Parshat Metzorah/Shabbat Hagadol: order, ritual, and the courage to let go

There is a song from the King and I that my mom and I used to sing together. Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid. 

We loved that song. I still do, and it seems to be playing in my mind a lot these days. I love it because it’s a song about courage, and what it sometimes takes for us to believe that we have it. And lately, I’ve been reaching for this song because in its sweet, nostalgic way, it helps me feel just a little bit more in control. That my fear or worry is temporary, that I may be as brave as I make believe I am. 

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to feel like we are in control of our lives. And what I have found is that maybe the only way we can exert any control, as counterintuitive as it seems, is to let go. To acknowledge that most things, and certainly the things that are most precious to us, live just beyond our grasp. And that is terrifying. But life gives us little, fleeting moments where the illusion of control is so thick, we can make believe it’s real. For me, when I start to feel overwhelmed or distracted, in a word, out of control, the thing that gives me the most comfort is structure. And this usually manifests in a compulsive leap into a new project or hobby– think cleaning out my closet or rearranging a bookshelf. I like tangible, measurable activities. Things that give me a sense of accomplishment and a sense of order. Checking off a cosmic to-do list, if you will. 

This shabbat is Shabbat Hagadol, the Great Shabbat, and the final one before Pesach. This Shabbat, we have one last chance to enjoy our challah, to revel in our non-kosher-for-pesach kitchens. To lean into the chaos of living in the world of chametz. But come Monday night, we will be transported into the unique and ordered world of Passover. To prepare for Pesach, we fastidiously organize, make lists, clean. And then, we begin the holiday with a ritual that in its essence is a ritual of structure. 

The Hebrew word Seder, the ritual landmark of Pesach, means order. Throughout the first two nights of Pesach, we move through a structured ritual that is intentionally and pedagogically designed to help us retell and reconnect to the story of our exodus from Egypt. With 14 stations along the way, bringing us from Kiddush at the very beginning of the evening, all the way to the joyful, often loopy, exhausted singing at the very end, the Seder is itself a ritualized landmark to help us find calm and rootedness in a broken, chaotic world. 

But the Seder isn’t necessarily unique in this sense. We could argue that the entirety of the Jewish calendar is structured in such a way as to help us find moments of rootedness and control throughout the year. In fact, Shabbat, our most frequent Jewish holiday, arrives at the end of every seven days as a refuge. A Palace in Time, to quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. A cosmic, teleological place in which we can pause, reset, make meaning and order from the chaos of the week.

And I don’t know about you, but by the time Friday rolls around, I am usually bleary-eyed, the edges of reality fraying just fast enough to make me feel that things are moving too fast. And then Shabbat begins, and whatever work is still unfinished remains so until Shabbat ends 25 hours later. No matter how busy or stressed I feel even late on Friday afternoon, the moment we begin to sing those first, familiar notes of Kabbalat Shabbat, everything else seems to melt away. On Shabbat there is peace, but the peace is possible because there is structure.

And the brilliance, the genius really of Shabbat, is its finitude. Shabbat asks us to give a mere 25 hours to ourselves, to our community, back to G-d. But 25 hours, just over one day, is manageable, it’s measurable, it’s an amount of time that we can fully embrace and dive into, leaving us energized, focused, and grounded to begin the week all over again. Shabbat gifts us a moment in time that is not interminable or intimidating, and in that kind of space there is so much possibility. 

Creation itself, which we recall on Shabbat, stems from this very desire to make meaning and order out of chaos:

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃ וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃ וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר׃

When God began to create heaven and earth— the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

The earth was unformed and void, Tohu Vavohu. Even G-d is driven by this need for structure. G-d, too, finds comfort in this radical act of ordering the mayhem. 

And our parsha this Shabbat, Metzorah, may be yet another one of our tradition’s responses to the often unpredictable, unexplainable, messy nature of our lives. We talked last week about how Tazria and Metzorah are often misunderstood. That many people believe that these texts are focused on disparaging the human body; that they are intended to make us feel ashamed of the very normal, natural things our bodies do; that the categories of ritual purity and impurity are unhelpful at best, harmful at worst. But I think there’s more to the story of these Parshiot, namely that the intensive rituals described in them are actually about making sense of our experience of our bodies. That the structure, the order of the rituals designed to bring a person back into a community after contracting tzaraat, a metaphysical skin ailment, are themselves a tether that can bring a person back to the normalcy of their lives. Maybe the rituals described in Tazria and Metzorah, and really throughout the whole of Vayikra, are intended to help us reorient ourselves in the midst of an experience that is messy and confusing, isolating, and that may make us feel helpless or powerless. I think ritual draws its power from its stability, its predictability. 

And so I’m looking forward to Pesach in a new way this year. This year, I am looking to Pesach as a place to land, a place to dwell for eight whole days in the order. Pesach looks and feels different this year. The world feels more unformed and confusing and painful than ever, and I am feeling mentally and emotionally pulled in every possible direction. I know we all are. So on Pesach, even if it’s just for a moment, let the solidity and the familiarity of the holiday rituals work their magic. We can’t possibly get rid of all the chametz in our lives, and we usually can’t change the world in the ways we wish we could. But we can linger in the rituals, in the beauty and comfort of sitting in community, of taking in those holy moments to reset and begin again. 

Shabbat Shalom!