SERMON   Parashat Vaera    January 12, 2024

Rabbi David Edleson   Temple Sinai    S. Burlington Vermont

Our Torah Portion this week, Vaera, is one that is well known to most of you even if you didn’t know that.   It contains about ½ of the story of Passover, and contains the verses that make up the heart of the Haggadah.   In it,  having fled Egypt, encountered a burning bush, married, had children, and been commanded by God to save the Israelites in Egypt, our portion details those initial encounters between Moses, Aaron, Pharaoh and those pesky fickle Israelites. 

It starts with the great promise that has animated the Jewish people since.  It reads: 

God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am יהוה. 

I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name יהוה. 

I also established My covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. 

I have now heard the moaning of the Israelites because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant. 

Say, therefore, to the Israelite people: I am יהוה. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. 

And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I, יהוה, am your God who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians. 

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 יהוה.”

This is very familiar from the Haggadah which traditionally consists mostly of rabbinic commentary of what exactly was meant by the string of verbs “free you, deliver you, redeem you, take you back and bring you to the land.” Why is such a list needed?  Isn’t it enough just to say “I’ll free you”? It is a question made for rabbinic debate. [ but it also shares with us the Torah’s vision of redemption. It does not say I will free you from slavery and you will be equal citizens of Egypt with all the rights and responsibilities thereof. Its vision is one of leaving oppression and going to a new home that will make freedom and autonomy possible. The Israelites had been in Egypt for over 200 years, and still it is clear that the Torah didn’t believe that the Israelites should or could find real freedom in Egypt. ]

But that’s not what I want to talk about tonight.  We’ll talk about that at Passover.   

It’s what comes immediately after this epic promise that I want to focus on. The very next line after God’s promise is this: 

But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.

That is the translation we usually use, but the literal translation would be more like, ‘When Moses told this to the Israelites, they did not hear Moses due to a shortness of spirit and hard labor. Kotser ruach v’avodah kasha.’

It could mean many different things.  

RASHI,  the famous rabbi from 11th C France said it simply meant “they were out of breath from working so hard and you can’t hear when you are gasping for air.”  

CHIZKUNI, also from France 200 years later, said it was about their fear that if they listened, it would result in more work being piled on them, as had happened the last time Moses challenged Pharoah.  

It could mean something about the bitterness and stress caused to our spirit when we work too hard. 

IBN EZRA from 11th Century Spain said it was simply that they were far too impatient to listen because they were exhausted and stressed from working so hard. 

Those are all perfectly plausible, reasonable answers to what kept the Israelites from hearing Moses’ prophetic promise of redemption. But some later commentaries offer more probing and perhaps meaningful answers. 

SFORNO, a rabbi living in Italy during the Renaissance said that they couldn’t hear Moses because they didn’t believe that what he was saying was at all possible given their situation. In other words, we can’t hear what we don’t believe is possible. 

Several commentators argue that the Kotser Ruach was the Israelites lack of faith, a quality that rears its head again and again through the sojourn in the desert. They simply didn’t have faith in God’s promise and so couldn’t hear, or couldn’t take this promise seriously. 

MENACHEM MENDLE OF KOTZK, more commonly known as the Kotzker Rebbe, a Hasidic leader in the 1700’s, made this comment: “the first step toward liberation will be freeing themselves from their passivity and their tolerance of the intolerable.” To this rabbi, they couldn’t hear Moses because they had become so used to the degradation and suffering of slavery that they had become passive in their own fate. They have given up the belief they change was possible, and they had come to tolerate the intolerable. 

A recent rabbinic scholar from the 1990’s, RABBI YEHUDA HENKEN argued that “kotser ruach” means  a lack of vision, and he quotes the book of Proverbs that says,   “Where there is no vision, a people perishes.”  Proverbs 29:18

Where there is no vision, a people perishes.  

If a people do not feel there is a possibility of freedom, of a change, when they feel they are stuck and have no control to change anything, they lose vision and can lose the ability to hear ideas that might actually save them or make things better.  

I can’t help but think of my Israeli peacenik friends who since October 7 have had real trouble imagining how to move forward and respond to most ideas with “that could never work.”It is almost as if they can’t even hear ideas that might shift the dynamic that is at work there.  So sure are they that the conflict is unsolvable, that they give up. 

I also can’t help but think of the Gazans, the Palestinians who also can’t really hear ideas that might make things better.   So sure are they that the conflict is unsolvable that they give up, or even worse, hear the most extreme violent ideas and think those will make things better, even though it is obvious that it will only make things worse.  

This is the tragedy of Kotser Ruach whether it is in Ancient Egypt, in Gaza and Israel today, or here in our community.  When things get bad, we can so easily convince ourselves that the path is inevitable, things will only get worse and there is nothing we can do to fix it.    We easily come to believe this even though all of human history and Jewish history shows us that things can change, things can get better and that one of the biggest impediments to positive change is the belief that it is not possible.  Our own pessimism and kotser ruach creates the very outcome we fear the most. 

This is true on national scales, but it is also true in our private lives, whether it is career, debt, or our relationships.   If we have no vision of how things can get better, then we can’t even hear the ideas that might help, and even worse, sometimes it means we can only really feel moved by the ideas that will actually make things worse.  

That tragedy in many lives and families, and the tragedy in Israel is that there are solutions that are quite workable, but they require a vision, trust, leaders that help instill that trust as Moses tried his best to do.  They require that our despair and our anger not prevent us from having a vision of a better future, because only that faith, that hope, that vision can create a path forward to something better. 

So we also need to contend with our own kotser ruach when it comes to Israel, antisemitism or the Burlington City Council.  Today in a meeting with several Burlington City Councillors, I had a brief glimpse of what that could mean.  It was a tense meeting, and “our side” included a range of rabbis, business owners, parents, teachers and Rev. Elissa Johnk from the First Congregation Church who argued passionately that these resolutions created real danger and animosity here at home and that the councilors were responsible as leaders for this.  

Once it was clear that we all agreed that these city hall resolutions and meetings only serve to make things worse here at home and do nothing for the people there, some ideas started to come out that offered a different vision.  There were suggestions of facilitated community conversations, or reinvigorating the Burlington Sister City connections with Arad and Bethlehem, or that we find ways to support those organizations there that are doing the work of coexistence and peace building.   For a few minutes, we were all able to see past the win/lose binary and start to think about what might make things better here; what could lead to a different future.  

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory wrote: “At the heart of Judaism is a belief so fundamental to Western civilization that we take it for granted, yet it is anything but self-evident. It has been challenged many times, rarely more so than today. It is the belief in human freedom. We are what we choose to be. Society is what we choose to make it. The future is open. There is nothing inevitable in the affairs of humankind.”

Of course, it is a very different think to have a vision and to be able to muster the needed chutzpah to realize that vision, and we are still a long way off, but on this very small scale, there was a glimpse past defeatism and resignation, a glimpse past the tolerance of the intolerable in the name of democracy, and instead there were a few moments of possibility.  

Without a vision, the people perish.  Whether we are talking about Gaza, Israel, or right here at home, it is the belief that change is not possible that leads to the most dangerous and worse outcomes.   As Jews, hope is central to who we are.  

On that note, I want to close with another quote from  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.  He wrote: 

Judaism is a religion of details, but we miss the point if we do not sometimes step back and see the larger picture. To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every ritual, every mitzvah, every syllable of the Jewish story, every element of Jewish law, is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism is a sustained struggle, the greatest ever known, against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet. There is no more challenging vocation. Throughout history, when human beings have sought hope they have found it in the Jewish story. Judaism is the religion, and Israel the home of hope.

Shabbat Shalom.