Fifteen Words

On Tuesday I was in Israel. On Thursday I took a train to Krakow.

The distance between those two sentences is about twenty-five hundred kilometers. It is also the distance between a living Jewish civilization and the place where one was murdered and made into a museum.

Kazimierz is the old Jewish quarter of Krakow. If you visit — and people do, constantly — you'll find restaurants with names in Hebrew and Yiddish, menus featuring "traditional Jewish cuisine," and shops selling questionable merchandise.

There are plaques marking synagogues. There are walking tours of the ghetto. It is all very thorough, and it is incredibly sad in a way I was not prepared for. The buildings are real. Some of the synagogues still stand. But the people who filled them are gone, and what remains is basically just decoration.

Jewish life here has the quality of a very detailed replica.

I'm spending Shabbat in Krakow thanks to Chabad, which operates here the way it operates everywhere — somebody shows up, sets a table, keeps the lights on.

Friday night there will be services. There will be a meal. Someone will say the brachot over wine and challah.

The parsha this Shabbat is Naso — "lift up" or idiomatically "count" — the longest portion in the Torah. It covers a lot of ground: the continuation of the Levite census from last week, the laws of the Sotah, the Nazirite vow, and then a long, repetitive catalogue of identical offerings brought by each tribal leader at the dedication of the Mishkan.

On first read, Naso is not the parsha you'd pick for inspiration.

But tucked between the laws and the offerings — buried in the middle of dense procedural text — sit the most famous words of blessing in the Torah.

God tells Moses to instruct Aaron and his sons, the kohanim — the priests — to bless the people of Israel. And then God gives them the words.

Exactly fifteen of them, in Hebrew. Three lines:

יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ יְהֹוָ֖ה וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ׃ {ס}        

GOD bless you and protect you!

יָאֵ֨ר יְהֹוָ֧ה ׀ פָּנָ֛יו אֵלֶ֖יךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ׃ {ס}        

GOD deal kindly and graciously with you!

יִשָּׂ֨א יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם׃ {ס}        

GOD bestow favor upon you and grant you peace!

— Bamidbar 6:24-26

The English smooths the imagery. The second line, in Hebrew, says ya'er Adonai panav elekha — may God make His face shine upon you. Light, directed at a single person. The third: yisa Adonai panav elekha — may God lift His face toward you. And the three lines grow as they go — three Hebrew words in the first, five in the second, seven in the third. The blessing expands outward, like hands being raised.

The verse right after is easy to miss:

וְשָׂמ֥וּ אֶת־שְׁמִ֖י עַל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וַאֲנִ֖י אֲבָרְכֵֽם׃ {ס}        

Thus they shall link My name with the people of Israel, and I will bless them.

— Bamidbar 6:27

Vesamú et shemí al bnei Yisrael — they shall place My name on the children of Israel. The kohanim don't do the blessing. They place God's name on the people, and God does the rest. The priests are a delivery mechanism. The blessing belongs to someone else.

Here's what stays with me. These fifteen words were given in the midbar — the wilderness. No Temple. No Jerusalem. No permanent address. The Israelites were camping, packing up, carrying the Mishkan on their backs from one stop to the next.

And this is when God hands over the words Jews have been saying to each other ever since. While they're still wandering.

Birkat Kohanim — the Priestly Blessing — is the oldest biblical text we have physical evidence for. In 1979, archaeologists found two tiny silver scrolls at Ketef Hinnom, outside Jerusalem, dating to the seventh century BCE — four hundred years before the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scratched into the silver, barely legible: yevarechecha Adonai veyishmerecha. The words had already been traveling for centuries by the time someone pressed them into metal.

They've been traveling since. Through both destructions. Through every exile. Through every diaspora community that gathered a minyan in a room and called it a shul.

The words don't need a building. They don't need a homeland. They need someone willing to say them and someone willing to stand there and receive them.

Last Shabbat I was in Israel for Shavuot — my first as a Jew. The holiday that marks the giving of the Torah at Sinai. Three and a half weeks after my conversion, standing in the place where the calendar was built to be lived, where the language on the street signs is the language of the liturgy.

A few days later I'm in a city where the Jewish quarter is a souvenir shop and Shabbat dinner depends on one Chabad rabbi and whoever walks through the door.

The blessing was built for exactly this. Bamidbar — in the wilderness. The words were given before any fixed address, and they've never needed one since. Every Friday night, in synagogues and living rooms and Chabad houses in cities where Jewish life was nearly erased, someone says these same words. Three, then five, then seven. Expanding ever outward.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham