Always in Motion

Tradition, as we know only too well, has been wielded – um, traditionally, actually – throughout the ages as a cudgel to keep us from engendering deep and meaningful change in our Church. I won’t name all who have been harmed, but women and LBGTQI? particularly stand out today. As recently as June 2019, however, Pope Francis reminded us of its true definition, and I think in this we can invest great hope:

We are now in the Easter season; Passover has just ended. Both commemorate deep roots; both tell and retell ancient stories, and, perhaps most importantly, both celebrate the movement, change, and new beginnings these roots inspire.

Avivah Zornberg, scholar and Scotch-Israeli master of midrash, is another woman whose voice a narrow concept of “tradition” should never bar us from hearing. Midrash is the Jewish practice of repeated deep readings of sacred texts to uncover ever-evolving sacred, sensual, and intellectual layers of meaning for our lives. In applying the Midrashic practice to Exodus, a story relevant to both Easter and Passover, she brings us the fresh perspective and insight we crave from women and others whose voices have so often been suppressed thanks to misapplied tradition. In fact, some portions of her interpretation of Exodus make exactly that point.

In Exodus Chapter 3, for example, she notes that Moses is forced to “turn away” from his set tasks because he cannot ignore a wonder nearby, a bush on fire but never consumed. Zornberg explained how this seemingly minor phrase, “turning away”, is significant. Midrashic practice, she writes, calls us to look especially closely whenever our attention is suddenly redirected and we feel compelled to turn aside from what we thought was our straight path in life. In the story, there is, she says, “a certain quality of the spirit that allows (Moses) to move away from the straight and narrow, as it were, from his own concerns, and to simply to notice an anomaly in the world and to look for meaning in it.”

Something is about to upend tradition, custom, old ways, the narrative is saying, and we will learn how and why and what it means for us if we look carefully and thoughtfully and receptively enough.

With all of this in mind, I’ll let the midrash master, Avivah Zornberg, take over:

God engages (Moses) in dialogue at that point, and basically tells him that the time has come for redemption and that he will descend now and save the people, and Moses will be the intermediary between God and the people and, also, between God and Pharaoh. And I think the most striking thing in the narrative — and it’s quite a long, drawn-out narrative — is that Moses consistently refuses to take on the mission.

“I’m not worthy,” and “They’re not going to believe me”; and whatever God says, he basically repudiates. It’s the most extraordinary first meeting between God and a human being. It’s not just that he’s too modest to take on the role, he’s skeptical about everything that God says. It’s really almost what you would call chutzpah. How does one talk to God like that?

And it’s interesting that in the — again, in the critiques that you find in the midrashic tradition, he’s not criticized so much for cheek against God as for slandering the people, for being dubious about the people’s capacity to believe, to allow themselves to be redeemed. He apparently doesn’t think very much of the people. Are they worthy of redemption?

In the end, after a lot of to and fro between God and Moses — the midrash says it takes seven days, actually; this is not something you would necessarily see from reading the text — a whole week, there’s this kind of resistance, until in the end, Moses says: Well, send by the hand of anyone you want to send by, so long as it’s not me. And at this point God gets angry, the text says, and says: Well, all right. We’ll involve Aaron with you. Your brother Aaron will go with you.

But the detail of God being angry with Moses I think is very significant, because it seems — and this is what I would suggest — it seems that Moses, in a very intense way, is representing the problem that God faces in trying to redeem the people. It’s not only a problem with Pharaoh. It’s not only the persecutor. It’s a problem with the people and with Moses, that there is a kind of resistance to God’s redemption, which is really, as I understand it, it’s something that can only really be understood in psychological terms: there’s an unwillingness to open oneself up to an alternative reality.

And Moses is very sensitive to the problem that he has and that he senses that the people also have, so that the whole situation as I understand it, as the story begins, is not a simple one of a cruel, persecuting Pharaoh and poor, helpless victims. It’s poor, helpless victims who will need in some way to arouse within themselves the capacity to be redeemed; that is, to open themselves to relationship, to communication.

I’d like to suggest that the whole story really is about the need for the people to be more than an object that has to be yanked out of Egypt, but for the people to become — to acquire the kind of life and openness and communicability that makes them want to emerge from that place of death, which is Egypt.

Thanks to Avivah Zornberg’s deeper look, I learned a way of looking at that one small part of the Exodus story through new eyes. It is not only the pharaohs (i.e. hierarchy) of the world who use tradition as a cudgel against us, but we, ourselves.

I am so proud of being among people like Avivah Zornberg – and you – who take the chance to explore always the possible alternatives to traditional thoughts and practices.

I am so proud to be among you who, as the Pope says, are always open to “flower, grow, and bear fruit.”