Hearing, and answering, our calling as Jews

I received this story via email:

A lady passing a young boy on the street noticed he was entranced by a pair of shoes in a store window. “You’re in such deep thought staring in that window!” she said.

“I was asking G-d to give me a pair of shoes,” was the boy’s reply.

The lady took him by the hand, went into the store, and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. When he brought them to her, she took the little fellow to the back part of the store and, removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his little feet and dried them with the towel.

By this time, the clerk had returned with the socks. Placing a pair upon the boy’s feet, she purchased him a pair of shoes.

She tied up the remaining pairs of socks and gave them to him. Patting him on the head she said: “No doubt, you will be more comfortable now.”

As she turned to go, the astonished kid caught her by the hand and, looking up with tears in his eyes, asked her: “Are you G-d’s wife?”

• • •

This week we begin the book of Vayikra (Leviticus), whose name, which means “And He [G-d] called,” is taken from the first word of the first verse in the book: “And He called to Moshe, and G-d spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting” (1:1).

Rashi points out that this is an unusual turn of phrase; normally G-d speaks to Moshe, whereas here G-d calls him. Indeed Rashi notes that when Balaam (the Gentile Prophet viewed by Jewish tradition as being a wicked personality) speaks with G-d, the word used is “vayaker,” meaning “G-d happened upon him.” The difference in these two Hebrew words is simply the letter Aleph. In a traditional Torah scroll, the Aleph appears as a smaller letter, suggesting a difference between experiencing something as a coincidence and as a calling.

Rashi also notes (1:1) that when Hashem called Moshe, only Moshe could hear Hashem’s voice and other people were unaware of G-d’s calling. Why does this unique calling of Moshe (as opposed to the more frequent description of G-d speaking to Moshe) occur here at the beginning of Vayikra?

Vayikra is also known as Torat Kohanim, the book of the kohanim, because much of it involves the laws and obligations particular to the priestly service in the Temple. Considering that the Jewish people are called a Mamlechet Kohanim (a priestly nation), we can view the underlying message of Vayikra as an allegory of our responsibility to the world. Just as the kohanim are meant to serve, teach and model for the Jewish people, we as a Jewish people are meant to serve, teach and model for the world, to lead as a light unto the nations. 

Leaders respond to a calling that, most often, no one else hears. What most people often pass off as the events of the moment, leaders perceive as challenge of the day.

• • •

When my children were little as we visited Washington, the place we found most meaningful was the Lincoln Memorial, particularly the words of his Gettysburg address reproduced on the memorial’s wall.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Had Abraham Lincoln not been president, there might never have been a civil war, and America, and with it the western world, might still be wallowing in the miseries of slavery. How different such a world would be! One man, in the right place, at the right time, heard a calling, and understood what needed to be done.  

Indeed, the first time the phrase Vayikra appears in the Torah as a calling (as opposed to naming something such as when G-d calls the light “day” (Bereishit 1:5 ) is when G-d calls to Adam (Bereishit 3:9) and says “ayekah?” (“where are you?”). Obviously G-d is not trying to find Adam; rather G-d is asking Adam, who had just eaten from the Tree, where he has allowed himself to go; yesterday Adam was so close to G-d, and now he is do distant he has to hide in the garden. 

The paradigm of being called, and hearing that calling, is knowing where I am.

Reading this vignette of the boy looking longingly through a window at a pair of shoes, I wonder how many people passed by without even noticing that boy’s bare feet, much less feeling his struggle. But one woman was not seeing a boy with bare feet, she was hearing a calling to do something about it.

This is perhaps our greatest challenge: to determine our calling — each of us as individuals, and all of us as a collective. Do we hear that small voice, and will we rise to the challenge to do what it calls us to do? That is the challenge of the book of Vayikra.

Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem.

Rabbi Freedman is rosh yeshiva at Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem.

Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com