Monday, December 7, 2009

Rabbi Artson's D'var Torah

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, gave the dvar Torah this morning.

He was blunt. It is necessary to hit bottom before you can rise, he said, as Joseph finds in this week’s Torah portion, Vayeshev, when his brothers throw him down into a pit before they sell him into slavery in Egypt. As a movement, we find ourselves at the bottom of a pit too. We are trying to scramble up its sides, back into daylight, using the methods that used to work for us, appealing to ethnicity, denominational loyalty, even the need for plain survival, but none of these appeals works because we have become too free to need them. Yes, we must survive, but why?

We must survive, as Jews but not only as Jews; if our questions and their answers are not universal they are not worth asking or answering.

But – and of course in divrai Torah there always is a but -- to be empty is to full of no thing. In the chasidic tradition, rak, emptiness, is a name for God, for God, after all, is no thing. When Joseph was at the bottom of the pit that was full of nothing, it was also filled with potential, which is nothing yet. We can see the emptiness not only as an overwhelming fact but as an invitation to walk, Rabbi Artson said.

Joanne Palmer

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