Practical Philosophy (Week 9)

This week’s Parsha is a bit dry and it’s Passover — so my reflection and learnings will be geared towards Pesach with some fun facts for you about the holiday. Enjoy!

Passover tid-bits:

Passover is the oldest Jewish holiday
Moshe (Moses) comes from “Nimsha min hamayim” translating into: pulled from the water
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated during Passover (many believed he was Jewish and the Rabbi’s at the time immediately transitioned to Yom Kippur hymns)
The worlds largest Passover seder is in Nepal, hosting 1,000 jewish
travelers
While Pesach makes up only up to eight days of the year, the celebration accounts for over 40 percent of kosher food sales in the U.S. each year, boosting it to a $2 billion industry.

This week’s Parsha: Tsav (meaning: “Command”)

In a nutshell:

Tsav: Moses instructs the Kohanim (Aaron and his sons)of their responsibilities and rights as high priests of the Jewish community and officially initiates them
Passover: Isaac (Abraham’s son) sends his 12 children (the original tribes) to Egypt because of a draught in Israel (then Cnaan). After living happily under one Pharaoh for many generations, a terrible Pharaoh comes along and condemns Jews to slavery and slaughters all their first borns. Miriam, Moses’s sister, casts him into the Nile river to save him when he’s picked up and adopted further down stream by the new evil Pharaoh’s daughter. Moses works his way up the food chain and becomes the Pharaoh’s right hand man before Miriam finds him later in life and explains that he’s Jewish. He then goes on to free the Jews from slavery, thus our reason for celebrating Passover.

Moral of the story and how it applies to our world today

The significance of asking questions: Passover is a symbol to remind us of the importance of freedom, both physically and mentally. Below is a must-read passage I was sent (thank you David) from a local Rabbi:

What is the significance of the word “Seder?” The Seder is, by definition, a system. It is a carefully planned evening that leaves very little to chance. It is a script. There is a beginning (Kadesh) and an end (Nirtza) and steps along the way to get us from “kuf” to “nun.” One may certainly ad lib and expound but not deviate. The Seder plate itself leaves nothing to chance. Most new seder plates aren’t even just plates. They are sectioned off somehow, with bowls or dividers and words designating each area. It has become a piece of art in people’s homes but its inspiration is more science. And how do we spend the time at the Seder? We manufacture questions. The Haggadah is a mix of deliberate questions, inferred questions and oddities that almost demand to be questioned. The deliberate ones, those not needed in order to transmit information, abound.

And then there are the inferred questions: Yachol mei’rosh chodesh…(you might be wondering why…), and Dayenu where we are asking if it really would have been enough. These are questions of depth rather than breadth, making someone consider a deeper meaning or another way to think about things.

And oddities that beg questions are everywhere. Having three matzas, breaking one of them, breaking a specific one, begs the question “why.” And every Seder, right before Urchatz, my father tells the story of my oldest sister who, when she could barely talk, washed her hands and started saying the bracha and my father stopped her and she looked up at my father with a horrified look of, “Why no bracha?!”

The Haggadah is the blueprint for designing a milieu that fosters questions: Model a questioning mindset by phrasing information as answers to questions, probe for deeper understanding and alter the status quo to create awareness of things we take for granted.

But what is the significance of asking questions? Questioning is both the basis of learning and a key element in our relationship with God. It is difficult to learn when a person isn’t curious about the world around them. We are all born with a sense of wonder and curiosity but, for many, that sense wanes as they get older. Maintaining that attitude is what fosters a growth mentality no matter what age.

In a similar statement, David Hamelech says, “Reishit chochma yirat Hashem (Tehilim 111:10) — Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Wonder and fear of God are related. Being awed by the world is to acknowledge that there is a higher power. When God tells Avraham to look up and try to count the stars, that is Avraham’s opportunity to behold the wonder of the universe and to recognize both his place in it and God’s dominion. Wonder, and the resulting questions, are elements of the humility needed to have a relationship with God.

Rav Soloveitchik, in a speech he gave in 1975, as summarized by Rabbi Steven Weil, Executive Vice President of the OU, in the April 2013 edition of Jewish Action, said:

Torah study is an “ecstatic, metaphysical performance;” it is a personal revelation. We therefore must approach learning Torah the way our ancestors approached the receipt of the Torah at Mount Sinai — with fear, awe, tremor and trembling (see Berachot 22a). Torah study must include deep humility, a recognition that one is standing before the Almighty, which itself leads to surrender to the Torah’s, meaning God’s, demands. If a Jew is…incapable of experiencing the presence of the Almighty, he is forbidden to study Torah because he lacks this crucial attitude.

Questions are not relegated to the Seder. On the contrary, the Seder should be the springboard for a life of questions, wonder, wisdom, humility and Torah learning. It is our responsibility to ensure that our questions and the questions of our children are not left to chance but are rather a matter of when not if.

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” — Socrates

Shabbat Shalom,

Guy