An interesting conversation from yesterday has been floating around in my head since it happened, connecting various dots of my recent experience. It took place -- as many interesting conversations do -- in the Thursday morning study group, where we have been slogging through the book of Isaiah for some months now. I say "slogging" not with any disrespect for scripture at all, far from it, but because most of the words we have encountered so far are just plain painful: detailed proclamations of inescapable doom, "urbicide," as Paul Berman calls the decimation of cities, destruction of whole civilizations. Then, in the middle of it all comes chapter 25: "My Lord God will wipe the tears away from all faces and will put an end to the reproach of God's people over all the earth..." (v.8) Beautiful, hopeful, joyful words of promise. Ahhhh!
"When will this happen?" We are, after all, reading a prophet. And so we got to talking about hope. The group around the table yesterday was pretty religiously diverse (!) from one person who takes biblical words literally, by her own account, to another who proclaimed himself a "total unbeliever." And so the conversation was energetic: was this, like the fall of Tyre a chapter earlier, something that was to happen in proximate history? A messianic prophecy? A dream? A wish? Just a lovely poem?
For the past few years I have been getting more and more elaborate in my Passover plans. I keep getting these wild ideas to build things: a few years ago it was Miriam's cups for everyone at the table, last year it was a Bedouin tent. This year I have a lot of construction ideas that have to do with the Red Sea parting (I'll leave the execution to your imaginations -- and maybe to my own too!) I keep thinking about that image of the sea splitting open and the cornered runaway slaves rushing through. There is an amazing midrash that says that the sea actually split into twelve channels of dry land, so that each tribe had its own tube of water to walk through. I don't know why it matters, except that it is even bigger and more exciting than the Cecil B. DeMille image. But it's the idea of miraculous deliverance, in one sea-split or twelve -- I can't stop thinking about it.
> Do I believe that the Red Sea actually split? Do I believe that the day will come when all tears are dried off all faces at once? Someone at our table in the Thursday morning group kept using the phrase "pie in the sky by and by" to describe this kind of hopeful thinking, as though it is a kind of seductive distraction to keep us from focusing on the real-world tasks of drying tears one face at a time. In a whole other chat the very same day, someone else talked to me about realizing that Chairman Mao, in destroying the temples of China, might have actually thought he was doing the people a favor. "After all, he was a Marxist -- he thought religion was the opiate of the people."
> I think of myself as a realist, as opposed to a believer in "pie in the sky by and by." I bake my own pies. If I suffer from apathy towards bringing about justice, it is not at all because I believe that Someone else will bring it about. If anything, my own sense of history tells me that the ratio of justice to injustice, well-being to suffering, remains relatively constant throughout the eons, and I don't actually expect that ratio to change dramatically in this millennium or the next. It's my job, or my privilege, as a person alive in a certain epoch, to exert myself in the direction of justice as I understand it. But I don't have a lot of illusions about the big picture. Or don't think I do.
> Still, while the discussion about Isaiah's joyous vision went on, I kept thinking about how much I love singing "Eliyahu Ha-navi" at the end of Shabbat, Pesach, Yom Kippur. "Come Elijah the Prophet! Quickly! In our own time! And bring the Messiah, son of David!" A realist? Maybe not as much as I thought... And then as we kept talking, another word started tickling in the back of my mind. "Imagination." These images, with their startling poetic expression, stimulate our imagination. The splitting of the Red Sea into twelve passages, the "banquet of rich viands...seasoned with marrow" prepared by God on the Temple Mount, the whole figure of Elijah, who we are told, appears occasionally even today, always in disguise -- as a homeless person, a prostitute, an Arab -- all of these "images" stimulate our "imagination," our ability to visualize (auralize? tactilize?) safety, pleasure, delight -- even when these are not accessible on the material plane.
As a child I was a more stark thinker than I am today. I always thought that "hope" was a strange idea -- why waste your time imagining that things would change for the better? Either they will or they won't. Anything other than whatever actually unfolds is just imaginary, and consequently a waste of time. At a younger age I might well have said something to that effect about Isaiah. But somewhere in this season, with Passover coming and Isaiah all around me, I think I am starting to figure something out about hope. It's not about the future. And it is imaginary. Hope travels with us right now, whatever our present circumstances, in the realm of imagination.
> Another beloved image from the midrash: we are told in Deuteronomy that Moses died and was buried in an unknown location. Presumably this is so that we wouldn't make pilgrimage to his tomb and start to worship Moses himself. Still, it seems like a sad end for such a great and inspiring leader. Imagine if Nelson Mandela, or Abraham Lincoln, were to die and no one would know where his body lay. So the midrash tells us that, yes, the location is secret -- but we do know that there is an underground tunnel that runs from the burial place directly to the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs in the Machpelah! So, by extension -- by imagination -- he has his place of honor with Abraham and Sarah and company, as well he should. Sometimes I think about that underground channel, like I think about the twelve channels that split the Red Sea. Do I think that it "really" exists? No, not exactly. But it is not a waste of time at all to imagine the underground tunnel that gives my beloved Moses a burial place of honor. Because that image (not to mention the image of Moses himself, of course!) makes the whole picture bigger, deeper and more beautiful than it would be without it. And that enlargement is hope.
> One of the reasons that Passover is so much fun is because we use all these sensory tools to help us fully, richly imagine the exodus from Egypt. Horseradish! Charoset! Matzah! Candles, flowers, new clothes, the seder plate. All of these beautiful and tasty things enlarge our imagination. And in so doing, they give us hope -- not necessarily about the future, even, but about the present moment. They build into our imagination, our conception of the world, possibilities of redemption, victory and justice, which we can carry with us into whatever faces us. Have a most blessed, imaginative, delicious and hopeful Passover, my dear community!
Copyright 2000 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 04/01/2000(rge)