From the Narrow Place, We Learn

From the Narrow Place, We Learn
by Rabbi Sivan Rotholz  

Tonight is Adult Learner’s Shabbat, when we celebrate those in our community who have gone forth from curiosity to arrive at the vast expanse of Jewish knowledge. As a way of honoring their journeys, I hope you might humor me in offering a journey of my own.

Ten years ago, when I first felt pulled toward the rabbinate, my mind went immediately to the most reductive thoughts: I know what a rabbi does. A rabbi leads Friday and Saturday services. I don’t like prayer. So how can I be a rabbi?

Now, rest assured, I know that I am standing on what is perhaps the most remarkable bima in the world. In the synagogue that has redefined what Reform prayer – or tefillah – can be. I know that so many of you are here because of the extraordinary, spiritual, soulful, joyful prayer space that Central Synagogue has created under the visionary leadership of Rabbi Buchdahl in partnership with some of the world’s most incredible rabbis and cantors. So it may be hard to imagine, sitting here, that someone could not like tefillah – and could still want to be a rabbi. But the prayer experiences of my youth didn’t look anything like Friday night services here. In fact, they left me so tefillah-averse that the idea of ever leading prayer felt nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, wanting to remain open to the still small voice that kept insisting that maybe I could be a rabbi, I set out on an expedition of listening and discovery. I spent six months having coffees with clergy and rabbinical students to educate myself about the real work of a rabbi, and everything I heard and absorbed opened into excitement and possibility. I would have the chance to be there for people at the heights of their celebration and in the depths of their sorrow. I would study to be part teacher, part therapist, part event planner, part community organizer. I would discover how to craft and lead rituals. I would sign on to a life of service. Suddenly, I was all in…but tefillah still felt like a barrier.

When I was asked in my entrance interview for Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical school, “how do you feel about tefillah?,” I answered honestly, “It’s something I will wrestle with. It will be a journey. I don’t know where I will land.” Thankfully, they admitted me.

And then I came across an interview with Rabbi Shai Held, one of the true Jewish thought leaders of our day, and an observant Jew. To my surprise, in that interview, Rabbi Held admitted that he was “not a tefillah person.” He said, “I feel… more prayerful in teaching or in learning than I do in tefillah.”

At that moment, I understood. Teaching and learning can be spiritual experiences by themselves. The classroom can be a place of worship. I can be a rabbi.

In this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Matot-Masei, 42 journeys of the Israelites are enumerated during their 40 years of wandering in the desert. In prefacing these journeys, the Torah says, “These were the marches of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt.”

Why are these 42 journeys listed? My teacher, Yiscah Smith, in her transformative book Planting Seeds of the Divine, invites us to consider how we can find a spiritual meaning in this, illuminating the idea that each of our lives consists of a series of crossings. And in asking why only Egypt is named from among the Israelites’ 41 places of departure, she offers this:

The word Egypt, in Hebrew, Mitzrayim, means “a narrow place.” Our parsha names only Egypt as the starting place for these journeys because every journey begins in a place of narrowness. We must continually learn and grow in order to move toward an expansive place – a metaphorical Promised Land. But – and here’s the catch – every time we settle into that open space, it becomes a new narrow place from which we are meant to move on through more learning and growth. This is what it means to be a human and a Jew.

Tonight we celebrate the Central teachers and students who have shown up week in and week out over the past year to study Torah and Tanakh, Talmud and text, Jewish poetry, music, art, and midrash.

The learners in our community start from a place of perpetual curiosity and a commitment to perennially learn and grow. Their journeys, like those in our parsha, are many and enumerated. They made their way through weekly Torah and Talmud and text study and a deep dive into the Book of Isaiah. They wrestled with the words of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They studied Hebrew prayers, looked at art and history through a Jewish lens, sat with text in the beit midrash (the house of study), and engaged in conversations with Jewish poets today. Like the Israelites on their numerous journeys out of Mitzrayim, each time these students mastered a skill or idea, their place of knowing was not a final destination, but a starting point for the next leg of their journey.

A decade after I began my own journey to the rabbinate, I am happy to report that I now love tefillah. I love to lead prayer, and I love to pray. And, my most spiritual practice is still teaching; I know now that study is a sacred act.

With the end of Parshat Matot-Masei, we conclude the book of Numbers – and prepare to begin the book of Deuteronomy. We will mark the end of this journey as we do the end of every book of Torah, with the words “Chazak chazak v’nitchazek” – “You are strong, you are strong, be strengthened.” We recognize our strength in how far we have come, and in the same breath we ask to be strengthened to begin a new journey. To our adult learners who have completed this year of study, and to the teachers who have guided them, we recognize your strength, and we pray that you are strengthened as you continue your journeys of learning and discovery.