Community Blog Ta Sh’ma 2024 Community Welcome from the President: On Seeing and Being Seen

On Monday, November 18, Hebrew College hosted more than 30 prospective rabbinical students for our in-person Open House, Ta Sh’ma (Come & Hear). The students met our faculty and current students for an inspiring afternoon of learning, conversation, music and prayer. After a lunch provided by the college student-run Shul Lunch Co-op, President Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld offered these welcoming remarks.

Welcome and thank you all for being here.

One of the things I feel I’ve learned over the years — from each of the times I moved to a new city, a new apartment, a new house — is that, for me, a place really only begins to feel like home once I’ve welcomed guests into it. So, thank you for giving us this opportunity to make this place feel a little more like home through the experience of welcoming you into it.

In this time of some dark rhetoric in our country about borders, about who does and doesn’t belong –may it be for all of us a reminder that our deepest sense of home, our deepest sense of belonging, is nurtured not through keeping people out but through the act of hachnasat orchim — through the act of welcoming guests.

The theme of seeing and being seen (that R. Daniel Klein spoke about so beautifully this morning) runs beneath the surface and between the lines of this week’s parsha in such a powerful way.

On the surface, this week’s parsha is all about Avraham’s servant looking for a wife for Yitzchak — but below the surface, it is also about Avraham’s servant looking for Yitzchak himself. Because after the Akeidah, Yitzchak completely disappears. For quite a while. One could argue this is a very intelligent response to what he has just been through. We do not see him again until Rivka sees him for the first time.

The only clue to Yitzchak’s whereabouts during this time is that he had just come back from the vicinity of Beerlahai Roi. It seems like there is something for Yitzchak about the experience of being more fully seen at Beer Lachai Ro’i — at the Well named by Hagar in the wilderness, the Well of the Living God Who Sees Me – that enables Yitzchak to see and be seen by Rivka, to bring her into his mother’s tent to create a home together, to be capable of love again.

We know how true this can be. How hard it is to see others — or to see another — when we ourselves do not feel seen.

We know this in our most intimate relationships and I wonder if it might also be one way of describing the impasse that we are facing as a society in this moment — people from all directions feeling so unseen that they are unable to see others.

What might the parsha offer us as a way through this impasse? As a way of breaking the cycle of feeling unseen and therefore unable or unwilling to see?

Prayer

If we go back to the moment when Hagar gave God the name El Ro’I back in Lech Lecha, we are told:

Vatikra shem Adonai hadover eleha
“She called the Lord who spoke to her”
Atah el ro’i —
“You are the God who sees me.”

And the midrash emphasizes that part of the power is this moment is that Hagar, who felt so unseen, so insulted, so diminished and demeaned by society, suddenly had the experience of being fully seen by the One who sees us all.

In that moment, she goes on to say hagam halo ra’iti acharei ro’i — “Haven’t I gone on to see after God saw me.”

The language is somewhat opaque, but it seems to suggest that the experience of being seen by God awakens within her an awareness of her own capacity to see.

Perhaps this is also being hinted at by the Ramban, who suggests that Beer lachai ro’i had become a regular place of prayer for Yitzchak after the Akeidah. Perhaps opening ourselves to the experience of feeling seen by God is one way of breaking the human cycle of feeling unseen and therefore unable or unwilling to see. Perhaps through the experience of being seen by the God who sees-but-cannot-be-seen, we can open ourselves to hear the summons: Stop. No more sacrificing of human beings. Open your eyes and look for the ram and the well. Open your eyes and look for each other.

But there is something else the parsha offers, I think, and that is the importance of patience, and sensitivity to the paradox that we long to be seen, and we also long not to be seen. What do I mean?

After the Akeidah, did Yitzchak long to be seen? Or did he, in fact, long not to be seen? Maybe, I want to suggest a little bit of both.

This is how the text describes Rivka and Yitzchak’s first meeting:

“Looking up he saw camels approaching. Raising her eyes, Rebekah saw Isaac. Rivka alighted from the camel and said to the servant, ‘Who is that man walking in the field toward us?’ And the servant said, ‘That is my master.’ So, she took her veil and covered herself. Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.”

After the search that has occupied most of the parsha, we arrive at this tender moment that is both a moment of seeing, and not-fully-seeing, of revealing, and also concealing.

Rivka’s veil has been handed down to us as part of the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony. But what does it mean? Why do we lower the veil at the bedecken — just before the moment of great intimacy beneath the huppah?

Perhaps to teach us that the lifted veil and the lowered veil are both part of any relationship. The lowered veil conceals and protects. The lifted veil exposes and reveals.

We each have a deep yearning to see and to be seen, but relationship also demands humility about the limits of our understanding. Just think about the words — “I know what you’re thinking; I know what you’re going to say.” These words can be comforting, but they can also be profoundly dismissive.

Relationship is bound up with knowing but also with not-knowing — with the humble capacity to be surprised by the other; with respect for the mystery of another person’s soul — and, for that matter, respect for the mystery of one’s own soul.

In his essay “Being Alone Together,” Parker Palmer writes:

The soul is like a wild animal. Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places . . . yet despite its toughness, the soul is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the corner of an eye — but the sight is a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself. Unfortunately, community in our culture too often means a group of people who go crashing through the woods together, scaring the soul away . . .”

My bracha for our community is that with patience, with prayer, with a sense of mystery, wonder, and respect — we create a place where it is possible for the soul to show up.

Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld is President of Hebrew College in Newton, MA. Hebrew College will host a virtual Ta Sh’ma Open House on Dec. 8 from 2-5 p.m. Learn more and register here.

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