(D’var Torah delivered at the Confirmation service of Hannah Lovinger)
Pardon me, but I’ve got to sing this melody…
Could we with ink the ocean fill
Were every blade of grass a quill
Were the world of parchment made
And everyone a scribe by trade
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean, drain it dry
Nor would the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky
This is a rendition of a liturgical poem (piyyut) set to music, written in the eleventh century by a cantor named Meir ben Isaac Nehorai. Since there is a reference to a scroll – and our Torah is a scroll – and since it speaks about God’s love for us – and God’s love for us was manifest in the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai – it has been sung on Shavuot. Traditionally Confirmation is held on that day since just like the Children of Israel accepted Torah, so do our contemporary Children of Israel affirm or confirm their acceptance of Torah.
I’ve officiated at 37 Confirmation services in my years as rabbi in Wilmington, Delaware, and four more in my years in Winchester, Staunton, and Harrisonburg. I had the students read this piyyut as part of a lesson on what it is they affirm. I can tell you with the promise that it is NOT a generalization, that every student had tears in his or her eyes after reading it.
They had tears because they were laughing themselves silly!
Can you imagine how distraught this rabbi was from that response? Here we were, the culmination of not only their year of studying with two rabbis to reach this climactic moment, but the culmination of their formal Jewish education…and they laughed at a matter of Jewish theology!!
What caused the laughter wasn’t the music to which it was set and which they had to sing. Rather it was the point of the poem. But please note…even with respect to so basic a concept as God’s love, and even if it was laughter at the notion of God altogether, there’s nothing wrong with rejection. They laughed because they rejected the idea.
One thing I’ve told each class…what they affirm on this day doesn’t have to be what the book says, what the sages said, even what their own rabbi said (although…well). What they affirm is receiving Torah and using their minds and their hearts and their souls to think for themselves; to accept or reject because they thought about it. They should know what our tradition has to say about this or that, because that’s the only way you can have a mature response to this or that. What they affirm, I would hope, is their identity as a member of a precious faith which, over four thousand years, something no other faith can proclaim, has produced some of the greatest minds the world has known.
Many of those people were devout and observant; many were secular; many were liberal; many were atheists, but what they had in common was that they were devout and observant JEWS, or secular JEWS, or liberal JEWS, or even atheistic JEWS. And if you remember your grammar, an adjective merely modifies the noun to which it is attached. The noun, the key word is “Jew” and that’s the bottom line, as it were.
The theme of the classes Hannah and I had together was a simple one…if your college roommate or someone in an adjacent dorm room, comes from Iowa and never met a Jew and asked you about Jews and Judaism, you can’t giggle and say, “I don’t know.” Rather, you’ve got to be able to stand up tall as a Jew, and as best as possible and as clearly as possible, explain, and answer questions, and know where to look if you don’t know the answer at that moment. If you do that, you’ve affirmed then and, hopefully always, that which symbolically you affirm today.