The Grammar of Community
Ninja turtles, butterflies and fairies, soccer stars and cowboys, witches and wacky onesie wearers… There were a lot of characters at our Purim megillah reading this year! Our community gathered at the exuberant intersection of brewery vats and ancient melodies (many thanks to the wonderful folks at Rooftop Brewery, and to everyone who chanted the story of Esther). One character, though, was apparently absent. God does not appear explicitly in the biblical book of Esther, a striking omission that leaves many readers searching for clues to the hidden divine.
The name Esther is taken as a pointer to hester panim, “the hiding of [God’s] face”, a warning given in Devarim 31:17. But also in our Torah portion this week, God refuses to be fully revealed. In a moment of sudden yearning, Moses cries out, “Let me behold your presence!” And God says, “You cannot see my face…” (Shemot 33:18,20)
But God does make a concession for Moses. God will pass by, and Moses can glimpse God’s “back”.
God passed before Moses and proclaimed: “Adonai, Adonai, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness…” (Exodus 34:6)
The list of attributes that God proclaims in passing by are known as the Thirteen Middot, the qualities that define God’s goodness. There are endless beautiful and spiritual commentaries on these traits, and yet the one that I have been sitting with this week anchors itself in nothing other than the tedious rules of grammar. To be specific, in a particular Jewish methodology for reading Torah, another list known as the Thirteen Middot of Rabbi Yishmael. Here is the chassidic rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev’s insight (Kedushat Levi, Ki Tissa 14-16, translated by Rabbi Josh Feigelson):
“My master and teacher Rabbi Dov Baer taught that the thirteen interpretive principles (middot) through which the Torah is interpreted are identical with the thirteen attributes (middot) of Divine compassion… The [Divine] attribute of rachum, compassion, is identified with the principle of gezera shava [deciding a case based on an identical word in another case]. In general, when one who is wealthy is compassionate toward one who is poor, the wealthy person must identify with the poor one, connecting with their pain and marginalization. In doing so, the wealthy person and the poor person find their common humanity. We can imagine this is how the Divine relates to us, as the book of Psalms states, ‘I will be with you in moments of trouble’ (Psalms 91:15). This is how the middah of compassion is the same as the middah of gezera shava.”
Okay, if you have read this far, I hope you stick with me on unpacking the grammar of compassion here. I often think of rabbinic spirituality as a literary or linguistic spirituality, seeing letters and words as building blocks of reality and imagining life as a Book. Here, a common interpretive technique becomes an analogy for how we cultivate compassion among humans.
Gezera shava literally means “an identical term or category”. When reading a verse of Tanakh, if the same word or phrase appears elsewhere in Tanakh, even if the context is completely different and the use appears to be unconnected, gezera shava allows the verses to collapse together, juxtaposed and creating new possibilities for meaning.
For example, the medieval commentator Rashi notes that when Joseph encounters an anonymous ish (“man”) in the field when trying to find his brothers, another verse that uses the word ish actually refers to the angel Gabriel. Therefore, Joseph must have encountered not a man, but an angel! If Rashi had chosen to connect ish to a different verse, we might learn that Joseph encountered not a random man, nor an angel, but a mensch of good character, or a left-handed man, or - you get the idea. The common element brings two verses together, and the unexpected differences generate interpretive chemistry.
Our teaching is interested in transferring the grammatical tool to human interaction. What might it mean to acknowledge that humans are simultaneously different from each other in radical ways, yet share “common terms”? You awaken compassion by drawing close to someone who in many ways is quite distant from you, by seeing in them something that resonates with your own identity, experience, or circumstances. The common element brings us close together - and then the creative possibilities of relationship come into being because we are so different in other ways!
For Levi Yitzchak, one of the expressions of God’s presence, what Moses so yearned to see, is the practice of compassion and the creative experiment of community. That’s what we do in our Kavana Cooperative. We care about each other, and as we are drawn together by some shared common terms, we offer our unique gifts which interact to create new possibilities for living a life of meaning and purpose. In that sense, God was indeed present at our megillah reading, not in the text of Esther, but in the spiritual grammar of community.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
