Sermon: Oh Flip! – Bereshit 2010
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 19 October 2010
Thirty thousand people were on the march. Encouraging them on was a band making as much noise as Alyth’s Big Bang – harps, cymbals, drums, tambourines, rattles. King David was at the front leading his people towards Jerusalem in triumph. In the middle of the procession was the Ark of the Covenant, symbol of God’s power among the people, containing the tablets of the Ten Commandments and the broken fragments of the original tablets which Moses had smashed in anger at the incident of the Golden Calf.
The procession reached the top of a hill – a threshing floor in a windy exposed place. The oxen pulling the cart on which the Ark was transported stumbled. The Ark swayed and looked like, horror of horrors, it might even fall off the cart. Uzzah the Levite put his hand forwards and steadied the Ark. Right then and there he collapsed and died! What happened? {[1]}
Every year when we read the Sedra Chukkat, the Torah portion in the Book of Numbers where Moses, having led the Children of Israel for the best part of forty years is sacked from his post by God – told that he will not enter the Promised Land – there is a loud harrumph of disapproval from one of our regular Shabbat worshippers. This man who has followed the unfolding story of the Torah every Shabbat during the year is disgusted that the simple action of hitting a rock to obtain water should deprive Moses of his position and be so, in his opinion, harshly punished. His loud disapproval is a wonderful example of instant Torah commentary
I would imagine that if he heard the story from the Second Book of Samuel of Uzzah dying after he tried to help by steadying the potentially falling Ark he would similarly be shocked and upset. And Norman if you are here on Shabbat for the Torah portion Shemini in the Book of Leviticus, you will hear this episode as the Haftarah portion of the week.
The Rabbis, of course, wondered just what Uzzah might have done that death resulted from the apparently meritorious act of steadying a falling Ark of the Covenant. In midrash they provide a few possible explanations {[2]}. One is that he was meant to be concentrating when employed in such a holy task and his inattention to his duty as a Levite is what so angered God. Another is that the Book of Numbers states that the Ark of the Covenant is meant to have been carried on the shoulders of the Levites – so what was it doing on an Ox Cart? Perhaps this act of laziness was Uzzah’s idea – and so his punishment was fair.
Another, based on the particular choice of Hebrew verb for the averted falling of the Ark was that Uzzah was in such a panic as the Oxen stumbled that he relieved himself! My favourite interpretation was that Uzzah let out such a stream of swear words as the Ark swayed that he could no longer be entrusted with its care in such a large and impressionable company of Israelites. And the final one, which is not in our classical Midrashic collections is that Uzzah died suddenly, as people do and then David and the Israelites connected his death with what he had done to steady the Ark as it risked falling.
Many of you will know how I managed to end up in a thumb splint for the next couple of weeks. My story was disconcertingly similar to that of the hapless Uzzah the Levite. Alan, Alyth’s Caretaker, and I were picking up the moveable Ark which we use for family services and Kollot in the Leo Baeck and Youth Halls so that we could move it downstairs. Where the handles are placed is very low and the Ark began to topple forwards as I picked it up. I foolishly steadied it with my thumb causing a tendon injury. Ow! However, the worst imprecation I let out was “Oh flip” so I guess I am safe from Uzzah’s fate!
Uzzah’s punishment, if punishment it was, seems unfair on face value, then so does Moses’s for hitting the rock, and Adam and Eve’s who are ejected from the Garden of Eden after this morning’s Torah portion. On face value the Torah which we will hear again from this week forwards contains many examples of seeming injustice.
How then can the Torah be for us the inspirer of right behaviour? How can it be our guide? Do we have read selectively perhaps, listening only to those parts of the Torah who face value meaning feels to us that it inspires justice? It is easy to read the Ten Commandments and be proud of the wisdom contained within. It is easy to read the Holiness Code in Leviticus and hear that we should love our neighbour as ourselves and that we should leave the corners of our fields for the poor and hungry and be inspired by its vision of social justice. But throughout this year as every year there will be tough passages to hear – and even in our lectionary which guides the readings we hear from our Torah there will be passages which we won’t hear in our Synagogue because they are too tough to take on face value – such as the rape of Dinah, the curses for failing to observe the covenant in Deuteronomy, the outer reaches of the purity laws in Tazria – Metzora.
There is something in Reform Jewish history that makes it difficult for us to deal with the challenging passages of the Torah – both those which we hear in the Synagogue when we read and those which we still omit from our three yearly cycle of readings. Early Reform Judaism saw one of its missions as being to restore the primacy of the Bible in Judaism, as opposed to the centuries of Rabbinic interpretation recorded in the Mishnah, Talmud and Rabbinic commentaries and the Midrashim. That was because this Rabbinic interpretation had got Judaism stuck so that it could no longer bring our religious wisdom to the modern world. Systems of authority had meant that Jews tended to accept one single line of Rabbinic authority as being true rather than interpreting the Bible as man’s striving after God’s will for themselves. This restricted vision of Judaism remains the case in Orthodox Judaism to this day.
Early Reform Jewish services and Synagogues gave prime place to liturgy which was from the Bible itself and ensured that Bible readings were translated, that our religion schools taught the Bible raw without requiring a particular line of interpretation. We did not study our Torah through Rashi’s eyes, Rashi being a particularly authoritative Biblical commentator from the Eleventh Century. Rather we studied our Bible with all tools at our disposal – biblical archaeology, historical, sociological and anthropological knowledge. You can still see this trend represented in a very healthy way in the inclusion of the Nelson Glueck Museums of Biblical Archaeology in the Reform Jewish Hebrew Union College Campuses in Jerusalem and the USA.
This early Reform Jewish approach has for us today though a spiritual challenge, perhaps even danger. It asks what the truth of the Torah and Bible as a whole was in the day in which it was written. What was the organisation of society at the time of the Torah that meant the orphan and the widow were in a particularly bad situation? Did the Red Sea really part – what were the volcanic or wind conditions that could cause it to do so? Was there really a mass Exodus from Egypt or did a confederation of Canaanite tribes create a founding myth to unite them in the worship of the One God? This is important and Reform Judaism never shies away from the search for historical and anthropological truth.
But archaeology and anthropology cannot inspire us to action in service of God and of our community. Our task as we hear the Torah this year is to study it for truths and values leading to action. Our traditional interpretations in the Midrashim, the Rabbinic works and even as we discovered in this morning’s Shiur back in the Psalms are a great aid to this because they give us the starting point of other’s strivings after spiritual truth. But we must also be brave and interpret Torah using our own spiritual resources.
When we hear about Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden it is fully valid to see this as a metaphor for the growing up, independence and responsibility which we must all share to live a full life. When Moses is sacked as leader we can question what it takes to move on from a position of leadership and to bring on and empower a new generation. When Uzzah dies as he steadies the Ark we can question how we ensure the sanctity and grandeur of our holy spaces and ritual objects which point towards the service of God.
These are my personal interpretations for today and in the spirit of living Reform Judaism they are put there to be argued with. Our Synagogue and all Reform Synagogues should be centres where the Torah, the Bible our traditional literature are studied, made accessible, argued over, dissected and put back together to build us spiritually as Jews. Our Oztar Alyth Adult Education will continue this year with Shiurim, our Talmud Classes, our Bible sessions and much more – come and join our Rabbis as we study together – hearing the Torah this year in our Shabbat services is only the beginning