It has been quite a week. The election results are deeply disturbing for so many of us, whether we are feeling threatened for ourselves or those we are close to as Jews, as trans and queer people, as people of color, as immigrants, as women, as people deeply concerned with the health of our democracy and our planet, or some combination of all of the above. In addition to all that has transpired here in the U.S., the terrible news from Israel, Gaza and Lebanon continues, along with news of violence between Israeli and Dutch soccer fans in Amsterdam this week, resulting in injuries to a number of Israeli fans. This is a deeply unsettling moment.
In reflecting on all of this, I am reminded of a famous midrash on this week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha. The portion begins with the famous “call” to Abraham (named Avram at the beginning of his story): seemingly out of nowhere, he receives an instruction from God to leave his home and set out for a new land. Rabbinic commentary is filled with musings about how, exactly, Avram came to know God. One midrash offers this parable:
“This may be compared to a man who was traveling from place to place when he saw a bira doleket (a castle either “lit up” or “on fire”). He said, ‘Are you telling me that this castle lacks a person to look after it!?’ The owner of the building peered out at him and said to him, 'I am the master of the castle.' What happened with Abraham our father was similar. He said, ‘Are you telling me that this universe lacks a master?,’ and the Holy Blessed One peered out at him and said to him, 'I am the Master of the Universe. Now, go forth…'"
The mystery of this midrash of how, exactly, we should translate “bira doleket.” If we read it as “a lit-up castle,” then the man in the parable seems to be musing that such a beautiful castle must have an owner. So Abraham contemplated the beauty of this world and thought, if there is such a creation, there must be a Creator! On the other hand, if the traveler in the parable sees a castle “on fire,” he wonders, “Why is no one attending to this fire? Where is the owner while their home is burning down?” And so Abraham looked around at a world filled with violence and injustice and mused, “Is there Anyone in charge here?”
Following this second interpretation, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain in the early 2000s, wrote that this midrash comes to teach us that “faith is born not in the harmony, but in the dissonance.” That is, the midrash wants us to take seriously that both God and injustice, violence, human chaos, can and do co-exist. Sacks writes:
“Judaism begins not in wonder that the world is, but in protest that the world is not as it ought to be…There can be no resolution to this conflict at the level of thought. It can be resolved only at the level of action, only by making the world other than it is.” Abraham’s discovery of Divinity, in this reading, is the understanding that we are called to attend to the fire, that we too must “go forth,” like Abraham and Sarah, to do what we can to attend to the world’s ills, in partnership with the Source of Creation.
On the topic of hope in paralyzing times, the writer Rebecca Solnit offers a bit of wisdom that aligns with Rabbi Sacks’ reading of the midrash:
"I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should show you out the door; because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of its poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope…To hope is to give yourself to the future, and the commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.”
As we enter Shabbat, may we know this deep kind of hope: the awareness that there is indeed a Source of Love and Justice in this universe, and that we are called into partnership with It. May we know that we have the power to “make the present inhabitable” through our commitment to the future. May each of us taste, this Shabbat, a bit of the “world to come,” a world that we can make possible.
