Re-Branding Shemittah - Bereshit 5775

Ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun 5775, which just happens to be a year of shemittah, the sabbatical year in which the Torah commands us not to sow or tend crops in the land of Israel (Lev. 25:1-7), but rather to let the land lie fallow. The Torah does not say this explicitly, but this seventh year of rest, this Shabbat for the land was likely instituted to avoid depleting the soil of its nutrients.

Long before the Jews were metropolitan residents, we were an agricultural people, and we were much more in touch with the land. We grew our own food, and when there was not enough rain or the soil was exhausted, we would starve. And hence the need for the shemittah. (BTW, it’s worth pointing out that the seventh of every unit in Jewish time has significance: the seventh day is Shabbat, the seventh month, Tishrei, contains the cycle of holidays we have just completed, and the seventh year is the shemittah.)

The shemittah made a whole lot of sense to our ancestors. Today, we mostly ignore it; it presents a few halakhic challenges to those who pay close attention to where our food comes from. But for the most part, shemittah flies under the radar of the vast majority of the Jewish world.

One of our tasks as contemporary Jews is to consider how seemingly inapplicable ancient customs and rituals can be re-appropriated for today’s world. Jews have always done this.  That’s how each of the three pilgrimage festivals (Pesah, Shavuot, Sukkot) became associated with key aspects of the Exodus story, and how Rosh Hashanah came to be about the new year, and Shemini Atzeret came to be redefined by Simhat Torah (which is not mentioned in the Torah at all), and so forth.

But shemittah - what on Earth do we do with that? (Heh heh.)

I’ll come back to that in a moment. Meanwhile, a brief note from the Torah:

When God creates the world in the first chapters of Bereshit / Genesis, God offers (in the second Creation story, Gen. 2:4b ff.) the following instruction to the man who has just been fashioned from the dust of the Earth (Gen. 2:15):

וַיִּקַּח ה' אֱ-לֹהִים, אֶת-הָאָדָם; וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ בְגַן-עֵדֶן, לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ.

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it.

Our responsibility, suggests the Torah, is to take care of God’s Creation, even while we use it for our own benefit. A midrash from Kohelet Rabbah (7:13) expands on this to say: “Beware lest you spoil and destroy My world, for if you will spoil it, there is no one to repair it after you." (Shimon Peres quoted this in Israel’s statement at the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development, and it was repeated at the summit last month by Israel’s current minister of environmental protection, Amir Peretz.)

How should we understand this (“to till it and tend it”) today? That God has given us permission to plant crops, but not to deplete the soil so that it is unusable. That we may raise animals for food (actually only explicitly permitted after the Flood) but not to create huge lagoons of manure that cause tremendous floods of poop, polluting rivers and streams and fields. That God has allowed us to process crude oil from the ground to heat our homes and get us from place to place, but not to the extent that we affect our atmosphere so much that the climate is irreparably changed. (Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas; see the manure lagoons above.)

Is this how we tend Creation?

We also read today about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the fruit of which was forbidden to Adam and Eve, but that they ultimately tasted. The 15th-century Portuguese Torah commentator Don Yitzhaq Abravanel saw this episode as an allegory for indulgence. Everything that the first couple needed was provided in the Garden, and so they were free to contemplate God and holy activities. But by indulging in the forbidden fruit, they chose instead material pursuits, the desire to manipulate the world not only to provide for their own needs, but also to produce many non-essential items, indulging their desires. From this, says Abravanel, only “spiritual death” will ensue.

Abravanel was surely not thinking about the climate in the 15th century. But it is not such a leap to see how what he sees as the human choice to pursue our own physical necessities (i.e. the good) and non-necessities (the evil over-indulgences) has led to an unholy imbalance in Creation. You might say that in the Garden, Adam and Eve lived sustainably, taking from all the available fruit trees only as needed. But once they tasted the forbidden fruit, they became subject to the whims of want, and we have been struggling with how to balance our lifestyles with the unintended consequences of desire and human ingenuity ever since.

There are two essential problems that the Earth is facing. The first is that there are already 7.3 billion people on this planet, and that number grows a wee bit each day. The second is that much of the world wants to live the way that we do in the West - to eat rich foods every day, to drive personal cars, to select from a nearly-limitless pile of wonderful, “essential” merchandise with which to fill our homes and our lives, to travel regularly to distant places for vacations and for work.

And all of these activities have a cost - a cost in energy, in resources. That cost is effectively invisible. And, speaking on a per-individual basis, it is insignificant.

But multiply that cost by seven billion - that is, a seven with nine zeroes after it - and it becomes much more significant. Now not all 7 billion live this way today.  But it is obvious that it would be impossible for everybody on the planet to live according to the American standard. Does it make sense that only those of us who got here first should be allowed to do so?

The results are that, among other things, the average temperature of the planet has risen by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 100 years, and is expected to rise another 2 degrees by the end of this century. Now that may not sound like much, but the effects on worldwide climate - including floods and droughts and other unusual weather events - will be profound.

On a related note, a recent study by the World Wildlife Fund indicated that populations of “mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent” today as compared with 1970, the year I was born. This is a much steeper decline than had been previously supposed.

We have come a long way since Gan Eden / the Garden of Eden. But all the more so, since this shemittah year calls to mind our duty to use our resources wisely and respectfully, to honor God and Creation by giving the land a Shabbat, should we not use this year to commit ourselves more forcefully to changing our current trajectory?

And although there are many ways to consider sustainable use of God’s gift to us, the biggest challenge that we are now facing is global warming. Ladies and gentlemen, the time to act on this was ten years ago.

A few weeks back, my daughter and I attended the Climate March in New York, along with along with Temple Israel Board member Veronica Bisek Lurvey and her son, our Executive Director, Leon Silverberg and his adult daughter, and some 300,000 other concerned Americans. The attendance far exceeded expectations.

It was a tremendous show of support in advance of the UN Climate Summit, at which pledges were made, commitments were given, speeches were delivered. We shall see if the nations that made pledges, particularly the US and the other big polluters, will follow through.

Meanwhile, perhaps we can take this shemittah year to consider wiser use of our resources on a macro level, and on a personal level. I suggest that we consider making a personal shemittah pledge: Use less. Drive less. Buy less. Throw away less.

We have to start small, but we have to be thinking big as well. Very small actions, performed by many, many people, can yield a significant result.  How many grains of sand does it take to make a beach?

But greater than that, perhaps now is the time to exhort our leaders directly for greater action. The United States made a modest pledge at the climate summit, to “bolster resilience efforts” (and frankly, I have no idea what that means).

Not much has changed in the seven years that I have been discussing these issues in this space. Where are the extensive solar arrays (solar panels have come down 50% in price since 2010)? Where are the wind farms? Where is the cap and trade system? We in Great Neck are seeing a few all-electric Teslas on our streets, but where is the all-electric Chevy?

Germany is now producing 30% of its energy from wind, biogas, and the sun. They have spent tens of billions of dollars on this infrastructure, and in 2010 there were 370,000 Germans employed in this sector. Germany pledged last month that by 2020 they would reduce their carbon emissions by 40% over 1990 levels. Why are we not doing this here?

God gave us this earth to till it and to tend it, with all the implications of that statement. And although we opted to leave Gan Eden and pursue the less-spiritual path, we are still bound to the obligation to protect and honor Creation through wise use. Let’s take this shemittah year to rededicate ourselves to personal and global consideration of the Earth, because it’s the only one we have.

Shabbat shalom.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 10/18/2014.)

Finding Yourself in the Torah's Holes - Bereshit 5773

This Shabbat marks the absolute completion of the intense cycle of holidays that began with Rosh Hashanah, almost one month ago.  We have welcomed a new year, 5773; we have repented for our transgressions and sought forgiveness from God and from others around us; we have celebrated the unadulterated joy of Sukkot and all of the ritual symbols that go with it; we have mourned those who have passed from this world on Shemini Atzeret, we have danced with the Torah in soaring jubilation as we finished reading one complete cycle of the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses.

And on this Shabbat we begin that cycle again with the reading of the first of fifty-four parashiyyot / weekly portions into which the Torah is divided.  This is Shabbat Bereshit, the Shabbat of Creation, and today’s parashah is filled to overflowing with precious gems. On this Shabbat we commemorate not only the creation of the world, but also the creation of the principle of Shabbat itself, arguably the most important feature of human existence that the Jews gave to the world: the weekly vacation day that allows all of us to recharge.

But what I think is most wonderful about Parashat Bereshit is not the two tales of Creation: the orderly seven-day epic of God’s fashioning each piece of the universe or the Garden of Eden story.  It is not the Torah’s attempt to answer the most primal philosophical Big Questions -- where we came from and how.  It is not the beginning of humankind or even the question of Homo sapiens sapiens’ apparent dominion over all of the Earth (Gen. 1:28) vs. our obligation “to till and to tend” the Earth (Genesis 2:15).  

No.  What is truly the most wonderful feature of this parashah is the preponderance of holes found within it.  The Torah’s opening stories are far from airtight; they are riddled with openings.

(When I was an undergraduate, I fulfilled my required semesters of phys. ed. by learning Tae Kwon Do.  This Korean martial art involves many kicks, and requires much flexibility in the legs, and we performed a lot of painful stretches.  I’m just not that flexible.  So one day, I’m trying valiantly to keep my left leg straight against the gym floor while stretching out over my right leg, when the Korean taskmaster -- I mean, teacher -- swipes his hand underneath my left leg, where there are several inches of clearance, and says, “Look at this!  You could drive a truck through there!” Those are the kinds of holes we have in Bereshit.)

But here, in the Torah, that’s a great thing.  One could make the point, by the way, that all of Judaism is fashioned from the openings in the text of the Torah (I’ll give examples in a moment).  The entire enterprise of rabbinic Judaism, the intellectual give-and-take that emerged in the centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, is based on disagreement over points of ambiguity found in the Torah.  

The first verse of the Torah is (Genesis 1:1, Etz Hayim p. 3):

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve-et ha-aretz.

Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaqi, the great 11th-century French commentator and democratizer of the Torah, is awestruck at the mystery and power behind these opening words.  

אין המקרא הזה אומר אלא דרשיני

Ein hamiqra hazeh omer ela “Darsheini!”  
This text only says, “Explain me!”  

It is calling out to us from the pre-Creation tohu vavohu, the concealed, chaotic mists of pre-history, beckoning to us to interpret.  So says Rashi.

You see, bereshit bara Elohim makes no sense!  It is grammatically incorrect.  It does not mean (as we have come to hear it courtesy of King James), “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”  Rather, it means, “In the beginning of [fill in the] BLANK, God created heaven and earth.”  Or maybe it means, “In the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth....” Or maybe (as it says in our humash), “When God began to create heaven and earth...”  Or something else entirely that we’re simply not expecting.

There is something missing.  And that missing word, or phrase, or concept, is where all the action is.  That is where we find ourselves reflected in the text.  We can drive whole fleets of trucks through that hole.  It is a vacancy that will never be filled, an opening that can accommodate any idea that you can fit.  The mystery remains permanently enshrined in the first three words of Genesis.

Here is another example.  Some time later, after Eve and Adam are exiled from the Garden, their sons Cain and Abel squabble over who is favored by God.  As I am sure that you know, Cain kills his brother Abel in cold blood.  But just prior to the invention of fratricide, Cain says something to his brother, something which does not appear in the Torah (Gen 4:8, Etz Hayim p. 26):

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר קַ֖יִן אֶל־הֶ֣בֶל אָחִ֑יו וַֽיְהִי֙ בִּֽהְיוֹתָ֣ם בַּשָּׂדֶ֔ה וַיָּ֥קָם קַ֛יִן אֶל־הֶ֥בֶל אָחִ֖יו וַיַּֽהַרְגֵֽהוּ׃

Cain said to his brother Abel, "BLANK."  And when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.

What could he possibly have said? “Abel, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” or “You know, I’d be much happier if I were an only child.”  Or maybe, “Hey, bro.  Your shoe’s untied!“  The 3rd-century BCE Greek translation known as the Septuagint actually has a line here that the Torah does not -- Cain says, “Come, let us go into the field.”

The Septuagint notwithstanding, there are many possibilities here, and not a single one of them is wrong.  We can imagine many things that Cain might have said just prior to murdering his brother - venting his spleen, or confessing his jealousy and love and pain, or even asking his brother for forgiveness for what he has long been planning to do.

That’s where you come in.  The Torah is not complete without us.  While it would not be accurate to say that the Torah is a blank canvas upon which we can paint whatever we want, it is certainly not true that the words of the Torah alone give us a clear, fixed, immutable message.  The very essence of Judaism, in fact, throughout history has been the interpretation of the words of Torah by us.  By humans.  Because what we received from God, the scroll of parchment that we read from every Shabbat and Monday and Thursday, is in many ways just a sketch.

There is a well-known Talmudic story (BT Menahot 29b) about how when Moses went up on Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah, and he finds God putting little crowns on some of the letters.  Moses asks God, “Ribbono shel olam, Master of the universe, what are you doing?”

God replies, “More than a thousand years from now, a scholar named Rabbi Akiva is going to infer many things from these crowns.”

Moses asks, “Can I see this guy?”

God says, “Turn around.”  So Moses does, and he is instantly transported into the classroom of Rabbi Akiva in Palestine in the early 2nd century, CE.  Moses is sitting in the back behind eight rows of students, and he is listening to Rabbi Akiva interpret the very words of Torah that Moses himself had transcribed.  But he can’t understand any of what Rabbi Akiva is saying, and he starts to feel queasy.

One of the students asks, “Rabbi, where did you learn all of this?”

Rabbi Akiva says, “It was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai!”  And Moses feels much better.

He is relieved because he understands that those parts of the Torah that Moses himself cannot understand will eventually be interpreted by us. The crowns, which are meaningless to Moses, are explained by Rabbi Akiva, and Moses sees then that everything in the written text is subject to later human analysis.  Now of course, nobody alive today can interpret the Torah with the authority of Rabbi Akiva.  But on some level, each of us is obligated to personalize our relationship with God, the Torah, and Israel, to fill in those holes and seek meaning from not just the letters and words themselves, but crowns and the spaces in-between.

Many of us personalized the sukkot in which we dined and welcomed guests last week.  I hope that your Pesah seder includes discussion about how we each identify with the Exodus story and the lessons that we draw today from seeing ourselves as having personally come forth from Egypt.  And each of us, when we hear the Torah read in the synagogue or study it in another context, should strive to connect with the words in a way that is meaningful for us.

But this idea goes far beyond the ritual aspects of Judaism.  The Torah urges us to take care of the needy in our neighborhood, and it is up to us to figure out how to do so.  The Torah requires us to honor our parents, and we each find our way through the depth and complexity of these relationships.  The Torah tells us to teach our children about our tradition, and each of us makes judgment calls about what we teach and how we teach and whom we task with assisting us in doing so.  The Torah instructs us to treat our customers and vendors fairly, and the burden is on us to make sure that we find the right way to do so.

What is missing from the Torah?  You.  Each one of us.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson


(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, October 13, 2012.)

Thursday Kavvanah, 10/27/2011 - The Glorious Dysfunctionality of Genesis

It's been quite some time since a regular, non-holiday-related kavvanah has appeared in this cyber-spot.  The Modern Rabbi has been quite busy with matters of teshuvah and the unadulterated joy of Sukkot and Simhat Torah.

But now we're back in business.  With the return of the Torah to the beginning, we get to dig once again into the fundamentally human, flawed lives of the characters of Bereishit / Genesis: the serpentine seduction of Eve, the brotherly love of Cain and Abel, the boozy escapades of Noah and his family, and so on.  There is so much here to mine regarding our own imperfect lives and society that I am reminded of that old rabbinic standard about the Torah from Pirqei Avot (5:24)

בן בג בג אומר, הפוך בה והפך בה, דכולא בה
Ben Bag Bag omer: hafokh ba vehafekh ba, dekhola ba.
Ben Bag Bag taught: Study it and review it, for everything can be found in it.

Why do we re-read the Torah each year?  Because analyze ourselves through its tales, and especially through the very human lens of the Bereishit narrative.  Let the good times roll (again)!

Kaf Zekhut - The Benefit of the Doubt

(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, Oct. 7, 2010.)

Among the stories of Bereshit we find the recurring theme of one righteous person among the wicked many: Noah, who was somewhat less evil than everybody else on Earth, prior to the flood; Abraham, who the midrash tells us was the first to choose monotheism over idolatry; Lot, who was surely no saint, but was the only one in Sodom and Gomorrah to merit being saved. Over and over, the central characters of the Genesis narrative are held up as rare light in gloomy times.

During a class that I was teaching at the Waxman Hebrew High School and Youth House on a recent evening, a student made the claim that all Muslims wanted to kill Jews. Given recent news events, I suppose that it would not be too hard for a twelve-year-old to put this idea together. I would wager that there are a fair number of Jewish adults who believe the same thing.

It is an unavoidable human trait to view groups of people in such simple terms. Our lives are so complicated that we take any available shortcuts for understanding the world. The desire to judge a person’s character based on obvious and yet irrelevant information (color of skin, religion, ethnicity) is simply too tempting.

Non-Jews have for centuries painted Jews with particular stereotypes that we know not to be true; it is difficult for us not to do the same of other groups. The human reality, of course, is that every society, every group, every culture has its own richly-textured fabric of individual personalities and characters. We like to see this in our own peer group, but not in the other. This is perhaps by evolutionary advantage, as it must have made sense to our ancestors to assume that all saber-toothed tigers would attack if given the opportunity, or that we could not trust the guys on the other side of the river who looked funny, made unintelligible sounds, and competed for the same food source.

And so the Torah, divine and yet so human, reinforces this simplistic understanding of the world. Everybody in Sodom and Gomorrah was bad. The generation before the flood deserved to die. So too the Egyptians. Reducing a group to a single adjective (e.g. wicked) might work in the ancient tales of our people, but such thinking is dangerous in today’s world.

I replied to this student that it is unfair to paint “all Muslims” with one brush, and that just as there are Muslims that for sure want to kill Jews or Americans or Christians or other “infidels,” there are far more who do not want to kill anybody. And the same goes for every other group, including our own.

I would prefer that we learn to view the other through the rabbinic lens of Pirqei Avot, where Yehoshua ben Perahya says, “Hevei dan et kol adam lekhaf zekhut.” Give each individual the benefit of the doubt. Only then may we, in the words of the Psalmist, seek peace and pursue it.

Bereshit 5771 - Can Entropy Be Reversed?

(Originally delivered on October 2, 2010.)

And so it begins again: Bereshit bara elohim. “In the beginning God created,” or “When God began to create...” or “At the beginning of God’s creating of heaven and earth,” depending on your translation. And, on the first day, Yehi or, “Let there be light.”

Once upon a time, I was a voracious reader of science fiction. The beginning of the Torah always reminds me of a short story by Isaac Asimov, written in 1956, called “The Last Question.” It is a series of vignettes about how successive generations of people ask successively bigger and more complex computers the question, “Can the entropy of the universe be reversed?”

Entropy is a measure of disorder. It’s the scientific term for a mess. When Hannah and Zev pull all of their toys off the shelves in our living room and scatter them about the floor, the entropy of the room increases.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy in a closed system always increases. Our universe is a closed system, and so the disorder of the universe, the entropy, always increases, and this can never be reversed, so that at some distant time in the future, all of the structure of the universe will cease to exist, and chaos will be complete.

So in the Asimov story, each time the question about entropy is asked, the computers return the same answer: “There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”

At the end of the story, the final, most comprehensive, most transcendent computer is asked the question, and, realizing that all possible data has been collected, determines how to reverse entropy, and says, “Let there be light.” And there was light.

I will come back to entropy in a moment.

* * *

Just before Sukkot, I attended a fundraiser for the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. One of the speakers was an Israeli who, during reserve service in Lebanon in 2006, was caught in a car that was hit by a missile, courtesy of Hizballah. He was burned from head to toe, and was initially taken for dead, but managed to survive. His presentation was tragic, graphic, and he delivered it with subtle humor and an elegant touch.

Now I am supportive of the work that FIDF does, and this former soldier’s story was quite moving.

However, it also included slides of him in the hospital, recuperating from the burns that covered his body and the shrapnel that tore holes in his flesh. It was designed to shock. We are apparently so inured to everything, so apathetic, that the only way that anybody can listen long enough is if we present a grave threat, a serious danger, or graphic violence. It’s kind of like television news. You know, if it bleeds, it leads.

I have tried softer approaches to the message I am about to deliver. Now, please permit me to shock you.

I have been here for three years now. In that time, I have officiated at:

3 beritot milah (including that of my own son)
2 baby namings
9 weddings
and
at least 26 funerals.

Now, one might be able to explain these figures away by pointing out that more people are involved with synagogues and/or rabbis later in life, skewing the results. Also, more people require a rabbi’s service in times of death; not everybody holds a traditional baby naming, for example, and the rabbi is optional at a Berit Milah. And of course, nearly half of all marriages involving American Jews include one non-Jewish partner, and I cannot officiate at such marriages.

Sometimes, though, I worry about the future of American Jewry. Will the forces of entropy drag us down, or will we overcome them?

Here are a few other items that have caught my attention in recent weeks:

Item 1.

As some of you may recall, I spoke on Rosh Hashanah about the key role that the Youth House plays in building our Jewish future, about making actively Jewish adults.

Two weeks ago, a Youth House parent reacted to the sermon by telling me that many parents prioritize their children’s activities based on what will get them into good colleges, and that if I want kids to come to the Youth House, I have to demonstrate the value of attending. What do they get out of it?

Effectively, what he was asking was, I want my child to go to a good school. How will the Youth House help him do so? Is it worth the investment of money and time?

Item 2.

During the High Holidays, there were hundreds of children in and about this building. Many went into the various age-appropriate services that were offered for them. Many, and especially those older than 13, did not. There were, I hear, plenty of teens in the parking lot, playing in the playground, glued to the screen of their electronic devices, and so forth.

Two of the members of the Youth House staff, our Youth Director Joe Pearlman and our Religious Activities Director Itamar Futterman, approached some of these teens to try to get them to come into the teen service that they hosted in the Youth House. And the reactions they got were variations of, “No, way. I’m not going in there. You’ve got to be kidding me,” and so forth.

Now, just a look around this room will show you how strong this community is. We can be comfortable with how many people are here today in services, or even how many come on a Shabbat morning without a bar or bat mitzvah. Even last Thursday, the first day of Sukkot, many members of this community, including many young children were here, joining together in the festival tefillot.

But I am a little bit more concerned about our teenagers, those between the ages of 13 and 18. Where are they?

I am happy that Aaron and Eric are two boys (now men!) whose families are heavily involved with Temple Israel, and who have a positive involvement with and attitude towards Judaism, Jewish life, and the synagogue. I am also certain that I will see them both around this building frequently in the coming years.

But about 50 children ascend this bimah every year to demonstrate their capability in reading Torah and Haftarah, and sharing with us the words of divrei Torah that they have crafted themselves.

And many of them, I rarely see again. Teens that I have worked with, that I have exchanged words of Torah with, that I have established a bond with. Teenagers from whom I have learned many new ways to understand our tradition. And that saddens me.

I read a great article in the NY Times about a week ago. It was about how parents often worry about precisely the wrong things: that is, they worry about perceived dangers that are violent, and not about the more subtle, less sensationalized dangers.

For example, many parents do not let their child wait for the school bus outside alone, for fear of abduction by strangers, which affects only about 100 children each year in the entire country. But few seem concerned with the poor diet and lack of exercise that has driven up childhood obesity rates. Nearly 1 in 5 children today are obese.

Well, here is something that some of us have not thought of. While some of us are very concerned with getting our children into college, some of us are pushing Jewish life out the window in favor of a myriad of other activities.

Let me tell you all something, my friends: your child or grandchild will, most likely, not grow up to become a star athlete or the first violin chair of the NY Philharmonic or the next Kristin Chenoweth. But he or she WILL be an adult Jew, one who will (God willing) be a part of a Jewish community, and perhaps raise a Jewish family as well. And that is why they need to be here now. Not in the parking lot. Not at basketball practice. Here, at Temple Israel, on Shabbat morning, and if not sitting next to you then at least sharing it with their peers at the Youth House or Junior Congregation or Morah Ronnie Katz’ toddler service.

Adam and Eve were forced out of Paradise. It might be interesting to argue over whose fault this is, but the salient feature is this: this nation, with its vast wealth, religious freedom and tolerance, and infinite choice in all matters was Paradise to our immigrant forbears. But it will soon cease to be Gan Eden if our grandchildren have no connection to the ancient mass of wisdom known as Judaism.

Our entropy increases.

The good news is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics has a workaround. Entropy may be reversed if you put some work into the system. My living room is not exactly a closed system, but it seems that the only way that I can restore order is if I pick up Hannah and Zev’s toys and put them back on the shelf. And that is precisely what we need to do.

I am working hard this year to make sure that the Youth House is appealing to teens, that it provides serious, intellectually stimulating content coupled with fun social events. Our Fall Retreat Shabbaton, next weekend, will do exactly that, and it is also open to all in grades 8-12, even if your teen is not enrolled at the Youth House. And did I mention that I am personally leading a trip to Israel for teenagers in February? It’s also open to everybody in grades 8-12.

And of course we all want the best for our children. We want the best opportunities, the best college, the brightest future. Continuing Jewish education through high school and, for that matter, university and adulthood, can be a part of that picture, ensuring the most brilliant, dazzling future for all of us. No college admissions officer will look down on time spent learning the texts of our rich, literary tradition.

Two weeks ago, when tornados blasted through Brooklyn and Queens, the power went out in the Youth House about 20 minutes before the end of classes. We brought all the students downstairs, and, in the dark, Itamar led us all in an activity in which students passed a roll of toilet paper from person to person, telling each other about themselves. It was the first opportunity of the year for the entire student body, from grades 7 to 11, to get to know each other, albeit in unusual circumstances. Two days before Yom Kippur, just before our annual bout of introspection and teshuvah, Vayehi or. And there was light.

Let us work in partnership to form stronger Jewish identities in our teenagers and imbue them with a love of Torah, avodah (serving God), and gemilut hasadim (acts of lovingkindness), I need the commitment of parents who are willing to put the work into this system. Join with me for the Jewish future.

Bereshit 5770 - Two non-conflicting views on Creation

(originally delivered on Oct. 17, 2009)

I have occasionally stated in public that a particular parashah is "my favorite." Well, I realized for the first time this week that I actually have several favorites. Qedoshim, in Vayiqra (Leviticus), is my favorite for interesting and relevant laws (it was also my Bar Mitzvah parashah). Beshallah, in Shemot (Exodus), is also a favorite, because of Shirat Hayam, the song sung by the Israelites after crossing the Sea of Reeds. I am somewhat partial to Vayishlah, because of the story of Jacob's wrestling with the angel, perhaps the most fitting metaphor for Jewish life. But the one that I most love for its commentary possibilities is clearly Bereshit. There is just so much there to talk about- the Big Questions - where did we come from? How did the world begin? And how did our ancestors respond to these questions?

Also particularly appealing about Bereshit is its challenge to the modern, thinking person. Today, most of us do not favor Biblical answers to the Big Questions. Scientific inquiry has long since put to rest any notion that the world was created in six days, 5770 years ago. Nonetheless, the following items about Creation as it is told in the Torah are indeed thought-provoking:
1. That there are, in fact, two creation stories found in the opening chapters of Genesis.
2. There is, in both stories, interplay between God and humans.
3. The themes of love, temptation, loss, and mortality are evident in Creation.
These are human stories, with so much interesting material, and so much wonderful commentary. They continue to inspire us.

As a scientific person and a thinking Jew, I have maintained an ongoing struggle with Bereshit (Genesis/Creation) for most of my life, much in the same way that Jacob wrestles with the aforementioned angel. (This is, of course, what makes us "Yisrael" - that we struggle with God and theological issues.)

An apocryphal story is told of a well-known scientist who once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the turtle standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Now, we cannot see those turtles. But we do have before us two seemingly conflicting stories before us regarding the origin of the universe: that of Bereshit, and the theory that the scientific community has settled upon, that about 13.7 billion years ago, there was a "Big Bang," when all matter expanded outward in a spectacular explosion, the effects of which we can still measure today.

It is indeed tempting to try to resolve the two stories, to say that the first six days of Bereshit actually took 13.7 billion years, or something similar. But when you get down to the details, the scientific record tells a story that simply cannot be harmoniously reconciled with the first chapter of the Torah.

That does not say, however, that we must remove God from the picture.

When I was in graduate school in chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, which is truly the buckle of the Bible belt, I heard a lecture by a professor of mechanical engineering that was his “proof” of the existence of God. God is evident, said this professor, in the perfection of all of the physical constants of nature. For example, that water is most dense at a point above freezing, allowing sea creatures to have survived in otherwise frozen waters, and Planck's constant in quantum physics, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light – that all of these values are so precise, that they had to be exactly what they were, or life would never have appeared on Earth – this is the primary evidence of God's hand in nature.

Now this man was, like many professors at A&M, a deeply religious Christian, and I presume a reasonably objective scientist as well. His goal, of course, was reconciliation. However, I don't think that this prof's idea adequately responds to the question of Creation. Furthermore, I feel strongly that there is no need to reconcile science and the Torah. I will come back to this in a few minutes.

There is, however, a similar strain of Jewish thought that emerges in the medieval period, albeit not in response to the challenge of science. A certain medieval philosophy favored by some Jewish thinkers, known as Neo-Platonism, argued that our perceived perfection of the universe pointed to perfection of God, and, by contrast, IMperfection of humans. This philosophy appealed, in particular, to the courtier-rabbis of the Golden Age of Spain, in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, and came out in their works, like, for example, in a poem by Isaac Ibn Ghiyyat, an extended tribute to the lights in the sky, created on the 4th day of Creation. It contains the repeated refrain, "Ata asita et hashamayim." “You [God] created the Heavens.”

Here is an excerpt in translation, featuring the seven planets known in the 11th century CE:

"You made the glory of the seven moving stars in contrast to the seven spheres
Created before them, and fixed the stars in the spheres
On the fourth day, you hewed them from the light You created on the first day
On the day on which God created the earth and heaven.
You created the heavens."

There are 21 other stanzas about the various lights in the sky. Says Ibn Ghiyyat, the glory of Creation is reflected in heavenly perfection. Creation is perfect; the heavens are perfect; God is perfect. This is the doctrine of Neo-Platonism. And our goal as humans is to strive to achieve heavenly perfection, to ultimately return from the imperfect world of the flesh to rejoin the perfection of the heavenly God.

Now Neo-Platonism was not originally "Jewish"; rabbis and Jewish philosophers to whom NP appealed made it work with their Judaism. This is a good example that demonstrates that there has, historically, always been room in Judaism for outside ideas: philosophy, art, music, etc. As Conservative Jews, we are certainly open to this.

Likewise, our response to science is not to reject it or ignore it. If that were the case, I would have to go daven somewhere else. On the contrary, the principles of scientific inquiry, in some ways, produced the Conservative Movement. The 19th-c. German idea called "Die Wissenschaft des Judentums" – literally, the science of Judaism – came to study our holy literature and traditions from the perspective that Judaism could be taught and studied critically, using the methods of science.

However, I'd like to advocate for NOT trying to resolve science and the Torah in general, or the Big Bang Theory and Creation in particular, because really, they cannot be adequately resolved. Science tells us (for example) that Creation could NOT have happened 6,000 years ago, in six days. The Torah does.

I cannot deny science. Nor can I deny Judaism. Or, for that matter, God.

We could play games of trying to rectify one with the other, like the professor of mechanical engineering, but this exercise holds the promise of only limited success; ultimately, religious arguments boil down to faith. No matter how elaborate the proof, faith will always be the critical step. But rather, a higher goal is to understand that the authenticity of our religious tradition is not invalidated by scientific evidence that seems to contradict it.

As Orthodox rabbi Natan Slifkin writes, in his book entitled The Challenge of Creation,

“To some, the idea that “God makes the trees grow” has been rendered redundant by the idea that “biological processes, based on chemical and physical laws, make the trees grow.” But the truth is that in formulating scientific explanations for things, we have not removed God from the picture; instead, we have discovered a new picture for Him to have drawn.”

My solution: we should take both stories for what they are - different sets of lenses, or myths, arrived at through different paths. And I use the word “myth” not in its typical meaning of falsehood, but rather the way that Rabbi Neil Gillman of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative movement’s pre-eminent philosopher, uses it: that is, a myth is something that explains the information that we take in and helps us make sense of our world.

Thus we have before us in Creation two sets of myths.

One set is our Jewish national story, the Torah. It may not be factually, historically accurate, but it is still our story.

The other set is the collected body of knowledge acquired through scientific inquiry. It is a different story, a different set of myths. It redraws somewhat the lines of Creation and the functioning of the universe, as Rabbi Slifkin suggests. But it does not contradict God’s role in our lives.

God is eternal. So are the laws of physics. And we continue to discover more about each individually; they need not comment on each other.