A Double Minyan for Peace, or, Seeing the Holiness in Others - Mattot 5774

On Tuesday evening, I experienced an evening minyan like no other. I was not here at Temple Israel, where there was the regular evening minyan at 8 PM, thanks to those who made the effort to come.

No, this minyan was unique. It was at Temple Sinai in Roslyn, and it was part of a Long Island Board of Rabbis (LIBOR) program that brought together Jews and Muslims from the area for learning and prayer. It was part of a world-wide program called Boharim BaHayyim, Choose Life, and such meetings were held all over the world: in Israel (where there were four such meetups in Jerusalem alone), in Kuwait, in the US and Canada, in several European countries. 

Tuesday was Shiv’ah Asar beTammuz, the 17th of Tammuz, which is one of the five minor fast days of the Jewish calendar, a sun-up to sundown fast, commemorating (among other things) the day upon which Moshe broke the tablets of Torah that he received on Mt. Sinai, and the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Babylonians after the siege of 586 BCE. It was also the eighteenth day of Ramadan. So observant Jews and Muslims around the world were fasting together on this day, and given the current situation in Israel and Gaza, some of us took this as an opportunity to meet, learn, pray, and break bread together after the fast. (An article about the international event also appeared on the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot’s website, and Nechama Liss-Levenson, a Great Neck writer and member of Great Neck Synagogue, blogged about the event for the Forward.)

The meeting at Temple Sinai attracted about 60 people, about half Jews and half Muslims. Among the Jews, there were representatives of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox communities.

So, after some introductory speeches, Rabbi Lina Zerbarini of the Sid Jacobson JCC taught a passage from our textual tradition, which we discussed as a group. The text, from the Talmud Yerushalmi (30b), raises the question of the greatest principle found in the Torah:

ואהבת לרעך כמוך ר' עקיבה או' זהו כלל גדול בתורה

בן עזאי אומ' זה ספר תולדות אדם זה כלל גדול מזה

Rabbi Akiva taught: “‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ [Leviticus, 19:18] This is the most important rule in the Torah.” Ben Azzai says: “’This is the record of Adam’s line. When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God,’ [Gen. 5:1] And this is an even more important rule.”

Why does Ben Azzai argue that this statement regarding the creation of human in God’s image is greater than loving your neighbor? Because it is essential to acknowledge the spark of Divine holiness that is present in each of us on this Earth - rich and poor, black and white, American and Pakistani, Jewish and Christian and Hindu and Buddhist and Muslim and secular and, yes, even the atheists. This latter principle should lead to the first one; that is, seeing the holiness in others should enable us to love them as we love ourselves.

A visiting Islamic scholar, Imam Ibrahim Negm, who is a special advisor to the Grand Mufti of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, invoked a similar principle from Muslim tradition. He said that you cannot call yourself truly faithful until you understand and appreciate the value of the faith of others. This fits nicely in-between the two Torah principles identified in the Talmud.

And then that minyan. The Jews went first. Temple Sinai’s bimah faces west, but the Jewish custom is that if there is a sefer Torah in the room, we face the Torah. So we gathered on the bimah together and recited the traditional ma’ariv, while the Muslims in the room sat patiently and observed in their seats. After we concluded with Mourner’s Qaddish, we returned to our seats while the Muslims, men and women, removed their shoes, gathered at the back of the room, and performed their evening prayer, known in Arabic by the name maghrib, a cognate to our ma’ariv.

I wonder how often it has happened that Muslims have gathered to pray in a synagogue? (It is worth pointing out here that both Muslims and Jews acknowledge each other’s tradition as purely monotheistic, and therefore that neither a synagogue nor a mosque is a place of avodah zarah, of idol worship. Not all Jewish authorities agree that this is the case for Christian houses of worship.)

At the end of both the Jewish and Muslim prayers is, interestingly enough, a prayer for peace. Just as we say “Oseh shalom bimromav,” they conclude by saying, “As-salaam aleikum.” How ironic, and yet not so.

****

Some of you may have noticed that Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi passed away a little more than two weeks ago. Reb Zalman, as he was generally known, was a key figure in the Jewish Renewal movement. He came from the Chabad-Lubavitch fold, but left them to forge his own path in the middle of the 20th century, drawing on a variety of religious traditions that brought him away from his Hasidic background. His obit in the New York Times said the following:

"His exposure to Eastern religion, medieval Christian mysticism and LSD... helped him formulate some of the innovations he brought to contemporary Jewish practice...

[Reb Zalman] “realized that all forms of religion are masks that the divine wears to communicate with us,” [a friend was quoted as saying]. “Behind all religions there’s a reality, and this reality wears whatever clothes it needs to speak to a particular people.”

Speaking as one who stands up and advocates for Jewish tradition on a daily basis, I must confess that some of his ideas were too far beyond the pale of what is normative in Judaism to be appealing to me. But what does indeed resonate with me is the idea that all religious traditions have similar objectives: to get us in touch with the Divine, to encourage us reach out to one another in healthy, inspiring ways, to spur us to do good works in this world.

He was, in this regard, not too far away from Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, from whose work the Reconstructionist movement emerged. Rabbi Kaplan rejected the idea of Jewish chosenness, arguing instead that all religious paths to God are effectively equal.

Now, I know that these sorts of ideas make some of us uncomfortable. If all religions serve the same goals, why should we be in any way particularistic? In other words, why be Jewish, when being Christian might be just as good and much easier? Kaplan’s response to this is that the Torah is ours; our ancestors have carried it with them for centuries and given it to us. I would add the rhetorical question, “Who are we to leave such a rich, glorious tradition? Who are we to deny our own heritage, to abandon what we have received from our parents and grandparents and all who preceded them?”

But the larger point here is that just as our tradition is rich and glorious and valuable and meaningful, inspiring centuries of Jews and, let’s face it, launching other religious traditions, so too are the teachings of the other great religions. And while we differ over dogma and rituals, the goals are ultimately the same. Love your neighbor as yourself. See the holiness in yourself as well as others. Pursue peace with all your being. Our tradition teaches this, and we should learn it and live it; and likewise for everybody else.

We need not fear the other. On the contrary, we should strive to see the divinity in each human being on this Earth. We cannot live a holy life until we understand and value the needs of everybody else around us, and appreciate their life and faith and fundamental human rights.

We must instead cooperate with all of the good, open, moderate people in this world, the ones who are willing to talk, and to bypass and constrain the bad actors. In our own corner, we have to work to eliminate the Jewish extremists like the group that carried out the brutal murder of 16-year-old Muhammed Abu Khdeir. And across the border, we have to reach out beyond Hamas to the people of Palestine and Gaza. (A credible poll from the past week by Palestinian pollsters indicated that roughly 70% of Gaza’s population does NOT support Hamas.)

Let’s face it. Just as Gaza has been hijacked by terrorists, who are more insistent on shooting rockets into Israel then taking care of their own people, so too have certain parts of the Muslim world been hijacked. And parts of Judaism and Christianity. There are even violent Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and Hindu nationalists in India who have persecuted Muslim minorities there.

But about 30 Muslims came the other night to break bread with Jews right here on Long Island, and hundreds more around the world did the same. We need to find more ways of bringing people together, not just one day a year, not just in the 30 or so gatherings that were held on Tuesday evening around the world, but again and again in more places and more contexts, in synagogues, in mosques, in churches, in ashrams, in temples of all sorts. We need to seek and appreciate the divinity in others.

As I wrote these words, I received the not-particularly-surprising news that Israel has launched its ground invasion. I hope and pray with all my being that our valiant IDF forces are able to take out terrorist infrastructure with a minimum of pain and loss and suffering on both sides, a minimum of lives lost. But we know that people will die, some ordinary people, some good people, some civilians. We should not lose sight of the divinity of a single person who loses a life or is injured, and we should continue to pray that this round will pass quickly.

But we should further pray that a long-term solution is found more quickly, that the good people of Gaza throw off the yoke of Hamas, that the good people of Israel are safe and secure and never again subject to hourly bombardment by terrorists of any stripe.

As a part of the illustrious tradition that God gave to us, every weekday, three times a day, we offer in the Shemoneh Esreh, the weekday Amidah, a series of berakhot / blessings that follow the pattern of: Praise - Request - Thanks - Peace.

I really wish, some times more than others, that we could save those thanks to God for when we get the peace. But tefillah / prayer does not work that way. On the contrary, it’s a blueprint for what could be. We thank God in advance for what we hope will be a better world.

And that goes double for the ma’ariv / maghrib minyan in which I participated on Tuesday evening. A blueprint. An aspiration. A hope.

I assure you that I am not as naive as I might seem. But I am filled with hope. We have to keep hoping for peace, concluding every service with a plea to God for peace, and taking baby steps toward peace, even in our darkest hours.

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 7/19/2014.)

Giving Bigotry No Sanction - Qedoshim 5773

When I was a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, that institution hosted a very interesting speaker. Her name is Irshad Manji, and she is a Canadian Muslim woman of Pakistani descent who may be one of the most controversial figures in the Muslim world today. She is a journalist who has written a couple of books on the idea of reforming Islam, and has been involved with projects designed to bring change to the Muslim world.

Ms. Manji had recently published her first book, The Trouble With Islam Today, in which she identifies many of the things that we in the West see as problematic within the Muslim world: its treatment of women, honor killings*, female genital cutting, slavery, and, of course, international terrorism and anti-Semitism. There is no question that much of today’s anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli hatred is coming from Muslims. (Last I heard, the suspects in the tragic bombing in Boston were Chechen; it is likely that they are Muslims.)

Knowing that she was standing before a group of Conservative Jews, rabbis and cantors and future clergy, Ms. Manji expressed hope that, while the Islam of the East is saddled with a range of social ills, the future of moderate Islam, something similar to non-Orthodox Judaism, lies in the West. She also pointed to a concept in historical Islamic jurisprudence called “ijtihad,” which fell out of common practice around the 10th century CE. Ijtihad is effectively the elevation of the self, the ability to think critically and make one’s own decisions within the sphere of shari’a, Islamic law. Ms. Manji advocates a return of ijtihad to Islam to bring the Muslim world into modernity, that introspection and self-criticism coming from Muslims in the West would yield a positive effect on the rest of Islam.

A brief grammar note: Arabic, like its sister language, Hebrew, has binyanim, verb constructs that modify a shoresh, three or four root letters, into related verb forms. One of these binyanim in Hebrew is reflexive, and is referred to as hitpa’el, the “hit” at the beginning being the major sign of reflexive-ness. When found in this binyan, a verb reflects back on the speaker.**

I am by no means an expert in Arabic grammar. However, I do know that ijtihad is a reflexive form of the root from which the well-known word jihad, meaning “struggle”, is derived. So “ijtihad” literally means, “struggle with oneself.”

Now, I have just mentioned shari’a and jihad, words which have probably raised the hackles of more than a few of us in this room. Why is that? I’ll return to that question in a moment. First, a few words about the Torah.

We read today in Parashat Qedoshim an extensive list of laws known to scholars as “the Holiness Code.” They include such diverse topics as honoring one’s parents, leaving some of your produce for the poor, treating animals respectfully, dealing fairly with your business customers, and so forth. It is a fascinating look into the world of our ancestors and their expectations for how to interact with others. (It was also, as luck would have it, my Bar Mitzvah parashah, and I appreciate it all the more so today.)

Qedoshim (and the rest of Jewish tradition) should be studied not just as a law code, not merely a framework for righteous behavior, but also as a means to improving ourselves. Why does the Torah need to tell us to leave the corners of our fields unharvested, so that poor people in our midst can come and take food? Because our inclination is to be greedy, to take more for ourselves. The Torah is therefore challenging us to rise above our base natures, to struggle internally over what we want to do vs. what we should do. And this is a struggle with which we are all intimately familiar.

I would like to highlight one verse (Lev. 19:16):

לֹא-תֵלֵךְ רָכִיל בְּעַמֶּיךָ, לֹא תַעֲמֹד עַל-דַּם רֵעֶךָ:  אֲנִי ה'.

Lo telekh rakhil be’amekha; lo ta’amod al dam reiekha, ani Adonai.

Do not go as a gossip among your people; do not profit by the blood of your fellow, I am Adonai.

While at first, the two halves of this verse do not seem to relate to each other, the 12th century Spanish commentator Avraham Ibn Ezra tells us the following:

Rather, “do not take a stand against the blood of your fellow” - do not conspire with violent men against him. It is obvious that many people have been murdered and otherwise killed on account of talebearing.

Ibn Ezra’s point is that talking ill of others causes bloodshed, because by contributing to the fear and hatred of others in your midst, you might actually inspire dangerous people to take action, even if that is not your intent.

I raise this because of the complicated issues surrounding the visit of the infamous Pamela Geller to our community last Sunday. Geller is an activist who decries the “Islamization” of America, and along with fellow activist Robert Spencer, the founder of “Stop Islamization of America,” or SIOA. This organization has been identified by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as “deeply problematic,” and characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “anti-Muslim,” an analog to “anti-Semitic.” Geller is probably best known for leading the charge against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” You might also know her for these signs, which were placed in the New York subways by her other organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, only after a court battle to win the right to place them:

In addition to these endeavors, she regularly makes inflammatory and “preposterous” (according to the SPLC) statements. She promotes the idea of an extremist Muslim conspiracy in our midst, involving our government, our media, and even “left-wing rabbis” to impose shari’a on all of us non-Muslims. She claims that there is no such thing as “moderate” Islam, and is fond of calling her critics “Nazis” or “leftists” or “Islamic supremacists.”

She spoke last Sunday here in Great Neck at the local Chabad synagogue. There were perhaps as many as 500 people in attendance.

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that Ms. Geller should not be given a forum at any synagogue. She puts herself forward as a defender of Israel, but what she and her organization are doing is characterized in no uncertain terms by the director of the ADL’s New York office, Etzion Neuer, as “bigotry.”

There is no question that the Islamic world has much to answer for. Many of the statements and actions by individual Muslims around the world that Ms. Geller points to on her website and at speaking engagements are, unfortunately, true. And those in their midst that tolerate hatred and despicable acts are guilty accomplices, and should rightly be taken to task.

However, that does not give us a green light to engage in the same types of hatred. And that does not mean that there is credible conspiracy to turn us all into Muslims.

Ms. Geller and her partners, Mr. Spencer and David Yerushalmi, the guy who is working hard to get state legislatures to pass ordinances that will prevent judges from consulting shari’ah law, and who also introduced her at Chabad on Sunday, promote themselves as fighting jihad. But what they are actually doing is something truly nefarious: they are creating a fear of something that does not really exist. There are no American courts that are giving American Muslims a pass on honor killings; the few American cases that I could find through Internet searches have resulted in jail time for the guilty parties. There is no attempt by anybody to bring Islamic law to public schools, or to force anybody to wear a veil, or to invade our public space in a way that violates our rights to live and practice our religion freely as Americans.

To imply that these things are in fact happening, when they are not, is talebearing. This is gossip. This is painting all Muslims with one brush.

Furthermore, these figures are exploiting the Jewish community’s fears regarding Israel. Israel has a much higher Muslim population, percentage-wise, than the United States, has Muslim judges (I have, in fact, been in an Israeli courtroom presided over by such a judge), and has a division within the Ministry of the Interior devoted to providing religious services to Israeli Muslims, and there is no fear in the Jewish state of creeping shari’a law.

Geller and her friends are really doing something shameful: they are deceiving ordinary American Jews into fearing something that just is not there. And they are further sowing division, not just between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but also causing a wedge between Jews right here in Great Neck and elsewhere.

This is standing by the metaphorical blood of your neighbor. And we Jews, with the lessons that we have learned from centuries of oppression, of blood libels and pogroms and genocide, we know that fear and hatred leads to the shedding of actual blood.

In 1790, following his visit to the Sephardic synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, he President George Washington wrote the following in a letter to the congregation:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation... For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is our duty as American Jews to continue to maintain the ideals that President Washington invoked. To be pro-Israel, one need not be anti-Muslim. And bigotry and persecution have no place in our synagogues, in our holy places. We cannot lower ourselves to the level of the anti-Semites, because that just gives them more credibility, and more ammunition for their hateful ways.

Rather, it is our duty to reach out to and support the moderate Muslims in this world, and there are many, particularly here in North America. As Irshad Manji has suggested, by elevating the moderates, the ones who are willing to engage in introspection through the ancient Muslim tenet of ijtihad, we have the potential to change this equation for the better. Change will not come unless we raise the bar of dialogue, rather than lowering it; Pamela Geller’s hateful recriminations leave no room for respectful disagreement.

As a footnote, I would like to add that if Ms. Geller ever reads this sermon on my blog, she will surely call me all sorts of names, as that is how she works. She will suggest that I am part of the vast conspiracy to suppress what she calls “the truth.” None of these accusations will be true; but her doing so will prove my point.

The truth, ladies and gentlemen, is that we cannot be naive about the dangers posed by fundamentalists and zealots of all stripes, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and so forth. But there are more productive ways for us to save lives and support Israel than to succumb to fear-mongering in our community.

It is for sins of talebearing that Ms. Geller and her colleagues should be ignored. They have a right to say what they want, just as anti-Israel activists do, just as, I suppose, outright hate groups do, as long as it does not incite violence. But let us not give them a forum; let us give bigotry no sanction.

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 4/20/2013.)

* The origin of honor killings is cultural, not endorsed by Muslim leaders; while it is abhorrent, it far predates the birth of Islam, and is related to the very principles we read in two separate passages in our parashah today, that mandate death for forbidden sexual liaisons. While Jewish society never enforced these killings, some traditional societies, including many which became Muslim in the 6th century and thereafter, maintained them. It is of course a shame and embarrassment that this practice still exists; perhaps as many as 5000 people are killed by their own family members each year world-wide. Muslim Men Against Domestic Abuse is one organization that is working to prevent these killings.

** Some Hebrew examples are:

• lehit’orer, to wake up
• lehitlabbesh, to dress oneself
• lehitpallel, to pray (literally, to judge oneself)
• lehitlonnen, to complain (interesting that this reflects back on oneself - not so good for the Jews, right?)

Teshuvah Day 6: How much time do you need to change?

"You know," I was saying to myself the other day, "Yom Kippur simply is not long enough.  Muslims fast for a whole month during Ramadan.  That's a whole month of repentance, 30 days of painful introspection and the opportunity to change one's behavior.  We have only one day."

Then I reconsidered.  It is true that there is only one major fast day during the year when we plead our case before God and, according to the Torah, practice self-denial:

וְעִנִּיתֶם אֶת-נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם
Ve-initem et nafshoteikhem
You shall afflict your souls (Numbers 29:7).

The tenth day of the month of Tishrei is set aside for suffering, for asking ourselves the really hard questions.

But that's just the Torah.  The rabbis understood that teshuvah / repentance literally can't happen overnight.  As such, we have been sounding the shofar, reciting Psalm 27, and doing heshbon ha-nefesh / inventory of the soul since the beginning of Elul.  Furthermore, the opportunity to ask others for forgiveness continues all the way until Hoshana Rabba, the 7th day of Sukkot.

OK, so it's not fasting every day for a month.  But there are no fewer than 50 days out of the year during which we should be thinking about self-transformation.  If we take this seriously, if we focus our energy on introspection and teshuvah, we have ample opportunity for change.

Gemar hatimah tovah!  May you be sealed for a good year.