Summer Sermon Series #1: Leading With Our Narrative - Pinehas 5773

I rarely have time for television, and in fact there have been times in recent years when I have questioned whether paying for cable is indeed a fiscally-sound choice.

However, two years ago Judy and I acquired a guilty pleasure: Mad Men, the series about a 1960s-era Madison Avenue advertising agency. It is an extraordinarily well-crafted show, and we take great pleasure in watching the characters and storylines unfold from week to week. Mad Men has just concluded its sixth season, and just a few episodes ago we realized that the series creators planted information in early episodes that fed into the later ones. I really do not have time for this, but it makes me want to go back and review those early episodes to put the entire puzzle together (fortunately, I have them on DVR.)

That is the power of narrative. It connects us; it draws us in.

Usually, I give a sermon once a month or so. This is the first time that I will be doing it for seven straight Shabbatot. I have been inspired by Mad Men to plot out these seven sermons very carefully so that they all fit together in a natural progression. What we will have, after this seven-part series is complete, is a blueprint for a vision of what Temple Israel is: who we are as a community, what we stand for, what we believe. So the topics that we will be discussing today and the next six Shabbatot are as follows:

1. Leading with our narrative (Pinehas)

2. Welcoming Others (Mattot - Mas'ei)

3. Learning / Torah (Devarim)

4. Egalitarianism (Va-ethannan)

5. Israel (Eqev)

6. Repairing the World (Re’eh)

7. Tradition and Change (Shofetim)

Why do this at all? Why not merely discuss the weekly parashah?

Having been here in Great Neck for six years, some things have come into focus. We now have a professional staff in place that is solid, works well together, and is supremely capable of making things happen. That is very good news for this community, because when the professionals work well together, we are able to build. And our ultimate goal is to continue to build – to build a congregation of shared Jewish values, of close-knit social involvement, of personal connections forged in the context of qehillah qedoshah, a holy community.

And of course, building means attracting others to join our qehillah. To do so, we need to be the kind of community that people want to join. And that's not such an easy sell nowadays.  Most Jewish involvement today can be characterized as “episodic.” That is, people show up from lifecycle event to lifecycle event, or perhaps from holiday to holiday. For the vast majority of us, the days of regular attendance at synagogue events, that is, services or dinners or volunteer activities or events, when many American Jews saw the synagogue as the center of their social lives, are largely gone. And that makes the task of attracting others even harder. After all, how can you justify spending thousands of dollars on synagogue dues when you will rarely take advantage of what the synagogue offers?

As a rabbi, my primary goal is to teach Torah, in the widest sense of that word, as I discussed in this space two weeks ago. We as a congregation can spread more Torah if we have more people tuned in to what we offer. And the way to reach more people is as follows:

1. We must have a clear sense of who we are and what we stand for. Now, of course we do not agree on everything. But there are some basic principles here that differentiate us from other congregations, and those are the items upon which we must focus.
2. We have to invite people in. If nobody new comes in, and we do not reach out to new people, Temple Israel will not continue long into the future. I will be speaking more extensively about that next week.
3. We have to tell our story more effectively - that is, who we are, what we stand for, and why being a part of this community is worth your time and your financial investment. Telling our story will strengthen our core and draw others in.

And that is today’s theme: We must lead with the narrative of who we are.

So who are we?

The sign out front on Old Mill Road defines us as a “Conservative, Egalitarian Synagogue.” That's a good start; we are committed to the principles of Conservative Judaism, including an open approach to Judaism that incorporates contemporary scholarship when studying Jewish text, a sense that Judaism has always been open to change and outside influence, that halakhic observance is important, but not necessarily the only or even the highest aspiration of Jewish life, that men and women are considered equal under Jewish law and tradition, and that change within Judaism comes about conservatively, that is, through careful consideration of the relevant sources and customs (hence the name of our movement). But that is not enough.

Our congregational narrative, that is, story of Temple Israel’s past, present, and future, includes not only those things, but also the following:

א. That Rabbi Mordecai Waxman served as the Senior Rabbi here for 55 years, and during that time not only wrote the book whose title became the unofficial slogan of the Conservative movement in the latter half of the 20th century (i.e. “Tradition and Change”), but also became a pioneer in egalitarianism by calling his own wife, Ruth Waxman, to the Torah in 1976, far earlier than most Conservative synagogues. As such, this congregation has been something of a standard-bearer for the movement and for egalitarianism for half a century.

ב. That the growth of this congregation, one of the largest Conservative congregations in the New York area, came after World War II, when many Ashkenazi Jews were leaving urban enclaves for leafier suburbs, and that the last quarter of the 20th century brought an influx of Jews who had left Iran in the wake of the revolution there. This synagogue, therefore, is unusual in the Conservative movement because of its rich ethnic diversity, and this is a strength upon which we continually draw.

ג. That Rabbi Stecker, Cantor Frieder, Rabbi Roth, Danny Mishkin, Leon Silverberg, Rachel Mathless and I, and a complement of lay volunteers are working very hard to maintain our level of quality in programming, educational offerings, and ritual services. Furthermore, we, in partnership with the laity, are committed to developing a vision of the Temple Israel of the future, a vision that will incorporate all of the items that I will be discussing over the next six Shabbatot.

ד. That although Temple Israel of Great Neck is one of the oldest congregations on this peninsula, the landscape has changed. We are now one of 20 or so synagogues, most of which are Orthodox. Just as we embrace diversity within our immediate community, we seek to maintain diversity and cooperation without.  It is of vital importance for TIGN to survive as the sole Conservative congregation and thrive on the peninsula for the sake of Kelal Yisrael, the idea that all Jews are interconnected as a nation. But it is also essential that we look outward as well. I mentioned two weeks ago that I hope that in the near future we will look for opportunities to reach outside these walls, particularly through learning Torah together with our neighbors.

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This communal narrative must be told and retold. The way that we build connections between people is by having them share their stories: our individual, personal stories and collective stories. Our congregation is not just a place to come to services or to get “bar mitzvahed”. It is a strong, vital community of more than 900 families, each with their own stories, and each a part of our communal narrative. Narrative, storytelling, builds connections, and builds community.

Parashat Pinehas is the parashah that we read from most frequently throughout the year. It contains instructions to the kohanim / priests for the sacrifices that were performed in the Temple in Jerusalem for every holiday. Today, we continue to read this passage about how to perform rituals that have not been performed for 1,943 years, as of the 17th of Tammuz, this past Tuesday. That is the day that the Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:6) identifies as the date when the daily Tamid offering ceased, when the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. Since then (more or less), we have given the words of our mouths and hearts as offerings to God in place of animal sacrifice; I think that this is a much better path to holiness and communication with God.

But here’s the important part: the rabbis could have decided, in the wake of the Temple’s destruction, that reading the parts of the Torah related to sacrifice, such as this one, was no longer relevant to us and thus could be omitted. Instead, they insisted not only that we read them, but that we read the entire Torah every year. Instead of casting them aside, we incorporated the story of the sacrifices and the destruction of the Temple into our national story in many other ways as well: we mention it at various points of our tefillot; we invoke it at various holy moments, such as when we add salt to our hallah at Shabbat meals, or when we break a glass at the conclusion of a wedding; and of course it is the theme of the Three Weeks that stretch from last Tuesday until Tish’ah Be’Av, the Ninth Day of Av, this year on July 16.

The Torah is the essence of the Jewish narrative; as Jews, we lead with that narrative, and it has been a rallying point for millennia. It has kept us Jewish, and enabled us to thrive through centuries of oppression and wandering.

Our communal story here at Temple Israel, as we have begun to discuss this week, is the focal point that makes us strong as a community, that keeps us coming back to the synagogue, and that attracts new members. We need to tell it and retell it, just like the Torah.

Next week, we’ll talk about inviting people in. Shabbat shalom!

Beha'alotekha 5771 - Finding a New Narrative For Peace in the Middle East

When I was living in Israel in 1999, pursuing my own version of the Zionist dream, I spent a couple of weeks as a volunteer at a kibbutz, namely Qevutzat Kinneret. I worked several different jobs there: bagging and harvesting bananas, working the dishwasher with a Russian immigrant named Sasha who could barely speak Hebrew, much less English, and beekeeping. That's right, I spent two days working with the beekeeper, harvesting honey.

The beekeeper’s name was Noga Ben-Tziyyon, and her family was among the founding members of the kibbutz. Noga had been taking care of the beehives for many years, and she was fearless. We were all wrapped up in protective gear, completely sealed off, but Noga would occasionally take off her gloves and reach into an open hive to see if she could locate the queen. She told me that she was frequently stung, and she did not really notice. Sometimes, however, there were scorpions hiding in the hives. “Once,” she said, “I was stung by a scorpion. And that hurt.”

Anyway, we chatted quite a bit in Hebrew while we were driving around from hive to hive. She told me that her parents had immigrated from Russia to Palestine in the 1920s. “And do you know why they came?” she asked me. I did not. “Biglal ha-tziyyonut.” Because of Zionism, she said, soft and proud.

What she was saying was that her family did not come here because they were fleeing pogroms, Nazis, oppressive Arab regimes, poverty, or anything else. They came to fulfill an ideological dream, the dream that Theodor Herzl urged us to realize: Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is not a dream. They were pioneers who built the Jewish homeland, by coming to work the land.

This tale might have once been called a story. Nowadays, you might label it a “narrative.” This is a word that pops up a lot lately regarding Israel, in the context of the conflicting narratives of Israel and the Palestinians. We’ll come back to that.

The narrative that Noga Ben-Tziyyon shared with the ½ million Jews who were in Israel prior to World War II is slightly different from Herzl’s. As a journalist covering the Dreyfus affair, Herzl crafted a vision of political Zionism which sought a Jewish homeland that would solve the problem of anti-Semitism.

Noga’s narrative, however, was that of Ahad Ha’am, who sought to solve a different problem of European Jewry, that of assimilation. Ahad Ha’am’s vision was to forge a new culture in Palestine, one that focused on national Jewish consciousness, the Hebrew language, and Jewish creativity and would therefore serve as a merkaz ruhani, a spiritual center of world Jewry.

The experience of Noga's generation of olim (immigrants to Israel) was quite different from that of my father-in-law, Ervin Hoenig. Ervin survived Auschwitz and arrived in Israel during the War of Independence, where he was handed a gun and sent off to fight with the Palmach. His experience in Israel was that those who had made aliyah before the Holocaust often looked down their noses at the generation of survivors, and asked them, “What’s wrong with you? Why didn't you fight back? Why did you go like lambs to the slaughter?”

And yet, that has become the dominant narrative about the building the State of Israel: that the Jewish State rose from the ashes of Auschwitz. People have told me about how back in the day in Israel, you could get on a public bus and see numbers tattooed on many arms.

Yes, it is true that many Shoah survivors came to Israel after the war. But just as many came from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Libya, and so forth; many of those Jews were refugees who were forced out of their countries. This is yet a third Israeli narrative.

Nonetheless, we reinforce the Sho'ah-based narrative over and over, and I do not think that this is ideal; the rebuilding of Israel in our time was already well in progress before World War II. While the Sho'ah certainly contributed to the establishment of the State of Israel, and in particular the UN vote on the partition plan of 1947, the wheels of statehood were in motion far before this. It is all too easy to forget this part of the story.

For example, a few weeks ago, five of our graduating seniors returned from the March of the Living. This is, in fact, a wonderful annual program that has been taking place since 1988. Right after Pesah, nearly 10,000 high school juniors and seniors spent one week in Poland (including Yom Hasho'ah / Holocaust Remembrance Day) and one week in Israel (including Yom Ha-atzma'ut / Israel’s Independence Day). The young adults who participated spoke at the Youth House two weeks ago about their strengthened Jewish identity and their deep connection with Israel. Any program that does this so successfully is tremendously valuable.

But the overarching theme of March of the Living is that the destruction of European Jewry led to the establishment of the State of Israel, when the reality is much more complex. No teen program spends a week in Morocco or Iraq or even Odessa and then a week in Israel.

The difference between a story and a narrative is that narratives usually come with agendas, and they can be dangerous. One narrative usually excludes another.

When President Obama addressed the Muslim world at Cairo University two years ago, what did he invoke as the primary Jewish claim to the land of Israel?

“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust... Six million Jews were killed -- more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews -- is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”

Although I credit Mr. Obama for asking the Arab world to lay off the Holocaust denial and the spreading of malicious lies about Jews, he did the State of Israel a disservice by pointing only to the history of anti-Semitism and not to the centuries of attachment to our ancestral homeland, the millennia of longing, Hatiqvah bat shenot alpayim, the hope of 2000 years. We have been yearning to return to Israel since the year 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Beit HaMiqdash, the Temple in Jerusalem.

Nowadays, we are hearing more about the Palestinian narrative. For example, here’s Mr. Obama again in Cairo, immediately after he invoked the Shoah:

“On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they've endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations -- large and small -- that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.”

You might have heard about Palestinian commemorations of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) that they have publicized as the flip-side of Yom Ha-Atzma'ut, Israel's Independence Day. I had not heard of it before 7 or 8 years ago. And a new term entered the fray this week, one that I had never heard before this year: Naksa, or “setback,” which is now being used to describe the Arab take on the Six-Day War. June 5, 1967 was the day of the setback.

Last Sunday, June 5th, the same day that 200 of us from Temple Israel were proudly marching along Fifth Avenue in celebration of Israel, the Syrian government allowed hundreds of protesters to try to breach the Israeli border in the Golan. The IDF warned them in Arabic not to do so, then shot in the air, then shot at their feet when they continued to advance. Now, we all know this to be a cynical attempt by the Assad government to distract from the fact that they are killing their own people who are engaged in active rebellion. Regardless, this was how they commemorated the Naksa, the setback. The number of casualties is disputed, of course; also disputed is whether or not protesters were armed. Nonetheless, people died, and Israel looks like the bad guy once again.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are engaged in a war of narratives, a verbal war which has real casualties on both sides.

Here is the problem: if we are going to get anywhere in resolving the ongoing conflict within and around Israel, we must change the narrative. Because as it stands now, we are not winning this war of words.

The overarching message of the Arab Spring is this: that the status quo of the 20th century has changed. What has enabled the Tunisian people, the Egyptian people, and the Yemeni people to throw off the yokes of their tyrannical rulers? The prevailing narrative has changed. The word on the street no longer reflected the words of the ruling parties.

And there is now a sense of urgency. The Palestinian unity government has pledged to unilaterally declare statehood through a UN resolution in September. Ladies and gentlemen, they have the votes in the UN. And if it comes to that, it will only further isolate Israel.

We need to change the narrative. Theirs and ours. The time has come. And better to be pro-active, like Ahad Ha’am’s response to assimilation, then re-active, like Herzl’s response to anti-Semitism.

We read today in Parashat Beha’alotekha the line that we sing every time we take the Torah out (Numbers 10:35):

וַיְהִי בִּנְסֹעַ הָאָרֹן, וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה: קוּמָה יְהוָה, וְיָפֻצוּ אֹיְבֶיךָ
Vayhi binsoa’ ha-aron, vayomer Moshe:
Qumah Adonai, veyafutzu oyevekha

When the ark traveled, Moses would say,
“Rise up, God, and let Your enemies be scattered.”

The ancient rabbis asked, “who are God’s enemies?” Midrash Sifre tells us that those who hate Israel, who hate the Jews, are the enemies of God. And we know that there are people who hate us, who want to kill us.

But there is more to the story. The enemies of God and Israel, in my mind, are the rejectionists on both sides; they reject peace because they are committed to their own narratives. Hamas and their supporters deny the right of Israel to exist, and therefore reject peace. Those within Israel and without who claim that we have no partners for peace are also rejectionists. One need only consider the Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Initiative, put forward in 2002 and 2009, to see that there are potential partners for peace.

Now is the time for those in power to show true leadership; we need a new narrative, one that unifies. This will not be easy, as there are both bees and scorpions in these hives.

Noga Ben-Tziyyon’s parents did not immigrate to Israel to displace anybody, or at the behest of the colonial powers. They came because Israel is the home of the Jews, and the merkaz ruhani, the spiritual center of world Jewry. Let’s not forget that story. And we have the power to guarantee it forever. All we have to do is change the narrative, try to ignore the bee stings, and scatter the scorpions.

Shabbat shalom.

And thanks to Rabbi Kate Palley for the tamtzit.