The Narrow Place

I am writing this from London, and I have taken off my kippa and replaced it with a ball cap.

I don't want to write that sentence. I have never wanted to write it less.

A few days ago I was in Jerusalem, where I wore it without a second thought — through the shuk, through the Old City, onto a bus — and the only danger was the kind that comes with a siren and a shelter and ninety seconds to get underground. You hear the alarm. You move. You live among people who move with you.

London does not have sirens for what happens on its sidewalks.

We almost didn't leave. For several days it looked like the airspace would close — every indication pointed toward an American-Israeli strike on Iran, and if the skies shut, we'd have been stuck. We would have stayed in a heartbeat. But the operation was called off at the last minute, the flights kept running, and here we are. Grateful to be headed home to Atlanta, devastated to have left, and — I'll say it plainly — afraid in a way I never was under rocket fire. In Israel, the threat usally announces itself. Here, it just walks toward you.

This week's parsha knows something about hearing promises in places that make listening impossible.

Parashat Vaera opens with God speaking to Moses in the most direct terms the Torah has yet offered. Not a burning bush. Not an angelic intermediary. A declaration:

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו אֲנִ֥י יְהֹוָֽה׃

God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am GOD.

— Shemot 6:2

And then the promise — four verbs, four expressions of redemption that will eventually give us the four cups of wine at the Pesach seder:

לָכֵ֞ן אֱמֹ֥ר לִבְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל֮ אֲנִ֣י יְהֹוָה֒ וְהוֹצֵאתִ֣י אֶתְכֶ֗ם מִתַּ֙חַת֙ סִבְלֹ֣ת מִצְרַ֔יִם וְהִצַּלְתִּ֥י אֶתְכֶ֖ם מֵעֲבֹדָתָ֑ם וְגָאַלְתִּ֤י אֶתְכֶם֙ בִּזְר֣וֹעַ נְטוּיָ֔ה וּבִשְׁפָטִ֖ים גְּדֹלִֽים׃

Say, therefore, to the Israelite people: I am GOD. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements.

— Shemot 6:6

Four verbs: I will free you, I will deliver you, I will redeem you, I will take you. Each one a stage. Each one a cup of wine we haven't yet poured.

And what happens when Moses carries this promise to the people?

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃ {פ}

But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.

— Shemot 6:9

Shortness of spirit. Literally: their breath was too short to take it in.

They couldn't hear the promise of redemption because the narrowness of their lives — Mitzrayim, Egypt, from the root tzar, meaning narrow, constricted — had squeezed the air out of them. Not because they didn't believe. Because they couldn't breathe.

I think about this on a London sidewalk, in a ballcap because wearing my kippah is too dangerous. Having to hide. Constricted. Narrow.

The narrowness isn't the same as slavery. I know that. But the mechanism is familiar — when your body is managing fear, your spirit has trouble receiving good news.

When the street itself is the constriction, you stop hearing promises about what life could be.

And yet. God makes the promise anyway. That's the part of Vaera that doesn't get enough attention. The Israelites can't hear it, Moses protests that he's unfit to deliver it, and Pharaoh certainly isn't interested. Nobody in the story is ready for redemption. God starts it anyway. The four verbs land in a room where nobody is listening, and they don't expire. They wait.

Last week, while we were still in Israel, something happened in Los Angeles. A man named Alon Abady and his wife Monique donated a sixteen-story, three-hundred-thousand-square-foot building — valued at a hundred million dollars — to Chabad of California. It will become the largest Jewish center in North America.

The backstory is the part that belongs in this column. The Abady family arrived in the United States from Syria in the 1970s with almost nothing. They were broke, alone, without a network. A young Chabad rabbi named Baruch Shlomo Cunin helped them — found them housing, gave Alon's mother a job, provided the scaffolding for a family to rebuild.

Decades passed. Abady built a real estate empire. He and the rabbi lost touch. And when Chabad came looking for a building, Abady didn't hesitate. He said it was time to repay a kindness.

The closing happened on a Friday afternoon, January 9. As Shabbat approached, they hurried to affix the first mezuzah to the front door.

Fifty years. A kindness given to a family in a narrow place, and a hundred-million-dollar building on Pico Boulevard — synagogue, classrooms, social services, a museum of Jewish history and the story of the Land of Israel — rising from the return. That's not a transaction. That's the four expressions of redemption playing out across a lifetime. I will free you. I will deliver you. I will redeem you. I will take you.

Each verb in its own decade.

I am not comparing a London sidewalk to Egyptian bondage, and I'm not comparing my discomfort to the Abady family's early years in America. I am saying that the Torah this week opens with a promise delivered into a place too narrow to receive it — and that the promise works anyway. Not immediately. Not in a single generation. But it works.

This evening, we will find our way to Shabbat in a city where I'd rather not be. The kippa will probably go back on for shul and come back off for the walk home. That's the station we're at — one of the stages, one of the four verbs, not yet the last one.

The narrowness is real. So is the promise.

God doesn't wait for us to be ready. That might be the most Jewish idea in the entire Torah.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham