Sermon: Shabbat Ve-etchannan – Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn-Harris

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 1 August 2015

My second year of study at a small liberal arts college in the States, I decided to take a semester long course in the fine arts department on sculpture. I am not particularly skilled at such matters and had never really thought to take such a class before, but such was the reputation of the lecturer that I thought I had best give sculpting a go. Of course, that the lecturer was also rather infamous on campus for only awarding two marks – an A, for anyone who attended and produced work, or a an F (failure) for students who did not attend or produce work, was also something of an incentive. At my very modestly sized institution of not more than 2,000 students, at least 300 of us took one of his classes every term.

But the upshot of taking his class was that I learned the art of bronze casting, specifically something known as the lost wax technique, in which one sculpts in wax, creates a mould around the wax, and then fires the mould at a high temperature. The result is that one is left with a hollow mould containing the relief of the wax sculpture which had once been inside. Into said mould, one would then pour molten bronze, allow the bronze to cool and then crack open the mould to find solid bronze sculpture, hopefully. At least that is the general theory behind the practice.

In reality, a number of challenges present themselves in this method, not the least of which is the problem of ensuring the bronze is effectively smelted. As it happens bronze smelting is not nearly as challenging as smelting other metals, notably say iron; hence, the reason why the bronze age is an earlier period in human history than the iron age. Still, smelting metals in general requires relatively high temperatures – far higher than can be obtained from an open campfire, for example, so academics have postulated that smelting began in pottery kilns. Then the matter of obtaining good quality metal arises, requiring a certain knowledge of chemistry and a reasonable degree of experience. For university undergraduates, all of this translates into a lot of safety equipment, serious supervision and a fair degree of bravery.

Other challenges abound in the lost wax technique, but for the moment I shall just focus on smelting, because smelting, at least metaphorically, is what according to this morning’s Torah portion happened to us, the Jewish people. According to Deuteronomy 4:19-20:

יט וּפֶן-תִּשָּׂא עֵינֶיךָ הַשָּׁמַיְמָה, וְרָאִיתָ אֶת-הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ וְאֶת-הַיָּרֵחַ וְאֶת-הַכּוֹכָבִים כֹּל צְבָא הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְנִדַּחְתָּ וְהִשְׁתַּחֲוִיתָ לָהֶם, וַעֲבַדְתָּם–אֲשֶׁר חָלַק יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, אֹתָם, לְכֹל הָעַמִּים, תַּחַת כָּל-הַשָּׁמָיִם.

כ וְאֶתְכֶם לָקַח יְהוָה, וַיּוֹצִא אֶתְכֶם מִכּוּר הַבַּרְזֶל מִמִּצְרָיִם, לִהְיוֹת לוֹ לְעַם נַחֲלָה, כַּיּוֹם הַזֶּה.

19. And when you look up to the sky and behold the sun and moon and the starts, the whole beauty of host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them. These the Eternal your God allotted to other peoples everywhere under heaven;
20. but you the Eternal One took and brought out of Egypt, that iron blast furnace, to be God’s very own people, as is now the case.

This turn of phrase — כּוּר הַבַּרְזֶל, iron blast furnace – is a most curious one. For starters, it is anachronistic. Strictly speaking, blast furnaces for the smelting of iron were not used until long after the biblical period. A more accurate translation would be a bloomery, the earliest known type of furnace for smelting iron. Now if that seems an arcane distinction to make, let me clarify why I think the distinction is an important one.

In a bloomery, iron ore was heated over charcoal, with the carbon monoxide released causing a chemical reaction changing the iron ore into metallic iron. But the heat from the charcoal was not hot enough to actually melt the iron (as would be the case with a proper blast furnace). Instead, the metallic iron would collect at the bottom of the furnace, be filled with ash and slag, and reheated to soften iron and melt off the slag. This process would be repeated numerous times until all the molten slag was forced out and what was left was the (relatively) soft, malleable metal we know as wrought iron.  Blacksmiths could then take the wrought iron, heat it in the remaining coals, and then quench it in water, creating a steel exterior. The chemical reaction in a blast furnace, by contrast, is somewhat different and it produces molten metal. Moreover, whereas a bloomery can only smelt one batch at a time, a blast furnace operates more or less continuously for extremely long periods of time. But so what, I guess you did not come to shul this morning for a lesson in metallurgy.

And yet understanding the nature of metaphor is important, otherwise we run the risk of not understanding properly or missing out on the finer points being made. If we read our parasha this morning carefully, we would realise that the passage from which this metaphor of the כּוּר הַבַּרְזֶל, the bloomery, actually has echoes in two other key verses in this chapter – vv. 12 and 15. In both these verses, we read that God spoke to the Israelites מִתּוֹךְ הָאֵשׁ, out of the fire. God’s voice emerges, quite literally, from the flames of the fire, but God does not change. God is not burnt up, God does not melt or dissipate or alter in any fashion. And God remains unseen. Only the flames of the fire are present, naked and visible to all.

People are something altogether different. Egypt is a bloomery, a furnace, aflame with sweltering heat and chemical reactions. We, the Israelites, enter into that furnace and the complex interactions present in that inescapable, enclosed area change us. Egypt does not melt – read here destroy – us, Egypt makes us malleable, beaten over and over again with the ash and slag of desert sand, until we are purified enough to be wrought by God into a people with a steely exterior. We are put through the bloomery of Egypt, but we are a one off batch. Egypt does not remain to smelt other peoples, to mould other nations into God’s people. Only the Israelites, our ancestors, are purified in this furnace.

But what has happened to this people, our people? Were we properly smelted, purified and formed into the nation that God intended, intends, for us to be? All those years ago when I cast bronzes, the clearest memory I hold of the process was the moment of smashing the mould and waiting to see if the sculpture beneath had genuinely cooled into the likeness of the wax image I had first created. Iron from a bloomery is not molten, hence, not poured like bronze. This type of iron is beaten and worked by hand into its final form. The Israelites were not cracked out of a mould; we were worked by hand by God. The moment that God’s voice emerged from the flames at Mt Horeb, we were like smelted iron mixed with slag and ash being heated again on the coals of the furnace. God’s voice amidst the flame was the heat that formed us and transformed us. What has happened to God’s handiwork? Are we the people that God created all those centuries ago? How many more times have we, as a nation, been smelt in some furnace or another? Has God’s blacksmithing changed us? Does God’s voice still emerge to us from the fire?

This morning as we read the haftarah of consolation following Tisha B’Av – comfort ye, comfort ye, my people – a week when we perhaps need comfort more than ever, another challenging week to be a contemporary Jew – the stabbing of a six people at Jerusalem’s Pride march[1], the death of an 18 month old Palestinian child at the hands of a Jewish extremist – at the end of this week the sense of being forged as a people by God may all too often seem just some remote theological fancy of the rabbi and no one else. But what might it really mean, if we were to take it seriously? Who could we really be if we lived everyday of our lives in the knowledge that we, too, had emerged מִכּוּר הַבַּרְזֶל, from the bloomery of Egypt?

[1] Subsequent to the delivery of this sermon over the weekend, the death of one of the stabbing victims, 16 year old Shira Banki, was announced. May her memory be for a blessing.