This week’s Torah portion, begins with an unspoken challenge: “how do we lift up the faces of one another?” The Hebrew word Naso is ambiguous in nature, often referring to being counted in a census, but also more generally to the raising up of our heads to be seen by one another.
The portion begins with the counting of the Levitical tribes, and extends later to the entirety of the People of Israel during the reciting of the Priestly Benediction a few chapters later in the book of Numbers. One of our holiest and most treasured of blessings, the Three-Fold prayer as it is often called, asks God to bless us and watch over us, to shine God’s light and offer us comfort, and finally to lift God’s face to us and offer us peace. While it is not stated, the final part of the blessing can only occur when our own faces are lifted and when we lift the faces of others. For it is only when we can look fully at the faces of one another that we can find God.
In many ways, this is the task I have been trying to accomplish my whole life and one, perhaps, I have been put on this world to do. In West Philadelphia, where I grew up, people often walked with their faces down. They had little sense of who they were and what they could accomplish.
My friends and neighbors housed in interconnected row houses that spread out for miles, only broken by noisy intersections, had their view of the future obscured by the pain of the present world in which they lived. The horrific death of George Floyd has brought back many of those emotions. He and I were roughly the same age and while he grew up in the south and I in the north, our worlds were similar. Back in my childhood, I wondered what I could do to make the situation better, to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the first place.
On Sunday night I participated in a Zoom vigil broadcast by a wonderful Reform congregation in Minneapolis called Shir Tikvah led by Rabbi Michael Adam Latz and my friends Rabbi Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg and Rabbi Debra Rappaport. There we sang, we cried, and we hugged.
I learned a new way of hugging on Zoom, where you pretend to push your hands against the Zoom boxes and then smile lovingly at fellow Zoomers who have no idea you are looking at them, but feel it anyway. In this beleaguered community, I felt not hopelessness, but hope. I felt the strength of people whose faces were uplifted and who were willing to lift up the faces of others.
At this difficult time let us extend our blessings out much beyond our own sphere of influence, let us try our best to look one another in the eye, let us try as hard as we can to find God.