Responding Jewishly to Terror and Grief - Balaq 5774

It was about 9 PM in Israel when I heard the news. My 13-year-old son and I were on Highway 90, just north of Beit She'an, driving south to Ben Gurion Airport for our 12:45 AM flight to JFK. He heard it several minutes before it came over the radio, because he was in communication with his friends via his smartphone. He announced, almost too casually, “Abba, did you know about the three kidnapping victims?” “Yes,” I said. “They found their bodies.”

I gasped audibly. So loudly, in fact, that he jumped. “Why are you so shocked?” he asked.

Why indeed? I must confess that this was not the outcome that I had expected. A living Israeli is worth far more to Hamas than a dead one. Gil'ad Shalit was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. I figured that somebody in the territories had masterminded a plan to get 3,000 or 5,000 more. But no – the original plan seemed to have backfired.  

My son further asked me, “Why do you care so much? You're not Israeli.”

“But I'm Jewish,” I replied. “I don't live in Israel, and about half of the Jews in the world do not live in Israel. But we are all one people. And when members of Am Yisrael, the nation of Israel, feel pain, whether they are citizens of the State of Israel or France or Canada or Argentina or India, we all feel that pain.”

“Oh,” he said, and that proceeded to think quietly about this revelation.

And while we continued to drive in silence and my thoughts went to the parents of Eyal, Naftali, and Gil’ad, I could feel the tears welling up behind my glasses, threatening to obscure my view of Highway 90, which is a voluptuous stretch of highway with an eternally gorgeous view of the Jordan valley. Even at night, the mountains just across the Jordan valley, referred to as the Gil’ad (an ironic view for the piece of news which had just arrived) were distant, haunting, calling to me across an ancient river and a modern and much-politicized border.

What can we do in times of loss like this? Are we helpless?  How should our faith help us in times like these both spiritually and practically?  What is the appropriate Jewish response?

One answer is to gather solemnly to recite words from our tradition. I think the experience that many of us had this past Tuesday evening, when members of this community came to Ma’ariv to memorialize the three slain young men, was cathartic.  We need to be among our own, we need community, to surround ourselves with those who understand our grief, who understand why we are so personally moved by a tragedy so far removed from us physically.

As Oryah and I drove through the center of Israel Monday night, Israelis interviewed on the radio said things like, let’s let Tzahal / the IDF do what we know they can do - i.e. root out all the Hamas terrorists hiding in the territories and kill them as enemy combatants or round them up and imprison them.

Unfortunately, over the course of the week, the situation worsened. Ladies and gentlemen, we are entering very dark times. As of yesterday, the Israeli police had not declared who killed Muhammed Abu Khdeir, the 16-year-old resident of Shuafat who was murdered and whose body was desecrated following the revelation about the three Israelis, and I am really, really hoping that it was not one of us.

We are not a bloodthirsty people. We are not hooligans. We are not terrorists.

The response, ladies and gentlemen, should be to draw on key Jewish values. We cannot allow the purveyors of terror to pull us down into the swamp with them. We must abide by the law and our morals.  We should not ignore or forgive, but we should respond as Jews.   

On Thursday, I was on a conference call organized by the Rabbinical Assembly, the international organization of Conservative rabbis. Rabbi Brad Artson, who teaches at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, shared some thoughts about how we should respond to the tragic slaying of Naftali, Gil’ad, and Eyal. His position is that we need to reiterate our commitment to four general principles highlighted in the Torah. They are:

1. Ahavat Tziyyon, love of Zion and Israel.

2. Kevod HaBeriyyot, maintaining human dignity.

3. Tzedeq, Tzedeq Tirdof, valiantly pursuing justice.

4. Rodef Shalom, pursuing peace.

Ahavat Tziyyon. We are one nation, and we share a destiny with the State of Israel, built on the Land of Israel. We all agree that we have a natural, historical right as Jews to our own self-determination, and therefore our own state, which the world must acknowledge and support.

Kevod HaBeriyyot. The first time that the word “Torah” appears in the Torah (Ex. 12:49) is a statement that you shall have one Torah for you and for the non-Israelites in your midst. That is, everybody is subject to the same laws, the same equal treatment, the same rights, the same ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, and that goes for all people between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Tzedeq Tzedeq Tirdof. We have an obligation to seek justice in all its forms. On a micro level, that means that murderers should be prosecuted. On a macro level, that means that we are obligated to protect ourselves when necessary, including taking out terrorist infrastructure. When we must go to war, the Torah is clear: we must go to war. But ultimately our goal is to arrive at peace, which brings us to…

Rodef Shalom. It is our obligation to seek peace, and we should work hard to bring it about. Working toward peace - treaties, security arrangements, trade, international borders, all of the thorny issues that this implies - is a positive mitzvah in our tradition. That does not imply that we merely have to roll over and be passive and give away huge chunks of land and security for peace. But it does mean that we are commanded to work towards peace tirelessly and wisely.

Peace must be just, must reflect our values, must include safety and security for all citizens, and must maintain human dignity for all.

Those are the four principles. But how can we put them into practice?

There are some in the Jewish world who feel that the only way to ensure that justice is served is through military engagement. Certainly, when there are rockets being launched from Gaza into Israel, the Jewish state has no choice. As I wrote this, the New York Times reported that Israel was massing troops on the border of Gaza, perhaps for some kind of “operation.”  This should not, of course, be understood as revenge, as some reports implied, but as security. Israel needs to make sure her citizens are safe.

We should be extremely careful not to allow our grief to cascade into angry calls for revenge. Regarding the use of force, we should always be on the defense, not on the offense. Great military minds may disagree; there are legitimate times when you must strike first. But the complicated nature of this situation calls for caution. At the negotiating table, however, we should leap into battle and not wait for something to happen. In my mind, that would strike the correct balance between the four values that Rabbi Artson raised.

We are a people that prays for peace daily. Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom. And more “operations” will not bring us more peace. On the contrary, we need not only to pray for peace, but to work at it with all of our being. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, an Israeli Chabad rabbi generally recognized as the greatest living Jewish scholar, suggested the following response:

It is true that we do have the right to fight in order to protect our lives, and to kill in a war of self-defense, as well as to punish the perpetrators.

But while revenge responds to a human need (however natural and normal the impulse), it is not in our hands: "Vengeance is Mine, and recompense," says the Lord (Deuteronomy 32:35)...

What, then, can and should we do?

We should do Kaddish.

In saying Kaddish over the dead, we promise to fill the gaps created by their passing, and to continue doing whatever we can so that "His great Name may grow exalted and sanctified."

But saying that is not enough: each and every one of us should also act as best he or she can in order to do Kaddish – by studying more Torah, by fulfilling one more mitzvah, by our physical actions or by giving of our time and money to those in need. Our acts do not serve to elevate the souls of these boys – for they are in a supreme spiritual level that needs no further elevation. Our acts elevate our own souls, curing all the lacks that were and still are in our world.

Rabbi Steinsaltz says that we should focus our energies not on revenge, but on returning to tradition, on improving ourselves, on elevating our souls. I would add that we should return to the negotiating table.

Furthermore, I would also add that we should draw inspiration from the prophet Micah, whose staggeringly-beautiful words we heard chanted this morning. The haftarah concluded with (6:8):

הִגִּיד לְךָ אָדָם, מַה-טּוֹב; וּמָה-יְהוָה דּוֹרֵשׁ מִמְּךָ, כִּי אִם-עֲשׂוֹת מִשְׁפָּט וְאַהֲבַת חֶסֶד, וְהַצְנֵעַ לֶכֶת עִם-אֱלֹהֶיךָ

He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you:Only to do justice, and to love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God.

We have to walk modestly with God, and not speak arrogantly of violence. We have to maintain our principles: Jewish nationhood, human dignity, justice and peace. And we have to seek to elevate our souls. As painful as this episode has been, we cannot call out for revenge. We need to take care of our people, to bring the guilty to justice, and seek a solution for all the young men and women of this world.

Am Yisrael Hai. The nation of Israel lives.

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, July 5, 2014.)

The True Meaning of Matzah - Seventh Day Pesah, 5774

I suspect that some of you must have a running bet over whether I’m going to begin a sermon with, “I recently heard on NPR…” I’m not sure what the current odds are, but it may be that money is about to be owed:

I recently heard on NPR a fascinating story about a church in North Carolina that really struck me. At St. Albans Episcopal Church in Davidson, a well-appointed outer suburb of Charlotte, there is a new bronze statue on the church grounds, depicting a figure lying, huddled on a bench, wrapped in a blanket. The only body parts of the figure visible are its feet, which display the wounds that, according to Christian tradition, were caused by the crucifixion of Jesus at the hands of the Romans. The statue is titled Jesus the Homeless, and, as you may imagine, has caused no shortage of uproar within the congregation. Some love it, including the church’s pastor, and some hate it. (BTW, the sculptor has a wonderful name that may resonate for some in this holiday season: Timothy Schmalz.)

What caught my attention when listening to this story is the power of this message. One goal of art, as with religion, is to take us outside of ourselves, to raise our awareness about things that we cannot otherwise see. The message that this statue projects is not the typical theology common to images found in churches - Jesus’s birth or death scenes, or decked out with glorious threads and haloes and rays of light.

Rather, the message here is, remember the needy! You who come to this well-kept suburban church, which could afford to spend $22,000 to purchase the art installation in memory of a deceased member, should remember that there are plenty of people in the world, good, deserving people, who cannot afford a home, much less one in a neighborhood like this. And this is a message that all of us who live in more comfortable environments would do well to remember.

And while some believe that this is an affront to the central character in Christianity, others see this as religious consciousness-raising par excellence. As the church’s spiritual leader Rev. David Buck puts it, "We believe that that's the kind of life Jesus had. He was, in essence, a homeless person."

Now of course, I am not here today to talk about Jesus, even though yesterday was Easter Sunday. Rather, I am going to talk about Pesah, which of course plays a role as the backdrop in the Christian bible for the events surrounding Jesus’ death.

However, I think that the symbolic intent conveyed by the statue is as valent here as it is in North Carolina, and in fact, one of the central mitzvot / commandments of Pesah, the consumption of matzah, is its spiritual analog.

Occasionally, I will admit that we have a problem in Judaism. We try to hit too many buttons at once. When you consider Pesah, for example, you can see how the central message of this holiday might be obscured amidst all the other noise. What are the themes of Pesah? There are several - this is a holiday with at least four names: Hag ha-Aviv (the festival of spring), Hag ha-Herut (the festival of freedom), and Hag ha-Matzot (the festival of flat, tasteless, cracker-like bread), and of course, Pesah, referring to the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb. But the central message of Pesah is even more specific than that. It is reflected in the following statement, which we say during the seder, right before we ask the Four Questions that get the conversation about slavery and freedom started:

הַא לַחְמָא עַנְיָא, דִּאֲכַלוּ אֲבָהָתַנָא בְּאַרְעָא דְּמִצְרַיִם.  כָּל דִּכְפִין, יֵיתֵי וְיֵיכוּל; כָּל דִּצְרִיךְ יֵיתֵי וִיפַסַּח.

Ha lahma anya di-akhalu avahatana be-ar’a demitzrayim.

Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul; kol ditzrikh yeitei veyifsah.

This is the bread of poverty that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.

Let all who are hungry, come and eat.

Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover.

Most of us probably rush by this statement on the way to more interesting territory in the Haggadah, or perhaps on the way to dinner, without thinking about it too deeply. It’s in Aramaic, and we all know that when we find ritual passages in Aramaic, it’s because the liturgical framers wanted us to understand. The passage refers to the Talmud, Tractate Ta’anit 20b. In enumerating the noble deeds performed by the great sage Rav Huna, the Gemara reports the following:

When Rav Huna was in possession of some medicament, he would take a pitcherful thereof, hang it on the door-post and say: “Whoever wishes to have some, let him come and take it.” … When he was about to sit down to a meal, he would open the doors, saying: “Anyone who desires to eat, let him come in and eat.”

What made Rav Huna a great sage (and not a merely good one) was his willingness to share with those in need. We echo those words when we open our seder, even before telling the Pesah story, by saying, in a language that (at least historically) the Jews understood better than Hebrew, “Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul,” let all who are hungry, come and eat.

We borrowed this text directly into the Haggadah because it speaks to the values that we highlight on this holiday. We should be more like Rav Huna. When we sit and discuss our departure from Egypt, an abundant meal awaiting us in the kitchen, we should not forget that we are a people whose nationhood was forged in slavery and oppression, and that we should remember (א) there are plenty of others out there who are still suffering, and (ב) that we might just as easily end up in Mitzrayim, the narrow place of Egypt, once again. It is our duty not just to recite this line, but to really mean it. If we do not open up our doors to those who lack food and shelter and clothing, then we must, in subsequent days and months, open up our hearts and our wallets.

And thus, reciting this line at the seder is far from the end of fulfilling our Passover obligation. Think about it for a moment: the first seder was nearly a week ago, and we’re still eating matzah, and (at least for the Ashkenazim) a range of meager foods.

Eating is so central to our lives - those of us who can afford to, do it almost all day long. It’s such a huge part of our personal and macro-economies that we often do not realize how omnipresent it is - how much time and energy we spend eating, or preparing, or shopping for, or growing and harvesting and transporting and all the other tasks associated with food.

So it is remarkable indeed that we eat this lehem oni, this bread of poverty, for eight whole days. Not just one or two evenings, but for about 2% of your calendar year.

Matzah is, or at least should be, something akin to the Jewish version of the homeless Jesus: a reminder: a symbol of what we have vs. what we might not have; a beacon calling us to be at once grateful for our freedom and our ability to dine like free people as well as mindful of those who have no freedom and cannot dine like we do.

Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul. This potent message of the seder continues to resonate, even as this festival winds to a close.

My sister, who is living in Budapest, Hungary this year, put together a seder for some family and friends last week. She told me that the matzah that she procured in Budapest was somehow much worse than the matzah that she has been accustomed to in the States.

Now, I’m not sure how that can be - matzah, lehem oni, the bread of poverty, is not something to be enjoyed. But whether you like eating matzah or not, and regardless of its quality and relative tastiness, the meaning of the matzah is consistent: we emerged from oppression so that we can extend a hand to others.

We do not often step over homeless people here in Great Neck, nor are we frequently approached by people asking for money on Middle Neck Road. But there are needy among us here, as there are everywhere. The matzah should remind us of that, as well as our obligation to be like Rav Huna, and figuratively, if not literally, open the doors to those in need.

 

And so, to conclude, we should use these last two days of Pesah (and for many of us the last days of consuming matzah until the next 14th of Nisan) to consider how we might emulate Rav Huna, how we might fulfill our obligation to care for those who have less than we do. How can we carry the message and symbolism of matzah into the other 98% of the year? Can we commit to the following?

• Bringing food to Temple Israel when our Chesed Connection collects, or directly to the food pantry at St. Aloysius church here in town
• Participating in Midnight Run, which we host here at Temple Israel, and helping with Hatzilu, which distributes food to those in need locally
• Donating to charitable organizations that feed the hungry (e.g. Mazon here in America, Meir Panim in Israel)
• Helping our children and grandchildren to understand the importance of giving by demonstrating our willingness to do so. Get them involved!
• Educate yourself on what the issues are surrounding hungry and homeless people. Find your own way to help out. Seek out other initiatives and promote them to your family and friends. Raise the bar of dialogue.

Don’t let the message of the matzah get lost in all the other messages of this season. Let all who are hungry, come and eat.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Monday, April 21, 2014.)

Name That Jewish Value - Terumah 5772

Welcome to Adar.  In the spirit of the season, I’d like to offer you the following:

A man was boasting about the piety of his rabbi.

“My rabbi, may he live to be 120, is so pious that he fasts every day - except, of course, for Saturdays and holidays.”

“How can that be true?” asked his friend.  “Why, just this morning I saw your rabbi eating breakfast.”

“That shows how much you know,” replied the first man.  “You see, my rabbi is very modest about his piety.  If he eats, it is only to hide from others the fact that he is fasting.”  [Big Book of Jewish Humor, Novak & Waldoks, p. 198]

I’ve been having an ongoing curricular discussion with Danny Mishkin, Temple Israel’s Director of the Youth House and Teen Engagement, on the subject of Jewish values.  In rethinking the Youth House, he has insisted that classes be focused on teaching these values, and as such has re-oriented my thinking about what we do here educationally.  His goal is to help teenagers build, if you will, “Jewish-colored glasses” - that is, to encourage them to view the world according to Jewish values, and act on them.  A secondary goal is to help parents of teens and the rest of the community appreciate what their children are learning, by having them present their work at the end of each unit, and thus bringing them into the conversation as well.

My question for you today is, “What is a Jewish value?”

Truth is, I had not thought too deeply about this until very recently.  Had I been asked that question 12 years ago, before I started cantorial school, I’m not sure if I would have known how to respond.  This is, of course, not a good sign, as I am a proud product of the Conservative movement.  I grew up attending a Conservative synagogue regularly on Shabbat and holidays, attending Hebrew school, becoming bar mitzvah, and continuing in the Hebrew High School at the same place; I also spent summers at Camp Ramah and participated in USY.  In college, I affiliated with Hillel and attended the Conservative minyan there.  After grad school, I taught Hebrew school at the Conservative congregation in Manchester, New Hampshire, and when I moved to Houston, single and in my mid-20s, I joined a Conservative congregation, read Torah regularly, and sang in the choir.

Even given all of that, had you forced me to identify Jewish values, I’m not sure I could have pointed to more than giving tzedaqah and the principle of 613 mitzvot, and I would have been hard-pressed to name a long list of these mitzvot.

So now I’m going to give what might be called a “pop quiz.”  Read the following passage from the Torah, Parashat Terumah, Exodus 25:1-8.  Can you infer any Jewish values from this text?

א וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר.  ב דַּבֵּר אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְיִקְחוּ-לִי תְּרוּמָה:  מֵאֵת כָּל-אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִדְּבֶנּוּ לִבּוֹ, תִּקְחוּ אֶת-תְּרוּמָתִי.  ג וְזֹאת, הַתְּרוּמָה, אֲשֶׁר תִּקְחוּ, מֵאִתָּם:  זָהָב וָכֶסֶף, וּנְחֹשֶׁת.  ד וּתְכֵלֶת וְאַרְגָּמָן וְתוֹלַעַת שָׁנִי, וְשֵׁשׁ וְעִזִּים.  ה וְעֹרֹת אֵילִם מְאָדָּמִים וְעֹרֹת תְּחָשִׁים, וַעֲצֵי שִׁטִּים.  ו שֶׁמֶן, לַמָּאֹר; בְּשָׂמִים לְשֶׁמֶן הַמִּשְׁחָה, וְלִקְטֹרֶת הַסַּמִּים.  ז אַבְנֵי-שֹׁהַם, וְאַבְנֵי מִלֻּאִים, לָאֵפֹד, וְלַחֹשֶׁן.  ח וְעָשׂוּ לִי, מִקְדָּשׁ; וְשָׁכַנְתִּי, בְּתוֹכָם

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves him.  And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats' hair; tanned ram skins, dolphin skins, and acacia wood; oil for lighting, spices for the anointing oil and for the aromatic incense; lapis lazuli and other stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece.  And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. (New JPS translation)

The values that I see immediately here are volunteering/generosity, community, building nice places in which to worship, and the presence of God.  If we dig a little deeper, we might find others.  

(BTW: Ramban (Spain/Israel 1194-1270 CE) says that the building of the mishkan, which immediately follows the episode at Sinai, is essentially a way for the Israelites to continue the conversation with God.  Perhaps this suggests the value of tefillah.)

What are the most important Jewish values that you can think of?

Tzedaqah
Mitzvot
Learning
Social action / Tiqqun Olam (“repairing the world”)
Holiness
Prayer
God
Limits
Modesty and piety (as with joke above)

Now, not all of these are exclusively Jewish, but they are all definitely principles that Judaism upholds.

Here are Danny’s top three Jewish values:

Hakhnasat Orhim - welcoming guests, and this might refer not just into your homes or into the synagogue, but also welcoming those on the periphery of the Jewish community into the center

Avoiding Avodah Zarah - not making idols, and perhaps more specifically the false idols of the wider society - pursuing material goods over good relationships, the whole range of activities that we undertake for selfish interests only

Im ein ani li mi li, ukhshe’ani le’atzmi mah ani? (Pirqei Avot 1:14) - your wants do not outweigh the needs of others

I think that this discussion speaks to the central question of Jewish identity in today’s world.  That is, how can we maintain our Jewishness when there are no barriers to complete assimilation into the wider society, and we are (on the whole) not committed to traditional Jewish practice?  (Aside: Poll numbers from Gallup released last week showed that among American religious groups, Jews have the highest well-being, and are also the least “religious.”)

There are, of course, many different ways to be Jewish, and many types of Jews.  Speaking not as a rabbi but as a lifelong Conservative Jew, I would say that all of us in the Conservative movement are committed to living a life that is distinctly Jewish but not isolated from the wider society.  That is, the vast majority of us embrace most holiday observances and lifecycle events, and we believe in teaching our children something about Judaism.  Many of us practice some form of kashrut.  But as far as an ongoing, daily commitment to every jot and tittle of traditional Jewish religious observance, most of us are not in the same place as many of those who identify as Orthodox.

So that leaves us with this essential question: how can we make our daily lives infused with Judaism, if many of us do not see ourselves as living within what the Rabbis called “arba amot shel halakhah,” the four cubits of personal observance of Jewish law*?  

This is a question that I wrestle with daily.

People often suggest (especially on weekdays when we don’t make a minyan) that the rabbi should speak more forcefully from the pulpit about fulfilling various aspects of halakhah, of Jewish law.  Although I have done this occasionally (for example, two years ago on Yom Kippur I spoke about “turning off” for Shabbat), I am not convinced that it is an effective use of this space.

Rabbi Stecker and I could stand up here on this pulpit and exhort this entire community (or at least the ones in the room) to pray three times daily in a minyan, to get all your suits checked for sha’atnez (the prohibited mixture of wool and linen), to commit to wearing tefillin (yes, even the women), not to spend money or drive anywhere (except to Temple Israel**) on Shabbat, and so forth.

But most of us are not likely to embrace significant changes in our Jewish practice, or at least, in accord with the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig’s famous pronouncement on the subject, “not yet.”  Most of us are comfortable with the moderate approach that has become the de facto, if not the ideological stance of the Conservative movement - that is, a traditional, egalitarian synagogue experience and some home rituals and lifecycle events, but without the communal expectations for public and private halakhic observance that the Orthodox world demands.

(By the way, did you see the article in the New York Times about Tibet’s favorite food?  Apparently, the Dalai Lama, who is expected to be a vegetarian in accordance with Buddhist values, occasionally eats meat outside of his compound in Dharamsala, India.  In other words, he keeps a kosher home, but eats treyf out.)

Returning to the question of maintaining Jewish identity, I think that Danny is onto something here, and that something is the set of Jewish values that we have already identified.  That is, we should try to orient our thinking such that we understand that everything that we do, that all the choices we make, can be seen as extensions of our Jewish selves.  If we envision our lives through the lens of these Jewish values, we have a better chance of maintaining an ongoing relationship with the set of principles that define Judaism.

Let’s take, for example, hakhnasat orhim, welcoming guests.  There are many ways we can act on this value.  Yes, we can open our homes to others, just as Avraham Avinu opened his tent to the strangers who were walking in the desert.  But what are some other ways to welcome?

Welcoming people in this building - making this a true place of comfort for all
Inviting “the other” into your life / activities
Getting to know your neighbors
Being involved with your community, and bringing others with you
Making school, work, synagogue, street, etc. a safe, welcoming space for everybody

All of these things, which can include many sub-activities (e.g. greeting somebody, giving directions to the sanctuary, engaging a visitor in conversation, and so forth), can all be understood as acting on the Jewish value of hakhnasat orhim.  

Point is, we can take all of the Jewish values that we have listed, and re-frame our thinking such that we see all of our daily activities as flowing from our Jewish identity.  These are things we can teach to our children, and speak of when we are at home and away.

Here’s a suggestion for an “assignment” that you might want to take on: find a Jewish value to which you would like to commit.  Print it out and stick it to your refrigerator door with a magnet.  Put it on a sticky note in your wallet.  And then pay attention to what you do every day, and see if you are living up to that value.

Behatzlahah!  Good luck.  Shabbat shalom!


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, February 25, 2012.)



* Talmud Bavli, Massekhet Berakhot 8a

הכי אמר רב חסדא מאי דכתי' (תהילים פז) אוהב ה' שערי ציון מכל משכנות יעקב אוהב ה' שערים המצויינים בהלכה יותר מבתי כנסיות ומבתי מדרשות

והיינו דאמר ר' חייא בר אמי משמיה דעולא מיום שחרב בית המקדש אין לו להקב"ה בעולמו אלא ארבע אמות של הלכה בלבד

Thus said R. Hisda: What is the meaning of the verse: “The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob” (Psalm 87:2)? The Lord loves the gates that are distinguished through Halachah more than the Synagogues and Houses of study.  

And this conforms with the following saying of R. Hiyya b. Ammi in the name of Ulla: Since the day that the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One, blessed be He, has nothing in this world but the four cubits of Halachah alone.


** In 1950, the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards passed a teshuvah / responsum on the Shabbat that said that if you do not live within walking distance to a synagogue, it is better to drive than to stay at home for Shabbat.