texts for the soul

Jewish texts: thoughts on the Israeli/Palestine War 

By Erin

Resoulutions: A Practical Guide for Self Repair by Rabbi Heather Miller

Day 17: Radical Reconciliation He sobbed aloud; and the Egyptians heard, and the house of Pharaoh heard. - Genesis 45:2 Across the four Torah portions concluding the book of Genesis, we learn of the story of Joseph. When he was a youth, his 11 brothers threw him into a pit in the middle of the desert and left him for dead. From there, Joseph was picked up by traveling merchants and sold into slavery. Some time later, he was accused of trying to seduce his master's wife, and thrown in jail. There, he became a masterful interpreter of dreams, and demonstrated his skill for the Pharaoh who appointed him his chief advisor. He correctly predicted a famine and outlined a plan for Egypt to survive. During the famine, Joseph's brothers travelled a great distance, desperate for refuge in Egypt. Ironically, they came to appear before Joseph to plead their case, but, because so many years had passed and because of his new station in the kingdom, they didn't recognize him. 

At first, he dealt with them harshly and orchestrated a complex plot to test them to see if they would abandon his full blood brother, Benjamin, as they had so easily betrayed him so many years prior. Instead, they risk their own lives for their brother, and he realizes that they have truly changed. 

He is moved by their obvious transformation. Then and there, he dramatically reveals his true identity to them. The text describes his deep cathartic release as he hugs them and sobs with cries so loud that all of Egypt, including Pharaoh, could hear them. This reconciliation and the resulting granting of refuge brings about an eventual prosperity for the entire family. 

With radical reconciliation in mind:

Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin page 325/326: On Yom Kippur, a day of fasting. Janowska Road Camp:  

Attempting to force the Jews to eat and Schneeweiss refusing on behalf of the rest. The German took out his revolver from its holster and pointed it at Schneeweiss's temple. Schneeweiss remained calm. He stood still, at attention, his head high. A shot pierced the room. The rabbi and the Hasidim stood as if frozen in their places. They could not believe what their eyes had just witnessed. Schneeweiss, the man who in the past had publicly transgressed against the Jewish tradition, had sanctified God's name publicly and died a martyr's death for the sake of Jewish honor. "Only then, on that Yom Kippur day in Janowska," said the rabbi to his Hasidim, "did I understand the meaning of the statement in the Talmud: Even the transgressors in Israel are as full of good deeds as a pomegranate is filled with seeds' " (Babylonian Talmud, Erwin 19a). -The story of Schneeweiss is told in a remarkable compilation of true stories from the Holocaust, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Yaffa Eliach, pages 155-159.

From Resoulutions: A Practical Guide for Self-Repair by Rabbi Heather Miller

Day 21: Bring the Brokenness with You

Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 8b Torah tells us that Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the two tablets of stone on which the ten commandments were written. But when he descended the mountain, he found the people engaged in the sin of worshipping the image of a calf that they had hewn from gold. He became enraged and broke the two tablets and eventually re-ascended the mountain and came down with a new set of tablets. 

The Babylonian Talmud reveals that both the whole and the broken tablets were carried in the ark by the Israelites everywhere they traveled. Society encourages us to embody perfection, but here, we see that the Jewish tradition regards both the whole and the broken as sacred. They are carried together on the continued journeys of the people. This means that the human experiences of loss, grief, and heartbreak should be regarded as sacred and should not be cast off.