By Aviva Chernick:
This week’s Torah portion contains within it many laws or mishpatim—judgements. The first set pertains to slaves, to the rules regarding freeing them, keeping them, and what to do if they have wives and children.
I am engaging in a Torah study called A Healing Journey Through the Torah – Trauma, Resilence and the Tree of Life. Today, as my chevruta (study partner) and I worked through this text, our teacher, Rabbi Lisa Goldstein pointed to the various ways we might approach a text that is challenging. I’m not referring here to feeling uncomfortable. As a teacher of mindfulness, discomfort is something I usually invite people to turn to with curiosity and compassion. I am referring here to texts that are painful in a way that is not manageable.
With regards to the judgements relating to slaves, Rabbi Goldstein asks “in a tradition that values family life so deeply, how can it be that the price of freedom is to leave one’s family behind?” I have no doubt that the Torah scholars amongst us will have an immediate reaction or response to this question. It is important to read this moment in Torah within the context of its time, and it is our responsibility to wrestle with Torah (which I am doing here now). That said, the content may still be too difficult, and, at times, for each of us, may be too distressing to contend with.
She writes, “Just as we have various strategies to respond to trauma in our lives, we have different ways to respond to what we might call a traumatizing text.” She then points to some of these strategies. One approach is the one employed by Rashi, who seems to suggest that this moment wasn’t as bad as it seems. (Rashi on Exodus 21:6). I often use this strategy in my teaching, framing the moment as a metaphor to make it more palatable.
For another strategy Rabbi Goldstein points to the work of Professor Gay Becker in her book, Disrupted Lives, Making Meaning in a Chaotic World. Professor Becker coined the term “emplotment”, described by Rabbi Goldstein as “…how people tell new stories when their older ways of making sense of the world fail.” She quotes Midrash Tanchuma Ve’etchanan 4:1 which places Moshe as the slave or servant and God as the master. The renewal of a story into a later moment in Torah or into current experience may be helpful with bringing about a renewed relationship to Torah and Jewish life.
And there is yet another strategy, which is to put the text aside. The laws about how the Israelites were to treat slaves may or may not be a challenging text for each of us to read. Maybe you have other texts that fall into this category. For me, there are specific texts in Tanach that I won’t read. They are unbearable to hear, alienating, and painful, completely the opposite of my usual experience of Judaism. And, at the same time, I don’t leave our tradition because of this. I fall in love, over and over again, with the art of wrestling, within the bounds of what is feasible for me.
You hopefully know me by now, and that I rest in deep devotion to our tradition and the Divine. It is that which guides me in my own practice and in my leadership of the Centre for Spiritual Wellbeing at Beth Tzedec. At the same time, I have so many questions and very few answers. It is unusual for me to write to you with criticism of our tradition, revealing my own struggles. I believe, however, that this is what it means to truly engage with Torah from our truest selves as well as what it means to lead authentically. I welcome you to consider your own relationship to our sacred texts, what is beloved to you, knowing when to dive in deeply and when to put the text aside when that is what you need for your own Spiritual Wellbeing.