For Our Teachers and Our Students: A Journey in NonLinear Faith

A long time ago this morning (likely yesterday by the time I finish writing and post), I sat at the table of local Torah maestro Beth Huppin. She is marvelous at demystifying Jewish text and weaving difficult teachings into meaning for any interested learner.

This morning's text, in honor of Yom HaShoah this week - was from Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943), Piaseczno Rebbe, who taught light in the Warsaw Ghetto (and before).

In his posthumous Sacred Fire, Shapira takes the Talmudic teaching that "when anyone repeats the Torah (teaching) of a dead scholar, the lips of the dead, though lying in the grave, mutter along with the speaker." (Read positively as "whisper," or "murmer" rather than "mutter" with its negative connotation.) Shapira argues that this is literally "in the grave," and literally "moving," not some dreamy picture of our teachers in an ethereal Olam Haba (world to come).

This teaching Shapira places near the end of a rather elaborate explication of the importance of students to teachers, which basically states that a teacher may learn something in the act of teaching that is far beyond the ken of the students, but which the teacher could not have understood without the configuration of particular learners around him.

Am I blown away by this teaching? Yes. While we were careful in the room this morning to read this as having broad meaning, I want for a moment to reflect on its context, a teaching during the Shoah, before I move on to weave in a few texts that came to my mind.

Consider: Shapira is teaching this in January 1942. By now he is aware of the death of teachers and students, and may, whatever hope he tries to keep alive, reasonably anticipate his own mortality. (Significant change came with partitioning of the ghetto in December 1941, two parts joined by a wooden foot bridge.) Did he intend this teaching as comfort to those he spoke them to that January? A reminder to himself that so long as people came to learn from him, he had purpose, and he could learn? To console himself at the loss of his own teachers?

Consider now the far-reaching meaning of this text. One of the questions Beth asked her students (me) to reflect on this morning was whether we had "ever experienced hearing the lips of the dead speaking" when we speak or teach words we learned from them.

This gives me chills, just thinking about it. And I say, "well, not literally, no . . . and, yes!"

Sometimes simply studying a text that is thousands (!) of years old, if in a moment I sense the person or people behind that text (author, editor, redactor), I may feel profound awe at the opportunity to find meaning for myself in their words.

There are people who converse with a text. I mean out loud, even. What do you mean by X? they might ask, or delving deeper, Does your idea hold up when you consider A? This, I think, was the savvy of the Talmudic rabbis - not to try to preserve the text as is (though with sacred texts they did their best), but to be in conversation with those texts, or to imagine themselves in conversation with the originators of the text.

Many scholars have done this simply in the margins of a text (See Rashi's Torah commentary, for example). Joseph Caro was overheard by his disciples having conversations with the personified Mishnah.

How do I do it? Usually quietly in my head. Sometimes jotting an epiphany on paper. And recently, I have begun the idea of writing out such conversations.

Am I "imagining" the conversation? What is imagination?
Am I "really" in conversation with a text?
Do the answers that I scribe for the text or its author actually belong to the person I am channeling?

Yes or no, it doesn't really matter.

What matters is:
Somewhere along the way, now and then, I experience the murmer, the דובב (dovev), of teachers past, some of whom I can never have known.

A long time ago this morning - now yesterday morning - I sat at the table of a great teacher. She taught the words of another great teacher. And he cited Talmud from more than a thousand years ago, which in turn cited Shir haShirim, Song of Songs, attributed to King Solomon nearly 3000 years ago.

There is no time in Torah. The teachings reach backward into the generations, and forward to students not yet born, who will elicit from their teachers new and revelatory understandings, just as our students do today for us, and as we have for our teachers. Though I prefer, unlike Shapira, to consider an Olam Haba rather than the earthly grave, I offer the prayer: May we hear the voices of our ancient teachers and their future students murmering through the veil.

In memory of teachers and students lost.

Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Reflections on the Passover Seder

This is the first year I have had Seder with my mother since her words were stollen from her more than two years ago (this is her third Passover without it) by a massive stroke. I have eaten many meals with her in this time, especially since I made the 3,000 mile cross-country move to be nearer to family - approximately two meals a week the last nine months.

But something profound happened at the Seder that has not happened in a single one of these other meals. My mother read. Out loud.

She put her finger on the page, she opened her mouth, and she vocalized and intoned as she ran her finger across the words. Her eyes were lit, and her voice filled with song and joy. The Haggadah gave her a voice, even if, in order to know what she was reading, I had to read silently to myself from the same words on the page. Once again, thanks to the built-in narrative of the Haggadah, my mother was able to participate in the conversation.

The Seder offers many opportunities to give voice to the voiceless. The narrative of slavery, that we all need to see ourselves as having come out of Mitzrayim, has us connecting directly with the experience of slavery (see my previous post). As we do so, we begin to tell a universal story of human growth, but also to connect ourselves, to listen for and to speak for those who are deeply entrenched in slavery, so much that they may not be able to use their own voice.

Let us go back to our 4 Children, for a moment. There is one, in Hebrew called: שאינו יודע לשאול. Usually this is translated as "Who doesn't know how to ask." But the "how" is read into a phrase that literally means "who doesn't know to ask." Not how, but simply to.

Sometimes we are so deeply entrenched in our own universe, we do not know that it is possible to ask, that asking is an option.

Enslaved for hundreds of years, it is only after Moses, a free man, rebels against the taskmaster (yes, kills him), that the Israelites are said to have cried out.

The Haggadah changed my experience of my mother's current struggle. It gave me hope and ideas about hearing her voice again. Nay, it actually allowed me to hear it, just a little bit, for just a moment.

And from this I learn:
We can give voice to those who are enslaved and don't even know it.
We can give voice to those who are traumatized and can no longer speak.
We must cry out from freedom so that others may cry out from slavery.

Torah teaches us that because we were "strangers," we must not estrange anyone from our community - not the poor, not the widow, not the orphan, not the stranger who joins us. As we continue through this Passover week, I invite my readers, friends, family to continue think about where we see voicelessness, and how we can offer a voice to them.



[edited for grammar and clarity - two words - 4/8/15, 11:48am]