Dodi's Aufruf Speech

Daniel Feldman
Aufruf Speech, Sunday, December 13, 2009
26 Kislev 5770 -- 2nd day chanuka

Thank you all for coming this morning. Ilana and I feel overwhelmed by Hashem’s Chesed in joining so many honored family and friends today at the start of this long-awaited, very special simcha – al hanissim v’al hapurkan. We’re grateful to be surrounded by familiar faces from all the key stations of our lives: for me, from Teaneck, New Haven, Israel, as well as the Kurshans, who have so warmly welcomed me into their remarkable family and, of course, ra’ayati kalati, Ilana.

Ilana and I want to thank our parents, especially our mothers, who planned our aufruf and wedding celebrations with extraordinary grace, efficiency, and virtually no help from us at all. You both already manage a dizzying array of responsibilities on a daily basis and we are inspired by and grateful for your selfless examples of love and dedication. We’re also honored to have here my grandmother, Grandma Betty (a minor celebrity here in Teaneck), all our phenomenal siblings, nieces and nephews, including my sister and brother-in-law Estie and Elizur and their adorable kids. Making a wedding in the States was more convenient for everyone involved except for them. We’re glad you came. Finally, I don’t have the words but feel obliged to make mention of the subtext to this entire simcha, which is that we give shevah and hoda’a to Hashem that my dad is here shalem itanu hayom. Shenizke l’refua shlemah, u’teshua gedola bzman hazeh. I also feel blessed to mark this simcha at this shul, in the embrace of a kehilla characterized by steadfast loyalty and personal devotion. To me, that is what this shul represents, from Rabbi Baum to all of my parents’ many dear friends who have stood by them during the adverse conditions of the past few years and are gathered here today in celebration. Our family owes you all an enormous debt of hakarat hatov.

My brother Joe said at his aufruf a few years back that after leyning, reading the haftara, and delivering a dvar torah at his aufruf, he felt as if his aufruf were a bar mitzvah redux. Well, when we decided to do a morning minyan today with the same bagel and pancake brunch we had at Aaron’s bris, you can imagine what sort of simcha we thought this would resemble –I hope that’s as far as the similarity to a morning brit this will go. No cutting! But I do want to think for a few minutes about the notion of marriage as a brit, a covenantal agreement which Ilana and I are forging next week. It’s a theme that we will develop next Sunday, but it also appears in an interesting form in yesterday’s parsha, Vayeshev. Vayeshev holds great personal significance for Ilana and me. It was the first pasha shiur by Avivah Zornberg I attended, and thus was the parsha under discussion when Ilana and I first met. I knew that Ilana was exceptional from that very first shiur two years ago when Avivah cited William Blake’s “The Tyger” and asked Ilana to complete the poem’s first stanzas. How does it begin again, Ilana?

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

She recited flawlessly by heart that night and has since completely stolen my heart. And so with perfect symmetry, it seems appropriate to share an idea from Avivah’s Torah that jumps out at me when reflecting on this occasion.

Vayeshev begins, Vayeshev Yaakov B’eretz Megurei Aviv, B’eretz Knaan. Yaakov settled in the land of his fathers’ sojourning, in Knaan. Regarding the words Vayeshev Yaakov, Rashi cites a fascinating midrash:

Bikesh yaakov leshev b’shalva: Yakov sought to settle in serenity. Kafatz alav rogzo shel Yosef. Immediately the misfortune of Yosef leapt upon him. The Midrash continues, Tzadikim seek to settle in peace and God replies, “Isn’t it sufficient for tzadikim what awaits them in the world to come – lo dayan l’tzadikim – why should they seek tranquility in this world, as well.” So says Rashi. What is wrong with pursuing shalva and why does Hakadosh Baruch hu mock the desire of tzadikim to find serenity in this world? Fortunately, we’re not tzadikim and are therefore eligible for this-worldly peace – perhaps one of the few benefits to not being tzadikim. But we can all still glean a crucial lesson from Rashi’s message here. In order to understand why God might have confounded Yaakov’s desire to dwell placidly in Eretz Knaan, the land of his forefathers, we need to step back and appreciate Yaakov’s situation at the start of Vayeshev.

Yaakov has just resolved his decades-long dispute with his brother Esau, liberated himself from servitude to his father-in-law Lavan, and after many tribulations finally settled in the land promised to him by Hashem. Yaakov grew up knowing that the members of his family were the legatees of a covenantal promise from God, a promise he directly received from Hashem, as well. The terms of that promise, as articulated originally to Avraham, were that Avraham’s progeny would be Gerim, foreigners in a land not theirs, and that they would be enslaved and oppressed, V’avadum v’inu otam. What has Yaakov experienced in the past two parshiyot? Yaakov complains of toiling for Lavan as a veritable slave. He tells Lavan, Gunavti Yom U’Gunavti Layla, I’ve been robbed day and night during the years Avaditikha, I served you, eved, and only by the grace of God who has seen my Onyi, my suffering, my Inuy, can I leave with anything more than the shirt on my back. Yaakov later uses the final keyword of the Avraham prophecy when he says, Im Lavan Garti, I was a ger, a stranger. As meforshim from the Midrash Mikthav to Rabbi David Silber have observed, Yaakov is not merely complaining; rather, he thinks he has been enslaved, oppressed, and exiled – he thinks he has lived the Avraham prophecy! And so when he returns to Eretz Yisrael with his children and new name, he comes not to dwell a while in the land, but to establish his family there permanently as a people. Rashi spells out that leshev b’shalva is no indulgent wish by Yakov to live in peace, but a deep-seated desire to live historically, to begin the nation.

It turns out, however, that Yakov was wrong. He had not fulfilled the prophecy; that was to come later. Yaakov’s mistake, Avivah Zornberg says, was that he wanted “to read the narrative of his own life as entering a period of fulfillment, of closure after the difficult conflicts and confrontations of his life.” But the promise of reaching a period of closure and fulfillment was not Yaakov’s to realize. He misapprehended the prophecy. He misread his life. He thought the story of breishit was coming to an end just as Hashem was about to launch a new plot.

I’d go so far as to suggest that Yaakov is the most interesting character among the avot precisely because he has this capacity to read and misread his heritage. He was the first Jewish grandchild and therefore the first to grow up knowing the tradition he was born into. In literary criticism there is a school called the Russian Formalists who postulated what they called the Rule of Three: in stories great or small things come in threes, since if something happens once, it is a phenomenon; if it happens twice, it’s a repetition; if it happens three times, it’s a pattern that can be predicted and manipulated. That’s why, in jokes it’s always three guys who walk into a bar or three knock knocks on the door. L’havdil, so too our third av, Yaakov, was in some way the first reader of Chumash: he knew what was vouchsafed by the Jewish epic, he understood what he was inheriting. But he is also a character in that drama, and as expertly as he interprets his parents and grandparents’ lives, he misreads his own. As Avivah said just this past week in Yerushalayim, You can be in a story and not understand the plot – a sentiment with which we can all easily identify. I think I also speak for Ilana when I say that I too recognize the instinct to model your own life on your parents’. Ilana and I are blessed with exemplary parents: leaders in the community and home whose rich, full, and happy lives could serve as a template for anyone seeking to lead caring and committed Jewish lives. But what led to what Rashi calls Rogzo shel Yosef, the turbulence of Yosef, was that at precisely the moment when Yaakov saw “clarity and coherence” in his own life by viewing it through the lens of his parents and grandparents, God saw the plot differently.

I empathize with a sensibility like Yaakov’s that yearns for shalva, for tranquility. Avivah calls it “a cognitive and aesthetic ambition to see history resolved, sojournings over, in this world.” But the lesson of the opening Midrash of Vayeshev as well as our experiences over recent years is not that God works to confound our best laid plans, but that precisely when we think we’re writing the narrative of our lives in one direction, we need to learn to read events differently, toward new, unexpected, and sometimes troubling storylines. Just when Yaakov thought he had found shalva, he was beset by the most agonizing travails of his life. And later in life, when he finds himself in foreign exile, he arrives at a point of utter serenity with his family and past. In my own family, we know all too well the scourge of the unfathomable, unexpected rogez. We know that ambitions and hopes for shalva can be frustrated by seeming cruel whimsy – but we know too that profound joy and intimacy can emerge at the most unanticipated moment.

Ilana and I bring that strength of seeking serenity and anticipating the unexpected to our marriage. Neither of us came to Eretz Yisrael leshev b’shalva, but it was clear to us from our earliest conversations about learning, parents, and siblings that despite other intentions, we had indeed come to the land to acquire a partner. Right after our lives had veered off course from narratives we had imagined for ourselves, and at the moment when we least expected to fine serenity, we suddenly found each other. Ilana, the months since you allowed me to come into your life have been the most exhilarating of my life. I’ve been privileged not only to come to know your obvious vitality, brilliance, erudition, and wit, but also to discover your great compassion, deep sensitivity, and profound concern for all those around you. We also know that the desire to find serenity in this world and the intensity of that search – no matter how long and frustrating – can be the starting point for a thrilling new chapter in life.

This is a chapter that both of us have begun in Eretz Yisrael, which is something else that we have in common with Yaakov – the place where we seek shalva is in the land. Now there may be something paradoxical about seeking shalva in a land where the post office has different hours every day of the week to ensure maximal confusion; where the process of trying to become a citizen is so exhausting and frustrating that anyone who survives is applauded as a hero; where you feel you need to take off work for two weeks just to order a washing machine. Israel, as any Oleh will tell you, is not exactly a convenient place to live. However, true shalva, I’d suggest, is not dependent on place, not even on the land of Eretz Yisrael, but is to be found in another person. There is profound wisdom in the ancient Talmudic concept of “bayit” as referring not only to a person’s home, but to his partner – a concept central to the halachot of the current chag. Ilana, I look forward to finding that home in you as we create our own narrative, a story that will surely be both of tranquility and rogez. I look forward to returning to Israel and Yerushalayim with you next week for our own Chanukat Habayit. And with these ideas in mind of chanuka, rekindled hope and the dream of finding a home in you and with you, I close with the words of Wallache Stevens, a writer whose poems have illuminated our feelings for each other often enough:

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

I love you very much. Thank you all for coming. Mazal tov.