Rosh Hodesh Blessing for the Month of Shevat

Last week, I returned to my work at Hebrew College after a three-month sabbatical. This was the first sabbatical I’ve taken in 35 years as a rabbi, so I really didn’t know what to expect, and honestly, I was a little nervous going into it. Would I be able to let go of a sense of responsibility to my work? Would I want to let go? Would I feel unburdened, or would I feel unmoored? Would I be able to relax and enjoy the spaciousness of this unstructured time, or would I feel stressed about whether I was excelling at relaxing?

It was, of course — like the rest of life — a mix of all these things and more.

I walked for several miles almost every day — through the woods near our house, through the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, by the ocean in California. I spent treasured time with my family, and had wonderful visits with former students, colleagues, teachers, and dear friends. I learned to knit and found myself utterly transported and transfixed by the slow, painstaking process of creating something new out of raw materials. At some point during the process, as I watched a sweater emerge from the threads of rich blue yarn in my hands, I realized how deeply comforting it felt to be stitching something beautiful together, in a time when so much of our world seems to be unraveling.

One of the things that took me by surprise was my hunger for silence, and for relief from the onslaught of words with which we are constantly bombarded. There was something exquisitely peaceful about walking or knitting quietly for hours each day and about retreating from the increasingly divisive discourse of this moment – in our nation, in our Jewish community, in our human family.

So, as I return from this precious sabbatical period, I am thinking a lot about the limits and possibilities of language, about the power and danger of both speech and silence, and about the words that I want to put out into the world.

The theme of language and its limits is a central preoccupation of the opening chapters of the Book of Exodus that we have entered over the last two weeks of our sacred Torah reading cycle.

As we move into the Exodus narrative, we encounter, in Moses, a reluctant prophet who can barely speak. “Please, O my lord, I have never been a man of words . . . I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” And then, with increasing, almost frantic urgency, “Please, O Lord, make someone else Your agent!”

We encounter, in Pharoah, a ruler whose brutality is bound up with his relentless refusal to listen. “Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go?” The hardened heart will not hear either the cries of infants or the call of God.

We encounter, in the Israelites, a people so beaten down that they cannot begin to hear the promise, the message of redemption that Moses brings to them. Moses’ initial fears are born out. Kotzer ruach blocks the possibility of real communication. “Their spirits crushed by cruel bondage,” the people cannot hear.

At the heart of this story of dehumanization and despair, then, is a crisis of language itself. Jewish mystical tradition refers to this reality as “galut hadibbur” — the Exile of the Word. As Aviva Zornberg notes in writing about this moment in the Exodus narrative: “The dynamic of language, of communication, has failed. In the Zohar, this failure is the profound meaning of exile; it encompasses the inability to hear and the inability to speak. Moses’ speech problem, in this context, is to be understood as a function of a deeper cultural rupture. The ears of this generation do not, cannot respond to living language. For this reason, Moses will not, cannot speak.”

Reading these words, I cannot help but think of the crisis of communication in our own time. As our language is degraded by so many different forces — from political polarization to social media to advertising to AI to unabashed cruelty from the halls of power — the temptation to retreat into silence can be overwhelming, almost irresistible.

We need places for silence in our lives, places where we can quiet the noise all around us and listen to — listen for — the still, small voice within. But we also know that silence has its own perils. Returning to the Exodus narrative, we can understand and empathize with Moses’ reticence and fear, and yet it is his speech — however faltering and imperfect — that God demands. Over and against the Pharoah-who-does-not-listen is the God-Who-Hears. This is the God who summons Moses, again and again, to move out of speechlessness and into speech, out of isolation and into relationship. This is the God who summons us to do the same, with all the bravery, honesty, and love we can muster.

As Yochanan Muffs writes in his book The Personhood of God:

“Any meeting of personalities requires great bravery. One who attempts to communicate with another endangers his own life, for to do this he must reveal what is in his heart. Such an act is potentially dangerous because one does not know ahead of time if he will find a receptive ear. There is always the possibility that the ear of the listener will be impervious. Any real communication, then, is a dangerous leap. But if one never screws up the courage to jump, he will wither away in silent isolation . . . The dialectical tension in the loving relationship – the painful need to express feeling and the anxiety that the expression might not be properly received – is the inner dialectic of the human personality, as well as of the Divine, and is impossible to avoid. Humankind can only overcome this tension by imitating God, by undertaking an act of bravery, a leap of faith, as God has done – by reaching out to the other, to communicate, to love.”

According to tradition, Rosh Hodesh Shevat is the day on which Moses began to share his final teaching with the people of Israel. It launches a thirty-nine-day period — from the first of Shevat through his death on the seventh of Adar — when Moses expounded the Torah to the gathered people. Moses has, of course, come a long way from the reticent prophet we encountered at the beginning of Sefer Shemot — the “man of few words,” who pleaded with God to choose someone else for the task.

But there’s something even more remarkable hinted at in the rabbinic commentary on this verse. Rashi, drawing on an earlier midrash, explains that “expounding” here means that Moses translated the entire Torah into seventy languages. We are asked to envision Moses repeating his teaching seventy times, in each of the seventy languages of the world.

There’s something extraordinarily poignant to me about this suggestion. In his final address, Moses is teaching us something profound about the nature of communication. He is teaching us not only the words of Torah, but the way of Torah — that relationship requires the courage not only to start speaking, but to keep speaking, to keep reaching out, to keep trying to communicate, to keep translating into every language we can imagine.

May the silence that we seek and the words that we speak help us hear the call of the Holy One within us and between us.

With blessings for the month of Shevat,

Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, President, Hebrew College