In this past week’s parsha, Balak, the Torah surprises us.   The normal scene completely switches and focuses not on the Jewish people but instead on prophets of other nations who have a relationship with God but who have not heard of the Jewish people.  For these people, the Jewish people are but a curiosity and an annoyance.  We suddenly see the world within the Torah from a different vantage point entirely.   

Recently a Kesher congregant gave me the gift of a deeply insightful book from Israel on the Torah portions by Yair Agmon, an  israeli writer and movie director.  On the above scene from last week’s parsha he writes that the Torah is teaching us the need to change perspectives.   As the Torah does so blatantly in Balak, so to do we need to periodically move the camera to a new angle and change perspectives in order to constantly find the amazement that is out there in the world, to look beyond the space in which which we often limit ourselves, to walk out beyond the edge of our farms, to the other side of the “cow pasture.”.  There we can find, with new perspective, the heros and visions we did not expect.  

This past week I was in Israel for the bar mitzvah of a former congregant from St. Louis. The bar mitzvah was held at a kibbutz called Yad Mordechai which few Israelis and even fewer Americans are familiar with. It is a completely secular kibbutz on the Gaza border.  This bar mitzvah in fact was the first time anyone had ever read the Torah at Yad Mordechai.   If not for the father of the bar mitzvah boy’s interest in this kibbutz I certainly would never have gone there and really would never have heard of it.  It is far outside of my geographical, religious and cultural Israel experiences.

Yet now, due to this bar mitzvah, I know more about Yad Mordechai than any other kibbutz in Israel.  The kibbutz is named Yad Mordechai for Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.  A small agricultural kibbutz far in the south they did not think they deserved to be named for him, yet soon after its establishment the kibbutz played a vital, heroic and sacrificial role in the war for Israel’s independence.  In 1948 as the Egyptian army marched the short road to Tel Aviv to end Israel once and for all, 21 men from Yad Mordechai died as this small band of kibbutznikim held back the Egyptians for six days, long enough for additional Israeli troops to amass on the road to Tel Aviv and stop them once and for all.   

How many wondrous places are there in our world and in the Jewish story that we do not seek out due to the habit  of retaining our perspectives and the comfort of not venturing forth and refocusing ourselves on the vast world that God has given us?  

Let us choose something this week, one new idea, new book of Torah, new place, new act of kindness, or learning, or human interaction in which to challenge our perspectives and discover something new in God’s world.

Shabbat Shalom