Cochlear Implant Update #1

 

Today, Friday, exactly a month after the “installation” of my cochlear implant, my audiologist flipped on the transmitter and I’ll spend the next six months or so training my brain to integrate two distinct streams of auditory information. This evening at services will be the first time you’ll have an opportunity to see me in my new “cyborg” status. 

Meditations on Music and Prayer during the COVID-19 Crisis

Meditations on Music and Prayer during the COVID-19 Crisis

A few weeks back, in one of our first forays into on-line Torah study, Petra Joseph spoke about the centrality of animal sacrifice in our tradition and wondered how one could pray for the reestablishment of Temple and the Sacrificial Cult. I recall that we had a good conversation, but for me it felt unfinished: I had not been able to convey effectively the notion that in prayer, the specific words we utter might not matter nearly as much as the intention and emotion we place on them. This slippage between the literal and the emotional is among the reasons I tend towards singing rather than declamation when I lead services.

At around the same time, a friend and colleague, Rabbi Lior Nevo, who is the Chaplain at the Jack Satter House in Revere, texted me to ask if I would like to meet her, her family, and some other families in the courtyard of the Cohen Residences (112 Centre Street) in Brookline, one of the buildings where I serve as Chaplain. Lior lives nearby and had the idea of putting on an outdoor concert for the residents of the building. I would play my guitar and lead the group in a couple of songs. I suggested “This Land is Your Land” and “Down by the Riverside.” She suggested “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Lior’s daughter brought her ukulele. A crowd of about 15 people, all standing 6 or more feet apart, serenaded first one and then the other side of the building. The response was overwhelming. Residents opened their windows despite the chill, danced, and sang along. One woman made signs: “Thank You” and “God Bless You”; through her open window she yelled, “You’ve saved my life!” Somehow, in that brief singalong, the coronavirus spell that had kept us all so separate evaporated and we were together again. 

Soon we were making plans for more concerts (so far I have participated in 4, although there have been many more, as well as dance parties with a dj, without me). The next one was at Jack Satter House in Revere, which was among the hot spots for COVID cases in Eastern Massachusetts. Residents were quarantined in their rooms; staff and volunteers were (and still are) making daily phone calls to check on people’s health and, in a few cases, to let them vent their frustrations with sheltering at home; and in general morale was low. The songs were largely the same, although I brought one of the favorites from my in-person sing-alongs at Cohen: “Bye Bye Love.” As it was in Brookline, the response in Revere was ecstatic. This time, staff came out to sing and dance along and to yell greetings to the residents they had not seen for what felt like a long while (note that it was a month ago). Again residents made signs and stuck them in their windows, so staff responded by making signs of their own. Lior described the effect of this concert as the transformational--the mood in the building shifted from shock and horror to determined solidarity. The worst had not yet come--in all, 11 JSH residents would die among the 23 who contracted the illness--but there was a new sense that the community would survive even if too many of its members would not. 

Amid all of this joy there was an odd moment. After we had played a rollicking version of  “Bye Bye Love” one, Lior and another of my colleagues balked at repeating it. Why? Is it not just an anodyne rock’n roll song? On the contrary, they declared it morbid; “why are we singing about loneliness and saying ‘I feel like I could die’?” I deferred to them and we broke into “You Are My Sunshine.” Or I should say that they broke into it, because I could not grasp the strain to play it on the guitar. Standing aside for a moment allowed me to ponder the words: “If you leave me and love another, You’ll regret it all someday”; and later: “I always loved you and made you happy, and nothing else could come between, but now you’ve left me to love another, you have shattered all my dreams.” “How is this any better?” I thought. And how odd that this song is a favorite lullaby of American parents everywhere--as though they want to signal to their children early on that any attempt at independence will lead to regret and heartbreak. 

In both cases, the objections are reasonable. They are also beside the point. “Bye Bye Love” is a glorious break-up song: we’re singing about emptiness and loss, but we’re doing so to a beat that makes it clear that life is far from over: we’re going out dancing! And although “You Are My Sunshine” is an anthem to passive-aggression, we sing it with a tenderness that transforms the weirdly twisted words into a paean to familial love. Both of these emotions--joyous determination to carry on in the face of death and deep love between the generations--were central to the power of these concerts, so really we couldn’t do without either of the songs. 

That said, Lior, who grew up in Israel and is not familiar with American “oldies,” has a hard time with the strangeness of “Bye Bye Love.” And although I can’t count the number of times I sang “You Are My Sunshine” to my children and later to older people in my care, I can’t quite shake the incongruence of the words and music. This incongruence, I think, lies at the heart of much of the strangeness of prayer, especially with texts whose explicit content--like those concerning animal sacrifice--seems incompatible with what we would really like to say. But if we focus on the fact that so much of what we say is in how and why we are saying it (or, preferably, singing it while dancing), we might find our way into those texts and, eventually perhaps, figure out what we mean when we sing them.

The Todah Offering in a Dark Time

The Todah Offering in a Dark Time - Parashat Tzav

This piece was published in Hebrew College's blog "70 Faces of Torah" on April 1, 2020

For someone in my field of geriatric chaplaincy, this difficult moment of social distancing is fraught with a painful irony. A significant portion of my job involves reducing the social isolation of the older people in my communities by engaging them not only with one another but also with the general public, to foster face-to-face relationships between residents and younger people in the context of shared meals, religious services, and learning opportunities. 

Now, of course, we are encouraging people to stay apart, to remain isolated in their apartments. My institution in Boston, Hebrew SeniorLife, like most other senior housing and care facilities, has closed its doors to visitors and volunteers, including family members of patients and residents. This guidance cuts so squarely against the grain of our usual instincts, but it also can represent the difference between life and death.

Death now seems so prevalent, so present in our lives, lurking ever more palpably in the spaces I inhabit, just as the season turns us towards life, towards the rebirth of Spring and the joy of Passover. The fear is real, and the prospect of thousands of deaths resonates, as many commentators have suggested, with the plagues in the land of Egypt during the Exodus. Somehow we seem to be playing the role of the Egyptians this year in addition to our usual role as Israelites. The verse “...there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was no house where there was not a corpse” (Exodus 20:30) carries particular force in a community struggling with this pandemic.

On this Shabbat HaGadol (the Shabbat before Passover) we will read Parashat Tzav, which includes the procedure for the Todah (Thanksgiving or Acknowledgement) offering, a particular form of Zevah Sh’lamim (Offering of Well-being or of Peace). This Todah offering is voluntary rather than obligatory, and like the Pesach offering (but unlike all other sacrifices), it needs to be eaten immediately--no leftovers can remain until the next day (See Leviticus 7:11-15; cf Leviticus 22:29-30). According to the Talmud, Rav Yehuda said that Rav said that there are four categories of people who need to offer Todah: seafarers who have made land, travellers in the wilderness who have reached their destinations, people who have recovered from illness, and prisoners released from captivity (b. Berakhot 54b). In this Talmudic context, we learn that in addition to an offering, such a person must also recite birkat gomel--the blessing that expresses our gratitude for God’s deliverance--before a minyan, as it says: “Let them exalt God before the congregation of the people” (Psalm 107:32). Today people bench gomel (the Yiddish expression is more common than the Hebrew) in the context of an Aliyah to the Torah.

These days, however, we as a society find ourselves deep in the wilderness; many are sick; even more are captives of a sort, isolated in their homes. The irony of celebrating Passover in a season of death is compounded by the recognition that for so many of us, there is apparently no cause for a Todah offering--as I write, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has extended the closure of non-essential businesses until the beginning of May and the death toll keeps rising. There is no end in sight quite yet. 

But even amid this darkness, two details of the Todah stand out. First, it must be eaten and enjoyed on the day that it is offered. In his comment to Leviticus 7:15, Haamek Davar says the reason is that the Todah should be celebrated with a single party with a lot of people--to make sure that the person making the offering has an ample audience to hear their story of God’s saving power. We can extrapolate from this explanation that the rule on Passover is similar: we do not leave any leftovers to make sure we invite as many people as we can accommodate: “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” says the Haggadah. 

Second, it is a voluntary rather than an obligatory offering, and in pointing that out in his comment on Leviticus 22:29, Haamek Davar continues by saying that “A person can bring [a Todah] any day.” It’s not limited to a holiday, so in theory one could bring it every day. Indeed, according to the Chidushei haRim (as cited in Etz Hayim), each day brings its own miracle, so we should celebrate each day’s miracles on the day they happen.

Amidst the darkness of this plague shine the myriad daily miracles contained in the actions of my colleagues here at Hebrew SeniorLife and of other essential workers across the country and the world. HSL’s Director of Culinary & Nutrition glowed with pride as he spoke about his team stepping up in this crisis: “They want to be here; they want to support our patients.” In response to the first deaths from COVID-19 at one of our facilities, the Jack Satter House in the hard-hit town of Revere, MA, employees from across the organization have teamed up to make a daily phone call to every resident, all in quarantine, to check to see if they have begun to exhibit symptoms and to make sure they have everything they need. As a Russian speaker, I was asked to call the handful of residents at Satter from the former Soviet Union. One of these people is on a very limited diet and thus couldn’t eat the limited selection of groceries currently available for delivery. When I alerted the team to this need, the chef at Satter arranged to special order and deliver appropriate products, including walnuts and sweet potatoes because, as he wrote in an email to me, “she prefers them.” When I spoke to the resident yesterday, her relief was as palpable through the phone as her distress was a few days before: “Ya tak blagodarna,” she kept repeating, “I am so grateful.”

Stories like this abound, and we must recount them and celebrate them even as we mourn our dead and continue to care for the living. Although it’s much too early to bench gomel (to give thanks for having survived a crisis), there is already so much for which we need to offer our gratitude.

Rock and Roll at the Deathbed - February 2020

At Izzy’s deathbed, I began with “Elecho,” I cry out to you, words from Psalm 30 calling from the depths, hoping for God’s renewed presence. The melody is haunting, pleading as it rises and falls on “Adonai be a help for me.” It hooks the heart, even as it cracks my voice. 

Izzy, it was clear to me, was dying, although it was also clear that Evie, his wife, was still hoping that he would hang on. The signs were there--the wasting limbs, the faded voice, the shallow breath--but she had remarked that he looked so much better than he had at the rehab earlier in the week.

The phone rang. It was a granddaughter, one of the beautiful young women whose portraits crowded the table next to the hospital bed. Evie said, “Our rabbi is here--one of our rabbis, the singing one. He’s brought his guitar and is praying with us. Rabbi, say hello to Ayelet.” Obediently, I took the phone and greeted her., asking where she was studying and letting her know how fond I was of  her grandfather. When I handed the phone back, Evie told her she would call her back when I had left.

What to sing next? My hand turned pages and found “Hard Times,” the Stephen Foster classic I had learned from a Bob Dylan record. A kind of secular prayer, it acknowledges that hard times are indeed upon us, and orders that “Hard times come again no more” and that they should stop “hanging around my cabin door.” But we know that it’s hopeless to insist, that hard times have arrived and are unlikely to pass in this 72-year-long marriage--a marriage that only death could do part. It was a magical love in which Izzy’s only substantive complaint on his deathbed was that the couple had married only in September when the wedding could have been in July: they had wasted two whole months of conjugal bliss. 

Imagine--from my perspective as a person who couldn’t make his marriage last past its twentieth year--that after 72 years of marriage, they wanted more. And given that likely there wouldn’t be more in the future, they were content to imagine that they could have had more even before they did get married. This overwhelming desire for her husband troubled Evie. Her son had admonished her: it’s not fair to ask him to stay any longer, because he can’t. But it was still so hard for her to acknowledge that the end was finally here. She could not accept it. 

“Well, what if both are true?” I suggested. “Perhaps you can tell him that you want him to stay but that you know that it’s impossible.” People so often struggle to hold such contradictory truths in their minds at one time, but Evie’s heart seemed to take over and she knew that both were true. But that was a day later, when he was no longer talking, just breathing, presumably hearing, his mouth open into a jagged rectangle, his unshaven chin bristling in a way I had never seen, even in rehab. The day before, the day with the guitar, he was still communicating. To my chaplain’s eye, he was already actively dying, but the nurse had not yet been there to make that determination. And to communicate it to Evie. Neither of those things falls into my purview.

So after “Hard Times”--”tis the song, the sigh of the weary,” what would I play next? Clearly, the time had come for a prayer--a formal Jewish prayer rather than a secular one. The obvious choice was the vidui, a prayer that offers the dying person an opportunity to acknowledge that they’ve made mistakes--or, in the common parlance of received religion, that they’ve sinned--in their life and that this is a final opportunity to pray for atonement. I sensed that even if Izzy was ready for this prayer, Evie was not, so I hesitated, which allowed her to suggest that I sing the Mi Shebeirakh, the blessing for healing that we so often offer at a sick person’s bedside. Evie, still recovering from a fall that fractured her hip and left her in terrible pain, very much needed a Mi Shebeirakh. She loved in particular the beautiful version by Debbie Friedman that we had sung the week before, when she still hoped that Izzy would bounce back. 

But today Izzy shook his head--did he also wave his arms?--not clear in my memory, but he made amply clear with whispered words and physical gesture that there would be no Mi Shebeirakh. So what to do? I plunged precipitously, perhaps recklessly, “Izzy, would you like the Vidui.” I asked in a pointed way I almost never do, perhaps (as I look back on the moment) because I felt that this might be the last opportunity for him to say the Vidui himself, rather than having a rabbi read it on his behalf, or perhaps because I sensed that this was what his refusal of the Mi Shebeirakh meant. Before he could respond, however, Evie exclaimed, nearly as vociferously as Izzy but louder, “NO!”--the pain of acknowledging that Izzy’s life was now wholly in God’s hands, that he would die within days if not hours, was simply too  much for her to process. 

So an impasse--of my own making? Perhaps, but by offering the vidui, I did lay the blockage out in the open. Evie, with the help of the nurse, of her kids, and of Izzy himself as he became quieter and weaker and eventually stopped talking all together, gradually got there. But that would be tomorrow--what about today, as Evie sat by Izzy’s side, protecting him, guarding him for now from the inevitable conclusion? As we remained in silence, I recalled, in a moment of grace, how often I had seen Evie and Izzy holding hands like the friends and lovers they had been for more than 72 years. And I also recalled how wistful I would become in those moments, as I was reminded that my own estranged wife and I would not be holding hands after 70 years of marriage. And as I write this I also recall how much I loved holding hands with my sons, their paws growing bigger and bigger until they became the size of my own and no longer sought the warmth and safety of my grip. 

So it was The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”--“When I touch you I feel happy inside.” That reality had not changed for Evie and Izzy in 72 years, and those words resonated in Izzy’s face as he mouthed them and feebly squeezed his wife’s hand for the two minutes or so the song lasted. As I sang, Evie’s face glowed with love and suffering.  Time, in that odd way it occasionally does, slowed down, even stopped as the image of the two lovers became fixed in my memory, holding hands in the face of immense loss. And somehow I knew that for this unity to emerge from the disjunctive impasse between his need to die and her need for him to keep living, God--grace, the universe, my own unconscious--had sent me something for them to agree on: when in doubt, hold hands.

How Moses Comes to Terms with Mortality

Parashat Vayelech (Deuteronomy 31:1-30)

Published on Hebrew College's "70 Faces of Torah" Blog on October 2, 2019

In my work as a geriatric chaplain in a Jewish setting, I have found that the story of Moses’s death — and God’s decision to deny him the satisfaction of entering the Promised Land — often resonates with people who are themselves struggling with the reality of their own mortality. One man in particular, a regular attendee of religious services who died recently, would begin raising questions about God’s justice whenever the topic of Moses’s death arose throughout the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. I can only wish that I recognized at the time how clearly his complaints reflected his own fear and rage in the face of his own inescapable demise. If I had, I might have suggested that we read Parashat Vayelech, this week’s Torah portion, together, to see how Moses himself moved from the desperate pleadings of Parashat Vaethanan to the calm reassurance of a man who has come to terms with death.

The first words of the portion, Vayelech Moshe — “Moses went,” hints at this shift. Commentators debate as to where in fact Moses went, but quite possibly the movement in question is psychological rather than physical, especially since his first words to the Israelites here include an acknowledgement that he can no longer function as he once did: “And he said unto them: I am a hundred and twenty years old this day; I can no more go out and come in; and the LORD hath said unto me: Thou shalt not go over this Jordan” (Deut. 31:2)

Rashi suggests that Moses’s invocation of his birthday indicates that his days and his years have filled out — that this day, according to tradition it is 7 Adar, will also be the day of his death. He knows he has reached the end of his life and the end of his leadership (which is how Rashi understands his inability to go out and come in rather than any physical frailty), so he states without bitterness that he will not cross the Jordan. He goes on to assure the Israelites that God, along with his successor Joshua, will cross over with them. He closes his brief address with the words: “Be strong and of good courage,” assuring the Israelites that God will not forsake them.

Turning his attention to Joshua, but still speaking in front of the people, Moses repeats this imperative (now in the singular): “Be strong and of good courage,” giving Joshua his charge to lead the people and to apportion the land among them. As with the Israelites as a whole, God will be with Joshua, and will not forsake him.

In this initial section of the parasha, Moses is occupied not with his own death or his feelings of loss, but with his concern for the people, who will soon face the unknown without him. They can still recall the generation of the spies, their parents who were unable to meet God’s challenge to occupy the land God promised to them. As Moses will point out later (see Deut. 31:27), even in his presence the people struggle to resist the lure of idolatry. What will happen once he, their leader and primary bulwark against God’s towering rage, has passed from the scene? Thus he reassures and encourages his people rather than bemoaning the unfairness of his own fate.

Towards the end of the parasha, Moses, speaking privately to Joshua, again repeats what now feels like a mantra: “And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge, and said: ‘Be strong and of good courage; for thou shalt bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore unto them; and I will be with thee’” (Deut. 31:23)

Or is it Moses who speaks these words? Although the clear antecedent of the verb “and he gave…a charge” is Moses, Rashi and other commentators are quick to insist (as are most of my students when we study this passage) that God speaks these words, the first time God has addressed Joshua directly. If that is so, God echoes Moses’s encouragement, repeating the words “be strong and of good courage,” which God will repeat to Joshua three more times in the first chapter of the latter’s eponymous book.

In that first chapter, however, God comes to Joshua, who is described as Moses’s servant, after Moses has died, suggesting that this is the first time God speaks to Joshua directly. Read this way, the earlier statement is Moses speaking on behalf of God (which is not unusual in the Torah or the Prophets). This dual voice gives this statement an additional resonance: not only will God be with Joshua in the Promised Land, but Moses will be there as well — not in any physical way, but spiritually, as the human source of the divine teaching that will guide the Israelites’ path through the challenges that lie ahead.

Significantly, the words of Moses’s refrain, hazak v’ya-ameitz, echo the words of the final verse of Psalm 27, hazak v’ya-ameitz libeka — “be strong and let thy heart take courage”–which Jews read every day from the beginning of the month of Elul to prepare for the High Holidays. Vayelech also helps us prepare for the Yamim Nora’im, since the Torah-reading cycle places it either just before Rosh Hashanah or, as is the case this year, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Every year, we, like the Israelites on the cusp of the Promised Land, like Joshua taking on the mantle of his great predecessor, like Moses himself, facing his own mortality, face the unknown, the awesome realization that we do not and cannot know the future. We know only that it will not be easy; that we, despite our best efforts, will stray from the path; and that we, even if we are healthy, never know when our lives will end. So through liturgy like Unetaneh Tokef and the symbolic death of our Yom Kippur rituals of self-denial, we stare into the abyss of our own mortality. The drama of Moses’s death provides a model for that process. We echo both God and Moses in our exhortation to ourselves and others to be strong and of good courage — that we will survive the ordeal of symbolic death on the high holidays (even as we know that our physical survival is only temporary) and that in leaving our descendants with encouragement and assurances (rather than focusing solely on our fear of own mortality), we ensure our spiritual survival.

A Blessing of the F(l)eet

This post was published in The Brookline Tab on July 15, 2019

On Friday, June 14, a group of seniors who live at the Danesh Residences at 100 Centre Street came together with Rabbi Jim Morgan of Center Communities of Brookline, and Reverend Lisa Perry-Wood of the First Parish in Brookline for “A Blessing of the F(l)eet,” a celebration of mobility for people who use any kind of device to get around (including feet!).

Some months ago, in the dead of winter, Danesh resident Anne Umansky came up with a Vitalize 360 goal with her Vitalize coach, Amanda Benduzek. Her plan was to bring people together in the spring time to celebrate our continued mobility and to bless the devices that allow us to keep moving. When Anne brought the idea to Rabbi Jim, who is a member of the Vitalize 360 interdisciplinary team, he was immediately enthusiastic but knew that he would need an interfaith partner to make the idea a reality. He called on his Unitarian-Universalist colleague, Reverend Lisa, who was equally enthusiastic and set about putting together a liturgy for the event. As Anne said, “I am so happy that this head can still come up with ideas that will blossom into reality!”

The event itself was simple and full of joy--Rabbi Jim and volunteer guitarist Maximo Silverman played a rollicking Sephardic melody that got people’s feet moving as the seats filled up. Rev. Lisa introduced the event and read a variation on Psalm 23 that gave thanks for all the ways we are able to keep moving. Rabbi Jim offered a traditional Jewish blessing for the miracles of our bodies, and then Rev. Lisa blessed all of the walkers, scooters, rollators, and canes that people had brought with them. Her last blessing was for the Baby Bjorn worn by Julie Miller, a Research Associate from MIT’s AgeLab who had joined us for the afternoon with her three-month-old son, Ezra. Finally, Rabbi Jim offered a blessing that rabbinic tradition associates with feet--the most basic of all mobility devices! We then said a toast over some sparkling wine (in lieu of smashing a champagne bottle on somebody’s walker!) and everyone sang along to “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”

Anne was thrilled with the event, especially the way it brought everyone together in the beautiful sunshine. She continued: “My motto these days is from E.M. Forster: Only Connect, and today we’re connecting because we’ve all faced the same challenges and are still able to celebrate that we’re still alive.”  Julie Miller, who was at the event representing MIT’s AgeLab, pointed out how important it is for people to continue to make meaning out of the challenges that face them as they get older. For Rabbi Jim of HSL, it was a reminder of the power of reframing: “What if we can see a walker as a blessing rather than--or perhaps as well as--a burden?”

The answer to that question was evident in the way every participant’s face lit up as they received their individual blessing, a moment of affirmation and connection amid all the challenges in their lives.

CCB staffers Amanda Benduzek, Becca Mayfield, and Rabbi Jim Morgan celebrate mobility with CCB residents Anne Umansky and Gail Flackett, Reverend Lisa Perry-Wood of First Parish in Brookline, and Julie Miller (with Ezra) and Adam Felts of MIT’s AgeLab. Anne, who participates in Vitalize 360 with Amanda, created the event, called “A Blessing of the F(l)eet: An Interfaith Celebration of Mobility,” in cooperation with Rabbi Jim and Reverend Lisa.

Shabbat and the Persistence of Slavery

Parashat Va’etchanan (Deuteronomy 3:27-7:11)

This post was published on Hebrew College's blog "70 Faces of Torah" on July 24, 2018.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

- James Baldwin

Nearly seventy years after its publication, Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece, The Invisible Man, continues to resonate with our nation’s continued experience of race, violence, and blindness. The horrifying scene of white cop murdering an unarmed black man, Brother Tod Clifton, finds echoes in too many American places, as does the almost perverse refusal to see the ongoing effects of slavery and oppression, including the benefits that continue to accrue to the descendents--in the broadest sense of the term--of the oppressors.

In Ellison’s account, this blindness has two aspects, the moral and the historical. Paraphrasing William Faulkner, he writes that “what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually...part of the living present. Furtive, implacable and tricky, it inspirits both the observer and the scene observed...and it speaks even when no one wills to listen.” This willful historical blindness enables what he calls the “feigned moral blindness” of most American whites, allowing them to ignore ongoing discrimination and violence by assigning slavery and its effects to “past history.”

This tendency towards moral and historical blindness that Ellison identifies in The Invisible Man is certainly not limited to his era. Indeed, we witness a numbing profusion of contemporary examples in our newspapers and on social media, with the effect that we can become exhausted and even begin to welcome the false comfort of historical and moral blindness. The Torah is also aware of this danger, most notably in the repeated injunction not to forget that we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt as a basis for pursuing justice for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.

One such injunction occurs in Parashat Va’etchanan, in the repetition of the 10 Commandments, which occurs at a moment when the Israelites are poised to enter the promised land, when the Exodus will soon enter into history as the legacy of a generation that has passed away. There is a danger, the Torah seems to understand, that the past will die and that history will be forgotten.

As Moses gathers the new generation of Israelites to review the revelation at Sinai, he admonishes them:

The Eternal our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. It was not with our ancestors that the Eternal made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today. (Deut. 5:2-3)

Commentators, both traditional and modern, hasten to assure us that Moses’ exclusion of ancestors is not literal, but elliptical. The medieval commentator Rashi, for instance, reads the phrase “not with our ancestors” as “not with them alone.” His reading renders this passage consistent with the one later in the book that states: 

I make this covenant...not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day...and with those who are not with us here this day (Deut. 29:13-14)

Moses’ insistence that God made the covenant with the current generation points to the radical implications of these passages: revelation is a transhistorical reality and the covenant is renewed in every generation, indeed every time we strive as Jews to follow God’s commandments and thus to encounter God’s presence. This capacity for renewal leads to the rabbinic understanding that the soul of every Jew was present at Sinai.

Yet Rashi’s gloss on Deut 3:2-3 reminds us that revelation--and the covenant it engenders--was also a historical event: it happened at a particular moment and thus we are enjoined throughout the Torah to remember it. As both transhistorical reality and historical event, it becomes like Faulkner’s idea of history: in the past but never past, forever popping up, often at times when it might feel more convenient to forget it.

One of those times, perhaps, would be the fourth commandment, which is the only one of the ten to undergo substantial revision in Deuteronomy:

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Eternal your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Eternal your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your ox or your ass, or any of your cattle, or the stranger in your settlements, so that your male and female slave may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Eternal your God freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Eternal your God has commanded you to observe the sabbath day. (Deut. 5:12-15)

In the book of Exodus, the first word of this commandment is “remember” (zakhor), and Moses couches observance of the Sabbath as an imitation of God, who rested on the seventh day after the six days of creation. In Deuteronomy, the command is to “observe” (or to “guard”--shamor), and the focus shifts from creation to redemption. Rashi, following rabbinic legend, suggests that God actually spoke the two words simultaneously, as part of a single utterance. Be that as it may, the fact is that both words appear in Deuteronomy: we must observe the Sabbath but also remember that each one of us (the verb here is in the singular) was a slave in Egypt and that God redeemed us from there. The injunction to observe does not replace so much as augment the injunction to remember.

Furthermore, the phrase “so that your male and female slave may rest as you do” does not appear in Exodus, the jarring implication here being that we, those who are commanded to observe the Sabbath, will likely own slaves. And as the experience of our own experience of slavery and subsequent liberation fades into “past history,” we will tend to forget it, which may tempt us to turn a blind eye to the oppression--especially our oppression--of others. We must, unlike Pharaoh, know that those who serve us are humans and treat them the way we treat the rest of our household: as entitled to rest on Shabbat as the rest of us. 

Of course the vast majority of us, Jews and non-Jews alike, abhor the idea of slavery and strive to treat all people with the highest ethical standards; despite the reality that slavery in many forms still exists in our world, most of us do not participate directly in the oppression of others. For that reason, we must not take the notion of “owning slaves” literally, lest we dismiss it as yet another biblical idea that belongs safely in the past and thus has no relevance to our lives. Just as many Jews have internalized the admonition not to forget that we were once slaves in the land of Egypt, we should also not forget that we, as it were, “had slaves,” which is to say that we have likely benefited from the oppression of others, even if we did not participate in that oppression and even if we might prefer to turn a blind eye to that inconvenient truth. As Ellison and countless others before and after him have affirmed, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow still loom over our national life in ways that too many of us wish to ignore. We must acknowledge and struggle with that reality and do all that we can to end that oppression.