Seven years ago this week-end I had asked to do the d'var Torah at my synagogue. My birthday was on Shabbat, and it was my first birthday after having cancer, my 60th. I was still recovering and weak, but it seemed right to do my first d'var Torah after cancer on my birthday. It was a different parsha, Tzav, and I talked about how things seemed new, and how I was marking events as before and after cancer, and how it must have felt dedicating the Mishkan and performing the sacrifices for the first time.
This year my birthday is not on Shabbat, but the next day, but again I wanted to mark the date with a drosh.
And again it is a matter of new beginnings. This Shabbat is Shabbat Hachodesh, the second Shabbat before Passover, and the first of the month of Nissan, "the first of months." (This year the date on the Jewish calendar is actually the first day of Nissan, and Passover begins in exactly two weeks.) So we read an extra reading from a third scroll, the twelfth chapter of Exodus. A second scroll is used for the special maftir (last section of the weekly Torah reading); there are special maftirs for five weeks leading up to Passover.
From the Chabad site on this Shabbat:
And G-d spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying: This chodesh (new moon, month) shall be for you the head of months; it shall be for you the first of the months of the year (Exodus 12:2)
There are two "heads" to the Jewish year. The 1st of Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah), the day of the creation of man, is the head of the natural year -- the year which the Jew shares with all of creation. The month of Nissan, marking the Exodus and the birth of Israel, is the head of a miraculous year: a dimension of time, inhabited solely by the Jew, in which the miraculous -- i.e., the power to transcend nature and norm -- is the very stuff and substance of life.
(The Chassidic Masters)
The chapter goes on to describe how the Israelites are to prepare for the tenth plague, the actual passing over of the Israelites' houses where the blood of the sacrifice marks the lintels.
The parsha this week is also about sacrifices - a description of the occasions to be marked by sacrifices, of the offerings themselves, and of how the priests are to carry them out. The rites seem strange to us; how bizarre to think that God should enjoy the smell of roasting meat and grant favor to those who bring it. Yet it is a very human impulse, the impulse to sacrifice something for a greater purpose. Do we ever progress or gain important goals without sacrificing something to get there?
Great people give so much time and energy to their chosen purpose that they often give up relationships and pleasures the rest of us take for granted. I remember, when I was a child beginning to play the violin, reading a child's biography of Paganini which described the young violinist spending hours practicing while he could hear other children playing outside. And how many families of the great feel that they have been sacrificed to some greater purpose?
The rest of us make sacrifices all the time - perhaps of immediate pleasures so we can have something more at the end. We all sacrifice some of our freedom so that we can live in a society that creates a greater good for us all. Perhaps our politics are determined by what we are and are not willing to sacrifice ourselves and whether we expect the sacrifices to come from others.
Shabbat shalom.