Topsy Turvy Start to 2021 (Shemot 5781)

Photo by Christophe Dion on Unsplash

The start of 2021 has been topsy-turvy. This week at Jewish Community High School of the Bay, with permission from San Francisco Department of Public Health, we happily are piloting optional, in-person, outdoor experiences for students, but still are prohibited from learning indoors on Ellis Street. In the United States more than 500,000 have received a second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, but we feel the pull of the pandemic’s spike accelerated by a potentially more infectious coronavirus variant. And in a period of just 15 days, Americans are experiencing the dislocation of a presidential insurrection and impeachment along with the exhilaration of a presidential inauguration. 

It is nearly overwhelming. Nearly impossible to keep in perspective. Calling on nearly every ounce of our resilience. 

This week’s Torah portion, Va’era offers guidance through the travails of Moses. This week’s parsha is focused on Moses' failure. Over and over again -- through six plagues -- Moses fails at his one job, liberating our ancient slave ancestors. But Moses isn’t swallowed up by these failures. Rather he seems to grow wiser and stronger through them. 

As my colleague, Rabbi Stephen Pearce once observed, Moses’ failures call to mind the great American figure who failed twice in business during the ‘30s; lost political races in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s; and suffered a nervous breakdown. But we remember him because he was elected president in 1860: Abraham Lincoln.

Reflecting on his three decades of failure and defeat, Lincoln said, “A [person] is about as happy as [they] make up [their] mind to be.” Perspective is everything. 

When the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked to reflect on Torah heroes, she picked five from last week’s Torah portion, Shemot. Each of these five overcame intense, external challenges: Yocheved (Moses’ mother), Shifra and Puah (the midwives), Miriam, and Batya (Pharaoh’s daughter who courageously drew Moses from the water).

Ginsburg observed, “these women had a vision leading out of the darkness shrouding their world. They were women of action, prepared to defy [corrupt] authority to make their vision a reality bathed in the light of the day.”

Ginsburg’s own life is a chronicle of resilience: enduring the barbs of Harvard law school where classmates and faculty felt she was taking a slot that should have gone to a man, any man; battling to find work in a law firm because she was a woman; being judged harshly as a wife and a mother for wanting to work. Like Moses and Lincoln, Ginsburg seemed to grow wiser and stronger through these challenges. As she reflected years later, “So often in life, things you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune.”

In the midst of this topsy-turvy start of 2021, I encourage all of us to lean on each other for the strength and wisdom needed to generate the perspective and resilience that will guide us from darkness to light.