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Words from the Head of School

My Heart Would Split

 
Dear Brandeis community,
 
This week’s parashah, Bo, continues the Passover story of the struggle between Moses and Pharaoh over the freedom of the Israelites. It contains scenes and language that are intensely familiar to me (and, statistically, would be to most American Jews, as Passover is the most celebrated holiday in Jewish American life): the demand to "Let My People Go," plagues being called down, the return to negotiations in their wake. It also includes what I have found to be one of the most problematic features of the Torah: the notion that God “hardens” Pharaoh’s heart during the negotiation process. It’s an action with many ethical quandaries embedded in it (what, for example, does it say about free will, if God is determining our responses to one another?), and one that our sages have puzzled over across millennia.
 
Seeing the phrase, I was drawn straight back to my own bar mitzvah preparations. I had parashah Devarim, at the start of Deuteronomy, where the Israelites are now wandering in the desert, the beginning of their 40 years in the wilderness. At one point in the narrative, they come to the kingdom Heshbon, ruled by King Sihon, and ask to make their way through its lands. Again, here, God hardens the king’s heart, and then instructs the Israelites to fight their way through the kingdom, leaving no survivors. My thirteen-year-old self was outraged—what kind of God is this, I asked, to provoke such a ruinous outcome? After my fiery drash, I worried I had broken some taboo, by asking such big questions. But as a rabbi in the community reminded me, such wrestling with God is the definition of Jewish practice. Or, as we put it in the Enduring Understandings of Judaic Studies here at Brandeis, “There are many legitimate ways to think and talk about God, including questioning God’s existence.”
 
Frankly though, such ruin in the Torah and in the world around us still outrages me. It can be easy, at times, to want to turn away from it all—when the catastrophes pile up, when public figures over and over again show themselves to be small-minded, or misogynists, or bigots, when the world we have built for our children seems to teeter on the precipice of irretrievable failure. I find myself in these moments turning straight to the book review in the Sunday times, studiously avoiding the front page. I’ll read a lot of blogs on basketball analytics. It’s all my version of averting my eyes.
 
One account of the encounter between God and Pharaoh says that God only finishes what Pharaoh began, because Pharaoh responds to the first five plagues by hardening his own heart. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has a lovely drash on this topic—and on how our own reactions to the hardness of the world shape our hearts and who we become. In it, she writes:
 
When we make the choice to turn away from suffering, when we engage in the action of walking away from others’ pain, we impact our inner life — our own heart is hardened, we become estranged from the divine and from our own holiest self. True, it’s scary to look that pain in the eyes, and then to grapple with the feelings of responsibility it might engender in us. But there’s a cost to that turning away.
 
I think this is right—whatever our quarrels with God or the world, as seekers of peace, as pursuers of justice, our work is to remind ourselves, each other, and our children not to turn away, not to harden our own hearts. Many of the poets I most admire insist on bringing the teetering ruin of this messy world into their work—Walt Whitman’s democratic soul, CA Conrad’s embodied engagement with war, Juliana Spahr’s long lists of dead and dying species, Anne Boyer’s common heart. It is, I think, one of the gifts of poetry, to open windows into such engagement for all of us. But this week, my mind went to a different poet, Emily Dickinson, who imagines being blind, and then being given the world to see:
 
Before I got my eye put out –
I liked as well to see
As other creatures, that have eyes –
And know no other way –
 
But were it told to me, Today,
That I might have the Sky
For mine, I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me –
 
The Meadows – mine –
The Mountains – mine –
All Forests – Stintless stars –
As much of noon, as I could take –
Between my finite eyes –
 
She ends the poem deciding it is safer to keep her soul indoors, behind windows, closed off. This poem seems an important reminder of the awe we can muster, when we choose to look—that we look not just upon the mess of the world but also its grandeur, and what a gift that is to our finite eyes. But unlike Emily Dickinson, I don’t think our hearts would split—we can hold it all, if we hold each other in doing so.
 
Wishing you all weekends filled with full and open hearts, my friends.
 
Warmly,
 
Dan
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