Dear friends,
What an amazing Parshah!

Besides the fact that it has so many laws, many of the vast number of them are so real world-oriented that if you had to give an example of what Torah really has to say about life, everything in Mishpatim would jump off the page at you.

Dealing with people who have no power, victims, slaves, the destitute, are there together with the laws that involve paying damages without flinching. One of the more unique cases requires providing a place for a person who has committed a murder by negligence. The gravity of the death of an innocent person isn’t negated, while at the same time the complexity of the internal reality of the perpetrator isn’t ignored. His negligence demonstrates, at least on some level, lack of genuine recognition of the value of human life. It doesn’t mean that he is a murderer in the simple sense of the word; he doesn’t hate anyone to the extent of making a conscious effort to eliminate his presence from the world. So, he is sent to one of the Levite cities, where he finds himself in an entirely different environment. This can be the key to his coming to an entirely new and better way of seeing himself, and from there, seeing other people. The Levites were dedicated to Torah. Being with them could potentially change him, and in another sense also change them, by making them aware of the fact that there are people whose lives have taken them to where they didn’t necessarily didn’t expect to be.

Did yours?

Case after case in the Parshah take you to the theme of “deal with it”! You harmed someone materially or physically, it’s up to you to not let the story end. You have to pay, ask for forgiveness and get on with your life. You can’t act as though nothing happened, nor can you act as though making a mistake, even if it is a terrible one, ends your life.

Your life is important, and your primary responsibility is to yourself. The famous dictum of the Mishneh, “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” doesn’t mean what some people take it to mean. It doesn’t mean developing a “me first” attitude towards life, the kind of attitude that would necessarily mean that when the bus comes, you are going to be the first one on regardless of how many people were there before you. It means that you must recognise that no one else can fulfil your potential, do your mission, or earn your portion in the Future World for you.  

One of the more famous cases involves a man who heard a prowler in his basement. When he went down to investigate, he found himself facing a burglar. He is obligated, not just permitted to defend himself. If he is, for instance a sharp shooter he should neutralize the burglar, but if not, he is supposed to save his own life even at the expense of the life of the burglar.
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You’re the only one that you have! You have a mission in life that no one else can perform. Your life is                                   complex, just like the lives of the rest of us. You can deal with each aspect of your life in ways that only you can master.

The Parshah is replete with all three categories of mitzvoth. There are civil laws and laws involving damages, payments, criminal justice etc., these are the ones that, had the Torah not guided you, you would still have dealt with the issue at hand. You can think erroneously that they are different than the other kinds of laws that make an appearance in the Parshah; such as the holidays which have to do with commemorating and living with the realization that Hashem is involved with the world, and has chosen us as His people. Left to your own devices, your logic wouldn’t demand that you eat matzah on Pesach! The fact that they appear in the same Parshah tells you something about both kind of mitzvot.

The laws that you would do anyway, (or think that you would do anyway), have to be approached with the same level of religious faith as the ones that seem more ritualistic. The reason is that the Torah is not there to tell you how to worship yourself. It’s there to tell you, (to use the phrase of the Vilna Gaon) how to rectify yourself and rectify the world.

You can only fix something if you know what its there for, how it works, and what it’s made of. Otherwise you can end up with tragic results emerging from the best intentions. The best example of this in relatively modern times, is communism. Many of the early communists were idealistic young Jews. To them, logic demanded social justice, and the Marxist version seemed to be on target. They were sure enough in their logic that they murdered countless innocent people. Along the same lines I just heard that the possibility of allowing abortion at any stage of pregnancy including the ninth month is on the agenda of New York’s legislature. It feels logical to people who have a subjective view of life, one in which the only act in the play is the mother, and the (viable) unborn child somehow doesn’t make it to center stage. Only Hashem can see reality objectively, without an agenda that is altered by personal frailty or past history.
Every time you do a mitzvah, you are making yourself and the world more perfect; more real. If you knew how much you are achieving by any mitzvah you do, you would as Rebbe Nachman would say, sing and dance through the whole seventy years…

Enjoy being part of a people who don’t shy away from the real world, from real people, and real situations.

Love,
Tziporah

​Dear friends,
It’s Tu bishvat, and I am busy checking weird looking dried fruit, until I have 15 samples of the bounty Hashem gives us straight from His earth. Tu Bishvat, the 15th of Shvat, always turns out to be during the time that the Torah narrates our liberation from Egypt, the splitting of the sea, and the way mann fell at G-d’s command to sustain us during our stay in the desert.
It seems to me that the main thing that these parshas tell you is that Hashem is willing to turn the world upside down for you, yes you, The Jewish people is made out of myriads of “you”. Not some anonymous “us”. It says in Pirkei Avot that Hashem loves humans because they are in His image. He sees the part of you that is like Him. That, means it is possible to discover the part of you that is eternal and always pure. Hashem split the sea for all of us, not just the greats or the brilliant ones. This is why the Talmud stresses that even the nursing babies knew in Whose presence they found themselves as their mothers took them through the sea.
Many things are compared to the splitting of the sea: the way Hashem sustains you, the way He finds your mate, (and for those of you who are not married, that too is part of His providence).
Another thing that is engraved on our collective memory is the way that the mann fell. As Abraham Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. We had mann for forty years; as much as we needed and not more, as near or as far as it needed to be, and it tasted the way we wanted it to taste. You can’t tell millions of people that they had mann every day unless they actually did. The memory is etched on your soul. 
The mann was the perfect food. It gave every individual the right nourishment to sustain him both physically and spiritually. It is called the “food of angels” in tehillim for that reason. Even though two people, for instance, were both getting exactly what they each need, they didn’t necessarily have the same experience with the mann.  Each one had food that tasted the way he wanted it to taste. One person could have a bowl of mann and to him it would taste like pizza, while another one could be eating the very same mann and it would taste like oatmeal.
Nowadays the way Hashem sends you your sustenance is still perfect. It gives you what you need both physically and spiritually. The way that he sustains you emotionally, financially, spiritually, intellectually, is what He knows you need for you to be the person you were created to be. It is perfect for you. The way He achieves this end is far more concealed than it was during the heady years we were in the desert. There are layers and layers of what seems to be outside cause and effect that create the illusion that He is not really involved, or worse still not really aware of your true needs. The way you interpret your life affects the “taste” of your life. You don’t necessarily make a conscious decision to taste your life as the equivalent of pizza or oatmeal, but non-conscious decisions are still real.  Examining your responses to life and owning them is much easier said than done.
Picture this scene:
Little boy “whaaa. Waaa”
Dad: “WHat’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
Little boy: “ I spilled my milk”
Dad (happy to teach a life lesson) “Don’t cry over spilled milk!”
Little boy: “It spilled on your computer”
Dad: “Whaa waaa”
 
I have met people whose lives were painful, but they experienced life as sweet, and others who have everything except the one thing that they are focused on. For some it is financial security - owning their own home instead of renting. For others it is finding someone with whom they could share their lives. For still others, it’s having a perfect body. The rest of the package might be there, but if the one component that they want more than anything else is absent, somehow renders everything bitter. You have the opportunity to look upward, and to see the Source, and to recognize that your measurement of mann is perfect.
When Moshe complained to Hashem about how little faith we had, Hashem, who could see us with even more acute vision than Moshe could, wanted Moshe to see our true beauty. He showed Moshe again and again that His love for us is neither something that is conditional, nor is it something that any mortal can completely understand.
Tu Bishvat is the new year of the trees. It says that this is a good day to pray for a good esrog. One of the four species that are taken on succot (the others being a lulav (palm branch), haddasim (mytles) and aravot (willows). Each one resembles a part of the body. The esrog looks like a heart (no, a heart doesn’t look like a valentine it looks like an esrog…). Pray for a good heart, one that will be open to seeing how wonderful, beautiful and holy you are underneath the layers of what you may think of as being the Real Me. Pray for being able to look at what you have, and at the people who surround you and see the mann.
Love,
Tziporah

Dear friends,
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First some good news

I just received Brachah Burr’s invitation, and heard about Ettie Svei’s engagement. I also received great pictures from Lele Katz’ wedding. Some of you know who I am talking about. If you don’t, share my simchah anyway! They are building homes that will be BEH part of our future. All of this in addition to the engagement of our tutor, Gittie Smith (Rabbi Smith’s daughter). Somehow, all of these simchahs melded for me, as I entered the Fountain, the Lakewood wedding hall where my grandson, Shaib (okay-Menachem Yishai), got married last Thursday. Sometimes you can't put things into words, but that has never stopped me from trying. I suppose the reason is that as a human being the need to let your inner life be heard is there from the beginning. When Hashem made the first human, the text tells you that he was called a ‘nefesh Chaya~, which means a living soul. The Targum translates the phrase (which presented its own difficulties-what sort of a soul wouldn’t be living, and why would G-d put it into our world?). He tells us that the meaning of the phrase is a ‘speaking soul’, meaning a soul that needs to find expression through the body.

I was at my grandson’s wedding in Lakewood.

That means that when I looked at him, I would see my son under the chuppah, and without too much effort see my own chuppah as well (especially since my son, now grown to full maturity looks very similar to my husband at his age). Without necessarily choosing to do so, I began envisioning my parents wedding, and the generations before in Eastern Europe, and from there backwards to Eretz Yisrael, and to ancient melodies that are foreign and totally a product of my imagination. Or Not.

The chosson stood there, serious and straight, alongside his kallah. They could have been Any Chosson and Any Kallah, generic versions of klal Yisrael’s past and future.  The chossons little siblings preceded them down the aisle (how civilized! I have grown so used to people getting married in parking lots…). They sped down on tiny scooters decorated with crepe paper, and threw flower petals as they rode down. They are the future. They grew up when artificial intelligence is part of the scene, where almost all women work outside of the home, and where learning Torah is flourishing more than in any era since the second temple, along with an assimilation rate that competes with the holocaust for its sheer destruction of everything Jewish. They live with profound contradictions, and do so with delightful oblivion. They are the next links on the chain.

I had never spent any real amount of time in Lakewood, where the chasunah took place. It amazed me to see some of the sights. The stately normal homes full of bnei torah, the large number of people who have made Lakewood their home because they want to feel part of something bigger than themselves (or to be near their children who have often made the life choices that they made as the result of their parents wanting to give them something more real than anything else in their world will ever be).

I also davened in the Roberts Shul. It has another name, but it is very much The Roberts shul - the imprint of the man who built it is wherever you look. When I was a child, it was usually true that you could figure out how religious a synagogue was by observing its inside. The most orthodox shul near my parent‘s home was a shtibel. I don’t know what chassidus the rebbe of the shul belonged to. If I am not mistaken, his name was Rav Usher Rosenblum, but he was the only completely uncompromised voice in the area at that time. The shul was clean, hopelessly shabby, and was the kind of place that you imagined the shamash warming up the soda and drying out the sponge cake for the occasional Kiddush. Young Israel was far more attractive, it was more modern looking, everyone spoke English, but the vast majority of the congregants were not observant. And ‘above’ that was Young Judea. It resembled a movie theatre on the inside, dark, plush, and unfortunately Conservative. The stereotype crashed down when I entered the Robert’s s shul. It was built with the intent of making genuine tefillah as comfortable and as beautiful as possible. You enter a small area, carpeted and with a sign directing the women upstairs. Nu-nothing new here. When I got upstairs, I discovered that the large room was carpeted, had comfortable seats, built in bookcases for chumashim and siddurim, beautiful lighting and a general aura of dignity and care that I have up to that point never seen in a frum women’s section of a shul. Gorgeous floral displays were placed on tables. They looked real enough to fool most of the women who had come for the chasunah. There was also a basket with various prescriptions of reading glasses added to the feeling that this is an important place, a place where important things happen. Outside the tefilla area was a room that held a leather couch, and opened to another room where everything needed for young kids to play was ready for them, this includes a door that closed isolating their sound from the tefillah just a few feet away. There is a room dedicated for tzedakah, so that those who are collecting for various causes or for their own needs have a place to be during the tefilah, and so that the people who come to learn and daven have a place to give tzedakah in dignity without being accosted during their learning or davening. There is a Bais Midrash with an extremely impressive collection of sefarim, where a kollel learns throughout the week. All and all, it was quite an experience.

Later Friday night, I took a walk with an old friend, who has lived in Lakewood for many years. Without either of us planning to do so, we headed towards BMG, Bais Midrash Gadol, the Lakewood Yeshiva. I found myself heading back to the stereotype that the Robert’s shul had broken. In my fantasy fed by the Robert’s shul, the Yeshiva should have been a place dedicated to learning the Torah with dignity, grace, and luxury. It isn’t. It’s a yeshiva. Loud, alive, crowded, not particularly more of anything than itself. When we entered the stark Women’s section and looked down all you could see is a sea full of shtenders (lecterns) jammed together. It was past 11, and no one seemed particularly concerned about it. They looked like they were there for the duration, about a thousand of them (the room, by my estimations could hold 2,000, and it was at least half full).

I am back in Yerushalaim now, where the inner and outer worlds meld and become one.

With love
Tziporah

Dear friends,

Here we are in the second week of shovavim, the chapters that deal with the exodus from Egypt. Last week’s Parshah ended with Moshe asking Hashem, “Why have you done evil to this people”. It seemed that things had only gone from tragic to unbearable since Moshe came back to Egypt to set them free. Wouldn’t you feel betrayed? Moshe didn’t, but he did have a question.

How many times have you heard people ask the same question Moshe did, either in the same words or in different ones? “Where was G-d when…?” is a great beginning for a sentence that by its nature is a statement, not a real question in which you have an authentic desire for an answer.  It’s a statement born of anger. “Why are things the way that they are, and not the way that I think they must be?”  is the feeling (and often the thought) that lies below the surface.

G-d’s answer to Moshe wasn’t a litany of self-justifications (which in this case would mean blaming the Egyptians, the Jews, or both). Instead, Hashem begins a process in which He lets Moshe enter a different world, one in which Hashem is more knowable than He is when you only look for Him on the surface level of reality.

This process actually began generations earlier when Hashem promised Avraham that he would have a child, and that his child would ultimately emerge as a great nation. Avraham didn’t know how his future children could definitely be counted upon to do this mission. All humans have free choice, what would happen if they decided to reject being a “great nation”. What if they prefer to be a smaller, less dramatic nation, one whose footsteps are not so easily seen in the sand. Hashem’s answer was (according to the Talmud) that His commitment to the nascent Jewish People would remain unchanging. They won’t be allowed to disappear, or choose out. They will discover who they are by suffering everything that exile has to offer. He then showed Avraham the entire spectrum of Jewish experience in exile. Torquemada, Hitler, Stalin, and the many forgotten men of evil who etched horror onto the ongoing mural of human experience. He saw the little children holding on to their parents who already knew that they were all doomed. He saw the acts of terror. He was then given a choice; is this what you want for your children, or do you want them to face up to who they are and what they could have been through the purification of gehinnom in Olam Haba. He chose this world, the world in which real change is possible, and the world in which one hour of tshuvah and good deeds gets you more than anything you can gain in Olam Haba, even though the raw pleasure of one moment in Olam Haba is greater than anything this world has to offer. The real question isn’t “Where was G-d when..?”, but, how can I find Him when I am living through the hard and painful moments. How can I use them to come back to being the person I was born to be? To answer that question, Hashem revealed something of a clue by revealing some of His Names to Moshe.

The function of a name separates a thing or a person from everything else. I am Tziporah Heller. That tells you that I am not a box of oatmeal or President Trump. It doesn’t tell you who I am, just who I am not. Unlike our names, The Names that Hashem give you insight to the One who made you.

1 - The Name ‘Ekya’ (which when praying or studying Torah would be pronounced with a hey rather than a kuf) which appears last Parshah. Its literal meaning is “I shall be”, which in context means that I shall be with you, guiding you through this moment and through everything the future offers. The number value of this Name is 21. If you time it by itself (21x21) the result is 441, which is the number value of the word emes which means truth. Truth by definition is the entire picture. You and I are stuck on page 769 in a book that began way before we were here, and will go on far beyond any time line that you or I can imagine. Hashem is with you when you opened your eyes and saw a world full of color, adventure, and people. He is there with you at this moment of incomprehensible challenge, and He will be with you at the end of your story when there is genuine resolution.

2 - The Name ‘Shakai’ means the One who is sufficient. The word sufficiency means, “enough” not less, but also not more. He made the oceans. The average depth of the ocean is 12,100 feet. The deepest part of the ocean is called Challenger Deep, and is located beneath the western Pacific Ocean, in the southern end of the Marianna Trench which runs several hundred kilometers southward of the U.S. territorial island of Guam. The One who made this, is also the One who lets the ocean hit the beach so gently that you can sit on the edge of the shore and build tunnels with your local three-year-old. One of the ways that this translates is by the occurrence of what Ramban calls “hidden miracles”, meaning events in which the components of concealment and revelation are just about equal, so that you can attribute the event to nature (whose mother is Mother Nature anyway?) or you can choose to see Hashem’s hidden hand. When you look back at your own lives, ask yourselves a few questions:

If you are in Bnos Avigail: How did your great-grandparent’s lives lead to your parents meeting, marrying, and having you as there child. Where were they from? What was the fate of other family members? Could they have predicted your learning Torah in English in Yerushalaim?

If you are in Neve: Could YOU or your parents have pictured you in Neve five years before you got here?
If you are just a friend, how likely is it that we would know each other, and find each other exchanging ideas using a computer? Could you have imagined this when you were a child?

Getting to know Hashem is a process. The next Name, is the one that we don’t pronounce as it is written. It gives you a distant glimpse into not just what Hashem does, but into what He is, and what He wants to share of Himself with us.

Can you really really know anything of Hashem’s essence?

Even when you think about your friends, and people who have been in your life for a long time, if you were to strip away their deeds and every word they ever said, would you know them? What that tells you is that their souls, which are a dimension of Hashem Himself are hidden from us. How deeply do we really know ourselves?  Hashem revealed something of His essential self to Moshe at this point, so that he could begin the long, difficult and sometimes overwhelming task of teaching us who we are, and who Hashem is to us.
More on this next letter, but in the meantime, THINK. Go deep inside so that when you hear about the miracles of the plagues, you will know more about what they tell you about G-d, His relationship to us and to His world, and even something of yourself. The main thing is to never stop looking, or seeing the beauty together with the challenges and to accept the reality that you have the strength to go beyond living in the world of doubt and blame.
Love,
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Tziporah