» To rah
por tion
Will We
Hear
The Call?
Parshat Vayikra, Shabbat Zachor:
Leviticus 1:1-5:26, Deuteronomy 25:17-19;
Samuel 15:2-15:34.
Editor’s note: In recognition
of the 50th anniversary of the
death of Rabbi Morris Adler
of Congregation Shaarey
Zedek in Southfield and in
tribute to his memory, this
Torah commentary was select-
ed from Rabbi Adler’s book,
The Voice Still Speaks.
Rabbi Morris
Adler
A
single word gives its name to
the portion we read this week,
as well as to the entire third
book of the Pentateuch — Vayikra —
“And He called.”
The first verse of the book reads, “And
He called unto Moses and the Lord spoke
unto Moses in the tent of the assembly.”
“And the Lord called unto Moses.”
Here is that wonderful old English
word that is becoming rare upon our
lips, a “calling.”
A man’s work was not simply his task, a
means of establishing status or even for earn-
ing a livelihood. It was a calling.
We have somewhat degraded the word
“vocation” when we speak of vocational
training or vocational guidance. Vocation,
in Latin, means “calling.” Once when the
word was used, a man felt that he had been
placed upon Earth in the midst of fellows to
fulfill a purpose and that he had been given
an assignment. It would be a betrayal of both
the God he believed in and of his own inner
integrity not to fulfill the vocation, the call
that had come to him.
We still use the word occasionally in con-
nection with the clergy. We say a man has
received a call, but it is not a call from God;
it is a call from a board of trustees, and it
comes in a very tangible form with very tan-
gible promises and conditions …
This sense of mission we ought to recover
for ourselves, for we live in a difficult and
challenging time. The challenge is in propor-
tion to the difficulty, and the opportunity is
as great as the danger.
In one respect, this may be the greatest
time in all history, for the decisions we make
in our generation, or perhaps in the genera-
tion immediately following ours, will deter-
mine, in a very literal sense, life or death.
A RESPONSIBILITY TO SOCIETY
If more people felt a sense of calling,
if they felt that their existence must be
translated into service, that in addition to
their personal fulfillment there rests upon
them a burden of responsibility for their
times and their society — then perhaps
we might find our way to the solution that
will spell life for the future.
America started as a calling. It started as
a revolution, and I sometimes feel we spent
the rest of our history in cancelling out the
implications of the revolution.
We started with a great idea. If you read
the documents of the founding fathers, you
sense a prophetic zeal in them. They were
not founding just another state. They were
not setting out simply to conquer a conti-
nent, frontier after frontier. They were not
striving simply for wealth. They had a pur-
pose to fulfill …
How important is it for us to recapture
this sense of calling, the idea that being an
American is something more than having
opportunities denied to the larger part of
mankind. Being an American places upon us
tremendous responsibilities, which must be
borne however great the sacrifice if we are to
be true to our vocation.
Somewhere in our educational system,
somewhere in our religious life, somewhere
continued on page 32
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