How can you say, “I am not defiled,
I have not gone after the Baalim”?
Look at your deeds in the Valley
Consider what you have done!
Like a lustful she-camel,
Restlessly running about…
Jeremiah 2:23
“Israel,” the prophet Jeremiah declares, “is a lustful she-camel.” In the company of so many complex and meaningful commentaries on the Pirke Avot Jeremiah’s dromedary is an admittedly unpromising way to start this graduation, but if there is one thing I have learned from Midrasha it is that wisdom manifests itself in the most unexpected places. So please bear with me for a moment.
Midrasha, too, is a lustful she-camel; like the camel, Midrasha has its ups and its downs.
And, having successfully convinced Rabbi Chester that I’m not doing anything obscene with this speech, let’s talk about lust. After all, Midrasha is nothing if it is not hormonal, and I would go so far as to argue that this is the defining characteristic of our relationship with our faith as much as it is with our peers. Yes, it is lust that keeps the women on Kesher retreats awake into the late hours of the night listening rapt as Emma Rosenthal reads the naughty bits of Cosmopolitan, and lust that causes the men of Kesher to try to join in those readings, but it is lust also that wakes us up early in the morning for services, and lust that has carried us to this stage today. The more time I have spent in this community the more I have seen that our ordinary teenage hungers pale in comparison to the spiritual hunger that brings every one of us back week after week. To look at a Kesher Havdalah service is to observe a group of students not thoughtfully committed to the practice of their religion, but caught up in a wild passion. We weep, we sigh, we moan: ours is a practice of tears and sweat and fire. There are teachers here to whose every word we cling desperately; there are lessons that keep us awake at night. We lust after Midrasha.
This graduation marks not only the end of our time at Midrasha but a fundamental change in the nature of our religious observance. The Hillels we’re going to be spending time in next year will not give us the same freedom or diversity of experience that we’ve so been privileged to have these past five years, and at some point in the future we’ll have to settle down and find another congregation of our own. But my hope at this graduation is that we never lose completely that lust that has held us captive to this place and these people since the eighth grade; that our Judaism is always passionate, always a little wild, that even as we go on our way, each and every one of us remains, at least a little bit, a lustful camel.