Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem - Vayyera 5775

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom.

Tune Out the Hatred - Mas'ei 5774

July has been a challenging month, to say the least. It has reminded me, among other things, that my Jewish identity depends not only on how I define myself, but also on how others define me.

Growing up in idyllic Western Massachusetts, the fabled Berkshires, I was not really exposed to anti-Semitism. I say, “not really,” because when a high-school friend used the idiom “to Jew you down,” in conversation with me, I knew that she did not really understand the import of the phrase, and she certainly did not connect it to any actual Jews (like the one she was talking to). And when I chose in 6th grade to wore a kippah every day to my small-town public elementary school, and an assortment of kids amused themselves by knocking it off of my head just to see me pick it up and kiss it (I now know that you do not have to kiss a kippah if it falls, but I did not know that in sixth grade), I knew that that was just ordinary kid-teasing, not anti-Semitism per se.

And really, for my entire life, having grown up decades after the Shoah, in a free country that is Israel’s greatest ally, I have had only limited exposure to classic anti-Semitism. Having lived in Great Neck for seven years, I am certain that virtually all of our children on this peninsula are accustomed to the idea that hatred of Jews is something that happens far away, if at all.

And I must confess that there have been times in recent years that I have watched the anti-Israel activism around the world, and even on US university campuses, and drawn a distinction in my head between anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.

But no more. I think that it is undeniable that we are seeing a rising tide of anti-Semitism around the world. Let me give you a few examples from the past week:

In Boston: http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-students-extracted-from-boston-anti-israel-die-in/

In Los Angeles: http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/la_pro_israel_rally_interrupted_by_violence

In Paris: http://forward.com/articles/202404/french-jews-fight-back-against-anti-israel-mobs-at/

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180022/anti-israel-protests-make-the-case-for-israel

In Berlin: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/179842/berlin-protesters-chant-jew-jew-cowardly-pig-come-on-out-and-fight

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/israel-gaza-crisis-german-protesters-chant-gas-jews-anti-israel-rallies-1457714

In Calgary, Alberta:

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/israel-supporters-attacked-by-crowd-shouting-kill-jews-in-canada/

Anti-Jewish sign appearing in a cafe in Belgium. The Turkish reads, "Dogs are allowed in this establishment but Jews are not under any circumstances."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/belgian-cafe-posts-sign-banning-jews-entering-store-article-1.1879839#ixzz38VlKpYpE"

Now consider this:

There are several armed conflicts going on around the world. Ukraine is in the news lately, primarily because of the Malaysian plane that was shot down by a missile last week. But what about the civil war in Syria? Estimates of total dead range from 120,000 to 160,000, including tens of thousands of non-combatants, and hundreds of children, and, get this, 2,000 Palestinians. That’s right! Nearly three times as many Palestinians have been killed in Syria at the hands of Syrians in the past three years than in Israel’s current incursion in Gaza.

So where is the international outrage over Syria? Where are the students holding “die-ins”? Where are the riots on the streets of Paris? Why are no Berliners chanting, “Gas the Syrians!”?

The only conclusion that can be reached is this: nobody cares about Arab deaths, unless they are at the hands of Jews. Why? I can only point to one thing: hatred of Jews and all things Jewish. (Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in the Atlantic, makes the same observations, but sidesteps the question of anti-Semitism.)

Because, let’s face it: we’ve done pretty well, despite the dramatic challenges we have faced in the last century or so. Israel is a modern miracle, a near-impossibility that has not only come into existence, but thrived despite all of the challenges she has faced: an unfriendly agricultural climate; geographical separation from much of the world; 66 years of war; terrorism within and without her borders; and so forth.

And Israel is, we hope, the final stop on a long and at times unpleasant journey. This morning in Parashat Mas’ei, we read about the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert. By my count (and I could be wrong), the Torah identifies 43 different locations where the Israelites camped on their way from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Israel. We are a nation that emerged from wandering in the desert, and we have carried that trait with us across centuries and continents. We are a people that has constantly been on the move.

Truth be told, much of that movement was due to the very same, ancient hatred that we have seen expressed in the past week. Most of our relocations have been, historically, to allow ourselves to live better somewhere else. And with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, perhaps we were deluded into thinking that having a home base would bring that wandering to an end, and perhaps lessen the hatred to boot. (Hence the recent wave of French emigration to Israel.)

In the middle of the 20th century, it was widely known that a rabbi had two major subjects to address in every sermon: the Shoah (Holocaust) and Israel, and the implication that was reinforced every Shabbat in synagogues like this all over North America was, Israel is the answer to anti-Semitism.

That may be true. It is certainly a good thing for the Jews to have a homeland.

But the downside of this formula was that it sent the message that the reason to return to synagogue each week was to be reminded about how everybody hates us; that the reason to stick together, to stick to Judaism, was because the non-Jews of this world would never let us join their clubs.

Well, we are past that. One only has to glance at the rate of intermarriage in this country to see that the barriers to full membership in non-Jewish society have been lifted. We are free to be who we want to be, and that can mean to be Jewish or not Jewish or whatever.

But the rising tide of anti-Semitism (actually, anti-Semitic acts are decreasing in the United States even while they are on the rise abroad) threatens to cause us to do something that I have always repudiated: to be defined by those who hate us. Our identity should be positive, not negative. We should be defined by who we are, not by what others say or feel about us. We are not Jews by virtue of prejudice; we are Jews because we embrace our heritage. And in today’s climate of infinite choice, we have to emphasize the positive reasons to choose Judaism (And I’m not talking about potential converts; I’m talking about born Jews. We are all Jews by choice.)

So what are those features of positive Jewish identity? What does it mean to be Jewish? Help me out here:

Torah / study / learning / law

customs / holidays / rituals / prayer

foods / music / prayer / art

etc.

These are all features of our positive Jewish identity. And there are so many of them!

My challenge to all of us, the strongly affiliated and the not-so, is to look at the hatred that is being directed at Jews around the world.  And then ask yourself:  what does it mean to ME to be Jewish?  For some of us, being Jewish is an essential part of who we are. For others, it matters, but we may not know why beyond a nagging feeling that it ought to matter.  

Whatever the nature of your connection, I challenge you to dig deeper and qualify how and why you are and need to be part of a community.  If you do not have an answer to this question, then you will only be letting those who hate us - whether they know you personally or not - define you.  

Knowledge and love and personal connection are what has sustained Jewish civilization for centuries, through times of oppression and genocide and the constant uprooting and relocation that has always been a part of Jewish life.

And though I would certainly never talk anyone out of becoming more observant, what I am advocating here is not that.  I am suggesting that we each take a moment, or several, to determine how you fit in and belong to this greater cousins’ club known as Am Yisrael.

Why is this important? Because we need to be equipped to defend ourselves and our tradition. When an angry mob in Germany (!) chants, Jude, Jude, feiges Schwein, komm heraus und kämpf allein, / (Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come on out and fight), we may be frightened, angered, disgusted, shocked, and so forth. But, like Israelis, who have managed to live with terrorism and fear and constant political pressures inside and out, we have to try to tune that stuff out, and arm ourselves with all of the positives of being Jewish. We have to equip our children with pride, so that they can saunter out into this world and face the mis-informed mobs on college campuses and speak with quiet confidence about the richness of our ancient tradition.

This week has left me fundamentally changed. Never again will I doubt that anti-Semitism lingers under the surface of much of humanity. Never again will I separate anti-Zionism or anti-Israel activism from anti-Semitism; I am now certain that they are one and the same.

We conclude Bemidbar / Numbers today, and whenever we get to the end of one of the five books of the Torah, we stand up and proudly declare, “Hazaq, hazaq, venithazzeq!” Be strong, be strong, and we will be strengthened.

We can fear the anti-Semitism, and but that would be exactly what the terrorists want us to do. Or we can be strong: strong in our beliefs, strong in our pride, strong in our commitment to Israel and Jewish living and learning, and thereby strengthen one another. That is the formula that has worked for two thousand years, the secret to a strong community, and it will continue to work for us as well, as we continue the Jewish journey.

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 7/26/14.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

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

A Call to Action - Lekh Lekha 5774

I’m sure that many of us saw the article in the New York Times last week about the demographic state of American Jewry. (The full report from the Pew Research Center may be found here.) The major findings are the kinds of things that set off alarm bells and rounds of hand-wringing in certain quarters of the Jewish community. For example:

• 22% of American Jews now consider themselves “Jews of no religion,” and that figure is higher for younger cohorts
• 72% of non-Orthodox Jews marrying in the last 13 years married somebody who is not Jewish
• Affiliated Conservative Jews now account for 18% of American Jews (cf. 35% Reform and 10% Orthodox
• The Conservative movement is now, on average, the oldest movement (median age of members is 55 years) and the one with the fewest children living at home (0.3 per family)

And so forth. There are plenty more where those nuggets came from.

Now it is very easy to let ourselves get agitated over this, and of course the Times loves stories that get Jews agitated. (Arnold Eisen, the Chancellor of JTS, invoked a classic joke in his blog post on the subject: One Jew sends a telegram to the other: Start worrying. Details to follow.)

But, like Chancellor Eisen, I’d like to suggest that we let cooler heads prevail here. The essential message that we should glean from this report is this: we have to read this not as a threat, but as a call to action. Allow me to explain by illustrating a point in Parashat Lekh Lekha.

Our newly-minted everyman hero, Abram, whom we just met at the end of Parashat Noah, is instructed by God to pick up and leave his home, and move to some other place:

וַיֹּאמֶר ה' אֶל-אַבְרָם, לֶךְ-לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ, אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ.

God said to Abram, “Go forth from your land, and from your homeland, and from your father’s house, to the land that I shall show you.

Abram does not know where he is going, but he trusts God, and so he picks up and leaves his homeland and his father’s house to head out to what we know will some day be called Israel. This is his Lekh Lekha moment, where Abram (according to a midrash), goes off in search of himself, primed to be the father of a new nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, we in this room, who are among the most committed American Jews, and in a wider sense the Conservative movement, we must go off in search of ourselves. And to do that, we have to leave the comfort of our homeland, of (dare I say it) Rabbi Waxman’s house. And I mean that in both the tangible and spiritual sense.

I was on a conference call this week with Dr. Jonathan Sarna, the prominent professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, to put the Pew survey into perspective. He pointed out that (א) studies like this pop up from time to time, broadcasting dire predictions and precipitating much communal angst, and (ב) that they have also spurred the major movements into action, and have even succeeded in helping turn them around.

Dr. Sarna pointed out that this is not the first such seeming statistical low point. In his book, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 224-5), we read that in 1919, the American Jewish Year Book offers that less than 23 percent of the Jewish population was “regularly affiliated with congregations.” (That is far less than today, percentage-wise.) In 1926, the US Census of Religious Bodies found that “average length of stay in a Jewish school” was two years total. The San Francisco of 1938 had an 18 percent affiliation rate. In Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1935, only 8 percent of men regularly attended synagogue (and the women even less), and ¾ of young Jews in all of New York City in had not attended services AT ALL in the past year, including High Holidays. And so forth.

Dr. Sarna noted that in the 1930s, Reform Judaism was seen by most American Jews as a small movement with limited appeal, and would soon disappear. But in response, Reform reinvented itself, and is today by far the largest movement. Similarly, he noted that his teacher, the sociologist Marshall Sklare, predicted in the 1960s that Orthodoxy would soon languish away. But Dr. Sklare was wrong, and Orthodoxy is thriving today, even though it only accounts for 10% of American Jews.

While news outlets have been quick to point out that the numbers look especially bad for Conservative Judaism, these kinds of surveys have spurred movement-wide change before, and this should be our call to action. This may be our Lekh Lekha moment.

We are living in an age in which fear/mistrust/dislike of institutions is rampant. Government. Corporations. Organized religion (although I’m not sure why anybody would call Judaism “organized”). Indeed, the very concept of “religion” is alienating to many people today; such is the hazard of living in an open, secular society. But that’s why we have to leave our comfortable surroundings, the physical and the metaphorical, and extend ourselves, to reconsider what we do and how we do it.

For decades, and especially through the periods of dramatic growth that the Conservative movement and Temple Israel experienced in the middle of the 20th century, we did not have to work to attract adherents. It was enough for congregations to hire a brilliant rabbi and a cantor with a soaring voice, set up a Hebrew school, and voila! In came the Jews.

But we are no longer living in those days. We cannot expect that people will just walk in the door and join us. Yes, that is true for a few people (we welcomed a bunch of new families this past weekend with a special welcoming ceremony). But many Jews today think that the synagogue experience is not for them; many Jews think that they just don’t have time or money or interest for shul, that they can’t manage the Hebrew or synagogue choreography, and are therefore intimidated or bored. Reaching those people will require that we go out to them, and provide avenues for involvement that are not solely focused on ritual. And here is where we can take some cues from Chabad.

Where do we usually encounter Chabadniks? On the street with lulav and etrog. On campuses offering free Shabbat meals and a welcoming home. Holding big, splashy programs with wide appeal for families. They go to where the Jews are, and they attract them with free offerings, a judgment-free, friendly environment, and the promise of an authentic Jewish experience.

But we have some things that Chabad does not. We are egalitarian, counting women and men as equals in Jewish life. We welcome dissenting views and incorporate history, science, and scholarship into our understanding of Jewish texts. We think and approach Judaism like contemporary Americans. And it is for this reason that we cannot cede the realm of outreach to Orthodoxy: we need to be out there where the Jews are, too.

A Reform colleague, Rabbi Leon Morris of Sag Harbor, offered the following in an opinion piece in Haaretz:

“... the troubling results of this survey actually underscore the urgent need for non-Orthodox Judaism to be successful. If a case needed to be made that the vast majority of American Jews will never become Orthodox, this study makes the case clearer than ever. The synagogues that have the greatest potential to reach the growing number of “Jews of no religion” are the non-Orthodox ones. If American Orthodoxy cares about the survival of Jewish life in America, the results of this study should in fact encourage American Orthodox leadership to work together more closely with the Reform and Conservative movements. Those movements are the shock troops for deepening Jewish life for the most endangered Jews described in this study.”

We are on the front lines, ladies and gentlemen, but we’re all looking the other way.

Dr. Sarna pointed out a few encouraging statistics: that a whopping 83% of the “Jews of no religion” say that they are proud to be Jewish, and 46% of them believe in God! And then he indicated another group: 36% of American Jews are in the “Other” category. They are not affiliated with a mainstream denomination, or describe themselves as “just Jewish.” These are the people, he says, that we should be going after. To this end, Dr. Sarna suggests a few things. We should...

• feature musical Friday night services at a fixed time each week
• reconsider the de-funding of Koach, the Conservative movement’s arm on college campuses
• refocus our energies on promoting day schools - making them affordable as well as the best educational option for Jewish children
• meet the technology challenge - not only to use the new tools of social media better, but also to stop telling people to turn off their phones in synagogue. (And let me assure you that this is a hard thing for me to accept.) People used to come to synagogue to be connected to others; now when they arrive they are told to disconnect

I think we could even come up with our own creative new approaches. There are things that we do already that are so creative and engaging and work on so many levels, but most of them are small programs that reach only a select few people. The things that I think work the best are those that create holy moments outside of the formality of synagogue services, where it is easier to make personal connections: tashlikh, the Sukkah-building workshop, the new members’ welcoming ceremony that we did last Sunday, the Youth House trip to Israel, the retreat at Camp Ramah that we led for Vav class students last spring, and will be doing again, the new groups like Temple Israel Bonds (for parents with children in the Religious School) and the EmpTInesters group.

Along these lines, we should have more retreats, more creative services that are held outdoors, more social groups that bring like-minded people together. We should have meet-ups in Kings Point Park where we learn Talmud, say. We should reach out through Facebook to gather people for a surprise, late-night qiddush halevanah (blessing over the moon), maybe with cocktails. We should organize a volunteer staff of community outreach coordinators, who keep an eye peeled for newcomers to Great Neck and reach out even before young couples sign up to bring their kids to Beth HaGan, or sign up for High Holiday seats.

The point is, we have to think outside the sanctuary. We can’t rely merely on the Bar/Bat Mitzvah process to capture and hold people, especially when so many can easily avoid our “requirements” and fees by going elsewhere.

In two weeks, I will be attending a training session at JTS about implementing the community organizing model, a workshop for rabbis that will help us in building our communities, and I hope that it will give me fresh ideas to bring back to Great Neck.

But it cannot be just the clergy; we have to work harder as a community as well. We cannot sit idly by, even here in this beautiful sanctuary, as 22% becomes 30% becomes 50%. If we want this community to grow, we have to find those “other” Jews, the 36%, invite them in.

So this is a call to action, and an opportunity. There are plenty of people, right here in Great Neck, that might well join our community if we can reach them and offer them appealing points of entry. Our Lekh Lekha moment has arrived - we may need to leave our current model, but we will do it knowing that the Promised Land is at the end of our journey.