No Time for Comfort - Shabbat Nahamu, 5774

We are now seven weeks away from Rosh Hashanah, and the theme of this period is rebuilding, of going from the sorrow of desolation and loss (Tish’ah Be’Av) to the joy of redemption and renewal.

Today is Shabbat Nahamu, the Shabbat of comfort, a name referring to the opening word of today’s first haftarah of consolation, repeated twice (Isaiah 40:1-2):

נַחֲמוּ נַחֲמוּ, עַמִּי--יֹאמַר, אֱ-לֹהֵיכֶם.  דַּבְּרוּ עַל-לֵב יְרוּשָׁלִַם, וְקִרְאוּ אֵלֶיהָ--כִּי מָלְאָה צְבָאָהּ, כִּי נִרְצָה עֲו‍ֹנָהּ:  כִּי לָקְחָה מִיַּד ה', כִּפְלַיִם בְּכָל-חַטֹּאתֶיהָ.

Comfort, oh comfort My people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and declare to her that her term of service is over, that her iniquity is expiated, for she has received at the hand of the Lord double for all her sins.

It is the first of the seven haftarot of consolation. Each of these is drawn from the book of Isaiah, and each seeks to provide comfort to Israel by reassuring that restoration is on the way.

This restoration is in the context of a remarkable historical turning point. Some scholars believe that he is writing around 538 BCE, about the time that the Persian king Cyrus conquered the Babylonian Empire, and issued an edict allowing exiled peoples, like the Jews, to return to their native lands. This was roughly 50 years after the Babylonians had taken Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple, and brought the Jews to Babylon, in what is today called Iraq.

But how did that restoration come about? How was the Second Temple built? Although Cyrus let the Jews return to Israel, not everybody was willing to pick up and move again. Fifty years is a long time - they had lives and businesses and were intermarried with the local population. Not many wanted to return; many Jews stayed in Babylon; some even moved instead to Persia, to the new imperial capital of the region. (It was in fact the events of the sixth century BCE that formed the basis of both the Iraqi and Iranian Jewish communities, both of which thrived into the 20th century.)

Rather, it was the initiative of a relatively small band (the book of Ezra says about 42,000) who returned to the Judean wasteland and braved Samaritan attacks to rebuild and rededicate the Temple, the Second Temple. It was a human endeavor.

On Thursday, I was preparing to speak about picking up the pieces of Operation Protective Edge, when I heard that Hamas had broken the cease-fire by firing rockets into Israel. On Friday morning, I read that Israel had responded with airstrikes. So, sadly, this chapter continues.

However, this will not go on forever, and when the (temporary) quiet returns, we will be faced once more with the challenge of, “Well, what’s next?”

I read this week that Amos Oz, the noted Israeli author and outspoken leftist, supported Operation Protective Edge to stop the rockets coming into Israel, calling it “justified, but excessive.” This sheds some light on the depth and complexity of the problem at hand. And he is not alone: elsewhere, I saw a Gallup poll that indicated that 93% of American Jews were supportive of Israel in the last month, and the figure is about the same in Israel. You can’t get 93% Jews to agree on much of anything, really, so that is quite a sobering  figure.

Whether we are at the end of this Gaza engagement or not, we have to consider the future now.

So here is the quandary that we are in today. Continued rocket-fire and reprisals notwithstanding, Israel has mostly completed Operation Protective Edge, entering Gaza and destroying terrorist infrastructure and killing enemy combatants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They mostly restored peace to Israel, so that nobody has to head down regularly into bomb shelters. They have rooted out and destroyed the 32 carefully-designed tunnels leading into Israel, thus foiling the apparent plan to infiltrate and attack Israel on Rosh Hashanah.

But what have they not done? They have not even considered any kind of negotiated settlement that will guarantee a long-term peace. And here is the problem.

Because, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, this will all happen again. And next time, there will be more rockets with a longer range, more tunnels, and greater danger to Israel. My son, who lives at Kibbutz Ein Gev up north, was not in range of Hamas’ rockets this time. Maybe next time he will be.

Unless.

Unless there is not a next time. And I am afraid that the only way that this can be is if the international powers, in cooperation with Israel, can create a successful, de-militarized Palestinian-controlled territory. And here is where Amos Oz and I agree once again.  (And some here will surely disagree with me.)

But I think that it is the lesser of two potentially bad futures.

Short of turning Gaza into a parking lot (which Israel is DEFINITELY not going to do; they are not genocidal barbarians, despite mob-driven protestations to the contrary), the only way that we have a chance for long-term peace is to create, if not a state, at least an independent, non-Hamas-ruled entity for Gaza.

Yes, I know that past events have suggested that trusting them will be fraught.

Yes, a major sticking point is that Hamas rules Gaza, and uses their own people as human shields and places rocket launchers in residential neighborhoods (BTW, did you see the video captured by the Indian television crew from NDTV of Hamas combatants building a makeshift rocket launcher next to their hotel, and then firing a rocket into Israel? Incredible!).

Yes, I know that multiple proposals for a two-state solution in the past two decades have failed for various reasons.

But remember: there is no other way out. The residents of Gaza, Hebron, Jenin, Nablus (Shekhem), and so forth are not going away. And they will not be absorbed into Egypt or Jordan.

(Aside: two years ago I was at a gas station in Ma'ale Adummim, the largest settlements on the outskirts of Jerusalem. I was having trouble with the self-service pump, so an attendant came over to help me. He was a Palestinian Arab, and, noticing that the car was a rental, he asked me where I was from. I explained that I was American, and then he complimented me on my Hebrew. I asked where he was from. He said, proudly, “From here!” “You mean, Ma'ale Adummim?” I asked, jokingly. He merely smiled in response as we completed the transaction.)

No, they are not going away. And the terrorist element among them is not going away either, unless all the powers at the table find a way to neutralize them. And that would require there to be a functioning government in Gaza that serves the people of Gaza rather than the idolatrous god of terror.

Ultimately, we have to reframe this conflict not as Israel vs. Gaza, or Jew vs. Muslim, but rather as moderates vs. fundamentalists. (Remember, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states are quietly rooting for Israel here, against the Muslim Brotherhood.) This is not naïveté.  It is, rather, the only sane way out of the current bottomless pit.

The path to rebuilding will be to return to the table. Remember that table? The one that is as forlorn right now as Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile, as described in the book of Lamentations, which we read on Monday evening for Tish’ah Be’Av. We will have to negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, and nobody will like it.

But let’s face it. If you compare Gaza under Hamas with the West Bank under the PA, with whom Israel has been cooperating on certain things for a long time now, the difference is stark. Why, when there are terrorists based in Gaza, has the West Bank remained largely quiet? Why did it not erupt in fury over Protective Edge? Because Israel and America have been training Palestinian police forces in the West Bank. Because trade and investment in the West Bank is quietly increasing. Unemployment in the West Bank, while not small at about 20%, is much better than the 40% in Gaza. With more people working, with priorities placed on public safety and security, with greater emphasis on cooperation, we have a chance.

Without those things, there will be more anger, more frustration, more anti-Semitic mobs, and more rockets. Guaranteed. Think about it.

You know, as a rabbi I spend a lot of time speaking about comfort, offering comfort, helping others to comfort. I must confess that the events of the last month and a half have been not just uncomfortable, but downright painful: Israelis in and out of bomb shelters, the tunnels, the body count in Gaza, the utterly cynical media manipulation of Hamas, the angry mobs chanting anti-Semitic slogans all over the world. And through all of that, I have had to offer comfort to bereaved families who have lost a loved one, comfort to my son, who was rightfully scared to fly back into a war zone, and comfort to members of this community, who are wrought over the situation in Israel and unsure how to help and support, and comfort to my wife, who has taken it upon herself to valiantly respond to her friends’ anti-Israel and vaguely anti-Semitic postings on Facebook.

Well, I am just about used up. And I am sure that all of us are as well.

But as with the brave returnees from Babylon and the building of the Second Temple, it will take a great human initiative to begin this restoration.

We are going to have to steel ourselves either for more fighting, or to return to that deserted table. That is the choice before us.

Shabbat shalom.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 8/8/14.)

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