The Most Valuable Gifts We Can Give - Kol Nidrei 5774

Charles Francis Adams, the 19th century political figure and diplomat, was a grandson of this nation’s second president, John Adams, and the son of the sixth president, John Quincy Adams. Charles Adams kept a diary. One day he entered: "Went fishing today--a day wasted." His young son, Henry Brooks Adams, also kept a diary. On that same day, young Henry made this entry: "Went fishing with my father -- the most wonderful day of my life!"

Sometimes, the smallest gifts in life are the biggest. Among the greatest gifts that we can give anybody else is our time.

Last week, on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we read from the Torah the story of the Aqedah, the Binding of Isaac, among the best-known stories in the Pentateuch. Brief recap: God commands Abraham to take his beloved son Isaac to Mt. Moriah, which will later be the location of the Temple in Jerusalem, and to offer Isaac up as a fiery sacrificial offering to God. We will leave aside the great theological challenges posed by this story to focus on a phrase which is repeated twice in the Torah’s narrative: “Vayelekhu sheneihem yahdav,” meaning, “the two of them walked together.” It’s a three-day trip from Beersheva to Jerusalem, and Abraham and Isaac walk the whole way (Rashi, by the way, suggests that Abraham’s Subaru was in the shop). We are left to wonder what they said to each other during these three days; the Torah doesn’t tell us.

Abraham had three days on which to puzzle over God’s confounding command to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. But Isaac got to spend three solid days hiking with his father, seemingly unaware of what awaits him on Mt. Moriah. Three days of talking, of walking together and enjoying the scenery, of singing and swapping jokes and checking out pretty flowers or funny-looking insects along the way. Perhaps, like little Henry Adams, Isaac had the most wonderful time of his life.

I am fortunate in that my workplace (i.e. Temple Israel) and my daughter’s school are both within easy walking distance from our house, and so almost every day, as often as I can, I walk her to school in the morning and back again at the end of the day. It’s four tenths of a mile, about ten minutes each way. We talk about school, of course, but also friends, and we identify plants and birds, we notice the trash that we find along the way and sometimes collect it, and we occasionally discuss complex subjects (for a six-year-old) such as work and death and human relationships. We sometimes smugly pat ourselves on the back for getting a little extra exercise and sparing the atmosphere a few extra carbon dioxide molecules.  Sometimes we sing; this past Tuesday morning we sang Woody Guthrie’s classic, “This Land Is Your Land,” followed by a rousing rendition of the first few lines of Kol Nidrei.

Twenty minutes each school day, multiplied by roughly 150 days, is 3000 minutes. That’s 50 hours of time over the course of a single school year.

I hope that someday my daughter will look back on these times and understand that this time spent with her father was invaluable. And maybe she’ll make a special effort, if she can, to spend a few quality minutes with her son or daughter every day.

Time is a simple gift that cannot be bought. It is among a short list of gifts that we can give to each other and the world that are worth more than anything available at Costco or Amazon.com: spending time with those you love, spending time performing deeds of hesed, charitable acts for those in need, and improving the condition of your soul by seeking holy moments in Jewish ritual.

None of these acts yields a financial return on investment. But they are all of infinite value; the time we give to others and to God is the holiest kind of time that there is. These simple gifts are returned to us many times over - in personal satisfaction, in the joy that comes with helping others and repairing the world, in the overall benefit to society, in the inner peace that comes from engaging with the Divine.

Our time is the greatest gift we can give to others. And what is the greatest gift that you can give to yourself? Torah.

You might have heard recently about a small fracas in the Jewish world over a video that “went viral” a few weeks back. It was a dance routine from the bar mitzvah of a boy who is now among Dallas, Texas’ best-known Jewish residents, a 13-year-old named Sam Horowitz. Who has seen it? In the video, Mr. Horowitz is shown dancing in a professionally-choreographed number with a bevy of scantily-clad women, interspersed with occasional shots of the “audience,” i.e. the friends and family of the Horowitzes. At least one rabbi, Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, took to the opinion pages of a national newspaper, the Washington Post, to excoriate this video and all it stands for, arguing that such ostentatious and sexualized displays not only cheapen the  bar mitzvah, but also threaten the idea of bar mitzvah as a sacred rite of passage.

I’m not going to do that, because it’s too easy, and not necessarily fair to the young Mr. Horowitz. It’s also worth pointing out that Sam Horowitz raised $36,000 for the Ben Yakir Youth Village in Israel, an enrichment program for 120 immigrants to Israel, mostly Ethiopian boys aged 12-18. You see, Sam declined traditional bar mitzvah gifts, instead encouraging his guests to make donations to this charity.

Judaism is not an ascetic tradition. On the contrary, we are instructed to enjoy the fruits of God’s Creation. There are no Jewish orders of celibate monks, at least for the last 2,000 years. We do not take vows of poverty or silence (not that any Jewish person could actually be silent for very long anyway). We are created to enjoy life, and live according to the principles of the Torah such that they are enjoyable, and not burdensome.

Nonetheless, it may be necessary on occasion to distinguish what is important and valuable from what is merely a distraction. Bar mitzvah, for example, is important and valuable as an acknowledgment of a young person’s stepping up to inherit the mantle of Torah, our primary Jewish legacy. It’s about being called to the Torah as a Jewish woman or man, and demonstrating in the context of the larger community that this child is now one of us, ready to be welcomed and counted as an integral member in the ancient line of Jewish adults. While we may quibble about whether Sam Horowitz’s dance number was appropriate, we cannot deny that he has acted on a lesson from the Torah in an unusually generous way.

The gift of Torah is the most valuable gift that we have; our ancestors took it with them wherever they went for centuries, as I mentioned on Rosh Hashanah. But it is also a gift that we can continue to give to ourselves, and it will continue to give back. Bar mitzvah is not the end of Jewish life; it is really only the beginning of the odyssey of intellectual and spiritual development known as adulthood.

Right now, our stomachs are full, and we are facing a full 25 hours without food and drink. Feels easy right now, right? This time tomorrow will be a wee bit more challenging.

Yes, one of the principles of Yom Kippur is, ve-initem et nafshoteikhem, you shall afflict your souls (Numbers 29:7). This is a day on which we should suffer in order to be cleansed; a little pain and misery keeps us human, reminds us of God and our role in the world in taking care of those in need.  Hardship makes us grow, builds character.  If we are blessed with comfort, this self-imposed day of hardship should expand our perspective.

But the goal is not to fast for the sake of suffering. Rather, the goal is self-improvement. (It is traditional to say tzom qal, have an easy fast; a better thing to greet fellow Jews with on YK is, “Have a meaningful fast.”)

What keeps us coming back to the synagogue, year after year? Many of us who come on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are not necessarily regular synagogue-goers during the rest of the year (although I might remind you that you’re always welcome to join us here at Temple Israel for the second-holiest day of the year, Shabbat, or at any other time to engage in more holy moments).

But the essential mitzvah of Jewish life, the one thread that ties everything together, the item that the ancient rabbis declared that God wants from us the most is not prayer. It’s not kashrut or Shabbat or fasting on YK or hearing the shofar or eating matzah or even honoring our parents or circumcising our sons or being fruitful and multiplying.

The one thing God wants the most from us is to learn. It’s learning. Learning Torah, that is, the Torah itself and all of the centuries of commentary and discussion and argument that come with it. And Yom Kippur, like every other day of the year, is a day on which we learn.

If there was one message I would want all of us to take home with us from our experience here this evening and tomorrow, it would be that Yom Kippur teaches us simplicity. When we afflict our souls, when we deny ourselves physical comforts, we learn humility, we learn to separate our needs vs. our wants. We learn to distinguish food for sustenance vs. food for comfort or boredom or social purposes.  We learn about our own strength of will and empathy for those who truly live in fear of starvation.

But rabbi, you might be thinking, what about forgiveness? What about sin? What about teshuvah / repentance? What about second chances? Tzedaqah?

Yes, all those things are integral to this day. But the message I think that we can all take home this evening, after the shofar sounds at 7:49 PM, is the following: focus on the essentials, the simplest gifts. Spend more time on the relationships with the people you love. Don’t worry about work when you’re out fishing with your child (literally or figuratively). Look for the ways in which we can apply the Torah’s lessons to our lives today.

What do we learn from Yom Kippur? Simplicity. By not eating, or bathing, and by avoiding pleasures of the flesh, and wearing leather shoes, we achieve a simple state, a state in which we may approach God and ask for forgiveness. What should we take away from these 25 hours of self-denial? That true wealth is measured in time that we invest in others, in improving our world, in volunteering, in learning the valuable ancient lessons that our tradition offers. Think about those things this day, and perhaps we will all return to them next week, next month, and throughout the coming year.

Our relationships with God, with all the people around us, and particularly those in need, are these essential things. These outweigh all other things on this day and every day. Simple.

We will read in tomorrow morning’s haftarah from the Book of Isaiah about the kind of fast that God wants from us on this day, and the kind of fast that God does not want. Isaiah tells us that God does not want a meaningless fast, one that is accomplished just to prove that you can do it, that does not enter your soul and help you make the necessary adjustments. On the contrary, the kind of fast that God wants is the one that reminds us of our duties to each other (Isaiah 58:6-7):

הֲלוֹא זֶה, צוֹם אֶבְחָרֵהוּ--פַּתֵּחַ חַרְצֻבּוֹת רֶשַׁע, הַתֵּר אֲגֻדּוֹת מוֹטָה; וְשַׁלַּח רְצוּצִים חָפְשִׁים, וְכָל-מוֹטָה תְּנַתֵּקוּ.

הֲלוֹא פָרֹס לָרָעֵב לַחְמֶךָ, וַעֲנִיִּים מְרוּדִים תָּבִיא בָיִת:  כִּי-תִרְאֶה עָרֹם וְכִסִּיתוֹ, וּמִבְּשָׂרְךָ לֹא תִתְעַלָּם.

No, this is the fast I desire:

To unlock fetters of wickedness,

And untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free;

To break off every yoke.

It is to share your bread with the hungry,

And to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to clothe him,

And not to ignore your own kin.

On this day of simplicity, Isaiah reminds us that we fast to remind ourselves to work for good in this world, to reach out a hand to those in need, to pull them up from homelessness and hunger and oppression. Such a simple, straightforward idea, and yet one which we routinely ignore in favor of, as Ecclesiastes puts it, “striving after vanity.”

I am going to conclude by quoting what I have often referred to as my favorite passage in the siddur / prayerbook. Every day, three times a day, we offer our thanks to God with the following:

וְעַל נִסֶּיךָ שֶׁבְּכָל יום עִמָּנוּ. וְעַל נִפְלְאותֶיךָ וְטובותֶיךָ שֶׁבְּכָל עֵת. עֶרֶב וָבקֶר וְצָהֳרָיִם:

… for Your miracles that accompany us each day, and for Your wonders and Your gifts that are with us each moment, evening, morning, and noon.

These gifts, the simplest gifts, are the greatest miracles we can offer. That’s not just God’s work; we make those daily and hourly miracles happen. Every time we make an effort to reach out to somebody who needs a hand; every time that we opt for meaning over substance; every time we put effort into building better relationships with the ones that we love. Those are little, daily miracles that you can create.

I said this once in a sermon over the summer, but it’s so appropriate that I need to say it again:

How do we know that God is a benevolent force in our lives? Because God, in creating humans in the Divine image, gave us the ability to work together, with and for each other, for the benefit of humanity. We can reach out to others in need. Therein lies our own divinity; we have the God-given ability to effect change, to give the simplest gifts to ourselves and to others. It’s up to us to act on that ability.

Tzom mashma’uti. Have a meaningful fast.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Kol Nidrei, 9/13/2013.)

Making Tiqqun Olam a Part of the Conversation (Summer Sermon Series #6) - Re'eh 5773

The Torah teaches us in many places that we are individually and collectively responsible for working toward improving the condition of our world. This concept can be found among the mitzvot / commandments that are identified in Parashat Re’eh, which we read this morning (Deut. 15:4):

אֶפֶס, כִּי לֹא יִהְיֶה-בְּךָ אֶבְיוֹן:  כִּי-בָרֵךְ יְבָרֶכְךָ, יְהוָה, בָּאָרֶץ

There shall be no needy among you, since the Lord your God will bless you in the land...

This promise of plentitude applies only if, as is stated in the following verse (15:5),

רַק אִם-שָׁמוֹעַ תִּשְׁמַע, בְּקוֹל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, לִשְׁמֹר לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת-כָּל-הַמִּצְוָה הַזֹּאת, אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם.

If only you heed the Lord your God and take care to keep all this Instruction that I enjoin upon you this day.

Sounds great, right? Except for the fact that God assumes that we will not follow orders, and hence there will always be needy people among us. And furthermore, the Torah requires us to take care of them (15:7-8):

לֹא תְאַמֵּץ אֶת-לְבָבְךָ, וְלֹא תִקְפֹּץ אֶת-יָדְךָ, מֵאָחִיךָ, הָאֶבְיוֹן.  כִּי-פָתֹחַ תִּפְתַּח אֶת-יָדְךָ, לוֹ; וְהַעֲבֵט, תַּעֲבִיטֶנּוּ, דֵּי מַחְסֹרוֹ, אֲשֶׁר יֶחְסַר לוֹ.

Do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman. Rather, you must surely open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs.

Not only will there always be people in need, but we are eternally obligated to take care of them, to help them get back on their feet when they are down. Many of us refer to these verses and others like them as referring to tiqqun olam, repairing the world. The Torah teaches us here and elsewhere that the world will always need repair, and we are obligated at least to try to fix it.

A few years back, Temple Israel had a tiqqun olam consult with one of my colleagues, Rabbi Jill Jacobs. Rabbi Jacobs is the Executive Director of T’ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, an organization of clergy from across the North American Jewish spectrum that works for protecting human rights. Rabbi Jacobs spoke with us about our ongoing involvement in social action programs. During the course of our discussion, she highlighted a message that has continued to resonate with me - that we should raise the volume of discussion about social action, that tiqqun olam should be considered as an essential plank in the building of community.

Which brings me back to what I am sure you will recognize as one of my favorite topics: community. The whole point of this Summer Sermon Series is to identify the essential values of our community. And as far as I am concerned, the true value of community is exhibited in what we do for one another, in how we take care of each other.

Why do we gather to pray, ladies and gentlemen? Is it merely to fulfill the rabbinically-ordained mitzvah of daily prayer, to discharge our otherwise-meaningless obligations to God? I hope not, although there is a segment of the Jewish world that things so. Is it to improve ourselves through the meditative process of self-consideration? Maybe. Is it to ensure that we rub elbows with the other members of our community from time to time? Perhaps.

More likely, it is to open us up, to sensitize us to the world around us. Jewish custom dictates that a synagogue must have windows, so that we do not get so wrapped up in spiritual expression that we lose sight of the outside world, that we forget that our relationship with God includes the other, the less fortunate, the members of our wider community that are not here with us.

In short, prayer is a call to action. It is to inspire us to feel God’s presence, to inspire us to go out and repair the world. A good tefillah experience will take you outside yourself, will help you see the things that need repair.

And all the more so, that is the whole point of being a community. Temple Israel is not a country club, where you pay dues to gain entry. On the contrary, Jews have formed communal organizations wherever they have lived throughout history so that they could take care of each other. Our people has an excellent track record of communal responsibility; a quick glance at the list of all the various Jewish organizations, the “alephbet soup” of Jewish institutions. I think that we are the only ethnic group that has an umbrella organization of organization leaders: the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, of which our illustrious congregant Jack Stein, alav hashalom, was once the Chairman.

Often, we Jews look inward, and take care of our own. And sometimes we look outward: As the great sage Hillel said in Pirqei Avot (1:14):

אם אין אני לי, מי לי;

וכשאני לעצמי, מה אני;

ואם לא עכשיו, אימתיי.

Im ein ani li mi li?

Ukhshe’ani le’atzmi mah ani?

Ve’im lo akhshav, eimatai?

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

And if I am only for myself, what am I?

And if not now, when?

These three deceptively simple questions speak to the depth of our obligation to look both inward and outward -- the task of tiqqun olam must be done now, and we must spend as much time repairing ourselves as repairing the rest of the world.

I think that if Hillel were to reappear in the 21st century, two millennia after his time on this Earth, he would be shocked at the way we live today. We have unprecedented personal wealth; even America’s working poor might seem quite well off compared to ancient rabbis living in the Middle Eastern agrarian society of the first few centuries of the common era, the period in which the Talmud emerged. We have technology that enables us to eat the same foods year-round, regardless of climate or location; we can travel great distances very quickly; we can communicate immediately with people all over the world. Our economics and technology have enabled to live far more independently than all of the generations that have preceded us. And this is, in many ways, contrary to the way that the rabbis envisioned Judaism.

Today, you do not need to be a part of any community. If you can work and earn enough money to pay your bills, you can live entirely independently. You can move to a place where nobody knows you and be completely anonymous.

But that is not the Jewish way. Jews have always depended on each other. And I am a fierce advocate for the case that Jews need Judaism, and they need their community -- if not for the material support, then at least for the spiritual nourishment. Because if there is one thing that we are sorely lacking in today’s world of great independence, it is guidance for the soul.

When we repair the world, ladies and gentlemen, we find within ourselves the Divine sparks that nourish our souls.

To return to Rabbi Jill Jacobs for a moment, how do we raise our consciousness about tiqqun olam? How do we move forward with our commitment to social action? Her concern, and it is a valid one, is that what happens in many communities is that a few dedicated volunteers take on the responsibility for all of the social action activities of the congregation. And soon enough, these folks get tired and burnt out and resentful that they are doing all the work. And so the goal should be not necessarily to do more, but (and this seems counter-intuitive) rather to talk more about tiqqun olam, to make social action a part of the regular discourse of the community.

But how do we do that? Sure, Rabbi Stecker and I can dedicate a certain fraction of every sermon to tiqqun olam, and benei mitzvah can talk about their “mitzvah project” every week, and so forth. But I do not think that’s enough.

Maybe we need to bring more speakers from different charitable organizations to talk about what they are doing in the world. Maybe we need to host panel discussions about big issues, like hunger or the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa or urban decay. Maybe we need to arrange a congregational mission to Cuba or Uganda or Detroit. Maybe we can dedicate next year’s Tiqqun Leil Shavuot to tiqqun olam.

Or maybe we can connect this with the subject of the third installment in the Summer Sermon Series: Torah. The key, it seems, is learning. The more we learn from our traditional sources (Torah, Talmud, commentaries, halakhic codes and so forth) about our obligations regarding others, the greater chance that we have of increasing our own levels of engagement with tiqqun olam, and the more likely that we will work more effectively as a community to repair the world.

This I know from personal experience: learning leads to action.

I was recently asked about God’s role in today’s world. Does God actively bring about the good and bad things that happen to us? Does God actually (as we state in the second paragraph of the Shema, which we read last week in Parashat Eqev) bring the rains when we follow the mitzvot, and shut off the heavenly water spout when we do not?

Anybody who has ever heard me talk about God knows that I cannot accept this sort of simply-constructed theology at face value. And neither can at least some of the rabbis of the Talmud, given their own observations of who is rewarded and who is punished (Berakhot 7a). Furthermore, I have no satisfying answers to the ancient question of why bad things happen to good people, but of course I am in good company with regard to that.

But one thing of which I am sure is as follows: that our God is fundamentally good, and that the proof of this is that God has given us the capability to do good for others. When we read in Bereshit / Genesis that God created us in the Divine image, we can understand this as meaning that God gave us a share in Divine goodness. It is through performing acts of hesed, lovingkindness, that we raise those sparks of Divine holiness, that we illuminate the faces of our friends, family, neighbors, and even complete strangers with the light of God’s own face.

Our very conception of what it means to be a sacred community must therefore include the idea of responsibility for each other, the obligation to, as the Torah puts it, open our hands. Let’s keep mining our holy books for the imperative to raise ourselves up through helping others in need; learning leads to action.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 8/3/2013.) 

This is the sixth in the Summer Sermon Series, a seven-part exploration of the most essential values of Temple Israel of Great Neck. The previous five installments were:

1. Telling our story

2. Being a welcoming congregation

3. Engaging with Torah

4. Egalitarianism

5. Israel

Gravity and the Luminescent Age of Torah - Devarim 5773 (Summer Sermon Series #3)

When I was in AP Physics in high school, I recall my teacher, Mr. Blackmer, teaching us about gravity. Some of you might remember (if you dig deep enough into your memory) that Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is as follows:

             m1m2

F = G ────

               r2

where:

F is the measure of gravitational force between two objects

G is the gravitational constant

m1 and m2 are the masses of the two objects

r is the distance between them

Usually, when we think of gravity, it is in the context of our relationship with the Earth. The Earth is turning, and the reason we are not all flung off into space is because gravitational attraction keeps us tethered to the ground. But we attract the Earth as much as the Earth attracts us. Mr. Blackmer wanted to demonstrate that gravitational attraction affects both bodies, and that when we jump up (for example), the Earth pulls us back down just as we pull the Earth up to us. Yes, the distance that we are pulling the Earth is vanishingly small. But it’s there. So Mr. Blackmer suggested the following: whenever you’re feeling down, and powerless, jump! It’s a reminder that you can affect really big things.

And then, to demonstrate, he jumped up, and the Earth moved just a wee bit to meet him.

Gravity is, I think, a nice image to illustrate the relationship between Jews and Jewish learning. Torah (used in its widest sense) is a huge mass of information, and many Jews are attracted to it, some more than others. And by studying it, we affect the entire body of Jewish learning, even if only by a little, because when we learn, we insert ourselves into the text.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the highest mitzvah of Jewish life is Talmud Torah, the learning of Torah in its widest sense, including all the texts of the rabbinic canon (Mishnah, Gemara, midrash, commentaries ancient and modern, and so forth). I spoke about the fact that more of us are studying Torah now than ever before, mostly due to access to new translations and new electronic tools for learning the greatest works of Jewish tradition. I can read Maimonides on my phone; I can search the Shulhan Arukh (R. Yosef Caro’s 16th century codification of Jewish law) on my desktop; you can study the Talmud on a tablet anywhere.

Judaism has entered the information age. In just a few years, the very idea of paper books will seem unwieldy and quaint. The implications for how we interact with Judaism are tremendous; we have always been “the People of the Book.” Somehow, “the People of the E-book” doesn’t quite work as well.

Shabbat issues aside, these new electronic Jewish resources are good for the Jews. We are living in a Luminescent Age of learning Torah, which bodes well for the future of Judaism. The availability of all of our holy texts at our fingertips means that more of us will seek (well, search) and more of us will find. And more of us will discover the value of learning Torah, of struggling with Jewish text.

We read this morning the beginning of the book of Devarim / Deuteronomy, the fifth and last book of the Torah. It opens with the phrase, “Elleh ha-devarim” “These are the words that Moshe addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.” (It is worth noting here that although devarim in modern Hebrew means “things,” it is classically understood as “words.”)

Elleh ha-devarim. It is the beginning of the end of the Torah. We are now forty years after yetzi’at Mitzrayim, the departure from Egypt, and on the East Bank of the Jordan River (funny how the “East Bank” never comes up in the news!), and Moshe is delivering a book-length speech to the Israelites prior to his death.

Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, aka Ramban, aka Nachmanides, the prolific commentator of 13th-century Spain, in his introduction to Devarim, observes that “Elleh ha-devarim” implies all of the laws given in the book from the Ten Commandments forward. A few verses later in Devarim (1:5), we read the following:

בְּעֵבֶר הַיַּרְדֵּן, בְּאֶרֶץ מוֹאָב, הוֹאִיל מֹשֶׁה, בֵּאֵר אֶת-הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת...

On the other side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound this Teaching...

Rashi suggests that this verse means that prior to his death, Moshe translated the entire Torah into seventy languages, the seventy that are traditionally thought of in rabbinic text as the original languages created in the Tower of Babel episode.

Put together, these ideas suggests to me that these medieval commentators saw the book of Devarim as a symbol of the Torah writ large, an iconic representation of all Jewish learning - the laws, the stories, the translation and commentary, and everything that flows from it. Translation, by the way, is not only a form of commentary in itself; it was also thought of rabbinically as intrinsic to the learning of Torah. In the Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 8a, we are urged to read the entire Torah three times each year, twice in the Hebrew and once in translation or with commentary. The Talmud goes further to promise that those who do so will enjoy long life.

These devarim, these words - they are our heritage, our past, present and future.

Ladies and gentlemen, I suspect that, more than Shabbat, more than kashrut, more than the physical aspects of Jewish observance, it is our collected body of knowledge and our commitment to study that has kept us Jewish. The Babylonians, the Romans, the Islamic conquests, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the Nazis - they could destroy our holy places. But they could not destroy what we carried in our heads and in our hearts. The gravitational attraction of our mass of Torah has kept us from flying off into oblivion, kept us on the ground.

But there is even more to the story. Rashi and Ramban and their fellow commentators are only a fraction of the journey that has brought these devarim, these words to us here today. For nearly two thousand years, since the beginnings of rabbinic literature, we have engaged as a people in the teaching, learning, interpreting, commenting, arguing over, creating and re-creating Torah. Every generation in every place where Jews have lived has, in some sense, shaped the Torah. We read the story of Creation differently here and now than our ancestors did in Jerusalem in the first century. We read the Exodus story differently today than the Spanish exiles of the 15th century. We understand Moshe’s rebuke of the people differently than Moses Maimonides did in Egypt of the 12th century, or Moses Mendelson did in 18th century Germany. And all of these may be effectively included in the mass of Torah that is all part of how we read it today - we are the next point in the Torah continuum, the next “dor” in “ledor vador,” from generation to generation.

The 20th-century German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber envisioned the revelation at Sinai, the moment when God gives Moshe the tablets of the Torah, as a kind of collision of humans with the Divine.  The Sinai experience left both God and humans fundamentally changed, like moving objects that crash into each other and exchange their momentum. The same is true for the words of our tradition. Every time we pull those books off of the Jewish bookshelf, every time we engage with our sacred texts, we are fundamentally changed, and so are the ancient words for all who come after us. And revelation continues even today, as Torah unfolds and God reveals more to us. We change, God changes, and the very nature of Judaism changes.

And that is one key to understanding who we are in the Conservative movement, and who we are at Temple Israel. We conserve tradition; we return to our traditional books year after year. But we also acknowledge that tradition has changed, that the Judaism of today is unique to this time and and to this place, but still connected to what came before.

I want to wrap this up by addressing something that happened in Israel this week, which will also serve as a connecting piece to the next two sermons in the series, on egalitarianism and Israel.

On Monday morning, Rosh Hodesh Av, the Women of the Wall and their supporters, about 350 people, showed up at the Kotel / Western Wall in Jerusalem for their monthly prayer service, the first such service since the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that it is legal (!) for anybody to pray at the Kotel “according to their custom.” In the case of Women of the Wall, that means praying out loud in a group, with some wearing tallitot and tefillin. We will speak more next week about why doing these things are acceptable under halakhah, Jewish law.

But it is not acceptable to the Haredi sector of Orthodoxy. To prevent the WoW from praying according to their custom, Haredi rabbis ordered girls’ seminaries to bus their students to the Kotel at 6:30 AM, half an hour before WoW meets, to fill up the Kotel plaza with people so that the WoW group could not get much further than the entry gates. Furthermore, a group of Haredim blew whistles, jeered and shouted at them, held aloft offensive signs, and a few threw bottles and eggs at those who were trying to daven. The police allowed the WoW to hold their service, and detained those that threw things. You can see video of this here.

It is true that many of us in the Jewish world read our sources and traditions differently, and it is a shame and embarrassment that some of us who hold the idea of Torah so dear choose to fight against an interpretation that conflicts with their own. Disagreement is a part of the continuum of Torah; on any given page of the Jewish bookshelf, one may find arguments that are leshem shamayim, for the sake of heaven. But mean-spirited, nearly-violent protests against other Jews who are trying to worship in a way that is condoned by 80% of the Jewish world?

This is why we at Temple Israel, in the Conservative world, must give in to the gravity of Torah. Let it pull you in. We must step up our efforts to engage with Torah, and not let the fundamentalists dictate how to read our holy books and how to interact with God.

Read it not as “Elleh ha-devarim,” these are the words, but rather, “Elleh devareinu,” these are OUR words. This is the living tradition that we have received from God, and that has been passed down to us via our ancestors. Every hand that has touched it has changed it just a little bit. And the next hand will always be yours.

The words of Torah include you. Find yourself in the text! It’s your heritage. We have, of course, many opportunities to learn here at Temple Israel, and if you want to dive into Torah but do not know where to start, come see me. Do not let the Luminescent Age of Torah pass you by!

Don’t fight against the gravity of Torah. Jump, and it will come up to meet you (but just a little bit).

Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, July 13, 2013.) 

The first two installments in the Summer Sermon Series may be found here:

1. Leading With Our Narrative

2. Elevating Ourselves Through Words of Welcome