The holiday of Shavuot is approaching. This year on the secular calendar it begins on Saturday evening, May 19. On Shavuot, we celebrate receiving the Torah, the foundational text of the Jewish people. "Torah" has multiple meanings in Jewish tradition. Most folks know it as the Five Books of Moses/ But “Torah” in a broader sense is much more. It’s the collection of each and every generation’s engagement with sacred text and with our efforts to live lives of holiness and connection—to each other and to the divine. 

In that expansive spirit, we are bringing you a two-part podcast series leading up to Shavuot. In Episode 13, I speak with Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz about modern Hebrew poetry, a recent expression of Jewish text. We talk about how modern Hebrew poets  take apart traditional language and ideas and create something new using ancient building blocks. And in Episode 14, Rabbi Mira Wasserman and I discuss Midrash, the way ancient rabbis read Torah in new and creative ways, giving old words new life, new meaning, new relevance. Shavuot is known as zman matan Torateinu ——  the season of the gift of Torah. I hope that these interviews help to show the resilience within Judaism to create and re-create, and they help you join in the ongoing and sacred conversation that makes Torah. Your listening, your comments have been a gift to me. Thanks for listening! Hag same’akh!


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Deborah Waxman: We're making a connection between the ancient text and our life right now in this moment. In doing that, we're giving life to the text. We're also giving life to ourselves. We've giving ourselves a context for understanding what's happening to us that's much bigger than us, that takes in a whole community, a whole people, God and the universe. It's really big.

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Mira Wasserman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman. And I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. Today, I'm so happy to be here with Rabbi Mira Wasserman. Mira is an assistant professor of Rabbinic Literature at the college for reconstructing Judaism. She is the newly appointed director of the Center for Jewish ethics and the Levin-Lieber Family Program in Ethics. And she recently published, "Jews, Gentiles and Other Animals," her first book. I'm so happy that you're here with us today.

Mira: I'm thrilled to be here.

DW: I want to begin by asking you to talk about an area you teach with our students and in the wider world about midrash. So, let's begin with just a definition. What is midrash?

Mira: So Midrash is the particular way our ancient rabbis had of reading holy words, of reading scripture, unlike the ways we're used to interpreting holy words today. They were very comfortable taking things out of context, they delighted in taking words, and sentences out of context, giving them new life to make old words speak to them with new meaning and new relevance and changed circumstances.

DW: So, to me, that feels like a definition of resilience. That's one of the reason why I wanted to ask you to come here today. You said it's so very different from how we are. We are children of the Enlightenment and we prefer order and rationality and proving that C emerges out of A plus B. And case law, where we go back and cite everything in an orderly way. And you're suggesting a radically different approach.

Mira: Right. It's different. It's playful, it's creative, it's imaginative, it's following an order. It's not disorderly. They have their own rules for what makes a good reading, what makes a bad reading. But to us as moderns, as Enlightenment moderns, it can feel very free-wheeling. And sometimes it's very serious. Somehow they're keeping a hold on playfulness, on the one hand and imagination and creativity; and also are taking the sacredness of Torah really seriously. They're paying attention to every word, to every letter, to the sounds of the words. And they're determined to find deep and profound meaning in every little jot and tittle, is often how it's translated. So it's a steep and serious engagement with the text, but it has no preconceptions about what a certain word or sentence might need to mean or what order it has to appear in.

DW: That's wonderful. It's such a wonderful explanation of what midrash is and how the ancient rabbis engaged in midrash. And you've pointed to what it might mean for us today. Can you reflect a little bit more on how this type of encounter with the sources and the resources we inherit might speak to us or play out in your life or in my life?

Mira: Yeah. I guess I'm thinking of couple things. One thing I'm thinking about is the life of congregations and rabbis in congregations, who week in, week out, are reading the stories of our tradition. They're reading very, very old stories about Avraham and Sarah, Yitzah and Rivka, Moshe. These are old, ancient, and yet, I know this from when I was a congregational rabbi, they're constantly being made relevant. It's almost a miracle, I think, week in, week out. And I was a congregational rabbi for over 10 years. There's always going to be something you can use that week for the upcoming election, for the tragedy that just happened, for the birth that you're celebrating in the community. There's going to be some touchstone in the story that you read. So that's one answer.

DW: And you're saying that's kind of a midrashic process, right?

Mira: That's kind of a midrash. We're making a connection between the ancient text and our life right now in this moment. In doing that, we're giving life to the text. We're also giving life to ourselves. We're giving ourselves a context for understanding what's happening to us that's much bigger than us, that takes in a whole community, a whole people, God and the universe. It's really big. I've been thinking a lot about how tradition lives in our lives today because, as you know, I lost my dad within the past year. And I've taken on all of these customs that are new and I've always known about, but they're new in my practice.

Mira: So, I'm saying kaddish every day. And I have the structured time where I'm really engaging with the liturgy in a way that I never have before. So I think one thing that strikes me is the way we bring the sacred into our everyday, ordinary lives. Prayer does that, daily prayer. The rabbis, it's really hard to bring this into my daily life, but the rabbis talk about having a set time for studying Torah every day. It should be a daily practice just like prayer, like all of the daily practices you've been talking about on this podcast. So having a set time where you go with a sense of openness, I think, encountering an old text and have an invitation to see a connection.

DW: I think it's such an important point. So often, when I'm reading, it's toward an instrumental end. So I think last week I was reading something on membership organizations and how they're struggling and/or flourishing at this moment in time. And I just made a note to myself to buy another book on, "Tyranny," that's the title of it. And obviously, they're toward a particular end. And that is such a different mindset that when I sit down to do some kind of text study that is not toward any end, just toward the end in and of itself, and how I might be opened up or changed by the encounter. And almost always, that kind of text study is, in conversation with someone else, is with a hevruta It's not just me and the text in front of me and the minds behind that text, because many Jewish texts are conversations across generations, but it's also the very contemporary conversation of the moment. And how much better my life would be if there were some space for that every single day.

Mira: Yeah. Another thing I've been thinking about is just the everyday ways that we're carrying old words, old meanings forward without even thinking about it. So, I was at the cemetery yesterday and reading stones from my family and seeing names repeat. My father's father has the same name as my brother and my grandfather has his father's name. There's something really powerful about the names we carry. Some of them are names that we were given, some of them are names that we take on. Something powerful about. And as I was sitting there, I remembered I had this flash of a pasuk [verse] that we come across in Genesis all the time. When people die it says that they're "gathered unto their ancestors". So, I was there in the presence of three generations of gravestones. And I thought, "Oh, this is what it meant. This is where my ancestors are." I also had a sense of how rare it is in the history of our people that our ancestors have been allowed to lay and gather in one place from generation to generation.

DW: It's so much migration and so much...

Mira: Yeah. And I feel pretty secure that they're going to... We're here, we're going to stay here. There's this little corner in Long Island where I know my ancestors will be and I'll have access to them.

DW: That's very sweet. This is actually... Goes to the topic of trauma and I want to drive us to the some of the text that you're working on right now. But I think about that very point about how when my grandparents, both of my father's parents were immigrants. They crossed an ocean. And they had no expectation that they would ever see any of their family members again. And they were definitely coming toward opportunity, there was a big pull. But the loss, the loss of a world, even if it was a troubled world and a world of constraint. Beause they both faced a lot of persecution in the parts of Russia that they lived. But that leaving behind then and how we navigate through life with our losses. But one of the reasons that I am a religious person, why I live Jewishly, is because it pushes me toward practices and toward teachings that help me lift up out of the exigencies of the moment, out of the troubles and the traumas. It pushes me towards celebration and it supports me when I'm struggling, both in the teachings, and then also in the community. 'Cause there's the ancestors and then there's also the living community that we make Jewish lives with.

Mira: There's another piece of this resiliency story that comes up for me through midrash that you're helping me remember now. And that's the story. You're telling a story about how your family came over. You know it wasn't easy for them. But there's a story that they brought with them. And I think it doesn't always happen that we have the objects or even the names that we're telling these stories [about], that we're connecting the stories that we have up with even older stories.

DW: Oh, so lovely. So one of the things that I've been excited about is that I know, this semester, you're teaching a course on Eichah Rabbah on the Midrash, on the Book of Lamentations. And the name of this podcast is Hashivenu from a verse that, originally comes from the Book of Lamentations. It's the penultimate line, it's the second to last line. And if you go to the notes about the name, listeners can find some teaching about all the different ways that verse has been deployed. And I think that lifting it up from this cry of pain at the destruction of the First Temple and moving it into the Torah service, I think of that as almost as midrashic as removing it from its original context, and deploying it in a radically different way that is enlivening, that is vitalizing.

DW: And you're actually deeply engaged in the Rrabbinic efforts to make sense of this book in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible that is... I know that there's some scholarly controversy about whether or not it was written immediately after the destruction of the First Temple or, possibly a little bit later as the Second Temple was being created. Whatever it is, it's an ancient book. And it is mostly about, well, Eichah. Lamentations is mostly about desolation. And we read it when we remember the destruction of the temple. And we read it on other public fast days. And Eichah Rabbah, the midrash on it is about those things and about a lot of other things as well.

Mira: Right. So, Eichah, the Book of Lamentations from the Bible is about the first destruction, a very ancient destruction. Eichah Rabbah, we think, dates from the fifth century of the common era. So it was put together, actually, a few hundred years after the second destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. That destruction happened in the year 70. And what we have in Eichah Rabbah is the fruit of generations and generations of rabbis reading about the earlier biblical story of destruction, and reflecting and turning and creating around that kernel of memory. Re-telling it in a way that's going to speak to them and also to us, I think. So as you... There's some surprises in Eichah Rabbah. It's a book about historical trauma and how to live through it and beyond it. One of the big surprises for me was how much humor there is folded into the story. There's all of these stories about how smart the Jerusalemites were. They were so smart that any Athenian who came to town would be played for a fool by the smart Jerusalemites.

Mira: One of my favorite stories is about an Athenian who makes his way into a school full of school children. The rabbi who's teaching them, is absent in the moment and they make this wager with the visiting Athenian who is a philosopher, an old man and say, "We're going to give you some challenges and if you can answer them, fine. And if you can't, you are to take your clothes off." It's a riddle, a lot of riddles. But the riddles are... The first one is, "Okay, what is it that... Where nine go in and eight come out?" He doesn't know. The answer is, it's a baby. So nine months and then eight days to a circumcision for a baby boy. Anyway, the old philosopher ends up having to take off all of his clothes. He's embarrassed in front of the little kids. And then the rabbi comes and delights with the children in them having had their day. I think about, "Why are we telling that story in this work about trauma and destruction?" And one of the messages I get, first of all, is that having fun is a piece of what it takes to go on living. Another piece is they didn't win the war, but there's something to hold onto.

DW: They didn't win the war. Jews hadn't been in Jerusalem for hundreds of years at that point.

Mira: For hundreds of years. Yeah. It's almost like they were winning a different game, right? They were the clever ones. They have this culture that's worth holding onto. And what they have, this cleverness, is something that can survive even when the Temple can't, even when the schools on the ground in Jerusalem don't.

DW: It's portable, it's cultivatable.

Mira: Yeah, it's a different kind of strength. And it's something to be proud of and delight in.

DW: I know that you've just reflected on this a lot in the book that you just wrote. I think that what it means to be human is to try to live a life of meaning. And so meaning making is an incredibly important value and way to spend our time. And one of the things I struggle with in our contemporary society with so many pulls on our time is how much of the world is organized to get me to go shopping in the mall, instead of making meaning, or to spend time on my phone instead of making meaning, or to be in isolation when I think so much of meaning making is in relationship. And so that larger effort of... But through the individual story and then through the engagement in this larger project of the midrash, Eichah seems to me like it is, ultimately about raising up who were are and why we're here, and what we're supposed to do while we're here.

Mira: I love that you are bringing up that "What does it mean to be human?" question. It is central in Eichah Rabbah in a really beautiful way. In the very beginning of the work are a series of sermons. And one of the sermons goes on and on and on, we've been spending the bulk of the semester studying this. It's sermon number 24. And what's so powerful about the sermon is in it, the rabbis imagine God being struck with heartbreak and desolation when God sees what has been wrought in the destroyed temple. What does God do? God invites His dearest, most beloved human beings to come join Him in mourning, to comfort Him. And He asks them how to mourn, "How do I do this?" He has Abraham by His side. He has Moses there, Isaac and Jacob.

Mira: And they tell their stories about the suffering and the travails that they went through as human beings. God isn't satisfied with what they're offering Him, until the sermon ends with Rachel telling her story. Rachel, the mother who's remembered as weeping for her children, is the one who is able to cut through to God's pain to convince God that she knows what it feels like to have a terrible loss. And also what it feels like to have the complicated feeling that the rabbis assigned to God, who's partly responsible for this heart break. In their rabbinic imagination, God could've stopped it and God didn't.

DW: Right. It's the ultimate question about theodicy, about where is justice? Where is divine justice in our unjust world?

Mira: Right. One of the amazing things about Eichah Rabbah is that unlike other works of religious literature that we have, the rabbis in Eichah Rabbah are not so interested in taking the blame on humans. They're much more interested in describing the human plight. "This is what loss feels like, it feels really bad." It feels really bad and they stay with that pain. And they allow God to stay with the pain, too. And they offer a hevruta, a comforter for Him who's very human.

DW: It's so beautiful. And I'm not aware of that so I will definitely go and look for that passage. And there it is, I think that... When I think about what trauma is, what catastrophe is, something like the destruction of the Temple, the center place of worship, we don't know who we are in relationship to each other and in relation to the divine in relationship to other people. Everything is shattered. And so meaning is hard to find. And then I think that resilience is ultimately about the process of re-weaving meaning and doing it together, doing it in conversation. And sometimes it happens within a lifetime and sometimes it takes over several lifetimes for a people in a big way. And that personally, I think what it means is it's not about denying or negating what has happened, but not letting that be the sole sum and limit. But also acknowledging and also allowing other things, whether that is the humor that you mentioned, whether is is the study, whether it is love, whether it is bring forth the next generation. It's just such a beautiful encapsulation of it.

Mira: You're not to do it by yourself.

DW: Yeah. Yeah. It is hard and it is doable. Thank you for such a rich conversation.

Mira: To be continued.

DW: Absolutely. My great pleasure. I would like to thank my guest, Rabbi Mira Wasserman for this really... Just such an interesting conversation. We talked about a lot of things with some focus on the text of Eichah Rabbah of the Midrash... On the Book of Lamentations. And even more about what it means to be human, what it means to be Jewish and certain practices. And I think also perspectives that we can take to help us to cultivate resilience. There will be a whole host of resources on our website if you're interested in learning more about anything that we talked about today. And you can also find resources on ReconstructingJudaism.org and on ritualwell.org. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish Teachings on Resilience.

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