Passover 2016

 Pesach 2016

When I went into the temple today to study there was a woman sitting at the desk, a volunteer. I re-introduced myself,

For some reason, she immediately went into a monologue about rabbis she had liked and not liked. Finally I asked her what exactly she didn’t like about any particular  rabbi.

She became specific, said that a student rabbi at her old temple in the southwest had interpreted an important word in Torah too lightly. I tried to help her find the word or phrase. We started at ehiah asher ehiah and then she pounced on  it: Hineni.

This rabbinic student had shared that hineni means right-on.

I smiled. You didn’t like that?

She shook her head. What do you think it means? Who says it again?

My mind was still on Metzorah. I had not yet admittedly re-entered Exodus for Pesach. I struggled for a moment. Abraham? Jacob?  Certainly. But I was in-transfer from Leviticus to Exodus and bringing in Genesis felt like an intrusion.

Moses, I responded. Burning bush.

What does it mean?

It means really being present, I mean with guts, with every ounce of your strength, being nowhere else.

She nodded her head.

I agree.

When I went to study Torah though...and I decided to create a wide fence around the Passover reading... the real hineni was right there, not said by Abraham  nor Jacob or Moses. It’s God who says hineni this time right when the people of Israel are panicking and the Egyptians are closing in.  The word hit me like a recurrence. I had just been talking about it and now I was re-living the experience of it. It was a re-entry, a revolving appearance of no  end and no beginning. It reminded me of the description Derrida uses for a spectre …A question of repetition. A specter is always a revenant. One can not control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back (Spectres of Marx 37)

In fact, in Torah this action  of repetition, this recycling energy, becomes more powerful and useful than any personal strength, the type I had just described to the volunteer.  This non-ending and non-beginning of spirituality, of love  is exactly the lesson of hineni. It defies singularity through the community of its speakers. It revisits singularity through a repetition of the singular word  from patriarch to patriarch then from God.  At the same time it forces us to accept the inter-connections of all the prophets, to see beyond the boundaries between their beings, their myths and their challenges....and our own as well. 

 When God speaks the same word, we are reminded of the covenant not as a tangible object  that is said and promised, but as a force of compassion  enacted over and over again.  Hineni can be seen as a life-line, a lift-up, a grasp on every eternal beginning.

It can also be seen as the word that connects societies and nations, religions, races, political parties and genders, not through the simple power of  singular strength. Oh no.   Rather, through an undeniable clarity of re-entry into  plurality over and over again. Deals may break, wars will kill, people will kill each other and hearts will shatter. The truth is though,  through that experience of the repetition (as we emulate the word) we can finally find the cut off point to our very own self-destructive and painful behavior. Repetition can do that to you. Just like a gem in a tightening tornado,  we are continually bound to break out completely from our self imposed angst. Nothing to fear.  We can take what matters with us.

Yes,   we will always eternally be racing through the Reed Sea and finding ourselves on dry land. We will know this repetition  in our bones, in our hearts, in our eyes. We will hear this echo of hineni  as a word that defies all logic, all scholarly investigation, all rational thought,  all exact grammatical, linguistic, literal and contextual definition. And we will learn to be aware (more and more) of each moment of each  revolving-evolution.

Hineni cannot unravel. Hineni has seen it all, those yet to be born, the struggles they will live, those who have already passed. Memory and forgetfulness merge in the word and not one human can overpower it.  In this world of violent and beautiful integration, our focus on hineni  can probably save hundreds of thousands of lives. Our focus on hineni can help raise-up hospitality to the level of necessary search and rescue operations.  It can  create a unification with the Other that has existed and recycled for millennium. It can lift the dead back into their chariots and bring them home to Mitzrayim or to Israel. It can supply us with fresh water to drink.

It's a celebration of our singular  accomplishments and the miraculous (yes) but only to fortify our catapult now, then and tomorrow into  the magnificent potential of a divine pluralism.

Right on!

One day upon re entry to the temple I will re-find this volunteer and repeat the word and remind her of our conversation. And thank her for reminding me. Happy Passover.