Good evening everyone, and thank you for coming.
אני מתנצל שאמשיך באנגלית. לצערי זה לא רק לטובת אורחנו מחו"ל אלא גם יותר נוח בשבילי.
I apologize to those of you who are less comfortable with the language, but I’ll take the liberty of speaking English this evening.
I’d like to thank all of our guests, who’ve come from this neighborhood and all around the world. Thank you all for coming to share in our wonderful simcha.
We commemorate so many life cycle events together: births and brit mila, bar and bat mitzvas, engagements, weddings and, unfortunately funerals.
Most of these events have one thing in common: they are unpredictable. Births and weddings come with only a few months of advance notice. Deaths, too, are often an awful surprise. Bar and bat mitzvas are the one exception – I could have predicted this evening twelve years ago!
A Bat Mitzva is two events at once. It is the end of childhood and the start of adult life. To all of us grown-ups, it is a moment when we welcome Shoshana to join our ranks; to take her place as a bat mitzvah; sharing full responsibility to be שומרת מצוות. But, to her, it also an end of childhood. As much as we all want to grow up, we also miss the freedom of no responsibility.
This week’s parsha marks a similar moment in our nation’s history. After more than 200 years of slavery, we are finally ready to exit Egypt and to assume our responsibilities at הר סיני. And, like a bar or bat mitzvah, the end of slavery was foreseen years in advance. Way back at ברית בין הבתרים, Hashem told אברהם that we would only be in Egypt for 400 years.
Of course, here we see one big difference. We know exactly when a bat mitzvah will be: exactly twelve years after the baby was born. In contrast, we were freed from Egypt 190 years early, after only 210 years.
This week, Shoshana had the honor and the privilege of reading from the ספר תורה at the Levana’s women’s minyan. She did a wonderful job, not only of the actual leining, but also in everything that she learned in the process. She learned that the טעמי המקרא, the musical annotation of the Torah, are not just music. Every note, every white space, adds meaning. She also learned that it is easy to tell when a sedra starts and ends because of the whitespace in the ספר תורה. And it’s a good thing too, or she might have missed the stop and been somewhere in בשלח now.
So, I bet Shoshana will be fascinated to learn that there is one parsha, ויחי, which is not set off by any space. Instead, it continues directly after ויגש, with no space between them. This is called a פרשה סתומה or “closed chapter” and ויחי is the only weekly סדרה that begins with one. A well-known רש"י explains that this is a hint that יעקוב wanted to reveal the future to his sons, but his prophecy was closed off to keep it a secret.
A few weeks ago, I read a neat extension of this idea in Torah Tidbits. The future, the end of days, is קץ הימים, and קץ in gematriya is 190, precisely the difference between 400 years and the actual 210 years we spent in Egypt.
We live in a world without prophecy to guide our day-to-day actions. It would have been much easier for בני ישראל if they could have known exactly how long their slavery would last. But, Hashem did not let יעקוב offer them this comfort. Instead, they had to live each day as it came, never knowing when their redemption would arrive.
Shoshana, you are growing up into this world. I’m afraid that the date of your bat mitzvah is the last absolute certainty that you will be granted. From now on, you are responsible for your life, for making the hard decisions that will shape you into the wonderful and loving adult that I know you will become.
Of course, you have your two parents and your older sister Aviva to guide you, and maybe even to yell at you and annoy you when we think you’ve made a wrong decision. But, in the end, you are responsible. As you grow up, I see you already making these hard decisions.
You chose to read the entire parsha and haftorah, even though you could have chosen much easier paths. You chose to work hard on this project while filling your days with so many other activities too: בני עקיבא, sewing, piano, rhythmic gymnastics, mathematics, friends, and school-work.
You’ve also dedicated so much time to choosing the best school for the next six years. You could have taken the easy choice of just following your classmates’ leads, or simply joining Aviva at Pelech. In the end, you probably will choose one of these schools. But, you will not choose it because it is the easy default. Instead, you are evaluating each of the schools and thinking through all the choices.
You also fight fiercely against the unfairness you see in the world, both in history and around you. You know what is right, and you are brave about expressing your opinions.
Shoshana, as you grow to be an adult, you will face hard choices every day. It will be easy to follow everyone else, and sometimes difficult to stand up for what is right. But, I know you, and I know that you have the strength to make the correct choices.
You are your own person, different from your sister in so many ways. Even though you wear so many of her hand-me-downs that you hate, you have still managed to create your own path through life.
But, as I come to the end of this speech, I find that I want to give you exactly the same blessing that I gave to your sister two years ago; yet with the realization that I have said it to two individuals, so alike each other and yet different in so many wonderful ways.
My ברכה is that you have the strength to say no to temptation, the courage to say yes to opportunity, the wisdom to decide between the two, and the perseverance to keep making these right choices for the rest of your life.
עד מאה ועשרים!; מזל טוב