My wife is due to give birth pretty much any day now. A friend who gave birth told us the secret - "Push toward the pain." At a certian point, when it hurts - that's good. That means things are moving. I wonder how much we do, how much we sacrifice, to avoid pain. I am not calling for masochism, I am not saying to seek it out, but I just wonder what we give up because we don't want to go through pain.
God says to Moshe, "Come to Pharoah, for I have hardened his heart." Moshe, I want you to come see a man who is in pain, a man whose stubbornness is killing him, a man who refuses to let go, refuses to admit that he's wrong - and I want you to go look in his eyes. Because this is where most people are at, I imagine. Pain, unfulfillment. Beneath the fact that they do stuff that makes them happy sometimes - scared, afraid to confront or be confronted, afraid of being challenged or abandoned, criticized. Moshe, bear witness to that, and see it deeply.
The commentaries want to know why does it say, "Come to Pharoah?" Why doesn't it say, "Go to Pharoah?" One answer often given is that God is telling Moshe, "I am there, in the eyes of that man in pain. Come to me through that encounter."
It seems that all transitions occur with difficulty, or pain, or blood. The depth of understanding that comes through sickness. Circumcision. The blood on the doorpost of the houses - the moment of leaving Egypt amidst great pain and tremors. Birth is the paradigmatic example - the tremors that bring life into the world.
Even witnessing a birth, as Mary told me, is a miracle, reminds us of the magnitude of life, reminds us of the axiom we like to forget - that life is messy and amazing, that growth is excrutiatingly worthwhile. The Mishnah tells us, "These are things that a person eats its fruit in this world, and whose principal remaisn intact in the world to come: Honoring one's parents, acts of kindness, waking up to study Torah in the morning and evening, bringing guests into one's house, visiting the sick, accompanying the bride to her canopy, burying the dead... " These encounters with life remind us of the ultimacy of life always, bring us into close encounter with life at its turning points. Some of them are fun, and some put us into direct contact with pain. If we turn away, take a painkiller, ignore life's eternal humming message, ignore the fact of change and the need for dynamic growth, for confrontation.
God tells Moshe: Look at the pain in this man's eyes. It is incumbent upon all of us who want to be truly alive to look pain in the eye, without shame, to look into the eyes of the sick even though we are scared of death, to look into the amazing eyes of the bride even though we are jealous, to look seriously into the eyes of the newborn, to watch the face of the mother as she pushes the baby out, to watch her pain and be reminded of the demands of life. And to open our pain to each other, when we hurt, rather than hide - to open, to say 'I hurt now' and to share it. Life is the rule.
Rav Gavriel Goldfeder
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Rav Gavriel Goldfeder is one of the first semicha recipients of the yeshiva. A graduate of Drew University in Religious Studies, he came to Bat Ayin after stints in other yeshivot and found a spiritual and intellectual home. Here he met his wife, Ketriellah, who was a student in our short-lived Women's Yeshiva. Upon graduation, Gavriel took the position of rabbi of the Aish Kodesh Congregation in Boulder, Colorado and together with Ketriellah and their growing family, they are busy creating (in Gavriel's words), "a community infused with Torah values, passion for learning and prayer, consideration of one another, and action, as well as deep celebration of the joys of life." |