from some of the larger pieces that may
be challenging for me, and allows me to
see this moment for what it is without
all of the
larger stories and narratives that it
fits into. So difference between being
at home and traveling. When you're home,
you don't notice the details of home,
all the parts. All of it comes together
as a whole and creates this experience
of being home. And I don't just mean a
literal home, but that feeling of being
at home somewhere, where you are not
measuring yourself, where you are inside
a place, you are safe, you are not
threatened, you are enclosed and not
exposed. You're at ease, you identify
with the place, you're here, you're
unselfconscious, you're home. And we all
have people in our lives who feel like
home, that when we are with them, we our
self-consciousness, hopefully we have
this with family and close friends, that
our self-consciousness abates and we
just exist, we're just here, we are
inside the experience, inside the
connection, inside of our own selves,
we're fully at home. We just exist fully
here without self-consciousness, without
this experience of outsideness, of being
separate from the other, from perceiving
ourselves and the other person, but
we're just totally here. In the
experience of travel, you perceive the
details much more sharply because
there's such a strong otherness between
me and the place I'm in. When I meet a
new person, because I experience such an
otherness between me and this other
person, I actually notice them sometimes
more clearly. Because I'm not at home
with this person, I'm perceiving them.
There is an otherness to them. There's
something to look at, something to see
outside of myself. The feeling of
outsideness is the lived tension between
you and the space. It's
an inherent self-consciousness, the
feeling of it is over there. If home is,
I am here, I'm inside this, being in a
space where we are othered outside is
the experience of that is I'm here and
that is over there. I see myself in
relation to the other person. I see
myself in relation to the place. I feel
a certain strangeness, a certain
otherness from this thing. We have two
ways of looking at our Judaism, from
inside and from outside, here and there.
One is to be within our Judaism
completely, to completely surrender to
that larger vision and whole, to lose
our self-consciousness, to lose our
otherness. And then there is the
experience of our Judaism where I see
myself in relation to my Judaism. I see
myself as separate from my Judaism. I
see the ways I chafe against my Judaism.
I'm not only inside my Judaism as a
modern person or just as a human being,
I am also outside of it.
And for those moments where I am outside
of my Judaism, I need the particulars to
bring me home.
For those moments where I feel
disconnected from someone I love, I need
a walk where we can just be two people
having a lovely conversation not under
the overarching narrative of our
connection.
We need to both see and hear. We need to
be the hedgehog and the fox. We need to
be able to see the panorama of our
Judaism and also see its details. You
need to be able to appreciate the local
truths of Judaism even when you have a
hazy vision of the panorama, even when
you don't see how every part fits into
the whole, even when you do live with a
thousand contradictions. Rabbi Ishmael
is saying, "See Judaism as imminent."
Rabbi Akiva is saying, "See Judaism as
transcendent." And Rabbi Ishmael says,
"See Judaism as so imminent that you do
not see everything as part of a greater
whole, that you do not always endeavor
to." He says there's truth to your
local, specific, individual, limited
experience of the details of Judaism.
Every mitzvah is not just part of a
larger whole. It is a world unto itself.
I don't always have to see each
encounter with Hashem, each encounter
with my Judaism as part of this larger
narrative of the truth of the world and
existence. It can also just be me and
Hashem in this moment, outside of that
larger narrative. It is not enough to
believe that God created everything and
I am just completely within that source.
I'm completely at home here. I must
recognize also that Hashem is dependent
on me as me in my particulars, in my
particular moments of connection from
where I am. Each of us have areas in our
Judaism where we feel at home, where we
feel here, not there, where the reality
of Hashem completely transforms us and
uplifts us. But then we have areas where
we are on the outside looking in, where
we feel like strangers, alienated,
self-conscious, perceiving our Judaism
from the outside, seeing it for its
particulars, struggling or celebrating
it for its particulars, not just for its
larger whole. When we're in those
moments and experiences, to resist the
urge to swim away from them, to resist
the urge to find a Judaism that will
sweep us all away,
that will just bring us home completely.
But instead, to see how God is with us
there. To become a fox. When you lose
sight of the vision, when you lose sight
of the overarching truth, when you lose
sight of that overarching surrender,
change the goalpost from how can I fit
myself into this master plan, and shift
it to where is God for me right here,
right now,
in this.
How can I meet Hashem in the particular,
even if so much is unresolved in my
relationship? Being here, right now,
with you on the couch and having a
conversation. Take a step back. Be a
visitor. Allow yourself to be a stranger
in your own life. Allow yourself to
witness the details of the thing. To
witness the details of the Torah. The
real here, really being here, is to
allow ourselves to both be here and also
over there. To be at home within our
Judaism and also be a stranger to it. To
allow ourselves to experience those
particulars. There are so many ways that
this truth shows up for me in my life.
When I am struggling with a particular
element of Judaism that seems to chafe
against my personality or my desires,
the instinct is to surrender to that
larger whole. But the opportunity is
lost when I don't focus for a moment on
the particular, me chafing against this
one particular value or idea. Not just
surrendering it to the whole, but
allowing myself to feel outside it and
to approach it for what it is on its
own. There's a rich experience of
receiving the Torah, where my senses are
scrambled, where I literally hear the
sight of godliness completely, where I
feel totally given up, totally
unself-conscious, totally within the
experience of receiving the Torah in my
life. And then there are many, many,
many moments of our own Judaism, many
moments of connection to Hashem, whether
that be us struggling with our Judaism,
whether that be a challenge in our life
that puts us at odds with the trust in
God that we see as being the highest bar
bar of connection,
where I have to slow down and see the
particular, where I have to look at
Shabbos, just Shabbos as it is, not just
as part of the larger story, but Shabbos
as it is. I have to look at this one
value, this one moment and interaction
with Hashem, this particular experience
where I feel like a stranger, where I
feel my self-consciousness, where I feel
like an alien to the Judaism that should
be my home.
And I reach for Hashem there,
from outside. Rebbe Nachman is saying,
"Sometimes when you're surrendering,
when you're trying to get deeper and
deeper to the essence, you aren't really
here. You aren't really at home. You're
trying to reach the transcendent. You're
trying to reach higher. You're trying to
reach over there.
And he says, "Stay here.
Stay right over here.
Exactly where you are.
When you feel outside, you are the most
inside you've ever been.
When you feel like Judaism is over
there, but you allow yourself to be
completely within this moment, Judaism
is right here. Sometimes reaching for
the transcendent, being totally
scrambled, is actually reaching outside
of ourselves.
Othering our Judaism.
And sometimes when we feel like aliens,
when we feel outside, when we feel
estranged or we feel distant, and we can
just focus on the particulars. We can
truly bring it home. We can truly meet
Hashem exactly, genuinely, truly from
where we are. On Shavuot, we receive
both the broad vision and overarching
narrative and truth of the Torah, which
totally consumes us.
And we also experience the invitation to
see with our own eyes, to hear with our
own ears,
to recognize in those moments where we
feel distant, where we feel at odds with
the Torah we are receiving,
that we can zoom in on the particulars,
on the moment with Hashem, on the
details of the mitzvah that I am
celebrating or struggling with, that I
could be here, right now, exactly how my
Yiddishkeit is meeting me. And to
recognize that that otherness that feels
like being separate, that feels like
being far away, that feels like being
estranged, is actually the gift of being
a traveler, of seeing things with fresh
eyes, of hearing each thing for what it
is, and not allowing it to get lost in
the larger whole. What I'm taking with
me
from this teaching into my life
is the recognition
that the particular struggles that I
have are not going to be solved
more generally.
I have to lean into the specifics. I
have to lean into right here, right now.
What is hurting? What do I feel
disconnected from? What do I feel
estranged from within my Judaism? And to
be a fox to pay attention to the
contradictions, to lean into every
opposing thread in my life
and to receive the Torah not just as
this overarching truth that doesn't
touch every part of me, but as something
that asks me to meet Hashem
in every particular part of who I am.
Wishing you a beautiful Shavuot. May you
experience how the Torah belongs to you.
Hashem wants to both lift you to a
higher plane and also meet you exactly
where you are. [music]
Looking forward to seeing you next
Sunday for a round table about women's
Torah study. Thank you so much for
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Bye.