Friday, June 7th, 2024

I once spoke about this from the bimah, but I can’t seem to get this out of my head so I’m sharing it in my blog:

When I was an undergrad at Columbia University (a very different Columbia from what today’s Jewish students are experiencing) I studied music and Hebrew literature. In Hebrew Lit, we read modern Israeli novels, classic Hebrew poetry, and the Torah. At first, the idea of reading the Torah intimidated me as the others in class had stronger formal Jewish education backgrounds than I.  But someone told me to simply approach the Torah as literature and I’d be okay. So I did. And I was.

In every piece of writing, I genuinely enjoyed the subtlety and shading of the language, the different use of words that are often translated in many ways. There was one lesson which I never completely understood until October 7th of this year. (Stay with me here, even if you don’t speak Hebrew and even if you haven’t studied Torah. This is really quite fascinating.):

When the Torah talks about Ishmael, Abraham’s child with Hagar, the son who would be the father of all Arabs, the Torah calls him “Pereh Adam,” which is generally translated as a “wild man”.  In fact, that’s not exactly right, it’s sort of backwards. If you pay attention to nouns and verbs, the Torah’s literal translation calls Ishmael essentially “wildness in a man” or “wildness personified.”  He is not a man who is wild.  He is wildness itself. Wildness in the shape of a man.

When I read this a million years ago as an undergraduate, I thought it was such a poetic use of the language. On October 7th, however, I finally understood that, sadly, it was a lot more than mere poetry. The members of Hamas – ultimately descendants of Ishmael – are not human.  They are wildness. They are pandemonium, turmoil, roughness. We witnessed it on October 7th.

I have nothing more to say about this barbaric Hamas wildness that I haven’t already ranted about. But, I will add now, on this Shabbat before Shavuot, the time that the Torah was given to us, that we should adopt this idea of personifying the values for which we stand. If we are kind, let us become Kindness personified.  If we are generous, let us become Generosity personified.  Let our human form merely be there to encompass all of the goodness and chesed that we believe it. While the choas is spreading around us, let us remember that we are the light, shining the way to Tikun Olam, repairing the world. 

Am Yisrael Chai!