Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

Grasshoppers or angels, the pluralistic opportunity

This past week, I had the great pleasure of accompanying our Year 7 students on their Synagogue Excursion, visiting shuls and engaging with different Rabbis around Sydney. As Emanuel School is a pluralist school, we make sure to expose our students to different denominations, from Progressive to Orthodox, from Ashkenazi to Eidut Hamizrach. During question time, a particular question kept repeating itself: “what denomination are you?” One Rabbi, a little befuddled, laughed and said, “I don’t think we should be put in boxes”. Nevertheless, our students persisted and said, “But what denomination ARE you?”. The Rabbi, who happened to be orthodox, said with a twinkle in his eye, “I am progressive”.  Then he explained, “These different labels don’t necessarily help us understand who we are. I am an orthodox Rabbi with a progressive outlook on life. Similarly, I know many progressive Rabbis who care deeply about tradition and in some ways are quite orthodox.” What a wonderful message for our students to hear. We may want to categorise people and institutions into neat little boxes. But life is far messier than that. This may be why in the Jewish world today many young people are opting for the term called ‘trans-denominational.’ This term describes a person who is on an engaged Jewish journey, but seeks to transcend denominational boundaries.

This notion of transcending limitations seems to be the ultimate definition of true freedom. In this week’s Parsha, Shelach, the Israelites are close to entering the land of Israel and 12 spies are sent on a reconnaissance mission to the land. Upon the spies’ return, they sow fear into the hearts of the Israelites. This leads God to decide that the Israelites are not truly free, nor ready to enter the land of Israel. God decrees the Israelites must wander the desert for 40 years so that an entire generation with a slavery mindset can die out. What leads God to determine that the people are still in an enslaved mindset? In discussing the giants that the spies saw in the land of Cana’an, the spies famously report, “we were but grasshoppers in our eyes, and so we looked in theirs too” .This strange phrasing describes not just how the spies felt (diminished) but how they imagined they were seen by the giants of the land (diminutive). An audacious Midrash imagines God’s response to this grasshopper mindset: God says, “Now I am angry. Did you know how I made you look in their eyes? Who told you that you didn’t look like angels in their eyes?”. Here the Rabbis of our Midrash imagine God to be saying this is a failure of your imagination: “If you want to limit yourself to a grasshopper, then fine but don’t dare assume that you know what other people think about you”. The power of this Midrash is that it reminds all humans that we tend to make careless assumptions all the time, pre-determining what we think people think about us. If we can imagine in a more expansive way and believe that other people see us in good ways, we are free to see ourselves differently. Ultimately, true freedom begins in our minds and imagination.

The Rabbi on our synagogue excursion challenged the grasshopper dictum. He implied that we live in a system that grasshoppers us, while we could be seen with the infinite potential of an angel. The pluralistic richness of our diverse student body at Emanuel, gives us a marvellous ethical opportunity, a chance to engage with people, students and families who are similar to us and different from us. If we can just jump over the  grasshopper mindset, we might discover something more wondrous and infinitely more surprising than we could have ever imagined, in ourselves and each other! And that is true freedom!  

Shabbat Shalom