If Beyonce had only made R’n’B – Dayeinu? (Shabbat M’tzora)

Written by Rabbi Eleanor Davis — 22 April 2024

“This ain’t Texas.  Ain’t no hold ’em” – but if you were to “lay your cards down, down” then until this year you probably wouldn’t have bet on Beyonce putting out a country music album.   Yet if you’ve heard the lead single, Texas Hold ’Em, you’ll know that the R’n’B star sometimes known as Queen Bey has indeed royally ventured into a very different musical style, with fabulous results.

To make the Cowboy Carter album, she did a deep dive into the history of country music and brought in country royalty like Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, yet Beyonce also brings influences from other genres, from hip-hop to opera, that give this album her own unique flavour.   Beyonce’s album will introduce country music to new audiences and expand country’s own vocabulary: shifting the parameters of what the genre can include, expanding the category with all sorts of interesting and enriching possibilities.

The Talmud includes the portion of Parashat M’tzora that we read today in a surprising category, one that also includes the laws of the idolatrous city and of the stubborn and rebellious son.  We heard today about what to do if a house is afflicted with tzara’at: if some kind of mysterious affliction plagues the stones of a house, there is a way to treat it, initially by scraping the affected part away and leading up to either a purification ritual led by a priest or the demolition of the whole house.  The process is described in enough detail that today we heard it read over three aliyot (call-ups), yet the Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) says about this: “לא היה ול עתיד להיותThere has never been a house thus afflicted and there will never be one in the future.”  This is a surprising statement.  The rabbis of the Talmud take Torah, the Biblical text, super-seriously: how can they suggest that Torah essentially contains fiction?

Even if G-d is the author, the idea that Torah contains unusable rules, for a situation that has not occurred and will never occur is extraordinary.  The rabbis seem to agree, because they continue by asking: “ולמה נכתב And why, then, was this passage written in the Torah?”  They answer their own question: “דרוש וקבל שכר  So that one may study/expound on it and receive reward for studying it.”  In the eyes of the Talmudic rabbis, the opportunity to study is end enough in itself for G-d to have included some creative writing even in Torah.  Perhaps, however, there’s also another answer that they take for granted so much that – for them – it goes without saying: perhaps these apparently fictional scenarios appear in Torah to enlarge the possibilities of their imagination.  Our limited human minds may need a nudge to consider ideas beyond our own personal experience, broadening our horizons and opening our minds.

This capacity to imagine will be needed on Monday night (and perhaps Tuesday night), as we take up the challenge of the Seder: to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt so that we are able to see ourselves too as having come out of slavery.  Many of us will sing the song Dayyeinu: famous to some as the time to take spring onions and beat one another while singing, as a reminder not to think nostalgically of slavery, when Egyptian taskmasters used to beat the Israelite slaves with whips.  Amid all the enthusiastic singing of the refrain day-day-yeinu, however, the words of the verses often get garbled – which means the word dayyeinu, it would have been enough for us, makes less sense than it should.

Each verse begins with the word ilu: if… G-d had done this and not this other – and then we say ‘dayyeinu – it would have been enough for us.’  Each time we begin a verse with ilu, we acknowledge the possibility that things could have been different: we imagine an alternative reality where something else had happened.  If G-d had only freed us from Egypt, or split the sea for us, or fed us manna and sustained us for forty years of wanderings; each of these is something that the enslaved Israelites could never have imagined.  That little world ilu reminds us that each of these steps shattered expectations: each was a change from what the people expected, opening up new possibilities for leaving slavery behind.

Part of our task as free people may be to build our capacity to imagine the world as different from its current state, because imagining may be the first step towards building.  If all we can imagine is a world in crisis, a world with wars and suffering, a world of climate emergency and fear, then how can we possibly change it?  If all we can imagine is ourselves as powerless, worthless or afflicted, how can we become otherwise?  Ilu – if we can expand our imaginations, however, perhaps we can expand the range of options for how our world, and our lives, might yet become.  Ilu – if we saw Talmud’s teaching that the house with tzara’at never did or will exist as an invitation to strengthen the mental muscles of our imaginations, what else might become possible?  Could we imagine new ways to heal affliction or rebuild the global house in which we live together?

Perhaps we can also take inspiration from the artists.  If R’nB queen Beyonce can create a chart-topping country album, who else might defy genre expectations to make something wonderful?  How might we too defy expectations that hem us in and limit what we can be?  Today is Shabbat HaGadol, traditionally the ‘great Shabbat’ when the sermon is extra-long to remind you how to prepare for Pesach.  I’ll keep the sermon shorter and instead invite you to open up your minds to the ‘gadol’, to thinking more expansively about what else might yet be possible, freeing our minds to imagine beyond where we are now.  What ilu opportunities could we create, if only our imaginations were up to the task? This Pesach, may we all find the freedom to imagine – and may we all live to see our best visions fulfilled.