The Pot Becomes the Potter

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

We are like clay in designer’s hand,
As he wills—to contract, as he wills—to expand,
So are we in your hand to lovingly define,
Look past our designs keep the covenant in mind.

An anonymous prayer poet shaped Jeremiah’s image (Jeremiah 18:6) of God, the Potter, into a Yom Kippur plea:  O, Designer/Yotzer!  Overlook our impulsive designs/yetzer and be mindful only of our covenant!

(Click here for the Jeremiah verse and the stanza of the Yom Kippur poem)

For poet and prophet, God is the Potter-All-Powerful who understands and overlooks.  But the great 20th century potter-philosopher, M.C. Richards, in her work, Centering, offers a potter more real.  In her knowing hands, a different theology takes shape and the potter is not all-powerful:

The potter does everything that he can do.  But he cannot burst into flame and reach a temperature of 2300 degrees Fahrenheit for a period varying from eight hours to a week and harden plastic clay into rigid stone, and transform particles of silica and spar into flowing glaze… He can only surrender his ware to the fire, listen to it, talk to it, so that he and the fire respond to each other’s power, and the fired pot is the child.

The potter can do but so much.   The Days of Awe are for each fired-pot child to attend to her own yetzer, to her own impulses, to the heat and glaze of his own life.  Unable to share the experience of the kiln, the potter surrenders, listens, talks and responds.  Perhaps this is a Potter to meet during the Days of Awe—a Potter who supports the vessels for the work that only they can accomplish.

Two Israeli poets examine the living clay—inside and out.  Yehuda Amichai dredges up vessels of experiences from the depths.   Encrusted or adorned, the basic shape of the jar is unchanged in the depths plumbed from ships that soar in the watery heavens above.  Don’t clean the clay of its experience!  Color and crust tell the ongoing story of the basic shape beneath:

My experiences are like jars sunk in the sea long ago
brought up from the sea bed covered with moss
and seaweed and barnacles all over, but the shape of the jars is still
as it was.  So are my experiences, the cry is still my cry
and the laugh still my laughter. Don’t try to clean
them.  The laugh is heavy and deep from the depths
and the cry is adorned with sediment thick and beautiful from the abyss.
This too is change this too a different place
and all the ships are in the heights of the heavens.

(Click here for Amichai’s poem in Hebrew and English)

Amichai examines accretions to the outer surface of the clay.  Another Israeli poet, Rivka Miriam, attends to the unseen interior:

And in the beauty of the jar is the oil captured
between olive and light
Bend your ear to the jar
and hear
the creating resonance of the innerness.

(Click here for Rivka Miriam’s poem in Hebrew and English)

We, along with the poets, examine the clay inside and out.  M.C. Richards, master potter, assures us that inside and outside are one and that our turning—Teshuvah—both this way and that—is natural:

The outer shape of the clay is the extension of its center.  We press out from the center and make the pot:  the outside is the surface of the inside.  We turn inward and outward with the same naturalness…

As human beings functioning as potters, we center ourselves and our clay…

The pot becomes the potter.  May the pot be becoming to the potter.

 

Posted in Days of Awe, Holidays, Poetry, Prayer | 7 Comments

More Than Repentance

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

Teshuvah means more than “repentance.”    “Repentance” asks me to say that I am sorry, once again.  Teshuvah turns on the Hebrew verb that means “turn” or “return.”  The act of Teshuvah holds the possibility of creative, reflective, purposeful turning—both turning from and turning towards.

During the Ten Days of Teshuvah, from the New Year to the Day of Atonement, we celebrate Teshuvah as a community value, a common cause for the betterment of each and of all at the turn of the year.

Here is a story from Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim—a story about the possibility of Teshuvah, turning and returning, in the most literal sense and in the most common of places.  When Teshuvah is in the air, it is everywhere:

The Rabbi of Beritchev saw a man hurrying along the street, looking neither right nor left.  “Why are you rushing so?” he asked him.

“I am after my livelihood,” the man replied.

“And how do you know,” continued the rabbi, “that your livelihood is running on before you, so that you have to rush after it?  Perhaps it is behind you, and all you need do to encounter it is to turn around—but you are running away from it!”

The American poet, W.S. Merwin, would not name this consciousness as Teshuvah, but he does celebrate purposeful turning:

Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember

almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back

that I did not notice where they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them

this morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying

are you ready this time

(For information about Merwin’s “Turning,” and for an exploration of the poet’s wide ranging use of the word “turn,” go to http://wp.me/poKPR-eF)

Posted in Days of Awe, Holidays, Poetry | 1 Comment

Tall Tales and Worthy Quest(ion)s

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

Can we allow an ancient story to tell itself on its own terms?  Are we willing to invite a story’s images without insisting upon its meanings?  Can we meet the gaze of a story, assuring it with our questions that it has our attention and we are not furtively glancing beyond it?

Elijah would come regularly to the Bet Midrash/study house of Rabbi [Yehudah haNassi].  One day—it was Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of the new month—Rabbi waited for him but he didn’t come.  Later, he said to Elijah:  Why, sir, did you not come?  Elijah said:  Until I awakened Abraham, washed his hands and he prayed and then I laid him down again, the same for Isaac and then for Jacob [I ran out of time].  Rabbi said:  Why not wake them all at the same time?

Elijah said:  I reasoned that their prayer would be so powerful that it would bring the Messiah before his time.

Rabbi said to Elijah:  And are there those in this world who are like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?  Elijah said:  There is Rabbi Hiyyah and his sons.  Rabbi decreed a fast [in order to plead for rain, urgently needed] and Rabbi Hiyyah and his sons were appointed to take the prayer leader’s podium [where Rabbi Hiyyah would lead, supported by his two sons].  Rabbi Hiyyah recited:  ‘Who causes the wind to blow’ and the wind gusted; He recited: ‘He causes the rain to fall’ and the rain came.  When he was about to recite: ‘He revives the dead,’ the world trembled.  They said in heaven:  Who has revealed mysteries in the world?  Others said:  It was Elijah.  They brought Elijah and whipped him with sixty flaming lashes.  Elijah, in the guise of a fiery bear, went into that prayer gathering and scattered them.  (Babylonian Baba Metzia 85b)

Rabbi Yehudah certainly recognizes Elijah the Prophet.  Do others know him?  How is the atmosphere of the Bet Midrash, the study house, affected by the knowledge—or even the suspicion—that Elijah is present?  Why does Elijah come to learn regularly in the Bet Midrash?

Why do the story’s events focus on the celebration of the new month on the one hand and a fast day, declared to pray for rain urgently needed, on the other?

Elijah reports that prayer blurs the distinction between the living and dead.  With his help, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob rise to pray—at least at the celebration of the new month.  Does Elijah’s evidence continue to ring true:  that past lives are vital and powerful in the world of prayer, participating still?

Elijah lives among the ancestors, the descendants and the angels.  His stories deserve close attention.  We might listen to Elijah-talk as Rabbi Yehudah did—trying to discern its import and impact upon community prayer in a contemporary setting.  Does Elijah intend to provoke Rabbi Yehudah, his study partner, with “speculation” about what might happen if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob should pray all together?

What a powerful pair of study partners!  Elijah moves the ancestors themselves while Rabbi Yehudah seeks their like in the living community.  There are powerful, world-changing prayer leaders whom Rabbi Yehudah cannot identify by himself.  Without Elijah (who is punished for revealing them), how do we recognize prayer leaders with such special gifts?

The world responds twice to Rabbi Hiyyah, then trembles and hesitates.  Are some prayers only a rehearsal, a song until the moment is right?  And one more question for now:  What would have happened if the prayer community had not been scattered—just in time—by a fiery, bear-of-a-prophet?

Posted in Elijah, Prayer, Talmud | Leave a comment

Certifiably Kosher

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

Can I say of myself that I am kosher?  Or, that he or she is kosher?

Rabban Gamliel and the 20th century Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, might have had an interesting conversation about such a use of the term, kosher.  First, some evidence of how Rabban Gamliel, a sage of the first century, used the word in an unexpected way:

And when Tabi his slave died, Rabban Gamliel received the consolation of mourners.  His students said to him:  Have you not taught us, master, that we do not receive consolation for slaves?  He replied:  My slave, Tabi, was not like other slaves, he was kosher.  (Click here for Talmudic story in Hebrew and English)

Rabban Gamliel declared that his lamented slave, Tabi, was kosher and therefore the great sage felt entitled to set aside his own ruling—to the confusion of his students—and to mourn Tabi’s death with community rituals that were reserved for Jews.

If we enter the conversation, we might press the very authoritarian Rabban Gamliel more than his students dared to do:  “Do you, sir, feel that anyone who wants to mourn a non-Jewish slave can set aside your ruling by declaring that his slave was kosher?  Or are you, alone, certified to define kosher in such a manner that extends beyond law and ritual?”

Tabi’s piety and learning are well known from other ancient stories.  But for Rabban Gamliel, kosher was a quality of being beyond the sum of these parts and not limited to either Jews or to matters of ritual fitness—the most familiar meaning of kosher.

Rabban Gamliel said of Tabi:  He was kosher.  The Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, said of himself, I am kosher.

Amichai went farther than Rabban Gamliel towards defining kosher in a way that was rooted in native, ritual soil.  The poet raised to the level of metaphor certain features of kosher animals, presenting cud and cloven hoof as signs of his own capacities for reflection and repentance:

I am a kosher person.  I bring up the cud in my soul
from the closed darkness of what is over and done with
so as not to forget, so as not to lose….

I am cloven as well.  I do not have hooves but I do have
a split soul.  The split, the cleft gives me the wherewithal to stand
while I strike myself as in the Al Het/For the sin striking
of the New Year…

 I am a kosher person.

(Click here for entire Amichai poem in Hebrew and English)

Both the modern poet and the ancient sage extended the meaning of kosher beyond the world of ritual into an ethical dimension in which kosher represents the most excellent features of being human.  (For a current example in Israel of how kosher extends from the ritual to the ethical, link to:  http://www.mtzedek.org.il/english/TavChevrati.asp).

The sage and the poet promote enduring questions:  How do we continue to define kosher? What responsibility do we have to the ancient traditions that give us the language that steadies us as we redefine and expand our sense of self and of community?  In what ways can I certify that I and my fellow human beings are kosher?

Posted in Mishnah, Poetry, Talmud | 2 Comments

Guarding Ourselves: A Seatbelt Beracha

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

Years ago I created a beracha, a blessing, for putting on my car seatbelt:  Blessed are you, O Lord, our God, king of the universe, who has made us unique by giving us commandments and has commanded us to guard our lives.

It was the preventable death of a friend that prompted me to pay attention to this act of safe-keeping for which I had not developed a good habit.  The tragedy provided one of those moments when the everyday dissolves to reveal something deeper.  Such a moment, whether tragic or joyous, is a moment larger than itself—inviting, if not insisting, upon a change of thinking and behavior.

The Hebrew word, beracha has the sense of overflow.  To make a beracha is to capture and hold the overflowing significance of a moment, to deepen (as James Hillman says) an event into an experience of enduring value.

In buckling my seatbelt habits to a beracha, I sought to change my life with support from something larger than myself.

Sages of old debated over whether a beracha required a special form and specific language or, whether words of the moment sufficed.

(Click here for a related discussion in an earlier post, The Art of Blessing)

Some insisted that the beracha must be the well formed vessel into which one could pour fluid experience.  Response to any moment of grief or of joy would, therefore, take elegant and honored shape beyond any individual’s capacity for words.

Even the beracha-smiths who forged the forms were reluctant to speak only in their own voices.  After they hammered out a standard introduction (Baruch ata/ Blessed are you…) these artists preferred to capture the theme of the beracha with a biblical quotation or allusion.  As much as possible, they gathered their past in order to meet their present and address their future.

Soon there developed a repertoire of berachot, blessings, celebrating senses and experiences.  Generations of those loyal to the form soon held that a beracha not minted by the sages was not a legitimate beracha.  What we might call “beracha consciousness” involved joining the timely moment to a timeless beracha.

But some sages did not insist upon the readymade beracha fashioned by their colleagues.  In their opinion, one could mark the overflow—the beracha—of a moment with one’s own words.

My seatbelt beracha emerges from the range of ancient conversations about making a beracha:  Blessed are you, O Lord, our God, king of the universe, who has made us unique by giving us commandments and has commanded us—thus far, one of the ancient introductory formulae that gives my beracha the shape and resonance of tradition.

While there is no ancient beracha for seatbelts or for the act of protecting oneself, there are biblical verses that the sages saw as urging such behavior: Watch yourself, guard your life, and Guard your very lives (Deuteronomy 4:9,15).  Witness the following story of a traveler who risks not responding to the greeting of a Roman official rather than interrupt his prayer:

A tale of pious person praying along the way:  A Roman officer came and greeted him, but he did not respond.  The official waited for him to complete his prayer and after he finished, said to him:  Fool!  Is it not written in your Torah:  Watch yourself, guard your life, and, Guard your very lives?  When I greeted you, why did you not respond?  If I had were to cut off your head with my sword, who would demand justice for you?

(Click here for the Beracha and Talmudic story in Hebrew and English)

In the ongoing conversation between ancient texts and lived experience, these verses have been used in recent times to justify various health measures, such as discouraging smoking.  But they have not—until now—entered into the religious imagination of beracha consciousness.

Blessed are you… who has commanded us to guard our lives.  All of us travelers deserve to be strengthened by traveling with a tradition that we guard and that guards us.

Posted in Blessing, Talmud | 1 Comment

Rising Virtue, Rising Duty, Rising Courage

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

Here are three voices that join a conversation about the meaning of rising in the morning—a psychologist, a rabbi and a poet:

I am lying in bed, says the psychologist William James, and think it is time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present to my mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and the pleasantness of the warm bed…. I may remain for half an hour or more with the two ideas oscillating before me in a kind of deadlock, which is what we call the state of hesitation or deliberation.  In a case like this the deliberation can be resolved and the decision reached in either of two ways:

(1) I may forget for a moment the thermometric conditions, and then the idea of getting up will immediately discharge into act:  I shall suddenly find that I have got up—or

(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of the duty of rising may become so pungent that it determines action in spite of inhibition.  In the latter case, I have a sense of energetic moral effort, and consider that I have done a virtuous act.

Were they to converse across the centuries, William James (early 20th c) and Rabbi Joseph Caro (16th c), the author of the Shulhan Arukh, The Set Table (of Jewish Law), would agree about the challenges of rising.  But for Rabbi Caro, getting out of bed should never result from simply forgetting the cold momentarily.   In the world of Caro’s religious imagination, breaking the gravitational force of the comfortable bed is a matter of rising to serve God; inducements of creature comfort are obstacles to divine service—nothing less than the evil impulse:

…one should strengthen oneself like a lion, and when awakening from sleep immediately rise quickly to the service of the Creator, be he blessed and exalted,  before the evil impulse prevails upon him with various persuasions not to rise.  It might try to outwit him in the winter:  How can you get up so early in the morning when it is so cold?  Or, in the summer it might say:  How can you get out of your bed when you haven’t yet had enough sleep? or similar persuasions….   And so, every reflective person who stands in awe and trembling at the divine word must prevail over the evil impulse and not listen to it (Shulhan Arukh 1:4).

(Click here for the passage in Hebrew and English)

The 20th century poet, Josephine Jacobsen, looks with a poet’s eye at rising.  She pulls back the covers to reveal more to keep us in bed than the cold or the heat. Whether motivated by religious belief, by coffee or by gritted teeth, the courage and company of those who rise each day offers itself as encouragement for the next morning:

There is a terrible hour in the early morning
When men awake and look on the day that brings
The hateful adventure, approaching with no less certainty
Than the light that grows, the untroubled bird that sings.
 
It does not matter what we have to consider,
Whether the difficult word or the surgeon’s knife,
The last silver goblet to pawn, or the fatal letter,
Or the prospect of going on with a particular life.
 
The point is, they rise; always they seem to have risen
(They always will rise, I suppose) by courage alone.
Somehow, by this or by that, they engender courage,
Courage bred in flesh that is sick to the bone.
 
Each in his fashion, they compass their set intent
To rout the reluctant sword from the gripping sheath,
By thinking, perhaps, upon the Blessed Sacrament,
Or perhaps by coffee, or perhaps by gritted teeth….
 
Let each man remember, who opens his eyes to that morning,
How many men have braced them to meet the light,
And pious or ribald, one way or another, how many
Will smile in its face, when he is at peace in the night.

(Click here for the Jacobsen poem in its entirety)

Posted in Poetry, Talmud | Leave a comment

Holding By Letting Go

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

The Talmudic storyteller brings us to the room where Rabbi is dying:

On the day that Rabbi [Judah, the Prince] died, the Rabbis decreed a fast and they prayed.  They said:  Let anyone who says, “Rabbi has died,” be skewered on a sword.

His maidservant went up to the roof and said:  The heavenly ones desire Rabbi, and the earthly ones desire Rabbi.  May it be God’s will that the earthly prevail over the heavenly.  When she saw how many times he had to get up to go to the toilet, painfully removing and then rewinding his phylacteries, she said:  May it be God’s will that the heavenly ones overcome the earthly ones.

Now, the Rabbis never ceased their praying.

She took a pitcher and threw it from the roof.

They ceased praying and Rabbi died.

The Rabbis said to their colleague, Bar Kapparah:  Go and investigate.  He went and found that Rabbi had died.  He tore his garment and turned the rip towards the back so that no one would see it.  He began by saying:  Angels and mortals have seized the Holy Ark and the angels have prevailed over the mortals; the Holy Ark has been captured.

They said to him:  He has died?  He said to them:  You are the ones who have said it; I have not said it.

At the moment that he was about to die, Rabbi spread out his ten fingers towards the sky and said:  Master of the world, it is well known to you that I labored in Torah with all of my ten fingers but didn’t make a profit from even the work of my little finger.  May it be your will that there be peacefulness in my rest.

(Click here for Talmudic story in Hebrew and English)

Here, as in every ancient story of the sages, Rabbi, with no name attached refers to none other than Rabbi Judah, the Prince. Such was his authority and prestige:  To say merely, Rabbi, was to speak of him.

Rabbi’s bed is surrounded by disciples.  With their ceaseless prayers, they keep him alive. In their anxiety, they issue a grave warning against demoralizing speech. Even the slightest murmur—“is he dead?  It looks like he might have died!”—could break their life sustaining focus enough to lose him.

Now, the storyteller brings us from the room to the roof above where the maidservant has gone—perhaps to add her prayers as she tends to the business of the household.

Rabbi’s name is unnecessary.  The lowly maid’s name is unknown.  Yet, she is the hero of the story.  She literally stands above the sages—on the roof—in the middle of the great struggle between heaven and earth for the life of the beloved master.  At first, she joins the tug-of-war on the side of the sages.  But, from her rooftop perspective, her insight becomes both higher and deeper than that of the frantic sages.

Compassion and empathy inform the maid’s new prayer which she translates into successful deed, tipping the balance in the struggle for Rabbi in favor of heaven.  In dramatic contrast to the sages who fight to hold on to their master’s life, she understands both the impulse to hold and the need to let go.

We imagine the drama:  The jar thrown from the roof explodes and the sages stop praying to run outside.  Just then, alone and free, Rabbi stretches his hands towards heaven, towards the roof,  his spread fingers emphasizing the summing of his life offered to the listening ear of God (and to the ear of the handmaid?).

Spread fingers grasp nothing and offer everything—such was Rabbi’s life of openhanded Torah teaching.  In keeping with the life he has lived, Rabbi hopes to enter what the poet, Neruda, calls the eternity of transparent hands.

The body, as Bar Kapparah said to his companions, is the ark that has been captured; but it is not the Torah within.

Posted in Talmud | Leave a comment

From Clenched Fist to Open Hand

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

The ancient sages disputed whether the troubled and troubling book, Ecclesiastes, should have a place among the holy writings.  Sages who appreciated its value suggested that Ecclesiastes charted a course through the thicket of life, blazing an articulate path through emotions and thoughts for which tradition had no voice, until Ecclesiastes came.  These sages said:  To what may Ecclesiastes be compared?  It may be compared to a river thick with reeds that no one could navigate until one sage came along and cut a path through it, marking it for use by others.

Once included among the holy writings, the Sages drew Ecclesiastes into the vital conversation that they called oral Torah, a conversation connecting sacred texts to lived experience.  The oral Torah conversation presumes that the holy text tells the truth and nothing but the truth.  But the sacred text cannot tell the whole truth, as the fixed and written word lacks the dimension brought by experience.  The oral Torah of the sages is a conversation that negotiates the distance between the fixed, sacred text and lived experience.

Rabbi Meir, a great sage of the 2nd century, engages the following observation of Ecclesiastes: As one came naked from his mother’s womb he will return as he came and will take nothing of his toil with him…so what is the good of his toiling…? (Ecclesiastes 5:14-15).  Here is tradition’s record of Rabbi Meir’s conversation with Ecclesiastes:

It was taught in the name of Rabbi Meir:  When one comes into the world his hands are clenched as if to say: the whole world is mine and I will inherit it.  And when one takes leave of the world his hands are open as if to say:  I have not taken from this world a single thing (Ecclesiastes Rabbah on Ecclesiastes 5:14).  (Click here for this midrash in Hebrew and English)

We enter the conversation between Scripture and sage by imagining what prompts Rabbi Meir’s response to the verse.  Perhaps Rabbi Meir objects that Ecclesiastes’ matter-of-fact observation undermines aspirations for living.  True, there is symmetry of coming and going from the world.  But, Rabbi Meir observes, it is not a perfect symmetry.  Life unfolds between a clenched fist and an open hand.  The open hand is the evidence of life unfolded, of growth—of learning to hold by letting go.  Aspire towards openhandedness.

Posted in Midrash | Leave a comment

Where Shall We Put The Sign?

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

In the “movie version” of the Passover story, we watch the people of Israel paint the blood of the Passover offering on their doors as a sign that marks their houses for protection against what will be the last of the plagues.  In the “movie version” of the story, the blood is brushed onto the outside of doorway.  But this is not a foregone conclusion in the conversations of ancient sages.

Did our ancestors paint the outside of their doors, or was it the inside?  Listen to the opinions in the following midrash and take note of how this ancient text argues with itself!

They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they are to eat it (Exodus 12:7).  This means: put the blood on the inside of the door.  Now, you say it means on the inside.  But perhaps it really means put the blood on the outside!  But the Torah argues for “inside” when it says: When I see the blood I will pass over you (Exodus 12:13).  When I see means the blood that is visible to Me, but not to others—this was the view of Rabbi Ishmael.

Rabbi Yonatan agreed that the blood was painted on the inside of the door, but he relied on a different part of the verse quoted by Rabbi Ishmael:  Now, you say it means on the inside.  But perhaps it really means put the blood on the outside!  But Torah argues for “inside” when it says: And the blood on the houses where you are staying shall be a sign for you (Exodus 12:13)—a sign for you, but not for others.

But Rabbi Isaac says:  I say that it means on the outside, so that when the Egyptians see it, they will tremble in their guts! (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Ishmael, Pisha chapter 6)

Rabbi Ishmael (2nd century) and Rabbi Yonatan (3rd century) converse across the generations.  Both agree (against the movie makers) that the blood was put on the inside of the door but each has his own reasoning.  Is the marking for God’s sake or for Israel’s sake?  Rabbi Isaac (3rd century) sees the blood as a mark of confrontation and defiance that will be unsettling to the now fearful Egyptians.

It is our turn to enter the conversation and extend it to a new generation.  Where would you put the sign?

Posted in Midrash, Passover | Leave a comment

Making Passover: By the Story or by the Book?

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Sicha, Continuing the Conversation

Some people learn best from stories; some prefer the rule book:  “I can’t keep a list of rules in my head.  Tell me the story and I’ll figure out what to do.”  Or, “spare me the story and just tell me what to do.”  Ancient sources related to Passover offer evidence of both ways of learning.

The Passover Haggadah speaks on behalf of the story, offering a scene in which five legendary sages elaborate the story of the exodus all through the night.  Before the curtain rises on their gathering, the Haggadah sings this overture:

And even if we were all wise, all discerning, all elders, all deeply knowing the Torah it would still be our obligation to tell of the exodus from Egypt—to do so is worthy of praise.

Next, the famous scene in which the story of the exodus is the carrier of meaning:

A tale of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah and Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon who were reclining in B’nei B’rak where they were telling of the exodus from Egypt all night long until their students came and said to them:  Masters! Time has come for the morning Shema!

An equally ancient text, parallel to the Haggadah, prizes rules, not story:

A tale of Rabban Gamliel and the elders who were reclining in the home of Baytus ben Zonin in Lod where they concerned themselves with the laws of Passover all night until the rooster crowed.  Then their host removed the tables from before them, roused them and they went to the study house. (Tosefta Pesahim 10:12)

This conversation of ancient sources about story and rules is joined by another.  Four times the Torah enjoins parents to explain Passover to their children.  In three Torah settings, explanations are prompted by, when your child asks you…  One time the explanation is unsolicited.  From here, ancient sages imagine three children at the Seder who ask questions and one child who does not ask:  The Torah speaks of four children: one wise, one wicked, one simple and one who is not able to ask.

The sages imagine the disposition of each child, projecting much of themselves onto meager biblical clues.  What is “wise” about the wise child’s question?  What is “simple” about the question of the simple child?  And how should one answer each one of them?  These two children as they appear in the Haggadah and in another ancient source offer another perspective on story and rule as carriers of meaning.

The Haggadah portrays the “wise” exchange as a “rule” question that receives a “rule” response:

What does the wise child say? What is the meaning of the decrees, the statutes and ordinances which the Lord your God has commanded you? (Deuteronomy 6:20)  You should tell him some of the laws of Passover including that one should not go to any “afikoman/dessert” gatherings after the Passover ritual is concluded.

The Haggadah’s simple child prompts a brief story of redemption:  What does the simple child say? What does this mean?  You shall say to him:  It was with a mighty hand that the Lord brought us out from Egypt… (Exodus 13: 14)

The Jerusalem Talmud presents a Seder portrait of the same four children who ask the same questions.  But in that version, the wise and simple answers are reversed.  The wise child receives the story and the simple child is (simply) told the rules of how to act.

In short, some great sages were absorbed completely by the story; others, by the rule book.   The Haggadah prizes story.  Yet, it answers the wise child by quoting the rules and the simple child by telling the story.  Another portrayal of the four children presents a wise child whose inquiry is met with the story and a simple child who is supplied with the rules of behavior.

Questions are neither wise nor simple on their own.  They rely upon the listening ears of others for shaping, for redeeming.  When attending to questions, are you a redeemer?

At the Seder we recognize that this night is different from all other nights:  Both story and rule can carry meaning.  Which carries meaning more fully for you?  Are you able to provide either the story or the rule needed by the other?

(Click here for the stories in Hebrew and English)

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