M’Ematai: An Invitation to Return to Each Other

Gemirna Kollel I Reflections

With thanks to our teachers and our teachers’ teachers who convey and draw out Torah like water from our ancestors’ wells, and to the One who created us all. Two of the sugyot we learned this year, the first and the last, asked the question “M’Ematai”? “From whence in the flowing current of time and space” is an approximation of our collective definition of this term.

The ebbs and flows of the year mapped onto our learning with surprising synchronicity in some ways and jarring discordance in others. We all came from different places, literally and figuratively, to form a braided river of cooperative meaning-making and community. Of all the outcomes of Gemirna Kollel, this was the one I expected least – to make deep and meaningful connections with the cohort, such that I felt that it was a foundation upon which to rest and return when the storms of life tore up my branches and uprooted my understandings again and again.

Moreover, I found a wonderful well of blessing in my chevruta relationship, one that kept me coming back every week for its refreshing and life-giving waters, even when the texts of the Sages and of my life were challenging to engage with.

Communally, we have just engaged with the holy spacetime of Shavuot on Mount Sinai and are now approaching the grief of the heat of summer in Tammuz and Av. Sefer Yetzirah teaches about olam – space/world/place (which corresponds to the world of asiyah), shanah-time/season (which corresponds to the world of yetzirah), nefesh-life-force (which corresponds to the world of briyah), and the BeShT and Shneuer Zalman of Lyady teach that this acronym spells ashan, the clouds of deep sacred darkness that were on Mount Sinai.

They teach that when we can unify these three dimensions of space, time, and life-force, we experience a kind of Sinai, which transcends space, time, and bodily limits on our experiences. Furthermore, that which obscures may also reveal deeper truths. M’ematai is a fork in the river, an unexpected question that challenges our assumptions. It can obfuscate the more obvious move at play, while letting the current carve a deeper channel into the stone of our experiences and thus tap into bigger questions.

What does knowing our orientation to spacetime have to do with our relationship to Talmud?

It is taught that the tribe of Issachar were Torah scholars, and written in Chronicles I 12:33 that they knew the importance of the times and could discern right action that was aligned with the times. Bereshit Rabbah asks, what does “times” mean? Rabbi Tanchuma answers: To the aligned opportunities; R’ Yosei ben Ketziri answers: for the intercalation.ּ

וַמְּבָנִי יָּׂששָ֗כָר יֹוַ֖דֲעִי בִיָנהלֲעִּ֔תִים לַ֖דֲעת מה־ַּיֲעְׂשה יְׂשָרֵ֑אל

Chronicles 12:33

מה לֲעִּ֔תִים רְּבִי תָנחּוַמֵ֑א אַמָר לּקּוָרָנִיֵסִין רְּבִי יֹוֵסִי בן קִיָצָרִי אַמָר לֲעְּבּוָרִים

Genesis Rabbah 72:5

We are currently moving through very narrow straits, what some teach might even be a birth canal to a different world. For our queer rabbinic ancestors and for us, knowing how to move, as adrienne maree brown puts it, at the speed of trust, to feel into the times and have our rhythms align with the pulse of the world, could be our job as students of the Torah. Gemirna Kollel has taught me to ask M’ematai so that I may discern “where” someone is in their life, what their Torah of the moment may be. We can know the tides of the times and feel the rush of Torah’s living waters as clarifying snowmelt that comes down from the mountains to sustain our lives. We can witness the ripples in ourselves and each other. This Torah is not necessarily new, but it is timely, perhaps even hevel. M’ematai has me wonder deeper and broader, and wander rather than stay on a single derech. Perhaps this braided river will chart the path, or it will lead us to be lost in a more profound way.

May the Torah scholars of the Gemirna Kollel craft Torah not just for these times, but to transcend the spirals and align with the cycles that inevitably bring us back home to each other again and again.