The Faces of Jewish Peoplehood - Va-era 5786

Peoplehood is a fundamental idea in Jewish life.

I grew up in a small town in Williamstown, Massachusetts, a place with very few Jewish people. I was usually the only Jewish kid in my class. Sometimes I look around at our fabulous neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, where, thank God, the Jewish presence continues to be visible and palpable more than a century after Jews first moved here, and I wonder how I ended up in such a Jewish place.

Where I grew up, it was a 17-mile drive to our synagogue, and we drove there at least four times a week to Hebrew school and to Shabbat morning services, where we were regulars. There was no day school, and so our Hebrew school was staffed by volunteer teachers who were members of the synagogue, and who were not necessarily skilled educators.

To get kosher meat, we either had to order through our synagogue for a once-a-month delivery, or schlep an hour away over a mountain to Albany to go to the kosher meat market. There were no kosher restaurants. There was a sad JCC building (also 17 miles away) whose facilities had peaked in the 1950s.

We had to work much harder to identify with our people and live Jewishly. This challenge highlighted how we were different from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors.

Speaking of non-Jewish neighbors, my childhood intersected with the 1979 Iranian Revolution in a curious way. In the early 1980s, Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the Shah of Iran, moved her family to Williamstown so that Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s eldest son, could attend Williams College. And his younger sister Leila went to my school. A bodyguard drove her every morning and sat in his car in the school parking lot with the engine running. (Many years later I met Reza Pahlavi, the heir to the Peacock Throne, who is very much in the news right now advocating for the Iranians who are protesting in the streets. He spoke at my synagogue on Long Island before I came to Pittsburgh. That congregation consisted of about one-third Persian-Jewish exiles, who were welcome and comfortable in Iran under the Shah, but since 1979 not so much.)

Back to the present: I have been wrestling lately with the idea of Jewish peoplehood, something which most of us have not thought about too deeply.

It is one of those features of being Jewish which should be obvious. We should all be endowed with a sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and all that that entails. Except that I have learned that, as a Jewish educator today, we simply cannot take anything for granted.

Peoplehood is a fundamental idea in Jewish life. What does it mean to be a people? Actually, that is something that is addressed in Parashat Va-era, from which we read today. Our ancestors went down into Egypt as a family, and emerge from slavery there as a people. And as God prepares for the Exodus, God makes five promises to the Israelites which are the earliest identifiers of peoplehood (Exodus 6:6-8):

וְהוֹצֵאתִ֣י אֶתְכֶ֗ם מִתַּ֙חַת֙ סִבְלֹ֣ת מִצְרַ֔יִם וְהִצַּלְתִּ֥י אֶתְכֶ֖ם מֵעֲבֹדָתָ֑ם וְגָאַלְתִּ֤י אֶתְכֶם֙ בִּזְר֣וֹעַ נְטוּיָ֔ה וּבִשְׁפָטִ֖ים גְּדֹלִֽים׃ וְלָקַחְתִּ֨י אֶתְכֶ֥ם לִי֙ לְעָ֔ם וְהָיִ֥יתִי לָכֶ֖ם לֵֽאלֹהִ֑ים וִֽידַעְתֶּ֗ם כִּ֣י אֲנִ֤י ה֙’ אֱ-לֹ֣הֵיכֶ֔ם הַמּוֹצִ֣יא אֶתְכֶ֔ם מִתַּ֖חַת סִבְל֥וֹת מִצְרָֽיִם׃ וְהֵבֵאתִ֤י אֶתְכֶם֙ אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֤ר נָשָׂ֙אתִי֙ אֶת־יָדִ֔י לָתֵ֣ת אֹתָ֔הּ לְאַבְרָהָ֥ם לְיִצְחָ֖ק וּֽלְיַעֲקֹ֑ב וְנָתַתִּ֨י אֹתָ֥הּ לָכֶ֛ם מוֹרָשָׁ֖ה אֲנִ֥י ה’׃

(1) I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians (2) and deliver you from their bondage. (3) I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. (4) And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I am your God who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians. (5) I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession, I am YHVH.

These are promises of relationship, a special relationship between our people and God, scaled up from the personal relationship already established between God and the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. These promises make us distinct from other groups and deserving of freedom and self-determination like other peoples; we have the one true God, and a set of laws and customs and rituals connected to our God and our Torah, and we have a place that is our historical home, and that place is not Egypt or Pittsburgh or Warsaw or Tehran, but rather Israel.

And the sense of relationship described here is much greater than just rituals and texts and a place. It’s more than synagogues and kosher establishments. Peoplehood is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts.

(BTW, these five promises are understood to be the basis of of the five cups of wine on the seder table. Yes, I know we all think of it as four, but the fifth cup is that of Elijah.)

I have been thinking about Jewish peoplehood to some extent due to the lies being told about Jews in the public square, falsehoods which are coming from all directions, and have fueled mass murder in our neighborhood, in Australia, and the burning of a synagogue just this past week in Mississippi. In order for us to respond to these falsehoods, we have to show the world who we are, that we are not what some say we are.

Throughout our history, we have been perceived differently than what we know to be our authentic nature.

And Parashat Va-era also addresses that, in fact, just before the Five Promises. The opening verses say the following (Shemot / Exodus 6:2-3):

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר אֱ-לֹהִ֖ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו אֲנִ֥י ה’׃ וָאֵרָ֗א אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֛ם אֶל־יִצְחָ֥ק וְאֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֖ב בְּאֵ֣-ל שַׁדָּ֑י וּשְׁמִ֣י ה’ לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם׃

Elohim spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHWH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name YHWH.

There are three terms for God used in those two verse: the unpronounceable YHWH, for which we usually use the euphemism Adonai (=“My Lord”), the less-known “El Shaddai,” God Almighty, and “Elohim,” God. Midrash sees Elohim as representing justice, and YHWH as mercy. But I have a different take.

“Elohim,” being the first moniker for God in the Torah, suggests a kind of general Narrator voice. Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve-et ha-aretz. When Elohim began to create the world. Vayomer Elohim yehi or, vayhi or. Elohim said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” (Bereshit / Genesis 1:1,3)

“El Shaddai,” God Almighty, is here used to describe how God related and made promises to our Avot, our Patriarchs Avraham, Yitzḥaq, and Ya’aqov. It is an outward-facing, relational name for God.

And then YHWH. God’s true self, capturing all the mystery and majesty and ineffable nature of the Divine. This is the essence of God as the One who will take us out of Egypt and give us the Torah, the name under which we are united as a people.

So just in these two verses, we perceive God as the distant Narrator, the personal Relater, and the indescribable yet all-powerful Being who is only gradually revealed to the world. Three aspects of God.

And so too do we have different aspects: how we narrate and fashion our own lives, how others perceive us, and our authentic, deep and complex selves, which we reveal in bits and pieces and only to those with whom we have a special relationship. All of these aspects are bundled together within us.

As the Jewish people, hardly united, never of one mind on any subject, and yet distinct from the others among whom we live, we have to remember not only how others perceive us, not only what we do in fashioning our community and our world, but also of course who we truly are in reflecting the majesty and mystery of YHVH.

And we must keep those things in mind as we walk through life. We must highlight and elevate the spark of the Divine in others, seeking to perceive the reflection of YHVH in everybody.

And that means responding to external forces – holding in our hearts the Iranian people, say, as their brutal regime kills thousands of people who seek freedom; and having compassion for the people of Minneapolis. We must remember that freedom and human life and dignity are gifts from God, and not just for the Jewish people.

But it also means embracing the essential features of our peoplehood: upholding Torah, tefillah / prayer, Shabbat, kashrut, Israel, calling a young woman to the Torah as a bat mitzvah, and all the texts and obligations which mark our covenant with YHVH, all of the things that our people have done for thousands of years. These authentic manifestations of our peoplehood are the glue which binds us together, across difference and disagreement, and these are the reasons we are still here.

Jewish peoplehood necessitates, as Parashat Va-era suggests, understanding who we are and how the world perceives us, but also the way we reveal our true selves: not only being proudly Jewish but also committed to that special relationship with God in all the ways God expects of us. It is in this way that we can fulfill our distinctive role in the world as a people united under YHVH.