Parashat Re’eh 5784
If you have a trained eye, Brooklyn is full of medicine. Beyond the blaring sirens, you will find linden trees in late spring that fill the air with their intoxicating scent. Besides providing sweet-smelling air, linden leaves, stems and flowers are also known for soothing anxiety, summer colds and fevers. Gripping the gate of the Ft. Hamilton entrance to Greenwood Cemetery are the tendrils of my favorite plant, passionflower, showing off its otherworldly flowers that bloom for only one day. The wild, fringe-like petals unfurl in the morning and by nightfall, they’ve already begun to wilt. The flowers, tendrils, and leaves can help with insomnia, anxiety, and muscle spasms. If you walk through the streets of South Slope, you will find towering mullein in people’s front yards. With its fuzzy soft leaves and tall, slender stalk of bright yellow flowers, mullein supports lung health, can soothe a chest cold or cough, and can be an emotional support in times of grief.
The list keeps growing as I wander the streets, parks, and cemeteries: deep purple elderberries, ecstatic-looking echinacea flowers, lush silvery-green mugwort. These plants are perfectly situated to ease the stresses that seem to multiply in our often chaotic borough, almost as if the Divine knows where they are needed most.
Our Torah portion, Re’eh, is the command form of the word “to see,” in which God, through Moshe’s final speech commands us to:
רְאֵ֗ה אָנֹכִ֛י נֹתֵ֥ן לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם הַיּ֑וֹם בְּרָכָ֖ה וּקְלָלָֽה׃
See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.
On this verse, Sforno asks a legitimate question, why just these two extremes? Why do we only have the option of a blessing–which he says gives us more than we need–and a curse–which gives us less than we need? Sforno says, we are given two extremes lest we become half-hearted or lukewarm about life, always trying to find a middle ground.
The first word of our Parsha being “to see,” with Sforno’s help it seems that our pasuk is saying that each day we have a very important choice, we can choose to see blessing–the abundance we have in our lives. Or, we can choose to see curse–the areas in which we lack, we don’t have enough in our lives or in the world.
Perhaps Sforno is saying that it doesn’t really matter which you choose, in either case (whether you are feeling abundant or lacking) you will be truly alive. How Jewish is that? Whether we are kvelling or kvetching, we understand what it is to be truly alive, but anything in the middle is half-hearted.
Since-October 7th, my eye, and perhaps yours, has been searching for brachot, blessings, abundance and medicine. I have been looking for what can help us get through this time, what light might be available around us that we may not be able to see. When I look around the garden that is PSJC, I see abundance and medicine in the form of laughter at kiddush, deep kavannah as we continue to pray for an end to this war and the return of our hostages. I see medicine in the form of our 20s and 30s Shabbat dinners on Friday nights and our schmoozes in the park on Saturday evenings, through book clubs and mah jong and sandwich making and advanced Talmud and so much more. Each gathering, each moment of connection, is a thread in the fabric of our community, weaving together a tapestry of support, resilience, and hope, and creating sacred spaces where healing and transformation can take place. Each moment of connection is a reminder of the blessings we have and the abundance that is available to us right here in this very building.
As our parsha instructs us, I invite you to not only look but also see. See the blessings, the abundance, the medicine, that is available to us in our borough and in our community. In this way may we be able to heal as a community and as a world.
