(Originally delivered on June 26, 2010.)
Dear God:
As You know, I returned on Thursday night from the United Synagogue’s New Directors’ Institute, a 3-day training seminar for educators taking new positions as Educational Directors at various synagogue schools. As You also know, my flight home was cancelled because there was a tornado (or something mighty close to it) in, of all places, Great Neck. As You must surely also know, there are downed trees all over our little peninsula, with many homes and other buildings damaged.
You may not know that I do not blame You for this mess, and all the moreso that I do not blame us. Yes, yes, I know that a tornado is a quote-unquote “act of God.” Yes, I know that You are given credit for powerful storms in the Tanakh and elsewhere in Jewish literature. Of course I know of Your promises to our ancestors, repeated throughout the Torah, that if we fulfill our obligations to you, we will receive good fortune, and that if we do not, the opposite will occur.
But I’ll tell You something. I am not going to get suckered into such a naïve understanding of Your ways. I am not like some religious leaders, Christian, Jewish and others, who take the theologically easy path, blaming the earthquake in Haiti or the flood in New Orleans on the evil deeds of the people of those locales. (OK, so there is no real comparison here - a few downed trees and power lines in a posh suburb may have inconvenienced us here a bit slightly, but the extent of destruction was nothing like those other two examples.) Nonetheless, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, natural disasters of all kinds - it is tempting to call these Your works.
You might know that my wife, Judy, was speaking to a woman in the street on Thursday evening, as they were surveying the damage in our neighborhood, and this woman said to Judy, “This is a punishment from God.”
I cannot accept that. I cannot accept that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah is inclined to be either deliberately or arbitrarily bloodthirsty. You are the Source of all good, the benevolent God who creates peace on high and down here, Mordecai Kaplan’s “power that makes for salvation.” You are the God who promised Avraham Avinu descendants as numerous as the grains of sand on the shore, Who redeemed us from Egypt and gave us our own land (and returned some of us to it once more in modern times.)
But are You not the same God Who flooded the world in the time of Noah, and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in a hail of fire and brimstone, who smote Judah’s sons Er and Onan, who slew the first-born of the Egyptians AND drowned their armies in the Sea of Reeds, who killed those responsible for the Molten Calf, who caused the Earth to swallow up the followers of Korah, who ordered us to blot out the Amalekites, and took away Saul’s crown when he failed to kill every single one of them out of mercy?
Are You not the same God before whom we recite at funerals the passage entitled tzidduq ha-din, the justification of the divine decree, in which we say, “You are just, O Lord, in ordering death and restoring to life, in Whose hand is the charge of all spirits.” Are You not the same God before whom we say on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, “Who shall come to a timely end, and who to an untimely end, who by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by wild beast?”
These stories and theological constructs speak powerfully to us. They tell us tales of our ancestors, and of who they were and, to some extent, who we are today.
Or, perhaps this was a theology that spoke to our ancestors. Perhaps fear of Your vengeful nature brought more people to the synagogue one thousand years ago, or even just two hundred.
But frankly, O God and God of our ancestors, although You are eternal, we are not. Times change, and our perspectives change. Thank God (thank You) for giving us Baruch Spinoza, and Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, and of course Kaplan, who gave to Your people new ways of understanding You.
Thank You for opening our minds and hearts to the possibility that Your contact with us is not a one-time Sinaitic revelation, but an ongoing one that continues to this moment. Thank You for granting us the idea that we are only open to You when we put no conditions on You. Thank God for the option to understand the Torah as the devoted work of Your people, who sought to understand You in their own time and in their own language and imagery, and the corollary possibility to re-interpret You and Your Torah for modernity.
Why am I letting You off so easy? Why am I perhaps allowing You to get away with murder?
Because, O Lord our God, I cannot let You take all the credit for bad things that happen, because if I did, then I would be in a real pickle. Despite the language of tzidduq hadin recited at funerals, justifying Your every verdict, can I with a pure heart tell a grieving son that God gave his beloved father the cancer that took him from this world? Can I tell a despondent mother that You took her daughter from this world at an early age because she committed some sort of wrong against You? No. That is ridiculous, offensive, and likely to engender more resentment, more anger, more denial of You and everything that we stand for.
There is a well-known Hasidic tale of Rebbe Levi Yitzhaq of Berditchev, who brought a din toire, a lawsuit against God for being responsible for the suffering of the Jewish people.
Well, my Lord, You will not be hearing from my lawyer any time soon, because I know that You are the source of good in this world; that You designed an orderly universe, that Creation is perfect.
We are imperfect, it is true, but that is not Your fault. We had a few glorious moments of perfection in Gan Eden, but things went rapidly downhill. I am sure that You are very disappointed in us.
And, while we are on the subject of disasters and disappointment, I am certain that you are really disappointed with the way that we have handled Your magnificent Creation. That oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, the one that is coating pelicans and causing tourists to re-think their summer travel plans, that is clearly not Your work. We did that ourselves, by being profligate with Your Creation, by digging holes where they were never meant to be dug, by engineering solutions that consider only the bottom line and not the Almighty on high, but most significantly, by designing our own lives such that they are NOT in harmony with Your own masterful design.
As you surely know, today in Parashat Balaq, Bil’am praised the Israelites with the famous phrase, Mah tovu ohalekha yaaqov, mishkenotekha yisrael, (Numbers 24:5) “How fair are your tents, O Jacob / Your dwelling places, O Israel.”
Your diligent servant Rashi told us that the Israelite tents are good because the entryways do not face each other. He was relying on the principle, described in the Talmud, that doors of residences should not face each other so that neighbors cannot readily see into each others’ homes.
But I think that Rashi pointed to something even greater than that. (And here is the point where my inner engineer pokes his head out.) Bil'am's praise of the Israelite's dwelling places tells us that they are good because they are well-designed, well-built; that they incorporate a respect for their neighbors and a respect for You. That is what makes them Godly, and what still makes us holy today, when we seek this order.
You, Lord, are the God of good, the God of order, not the God of disorder. Chaos must come from somewhere else.
Psalm 148, which we read this morning, as we do every morning, tells us that the order of Creation includes violent storms; but it cannot be true that it is ever Your intent to harm Your people out of vengeance.
And you know very well that this is not my idea, but has resonated with Jews for hundreds of years. Yes, on the High Holidays we chant the Untaneh Toqef, which warns of the various ways that we might perish during the New Year if we do not follow Your mitzvot. But we also chant the shelosh esrei middot, Your 13 attributes as quoted in Exodus:
“Adonai, Adonai, El rahum vehanun erekh apayim verav hesed ve-emet. Notzer hesed la-alafim, nosei avon vafesha vehata’a venaqeh.”
“The Lord, the Lord, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and granting pardon.”
Except that, as You know, God, the very end of that statement is truncated, because venaqeh does NOT mean, “and granting pardon.” On the contrary, the original text reads “venaqeh lo yenaqeh.” “He surely does NOT pardon, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children“… etc.
We changed that line! Our ancestors modified it for use in prayer, because they understood that you work through hesed, lovingkindness, and not through revenge. You gave us the Torah in love, and You continue to reveal Your word to us in love.
I do not know where natural disasters come from, or why we continue to suffer from them. But I am certain that they are not Your retribution for our human failings, because the God that loves us does not rise up in rage against us.
Please stay in touch.
Be-ahava,
Zissa Kalman ben Arye Leiv haLevi uFesya Leah.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Qorah 5770 - Standing with Israel Now
(Originally delivered on June 12, 2010.)
A story is told of the Texan who visits Israel, and is underwhelmed by the size of a kibbutz. "Let me tell you something, my friend," he says to his Israeli host. "On my ranch back in Texas, I can get in my car at dawn, start driving west, and not reach the end of the property before sundown."
"Oh," says the Israeli. "I used to have a car like that."
This is a perspective on the Israeli character that is best appreciated if you have been to Israel and are familiar with the land and its people. There are plenty of other perspectives regarding Israel, and some that have come to the fore in the past few weeks are especially troubling.
I confess to being a zealous Israel-phile and supporter of the Jewish state. Many of you know that I travel there about twice yearly (more if I can get away with it), and not just because my older son lives there. I love the state of Israel - the land, the people, the culture, the cities, the food, the climate; I love hiking the varied terrain of Israel; I love resonating with the holy sites and the archaeological wonders; I admire the entrepreneurial spirit; I embrace the prickly outside and the sweet inside of the Israeli persona. If I were an engineer and not a Conservative rabbi, I might be living there now. (One irony of the Jewish state: no work for Conservative rabbis or cantors.)
But more than all of that, I know that we need Israel - not the land, mind you, but the political entity. There are good, solid reasons for there to be a place that the Jewish people can call home, good reasons why Brooklyn is not the Promised Land. Some of these reasons are theological, but some have more to do with the words of Hatikva, Israel's national anthem: Lihyot am hofshi be-artzeinu - to be a free people in our own land.
Occasionally, it helps to remember that we live in diaspora, in somebody else's land. The events of the past couple of weeks have reminded me that threats are looming. Some of my colleagues and others in the pro-Israel camp tend to highlight threats, and I am often suspicious of their motives, and therefore suspect the validity of the threats. After all, fear is a strong motivator; it causes people to, among other things, write checks and call their representatives.
And yet, I am surely beginning to see a confluence of existential threats, and a kind of alarm has begun to sound in my head. I have watched these events unfold in horror and disappointment and frustration.
So you can probably guess at least two of the three items that I am about to mention:
1. Mavi Marmara
2. Helen Thomas
3. Peter Beinart
1. I am certain that do not need to describe the first item to you - this has been widely reported for the past two weeks. I must say that when I first heard the news headline (Israeli commandos shot and killed 9 "peace activists"), I was shocked; as more information filtered out, the case appeared far more complex than the initial headlines let on. No matter, of course; the damage was done. Just as the world still associates the name of the northern West Bank city Jenin with "massacre," and the name Mohammed al-Dura with the photograph of the Palestinian boy cowering with his father in the line of Israeli fire, even though both of these stories have been debunked, "Mavi Marmara" will heretofore always suggest, "Israel killed innocent civilians."
Never mind that this was clearly an attempt to provoke Israel to violence and more bad PR. Never mind that the activists were members of a Turkish fringe Islamist group that has been linked to Al Qaeda. Never mind that one of them radioed the provocative statement, "Shut up! Go back to Auschwitz" to Israeli naval authorities. In the court of world opinion, Israel loses again.
There will surely be more of these flotilla operations, and Israel will most likely respond in the same way. So that is the first item.
2. Ms. Helen Thomas, the so-called "Dean of the White House Press Corps," self-destructed this week when video footage surfaced of her saying that the Jews should "Get the hell out of Palestine," and furthermore that they should "go back to Poland and Germany." (If you have not seen this, you really should. It's truly, incomprehensibly awful.) Ms. Thomas is 89, and was (until this week) still working for the Hearst news corporation in the White House; she has been doing that since the Kennedy administration, and was the only member of the White House Press Corps who had a chair with her name on it (rather than the name of her news organization).
As painful as it was to watch her destroy her remarkable life (she was a groundbreaking reporter for a number of reasons, known for her red dress and incisive tongue), the real pain is the evidence that she brought to light regarding the relationship between some journalists and Israel. While there are many in the pro-Israel camp who have accused some media outlets of anti-Israel bias, that was not something that I was ready to embrace until this week. To be sure, there are many folks out there right now, smugly reciting, "I told you so."
It is, of course, unfair to paint journalists with one brush, and I am not cancelling my subscription to the New York Times. However, there were only a few news organizations, that had picked up this story late last week, and it did not appear in the Times, generally recognized as the American paper of record, until Tuesday, the day after she resigned. It makes one wonder about the following possibilities:
(a) Did the Times (which has a significant Jewish readership) not deem this story newsworthy? or
(b) Were they trying to downplay anti-Israel bias among journalists?
How many other Helen Thomases are there out there, among the ranks of journalists, authors, teachers, TV producers, and so forth? How many others might, when they let down their guard, say such hateful things? Maybe I'd rather not know the answer to that. So that's the second item.
3. The third item is the article that appeared a couple of weeks ago in the New York Review of Books by Jewish-American author Peter Beinart, which Rabbi Stecker mentioned in this space last week. In the article, entitled, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment," Beinart argues that major Jewish organizations in America are losing touch with the majority of younger American Jews over their Israel stance. Liberal Zionism, he claims, is slowly dying, while the children of secular zionists find it outrageous that their parents' generation does not see Israel's faults.
Perhaps more troubling, says Beinart, is the phenomenon of non-Orthodox Jews gradually disengaging from Israel. A physical manifestation of this is the observation that some have made in the Jewish Week regarding the Salute to Israel parade, which many of us attended three weeks ago. He says,
"[A study by the American Jewish Committee] found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach." The result may be, says Beinart, that soon enough, the only ones supporting Israel are the Orthodox. While one of our congregants has written a letter to the editor of the Jewish Week to point out that Temple Israel sent 170 members to the parade (look for it in next week's issue), the prevailing sentiment is that the majority of parade marchers were Orthodox, and I must confess that this has been my impression for a number of years.
Beinart also points out that this is part of a wider phenomenon - it is not merely disengagement from Israel but a general withdrawal from Jewish communal issues that plagues the non-Orthodox majority. We just do not seem to care as much about anything.
There have been no shortage of eloquent responses to Beinart's accusations. But I can tell you that from my perspective, he is right on. My siblings and peers are far less committed to Israel than our parents; their children will, most likely be even less so. So there is item three.
I am going to add one more to this list of threats, not because it is something that happened recently, but because I am hearing this organization's name pop up more and more frequently:
4. The Global BDS Movement
Boycott, divestment, sanctions.
This group seems to be the most successful in broadcasting a message that makes me squirm - that of isolation of and delegitimization of Israel.
Among other things, they say Israel's occupation of the West Bank meets the very definition of apartheid - that the law applies differently to different people.
They say the residents of Gaza are suffering.
They say the blockade against Gaza has accomplished nothing.
I do not have the time to argue these points individually, but there is always another side, and you get the picture.
Now it might be tempting to paint this group as a bunch of anti-Semites. In actuality, there are many Jews who support this idea. (Maybe some of you heard about the octogenarian Jewish Holocaust survivor Greta Berlin, founder of the Free Gaza movement and coordinator of the recent flotilla.) Their goal, however, is to continually hammer home the idea that Israel is illegitimate and deserves to be isolated from the rest of the world. And that message is now being broadcast far and wide.
These four threats call to mind the experience of Qorah in today's parashah. Qorah is a threat to the stability of Benei Yisrael; he accuses Moses and Aaron of taken advantage of their positions. (Num. 16:3) "Umadua titnase-u al qehal adonai" - Why do you raise yourselves above the Lord's congregation?" says Qorah.
Sometimes, threats are real, says the Torah. God evidently sees Qorah and his 250 followers as a true threat to the Mosaic hegemony; Ibn Ezra explains that the followers are piling on grievance - they are an assortment of grumblers and malcontents. The end of the episode seems, to our modern sensibilities, cruel - Qorah and his faction are swallowed up by the Earth, they go down to Sheol, and all is well and good again.
These existential threats to Israel, the external and the internal (i.e. within the Jewish community), seem to be multiplying, something like the Qorah rebellion. Unlike Moses, however, we cannot expect the earth to open up and swallow those advocating delegitimization. (And frankly, if that happened, I would be pretty freaked out.)
So how do we respond?
These threats must be countered. We at Temple Israel (and throughout American Jewry) need to work harder to promote Israel in our community and elsewhere. We need to go there.
To that end, one of the things that I will be doing in the coming year as the interim Director of the Youth House is leading a trip there with our teenagers during the February vacation. My intent is to raise enough money to subsidize Youth House members such that the price comes down from about $2700 to about $1500 for a nine-day trip. If we participate as a community, we can easily do this, and it will be a fantastic community-building and consciousness-raising experience for all involved.
Also, Rabbi Stecker and Cantor Frieder and I will soon be unveiling plans for a congregational trip to Israel, probably in August of 2011. This will be an opportunity for families to travel together and learn about and understand Israel as the multigenerational community that we are. Watch for that, and join us.
In addition to going there, we also need to invest our time and our money in pro-Israel activism here. Seek out organizations that suit you, and support them however you can (e.g. State of Israel Bonds dinner on Tuesday night; we will have a congregational trip to the AIPAC Policy Conference next May; then there's the Parade as well). But the worst thing that we can all do is to be silent, to be apathetic. You all understand the need for the continued existence of the State of Israel. Now is the time to stand up for her.
A story is told of the Texan who visits Israel, and is underwhelmed by the size of a kibbutz. "Let me tell you something, my friend," he says to his Israeli host. "On my ranch back in Texas, I can get in my car at dawn, start driving west, and not reach the end of the property before sundown."
"Oh," says the Israeli. "I used to have a car like that."
This is a perspective on the Israeli character that is best appreciated if you have been to Israel and are familiar with the land and its people. There are plenty of other perspectives regarding Israel, and some that have come to the fore in the past few weeks are especially troubling.
I confess to being a zealous Israel-phile and supporter of the Jewish state. Many of you know that I travel there about twice yearly (more if I can get away with it), and not just because my older son lives there. I love the state of Israel - the land, the people, the culture, the cities, the food, the climate; I love hiking the varied terrain of Israel; I love resonating with the holy sites and the archaeological wonders; I admire the entrepreneurial spirit; I embrace the prickly outside and the sweet inside of the Israeli persona. If I were an engineer and not a Conservative rabbi, I might be living there now. (One irony of the Jewish state: no work for Conservative rabbis or cantors.)
But more than all of that, I know that we need Israel - not the land, mind you, but the political entity. There are good, solid reasons for there to be a place that the Jewish people can call home, good reasons why Brooklyn is not the Promised Land. Some of these reasons are theological, but some have more to do with the words of Hatikva, Israel's national anthem: Lihyot am hofshi be-artzeinu - to be a free people in our own land.
Occasionally, it helps to remember that we live in diaspora, in somebody else's land. The events of the past couple of weeks have reminded me that threats are looming. Some of my colleagues and others in the pro-Israel camp tend to highlight threats, and I am often suspicious of their motives, and therefore suspect the validity of the threats. After all, fear is a strong motivator; it causes people to, among other things, write checks and call their representatives.
And yet, I am surely beginning to see a confluence of existential threats, and a kind of alarm has begun to sound in my head. I have watched these events unfold in horror and disappointment and frustration.
So you can probably guess at least two of the three items that I am about to mention:
1. Mavi Marmara
2. Helen Thomas
3. Peter Beinart
1. I am certain that do not need to describe the first item to you - this has been widely reported for the past two weeks. I must say that when I first heard the news headline (Israeli commandos shot and killed 9 "peace activists"), I was shocked; as more information filtered out, the case appeared far more complex than the initial headlines let on. No matter, of course; the damage was done. Just as the world still associates the name of the northern West Bank city Jenin with "massacre," and the name Mohammed al-Dura with the photograph of the Palestinian boy cowering with his father in the line of Israeli fire, even though both of these stories have been debunked, "Mavi Marmara" will heretofore always suggest, "Israel killed innocent civilians."
Never mind that this was clearly an attempt to provoke Israel to violence and more bad PR. Never mind that the activists were members of a Turkish fringe Islamist group that has been linked to Al Qaeda. Never mind that one of them radioed the provocative statement, "Shut up! Go back to Auschwitz" to Israeli naval authorities. In the court of world opinion, Israel loses again.
There will surely be more of these flotilla operations, and Israel will most likely respond in the same way. So that is the first item.
2. Ms. Helen Thomas, the so-called "Dean of the White House Press Corps," self-destructed this week when video footage surfaced of her saying that the Jews should "Get the hell out of Palestine," and furthermore that they should "go back to Poland and Germany." (If you have not seen this, you really should. It's truly, incomprehensibly awful.) Ms. Thomas is 89, and was (until this week) still working for the Hearst news corporation in the White House; she has been doing that since the Kennedy administration, and was the only member of the White House Press Corps who had a chair with her name on it (rather than the name of her news organization).
As painful as it was to watch her destroy her remarkable life (she was a groundbreaking reporter for a number of reasons, known for her red dress and incisive tongue), the real pain is the evidence that she brought to light regarding the relationship between some journalists and Israel. While there are many in the pro-Israel camp who have accused some media outlets of anti-Israel bias, that was not something that I was ready to embrace until this week. To be sure, there are many folks out there right now, smugly reciting, "I told you so."
It is, of course, unfair to paint journalists with one brush, and I am not cancelling my subscription to the New York Times. However, there were only a few news organizations, that had picked up this story late last week, and it did not appear in the Times, generally recognized as the American paper of record, until Tuesday, the day after she resigned. It makes one wonder about the following possibilities:
(a) Did the Times (which has a significant Jewish readership) not deem this story newsworthy? or
(b) Were they trying to downplay anti-Israel bias among journalists?
How many other Helen Thomases are there out there, among the ranks of journalists, authors, teachers, TV producers, and so forth? How many others might, when they let down their guard, say such hateful things? Maybe I'd rather not know the answer to that. So that's the second item.
3. The third item is the article that appeared a couple of weeks ago in the New York Review of Books by Jewish-American author Peter Beinart, which Rabbi Stecker mentioned in this space last week. In the article, entitled, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment," Beinart argues that major Jewish organizations in America are losing touch with the majority of younger American Jews over their Israel stance. Liberal Zionism, he claims, is slowly dying, while the children of secular zionists find it outrageous that their parents' generation does not see Israel's faults.
Perhaps more troubling, says Beinart, is the phenomenon of non-Orthodox Jews gradually disengaging from Israel. A physical manifestation of this is the observation that some have made in the Jewish Week regarding the Salute to Israel parade, which many of us attended three weeks ago. He says,
"[A study by the American Jewish Committee] found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach." The result may be, says Beinart, that soon enough, the only ones supporting Israel are the Orthodox. While one of our congregants has written a letter to the editor of the Jewish Week to point out that Temple Israel sent 170 members to the parade (look for it in next week's issue), the prevailing sentiment is that the majority of parade marchers were Orthodox, and I must confess that this has been my impression for a number of years.
Beinart also points out that this is part of a wider phenomenon - it is not merely disengagement from Israel but a general withdrawal from Jewish communal issues that plagues the non-Orthodox majority. We just do not seem to care as much about anything.
There have been no shortage of eloquent responses to Beinart's accusations. But I can tell you that from my perspective, he is right on. My siblings and peers are far less committed to Israel than our parents; their children will, most likely be even less so. So there is item three.
I am going to add one more to this list of threats, not because it is something that happened recently, but because I am hearing this organization's name pop up more and more frequently:
4. The Global BDS Movement
Boycott, divestment, sanctions.
This group seems to be the most successful in broadcasting a message that makes me squirm - that of isolation of and delegitimization of Israel.
Among other things, they say Israel's occupation of the West Bank meets the very definition of apartheid - that the law applies differently to different people.
They say the residents of Gaza are suffering.
They say the blockade against Gaza has accomplished nothing.
I do not have the time to argue these points individually, but there is always another side, and you get the picture.
Now it might be tempting to paint this group as a bunch of anti-Semites. In actuality, there are many Jews who support this idea. (Maybe some of you heard about the octogenarian Jewish Holocaust survivor Greta Berlin, founder of the Free Gaza movement and coordinator of the recent flotilla.) Their goal, however, is to continually hammer home the idea that Israel is illegitimate and deserves to be isolated from the rest of the world. And that message is now being broadcast far and wide.
These four threats call to mind the experience of Qorah in today's parashah. Qorah is a threat to the stability of Benei Yisrael; he accuses Moses and Aaron of taken advantage of their positions. (Num. 16:3) "Umadua titnase-u al qehal adonai" - Why do you raise yourselves above the Lord's congregation?" says Qorah.
Sometimes, threats are real, says the Torah. God evidently sees Qorah and his 250 followers as a true threat to the Mosaic hegemony; Ibn Ezra explains that the followers are piling on grievance - they are an assortment of grumblers and malcontents. The end of the episode seems, to our modern sensibilities, cruel - Qorah and his faction are swallowed up by the Earth, they go down to Sheol, and all is well and good again.
These existential threats to Israel, the external and the internal (i.e. within the Jewish community), seem to be multiplying, something like the Qorah rebellion. Unlike Moses, however, we cannot expect the earth to open up and swallow those advocating delegitimization. (And frankly, if that happened, I would be pretty freaked out.)
So how do we respond?
These threats must be countered. We at Temple Israel (and throughout American Jewry) need to work harder to promote Israel in our community and elsewhere. We need to go there.
To that end, one of the things that I will be doing in the coming year as the interim Director of the Youth House is leading a trip there with our teenagers during the February vacation. My intent is to raise enough money to subsidize Youth House members such that the price comes down from about $2700 to about $1500 for a nine-day trip. If we participate as a community, we can easily do this, and it will be a fantastic community-building and consciousness-raising experience for all involved.
Also, Rabbi Stecker and Cantor Frieder and I will soon be unveiling plans for a congregational trip to Israel, probably in August of 2011. This will be an opportunity for families to travel together and learn about and understand Israel as the multigenerational community that we are. Watch for that, and join us.
In addition to going there, we also need to invest our time and our money in pro-Israel activism here. Seek out organizations that suit you, and support them however you can (e.g. State of Israel Bonds dinner on Tuesday night; we will have a congregational trip to the AIPAC Policy Conference next May; then there's the Parade as well). But the worst thing that we can all do is to be silent, to be apathetic. You all understand the need for the continued existence of the State of Israel. Now is the time to stand up for her.
Magnum Farce
(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, June 11, 2010.)
As I write this column, the world is up in arms about Israel's move to board the flotilla of ships headed for Gaza with supplies. Spin factories on both sides of the issue are churning out video, emails, and press releases to demonstrate that Israel is either the guilty aggressor or innocent self-defender. The real story here is not the boats or the propaganda or even the body count; the real story is the tremendous gullibility of all parties involved.
While I cannot claim to possess any inside information about this incident, I have heard/seen/read enough to say confidently that Israel made a tactical error, as she sometimes does. Defense Minister Ehud Barak chose not to take any chances; they were going to pull those ships into Ashdod by hook or by crook. By sending out Blackhawk helicopters and lowering marine commandos onto the ships, the Israelis walked right into a trap that was so obviously set for them. The goal of this flotilla was not to bring supplies to Gaza. Rather, it was a decidedly un-clever ruse to provoke a heavy-handed Israeli response that would bring international condemnation, and the Israelis performed brilliantly, exactly on cue.
And, sticking to the script as well were all of the usual suspects, chiming in with condemnation from all corners of the globe. EU nations, the Arab world, and the UN all jumped at the opportunity to criticize the Jewish state one more time. Here's another brick in the delegitimization wall.
But worst of all is the press. Always seeking the sensationalist angle and never the underlying story, the ad nauseam drumbeat of simple math or analogy (e.g. Israel + "humanitarian" activists = massacre, or Israeli : Palestinian :: oppressor : victim) fuels the world's misunderstandings. By the time this column is published, the news cycle will already have left the saga of the Mavi Marmara behind; whatever emerges as a result of investigations in the coming year will be largely ignored. Thanks to the need to sell advertising space, the bad guy beating up the good guy story always wins. Where is the analysis that upends this farce? Where are the probing interviews with the pro-Palestinian activists that ask the tough questions? Who will uncover the true motivations behind these "peace activists," who were clearly preparing for war?
None of this was unpredictable. Everything went according to the same tired plan. And regardless of the facts, guess who comes out looking bad?
Meanwhile, Israel's current government channels its talent into maintaining the outrage against Iran's nuclear weapons, which have been nearing completion for some time now. The two-state solution, Israel's only real choice for the long run, is apparently on the table only via lip service.
Now is the time to think strategically. Baqesh shalom verodfehu, says the Psalmist. Seek peace and pursue it. Let's hope that somebody in Jerusalem, the city of peace, hears that message echoing through its ancient walls.
As I write this column, the world is up in arms about Israel's move to board the flotilla of ships headed for Gaza with supplies. Spin factories on both sides of the issue are churning out video, emails, and press releases to demonstrate that Israel is either the guilty aggressor or innocent self-defender. The real story here is not the boats or the propaganda or even the body count; the real story is the tremendous gullibility of all parties involved.
While I cannot claim to possess any inside information about this incident, I have heard/seen/read enough to say confidently that Israel made a tactical error, as she sometimes does. Defense Minister Ehud Barak chose not to take any chances; they were going to pull those ships into Ashdod by hook or by crook. By sending out Blackhawk helicopters and lowering marine commandos onto the ships, the Israelis walked right into a trap that was so obviously set for them. The goal of this flotilla was not to bring supplies to Gaza. Rather, it was a decidedly un-clever ruse to provoke a heavy-handed Israeli response that would bring international condemnation, and the Israelis performed brilliantly, exactly on cue.
And, sticking to the script as well were all of the usual suspects, chiming in with condemnation from all corners of the globe. EU nations, the Arab world, and the UN all jumped at the opportunity to criticize the Jewish state one more time. Here's another brick in the delegitimization wall.
But worst of all is the press. Always seeking the sensationalist angle and never the underlying story, the ad nauseam drumbeat of simple math or analogy (e.g. Israel + "humanitarian" activists = massacre, or Israeli : Palestinian :: oppressor : victim) fuels the world's misunderstandings. By the time this column is published, the news cycle will already have left the saga of the Mavi Marmara behind; whatever emerges as a result of investigations in the coming year will be largely ignored. Thanks to the need to sell advertising space, the bad guy beating up the good guy story always wins. Where is the analysis that upends this farce? Where are the probing interviews with the pro-Palestinian activists that ask the tough questions? Who will uncover the true motivations behind these "peace activists," who were clearly preparing for war?
None of this was unpredictable. Everything went according to the same tired plan. And regardless of the facts, guess who comes out looking bad?
Meanwhile, Israel's current government channels its talent into maintaining the outrage against Iran's nuclear weapons, which have been nearing completion for some time now. The two-state solution, Israel's only real choice for the long run, is apparently on the table only via lip service.
Now is the time to think strategically. Baqesh shalom verodfehu, says the Psalmist. Seek peace and pursue it. Let's hope that somebody in Jerusalem, the city of peace, hears that message echoing through its ancient walls.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Shavuot 5770 - Four Good Reasons to come to Synagogue
(Originally delivered on the first day of Shavuot, May 19, 2010.)
Just eleven days ago, on Shabbat Parashat Behar/Behuqqotai, I spoke here about the importance of coming to the synagogue, of families participating together in Shabbat services and Religious School and the Youth House.
A congregant came to me after this sermon to point out the following: yes, I made a clear case for the value of participating. If the goal is to endow our children with Jewish knowledge and identity so that they will pass these things along to their own children, regular facetime at synagogue is mandatory. Judaism will not seed itself in your child; it must be tended.
But, this person said, I neglected to explain why here, why at Temple Israel, why with a room full of people, some of whom are not friends or relatives, some who are complete strangers? Why not at home? After all, some people hold services in their homes, and today anybody can hire a rabbi who will train your child and perform a Bar Mitzvah at home, or on a beach in Mexico, or on a ski slope in Colorado, or even at the Kotel in Jerusalem. Can we not fulfill these obligations independently of one another? Why do we need this room, this building?
I will add to her question the following: some of you may be aware of a new phenomenon, so-called "independent minyanim." There are 60 or more of these independent minyanim that have sprung up all over North America in the last decade. These are groups of generally younger adult Jews that gather on Shabbat just to pray - in a private home or a rented space - and maybe have a potluck lunch together after. There is nothing else to the congregation - no dues, no Hebrew School, no committees, no employees, no board, and so forth. Some of these minyanim, like the flagship Kehillat Hadar on the Upper West Side, have been tremendously successful. Why not just daven in a minyan when you need to communicate with God? Why pay costly membership dues to a full-service community center like Temple Israel?
Individualism is the hallmark of American society; Alexis de Tocqueville identified this when he visited the United States in the 1830s. He furthermore noted how religion and individualism aided and abetted each other in a way that was unknown in his native France. The freedom of religion in the New World enabled a flowering of religious expression, something that was unthinkable in Europe.
Although de Tocqueville did not investigate American Judaism, we too are subject to the same forces that opened up Christianity on this side of the Atlantic. American Jewry, unlike the rest of the world, never had chief rabbis. We have never had a hierarchical chain of Jewish command. In fact, in the early years, there was virtually no rabbinic control in America. And that led, as it did with Christianity, to a gradient of Jewish options and patterns of Jewish behavior, unheard of in the Old World.
Dr. Jonathan Sarna, in his recent book titled, fittingly, American Judaism, points to the following example: among the 23 Sephardic Jews, originally from Holland, that landed as refugees in New Amsterdam in 1654, there were two extremes. One of them, Solomon Pietersen, soon became the first intermarried Jew on American soil; his children were baptized, although it is not clear that he converted away from Judaism. At the other end of the continuum, Asser Levy was clearly devoted to maintaining Judaism and Jewish practice, observing Shabbat and kashrut (although I'm not sure how he managed that with neither a kosher butcher nor the Vaad Harabonim of Queens).
So goyish was this New World that its first Torah scroll, which arrived from Holland in 1655, was sent back in 1663, leading historians to conclude that they could not make a minyan. (Incidentally, the congregation that this handful of Jews founded, the oldest in America, is still today called "Shearith Israel," or "she-erit yisrael," the remainder of Israel, because they saw themselves as being survivors who had only barely made it to freedom in the New World, or perhaps because they were those who had survived that same freedom.)
356 years into the American Jewish experiment, freedom is still the operating principle. We still have no chief rabbi, and sometimes, depending on where you are, it is difficult to make a minyan. But the remarkable thing about American Jews is that we have have maintained the same continuum of identification. At one end stand the most fervent, the isolated Haredi groups in Brooklyn who only speak Yiddish and never mix with anybody else. At the other, people who were born to Jewish parents, but renounce all forms of Jewish identity. And all the rest of us, all 5 million of us, are somewhere in-between.
Meanwhile, for much of the 20th century, as Bar Mitzvah became, for American Jews, more about the party and less about the religious significance of the transition to adulthood under Jewish law, synagogues developed a monopoly on the process. If you wanted your child to have a Bar Mitzvah (and for most of the last century there was no "bat" for the majority of American Jews; some of you might have noticed that Elena Kagan was the first bat mitzvah at Lincoln Square Synagogue in 1972), then you had to belong to a synagogue. And, of course, if you wanted High Holiday tickets, membership was required.
But no more. High Holidays, even Yizkor, mean less to our children. Most of you will be here tomorrow - take careful note of who shows up just for Yizkor. And synagogues no longer have a lock on the Bar Mitzvah process. Chabad will take any boy, in whatever state he arrives, and "bar mitzvah" him (and I deliberately use the verb form of that word). Effectively for free.
We have many more options for religious involvement today than we ever did. That can be a good thing. But it also has led to a diffusion of the strength of institutions like Temple Israel.
Today, only about half of us at any given time belong to Jewish institutions like this one. The rest join when they need to for various reasons, or rely on open spiritual points of access, or perhaps simply have no use for synagogues.
Given all of the above, I ask once again, "Why should anyone bother with being part of a complex, multi-generational community such as ours?"
I am going to give you four answers, each drawing on a quote from Jewish literature.
Number 1. Torah
Today we celebrate our having received the Torah on Mt. Sinai. Of note is the fact that we did not receive the Torah as individuals, standing at the foot of the mountain alone, but that we received the Torah as a people, as individuals answering in one voice, rising to the challenge of this new set of laws with the first-person plural promise (Exodus 24:7), "Na'aseh venishma," we will faithfully do it. To this day, many Jewish rituals require minyan, indicating that communal participation is an essential part of the Jewish equation. Our Shabbat morning re-creation of ma'amad har sinai, standing at Sinai, when we read from the Torah together, is a communal echo of the actual event, but the revelation of Torah is an ongoing phenomenon, one that we all participate in together.
We are one people, who received (and continue to receive) the Torah together, and follow its mitzvot together.
Number 2. Ruth
We read tomorrow from Megillat Rut, the story of the first convert to Israelite peoplehood. When the Moabitess Ruth is told by Naomi, her Israelite mother-in-law, to stay with her own people, Ruth says (Ruth 1:16), "Amekh ami velohayikh elohai," your people are my people and your God my God. We share the collective experience of peoplehood. Yes, there are many different types of Jews, from many places, that speak many languages and worship differently. But we are all connected in a way that defies American individualism. We share a common heritage, a common story, and of course one God.
Ruth is, in Biblical parlance, a "sojourner;" in tanakhic language, a resident alien who dwells among Israelites, making her subject to the laws of the Torah as well. She understands that joining with this people comes with obligations.
It is the community, this sacred community that gives our lives structure and meaning. That is one reason why Jews have always belonged to synagogues, and that is why we must come here and participate.
Number 3. The Blessing of Bil'am
"Mah tovu ohalekha ya'aqov / Mishkenotekha Yisrael." How fair are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings, O Israel! (Numbers 24:5)
These are the words with which Bil'am ben Be'or blessed the Israelites when sent to curse them by a different Moabite, Balaq, the king of Moab. Bil'am was surely speaking about tents that were zoned for residential use, not synagogues (because, frankly, there were no synagogues in the time of the Torah). However, the word "mishkenotekha" suggest the "mishkan," the tabernacle, God's dwelling place on earth.
We say these words when we enter a synagogue, not when we enter our homes, because even though you might be able to worship in your home, we look to the synagogue as the center of our community. This is not just another place to worship, it is a "miqdash me'at," a building endowed with a modicum of qedushah, holiness, from on high.
Number 4. Not separating oneself
We read in Pirqei Avot (2:5) a teaching of Hillel, the first century sage: "Al tifrosh min hatzibbur," do not withdraw from the community. Commentators illuminate this simple rabbinic command by saying that by isolating yourself, you might spare yourself some tzuris, the problems of others and the issues and politics surrounding any communal venture. But you will then also miss out on the happy times as well.
A community not only worships together and receives the Torah together. We also celebrate together and grieve together, comfort one another and exchange good will and swap jokes and schmooze and do all of the things that members of a community do in the interstices of ritual structure. True, you do not need to do those things here. But we live in a devoutly independent era, one in which many of the bonds that have historically brought us together have been severed. We need each other, now more than ever.
Furthermore, Jewish learning and engagement with the words of Torah and rabbinic commentary and midrashim and the music and the art and the culture are all essential pieces of the identity puzzle. We are not Jews for a few hours per week. We are Jewish all the time, and the commandments to love your neighbor as yourself and to return your enemy's donkey are as much a part of the fabric of Jewish life as the obligation to light Shabbat candles or drink four cups of Kosher for Passover wine.
* * * *
Community, togetherness, Am Yisrael - these are essential features of Judaism. Without each other, we will soon cease to be Jews.
My friends, this ain't the Middle Ages, when Jews were confined to ghettos and subjected to rabbinic authority exclusively. We live in an open world, a world of choices, one without borders, as you might recall having heard me say before. But all the more so - WITHOUT the confines that defined the pre-modern Jewish world, we need to actively identify with others - to pray with them, to rub elbows with them at kiddush, to learn with them together in Religious School or the Youth House or my Sunday morning Mishnah class. If we do not seek these opportunities out, they will never present themselves.
Although this might be counter-intuitive in the age of the iPod, Judaism de-emphasizes the "I," and favors the "we." The synagogue is a kind of "wePod." And it plays the following tunes:
Na'aseh venishma, Amekh ami velohayikh elohai, Mah tovu ohalekha ya'aqov, and Al tifrosh min hatzibbur.
This is the formula for Jewish community, and the formula for Jewish life. Make it yours as well.
Just eleven days ago, on Shabbat Parashat Behar/Behuqqotai, I spoke here about the importance of coming to the synagogue, of families participating together in Shabbat services and Religious School and the Youth House.
A congregant came to me after this sermon to point out the following: yes, I made a clear case for the value of participating. If the goal is to endow our children with Jewish knowledge and identity so that they will pass these things along to their own children, regular facetime at synagogue is mandatory. Judaism will not seed itself in your child; it must be tended.
But, this person said, I neglected to explain why here, why at Temple Israel, why with a room full of people, some of whom are not friends or relatives, some who are complete strangers? Why not at home? After all, some people hold services in their homes, and today anybody can hire a rabbi who will train your child and perform a Bar Mitzvah at home, or on a beach in Mexico, or on a ski slope in Colorado, or even at the Kotel in Jerusalem. Can we not fulfill these obligations independently of one another? Why do we need this room, this building?
I will add to her question the following: some of you may be aware of a new phenomenon, so-called "independent minyanim." There are 60 or more of these independent minyanim that have sprung up all over North America in the last decade. These are groups of generally younger adult Jews that gather on Shabbat just to pray - in a private home or a rented space - and maybe have a potluck lunch together after. There is nothing else to the congregation - no dues, no Hebrew School, no committees, no employees, no board, and so forth. Some of these minyanim, like the flagship Kehillat Hadar on the Upper West Side, have been tremendously successful. Why not just daven in a minyan when you need to communicate with God? Why pay costly membership dues to a full-service community center like Temple Israel?
Individualism is the hallmark of American society; Alexis de Tocqueville identified this when he visited the United States in the 1830s. He furthermore noted how religion and individualism aided and abetted each other in a way that was unknown in his native France. The freedom of religion in the New World enabled a flowering of religious expression, something that was unthinkable in Europe.
Although de Tocqueville did not investigate American Judaism, we too are subject to the same forces that opened up Christianity on this side of the Atlantic. American Jewry, unlike the rest of the world, never had chief rabbis. We have never had a hierarchical chain of Jewish command. In fact, in the early years, there was virtually no rabbinic control in America. And that led, as it did with Christianity, to a gradient of Jewish options and patterns of Jewish behavior, unheard of in the Old World.
Dr. Jonathan Sarna, in his recent book titled, fittingly, American Judaism, points to the following example: among the 23 Sephardic Jews, originally from Holland, that landed as refugees in New Amsterdam in 1654, there were two extremes. One of them, Solomon Pietersen, soon became the first intermarried Jew on American soil; his children were baptized, although it is not clear that he converted away from Judaism. At the other end of the continuum, Asser Levy was clearly devoted to maintaining Judaism and Jewish practice, observing Shabbat and kashrut (although I'm not sure how he managed that with neither a kosher butcher nor the Vaad Harabonim of Queens).
So goyish was this New World that its first Torah scroll, which arrived from Holland in 1655, was sent back in 1663, leading historians to conclude that they could not make a minyan. (Incidentally, the congregation that this handful of Jews founded, the oldest in America, is still today called "Shearith Israel," or "she-erit yisrael," the remainder of Israel, because they saw themselves as being survivors who had only barely made it to freedom in the New World, or perhaps because they were those who had survived that same freedom.)
356 years into the American Jewish experiment, freedom is still the operating principle. We still have no chief rabbi, and sometimes, depending on where you are, it is difficult to make a minyan. But the remarkable thing about American Jews is that we have have maintained the same continuum of identification. At one end stand the most fervent, the isolated Haredi groups in Brooklyn who only speak Yiddish and never mix with anybody else. At the other, people who were born to Jewish parents, but renounce all forms of Jewish identity. And all the rest of us, all 5 million of us, are somewhere in-between.
Meanwhile, for much of the 20th century, as Bar Mitzvah became, for American Jews, more about the party and less about the religious significance of the transition to adulthood under Jewish law, synagogues developed a monopoly on the process. If you wanted your child to have a Bar Mitzvah (and for most of the last century there was no "bat" for the majority of American Jews; some of you might have noticed that Elena Kagan was the first bat mitzvah at Lincoln Square Synagogue in 1972), then you had to belong to a synagogue. And, of course, if you wanted High Holiday tickets, membership was required.
But no more. High Holidays, even Yizkor, mean less to our children. Most of you will be here tomorrow - take careful note of who shows up just for Yizkor. And synagogues no longer have a lock on the Bar Mitzvah process. Chabad will take any boy, in whatever state he arrives, and "bar mitzvah" him (and I deliberately use the verb form of that word). Effectively for free.
We have many more options for religious involvement today than we ever did. That can be a good thing. But it also has led to a diffusion of the strength of institutions like Temple Israel.
Today, only about half of us at any given time belong to Jewish institutions like this one. The rest join when they need to for various reasons, or rely on open spiritual points of access, or perhaps simply have no use for synagogues.
Given all of the above, I ask once again, "Why should anyone bother with being part of a complex, multi-generational community such as ours?"
I am going to give you four answers, each drawing on a quote from Jewish literature.
Number 1. Torah
Today we celebrate our having received the Torah on Mt. Sinai. Of note is the fact that we did not receive the Torah as individuals, standing at the foot of the mountain alone, but that we received the Torah as a people, as individuals answering in one voice, rising to the challenge of this new set of laws with the first-person plural promise (Exodus 24:7), "Na'aseh venishma," we will faithfully do it. To this day, many Jewish rituals require minyan, indicating that communal participation is an essential part of the Jewish equation. Our Shabbat morning re-creation of ma'amad har sinai, standing at Sinai, when we read from the Torah together, is a communal echo of the actual event, but the revelation of Torah is an ongoing phenomenon, one that we all participate in together.
We are one people, who received (and continue to receive) the Torah together, and follow its mitzvot together.
Number 2. Ruth
We read tomorrow from Megillat Rut, the story of the first convert to Israelite peoplehood. When the Moabitess Ruth is told by Naomi, her Israelite mother-in-law, to stay with her own people, Ruth says (Ruth 1:16), "Amekh ami velohayikh elohai," your people are my people and your God my God. We share the collective experience of peoplehood. Yes, there are many different types of Jews, from many places, that speak many languages and worship differently. But we are all connected in a way that defies American individualism. We share a common heritage, a common story, and of course one God.
Ruth is, in Biblical parlance, a "sojourner;" in tanakhic language, a resident alien who dwells among Israelites, making her subject to the laws of the Torah as well. She understands that joining with this people comes with obligations.
It is the community, this sacred community that gives our lives structure and meaning. That is one reason why Jews have always belonged to synagogues, and that is why we must come here and participate.
Number 3. The Blessing of Bil'am
"Mah tovu ohalekha ya'aqov / Mishkenotekha Yisrael." How fair are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings, O Israel! (Numbers 24:5)
These are the words with which Bil'am ben Be'or blessed the Israelites when sent to curse them by a different Moabite, Balaq, the king of Moab. Bil'am was surely speaking about tents that were zoned for residential use, not synagogues (because, frankly, there were no synagogues in the time of the Torah). However, the word "mishkenotekha" suggest the "mishkan," the tabernacle, God's dwelling place on earth.
We say these words when we enter a synagogue, not when we enter our homes, because even though you might be able to worship in your home, we look to the synagogue as the center of our community. This is not just another place to worship, it is a "miqdash me'at," a building endowed with a modicum of qedushah, holiness, from on high.
Number 4. Not separating oneself
We read in Pirqei Avot (2:5) a teaching of Hillel, the first century sage: "Al tifrosh min hatzibbur," do not withdraw from the community. Commentators illuminate this simple rabbinic command by saying that by isolating yourself, you might spare yourself some tzuris, the problems of others and the issues and politics surrounding any communal venture. But you will then also miss out on the happy times as well.
A community not only worships together and receives the Torah together. We also celebrate together and grieve together, comfort one another and exchange good will and swap jokes and schmooze and do all of the things that members of a community do in the interstices of ritual structure. True, you do not need to do those things here. But we live in a devoutly independent era, one in which many of the bonds that have historically brought us together have been severed. We need each other, now more than ever.
Furthermore, Jewish learning and engagement with the words of Torah and rabbinic commentary and midrashim and the music and the art and the culture are all essential pieces of the identity puzzle. We are not Jews for a few hours per week. We are Jewish all the time, and the commandments to love your neighbor as yourself and to return your enemy's donkey are as much a part of the fabric of Jewish life as the obligation to light Shabbat candles or drink four cups of Kosher for Passover wine.
* * * *
Community, togetherness, Am Yisrael - these are essential features of Judaism. Without each other, we will soon cease to be Jews.
My friends, this ain't the Middle Ages, when Jews were confined to ghettos and subjected to rabbinic authority exclusively. We live in an open world, a world of choices, one without borders, as you might recall having heard me say before. But all the more so - WITHOUT the confines that defined the pre-modern Jewish world, we need to actively identify with others - to pray with them, to rub elbows with them at kiddush, to learn with them together in Religious School or the Youth House or my Sunday morning Mishnah class. If we do not seek these opportunities out, they will never present themselves.
Although this might be counter-intuitive in the age of the iPod, Judaism de-emphasizes the "I," and favors the "we." The synagogue is a kind of "wePod." And it plays the following tunes:
Na'aseh venishma, Amekh ami velohayikh elohai, Mah tovu ohalekha ya'aqov, and Al tifrosh min hatzibbur.
This is the formula for Jewish community, and the formula for Jewish life. Make it yours as well.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Behar-Behuqqotai 5770: Shemittah and the Jewish Child
(Originally delivered on May 8, 2010.)
Shabbat shalom!
Some of you may have noticed that during the past year my appearances in this space at this time have been few and far between. It has been somewhat difficult for Rabbi Stecker and I to find opportunities for me to give a sermon on Shabbat morning because of my other commitments, specifically the Machon Alone service, which is for 5th-7th graders, the Shabbat HaMishpahah program, which is for all the students in our Religious School, and the Adult Learners' service, which is for anybody else who wants to learn some of the history, meaning, structure, and mechanics of the Shabbat morning service. All of these things are important - they each serve a group of learners. And learning, my friends, is where it's at, Jewishly speaking.
Why, after all, do we celebrate Bar or Bat Mitzvah? It is not merely about the party, or even about the Saturday morning demonstration of a child's abilities. It is about acknowledging that the Bar/t mitzvah has achieved enough learning to join the ranks of Jewish adulthood.
Amy, who has learned a few things from me and a few things from her other teachers, has learned the most from her parents, and that is how it should be. Her family is committed to Jewish learning more than most, perhaps exemplified by her mother Moji's many years of teaching at the Waxman Youth House, which is a truly unique learning environment located just across the parking lot.
Amy told us this morning about the shemittah year, the Shabbat for the land. With her permission, I am going to use her devar Torah as a jumping-off point for a slightly different discussion.
But first, here is a piece of ancient wisdom about fertilizer:
Mr. Cohen retires and moves south. He buys a home in rural Alabama, adjacent to farm land. One day, as he is sitting on his front porch, one of his neighbors drives by in a tractor, pulling a cart full of an unpleasant-smelling brown substance.
"Howdy, Mr. Cohen," says the farmer. "Hello, my friend," replies Cohen. "Tell me, what's in the cart?"
"That's cow manure," says the farmer.
Says Cohen, "Oh. And what do you do with it?"
"Well, Ah spread it over the strawberries."
Cohen replies, "My friend, you should stop by our house one Sunday morning. We use sour cream."
Some of you have no doubt seen me working in the garden in front of our house (not on Shabbat, of course!), as you are driving by on Old Mill Rd. Like Amy, I too love to garden.
When we moved in, three summers ago, that garden was full of cherry tomatoes. They were completely untended - no water, no cages to climb on, the vines were crawling all over each other. It looked as though they had seeded themselves from tomatoes that had grown there the previous year. I picked as many as I could, but the vines were full, and many were falling off and moldering on the ground. It was an unexpected bounty of what my father (also an avid gardener) likes to call "volunteers" - they simply appeared.
Back for a moment to the point that Amy made. For six years, says the Torah, we tend the land. We work it hard, and we harvest its bounty. In the seventh year, we do not work the land, and yet we are still able to eat what grows naturally, the "volunteers." OK, so you're thinking, that doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, in today's world of refrigeration, factory farms, and produce shipped from all over the world to keep supermarkets stocked with out-of-season items year-round, it might be difficult to see this as a hardship. But in ancient Israel it must have been quite a challenge. One midrash tells us that the shemittah year is the great economic equalizer. That is, in the seventh year of the cycle, rich and poor alike must scavenge for food, eating whatever they can find.
Farming is, undeniably, a difficult way to make a living. (Are there any farmers here? Virtually all our ancient ancestors were.) Farmers know that agriculture is a business of very slim margins, very demanding schedules, and a precarious lifestyle that rises and falls with the amount of rain.
I am going to propose the following: that raising a child to be a decent human being is not unlike raising a successful crop of tomatoes, or corn, or soybeans. In each case, constant care and attention is required. The environment must be continually monitored, and adjustments must be made when necessary. Proper amounts of nutrition and other supplies must be purchased and applied correctly.
And all the more so for raising a Jewish child to be a Jewish adult, a knowledgeable, self-aware Jewish adult with a strong identity, who seeks out Jewish friends, Jewish activities, Jewish institutions, and ultimately raises Jewish children of his/her own - this is far more complicated than growing cherry tomatoes. And I'll tell you why - because, unlike tomatoes, Jewish children do not seed themselves. Or, more properly, in today's world, Judaism does not seed itself in your child.
If Jewish education functions like the shemittah year, then we will never produce Jewish adults. Rather, parents, teachers, and rabbis must function like farms during the other six years of the cycle: watering, pruning, fertilizing, and so forth. It takes time and commitment. Sometimes, it even takes cow manure.
I cannot tell you how many times in recent years I have found myself truly saddened while sitting here in this sanctuary as I observed benei mitzvah families wherein the parents are singing along with Cantor Frieder at appropriate times, and the children are not, because they do not know the words or the melody. Sometimes, these are families for which the Shabbat morning of the child's bar/t mitzvah is the first (or perhaps the only) time that I see them in this sanctuary. Occasionally, there are parents whom I see regularly in services and around the building on various committees, but the children who live with them I do not even recognize.
My daughter Hannah, whom many of you know correctly as the cutest thing on earth (beli ayin hara), is not yet three years old. She cannot yet read or write, and can barely put together a grammatically-correct sentence in English. She has never set foot in Religious School. But she knows many prayers in our siddur by heart. Not because I taught her, mind you, but because she has heard them over and over and over, because she comes with me every Friday night to Temple Israel, and goes to Morah Ronnie Katz's Tot Shabbat service every Shabbat morning. And that is really all it takes!
Sure, you're thinking, but he's a RABBI. Of course his daughter knows how to pray at age 2. Well, let me tell you something. If you brought your 2-year-old to Temple Israel every Friday night for a year, she or he would soon know all of those prayers. And learning it that way is far more effective than any Religious School can possibly be. Every hour spent in the synagogue in your child's younger years will make her or him that much better prepared for Bar/t mitzvah and beyond. That great rabbinic sage Woody Allen said, "80% of success is showing up." Well, you do not have to be a rabbi to give your children the gift of Judaism, but you do have to show up.
Jewish children do not seed themselves. Amy's family is exemplary in this regard - they show up, they bring their kids. They are not leaving Jewish education to chance. They are not metaphorically counting on the volunteers of the shemittah year, like our ancestors did.
OK. So here is the idea. Take your kids to the Temple. As often as possible. Come Shabbat morning. Come Friday night. And don't let them run around outside, playing with their cell phones (which, by the way, are better left at home on Shabbat). Make them sit with you. Show them the pages in the siddur. Encourage them to sing along.
The parents and grandparents in this room are equipped with tremendous potential for producing Jewishly-knowledgeable, strongly-identified children. Merely having Shabbat dinners every Friday night and showing up for benei mitzvah and particular holidays will never be enough. You must bring your family to the synagogue. You must bring them to the Tot Shabbat services with Morah Ronnie Katz, and Junior Congregation, and Shabbat HaMishpahah. If you do not do so, your children will never feel comfortable in this room, never feel comfortable with the rich tradition of Jewish learning, wisdom, music, and liturgy; never feel truly comfortable among their own people. The default today is not "Jewish," as it was in the shtetlakh of Eastern Europe or the homes of Kashan; the default today is "unaffiliated." And just one generation after "unaffiliated" is "not Jewish."
We cannot ensure Jewish grandchildren and great-grandchildren simply by dropping off our children at Religious School and expecting them to learn. We must model for them. And fertilize, and water, and prune.
And furthermore, we cannot tell them that they are done with Jewish learning after the Bar/Bat Mitzvah. The adolescent years are critical to your child's development as a Jewish adult. This is the time when they begin to question the lessons that they have learned, to knit together their own identity, to ask the tough questions about God, about tradition, about family obligations. Think back to your own teenage years, whether you attended a Hebrew High School or not; you will surely remember this as a time of great change and development, and your external influences at the time had a strong impact that has, most likely, lasted until this day.
Just think about the pop music of your adolescent years - what was playing on the radio when you were in high school? Those songs became the soundtrack of your life.
We all want Judaism to be a part of that picture, that adolescent stew. We want at least a few of those songs to be Jewish songs.
Well, the best way to do this, in addition to bringing them with you to Shabbat services regularly, is to enroll your children in the Youth House, and make sure that they show up. Many of you know that I will be the director of the Youth House next year, and Moji and I have already planned an exciting, vibrant year of learning and fun. By showing up at the Youth House, your teenagers will not only have a good time socializing with their peers, but will also come away with lasting attachments to Judaism that will be with them for the rest of their lives as well-informed, strongly-identified Jews. We will cultivate that Jewish soundtrack.
Let me conclude by saying that sometimes a child needs to be given his or her own freedom to develop organically, and sometimes more direct involvement is required. The proper proportion that we can glean from the mitzvah of shemittah is 6/7ths of careful, labor-intensive fertilizing, and 1/7th of laissez-faire.
I know that I will see Amy and her family here in this sanctuary and elsewhere at Temple Israel in the coming years, metaphorically watering, pruning, and weeding. Let me see more of everybody here doing the same thing.
Shabbat shalom!
Some of you may have noticed that during the past year my appearances in this space at this time have been few and far between. It has been somewhat difficult for Rabbi Stecker and I to find opportunities for me to give a sermon on Shabbat morning because of my other commitments, specifically the Machon Alone service, which is for 5th-7th graders, the Shabbat HaMishpahah program, which is for all the students in our Religious School, and the Adult Learners' service, which is for anybody else who wants to learn some of the history, meaning, structure, and mechanics of the Shabbat morning service. All of these things are important - they each serve a group of learners. And learning, my friends, is where it's at, Jewishly speaking.
Why, after all, do we celebrate Bar or Bat Mitzvah? It is not merely about the party, or even about the Saturday morning demonstration of a child's abilities. It is about acknowledging that the Bar/t mitzvah has achieved enough learning to join the ranks of Jewish adulthood.
Amy, who has learned a few things from me and a few things from her other teachers, has learned the most from her parents, and that is how it should be. Her family is committed to Jewish learning more than most, perhaps exemplified by her mother Moji's many years of teaching at the Waxman Youth House, which is a truly unique learning environment located just across the parking lot.
Amy told us this morning about the shemittah year, the Shabbat for the land. With her permission, I am going to use her devar Torah as a jumping-off point for a slightly different discussion.
But first, here is a piece of ancient wisdom about fertilizer:
Mr. Cohen retires and moves south. He buys a home in rural Alabama, adjacent to farm land. One day, as he is sitting on his front porch, one of his neighbors drives by in a tractor, pulling a cart full of an unpleasant-smelling brown substance.
"Howdy, Mr. Cohen," says the farmer. "Hello, my friend," replies Cohen. "Tell me, what's in the cart?"
"That's cow manure," says the farmer.
Says Cohen, "Oh. And what do you do with it?"
"Well, Ah spread it over the strawberries."
Cohen replies, "My friend, you should stop by our house one Sunday morning. We use sour cream."
Some of you have no doubt seen me working in the garden in front of our house (not on Shabbat, of course!), as you are driving by on Old Mill Rd. Like Amy, I too love to garden.
When we moved in, three summers ago, that garden was full of cherry tomatoes. They were completely untended - no water, no cages to climb on, the vines were crawling all over each other. It looked as though they had seeded themselves from tomatoes that had grown there the previous year. I picked as many as I could, but the vines were full, and many were falling off and moldering on the ground. It was an unexpected bounty of what my father (also an avid gardener) likes to call "volunteers" - they simply appeared.
Back for a moment to the point that Amy made. For six years, says the Torah, we tend the land. We work it hard, and we harvest its bounty. In the seventh year, we do not work the land, and yet we are still able to eat what grows naturally, the "volunteers." OK, so you're thinking, that doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, in today's world of refrigeration, factory farms, and produce shipped from all over the world to keep supermarkets stocked with out-of-season items year-round, it might be difficult to see this as a hardship. But in ancient Israel it must have been quite a challenge. One midrash tells us that the shemittah year is the great economic equalizer. That is, in the seventh year of the cycle, rich and poor alike must scavenge for food, eating whatever they can find.
Farming is, undeniably, a difficult way to make a living. (Are there any farmers here? Virtually all our ancient ancestors were.) Farmers know that agriculture is a business of very slim margins, very demanding schedules, and a precarious lifestyle that rises and falls with the amount of rain.
I am going to propose the following: that raising a child to be a decent human being is not unlike raising a successful crop of tomatoes, or corn, or soybeans. In each case, constant care and attention is required. The environment must be continually monitored, and adjustments must be made when necessary. Proper amounts of nutrition and other supplies must be purchased and applied correctly.
And all the more so for raising a Jewish child to be a Jewish adult, a knowledgeable, self-aware Jewish adult with a strong identity, who seeks out Jewish friends, Jewish activities, Jewish institutions, and ultimately raises Jewish children of his/her own - this is far more complicated than growing cherry tomatoes. And I'll tell you why - because, unlike tomatoes, Jewish children do not seed themselves. Or, more properly, in today's world, Judaism does not seed itself in your child.
If Jewish education functions like the shemittah year, then we will never produce Jewish adults. Rather, parents, teachers, and rabbis must function like farms during the other six years of the cycle: watering, pruning, fertilizing, and so forth. It takes time and commitment. Sometimes, it even takes cow manure.
I cannot tell you how many times in recent years I have found myself truly saddened while sitting here in this sanctuary as I observed benei mitzvah families wherein the parents are singing along with Cantor Frieder at appropriate times, and the children are not, because they do not know the words or the melody. Sometimes, these are families for which the Shabbat morning of the child's bar/t mitzvah is the first (or perhaps the only) time that I see them in this sanctuary. Occasionally, there are parents whom I see regularly in services and around the building on various committees, but the children who live with them I do not even recognize.
My daughter Hannah, whom many of you know correctly as the cutest thing on earth (beli ayin hara), is not yet three years old. She cannot yet read or write, and can barely put together a grammatically-correct sentence in English. She has never set foot in Religious School. But she knows many prayers in our siddur by heart. Not because I taught her, mind you, but because she has heard them over and over and over, because she comes with me every Friday night to Temple Israel, and goes to Morah Ronnie Katz's Tot Shabbat service every Shabbat morning. And that is really all it takes!
Sure, you're thinking, but he's a RABBI. Of course his daughter knows how to pray at age 2. Well, let me tell you something. If you brought your 2-year-old to Temple Israel every Friday night for a year, she or he would soon know all of those prayers. And learning it that way is far more effective than any Religious School can possibly be. Every hour spent in the synagogue in your child's younger years will make her or him that much better prepared for Bar/t mitzvah and beyond. That great rabbinic sage Woody Allen said, "80% of success is showing up." Well, you do not have to be a rabbi to give your children the gift of Judaism, but you do have to show up.
Jewish children do not seed themselves. Amy's family is exemplary in this regard - they show up, they bring their kids. They are not leaving Jewish education to chance. They are not metaphorically counting on the volunteers of the shemittah year, like our ancestors did.
OK. So here is the idea. Take your kids to the Temple. As often as possible. Come Shabbat morning. Come Friday night. And don't let them run around outside, playing with their cell phones (which, by the way, are better left at home on Shabbat). Make them sit with you. Show them the pages in the siddur. Encourage them to sing along.
The parents and grandparents in this room are equipped with tremendous potential for producing Jewishly-knowledgeable, strongly-identified children. Merely having Shabbat dinners every Friday night and showing up for benei mitzvah and particular holidays will never be enough. You must bring your family to the synagogue. You must bring them to the Tot Shabbat services with Morah Ronnie Katz, and Junior Congregation, and Shabbat HaMishpahah. If you do not do so, your children will never feel comfortable in this room, never feel comfortable with the rich tradition of Jewish learning, wisdom, music, and liturgy; never feel truly comfortable among their own people. The default today is not "Jewish," as it was in the shtetlakh of Eastern Europe or the homes of Kashan; the default today is "unaffiliated." And just one generation after "unaffiliated" is "not Jewish."
We cannot ensure Jewish grandchildren and great-grandchildren simply by dropping off our children at Religious School and expecting them to learn. We must model for them. And fertilize, and water, and prune.
And furthermore, we cannot tell them that they are done with Jewish learning after the Bar/Bat Mitzvah. The adolescent years are critical to your child's development as a Jewish adult. This is the time when they begin to question the lessons that they have learned, to knit together their own identity, to ask the tough questions about God, about tradition, about family obligations. Think back to your own teenage years, whether you attended a Hebrew High School or not; you will surely remember this as a time of great change and development, and your external influences at the time had a strong impact that has, most likely, lasted until this day.
Just think about the pop music of your adolescent years - what was playing on the radio when you were in high school? Those songs became the soundtrack of your life.
We all want Judaism to be a part of that picture, that adolescent stew. We want at least a few of those songs to be Jewish songs.
Well, the best way to do this, in addition to bringing them with you to Shabbat services regularly, is to enroll your children in the Youth House, and make sure that they show up. Many of you know that I will be the director of the Youth House next year, and Moji and I have already planned an exciting, vibrant year of learning and fun. By showing up at the Youth House, your teenagers will not only have a good time socializing with their peers, but will also come away with lasting attachments to Judaism that will be with them for the rest of their lives as well-informed, strongly-identified Jews. We will cultivate that Jewish soundtrack.
Let me conclude by saying that sometimes a child needs to be given his or her own freedom to develop organically, and sometimes more direct involvement is required. The proper proportion that we can glean from the mitzvah of shemittah is 6/7ths of careful, labor-intensive fertilizing, and 1/7th of laissez-faire.
I know that I will see Amy and her family here in this sanctuary and elsewhere at Temple Israel in the coming years, metaphorically watering, pruning, and weeding. Let me see more of everybody here doing the same thing.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Shabbat Hol Hamoed Pesah 5770: Apples and Fundamentalism
(Originally delivered on April 3, 2010.)
Not too long ago, I was in the supermarket produce section, and I spotted something that I had never seen before: An O-U sticker on an apple. And frankly, I was shocked. Up until that day, I had assumed that all fruits and vegetables were OK, kashrut-wise. That is, all of the issues concerning those of us who keep kashrut had no comment on produce. It was open territory. Apples, zucchini, quinces, kumquats - all good. No worries. (Yes, I'd heard some rumblings about insects in broccoli and raspberries, but I was not particularly bothered by this, not having actually seen these bugs myself.)
But this hekhsher on the apple knocked me off balance. Why on earth would a fruit need a hekhsher? Now I could talk about here the details regarding fruit coatings, or insects, or the politics of kashrut-certifying agencies. But what troubles me more than those items is this: fundamentalism.
I think the OU on that apple demonstrates that there is a certain corner of the Jewish world that wants all of their decisions made for them by an increasingly right-leaning rabbinate, one that continually seeks out stringencies. This is the world that thinks that everything must be "glatt," as if this means "more kosher." It does not, and, to be sure, Ashkenazi tradition does not require kosher meat to be glatt (meaning that the lungs of the animal have been checked for lesions).
Despite this, Judaism does not lend itself well to fundamentalism. In a broad sense, Judaism is actually anti-fundamentalist. Let me explain.
Two weeks ago, I was asked a provocative question in my Sunday-morning Mishnah class. We are studying Massekhet Ta'anit, which is a tractate primarily about what our ancestors did when it did not rain in Israel during the winter months. The rains were, of course, essential to agricultural success and therefore the availability of food for the rest of the year. Jews in the time of the Mishnah (i.e. 1800 years ago, more or less) had all sorts of customs for bringing on the rain: fasting, not wearing leather shoes or bathing, blowing the shofar, sprinkling ashes on the Temple president's head, etc.)
We were studying a certain Mishnah that indicated that when rain did not fall in a particular city, but did fall in the surroundings, the people outside the city would fast, but not blow the shofar. And yet, Rabbi Akiva said exactly the opposite - that the suburbanites would blow the shofar, but not fast, to bring on the rain.
So here's the question:
Why, if the Mishnah is the oral law, which was ostensibly handed down to God on Mt. Sinai, are there disagreements like this? How can it be that one set of rabbis heard one tradition from their teachers, who got it from Moses, and Rabbi Akiva heard exactly the opposite? Shouldn’t the word of God, handed down from generation to generation, be perfect and not disagree with itself? And, given that the Mishnah is the first reporting of the Oral Law and therefore closest to the Sinaitic experience, should it not be the least likely textual source to feature disagreement?
Great question!
Now if I were a fundamentalist, I would say that nothing in the Torah or the Talmud is contradictory. That is, everything makes perfect sense, as it was dictated by God to Moses, and anything that looks like it might appear contradictory is simply human failure to adequately understand the God-given complexity of the text. Human flesh is fallible; God is perfect, and any failure to interpret God's perfectly-revealed word must be our error.
But I am a Conservative rabbi, so my response to this is the following: look at how wonderful and resilient our tradition is! We can tolerate exactly opposing opinions.
This is, I think, one of Judaism’s great strengths – that is, that there are multiple approaches, and they can all be valid at the same time. The Torah is fixed, it is true (or at least it has been for the last, let’s say, 1200 years or so, since the Tiberian Masoretes published their exacting manuscripts. But there are, according to the rabbinic maxim, “shiv’im panim latorah,” that is, there are 70 faces to the Torah. Within each verse there are many layers of meaning. It calls to mind a fairly well-known midrash:
Moses is transported into the classroom of R. Akiva (the same R. Akiva appearing in our mishnah). He hears Akiva aggressively interpreting the Torah, reading some meaning into every jot and tittle in the text. Moses is very surprised, because he has never heard any of this stuff. A student raises his hand, and asks, “Where did you learn this?” R. Akiva replies, this was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, whereupon Moses felt much better.
There might have been one story on Mt. Sinai that Moshe was aware of as he was receiving the Law from God. But as the generations passed, new ideas, which were inherent in the text, have been revealed. These "previously unknown" traditions were so well-hidden among the letters of the Torah that Moses himself was unaware of them.
Now maybe that is the case, or maybe later generations of scholars created new traditions (and new faces to the Torah) that were NOT indeed handed down with the Torah on Mt. Sinai, to serve their needs in their times. But regardless, the multiplicity of opinions and customs and rules is something that makes our faith unique.
Furthermore, this diversity of thought and action is what makes Judaism and fundamentalism incompatible. What, indeed, are the fundamentals? In most places that you find a general principle, there is for sure going to be an exception.
Another example: some of us have been taught that women are, traditionally speaking, exempt from all positive, time-bound mitzvot, save lighting Shabbat candles, making hallah, and going to the miqveh. But women are obligated to birkat hamazon, and daily prayer, and observing Shabbat, and a number of other things (if you want to learn more about this, come to the class that R. Stecker and I are teaching in a few weeks on Women and the Mitzvot). When some very fervent people make rules, they like to ignore (or at least play down) the exceptions, and even the multiplicity of opinions, claiming that there is only path to God.
But we in the Conservative movement think differently. Our very roots are in a school of thought that emerged in the middle of the 19th century, essentially what was at the time the right wing of Reform, the so-called "Positive, historical" movement. "Positive" because it affirmed the validity of Jewish law today (unlike Reform) and "historical" because it acknowledged the development of Jewish practice over time (unlike Orthodoxy, which essentially believes that all of contemporary halakhah was handed down on Mt. Sinai, down to the last hekhshered apple.)
What makes our approach different? Well, we do not think that there is only one path, or only one right way. We recognize the diversity of Jewish practice, belief, and values.
But that also makes our world, the universe of progressive Jewry that the Conservative movement inhabits, seem that much more problematic. I think that there is something in human nature that wants to know the RIGHT way of doing things, and all the more so in today's world of infinite choices and soundbite-sized analysis. The easiest thing to do is to become a fundamentalist, to abdicate your personal choice entirely. That way, everything always makes sense. There is only one side to the issue. There is only ONE face to the Torah, and all other faces are not only invalid, but potentially dangerous.
So I (as a Conservative rabbi) might not tell you that there is only one right way to observe Shabbat, for example. But on the other hand, I will never advocate for opting out of Shabbat observance entirely. There is a middle ground between fundamentalism and relativism, and I think that Conservative Judaism strikes a proper balance - we do not fear individual choice, considering the long history of Judaism and the likes of Rabbi Akiva and his successors, nor do we shy away from religious observance in the traditional mode. This is what makes us both positive and historical; this is what makes us Conservative.
I am very happy that some of our teenagers were here with us today, and I am very much looking forward to working with them next year in the Youth House. Frankly, I wish that we did not have to set aside one Shabbat per year for Youth House participation, and that we had teenage members of our community, whether they belong to the Youth House or not, coming to participate with us every single Shabbat morning (and evening, and afternoon) of the year. I understand that this requires a cultural change, and that is not something that comes easily.
I am concerned that many of our young people conclude their Jewish education or involvement at age 13, and therefore never have the opportunity to develop an appreciation for the richness, the depth, and the usefulness of Judaism and Jewish learning. The fundamentalist voices in the Jewish world continue to grow louder, and I worry that our children will not be equipped the proper tools to when they encounter smiling, welcoming zealots in the future.
We here in this room are the true inheritors of the Sinaitic tradition; we are the real Jews; do not let anybody tell you differently. I want our young people to know this and be the proud inheritors of the positive, historical tradition. And my guess is that many of you do as well.
So we can either get caught up in whether or not an apple is kosher, or why you can't buy actual mustard that is kosher for Passover, or lament the lack of less-expensive kosher but non-glatt meat, or we can dedicate ourselves to understanding a complex tradition that encompasses not only details of ritual observance, but also guidelines for living ethically, for personal and business relationships that include a spark of the Divine, and for taking care of each other, our community, and those around us in need.
This is the real Judaism, the non-fundamentalist tradition stretching back to, well, to Mt. Sinai. And this is what we should be teaching our children and grandchildren.
Not too long ago, I was in the supermarket produce section, and I spotted something that I had never seen before: An O-U sticker on an apple. And frankly, I was shocked. Up until that day, I had assumed that all fruits and vegetables were OK, kashrut-wise. That is, all of the issues concerning those of us who keep kashrut had no comment on produce. It was open territory. Apples, zucchini, quinces, kumquats - all good. No worries. (Yes, I'd heard some rumblings about insects in broccoli and raspberries, but I was not particularly bothered by this, not having actually seen these bugs myself.)
But this hekhsher on the apple knocked me off balance. Why on earth would a fruit need a hekhsher? Now I could talk about here the details regarding fruit coatings, or insects, or the politics of kashrut-certifying agencies. But what troubles me more than those items is this: fundamentalism.
I think the OU on that apple demonstrates that there is a certain corner of the Jewish world that wants all of their decisions made for them by an increasingly right-leaning rabbinate, one that continually seeks out stringencies. This is the world that thinks that everything must be "glatt," as if this means "more kosher." It does not, and, to be sure, Ashkenazi tradition does not require kosher meat to be glatt (meaning that the lungs of the animal have been checked for lesions).
Despite this, Judaism does not lend itself well to fundamentalism. In a broad sense, Judaism is actually anti-fundamentalist. Let me explain.
Two weeks ago, I was asked a provocative question in my Sunday-morning Mishnah class. We are studying Massekhet Ta'anit, which is a tractate primarily about what our ancestors did when it did not rain in Israel during the winter months. The rains were, of course, essential to agricultural success and therefore the availability of food for the rest of the year. Jews in the time of the Mishnah (i.e. 1800 years ago, more or less) had all sorts of customs for bringing on the rain: fasting, not wearing leather shoes or bathing, blowing the shofar, sprinkling ashes on the Temple president's head, etc.)
We were studying a certain Mishnah that indicated that when rain did not fall in a particular city, but did fall in the surroundings, the people outside the city would fast, but not blow the shofar. And yet, Rabbi Akiva said exactly the opposite - that the suburbanites would blow the shofar, but not fast, to bring on the rain.
So here's the question:
Why, if the Mishnah is the oral law, which was ostensibly handed down to God on Mt. Sinai, are there disagreements like this? How can it be that one set of rabbis heard one tradition from their teachers, who got it from Moses, and Rabbi Akiva heard exactly the opposite? Shouldn’t the word of God, handed down from generation to generation, be perfect and not disagree with itself? And, given that the Mishnah is the first reporting of the Oral Law and therefore closest to the Sinaitic experience, should it not be the least likely textual source to feature disagreement?
Great question!
Now if I were a fundamentalist, I would say that nothing in the Torah or the Talmud is contradictory. That is, everything makes perfect sense, as it was dictated by God to Moses, and anything that looks like it might appear contradictory is simply human failure to adequately understand the God-given complexity of the text. Human flesh is fallible; God is perfect, and any failure to interpret God's perfectly-revealed word must be our error.
But I am a Conservative rabbi, so my response to this is the following: look at how wonderful and resilient our tradition is! We can tolerate exactly opposing opinions.
This is, I think, one of Judaism’s great strengths – that is, that there are multiple approaches, and they can all be valid at the same time. The Torah is fixed, it is true (or at least it has been for the last, let’s say, 1200 years or so, since the Tiberian Masoretes published their exacting manuscripts. But there are, according to the rabbinic maxim, “shiv’im panim latorah,” that is, there are 70 faces to the Torah. Within each verse there are many layers of meaning. It calls to mind a fairly well-known midrash:
Moses is transported into the classroom of R. Akiva (the same R. Akiva appearing in our mishnah). He hears Akiva aggressively interpreting the Torah, reading some meaning into every jot and tittle in the text. Moses is very surprised, because he has never heard any of this stuff. A student raises his hand, and asks, “Where did you learn this?” R. Akiva replies, this was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, whereupon Moses felt much better.
There might have been one story on Mt. Sinai that Moshe was aware of as he was receiving the Law from God. But as the generations passed, new ideas, which were inherent in the text, have been revealed. These "previously unknown" traditions were so well-hidden among the letters of the Torah that Moses himself was unaware of them.
Now maybe that is the case, or maybe later generations of scholars created new traditions (and new faces to the Torah) that were NOT indeed handed down with the Torah on Mt. Sinai, to serve their needs in their times. But regardless, the multiplicity of opinions and customs and rules is something that makes our faith unique.
Furthermore, this diversity of thought and action is what makes Judaism and fundamentalism incompatible. What, indeed, are the fundamentals? In most places that you find a general principle, there is for sure going to be an exception.
Another example: some of us have been taught that women are, traditionally speaking, exempt from all positive, time-bound mitzvot, save lighting Shabbat candles, making hallah, and going to the miqveh. But women are obligated to birkat hamazon, and daily prayer, and observing Shabbat, and a number of other things (if you want to learn more about this, come to the class that R. Stecker and I are teaching in a few weeks on Women and the Mitzvot). When some very fervent people make rules, they like to ignore (or at least play down) the exceptions, and even the multiplicity of opinions, claiming that there is only path to God.
But we in the Conservative movement think differently. Our very roots are in a school of thought that emerged in the middle of the 19th century, essentially what was at the time the right wing of Reform, the so-called "Positive, historical" movement. "Positive" because it affirmed the validity of Jewish law today (unlike Reform) and "historical" because it acknowledged the development of Jewish practice over time (unlike Orthodoxy, which essentially believes that all of contemporary halakhah was handed down on Mt. Sinai, down to the last hekhshered apple.)
What makes our approach different? Well, we do not think that there is only one path, or only one right way. We recognize the diversity of Jewish practice, belief, and values.
But that also makes our world, the universe of progressive Jewry that the Conservative movement inhabits, seem that much more problematic. I think that there is something in human nature that wants to know the RIGHT way of doing things, and all the more so in today's world of infinite choices and soundbite-sized analysis. The easiest thing to do is to become a fundamentalist, to abdicate your personal choice entirely. That way, everything always makes sense. There is only one side to the issue. There is only ONE face to the Torah, and all other faces are not only invalid, but potentially dangerous.
So I (as a Conservative rabbi) might not tell you that there is only one right way to observe Shabbat, for example. But on the other hand, I will never advocate for opting out of Shabbat observance entirely. There is a middle ground between fundamentalism and relativism, and I think that Conservative Judaism strikes a proper balance - we do not fear individual choice, considering the long history of Judaism and the likes of Rabbi Akiva and his successors, nor do we shy away from religious observance in the traditional mode. This is what makes us both positive and historical; this is what makes us Conservative.
I am very happy that some of our teenagers were here with us today, and I am very much looking forward to working with them next year in the Youth House. Frankly, I wish that we did not have to set aside one Shabbat per year for Youth House participation, and that we had teenage members of our community, whether they belong to the Youth House or not, coming to participate with us every single Shabbat morning (and evening, and afternoon) of the year. I understand that this requires a cultural change, and that is not something that comes easily.
I am concerned that many of our young people conclude their Jewish education or involvement at age 13, and therefore never have the opportunity to develop an appreciation for the richness, the depth, and the usefulness of Judaism and Jewish learning. The fundamentalist voices in the Jewish world continue to grow louder, and I worry that our children will not be equipped the proper tools to when they encounter smiling, welcoming zealots in the future.
We here in this room are the true inheritors of the Sinaitic tradition; we are the real Jews; do not let anybody tell you differently. I want our young people to know this and be the proud inheritors of the positive, historical tradition. And my guess is that many of you do as well.
So we can either get caught up in whether or not an apple is kosher, or why you can't buy actual mustard that is kosher for Passover, or lament the lack of less-expensive kosher but non-glatt meat, or we can dedicate ourselves to understanding a complex tradition that encompasses not only details of ritual observance, but also guidelines for living ethically, for personal and business relationships that include a spark of the Divine, and for taking care of each other, our community, and those around us in need.
This is the real Judaism, the non-fundamentalist tradition stretching back to, well, to Mt. Sinai. And this is what we should be teaching our children and grandchildren.
Rethinking Everything
(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, April 15, 2010.)
My crocuses appeared and subsided a few weeks ago, followed quickly by the tulips, and as I watch the lilies beginning their annual ascent from the earth, I am reminded that spring has kicked off in earnest. The egg and karpas sat innocently enough on my seder plate, speaking of spring: renewal, fertility, and change. After settling back into our hametz-ish routine, the question becomes, "Now what?"
A good holiday should not only inspire reflection in the moment, but should stay with you for some time after. Pesah is a good holiday, and all of the items that have been bubbling away in the remote corners of my mind all winter are now coming to the fore, not only dislodged by Pesah preparations, but aided and abetted by an article I spotted in last week's issue of The Jewish Week. An excerpt from Rabbi Elie Kaunfer's new book, Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us About Building Vibrant Jewish Communities was featured on the front page. (Some of us heard Rabbi Kaunfer, a classmate of mine from the Jewish Theological Seminary, speak here at Temple Israel last spring about this new model of Jewish involvement.)
I read the excerpt, and it seemed to me so jaw-droppingly on-target that I immediately ran to my computer and ordered the book. Rabbi Kaunfer holds that while the institutionalized Jewish world has been disproportionately obsessed with assimilation and intermarriage, the real issue in American Judaism is disengagement -- that is, that most Jews have not been given the tools with which to truly grapple with the very relevant issues that Jewish literature embraces, and therefore they do not try. The Talmud is filled with wisdom that obtains today just as it did in the fifth century; why do most synagogues (including ours) put virtually all of their educational energy into teaching the purely mechanical aspects of putting on a bar/bat mitzvah show, when we could be teaching our children to think like Jews? Birthright Israel might inspire some young adults regarding Israel and Jewish life, but when they return, they lack options for seriously pursuing the study of Hebrew, say, or wrestling with the likes of Rashi and Ibn Ezra. We have been sold a bill of goods, says Rabbi Kaunfer, a watered-down palette of offerings that are, at best, uninspirational. People want meaning and substance, but there are few Jewish outlets providing these, particularly outside of Orthodoxy.
This argument resonates with me quite heavily. In today's world of infinite options, what is the appeal in belonging to a synagogue that roughly 80% us appear in only when absolutely necessary? And how many more years of long, meaningless services will that 80% endure before just giving up entirely? Roughly half of American Jewry has given up on institutions already. These institutions should be working hard to give Jews the tools they need to find meaning in Jewish tradition. Otherwise, the engagement gap will just continue to grow.
Rabbi Kaunfer suggests some ways of facilitating re-engagement; you can surely find them online if you are curious. But the big picture is that we should be re-envisioning all that we do here at Temple Israel. Project Re-Imagine focused on the Religious School, and made some changes that were largely inside the box. We need to think bigger, and much farther beyond what we have always done, and this applies not only to our children's education but to worship, membership, social action, home rituals, and all of the other features of Jewish life.
Spring is the season of renewal. Perhaps this spring we might take to heart the stunningly fresh words from the book of Lamentations that we sing every time we put the Torah away: Hadesh yameinu kekedem (Renew our days as of old). Rabbi Kaunfer concludes with the following challenge: "Our task now is to imagine a world in which every Jew has the potential to take hold of the gift of Jewish heritage. Imagining that world is the first step to building it." Let's take him up on that challenge.
My crocuses appeared and subsided a few weeks ago, followed quickly by the tulips, and as I watch the lilies beginning their annual ascent from the earth, I am reminded that spring has kicked off in earnest. The egg and karpas sat innocently enough on my seder plate, speaking of spring: renewal, fertility, and change. After settling back into our hametz-ish routine, the question becomes, "Now what?"
A good holiday should not only inspire reflection in the moment, but should stay with you for some time after. Pesah is a good holiday, and all of the items that have been bubbling away in the remote corners of my mind all winter are now coming to the fore, not only dislodged by Pesah preparations, but aided and abetted by an article I spotted in last week's issue of The Jewish Week. An excerpt from Rabbi Elie Kaunfer's new book, Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us About Building Vibrant Jewish Communities was featured on the front page. (Some of us heard Rabbi Kaunfer, a classmate of mine from the Jewish Theological Seminary, speak here at Temple Israel last spring about this new model of Jewish involvement.)
I read the excerpt, and it seemed to me so jaw-droppingly on-target that I immediately ran to my computer and ordered the book. Rabbi Kaunfer holds that while the institutionalized Jewish world has been disproportionately obsessed with assimilation and intermarriage, the real issue in American Judaism is disengagement -- that is, that most Jews have not been given the tools with which to truly grapple with the very relevant issues that Jewish literature embraces, and therefore they do not try. The Talmud is filled with wisdom that obtains today just as it did in the fifth century; why do most synagogues (including ours) put virtually all of their educational energy into teaching the purely mechanical aspects of putting on a bar/bat mitzvah show, when we could be teaching our children to think like Jews? Birthright Israel might inspire some young adults regarding Israel and Jewish life, but when they return, they lack options for seriously pursuing the study of Hebrew, say, or wrestling with the likes of Rashi and Ibn Ezra. We have been sold a bill of goods, says Rabbi Kaunfer, a watered-down palette of offerings that are, at best, uninspirational. People want meaning and substance, but there are few Jewish outlets providing these, particularly outside of Orthodoxy.
This argument resonates with me quite heavily. In today's world of infinite options, what is the appeal in belonging to a synagogue that roughly 80% us appear in only when absolutely necessary? And how many more years of long, meaningless services will that 80% endure before just giving up entirely? Roughly half of American Jewry has given up on institutions already. These institutions should be working hard to give Jews the tools they need to find meaning in Jewish tradition. Otherwise, the engagement gap will just continue to grow.
Rabbi Kaunfer suggests some ways of facilitating re-engagement; you can surely find them online if you are curious. But the big picture is that we should be re-envisioning all that we do here at Temple Israel. Project Re-Imagine focused on the Religious School, and made some changes that were largely inside the box. We need to think bigger, and much farther beyond what we have always done, and this applies not only to our children's education but to worship, membership, social action, home rituals, and all of the other features of Jewish life.
Spring is the season of renewal. Perhaps this spring we might take to heart the stunningly fresh words from the book of Lamentations that we sing every time we put the Torah away: Hadesh yameinu kekedem (Renew our days as of old). Rabbi Kaunfer concludes with the following challenge: "Our task now is to imagine a world in which every Jew has the potential to take hold of the gift of Jewish heritage. Imagining that world is the first step to building it." Let's take him up on that challenge.
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