In the past month I have grown accustomed to sending my American family regular updates from the home front here in Israel. Photographs of the tents erected on the grass between apartment buildings to serve as makeshift shiva homes large enough to accomodate the droves of people who arrive to console the grieving. Images of the rivers of people streaming into Mount Herzl for the military funeral of a lone soldier with no immediate family in Israel. The ubiquitous posters tacked to every lamppost and billboard featuring the missing men, women and children kidnapped in Gaza. A banner with images of missing babies, with the chilling question, “Where will your children sleep tonight?” A photograph of the giant box of tomatoes and cucumbers we ordered from the Gaza envelope, picked by volunteers and driven by truck to Jerusalem, since there is no one left to pick and purchase the produce more locally. And an image my husband saw on the news of a smiling soldier on the Lebanese border who strikingly resembles, and may very well be, my son’s homeroom teacher.

            But yesterday, instead of me updating my family in America, my family sent updates to me. All of my siblings and my husband’s siblings—as well as our parents, and other family members and friends—had made the long trip to Washington, DC for the rally in support of Israel on the National Mall. Over the course of the day, they sent countless photos and videos: Images of children draped in Israeli flags, holding hands and singing Hatikvah. Images of the Metro platform lined with hordes dressed in blue and white, en route to the rally. Signs that read “Christians stand with Israel,” “Nebraskans stand with Israel,” and “Am Yisrael Chai.” Videos of schoolchildren davening Hallel on buses, crying out to God from the straits of these horrible times but also affirming that “This is the day that God has made.” As I watched the videos of the speeches from the rally and scrolled through snapshots of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who traveled by plane, bus, and car to show their support for Israel, I was reminded of a line from the Talmud I taught yesterday: “The Holy One, Blessed Be He, performed a charitable deed toward Israel in that he scattered them among the nations” (Pesachim 57b).

            This statement appears in the context of a sugya about the Paschal offerings, which must be eaten in groups on the eve of Passover. Each group consists of one or more family units. The Mishnah raises the question of a newly-married bride who has recently moved from her father’s home to her husband’s home. Who slaughters the Paschal offering for her? Does she eat with her father or her new husband? This Mishnah generates an extended Talmudic reflection on the meaning of home, particularly for those individuals who feel the gravitational pull of more than one home, or who are not living in the place they consider their homeland. For a people who has spent so much of our history in exile, how do we relate to Jewish dispersal?

            We Jews have never lived only in one place. God’s original call to Abraham was to leave his homeland and travel to another place that God would show him. The rabbis in the midrash (Song of Songs Rabbah 1:3) compare Abraham to a vial of perfume that is shaken so that its scent may waft far and wide. So too did God tell Abraham to move about the world so as to spread God’s great name. The Talmudic rabbis add that one advantage of a global Jewish presence is that Jews, wherever they live, will attract converts to the faith, just like a person sows seeds far and wide so as to reap abundantly (Pesachim 87b). It is far easier to be a light unto the nations when those nations can observe us from up close and conclude, “Surely that great nation is a wise and discerning people” (Deuteronomy 4:5).

            Perhaps not surprisingly, the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud—themselves living at a remove from their homeland—have much to say in praise of diaspora. They point out that God does not just value land and the Holy Temple, but also Torah and the Jewish people, which are counted among God’s most precious acquisitions. In fact, the rabbis consider that Babylonia may be more conducive to Torah study than the land of Israel, because food is more plentiful – when the sage Ulla arrives in Babylonia from the land of Israel and sees how plentiful dates are, he cannot understand why the Babylonians don’t just eat dates and study Torah all day long. (That night, when he gets diarrhea, he reconsiders – perhaps abundance is not all it’s cracked up to be.) Rabbi Hiyya argues that the Jews were exiled to Babylonia as a sign of God’s compassion, because God knew that the Jews would not be able to withstand the harsh decrees of the Romans in the land of Israel. Life in the land of Israel is hard, says Rabbi Hiyya. Diaspora can be a saving grace.

            But for the rabbis living in Talmudic times, as in our own day, the question of Israel vs. diaspora was not Either-Or. Rather, there were Jews living both in Israel and throughout the world, with the majority of Jews concentrated in two major centers, such that the global Jewish population might be conceptualized as an ellipse with two foci. The Talmudic rabbis understood the value of this demographic. They recount a conversation in which a certain heretic sneers at a rabbi, telling him, “You Jews are so lucky that we haven’t wiped you out yet.” The Jew responds, “We’re not lucky. You can’t wipe us out even if you want to, because we’re not all in one place. And even if you were to exterminate all the Jews in your kingdom alone, what good would it do you? The other nations of the world would regard you as murderous.” The heretic admits that this is their dilemma – as a result of Jewish dispersal, they have no easy way to wipe us all out.

            Other rabbis assert that exile may not have inherent value, but it is a necessary step on the journey to redemption. After all, how can the prophecy of the ingathering of the exiles be fulfilled if everyone is already ingathered? Rabbi Alexandri—his name alone attests to his cosmopolitanism—asserts that “There are three that return to their place: The Jewish people, the money of Egypt, and the letters on the tablets of the Ten Commandments.” The Jews will be restored to their land. King Shisak of Egypt will take back the money “borrowed” by the Israelites during the Exodus when he attacks Israel in the days of Rehoboam (see I Kings chapter 25). And when the Ten Commandments are shattered, the letters rise up to the heavens, back to their divine origin. Notably it is not clear that all of these acts of return are inherently positive – certainly not the return of the Egyptian riches, and perhaps not even the return of the letters, which was a consequence of the people’s sin and Moses’ anger. Is the return of all the Jewish people to the land of Israel truly something we ought to aspire to? What do we mean, in our daily prayers, when we ask God to “gather us together from the four corners of the earth”?

Yesterday, while watching Jews flock in droves to the National Mall, it seemed like an ingathering of exiles of sorts, in spite of the diasporic setting. Like the Mishnah’s bride, who is unsure whether she ought to be included in her father’s or her husband’s home on Passover, I am fortunate to be rooted in two homes – the diasporic homeland that is my birthplace and my parents’ home, and the land of Israel where I have made my home. No doubt that each of these homes is enriched and fortified by the other, with all of us united in our prayers – for the safe return of the hostages and soldiers, for the ingathering of the exiles, and for the redemption of the people of Israel, wherever they might make their home.

Last Friday afternoon, on the eve of Shabbat Breishit, my husband got a call from our synagogue Gabbai asking him to help roll the Torah scrolls. On any other year the scrolls already would have been rolled on Simchat Torah, when it is traditional to complete the book of Deuteronomy and then roll back to the start of Genesis. But this year all the scrolls were still in Deuteronomy, because the first air raid siren in Jerusalem had gone off just after 8am. Synagogues had ended abruptly and congregants had dispersed, so we were still caught up in endings and death—the end of the Torah, the death of Moses—waiting for the world to begin anew.

            To the extent that we are caught up in the past, unable to fully believe our present reality, I am still hearing echoes of Kohelet, the scroll we read on Sukkot. The book asks stark questions about life and death, vitality and mortality – matters of philosophical contemplation in good times, but urgent and pressing in our current reality. “Alongside justice there is wickedness,” Kohelet reminds us. “Alongside righteousness there is wickedness.” (3:16).  What, then, is the purpose of man’s actions? “What value can man get from all that he does?” (3:9).  

In the past two weeks, with so many people around us displaced and so many husbands and brothers deployed, my family and community have been caught up in a frenzy of volunteering. We have cleaned out shelters, sorted our closets to bring clothing to refugees fleeing the north and south, prepared food for soldiers, babysat for mothers whose husbands are in uniform, delivered supplies to army bases. My son spent last night collecting photos of well wishes from all the students in his class, which he incorporated into a video montage to send to their teacher, stationed on the northern front. Meanwhile my daughters draw pictures for soldiers that say, “Stay safe,” and “May God protect you,” and “Come home in peace.” I know that much of this work is making a real difference to people who feel alone, displaced, or scared. But I also wonder how much of what we are doing is helping ourselves more than it is helping others. In moments of despair I wonder: What is the value of it all when so many lives are hanging in the balance, and so many lives have already been lost? Perhaps it is all futility, as Kohelet repeatedly laments?

            “There is a time for everything,” Kohelet teaches. “A time to be born and a time to die. A time for peace and a time for war.” In this time of war, my husband Daniel and I went to a wedding last night – the daughter of one of his colleagues at the university was marrying a Haredi yeshiva boy. The wedding had been planned months ago, but in the past week the venue had shifted to the ground floor of the groom’s Yeshiva, so as to comply with the Homefront Command guidelines prohibiting large gatherings outdoors. Since so few of the invited guests would be attending, the couple had invited all the boys in the yeshiva to join the festivities. It would be more men in their twenties than I’d seen in days; Daniel jokes that now, with nearly everyone enlisted, he is the youngest dad on the block.

Even in peace time, Daniel and I rarely go out at night, but my mother-in-law was watching the kids for us, so we had the evening to ourselves. As I got in the car dressed for the wedding, I heard echoing in my head a line from Kohelet: “It is better to go to a place of mourning than to go to a place of celebration” (7:2). We knew of several shiva houses in our neighborhood, in this time when so many families are mourning. And so on our way to the wedding, we stopped at the home of the cousin of my daughter’s friend, killed at the music festival. Sitting in front of us was a woman who could not stop crying. We assumed she was a grieving family member, until we overheard her say that she herself had just gotten up from shiva for her own son that morning. Across the street, we observed on our way out, was another shiva house, where they were mourning a couple who had died protecting their sixteen-year-old son from a grenade. “Should we go to that shiva, too, or just proceed straight to the wedding?” my husband asked, and I grimaced.

I generally spend my days teaching, studying, and writing. But it is hard to sit and write at a time like this. Every other minute my phone pings with more opportunities to lend a hand – my friend wants to know if we can cook dinner for a family of nine from the north who is staying next door to them. Another friend informs me that a truck has just arrived with vegetables from a kibbutz down south – they are selling their produce in Jerusalem. My mother-in-law is off to visit refugee families currently being housed in a local hotel. There are two hours today when a few of my kids are in school, and the ones who are home can occupy themselves – why am I spending them at the computer? There may be a time for everything, as Kohelet teaches, but there isn’t enough time for everything. There isn’t enough time at all.

“The making of books is endless,” Kohelet laments in the final verses. “And much study is wearying of the flesh” (12:12). And yet I continue to teach and write and study, because Torah is what gives me strength. I wish I could roll back time, like we rolled back the Torah scrolls. I wish the past two weeks had never happened. But the river of time does not flow backwards. Like all rivers, it flows to the sea. And the sea of tears is never full.

I was chanting from the Torah in synagogue when the first siren went off. It was the morning of Simchat Torah, the holiday celebrating our commitment to read the entire Torah over the course of the year, starting with Genesis and concluding with the final verses in Deuteronomy about Moses’ death: “Moses was one hundred and twenty years when he died; his eyes were undimmed, and his vigor unabated.” Moses, who wishes more than anything else to enter the promised land, is permitted only to look out at the land from afar, from the top of Mount Nevo, where no one knows, to this day, exactly where he is buried.

            I have always been moved and haunted by the pathos of these verses, but never more so than today. I had just concluded Moses’ final blessing to the people of Israel—“Israel dwells in safety, untroubled is Jacob’s abode”—when suddenly no one felt safe in synagogue, where we’d been praying outside in an open courtyard. Quickly we all filed down a narrow staircase to an underground shelter. “My children – they are home alone,” I thought in panic, because Israel no longer dwelled in safety. We all knew the regulations: Stay in the shelters for ten minutes after the sirens. Under such conditions, what could we do but continue praying? Three members of the minyan with more presence of mind had carried the Torah scrolls downstairs with them, and so there in the dimly-lit shelter, while the sirens continued to wail aboveground, I went on to read the end of Moses’ final blessing: “O happy Israel! Who is like you? A people delivered by the Lord. Your protecting shield, your sword triumphant. Your enemies shall come cringing before you.” Who could know, when we chanted those words, that we would spend the rest of the day listening to the thundering of rockets in the air, and the buzz of military helicopters circling overhead?

Finishing the Torah is supposed to be festive and momentous. Under ordinary circumstances, we would dance with the Torah scrolls in circles of men, women and children, singing with full-throated ease. There was no dancing that morning, no circles of joy – everyone was eager to get home safely as soon as possible. When Moses ascends Mount Nevo, God shows him the entire land of Israel: “Gilad as far as Dan, all Naftali, the land of Ephraim and Menashe; the whole land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negev and the Plain.” We still did not know where the sirens were coming from, and which parts of the country were under attack – Gush Dan, where Tel Aviv is located? The Negev? Or the whole land of Judah, including our home in Jerusalem, where my children were alone, no longer untroubled in their abode? For a moment my voice wavered – how easy it would be to succumb to the emotional heft of the moment, as I read the Torah’s final words. But then I heard the community lifting me up and carrying me forwards: “Strong, strong, may we be strengthened,” they recited, as is traditional upon completing a Torah scroll. “Strong, strong may we be strengthened,” I repeated, my voice this time unwavering.

As soon as the requisite ten minutes had elapsed, we emerged from the underground shelter and went back out to the synagogue to continue praying. My husband returned home immediately to join our children, but I stayed for the final half hour of the service, which was interrupted by one more siren that sent us down again to the shelter. There we said the prayer, recited each week, for the welfare of the State of Israel and its soldiers “who stand guard over our land and the cities of our God, from the Lebanese border to the Egyptian desert, and from the Great Sea unto the approach of the Aravah, on the land, in the air, and on the sea.” Later that day, looking down from our porch, we would see so many men who would otherwise be observing the sanctity of the day, but instead were getting into their cars in military uniform, driving off to army bases. I was not alive for the Yom Kippur war, but I had read and seen enough to feel chilled by the resonance. Our country was being invaded that very morning by land, by air, by sea. We concluded the silent prayer with the blessing of peace: “May He who makes peace in His universe make peace for us and for the people of Israel.”

This holiday, which in Israel is not just Simchat Torah but also Shmini Atzeret, marks the start of the rainy season. Standing at the front of the shelter, the prayer leader recited the traditional liturgy that the rain should fall “for blessing and not for curse. For life and not for death.” The woman praying behind me in the safe room added in an undertone, “For peace and not for war.” May it be rain, and not rockets, that descend on us in the season ahead. As is customary in our synagogue, we recited a modern feminist version of a liturgical poem about the prayer for rain, which invokes Deborah the judge who led the Israelites in battle against their enemies, and Miriam who watched over her younger brother in the Nile when his life was in danger. I hoped my kids had had the presence of mind to enter the safe room. I hope the older siblings were watching over the younger. I had no idea, back when I will still in synagogue, how terrified the little one would be.

When I returned home—thankfully there were no sirens on the way—and entered our safe room, I found my husband and children huddled together. Our safe room is also the bedroom shared by my youngest daughter and son, their beds covered in stuffed animals and strewn with Curious George books. The room was dark because it was Shabbat and a holiday, when we do not turn on lights. The window was closed and shuttered, because it was a safe room – no “bad guys” could get in, as my three-year-old son Yitzvi put it, but also no light. Instead the kids were creating their own light, singing all the prayers they knew out loud together. My daughter shifted over to make room for me to sit next to my husband, who whispered in my ear, “They were all in here when I got here, praying, with the doors and windows barred. They knew just what to do.”

I put my finger to my lips and did not ask any questions. I thought about the story of King David, who was told that as long as he kept learning Torah, the angel of death would not be able to snatch his soul away. Somehow Yitzvi had the same intuitions. He didn’t know most of the words to the songs, so he hummed along, and any time the kids paused in between prayers, he shouted out, “Don’t stop davening! Don’t stop! I don’t want the bad guys to come!” Every little sound startled him, and he vomited twice in fear.  

My oldest son, who is 12, told his younger siblings to hold their hands in the air. “As long as you hold your hands above your head, Bnei Yisrael will win,” he instructed. It was magical thinking meets biblical allusion. Immediately after the Israelites leave Egypt, they are attacked from behind by the nation of Amalek. “Whenever Moses put up his hand, Israel prevailed, but whenever he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed,” the Torah teaches. But Moses’ hands grew heavy, so his brother and his nephew had to support his hands, keeping them steady “until the sun set.” I thought about how an elderly neighbor had once told me that she loved hearing my kids pray on the porch during the pandemic. “The prayers of young children go straight up to the throne of God’s glory,” she told me from behind her mask. I wanted my children to keep on praying, but my husband and I were there, like Aaron and Hur, to support them when the situation grew too heavy.

My children did not pray steadily until sunset. In between the sirens, we came out of the safe room, played board games, made lunch, and tried to ignore the rumbling from over the distant hills. A family from down the block who did not have a safe room in their home joined us, along with two seminary girls who were staying with them for the holiday, and we were fourteen people crowded in the safe room for the last three sirens of the day. When we made Havdalah, gathered around the braided candle, I recalled how this was the time referred to in Israel as “Acharey HaChaggim,” after the holidays, when school finally resumes after the long holiday break, everyone goes back to their routines, and adults can finally work a full uninterrupted week. “Acharey Hachaggim Sameach,” people often greet each other cheerily at this time of year – “Happy going back to routine!” I didn’t need to hear the news to know that there would be none of that. Not this year.

In this week’s parashah we bear witness to the pathos of Moshe’s plea with God to allow him to enter the land of Israel. Moshe, in speaking to the people of Israel at the end of their wilderness journey, explains that it is on their account that he has been denied entry to the land – “The Lord was enraged with me because of you” (3:26). Moshe thus blames the people he has devoted his entire life to shepherding and sheltering. The midrashim on the opening verses of our parashah attempt to come to terms with Moshe’s relationship with the Israelites at the end of his life, employing a surprising metaphor that lays bare the ambivalence of a leader who has given himself over entirely to his people.

            In the opening verses of our parashah, Moshe tells the people that following the defeat of the enemy kings Sihon and Og, he pleaded with God to let him enter the land along with the Israelites: “Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon” (3:25). The term for “cross over,” e’ebra, is echoed in God’s response to Moshe in the next verse: God becomes enraged (va-yitaber) with Moshe and tells him never to raise the subject again. Both terms also resonate with God’s instructions to Moshe at the end of the book of Numbers to ascend and view the land from afar, from the “heights of Avarim” (27:12), which Biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg translates as “the heights of transitions” (Zornberg, Bewilderments, p. 291). Moshe, who pleads with God to let him cross over, finds his desire frustrated by an angry God Who insists that he will merely be allowed to view the land from a transition point that will mark his own passage from life to death, as per the next verse: “When you have seen it, you shall be gathered to your forbears” (27:13). To employ a parallel play on words in English, we might say that Moshe is preoccupied with his fervent desire to cross over, but God crossly insists that no, Moshe’s life is over.

            The root avar, which lies at the root of all these terms in the original Hebrew, connotes not just crossing over and getting angry, but also a surprising additional meaning uncovered by a very early midrash on the book of Deuteronomy. In Sifrei Dvarim (Piska 29) the second-century sage Rabbi Yehoshua reads vayitaber as referring to “a woman who is in no condition to converse because of the pangs of pregnancy.” This term may refer to God, who is so angry with Moshe that He refuses to engage further; but it is also an apt term to describe Moshe, who has carried the people around for so long that he is at the end of his tether. Rabbi Yehoshua is playing on the phonetic similarity between avar (cross over) and ibur (pregnancy), both of which share the same three-letter Hebrew root. The term ibur is used in rabbinic sources to refer to anything that is enlarged or expanded by means of something that is added on (like the “impregnation of a city” by expanding its boundaries, or the “impregnation of a year” by adding another month in a leap year). Rabbi Yehoshua may be explaining Moshe’s use of this term—vayitaber Adonai bi—as signifying that God impregnated Moshe with the people of Israel, pushing him to expand beyond his ordinary capacity and bear the Israelites through the wilderness until they reached full term.

            Rabbi Yehoshua’s invocation of the metaphor of pregnancy to describe Moshe’s leadership is not without biblical precedent. Earlier in the wilderness journey, at a place known as Kivrot Hataavah (the graves of craving), the people complained bitterly to Moshe about the manna, wishing instead that they had meat to eat. Distressed and frustrated by the people’s incessant demands, Moshe cried out to God, “Why have you dealt ill with Your servant, and why have I not enjoyed Your favor, that You have laid the burden of all this people upon me?” (Numbers 11:11). Here, as in our parashah, we encounter a distressed and frustrated Moshe who cannot enjoy God’s favor on account of the burden of bearing the people of Israel. And here, too, Moshe invokes the metaphor of pregnancy in speaking of his relationship with the people: “Did I conceive this people, and did I bear them, that You should say to me: ‘Carry them in your bosom as a nursemaid carries an infant’ to the land that you promised to their fathers’?” (11:12). Moshe refers to the people as an unwanted pregnancy so burdensome that it has made him want to die: “I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If you would deal thus with me, kill me instead!” (11:14-15).

            Moshe’s exasperation with bearing the people and laboring on their behalf finds its echo in Deuteronomy, in a verse rendered famous by its use of the term Eicha: “How (eicha) can I bear alone the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering” (1:12), he tells the people at the end of his life. But Moshe has always been an ambivalent mother. Although initially very resistant to taking on his role—as evident by his demurral at the burning bush—Moshe came to care deeply and devotedly for his charges. Following the sin of the golden calf, when God threatened to destroy the people and make Moshe into a new nation—“Let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them and make of you a great nation” (Exodus 23:10)—Moshe refused to let God save his own skin at the expense of the people: “If You will forgive their sin, good; but if not, erase me from the book You have written” (23:32). Moshe may not have wanted to bear the people, but now that he is responsible for them, he realizes that his fate is bound up in theirs.

Like an ambivalent mother, Moshe resents his children for the toll they have taken on him, but he also cannot imagine his life without them. He realizes that to become a mother is to give of yourself to your child. It is to bear that child within you, to carry it around, and then to let that child loose into the world and watch it travel to places you will never be able to access. It involves forsaking your own hopes and ambitions, while seeing them realized through your children.

            Perhaps now, at the end of his life, Moshe has come to appreciate the way in which motherhood embraces the multiple meanings of the term avar/ibur invoked repeatedly in our parashah. He has felt the full weight of bearing the people through the forty years of wilderness wandering, like a forty-week pregnancy. The pangs of labor have been intense, and there were moments when he cried out to God that he simply could not bear it anymore. At the same time, he wishes he could cross over with them. His children will go further and live longer into the future than he will, and while he is full of hope for them, he is also deeply saddened that he cannot continue alongside them. Moshe has borne the people as again and again they pushed the limits of his forbearance; now the time has come to join his forbears, if only he can bear to let go.

When my husband and I began dating, I took him to meet my family in the town where I was raised. One afternoon we went on a long run together around town, and I gave him a guided tour of my childhood: Here is where I went to high school. Here is where I fell off my bike in fifth grade. Here is where my best friend lived. I was reminded of this moment in our courtship when reading this week’s second parashah, Masei, with its focus on geography and its underlying theme of romantic reminiscence.

            Parashat Masei, opens with a long list of all the encampments of the Israelites in the wilderness, proceeds to delineate the borders of the land of Israel, and then mandates the allocation of specific cities for the Levites and, from among those holdings, the designation of cities of refuge. At first this focus on journeys, boundaries, and cities seems rather dull and prosaic; after all, does the Torah really need to recount for us every single one of the forty-two places in the wilderness where the Israelites set up camp? Read with a more poetic sensibility, however, our parashah becomes a love letter to the Jewish people and to the land of Israel, expressing God’s devotion in language less literal than lyrical.

            The opening verses of our parashah provide an itinerary of the wilderness journey, beginning with the departure from Rameses, Egypt on the fifteenth of Nisan, and culminating in the arrival at the steppes of Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho, a full forty years (and forty-nine biblical verses) later. The midrash explains the purpose of this extensive itinerary by reference to a parable about a king whose son was ill. The king took his son on a journey to a distant place to heal him. When they were on their way back, the king began recounting the various stages of their journey: “Here we slept. Here we cooled off. Here you had a headache.” The parable draws the analogy to God’s instruction to Moshe to “recount to the Israelites all the places where they provoked me” (Tanchuma Numbers 33:1; Rashi on 33:1). In this parable, God is the king who brings the Israelites on a long journey to heal them from the wounds and traumas inflicted by slavery, transforming them into a mature people capable of bearing responsibility. As the many encampments suggest, it was a journey with many starts and stops, and many moments of rupture. But in spite of all the times the Israelites provoked God along the way—by complaining about the food, by speaking ill of their leaders, by constructing an idolatrous calf—God nonetheless stayed with them.

In the weekly synagogue Torah reading, it is customary to chant the forty-nine verses detailing the Israelites’ itinerary to a special melody instead of the regular cantillations. This melody is very similar to the melody used to chant the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15), originally recited when the Israelites first set out on their journey, suggesting that the itinerary of the “journeys” from which Parashat Masei takes its name is in fact a song of its own, parallel to the Song of the Sea. As such, we might thing of the Song of the Sea and Masei as bookends, flanking the forty years of wandering in poetic chant. In the Song of the Sea, the people praise God for what He has pledged to do for them: “In Your love you lead the people You redeemed…Till your people cross over, O Lord” (Exodus 15:13, 16). In the lyrical itinerary of Masei, they attest that God has made good on that promise, standing by them through thick and then.

            The period of wandering in the wilderness is analogized in the prophetic imagination to a time of young love between God and Israel: “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown” (Jeremiah 2:2). God led the people day in and day out, by pillar of cloud and pillar of fire, through the seemingly endless sands of the wilderness; the people in turn followed God devotedly, trusting in God’s love. In the book of Exodus, the final of the “four languages of redemption” used to describe God’s pledge to the Israelites captures this exclusive bond: “And I will take you to be My people, and I will be Your God” (Exodus 7:7). The long wilderness journey, in all its many stages, serves to seal this bond of love between God and the people of Israel, which will blossom into maturity once the people settle in the Promised Land.

            The second half of the parashah, which focuses on the borders of the land of Israel and the designation of special cities within it, looks ahead to this period of more mature love, when God and Israel at last settle down with one another. The Torah sketches the boundaries of the land, moving from the tip of the Dead Sea in the south, to the shores of the Great Sea in the west, to peak of Mount Hor in the north, to the slopes of the Kinneret in the east. These verses read less like a geography lesson than like a literary blazon cataloguing the physical features of a beloved subject, as in Spenser’s marriage poem, Epithalamion: “Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright / Her forehead ivory white…” Indeed, throughout the classic biblical love poem, the Song of Songs, the female lover is described by invoking geographical sites and features of the land of Israel: “My beloved to me is a spray of henna blooms from the vineyards of Ein Gedi…Your hair is a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead… Your neck is like the Tower of David” (Songs 1:13, 4:1, 4:4). The midrash leaves no doubt that the land is an expression of God’s love: “The Holy One Blessed Be He said to Israel: The land of Israel is beloved unto me, as it is written, ‘the land the Lord your God cares for’ (Deut. 11:12), and Israel is beloved to me, as it is written, ‘for the Lord your God loves you’ (Deut. 23:6). God said: I will enter the people of Israel, who are beloved to Me, into the land that is beloved to Me” (Tanchuma Buber, Masei, 5).

            The prophets, too, describe the people’s relationship to the land of Israel as a romantic bond. When the people of Israel leave the land, it becomes like a widow (“Alas! How lonely sits the city… She that was great among nations, is become like a widow” Lamentations 1:1); when they return to the land, it is like a wedding celebration (“Nevermore shall you be called abandoned. But you shall be called ‘I desire her,’ and your land ‘mastered’ (be’ula, from ba’al)… as a young man masters a maiden, and as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,” Isaiah 62:4-5). God’s love for the people of Israel is consummated only when they settle within its borders, which God fervently desires. As Rabbi Yehuda Brandes notes in a Dvar Torah that inspired my own (also see the Tiferet Shlomo on Masei; quoted in Torat Imecha, vol. 2, p. 443, untranslated), the term used in our parashah to signify “draw a boundary line” (t’tau, 34:7; v’hitavitem, 34:10) comes from the same root as the Hebrew word for “desire” (ta’ava), suggesting that the demarcation of boundaries is not merely political or geographic, but is an expression of love and longing.

            Our parashah, filled with place names and geographical features, is a mapping of the evolving romance between God and Israel, beginning with the young bride trailing after her groom through the wilderness and culminating in the couple building a home together in the Promised Land. From Rameses to Succot, from Succot to Etam. From the Great Sea to Mount Hor, and from Mount Hor to Levo Hamat. Like the tour I gave my husband of my hometown, these litanies—read less literally—are a lyric of love.

(this essay is part of a series entitled Adventures in Mishnah with My Kids. To subscribe, see weblink below)

Last week when we made havdalah, the candle suddenly burned out just as we were reciting the blessing about the Creator of fire. We hastily lit two matches and held them together to replace the candle, which, we discovered a short while later, had not been furnished with long enough wicks; the bottom third of the candle was all wax and no wick. We were prepared to throw the candle away, but Matan—the scientist in our family—assured us that he could refurbish the candle by boring out a narrow hole and filling it with a match. That evening, proud of his pyrotechnic prowess, Matan read in bed by the light of our de-commissioned Havdalah candle. 

When I came into his room to learn a mishnah that evening, he pleaded with me to first finish the Harry Potter chapter he was in the middle of reading. And so I obliged, reading to him about Harry’s al fresco dinner with the Weasley family, during which Mrs. Weasley magically conjures candles to light the darkening garden so that everyone can finish their strawberry ice cream. “See? They use candles too,” Matan points out to me—he is upset that I insisted that he also turn on his reading lamp because, as I told him, a havdalah candle really doesn’t provide enough light for reading.  

As it turned out, the mishnah we learned that night was about reading by the light of a candle, though in the times of the Mishnah, a candle was more of an oil lamp. The Mishnah (1:3) teaches that a person may not read by candlelight on Shabbat, out of a concern that he might tilt the lamp to add more oil to the wick, which is like lighting a fire on Shabbat. The Talmud (Shabbat 12b) tells a story about Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha, who proclaimed that he could read by candlelight on Shabbat because he would make sure not to tilt the lamp. But once it happened that while he was reading, he needed more light and he unthinkingly tilted the lamp. Humbled, he declared, “How great are the words of the sages, who said not to read by candlelight!” Another sage adds that after realizing his error, Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha recorded his regret and his resolution on a wax tablet: “I, Ishmael ben Elisha, read and tilted a candle on Shabbat. When the Temple is rebuilt, I shall bring a sin offering.” 

“After we finish this Mishnah, I want to keep reading by candlelight,” Matan tells me. I warn him that it’s dangerous – what if he falls asleep with the candle still burning? “I won’t fall asleep, I’m sure of it,” he tells me, and I remind him of Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha’s overconfident self-assurance. God forbid an accident should happen, I warn him, trying not to think of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre. “I don’t want you to regret it and say, ‘How great are the words of my mother, who said not to read by candlelight!” 

In the continuation of the mishnah, we learn that school children are permitted to read by candlelight on Shabbat if they are sitting and studying with their teacher, because their teacher will make sure they don’t tilt the candle. The Babylonian Talmud explains that the fear instilled by their teacher will prevent them from tilting inadvertently. The Palestinian Talmud offers a different explanation: There is no concern that the students will tilt the candle because they want it to go out anyway, so that they can get a break from their studies. Matan can understand that. “If I were doing my math homework by candlelight, I’d be really happy if the candle went out. But if I’m reading Harry Potter, then yeah, I might tilt the candle to get more light.”  

Before I leave Matan’s bedroom that evening, I make sure to take the candle with me. “How do you know I won’t conjure a candle after you leave?” he asks me. I tell him that he had better not conjure a candle on Shabbat, because it would definitely be muktzeh – if the candle didn’t even exist before Shabbat, it would fall into the category of nolad—something born or created on Shabbat which therefore could not possibly have been designated in advance for use on Shabbat before Shabbat. “In any case, don’t conjure any candles in your bedroom at night – it’s too dangerous,” I warn him, taking the magic wand from his nightstand, where he’s kept it ever since he began reading Harry Potter. Fortunately Matan is much better at science than at magic, but I’m not taking any chances.

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Just before Shalvi turns five, I ask her what she would like for a birthday present. She tells me that she wants “either a dancing unicorn or a Sefer Torah,” and I can only laugh. The dancing unicorn was actually a gift her twin sisters received two years earlier from my mother-in-law – the furry stuffed animal, equipped with a set of double A batteries, dances and sings a repetitive song about prancing on rainbows when the button on its horn is pushed. The song drove me crazy, especially because I was forever knocking the button inadvertently when cleaning up the kids’ stuffed animals or tripping over their toys. At some point I conveniently “lost” the stuffed unicorn – I gave it away along with some clothing the girls had outgrown, hoping they wouldn’t notice. Unfortunately they had not forgotten, and Shalvi was still asking for a new stuffed unicorn to replace the one that had disappeared somewhere over the rainbow, to my relief and my daughters’ consternation. Needless to say, there is no way I am going to buy her a new stuffed unicorn.

            A Sefer Torah, on the other hand, is a different story. We own many printed editions of the Five Books of Moses, but Shalvi was asking for a Torah scroll – long sheets of parchment handwritten with ink from a quill, wrapped around two wooden rollers, often encased in a velvet mantle with an ornate crown and other ornaments. A proper Torah scroll—one fit for ritual use—costs several tens of thousands of dollars, but as I learned from a bit of googling, it is possible to buy a “toy” scroll that contains the entire Five Books of Moses computer-printed on a long sheet of white paper wrapped around lightweight wooden rollers with a faux-velvet mantle, and metallic ornamentation. Confronted with the choice between a dancing unicorn and a Torah scroll—between a golden calf and the Ten Commandments—there was no doubt in my mind about what I would give Shalvi for her birthday.

            I ordered a toy Torah scroll from a Judaica shop in Geula, a religious neighborhood in northern Jerusalem. It arrived a couple of weeks later, just in time for Shalvi’s birthday. When we unfurled the scroll, we were surprised to discover that the Torah scroll was printed with vocalization and cantillation marks – a series of dots, lines, and symbols written above and below the letters to indicate how the words of the Torah are meant to be pronounced and chanted. While printed books of the Bible are generally written with these notations, a proper Torah scroll contains only the Hebrew letters – the reader who chants from the scroll in synagogue must have already learned and memorized how to pronounce and chant all the words. My kids were excited to discover that it was so much easier to read from Shalvi’s birthday scroll than they had anticipated – they didn’t have to learn and memorize the words, but could simply sound them out. They could take it out of its “ark” – the top shelf of our playroom closet—on Shabbat and conduct their own Torah service, parading the Torah and calling up one another to take turns reading from it. This Torah scroll, legible and accessible to my early readers, was truly their own.

            Five hundred years ago, the chief rabbi of Egypt—Rabbi David ben Solomon ibn Zimri, also known as the Radbaz—was asked a question about why a Torah scroll must be written without vowels and cantillation marks. According to tractate Sofrim, an ancient rabbinic work dating back to the eighth century, it is forbidden to ritually chant in synagogue from any scroll that contains such notations. Why not, the Radbaz was asked? After all, it would be so much easier to chant from a Torah scroll without error if only the reader did not have to commit so much to memory. Moreover, the vocalization and cantillation are aids in understanding the meaning of the Torah, and according to the traditional understanding, they were conveyed by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Why omit these explanatory aids from the Torah scroll?

            The Radbaz responded by invoking a midrash from the Talmud (Shabbat 88b) about the revelation on Mount Sinai. The midrash teaches that when Moses when up on Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, the angels in heaven bristled suspiciously: What business had a flesh-and-blood human being in ascending to the heavens? God instructed Moses to field the angels’ question, and Moses explained that the Torah simply wasn’t relevant for them. “The Torah teaches not to murder – is there murder among you angels?” Moses asked. “Do you have a father and mother to honor? Do you have business that would make you swear falsely?” The angels, upon hearing, Moses’ response, realized that in fact it was they who had no business receiving the Torah, and praised God’s rightfulness and majesty in giving the Torah to humanity.

            The Radbaz goes on to explain that this answer is not entirely satisfying, because in fact there are two ways of reading the Torah, one that is appropriate for the angels in the heaven, and one that is appropriate for human beings on earth, as Nachmanides also taught. The angelic Torah is printed not just without vowels and cantillation marks, but also without spaces between the words, because the angels read the entirety of the Torah as the names of God. The Torah given to human beings, however, contains spaces between the words, and we parse the Torah such that it teaches about permitted and forbidden behavior, purity and impurity, and the rest of the laws. The angelic Torah and the human Torah contain the same letters, but they signify very different truths.

The Torah is thus like the DNA code in which, as we know from molecular biology, the sequence of nucleotides is broken into three-nucleotide units known as codons, which translate into various amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Depending on how one parses the nucleotides—where the first codon starts—one can come up with completely different amino acid sequences, and thus entirely different proteins. To combine the insights of molecular biology and Nachmanides, the angelic nucleotide sequence would look something like UAGCGCACG, whereas the human sequence instead looks like UAG CGC ACG. Neither sequence contains vowels or cantillation marks, because even the human Torah with its spaces between the words nonetheless lends itself to multiple interpretations depending on how the words are parsed and pronounced once they are infused with human breath and spoken aloud. When human beings speak words of Torah aloud, we breathe life into the inert text on a page, just as God breathed life into Adam to make him a living being. Creation and revelation are parallel: Human beings infuse God’s Torah with meaning, rendering it a tree of life, in much the same way as God created humanity in the garden.

There are an infinite number of ways of reading and understanding the Torah – no two people read the text in exactly the same way, and no one person reads the text the same way at different points in his or her life. There are always new meanings to be deciphered, new insights to be gleaned. It is for this reason that a Torah scroll is written without vowels and punctuation. As the Radbaz teaches, “If one adds vowels and punctuation to a Torah scroll, one gives it boundary and measure… However, because a Torah scroll contains all kinds of perfection and in every word hangs heaps and heaps, we do not add vowles so that it can be interpreted in all different kinds of perfection.” My children’s Torah scroll is easier to read – there is no doubt about that. But it is also more limited in its possibilities. Each word can only be pronounced and read in one way. For now, that’s not a bad thing – they are still working at sounding out the words and making meaning. But with time, I hope that the Torah’s dots and lines will fly up to the heavens, leaving them with the infinite Torah to read and parse and infuse with their own creative insights.

My son who is two is obsessed with construction. Each Friday morning, when his day care is closed but his siblings are in school, we set out for a walk and rarely get far; inevitably he insists that we stop to watch the first construction site we come across. He is mesmerized by the workers in hard hats digging out an elevator shaft, throwing debris down a long chute made of plastic garbage cans held together by chains. “Oh look!” he turns to me when he spots a worker up on the roof. “So high! So high!” I want us to keep walking—we were on our way to buy challah, or deliver cookies to a friend, or run one of our other pre-Shabbat errands—but alas, no. Yitzvi wants to watch until the building is finished – until the elevator shaft is completed, and another story is added on to the apartment complex. He sits upright in his stroller, riveted; I am standing behind him, leaning on the handles as I read the novel I brought with me in my shoulder bag, losing myself in my book as he watches the erection of scaffolding and the pouring of concrete.

Yitzvi cannot see me as I stand behind his stroller reading, but passersby will often glance at the two of us and smile in amusement. I always feel somewhat sheepish; is this really any better than parking my son in front of a television set? That night in bed, I will read him The Children’s Encyclopedia of Trucks, or Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site, feigning interest as he excitedly identifies the bulldozer, the dump truck, the cherry picker, and the crane. These are not the books I would have chosen—I prefer interpersonal drama to the taxonomy of motor vehicles—but I try to enter his world, to speak in his terms, to smile as he pretends his arm is the boom of an excavator that he is slowly lowering into his lap.

The next day, on Shabbat, we are all home in the afternoon reading on the couch and playing games on the floor. Yitzvi, as usual, is trying to build a tower out of wooden blocks, convinced he can add yet another story without the entire structure toppling. He is happy for his sisters to help, but only if they share his single-minded focus on building the tallest tower possible; when Liav tries to add wooden trees from our Brillo train set and Fisher Price people to one of the lower stories, he pushes her away. “No people! No trees!” Shalvi adds another layer of blocks on top and Yitzvi eyes her suspiciously; if her block makes the tower crumble, he will lunge at her in anger. “It’s Yitzvi’s tower,” he tells us all, in case we have any doubts – not just that the structure is his, but also that we all must call it by his name.

In the book of Genesis, the story of Noah’s flood is followed by an account of an ambitious, if misguided, construction project. The builders of the Tower of Babel wish to reach all the way to the heavens and to make their name great: “Come let us make a city and a tower with its top to the skies, to make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). The Babel builders, who all speak “the same language and the same words,” are united in their goal of building the highest tower possible; anyone who does not further their goal is dismissed as irrelevant. The midrash teaches that if one of the workers fell from the tower and died, the other builders would not even notice him; but if a brick fell to the ground, they would weep over the loss (Pirkei d’ Rabbi Eliezer 24). At Babel, the project mattered more than the people.

Essentially the Babel builders were like toddlers, insistent that everyone speak their language and share in their goal. My son with his blocks lacks the sophisticated vocabulary or the open-mindedness to engage with his older sister when she tells him, “We can take the little people and put one on every story of the building, and then the tower will have color and look nicer, and the people can play with each other – they can be a whole family.” He shakes his head vehemently. “No people!” he exclaims indignantly, and with an angry flick of his arm, the freckled Fisher Price boy with the red baseball cap is precipitously plunged three stories down to the floor. “No! no! No!” he insists, his already-limited toddler vocabulary contracting into this single angry word.

The Babel builders, in spite of their goal of making a name for themselves, remain anonymous – we don’t hear the name of a single one of them. It is only in the next chapter of the book of Genesis, with the introduction of Abraham’s family, that the characters become individuated. God promises Abraham, “I will make your name great” – unlike the Babel builders, Abraham’s name will be known and remembered. The story of Abraham and his descendants will continue throughout the rest of the book of Genesis, unlike the story of the Babel builders, which ends when their tower collapses.

On the floor of our living room, my son’s tower sways precariously as he tries and fails to add another story. “No! No! No!” he cries, the same language and the same word, again and again. I crouch on the floor amidst the scattered blocks and try to explain, speaking his language, how this story might go on.

It was the first week of school in Israel, and as I left my son’s preschool classroom, I could hear him calling after me tearfully through the window, “Don’t leave me, don’t go, Ima. Stay. Stay with me! Don’t go!” There were many other three-year-olds crying that morning – in his preschool, and in preschools nationwide, but as I exited the gate of the schoolyard with a heavy heart, it was his voice that continued to echo in my ears. I had walked less than a block down the busy Jerusalem street when suddenly I heard the long blast of the Shofar, the ram’s horn blown every morning throughout the Hebrew month of Elul and on the High Holidays that follow. The street light changed and the traffic slowed, and in the ensuing moment of stillness, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing – was it the echo of the Shofar, or the echo of my son’s cries?

The rabbis of the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 33b) draw an explicit analogy between the sound of the Shofar and the sound of crying, based on a verse from the Torah: “It shall be a day of sounding [Terua] for you” (Numbers 29:1). They explain the sound of the Terua by reference to another verse in the book of Judges, in which the mother of Sisera, the enemy general, looks out her window anxiously anticipating her son’s return from battle: “Through the window the mother of Sisera peered out and wailed: ‘Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why so late, the clatter of his wheels?’” The Shofar, we are taught, is supposed to sound like the cries of Sisera’s mother pining for her son. I imagine my son still peering through the window and hoping I’ll come back, and it is as if every Shofar in the city is being sounded at once, in comfort and commiseration.

My son knows that I will come back to pick him up in the afternoon. I told him that over and over on our walk to school this morning, and countless times over the last week. I know he is internalizing my words because yesterday, I heard him playing on the floor with his wooden train set and repeating to himself, “I always come back. I always come back” – his own version of Freud’s Fort Da game, in which the child spools and unspools the threat to enact his mother’s absence and return. But perhaps he believes me only insofar as Isaac believed Abraham when he heard his father say to the lads who had accompanied them to Mount Moriah, “You stay here with the donkey, and I and the boy will go up and worship and then come back to you” (Genesis 22:5). Even Abraham couldn’t possibly have known with certainty that both he and Isaac would come back. In the liturgy of the penitential prayers for the high holidays, we refer repeatedly to Pachad Yitzchak – the fear of Isaac as he lay trembling on the altar, his father poised with the knife just before Abraham hears a voice that causes him to retract and come back. Is this the terror my son feels – the terror that perhaps I won’t come back after all?

According to the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 16a), the shofar must come from the horn of a ram so as to remind God of the binding of Isaac. Just as Abraham was about to slaughter his son, a voice called out and told him to withdraw his arm, and then, at that very moment, a ram appeared in the thicket. The rabbis imagine God instructing the people, “Sound the Shofar made from a ram’s horn before me, so that I will remember the binding of Isaac, and I will ascribe it to you as if you had bound yourself before me.” In the morning, when I lead my son to preschool knowing that he will scream in protest when we get there, I try to distract him so he agrees to keep walking. “Look, I see a garbage truck up ahead, let’s go catch up with it,” I tell him, or, “Let’s race to the next bus stop.” But he is too smart for my tricks.

“Are we going to Gan?” he asks suspiciously, and I am reminded of Isaac’s question to Abraham on the walk to Mount Moriah: “Father, here are the firestone and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” (Genesis 22:7). My son, too, knows that something is amiss. As I replay those moments of duplicity later in the day, I tell myself that like Abraham, I am driven by the faith that I am doing the right thing after all, my son’s protestations notwithstanding. And yet my heart, like his, is so heavy. God does not need to ascribe it to us as if we had bound ourselves. It feels like we’ve actually done it.

That same penitential prayer in which we refer to the “fear of Isaac” also refers to “the stronghold of the mothers.” Each of these phrases is followed by a refrain – Aneinu, answer us. “Fear of Isaac, answer us. Stronghold of the mothers, answer us.” I realize that both my tearful son and his heavy-hearted mother are voicing the same prayer. Answer us. Please, God. Answer us. In this season of repentance and return, please God, come back.

Throughout the month of Elul, it is traditional to conclude our prayers with Psalm 27, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” The psalmist places trust in God when all alone in the world: “Though my father and mother have left me, the Lord will gather me up.” In the afternoon, when I come to pick up my son, he is no longer peering forlornly through the window, listening for the clatter of the stroller wheels. Instead he is playing on the carpet with plastic farm animals, and in his hand is a Fisher Price ram. When I kneel beside him, he is neither excited nor surprised to see me, because deep down, he knew it all along: I always come back.

Around the time my daughter began studying the book of Genesis in preschool, my toddler son became obsessed with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He goes through phases with books, and right now, this is the only book he wants to read, all day long – by the light of the moon or the light of the sun, when hungry or after a snack of two pears, when wrapped up in the cocoon of his favorite blanket at bedtime or when spreading his wings to flit about the park. “Hung-ee catapilla, hung-ee catapilla,” he insists, his appetite for the book insatiable.

Meanwhile, his sister is learning about the creation of the world – how God began with the earth unformed and void, and then filled the world with the sun, the moon, the trees and grasses, the fish and birds and cattle and human beings, before finally God rested. Shalvi wants me to read it all to her from the illustrated children’s Bible we have on our shelf. She takes down the book and thrusts it into my lap, on top of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in its board book version. “Hung-ee, hung-ee,” Yitzvi insists, dropping the illustrated Bible to the floor. He doesn’t know how to win out over his sister, but he delights in shutting her book and witnessing her frustration.

I look at Shalvi sympathetically. She’s going to have to read her book to herself, or wait patiently for one more Hungry Caterpillar rendition. She sighs with visible annoyance as I begin with the egg on the leaf on the book’s opening page. I am reading the book to my son – he is the one who points to all the pictures and determines the pace at which I turn the pages. But I’m trying, this time, to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar through my daughter’s eyes, as she holds the illustrated Bible in her lap and waits patiently for her world to begin.

At first the world is just darkness and potentiality – a tiny egg in a dark world illuminated only by moonlight. This is the darkness of the start of creation, when the world is still unformed and God creates light, but life has not yet emerged. And then there is a sun, and the first creepy crawly things appear, and “pop” – the caterpillar emerges. On each subsequent day, the caterpillar eats more than the day before, and the pages unfold as a series of flaps that grow wider and wider – one apple, two pears, three plums… Each day follows the same formula: The caterpillar eats, but he is still—I draw out the final “l,” then pause and look at Yitzvi. “Hung-ee,” he concludes. In the book of Genesis, each day of creation is narrated with the same repetitive formula: “God said ‘Let there be’… And it was so… God saw it was good… And there was evening and morning.” I can imagine a children’s Bible in which each day of creation appears as an increasingly wider flap: Narrow for the light and darkness, a bit wider for the firmament, wider for the creepy-crawly things, still wider for the sun and moon, nearly a whole page for all the animals. Each day, God creates more and more, but the world is still incomplete. The caterpillar is still hungry.

On the sixth day of the caterpillar’s life, his appetite peaks. Over the course of a full-color two-page spread, the caterpillar eats every kind of food – cake, ice cream, cheese, salami, candy, pie. This explosion of bounty has its parallel on the sixth day of creation, when God makes “every kind of living creature, cattle, creeping things, and wild beasts of every kind,” as well as man, created in God’s image. God charges the man and woman to be fertile and multiply and to fill the earth. But the tiny caterpillar in the bottom right-hand corner of the page is full already. He has a stomachache, and can’t possibly eat another bite.

Then comes a period of waiting, of dormancy, of sitting still and holding tight. God sees all that He has made, and finds it very good. And the heaven and earth are completed, in all their array. What is left for the seventh day of the week? The caterpillar builds his cocoon and remains inside for two weeks. It seems as if nothing is happening. The cocoon is large and brown and it fills the whole page – for the first time, we don’t see the caterpillar anymore, with his smile and big green eyes. This is a period of resting, of desisting from labor, of not doing anything at all. This is Shabbat, the day of rest, when we are supposed to imitate God and desist from the work of creation.

We think on Shabbat that nothing is happening. We think that when we stop creating, nothing new will emerge. What could possibly come of resting and staying put, holed up in the cocoons of our homes? Quite a lot, apparently. At the end of the book, when the caterpillar emerges from that cocoon, he is a beautiful butterfly, his dazzling multi-colored wings spread across two facing pages. All that time he was in that cocoon, when it seemed like nothing was happening, new cells were forming rapidly, increasingly and multiplying so that the butterfly might spread its wings and fill the earth.

“Again, again,” Yitzvi insists when we turn the final page, and I know he’s going to give me trouble if I try to read his sister’s book. “Yitzvi,” I say to him calmly, in my most assertive voice. “It’s Shalvi’s turn now. You can listen to her story, and then we’ll read the Hungry Caterpillar again.” He lowers himself to the floor and jumps up and down, preparing for a tantrum. But then Shalvi surprises me.

“It’s OK,” she says, and I can’t believe I’ve heard her correctly. “You can keep reading to Yitzvi. I can look at the pictures of my book for now, and then you can read to me later.” I have never known Shalvi to cede so graciously to her younger brother – usually she competes with him fiercely for my attention. Whence this newfound maturity? How did I miss this transformation? I notice that her brightly colored sweater is getting too small — this might be the last time she wears it. She flies off the couch and alights on the armchair beside me as her squirmy brother crawls back into my lap to hear his story again.
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Sometimes I think I can’t bear it anymore. How many times can I read the same story over and over again? I know The Very Hungry Caterpillar by heart, and Yitzvi can complete every line, so we read the book responsively. I chant the book in a tune that has become familiar to us both, pausing each time in the same places: “By the light of the—.” I pause, and Yitzvi bobs his head excitedly: “Moon!” I go on: “A little egg lay on a—.” Again, I pause, and Yitzvi immediately chimes in: “Leaf!” We read through the entire book as a call-and-response, as if I am the prayer leader and he is the congregation’s most vocal member.

Prayer has never come easy for me, and when I read the same picture books again and again, I begin to understand why. The traditional Jewish liturgy is largely fixed and unvarying, with the same prayers recited every day of the week, and additional prayers for the Sabbath. The challenge of prayer is to find meaning in reciting the same words day after day. Our prayers are not supposed to be rote; we are supposed to pray to God from the fullness of our hearts, bringing our fears and hopes to bear. How is this possible when each day we open to the same page and begin with the very same words thanking God for the gift of waking up in the morning: “I am grateful to You, O living and sustaining King, for restoring my soul to my body.”

I try to pay attention to how the words speak to me differently today, in this time, in this place. Why am I especially grateful to have woken up today of all days? Was there reason to think I might not have woken up on this particular morning? Ideally the liturgy becomes a script we act out, each time infusing the words with new resonance, new significance, a new emotional valence. “Lord, guard my lips from evil and my tongue from lies. Help me ignore those who slander me.” What are the evil lies I am concerned about speaking on this particular day? Who might wish to slander me, and why? The liturgy prompts the same questions in me day after day, but my responses are rarely the same.

And yet the purpose of prayer is not to arrive at the answers to these questions; our responses are just a means of forging a deeper connection with the One to whom we are praying. The rabbis of the Talmud (Berachot 26b) credit the forefathers in the book of Genesis –Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—with the establishment of the daily prayer services. Abraham instituted the morning prayer when he prayed on behalf of Sodom; Isaac instituted the afternoon prayer when he went out to the field in the late afternoon; and Jacob instituted the evening prayer when he dreamt of a ladder of angels. None of these individuals was reciting a of fixed liturgy; they were talking to God. In its most fundamental sense, prayer was, and is, a means of communication. The point is not the words spoken or the text recited, but the connection forged.

When I re-read the same board books and struggle not to get too bored, I challenge myself to view the fixed, unvarying text as a springboard for connection. I look into my son’s animated eyes as we come to his favorite page, on which the caterpillar eats the cake and the ice cream and the pickle, etc., and each time, unfailingly, “He was still hungry.” Yitzvi never gets bored. He is delighted each time anew. The phrase “His graciousness endures forever” repeats twenty-five times in Psalm 136, which is recited every morning. I marvel to think that God’s patience could be as enduring as God’s graciousness. Does God never tire of our prayers? Is God still hungry for more?

The Talmudic rabbis note that although grass was created on the third day of creation, it did not emerge from the earth until the sixth day, when we are told, at least initially, that “no shrub of the field was yet on the earth” (2:5). The rabbis explain that for three days, the grass stood poised beneath the surface of the earth, waiting to grow until Adam came and prayed for it to emerge. According to the Talmud, “God desires the prayers of the righteous” (Hullin 60b), and thus aspects of the creation of the world were contingent upon human prayer. Likewise, albeit more problematically, the Talmud teaches that the reason the patriarchs and matriarchs were infertile is because, again, “God desires the prayer of the righteous” (Yevamot 64a). God created an imperfect world so that human beings would have reason to reach out to God in prayer.

If only we could recite our prayers with the same eagerness and devotion with which God receives them. If only I could read to my child with the same excitement the words seem to awaken within him. “Again, again!” Yitzvi insists each time we turn the final page. No sooner has the caterpillar become a beautiful butterfly than Yitzvi wants to turn back time, starting all over with the egg on the leaf. I summon my patience and endurance and return to the first page, to the beginning of Genesis, creating the world anew.