Engaging with the Earthly Israel - Eqev 5773 (Summer Sermon Series #5)

Today we will be talking about Israel, the land, the fable, and the reality. This is especially appropriate today, since we read in Parashat Eqev about the Seven Species that are identified as being symbolic of the land (Deut. 8:7-9):

כִּי ה' אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ, מְבִיאֲךָ אֶל-אֶרֶץ טוֹבָה:  אֶרֶץ, נַחֲלֵי מָיִם--עֲיָנֹת וּתְהֹמֹת, יֹצְאִים בַּבִּקְעָה וּבָהָר.  אֶרֶץ חִטָּה וּשְׂעֹרָה, וְגֶפֶן וּתְאֵנָה וְרִמּוֹן; אֶרֶץ-זֵית שֶׁמֶן, וּדְבָשׁ.  אֶרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר לֹא בְמִסְכֵּנֻת תֹּאכַל-בָּהּ לֶחֶם--לֹא-תֶחְסַר כֹּל, בָּהּ; אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אֲבָנֶיהָ בַרְזֶל, וּמֵהֲרָרֶיהָ תַּחְצֹב נְחֹשֶׁת.  

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper.

This is such a gorgeous image; one which, I suppose, colors our understanding of the land of Israel today. I will come back to this.

One advantage to being on Facebook is that you get to join others on their vacations. So this summer, while Rabbi Stecker is on sabbatical and I have been mostly in the office, I have had the pleasure of viewing photos from vacations abroad. And the ones from Israel are always the most captivating. Many of you know that I fly to Israel at least twice a year, and I have been to all of the major tourist sites numerous times, and I have visited most of the minor sites as well. In fact, I am often surprised and pleased when I am able to find someplace new to visit.

But watching others go to places that I know well is also fascinating, because it is kind of like experiencing it again for the first time, through the eyes of the tourist. It is a reminder of the many things that I love about Israel, about the special place it occupies in my life as a Jewish American.

There is a cryptic Talmudic passage about two Jerusalems, the earthly one and the heavenly one (BT Ta’anit 5a):

ואמר ליה רב נחמן לרבי יצחק: מאי דכתיב (הושע י״א) בקרבך קדוש ולא אבוא בעיר, משום דבקרבך קדוש לא אבוא בעיר?

אמר ליה, הכי אמר רבי יוחנן: אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא לא אבוא בירושלים של מעלה עד שאבוא לירושלים של מטה. ומי איכא ירושלים למעלה? ־ אין, דכתיב (תהלים קכ״ב) ירושלים הבנויה כעיר שחברה לה יחדו.

R. Nahman said to R. Isaac: What is the meaning of the scriptural verse (Hosea 11:9), “The Holy One is in your midst, and I will not come in to the city”? [Surely it cannot be that] because the Holy One is in your midst I shall not come into the city!

He replied: Thus said R. Johanan: The Holy One, blessed be God, said, ‘I will not enter the heavenly Jerusalem until I can enter the earthly Jerusalem’. Is there then a heavenly Jerusalem?-Yes; for it is written (Psalm 122:3), “Jerusalem, you are built as the city that is your companion.”

One rabbinic take on this idea is that Yerushalayim shel ma’alah, the heavenly Jerusalem, mimics Yerushalayim shel matah, its earthly counterpart, but while the city on high is fully built and hence infused with a particular holiness that is worthy of the presence of God, the lower one is incomplete. We might read from this that it is upon us to finish the project of making Yerushalayim shel matah worthy of God’s presence.

But all the more so, this image suggests something for Israel at large. Too many of us in the Diaspora, when we visit Israel, or even when we consider Israel from the comfort of our living rooms, think that we are dealing with Yisrael shel ma’alah, the heavenly Israel, and lose sight of the fact that Medinat Yisrael, the modern State of Israel, is built in Yisrael shel matah. It is indeed special, and possesses a fundamentally different resonance to us than France or India or New Zealand. But it is decidedly earthly, where people have to make a living, garbage needs to be collected, and students need to do their homework.

As such, the State of Israel as we know her and love her fulfills not the ancient vision of the Holy Land, not the mythical place of messianic vision, but a whole new offshoot of modern Jewish expression. It is, after all, a land built primarily by secular Zionists, even though a large chunk of the money donated to build that land was contributed by religious Jews. And we at Temple Israel have been committed to that vision of Yisrael shel matah for more than six decades. Even so, it is sometimes very easy for us to forget that Israel is not just about politics, about conflict, about our image in the international sphere. As with every other mundane nation in the world, the Israeli experience is about the palette of interpersonal relationships that characterize human existence.

Two alumnae of Temple Israel's Hebrew High School, Zoe Oppenheimer and Jessye Waxman, each spent a semester studying in Israel this past spring. Zoe studied Hebrew in a program at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva. Not only was she in Hebrew classes all day, but was also required to speak Hebrew outside of class, even with her American friends. Jessye spent a semester at an international environmental program at Kibbutz Ketura, not far from Eilat, where she learned with people from all over the world: Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the US, Europe, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, etc.

Their experiences were quite different from one another. However, something that both Zoe and Jessye came home with was, in my mind, the primary reason that Diaspora Jews should try to spend more time in Israel than the typical ten-day-to-two-week vacation jaunt allows. They both spent time with a variety of Israelis, and were able to get an on-the-ground picture of what everyday life is like while Israelis work, study, have fun, commiserate, argue, and generally live. And that is not the picture of Israel that most of us have.

On the contrary, our view, the one most often seen from the comfort of an air-conditioned coach bus, is more about our ancient stories than it is about modern realities of the Jewish state. The tourist trip to Israel generally includes a good deal of time in ruins, particularly in Jerusalem, and a hefty dose of Jewish history. This is, of course, very important – it is, in some sense, our history that connects us to the land. Without the biblical, rabbinic, and linguistic connections to the land of Israel, the one identified today by the Seven Species, or the one yearned for by Isaiah in the haftarah, the Zionist case for building the Jewish state in that land becomes much weaker.

But the real Israel, the actual, modern state is not the Israel of the Torah, nor is it the ideal of the messianic redemption to which the ancient rabbis pointed. Israel is a very complicated place, plagued by deep political, economic, and social divides (and fortunately, a recently-discovered, sizeable natural gas reserve in her territorial waters).

But even though Medinat Yisrael is not a fulfillment of any kind of messianic ideal, the lion laying down with the lamb and Lo Yisa Goi, full-on Isaiah-type stuff, it is, as we refer to it in multiple places in our liturgy, “reishit tzemihat geulateinu,” the dawn of the flowering of our redemption.

And indeed, as the Jewish population of Israel is now the largest in the world, as Israel becomes ever more influential in producing teachers and professors and what you might call “Jewish content,” as Israel's economic power continues to grow, and furthermore as Diaspora Judaism continues to struggle with maintaining itself, it seems that we may indeed see a glimpse of the Jewish future in Israel.

Some of you may know about studies that have shown that younger American Jews are not nearly as attached to Israel as their parents and grandparents.  That might have something to do with what we learn (or do not learn) about Israel. I am often saddened by the fact that generally the only news we hear out of Israel is the bad news. (Even the optimistic news this week about Secretary of State Kerry’s minor success in bringing Israelis and Palestinians back to the table for peace talks was muted.)

But the solution to this is not to lecture our teens about why they should appreciate Israel, and may not necessarily be to send them on free 10-day trips to Israel where they can have a full-on tourist experience in five-star hotels, a la Birthright. Rather, the real solution is to encourage our young people to go and live there for a while - to spend a semester in an Israeli university, to figure out how to pay the rent on your Jerusalem flat, or to manage renewing your visa at Misrad Hapenim, the Interior Ministry (which can, at times, resemble an auto-da-fé), or navigate the Tel Aviv bus system, or haggle over the the price of a bag of za’atar in the shuq. The real Israel is not Yisrael shel ma’alah, but is alive and vital and very, very human.

And it is our duty to present an honest picture, and to engage our young people with that picture, and not just through Facebook.

I had a buddy in college, a guy who lived in my freshman dorm at Cornell, who was an American of Thai parentage. He was preparing for medical school, but he knew that some time in his 20s, he was expected to spend a year living as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, a family tradition that would help instill within him a greater sense of connection to his ancestral home and his faith. We lost touch after school; as far as I know, he went, and he is now practicing emergency medicine in Florida.

But would it not be a wonderful idea for us to expect our own children to spend a year in Israel, engaging with Yisrael shel matah? I think this would be a much better use of our collective financial support for Israel than Birthright.

Today’s haftarah, the so-called Second Haftarah of Consolation, speaks of the hope of national restoration in the wake of destruction. Isaiah paints a bleak picture of his reality, in exile in Babylon, but hints that redemption might come if we return to our roots (51:1):

שמעו אלי רודפי צדק מבקשי ה' הביתו אל צור חוצבתם ואל מקבת בור נוקרתם

Listen to Me, you who pursue justice,

You who seek the Lord:

Look to the rock you were hewn from,

To the quarry you were dug from.

We too can take from Isaiah a piece of this hope, the hope that Yisrael shel matah will continue to strive to reach toward Yisrael shel ma’alah, that all we have to do is invest ourselves personally with the earthly Israel to help raise her heavenward: to engage personally with her people, to commit ourselves to supporting those institutions that are working for peace between all of the disparate groups living on that small strip of land, to help cultivate the figurative Seven Species so that all may reap that harvest.

Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 7/27/2013.) 

This is the fifth installment of my first-ever Summer Sermon Series - a seven-part discussion of the most essential values in Temple Israel of Great Neck’s vision of Jewish life. The first four topics were as follows:

1. Telling our story

2. Being a welcoming congregation

3. Engaging with Torah

4. Egalitarianism 

We Were All At Sinai. (Women, Too.) - Va'et-hannan 5773 (Summer Sermon Series #4)

Today’s topic is egalitarianism, the principle that men and women are equal under Jewish law. This is an especially hot item today, given some high-profile recent events in the Jewish world. 

The curious thing is, I thought that the argument over women’s roles in Judaism ended thirty years ago! I grew up in a Conservative congregation that counted women as long as I could remember. My mother served for years as a gabbayit and frequently read Torah. Temple Israel became egalitarian in 1976, when Rabbi Waxman’s wife Ruth was called to the Torah, and chanted the haftarah as well. I never thought that in 2013 we would still be talking about it.

And yet we are, perhaps largely due to the activities of Women of the Wall, the group of women, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, that meet regularly every Rosh Hodesh for a service at the Kotel, the Western Wall. I mentioned last week that in their first service since the Israeli Supreme Court officially sanctioned their service, including the wearing of tallit and tefillin and praying together out loud, a large group of Haredim (often but inaccurately called “ultra-Orthodox”) attempted to obstruct them by harassing the 350 worshippers and boxing them out of the Kotel plaza by busing in yeshivah girls at 6:30 AM. WoW has kept the issue of egalitarianism at the fore in the wider Jewish community, both in Israel and here.

Judaism’s segregation of women and men into separate and unequal roles is a long-standing tradition, but one that we should work even harder to reverse. After all, we live in a world in which women are a majority of college students. They may not yet earn as well as men, but nobody thinks twice today about female doctors, lawyers, CEOs, or politicians. Why should the situation be any different in the synagogue?  In a world in which women are presidents and prime ministers, how can we countenance denying them equal leadership roles in matters of faith?

And while the majority of our ancient books - the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), rabbinic texts - reflect the position of women in the eras in which these books emerged, we no longer live in those times. Halakhah / Jewish law has changed throughout the ages to reflect new social realities, and it should continue to do so today. There is a rabbinic principle in halakhic analysis called “shinui ha-ittim,” loosely translated as, “times have changed.” Sometimes, we have to account for the fact that the world continues to move forward, and what applied yesterday may not still be valid today. As a people, and indeed as a species, we mature, evolve, we learn; so too do our laws and customs.

So why was it so surprising, for example, when one of the new members of the Israeli Knesset, Dr. Ruth Calderon, a professor of Talmud at Hebrew University, gave a Talmudic lesson to the Knesset at her swearing in? The original Hebrew video of this on YouTube has had over 200,000 views, a very large number for a relatively small Hebrew-speaking population. (Here is a version with English subtitles.) It is a beautiful and heart-warming speech that I urge you to view. 

It is surprising because we are still in a transitional time, a time in which many quarters of the Jewish community still reject full female participation in Jewish life, still do not call their daughters to the Torah in acknowledgment of becoming bat mitzvah, still segregate women on the other side of a mehitzah, which can be as minimal as a curtain and as extensive as a complete wall, and justify all of this with the apologetic statement that “women are on a higher spiritual plane, and therefore do not need the mitzvot to which men are obligated.”

Of course, this has been the custom for hundreds and maybe thousands of years, and I do not wish to cast aspersions on the way that others worship, because then I would be just like the Haredim that are trying to obstruct WoW. However, times have changed. Women and men share much more than they used to, and not just the workplace. Statistics show that among younger couples, men are far more likely today to stay home with the kids while the wife works, and to share in running the affairs of the household. We are living in fundamentally different times. And we here in the Conservative movement more readily acknowledge the changes in gender roles in the wider society, and reflect them in our Jewish practice.

Those that say that we in the Conservative movement have gone off the traditional rails because we have enabled womento participate fully are right only with respect to history. But in terms of halakhah’s response to modernity, they are the ones who are wrong. And we have traditional sources on which to base our elevation of women in Judaism.

As a simple example, there is a clause found multiple times in the Talmud that is relevant here. It goes like this:

שאף הן היו באותו הנס

She’af hen hayu be’oto ha-nes.

Literally, it means “since they (feminine) were part of the same miracle.” It’s used in three places: once in reference to women’s obligation for reading Megillat Esther on Purim (Megillah 4a), once in reference to women’s obligation to light Hanukkah candles (Shabbat 23a), and once referring to women’s obligation to drink four cups of wine at the Pesah seder. This last one is most applicable today, as we read the Ten Commandments. Women must drink the four cups of wine because they were redeemed from Egypt along with the men. Well, the Torah also tells us (Exodus 20:15, e.g.) that kol ha’am, all the people, witnessed the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, shortly after the Exodus from Egypt. The women were there, too, and as much a part of that seminal, covenantal moment as the men.

Many followers of traditional Judaism swear up and down that the only three positive, time-bound mitzvot / commandments to which women are obligated are making hallah, lighting Shabbat candles, and going to the miqveh, and they are exempt from all others. They are wrong. This is a mistaken understanding of rabbinic tradition, and the Talmud mentions many other mitzvot to which women are obligated in addition to the three I have identified above. Here are just a few examples: Berakhot 20a-b and Eruvin 96a suggest that women may put on tefillin; Megillah 23a states that a woman may read Torah before the congregation; Menahot 43a states clearly that women are required to fulfill the mitzvah of tzitzit, etc.

Reading in the larger sense, the fact that women have traditionally been excluded from the performance of many mitzvot is more about sociology than what is found in traditional Jewish sources. The rabbis defined a woman as something less than a man, in the same boat with children and slaves, because that is how women were understood in Israel and Babylonia 1500 years ago, and in so doing they exiled women to the other side of the mehitzah.

The Conservative movement has, since the mid-1980s, encouraged women’s equal participation; we have ordained female rabbis since 1985. The vast majority Conservative synagogues are egalitarian.

Given how times have changed, it is therefore upon us to continue the struggle to bring women to the same status in Jewish life as men, to offer women the same opportunities for participation as men have traditionally been given. How can we do this? By continuing to call our girls to the Torah as benot mitzvah, to teach female members of our community to be shelihot tzibbur, prayer leaders, and Torah readers, to encourage women to take on other mitzvot traditionally thought of as masculine, such as tallit and tefillin, and generally to provide more opportunities for women as well as men to participate fully in Jewish life, on equal terms.

And by the way, it is not only the Conservative movement that acknowledges this. No less an Orthodox authority than Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the pre-eminent halakhic decisor of Orthodoxy, gnashed his teeth and invoked the inflexibility of halakhah in the face of modernity when he conceded in a 1976 teshuvah (rabbinic answer to a halakhic question; Iggerot Moshe OH 4:49) that women may indeed put on a tallit, blow the shofar, and shake the lulav, and recite the appropriate berakhot. Not that many women in Orthodoxy do these things, but in theory, they can under Rabbi Feinstein’s authority. (To be sure, this was not a concession to the Conservative movement. Rabbi Feinstein elsewhere insisted that Conservative synagogues are not synagogues, and that Conservative rabbis are not rabbis.)

This is Shabbat Nahamu, the Shabbat of comfort, when we begin the arduous process of healing and rebuilding in the wake of Tish’ah Be’Av, the saddest day of the Jewish year and the commemoration of the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. Today we read the first of seven special haftarot that speak of redemption, as we look toward Rosh Hashanah and the holiday cycle of Tishrei. And there was a hint of reconciliation from Orthodoxy this week: the Orthodox Union (OU) and the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest body of Modern Orthodox rabbis, issued a statement this week against the protests that have taken place at the Kotel. While not exactly endorsing Women of the Wall and their struggle, the carefully-worded document includes the following:

Recently we have witnessed a frightening exacerbation of internal discord and an ominous intensification of inflammatory rhetoric. We have heard vile insults, offensive name-calling — including the inciteful invocation of the name 'Amalek' — and vicious personal attacks emanating from all sides on the various troublesome issues that we now confront. We have even witnessed physical violence. Indeed, in recent months we have seen precincts of Jerusalem’s Old City, in the shadow of the destroyed Temple for which we mourn today, become a venue for provocation and insult, rather than a place of unity for the global Jewish community.

 

We urge all Jews to celebrate the diversity of our community, whatever our ideology or choice of head covering. Each of us — men, women and children — is a cherished member of our people and we must educate all members of our community to honor and respect each other. We pray that all will one day soon glory in the rebuilding of our nation and our Temple.

OK, so it does not exactly say, “let’s build an egalitarian section at the Kotel.” But it is a statement against sin’at hinnam, the causeless hatred for which the Second Temple was laid waste on Ninth of Av in the year 70 CE. And that should be what Shabbat Nahamu is all about. We are all in this together, and we cannot let our internecine theological disagreements drive us apart.

We were all at Sinai. Women and men. So says the Torah. And we are all equally permitted to partake of the full extent of what Jewish life offers. We can live and worship comfortably alongside those who do not accept egalitarianism, but we must continue to stand up for equality in Jewish life. Let us hope that the rest of the Jewish world will soon be willing to daven alongside us as well.

Next week, we’ll talk about Israel.

Shabbat shalom!


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, July 20, 2013.)

This is the fourth installment in the seven-part Summer Sermon Series, in which we are discussing the essential Jewish values that we at Temple Israel highlight in our approach to Judaism. This is our vision of Jewish life; the first three installments are:

1. Telling our story

2. Being a welcoming congregation

3. Engaging with Torah

Tish'ah Be'Av and the Egyptian Connection

My summer travels have found me gallivanting through multiple airports, and while trying vainly to find a wi-fi signal in Ataturk International (i.e. Istanbul, where a violent anti-government protest was in progress, although thankfully nowhere near Gate G-11), it occurred to me that if Israel is ever at peace with all of her neighbors, Ben Gurion Airport could be an international hub that rivals the big European airports. Peace produces prosperity.

Meanwhile, the drama in Egypt has been working up for a few weeks now, and I must confess that I am following it with slightly more interest than I would the average Middle Eastern uprising. I suspect that instability in Israel’s largest and most powerful neighbor is, at least in the short term, good for the Jewish state. First, the Egyptian military is interested in maintaining peace, and honoring prior agreements is the best way to do so. Second, the leaders of this coup are mostly former allies of Hosni Mubarak, the deposed president, who (despite his many failings) did keep those agreements during his tenure. Third, we can be sure that just about any ruling party that will succeed the Muslim Brotherhood and now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi will be better for relations with Israel. But in the long term, stability will be far more valuable.

As we are now into the Nine Days of the month of Av, the somber lead-up to Tish’ah Be’Av, I am reminded that uprisings and their aftermath tend to come during the hot summer months (think the Fourth of July, or Bastille Day, July 14th, in France). True, the Jewish rebellion against the Romans had been raging for three years, only to be crushed on the ninth day of Av in the year 70 CE with the destruction of the Second Temple; the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple on the same day in 586 BCE followed a siege that may have lasted the better part of a year. But the dramatic conclusion in both cases on the same day suggests that Av is the season for rebellion.

As Israeli strategists try to divine what all of this might mean for border security and concerns for the viability of long-term peace in the region,* we should not forget the Egyptian people, with whom the people of Israel have a relationship that stretches back at least 3000 years. Let us hope that whatever stumbling blocks they face as a more-ideal democracy unfolds on the Nile River valley will be minimal, so that Egyptians can soon go about their worldly pursuits with some modicum of safety and security. In the long run, a stable democratic government that empowers the Egyptian people will afford them better lives and greater satisfaction, and satisfied citizens do not wage reckless wars against their neighbors.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism was fundamentally changed, and for the better. Scholars of ancient Judaism tell us that it took several hundred years of commentary and learning and debate for normative rabbinic Judaism to emerge as the standard of Jewish practice, but it is worth noting that this model is far more democratic with respect to our individual relationships to God than the sacrificial Temple cult that preceded it. May the Qadosh Barukh Hu help raise the democracy quotient in Egypt, speedily and in our days.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, July 11, 2013.)

* An update from this column as it appeared in the Voice: The Wall Street Journal reported on July 11, 2013 that

Israel's military plans to downsize its conventional firepower such as tanks and artillery to focus on countering threats from guerrilla warfare and to boost its technological prowess, in a recognition that the Middle East turmoil has virtually halted the ability of neighbors to invade for years to come.

  It seems that Israel's borders are safer now than they have been for a long time. Good news!