Rabbi Anderson's Divrei Torah

Shabbat shalom! Today I am in a very strange mental space. As most of you know, my father passed away earlier this week; his funeral will be in Baltimore tomorrow afternoon. That puts me in the state called aninut, or deep mourning. In Jewish tradition, the onen is exempt from – and in some cases even discouraged from performing – most positive mitzvot, including core prayers like the Shema and Amidah and core obligations like Torah learning, because they are assumed to be either too distracted by grief or too preoccupied with funeral arrangements. It’s not totally clear whether all the restrictions of aninut apply in a scenario where the relative is in a different city and not directly involved in the burial, and it is clear that many of those restrictions are lifted on Shabbat, but I am so glad and so grateful that the TI community has many people who are davening and leading while I am out of commission.

Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of this week not totally sure what I should be doing, which is kind of the essence of aninut. But one thing that really comforts me is being so close to the ECC summer camp – most mornings I’m coming into the office while some of them are out on the playground, and if I leave my office door open I hear a lot of coming and going, while the bathrooms near my office are sometimes repurposed for changing in and out of swimsuits. I’ve even been to enough ECC havdalahs and Shabbats that some of the kids wave at me when they see me in the hall, which makes me feel like a rock star. And when I crept into the social hall before ECC Shabbat yesterday, I soon found three very imaginative snakes – snakes who looked like four-year-olds – slithering next to me. It makes me happy to watch them play and listen to them talk and sing and sometimes even read them picture-books.

This week, hanging out with the ECCers also makes me feel close to my dad. He came from a big family where there was always a pack of kids running around; he told me once that at get-togethers on his mother’s side, he and his brothers would compete with their youngest uncle to see who was better at soothing a baby, because there were always plenty of those, too. Dad was my primary caretaker during my elementary-school years, while he was writing his dissertation, and he retired from teaching a week after Rayne was born, which let him stay with us for several months with each child and care for them in the months between my going back to work and the age where I felt comfortable putting them into daycare. He was just really good with babies and little kids. He didn’t want to work with them professionally – he taught undergraduates – but he loved engaging with them, telling them stories, reading them books, and entering into their imaginative play. Even in the last years when his personality started changing, and he started withdrawing from other people, he would light up when I happened to invite over friends with young children. For a few minutes, I had my dad back again.

Today’s Torah portion, Ekev, is named for its second word, a rare conjunction that appears five times in the Torah and means something like “because” or “if.” Two of those five ekevs are in today’s parsha:  the opening verse, where we are promised blessings if [ekev] we observe God’s teachings, and 8:20, where it’s negative: “because [ekev] you did not heed the voice of the Lord your God… you shall certainly perish” (8:20). The next two ekev verses are in Genesis chapters 22 and 26: at the end of the Akeidah narrative, the angel of the Lord promises Abraham that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sand on the seashore “because [ekev] you have obeyed My voice” (Gen. 22:18).  Several chapters later, God renews the same promise to Abraham’s son Isaac – that offspring as numerous as the stars will inherit the land, “inasmuch as [ekev] Abraham obeyed My voice and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws” (Gen. 26:5).  The final ekev verse appears in Numbers 14, where God promises that the faithful Caleb will survive to enter the land of Canaan “because [ekev] he has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly… and his descendants shall possess it” (Num 14:24).

The word ekev is clearly associated with listening to or obeying God, or God’s voice. But it’s also noteworthy that ekev is associated specifically with promises of descendants and land inheritance, because those are the themes that unite today’s Torah and Haftarah readings. In the Torah portion we just read, first among God’s blessings for those who listen is fertility: God “will favor you and bless you and multiply you” (Deut. 7:13).  And, of course, God will give us the land, the good land, the land with milk and honey (and wheat and barley and pomegranates!) that we can pass on to our children as an inheritance.  The multiplication and reclamation of both children and land is also the promise of our haftarah, and there again it’s linked to Abraham and his wife Sarah, the couple who are first introduced as barren but from whom all Jews eventually descend, whether biologically or spiritually. Even God is described as a parent in both the Torah and the haftarah we read today: a parent who has to discipline and educate a child, but also a parent who remembers and forgives the child every time. The haftarah actually uses female imagery for God, but this week, missing my dad, I’m a lot more sympathetic to the language of God the Father.

My father grew up in a family, and in an era, where children were routinely spanked. He told me much later – after I had kids – that he spanked me exactly once, when I was three and wandered off in a wooded park area with treacherous creek banks. He was scared to death when he finally found me, picked me up, and swatted me on my rubber-pantsed rear. Both of us burst into tears, and that was the last time he tried to spank anyone. Of course, I don’t remember my dad spanking me even once; I only remember him constantly teaching me. But when our Torah portion talks about God disciplining the Israelites like a parent disciplines a child, I think about my dad’s story: maybe both of them cried, and then decided to do better. A little later in the parsha, there’s parenting advice that’s more congenial to my dad’s parenting style, which we already recited it this morning in the middle paragraph of the Shema: “Teach them” – that is, God’s words – “to your children – speaking to them when you stay at home and when you walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up, and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (11:19-20).

The rabbis of the Talmud[1] used this verse to derive the idea that children should learn to speak from listening to their parents recite the Torah. From my dad, who didn’t recite Torah but who spent so much time with me, I learned kindness and joy and a passion for education and a hatred for injustice – all of which are, conveniently, in the Torah. And I learned the consequences of listening and not listening, which are so much a part of today’s parsha, and the idea that when children are yours (and not the ECC’s) they come with responsibility – because they listen even when you’d rather they didn’t. “Take thought this day,” Moses warns, “that it was not your children, who neither experienced nor witnessed the lesson of the Lord your God…. but that it was you who saw with your own eyes all the marvelous deeds that the Lord performed” (11:2 and 7).  Although Moses is speaking to a new generation of Israelites, he is holding them responsible for somehow passing on the Torah to their children, who have not seen anything but who are multiplying like the stars in the heavens from the “seventy souls” that left for Egypt (10:22). However we understand Torah, passing it along to our children – whether biological or spiritual – is a huge responsibility. Ekev – the consequences if we fail are huge, but so are the rewards if we succeed. Ekev – maybe we can be children and parents at the same time, learning and listening, but also loving and teaching.