Parashat Vayikra

It is well known that pondering each week’s Torah portion is a ritual that helps us mark the passage of time. The text of the Torah is immutable but each time we return to it, we have changed, and this changes our relationship with and reactions to the ideas we encounter in each reading. For me, writing this dvar Torah is an opportunity to return to a text that I have not thought deeply about since my bat mitzvah in March 1988, when Vayikra was my Torah portion. 

As a former English teacher, returning to a book as a changed reader is not a new experience. For example, when I read The Catcher in the Rye as a student, I shared Holden’s disgust for “phonies” and connected with his determination to live an authentic life, no matter the cost. As a teacher, however, I found myself empathizing with his teachers as they awkwardly try to guide Holden in the best way they know how. This happened again when I  prepared to teach To Kill a Mockingbird and found that the poignancy of  Scout and Jem growing up without a mother struck me in a new way as I tried to imagine my sons without a mom and my husband without a wife, and understood for the first time the river of grief, loss, and loneliness that runs through the Finch household. 

The differences between the person I am today and the person I was at my bat mitzvah are evident, and so I began to wonder: What do I have in common  with the twelve year old me who read this text for the first time? One clear connection struck me when I met with Rabbi Gurwitz to review the portion and felt again the disappointment that the portion isn’t more “interesting.” As a voracious reader of fiction, I wanted some semblance of plot and characters rather than a list of orders and directions. And another similarity: as I attended bnai mitzvah after bnai mitzvah as a middle schooler, observing classmates on the bimah, a question began to rattle around my brain: Would I be able to do what they were doing? Fast forward to now as I read my colleagues’ divrei Torah in the weekly emails and ask myself: Am I as qualified to do this as they are? Only now, as an educator and the parent of a twelve year old preparing for his bar mitzvah, there is another voice in my head saying: Yes, you can do this! You will do it your way, which will be different from anyone else’s way.  And: Yes, you can do it, and it will require hard work and also some sacrifices — which is, of course, one of the main themes of Vayikra.

 

As it happens, the  strongest memories from my bat mitzvah do not involve anything that happened on the day of the bat mitzvah itself. I remember the meeting at the synagogue during which our rabbi explained to my parents and me that, unless I turned things around and began to seriously prepare, they would have to change the date of my bat mitzvah. I will never forget the color draining from my mother’s face as I realized that I was in deep trouble. I had been focusing on the fun of helping plan a party, selecting dresses, deciding on the colors for the invitation, while sneakily avoiding the work inherent in preparing for this rite of passage. I had entered the realm of magical thinking, convincing myself that I could be ready without any of the sacrifices necessary to arrive at readiness.  After dinner that night, my father brought me into our den, stacked the two half-circle coffee tables on top of each other to create a makeshift podium, and we got to work, a ritual we reenacted nightly for the next several months.  As in Vayikra, there wasn’t a lot of sturm und drang about the need for sacrifice; rather, he took a matter of fact approach to the orders we had been given not so much by God as by my mother:  Changing the date is not an option!  Make whatever sacrifices are needed to be ready by March 19!  Looking back decades later, I understand that what I learned from my father during  those months was that, when faced with a moment of sacrifice, whining, complaining, or even asking “why” or “why me?” are not an effective approach. Better instead to roll up your sleeves and just do it. 

Now as a parent, I have an additional question when thinking about those months of preparation: What sacrifice was my father making as we painstakingly learned Vayikra together?  In other words, what would he rather have been doing with those many, many hours? Evenings were his time to read the newspaper, catch up with my mom, or participate in more enjoyable parenting activities like shooting hoops or watching sports  with my younger sister or watching our favorite TV shows together as a family.  But then I thought about something Rabbi Gurwitz said as we discussed Vayikra: sacrifices draw us closer to God and are a way for us to express gratitude. I am certain that for my father, preparing his oldest child for her bat mitzvah brought back memories of his own bar mitzvah, strengthening his feelings of connection to our ancestors, his faith, and thus to God.  God’s requirement of sacrifices is an act of optimism. My father’s sacrifice to help me prepare was also an act of optimism: he believed I could do it, he believed it was a worthwhile endeavor, he believed in the journey of the process even more than he believed in the rewards of the celebration.  

The dvar Torah I wrote about Vayikra for my bat mitzvah is long gone. I imagine it was most likely about thinking of sacrifices not in the literal way outlined in the text, but in a more metaphorical way: the sacrifices we make in our daily lives – as Jewish people and as teenagers – as we strive to be good sons and daughters, good friends, and good students.  As a school principal, however, I often find myself thinking of the sacrifices my colleagues have made in choosing to remain in education. Like Holden, it is easy to follow an authentic path when we are young and, often, naive. As adults, it is harder to hold true to our passion when faced with the financial realities of adult life and with aspects of the field we could not have predicted including the scourge of school shootings, COVID, the steep increase in mental health challenges, and the siren song of cell phones, social media, and immersive video games that can act at cross purposes with our goals. I have come to realize that many of us who remain in education do so because it feels like a calling – which is perhaps another way of saying that it makes us feel closer to God. Education is, at its core, an optimistic profession. We ask our students to sacrifice and work hard because we believe they can do it and because we believe the act of learning is a worthwhile endeavor. And finally, we remain in the field because we feel gratitude to have found a profession that, despite, or perhaps because of the challenges, feels important and meaningful. 

Shabbat Shalom.