Musings on Love: Shabbat Chol HaMoed Pesach
I hope you are having a lovely Pesach. I had the rare privilege this year of sitting around the seder table with both my parents and my children... which was quite meaningful and had me thinking even more deeply about the generational transmission theme I reflected on here last week. Meanwhile, the presence of these generations at my seder table also brought another key theme of the season to the forefront for me: love. Indeed, love is one of the dominant themes for Shabbat of Chol HaMoed Pesach, the Shabbat we enter into this evening, during the intermediate days of Passover.
Because of the festival of Pesach, this Shabbat we depart from our "regularly scheduled program" of the weekly Torah reading cycle (where we're currently in the middle of Leviticus) and instead flip back to the Book of Exodus to read 33:12-34:26. As our text picks up, the Israelites have already left Egypt, and have already made the colossal error of the golden calf. Now, Moses, standing at Sinai, says to God: “See, You say to me, ‘Lead this people forward,’ but You have not made known to me whom You will send with me. Further, You have said, ‘I have singled you out by name, and you have, indeed, gained My favor. Now, if I have truly gained Your favor, pray let me know Your ways, that I may know You and continue in Your favor. Consider, too, that this nation is Your people.”
As the story unfolds -- and I encourage you to read through it if you aren't already familiar -- Moses continues to express a desire to be close to God, to understand how God works, and to "behold God's Presence." Although he isn't permitted to see God's face, he does have an intimate experience of the Divine, as God passes before him while he is sheltered in the cleft of a rock. The Torah reading for this Shabbat is rich with the emotional actions that make up so many love stories: yearning, intimacy, mutual disclosure, and mutual commitment, to name a few examples.
As if to underscore the love theme, our tradition also has us chant the Book of Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) on this Shabbat of Pesach. At face value, Shir HaShirim is very ancient (and racy!) love poetry, set in a lush garden. Lovers praise each other's physical characteristics, yearn for one another, play hide-and-seek with one another. I used to scoff at the fact that rabbinic tradition reads this biblical book metaphorically, as fundamentally being about the love relationship between God and the Jewish people (why, I wondered, couldn't they deal with the face value, that the text depicts a human love story?!). Over time, however, I've come to see the importance of this traditional lens, as poetry and metaphor often work a lot better than philosophical treatises for trying to "do theology," enabling us to articulate and share our experiences of and beliefs about God, including the mutual yearning and love we imagine.
Just a few weeks ago, a new book was released that I'm already certain will be one of the most important Jewish works of our generation and an enduring contribution to every Jewish library: my colleague and friend Shai Held's new book Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life. In the introduction to the book, Held makes the claim that "Judaism is built on the idea that God loves us and beckons us to love God back." Perhaps this seems obvious (after all, this is indeed the central idea of the prayers Ahavah Rabbah / Ahavat Olam and Shema), but in many ways, this book is Held's attempt to offer a corrective to the notion that Christianity -- and not Judaism -- centers the concept of love. [As an aside, if you're at all interested in this topic, I strongly encourage you to go to your favorite independent bookstore and purchase a copy; here at Kavana we are already planning that Rabbi Jay and Bruce's "Classics of Mussar" group will be reading and discussing this book together in the early fall!]
Coming off of my multigenerational seder experience, I especially appreciate Held's treatment of the family as a key setting for love. He writes that fundamentally, running a household is about creating a place where children can be surrounded with unconditional love. If our children are filled up with love there, we create the conditions that then allow them to walk into the world capable of love, able to put love into action (through acts of compassion, etc.). In Held's words, "an aspiration for what a Jewish home is is a school for love." (These concepts are explained at length in chapter 4 of his book, or you can click here to see a recent interview with Held at Harvard Hillel... scroll to the 45-51 minute mark to catch this part of the discussion.)
This week, I have felt incredibly blessed... indeed, filled with the love that my parents have always surrounded me with, and mindful of the ways that as a parent, I am also trying to create a loving environment for my own kids. I am grateful, as I am keenly aware that not everyone is so fortunate to have grown up in such a loving and positive home; as Shai Held says in the interview linked above, "For many of us, our experiences of love were different. In that case, this [attempt to channel love] is repairing, creating an alternative."
Over the past few days, I've also felt the centrality of intergenerational familial love as I watched a pair of new videos released this week: one created by Hamas of American/Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg Polin, and another, a response, filmed by his parents, Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin. Hersh's video ends with a message for his family: "I love you so much, and I think about you every day." And their video echoes that sentiment: "Hersh, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days, and if you can hear us, we are telling you: We love you, stay strong, survive." The mutual love the Goldberg-Polin family expresses is such a poignant -- and excruciatingly painful -- reminder that this Passover, we are all still residing in a world of brokenness and bitter constraint, yearning for redemption, on so many levels.
Switching directions for a moment, I also want to share that I believe that a spiritual community like Kavana can also serve as an extension of the kind of family and household that Held describes: a place where we can receive and be filled with love, and then readied to encounter the world as givers and conveyors of love. I received a note earlier this week from someone in the Kavana community who attended Rabbi Jay's Kabbalat Shabbat service last Friday evening, having gone specifically to say Kaddish in the wake of a death of a loved one. Abbe wrote: "After saying Kaddish, so many people came up to talk to me about E. Yes, I cried and it was hard, but it was also pretty amazing. I felt so 'held up' by everyone who was there... as if we were dominos holding/supporting each other from behind and the side. I was in the front and my heart and lungs were open to feel that connection that the community gave to me." This is such a beautiful description of what it can look and feel like to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with one another and to experience the love and support of community. Receiving love in this way makes us capable of transmitting love to those around us, and acting with love (chesed/compassion) in the world. What a lovely encapsulation of the true value of the work we do each and every day as we build this Jewish spiritual community together!
Finally, in a guest essay that ran in the NY Times Opinion section last week ("Passover's Radical Message is More Vital Than Ever"), Shai Held extends the concept of receiving and giving love to the holiday at hand. Of the Passover story, he writes: "We are meant to live with a sense of gratitude and indebtedness to the God who set us free." This, he argues, is what leads us to empathy for the stranger, and ultimately to the radical biblical mandate to love the stranger as well. In Held's words again: "To tell the story of our past is always also to internalize an ethical injunction for our present and our future: to love the stranger, for we know what it feels like to be a stranger — we know the vulnerability, the anxiety and the loneliness — having ourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt."
As we move into this special Shabbat of Chol HaMoed Pesach, I want to wish our whole community a Shabbat filled with love. May we each use this opportunity to recall just how loved we are and have always been (whether by God, by our parents, by surrogate family, by a romantic partner, by our children, and/or by our community). With keen awareness of the great love we have received and continue to receive, may we cultivate within ourselves a love of others so abundant that it will overflow and spread to those around us, extending to our family members and friends, to our neighbors and also to the stranger.
May love help us bring our world one step closer to redemption this Passover.
Shabbat Shalom - with much love,
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
