Dvarim -- 5774

“You talking to me?” Travis Bickel famously asks in the film Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976).  The children of Israel could well ask Moses the same question in this week’s parsha, Dvarim.

Moses begins the Book of Deuteronomy with a long soliloquy.  He recounts how the Generation of the Wilderness doubted God’s promise and was condemned to wander in the wilderness.  “Yet you refused to go up, and flouted the command of your God.  You sulked in your tents and said, ‘It is out of hatred for us that God brought us out of the land of Egypt, to hand us over to the Amorites to wipe us out’ (Deuteronomy 1:26-27).”   But Moses is actually speaking 39 years after that betrayal, and the people he’s talking to aren’t that first generation, but rather their children.  “Moreover, your little one who you said would be carried off, your children who do not yet know good from bad, they shall enter it; to them will I give it and they shall possess it (1:39).”  It is to these children, now grown, that Moses is speaking in Deuteronomy, not their faithless parents.  Yet he seems not to be aware of that fact.  He cannot see who the people right in front of him actually are.  Moses is stuck in the past.

Sometimes, the people we think we’re talking to are not the people we are actually talking to.  Our own needs may be clouding our ability to listen and process.  We may be projecting our expectations onto the other person.  Or the other person may be dealing with a situation about which we are entirely unaware.  All these keep us from clear, direct communication.

As I rabbi, I experience this regularly.  People sometimes assume I hold a certain belief.  People sometimes assume I’m judging them.  They are not speaking to Rabbi Dean Shapiro, but with their childhood rabbi, or their image of what a rabbi “ought” to be, or with their own guilty conscience.  There’s not much I can do about their projection onto me except be aware of it. 

It’s helpful to pause before beginning a conversation, to take stock of our emotions and our expectations.  It’s helpful to think through our hopes and needs from the communication (these are not the same thing).  It’s helpful to identify the person to whom we’re speaking as they truly are.

In these ways, we talk to, not past, each other.

Ma'asei -- 5774

Aaron, the High Priest, climbs Mt. Hor and dies.

I imagine him, in his final moments, surveying the land and his life, too.  He saw the journey from slavery until now, a continuous line superimposed on the landscape before him.  “Here I built the Golden Calf; here I spoke against Tzipporah,” he thinks.  But I also imagine that, from his heightened vantage point, he was also able to see what he couldn’t see before:  “There was an easier way around that mountain; there was a spring of fresh water so close to us, but we didn’t find it!”  He is suddenly aware that life is full of possibilities, of countless roads not taken.

Later in the parsha, God defines the boundaries of the Promised Land.  But, looking at the Land from the Mountaintop, Aaron couldn’t see any such demarcations.  All he saw were swaths of forest, the sapphire sea lapping at the shore, and the wind blowing hot across the desert.  There were no boundaries and no barriers, only open space.  As a younger man, a journey-man, he had encountered confrontations, impediments, and obstacles to be overcome.  Now, looking back on his life, he sees possibilities unexplored, choices he hadn’t known existed, solutions that were there for the taking.

“If only,” Aaron thinks, and breathes his last.

Pinchas -- 5774

When a challenging inquiry comes before Moses, he does something phenomenal:  he admits he doesn’t have the answer.

Zelophehad’s five daughters plead to inherit his estate, having no brothers.  Why should an uncle or male cousin benefit, and they be left without?  The question of female inheritance had never been raised before.  Moses doesn’t know what to do, so he goes to inquire of God.

In our times, “I don’t know” is not an acceptable response.  We expect others – and ourselves – to have answers on the tip of our tongues at all times.  If a fact is in dispute, we whip out cell phones and look it up.  Emails that aren’t returned within 45 minutes get follow-up-e-mails.  The pace leaves us without time to think or to process.  This leads to thinking that’s shallow, rote, and reactive.  Better results come from taking ample time to noodle.

Next time you get stumped by a tough question, try something revolutionary:  say “I don’t know.”