Parashat Tetzaveh Exodus 27:20-30:10

Haftarah 1 Samuel 15:2-34

Shabbat Zachor portion Deuteronomy 25:17-19

Dear TBE Community,

A friend recently shared a spiritual experience with me she had on a remote Pacific beach, and parts of what she told me reminded me of a place I visited many years ago.

When I worked as a documentary filmmaker for German broadcasters, one of our productions took us to the small beach town of Mazunte, in Oaxaca, Mexico. We came to shoot a reportage about local efforts to raise awareness for the preciousness of sea turtles and to protect these mysterious ancient animals that were then in danger of extinction.

Today, Mazunte is a staple destination for bohemian globetrotters; iit has become more developed and expensive than it was back then, but it still is a paradise infused with the magic of indigenous spirituality, herbal smoke from the temazcals wafting through windy dusty alleys, people chilling in hammocks or doing yoga at sunrise and sunset on the beach.

Or at Punta Cometa, the ragged cliff at the end of the beach and the southernmost point of Oaxaca, said to be inhabited by powerful spirits. People get up before the crack of dawn to meditate there with the first rays of the sun breaking through the horizon. One of the reasons that make this place so special is that from Punta Cometa, one sees the sun both rise and set over the ocean, and together with the sun, often the moon moving in opposite directions. It affords a sense of wholeness and being embraced by the universe, a sense of holiness, of being somewhere apart from the ordinary. Punta Cometa is one of those places from where humans might get a glimpse of the larger picture of the earth, the workings of the universe that surrounds us. A place where the words of the Maariv Aravim prayer can resonate deeply:

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe,

who speaks the evening into being,

skillfully opens the gates,

thoughtfully alters the time and changes the seasons,

and arranges the stars in their heavenly courses according to plan.

You are Creator of day and night,

rolling light away from darkness and darkness from light,

transforming day into night and distinguishing one from the other.

Sitting on the ragged cliff surrounded by moon and sun, one might feel closer to the divine essence that holds the universe together, closer to what revelation can mean: Not the noisy fire and smoke extravaganza of the revelation at Sinai. But a slow uncovering of layers, approaching truths already known though they are hidden. Revelation, in the Jewish sense, is not a sudden penny-dropping movement from old to new, but rather a slow uncovering of something that has always been there. Of sensing the presence of something despite— or dafka because of— its absence.

Parashat Tetzaveh is famous for it being the only Torah portion from which Moses, or his name, is absent. And yet Tetzaveh always falls out on the Hebrew calendar around the 7th of the month of Adar, traditionally designated as both the day of Moses’ birth and his death. Moses, in his absence from the parsha, is very much present.

A similar push and pull, a dance between absence and presence, between truth and disguise, between blessed and cursed characterizes Purim as well. Purim is about bringing out the unrevealed in the revealed, about hiding one’s true essence underneath a costume. About knowing truths even when we don’t fully grasp the magnitude of their workings. Like that of the sea turtles in Mazunte who, in full moon nights, return to the same beach near Punta Cometa – and only to that same beach – where they themselves hatched years ago, to lay their eggs and to continue the lifecycles of a species that has existed for more than 100 million years.

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch