IT’S ALL ABOUT TORAH

BY RABBI GARY KARLIN, SHAAR SHALOM CONGREGATION, HALIFAX, NS

I’m not kidding myself. I’m an Atlantic Canada newbie. By the time you read this, I’ll be getting ready for my two-year anniversary on July 4 as the Rabbi of Shaar Shalom Congregation, and as a resident of Halifax. Two years here is very much still a “from away,” but just starting to feel at home, and hopefully more accepted as a Haligonian.

But being from a place is not really about geography. It’s about being somewhere long enough to have a past, a store of memories, a history. It’s about people: family and community.

The Hebrew language has a word for the connection between place and people: bayit. In Hebrew School, many of us learned that bayit means house. Beit k’nesset is a house of meeting—a synagogue. Beit sefer is a house of a book, or books—a school. But bayit also means “family.”

When the Torah talks about how we were to offer the ancient Passover sacrifice of a lamb or goat, it tells us that each head of household is to take one animal per household, “seh l’veit avot, seh la-bayit” (Exodus/Shemot 12:3). If there were too few in the family to finish the sacrificial meat, then they would link and pool resources to offer an animal jointly, “if the household is too small for a lamb, let him share one with a neighbor who dwells nearby, in proportion to the number of persons: you shall contribute for the lamb according to what each household will eat” (12:4).

Note here the triad of elements: family/ community, a significant occasion, and ritual food. We join with others with whom we share our lives most intimately (family) and then only slightly less so (community). We follow a shared calendar of holidays like Passover, as well as other times of common memory. And we perform unique and evocative rituals using food, drink, words, and actions. Think of a family Shabbat meal with kiddush wine and two loaves, or eating outdoors in a Sukkah during that wonderful fall festival, or hearing the Rosh haShanah shofar with so many others before returning home with loved ones to dip apple in honey. The uniqueness of Yom Kippur, in fact, is that it focuses only on two of the three elements, people and an occasion, while dispensing entirely with the third.

Tying all these together, of course, is Torah— by which we mean not only the humash, the “Five Books,” but also the vast Jewish literary tradition that continues to flower from the written Bible: Midrash and Mishnah and Talmud, Halakhah (law) and Aggadah (lore), philosophy and mysticism, poetry and prose, even music and art. Shavuot, which begins this year on Sunday evening, May 16, celebrates the giving of our Torah at Mt. Sinai, but in a sense it is a starting point for everything else: family, community, shared sacred times and ritual. This Shavuot 5781, we’re especially fortunate to be able to gather safely together to symbolically re-experience the giving of the Torah as always: with family and community, with sacred time and song, and with food and ritual, both at home and in shul.

Wishing you and yours a joyous and meaningful Shavuot—hag Shavu’ot same’ah.