Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem - Vayyera 5775

I am a big fan of Israeli pop music, particularly the way it tells the story of Israel. Not necessarily the explicit story, the history-book story, but the implicit story of who Israelis are, where they came from, what they value, and what life is like in Israel. Back in the ‘80s, when I spent a few summers at Camp Ramah in New England, and participated in USY, Israeli pop tunes saturated my life, particularly the Eurovision festival entries (Halleluyah, Abanibi, Hai, etc.) and the “Hasidic” song festivals (Adon Olam, etc.). As an American Jewish teenager who loved Israel, these songs created something of a background soundtrack to my life. And there was no song more resonant than Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, the song by Naomi Shemer that told the story of loss and reunification of the holiest place in Israel, the city that occupies such a special place in the hearts of so many of us. To this day, it seems that this song is the best-known and best-loved of the entire Israeli pop canon, at least in this hemisphere.

On Wednesday morning I heard about the Palestinian man with links to Hamas who plowed his car into a group of innocent Israelis waiting for a train at the Shim’on HaTzaddiq station on the new light rail line, killing one and injuring a dozen more people. This follows a similar attack two weeks ago in which a three-month-old baby girl and an Ecuadorean tourist were killed, and another incident in which an American-born rabbi, Yehuda Glick, was shot and critically wounded for advocating to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount.

And I realized that I had no choice but to pause to grieve for Jerusalem, the city whose name may be derived from ‘Ir Shalom, the City of Peace.

Where is the Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, the Jerusalem of Gold that we all know and love? Does that song merely capture a fleeting dream, a candle of hope and unity that only flickered briefly before being snuffed out by the intractable reality on the ground? Is the zahav, the gold, merely that of a rising flame of tension, disunity, and instigation?

I lived in Jerusalem in the year 2000 for about seven months, for my first semester in Cantorial School at the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies, just before the Second Intifada broke out. It was a relativly peaceful and even optimistic time in Israel. Just a few years after the Oslo Accords, peace was coming. Areas of the West Bank and Gaza had been turned over to the Palestinians. There was new development and cooperation on matters of security and trade. No part of Jerusalem seemed unsafe, and I walked the streets of East Jerusalem and the Arab quarters of the Old City without fear.

But oh, how things have changed. It was, you may recall, the failure of the Camp David summit in July of 2000 that ultimately led to the Intifada. I had just returned to New York to continue my studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary when the City of Peace became the city of bus and cafe bombings.

Things cooled down again after a few years. Israel built the separation fence (which in places is a wall), which worked quite well in keeping would-be attackers out of the Jewish population centers. Jerusalem’s brand new light rail line, which took years to build, opened in 2011, and the optics of a, thoroughly modern commuter train running alongside the Old City walls built by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century are truly inspiring. I have been on the train a few times, and am always captivated by its tri-lingual scrolling sign, announcing the next station in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The cool thing is that, since English goes from left to right and the other languages from right to left, the info scrolls in both directions.

But it is this light rail system, originally built to serve both Arab and Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem (the population of which is 37% Arab), that has unfortunately been a focal point of some of the recent violence. It was the target of attacks in July by Palestinian youths, who sacked the stations in their areas. So the municipality stopped running the trains there. The two deadly car attacks of the last couple of weeks took place at rail stations, easy targets for terrorists. This symbol of old and new, of coexistence and cooperation and shared economy and destinations, of progress and promise, has devolved into a symbol of hatred and resentment, of failure and intransigence, of murder and riots.

To quell the angry mobs of Palestinian protesters last week, Israel ordered a full shutdown of the Temple Mount for a day, the first time since the summer of 2000, igniting even more tension within the city as well as angering Israel’s mostly-cordial Arab neighbors in Jordan, who are still somewhat in control of what goes on on top of the Temple Mount plaza. Jerusalem is at a rolling boil of hatred, anger, fear, and grief.

Among the many, many things I learned about in rabbinical school are the basic principles of “family therapy.” Family therapists see each family as a system of interconnected personalities, and that when a family system is not functioning in equilibrium, then one or more of the people in the system misbehave and cause emotional damage. Often, the way to fix such a family system is to make a significant change in the structure. The hard part is knowing what must be changed.

The parashah that we read today describes the residents of Jerusalem as being from the same family - Abraham’s sons Ishmael and Isaac are the patriarchs of the Jews and the Arabs, respectively, and the Torah presents both of them as having a certain role to play in the world, siring two great nations. Let’s face it - Muslim, Christian and Jew, Israeli and Arab, we are one big family system that is misfiring all over the place.

As if to draw a fine point on this picture, Israel’s new President, Reuven Rivlin, a right-wing politician who supports settlements and rejects the two-state solution, said in a speech two weeks ago (as quoted in an article in the current Jewish Week): “The tension between Jews and Arabs within the State of Israel has risen to record heights, and the relationship between all parties has reached a new low. We have all witnessed the shocking sequence of incidents and violence taking place by both sides… It is time to honestly admit that Israeli society is sick - and it is our duty to treat this disease.”

With every terrorist attack, we, the Jews, the Israeli public are driven further away from seeking a negotiated resolution to the current situation. And that is an understandable response. As has often been noted, whenever Israel has retreated, terrorist groups have been emboldened.

But this observation is always made from the position of defeatism. The message is, “Nothing should change, because change has never been good for us.” I cannot accept that message.

Returning to President Rivlin, I offer his words given at an amazing speech in Kafr Qasm, an Israeli Arab town, where he spoke at the annual commemoration of the 1956 massacre of 48 Arab residents of the town by Israeli troops. He acknowledged the discrimination that Israeli Arabs have faced at the hands of the Jewish majority, and exhorted Arabs and Jews to take a step forward together based on “mutual respect and commitment”:

“As a Jew, I expect from my coreligionists, to take responsibility for our lives here, so as President of Israel, as your President, I also expect you to take that same responsibility. The Arab population in Israel, and the Arab leaders in Israel, must take a clear stand against violence and terrorism.”

The current escalation threatens the very foundations of the City of Peace, and it will not go away until there are fundamental changes in the family system. Those changes will have to be that, for the sake of Jerusalem, the Palestinians renounce terrorism, that PA President Mahmoud Abbas stops making inflammatory statements that seem to sympathize with terrorists, that Israel ceases demolishing homes, even the illegal ones, in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and at least temporarily stops issuing building tenders for new construction for Jewish homes in disputed areas, and that both sides return to the table. As a family, we have to talk to each other.

We have no other choice. The only other option is the status quo, and we see how well that is working. The family system is broken.

We read this morning one of the most well-known and controversial stories in the Torah, the Aqedat Yitzhaq, the Binding of Isaac. Tradition tells us that it takes place on Mt. Moriah, which we today know as the Temple Mount. It is the Torah’s way of telling us that Jerusalem is the holiest place in the world, the location where a paradigm shift in our relationship with God took place. And, of course, Christians and Muslims believe this city to be holy as well.

Prayer, ladies and gentlemen, is not just a request for things that we want, it is also a blueprint for a world that could be. We should pray for those killed and injured in this conflict. But we also have to pray for the holy city of Jerusalem, and hold out hope that this situation will change.

שַׁאֲלוּ שְׁלוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם; יִשְׁלָיוּ, אֹהֲבָיִךְ.  יְהִי-שָׁלוֹם בְּחֵילֵךְ, שַׁלְוָה, בְּאַרְמְנוֹתָיִךְ.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May those who love you be at peace. May there be well-being within your ramparts, peace in your citadels.”
(Psalm 122:6-7)

Giving up hope is not an option. We must continue to sing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, but also to invoke Psalm 122, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and to continue to place that before us as a goal. We must hope that change will come; if we give up that hope, then there will never be peace in the City of Peace.

Shabbat shalom.

Equal Access to God - Pesah 5774

My eldest son’s bar mitzvah was in Israel two-and-a-half weeks ago. He lives at Kibbutz Ein Gev, which might just be Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden), located on the eastern shore of the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. We put together complete, Conservative-style, fully egalitarian Shabbat evening and morning services there for family and friends and kibbutzniks, but we started the process in Jerusalem, two days earlier at the Kotel, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. There, on Thursday morning, we held a service where Oryah laid tefillin and read Torah, accompanied by his immediate family.

What was particularly unique and interesting about this day for me, in addition to my son’s bar mitzvah, was that this Thursday morning service took place not at what most of us think of as the Kotel, but at what might be described as a new ancient location: the southernmost area of the Western Wall, just under the archaeologically-significant outcropping of the wall known as Robinson’s Arch. (It was named after the early 19th-century American biblical scholar, Edward Robinson, who identified the arch on a visit to Palestine in 1838 as part of the ancient bridge that led to the Temple plaza from Jerusalem’s downtown prior to the Roman destruction in 70 CE.)

To distinguish it from the main plaza in front of the Western Wall where most people congregate, this area has come to be known informally in recent years as “HaKotel HaMasorti,” the Conservative Western Wall (Masorti being the international term for the Conservative movement).  But now it has a new name: “Ezrat Yisrael.” It’s really a very clever name: it’s the name of an area in the Second Temple that was open to all Israelites (i.e. those who were neither Kohanim or Leviim). However, to the speaker of modern Hebrew it suggests a place that is open to all Jews, differentiated from the women’s section in an Orthodox synagogue called the ezrat nashim, the women’s section that is separate from that of the men in any Orthodox synagogue; this name also derives from ancient Temple, where there was also an ezrat nashim.

Since last September, when the Israeli government finally agreed to make access to the Masorti Kotel easier, there are a couple of new features at the Robinson’s Arch area. There is now a huge, expansive platform with several rolling lecterns overlooking the site, which may be reserved in advance by anybody wishing to hold an egalitarian service there. There is also a special, separate entrance adjacent to the main entrance to the Kotel Plaza, with a sign saying “Ezrat Yisrael” and a security guard (although no metal detectors, as for the traditional Kotel). These innovations have made the whole experience far more pleasant and convenient and accessible than the site had been previously. As I passed through the new entrance, I thought, Pithu li sha’arei tzedeq, avo vam odeh Yah. Open for me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter to praise God. (Psalm 118:20 - We sang those words a few minutes ago in Hallel.) It has been a long time coming that this prayer space of equality, where women and men may worship in contemporary style, where all can be seen as equal with respect to God, where all may participate fully, is now open to the public and functioning respectfully.

We held our service on the new platform, overlooking the ancient walls built by King Herod nearly 2,000 years ago, and enjoyed the relative peace and serenity of the scene as compared with the hubbub of the traditional Kotel area.

A little basic history is called for here: Prior to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, Judaism was mostly centralized. Worship was governed by the kohanim, the priests, and included pilgrimage and agricultural sacrifice.  When the Temple was destroyed and the role of the priesthood effectively nullified, a new group of leaders, scholars that went by the title of “Rav” or “Rabban” or “Rabbi” developed a new way to engage with God: through words of prayer and words of study. As a result, they redefined what it means to be holy for Jews. Holiness would no longer be assigned to one central place, but would be carried with the Jews in their hearts and minds wherever they went throughout the world. We each carry within us the spark of holiness, and wherever we gather to sanctify time or to engage with the ancient words of our tradition, that holiness multiplies itself to make a miqdash me’at, a little place of holiness.

(As an aside here: It was this portability and effective democratization of Judaism that enable us to survive. As I referenced on Shabbat Hagadol, we could have disappeared when the Romans ceased the Temple service. But instead we found a creative workaround. This is why the Dalai Lama convened a bunch of Jewish leaders back in the early 1990s to learn strategies on how a people may maintain its faith in exile; this tale was the subject of Rodger Kamenetz’s book, The Jew in the Lotus.)

That said, I must confess that I have become, in recent years, somewhat disenchanted with whole Kotel experience. It has become an obsession for our people - these ancient stones. Certainly, they are laden with history, and certainly, it is a place that speaks with great emotional power. But since the Roman destruction, there really are not holy places in Judaism like there are in, say, Islam. Holiness is where the Jews are, and is not tethered to any particular location.

But the fascination with that big, open-air, continuous pick-up minyan adjacent to an ancient retaining wall is challenging to me. It has a faint whiff of avodah zarah, idolatry. The history of the Temple Mount is powerful and inspiring, incorporating the ancient Jewish tale of destruction and rebuilding coupled with hope and Divine connection, but it has never been, and was never intended to be what it has become in recent years: an Orthodox synagogue. We do not worship rocks, ladies and gentlemen. We worship only God.

Today, the Kotel has a mehitzah (that was not always the case) and an Orthodox rabbi appointed by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, who has expressly forbidden mixed minyanim, or even women-only services that feature women singing out loud like men do. I continue to read accounts of how some of the worshippers there have become increasingly bold about telling others how to behave / pray / walk / dress and so forth in the plaza. Ladies and gentlemen, there are many paths to God, and if my approach differs from yours, that’s fine. We should make an effort to accommodate each other where possible, and respect each other’s path.

When I am at the Kotel, I too feel the ancient reverberations of our history and our tradition emanating from that wall. And I feel the sadness of loss, the hope of rebuilding, and the yearning of two thousand years of exile. Indeed, the ancient ruins of Israel, the wellspring of our heritage, made it not just possible but mandatory that the Jewish state be located there, and not in Madagascar or Birobidjan or Brooklyn or Vilna.

But even more, I feel the pain of divisiveness, the arrogance of those within our midst who want to tell others what to believe and how to act, the anger at the insulting and even dangerous behavior of those who have somehow incorporated intolerance into their religious zeal.

If those Herodian rocks could speak, what would they say? Can’t you people all just get along? Can’t you just accept that there are many paths through Judaism, that every Jew should be entitled to visit this venerated, historical place and access God through whatever means he or she chooses? If those rocks could speak, wouldn’t they remind us of the Talmudic passage that tells us that the Second Temple was lost due to sin’at hinam, causeless hatred?

The victory of the last year, when the Netanyahu government agreed to created this open prayer space for egalitarian groups at Robinson’s Arch, is of utmost importance because of the message it broadcasts to the Jewish world: Women count too. And this message, which is a bridge we crossed at Temple Israel in 1976, has not yet infiltrated into much of the traditional Jewish world. Pesah in particular is a time when we should actively recall this, because of a passage in the Talmud related to the seder (Pesahim 108a):

ואמר רבי יהושע בן לוי: נשים חייבות בארבעה כוסות הללו, שאף הן היו באותו הנס.

Ve-amar Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi: Nashim hayyavot be-arba’ah kosot halalu, she-af hen hayu beoto hanes.

R. Joshua ben Levi said: Women are obligated for the Four Cups, because they too participated in the same miracle.

It may be hard to believe for the frummer residents of Beit Shemesh and Boro Park, but half of those who were redeemed from Egypt were female. And so they deserve a place at the table as well, not relegated to another room or behind a mehitzah. And not just on Pesah, but in all aspects of Jewish life.

Why do we need to continue to focus on the equality of women? Because there are Yiddish signs in neighborhoods of Brooklyn asking women to step off the sidewalk in deference to a man. Because there is an ongoing campaign in Jerusalem and other primarily Haredi cities to remove women from sight: prohibition of women on advertising billboards, or when they do appear, vandalization by anonymous zealots. Because an eight-year-old girl, Naama Margolis, was harassed and spat upon by Haredi residents of Beit Shemesh two years ago because they felt that her dress was was not sufficiently modest. Eight years old!

This is all the more reason why the Ezrat Yisrael is so important. While certain quarters of Judaism are busy trying to make women invisible, we have succeeded in elevating them by actually building a raised platform. We have physically elevated those choosing to worship adjacent to the ancient site of Beit HaMiqdash, and thus raised them spiritually as well.

Chairman Mao famously said, “Women hold up half the sky.” Well, they did in ancient Israel too, and in Egypt, and they do so today. (Maybe even more than half.) But that does not mean that our work is done - on the contrary, we must continue to strive to make men and women equal partners in holiness, with equal access to God.
By bringing together the sparks of holiness found within every one of us, male and female, we can only raise ourselves higher.

Hag sameah.

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