A Call to Action - Lekh Lekha 5774

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Understanding, or, MAVEN Blasts Off

There was a petite news blip I heard some time over the past week, nestled into the din about the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, that caught my attention. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN orbiter, a NASA project, is supposed to take off on November 18. But as NASA has been mothballed, along with a whole bunch of other “non-essential” government agencies as part of the shutdown, it seemed the the program would miss its window of proper alignment between Earth and Mars. The next window will not arrive until 2016.

Congress, however, managed to create an exception for the program, which is generally referred to by its acronym, “MAVEN.” And so, the MAVEN will indeed be blasting off on-schedule.

To anybody who is familiar with common Eastern European-American Jewish culture, the word “maven” (or, according to its official YIVO Institute transliteration, meyvn) lands on our ears with a knowing wink. It comes from Hebrew, meivin (accent on the second syllable), via Yiddish. There is a sarcastic sense about this word: a “maven” is somebody who thinks he knows a lot.

In modern Hebrew, the common phrase, “hameivin yavin,” literally means, “the one who understands will understand.” It’s a way of saying, “I’m not saying something explicitly, but those who can read between the lines will get what I’m saying.” In other words, something said with a wink for those who are in the know. Those who are in the know are having a good chuckle over the name of this particular NASA program.

But in a greater sense, the idea of this maven headed off toward Mars offers an ounce or two of inspiration. As a reminder of why we pay taxes that fund such government programs, MAVEN will be blasting off to continue the ongoing human project of understanding Creation and our role within it. But also, the mission and its Yiddish/Hebrew nickname offer a reminder that it is our obligation to seek understanding throughout our lives: understanding of ourselves, understanding of others, so that we may continue to build relationships and repair the world.

Shabbat shalom!

The Most Valuable Gifts We Can Give - Kol Nidrei 5774

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, this is the fast I desire:

To unlock fetters of wickedness,

And untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free;

To break off every yoke.

It is to share your bread with the hungry,

And to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to clothe him,

And not to ignore your own kin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tzom mashma’uti. Have a meaningful fast.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

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

Urban Gardening and Torah: New and Old Ways to Overcome Fear - Rosh Hashanah 5774

I want to tell you an inspiring story about a man named Ron Finley. You probably have not heard of him, but if you have, it is most likely because of the TED Talk that features him telling his story. Ron Finley is a man who is not afraid to roll up his sleeves and tackle one of the biggest problems of modern inner cities - the lack of good, healthful produce. And how has he done this? By turning otherwise unused plots of land into vegetable gardens. That’s right, Ron is an urban gardener. His tagline in the TED Talk is, “If you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t gangsta.”

Ron grew up in the infamous South Central Los Angeles, a place that lacks many things. The list of problems facing those who live there might seem insurmountable. Fear permeates every corner of neighborhoods like this: fear of what dangers lurk on the streets; fear of not having enough to eat or not finding a job; fear of the police; fear of all types of individual and societal inadequacies. We often use the word ghetto to describe this environment, although the irony here is that the original ghetto was the Jewish quarter of Venice, Italy; its modern meaning is, as we all know, quite different.

In LA’s ghettos, as anywhere else, there is a fundamental problem that feeds into all others: finding good, healthy food is very hard. Many rely on fast food outlets, which are somehow never in short supply in these neighborhoods, or on bodegas, which provide highly-processed, not-very healthy options. These areas have come to be known as “food deserts.”

I have come to believe, in recent years, that the choices we make about food and drink are among the most important choices that we face. Without the availability of healthy food, parents cannot raise children in a nutritionally-sound manner, cannot raise children who can pay attention in school and learn all the essential lessons of self-respect that are necessary for becoming productive members of society.  

And of course, Judaism teaches us that how we eat is essential to who we are; kashrut, the set of Jewish dietary laws, establishes a framework for holy eating. Our relationship to food is integral to all of the other physical and spiritual aspects of our lives. Why do we make berakhot / blessing before and after we eat? To connect the tangible to the intangible; to elevate ourselves as we perform the most fundamental and mundane act.

Understanding the essential role of food in producing physically and emotionally healthy residents of LA, Ron Finley had an idea. A really great idea.  It occurred to him while driving 45 minutes to get fresh produce, past the dialysis clinics that were “popping up like Starbucks” in his neighborhood, that the lack of healthy vegetables was a major scourge on the community. At the same time, there was plenty of available land - vacant lots, dirt strips along sidewalks and roads, and so forth, an amount equivalent to 20 Central Parks. Ron put his aptitude for gardening to work, and began to plant fruits and vegetables on that otherwise-unused land.

Soon, Ron was coordinating volunteer teams of neighbors to help him. And the yield was growing. People were coming to pick the food and take it home to their families. Ron and his gangsta gardener allies were supplying people with something that they could not get before, and making a tangible difference in people’s lives. He created a non-profit, all-volunteer organization, LA Green Grounds, that plants tomatoes and peppers and squash and kale all over poorer neighborhoods of LA, yielding not only vegetables, but also pride, sustainability, and happier, healthier families. “If children grow kale,” he says, “they eat kale.”

Ron Finley triumphed over fear, hopelessness, and the intransigence of his city and community. He made, and continues to make a difference. He succeeded in repairing the world, in fixing up his very-fractured neighborhood just a little bit. And because of it, he’s a modern day hero.  

Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the founder of the Bratslaver Hasidic movement, said (quite famously),

כל העולם כלו גשר צר מאוד, והעיקר לא לפחד כלל

Kol haolam kulo gesher tzar me’od; veha’iqar lo lefahed kelal.

The whole world is a very narrow bridge

And the essential principle is not to fear at all.

I love this image (and of course the song that goes with it) - we are all crossing over a tiny, rickety bridge over a vast chasm. This ain’t the Triboro; think wooden slats between pieces of frayed rope spanning two cliffs. We are crossing that narrow bridge. But we cannot allow fear to overtake us. Ron Finley has refused to be kept down by the rampant fears of the ghetto; he overcame fear by taking charge, by finding a solution.

A Hasidic story about fear goes like this:

A young girl from a very poor family was having terrifying dreams. Her parents consulted their rabbi about this problem. He said, “The sages say that we dream at night what we think about during the day [Berakhot 55b]. Ask your daughter what she is afraid of.”

When they asked her, she replied, “I often see how you both sit and worry over the poverty we live in. Of everything, I am most afraid of your fear.” (Schneerson, Toward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Rebbe, p. 138.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the older I get, the more fear I see in this world. We are a society consumed by fear; the question is, how do we respond? How do we overcome fear?

What are you afraid of? Failure, crime, being sued, death, germs, Bisphenol A, what might be in our air or water or food, what our kids might be learning or not learning, losing a job or a loved one or an opportunity, or that next medical checkup?

I must confess that I am as guilty as everybody else: I am afraid of climate change, of the easy availability of guns, of the constant intrusion of various types of electronic gadgets into our everyday lives. I am afraid of what kind of world my kids will inherit. I am afraid of failure - in my work, in my marriage, in my relationship with God.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, quite famously, in his inaugural address in 1932:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

President Roosevelt was speaking to a ruined nation, a country ravaged by the Great Depression, where the unemployment rate was as high as 25% (in our recent recession, unemployment topped out near 10%), where hopelessness and fear kept this country from moving forward for nearly a decade of misery.

Perhaps we fear more today than we ever have; or maybe not. One thing is certain: in every generation, we fear the loss of what we know and have.

We fear change. We fear waking up in a world that is unfamiliar and maybe dangerous, a world in which all those things that we have held dear are no longer important or valued or even present.

In the past year, Judy and I were turned on to Downton Abbey. (Who here has seen it?) For the uninitiated, it is a period drama on PBS from the years after World War I in which an aristocratic English family and their servants watch the world changes and their traditional way of life crumbles. Their fears play out as Lord and Lady Crawley, the Earl and Countess of Grantham, are busy trying to marry off their daughters, who have decidedly modern and independent notions of their own.  

A ways into the third season, I realized that Downton Abbey is effectively Fiddler on the Roof set in England, and with much, much more money.  (And, by the way, it is worth noting that Lady Crawley is, in fact, an American heiress whose maiden name is, get this, Levinson. That’s right, she’s a Member of the Tribe. A Jewess.) I actually made the connection between Downton Abbey and Fiddler a week or so before seeing an article in the Forward that said more or less the same thing.

Fiddler on the Roof (many of us may recall, since the Temple Israel Players mounted it this past spring) is a story about an ordinary Jewish guy living in a Russian shtetl, Tevye the Milkman, trying to find suitable matches for his daughters while eking out a living and avoiding the dangerously anti-Semitic local authorities. Meanwhile, the daughters continually subvert their father’s vision of the world by making their own increasingly-challenging decisions about marriage. And while state-sponsored pogroms rage in Anatevka and communists gather their forces in Moscow for the coming revolution, Tevye mourns for what was and fears for what will be.

I don’t know how or when Downton Abbey will conclude; Lord and Lady Crawley and their servants (who all charmingly refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs., e.g. Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes) seem to be willing to adapt to changing times, but it is not without grief and occasional agony. Of course, Tevye and his family ultimately leave Anatevka. And where did they go? They are us.

Think about that for a moment: the Jewish people have lived in many places over the last 2500 years, and we have managed to take our faith, our culture, our language, and our Torah with us everywhere. Our strong, rich heritage has sustained us as we were welcomed and then exiled from lands that stretch over much of the world. We are still here. And we too are living in changing times, in which what we know and love may soon be lost.

How do Tevye and Lord Crawley manage, as their worlds decay around them? They learn to accept, and they keep moving. They do not succumb to fear.

So here is the question we must ask ourselves on this day of introspection: How do we overcome fear?

And here is the answer: We overcome fear by staying above the fray, by not letting ourselves sink into that swamp. And the way to do that is to work for the benefit of others.

Rabbi Stecker will be speaking here tomorrow about taking a leap of understanding. I’d like to suggest another leap: the leap of action.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the foremost Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, suggests in his monumental work, God in Search of Man, that faith comes through our deeds rather than our beliefs:

“A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought... In carrying out the word of the Torah he is ushered into the presence of spiritual meaning. Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the hereness of God.” (God in Search of Man, p. 283)

The first way to overcome fear is by taking a leap of action. By doing, we infuse our lives with holiness. And in particular, by doing for others in need, we raise ourselves up from the depths of fear and hopelessness. Ron Finley figured that out, and he has raised not only himself up, but a whole bunch of other residents of South Central along with him.

When I was studying to be a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Rabbi Carol Davidson, told my class a truly amazing story. She and her husband befriended a homeless man who was living on the street near their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He had been in and out of prison, and every time he got out, he returned to the streets and his street pals, where he begged and used drugs and eventually would be sent back to jail. But Rabbi Davidson could also see that this man had potential, and so they embarked on a campaign to get him a job and a life off the streets. They found him an apartment, got him some clothes and basic necessities, and gave him all the support that he needed to get himself on his feet. After a personal investment of thousands of dollars and a good deal of time and energy, this formerly homeless man had a career and a family and was living happily in New Jersey.

Now, I may not advocate this approach for every homeless person you might find; Rabbi and Mr. Davidson took a big risk. But the message is this: We can submit to our fears of social ills, like potentially dangerous people living on the street or on the public dime, or we can reach out and overcome them in appropriate ways.

And, on a larger scale, all of the fears that we identified earlier, all of the little daily challenges that plague our everyday existence, can be surmounted if we engage ourselves in tackling those problems. Concerned about climate change (and you should be)? Try to reduce your energy footprint. Concerned about the safety of your neighborhood? Get to know your neighbors. Concerned about your children’s future? Spend more time talking to them about their own hopes and dreams. Take a leap of action.

***
But that’s not enough. Reaching out to others is not the only path to conquer fear. Fear is, after all, an internal struggle, a battle with ourselves over control of our own emotions. And Judaism offers ways to address the internal struggle.  The Torah, and Jewish learning in the wider sense, offers us a sort of how-to guide to facing our inner fears.

The first way is tefillah, prayer, one of the primary reasons that we are here today (well, some of us). Curiously enough, there is no accurate Hebrew translation of the English word “prayer,” and there is a good reason for that. “Prayer” is the recitation of words, ostensibly so some higher power can hear them. But that is not what Jews do when they come to a service, or when they recite the words of Jewish liturgy by themselves.

Rather, the Hebrew verb that approximates the meaning of “to pray” is “lehitpallel.” But that word comes from a rather obscure Hebrew root meaning, “to judge.” And it’s a reflexive verb - anybody here who has studied a Romance language should be familiar with reflexive verbs - it reflects back on the speaker. So what Jews do in synagogue three times a day is “lehitpallel” - to judge oneself. When we pray, we are judging ourselves.

Tefillah, self-judgment, is an internal act. Yes, there are words that we say, and we wonder, maybe God hears them and maybe not. But the act of tefillah is about our own internal scales, about examining ourselves, about challenging ourselves to think better, to act better, to do better.

So tefillah, so-called “prayer,” self-judgment, can be one path to overcoming fear.

And here is the other: We read the Torah in its entirety once through every year. (Actually, the rabbis of the Talmud exhort us to read it three times each year, but if we can get through it all once, it’s enough.) Five times throughout the year, we conclude one of the Five Books of Moses. And what do we say immediately after finishing each book? Hazaq, hazaq, venithazzeq. Be strong, be strong, and we will be strengthened. Hazaq, hazaq, venithazzeq.

That third word, venithazzeq, is yet another reflexive verb! Lehithazzeq, “to strengthen oneself,” suggests that the Torah is the source by which we make ourselves not physically beefier, but spiritually stronger.

Torah (here used in the wider sense, not just the Five Books of Moses, but the collective body of Jewish knowledge) is the source of our strength as Jews - the textual heritage that has sustained us for millennia as we traveled through Baghdad and Rome, Cordoba and Tehran, Warsaw and “Anatevka” and New York and Tel Aviv.

Every time we put the Torah away, we say,  

עֵץ-חַיִּים הִיא, לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ; וְתֹמְכֶיהָ מְאֻשָּׁר

Etz hayyim hi lamahaziqim bah, vetomekheha me’ushar.

It is a tree of life for those who grasp it, and all who hold it up are happy (Proverbs 3:18). 

We have overcome the fear of change and the hopelessness caused by exile and dispersion by holding firmly onto that Etz Hayyim, the Tree of Life that is our source of strength. Holding on to the Torah, learning from it, gives us knowledge, pride, comfort, healing, and spiritually erodes our fear.

To recap, here is our battle plan for conquering fear: Through the one-two punch of tefillah and Torah, we continue to wage that internal battle against fear. And by doing for others, by taking that leap of action, we conquer fear externally.

By judging ourselves, by connecting with our intellectual heritage, and by repairing the world, we can face the future and rise above the things that want to drag us down. Tevye did that even as he lost his home and set out for America; Rabbi Davidson repaired her world by following lessons from our tradition. And we can do that too.

Veha’iqar lo lefahed kelal. The most important thing is not to fear at all. Shanah tovah umetuqah, a happy and sweet new year.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Rosh Hashanah 5774, 9/5/2013.)