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Rabbi David Ackerman
03/31/2013 - Pesah and the Language of Longing
Pesah and the Language of Longing
Shabbat Hol ha-Moed Pesah, the Sabbath that falls in the middle of the weeklong festival of freedom, marks the liturgical high water mark of the year. Along with Shabbat in the middle of Sukkot, its analog at the opposite end of the year, Shabbat Hol ha-Moed Pesah features congregational scriptural readings from all three sections of the Hebrew Bible, tied to one another through a variety of shared themes and ideas. A palpable sense of longing, certainly an appropriate sensibility for the early days of spring, is one such theme, powerfully and beautifully presented in each of the day’s Biblical offerings.
Shir ha-Shirim, the Bible’s great love poem known as the Song of Songs, leads off. The Song presents the aching, often quite erotic, yearnings of two lovers in words that have long been part of the spiritual vocabulary of our tradition. Consider these phrases - “Upon my couch at night I sought the one I love— I sought, but found him not. ‘I must rise and roam the town, Through the streets and through the squares; I must seek the one I love.’ I sought but found him not. I met the watchmen Who patrol the town. ‘Have you seen the one I love?’” [Song of Songs 3:1-3] As readers and listeners we get to hear and feel the insistent and feverish yearning of the Song’s lover to be with her beloved, and we get to hear and feel her anguish at not finding the object of her desire. “I sought, but found him not.”
Whether we understand the Song’s words in their plain sense - as actual words of desire shared between two flesh and blood lovers - or in the allegorical mode preferred by our tradition - as the expression of love and devotion shared between God and the people of Israel - the emotional resonance of the longing remains the same. Lovers seek one another; God and humanity do as well. Just a few lines later, the Song offers us these resonant phrases: “I opened the door for my beloved, But my beloved had turned and gone. I was faint because of what he said. I sought, but found him not; I called, but he did not answer.” [Song of Songs 5:6]
The Midrash attached to these verses perceives an allusion to Moses’ desire to connect with God. How beautiful then, to turn from chanting the Song to chanting Moses’ plea of longing to stand in God’s presence as the Torah reading for the Shabbat of Pesah! Moses’ expression of yearning feels a bit less affective than that of the lover of the Song, but it’s no less insistent. Here are some of his words: “Now, if I have truly gained Your favor, pray let me know Your ways, that I may know You and continue in Your favor. Consider, too, that this nation is Your people.” [Exodus 33:13] “Pray let me know Your ways!” Here and elsewhere, Moses appeals both to God’s sense of fairness and to Divine logic. And here, as elsewhere in the Torah, Moses builds his argument with care. A handful of phrases later he sums up his plea: “He said, ‘Oh, let me behold Your Presence!’” [Exodus 33:18] Let me behold Your kavod, Your Honor, Your Beauty, Your Presence.
Moses has sought God ‘through the streets and through the squares,’ and, with the lover of the Song, now knocks on the door in hope of an answer. “Let me in” is the thread of yearning and desire that connects Moses and the Song’s lovers. In different tones of voice and with different kinds of words, the lovers of the Song and our first and greatest Prophet both express a powerful and heartfelt longing to stand in God’s Presence.
The prophet Ezekiel’s justly famous vision of the valley of dry bones - the haftarah for the Shabbat of Pesah - articulates that same sense of yearning with great dramatic power and flair. In a burst of frenzied inspiration, Ezekiel envisions a large collection of very dry bones connecting with one another, miraculously growing flesh and skin, and arising back to full-blooded life. His fantastical metaphor for radical hope in the face of grinding despair emerges not from his creativity alone but by suggestion from a popular aphorism, a set of phrases attributed to the people of Israel actually cited by the prophet toward the end of the haftarah. “And He said to me, ‘O mortal, these bones are the whole House of Israel. They say - Our bones are dried up, our hope is gone; we are doomed.’” [Ezekiel 37:11]
Six Hebrew words tell the tale of our ancestors’ longing for connection in the midst of despair. יבשו עצמותינו אבדה תקותנו נגזרנו לנו - our bones are dried up, our hope is gone, we are clean cut off. Ezekiel hears our ancestors’ words as expressions of hope and desire rather than as articulations of despair and despondence. In God’s name, he responds with the impossible; who indeed can imagine dried out bones coming back to life?!? But beneath the drama lies the same desire for connection that we’ve already heard from the lovers of the Song of Songs and from Moses. We know the middle words of this popular aphorism very well; we recite them in the reverse with frequency and with great emotion: od lo avda tikvateinu - our hope is not yet gone. Our longing might yet be answered; our knock on the door might yet lead to an opening; our plea might yet lead us into God’s presence; our bones are not yet dried up!
Each Pesah I respond emotionally to this concatenation of expressions of longing. To me, the juxtaposition of the Song’s erotic poetry, Moses’ lawyerly pleadings, and Ezekiel’s report of our ancestors’ pithy cry of anguish, serves as an invitation, one meant for all of us, to find my own language of longing and desire. Yearning has been with us since the beginning. We have expressed it in different ways in a great variety of settings and moments, but always out of our very human longing for meaningful connection with others and with God. The words may change; the music remains very much the same.
Shavua Tov and Hag Sameah.
Previous Posts
03/31/2013 - Pesah and the Language of Longing (Most Recent) (Current display)02/15/2013 - Rabbi David Hartman z"l
01/18/2013 - MLK Friday Night Welcome
02/07/2013 - Last Shabbat (Yitro)
10/10/2012 - Reflections on Kohelet (Ecclesiastes)
09/27/2012 - Yom Kippur 5773
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