I’ve talked before about the concept of *imitatio Dei.* It’s a religious concept in which we find virtue and blessing by imitating God. God creates Adam and Eve, we imitate God by creating life. God heals Abraham by sending three angelic messengers, we are taught to visit the sick. God loves, we love … And in this section of Leviticus we see that we can imitate God’s holiness as well. We have the opportunity to be God-like in our actions.
A few thousand years before the Holocaust, our people suffered under Pharoah. Lots of troubling comparisons can be made that show similarities between Pharoah and Hitler. Both subjugated and enslaved our people. Both refused to see us as equals, as God’s children. As the Torah says, *Pharoah knew not Joseph.* (Exodus 1:8) The Pharoah refused to see and know Joseph and the Isaraelite people as fellow human beings. We are painfully aware of just how true this was for Hitler and the Third Reich, as our names were stripped from us, replaced with numbers tatooed on our arms
Moses seeks reassurance. As the 12th century commentator Rashbam explains, Moses says go God, I know you said you’d send an angel to protect us, but I would much prefer if it was you, yourself.
This behavior hearkens back to the Moses we meet at the beginning of Exodus, the Moses that doesn’t want to lead the Israelite people, the Moses that thinks of excuse after excuse as to why he isn’t the right person for the job.
How is a good sermon like a piece of matzah?
They both should take less than 18 minutes!
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Matzah. It’s the bread of affliction, the afikomen, the basis of the Hillel sandwich. It represents the ferver of excitement as the Israelites were on the cusp of freedom. There was so much to do, so much to prepare, that the bread did not have time to rise.
What might this mean, that none of us are able to see God’s face?
Rashi explains that it is a matter of authority and permission. Just after this, God makes all of God’s goodness pass before Moses, but according to Rashi, God does not allow Moses to see God’s face.
But another commentator, S’forno, has a different take, written from God’s perspective: Your inability to see what you would like to see is not due to My depriving you, personally, of such an experience, but is rooted in man’s inability to see such things unless you had died first, as an eye of flesh and blood cannot see such things. You would be fatally blinded before understanding anything you would see.
According to Jewish law, a sanctuary requjires three things to be considered kosher. The first is a Torah scroll. During any Jewish service, we never lose sight or focus on what is most important, the holy text of our Torah. The second is a bit harder to discern, especially if you are looking around in this sanctuary, because I have to let you in on a secret, we don’t have it. The second item is a window. Each sanctuary must look out onto the outside world. Please rest assured, however, the building plans for our renovated sanctuary do include the construction of beautiful window that will look out onto a garden. And the third item? It is the subject of our Torah portion T’tzaveh this week. It is the ner tamid, the eternal light.
You maybe remember that this Torah portion, Parashat T’rumah is the first example of a synagogue’s capital campaign. God tells Moses that the Israelites should give generously in order to hopefully be able to build a new synagogue in Athens, GA … Sorry, that’s not quite right … but God does command the constrcution of the first synogugue. This is what God tells Moses:
The demonstration of sensitivity to difference is what I want to talk about tonight. This is especially important as we live amindst the so-perceived differences of immigrants, the differences of Syrian refugees who desperately need the United States to be a save haven. This week, there has also been a uptick in the introduction of more so-called ‘religious freedom’ bills, which also discriminate amongst those who are different, whether by gender choice or sexual orientation.
During one of the years when I served at Temple Israel in Omaha, Nebraska, we asked congregants to write and deliver the sermons during the summer months. We called it Sh’ma Yisrael. As I’ve said in the past, the Sh’ma is not only the imperative of Listen, you members of Yisrael, pay attention to the message that follows these words. It also urges us to listen to each other, and to know each other. The words, Sh’ma Yisrael, are the message!
And Jacob lived 17 years in the land of Egypt. This is how this week’s portion begins. It’s name, Vayechi, means, and he lived. A…