November 9, 2024
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Parashat Lech-Lecha
Holy Flying Fish
November 9, 2024 – 8 Cheshvan 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
I have a friend who is a therapist. She tells the story that once, she had someone in her office who was really struggling. As he shared story after story of misfortune and sorrow, she found herself thinking, “oy, he really needs a therapist.” Then, the patient paused and asked her for her wisdom. “Oh no,” she thought, “I am that therapist.”
I’ve never felt this story more deeply. This week, I looked at the sermon schedule and thought, “oh no…I am supposed to be the rabbi.” How do you speak to this moment? Everyone is feeling this week so differently. For some people, this was an incredible week of miracles, and for some people, this week plunged them into despair and anxiety. What do you say to that? What do you say to this space where we are all processing it so differently?
I want to tell you a story today. It’s one of my favorite stories of all time and I hope you love it just as much. It’s about two rabbis. Now these two rabbis could not have been more different. Rav Baruch of Medzhybizh was a very distinguished rabbi. He believed every prayer should be said with decorum, proper pronunciation and annunciation; that prayer services should be thoughtful, reflective, quiet, studious, and proper affairs. When he davened, he would come into the sanctuary, and he would sit down with a straight back, and he would pray reverently and quietly, as would his students. They would do every prayer, with every word, until the end.
The other rabbi, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, was charismatic and emotional. He didn’t believe in doing things because you should do them one particular way, he believed in following his heart wherever it led him. He sang loudly sometimes, and quietly others; he believed you should move in a service, and you should dance– if you felt it, you should just get up and move and dance around the room. He believed in singing prayers loudly that he felt and maybe skipping some other words. He was all about the emotional experience of the prayer. By the way, when he came into a sanctuary he didn’t sit in one spot. He would start over here, move over there, he would dance over there, he would clap, he would sing– it was a lot of motion and movement all the time.
Now, Rabbi Yitzchak of Berditchev had one dream, and that is he wanted to share a Shabbat with Rav Baruch of Medzhybizh. So he sent him a message and said, “Hi, I’d really love to have Shabbos with you.” And Rav Baruch writes back, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s just not going to work. There’s no universe in which you come to my shul, my house…It’s just not going to be pretty, no thank you, let’s get together another time but not for Shabbos.”
But Rabbi Yitzchak was not to be deterred. He says “please please please, just let me do anything to come to your Shabbos table.” Rav Baruch responds again, “really, you’re so smart and you’re so kind and you’re so thoughtful, but I just don’t think it’s a good idea.” Yitzchak says “please I will do anything, I mean anything, I will daven the way you daven, I will sit the way you sit, I will do nothing the way that I do it, I will do everything according to the way that you do it, just please, please let me sit with you for Shabbat.”
So what can Rav Baruch do? He doesn’t want to seem rude, so he says, “fine, you’ll come, you do things my way, we’ll have Shabbos together.”
The whole week leading up to Shabbat dinner, Rabbi Yitzchak was beyond nervous. He could not figure out how he was going to pretzel himself into Rav Baruch’s style, but he was determined to. So he was talking it through with people and he said, “you know, I know that if I say anything out loud, I will be tempted to sing the way I do, so I will just pull my lips together, and I know if my limbs are free I will be tempted to move around the room the way I do, so I will sit on my hands, and that way I’ll get through the service.”
So he goes, and they start the service, and everyone with their decorum, l’cha dodi, and Rabbi Yitzchak humming along, and he’s holding himself together. And the service goes on and the service goes on, and as the service goes on it gets harder and harder for him to hold himself in and everyone can see he’s struggling. He’s sitting there vibrating and humming loudly. But he’s doing it and he’s following protocol, and he gets through the service. Beautiful.
They make it to dinner. Now, at this time, you need to know two things: one, you need to know that the great rabbis of the time used to wear their tallitot to eat. It was considered a really beautiful practice, bringing the meal into holiness. And, they also had a practice of gefilte fish. Very important. They served sweet gefilte fish, and sour gefilte fish, and it was a big deal. You had to pick whether you wanted sweet gefilte fish first or sour gefilte fish first, and there’s some wisdom to this. Some people would say I want to have the sour first so that I can end on the sweet, and some people would say I want the sweet first to prepare myself to engage with the sour gefilte fish. So, Rav Baruch, full of decorum, full of properness, is going around the table asking, “would you care for sweet or sour first? Would you care for sweet or sour first?” And they go all the way around the table and he finally gets to Rav Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev and he says, “would you like sweet or sour first?” And Rav Levi Yitzchak goes, “I DON’T CARE ABOUT FISH! ALL I CARE ABOUT IS GOD!” And slams his hands down on the tray of fish.
Fish goes flying everywhere. There’s gefilte fish flying this way and gefilte fish flying this way and gefilte fish flying this way and gefilte fish flying all over. And by the way, it smells. And there’s fish, flying, flying, flying, and one gefilte fish lands smack dab in the middle of Rav Baruch’s forehead. And the entire room gasps. The fish slides down his face…and lands on his tallis. It’s dripping. The Talmudim are standing there with horror on their faces.
Rav Baruch, ever a proper man, takes a napkin, wipes his face and his tallis while the room is still frozen in horror. He puts the napkin down, he looks up, he looks down, he looks up, “you’re right. You’re right. I’m sorry that I didn’t see that. Thank you for joining me for Shabbat this week. I’m going to treasure this tallis forever, because this tallis is marked by someone who truly loves God.”
Rav Baruch was true to his word. He wore that stinky, stained tallis every Shabbos for the rest of his life. And he not only wore it for every Shabbos the rest of his life, but he passed it down generation to generation to generation, and that stained tallis became so holy that they would only wear it on Ne’ilah for Yom Kippur, the holiest service of the holiest day of the year.
Why am I telling you this story? Well, first of all, I love it, who doesn’t love a story about flying gefilte fish? But I also feel that this is such an important story for our time. It’s a story about how important it is for each one of us to be fully and authentically ourselves. But it’s also such a fascinating story because fundamentally, both Rav Baruch and Rav Yitzchak were right. Let’s take Levi Yitzchak first. He’s totally right that it’s important to come together, that it’s important to find ways to be together, we’re good with that. But Rav Baruch is also right, that his and Rav Yitzchak’s styles are totally incompatible. The challenge of the story is how do we find our way through in a way with our different and individual styles, can operate in the same space?
There’s been a lot of talk on social media this week, about how all of us should be processing the election. “You should be happy! You should be grateful!” “You should know how anxious I am! You should know how upset I am!” Rav Baruch and Rav Yitzchak teach us that we don’t have to feel any particular way, we don’t have to and we should not change our practice. The end of the story wasn’t that Rav Baruch says “from now on Rav Yitzchak I will do it your way,” no, what they say is “we are together, going to find a way to be in community in a way that matters.”
So our challenge is, we are that therapist, we are that rabbi. We are the people who have been selected, who have been chosen to live into this moment. Our challenge is to be fully, authentically, completely ourselves. Our challenge is to fully live our values. Our challenge is to fight for what we believe in, and our challenge is to find a way to come together. To make sure we can join together for what matters, and to keep our focus on our highest priority, which is serving God, serving the Jewish people, and serving for the blessing of the world.