Tu Bishvat: A Mystical Opportunity to Repair the World

Living in the town of Tzefat in 16th-century northern Israel, Rabbi Isaac Luria dwelt among Spanish-Jewish exiles who traded heavily in the mystical concepts of kabbalah, ancient received wisdom. Rabbi Luria, sometimes referred to by his acronym, the AR”I (Elohi Rabbi Yitzhaq, the divine Rabbi Isaac), crafted a new approach to kabbalah which envisioned God’s tzimtzum (contraction) in creating the world. This tzimtzum caused the infinite light of God to be poured to overfilling into the vessels that had contained the ten sefirot (Divine emanations) of the Tree of Life, causing many of them to shatter. Some of these vessel fragments became bound up with sparks of the original light in impure qelipot (shells). Rabbi Luria saw one of our goals as Jews to be liberating those sparks from the qelipot, and thus repairing the world.

One ceremony which grew out of the Lurianic school of kabbalistic thought is the Tu Bishvat seder. Modeled on the Passover discussion and dinner that we all know, the mystical Tu Bishvat seder featured the consumption of shelled fruits and nuts as a physical manifestation of our task to repair the world through seeking and opening the metaphorical qelipot. Although Tu Bishvat is identified in rabbinic literature as the day on which all trees in the world turn one year older, the Lurianic kabbalists reframed it as an opportunity to celebrate not only the actual trees, but the Etz Hayyim, the sefirotic Tree of Life, and to return sparks to their primordial source.

We at Temple Israel will attempt to liberate a few sparks on the evening of January 30, as we gather for the N’ranena musical Kabbalat Shabbat service, followed by dinner and a mystical Tu Bishvat experience. Join us as we drink four cups of wine or grape juice, eat tree produce, chant a niggun or two, and connect with the Tree of Life. It will be a sacred moment for the entire family.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

The True Meaning of Matzah - Seventh Day Pesah, 5774

I suspect that some of you must have a running bet over whether I’m going to begin a sermon with, “I recently heard on NPR…” I’m not sure what the current odds are, but it may be that money is about to be owed:

I recently heard on NPR a fascinating story about a church in North Carolina that really struck me. At St. Albans Episcopal Church in Davidson, a well-appointed outer suburb of Charlotte, there is a new bronze statue on the church grounds, depicting a figure lying, huddled on a bench, wrapped in a blanket. The only body parts of the figure visible are its feet, which display the wounds that, according to Christian tradition, were caused by the crucifixion of Jesus at the hands of the Romans. The statue is titled Jesus the Homeless, and, as you may imagine, has caused no shortage of uproar within the congregation. Some love it, including the church’s pastor, and some hate it. (BTW, the sculptor has a wonderful name that may resonate for some in this holiday season: Timothy Schmalz.)

What caught my attention when listening to this story is the power of this message. One goal of art, as with religion, is to take us outside of ourselves, to raise our awareness about things that we cannot otherwise see. The message that this statue projects is not the typical theology common to images found in churches - Jesus’s birth or death scenes, or decked out with glorious threads and haloes and rays of light.

Rather, the message here is, remember the needy! You who come to this well-kept suburban church, which could afford to spend $22,000 to purchase the art installation in memory of a deceased member, should remember that there are plenty of people in the world, good, deserving people, who cannot afford a home, much less one in a neighborhood like this. And this is a message that all of us who live in more comfortable environments would do well to remember.

And while some believe that this is an affront to the central character in Christianity, others see this as religious consciousness-raising par excellence. As the church’s spiritual leader Rev. David Buck puts it, "We believe that that's the kind of life Jesus had. He was, in essence, a homeless person."

Now of course, I am not here today to talk about Jesus, even though yesterday was Easter Sunday. Rather, I am going to talk about Pesah, which of course plays a role as the backdrop in the Christian bible for the events surrounding Jesus’ death.

However, I think that the symbolic intent conveyed by the statue is as valent here as it is in North Carolina, and in fact, one of the central mitzvot / commandments of Pesah, the consumption of matzah, is its spiritual analog.

Occasionally, I will admit that we have a problem in Judaism. We try to hit too many buttons at once. When you consider Pesah, for example, you can see how the central message of this holiday might be obscured amidst all the other noise. What are the themes of Pesah? There are several - this is a holiday with at least four names: Hag ha-Aviv (the festival of spring), Hag ha-Herut (the festival of freedom), and Hag ha-Matzot (the festival of flat, tasteless, cracker-like bread), and of course, Pesah, referring to the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb. But the central message of Pesah is even more specific than that. It is reflected in the following statement, which we say during the seder, right before we ask the Four Questions that get the conversation about slavery and freedom started:

הַא לַחְמָא עַנְיָא, דִּאֲכַלוּ אֲבָהָתַנָא בְּאַרְעָא דְּמִצְרַיִם.  כָּל דִּכְפִין, יֵיתֵי וְיֵיכוּל; כָּל דִּצְרִיךְ יֵיתֵי וִיפַסַּח.

Ha lahma anya di-akhalu avahatana be-ar’a demitzrayim.

Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul; kol ditzrikh yeitei veyifsah.

This is the bread of poverty that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.

Let all who are hungry, come and eat.

Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover.

Most of us probably rush by this statement on the way to more interesting territory in the Haggadah, or perhaps on the way to dinner, without thinking about it too deeply. It’s in Aramaic, and we all know that when we find ritual passages in Aramaic, it’s because the liturgical framers wanted us to understand. The passage refers to the Talmud, Tractate Ta’anit 20b. In enumerating the noble deeds performed by the great sage Rav Huna, the Gemara reports the following:

When Rav Huna was in possession of some medicament, he would take a pitcherful thereof, hang it on the door-post and say: “Whoever wishes to have some, let him come and take it.” … When he was about to sit down to a meal, he would open the doors, saying: “Anyone who desires to eat, let him come in and eat.”

What made Rav Huna a great sage (and not a merely good one) was his willingness to share with those in need. We echo those words when we open our seder, even before telling the Pesah story, by saying, in a language that (at least historically) the Jews understood better than Hebrew, “Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul,” let all who are hungry, come and eat.

We borrowed this text directly into the Haggadah because it speaks to the values that we highlight on this holiday. We should be more like Rav Huna. When we sit and discuss our departure from Egypt, an abundant meal awaiting us in the kitchen, we should not forget that we are a people whose nationhood was forged in slavery and oppression, and that we should remember (א) there are plenty of others out there who are still suffering, and (ב) that we might just as easily end up in Mitzrayim, the narrow place of Egypt, once again. It is our duty not just to recite this line, but to really mean it. If we do not open up our doors to those who lack food and shelter and clothing, then we must, in subsequent days and months, open up our hearts and our wallets.

And thus, reciting this line at the seder is far from the end of fulfilling our Passover obligation. Think about it for a moment: the first seder was nearly a week ago, and we’re still eating matzah, and (at least for the Ashkenazim) a range of meager foods.

Eating is so central to our lives - those of us who can afford to, do it almost all day long. It’s such a huge part of our personal and macro-economies that we often do not realize how omnipresent it is - how much time and energy we spend eating, or preparing, or shopping for, or growing and harvesting and transporting and all the other tasks associated with food.

So it is remarkable indeed that we eat this lehem oni, this bread of poverty, for eight whole days. Not just one or two evenings, but for about 2% of your calendar year.

Matzah is, or at least should be, something akin to the Jewish version of the homeless Jesus: a reminder: a symbol of what we have vs. what we might not have; a beacon calling us to be at once grateful for our freedom and our ability to dine like free people as well as mindful of those who have no freedom and cannot dine like we do.

Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul. This potent message of the seder continues to resonate, even as this festival winds to a close.

My sister, who is living in Budapest, Hungary this year, put together a seder for some family and friends last week. She told me that the matzah that she procured in Budapest was somehow much worse than the matzah that she has been accustomed to in the States.

Now, I’m not sure how that can be - matzah, lehem oni, the bread of poverty, is not something to be enjoyed. But whether you like eating matzah or not, and regardless of its quality and relative tastiness, the meaning of the matzah is consistent: we emerged from oppression so that we can extend a hand to others.

We do not often step over homeless people here in Great Neck, nor are we frequently approached by people asking for money on Middle Neck Road. But there are needy among us here, as there are everywhere. The matzah should remind us of that, as well as our obligation to be like Rav Huna, and figuratively, if not literally, open the doors to those in need.

 

And so, to conclude, we should use these last two days of Pesah (and for many of us the last days of consuming matzah until the next 14th of Nisan) to consider how we might emulate Rav Huna, how we might fulfill our obligation to care for those who have less than we do. How can we carry the message and symbolism of matzah into the other 98% of the year? Can we commit to the following?

• Bringing food to Temple Israel when our Chesed Connection collects, or directly to the food pantry at St. Aloysius church here in town
• Participating in Midnight Run, which we host here at Temple Israel, and helping with Hatzilu, which distributes food to those in need locally
• Donating to charitable organizations that feed the hungry (e.g. Mazon here in America, Meir Panim in Israel)
• Helping our children and grandchildren to understand the importance of giving by demonstrating our willingness to do so. Get them involved!
• Educate yourself on what the issues are surrounding hungry and homeless people. Find your own way to help out. Seek out other initiatives and promote them to your family and friends. Raise the bar of dialogue.

Don’t let the message of the matzah get lost in all the other messages of this season. Let all who are hungry, come and eat.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Monday, April 21, 2014.)

Four Essential Jewish Questions of Our Time - Shabbat HaGadol, 5773

Every year around this time, Rabbi Stecker and I find ourselves working very hard to help others with their sedarim. Starting a month before Pesah, we teach seder skills and material in a wide variety of formats and before many different audiences: the Men’s Club, the Nitzanim Family Connection, the Religious School Bet class, the Shabbat afternoon se’udah shelisheet crowd, and so forth. 

Pesah is, as I am sure many of you know, the most-practiced ritual of the Jewish year among American Jews. About 4 out of 5 of us show up to a seder of some sort, and for some of those Jews, this will be the ONLY Jewish experience that they will have in 5773; far more people come to a seder than seek forgiveness in the traditional ways on Yom Kippur.  For those of us who are regulars, who are committed to Jewish life, this is an opportunity to engage, and I encourage everybody here to reach out as ambassadors of Jewish living.

Related to that, I think that now is the time to start asking the hard questions about American Judaism, and talk about them around the seder table. After all, the seder is meant to be not only a meal, but also a discussion. It is modeled after the Greek symposium, an ancient type of dinner party that featured food, wine, discussion, and entertainment, all of which was enjoyed while reclining. We have the haggadah to guide us through our Jewish symposium. But the haggadah is only a guideline, a kind of framework: you can fulfill your Pesah obligation of “Vehigadta levinkha bayom hahu,” (Shemot / Exodus 13:8) of telling the story to your children on that day by reading it from the haggadah, but you can also fulfill it if you leave the printed page. The very word, “haggadah,” is derived from the same shoresh / Hebrew root of the commandment “vehigadta” in that verse; haggadah means telling, and does not necessarily mean reciting from a book.

Telling the story of Pesah, of traveling from slavery to freedom, usually raises a few questions. Well, four at least. But in fulfilling the obligation of “vehigadta levinkha,” of telling your children, should we not connect our modern world with our ancient tales? Here are four more questions for discussion, questions that we should all be asking around the table on Monday and Tuesday night:

1. On this Festival of Freedom, how will we ensure that our own contemporary freedom does not lessen, or indeed sever our connection with Judaism?

2. Is it indeed possible for us to continue to be Jewish while enjoying full assimilation into American society? Or is the only recourse to preserve our Jewish identity, as the Haredi world seems to believe, to self-segregate, i.e. to “enslave” ourselves, to curtail our independence?

3. What kind of Jewish world do we want in the future?

4. What are the things that we can do to make sure that our grandchildren have strong Jewish identities, and healthy, modern and open synagogue communities where they can practice comfortably?

And, like the traditional Four Questions of the seder, these can be summed up in one question: “Where are you headed, Jewishly speaking?” The question is to be asked, as it is to the Four Sons, in a manner that is both national and personal.

Let me tell you why these are the essential questions of our time.

Five years ago, Dr. Arnold Eisen, then the newly-minted Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, spoke here at Temple Israel. Responding to the state of the Conservative movement, he said that the decline in our numbers was not insurmountable, but that if things did not turn around in 5-10 years, the then-future prospects were not so good. Well, it’s been five years, and (Temple Israel’s relative stability notwithstanding) I have not detected any real change in the slope of that decline.

Numbers in the Reform movement and in Modern Orthodoxy are not much better. The only segment within Judaism that is growing rapidly is, of course, the Haredim, the fervently Orthodox.

There is no question that we Jews have greater freedom here and now than we have ever had; we are fully integrated into American society. There are few remaining barriers to Jews: We are not excluded from the best universities, as some of us were in the first half of the 20th century; we are welcome at the most prestigious workplaces and social forums in the nation; we occupy a third of the United States Supreme Court; the idea of a Jewish president is not beyond the realm of possibility; and much of non-Jewish America is willing not only to date us but to marry us as well.

There are no surprises here; we have come a long way in a few generations. Many of you know that statistics (from, for example, the National Jewish Population Survey) have shown the intermarriage rate hovering at about 50% for more than two decades. Related numbers show that children in intermarried families, on the whole, grow up with a far lower connection to Judaism. There are, of course, Jews who have married non-Jews who succeed in raising strongly-identified Jewish children, and there are many non-Jewish parents who are committed to raising Jewish children -- bringing their kids to synagogue, Hebrew school, and so forth -- but they are the exception, not the rule. 

But really, the issue is not intermarriage, which is I think merely a symptom of the greater problem. It’s about American Judaism in general, and particularly non-Orthodox Judaism. It’s time to think critically, not just about numbers, but the strength of our community’s connection to Judaism.

We know that Orthodoxy, and in particular Haredi Orthodoxy, is booming. They are growing rapidly, with many children per family, strong communal interconnection, and of course a zeal for Judaism and Jewish life. You may have read NY Times columnist David Brooks’ piece on this recently, a fawning account of his visit to black-hat Brooklyn titled “The Orthodox Surge.”

Brooks reports an excursion to Pomegranate, the top-shelf kosher grocery store that he likens to the specialty-food supermarket giant Whole Foods. I will not dwell on the strengths of Brooks’ argument, or its weaknesses. But in response, Jordana Horn of the Forward wrote an opinion piece that should be mandatory reading at your seder table. Ms. Horn describes herself as a committed Conservative Jew, and resents Mr. Brooks’ implication that Orthodoxy holds the Jewish future.

After pointing out that it is possible to be dedicated to Judaism and not Orthodox, she makes the following observations:

I fear that when my children grow up, they will encounter a world in which they will have to choose to be Orthodox or secular, and that no other options will exist — that while Conservative and Reform Jews were busy building gorgeous edifices of synagogues, they will have neglected to build communities that ensure their survival. 

I long for someone to stand up in Conservative and Reform synagogues and say, “Hey — if we want our egalitarian models of Judaism to have a fighting chance in the future, we need to think out of the box.

“We need to put our money where our mouths are when it comes to ensuring a Jewish future. We need to make sure our young congregants are on JDate. We need to make sure to reach out to and include Jewish singles and young families as much as we do senior citizens.

“We need to have a financial plan for making Jewish nursery school the best possible option, and an accessible one, for Jewish parents. We need Jewish day care in our synagogues for working parents so that the synagogue is seen as an indispensable part of life. We need to have infant and child care in every single service and program we offer.”

Ms. Horn is right on. And she could have said far more. Not just Chabad, but many variants of Orthodoxy have a tremendously impressive suite of outreach offerings that are easy to enter; they bring them right to you. They go where the Jews are, and they invite people in. Ladies and gentlemen, we say on two nights of every year, in front of all of our friends and family, “Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul,” “Let all who are hungry, come and eat.” But aren’t we just paying Aramaic lip service? Are we really working hard to bring people into our fold? 

And furthermore, are we working hard with the people who are already there at the seder table, young and old, intermarried and in-married, to give them the tools that they need to live authentically Jewish lives as mainstream Americans?

Many of you have heard me say this many times in this space that we in the Conservative movement are committed to Rabbi Mordecai Waxman’s slogan of “tradition and change.” You know that I am committed to the Judaism of the Torah and the Talmud, the faith which inspired our ancestors and sustained them through centuries of misery, poverty, persecution, and wandering across continents and oceans. You know that I hold steadfast to the principles that Moses Mendelssohn, as the first emancipated Jew, held dear in the middle of the 18th century when he successfully joined German society as a practicing Jew. You know that I reject the isolation that the Haredi world pursues, that I am committed to living as much as an American as a Jew, that I support the moderate approach to halakhah and interpreting our canonical texts through a lens that is at once traditional and modern and scholarly. You know that I, that we at Temple Israel, stand for open engagement with both the Torah and with science, with egalitarianism and modernity, with Israel and with America.

And yet I, like Jordana Horn, wonder if my daughter and her children and grandchildren will have to choose between the Jewish approach that is stuck in 18th-century Poland and the one that hangs bagel ornaments on Christmas trees.

So those are the four questions we should be asking our friends, our family, our children and grandchildren. Where are you going, Jewishly? 

And hey, maybe that’s OK with most of those 80% of American Jews who show up for a seder. Maybe they do not care if there is a middle ground to Judaism. But I’d like to think that they do, and that if we all reach out to them, just like Chabad is doing so successfully, maybe they would be happy to come around here once in awhile, and not just on a major holiday or a family simhah.

For extra credit, the followup question is this: If you do indeed want a middle path to Jewish life, what are you going to do to make sure it does not disappear? Are you going to marry a Jewish person, or insist on conversion for a non-Jewish partner, or at the very least, work to agree that said partner will commit to raising your children as Jews? Are you going to join a synagogue? Are you going to take your family on vacation to Israel, rather than Mexico? Are you going to make sure your children obtain a Jewish education? Are you going to challenge yourself to try on for size just one new mitzvah, one that is easy and meaningful to you, like lighting Shabbat candles or blessing your children on Friday night, or studying some Torah? Are you going to discuss with your children how important it is to you that your grandchildren know that they are Jewish and why?

After all, what is the use of freedom, and freedom to practice our religion, if there is only one variety to choose from, and that variety rejects the very freedom we enjoy, and the secular structures that make it possible?

From the second day of Pesah until Shavuot we count off seven weeks of Sefirat HaOmer, the counting of the sheaves of grain that our ancestors were commanded by the Torah to do. Although today we bring no sheaves, we are understand this period as one of self-discipline, of kabbalistic meditation on the emanations of God, and as a period of preparation for receiving the Torah on Mt. Sinai. It is a time of study, and as it seems likely that the theme for our Tikkun Leyl Shavuot will be an examination of the role and power of the qehillah qedoshah, the synagogue community, I urge you to begin to consider these themes as we launch into Pesah and beyond.

 Where are you going, Jewishly? Ask these questions around your seder table.  Shabbat shalom and hag sameah.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 3/23/2013.)

Where are your lines? - Shemini 5772

Two weeks ago, on the first night of Pesah, I did more or less what I do every year.  I went to the evening service here at Temple Israel at 6:30 and then went home to begin the seder with my family.  By 7:45 we were knee-deep in salt water and the rabbis of Benei Beraq.

At that time, about 18 miles away at Madison Square Garden, a seder was concluding, and the Exodus to the auditorium was about to begin.  You may have read about this in the New York Times: a family of Bruce Springsteen’s most loyal Jewish fans, unable to reconcile the inconvenient scheduling of Mr. Springsteen’s MSG show with nightfall on the 14th of Nissan, opted to hold a rock-and-roll themed seder at a restaurant above the Garden.  Thus they could fulfill their obligation to recall the departure from Egypt with matzah and maror and still worship at the altar of the hard-driving guitar  anthems of E Street.  And, in true Passover fashion, they did not delay the evening’s ritual, so that they could make it to their seats within the 18-minute margin.  You might say that they were “born to run.”

Now, I must confess two things: first, although I will always have a soft spot in my heart for rock & roll, and for big concerts, I have never been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen.  Second, that this is not within what I understand to be an traditional celebration of the Festival of Freedom, for several reasons.  But while the family’s loyalty to Springsteen is indeed impressive, I must say that their loyalty to Pesah is even more notable.  Why?  They could have skipped the seder altogether.  My decade of experience as clergy has taught me that in the choices that modern Jews make, the secular activity almost always wins out over the Jewish one: youth sports trump Shabbat, work trumps minyan, the PTA meeting trumps an adult learning class.  

Had they not held the seder, there would be no story here.  But they chose to mark their liberation from slavery with the traditional meal and discussion, even inviting the band members to join them (one did: saxophonist Jake Clemons, nephew to the late, legendary Clarence; he read from their original, Springsteen-themed haggadah, which they had created for the occasion, stumbling over the word “haroset.”  By the way, in the wake of the story in the New York Times, the Museum of Jewish Heritage requested the haggadah for their collection of 20th/21st century Jewish artifacts.)

And all I can say is, “Kol ha-kavod.”  All glory is due to this family.  Even though I would not do it this way, even though others might say that they were mocking tradition, this family stuck to their principles and ate their Hillel sandwiches in the way that made sense to them.  They had their matzah and ate it too...

This is the nature of Judaism: we all make choices.  And while there are people in the Jewish world who claim to speak for God, and will say, “It must be done THIS way,” and will be quick to point out all the “rules” that this family broke, the reality is that we all in some sense make the rules, based on a complicated, subjective mix of text, tradition, communal expectation, and personal autonomy.  As the Talmud tells us (Bava Metzi’a 59b, quoting Deut. 30:12), “Lo bashamayim hi.”  The decision for what is kosher is not found in heaven.  

****

Our parashah this morning, Parashat Shemini, captured a range of ideas in a few short chapters, and there are two items to which I would like to call your attention.

1.  Nadav and Avihu, two of Aaron’s sons, are swallowed up in fire because they did something wrong in performing priestly rituals.  In the face of their sudden, violent deaths, the Torah goes out of its way to point out that their father Aaron, the High Priest, is silent, and his silence seems to speak volumes.

2.  Chapter 11 contains a long list of animals that are kosher and not kosher, what we can eat and what we cannot.  As many of you know, the mammals and the fish have particular features -- split hooves and a rumen, or fins and scales -- that make them acceptable, while the birds are not given blanket rules but are merely mentioned by name as being “pure” (tahor) or “impure” (tamei).

What both of these stories teach us is that our lives and behavior are shaped by God-given lines - some things are in and some are out.  Rashi’s theory about Nadav and Avihu is that they were drunk, and God schmeisted them for a serious transgression, which the Torah describes immediately after Aaron’s notable silence.  But that is only one theory; the Torah does not really tell us.

There has been much ink spilled over the kashrut rules (some of which appear elsewhere in the Torah): one possibility, promoted by Maimonides, the 12th-century physician, is that the “pure” animals are healthier to eat, and that’s what they told us in Hebrew school when I was growing up, although I’ve never bought that.  Noted sociologist Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger (1966), points to the Torah’s interest in clear categories.  We are allowed to eat what is easily defined, and animals that do not fit neatly into one category or another are forbidden (like the pig, which has a split hoof but no rumen, or the camel, which has a rumen but no split hoof).

So yes, the Torah gives us lines.  But there is also a good deal of human interpretation involved with where these lines fall.  The “why,” the reasoning and/or spiritual justification for various mitzvot, is virtually always up for debate.  The “what” is less so, but still the 2,000 years of rabbinic interpretation have yielded various positions, some of which contradict each other.  

****

All of which brings me back to the Springsteen seder.  Faced with the challenge of two seemingly conflicting loyalties, The Boss’ biggest Jewish fans created a ritual that straddled the line between honoring Jewish tradition and living in the modern, secular world.  The latter has virtually no boundaries; the former has many.

And as I have already pointed out, that is what we ALL do.  Particularly here, in the Conservative movement, where fealty to tradition is greater than in Reform, and immersion in the wider world is greater than in much of Orthodoxy.

But there is something even more here.  The Torah’s lines are as much about food as they are about the human spirit.  On some level, whether conscious of it or not, whether we heed our internal moral guideposts or not, each of us wants to be good, to be holy, to be pure.  The message that the Torah sends, regardless of what we eat, is as follows: you have within your hands the power to make the right choice.  Leviticus (and the other material of Priestly authorship elsewhere in the Torah) urges us to separate the positive from the negative, the light from the dark, the good from the bad.  

Some of you know that I have a good friend and colleague, Rabbi Antonio di Gesu, who is the rabbi of the Jewish community of Japan.  (There are actually three rabbis in Tokyo -- the other two are both Chabad rabbis, one of whom is a messianist and the other is not, and they don’t speak to each other, much less to my friend.)  Japan is a particularly irreligious place.  There are some Shinto traditions and some Buddhist, but these do not really give the average Japanese person the guides to life the way that Judaism does.  

So Rabbi Antonio, in addition to serving the Jewish community, mostly expat Americans and Israelis, also serves a good number of non-Jewish Japanese seekers, people who are looking for something that their tradition does not offer.  They come to services, they come to his office with questions, they try Judaism on for size for a while.  Some stick around.  Perhaps what draws these typically young Japanese adults to our tradition, so alien to them, is the lines that we have, the physical and spiritual lines that are our guides to making us better people.

You see, we have a rich tradition of story and song, of text and context, of law and custom.  It is so much more than eating matzah and singing Dayyenu once a year.  We have the Torah, the Mishnah, the Gemara, the midrashim, the commentators, philosophers, poets, payyetanim / liturgical poets, hazzanim, and on and on.  We draw inspiration from writings that span millennia.  

Part of that body of text is law, yes.  There are many parts of the Jewish world for whom halakhah, Jewish law, where those physical lines are drawn, is the ultimate expression of their relationship to God.  Some might look at this parashah and see only what you can eat and what you can’t.  But the goal of Judaism is higher than that.  Ramban, aka Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, aka Nachmanides, the 13th-century Spanish commentator, urges us to extrapolate from what is stated in the Torah to what is not:  

“In matters about which God did not command you,” says Ramban, set your eyes to “do what is right and good in the eyes of God” [Deut. 6:18]... It is impossible to mention in the Torah the entirety of human conduct with neighbors and friends, in all business activities and all the improvement of society and of the state.” (Ramban, comment to Deuteronomy 6:18)

And after listing many explicit mitzvot / commandments, he continues, the Torah tells us to make good choices about the unstated things, says Ramban.  It is up to us to determine what the laws of kashrut imply about the rest of our choices.

That is our stock in trade as Jews.  Not kashrut, per se, but the wisdom and discipline that come with boundaries.  Our tradition, through its many channels and historical currents, offers the lines that we need, physical and spiritual.  How we relate to others.  How we honor our parents.  How we treat our business partners, our clients, our patients, our vendors. How we respect ourselves and our loved ones.  These things are as much a part of being Jewish as what we eat.

As we sail into the openness of the future, of the growing secular wave of American society, I challenge each of us to draw on our tradition to help us navigate.  There will always be a tension between attending the concert or the seder, the Shabbat haMishpahah service or basketball practice.  Let’s hope that we all find ways to bring some holiness into our lives, balancing whatever we need to balance to make it work.  Let’s make Ramban proud, and make the choices that are “right and good in the eyes of God.”  Where are your lines?

Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson


(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 4/21/2012.)