Tetzaveh

Katit la-ma'or: Beaten for the light - Mark Saperstein

Marc Saperstein, a rabbi and professor, relocated to London last June to become Principal of the Leo Baeck College. For the previous 29 years, he taught Jewish history and headed Judaic Studies programmes at universities in Cambridge (Massaschusetts), St. Louis, and Washington DC.

When I was a child, growing up in a New York suburb, it was a family ritual to sit together for lunch on Sundays at 12:30, while listening on the radio to a programme called "The Eternal Light". This was a series of specially commissioned, and beautifully written, half-hour dramatizations of Jewish stories sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The programme always began with the first verse of our parashah (in the older translation): "Command the children of Israel to bring unto thee pure olive oil, beaten for the light, to cause the lamps to burn continually."

That phrase, "beaten for the light", katit la-ma'or, remained with me, but only as words. Some years later, after finishing my BA, whilst travelling in Morocco, I saw a grove of olive trees, and near the edge of the grove, a group of men, with large paddles, smashing what looked like large bags made of a porous cloth. This illustrated for me the reality behind the biblical phrase: these men were beating the olives in order to extract the oil that would be either eaten as food or burnt for light.

The final step in my processing of this phrase occurred when I began my study of Midrash (traditional rabbinic narrative) in rabbinical school, and came across the following passage in Shemot Rabbah (Midrash on Exodus) on our verse: "'The Lord has named you a leafy olive tree, fair with goodly fruit' (Jeremiah 11:16). Olives are placed in a grinding mill, where they are ground; their pulp is then tied up in a hempen bale, upon which heavy stones are placed. Only after all of that do olives yield their oil. So too, Israel. The nations of the earth knock them down, drive them from place to place, imprison them, put chains around their necks, and post soldiers all around them. Only then do Israel resolve on repentance, and the Holy One responds to them" (Shemot Rabbah 36,1).

Needless to say, this is a deeply pessimistic view of Jewish historical experience among the nations: unbalanced, hyperbolic, mythic, what Salo W. Baron called "the lachrymose conception of Jewish history" as an unending vale of tears. But it raises an interesting question. Do Jews tend to abandon their faith and their traditions in good times and return to their spiritual roots only when they are persecuted? Do Jews produce their most important cultural creations only under conditions of oppression? Can we fulfil our role as a light to the nations only as a suffering servant, beaten for that light?

The historical reality is more complex. Jews indeed often felt impelled to write poignant lamentations, powerful chronicles, inspiring liturgical poems in times of persecution. But the Babylonian Talmud, the poetry of Samuel ha-Nagid ibn Nagrela and Judah Halevi, the philosophical works of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides, the massive historical volumes of Graetz, the novels and plays of Israeli and Anglo- and American-Jewish writers, were written during periods of relative tranquillity, in environments where Jews were not being imprisoned and enchained by their Gentile neighbours. The flourishing of Jewish educational institutions in Israel, the United States and England, in numbers that exceed those of East European Jewry in its prime, testifies to the capacity of Jews to thrive culturally as well as materially not in spite of the peoples around them, but in interaction and dialogue with them.

Unlike the olive, we need not be beaten and crushed to produce light-giving oil. We can keep the lamp of Jewish knowledge, creativity, and devotion burning continually in good times as well as in bad. But no light is inherently eternal. To keep that lamp burning continually requires effort, and commitment.