What a surreal encounter. G-d finds
Moses tending a flock of sheep in the desert. G-d wishes to
communicate with Moses, but first has to get his attention. Moses is
found standing near a simple bush that turns out to be not so simple.
G-d causes a fire to burn within the bush, but the fire never ignites
it. As the Torah says, "the bush was not consumed" and thereafter is
known as the burning bush.
This week, we begin the second book
of Torah. In Hebrew, it is called Shemot, which means Names. The book
begins with a listing of names of the family of Jacob who descended to
Egypt at the time of a terrible famine in Canaan. In English, we call
the book Exodus, which comes from the Greek, meaning the road out. It
takes twelve chapters and ten plagues for the Israelites to take the
road out of Egypt. That road out begins with the encounter of G-d and
Moses at this burning bush.
In chapter three we find, "And the
angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the
midst of a bush; and Moses looked, and behold the bush burned with
fire but the bush was not consumed."
Is it possible that a bush could
burn, and yet, not be consumed by the very fire that burns it? Is it
possible that a people burn under the flames of persecution for
centuries, and yet, miraculously not be consumed, but survive? We know
the answer to the latter question to be a resounding yes. That people
is our people. That people is the Jewish people.
The fires of destruction have raged
around us, and yet, we survived. In the late 19th century, the
otherwise great British historian, Arnold Toynbee, described the
Jewish people as the fossils of history. A fossil, of course, is the
remains of an organism that lived ages ago and has long expired.
Before the Czarist pogroms, the Communist repressions and the Nazi
Holocaust, Toynbee saw our exodus from the world stage. The fiercest
fires were yet to burn around us. During the years of the Second World
War, millions of our people literally burned and their bodies, turned
to ashes, were tragically consumed.
And this year we are to celebrate
the sixtieth anniversary of the State of Israel. The fires burned and
our ancient language of the Bible Hebrew was not consumed. It is the
modern spoken language of Israel today. Jewish children dream in
Hebrew. The fires burned and we pray today at the Western Wall so
close to where the Holy Temple once stood before the Romans set it
ablaze. We are that bush in the desert that burned but was not
consumed.
The Talmud, in the tractate Avodah
Zarah, relates the tragic, but moving story, of Rabbi Hanina ben
Teradyon, one of the great sages of Israel tortured to death during
the early second century by the Romans. The Jews were forbidden to
teach and learn Torah, but Rabbi Hanina, amongst others, persisted.
They could not imagine life without Torah learning. The Romans
condemned Rabbi Hanina to a horrible death. He was to be burned along
with a Torah scroll which he held in his arms. While suffering his
fate, Rabbi Hanina spoke words of great faith to his students. They
asked him "Master, what do you see?" He answered "I see the parchment
burning while the letters of the Torah soar upward. The Torah burned,
but it was not consumed. The Jewish people burned, but was not
consumed. Could a bush in the desert burn and yet not be consumed?
We learned this past week of the
exodus of 40 Jews out of Iran and their home coming to Israel. Jews
have been trickling out of Iran in the past years, quietly, so as not
to arouse the ire of the Islamic Revolutionary government. In 2004,
there were some 25,000 Jews left in Iran from the 100,000 living in
that country at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel.
Today, there are some 10,000 Iranian Jews left. The story of the book
of Exodus has not yet been completed. The story continues.
Sadly, the fires continued to burn
near the borders of the State of Israel today in the form of Hamas and
Hezbollah fueled by the pathological hatred of Iran's president. We
can only hope and pray that these fires do not turn into full flames.
We hope and pray even more that whatever fires may burn, Israel, like
that little bush in the desert, never, never be consumed.
