Parashat Tetzaveh

Parashat Tetzaveh 5770

An Excused or an Excused Absence?

Many scholars of the Bible have commented that this week’s Torah portion is the only sedrah from the beginning of Exodus to the end of Deuteronomy in which the name of Moses is absent.  Why is he not mentioned in a Torah portion that begins with the words “Atah tetzaveh,” meaning, “You shall further instruct…”?  God refers to Moses but does not mention him directly by name!  What’s up with God?

Scholars offer three interpretations that try to explain this unique occurrence in the text:

The Vilna Gaon suggests that in most years this Torah portion is read during the week in which the Seventh of Adar falls.  History records that this is the day upon which Moses died.  Just as we grieve the lost of our own loved ones following their death, there is a vacuum in the Torah text in the days that follow the death of Israel’s greatest prophet.  It becomes too painful to mention his name without the thought of tears coming to the eyes.

Another commentator, the Ba’al haTurim, relates the absence of Moses by name in this week’s Torah portion to an event that takes place in the sedrah for next week when Moses pleads before God on behalf of the Israelite people who acted with poor judgment when they built a golden calf.  Moses says to God, “Ah now, this people has sinned a great sin, they have made themselves gods of gold!  So now, if you would only bear their sin –! (in other words, forgive them).  But if not, pray blot me out of the record that you have written!”  (Exodus 32:32)  We learn in the Talmud in Tractate Makkot 11a, a principle that “the curse of a sage comes true, even if it was conditional…”  In response to Moses’ conditional remark to God, his name was blotted out of the text for one week.

A third commentator, the Pane’ach Raza, relates the absence of the name of Moses to another principle that states, “There is no anger that does not leave an impression.”  God became angry with Moses when he declined God’s invitation to lead the Jewish people out of Egypt.  Moses said to God, “Please send someone else!” (Exodus 4:13-14)  God responded by saying that his brother Aaron would accompany him.  In so doing, Moses forfeited his chance of becoming the first priest of Israel.  Aaron and his sons earned that role in his place.  Tetzaveh is dedicated to Aaron and the priests, which is why Moses is missing in this week’s Torah portion.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sachs notes in his d’var torah for this week, and based upon my own experience dealing with people who are grieving, all three explanations focus on the absence of Moses, but in that absence there is a deep and abiding presence of the man who had, and continues to have, on Judaism in general and on Jewish history.

Moses may be missed, but the legacy that he leaves behind reassures that his memory continues in many different facets of our tradition.  One of the ways in which we relieve some of the anxiety related to our grief is through prayer.  Prayer is very much at the heart of the Torah reading for this week, even though it, too, is invisible to the naked eye.  Sometimes we need to read between the lines to better understand the hidden messages that are buried in the Torah for us to uncover.  This week we read about the vestments that Aaron and his sons will wear when they conduct their priestly duties.  In their world, worship takes on the form of sacrifices, not prayer.  The priests served in this capacity until the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.  In the years that followed, as rabbinic rule strengthened, prayer replaced the sacrificial cult as the mode for expiating God and to express one’s gratitude as well as one’s guilt.  For centuries since, Jewish scholars have debated, “What is the nature of worship in Judaism?”

For example, is prayer a privilege or is it a duty, an obligation?  If praying is a product of the rabbis, and not of the Bible itself, then why do our legal authorities insist that we have a responsibility to pray three times each day?  According to the priestly tradition, their actions were precisely regulated.  As Rabbi Sacks notes, “Any deviation – such as the spontaneous offering for Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu, was fraught with danger.  The priests did the same thing, in the same place, at the same time, following a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly cycle.”  Their ritual was fixed in nature, in the same way that the prayers of the siddur are a fixed liturgy.

Yet, we are told that praying does exist in the Bible.  The time of the services were set by our ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who prayed to God at different times from one another.  Since Abraham got up early in the morning to run and do a mitzvah, Abraham becomes the archtype of our morning worship.  (Genesis 19:27) Isaac is designated as the person who establishes for us the afternoon service, since it was his custom to go out into the field to meditate when evening approached. (Genesis 24:63)

And our evening service is attributed to Jacob who receives a vision at night of a ladder stretching from the earth to the heavens with angels going up and coming down. (Genesis 28)  There are other examples of Biblical characters offering words of prayer to God beseeching Divine help when in need of support.  In these examples, the words that they express are spontaneous in nature, unlike the fixed actions of the priest.

One can easily see the dichotomy that existed when the sages of the Talmud began to debate amongst themselves on what the nature of worship ought to be.  In Tractate Berachot 26b, we read:

“Rabbi Jose ben Rabbi Hanina said: ‘The prayers (morning, afternoon, and evening) were instituted by the patriarch.’

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: ‘The prayers were instituted to replace the daily sacrifices.’”

We can begin to appreciate how two different spiritual traditions began to evolve around each other in the presence and the absence of certain situations.  In one instance, the patriarchs teach us the importance of individual prayer.  How enriching it is for each of us to be in private dialogue with God, our Creator.  On the other hand, we learn from the priests the significance of having structure to our ritual, because it brings us together as a community for a single purpose.  Worship is collective as well as singular.  Even though the Talmud tells us that there must be a fixed nature to our prayers, the highest form of prayer is when we add something to our words of devotion to God.  In Tractate Berachot 4:4 we learn from Rabban Gamliel (the same sage who is a part of the Haggadah) that a person is obligated to say the Amidah every day – in its entirety.  Rabbi Joshua, argues however, that one can say an abbreviated form of the Amidah and still fulfill his obligation for the day.  And Rabbi Eliezer concludes, that in both cases when the prayer is fixed in nature, and a person’s words are not genuine, then he has not fulfilled his obligation.  Future sages ask, “What does Rabbi Eliezer mean by his comment?”  We learn that one should not recite one’s prayers in the same way that a person reads a letter.  Nor should the prayers be a burden to recite.  Rather, we ought to find a way to say a new prayer every day, to add to the words of the Amidah.  Or, at a minimum, find a way to recite the words that are written in a new way!

Moses represents the world of the spontaneous, with his insights and his outbursts.  He is a man of history, who rants and reacts in an effort to shape a community out of individuals.  Aaron is a part of the world of the structured.  This, too, is an important element in creating a sense of community, in which everyone knows his own place, and that there is a sense of stability – nothing changes.  As Rabbi Sacks claims, “Aaron’s role, though less dramatic, is no less consequential.”  Both are a necessary “hemispheres” to the Jewish mind, “the voice of eternity in the midst of time.”

What makes prayer so powerful, in any religious tradition or spiritual practice, is its power to have an influence on us and our inner beings.  When we recite words that are our own, we are moved by our poetry.  Yet, we can achieve the same feeling when the words that we recite are not own, that have been crafted by others, because they connect us to something greater than ourselves.  When the words that we pray come to us from someone else’s past, there is a certain sanctity to the legacy that they leave behind.  For example, when people hear the solemn sounds of the “Eil Maleih” prayer during Yizkor and at a funeral, something inside of us resonates with the melody, if not the words.  They bring us to tears, and we wonder why.  They raise a feeling of hope that can be found in the testimonies of previous generations in ways that Hatikvah resonate in the Jewish soul in a different dimension.  We are given strength by our words of prayer.

“Prayer changes the world, because it changes us,” writes Rabbi Sacks.  “It opens us up to the sheer wonder of existence… Prayer teaches us to thank, to rejoice in what we have rather than be eternally driven by what we don’t yet have.  Prayer is an ongoing seminar…  By helping us notice the things we often take for granted, it redeems our solitude.  It gives us a language of aspiration, a vocabulary of ideals.  And seeing things differently, we begin to act differently. The world we build tomorrow is born in the prayers we say today.”

There is a poem that I sometimes read at funerals that contains the line, “In every absence there is a presence to be felt.”  It suggests that when someone is missing, whose presence has become lost to us through death or for some other reason, not all is lost.  There is a palpable presence of that individual that remains.   When we tap into that presence, we regain our strength and are comforted in our loss.  Our prayers are what help us to reach that sacred space of connection to the losses that are a part of our world.  Prayer is what binds us together as individuals into a community.  May each of us find the spirit within us to seek out that which is missing and come together in community as we build our own Mishkan here at TBA.