Back to Sinai: Lessons on inclusion and Empathy
Rabbi Sari Laufer
February 10, 2023 | 19 Shevat, 5783
Watch video of Rabbi Sari’s sermon and all Shabbat sermons HERE.
When I was in first grade, a boy in my class kissed me during gym class.
And I was sent to the hallway!
Telling this story as a humorous anecdote at dinner with friends recently, I paused. I guess, I said, that was the beginning of my feminist awakening.
It was not until many years later that I confronted another moment, an exclusion that called out with the same injustice as being punished for Joey’s first grade choices.
Tomorrow morning, when we open the Torah, we prepare to—once again—stand at Sinai, to experience revelation and receive Torah. And, as with all of the big and covenantal moments in our lives—marriage, birth, b’nai mitzvah, first grade Shabbat—we need to prepare ourselves. The Torah gives clear instructions for those preparations: “Go to the people,” God tells Moses, “and tell them to get ready. Make sure, Moses, that they stay pure today and tomorrow; make sure that they wash their clothes. Keep them safe, Moses—don’t let them go up the mountain or touch its border.” “Sure, sure,” Moses nods—and then heads down the mountain to warn the people.
וַיֵּ֧רֶד מֹשֶׁ֛ה מִן־הָהָ֖ר אֶל־הָעָ֑ם וַיְקַדֵּשׁ֙ אֶת־הָעָ֔ם וַֽיְכַבְּס֖וּ שִׂמְלֹתָֽם׃
Moses came down from the mountain to the people and warned the people to stay pure, and they washed their clothes.
And then, one verse later—the moment that stopped me in my tracks when I first encountered it, and continues to make me stumble, each and every time I read it or teach it:
וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־הָעָ֔ם הֱי֥וּ נְכֹנִ֖ים לִשְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת יָמִ֑ים אַֽל־תִּגְּשׁ֖וּ אֶל־אִשָּֽׁה׃
And he said to the people, “Be ready for the third day: [the men among] you should not go near a woman.”
Judith Plaskow is one of the world’s foremost feminist theologians, and the author of “Standing Again at Sinai”—a book that changed my life and my understanding of our text and tradition. In its introduction, she writes:
There is perhaps no verse in the Torah more disturbing to the feminist than Moses’ warning to his people in Exodus 19:15, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.” For here, at the very moment that the Jewish people stand at Mount Sinai ready to enter into the covenant- not now the covenant with the individual patriarchs but presumably with the people as a whole- Moses addresses the community only as men….
She continues, noting that: Moses does not say, “Men and women do not go near each other.” At the central moment of Jewish history, women are invisible. It was not their experience that interested the chronicler or that informed and shaped the text….
Reading her book in college, I understood this fundamental question as: How can I access this text—this tradition, this community—if I was excluded at its most foundational moment? And, as you might have guessed, have largely dedicated my life to answering. But this is not only a feminist question, and it is not only a question for this momentous occasion.
Raise your hand if you have ever felt an outsider, left out, or left behind.
Raise your hand if your child has ever come home and told you that they were excluded by a classmate, or a friend?
And what happens, do you think, when that happens over and over again?
February is, in case you did not know, Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month. Julia Watts Belser is a rabbi, academic, and spiritual teacher who works at the intersections of disability studies, feminist Jewish ethics, and environmental justice. She tells the story of a colleague who, upon looking at the facts from recent climate disasters—stories of New Yorkers who were trapped in high-rise apartment buildings for days after Hurricane Sandy; nursing home residents in Florida who died from extreme heat after their institution failed to evacuate in advance of Hurricane Irma; or disaster warnings that were inaccessible to Deaf communities—threw up his hands. She writes:
“It’s terrible,” he told me. “But what can you do? Some people just aren’t going to make it.” Once I got over my outrage, I realized my colleague had unwittingly named a core problem facing those of us organizing for climate justice: the assumption that some folks simply aren’t cut out to survive.
All of us who raised our hands earlier, all of us who have felt vulnerable or outside—let that be our canary in the coal mine. Let that remind us—and inspire us—to heed Belser’s call to action, taken from disability justice advocates: No body is disposable. All bodies, our tradition teaches, are Divine.
The most repeated commandment in the Torah is one that actually does not appear in the Ten Commandments chanted this week. We rabbis love to remind you that “love the stranger” and “remember the stranger” are repeated 36 times in the Torah; more than the command to love God or honor your parents, we are asked to see the person we might be tempted to ignore, the one who does not belong to us, the person who does not fit in. Not only the stranger, in fact—we are commanded time and again to protect also the orphan and the widow. We are called to give voice to those whose own might be ignored or overlooked, to share power with those who have less or have none. And why are we asked to do this? Because we were strangers in the Land of Egypt. Because we know the heart of the stranger. Because that was us once before—and could be us once again.
The enduring understanding of the Exodus is empathy. The ideology of the Exodus is inclusion. The result of revelation is responsibility.
Many of you have heard me tell stories on Friday mornings, whether in AMC or in our kinder and first grade services. You may have noticed—because it is not accidental—that I often return to these lessons: empathy, inclusion, responsibility. I often remind our young friends that it is their job—along with growing and learning—to notice which friends might be sitting alone, or seems sad. It is their job to notice who does not get invited to birthday parties, or gets teased about the way they look or what they like to play or dress. And for us grownups, we might want to notice the same.
Because it starts early—the exclusion and the empathy. And all bodies are Divine—no body is disposable. Because we know the heart of the stranger. Because we have been the stranger.
Shabbat Shalom.