Enquiringly he enquired (Shabbat Sh’mini 26.04.2025)
You can listen to Rabbi Eleanor's sermon here or read it below.
Over the past few months, a certain song has made a new breathing exercise famous. It isn’t our usual slow breathing for a reflective moment, and I’m not going to demonstrate it, because I really don’t know how Doechii does it without hyperventilating. I will tell you that it arises in her song ‘Denial is a River’ when Doechii is getting angry, thinking about how badly her ex has treated her: anger is making ideas for revenge seem appealing, not all of them strictly legal, so the breathing exercise is supposed to calm her down enough to keep rapping, rather than doing something she might regret; and at least temporarily, it seems to work.
Sadly it seems that Moses didn’t have even Doechii’s breathing exercise to contain him, because his anger issues more than once make him do something regrettable. This time, in Parashat Sh’mini, it’s an uneaten sacrifice that sets Moses off, and he rounds on his brother the High Priest, even though Aaron is only hours or minutes into grieving the death of two of his sons. On seeing how unkindly Moses speaks to Aaron, our ancient rabbis are unimpressed: “See what anger can do even to a person as wise as Moses: he forgot the law, including that a priest in mourning should not eat of a sacrifice” (Lev. R. 13:1). The rabbis don’t care that this is righteous anger, driven by concern that God’s instructions must be followed properly, perhaps even to ensure no one else dies in the worship of God. They notice instead that the heat of anger melts away his learning, here and in two other places; anger closes Moses’s eyes to his brother’s humanity and makes him forget how to speak to a fellow traveller, a colleague or even a brother.
Yet if we look just a little earlier in the same passage of Leviticus, following the rabbinic principle (BT Megillah 13b) that God creates the remedy before creating the problem, there’s a potentially powerful antidote to anger. This is the easiest time of year to do hagbahah (lift the scroll) because we’re reading from roughly the middle of Torah, so the rolled parchment is pretty evenly divided between the two poles. In searching out the exact middle, we might remember that the ancient rabbis weren’t necessarily any better at mathematics than modern clergy (not great!), and that there are different ways of counting. They were great at finding meaning, though, so the rabbis of the Talmud share the Masoretic teaching that if you count all the words in a Torah scroll, the very middle falls in our Torah reading today.
As Torah has an even number of words, the exact middle is two words, from our third aliyah today: “דָּרֹ֥שׁ דָּרַ֛ש (darosh darash) – enquiringly he enquired” (Lev. 10:16). For the grammar nerds: it’s an infinitive absolute plus a third-person masculine singular perfect tense. What we can all hear in darosh darash is that these two very similar words share the same Hebrew root, which has to do with enquiry or seeking out, intensified by the repetition. This means that at the very heart of Torah is emphatically an attitude of curiosity: not a statement of truth or a judgment of right and wrong, but a spirit of seeking to learn more. The Psalmist tells us that “רָשָׁ֗ע כְּגֹ֣בַהּ אַ֭פּוֹ a wicked person, in the height of their anger, בַּל־יִדְרֹ֑ש will not enquire/will not seek” (Psalms 10:4), using another word connected with the same root as darosh darash. To put it the other way around, perhaps: a wise person, in the depth of their seeking, will not get angry – or at least not so angry that they do something they regret.
To put darosh darash at the centre is to make Judaism a way of life that looks at the world with wonder that keeps us searching. That sounds pretty simple, but to remain open and see ourselves as having more to learn takes a degree of humility and even courage. As Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove puts it in his recent book: “To be religious is not to walk this earth with certainty. To be religious is to walk this earth filled with wonder, awe, and appreciation for what we don’t know and may never know, but to remain, nevertheless, committed to seeking” (For Such a Time as This, p.156). To be religious, in this view, is essentially to begin with an attitude of curiosity and seeking.
The darosh darash mindset invites us to set aside our fixed ideas and engage with creativity. This is the same Hebrew root word as gives us the word ‘midrash’ – that area of Rabbinic literature where enquiry into the meaning of texts leads to creative thinking. Sometimes it produces narratives so often retold that we sometimes assume they’re Torah, like Nachshon walking into the sea before it parts; sometimes it produces ideas so modern we can’t believe they’re centuries old, like bringing Aaron’s wife Elisheba back into the story. When our ancient rabbis read with curiosity, with minds open to learn more, they find gaps and stories to fill them, enriching the tradition that we are privileged to inherit. Where will Judaism take us next? That may well be defined by our capacity to remain curious and enquire. When the Rabbis identify those two words darosh darash as the very centre of the Torah, they remind us to be wary of fixed certainties and encourage us to keep enquiring.
Practically, this attitude of noticing and curiosity also finds expression in the Jewish tradition of berakhot (blessings): those little invitations to pause, to appreciate and to wonder. Blessings like the birkat ha-ilanot, the blessing that we say on seeing fruit trees in blossom for the first time each year; particularly potent at this time of year, even in north-west London (and possibly even Leeds).i Those luminous blessing-worthy blossoms cause the Jewish month of Iyyar, which will begin on Tuesday, to be known as the month of radiance – and make this month an excellent time to try approaching the world and each other with an enquiring דָּרֹ֥שׁ דָּרַ֛ש (darosh darash) mindset, an attitude of enquiry and seeking, for ourselves. To borrow from the traditional prayer: May the new month of Iyyar come to us for goodness and blessing. May the Holy One, who is blessed, bring us and all this people, the family of Israel, a new month of life and peace, of happiness and joy, of wonder and enquiry, of curiosity and creativity. And let us say Amen. i The blessing ends “אָדָם בְּנֵי בָּהֶם לֵהָנוֹת טוֹבוֹת וְאִילָנוֹת טוֹבוֹת בְּרִיּוֹת בוֹ וּבָרָא כְּלוּם בְּעוֹלָמוֹ חִסַּר שֶׁלֹּא, Who has made nothing lacking in His world, and created in it goodly creatures and goodly trees to give mankind pleasure.”
