shmini: 1+1=1
hello friends,
A few very brief thoughts on this week's Torah portion. So in this portion we have Moses giving some commands and then we're told that ויקרבו כל העדה, all the congregation approaches the entrance of the tent of meeting and and stands before Hashem. A couple things I wanted to mention here. The first is that the word used for approach has the root קרב, to draw close or to draw near. The second is that the word for congregation here (עדה, same root as my name) is closely related to the word for witness. I don't think this is a case of the congregation scrolling casually up to the tent! Haamek Davar provides a few options: they approached closer than usual, they approached while rejoicing, or they approached at a run.
I've been studying Likutei Moharan with my chevrusa, and we're currently learning Torah 1:2, where Rebbe Nachman teaches that every Jew must seek after the wisdom contained every single word/thing/matter, each Jew must bind their very bones to the wisdom within every matter, so that this wisdom will light the way for them to draw themselves near (התקרב, same root of approaching) to haShem yisbarach.
This is the idea of ויקרבו כל העדה: all the witnesses, those who look closely at each thing and seek its wisdom, draw near [to haShem].
Later in this Torah portion we reach a repeated word directly at the middle of Torah (counting by words): דרש דרש. This word means "to examine" or "to inquire", and many commmentators have translated the repetition in various ways (such as "to examine closely".) I like to think about it lately as the kind of examination Rebbe Nachman discusses: not merely examining a matter, or inquiring about a thing, but asking for that essential wisdom contained in everything. Examining with the intention to draw closer to haShem.
I've been thinking about this in the context of teaching. When a student makes a "mistake", what is the underlying wisdom? What assumptions were they making that made that approach reasonable? Dan Meyer made a tweet recently that summed this up for me, where he said that over the course of his career he has gone from addressing students from a place of "look at my ideas!" to "look at math ideas!" to "look at your ideas!"
The wisdom in each thing is not the same for each person, and yet it is the same for each person. After all, each person has their own bones! And yet, the process of דרש דרש is to take two different drashes, two different wisdoms from the same object, and understand the underlying unity that connects them. Rabbi Mike Moskowitz, the cishet scholar-in-resident for trans and queer jewish studies at CBST, mentions in Textual Activism that the phrase כלל ישראל כאיש אחד בלב אחד (all Israel as one human with one heart) has the same numeric value as יש הרבה דרכים למקם (there are many paths to hashem). I would add that the gematria of דרש is equal to the gematria of כל העדה (each and every witness) + שלם (to be whole).
I'm going to go inquire after the wisdom of an ice pack on my hand,
hope you all have a great shabbos
ada